Alex Priest — Design System

I create clarity from chaos for startup founders. I've spent fifteen years in the room for the hardest decisions at companies like Uber, where I was employee #35, and CloudKitchens, where I led design through a period of intense growth. Now I advise a handful of founders at a time on the decisions that shape their companies.

The work I do isn't about having the right answers — it's about asking the right questions at the right time. Most founders are solving the wrong problem with perfect precision. I help them find the real problem.

What I believe

Speed of decision matters more than quality of decision. Reversible decisions should be made fast. The best founders develop an instinct for separating the two.

Design is how it works, not how it looks. Every pixel should earn its place the way good prose earns its sentences: by being necessary.

Background

Before advising, I spent a decade and a half building products at companies ranging from five people to fifty thousand. I've shipped consumer products used by hundreds of millions and enterprise tools used by dozens. The common thread: making complex decisions clear.

I also make vermouth. Long story.

Get in touch

If you're a founder working through hard decisions, I'd love to talk. I take on a small number of advisory relationships at a time — enough to go deep, not so many that I'm spread thin.

The best way to reach me is by email. I read everything and respond to most things.

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.

A warm afternoon by the pool — A warm afternoon on the coast. The kind of light that makes everything look like a memory.

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. ↩

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.

The right question, asked at the right time, is worth more than a hundred answers.

Clarity isn't a destination. It's a practice.

...the end of one thought.

The beginning of another...

Use --accent for interactive elements. The font-variation-settings property controls weight.

const theme = 'light';
// Apply theme
document.setAttribute('data-theme', theme);

Reversible decisions — make fast
Irreversible decisions — deliberate
- Board composition changes
- Major acquisitions
False urgency — dismiss

Define the decision clearly
Set a deadline
Identify minimum information needed
Make the call and commit

Element	Font	Size
Body	Signifier	1rem
H3	Montreuil	0.75rem
Footer	Montreuil	0.9rem

Read about the pattern behind clarity in the latest post.

As Jeff Bezos wrote in his 2016 shareholder letter.

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This guide is inspired by—and owes a tremendous debt to—Robin Sloan's style guide. His colophon convinced me every writer should keep one of these. Most of these rules started as his; I've adapted them to my own preferences and added a few of my own.

Capitalization

Sentence case for titles and headings. "A few thoughts on writing well," not "A Few Thoughts on Writing Well."
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Oxford comma, always. Without it, you risk inviting the strippers, JFK and Stalin.
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What I believe

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Get in touch

The pattern behind clarity

A framework for focus

When speed becomes strategy

The practice

On compound clarity

Finding the signal

A note on intuition

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The decisions that shape everything

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