# When freedom means people leave to start companies

- **Episode:** [189](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/189.md) (2025-04-17)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** freedom, entrepreneurship, retention, company-culture
- **Time:** 42:35–44:59 (start 2555s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=2555](https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=2555)

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[42:35] Al Elliott: I would be worried about giving so much freedom to people who are essentially entrepreneurial with their ideas that you're just going to be set, people are just going to go, Oh, that's great. I'll go and do this myself then and leave
[42:48] James Hawkins: Yeah, I think that does happen. Like it's one of the main reasons that more people leave PostHog to start a company than to join another company. By quite a way, I would say. The normal reason though, why people won't do that, often what ends up happening is we hire ex-founders who have tried to build something from scratch already. And then they're like, oh, this is less fun than I thought it would be because literally no one cares. Whereas at PostHog, we have lots of distribution. We have like hundreds of thousands of users. And so kind of anything we build, and our product principles kind of work, like it kind of means anything you build, if you're roughly following our guidance, just will get usage. And so it's like, if your actual joy in, as a person, is like building stuff, getting into users' hands and the craft of building things, we're going to be a better environment than building a startup from scratch, where no matter how much you care about the craft of what you're working on, if no one cares at all about the idea in the first place, no one will even use the like beautiful utopian software you've been working on. And so I think there's a lot of kind of, it's almost the other way around where we tend to hire people who like, it is so horrible trying to start a startup from scratch when no one cares. That is so cool that I can have the freedom of building a startup, but with actual users. And I can get into this feedback loop really quickly. It makes me feel like I'm having much more of an impact. So we will sometimes lose people who get overexcited about some new idea and they just can't help themselves. But— It's not been as bad as you would think, I think. And then like, because the company's growing so quick, we, like our stock price and stuff is like rocketing all this and we do secondary so employees can sell shares on a regular basis. It's something we've been doing. So that, okay, yeah, you don't own the whole pie, you own a slice of it, but the pie is growing extremely quickly. So we're able to, yeah, it's not perfect, but there are enough other benefits that it just feels irrational when you actually question the motivation of the people who work at what they really care about. And usually, and like what we're interviewing for and looking for is like, it's cool you've been a startup founder before, but the thing we actually like about it is you like building stuff with a lot of freedom and you're good at thinking like a product person would and also as an engineer. Um, and if your real passion is just building stuff and getting people's hands and improving it, like we can, it would probably be a better spot for that