We don’t like to talk about governance in early-stage tech.

We talk about shipping. Velocity. Moats. TAM. GMV.


We do not talk about: who actually has the keys, who can move money, who can change production systems at 2am without a second pair of eyes. I’ve been around long enough. In early Bitcoin, Ethereum, Web3 infra, and now at the intersection of AI and humanoid robotics, to see a pattern that doesn’t care about your valuation, your narrative, or your investor deck:


If you don’t design governance, you are designing drift.


And drift always shows up.


In Web3, it looks like companies shutting down out of nowhere, and CEOs that don't like questions.


In AI, it looks like unlogged access, unreviewed model changes, and behavior nobody can fully explain after the fact. This piece is for founders, CTOs, and engineers who are accidentally running a multi-million dollar system “on vibes.” Especially in Web3 and AI, where the blast radius is high and the paper trail is thin.


Let’s talk about what “real governance” actually means in practice.


1. If your code has permissions, your company should too.

Developers understand permissions intuitively.


You wouldn’t give every microservice root access to your database.

You wouldn’t let every junior engineer SSH into production with full sudo.

You wouldn’t hardcode a private key into a frontend and call it “move fast.”


Yet a surprising number of early-stage companies do the organizational equivalent:


That works until it doesn’t.


Baseline rule: If your app has role-based access control, your company should too.


Start simple:



This is no more exotic than designing a permissions model.

You’re just applying engineering discipline to human behavior.


2. Separation of duties is not corporate theatre

In security and finance, separation of duties exists for a reason:


In an early-stage tech company, this feels “heavy.” It’s not. You can implement separation of duties with:


In Web3, that might look like:


In AI and robotics, it looks like:


If your system allows one person to quietly change code, controls, and cash, you don’t have governance. You have a single point of failure with a LinkedIn profile.


3. Treasury controls: stop treating millions like testnet tokens

Web3 and AI founders love to say “we’re still early.”

Banks, regulators, and future prosecutors do not care.


If you are holding:

…you are running a treasury, not a Discord server.


At minimum:

Segregate accounts


Define thresholds and workflows


Instrument your treasury like a production system


If this sounds like “too much process,” ask yourself:

Who is blocking governance and why


If the answer is no one, fix it now, while the numbers are still small.


4. Audits and logging: build the forensic trail you hope you never need

In engineering, we log because we know things break.

In governance, you log because people are human.


For Web3 and AI systems, auditing is not just:

“We did a smart contract audit once.”

“Our lawyers read the terms.”


You need two kinds of auditability:


Technical audits


Behavioral audits


Operationally, that can look like:


If something ever goes wrong (and statistically, something always does), you want to be the person who can say:

“Here’s the trail. Here’s what happened. Here’s how we’re fixing it.”


5. Board oversight: your board is not a group chat

Early-stage founders often treat the board as:


That’s not a board. That’s an audience.


A real board:


You don’t have to become a public company overnight.

But you can: Bring in at least one independent director with finance, legal, or risk experience


Give your board explicit visibility into:


Normalize the phrase: “I’m not comfortable with that risk profile.”


If your board never pushes back, you don’t have a strong vision. You have weak oversight.


6. Transparency, compliance, and ethics are not branding — they’re survival

In Web3, “trustless” systems often hid very trust-full human bottlenecks.


In AI, “alignment” can be a nice word on a slide while internal policies live in Notion and never make it to production logs.


When I talk about transparency, compliance, and ethics, I’m not talking about:


I’m talking about decisions like:


Compliance becomes uncomfortable when it’s retrofitted under duress.


Ethics becomes a buzzword when it’s only invoked after a blow-up.


The founders I respect most in this cycle are the ones who are engineering governance in on day zero (especially in Web3 and AI, where the externalities are real).


7. “We’re small. We’ll fix it when we’re big.” No, you won’t

There’s a lie that a lot of early-stage teams tell themselves:

“We’ll put in real governance once we’ve raised the next round.”


By then:


And if something goes wrong, your size won’t save you.

Regulators, courts, and journalists do not care that you were “just a startup.”

The good news: you don’t need a 40-page policy manual to be responsible.


You can start with:


That’s it. That alone puts you in a different category from 90% of early-stage teams still running “on trust.”


8. Build like someone will eventually ask hard questions

If you’re working in Web3, AI, or robotics, someone will eventually ask hard questions:


You can’t control when that happens, or what triggers it.

What you can control is whether your answer is:


“Here’s how we designed this from day one. Here’s the proof.”

or

“We never thought we’d get this big.”


If you’re an early-stage founder, operator, or engineer: governance is not something you bolt on at Series C.

It’s something you quietly design now, while you still have the chance to do it cleanly.

Your company deserves more than vibes. So do your users.