A Few Notes on Getting Things Built

The world is drowning in advice. Most of it is untested theory, recycled platitudes, or content marketing dressed up as wisdom. The problem with advice is that you rarely know how much it cost the person giving it.

What follows is not theory. These are not guesses. They are rules I have collected the hard way, by building, shipping, selling, and occasionally breaking things across nine different sectors. They were learned through bad hires, lost deals, market downturns and the occasional, improbable win.

They are, more than anything, notes to my former self. Perhaps you will find some use for them.

1. Never outsource understanding your numbers. You can hire a bookkeeper, a CFO, an entire finance department. But if you cannot, with confidence, read a balance sheet and a P&L, you have a silent co-founder you don’t know and cannot trust. The numbers tell the true story of the business. Learn the language.

2. The most powerful person in a negotiation is the one prepared to walk away. Neediness is a mortal sin at the deal table. If you cannot stomach the thought of the deal falling through, you have already lost. Know your floor, and mean it.

3. Hire for quiet competence, not loud enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a cheap drug, and easy to fake. Competence is proven by a track record of shipping good work, quietly and without drama. Look for the person who talks about the work, not the story they tell about themselves.

4. Your first instinct on a person is almost always correct. Your second and third instincts are an attempt to talk yourself out of what you already know. This is true for hiring, firing, and choosing partners. Do not waste time on due diligence to confirm a bad gut feeling.

5. Protect your mornings. The first three hours of your day are for building your own future, not for reacting to someone else's agenda. Use that peak energy for deep work. The emails will still be there at 11am.

6. Good process is freedom. Bad process is a prison. Bureaucracy is process for its own sake. Good process is simply the act of solving a problem once, memorialising the solution, and moving on to a more interesting problem. It is the skeleton that allows a business to grow.

7. Stop trying to be for everyone. The market for ‘everything’ is crowded and deeply unprofitable. The most valuable word in business is often 'no'. Say it to the wrong customers, the wrong features, and the wrong markets. It is the only way to earn the right to say 'yes'.

8. Don't 'network'. Build things with people you rate. A shared project is worth a thousand coffees. Joint work, with real stakes, is the fastest way to learn if someone is reliable, talented, and worth your time. Your best contacts will be the people you have been in the trenches with.

9. A failure you learn from is a tuition fee. A failure you do not learn from is a dead loss. It is the only kind of failure worth having, but the key is to only pay the fee once. Extract the lesson, write it down, and do not repeat it.

10. Read the documents. All of them. Especially the boring parts. The expensive surprises are not in the headline terms; they are buried in the shareholder agreement, the warranty clause, or the termination for convenience section. Read the fine print, or pay for it later.

11. Don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with your customer’s problem. Your brilliant idea, your elegant code, your beautiful product—it is all disposable. The customer’s problem is the only part of the equation with any real, lasting value. Serve that.

12. Reputation is built on the promises you keep and the shortcuts you don't take. It is the sum total of every deadline met, every difficult conversation had, and every time you chose the harder right over the easier wrong. It is your ultimate collateral.

There are more, of course. But these are the ones that have cost the most to learn, and are therefore the most valuable. They are the rules that have been earned.