Ben Perreau

A founder hires a CRO and hands over sales. Six months later the three biggest customers still text the founder when something goes wrong, and the founder still answers. The CRO owns the number and none of the relationships that decide it.

If Goldman is right that AI layoffs wait for a recession, plenty of companies are building the list now without calling it one. Every role a team quietly stops backfilling is a line on it.

What's the best handover note you've had from the person who held your job before you? What was in it?

Whoever sets the CEO's agenda decides which problems get discussed this quarter. At a lot of companies that's a chief of staff, and few people outside the exec team know their name.

The month before a reorg is announced, nobody below the exec team makes a decision they'd have to defend to a new boss.

Ask an exec team which weekly meeting they'd cancel if AI took perfect notes and tracked every action. Most say the status update. Six months after the tools arrive, most of those status updates are still on the calendar.

AI can now give a CFO three versions of next year's forecast before lunch, each one clean and plausible. The job that's left is knowing which assumption in which version is wrong, and that's mostly years of watching the business miss.

Most exec meetings end with twenty minutes of 'any other business'. That's usually where the problem everyone's been avoiding turns up, with ten minutes left and half the team packing up.

The expensive part of a wrong exec hire is the six months when their team could tell and the CEO hadn't heard yet.

Before a board meeting, plenty of CEOs rehearse the questions about revenue and none about the leadership team. Then a director asks why two of the last four executive hires have left, and the answer gets made up on the spot.

Most exec searches start with a job spec. I'd start with the list of decisions the CEO stops making the day the new person arrives. If that list is short, the new hire spends their first year working it out alone.

What's the clearest sign you've seen that a new strategy was landing? I mean something a team did differently on an ordinary Tuesday.

Most annual plans get written top-down in October and rewritten bottom-up in February, once the teams have read them.

An exec team that agrees in the meeting and argues in DMs afterward hasn't decided anything yet.

Founders and CEOs: what's the most useful thing a board member ever told you to stop doing?

The week before a board meeting, a lot of exec teams stop running the company to build the deck. Add up those hours once. Then ask the board which slides they read.

Most companies can tell you their revenue per head to the dollar. Ask how long it takes a problem to get from the team that spots it to someone who can fix it, and you get a shrug.

Founders: when did you stop being the person who should make the product decisions? How did you find out?

I can’t possibly add plurality to the pile of commentary about You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes film, that will continue to be here for days to come, without ruining the masterful plot. But it’s hard to overstate how important it is for any entrepreneur, storyteller, VC or indeed leader to watch that film and just to let it get you thinking.

Plenty of AI tools can draft a customer email in seconds. Then it waits two days for three sign-offs.