Okay. So you’re growing fast. You started out with three people and now you have 47! You’ve picked up some funding. The product is coming together. You’re hiring so fast you don’t even know everyone you see in the halls anymore. People are jamming.  Then there’s Jeff.  If you’re at a growing startup, you probably already know him. He’s not a bad person. He’s not doing anything illegal or even anything blatantly wrong. But there’s something off. He’s not productive. He’s not a culture fit. He’s simply not right for your company right now. Whatever it is this person is doing — whether they’re named Jeff or not — it’s costing you, often much more than making a change. So what do you do about it?  Michael Lopp specializes in answering this question. Known to the tech blogosphere as Rands, Lopp managed engineers at Apple for over eight years and now works at Palantir, where he focuses almost exclusively on maintaining and retaining some of the world’s best technical talent (including how to make meetings suck less). Unsurprisingly, this job also entails identifying and managing people who don’t measure up — “the Jeffs of the world,” as Lopp puts it. There’s no avoiding it — this is one of the worst, hardest things founders and managers ever confront. And while there’s no painless approach to performance interventions or letting people go, there is a way to go about it that dodges lawsuits, permanent scars, and — ideally — the need to fire anyone. Lopp presented this approach in an exclusive talk at First Round’s recent CTO Summit.