Insights
Thinking on how early-stage companies actually grow.
There’s no shortage of research on how organisations work. The gap is in the doing: the organisational and people side of building a company is the part that gets deferred, even when everyone knows it matters. This is where I share what I’m learning about it — from the field, from the research, and from the people doing the building.
The field report
Where the Strain Lives
Where the organisational side of early-stage companies breaks first, and why.
Over the first half of 2026 I ran twenty-one depth interviews with early-stage founders and operators, mapping the operational and people problems that surface as a company grows, and the patterns in how founders respond to them. The findings confirmed something I’d seen from the inside: the constraint is rarely capability or ambition. It’s that the right foundations get put in too late, if at all.
It’s the closest thing I know to a map of where the strain lives in an early-stage company, and what it costs to leave it unaddressed.
The Culture Co-Lab
Design to Scale
A collaborative series with The Honeycomb Works and Six Degrees Strategy.
The Culture Co-Lab is a thought-leadership series I co-founded with two fellow practices, built on a shared belief: how you build, lead and run a company matters as much as what you build. It brings three distinct perspectives to one conversation — across articles, white papers, webinars and more — on the intersection of culture, leadership, and operations and systems.
How Puraffinity Embeds High-Performance Behaviour →
A fireside chat with Jess Middlemiss, CTO of Puraffinity, on the everyday habits behind high performance and how to make them hold as a technical team grows.
Embedding Behaviours in Small Teams →
A practical video on building team habits that keep working when the founder is no longer in the room.
Your Culture Is Already in the Room →
Why early investment in the organisational side pays off, and why each opportunity to test and improve becomes more costly as a company grows.
Why Your Culture Data Is Lying to You →
A white paper on why most culture initiatives fail to shift behaviour, and what better data looks like.
Culture Debt vs Technical Debt →
A webinar on why the organisational shortcuts a company takes early come due just as painfully as the technical ones, and why they deserve the same attention.
The Expensive Infrastructure Decision Founders Leave to Chance →
The case for treating organisational culture as structural investment: not a values exercise or an HR concern, but a foundational business decision.