Published addenda
Each piece starts with an existing article and adds the context, limitation, correction or alternative interpretation it needs.
Startup Strategy
Responding to Y Combinator
Launch speed, concentrated metrics, and aggressive ambition make sense under some venture conditions, but founders and investors do not carry the same downside.
Growth Strategy
Responding to NFX
Constant motion and data collection can produce a stream of positive-looking tests while hiding false discoveries, customer harm, and evidence that it is time to stop.
Entrepreneurship
Responding to Stripe
Fast growth, outside capital, and a widespread market are strategic commitments with costs—not neutral characteristics that separate startups from ordinary businesses.
Venture Capital
Responding to Carta
Ownership medians make private markets more legible, but the same percentage can conceal different terms, capital needs, control rights, and chances of success.
Product Development
Responding to Basecamp
Shape Up controls projects that drift, but a fixed appetite cannot reveal a badly chosen problem or prevent essential complexity from being pushed onto customers.
Small Business
Responding to U.S. Small Business Administration
Templates organize assumptions for lenders and teams, but polished forecasts cannot replace paid tests, supplier commitments, and explicit limits on personal loss.
Organizational Culture
Responding to strategy+business
Alignment reduces friction, but it can also silence the employees whose resistance is the first evidence that a strategy’s assumptions are failing.
Management
Responding to Knowledge at Wharton
Plans and leaders do not operate in isolation; targets, authority, information, and rewards often determine whether supposedly good strategy produces harmful behavior.
Organizational Strategy
Responding to Bain & Company
Customer focus and urgency can survive growth, but founder-centered judgment is itself a form of complexity that process must eventually replace.
