How to Be Exceptional (and Earn Equity)

Raises should track value created, not time served. Bumping pay for someone who hasn’t grown their value to the business is really just inflation adjustment. Startups don’t need coasters to keep the lights on — they need an army of mini-founders to reach product-market fit and then scale it. The best team wins, and “best” is not the same as most skilled or most credentialed.

The logic is simple: equity is ownership, so more of it should go to the people who consistently act like owners. What follows is a working list of what exceptional teammates actually do — the “hands of the CEO” who quietly get things done — and why they earn to be disproportionately well-compensated. Exceptional people are the opposite of complacent: happy, but never satisfied. Never “done.”

Agency

High agency is the single biggest predictor of outsized impact. It means you act like an owner — you do what the company would do if it could momentarily clone the CEO and point them at the problem.

High-agency people find a way, not an excuse. Constraints are real but rarely immovable — instead of “we can’t do that,” they say “…but I think we can do this.” They treat every problem as theirs until it’s clearly owned by someone else.

A thought exercise: you’re stranded somewhere remote with one five-minute call left before your phone dies. Who do you call? Probably the highest-agency person you know — not necessarily the most equipped, but the one who will loop in the right people, monitor progress, and not rest until you’re safe. That’s the person to be for your team. High-agency people also:

• Loop others in when they need help — they don’t suffer in silence.
• Raise concerns early and often, before they become bigger and harder to fix.
• Link information without being asked, so knowledge is easy to traverse.
• Write really good docs.

Unblocking your team is your default #1 priority

An exceptional teammate’s default #1 priority is to unblock the rest of their team.

Doesn’t that stop you getting your own work done? No — the longer your team is blocked, the lower the entire team’s output. Say a teammate is stuck and you can unblock them in 45 minutes. If you finish your task first, they may stay blocked overnight until you’re both online again — turning a 45-minute fix into 12+ hours of lost time. Pause, unblock them now, and the net cost is 45 minutes. There’s nuance (a critical deadline on your side can outrank it), but fast unblocking almost always wins on total output.

Understanding why

Understanding why something is being done is almost always as important as doing it.

Exceptional people don’t blindly add features or rearchitect systems. A designer who understands why an interface exists can spot UX faults and learn from how others solved it. An engineer who understands why a feature is being built can sense whether users will like it and surface concerns before deploy — and, understanding why one architecture was chosen over another, can ask the questions that reveal faults before they become downtime.

Responsibility & ownership

Responsibility is demonstrated, not awarded. Responsibilities are given to responsible people.

People who haven’t proven themselves capable of more responsibility don’t get it. Exceptional people exercise responsibility beyond their current remit — demonstrating judgment and authority over key parts of the business — which is exactly what makes them eligible to be given ownership of more of it.

Dependability

An exceptional teammate gets done what they say they’re going to get done.

All it should take is acknowledgement — a Slack reply, a mention on a call — and it gets done. They don’t say “can you make that a GitHub issue for me?” If you had the time and detail, you’d have done it already. They make their own note and chase it down with the right urgency. They’re dependable with information too: they take notes on calls because they know they can’t hold every detail in memory while also asking good questions.

Availability

Offering a small slice of attention during off-hours can save your whole team the loss of theirs. Imagine a service breaks Friday night; a teammate unfamiliar with it plays “restart hot-potato” all weekend, roping others in, until you come online Monday and fix it with a two-line change in 15 minutes. Multiple weekends ruined for want of one reply. Be available enough to catch the critical issues, and you stop compounding problems dead in their tracks. One founder, days after raising $200M, still answered a customer’s critical issue within minutes on a Sunday evening — from first ping to resolution in seven. That’s a customer for life, and a standard anyone on the team can hold.

Context discovery

Highly responsible people spend the first 15–45 minutes of their day figuring out what happened while they were offline — catching mistakes and miscommunication early. Things happening while you’re busy isn’t the problem; not finding out is. Skip the downtime thread and a correctness bug you’d have caught at a glance can run for days, past log retention, into major customer and business damage. Read the relevant threads first thing and the same bug gets caught in 30 minutes.

Hedge against miscommunication

Good communication is clear, concise, and hedged against faults — like missed pings.

For every channel you’re expected to be reachable on, check your mentions at the start of the day, after lunch, and an hour before you sign off. Pings get missed — your phone stays silent, or you tell yourself “I’ll get to it after this push” and forget. A few minutes of discipline prevents a small miss from becoming a 10-hour stall for the team. And when something genuinely is lower priority, write it down so it’s tracked — you haven’t lost it, you’ve just deferred it.

Use AI responsibly

Exceptional people supplement their knowledge and expertise with AI — they don’t replace it.

LLMs and agents are powerful, but they hallucinate, occasionally miss the obvious, and often lack critical context. Used well, they still give you an edge. Exceptional people load thinking models with the right context to pressure-test their own understanding — without treating the answer as gospel — review everything and take full responsibility for whatever they hand off to an agent, and look for ways AI helps rather than bloats.

The bottom line

Everyone on the team should be held to high agency. Reward the people who own outcomes, unblock others, understand the why, and stay dependable and available — with responsibility, and with equity. Ownership of function earns ownership of the company.