Hiring, Developing, and Promoting Middle Managers at Startups: EVeM CEO Yoshinobu Nagaramura

EVeM founder Yoshinobu Nagaramura, who took HowTelevision to IPO as COO, lays out a four-category management framework and explains why instinctive management destroys startup organizations.

• Nagaramura defines management as four equal pillars: strategy, organization, people, and self-management — most founders only focus on people and miss the rest.
• The most common startup management failure is starting too late: founders delay structure and goal-setting until the 20-person mark, by which time culture is already broken.
• Hiring experienced managers from Recruit or DeNA without aligning on a shared management language causes culture collapse within a year — credentials don’t substitute for common frameworks.
• Middle managers must proactively ‘middle-up’: in startups, strategy rarely cascades down cleanly, so managers must surface ambiguity and propose frameworks upward rather than waiting.
• The best manager candidate scores high on two axes simultaneously: team-purpose mindset (team wins feel personal) and self-direction (self-evaluates without needing external validation).
• To develop other-dependent candidates into managers, assign them visible work where success is likely and public praise is probable — confidence precedes self-direction.
• When promoting a first-time manager, set explicit reversal conditions upfront (e.g., ‘if the team is not in state X in three months, we revisit’) to make demotion recoverable without the person quitting.
• Trust is built by listening 98% in the first meeting and then rigorously keeping small shared agreements — leading with your own credentials achieves the opposite.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube