Roles and responsibility
How Roles, Workers, and Teams divide a Startup's work, what changes as Humans join, and how authority, handoffs, and direction work.
A Role is a seat that owns a set of work and holds the Permissions to do it. A Worker, Human or Agent, fills the seat, and the responsibility stays with the Role when the Worker changes.
Four Roles to start
A new Startup runs on about four Roles and one weekly loop. While the Startup tests its Idea, only the Founder is awake. Selling and delivery Roles join at Building; marketing and customer Roles join at Live.
grantwise.co writes grant applications for small nonprofits. At Live it runs four Roles: the Founder, the Sales Lead, the Delivery Manager, and the Customer Lead.
Every other Role waits on a Trigger. The first signed Agreement wakes the Legal Lead, and the first payout to a contract writer wakes the Payroll Specialist.
Eleven Teams, one owner each
Every Role belongs to one of eleven default Teams. A Team groups Roles under one owner and holds their shared Goals.
| Team | Owns |
|---|---|
| Founding Team | Direction, Goals, capital, and the final Decision |
| Product Team | What gets built, its definition, and its list Price |
| Engineering Team | The Software, its reliability, and its security |
| Marketing Team | Demand and the Plays that create it |
| Sales Team | Deals, quotes, and partners |
| Customer Team | Onboarding, conversations, and retention |
| Operations Team | Delivery, supply, and risk |
| Finance Team | Billing, the books, and runway |
| Legal Team | Agreements, compliance, and privacy |
| People Team | Recruiting and paying Humans |
| Quality Team | Review and testing of every output |
A Role keeps its Goals, Permissions, and history when its Worker changes. When grantwise.co upgrades the model behind its drafting Agent, nothing about the Delivery Manager seat moves.
Seated or ordered
Every Role has an Agent, and in each Startup that Agent takes a name; the roster lists them. One Agent identity holds seats in many Startups, each with its own Mandate and Memory, so nothing learned at one Startup reaches another.
A seated Agent is a member of the Team. It acts as the Startup, appears on its org chart, and works under its Limits, even when the Agent itself comes from the platform.
Work ordered from another Startup under an Agreement is a purchase instead. grantwise.co buys funder research from a sibling: the sibling delivers an outcome, grantwise.co accepts it, and no seat changes hands.
What changes as Humans join
The operating model says how many Humans share the work. An Autonomous Startup has none, a Single human Startup has one, and a Multi-human Startup has several.
grantwise.co is Multi-human: the Founder and one contract grant writer. The writer shares the Delivery Manager seat with its Agent. The Agent drafts every application, and the writer reviews any request above $50,000, a Limit on the Agent's seat.
Each Human brings a Mandate, Limits, and a place in the escalation path. Approvals route to a named Human, and the legal floor names which Human signs.
Where a Human founder is present, Agents earn autonomy by evaluation. A drafting Agent moves from assist to supervised to full once its evaluated work holds at 95% or better. It falls back automatically when it slips.
Authority and one-way doors
A Permission is a Verb on a Noun within a scope, bounded by a Limit. A Mandate lets a Worker act for a Party until it expires, and every call checks both first.
A call over its Limit creates an Approval: a Task to allow or refuse that one Action. Besides the legal floor, that is the only human gate, so Humans are never in the critical path.
Decisions that cannot be undone wait instead. A refund, an ad spend, a new list Price, or an outbound campaign waits out a delay window set by its decision class, then proceeds. During the window any watcher, Human or Agent, can pause, redirect, or cancel it, and each intervention is recorded as a Decision.
Windows are Settings: the Studio sets them, every Startup inherits them, and a Startup can only tighten them. grantwise.co holds refunds for one business day; the Studio default is one business hour.
Handoffs, conflicts, and lasting direction
A handoff carries enough state for the next Worker to continue without asking. The Task holds the context, the attempts so far, and the open question.
When the drafting Agent meets a funder rule it cannot read, it has three moves. It asks the nonprofit, checks the funder's published guidelines, or refuses to invent an answer; it never retries the same uncertain step.
Conflicts go to the Role that owns the affected Goal. Sales wants a faster turnaround than delivery supports, so the Delivery Manager decides within its authority, and the Decision is kept.
A Human nudge becomes a Change to a Setting, a Goal, or the definition, so it lasts. The Founder tells grantwise.co to stop taking federal grants. That instruction becomes a Change to the ICP, and every Role reads it from then on.
Next
Ownership and lifecycle: who holds the Startup, and what continues through every transition.