Sabeer Nelli Says Founders Should Measure Progress by What They Simplify, Not Only What They Add
Behavioral research has found that people can overlook subtractive solutions, a tendency Nelli says leaders should consider when reviewing growing business processes.
TYLER, TX, September 2, 2026 – Sabeer Nelli, founder and CEO of Zil Money, says founders should look at progress through more than what their companies add. As businesses grow, he believes leaders should also regularly examine what can be simplified, consolidated, or removed.
The idea has support from behavioral research, although the research was not conducted specifically on founders or businesses.
A 2021 study published in Nature found across eight experiments that people tended to overlook beneficial changes that involved removing something. Participants were more likely to identify useful subtractive solutions when they were specifically reminded to consider subtraction or had more opportunities to recognize the limitations of an additive approach.
A preregistered replication published in The Journal of Creative Behavior in 2025 tested 477 French adults and again found substantially more additive than subtractive ideas. Reminding participants that they could remove things increased consideration of subtractive solutions.
Neither study measured startup management or business performance. Nelli says the broader problem-solving tendency, however, raises a useful question for leaders: when companies try to improve something, do they automatically look for another feature, system, person, or approval step before asking what they could remove?
“Adding is visible. Subtracting is not,” says Nelli. “But most of the friction inside a growing company comes from things nobody ever went back to remove.”
Nelli says the issue can become especially visible in operating and finance processes. An approval step may have been necessary when it was introduced. A spreadsheet may have solved an urgent reporting problem. A software subscription may have filled a temporary gap.
Over time, the original reason can disappear while the process remains.
For finance and operations leaders, Nelli says reviewing complexity can mean asking whether recurring reports are still used, whether approval layers still match current risk controls, whether teams are entering the same information in multiple systems, and whether older manual steps are still necessary.
The same discipline can apply to product roadmaps. Features, integrations, internal tools, and projects should continue earning their place rather than remaining indefinitely simply because time or money was already invested in them.
“The founders I respect most aren’t the ones with the longest roadmap,” he adds. “They’re the ones willing to shorten it.”
Nelli is not arguing that growing companies should stop adding people, technology, products, or capabilities. His point is that addition should not be treated as the only visible form of progress.
He believes leaders should periodically ask two questions: what does the company need now, and what is it still carrying from an earlier stage that no longer serves that need?
That review can apply to a software subscription, a report, an approval, a meeting, a workflow, or a product initiative.
As companies grow, Nelli argues that the ability to remove outdated complexity can become as important as the ability to build something new.
About Sabeer Nelli
Sabeer Nelli is the founder and CEO of Zil Money, a financial technology company focused on business payment management. His background includes building and operating businesses in financial technology and other industries.
Contact