They lack agency: what startups look for and nobody tells you

At Nodi we connect talent with startups. We do it every day: we review profiles, we run interviews, we understand what each team needs and we look for the right person for that specific moment.

And in that process we learn things no job board will ever teach you.

One of the most important ones I heard a while ago from the co-founder of a YC company. We had spent weeks sending him candidates for a software engineer position. Good profiles, with solid experience, clean references. And every one of them was rejected. One after another.

I asked him why.

His answer was short and kept me thinking for days: "They lack agency."

What is agency?

It is not an easy word to translate into Spanish. It is not initiative, it is not ambition, it is not a positive attitude. It is something more specific, and rarer.

One of the best ways to understand it comes from George Mack, who describes it with a simple question:

> Imagine you wake up in a jail cell in a third-world country. You can only call one person to get you out of there. Who do you call?

Think about it. The person you picked has something. A spark. A capacity to move the world even when the world tells them it cannot be done. That is agency.

It is not optimism. The optimist says the glass is half full. The person with high agency says they are the tap, that they can fill it.

And in the world of startups, that difference is everything.

Why startups hire differently

A big company can afford to hire someone who executes well inside a system that already works. There are processes, there are managers, there is documentation. The work is defined.

In a startup, especially at early stages, none of that exists. Or it half exists. Or it changes next week.

What an early-stage team needs is not someone who waits for instructions. It is someone who sees a problem, decides it has to be solved, and solves it, even if nobody explicitly asked them to. Even if it means learning something new. Even if it means making someone uncomfortable with a different opinion.

When the co-founder told me "they lack agency", what he was telling me was: these candidates are good employees, but they are not the players I need right now.

What high agency looks like in practice

It is not an abstract personality trait: it shows, and it can be observed.

The person with high agency does not wait for the perfect permission to act. When they run into an obstacle, their mind does not stop at "it can't be done" but opens a second internal conversation: how do I get around it?

They ask themselves different questions. Instead of "what am I supposed to do?", they ask "what should happen here, and what can I do to make it happen?"

They have a bias toward action. They do not ruminate endlessly. They would rather launch, learn and correct than wait for the perfect moment that never comes.

And when someone in a position of authority tells them something is not possible, that is not the end of the conversation. It is the start of another one.

The question that changes the interview

Since that conversation, at Nodi we started paying more attention to this when we evaluate candidates for startups.

We do not ask directly "do you have high agency?" Nobody is going to say no.

But we do look for stories. Moments when something was not defined, something was not working, something needed someone to take ownership, and that person was the candidate in front of us.

Have you ever identified a problem before anyone asked you to? What did you do about it?

When was the last time you were told something could not be done, and you did it anyway?

The answers to those questions say much more than the CV.

Why this matters now

We are living in a moment when the startup ecosystem in Latin America is maturing. There is more capital, more experienced founders, more technical talent available.

But the filter that separates the teams that move forward from the ones that stall is not only technical. It is a mindset.

The startups that win are the ones with people who do not wait for someone else to solve the problem. Who do not freeze when there is no manual. Who understand that at an early stage, clarity does not come before acting, but after.

That is what we look for when we connect talent with startups from Nodi. Not just skills. Agency.