Starting a Business
10 pieces · 47 min of reading
The Smallest Possible Version
Almost every failed first business fails the same way: someone spends months building something nobody asked for, then finds out too late. The fix isn't a better idea — it's building the smallest possible version of the idea first, and letting real people tell you whether to keep going before you've spent your savings finding out.
Quick read4 min02Where Money Actually Comes From
"Revenue," "margin," "cash flow" — three words that sound like accounting homework but are really just the answer to one question every business must answer: does more money come in than goes out, and does it arrive in time to pay the bills? Here's the whole picture, and a calculator to make it real.
Quick readInteractive4 min03Pricing Without Fear
Almost every first-time founder makes the same mistake, and it's not the one they worry about. It's not pricing too high. It's pricing too low — out of fear, guilt, or a guess dressed up as strategy. Pricing well is less about spreadsheets and more about confronting a feeling. Here's how to do it with your eyes open.
Quick read4 min04The Legal Bare Minimum
Most first-time founders either ignore the legal side entirely until something goes wrong, or freeze up trying to "get everything perfect" before starting anything. Neither is right. Here's the actual short list of legal basics that matter early — enough to protect yourself without stalling for months on paperwork.
Read5 min05How to Talk to Customers (Before You Build Anything)
You can validate or kill a bad idea in an afternoon of honest conversations — before spending a single dollar building it. Most beginners skip this step, or do it in a way that quietly lies to them. Here's how to do it right.
Quick read4 min06Reading the Business You Work For
Most employees, including talented, hardworking ones, never learn to read the business they work inside — what actually makes it money, what its numbers mean, or how their own role connects to either. That gap quietly caps careers. The people who advance fastest almost always understand the machine, not just their part of it.
Read5 min07The Mental Models Top Operators Use
Ask people who've run large organizations, built companies, or made careers of consequential decisions what actually separates good judgment from bad, and the same handful of thinking tools keeps coming up — not tied to any industry, any title, or any org chart. These are those tools.
Read6 min08Co-Founders: Choosing, Splitting, and Not Breaking Up
Two friends start a company at a kitchen table. Neither wants to make it awkward, so they shake hands on "fifty-fifty" and get to work. Eighteen months later one of them is doing all the work, the other has taken a job elsewhere, and he still owns half the company. Nobody did anything illegal. They just never had the conversation.
Read5 min09Starting Something Inside a Company
In 1968, a chemist at 3M named Spencer Silver was trying to make a super-strong glue and made a weak one instead: it stuck, but peeled off cleanly. He spent about five years promoting it inside the company and couldn't convince anyone it was useful. Then in 1974 a colleague, Art Fry, used it to keep bookmarks from falling out of his church hymn book. Even then, the first test launch in 1977 flopped. The product only took off after a second, better-designed trial, and reached shops nationwide in 1980 as the Post-it Note.
Read5 min10Judging a Proposal: The Outside View
In 1957, the Sydney Opera House was budgeted at £3.5 million and scheduled to open in January 1963. It opened in October 1973, ten years late, and cost A$102 million. The building is now one of the most loved in the world, which makes the point more uncomfortable, not less: the people who approved it were not fools, and the plan was not obviously bad. The estimate was simply built the way almost every estimate is built, from the inside.
Read5 min