👋 Howdy to the 1,203 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 551,719-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🤝🏻 Trust, Transparency & 400 Million Reviews. An interview with Adrian Blair, CEO at Trustpilot.
🛹 The Wikipedia Paradox: Fully Editable, Fully Trusted. Seven rules, one encyclopedia, and a lesson every founder can steal.
🥅 Ted Lasso: The Lasso Way. A story of empathetic leadership from the Manager of AFC Richmond.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I had an interesting week last week with a couple of speaking engagements; something I’m pushing myself to do more of. I dropped in Tuesday to Stone & Chalk, Melbourne’s premier co-working space for tech, for a quick fireside chat. I also ran a session on people-first equity plans at the Startup People Summit, run by a friend of the newsletter, Matt McFarlane.

It’s really weird. I get anxious speaking with 1-2 people at a co-working space, but feel no pressure whatsoever speaking in front of a crowd. Anyway, it was a good step forward. I’d like to keep putting myself out there, as it’s a great one for winning friends and allies, which—aside from being generally just a positive thing—helps drive my companies forward.

BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

The Four Types Of Managers & How To Manage Them

Managing people is not for everyone. And managing managers is certainly not for the faint of heart. How your managers behave, how they lead, and whether they hit their goals reverberate through the entire company. Put simply, if your managers suck, your company probably does too.

And in 2026, they matter more than ever. Amazon, Google and Meta have spent the last two years quietly torching layers of middle management. Andy Jassy told his people to flatten the org. Sundar cut a chunk of manager roles outright.

Which means the managers you have left are carrying a lot more weight. A great one is worth their weight in Nvidia stock. A bad one can take a whole department down with them, and you have fewer people around to notice before it happens.

So today we are going to take a deep dive into the manager. We will look at everyone from Elon Musk to everyone's favorite in Ted Lasso, figure out which archetype they fit into, and work out how, or in some cases if, we can help them. Let's dive in.

Welch’s Performance x Values Matrix

The infamous Jack Welch was one of the most successful CEOs in history. The first true rockstar leader. It's not surprising, as he was able to raise GE's market cap from $14 billion to $410 billion dollars by the time he left.

He ran GE for 20 years. Fortune named him Manager of the Century. CEOs copied his haircut, his acquisitions, and his habit of firing the bottom 10% of the company every year. They called him Neutron Jack, because after he walked through a building, the building was still standing, but the people were gone.

Philosophy aside, the man knew how to assess a manager, and we are going to be using one of his tools today: the Performance x Values Matrix. Welch first laid it out in a letter to GE shareholders in the early 90s. He split his managers into four types based on two questions: do they deliver on their commitments, and do they share our values? The interesting part was what he did with each. The ones who hit the numbers but trampled the culture were, in his words, the hardest call of all.

It’s a very simple framework. Managers are marked as either a yes or a no on two elements: do they hit their goals, and do they add to the culture? The four possible combinations span the breadth of managerial excellence, or lack thereof. Let’s look at each one individually and figure out what to do with each of them.

The Star Manager

The Star Manager excels in both performance and culture. They crush their goals while building a positive, engaging, and supportive work environment for their teams. These managers are priceless. You'll know one when you see one. Their team's Slack channel is the loudest in the company. Their attrition is basically zero. People from other departments keep asking to transfer in. And the numbers go brrrr.

Market cap around $300 billion, a culture famous for infighting, and a stack-ranking system that pitted employees against each other (a Welch import, funnily enough). Nadella's fix was almost embarrassingly simple: swap ‘know-it-alls’ for ‘learn-it-alls.’ A decade later, Microsoft is worth north of $3 trillion. Empathy, it turns out, compounds.

Take a look at the traits list above. Strong work ethic and honesty top the chart, sure. But sense of humor is third. Kindness is in there. ‘Cares about me personally’ is in there. Stars aren't just good at the job. People like being around them.

Benefits of a Star Manager

If you want high employee morale, low turnover, and strong business results, recruit, develop, and nurture your Star Managers. They create a beautiful work environment where employees feel valued and motivated. They also make your life easier, because they're the one part of the org chart you don't have to think about at 2am.

How to work with a Star Manager

The mistake most founders make with a Star is to leave them alone. They're fine, right? They're crushing it. Wrong. Neglect is how you lose them.

Once you know you have one of these managers on your hands, you need to keep them happy. Give them raises before they ask, offer extra equity, and create buy-in however you can. Hell, give them a kidney if they ask. You will kick yourself if you lose a true star.

The Nice Manager

This next manager is tough. Nice Managers are those who create a positive culture but struggle to hit business targets. You know the type; everybody loves them, but they add very little strategic value. Their teams may be happy and loyal. But they lack results.

And worst of all. Getting rid of them means the culture will take a hit. Having a Nice Manager on your team can counterintuitively be a real ball-ache.

Challenges of a Nice Manager

The patron saint of Nice Managers is, of course, Ted Lasso. Yes, I know, I wrote a whole piece on his leadership genius. Stay with me. Beloved by the players. Baked biscuits for the boss every morning. Turned a dressing room full of egos into a family. And at the end of season one, AFC Richmond got relegated.

That's the Nice Manager in a nutshell. The vibes are immaculate. The scoreboard is not. The good news is that Ted didn't stay there, and the rest of this section is about how you get your own Ted to season three.

Interestingly, Welch had a soft spot for this type. In his framework, the manager who shares the values but misses the numbers gets a second chance, maybe a third. He figured you can teach someone to hit a target a lot more easily than you can teach them to give a shit about people.

How to work with a Nice Manager

Nice Managers usually don't have a motivation problem. They have a hard-conversation problem. They can't tell Dave his work is bad, so Dave's work stays bad, so the team misses the number. Fix that and half the battle is done.

This type of manager will challenge you as a leader, especially if you are high on empathy. You will forever see the bright side. 'If only they can figure it out,' you'll tell yourself. And maybe they will. With the right amount of support, you can move this person from a Nice Manager to a Star, but not always.

PARTNERS 💫

The Taskmaster

Many pundits would say the most famous example of this management style is Elon Musk. And after reading Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, I find it hard to disagree.

The hardcore email went out at midnight. Click yes by 5pm tomorrow or take three months' severance. Hundreds of engineers looked at the button, looked at their families, and quietly took the severance. Twitter kept the lights on: barely. Tech startups with a growth-at-all-costs mentality have managers who fit this profile. They deliver results but create a stressful work environment. In a simpler framing: a shit place to work.

Yes, Elon is an example of someone who has conquered the business world with this management style. But for every Elon, there are a thousand managers working on less innovative, world-changing products that simply lose the team and tank their company by operating this way.

Welch, for what it's worth, called this the hardest call of all. The manager who delivers the numbers but doesn't share the values. His conclusion, after years of looking the other way, was that GE couldn't afford to keep them. Every manager you tolerate tells the rest of the company that the values are optional.

Impact of a Taskmaster

Having a demanding manager can lead to high turnover, employee burnout, and potential long-term brand damage. That said, if you can align them with the company's values, they become an asset. They can move straight from a problem to the ultimate solution for you and your team.

The tricky part is that Taskmasters are often your best individual performers. They got promoted because they shipped. Nobody checked whether anyone wanted to work for them.

How to work with a Taskmaster

The Taskmaster's problem is almost never competence. It's that they don't see the wreckage because they're already three miles down the road. Your job is to make the wreckage visible and make it cost them something.

Remember, as a leader, fostering a positive culture and retaining top talent is your job. By actively managing and developing all leaders, including demanding ones, you make sure the entire organization is aligned and set up for success.

1761, London Stock Exchange

There was a term that rose to prominence in the 18th century at the London Stock Exchange to describe a stockbroker who defaulted on his debts. First heard in writing in 1761, it bemoaned someone who had fallen behind: the laggard. Someone who was failing; a person of ill repute.

Defaulters were named on a board at the Exchange and barred from the floor. Which is roughly what we're about to recommend, minus the board.

_{*The following image actually has nothing to do with the London Stock Exchange. Looks like it does, though, right?}

The term was 'The Lame Duck'. In the literal sense, the term refers to a duck which is unable to keep up with its flock, making it a target for predators. This will be the unfortunate moniker of our final manager archetype.

The Lame Duck

When working with a Lame Duck, there will have been a time when you thought they were going to work out. A hot recruit you have brought in from outside, with all the potential in the world. But then it all started to move in the wrong direction.

The classic version goes like this. You hire a manager from a company with a logo everyone recognizes. Great CV; great references; great at running a 40-person team with a budget, a recruiter, and a PMO. You have 30 people and a Notion board. Six months in, they've hired two people who report to nobody; the team is confused, and the number hasn't moved.

And then one day you wake up, and you realize: 'Holy shit, Bob is a Lame Duck.' If and when that day comes, you know what has to be done. Speak with HR, follow the processes, but for God's sake, get that person out of your organization as fast as possible.

The reason founders don't is sunk cost. You spent four months recruiting Bob, told the board about Bob, and told the team Bob would change everything. Firing Bob means admitting you were wrong about Bob. Do it anyway.

Consequences of a Lame Duck

The presence of this manager type can lead to low employee engagement, high turnover, declining overall business health, not to mention a lowering of the organization's standards as a whole.

That last one is the killer. Every week a Lame Duck stays in their seat, your best people are watching and quietly recalculating what the bar actually is around here.

How to work with a Lame Duck

Be honest with yourself about the odds first. The Nice Manager has a fixable problem. The Taskmaster has a fixable problem. The Lame Duck has two problems and usually no idea they have either. You owe them a real shot. You don't owe them a long one.

Welch, for the record, called this one the easy call. Misses the numbers, doesn't live the values, out. Nobody at GE lost sleep over the Type IIs.

Our final management archetype is, in many ways, the easiest to manage. If you have a Lame Duck on your hands, and you've done what you can but you cannot help them, there is only one thing left to do. It's time to send them waddling off into the sunset.

Good vs bad managers: the data

As we move towards the end of today's piece, I would be silly to not add some data to the conversation. The Predictive Index conducted a 2018 people management study in which 5,103 employees took part. It's getting on a bit now, but nothing I've seen since has contradicted it. First and foremost, great bosses give just the right amount of feedback.

Too little and people feel invisible. Too much and they feel micromanaged. The sweet spot is a 9 out of 10 rating. Everything else drops off a cliff.

It also showed that people’s energy towards their job was hugely affected/effected (I can never tell) by how they viewed their manager. It was also really important that their managers were not only respected, but liked.

Another key finding is that bad managers are typically self-centered and also lack any self-awareness. Which tracks. Nobody in the history of management has ever described themselves as a Lame Duck.

Gallup has been banging this drum for a decade. Their number is that managers account for about 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not the CEO. Not the perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. The person you report to. And in their latest global report, manager engagement itself dropped, which is a worrying thing to read if you've just cut a third of your management layer.

But other studies have shown that although bad management can have a real impact on retention, leadership matters more. Take a look at these stats from Culture Amp.

So it's clear: managers matter, but leadership matters even more. A great manager under a poor leadership team only keeps 38% of their people. A poor manager under great leaders keeps 60%. Read that again. Your managers can't out-manage a bad executive team, and that team is you.

Interestingly, the most important thing that trumped all was development opportunities. Culture Amp's research shows that employees without access to consistent development opportunities are twice as likely to leave within a year.

How you can apply this

Summary

Managing people is hard. Whether it's your new VP of engineering, a decade-long rusted-on CFO, or the reluctant but true Heir to the Kingdom of Gondor, you need experience stewarding people through different stages of their careers. Some leaders might start out looking like deadbeats, but go on to do great things. Others will take time to understand and fit your culture. And then there are those whom you love but simply refuse to hit their goals.

And in a world where everyone is flattening the org chart, the managers left standing carry more weight than ever. Fewer of them, more riding on each one. Which means the matrix isn't a nice-to-have anymore. Your job is to enable people and to help them get the best out of themselves. For your sake, the company's sake, and most importantly, their sake.

Extra reading

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting beehiiv—an all-in-one email newsletter and publishing platform built specifically for creators and media brands to write, grow, and monetize their content.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

👋 Howdy to the 1,021 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 550,516-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🛹 The Wikipedia Paradox: Fully Editable, Fully Trusted. Seven rules, one encyclopedia, and a lesson every founder can steal.
🥅 Ted Lasso: The Lasso Way. A story of empathetic leadership from the Manager of AFC Richmond.
💵 Take The Cap Off Your Salary Bands. An interview with Matt McFarlane, Founder & Director at FNDN.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Something I’ll never understand is the bootlicking toadyism with which the United States treats Putin (and Kim Jong Un). You want to show some level of respect to your counterpart when engaging in diplomacy, but there’s no prize for being the most sycophantic person in the room.

All while the same administration wages economic war against Canada. It’s as if up is down, black is white, and night is day. It’ll be interesting to see what happens come 2028. I guess until then I’ll just have to pinch my nose and get on with it. Onwards!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Adrian Blair, CEO at Trustpilot

Adrian Blair is the CEO of Trustpilot, the world's largest open customer feedback platform, which now holds over 400 million reviews and around 60 million monthly active users. Trustpilot is listed on the London Stock Exchange and posted $261.1M in revenue in 2025. He took the job in September 2023, succeeding founder Peter Holten Mühlmann, and arrived with a career built almost entirely on scaling other people's marketplaces. He joined Google in 2004 out of Harvard Business School, where he picked up the OKR habit he still runs at Trustpilot today. Then came seven years as Global COO of Just Eat, from 2011 to 2018, during which he helped take the company from a loss-making startup to a FTSE 100 business generating over £170M in EBITDA. From 2019 to 2022, he was CEO of Dext, a SaaS accounting automation platform, where the company tripled its worldwide user base.

Trustpilot spent nearly two decades building a moat around a single asset: the belief that its reviews are real. Then the internet filled up with content that nobody could trace back to a human, and every feedback platform on earth inherited a credibility problem it hadn't had in 2019. Adrian bets that this makes Trustpilot's archive more valuable, because genuine human experience is now the scarce thing. The numbers suggest he's onto something. In January, Trustpilot was ranked the fifth-most-cited domain on ChatGPT, and the company is leaning into it hard. What makes him worth reading is that he's also the rare public-company CEO who will tell you he doesn't want your AI-written memo because he can't tell whose judgment he's reading. The man running the world's largest trust infrastructure is betting the company on AI, while quietly refusing to let it make the call that matters.

What does online trust mean in 2026 for Trustpilot?

Trust has always been important in the world and in business. For as long as there have been human beings, there has been trust. And, when you think about it, trust is a very personal thing. It is something we as individuals decide for ourselves. No one can tell Bill who Bill should trust. Only Bill can decide that. You make that decision with your head and with your heart. It is not pure calculation. Two plus two equals four, and you don't need trust to know that. But who Bill chooses to trust is a heart thing as well as a head thing. Part calculation, part emotion.

So how do people build trust? There are three things. First, you trust businesses that are transparent about problems. If something didn't go well, tell me about it. Don't try to cover it up; don't try to hide it. The second is credibility. Businesses have to actually deliver on their promises. Otherwise, why should you trust them? And the third is personal respect. They need to treat you as an individual rather than as a member of a group. They need to actually care about Bill, not just see you as a particular demographic or whatever. Those ways of building trust are timeless. The question now is how AI changes them. How does the way businesses build trust with people change in the age of AI?

Our role in that is really important. Trustpilot is the world's largest open customer feedback platform, which means you can share feedback about any business you have genuinely experienced. You don't need to be invited. The business doesn't have to give you permission. In fact, if the business isn't on Trustpilot at all, you can create it yourself and go and leave them feedback. It is the ultimate transparent feedback platform, and that is an extremely powerful thing if a business is serious about building trust with people. So for us, trust in the age of AI is about using new technology to help businesses build trust with their customers and to understand that trust more deeply and more profoundly than ever before.

Do you think it's more difficult to build trust today?

I think in general it is more difficult. There is so much content out there in the world, and you don't really know what sits behind it. You don't know if it was written by AI. You don't know if there is a real human experience there. Some social media platforms are pretty ungoverned spaces too, where people get lots of followers and message whatever they want to.

All of that makes what we are doing at Trustpilot a very important space, because we are not an ungoverned social media platform. We have very strict rules about what is and is not acceptable, from businesses and from consumers, and we have a team whose job it is to govern those rules. That is what makes the platform useful for consumers. If someone claims to have a 4.9 rating on Trustpilot, you can come to Trustpilot and check whether that is actually true. We are the place where people submit the feedback, so we have the canonical source of all that information. You can find the truth through that, and then make your own decision about who you want to trust.

But AI is making what we do more powerful, because it lets us get that content out across new surfaces. We have always shown up hugely on Google search results. You see a lot of Trustpilot reviews, and we get about 5 billion impressions on Google every month. Now our content is appearing in ChatGPT, in Claude, in Perplexity, and the others. These are new surfaces where the feedback comes to life and gets projected. And we love that, because we want the feedback on Trustpilot to have as much influence as possible out there in the world.

How much weight does Trustpilot hold in AI search results?

There are various measures around. In January this year, we were ranked the number-five domain globally for ChatGPT citations. So we are right up there with the likes of Wikipedia and Reddit, who I think are at the top. We are getting cited an incredible amount. The reason for that is twofold. The first is that what we have is incredibly useful and unique. We have over 400 million reviews on Trustpilot, with people recording their experiences with businesses, and that content doesn't exist anywhere else. So if you are an LLM and you want to give the user the most useful answer to their query, you must take advantage of it.

The second is that we are really leaning into it. We want this to happen. We want to be the best place for you to leave feedback as a consumer, and if you know your feedback will be heard and read in all kinds of places, that's all the more reason to leave it on Trustpilot. So we have leaned into these platforms and are keen to see our content adopted more.

What does your day-to-day look like as CEO?

I have always been very structured about how I use time. I am a former COO. I was Chief Operating Officer at Just Eat, the food delivery platform, for seven years, and ever since I started that job, I have had to maintain a very structured week.

Generally, I do a lot of internal meetings on Mondays and Tuesdays. I have one-to-ones with my direct reports and a weekly executive team meeting for a couple of hours. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I travel. We are a very global business. We are headquartered in Copenhagen, with large teams in London and New York, as well as in Denver, Amsterdam, Milan, Hamburg, Edinburgh, and Melbourne. We are distributed across a lot of places, so on those two days I will physically be out there with one of those teams. Then on Fridays I try to do more external stuff. It is always important to me to talk directly to customers, and I try to have at least one customer call every week to learn more about them and how they use Trustpilot. But as CEO of a public company, there is always a lot of external stuff you need to do as well.

The really critical thing for anyone in one of these senior positions is that you stay in touch with the front line. For me, that starts with the customer. It is actually our first value at Trustpilot. So it matters that I am talking to our customers directly. But it is also the frontline employees, whether that is the engineers writing the code, the marketing people creating the creative, or the salespeople and customer success managers having those customer interactions. I’m always very keen to be out there with them, knowing those people and knowing the challenges they face every day. Because as a senior person, the more layers you end up with between yourself and those frontline folks, the greater the risk that you just lose touch and exist in a bubble.

What goal-setting frameworks do you use?

I joined Google in 2004, and Google was an early adopter of OKRs. These days, more than 20 years later, I think it’s very, very common in tech. But ever since then, it has just been part of my daily bread at work. At every company I have been in, we either had OKRs when I joined, or the first thing I did was implement them. So that is basically what we do at Trustpilot. We work on a quarterly cadence, and our financial year is the calendar year, so it’s very easy to get your head around the planning cycle.

PARTNERS 💫

How do the OKRs move from top-down and bottom-up?

I think it is very important to have unifying OKRs across the organization because most things that really matter can't be accomplished by a single function on its own. We have a series of overarching goals, and we call them ‘trust musts’, because it rhymes and we are called Trustpilot. We have a few of them for the year, and everyone in the business knows what they are.

We keep them consistent for the whole calendar year because, if they are sufficiently big and meaty, you can't accomplish everything in a quarter, and that consistency helps everyone really get behind them. So we have company-wide goals, which are these trust musts, and then of course you also have to have functional objectives, because there will be a lot of things that are very important but don't ladder up directly into one of those overall company goals.

The difficult thing is to not end up with way too much. The default state as a company grows is that you just add more and more and more complexity and never take anything away, and then you end up with people who are confused and tired. It is like I said about the front line. The default is that you lose touch unless you try extremely hard not to. And the default is that you end up with way too many OKRs unless you are actually working really hard to stop it.

Do you have any cultural rules you hold dear?

I’ll tell you one of the most important ones—and I often draw this framework on a whiteboard for people when they first join the company. I always have an inverted triangle in mind. At the very top, outside the triangle and above the whole thing, you have the customer. That is the most important person. Below that, running across the top of the triangle, you have the front line of the organization. And right at the bottom, you have the CEO, with various layers of management in between.

I think that is a helpful way to think about any company. First of all, it gives you an appropriate sense of humility as a leader that ultimately you are there to serve. Your only means of serving the customer is to serve the front line, because you are not doing things for the customer yourself. The front line is. So that’s a pretty fundamental place to start. If leaders have some other idea, my job is to serve my boss, which is typically the human instinct, then you end up with a completely inverted sense of what you are actually there to do.

Now, if you have worked in tech for a long time, you have an acute sense of pace and urgency. The world changes incredibly fast. Companies that don't get the program get killed very quickly. You have to have a rapid heartbeat. I always think in terms of the heartbeat of a mouse, not the heartbeat of an elephant. You need quick cycle times. I love the Jeff Bezos thing of type one and type two decisions. Some of those can't be reversed, so you have to be incredibly careful. The vast majority of decisions are reversible, though. You don't have to sweat about getting tons and tons more data before you decide. You can often just move, and that bias toward action speeds up cycle times. So pace and urgency matter a lot.

Maybe a final one for me is that when you work in tech, the most important thing is actually the product itself. You can have the best sales organization in the world, but if the product is not as good as someone else's, you are going to get killed. You have to be really clear about what your product value is, what you are doing for customers, and whether you are actually the best at it. That is where it all starts.

How are you using AI operationally at Trustpilot?

We are using it all over the place. Obviously, we are coding with it—I think everyone is doing that now. We use Claude Code in engineering, and the finance team is all using it as well. We have got a lot of use cases in customer experience now too, but we are really encouraging the whole organization to innovate in their own area. And as I mentioned, with that frontline focus, it is often the folks who are closest to the front line who come up with the best ideas.

Any use case that really stood out?

Within customer care, being able to take the customer to something helpful, to the right bit of content, much more quickly than was possible in the past. And within finance, some of the analysis we can now do at a far more rapid pace than was ever possible before. I think that kind of thing is interesting.

The one I don't appreciate is content where people have basically had a paper written by AI. I think we have all got to be a bit careful with that, because, of course, it will sound terribly clever and intelligent, but ultimately I want to know what the actual judgment of the person who wrote it is. And I do wonder sometimes, when I get stuff, whether this is your judgment or is this Claude's.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

The ability to compartmentalize is very important. Certainly, if you are the CEO of a company, at any given point there are all kinds of things on your plate that, if you wanted to, you could lie awake stressing about. You have to have the discipline to switch off. To be fully engaged when you need to be engaged, but also, in my case, to be fully with the kids or fully with my wife when I am not at work. Just as I am not sitting in a board of directors meeting texting my wife, I shouldn't be sitting with my wife texting the board of directors.

You also have to stay in shape. I would find it very hard to do this job if I didn't get enough exercise, sleep reasonably well, and all that kind of thing. It is a cliché, but it really is a marathon, not a sprint. You want to be doing these jobs for many, many years, not show up for a couple of years with a lot of energy and then burn out. You have to work sustainably.

But it starts with having a sense of what you are trying to achieve and really believing in it. I think that is the best motivator of all, because it is the one that keeps you going when times are hard. A lot of other motivators might fizzle out, but if you have really got that belief in your company's mission, that will carry you through thick and thin over the years.

Extra reading

And that’s it! You can follow Adrian on LinkedIn or check out Trustpilot on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method—an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping growing startups.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

👋 Howdy to the 1,984 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 547,495-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🥅 Ted Lasso: The Lasso Way. A story of empathetic leadership from the Manager of AFC Richmond.
💵 Take The Cap Off Your Salary Bands. An interview with Matt McFarlane, Founder & Director at FNDN.
🥣 Granola: Healthy Breakfast & Killer AI Notepad. The AI notepad that ate a category.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

This email was supposed to go out last night. Truth is, I fell asleep—literally so exhausted I couldn’t move—and actually forgot about my newsletter entirely. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been there. It’s not great, and kinda embarrassing.

_{*I’m aware this video has nothing to do with the paragraph above, but I still wanted to share it because I found it sooooo funny.}

It’s a lot running this newsletter as its own startup (we have a team of four now) along with my startup baby Athyna. I’m also trying to train like a semi-professional athlete at 40. I guess every now and then I’m going to fall in an absolute heap. So, apologies for the late send; trust that I have given myself a firm facepalm. Here’s hoping you enjoy this one!

GUEST POST 💄

The Wikipedia Paradox: Fully Editable, Fully Trusted

Today, trust is not so easily earned. Especially in tech. Facebook, Polymarket, Flock Cameras, Palantir. The public has gone from ‘these guys are building the future’ to ‘these guys are building a surveillance state with a loyalty program’ in about a decade.

Even Google quietly retired ‘Don't be evil’ back in 2015, which is a hell of a thing to have to retire. And yet one tech brand has somehow escaped the whole mess. The seventh most visited website on earth. More trusted than the BBC, most governments, and definitely your uncle's Facebook feed. Yes, we are talking about Wikipedia.

Yet, about once a year, Jimmy Wales's face pops up at the top of Wikipedia asking for three dollars. A sad yellow banner, a headshot from a wedding in 2009, and copy that reads like a hostage note. Every year I close it and feel bad for about a week. Today, my buddy Isaac Peiris is going to break down why Wikipedia does this, what it costs, and what you can take from it. Over to you, Isaac.

How Wikipedia builds trust

Hey, Isaac here! I write Brand Chemistry, a weekly newsletter about how brands earn an audience and turn it into growth. Which means I have been talking about trust for a while now, and Wikipedia always stands out as a brand that, on paper, shouldn’t be trusted at all. But somehow it’s one of the most trusted names in the world.

On 26 May 2005, someone typed a sentence into Wikipedia claiming that John Seigenthaler, a newspaper editor who had once been Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant, was suspected of involvement in both Kennedy assassinations. A stranger invented it as a joke. It sat on the page for 132 days. Seigenthaler wrote a column in USA Today asking how a website like that was allowed to exist. It was the worst possible advertisement for the idea that a public encyclopedia anyone could edit was ever going to work.

Twenty-one years later, anyone on earth can still edit any page on Wikipedia, anonymously, without an account. Wikipedia is also the single most-cited domain in ChatGPT's answers, at 13.15% of all citations across the roughly 600,000 citation events Similarweb tracked in early 2026, ahead of Reddit and ahead of every publisher on earth. Those two facts should not survive in the same paragraph. Wikipedia's answer to being humiliated in public was to leave the doors open and make every future humiliation permanent, timestamped, and searchable by anyone who wants to check.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, spent last year writing down why that works. His book, The Seven Rules of Trust, arrived in October. I went in expecting a list and came out with something more useful: an explanation of why trust behaves differently from every other asset a founder tries to build.

Someone else holds the verdict

Rachel Botsman, Trust Fellow at Oxford's Saïd Business School, defines trust as a confident relationship with the unknown. Her sharpest point is that if you already knew how something would turn out, you wouldn't need trust at all. Trust exists only where risk does. It is what lets someone act before they have proof. Wales arrives at the same place from the other direction.

Put those together and trust is a risk that someone else decides to take on you. You can be trustworthy on your own. Whether you are trusted gets decided outside your control, inside other people's heads, which makes ‘build trust’ a strange thing to put on a quarterly plan. Charles Green and David Maister gave it a shape in The Trusted Advisor. Their trust equation puts self-orientation in the denominator, so the more visibly you are in it for yourself, the smaller the number gets. Credibility and reliability on the top line cannot rescue it.

Bill argued in a guest edition of Brand Chemistry that trust now turns up on a balance sheet. An asset that only appears on your books once someone else has decided it belongs there is a strange form of ownership, and it helps explain why the companies that try to buy it can struggle to reap the full benefits. Trust resists acquisition. When OpenAI paid nine figures for TBPN, a YouTube channel with fewer than 70,000 subscribers, they bought distribution and the credibility of two hosts. The verdict of each individual viewer was the part that was never for sale. You spend years earning your way towards trust, and somebody else decides whether you have arrived.

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Not all seven rules pull equal weight

Wales has seven rules. He presents them flat, seven of equal weight. They aren't. Read together, they sort into three questions a person runs through before deciding to risk you, and they arrive in that order. Do you see me? Can I check? And will you hold when it costs you?

Warmth comes first

Make it personal, be positive about people, and be trusting. These lean on Frances Frei's trust triangle from Harvard, her map of the three things a person needs before they will trust you. The version everyone knows is a grieving customer emailing Chewy to return an unopened bag of food after her dog died. Chewy refunded her, told her to donate the food to a shelter, and sent flowers signed by the rep who took the call. Self-orientation at zero, in the equation's terms.

Ritz-Carlton runs the internal version of the same rule. Any employee can spend up to $2,000 per guest to fix a problem without asking a manager first. That is ‘be trusting’ pointed at your own staff instead of your customers, and it costs real money every year to keep the policy honest. This whole cluster is table stakes. Missing any of it ends the conversation. Clearing all of it earns you consideration and nothing more.

Show the receipts

Create a clear purpose, and be transparent. A purpose is the promise, and without one there is nothing to hold you to and no test you could ever fail. Transparency is the receipt. It lets people watch you keep the promise without having to take your word for it.

Wikipedia does both at once. The promise of free access to the world's knowledge is backed by non-profit status. Every edit, every revert, and every argument between editors sits in public, permanently, for anyone to inspect. English Wikipedia has logged more than 1.3 billion edits, and roughly 291,000 people edited something in the last thirty days. All of it on the record. You trust the article because you can watch it being fought over.

Even the flaws read as proof. Northwestern research on customer reviews found purchase likelihood peaks somewhere between 4.0 and 4.7 stars, then falls as ratings approach a flawless 5.0. A visible flaw that can be checked beats a perfect score that cannot.

Two companies turned that into an operating system. Buffer has published every employee's salary, and the formula that produces it, for over a decade. GitLab runs a public handbook of roughly 2,000 pages covering compensation bands, board material, and how they handle a security incident, with an internal rule that every change at the company gets made in the handbook first. Both handed their competitors a map. Both get candidates who turn up to the first interview already sold. The cost is the point. A policy that costs nothing to publish tells a candidate nothing.

I get asked about this a lot at Pistachio, but the request almost always comes pre-defused. They want the benefits of the transparency page without the disclosure, the values without the number attached. But this only works with the actual receipts.

What did it actually cost you?

Be civil, and be independent. The other five rules get you considered. These two get you believed, because these are the only two that can actually cost you. Start with independence. In February 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia community forked the project and walked out over a rumor that Wales might put ads on the site. By that August, he had committed, permanently, to running none. Some estimates put the forgone revenue at around $2.3 billion a year. The Wikimedia Foundation operates on roughly $185 million a year. They turn down more than ten times their entire annual budget every year, and have done it for twenty-four years.

That invoice is the reason ‘anyone can edit it’ never turned into ‘nobody can trust it.’ Economists call this ‘costly signaling’, after Michael Spence's 1973 work on job-market signaling. A signal carries information only when faking it would cost a liar more than the lie could return. Every cheap claim a company makes is therefore evidence of nothing. The only thing a mission statement on your careers page proves is that somebody can type.

The independence rule has a trap, where independent gets read as a synonym for neutral. Wales's own qualifier is that you stay out of public fights unless they are directly relevant to what you do. Wise clears that bar. Their whole business is built on the promise of fairer foreign exchange fees, so saying loudly that banks were stealing from customers through exchange rates was just naming what Wise existed to fix.

Calling someone else out is itself a promise about your own conduct. It turns the scrutiny straight back onto you. Wise could afford that because they stood on the customer's side and had a product that followed through. Pick the wrong fight and the maths flips quickly.

The most trusted institution left is the one you run

This is where the Barometer gets uncomfortable, and interesting, for anyone running a company. Trust in almost everything is falling. Only 22% of people say they currently trust someone meaningfully different from themselves. In the middle of all that, 78% said they trust their employer to do the right thing, the highest score of any entity Edelman measured. Higher than government, higher than media, higher than business in general, higher than NGOs. The last institution people still believe in is the one that pays them.

That is an enormous line of credit sitting inside your company, and most founders draw down none of it. 73% of people say CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides. 44% think they do it well. Twenty-nine points of demand that nobody is serving.

The seven rules read differently once you notice that. Every one of them is cheaper to run inside a company than outside it, and every one of them is verified faster. Your team can see whether you make it personal, whether you are actually trusting, whether the stated purpose survives a bad quarter. They watch you get tested weekly, in real time, with no press release in between.

Employees are the only audience that gets to check the whole equation. They are also the audience most likely to tell everybody else what they found. For a company whose talent is the product, that verdict is the growth strategy.

There's always an invoice

Build is the wrong verb for trust. You make a promise specific enough to be tested, and then you pay the bill when it lands. Most companies never get there. They never get trusted because they are never truly tested, and they are never tested because they never made a promise that could cost them anything to keep. They stayed safe, stayed liked, and stayed forgettable.

Wikipedia got humiliated in public in 2005 and answered by making every future test public too. Twenty-four years of turned-down ad revenue is the invoice. Top of the citation ranking of the machines now answering the world's questions is the receipt.

Nine figures bought OpenAI a microphone. Whether anyone believes what comes out of it is still, as it has always been, a verdict reached one viewer at a time. The bill always arrives. Trust is what you have left once you have paid it.

Playbook

Future

AI has dropped the cost of a confident claim to zero. Anyone can now generate a values page, a founder manifesto, and a set of testimonials before lunch, which means the market is about to be flooded with signals that cost nothing to send. Costly signaling says every one of those is worth exactly what it cost to produce.

The scarce thing becomes the verifiable receipt. Wikipedia is second in AI citations because its entire argument history is machine-readable, permanent, and free to audit. Companies with a public handbook, a public changelog, published pricing, and a decade of decisions anyone can go back and check will be the ones AI can actually cite.

The rest become unsourceable, which in an answer-engine world is close to invisible. Trust was always decided by other people. Increasingly, some of those people are machines, and machines only trust what they can check.

Extra reading

And that’s it! You can follow Isaac on LinkedIn and X (Twitter), and make sure to subscribe to his newsletter, Brand Chemistry, as well!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Svix—a webhooks-as-a-service platform that helps developers send secure, reliable, and scalable webhooks.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

💵 Take The Cap Off Your Salary Bands. An interview with Matt McFarlane, Founder & Director at FNDN.
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💸 Unfiltered: The Long Game At BILL. How BILL quietly became the back office for 8 million businesses.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Went to look at a block of land last week in a place called Olinda, just about an hour outside of Melbourne. The block was so dense and lush that it was as if I’d stepped into a scene from Jurassic Park. I loved it. Then I found out, you pretty much can’t build on this block. It’s in a typical(ish) suburban street, with a load of neighbors, but zoning is now too tight for it to be possible to build. Isn’t that kinda, crazy?

I am all for conserving beautiful places, but this is a block of land, on a residential street. What’s the point of having a block of land if you can’t build? Kinda of crazy considering how much buidling we need to do to make houses affordable in Australia. I guess you could pay $4k per month to camp there. Anywho, enjoy today’s piece!

DEEP DIVE 🕵🏻

Ted Lasso, Manager at AFC Richmond

Ted Lasso (/ˈlæsoʊ/ LASS-oh; born 1975) is an American college football coach who gained international recognition for his innovative coaching methods and positive management style during his tenure coaching the English soccer team AFC Richmond (and now his new role with the women’s team).

And for those who have been living under a rock, or at the very least are somewhat uncoupled from the cultural zeitgeist, Ted Lasso is also fictitious. He’s a character. Made up. A complete and utter fugazi. But even though Coach Lasso may not walk amongst our mortal souls, a lot can be learned from him.

Leadership lessons, you see, need not be from real people. There are lessons to be learned all around you. Our recent deep dive on a fictitious Stark King of old is a case in point. Today’s story will be no different. This is a story of leadership through empathy. Leadership the Lasso Way.

Early years

A young Coach Lasso, at the time known simply as Theodore, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, to Kathryn Lasso (née Wendt) and Jeremiah Lasso. He grew up an eager and athletic child, and played college football as a quarterback at Wichita State University.

_{*Note: This whole section is entirely made up. You know that, right? Seriously though—I am mixing Jason Sudeikis, the character of Ted Lasso, and my own imagination. Stick with me.}

Sealing their Division II title, Coach Lasso went semi-viral for a ‘happy dance’ he shared with his players in the change rooms after the game.

It was this dance that would be the catalyst for a completely new life experience for Ted after it caught the attention of Rebecca Welton, the new owner of the Premier League’s AFC Richmond.

Career in the Premier League

Although Coach Lasso and his team, The Greyhounds, may not have lit up the scoreboard during his three-year coaching stint in the Premier League, they were able to play with considerable passion and heart, rebounding from a heartbreaking relegation after the first year under Ted’s reign.

But this isn’t a story of silverware and dynasties. It’s not about Sir Alex Ferguson or Manchester United. Ted’s journey isn’t defined by dominance—it’s defined by growth. His success wasn’t measured in wins, but in the transformation of a team, a culture, and himself.

Before we unpack Ted’s coaching philosophy, it’s worth asking: where did his mindset come from? After all, no coach—real or fictional—builds their style in a vacuum. Ted may have brought biscuits to the pitch, but behind the mustache and Midwest charm were lessons forged from his own heroes.

From high school gyms to NBA arenas, from grassroots football to Premier League sidelines, Ted's inspirations span continents and courts. Let’s take a quick detour into the playbooks that shaped him.

Coaching heroes

Coach Lasso’s coaching inspirations were numerous, but with a heavy slant to famous coaches from two sports: football (soccer) and basketball. On the basketball side, he cited people from nine-time NBA champion Steve Kerr to his high school coach, Donnie Campbell.

_{*Ok ok, me again. These coaching heroes are actually the heroes of Ted Lasso—or at least the creator of Ted, the actor who played him, Jason Sudeikis.}

But Ted’s biggest north star was the legendary NCAA coach John Wooden. Wooden won a record ten national championships at UCLA and was as known for his character-building philosophy as his win record.

Wooden was famous not only for his championship wins but also for his philosophy emphasizing character and personal integrity—sound familiar? Wooden would actually leave his lasting imprint on sport at large when he developed the ‘Pyramid of Success,’ a conceptual blueprint for personal and team success. The Pyramid hangs in Ted Lasso’s office at AFC Richmond.

Wooden was renowned for his timeless wisdom, often delivered in sharp, memorable phrases. Among his most quoted: “It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen,” and “Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.” But the one that sticks with me most is the one below.

But Ted didn’t just draw from the sages of the past. His coaching ethos also borrowed from modern leaders like former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp. Klopp’s approach to culture-building and emotional connection rubbed off on Ted—who even took his squad to karaoke as a team-bonding exercise in 2018, echoing Klopp’s famous squad night out. That spirit of unity became a cornerstone of Ted’s time at Richmond.

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The Lasso Way: A different kind of playbook

Ted’s playbook of success—The Lasso Way—is well documented. But over the next few paragraphs, I will do my best to distill the philosophies into bite-sized pieces you can take away.

But first, let me set the tone with a quote that perfectly captures how Ted thought about building culture within his teams.

That says it all. If we’re going to dissect the Lasso playbook, it starts right there: with identity, trust, and culture. Here’s how I’d sum up what made his approach work.

Ted was by no means perfect. No one person is. But he was someone who strived to be better each and every day. Because of this, his team was drawn in, and couldn’t help but follow his example.

Some favorite Ted-isms

Future

Let’s break the fourth wall for a moment—yes, Ted Lasso is fictional. But also yes: Ted Lasso is the kind of leader we should all strive to be: kind, empathetic, humble. A mentor who puts people first, leads with care, and believes in second chances. If leadership is about lifting others, Ted showed us how. And here's the kicker—the story isn't over. As I write this, Ted is back at Richmond for season 4, taking on his biggest challenge yet: building a brand new AFC Richmond women's team from the ground up.

In summary, if we can’t be like Ted today, we should all be working to be just that little bit more like Ted tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day after that. Because, as Coach Lasso says, “Every day is a chance to be better than we were the day before.”

Fun facts

Extra reading & listening

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method—an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping growing startups.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

👋 Howdy to the 1,458 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 543,659-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🥣 Granola: Healthy Breakfast & Killer AI Notepad. The AI notepad that ate a category.
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🎈 The Unexpected AI Hero (Newsletters). How to convince AI you are the best product on the market.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

The trailer for the new Facebook movie dropped with Jeremy Strong set to play Zuck. Although I’m not sure that I should, I kinda feel sorry for Zuck. I’m convinced he’ll go down as one of the great villains of our time. Steve Jobs created the iPhone, but something tells me if he saw what phones and social media had done to us, he’d already have invented the alternative.

Zuck knows about the addiction, the self-harm, the polarization, yet he propagates it. I don’t know how you can live with yourself being the head of a company so corrosive to society. The good news is Meta got slammed by a recent lawsuit, so here’s hoping there is some light at the end of the tunnel. A future free of phones and social media would be a wonderful future. Now, let’s dive into today’s piece.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Matt McFarlane, Founder & Director at FNDN

Matt McFarlane is the Founder & Director of FNDN, a compensation consulting practice for startups and high-growth tech around the world. Before FNDN, he led the People Experience team at Oyster, where he set pay across 70+ countries while headcount went from 250 to 650 in 12 months. FNDN takes on only a handful of clients at a time, usually companies between 50 and 500 people, and works on the unglamorous plumbing of pay. Compensation philosophy, job levels, salary bands, pay equity. Alongside it, Matt hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter, and founded the Startup People Summit, whose inaugural event in 2025 ran more than 40 sessions across five tracks.

None of this was the plan. Matt's career started when a recruiter talked him into a twelve-month admin job. He used it to get a foot into HR, and he moved through generalist roles in legal, professional services, and manufacturing before landing in high-growth tech and finding the thing that stuck. What makes him worth reading is that he refuses to treat pay as a number. He argues that the default employee stance on compensation is mistrust, that most companies quietly rack up 'people debt' by making pay calls without structure, and that the bill lands the moment a second and third person are hired into the same role. He was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Australia in 2025 and one of the HR Influence Awards Top 12 for ANZ in 2026.

What is the biggest myth about pay transparency?

A lot of people think pay transparency is just putting a number in front of people. There are Buffer-style companies out there that have the most extreme version of it, and I think that the idea that everyone knows what everyone earns is another myth. Fundamentally, pay transparency means people understand why they are paid what they are paid and how it has been determined.

But it's so much more than that. Telling someone the salary range for their role is one thing, but explaining it is another. What I learned implementing this at the companies I worked at is that most of the work only starts once you've shared the number. That's when you have to help people understand how it was determined and where they sit inside it. You've got to think about how you educate new employees, how you educate existing employees, all those sorts of things. It's really not a case of sharing the range and ticking the pay transparency box. There's so much more to it, and people often don't realize how involved it can be.

So it's really transparency of the methodology?

For me, arguably, that’s the most important thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve surveyed people and asked them to put up their hand if they think they’ve ever been paid unfairly in their career. Everyone puts it up. The default stance on pay is mistrust. People just assume they are being taken advantage of in some way and that the company has all the power. They are buying the benchmark salary surveys. They know what other people doing this job are earning. You don't.

So, when it comes to pay transparency, for me, it is fundamentally about showing, as a company, that these are the roles we have, this is how we think about what they are worth, here is how we assess the market, and here is what the market is saying.

What are the pros and cons of the Buffer model?

Typically, to do pay transparency effectively, you need a strong foundation in how you think about pay. Because, as I said, people don’t care about the number; they care about how you have arrived at that number and how you can explain, defend, and define it. I have worked with companies that have had a Buffer level of pay transparency, but they haven’t had a compensation strategy. There was no job level framework and no market data at all. And not knowing why you are paid what you are paid and why I am paid what I am paid is really just damaging.

The con a lot of companies see is that you have to sort out all the bottom levels of the pyramid before you get anywhere near the pinnacle of pay transparency. You have to be able to explain how you think about pay and how it works at your company. For a lot of companies, there's a lot of baggage to unpack and effort in building that. Building those practices is the main thing I help companies do, with or without the step to pay transparency.

A lot of companies see it as rigid and inflexible too. Most companies that do have compensation practices have these really big, wide bands, like $100k to $200k. They've got people sitting in all different parts of the band, or outside it entirely, while nobody really knows why. Issues start when there’s poor governance around how those bands get used. So the second you want to flick the switch on transparency, you have to get much stricter about why one person sits at the bottom, and another sits at the top. Or you go the Buffer route and drop bands altogether in favor of a single rate—you're in this role, this is what we pay, you're either happy with that or not, and we decide from there. In countries like the U.S., where there's a strong negotiation culture, that can feel limiting. But there are plenty of ways to counter it by baking it into the recruitment process from the get-go.

On the pros side, for me, it's such a trust booster. At the last company I worked at in-house, we took a stance almost identical to Buffer's. We built an app in a no-code tool and shipped it to 650 employees. They could look up the salary for any role in any geography in the world. When you make that kind of commitment, and you do all the other things that enable transparency, what it does for trust is unbeatable, in my experience. It takes a lot of the uncertainty out of the equation, and a lot of the self-advocacy people feel they have to have for themselves.

What does 'people debt' actually mean?

It's fundamentally you making a trade-off or a shortcut. It obviously has similarities to tech debt, but here you're taking a shortcut in your people practices to move faster and ship something. It could be hiring, could be progression, could be compensation, performance, whatever. The example I see most often is in compensation. We're hiring for a role, we don't know what the salary should be since it’s the first time we've hired for it, so we just offer the person whatever they asked for in the recruiting process. We haven't benchmarked it. We haven't really thought about it. We've consciously decided not to build any framework that keeps it consistent with our other offers and with the market.

The debt part kicks in when you start hiring more of these people. Now you've got three or four people doing the same job. Everyone's seen that video of the two monkeys in the cage. They both do the same action; one gets handed a cucumber, and the other gets a berry. Monkeys love berries, so the one with the cucumber is like, ‘What the hell? Why am I getting that and not the berry?’ That's pay equity in a nutshell. We're the monkeys. People don't like being paid differently for the same work when they think they're at the same level.

This is where you want to be able to say: these two roles are doing the same thing, we value them the same, we pay them the same. That's exactly where a lot of companies get stuck. Suddenly you've got a few people in the same role; they talk to each other about what they're being paid, and they realize there's no consistency. That's when the issues start landing on leaders and HR.

So how do you fix people debt?

I see this come up most commonly with organizations building their pay ranges for the first time. They inevitably end up with people in three different groups. Below the range, in the range, or above the range. The people above the range are the real challenge. The first thing to be conscious of, especially with the startups and scale-ups I work with, is that these are your founding people. They know all the shit about your company. They know how everything works, and you can't risk losing them. So I rarely see an organization say—and I'd rarely recommend it—“Hey Bill, you're on 150k, and the band now tops out at 130k. Sorry, mate, no pay increase until the range catches up.”

One solution I've helped companies put in place is that you still get an increase, just a smaller one than everyone else. There's still movement, and there's still some acknowledgment that the market is shifting and the cost of living is changing. The alternative, which I'm more of a fan of, is to give that raise as a bonus instead of adding it to your salary. The salary stays the same, but the person still gets cash in their pocket. It works as a relief valve, so they’re getting paid without pushing themselves further out of alignment every year. And of course, the other option is to ask whether we should just be promoting them. If a person moves into a higher-level role with a higher range, suddenly they’re back in range. So there are a few different routes, but those are the most common solutions.

How much should a company budget for salary growth each year?

A lot of companies get caught up in cost of living as a proxy for budgeting their compensation review cycle. I often have to take it back to basics with the whole organization, but ultimately it comes down to clarifying what CPI actually is. The ‘consumer price index’ measures the movement in the value of a set number of things—bread, milk, all the things we're all buying day in, day out. Now, for most of the companies I work with, salaries are set based on supply and demand for a set of skills. Not a set of groceries, but a set of skills, and that's the market you want to be tracking.

The reason you don't want to use CPI is that, say, CPI is really low, but salaries for a role are moving fast. AI engineers are the obvious example right now. If you're only handing out 1% increases, your salaries detach from the market you're actually trying to hire in. And the inverse is true too. Right now, AI aside, salaries for most roles are fairly stagnant while inflation is high. Do you want to pile more cost onto a company with a finite runway, where there's only so much money to deploy toward getting profitable? You don't want to overspend. That's the balance you're trying to strike. That doesn't mean you ignore CPI. You definitely need to think about high inflation environments. If it's hitting people's livelihoods and they're sitting at work worrying about whether they can afford to eat, there are ways to solve for that. But CPI itself shouldn't be what you budget off.

What you want to look at is your market data. Track the movement YoY or MoM, and see how the value the market places on a role has moved. Our ranges should move with it. Then you look at where people sit inside the range. We use a term called ‘compa-ratio’, which is someone's salary divided by the midpoint of their range. It tells you where they're placed. Companies will have a view on where they want people sitting. Typically, if you're new, you're below the midpoint, toward the bottom of the range. If you're really tenured or seasoned or a high performer, you're at the higher end, so your compa-ratio is above one.

That's how I go about the budgeting process. We know the market has moved by this much, but the thing people forget is that the same budget is doing three jobs at once. It's tracking the market, it's rewarding performance, and it's paying for promotions. Those last two are the ones that always get left out. Knowing roughly where your performance profile sits, and most companies have a bit of a bell curve, gives you a sense of what to budget for. Same with promotions. Assume how many people you expect to promote across the organization. In really high-growth companies, I often see something like 20% of the company getting promoted YoY. Work out what that number is for you and budget for it.

PARTNERS 💫

How do you handle it when the market spikes and then falls back?

There are two things to clarify there. Salaries growing slower isn't the same as salaries going backward. It's like inflation. If inflation is zero, it just means prices have stopped going up. It doesn't mean prices have reversed. That said, I do see some groups where salaries genuinely go backward YoY. Admin-type roles and junior roles are the hotspots I'm thinking of right now. But I rarely see that sustained across successive years with material decreases.

Where I have seen progressive YoY decreases in what the market pays for a role, my approach in the first year is usually not to acknowledge it. In most countries where I've done comp or worked in HR, it's effectively impossible to take money off someone's salary anyway. So you're never clawing it back. You might tell them the market has moved down for their role, and leave it there. But if the decline is sustained, then you start to think your ranges may need to come down. That raises the question of what you do with the people already sitting in them. You'll inevitably start making new offers at a lower rate, which is fine, but it's the people who've been in the role for a couple of years that you have to think about.

One option is to handle them the way we talked about with people above the band. Still offer them something, because in theory their value to you is increasing YoY anyway. They're building context on the company, building relationships, building a deeper understanding of how the organization works. They're contributing more value.

This is where replacement value comes in. If you replace someone who's been at the company 10 years with someone brand new off the street, you can't replace 10 years of institutional knowledge overnight. So the person with 10 years is invariably worth more to you. That's worth weighing when you're deciding where your offer rates start and whether that has knock-on effects for people already in the role. The other thing is that eventually they get promoted out of that role anyway, into a role with a different band, and it sorts itself out.

So is having people above the salary band just a necessary evil?

I'm also a big fan of not having that. It's increasingly relevant to the environment we're in, where everyone is building leaner, smaller organizations. Leaner means flatter, and flatter means less opportunity for career progression. So there are two solutions.

The first is taking the cap off your salary bands. Have a starting rate, and that's the bottom of your range. But why hold people back at the top? Every company I speak to says they want a high-performance workforce. Well then, pay for it. Pay like you're a high-performance workforce. If you've still got someone in the same role after five or six years, they should be crushing it. They should be so good at that role that their value keeps going up. You don't cap them just because you built a range that says so.

That's the other myth with compensation bands, and I grappled with it early in my career. You build this thing, and then you feel like you have to defend it, like you always have to color inside the lines.

The second solution, and this is increasingly common in almost every engineering and tech organization in the world, is that if someone wants to stay an individual contributor, you build a progression path that runs parallel to the management track. You can have a senior contributor who's the equivalent of a director or a VP, because they're so dominant in your product and your technology that they're having organization-wide impact anyway. They're probably setting direction for the product, doing quasi-CTO type stuff.

Location-based or location-agnostic pay, who wins?

I'm a bit of a fence-sitter here. It really depends on the organization, and I'm not a proponent of either. For example, if you're born in New York and you start a company there, should you have to pay the New York rate to someone you hire in Indonesia or Australia or anywhere else that costs less? I don't think that's necessarily fair. It's a bit of a handicap on companies that want to go out and employ people beyond their own region.

But equally, is it right to employ someone in a traditionally low-cost place and reinforce the low, constrained salaries they already have? I've hired people who asked for 15k USD as a salary, and I've seen what happens when a good salary structure lets you set the minimum we're prepared to pay anyone anywhere in the world is 30k or 50k. The impact that has on somebody is game-changing. It opens doors. They get more invested in the work, and they do it better. In that example, they could suddenly afford childcare and things like that, which gave them back time and headspace to do a great job at work.

That's why I land somewhere in the middle. The thing to acknowledge about geo-agnostic pay is that you still have to pick a place in the world to anchor to. If I use a New York salary and pay that to everyone I hire globally, how long does my runway last? Unless you're extremely well funded, not very long. And conversely, if you're paying bargain-basement bottom dollar, what kind of people is that actually going to get you? So it's one of those questions people have to answer for themselves. I don't think either extreme is right. There's a solution in the middle where you're cost-conscious and not paying San Francisco or New York rates to the whole world, but you're also not paying the lowest salary that happens to exist in a given place.

How should founders think about equity, and options versus RSUs?

First and foremost, don't grant options at all if you're not prepared to do everything needed to make them actually work. People give out options or RSUs because they want employees thinking like founders, invested in the long-term success of the business. But almost every company grants them and then tells nobody anything about them. You get an offer letter with a number on it. It might be a percentage; it might be a volume. It's rarely a value, unless they're RSUs.

Explaining what that number means matters. People need to understand what it's worth, how it's growing over time, and how the work they're doing connects to the outcome of the business. That's what actually creates the ownership mindset you're going for. Don't sink all that time into lawyers and accountants and build an equity program if you're not prepared to help people understand it on an ongoing basis.

On working out the right amount, it again comes down to country. But this is the one area where I'm more pro location-agnostic. Whether you're a software developer in India, Sydney, or San Francisco, if it's the same job at the same level, the impact you're having is arguably the same. You're creating the same opportunity for success in the business, so your slice of that success should be the same. Equity is trying to do something different from salary. Salary pays you to eat and put a roof over your head where you live. Equity isn't that.

Then on options versus RSUs, they function differently. The thing that gets misconstrued about options is that you're not actually giving anyone anything of value. You're giving them the chance to buy something with their own money. Yes, there's hopefully a gap between what they pay and what it's worth at the point of sale. But I often see options presented as, ‘Hey, we're giving you $100,000 worth of options.’ No. You're giving me the chance to buy $100,000 worth of shares, and I have to spend my own $100,000 to get it. That's another education problem.

On the RSU side, you're actually granting shares. You're handing them over. There's a tax liability, and there are all these knock-on impacts, which is another thing companies need to think about depending on which one they're offering. Neither is perfect. Both have pros and cons.

Tell me about Startup People Summit?

It's a one-day virtual conference about building people practices in scaling businesses. I created it because I'm in Australia, I've worked in startups and scale-ups for most of my career, and everywhere I looked, the conferences were tailored to enterprise organizations. They're dealing with a completely different type of problem. None of it had the startup and scale-up ingredients, where you're building something right for right now, knowing that in twelve months you'll probably redesign it because you're a different company by then. Very different environment, and typically very different budgets to solve it with.

So it's a big conference designed to show people what the more progressive operators in this space are actually doing, and to be a source of inspiration at a time when it's increasingly hard to know what the right path is. It's the playbook in event form, for anyone who doesn't already know how to build a great people function in a startup or a scale-up.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

There are probably three things that come to mind that have been important in getting the best out of myself. First and foremost, I'm a really big fan of the idea that you're the average of the people you surround yourself with. I've always been attracted to people who have done cool shit, and I've wanted to be near them, from a proximity perspective, and understand how it worked for them. There's just something infectious about that that drives you. The second thing I've learned about myself is that when I've got that first part right, I love what I'm working on, and I tend to work really intensely at it. What I've learned over the past three years of running my business is that I need to balance that with frequent periods of rest. I need to take a week off to recover from all the late nights and long weekends. Sometimes I just get obsessed with whatever I'm working on, which I love, and it's because I enjoy it, but I need to break it up by going away and sitting by the beach for a bit.

The third thing I feel like I've fine-tuned is my ability to refocus. We all know the psychology of setting ambitious goals, goals that feel almost out of reach, is incredibly compelling and very energizing. But coming back to that goal frequently is something I do well now that I certainly didn't earlier in my career. I've got a routine where I sit down and ask, what do I want to accomplish this year? Then I break that down by quarter. From there, I've got a monthly refocusing exercise and a weekly one. At the start of every week, I sit down to review what I am accomplishing and how it ties back to my goals. And daily, I literally have a sticky pad on my Mac with my top three for the day.

That's my system. Every month, I run a board meeting with my partner. How much money did I make? How much did I spend? How's my pipeline? Everything. And it all starts with what's my goal, how's the progress, what's going well, what's not. It's a simple routine, but it pulls me up out of the weeds of whatever I'm dealing with and gives me a reset back to what I'm trying to accomplish for the year. So far it's worked really well. It helps me pivot when things aren't working, and it gives me a sense of gratitude too. Day-to-day, it can be really hard to sit down and see what I actually accomplished. But every month at that board meeting, I get to see what I'm doing. And when you see a revenue number, or a client you've closed, it feels nice. Then you get on with it.

Extra reading

And that’s it! You can also follow Matt on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to check out FNDN website while you’re at it.

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Granola: Healthy Breakfast & Killer AI Notepad

“Life's this game of inches. One half-step too late or too early, and you don't quite make it. One half-second too slow, too fast, you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch.” This was the famous speech from Coach D'Amato, played by Al Pacino, in Any Given Sunday. This way of thinking typifies startup wunderkind Granola.

Before understanding what makes Granola tick, I had one question rattling around in my head: ‘What is this team doing that makes them so successful?’ I mean, impeccable execution should only get you so far? But the AI notepad, Granola, and its insane rise can really be broken down by a furious approach to being better in every way than the products that came before it.

Not in a Mad Max Fury Road type fury, but more of a meticulous, methodological approach. The scalpel rather than the anvil, if you will, with surgical precision that laid the groundwork for their rise to $1.5 billion within two years of launching.

To unearth what led to their success, I sat down with founders Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, as well as COO Michael Altom. So let’s dive in, folks, to the story of the one and only Granola.

A note-taking journey through time

Before moving ahead, I think we should take a quick look in the rearview mirror. We have clear evidence that humans have been taking notes since time immemorial. The oldest known painting (or possibly note), a warty pig on a cave wall in Sulawesi, Indonesia, is ~45,000 years old. We don't know exactly what the artist was trying to say, but I like to think it was ‘action item: hunt pig.’

If you don’t count that as a true note, I get it, but what about the Ishango Bone, a baboon fibula from 20,000 years back? Humanity's first spreadsheet, carved into a dead monkey's leg. Next stop was Mesopotamia, where Sumerian scribes jotted down grain sales, beer rations, and who owed what on literal wet clay. From there, things moved rapidly.

Fast forward, though, to the 1980’s, and we’d reach what administrative clerks the world over would call the Post-it Revolution. Then the rise of the PalmPilot > Evernote > Apple Notes > and a graveyard of to-do apps that were all branding, no retention.

We’d finally make our way from the caves to the jungles, to the office, and then finally to the remote revolution, and to 2016, when we had the incredible idea of having a robot join our meeting and take the notes for us.

‘Tools for Thought’

Our co-founding duo had a different lead into their startup partnership. Chris had come from a career spanning Google (Gmail, Search, Maps, Google Now), into Socratic (10M users and 2017 Apple App of the Year), a startup he founded that would be acquired by Google, to Google’s in-house incubator to work on a product called Stack, to another acquisition of said product, by you guessed it…Google (Drive).

“I started playing with LLMs about eight months before ChatGPT launched, so a little before people were really talking about it,” he would tell me. “And I became convinced that all the tools we use for knowledge and productivity work were going to change because of LLMs.”

Armed with this unique insight and a voracious fire in his belly, Chris’s next step was to find someone who could come in and help him on the build side. “I needed a co-founder, and the hard parts were either actually training the models or the design side. So it was going to be a researcher or a designer.” Enter: Sam.

Sam and Chris didn’t exactly bump into each other in a bar, nor was their pairing pure happenstance. Chris courted Sam like an old-school romantic love story. He knew what he wanted in a founder relationship, and he went out to find it. What he wanted in this case was someone who could think through this problem from more than just a UI perspective, so he went straight to the ‘Tools for Thought’ community, of which Sam was a part.

You see, a note can be one single, solitary data point filed away in a filing cabinet. This is how most note-takers work today. Sam and his Tools for Thought brethren—and sistren—would think about a note very differently: a note is not just a note, but rather a node in a complex system of notes, sharing context between one another.