Have you ever regretted a hiring decision? How did you know they were a "bad" hire? Maybe you brought someone on full-time, part-time, or freelance, and things just didn t work out. That happened to me in a non-technical role. I believed hiring someone for marketing and public relations would boost sales, help grow the team, and build our brand. Instead, I ended up with someone who seemed perfect on paper but couldn t execute, which cost me more in both wages and lost revenue.

What I learned is that you need different questions to really understand someone s skills and experience. When I switched from asking traditional or situational questions to using behavioral interview questions, I made better hires.

Most founders have had someone on their team who didn t work out. What was yours? And how did you course correct?

I ve started treating not now as three different decisions:

• The evidence is too weak.

• The problem matters, but the timing is wrong.

• The idea conflicts with a choice already made.

They look identical in a backlog, but they deserve different revisits. The first needs research, the second a trigger date, and the third a deliberate re-open of the earlier trade-off.

How do you record deferred product decisions so future you can tell whether to investigate, schedule, or leave them closed?

Every CRM I look at is priced for a team of ten. I'm not a team of ten. Most of the founders I talk to aren't either, and almost all of them are running their whole pipeline in a spreadsheet and quietly embarrassed about it.

I don't think they should be. A spreadsheet is fast, free and does exactly what you tell it. It just breaks at some point, and I'm trying to work out where that point is.

For the people who moved off it: what actually forced you? Was it the number of deals, forgetting a follow-up, a second person joining, or something else entirely?

I spent this week pushing one founder on a single claim in his launch copy, and by the end he had changed shipped text three times. Not because the claim was false. Because it was true of something narrower than the sentence said.

His tagline promised every file was cryptographically signed for verifiable provenance. True at the moment the file was made. Not true after anyone trims it in another tool, which is what happens to almost every file before a human sees it. The honest version of that sentence already existed on his site. It was in the footer.

Then the description said a free tier was available, while the product served me a waitlist, because it had opened in one region only.

Neither of those is a lie. Both are things a visitor can catch in under a minute, and the person most likely to check is the person you most wanted to convince.

i've been shipping for 8 years. every resume i've ever sent has one line at the top that i thought was my strongest credential.

no interviewer has asked me about it once.

When I started building AURELIA, I thought complexity came from writing more code.

Now I think it comes from something else.

Every time we add a new feature, we also add a new decision.

After months (or years), those decisions become scattered across files, databases, APIs, and people s memory.

Most people know the rules: use a unique password for every service, make it long, don't reuse it anywhere. And yet almost nobody actually does this consistently not because they don't understand the risk, but because humans are fundamentally lazy and comfortable when it comes to security. It's not stupidity, it's just how we're wired: the effort of managing 40 different passwords feels real and immediate, while the risk of a breach feels abstract and distant.

There's also a quiet assumption a lot of people carry around without saying it out loud: "that happens to other people, not to me." Data breaches happen to companies, celebrities get hacked, someone else's crypto wallet gets drained never mind that statistically, reused or weak passwords are involved in the vast majority of account compromises. The moment it's framed as "yeah but that won't happen to me," all the rational advice about password hygiene just quietly gets ignored.

I ve been thinking about a mistake we make when discussing AI-agent context:

We treat all context as if it serves the same purpose.

The usual advice is straightforward:

• Remove unnecessary context

• Summarize long outputs

• Reduce token usage

• Make the agent cheaper

Small ship this week, but I sat on the why longer than the code.

I build an app people open in the hard ten minutes with a kid a tantrum, a bedtime that came apart. Whoever's using it is, by definition, not in a state to go spelunking through Settings. So Apple's standard path for redeeming a code always bugged me: copy it, leave the app, App Store tap your face Redeem Gift Card or Code, paste, switch back, hope it took. Fine for a productivity tool. For someone at the end of their rope, that's where you lose them.