Unpopular popular opinions

1. You don’t need to/shouldn’t promote someone just because he/she joined your company at early stage to leadership role if he doesn’t have the relevant experience. I have seen people in leadership roles who joined as a fresher and sticked with company for 3-5 years. Yes, they might have done excellent job and you can benefit them in n number of ways but not promoting to leadership role. 2. Impose financial discipline (even make it one of the core value) from the early stages, even more if you are a B2C company. Spend money on Finance leadership as early as possible, the ROI would be much much higher than you think. 3. Hiring left, right and centre when you need to scale, you don’t need to do that there should be a strong justification for every hire you do. Have seen companies who hired and did a head count reduction in six months of time. 4. Have seen/heard companies dying for not killing a project or vertical in early stage when it is evident that it would not work. So be ready to take these hard decisions.