Why I Wrote

Writing is how I process things.

These essays were me synthesising the past. The mistakes. The lessons that cost the most to learn.

Some of you probably noticed: this was also me processing pain in the present. Writing as therapy. Old stories get told, and somehow the pain attached to them fades.

It worked.

What’s Next

Old stories are told. Pain no longer there.

The future isn’t something you write about. The future is something you build.

Stay Connected

To everyone who read these essays—thank you. I have your emails, and I’ll figure out how we stay in touch.

Simplest way for now: twitter.com/_bloomt

If—

One last thing.
This poem stuck with me through everything. Maybe it’ll stick with you too.

If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Ivan

I was at a friend’s company recently when they held a ten-year anniversary celebration for one of their engineers. It was a nice event. There was cake. The CEO gave a speech about loyalty and impact. Everyone seemed genuinely happy.

But I kept thinking about opportunity cost.

Not the engineer’s opportunity cost—that was obvious. They’d traded their peak building years for a salary and some equity that would never fundamentally change their life. I was thinking about society’s opportunity cost. Here was someone clearly capable of creating something new, instead optimizing someone else’s creation.

This pattern is everywhere in tech now, and it’s getting worse.

The Mathematics of Building

Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re clarifying.

Building a significant company takes 5-10 years. This isn’t a rule exactly, but it’s rare enough to see exceptions that we can treat it as one. Facebook, Google, Amazon—they all took roughly a decade to become what we’d recognize as successful. Even the companies that seem like overnight successes usually aren’t. Airbnb was founded in 2008 and didn’t become profitable until 2017.

Failing, by contrast, is fast. You usually know within 1-3 years if something isn’t working. The market tells you, clearly and repeatedly, when you’re building something nobody wants.

Given a productive career of about 40 years, this means you get perhaps 6-8 real attempts at building something significant. Not side projects or lifestyle businesses, but real attempts at building something that could matter.

Most people never use even one of these attempts.

The Premium Employee Phenomenon

What do they do instead? They become what I’ve started thinking of as “premium employees”—people with founder-level abilities who’ve chosen employee-level ownership.

These aren’t typical corporate workers. They’re exceptional. They ship products that millions use. They solve hard technical problems. They understand customers, markets, and business models. In many cases, they’re more capable than the founders they work for.

But they’ve made a curious trade. They’ve exchanged the possibility of building something significant for the certainty of building someone else’s thing.

The economics of this trade have gotten worse over time, but in a way that’s hard to see year-to-year. In 1990, a senior engineer at Microsoft could reasonably expect to retire wealthy from employee stock options. By 2000, you needed to be in the first 100 employees at Google. By 2010, the first 50 at Facebook. Today? Unless you’re at an AI company pre-product-market fit, employee equity is mostly a retention tool, not a wealth-creation mechanism.

Yet the comfort has increased proportionally. Tech companies have gotten very good at making employment feel like entrepreneurship. You “own” products. You make “bets.” You think about “strategy.” But you don’t own anything, your bets are with someone else’s chips, and your strategy is constrained by someone else’s vision.

The Cognitive Dissonance

The interesting psychological phenomenon is that these premium employees know this. They’re too smart not to.

They have startup ideas. Often good ones. They see problems in their companies that could be standalone businesses. They know early employees at successful startups who are now wealthy. They read the same essays about building companies that you’re reading now.

But they stay.

They stay through multiple re-orgs that reset their trajectory. They stay through bad strategic decisions they predicted would fail. They stay through the departure of colleagues who go on to build successful companies.

Why?

The Comfort Gradient

The traditional explanation is risk aversion, but that’s not quite right. These people deal with risk constantly. They join projects that might get cancelled. They work for executives who might leave. They build on platforms that might change. They’re comfortable with uncertainty—as long as someone else owns it.

What they’re actually optimizing for is something subtler: the ability to be selective about which problems they solve.

When you work at a successful company, you can choose to work on interesting technical problems without worrying about distribution. You can focus on architecture without thinking about sales. You can optimize algorithms without negotiating contracts. The company is a platform that lets you do the fun parts of building while someone else handles the parts you’d rather not think about.

Starting a company means you have to do everything, especially the things you’re bad at or don’t enjoy. That’s the real fear—not failure, but discomfort. Not bankruptcy, but boredom. Not running out of money, but running out of enthusiasm for the parts of building a business that aren’t intellectually stimulating.

The Local Maximum

This creates a local maximum problem. Every year, the premium employee gets better at being an employee. They learn the promotion system. They build internal credibility. They understand the political dynamics. They get very good at navigating their specific context.

But none of these skills transfer to building something new. In fact, they often make it harder. The muscle memory of having resources makes it hard to be scrappy. The habit of consensus-building makes it hard to make fast decisions. The comfort of a salary makes the volatility of founder life feel unnecessarily harsh.

So they stay another year. And another. And eventually, they’ve been there a decade.

The Real Cost

The individual cost is obvious: they never build anything of their own. They retire with a nice house and a 401k or ISA but no lasting creation. They optimized for comfort and got it.

But the societal cost is larger and less visible. Every premium employee who doesn’t start a company is a company that doesn’t exist. It’s jobs that aren’t created, innovations that don’t happen, and problems that don’t get solved.

This might sound melodramatic, but consider: if even 10% of the premium employees at big tech companies started their own companies, we’d have thousands more startups. Most would fail, but some wouldn’t. The ones that succeeded would create more opportunities for the next generation to either join or compete with.

Instead, we have a generation of the most capable people in tech spending their careers optimizing metrics for companies that are already successful.

The Window

The crucial insight is that the window for starting something doesn’t stay open forever. Not because of age—plenty of successful founders start in their 40s or 50s. But because of identity.

After a decade as a senior employee, your identity becomes intertwined with your role. You’re not someone who happens to work at Google; you’re a Googler. You’re not someone who solves problems; you’re a Staff Engineer. The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to imagine yourself as anything else.

This is why the ten-year anniversary celebration I mentioned at the start felt so poignant. It wasn’t just celebrating a decade of employment. It was, in a way, celebrating the closing of a door. The engineer being celebrated was talented enough to build something significant. But after ten years, they almost certainly won’t.

The Question

So the question becomes: if you’re a premium employee reading this, what should you do?

The answer isn’t necessarily to quit tomorrow and start a company. That’s the kind of dramatic gesture that makes for good stories but bad decisions.

The answer is to be honest about what you’re optimizing for. If you’re optimizing for comfort, stability, and the ability to work on interesting technical problems without business responsibility, then stay. There’s nothing wrong with that choice. Someone needs to build the infrastructure that everyone else builds on.

But if you’re staying because you’re telling yourself you’re “not ready” or you’re “learning” or you’re “waiting for the right idea,” then you’re lying to yourself. You’re ready. You’ve learned enough. And the right idea is the one you’ve been thinking about for the past three years but haven’t acted on.

The tragedy isn’t that smart people work for others. It’s that they convince themselves they’re entrepreneurs in waiting when they’re actually employees by choice. The sooner you admit which one you are, the sooner you can either make peace with it or change it.

The clock, as they say, is ticking. But it’s not ticking toward some deadline where it becomes impossible to start. It’s ticking toward the point where you’ll no longer want to.

And that point comes sooner than most people think.

For a consumer tech company, there is only one god: Growth.

It’s a jealous god. It demands you to forget about profit. It demands you see sustainability as a weakness. It demands total, fanatical devotion to a single metric: acquiring more users, faster than anyone else, at any cost.

This isn't a philosophy. It is the only rule that matters.

Why VC don't care about business

This sounds insane until you understand how the money works. Venture capitalists are not in the business of building "healthy companies." Their model is a power law. They need one monster home run out of a hundred bets to return the entire fund. They don't want a 2x return; they want a 1000x return.

This only happens one way: monopoly.

They are not investing in your P&L statement. They are investing in your ability to conquer an entire market, become the default utility, and then tax everyone who uses it. So when they give you money, they aren't asking you to be sensible. They are ordering you to go to war.

Weapon: unlimited money

To win this war, they hand you a weapon that bends reality: effectively unlimited money. This isn't just funding; it's a war chest so deep you can ignore economic gravity for years.

Your job is to use this weapon to make your product an addiction. You subsidise your customers so aggressively that choosing your service becomes an unconscious reflex. You are not buying customers one by one. You are buying the market's muscle memory. You are making your product cheaper and easier than thinking.

The hunting ground: Dinosaurs

This strategy is most brutal and effective in markets run by dinosaurs. Look at banking, insurance, logistics—industries with fat margins, terrible customer service, and ancient technology. These are your hunting grounds.

The incumbents are slow, profitable, and complacent. They can't compete with you because you're not playing their game. You use your war chest to offer a product that is 10x better for free. You bleed cash, but they haemorrhage market share. Your "race to the bottom" is still a luxury cruise compared to their bloated cost structure. You are not competing; you are orchestrating an extinction.

The endgame

There are two phases to this. First, when you have nothing, you have to survive. You act like a normal business because you have no choice. You prove you can build something people want.

But the moment you take the big money, the mission changes. You are no longer playing to survive. You are playing to dominate. Profitability is a distraction. Your only job is to grow. You are in a land grab, and you must burn the ships.

By the time the money runs out, if you are the last one standing, you have won. You own the market. Profitability, at that point, is no longer a goal. It’s a dial you can turn whenever you want.
But until then, there is only one god.
And it demands growth.

Don’t like that god? Don’t play the game of a consumer tech.

You do not manage fat cats. You do not re-motivate them with inspiring speeches or threaten them with performance reviews. To do so is to treat the symptom, not the disease. The disease is in the organisational design itself. You must construct an architecture of hunger, a system so hostile to complacency that fat cats are either revitalised or, more likely, repelled. This is not about building a "nice place to work"; it is about building a place where great work is the only currency.

This architecture stands on three pillars: a fanatical devotion to making, a ruthless alignment of incentives, and a culture of productive discomfort.

The Cult of the Maker

The foundational defence against complacency is to value output over process. A fat cat thrives in the abstract world of meetings, slide decks, and strategic reviews. It is a world of plausible deniability, where activity is easily mistaken for progress. In contrast, they suffocate in an environment where the only question that matters is: "What have you done? What decision you have made? What have you shipped?"

This requires a profound respect for the "Maker's Schedule." The long, uninterrupted blocks of time required for deep work—coding, designing, writing, creating—are sacred. The "Manager's Schedule," a patchwork of 30-minute meetings, is treated as a necessary evil, not the default mode of operation. An organisation that allows its makers' days to be fragmented by endless status updates is an organisation that is actively cultivating fat cats, who weaponise meetings to assert relevance without producing value.

The culture, where the junior engineer, designer, researcher, analytics → empowered to call out the bullshit is necessary but not sufficient.

Radical Alignment and Ruthless Accountability

Ambition is a fire fed by incentives. When an organisation offers warmth without requiring fuel, the fire goes out. A fat cat is simply a rational actor responding to a system that rewards tenure over performance and comfort over contribution. The antidote is to make mediocrity financially and socially untenable.

Compensation must be brutally and transparently tied to performance. As seniority and pay increase, the composition of that pay must become "funnier." Standard quarterly vesting is for soldiers. Generals operate on a different timeline. The most senior, highest-paid individuals are moved to long-dated options— exercise date in 5 or 10 years—paired with massive, binary bonuses tied directly to solving their assigned problem. This structure achieves two critical goals: it forces a long-term view aligned with the company's ultimate valuation, and it makes "sitting and vesting" impossible. If the problem isn't solved, the bonus doesn't materialise and the options remain worthless. There is no reward for comfortable failure.

This accountability is powered by data. The organisation must be drenched in clear, public, high-stakes metrics aligned to very direct problems.
Software should be the ultimate arbiter of truth. Contribution is not a matter of opinion or politics; it is visible on a dashboard.
There is nowhere to hide. This data-driven transparency dissolves the political fog that fat cats use for camouflage. They cannot survive under the harsh, clarifying light of objective results.

We are getting closer, but still not enough.

The Architecture of Discomfort

The final pillar is the most crucial: the deliberate engineering of a culture that rejects comfort. Comfort is the fat cat's natural habitat. The goal, therefore, is to create an environment of productive discomfort—a state of constant, low-grade paranoia about the competition, the customer, and the creeping threat of irrelevance.

This begins by abolishing the idea of a static hierarchy. The organisation is in a state of constant, fluid reorganisation, because it is structured not around titles, but around problems. An org chart is replaced by a prioritised list of existential challenges and opportunities.
Individuals are assigned to these problems. The higher your pay, the more difficult the problem you are assigned, and the more absolute your accountability for solving it. There is no "VP of X" title to hide behind; there is only the mission you have been given.

This system frames all work as "tours of duty." You are here to solve a specific, difficult problem. When it is solved, you must find the next, even harder problem to tackle. Those who seek to build empires and nest in their organisational box will find the ground constantly shifting beneath them. Decision-making is decentralised and pushed to the edges, empowering the makers and frustrating the political operators who thrive on centralised control.

Ultimately, the organisation itself must act like a hungry startup. The CEO's most important role is not as a grand strategist, but as the Chief Janitor.

A fat cat is a symptom of an organisation that has lost its will to fight. It has traded the spartan intensity of the garage for the plush carpets of the corner office. The goal is not to build a comfortable zoo where every animal is fed regardless of its contribution. The goal is to build a lean, hungry wolf pack. And in a wolf pack, those who lose their hunger are, by definition, no longer part of the pack.

Most engineers grow up in a bubble. They mistake their own narrow experience for universal law. Their arguments are a tiresome loop of opinions based on what worked for them, on their pet projects, or on the last framework they mastered. I have my own opinions, of course, but I try not to confuse them with the laws of physics, and of course I fail every day.

The debate over programming languages is a perfect example of this.

From one perspective, the language doesn't matter. From another, you need it to attract the right people. Everyone thinks hiring from a large talent pool—say, Java engineers—is the safe, logical bet. My experience shows the opposite. It’s a trap. You get a flood of resumes, but you’re filtering for compliance, not for passion.

Hiring from a smaller, more obscure talent pool forces you to be smarter. It filters for curiosity.
So, you’re building on Java? Your first priority shouldn’t be to find a Java guru. It should be to find brilliant misfits who are obsessed with your product and are willing to compromise on their favourite tool to build it. Find the developer whose main gig is in Java but who spends their weekends building oddities in Lisp or Rust. Those are the minds you want. They understand that the tool serves the mission, not the other way around. This doesn't scale if you need an army, but if you're building something new, you don't need an army. You need a commando unit.

Opinionated? Let’s have more fun:

The Illusion of Scale

The other great fetish of our industry is "scale." Engineers love to talk about the profound difficulty of building scalable systems, but for most, this is a phantom menace. Let’s be honest: in an era where you can spin up endless auto-scaling nodes on AWS or GCP with a single Terraform file and plug into databases like Spanner or Aurora, the technical challenge of scaling has been largely solved. If you’re smart enough to separate your transactional and analytical workloads, you won’t face a real scaling problem until you reach a massive user base.

Ping me when you have 10 million customers using your product concurrently. Then you’ll need a bit of engineering.

So if your system is struggling at a smaller scale, the problem isn't the technology—it's the people most of the time. The issue stems from two places: manufactured complexity and a lack of skill in simplification.
The first is CV-driven development, where engineers build overwrought systems for their resumes, not for the customer.

The second is blindly repeating industry mantras—Microservices, DDD, CQRS—without understanding the context. These are powerful tools, but you don’t give guns to children.

The common excuse for all the complexity is the need to "ship faster," as if thinking is a luxury. This argument is absurd.

When you cook a new dish, do you just throw everything into the oven and hope for something edible? Or do you spend five minutes looking up a recipe? Those five minutes of thought save your dinner.

Rushing to implementation without a plan just means you'll have to cook it all over again.

The Real Frontier

Of course, there are genuinely interesting technical questions on the horizon.

Is it finally time for functional languages like F#, OCaml, and Rust to take center stage in the age of AI? (Sorry, Haskell, you missed the train again.)

What would a truly great development workflow look like with AI agents in the loop?

Can we build in-house principal engineer AI bots, trained on all our incident data and pull requests, to review code, participate in all RFC and solve problems autonomously?

These are exciting puzzles. But they are still not the product—unless, of course, you’re building products for engineering teams.

In the end, the customer doesn't care how you ship the software that solves their problem. They don’t care if you hired a thousand people or just ten people armed with an army of AI agents.

What they care about is a fantastic user experience, support that actually helps, and having their problem solved in a way they never anticipated.

It should feel like magic. Technology is almost always just the tool, the plumbing behind the curtain.

But to make the magic work, you have to know your tools inside and out.

The theory is that higher autonomy leads to higher job satisfaction, which is meant to be good for the company.

This all sounds very enlightened. And it is, of course, partly true, however:

The last time I checked, the purpose of a for-profit company is not to maximise the well-being of its employees. The purpose is to create value for customers, which in turn maximises profit for shareholders. Employee satisfaction is a means to that end, not the end itself. It's a useful side effect of winning, not the goal. When you forget this, you start optimizing for the wrong things. You get a happy, comfortable, and thoroughly mediocre company that gets its ass kicked by hungrier competitors.

Let’s be clear: the goal is to make money. So, how does autonomy fit into that?

For the company, granting autonomy is a high-leverage bet. An autonomous employee or team can move faster. They don't need to wait for six layers of management to approve a decision. They are closer to the problem and can, in theory, solve it more effectively. This is a good deal for the company, but only if two conditions are met:

1. The decisions are good.

2. The people are acting in the company's best interest.

An autonomous employee who is brilliant but lazy is a net negative. An autonomous team that is hardworking but incompetent is a disaster. And an autonomous operator who optimises for their own career at the expense of the customer is a cancer(this case is a bit special as - right question to ask why incentives are not aligned → But you can read about it here )

Autonomy, then, is not a right or a perk. It is a tool given to people who can be trusted to wield it correctly. And trust requires a mechanism for verification.

This mechanism is called accountability.

The relationship between these two forces is brutally simple. It’s a law.

The amount of autonomy you can grant is directly proportional to the rigor of your accountability system.

The more freedom you give, the better your ability to measure the outcome of that freedom must be. If you have a weak, slow, or vague system for measuring results, granting wide-ranging autonomy is suicide. It's like giving a teenager the keys to a supercar with no speedometer, no GPS, and a promise to "check in next quarter."

A proper accountability system is not about blame. It is about clarity and consequences. It measures what matters—customer value, revenue, system performance—and makes the results visible to everyone. When you have this, autonomy works. People who deliver results get more scope. People who don't, don't. The system self-corrects.

This also solves the seniority problem. Autonomy it’s not only a function of your title; it's a function of your proven track record of accountability. A junior engineer has autonomy over the function they are writing. The CTO has autonomy over the entire technology strategy. The scope of their freedom is matched by the weight of their accountability.

The most common failure mode is the senior leader who uses the language of autonomy as a shield. They'll say, "I believe in empowering my teams, so they own this decision." When the decision proves to be a mistake, the same leader will say, "The team has full autonomy, and we will work with them to learn from this."

This is a perversion of the concept. They are delegating the decision but deflecting the accountability. True leadership is accepting a level of accountability that is greater than the autonomy you personally exercise.

So, if you want a more autonomous culture, don't start by talking about feelings or trust falls.
Start by building a ruthless, transparent system of accountability.
The right people will flourish.
The wrong people will leave.
And that’s exactly the outcome you want.

This high potential for impact means two things: the pay is good, and everyone wants the job, so the market is flooded.

You’ll get stacks of resumes from people with impressive-sounding titles at impressive-sounding companies.

Most of them are noise. They’ve learned the jargon, they can talk about "frameworks," they will have multiple MBAs, and they have a well-rehearsed answer for "What’s your favourite product and why?"

This is useless. It tells you nothing.

Most of the time you don’t have time for the corporate theatre. You have to build, ship, and win. You can’t afford to hire people who were good at talking about building products. You need people who were good at building them. That meant you have to get very good at filtering, very fast.

Forget the resume. Forget the brain teasers. Here are a few simple, brutally effective ways to find out if you’re talking to a doer or a talker.

1. Ask "What have you broken?"

A good PM is not just a "product person." They are a "system person." They understand that a company is a a complex machine for turning ideas into money.

To launch anything, you have to interact with this machine: with engineers, marketing, designers, lawyers, compliance, support, sales, etc. This process is never clean. It’s messy. You have to push, negotiate, and sometimes, break things.

A candidate who has never broken anything is a candidate who has never truly shipped anything of consequence. They’ve stayed in their lane. They’ve managed a backlog. They’ve written neat little tickets. But they’ve never had to force a decision, bypass a stupid process, or piss off a Clvls to get something done for the customer.

A great candidate will light up at this question. They’ll have a story. "Oh, you mean the time I bypassed the marketing team to run a landing page test because their queue was six month long? It caused a huge fight, but we got the data that proved the feature was worth building."

That’s your person. They see the system, understand the rules, and know when to break them for the sake of the goal.

2. Give them a real, unsolved problem.

Don't ask them to design a better ATM for children. That’s a hypothetical exercise in creativity. It’s worthless.

Instead, take a real, messy, unsolved problem your team is facing right now. The messier, the better. "Our user activation rate for this new feature is 12%, and we need it to be 25%. We’ve tried X and Y, and they didn’t work. The engineers think the UI is confusing, marketing thinks the messaging is wrong, and the data is inconclusive. What do you do?"

A weak candidate will retreat into theory. They’ll say, "Well, first I’d want to do more user research. I’d set up some interviews, maybe run a survey. I’d want to look at the competitive landscape..." They are trying to follow a textbook. Tell them fuck you very much, and look for the next one.

A strong candidate will immediately start asking sharp, diagnostic questions. They’ll get hungry for the details. "Okay, 12%. Is that consistent across all traffic sources? What’s the drop-off point in the funnel, exactly? Can I see the current UI? What was the hypothesis behind X and Y? What’s the easiest thing we could ship in the next 48 hours to test a new hypothesis?"

They aren’t trying to give you the "right" answer. They are trying to solve the problem, right there in the interview. They are stress-testing the situation. This mimics the reality of the job.

3. Ask "How would you measure this?" about something qualitative.

Great products aren't just about conversion rates. The PM who think they are → just on a journey to start the career. They are also about how they make people feel. They are about trust, delight, and confidence. These things are hard to measure.

So, pick one. "How would you measure whether our customers trust us?"

A mediocre PM will give a fuzzy answer. "Well, we could use Net Promoter Score..." Or they’ll say it can’t be measured.

A great PM will get creative and practical. They’ll think in terms of proxies. "Trust? Okay. I’d look for repeat behaviors. Do they add a second or third transaction? I’d also measure 'anti-trust' signals. What’s our support ticket rate for X? How many people call in to verify a transaction they made? We could measure the percentage of users who complete a high-value action without dropping off to call support. That’s a proxy for trust."

They understand that you can’t measure a feeling directly, but you can measure the behaviours that feeling produces.

The Final Test: Servant, Not King

These aren't tricks. They are simple tests for the things that actually matter: a bias for action, a hunger for solving real problems, and the ability to connect fuzzy human concepts to concrete data. Someone who passes these tests is someone who can do more than just manage a product. They can change the trajectory of a business.

But the very best PMs understand a final, crucial truth. In the end, they are not the kings, but the servants. Their job is to make life a bit better for everyone else. They exist to ensure that the people who are actually building the product—the engineers, the designers—can focus on their craft.

They manage the noise so the makers can work in a calm, fantastic atmosphere. They absorb the chaos of the organization so that the team can experience clarity. The ultimate test of a PM isn’t just their ability to ship. It’s their ability to create an environment where others can do their best work, happily.

Every morning you wake up and go to work, you are making a transaction. You are trading your time, your one non-renewable asset.

And you are getting one of two things in return: you either learn, or you earn.

If you are doing both, you are winning. If you are doing only one, you had better be sure the payoff is massive. If you are doing neither, you are a fool. You are just getting older.

People get emotional about this. They talk about passion, purpose, and the worst word of all: "fulfillment." They imagine it's some mystical state of grace. It's not. It's an equation, simple:

Fulfilment = Resources​ / Desires

Your resources are everything you have: money in the bank, skills in your head, the strength of your network, the power of your name. Your desires are everything you want: the car, the house, the freedom, the respect, the family.

You want to be "fulfilled"? You have two choices. You can play with the denominator or the numerator.

Some will tell you to shrink your desires. Meditate. Be a monk. Want less. This is the philosophy of surrender. It’s a cope for people who are afraid to compete. You don't win a race by deciding you don't want the prize. This is a loser's mentality.

The only real path is to attack the numerator. Radically increase your resources.

This is where you must think like an investor, not an employee. Your life is your business. Your career is its primary product. You must manage it across three-time horizons: Today, Tomorrow, and The Future.

Today is your Cash Flow. This is your salary, your current happiness, the friends you see this weekend. It’s important. It keeps the lights on. Many people get trapped here. They optimise for a comfortable Today, trading everything for a steady paycheque in a job where they learn nothing new. Why learn nothing new? Cause it’s very painful. If you don’t fell the pain → you are learning speed is not fast enough. This is the most dangerous trap in modern life.

Tomorrow is your Pipeline. This is your optionality. The job you have today—does it open doors or close them? A high-paying job as a manager of a floppy disk factory in 1995 felt great "Today." But it was a dead end. Tomorrow was a brick wall.

You have to ask the brutal question: does this move increase my options or decrease them? The job in Antarctica for a mountain of cash might seem like a good deal. But if you're the only skilled person on the continent, your next move is where, exactly? You might have money, but you have no pipeline. You have become a local king on a tiny, frozen island. Unless that money is "fuck you" money—enough to fund your next company, your next life—it's a bad deal. You've traded your pipeline for cash flow.

The Future is your Equity. This is the big one. This is what separates the players from the spectators. In 20 years, will your profession even exist? Will everything you know be done by a cheap AI? Are you learning to be the world's best blacksmith in the year 1910?

Your skills are your personal equity. A salary is renting out your time. Equity is owning a piece of the machine. The only way to survive the future is to build skills that have leverage. Skills where you can build things, sell things, or manage complex systems.

So, the strategy is simple.

1. Assess your current deal. Are you learning or earning? If the answer is "not much of either," you are burning your life. Do you have a plan?

2. When making a choice, optimise for Tomorrow, not just Today. Ask yourself: "Will this give me more, better choices in five years?" A lower-paying job at a company on a rocket ship trajectory is a better deal than a high-paying job at a company that is slowly dying. One builds your pipeline; the other cashes it out.

3. Invest in your Future. Aggressively learn the skills that technology cannot easily replace. Your career isn't a job; it's a portfolio of skills. You are the fund manager. Don't invest in dying assets.

Stop thinking like an employee who hopes for a raise.
Start thinking like a founder who is building an empire.
Your life is your business.
Run it like one.

This isn't a story about lazy employees or incompetent managers. It's about what happens when you reward the wrong behavior at scale. When headcount becomes the primary signal of importance, rational actors will optimise for headcount, even when it destroys the very value they're supposed to create.

Consider a typical scenario: David manages a customer acquisition team. Instead of figuring out how to actually acquire customers more efficiently, he spots an opportunity in the org chart. He proposes splitting his function into three teams: "Customer Acquisition," "User Growth," and "Customer Engagement." Each team will focus on "different" metrics - acquisition cost, activation rate, and retention rate. Each needs a manager, analysts, and engineers. David gets promoted to Director of Growth, overseeing all three teams.

On paper, this looks like sophisticated thinking. In reality, it's sophisticated waste. The three teams will spend most of their time coordinating with each other, fighting over resources, and optimizing for their individual metrics rather than the actual business goal: getting more customers to use the product successfully.

David isn't evil or incompetent. He's responding rationally to the incentives around him. The company rewards empire building, so he builds an empire. The tragedy is that he's probably capable of real value creation - but the system pushes him toward complexity instead of results.

This pattern repeats because humans naturally choose the path of least resistance. Fighting for territory is easier than creating new territory. Saying "give me more people" is simpler than saying "let me build something that didn't exist before."

Like children squabbling over toys, managers default to zero-sum thinking: if I can overlook Sarah's team, I win. If I can expand my domain to overlap with Tom's, I'm more important.

But this is fundamentally backward. The most valuable people in any organization are those who create positive-sum opportunities - new revenue streams, new efficiencies, new capabilities that didn't exist before. The second most valuable are those who eliminate negative-sum activities - the bloat, the redundancy, the busy work that accumulated over time.

What if promotion to Director or above required one of two achievements: either you build a new revenue stream, or you eliminate organisational bloat while maintaining output?

No more promotions for just existing and accumulating people. No more rewards for splitting one team into three. No more empire building disguised as strategic thinking.

Would this change anything? Suddenly, the path to earn more requires deep understanding of the business, not just political skill. You either have to spot opportunities that others missed, or you have to be brave enough to cut through the complexity that others created. Both require real competence. Both create genuine value.

The game will always exist. However who will win? Companies that reward builders and simplifiers or those that reward empire builders and complicators. The math I think is simple, even if the execution is slightly painful but not that complicated.

Leadership isn't just about setting direction—though clarity matters enormously. The part we talk about less is how much of leadership is actually therapy.

Think about it: every interaction is fundamentally about feelings. How someone feels after talking to you determines everything a lot what follows. The words you choose, your tone, your body language—they're all transmitting emotional data. The person across from you is decoding: Do I matter here? Am I valued? Am I growing or shrinking?

This becomes particularly nuanced when you're working across different communication styles and cultural contexts. The directness that shows respect in one setting reads as aggression in another. The careful diplomacy that preserves harmony can come across as disengagement. Sometimes it's an art to balance clarity of communication with honoring feelings—being understood while ensuring people feel respected. We're all adapting to each other constantly, which creates layers of interpretation that can either build bridges or create chasms.

But regardless of these complexities, there's a simple and profound choice at the heart of every conversation: Do you make people feel larger or smaller when they leave your presence?

You have to make people feel respected, even in difficult moments. Even when delivering hard feedback or making tough decisions, respect has to remain the foundation. It's not about being soft—it's about maintaining human dignity regardless of circumstance.

You can help someone see their potential, show them how their work matters, make course corrections feel like stepping stones rather than failures. You can create an environment where people feel like the tallest trees in the forest, where growth feels inevitable and limits seem artificial.

Or you can do the opposite. Make people feel insignificant, unheard, like their contributions don't matter. Turn them inward with doubt, make them question their worth.

The Wendy Standard

If you've ever watched Billions, you know Wendy. She's the perfect example of what therapeutic leadership looks like in practice. Wendy doesn't just manage performance—she unlocks it by understanding what drives each person, what scares them, what motivates them at their core.

Watch how she handles difficult conversations. She never makes anyone feel small, even when delivering hard truths. She sees through the ego and the posturing to the real person underneath. She asks the questions others are afraid to ask and creates space for vulnerability that most workplaces would hardly allow.

Most importantly, she helps people see themselves clearly—both their blind spots and their untapped strengths. She doesn't just tell people what to do; she helps them understand why they're stuck and gives them the tools to move forward.

That's what great leadership looks like when you add the therapeutic dimension. It's not about being everyone's therapist, but about understanding that emotions do matter.

The Ordinary Greatness

Here's what's remarkable: yes, some people are genuinely geniuses. I was lucky to work with a few, and they absolutely exist. But here's the thing—even they are just people like everyone else.

Most innovations and companies aren't built by lone geniuses working in isolation. They're built by teams of people who've had their potential unlocked, including the occasional genius, all working together toward something bigger than themselves.

Great leadership means understanding this reality. It means admitting the role of luck, acknowledging the effort, and most importantly—helping others discover capabilities they didn't know they had. Your job isn't to find the rare exception or wait for lightning to strike. It's about seeing the untapped potential that's already there and creating the conditions for it to emerge.

The person sitting across from you right now has abilities they haven't fully accessed yet. The question is: will your leadership help them find those abilities, or will it leave them undiscovered?

The Team Sport Reality

This dynamic extends far beyond direct reports. We're always playing a team sport, whether we acknowledge it or not. The person who thinks it's all about them—their individual brilliance, their irreplaceable contributions—is usually operating under a dangerous delusion. It's painful to watch someone convince themselves they're the entire show when success almost always comes from collective effort.

The most effective leaders understand this deeply. They help people see how their work connects to something larger, how their individual excellence serves the team's mission. They make the interdependencies visible and celebrated.

Because in the end, the best leaders aren't just setting direction—they're growing other leaders. And as one wise man told me, there is no individual contribution in the work.
We are all leaders.

I've been obsessed with incentives for years. Not because they're particularly glamorous, but because they explain almost everything. Show me a company's compensation structure, and I'll tell you what actually gets built there.

Here's what I believe: if you want people who can create new revenue streams to stay at your company, you have to make them rich. Not comfortable. Rich. You have to give them a real percentage of what they build.

This seems obvious to me. Some people can build new things. Some people can optimise existing things. Some people just want a paycheque and minimal hassle. If you're a company that wants the builders to stick around instead of leaving to start their own thing, you need to pay them like founders.

K listened to this and said something that stopped me and force to think for the last days: "Ivan, I understand that, but big tech companies don't work like that."

He's right, and I've been thinking about why.

In the US, there's a clear default path for builders: if you want to create something new and potentially valuable, you leave. You start a company. You raise money, build a team, and either get acquired or go public or pivot until you find something that works. The system assumes that real innovation happens outside big companies.

This creates a strange equilibrium. Companies get good at optimising existing products and bad at creating entirely new ones. The people who could create new things leave to do exactly that. Everyone accepts this as normal.

In Europe, the dynamic is different. The emphasis is on work-life balance, regulation, stability. The culture doesn't celebrate getting "hefty rich" the way Silicon Valley does. Even if you build something valuable and get acquired for tens of millions, after taxes you're comfortable but not truly wealthy. So why take the risk?

Both systems funnel builders away from big companies, just for different reasons and to do a different things.

But here's what struck me, drinking wine and thinking about our conversation: what seems normal to me is completely alien to most people. I've spent my career either in startups where your performance directly translates to your returns, or in big tech companies back home where the culture was different—where companies actively looked for people who could build new verticals and were happy to make them hefty rich if they could make the company rich.

It was always a simple win-win. The idea of "climbing the ladder" as the primary career path felt foreign to me.

This is one of those moments where you realise your assumptions about how the world works are just artefacts of your particular experience. What I thought was obviously the right way to structure incentives turns out to be unusual, maybe even rare.

The question this raises is interesting: are we stuck with these systems, or could they change?

I think about companies like Google in their early days, giving engineers 20% time to work on whatever they wanted. Some of that turned into Gmail, Chrome. But even then, the engineers didn't get a meaningful piece of the new revenue streams they created. They got performance bonuses and promotions.

What if they had gotten 1% of Gmail's revenue? Would Google have even more innovative products today? Would fewer talented people have left to start their own companies?

I don't know the answer, but I suspect the current equilibrium isn't stable. As building new things becomes easier—better tools, AI assistance, lower barriers to entry—the cost of forcing builders to choose between staying at a big company and getting properly rewarded for their work gets higher.

Maybe we'll see experiments. Maybe some company will try giving real equity stakes in new verticals to the people who build them. Maybe it will work spectacularly and others will copy it. Or may be not.

But I think we'll find out. Because the people who can build new things have more options than ever, and the companies that figure out how to keep them will have a significant advantage.

The incentives, as always, will tell the story.

This sounds abstract, let me make it concrete: If you're sitting on cash, you're failing. If you're paying dividends, you're admitting you can't find better uses for capital. If your shareholder value is growing at 8% YoY while the S&P 500 does the same, you're actually destroying value – you're offering the same returns with much higher risk.

Most people think business is about strategy, product-market fit, or execution. All of that matters, but the underlying truth is simpler: the most powerful capital isn't money. It's people who can turn money into dramatically more money.

After working in different enterprises, founding my own companies, investing in multiple startups, I personally group people in distinct types of value creators in any organisation.

The Builders: Your 2% Who Create Step-Changes

Builders are the people who seem crazy to everyone else because they can't stop creating things. They don't just ship features – they try to re-invent the business.

Most companies totally misunderstand them. They try to make Builders optimize existing systems, which is like asking a novelist to spend their life editing other people's books. It might work for a while, but it kills something essential.

What's fascinating about Builders is that they don't separate work from life the way most people do. To them, building new things is like breathing. When they leave companies, everyone assumes it's about money, it’s only 10% true. Usually it's more basic: they need to build, they need to own their work, and they need to feel that creation is valued and the best way of measuring the value our society come up with → $ value.

Builders are simultaneously your most valuable and most disruptive assets. They'll ignore processes, challenge assumptions, and make middle management uncomfortable. But they're also the only ones who can create true step-changes in value.

The Conductors: Your 5% Who Make Things Happen

Conductors are fascinating because they're almost invisible until you know what to look for. They're not always the ones with the official authority – they're the people who somehow make things happen by connecting the right people and navigating the invisible networks that actually run organisations.

What makes Conductors special is that they can read organisational dynamics like brilliant engineers read code. Where everyone else sees bureaucracy and obstacles, they see paths to get things done. They treat complex organisations like their own orchestra.

You can spot a Conductor by looking for projects that somehow succeeded despite impossible organizational odds. When you find one of these successes and ask around, you'll usually discover a Conductor quietly orchestrating in the background – building coalitions, unblocking bottlenecks, making the impossible look inevitable.

Conductors are why good strategies actually get implemented instead of dying in committee. They're how cross-functional projects succeed instead of getting bogged down in turf wars. They're the reason innovation happens despite the system rather than being killed by it.

The Core Team: Your Essential 90%

Core Team members aren't the people who will change the world, but they're the ones who keep it running. They're competent, reliable, and take pride in their work. They see work as a way to support their life, not as life itself. This isn't a criticism – stable operations require exactly this mindset.

Here's what's particularly interesting: this hierarchy of capabilities works in only one direction. Builders can often be excellent Conductors when needed, and both Builders and Conductors can do Core Team work effectively when required. But the reverse is rarely true. It's like a one-way capability ladder that you can climb down but rarely up.

The Coasters: Your Hidden Value Destroyers

Then there's a fourth group we need to discuss – the Coasters. They're different from Core Team members in a crucial way. Core Team members actually do the work. Coasters are experts at looking busy while adding minimal value.

What makes Coasters particularly dangerous is their sophisticated camouflage. Instead of clear commitments about what they'll deliver, they offer elaborate explanations about why simple things are complex and why most initiatives face insurmountable obstacles.

The really interesting part? Coasters sometimes rise in organisations precisely because they spend their energy on appearing valuable rather than being valuable. While Builders are building, Conductors are conducting, and Core Team members are executing, Coasters are perfecting corporate camouflage.

Why This Matters Now

We're entering an era where the gap between high-performing and mediocre companies is about to become exponential. AI will amplify the capabilities of your Builders and Conductors while making Coasters increasingly obvious. Remote work has made it harder to spot who's actually creating value versus who's just managing perception.

The companies that understand these archetypes – and more importantly, know how to identify and empower their Builders and Conductors while filtering out Coasters – will have an insurmountable advantage.

The question isn't whether you have these people in your organization. You do. The question is whether you can see them clearly enough to bet your company's future on them.

I've been thinking about this recently because I've noticed something interesting: the best people I know regularly violate this rule. Not because they're bad managers, but because they understand something subtle that most people miss.

The key insight isn't that micromanagement is bad. It's that management style should be a function of two variables: competence and motivation. This seems obvious once you think about it, but it's surprising how rarely people do.

Let's start with first principles.

What's the actual goal of management? It's to ensure valuable work gets done. Everything else - employee happiness, team culture, process optimization - these are all inputs to that function. Important inputs, certainly, but not the fundamental purpose.

The interesting thing about competence and motivation is that they create a matrix. Think of competence as having four levels:

1. Unknown (We don't know what they can do)

2. Junior (Learning the basics)

3. Professional (Can execute independently)

4. Expert (Deeply understands the domain)

And motivation as having four levels too:

1. Actively sabotaging

2. Uninterested

3. Fine/Acceptable

4. Fully Driven

This creates sixteen possible states. But here's where it gets interesting: these states aren't fixed properties of people. They're properties of people in specific contexts.

The same person who's an Expert/Fully Driven (4/4) on Project A might be a Junior/Fully Driven (2/4) on Project B. This is why treating management style as a personal characteristic rather than a contextual response is fundamentally flawed.

What separates really seniour people isn't their position in this matrix - it's the speed at which they can reach 4/4 in new contexts. A junior engineer might take six months to become competent in a new domain. A senior engineer might do it in two weeks.

The best managers understand this instinctively. When they have someone who's Expert/Fully Driven, they get out of the way. Giving a motivation speech to someone in this state would be like explaining addition to a mathematician.

But - and this is crucial - what if you have someone who's Expert but Actively Sabotaging? The conventional wisdom about "never micromanage" suddenly looks naive. In this case, tight control isn't just appropriate - it's necessary.

This reveals something about management: it's not about finding one perfect style and sticking to it. It's about developing the ability to move fluidly between different styles based on the situation.

Great managers are like skilled martial artists - they can switch stances instantly based on what the situation requires. Bad managers are like someone who only knows one move.

The pushback against micromanagement usually comes from experts who are highly motivated. They've experienced the frustration of unnecessary oversight, and they're not wrong - in their situation, micromanagement is indeed harmful. But they're generalizing from their specific case to a universal principle, and that's where the logic breaks down.

If you're feeling micromanaged, instead of immediately assuming your manager is doing something wrong, ask yourself two questions:

1. Have you demonstrated both the competence and motivation to have more autonomy?

2. Has something changed recently in either your performance or motivation that might have triggered this shift?

Often, what feels like unnecessary micromanagement is actually a rational response to changing circumstances. The best way to address it isn't to complain about the management style, but to have an honest conversation about the factors driving it.

This isn't to defend bad managers who micromanage out of insecurity or inability to delegate. They exist, and they're a problem. But the solution isn't to denounce micromanagement as universally bad - it's to understand when different management styles are appropriate and to build the skill to switch between them effectively.

The next time someone says "don't micromanage," ask them: "in what context?" Because like most management advice, the real answer isn't never or always - it's "it depends."

And that "it depends" is where all the interesting work happens.

Here's the thing about fog in the mountains: it transforms a straightforward hike into a psychological endurance test. Every step becomes a negotiation between what you think is there and what might actually be there. Your brain, desperate for reference points, starts playing tricks on you. You start to hate your lovely activity. You doubt a lot. Are you still on the trail? Is that next step solid ground or a void?

I was on this hike with my partner. The conditions were terrible - we'd started late (a bit of a mistake) and found ourselves caught in what I can only describe as a white wall of nothingness. We had another 600-700 meters of elevation to cover. For context, I'm not exactly what you'd call "ultralight hiker, I do love to eat a lot and drink." On a good day, a kilometer of elevation gain is manageable. In this fog? It felt like I have to write a will.

And this is where I started thinking about leadership, real leadership, not the kind you read about in airport business books.

The problem wasn't the mountain. The problem wasn't even my fitness level (though that didn't help). The problem was the fog - the uncertainty, the inability to see where we were going or how far we'd come. Sound familiar? It's exactly what kills most startups and big company initiatives. Not the actual challenge, but the psychological weight of uncertainty.

Good leaders - and I mean genuinely good ones, not just people with "Leader" in their titles - do one thing above all else: they clear the fog. They might not be able to make the mountain smaller or make you fitter, but they can make sure you know where you're putting your feet.

This is harder than it sounds. In startups, like in mountaineering, you often don't actually know what's ahead. But here's the counterintuitive truth: making a clear wrong decision is often better than leaving things foggy. At least with a wrong decision, people can see where they're going, even if they end up having to backtrack.

Bad leaders create fog. They hedge their bets, speak in ambiguities, leave room for interpretation. They think this create a room for creativity, I don’t thin so. It just makes everyone else's job harder.

Good leaders are fog machines in reverse. They take complex, uncertain situations and make them navigable. They might say "We're going this way" even when they're not 100% sure it's right, they have to say it with 200% certainty, cause they know → You can fix wrong decisions, but you can't fix paralysis. But by making the decision clear, they make it possible for everyone else to focus on the actual work instead of the uncertainty.

In the mountains that day, we made it to our destination. Not because we were particularly skilled or brave, but because we kept moving forward, one step at a time, in what we were thinking was the right direction. The fog never lifted, but we had a clear rules: keep going up, check each step, maintain contact, don’t cry, and never stop cause paralysis is very hard to fix.

The next time someone asks me about leadership, I'll tell them about the fog. Because that's what real leadership is about - not only giving inspirational speeches, but simply making it clear enough for people to do their work. Everything else is just noise in the fog.

This is probably also why management and leadership are different things. Management is about executing within known parameters. Leadership is about making those parameters visible when they're obscured by uncertainty.

The irony? The best leaders often make themselves seem unnecessary. When everything is clear and everyone knows what they're doing, it can look like no leadership is happening at all.
But try removing it, and watch how quickly the fog rolls in.

Growing up, I was that kid winning physics olympiads while struggling with literature and languages. Like really struggling. My language teacher was constantly escalating to the school director, treating everything like a crisis that needed immediate intervention. But I got lucky – our director was different. Instead of trying to "fix" me, we made an agreement: I show up to language classes instead of hiding in the physics lab doing exercises, and she would shield me. No pressure about results, just be present.
Later, computer science won over physics – that’s not on her, that’s the essay about incentives and economics.

Want to understand what I mean? Watch "The Last Dance" about Jordan and the Bulls. Seriously, if you're a manager and you haven't watched it, stop reading this and go watch it now. It's the best management course you'll ever take – just $5 instead of $200,000 for your typical MBA.

The key insight isn't just that Jordan was brilliant – it's about how the Bulls built a championship team around different types of excellence. Rodman wasn't your typical "A-player" by any corporate standard. He was eccentric, unpredictable, and broke every rule in the management handbook. He was also crucial to their success because he was phenomenal at what he did best.

Let's be real for a moment. Some people in any organization simply view work as a transaction – they show up, do the minimum, and collect their paycheck. And you know what? That's their choice, and it's completely valid. We waste so much energy trying to "fix" these people or force them to be more engaged. Why? They've made a conscious decision about their relationship with work, and that's fine. As a manager, your job isn't to judge or change these folks – it's to recognize this reality and focus your energy where it can make a real difference and create a system for the rest to be P&L positive.

Now, there's an important distinction here: coasting isn't the same as underperforming. Someone who coasts still meets their basic responsibilities (and with proper systems in place, they'll either be P&L positive or naturally move to the underperforming group) – they're just not going above and beyond.

But true underperformance is different. That's not about work-life choices; it's about not meeting fundamental obligations. And while you can accept coasters, you can't tolerate genuine underperformance. It's a nuanced but crucial difference that every manager needs to understand.

The formula is simple:

Focus Group = Total Org - (Coasters + Underpperformers)

With good systems in place, underperformance should naturally approach zero without consuming much of your time.

The real art of management isn't about grading people like they're school assignments. It's about creating an environment where different types of excellence can shine. It’s how you can build the winning teams from your focus group.
Setting the goals and agreeing on what's important and what's not. Create an environment where someone can be absolutely brilliant at one thing and just okay at others – and that's not just acceptable, it's celebrated and rewarded.

Here's my belief: everyone is an A-player at something. Your job as a manager isn't to turn them into someone else's version of an A-player. It's to figure out what they could be exceptional at, and then give them the space and support to get there. And if you can't see where someone could be exceptional? Well, maybe the problem isn't with them. Maybe it's with your ability to recognize potential. (Sometimes they might be exceptional in other companies or career paths – just have that fair conversation.)

So next time someone tells you they only hire or want to work with A-players, ask them what they really mean. Are they looking for mythical all-rounders who are great at everything?
Or do they understand that real excellence comes in many forms.

He caught me right after dinner, wine in hand, hoping for a peaceful evening. "Hey, I'm building this renting car aggregator app with new agent" he said, "and I need someone to help with a 10-12 screen journey over the next couple of weeks. The only alternative is this person, check the Telegram - what do you think?"

A quickly clicked the LinkedIn link. 10 sec. I told him no, promised to connect him with someone better suited, and went back to my wine. But the conversation stuck with me. Why did I respond so quickly and definitively?

Hiring an agency designer for your startup is like buying a Ferrari when what you really need is a tractor.

The Ferrari might look stunning in your driveway and turn heads at car shows, but it can't help you plow the fields that will feed your family.

You're paying premium prices for features that actively work against your needs - low ground clearance when you need high, delicate engineering when you need rugged reliability, and fancy electronics that break down in harsh conditions.

The agency designer, like the Ferrari, has been optimized for show rather than practical work. They've been conditioned to please clients, not end users.

The cost of this misalignment is massive.

Agency designers operate in isolation. They receive a brief, disappear for a while, and return with a polished solution. What's worse, they're conditioned to treat engineers as mere implementation resources rather than equal decision-makers with deep customer insights. This is particularly toxic in a startup environment, where engineers are often the ones who understand customer problems best - they're the ones dealing with bug reports, analyzing usage patterns, and seeing where users struggle firsthand. The best solutions emerge when designers work as equals with engineers, respecting their customer knowledge as much as their technical expertise.

Perfect is the enemy of shipped, yet agency designers struggle with this reality for two fundamental reasons. First, they're shaped by the billing-by-hour model, where slower execution means more revenue. Second, they're paralyzed without detailed briefs and product roadmaps – documents that simply don't exist in startups. The result? Weeks spent perfecting shadows while competitors are shipping features and capturing market share.

Agency designers get their feedback in client presentations, not through usage data and customer behavior. They've never had to own metrics. When was the last time an agency designer was held accountable for user retention or conversion rates? This lack of metrics ownership creates a fundamental disconnect from the realities of product development.

While agency designers craft pixel-perfect mockups, your competitors are shipping and learning. Being slow is more dangerous than being wrong. You need someone who can ship quickly, measure ruthlessly, and iterate based on real data. If you can't measure it, it's not real - and many agency designers have never had to operate in this reality. Design is just a part of product journey, not the journey in itself.

The skills that make someone successful in an agency are almost orthogonal to what a startup needs. You need someone who can:

1. Solve real business problems, not design exercises

2. Make autonomous decisions with incomplete information - no briefs needed

3. Ship fast, measure results, iterate faster

4. Work as equals with engineers, not just hand off designs

5. Own and be accountable for customer metrics, not just pixels

6. Communicate decisions clearly in writing, not just in Figma

There's another insidious problem with senior agency designers: they've often mastered the art of political theater. To climb the agency ladder, they've learned to excel at grand presentations about "design thinking," cosmic visions, and abstract futures - all while playing sophisticated political games. They become experts at managing up and crafting narratives, rather than shipping products.

Do you really want to import this snake-pit culture into your startup? You need pragmatic builders, not political animals who speak in TED talk soundbites about "design systems" while actually optimizing for their personal influence.

This isn't to say agency designers can't transition to product roles. Many do, successfully. But there's usually a painful adjustment period as they unlearn both the agency habits and the political games. As a startup, you can't afford to be someone's training ground or detox center. And do you have a patience and energy?

If you're founding a startup and need design help, look for designers who have product experience, even if their portfolios aren't as flashy. Better yet, look for designers who have founded something themselves or been early employees at successful startups.

Remember: you're not hiring someone to win design awards or create a portfolio piece. You're hiring someone to help your business move faster and gain market share while your competitors are still perfecting their color palettes.

Your success will be measured in weeks to market, not Dribbble likes.

Choose accordingly.

We were recruiting one of the brightest minds – physicists, chemistry scientists, mathematicians who could be solving humanity's hardest problems. Instead, their brilliance was being channeled into making people buy things they probably didn't need. Our algorithms were so good at prediction and influence that it was almost scary. We paid these brilliant minds triple their academic salaries, effectively buying their potential impact on real human problems and converting it into click-through rates.

"Look what we've built," either me or my partner said pouring another whisky. "The most sophisticated manipulation engine in this part of the world, powered by people who could be curing diseases or solving climate change."

The Mission Machine

Let me be ruthlessly clear about something fundamental: A business exists to generate returns for shareholders. Period. Everything else - including mission - must serve this core purpose. But here's where most people get it wrong. They see mission as either a marketing tool or a moral obligation that restrains profit. Both views miss the mechanical beauty of what a mission really is.

A properly engineered mission is the most powerful profit-generation mechanism ever created. But it only works if you build real wealth creation systems beneath it. Yes, you must be a greedy bastard to be a successful C/Board-level person - that's literally what you're selected for. But the real art is creating mechanisms where others can be greedy bastards too.

I'm not talking about optimising existing products or improving margins - that's just keeping the lights on. I'm talking about creating entirely new value streams. If someone in your company builds a new business line that generates $100M in value, they should capture $50M of it. Not because you're generous - because it's good mechanics. They'll immediately start hunting for the next billion opportunity.

This is what separates great companies from good ones: The great ones build systems where anyone smart enough to create massive new value can get genuinely rich from it. Not just comfortable. Not just well-paid. Fucking Rich.

Your mission makes this possible in three ways:

First, it's a talent arbitrage mechanism. Your mission lets you hire brilliant people for less money than your competitors. It helps you retain them longer because humans crave meaning. In pure economic terms, this is an enormous competitive advantage - you're literally buying intellectual capital at a discount.

Second, it's a decision-making accelerant. When people believe in your mission, they make faster, better decisions aligned with long-term value creation. They solve harder problems. They think in decades, not quarters. They find non-obvious solutions that your competitors miss.

Third, and most importantly, it's a scalable motivation engine. Money alone hits diminishing returns as a motivator. But combine significant wealth creation potential with meaningful work? That's a force multiplier that scales almost infinitely.

But - and this is crucial - this only works if you're brutally honest about it. Your mission isn't about saving the world. If you want to save the world, build a massively successful business and donate your wealth to experts who specialise in world-saving. They'll do it better than you can while trying to run a business.

Your mission is about building mechanisms that make getting rich an inevitable side effect of solving valuable problems. Everything else is self-deception.

The Public Company Challenge

In the startup world, this problem is relatively straightforward to solve. Smart founders understand that their people are their most valuable asset and structure option packages accordingly. When you own significant equity and have a clear path to wealth creation through value creation, mission and profit naturally align.

But what happens when you scale? When you go public? This is where things get interesting.

Public companies face a unique tension between quarterly performance and long-term value creation. The pressure to hit numbers every three months can kill any meaningful innovation or mission-driven transformation.

This is where the Yandex model was fascinating.

The Yandex Model:

1. The Core Cash Machine

- Search and advertising: predictable, high-margin business

- Keeps the public market happy with consistent growth

- Funds the aggressive expansion into new verticals

2. The Vertical Value Creation Engine

Each new business line (ride-hailing, delivery, e-commerce, education, cloud) operates as a separate vertical with:

- Its own P&L

- Dedicated leadership

- Specific equity pool

- Clear path to either IPO or value capture

3. The Talent Allocation Mechanism

- Engineers and leaders could move from core business to new verticals

- Each vertical offered founding-team equity packages

- Clear wealth creation path: build a billion-dollar business, own a meaningful piece of it

The results speak volumes. Multiple billion-dollar businesses emerged:

- Yandex.Taxi merged with Uber Russia (was a multi-billion dollar entity)

- Yandex.Market became a dominant e-commerce player

- New verticals kept attracting top talent with public company stability plus startup upside

The Core Business Paradox

Some might ask: "Won't everyone just chase new verticals if that's where the real wealth is? Who will run the core business?"

The answer is surprisingly simple: Most people can't build new businesses. This isn't a criticism - it's just reality. Your core business will always have talent because most people are naturally suited to optimising and operating existing systems rather than creating new ones.

You don't need to artificially constrain opportunities or create barriers. In fact, having clear paths to massive wealth creation acts as a natural sorting mechanism. People self-select into roles where they can create the most value based on their capabilities.

I'll dig deeper into the archetypes of builders, conductors, and coasters in my next article. But for now, understand this: Your job isn't to protect your core business from talent drain. Your job is to create opportunities for wealth creation and let people find their natural level.

The Real Truth

That whisky-fueled moment of doubt? I was naive then, sad for the wrong reasons. The real failure wasn't that we were pulling brilliant minds into advertising. The failure was in my own limited thinking.

With a different narrative - the same exact business, the same technology, the same talent - we could have scaled from a 100M business to billions. Nothing about the core business needed to change. We just needed to craft a better mission machine, one that would attract even more brilliant minds and give them even bigger problems to solve.

We weren't just optimising ad clicks - we were building one of the world's most sophisticated acquisition and retention engines. We weren't just selling different ads and marketing tools - we were creating a new way for businesses to reach their customers. The technology, the talent, the potential - it was all there. We just needed to think bigger and go for more markets.

The right question isn't whether you're the bad guy for making people rich. The right question is: Are you building mechanisms that make getting rich an inevitable side effect of solving important problems at massive scale?

Because when you get that right, you don't need to choose between mission and money. They become the same thing.

Related Reading:

For a similar dive into implementing similar principles at the prod/eng team level, check previous article on scaling orgs and creating internal venture mindsets: Scaling Product Org

Chin&Chin

You know what I'm talking about - that seductive idea of "work-life balance," of spreading yourself evenly across different areas of life. It's the gospel of mediocrity masquerading as wisdom. And I'm here to tell you why it's completely wrong if you're aiming for greatness.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Excellence

Here's where most people will disagree with me: Balance is for those content with being average. There, I said it. If you want to be truly exceptional at anything - and I mean anything - you need to embrace imbalance. You need to be obsessed.

Remember "Whiplash"? That movie got it right. The path to greatness isn't comfortable. It isn't balanced. It's intense, it's consuming, and yes, it's fundamentally unbalanced. And you know what? That's exactly how it should be.

Why Unbalanced Is Fucking Awesome

We need to stop apologizing for obsession. Instead of preaching balance, we should be celebrating those who throw themselves completely into their passions. These are the people pushing boundaries, advancing fields, creating extraordinary things.

You need three things to be great:

- Passion that burns so hot it scares normal people

- Love so deep it looks like madness from the outside

- Obsession that makes others uncomfortable

The Engineering Example

Want to be a great engineer? Let me tell you - it's not about checking boxes and maintaining "work-life balance." It's about:

- Being obsessed with your craft

- Surrounding yourself with engineers who make you feel stupid

- Reading and understanding the best solutions and most complex fuck-ups

- Contributing to mature products that challenge you

- Solving problems elegantly and simply

Here's the thing about great engineering that most people miss: it looks deceptively simple. Any average engineer can create complex solutions for complex problems - that's easy. But the truly great ones? They achieve the impossible: they make everything so simple that you almost don't believe it's possible. Yet it is.

That's the mark of engineering excellence - when your solution is so elegant, so straightforward, that it seems obvious in hindsight. But getting there? That requires obsession, deep understanding, and the courage to strip away complexity until only the essential remains.

And here's a truth about LLMs - they're trained on average code, on average solutions. But true engineering excellence follows a power-law distribution - the best solutions are outliers, not averages. That's why no LLM will replace truly great engineers who understand this.

The Beauty of Obsession

Maybe your first obsession won't lead to greatness. That's fine. Find another mountain to climb - whether it's sports, relationships, art, business, or something entirely different. The specific field matters less than the intensity you bring to it.

The world doesn't need more balanced people. It needs more people willing to become obsessed with excellence, willing to push boundaries, willing to be unashamedly passionate about what they do.

The Final Truth

Average is for average people. And that's fine - not everyone needs to be exceptional. But if you want greatness? Embrace the imbalance. Dive deep. Get obsessed.

Because in the end, nobody changed the world by being balanced.

Don't just be good. Be fucking great. And never apologize for the obsession that gets you there.