Every decision routes through you. And it feels like being needed. It isn't really, though. It's the system failing quietly. I call it founder-as-bottleneck, and once you can see it, you can't unsee it. The tells: Approvals stack up on your desk while everyone waits. The team stalls the second you're heads-down or out. Nothing ships without your sign-off, even the small stuff. That's not a sign you're indispensable. It's a sign the work has nowhere else to go. Here's why it happens. No one owns ops. Nothing is written down. So the process lives in your head, and your head becomes the only door every decision has to walk through. You're not the leader in that setup. You're the choke point. The reframe that changes everything: this is a systems gap, not a work-harder problem. You can't out-hustle a missing structure. Longer hours don't fix an undocumented process, they just make you the bottleneck for more hours a day. The fix isn't you doing more. It's the decision having somewhere to go that isn't you. An owner. A documented path. A default that doesn't require your name on it. Being needed for everything and being trapped by everything look identical from the inside. That's the part nobody warns you about. Drop your take in the comments. Which of the tells hit closest to home.