I think &quot;assholes&quot; might be people who personally care AND practice direct challenges, but do so in a way that shame and blame individuals. Calling out mistakes is fine, as long as you don&#x27;t assign biased blame to the person making the mistake. Startups are already difficult endeavors without the added pressures of being directly on the hook for a mistake. Teams should accept the suffering from an individual&#x27;s mistakes with the assumption mistakes will be made by team members. If a given team member makes too many mistakes, then perhaps a review is necessary, but otherwise, it&#x27;s a <i>team</i> mistake which can be learned from and used to improve the team and product.