Blog
Notes on technical leadership, hiring, and shipping fast for funded startups.
- 19 Aug 2026
The Most Expensive Thing Micromanagement Kills
Micromanagement's most expensive cost isn't morale, it's innovation. The one source of new ideas that puts you ahead of the market is the first thing control kills. Here is why it happens, and how to stay in control without strangling it.
- 12 Aug 2026
The Real Cost of Hiring Engineers Offshore
Hiring three engineers offshore for the price of one in London looks like an easy win. The rate is real, but the saving usually isn't. Here are the costs the hourly-rate maths leaves out, and why offshoring works with the right technical judgement and quietly bleeds money without it
- 5 Aug 2026
Technical Direction After a Raise on a Vibecoded MVP
You raised on an MVP you built with AI tools, and now you have to make real technical decisions without a technical background. Here is the order I would work through them: goals, metrics, audit, hiring, process. Do them in that order and most of the hard calls get easier.
- 29 Jul 2026
Why Hiring More Engineers Can Slow Your Startup Down
Founders scale their engineering team expecting to move faster and end up slower. The usual cause is not the new hires. It is that every decision still routes through the founder, who has quietly become the bottleneck. Here is how to spot it and fix it before you hire.
- 24 Jul 2026
Why the Best Distributed Teams Aren't Actually Distributed
Spreading one engineering team across five timezones is not distributed working, it is friction with extra steps. The shape that actually works is small teams concentrated in one place, with the organisation global rather than the team.
- 22 Jul 2026
Why Your Team's AI Push Stalled, and What's Actually Blocking It
Your team said yes to AI and quietly didn't adopt it. The blocker usually isn't knowledge or tooling. It's fear, and more training makes it worse. Here's what actually moves adoption
- 17 Jul 2026
Why Knowing How Your Product Is Used Beats Shipping the Next Feature
Most features a team ships get ignored, and AI is widening that gap. Here's why measuring how your product is actually used matters more than building more of it.
- 10 Jul 2026
Why You Should Ask Engineers Business Questions When Hiring
Most technical interviews focus entirely on code. Here's why the best startup engineers should be able to talk about your business, and the questions that reveal it.