[nodamage]

Even in her anecdote she doesn't actually come out and say they lowered their standards until they ended up hiring women who "couldn't do the work", at least in terms of technical ability. Her only description of these women is:

"But, they lacked the energy to put us into overdrive. Worse, they were starting to drain the energy from the rest of the team."

What exactly does it mean to "lack energy"? Were these women unqualified or otherwise incapable of doing the work? If so, why not say so explicitly? Because otherwise, in the context of startups I would be inclined to interpret that sentence as meaning "they weren't willing to work 80 hour weeks like the rest of our team so we fired them".

[unclebucknasty]

Yeah, these are the kinds of vague, subjective terms that are sometimes used to target people whose actual performance is unassailable.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Besides that, a manager/leader/founder needs to take ownership of their team's motivation (within reasonable limits).