Clarity Is King: How Today's Top Startups Are Winning

Forbes

28-04-2025

The Forbes 2025 list of top startups reveals a shared truth about organizational excellence: clarity has emerged as the essential centerpiece around which all other elements of success revolve.
Today's most successful organizations have recognized that without fundamental clarity—in values, management, hiring, and technology adoption—the other virtues of connection, innovation, resilience feel out of reach.
My conversations with both founders and people leaders who made it on the Forbes 2025 list showed me what clarity looks like when it's applied to values, management, hiring, and AI strategy.
Clarity is the foundational virtue of most successful organizations in today's time.
It all begins with your core values. When an organization knows how it wants to operate, the what begins to emerge. Being clear on what they are, how they were derived, and how they might be applied on a regular basis is crucial.
"Culture to me is just clarity," explains Alli Trussell, SVP of People at Bilt. 'We have a responsibility as a company to be radically clear about who we are.' Bridgewater is famous for this – listing out its principles in an employee handbook for all employees to digest.
Jenny He, CEO of Ergeon, articulates that a company's values can't just live in a handbook. "While we do not have our core values plastered on walls and on pieces of paper, I do think we embed them in all of our decision making and use them as our constant conversation hierarchy around principle-based decision making."
And while many start-ups claim to have values, the rigor with which these organizations apply and revisit their values distinguishes them from their peers. As Erica Lied, Head of Human Resources at Ridgeline, emphasizes: "If you're not revisiting the tenants of what make you and your competitive advantages at least on a weekly basis and doing more than lip service, you are not going to have a sustained culture."
Knowing one's values makes hiring easier. Many of the startups I spoke with have written down, with clarity, what excellence looks like in each role. This clarity serves as the foundation for every aspect of recruitment, from job descriptions and interview questions to final decisions.
David Britton, founder of DoorLoop, explains how his company transformed its hiring approach: 'At our last company, we used to rely on what we called 'the lunch test'—could we see ourselves grabbing lunch with this person? It was a strictly personality assessment. At DoorLoop, we've completely reimagined our process with quantitative assessments tied to specific scorecards.'
Anshu Sharma, CEO of Skyflow, positions this clarity as the defining element of culture: '90% of culture is who you offboard and onboard into the company. You don't really change people... their character doesn't change.'
This is especially relevant for category-creating companies. Max Azarov, CEO of NovaKid, explains: 'When we hire people we look at, they should have done something exemplary in their life, but not necessarily in the same field. They should have the motivation, the passion, and they should have done something really well. But there is no experience fit because we are doing something new.'
The most successful startups have doubled down on developing exceptional managers—recognizing that no LLM can replace the human needs for motivation, feedback, and growth. What sets these organizations apart is their insistence on clarity in communication as the cornerstone of management excellence.
Melissa Kaganovsky from Navan reinforces this perspective: 'At Navan, managers and HR teams have a huge opportunity to positively impact employee mental health and overall well-being. Leadership grounded in clear communication is core to our philosophy, and we're committed to providing the training, resources, and support needed to empower managers to lead effectively and compassionately.'
Jessica Bartlett, Head of People at Spotnana, articulates how crucial it is to build cultures of clarity in feedback: 'I think delivering difficult feedback is a challenge. Because as a manager, you're invested in this person and you don't want to hurt their feelings. And it's that realization of actually if you don't give them the tough feedback, you're letting them down because now they don't know, hey, there's an area that I need to develop and it's going to make me better.'
Sasha Robinson, VP of People at Trainual, reinforces how clarity transforms the feedback process: 'If you truly align your feedback to your values, people will rise to the occasion 99% of the time. When you give very direct, corrective feedback and you see (immediate) improvement, it's clear, they just weren't trained properly or they just didn't fully understand what was asked of them, which is a communication failure on the organization and leadership.'
While many organizations implement AI haphazardly, today's leading startups have understood the problems that AI might solve for them and deployed their teams to go use AI. Rather than adopting AI for its own sake, they've established precise objectives, integration approaches, and success metrics that align with their core mission.
"We are obviously leaning all the way in," explains Alli Trussell from Bilt. 'One of the things I'm going to be focusing on is how to make it even more ingrained into every mode of operation that we have. And that is something that we hold managers to. You need to be AI first. You need to understand this so well so that you can teach your team to start there, not finish there.'
Maya Marcus, Chief People Officer at Abnormal Security, emphasizes how this clarity must permeate the entire organization: 'AI is a very big part of our platform. We encourage every employee to use it – and we use it everywhere. Our view is that it's important for us to disrupt ourselves before somebody else disrupts us.'
This concept of disrupting oneself – be it an individual or an organization – is one that coaching can help with. Heather Conklin, CEO of Torch, shares how coaching – structured around clarity – transformed her approach to leadership: "Nothing has impacted my leadership more than coaching. At its core, coaching helped me get clearer on who I am and become more intentional with how I show up. That shift changed everything: my relationships, my results, and how I think about growth.'
What emerges from these conversations is a compelling insight: clarity isn't merely one quality among many that successful startups possess—it's the essential foundation upon which all other elements of excellence depend. Without clarity in values, management practices, talent strategy, and technology implementation, organizations cannot achieve sustainable success regardless of their funding, market opportunity, or technological innovation.
Austin Allison, CEO of Pacaso, captures this perspective: 'Companies are people, meaning the caliber of a company is directly correlated with the caliber of the people and their ability to do great work... the most important job of the CEO is to attract the right people and then empower those people to do their best work.'
In an era defined by uncertainty, complexity, and accelerating change, clarity has emerged as the ultimate competitive advantage—not as a temporary response to current conditions but as an enduring principle of organizational excellence that will continue to define success for years to come.