What I Got Right: Be Dangerously Good at One Thing.
Nine days, nine mistakes. Now the other side.
This is not a pivot to positivity. It is a pivot to completeness. A founder who only talks about what went wrong is telling half a story. The things that worked are at least as instructive as the things that didn’t. Here is the first one.
For the last nine days I wrote about mistakes. Real ones. Things I would go back and do differently if I could.
But the company is still here. Eight years in, with real customers, a product that genuinely works, and a team that believes in what we are building. That did not happen only because I survived the mistakes. Some things I got right from the beginning and never let go of. This is the first one.
The Only Advice That Actually Generalizes
Every founder gets told different things. Raise early. Don’t raise. Hire fast. Hire slow. Focus on product. Focus on distribution. Move fast. Be deliberate.
Most of this advice is contextual. What worked for one founder in one market at one moment may have nothing to do with your situation.
But there is one thing I have watched hold across almost every founder I respect, regardless of what they built or where they built it.
They were dangerously good at one thing. And genuinely competent at everything else.
Not famous for one thing. Not credentialed in one thing. Dangerously good. The kind of deep where you see problems others miss, where your judgment in that domain is hard to argue with, where the best people in that field would respect what you know.
And alongside that depth, a deliberate breadth. Not expertise everywhere. Enough to understand every function, have the right conversations, make informed decisions, know when someone is pulling wool over your eyes.
That combination is what I now think of as the actual job of a founder.
What That Looked Like for Me
My one thing was tech and product. I never really separated them.
To me, a great product is just great engineering with a user in front of it. The technical decisions and the product decisions were always the same decisions, made at the same time, by the same person. That person was me.
That depth gave me something I could not have hired. I could see what was possible before the team could articulate it. I could tell when an engineering approach was going to create a product problem three months later. I could sit with a customer, hear what they were struggling with, and know immediately whether we could solve it and roughly how.
Eight years later, the feedback I am most proud of is still about the product. Customers notice when something has been built with genuine care and genuine understanding. That is not a marketing outcome. It is a product outcome. And the product was shaped, every day, by staying close to what was being built.
I am in the code every single day. In the last three months, I made 2,000 contributions on GitHub. Not as a statement. Just as how I work. The code is where my thinking happens. Staying out of it would be like driving with one hand tied behind my back.
The Breadth Side
The depth alone would have kept me in a corner.
I pushed myself, sometimes uncomfortably, into every other function. Sales. Marketing. Finance. Hiring. Legal. Customer success. I was not trying to be an expert in all of them. I was trying to understand them well enough to make good decisions and recognise good people.
The ISB MBA accelerated this significantly. It gave me frameworks for markets and strategy and organisations that I did not have as a pure engineer. It gave me a language for the business layer.
But here is what I noticed: the breadth became useful because of the depth, not instead of it. The strategy frameworks made more sense because I already understood leverage from engineering. The go-to-market thinking made more sense because I already thought in systems.
Without the foundation in one thing, breadth is just awareness. You know a lot of things at a surface level. You can have conversations. But when you hit a genuinely hard problem, awareness is not enough.
What the Depth Eventually Built
The way an engineer thinks is not just useful for engineering. It is useful for everything.
When I looked at sales and marketing, I did not see a people problem. I saw a systems problem. Something to be instrumented, automated, improved through iteration. That shift in thinking changed how we built our go-to-market from the ground up.
Today, almost everything on the distribution side is automated. Inbound, outbound, content. Built as systems that compound without proportional headcount. That did not come from a marketing hire or a GTM consultant. It came from an engineer who never stopped thinking like one.
That is what the depth buys you. Not just the ability to build the product. The ability to see every problem as a product.
The Lesson, Stated Simply
Your one thing does not have to be tech. It could be sales. It could be design. It could be a specific domain, healthcare or finance or logistics, where you have genuine depth that others do not.
But you need one thing. Something you know all the way down. Something that shapes how you think even when you are nowhere near it.
And alongside it, you need to build the breadth deliberately. Not to become a generalist. To become a founder, which is its own specific thing: someone who can operate across everything while being irreplaceable in something.
That combination, for me, is what made Hyperleap possible. Not the MBA alone. Not the engineering alone. The two together, with the engineering as the foundation everything else was built on.
Go deep first. Then go wide. In that order.
The bottom line: Every founder needs a domain where they are genuinely, uncomplicatedly excellent, and the range to operate across everything else. The depth shapes how you think. The breadth gives you somewhere to apply it. For me it was tech and product. For you it might be something completely different. But it needs to be something.
What is your one thing? And how far down does it actually go?