Austin Stidham

I've spent my career reading incentive structures from the inside. Not studying them theoretically, but operating within them at scale, under pressure, watching them shape behavior in real time and learning what they were actually built to produce.

In March 2014, less than a year after its founding, I joined a startup entering hyper-growth (LuLaRoe) and became responsible for calculating and verifying compensation payouts across a rapidly expanding organization. What that immersion revealed wasn't a people problem. It was a structural one. Incentive distortions were predictable, consistent, and invisible to everyone except the people they were pulling.

That ground-level view led to a broader mandate. Redesigning compensation architectures as the organization scaled into a billion-dollar enterprise.

The work was never abstract. Following the redesign, I presented the structural changes directly to field leadership and conducted multiple hour-long Q&A sessions with organization members whose compensation was directly affected by the new architecture.

Defending structural decisions to people with a direct financial stake in disagreeing with you is a different discipline than designing them. It's where the behavioral dynamics of incentive response stop being theoretical and become viscerally real. You discover quickly whether a structure is genuinely defensible or just internally elegant. That distinction matters more in a PE context than anywhere else, because the field doesn’t care what leadership intended.

None of it was about building more sophisticated structures. It was about closing the gap between what leadership intended to reward and what the mechanics actually incentivized when a rational person optimized for their own return.

For PE firms, it shows up in due diligence assumptions, post-close underperformance, and management teams that are technically aligned on paper and behaviorally misaligned in practice.

That gap is where I work.