This is a collection of notes I took over the years while running my company. I’m sharing them here to help other founders avoid the same mistakes I made.
Foundation
Start here before you write a line of code or make a hire. Getting these right early saves enormous pain later.
Mission & Vision — Why your company exists and where it’s headed. A clear mission aligns your team, guides every major decision, and tells investors and customers what to expect from you.
Strategy — Making deliberate choices about where to compete and how to win. Strategy is what separates companies that stay focused from those that chase every opportunity and end up nowhere.
Fundraising — How to structure your pitch, what investors are really evaluating, and how to run the process. Fundraising is a skill you can learn, and getting it wrong wastes months.
Product & Market
Building the right thing for the right people, and getting them to find you.
Product — “Product” is bigger than your app — it includes the website, onboarding, docs, emails, and support. This section covers what it takes to ship something that truly works end to end.
Positioning — How to define your category, identify your real competitors, and craft a message that makes buyers immediately understand why you’re different. Positioning is one of the highest-leverage decisions you’ll make.
Go-To-Market — How to land your first enterprise customers through founder-led sales. The playbook for early markets where the buyer doesn’t know how to budget for your product yet.
Product Manager Checklist — A practical checklist for PMs to stay customer-focused and keep their team moving. Useful both for evaluating PM candidates and for PMs who want to level up.
Hiring & Team Building
The quality of your team determines the quality of your outcomes. These pages cover the full hiring lifecycle.
Hiring — How to think about what kind of leader you need (value creation vs. value protection), how to structure interviews, and what signals actually predict success.
Interview Questions — A battle-tested collection of questions for any candidate and for specific roles. Structured interviews produce far more signal than freeform conversation.
Reference Checks — The specific questions that unlock honest, useful references. Most reference calls are wasted — these questions aren’t.
How to Hire an Engineering Leader — A specialized guide for one of the most consequential hires you’ll make. Covers how to define the role, run the process, and avoid the most common mistakes.
Leadership & Operations
Running the company once you’ve built the team.
Leadership — Behaviors, tools, and mental models for startup leaders. Covers focus, communication, candor, and how to create a culture where people do their best work.
People Management — What motivates people (mastery, autonomy, purpose) and how to create the conditions for a high-performing team. Covers performance management, feedback, and org design.
Planning — How to turn strategy into resource allocation without either micromanaging teams or leaving them without context. Covers common planning failures and how to avoid them.
Engineering — Process, estimation, backlogs, and how to think about engineering leverage. For founders and engineering leaders who want to build a fast, disciplined team.
Hard Lessons — The expensive mistakes most founders make at least once. Reading this won’t make you immune, but it might make you pause at the right moment.
Crisis Management — How to handle layoffs and other high-stakes moments without losing trust or creating panic. Includes what to write, who to tell, and in what order.
Good Resources
Books, videos, and articles I’ve found genuinely useful — not just popular.
- 📙 High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil — The best single resource for founders navigating hypergrowth. Practical and specific.
- 📝 What to focus on in the first 18 months of a startup by Suhail Doshi — A concise, honest take on early-stage priorities.