Gossip Kills Startups

In the early days of a startup, everything feels electric. Ideas fly fast, Slack channels buzz, and there’s an unspoken intimacy in the small team huddled around a shared mission.

But somewhere between seed funding and your first board slide, something starts to rot: gossip.

It doesn’t come with a name tag. It starts as a “quick vent.” A whispered "Did you hear what happened in that meeting?" or a not-so-subtle eye-roll after a Zoom call.

It feels like bonding. Like loyalty. Like justice. But gossip’s never neutral. It’s corrosive.

How Gossip Took Down a Rocketship

Away was the sleek luggage startup with Instagrammable design and millennial hype. From the outside, it was a rocketship.

On the outside: a rocketship. On the inside: cracks. The CEO banned internal emails. All comms had to be public on Slack. Transparency in theory. Surveillance in practice.

There was no safe place to speak freely. So people created one.

Private Slack groups and side chats emerged, where team members could whisper their doubts, frustrations, and theories.

“It was very clear who was in the clique,” one ex-employee told The Verge. “If you weren’t, you were always the last to know.”

Gossip became a survival mechanism. By the time the stories leaked to the press, the damage was done. The Verge’s exposé revealed a toxic internal culture, and within weeks, Korey stepped down.

Not because the product failed, but because the trust did.

Why We Gossip

Gossip doesn’t always wear devil horns. Sometimes it just wears confusion.

When people don’t understand a decision — the vacuum gets filled with speculation.

We’re wired to bond. Gossip is the fast lane.

65% of what we say? It’s about other people. Not ideas. Not plans. People.

It’s not talking about people that’s the problem. It’s doing it behind their back, without a path forward.

In startups, where things change fast and structure is light, gossip feels like the backchannel to truth.

But it usually bends that truth out of shape.

Gossip vs. Feedback: What’s the Difference?

Gossip is peer-to-peer. It loops around the problem, never through it.

Feedback is face-to-face. It steps in, not around. It invites change.

Gossip says: “Can you believe what Alex did?”

Feedback says: “Hey Alex, can I share something I noticed in the meeting that might help?”

One erodes. The other builds.

And no — eliminating gossip doesn’t mean bottling it up. Quite the opposite.

It means building the culture where frustrations aren’t buried — they’re aired, addressed, and metabolized. Because great teams don’t avoid conflict. They walk straight through it.

Founders vs Founding Team

At the beginning, it’s magic.
Late nights. Shared wins.
A half-eaten burrito on a whiteboard marker.
Everyone’s in the trenches.
No walls. No hierarchy. Just belief.

Then… the shift.

Series A closes.
Calendars go dark.
Investor meetings fill the day.
And new VPs arrive with shiny LinkedIns and even shinier equity grants.

Suddenly, the early team’s not in the loop.
They’re outside it.

That’s when the whispers start:

“Did you hear they made that hire without telling us?”
“Why’s the new guy getting more equity than we did?”

It doesn’t feel like a mission anymore.
It feels like office politics.

It’s not dysfunction.
It’s disconnection.

And unless founders catch it early—with honesty, transparency, and actual conversations—the culture splits.

Two teams form:
The insiders. And everyone else.

By the time you notice?
Trust is gone.
And you can’t raise another round to buy it back.

What Happens When We Choose Feedback

When gossip dies, speed returns. Problems surface early. Trust compounds.

People stay not because things are perfect, but because they know when something’s wrong — it gets addressed.

And yeah, people still vent.

But it happens in 1:1s, retros, and Slack threads that lead somewhere. Not on side-channels with eye-emoji reactions.

A culture that trades gossip for feedback doesn’t avoid friction. It metabolizes it.

Final Thought

Every startup has a choice: tolerate gossip or champion feedback.

One is slow poison. The other is your antidote.

So say the thing in the room. Give the note. Build the culture your future team will thank you for.

Because feedback is fuel. And gossip?

Just smoke.

Until next time,

Ajay