If I founded a software company tomorrow, these are the principles I would encode into its DNA before writing a single line of code.
Before founding anything, the prerequisite is knowing why it should exist: establish the mission. Everything below is downstream of that one answer.
Culture & values
- Default to open — share work early and often; radical transparency in decisions; learn in public, documenting failures and learnings openly.
- Strong opinions, loosely held — advocate fiercely, but pivot quickly with new data.
- Ship daily — bias toward action and visible progress over perfect planning.
Decision-making
- Type 1 vs. Type 2 decisions — reversible decisions made quickly by individuals; irreversible ones with group input (Jeff Bezos’s “one-way” vs. “two-way” doors).
- Disagree and commit — one decision made, full alignment regardless of initial positions.
- Data-informed, not data-driven — metrics as input, but trust intuition for innovation.
Cultural principles
- No brilliant jerks — competence never excuses poor collaboration.
- Work-life integration, not balance — flexible boundaries, results over hours.
- Celebration of craft — pride in elegant solutions and beautiful code.
- “Yes, and…” culture — build on ideas rather than shooting them down.
Team & hiring
- Builder-first mentality — every hire should be able to ship something independently within the first week.
- Cultural add, not cultural fit — founding hires should add net-positive to the culture, not mirror it. (Reference.)
Core competencies
Assessed in interviews and contract-to-hire projects:
- AI utilization is expected — leverage AI into the value you produce.
- Excellent writing — I don’t believe someone can be a good thinker and a bad writer.
- Fluent English, especially written — a proxy that proves you are an intrinsic learner.
- Autonomy and high agency — they spot the problem before I do, then solve it without being asked.
Team composition
- Small pods (2–3 people) with full ownership of specific products or features.
- No middle management — flat hierarchy, direct communication.
- Rotating leadership — different people lead different initiatives by expertise.
- Two-pizza teams — six to eight people is the sweet spot.
Growth
- Slow hiring — the first ten hires over 12–18 months, each one raising the bar.
- Contract-to-hire — test compatibility through project work first; interviews are capricious, projects are the best litmus test. (Case study: Kepano became Obsidian’s CEO through contractor work.) The bar: I have to be amazed by the output to consider hiring.
Performance evaluation
- Glory list — each member keeps their own list of wins, revised together in 1-1s, as the primary input for evaluation. No predefined OKRs or KPIs: plans and directions pivot all the time, rendering those frameworks volatile and inefficient.
Tools & communication
- Notion as the company knowledge base; Slack as the main channel — no internal email.
- Treat mentions as a mail inbox: process them on a cadence, address each one. Treat non-mentions as a broadcast bulletin board — read them as news.
- If a message should be seen by someone, mention their name. If it must be seen, write
ackp(“acknowledge please”). - Replying when you see a should/must message is decent etiquette — especially when an action hangs on it.
- If synchronous communication or immediate action is required, tap a shoulder or call. Synchronize sparingly.
(A blueprint I keep sketching and re-sketching alongside a friend’s thinking.)