If you collected the reasons startups fail and arranged them by what founders believe versus what the data shows, you’d find a striking mismatch. Founders tend to blame external forces – fierce competition, bad timing, market downturns. The evidence points inward. Most startups die from dysfunction that builds quietly inside: relationships that fracture, psychology that…
Visit your dentist twice a year. Sleep eight hours in an unbroken block. Floss every night. These instructions arrive wrapped in the authority of science, the reassurance of consensus, the patina of timelessness. They feel like facts discovered rather than decisions made – as though someone in a laboratory, bent over instruments, unearthed them from…
Most career advice treats networking like compound interest – just keep depositing connections into your account and watch wealth accumulate. Build relationships. Expand your circle. Never eat lunch alone. The advice isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just radically incomplete. What nobody tells you is that some connections subtract. They drain energy, compromise judgment, or expose you…
The first time someone steals your work, you remember the room. Mine had fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency just below conscious awareness and a conference table scarred by years of coffee rings. Nadya was presenting my distributed systems architecture to the board – not our architecture, not the team’s architecture, but hers. Three…