Practical thinking on building, funding, and scaling startups — from someone who has done it. No fluff, no generic advice. Just the stuff that actually matters.
Closing a funding round feels like finishing a marathon. It's not. It's the starting gun for the next one. And the 90 days that follow a raise are probably the most consequential in your company's life — a period where founders regularly make expensive, irreversible mistakes.
Read the article →Every week a founder tells me they've been using an AI coach. They say it with a slight defensiveness — like they're waiting for me to tell them they've wasted their money. I don't. But I do ask them what they've actually got from it. The answers are almost always the same: "It's
Read more →Every founder I speak to right now is either using AI tools heavily, feeling guilty that they're not using them enough, or quietly suspicious that the whole thing is mostly hype. The honest answer is that all three instincts are partially right. AI is genuinely useful in sales an
Read more →I've read hundreds of board reports. Most of them are useless. Not because founders are bad writers — but because they're writing the wrong document entirely. They're producing a quarterly press release, carefully worded to manage perception, heavy on narrative and light on anyth
Read more →Co-founder conflict is one of the leading causes of early-stage company failure. Not bad markets, not wrong products — two people who started something together and couldn't work it out. The painful irony is that most co-founder conflicts are predictable and preventable. They hap
Read more →Most founders think they're doing customer discovery when they're actually doing customer validation. There's a significant difference. Discovery means going in open and trying to understand reality. Validation means going in with a conclusion and looking for evidence to support
Read more →The moment a founder stops being able to close every deal personally is one of the most uncomfortable in a company's life. Not because the business is failing — usually it's the opposite. The pipeline is growing, the team is expanding, and suddenly you're the bottleneck. Every de
Read more →OKRs are one of the most cargo-culted frameworks in startups. Founders hear that Google uses them, implement them badly, watch everyone ignore them, conclude they don't work, and go back to running the business on instinct. Then they raise a Series A, an investor suggests they tr
Read more →Chris Erler recently published a piece on his Substack, From Scale Up to Exit, called "Operator to Architect: Why the Systems That Make You Sellable Are the Same Ones That Set You Free". It is one of the best things I have read on the founder scaling challenge in a long time, and
Read more →The pitch deck gets blamed for too much. Founders who don't raise assume their deck was the problem. Founders who do raise credit the deck. The truth is the deck is a door opener — nothing more. An investor who reads your deck and is intrigued will take the meeting. An investor w
Read more →Most founders hire on gut feel. They meet someone who seems smart, confident, and likeable — maybe they've worked at a recognisable company — and they make an offer. Six months later, the person is underperforming, the team is frustrated, and the founder is asking why they though
Read more →Most founders are measuring the wrong things. Not because they're not smart — they are — but because the startup ecosystem has a chronic obsession with metrics that look impressive in a deck and mean almost nothing for actual progress. Website traffic. LinkedIn followers. Total s
Read more →Most founders think unit economics are something investors care about. They're right — but that's the wrong reason to understand them. Unit economics are the compass for every growth decision you make. Hiring, pricing, channel investment, market expansion — all of it should be an
Read more →Most advice about when to raise funding is written by people who benefit from founders raising funding. VCs want deal flow. Accelerators want graduates. Advisors get paid for intros. So the answer they give is almost always some version of "now" or "soon." I don't have that confl
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