12 Principles For Your Career / Business

It's been ~2 years since I founded ForecastOS and ~12 years since I started my investment banking -> software engineering -> quantitative investing -> founder arc.

I’ve learned a lot the hard way (pain) and the easy way (patterns).

Below is a collection of 12 principles I keep coming back to. Take what’s helpful. Ignore the rest.

1. Expect Everyone to Act In Their Own Self Interest and You'll Rarely Be Surprised
2. Once Something Is Agreed, Paper it Immediately
3. Don't Deviate Far From Standard Terms
4. Be A Good Steward of Capital
5. Beware The Most Dangerous Person in the Room
6. Improve Health to Improve Productivity
7. What Product-Market Fit Feels Like
8. (How to) Hire Extraordinary Employees
9. Avoid Complexity
10. There Can Only Be One (Founder & CEO)
11. Know Your Odds of Success. Be Good Enough To Succeed
12. The Central Limit Theorem of Advice

1. Expect Everyone to Act In Their Own Self Interest and You'll Rarely Be Surprised

A nicer way to say this is: “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”

People aren’t evil. They’re incentivized. And incentives beat values more often than we’d like to admit, especially when money, ego, status, or job security are involved.

Don’t rely on other people to be saints.

Instead:

• Assume self-interest. If someone benefits from doing something that disadvantages you, expect them to consider doing it.
• Design for it. Make it in peoples’ best interest to do what you want, and not in their best interest to do what you don’t want.

This applies everywhere, including:

A) Employees / ESOPs

Retain and motivate employees by structuring comp and equity such that staying and performing is rational (i.e. better than what is available to them elsewhere). Don’t rely on loyalty. Loyalty can be fragile when rent is due.

B) Customers / Vendor Risk

No one gets fired for buying from Salesforce. People do get fired (or look dumb) for betting their roadmap on a startup that disappears in 18 months.

If you’re early-stage, you’re selling against risk, not just features. You can reduce that risk by:

• selling to smaller / risk-tolerant customers first,
• selling something low-effort to adopt (i.e. low switching cost), or
• building something new (i.e. not available elsewhere) or 10x better so that the buyer can justify the risk.

C) Investors / Partners / Advisors

Always ask: what do they want? How does my success (or failure) affect them? Once you see their incentive clearly, advice becomes easier to evaluate.

2. Once Something Is Agreed, Paper it Immediately

I’ve regretted not doing this more than once; I was slower than I should have been to learn this lesson.

A surprising number of people will change spoken commitments after the fact - sometimes without highlighting changes. Putting something in writing doesn’t “ruin the vibe.” If they’re serious about their verbal commitment, nothing changes.

Paper it. Immediately. And validate all details are as agreed.

3. Don't Deviate Far From Standard Terms

Weird terms create weird problems later.

If your salaries, equity grants, board rights, valuation, customer contracts, or investor terms are too far from normal ranges, future employees / customers / investors will ask: “why is this weird?”

Find out what typical bounds look like. Pick a sensible spot in that range. Save your novelty for your product / solution.

4. Be A Good Steward of Capital

Won’t someone think of the shareholders?

If you raised money, that’s shareholder money, not your money. Treat it with respect. Protect it. Try to grow it. Cut waste aggressively.

You should be proud to show investors each line item on your income statement:

• “Look what we built.”
• “Look how little we spent doing it.”
• “Look how capital-efficient we were.”

Keep offices austere. Revisit spend constantly. If you’re technical, find technical deals: negotiate vendors, use spot instances where possible (often 70% savings), avoid shiny tooling that doesn’t move the needle, etc.

We wouldn't have survived long enough to build a successful product (Hivemind was our fourth product) if we weren't so careful with our finances.

In startups, survival is compounding. The longer you survive, the longer you have to find product-market fit, and the more likely you are to produce returns for shareholders. It's all about the shareholders.

5. Beware The Most Dangerous Person in the Room

Watch out for people in (senior) roles who don't deserve them on paper. They have the most to lose.

My experience has been they (by necessity) prioritize politics, posturing, and narrative management over outcomes. Expect them to behave accordingly.

You can sometimes spot them by:

• unimpressive schooling / grades in fields where it matters,
• unimpressive experience,
• exaggerated achievements,
• shallow understanding of (and network in) the problem space,
• a pattern of conflict (e.g. public lawsuits, accusations),
• etc.

Avoid working with them if possible, despite charisma and assurances. Remember: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

6. Improve Health to Improve Productivity

The healthier you are, the higher your average speed. Being healthy isn’t just self-care; it’s throughput. As such:

• sleep +8 hours whenever possible,
• do cardio and lift weights - a little goes a long way, and
• work <=60 hours a week (hands on keyboard).

As a former investment banking analyst, I can confidently say the following about +60 hour work weeks:

• outside of doing god's work (i.e. rearranging logos in PowerPoint at 4 AM for a 9 AM meeting), they are not needed / productive,
• your health (and output) will slowly degrade, and
• your marginal hourly productivity will become negative. You aren't well enough rested to be clever.

Every successful founder I know doesn't sustainably work more than 60 hours a week (hands on keyboard).

Work (sustainably) hard. Exercise. Rest.

It's a marathon, not a sprint.

7. What Product-Market Fit (PMF) Feels Like

Product-market fit is not a dashboard metric. It’s a feeling. It’s the moment selling flips from actively pushing your product to having it pulled from you.

• You don't sell the product, you describe it / demo it. Buyers want it based on that alone.
• Buyers don't need to be educated. They are aware they have the problem you are solving and are actively trying to solve it.
• Buyers want to talk to you. Most schedule additional calls. Inbound interest picks up substantially.

To find PMF, find a painful, resourced problem.

The best problems are:

• common in a specific niche,
• valuable to solve,
• known by customers; budget exists to solve it, and
• currently solved badly.

Solve that. Sell that.

Listen to problems. Ignore proposed solutions.

Customers are excellent at describing their problems but (often) bad at designing solutions.

As the old adage goes: to travel large distances quickly, people will ask for a faster horse, but what they need is a car.

You can only do one thing well.

That doesn’t mean only try one thing. Try many things quickly. But once something hits (you'll feel the pull), focus on that.

8. (How to) Hire Extraordinary Employees

I have a lot to say about identifying and hiring top talent... BUT I think one heuristic that captures 80% of what is important is: extraordinary people do extraordinary things.

When looking to hire extraordinary employees, look for people with extraordinary accomplishments or achievements. That could be academic, athletic, or professional. Often achievement is not isolated, but repeated, and easy to identify.

Don't expect people without extraordinary achievements to do extraordinary things. While there are (many) exceptions, if they haven't produced extraordinary achievements by the time you are interviewing them, why would they start now? Answer: they probably won't.

With the above in mind, a few other things to be mindful of when hiring:

• Do you like them? You'll be spending +40 hours a week, every week, with them.
• Do they want the job you are hiring for? If they don't, save the time you'll spend convincing / motivating them and find someone who does.
• Do they have the right attitude and aptitude? Everything else can be taught.

9. Avoid Complexity

You can only load so much context into a brain (or LLM, it turns out).

Complexity is a tax:

• harder to understand,
• harder to debug,
• harder to onboard,
• harder to improve, and
• easier to break.

Simple is clever. Clever scales.

10. There Can Only Be One (Founder & CEO)

Elon, Gates, Zuck, etc. With very few exceptions, successful companies (and governments) have one person at the top.

Co-founders are great; they work hard for less cash (and more equity), provide continuity should other co-founders burn out, etc.

But decision-making authority and clarity matter. If you have co-founders, decide who has final say. They become your company's benevolent dictator - the CEO. They become accountable for all top level decisions. They also become the shareholders' one throat to choke.

11. Know Your Odds of Success. Be Good Enough To Succeed

In university level calculus - before grade inflation, smh at you Gen Z - perhaps 50% of the class would fail the final. No one, and I mean no one, thought any of the top math students would be among the 50% that failed. And they never were. They were consistently at the top.

Startups are similar. Maybe 10% succeed. And it’s often the top 10% of founders (and teams) that do.

Anecdotally, all of the most impressive entrepreneurs I know (who were also top decile in academics and work ethic) have succeeded. More or less everyone else failed, perhaps predictably.

Further, in business, like in Catan, they are many winning strategies. The best strategy for you depends on i) what you're top 10% at executing and ii) how the board is set.

The uncomfortable takeaway: avoid games you are unlikely to win. Be honest about what you’re top-tier at, and choose a game where that actually matters.

Two more practical angles below.

A) Know What Success Requires: My Experience Biking Across the Country

When I biked across the country, I did napkin math on what success demanded: km/day, watts/hr, calories consumed, changes in wind resistance and power requirements due to elevation and headwinds (I went Toronto to Vancouver, into the wind), etc.

I did the math on what was needed. Then I trained until my fitness could meet or exceed that.

Companies are multivariate (i.e. many things matter), but the principle holds. Identify the 5-20 variables that actually determine your outcome (ROI, distribution, conversion, retention, product milestones, iteration velocity, hiring, etc.), measure them, then make sure you meet or exceed what's needed.

Easy in theory, hard in practice. But a helpful exercise nevertheless.

B) Persistence Increases Odds of Success

“Never give up” is not a strategy. But persistence plus learning is powerful. Survival buys you attempts. Attempts buy you luck. Luck buys you outcomes.

12. The Central Limit Theorem of Advice

Repeated advice is good advice.

Everyone is searching for the secret insight they’re missing. In practice, you’ve probably already heard the advice you need - multiple times.

Pay attention to what you hear most often. That’s the signal.

Consider the above an n=1 sample from an infinite number of viewpoints on principles for your career / business.

Take what’s helpful. Ignore the rest.

Remember: these thoughts are worth what you paid for them ;)