Operations
The handful of contracts every founder should understand
The core contracts founders should understand before signing: what governs ownership, IP, and obligations, and why reading them yourself matters even with a lawyer.
Category
Operations
Hiring, processes, and the daily work of running a team. The eighty percent of founder work that nobody puts on a slide.
16 articles
Articles in Operations
Operations
Letting someone go without breaking the team
How founders let someone go without damaging the team: why waiting too long costs more, handling the exit with dignity, and what the people who stay learn from how you do it.
Operations
The founder's weekly review
Why founders need a weekly review: how one honest hour of reflection catches drift early, what to look at, and building the habit that keeps a company pointed the right way.
Operations
The job description that gets your first hire right
How founders write a first-hire job description that works: defining the real role, being honest about stage and scope, and screening for the person a small team actually needs.
Operations
The year after launch: owning, maintaining, and changing custom software
What non-technical founders should settle before launch: code and data ownership, a real handover, and maintenance terms that keep custom software an asset for years.
Operations
Performance reviews for small teams: the minimum viable version
Most small teams copy enterprise review systems that are already broken. The fix is a weekly check-in and a quarterly forward-looking conversation.
Operations
The end-of-week ritual: patterns from operator newsletters
Why operator newsletters from Jason Fried to Lenny Rachitsky independently converged on the same Friday review ritual, and how to make it work for your team.
Operations
Project management tools: what teams settle on after the churn
Engineering converges on Linear, cross-functional work lands in Notion, and operations-heavy teams keep ClickUp, Monday, or Asana. The split is cultural, not technical.
Operations
Multi-currency payroll across MENA
Why MENA payroll is structurally harder than US or EU payroll, and the three-rail stack operators converged on to solve it.
Operations
The 30-day onboarding plan: patterns from public playbooks
Public onboarding playbooks converge on a four-week structure: context, then a small ship, then real work, then review. Here is the pattern and how it scales down.
Operations
Documentation people actually read
Most internal documentation fails because it is written for a future onboarder who reads top to bottom, not for the busy colleague using search.
Operations
Outsourcing vs in-house: the math at scale
Why the outsource-vs-in-house decision is a coordination question, not a cost question, and how to find the real inflection point.