Jobs’ message flies in the face of what many entrepreneurs want to believe but has been reinforced time and time again by my research. I focus on the early decisions founders make about the people they involve in their startups and how they involve them. These people include themselves (as “core founders”), cofounders (the people who come onboard around the time of founding to help build the startup), hires (who fill holes in the founding team or help it deal with growth issues), investors (outside providers of capital), and members of the early board of directors. To study them, I draw upon my own entrepreneurial experiences, my firsthand observations of dozens of founders, and a dataset of 16,000 U.S. founders that I have collected since 2000.