What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Farsighted
Founders are trained to move fast, and that habit becomes a liability the moment a decision is genuinely one-of-a-kind: whether to raise money, whether to bring on a co-founder, whether to kill a product line. The instinct is to frame it as a single yes-or-no question and answer it from inside your own head, usually the same week you first noticed the problem. That speed is exactly what causes founders to miss the people and second-order effects a big call actually touches, and to picture only the outcome they're hoping for.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
See the whole board before you name the choice
Most founders frame big calls as "do we do X or not," when the more useful first step is listing everyone and everything the decision touches — customers, team morale, competitors' likely response, your runway, your co-founder's appetite for risk. Before locking onto the first workable plan, map the fuller landscape rather than the two or three factors that came to mind on your walk to get coffee.
A two-person founding team signs a two-year office lease because it feels like the responsible, "real company now" move. They map the cost against current revenue but never consider that half the team might go remote. Eight months in, they're paying for space nobody uses.
Before any decision above a certain size, spend fifteen minutes writing down every person, cost, and dependency it touches — not just the ones that jump to mind first.
Rehearse more than one future for your company
It's natural to plan around the future you're rooting for, but a stronger practice is sketching several genuinely different ones — the slow-growth version, the version where a competitor undercuts you, the version where your best hire leaves in month six. Structured scenario-thinking isn't pessimism; it's insurance against being blindsided by a future you never let yourself picture.
A founder raises a round sized entirely around the fastest-growth projection. When growth comes in at half that pace, the spending plan built for the optimistic future leaves almost no room to adjust, and cuts happen in a panic instead of by design.
For any major plan, write a one-paragraph sketch of at least three different futures — including one where the plan underperforms — before committing resources to any single one.
Get someone in the room who isn't rooting for you
Inside a small founding team, everyone shares the same incentives and blind spots, which makes it easy to mistake agreement for validation. Before locking in a big choice, seek out someone with no stake in your success feeling inevitable — a mentor outside your circle, an advisor from a different industry, a customer who isn't already a fan.
A founding team convinces itself a new feature is essential after discussing it only among themselves and a few enthusiastic beta users. They never ask a skeptical or lapsed user, and the launch solves a problem almost nobody outside the fan base actually had.
Before finalizing a decision that affects the whole company, get one candid reaction from someone who has no reason to simply agree with you.
Keep an honest record and review it afterward
The payoff of everything above only shows up if you keep a plain, honest record of what you decided, why, and what you expected to happen — then actually look back at it once the outcome is known. Most founders move on to the next fire the moment a decision is made, which means the same blind spots resurface in the next big call instead of getting corrected.
Mapping the landscape and imagining multiple futures both take time you may not have during a genuine crisis. When speed is truly required, compress the process rather than skip it: spend an hour, not a week, but still force yourself through a short list of factors and at least one alternative future before deciding.
Name one thing, honestly
What's the next big decision on your plate where you've already picked an answer — and who would you have to talk to in order to actually test it?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before finalizing a decision that affects the whole company, get one candid reaction from someone who has no reason to simply agree with you.