A scale-up is a company between two operating modes. The transition between them is where most growing companies break, and three of its properties make it unusually hard.
30 March 2026 · 5 min readWhen the same operational problem keeps returning in different forms, the cause is rarely where the founder is looking. Not because they're missing it, but because they're inside the structure that produces it.
29 April 2026 · 7 min readFounder distress in scale-ups rarely shows up as a single dramatic collapse. It shows up as slow degradation across eight axes, each making the others worse.
New notes land roughly every three to six weeks. The lightest way to be told when one drops:
