Sean Mullaney
speaker
1,197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The feedback loops are very short and pretty direct.
And what I learned is that when you are leading a team, you are not the most important person on this team.
When you're an individual contributor, yeah, you kind of have to take that mentality.
But what I quickly realized is that my team did not want me to give them the answers to all the problems.
I spent my first six or 12 months running around telling everyone, you should do this, you should do that.
I've got a better answer.
Oh, is that your solution?
No, I've got a better idea.
Okay.
But I mean, honestly, that failure, and I'll only describe it as a failure in my first six or 12 months as being a leader, was so acute that I immediately had to stop and reassess what it was.
The worst thing you can do is...
If your image of how you're doing your job is vastly different to what everyone else sees of you and you keep that facade for a long time, that's painful.
So it was a fast failure and one that I learned from very quickly.
And what I really learned is about when you're leading teams, it's about giving them agency and autonomy and direction.
But it's enabling them to do their best work.
It's not about you.
And the best, you know, as I took on more leadership roles at Stripe and Algolian places, my goal was always to be the least important person in the room.
Because if I'm spending my time like going and telling people how to do their job, they feel disempowered.
But more importantly, like you become the bottleneck.
And honestly, like even now at Seapoint, every single person I've hired for our startup could be a founder on their own.
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