The Decisions That Shape Everything
Every founder reaches a moment where the path forward isn't clear. The market shifts, the team fractures, the board asks questions that don't have clean answers. This is where the real work begins — not in the building, but in the deciding.
I've spent fifteen years watching this moment arrive. At Uber, it came early and often — every week brought a decision that could have ended the company. The skill isn't in having the right answer. It's in knowing which question to ask first.
Most founders think their problem is information — they need more data, more advisors, more frameworks. But the founders who break through fastest are the ones who realize their problem is attention. They're solving the wrong problem with perfect precision.
The pattern behind clarity
There's a pattern I've seen repeated across dozens of companies, from Series A to pre-IPO. The best decision-makers share three traits: they separate signal from noise instinctively, they're comfortable with incomplete information, and they understand that speed of decision often matters more than quality of decision.
The best founders don't avoid hard decisions. They develop an instinct for which hard decisions matter and which are distractions dressed up as urgency.
This isn't recklessness. It's the recognition that in a startup, time is the only non-renewable resource. Every day spent deliberating is a day your competitor spends executing. The cost of a wrong decision made quickly1 is almost always less than the cost of a right decision made too late.
A framework for focus
When I sit down with a founder, we start with a simple exercise. I ask them to list every decision on their plate. Then we sort:
- Decisions that are reversible — make them fast, move on
- Decisions that are irreversible — these deserve deliberation
- Decisions that feel urgent but aren't — these are the traps
- Board pressure that's really about optics
- Competitor moves that don't affect your strategy
- Team requests that solve symptoms, not causes
The third category is where most founders lose their time. Learning to identify and dismiss false urgency is perhaps the most valuable skill a founder can develop.
The right question, asked at the right time, is worth more than a hundred answers.
When speed becomes strategy
There's a counterintuitive truth about decision-making: the companies that move fastest aren't the ones with the most information. They're the ones with the clearest decision-making framework.
- Define the decision clearly — what exactly are you choosing between?
- Set a deadline — decisions expand to fill the time available
- Identify the minimum information needed — not all, just enough
- Make the call and commit fully
- Set a review date — you can always course-correct
Here's how the fastest-growing companies I've worked with handle their decision cadence compared to industry averages:
| Decision Type | Industry Average | Top Performers |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring (senior) | 4–6 weeks | 2 weeks |
| Product pivot | 3–6 months | 2–4 weeks |
| Market expansion | 6–12 months | 6–8 weeks |
| Pricing changes | 2–3 months | 1–2 weeks |
The theme detection code that powers this site's dark mode is a good example of a decisive, reversible implementation:
const theme = localStorage.getItem('theme') ||
(window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)')
.matches ? 'dark' : 'light');
// Apply immediately — no flash of wrong theme
document.documentElement.setAttribute('data-theme', theme);Simple. Reversible. Ships in five minutes. That's the mindset.
The practice
What changes when you internalize this? Everything. The weekly leadership meeting shrinks from two hours to forty-five minutes. The Slack threads stop spiraling. The board meetings become conversations instead of presentations.
On compound clarity
There's something beautiful about watching a founder develop this muscle. The decisions get faster, but they also get better. Not because the founder is smarter — because they've learned to focus their intelligence on the decisions that actually matter.
Clarity isn't a destination. It's a practice — one that compounds over time, like interest.
Finding the signal
The founders I work with now come to me not because I have answers they don't. They come because having someone in the room who's seen the pattern before2 — who can say "this is the decision that matters, and this one can wait" — saves them the most precious thing they have: time spent on the wrong problem.
A note on intuition
Intuition isn't magic. It's pattern recognition compressed into instinct. The more decisions you make, the faster your pattern.match() runs. The key is making those decisions consciously enough to learn from them.
If you're a founder wrestling with decisions that feel impossible, I'd love to talk. Not to give you answers — to help you find the right questions. That's where clarity lives.
Footnotes
- Jeff Bezos popularized this as "Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions" in his 2016 letter to shareholders. Type 2 (reversible) decisions should be made quickly by individuals or small groups. ↩
- This is sometimes called "earned intuition" — the ability to recognize patterns from experience that would take a first-time founder months to identify on their own. ↩