Created by devmizanur.com
Essays on leadership, capital and the craft of building companies.
The org chart was never the problem. The problem was that I kept promoting people into jobs that had stopped existing six months earlier.
If the board meeting is where your directors learn what is happening, you have already lost the value of having a board at all.
Valuation is the number everyone quotes and the one that matters least. Here is the clause-by-clause read I wish someone had given me at 29.
Values on a wall are marketing. Culture is the behaviour you walk past without comment when you are tired and behind on the quarter.
It was profitable, growing and beloved by a loyal minority. It was also quietly consuming the attention we needed for everything else.
Bringing in someone more experienced than you is the highest-leverage move available to a founder, and the one most likely to be fumbled.
Founders track ownership percentage. They should be tracking the value of what remains, and the two diverge faster than anyone expects.
Weekly, monthly, quarterly. Get the rhythm right and strategy executes itself. Get it wrong and no amount of talent compensates.
Every downturn feels structural while you are inside it. Every recovery feels obvious afterwards. Neither feeling is useful.
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”