Field notes from the firm.
Lessons taken from shipping software, advising founders, and sitting through more pitch rooms than we'd care to count. Published when there is something worth saying — not on a schedule.
Notes from twenty Start-Up Visa files.
After writing more than twenty business plans for the Canada Start-Up Visa program, a small list of patterns shows up file after file. None of them are about polish.
- Category
- Strategy
- Published
- May 18, 2026
- Length
- 10 min read
How a fourteen-day due-diligence report gets built.
Twenty-one independent diligence reports later, the process is the same one we wrote down after the first three. Here is what it looks like in practice, day by day.
The most common bottleneck across twenty-six founders.
It is not the product. It is not the market. It is not the funding. After two years of advisory work, the bottleneck is something quieter — and it is the same thing almost every time.
What a PhD in Business actually buys you in the founder's chair.
Most things the academy taught me turned out to be either wrong or useless once I was the operator. A few — the quiet, unfashionable ones — turned out to be the most useful tools I own.
4 notes on record · updated when there is something worth saying