The failures that repeat, the ones that do not, and what actually correlates with a company surviving its second year. Start at the top; each piece assumes the one before it.
Start here
Work through these in order. Each one assumes the argument before it.
Start before you are ready
Why preparation and avoidance look identical from the outside, and the three questions that separate them.
Price the work, not the hours
What you are really selling when a client cannot judge the craft, and why hourly billing caps your ceiling.
Hire for finishing, not for potential
Talent that does not deliver costs more than competence that does. The interview signals that predict it.
Survive the second year
First-year revenue is often luck. The second is the one that tells you whether there is a business here.
Know the scale you actually want
The honest answer, not the one for investors — and how it changes every hire after it.
Most founders don’t fail. They strategize themselves out of business.
Some planning is really just avoidance—another deck, another persona exercise, another quarter without a paying customer; in other words, fear of failure. Forty-four years in, here…
The first week of a company
Almost none of the interesting decisions come first. The boring infrastructure does, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way that is invisible for about…
Nobody loses their nerve at the bottom. They lose it just before it works.
The failures I have watched up close did not happen in the bad months. They happened in the month things started going right. Here is what…
Nobody teaches you to be an entrepreneur
An employee once asked me who counts as one. Thirty years in, I had never stopped to answer it, and the answer turned out not to…
The ceiling was me
A logistics company I started in the eighties went from nothing to $120,000 a month in thirteen months, and then stopped dead. It took me a…