In early-stage startups, founder behavior isn’t just one of many factors — it can be the dominant variable (and often is) in determining whether a company endures and thrives, or, plateaus and dies. I’ve worked with countless founders and categorized functional behaviors and dysfunctional behaviors for startup-company building. This post serves to illuminate them, show you a simple rubric for evaluating them, and ways to mitigate. Again, this is not to judge whether a founder is good/bad, right/wrong, ethical/unethical — this is purely to assess behaviors that enrich company value and those that do not. This list is also not exhaustive.

This is a living, breathing compilation of founder-led sales expertise I have organized after working with more than 40 early-stage VC companies (Seed to C) over the past 5+ years. I have further enriched it with transcribed conversations I have had with CEOs who have generated revenues of up to 100MM per year. The patterns of what works and what doesn't are quite interesting. Below, I share these observations. However, they are not to be taken as truth since all heuristics have limitations due to context-specific nuances. 

For early-stage B2B startups, founder-led sales is not just the default—it’s the differentiator. No sales hire can match your vision, context, or capacity to reframe customer problems at this embryonic stage. This post will guide you through why founder-led sales matters, how to systematize it without losing flexibility, and ways to transition when you’re truly ready. We are big fans of the principle “earn the right to elevate.” especially if you are a startup.

Most people think that it is more important to 'give' than take in a relationship. Yes, having a ‘pay it forward’ culture is one of the things that makes Silicon Valley (SV) a special ecosystem. However, it's just as important to 'take' as it is to 'give' too— it must be balanced.

if it is not clear what behaviors your company values and expects, then people are left to their interpretations and personal biases of what behaviors are expected of them. Their behaviors could be aligned or misaligned with what you expect. However, they are only doing the best they can with what they know, drawing on their historical experience of what those words mean.

Money influences far more than we often admit. It shapes our choices, our self-worth, and our sense of possibility. But most of us carry subconscious beliefs about money that create fear, tension, or limitation—especially in the high-stakes world of startups. In this post, you'll explore a powerful exercise to surface and shift your personal relationship with money—so that you can use it as a partner in creation, not a source of anxiety or constraint. Whether you're a founder, operator, or someone navigating big life decisions, this process helps you trade inherited scarcity for self-authored agency.

Emotions aren’t noise — they’re structured signals. Beneath every emotional expression lies a pattern, a message, a map of how someone’s internal world is making sense of their experience. Whether it's anxiety, anger, sadness, or hope, each emotion has a logic — and if we learn how to listen for it, we can connect more deeply, ask better questions, and create real psychological safety.

In this post, we explore how to work with emotion as information — not something to fix, but something to understand. We show how common emotional states are built, what they’re trying to communicate, and how you can engage more skillfully with the people around you. Especially when the stakes are high.

As a founder coach and facilitator, nothing brings me more joy than identifying and working with levers for excellence. What do I mean by that? The conditions upon which their X-Factor reveals itself. In my experience, there is a spectrum of 4 distinct types and we could all generally fall into multiple buckets to varying degrees (more below).

Most founders and core teams hit ceilings not because they lack effort or intelligence, but because they’re trapped inside assumptions they haven’t thought to question. Exponential thinking breaks that loop. It’s a way of seeing that turns limits into leverage—helping you dissolve roadblocks, accelerate outcomes, and operate at a scale that looks impossible from the outside. In this post, we unpack the practical tools and mental frameworks that top-performing founders use to think 10x beyond their constraints—and show you how to build that muscle yourself.

You give feedback with the best intentions—but it lands wrong. Your teammate shuts down. Your co-founder changes the subject. Your manager stops asking for your perspective.

When feedback is misread as judgment, even great teams break down. In this post, I break down the 3 essentials that make feedback land with clarity and compassion—so you can build trust, not tension. Whether you're managing, leading, or partnering, this is how you stay honest and connected.