Really good decisions are the ones that, years later, you are really glad you made.

They are rarely ones that were uncontroversial at the time, and often they may have felt like big risks. This obviously doesn’t mean that you should always only take big risks, but if you want Future You to be grateful for the decisions that Current You made, you probably need to do some things that people around you all think are too risky.

A thread about parenting, and developing teams.

My eldest, Jasmine (18) is currently motorbiking solo across Vietnam. Yesterday she messaged to tell me that she’d been in an accident. She’s ok, just a bit scraped and grazed, but it was a tough day for her. She was riding in the countryside, it was raining, and a car didn’t see her and just pulled out of a junction into her path. She moved lanes and breaked, but still hit the car and came off. The driver didn’t speak English and was pretty upset with her. Her bike was messed up.

If you hire someone who has earned >£100k in a large company, the chances are their main skill will be talking to you. Specifically, managing your expectations and explaining why performance that you thought was bad, is actually good. You now have a toxic problem which can destroy the culture that got you here. Be very careful.

You get to hire your first person on a big salary because your team (who joined on small salaries) have delivered growth against the odds. Unreasonable growth.

Something obvious to bootstrapped entrepreneurs, but seems alien to corporate & VC funded founders:

A business that makes money ‘except for..’ doesn’t make money. A business that doesn’t make money has no value (apart from as a building block towards a business that makes money) Some categories of ‘except for...’ are quite easy, some are as hard as building a business that works from scratch.