Frameworks

Team First, Customer Second, Product Third

A fixed priority order for founders: build the team before the product, because magical teams are what produce magical products.

Write Grow Sell and the Great Wall of Opens

Compress the business into three verbs and one daily number written on a physical wall, so every person knows what the main thing is.

Always Be Recruiting: The First Five Hire the Next Fifty

Treat recruiting as a permanent background process and over-invest in the first five hires, because they become the closers for everyone after.

The Kickoff Doc: Floor Goal, F-Yeah Goal, Anti-Goal

A one-page doc that replaces a single made-up target with a goal range plus the traps that would make you lose while winning.

The Off-List Reference Check

A reference-check procedure engineered to surface the negatives, by going past the provided referees and scoring the candidate out of ten.

The First Ten Seconds Firing Rule

Deliver the termination news within ten seconds of the conversation starting, and never let the firing be the first time they hear the standard.

The HoldCo Inversion: Everything You Learned as an Operator Is Backwards

Running a holding company is the exact opposite of running a company, which is why most successful operators fail at it.

The You Know What You Should Do Move

Raise a founder's ceiling by recontextualising their small project as the seed of something enormous.

Paid Tests and the Specificity Interview

Replace interview claims with paid sample work and a fixed ladder of number-level follow-up questions.

The Standard Is What You Allow

Whatever quality you let slide becomes your new baseline, so relentlessly set the bar every day.

Standards Over Speeches

Build a winning team by enforcing tiny daily input standards rather than delivering motivational speeches.

Don't Solve Their Problems

Let your people struggle through problems so they build capability instead of depending on you.