By any conventional startup logic, LumberFi should already be slowing down.
In just two years, the construction-tech platform has gone from zero to more than 70 employees, 5× annual growth, and recognition from both NASDAQ and the NYSE as one of the fastest-growing companies in its category. But founder and CEO Shreesha Ramdas is already operating in 2027.
That is not because he ignores execution. It’s because he refuses to own it. “The way I’ve built the team is that they should be the ones running the company, not me,” Ramdas said. “What I should be working on is what will matter a year from now.”
I’ve coached hundreds of CEOs through high-growth phases, and I can tell you: this instinct to let go early instead of clinging to control is rare. Most leaders don’t become bottlenecks because they lack talent. They become bottlenecks because they won’t get out of the way.
Ramdas is not new to scale. He was part of multiple venture-backed growth stories: LeadFormix (acquired by SAP), StrikeDeck (acquired by Medallia), and then Medallia’s IPO.
Standing on the NYSE floor after Medallia rang the bell, his CEO turned to him and said: “It’s your turn.” That moment changed how Ramdas approached his next company. This would not be another flip. It could be his last. This one is about legacy.
I hear that shift all the time when founders reach this stage of their careers. The question stops being How do I win? and becomes What do I want to build that outlives me?
So instead of choosing a glamorous tech category, Shreesha chose one of the most operationally brutal: construction. He wanted a place where transformation would be real, and hard.
From day one at LumberFi, Ramdas decided that internal friction could never be allowed to become the growth bottleneck. “I need a team that completes me, that can take my shape, so I can go fight the external battles, not internal ones.”
So he built the company around a single design principle: The CEO must never become the referee.
That meant:
If the CEO owns decisions, everyone else waits. If the team owns decisions, the company moves.
Ramdas has a blunt theory: “The only thing that really slows organizations down is centralized decision-making.” I see this all the time in Fortune 500 companies: brilliant leaders, paralyzed teams. Every company says it wants empowerment. Most still behave like everything important needs approval. That creates what Ramdas calls decision gravity: everything eventually falls back to the top. So LumberFi attacks it deliberately.
Ramdas codified the company’s operating culture into a simple system he repeats in every meeting. He calls it EOE: Energy. Ownership. Experimentation.
“You will not be fired for making decisions,” Ramdas told his team. “As long as you don’t bring the company down.” That’s what creates psychological safety, not nice words, but the freedom to make real calls without looking over your shoulder.
Most founders claim to want candor. Few actually enforce it. Ramdas does so relentlessly. “I told them: be brutal with each other. If you have an issue with someone, go talk to them directly. Don’t bring it to me.”
Early on, when executives tried to escalate conflict upward, he refused to intervene. Not because he didn’t care but because teams that outsource conflict management never develop trust. Now, LumberFi’s leaders challenge each other without politics, and without the CEO in the room. That’s why they are able to keep moving fast even as they grow.
While the team runs the business, Ramdas stays focused on what’s coming next. “My job is to think about what will matter a year from now,” he told me. “That means holding today’s deals in one hand and tomorrow’s partners in the other.” Most executives get pulled into the noise of the quarter. Shreesha deliberately stays ahead of it.
He applies the same long-term discipline to leadership hiring. Ramdas is already talking to candidates he won’t hire for another year. He wants time to observe who they really are before the pressure is on. It gives him something no recruiter can provide: signal over time. So when a role actually opens, there is no interview theater. There is already a track record of conversations, judgment calls, and cultural fit. This is how he protects the company from the most expensive mistake any scaling CEO can make: the wrong leadership hire at the wrong moment.
LumberFi uses AI aggressively: agents for note-taking, follow-ups, functional automation, and workflow acceleration. But Ramdas draws a clear line.“If you think AI can be a referee or a coach — no.” AI scales work. It does not replace ownership. The company’s real advantage is not automation. It is the fact that humans are not afraid to decide.
What Shreesha has built at LumberFi is exactly what I mean when I talk about teamship: a leadership system in which the executive team functions as a single operating unit rather than a collection of powerful silos reporting up to a CEO.
Most CEOs believe they have empowered teams. But in reality, they have created highly capable silos that still orbit a single decision-maker. When something gets risky or uncomfortable, it all flows back to the CEO. And that’s when momentum dies.
Shreesha broke that pattern by designing his company so that the executive team owns the business together. He removed himself as the referee. He forced candor. He decentralized decisions. And he created psychological safety around making calls, not just raising concerns.
That is the heart of teamship: leaders who do not just align but commit together. What impressed me most was not how fast LumberFi is growing. It was how little it depends on one person to keep moving.
When Shreesha says he needs leaders who “complete me” and “have my back,” he’s describing the core of co-elevation: not just doing your job well, but taking responsibility for the success of the people around you. People do their best work when they know their peers are counting on them, not when they are waiting for permission from above.
This is why his leadership team can challenge one another directly. This is why they can make tradeoffs without escalation. That’s why they can stretch without snapping.
In an AI-accelerated world, everything will move faster. What matters is whether the team stays aligned as it does. Shreesha built a company where growth doesn’t pull people apart.
Originally published at Forbes