One of the most underrated skills for a startup CEO is making decisions quickly. Not perfectly—quickly. Slow decisions drag everything down. They sap momentum, create confusion, and give competitors time to catch up. Fast decisions, on the other hand, are like hitting the gas pedal on the company. People
A hard-won guide to staying mentally healthy while building a startup I founded Stitcher, the podcast platform, in 2007 and ran it for seven years until we sold in 2014. We raised through Series B with investors like Benchmark and NEA. From the outside, it looked like a typical startup
I still remember one of my earliest board meetings at Stitcher. I was sitting at the head of the table, looking around at the brilliant people surrounding me, thinking: What am I doing here? I’m not the right person for this job. I’m just faking it. One of
Every startup founder hits conflict with their co-founder(s). It’s not a sign of failure, it’s a sign you’re doing something hard together. The question isn’t whether conflict happens, it’s how you handle it. The worst approach is to ignore it. Avoiding the conversation might
A startup CEO coach helps founder CEOs with the hardest part of building a company: scaling themselves at the rate that the business is scaling. That means making good decisions, staying focused, and not burning out in the process. It’s useful to clear up what a coach is not:
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