Leadership
How founders and managers guide a team, especially through uncertainty or disagreement. It’s tested most clearly not in the good quarters but in the ones nobody wants to talk about.
What a founder owes a team during a bad quarter
A genuinely bad quarter tests founder communication more than any other stretch of company life. What gets said, and left unsaid, tends to matter enormously.
Recognizing when the team, not the product, is the risk
Founders default to diagnosing struggles as product or market problems. Sometimes the actual constraint is the founding team itself, and that is harder to admit.
The co-founder breakup nobody saw coming
Co-founder splits often look sudden from the outside. Nearly all of them were visible, in hindsight, for months before anyone acted on the warning signs.
The pivot that looks like failure from the outside
A well-timed pivot often gets read publicly as a company admitting defeat. Internally, it frequently looks like the opposite: a team finally facing reality.
The co-founder breakup nobody saw coming
Co-founder splits often look sudden from the outside. Nearly all of them were visible, in hindsight, for months before anyone acted on the warning signs.
The pivot that looks like failure from the outside
A well-timed pivot often gets read publicly as a company admitting defeat. Internally, it frequently looks like the opposite: a team finally facing reality.
A founding team is a bet on how people handle conflict
Founding teams get chosen mostly for complementary skills. What actually determines whether a team survives is how its members handle real disagreement.
