According to Ben Horowitz, being a CEO is about courage. The loneliness of decision making requires even more courage to the CEO. Despite not having done it myself, I’ve had the privilege of supporting my partner in the task. Most of the times it’s been more about strengthening a decision…

Most managers talk about culture, very few manage it. Virtually all of these quotes are taken out of Ben Horowitz’ “What you do is who you are”, which is a great source of inspiration for managing and thinking about corporate culture, so this post will seem more like a book…

No manager is born trained to manage people well; all managers talk about it, and some make it sound as if this was an innate skill. Don’t believe the hype. Managing people (and organisations) is only learned through practice. Yes, high IQ is valuable, yes high EQ is critical and…

A venture backed company with no growth is dead. The business of venture capital is growth, so assuming 50% of your growth is determined by your market (see starting up quotes and product quotes) and assuming you can build an ok product to get started, the rest of the adventure…

The product manager is said to be a mini CEO in tech startups. When the company is under 20 people, one of the founders should be the product manager. I say its the mini-all-of-this-series-of-posts in the company. The frameworks on how to make decisions are very similar, the difference comes…

Hiring should account for 50% of a founders’ time. The impact of a great hire is always underrated. The impact of a poor hire is usually invisible. The impact of a bad hire is generally easy to detect, but many times emotionally challenging to attend. …

Taking the words of the architect Louis Khan, I marvel at beginnings. It’s a time of excitement, fast paced learning, intellectual challenge and very long hours. I’ve never worked more hours than in the first couple of years of a company. Most of the company shaping decisions are made in…

2020 has been a year of high speed growth and process iteration at Elma. This has forced us to build great solutions at an incredible speed. In this post I share some product specific tips and learnings we have seen. We have discovered that health insurance companies are very operations…

While fundraising, we get a question every once in a while which we always think has an obvious answer. Yet, even after plenty of examples of tech startups beating their incumbent counterparts at the digitalisation game, the same question keeps coming up. What stops an incumbent (or a player in…