I’ve always loved music, especially indie bands, and I’ve always loved startups, especially the untold stories of the pragmatic growth types. And the more time I spend working with founders, the more I see the similarities between the two.
A startup’s founding team is a lot like starting a band. At its heart, it’s a collection of people who’ve decided to join together to build something great. Each contributor has a formal role: lead singer, drummer, guitarists, bass player, though these can vary depending on the venture. There’s also a wider range of supporting players, like business manager, promoter, agent, and tour manager. Each person fulfills a critical function and brings their own style and energy. When it all comes together, it can be magic. But if the players aren’t in sync, egos clash, or communication breaks down, things can fall apart fast.
Seth Pitman, PhD, ABPP, a former member of the band Wild Light and now Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist and Strategic Business Consultant, summed it up perfectly when reflecting on his own experience:
“We were in that lucky first group that somehow made it through the noise and into the 1%. Then we found we didn’t have the skills to manage the next stage, and things collapsed. The skills we lacked were largely interpersonal and to some extent managerial. We had the vision, music, and external support but the problems were internal.”
This is the exact same challenge startup teams face when they hit their growth inflection points. The product, market, and external excitement may be there, but if the internal dynamics aren’t right. If the team doesn’t evolve, if leadership doesn’t invest in itself, then things can fall apart quickly and unravel.
The Early Days: Finding Your Sound
When you first form a band (or a startup), it’s all about the spark: the creative energy, ideas, and late nights making something new and exciting. You’ve likely already spent years learning, studying, and thinking about what you want to achieve and how you’ll stand out from the competition. Founders, like musicians, are obsessed with crafting their product, making sure it’s just right before sharing it with the world.
But passion and obsessiveness alone don’t build a sustainable company or lasting music career. You also need to build replicable systems that allow you to improve consistently over time and cultivate strong relationships based on mutual trust and respect. You need to learn how to work together as a unit, not just as individual contributors. In short, you need coordinated execution.
Breaking Out: Scaling the Team and the Vision
If you’re lucky, the world starts to notice your hard work and value what you’re doing. You land investments, early customers, or press attention just like a band landing a record deal, gaining social traction, and performing in front of bigger and bigger audiences.
This is where things start to get real. You’re hiring fast, trying to keep up with demand, managing expectations from customers, investors, and partners. It’s no longer just about making great music (or building a great product); it’s about running a business. In some ways, the hardest part has just begun.
For many founders, this is where soft skills become the difference-maker. Communication, role and authority delegation, conflict resolution, and team dynamics now matter just as much as vision, product, and strategy. Your idea can only take you so far. Now you need to execute, feverishly, over a much longer haul.
Avoiding the Breakup: Investing in Leadership and Team Dynamics
Wild Light had the music, recognition, and external support in place, but it was internal problems that ultimately led to their collapse. I’ve seen startups follow the same pattern: a great idea, strong market fit, and strong backing, only to implode due to leadership misalignment, lack of trust, or an inability to scale the organization effectively.
Many founders at this stage are so focused on external growth that they neglect their own development as leaders. That’s a huge oversight. If you ask any TEAMS that have fallen apart across any genre or venture, they’ll blame the interpersonal conflicts first and foremost. The lack of an ability to sustain the gel. The best startup CEOs, akin to the best frontmen in bands, know when to adapt, delegate, and evolve.
Seth’s Take: From Indie Rock Band to Business Psychology
“After Wild Light broke up, I became focused on understanding why ventures and relationships fall apart, especially when there’s so much to gain from working together. I’ve learned that success isn’t just a product of talent or timing; it hinges on how people navigate conflict, build lasting relationships, and sustain trust under pressure.
Strong leadership means balancing external demands — market pressures, investors, and the like — with internal team dynamics. Growth introduces friction, and if a leader can’t hold competing considerations simultaneously, things unravel. The best leaders don’t just set strategy. They recognize shifting team dynamics early, address them directly, and create the conditions for trust and cohesion.
So how do you avoid the countless pitfalls at this stage of the journey? It takes more than just hiring well or tightening up operations. From both my experience in Wild Light and as a clinical psychologist and consultant, I’ve seen how leadership struggles often stem from factors that aren’t immediately obvious: assumptions people make about each other, unspoken tensions (at all levels of the organization), and how a leader’s personal history plays into their style, including their blind spots. The founders who last may well be genius visionaries, but they absolutely must understand how to hold a group together when things get tough.”
Consistency Wins: Don’t Aim to Be A One and Done
For those who’ve followed me over the years, they know I’ve done a lot of integration of music into the brands I’ve built and made correlations between emerging artists and startups fighting and clawing for relevancy, customers, and scale. The same grit and grind exists in both professions. And there’s just something so motivational and poetic when a band or startup rises to success.
That prior paragraph was ripped verbatim from a 2019 post on the York IE blog entitled, What Startups Can Learn From The National. I’m nothing but consistent in my band/startup parallels. I always joke, “I was born to be a lead singer of a band, but had no singing voice so I got into startups.”
If you believe in something, say it over and over again across all mediums until you’re blue in the face.
Lessons for Founders from the Bands That Made It (and Some That Didn’t)
The bands that endure aren’t always the most talented. They’re the ones who learned how to tend to important relationships, navigate challenges together, and evolve with changing times and needs. The same is true for startups.
Here are a few key takeaways from the music world that every founder should consider:
🎸 Know Your Role – Not everyone is meant to be the frontman. Play to your strengths and build a team with complementary skills. Sometimes, the right ‘hired gun’ makes all the difference.
🥁 Keep the Rhythm – A startup needs operational stability, just like a great band needs a solid drummer. Culture, execution, and consistency matter as much as vision. Identify your team’s glue and protect it.
🎤 Communicate Like a Band – The best bands have unspoken chemistry, but that comes from countless hours of practice, trust built over time, and clear communication (much of which is intuitive and unspoken). In startups, transparency, alignment, and coordinated execution keep everyone in sync.
🎶 Evolve Your Sound – What got you here won’t get you there. The best bands (and companies) don’t just play the same setlist forever. They adapt, experiment, and grow. Startups need to realize that at each stage of the startup lifecycle, they need to behave differently.
🧠 Take Care of Your Mental Health – Scaling a startup or band pushes people to their limits. But mental health isn’t only an individual responsibility. It has to be baked into the culture, not outsourced or treated as an afterthought. Leaders set the tone by fostering open communication, realistic expectations, and a working environment where people can thrive, not just survive.
💿 Surround Yourself with the Right People – The best bands have great managers, producers, promoters, and agents willing to go to bat for them. Founders need the same robust support system: mentors, investors, board members, and operators who can help them scale without losing their way. Family support (and straight talk) is also imperative to both careers.
Encore: The York IE Approach
At York IE, we don’t just invest in companies but we embed ourselves in their growth story, helping founders and leadership teams develop the skills, strategies, and mindsets they need to scale.
Whether it’s go-to-market execution, technology operations, leadership development, or strategic advisory, we’re here to make sure you don’t become a one-hit wonder.
Because when a startup team is truly in sync, when the leadership learns how to evolve, communicate, and scale together, that’s when you go from a great song to an all-time classic.
Let’s build something that lasts. 🚀
Keeping the Band Together: Seth Pitman, PhD, ABPP
“Most startups focus on external growth, but internal dynamics determine whether they last over the long haul. Scaling magnifies stress, exposes leadership blind spots, and tests relationships in ways founders often don’t anticipate.
“As a clinical psychologist and strategic business consultant, I help founders avoid the traps that derail high-growth companies: burnout, leadership bottlenecks, team cohesion, and the hidden tensions that surface as a company scales. Beyond traditional coaching, I diagnose what’s really happening beneath the surface and help leaders build the skills they need to navigate pressure without sacrificing their vision or losing their team.”
The best bands and startups don’t just get bigger. They learn how to adapt and sustain their creative momentum without falling apart. Let’s make sure yours does, too. 🎶
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This post was written in collaboration with Seth Pitman, PhD, ABPP. Seth is a Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist & Strategic Business Consultant. He was also a founding member of the indie band Wild Light. If you are interested in his consulting services, reach out directly for a free 60-minute discussion and discovery call: [email protected].
