Charlie Songhurst

Often, one of the things that I see correlate very well with success is how quickly they exit their first employee that doesn't fit.

And I think what that's actually showing is, are they willing enough to be disagreeable to make the company what they want?

And so the willingness to cross that chasm, and often you're dealing with young founders, that's a major infraction point.

And if you don't do it, that often leads to a toxic culture and bad results.

Then there's sort of more subtle melodies, like sort of turning things into an academic project, particularly with founders with very strong academic backgrounds, often in deep tech and PhDs.

There's sort of like generals fighting the last where they think of prestige as a currency because it is an academia.

And so they just think if we do amazing work and we tell the world about that amazing work, good things will happen.

Because as a holistic, that did work.

But it means they don't engage with revenue.

They don't get quite product market fit.

It's too much a sort of ivory tower intellectual exercise.

Or conversely, do they just sort of think we get momentum, we get revenue, we get traction, it'll work.

And they haven't really thought about that.

deep microeconomics and unity economics of a scaling company.

And so I almost inverted and say, don't study greatness, study failure, and work out how not to be that.

If you're sort of thinking of history, trying to be as good or eminent as Augustus would be really, really difficult.

Not being as incompetent as Caligula seems really easy.

And so as a practical advice,

Not making the catastrophic mistakes and just surviving long enough feels like a good strategy.

There was some general somewhere that said, it's not that good soldiers become veterans.