The two or three decisions that actually matter

Ask most founders what their strategy is and you'll get a list of forty things they're doing. That isn't a strategy. That's a to-do list wearing a suit.

Strategy is subtraction. In any given year, a company's trajectory turns on two or three decisions. Everything else is execution — important, often hard, but not fate-changing. The job is to find those two or three, make them well, and make them in the right order. Almost everything I've done as an advisor comes back to helping a founder cut through the noise to those calls.

The hardest problem is rarely the obvious one

Founders usually arrive with a symptom: growth has stalled, the raise is slipping, a key hire isn't working. The symptom is real, but it's rarely the decision. The work is finding the problem underneath it — the one that, once solved, quietly resolves three others. Spend your scarce judgment there, not on the loudest fire.

Speed comes from clarity, not hurry

Teams don't move fast because they're busy. They move fast because they know the two or three things that matter right now, and they're not being asked to care equally about everything else. Hurry without clarity just produces motion. Clarity is what lets a team run.

A strategy you can't say in a sentence is usually a list you haven't finished cutting.

How to find the decisions that matter

1. Write down the two or three things that would actually change the trajectory. Not the forty things on the plan — the handful that, if you got them right, would make the rest easier or irrelevant. If your list has ten items, you haven't finished thinking.
2. Separate the reversible from the irreversible. Most decisions are two-way doors: make them fast, learn, adjust. A few are one-way — a market, a business model, a defining hire. Those deserve a different kind of care and a different pace. Confusing the two is how companies end up slow on the cheap decisions and reckless on the expensive ones.
3. Sequence them. Order is strategy. The right decisions in the wrong sequence can still sink you — raising before you've found the proof, scaling before the motion repeats. Ask not just what, but what first.
4. Then protect the team from everything else. Once the two or three are set, most of your job is holding the line — saying no to the good ideas that aren't these ideas, so the company can actually finish something.

None of this is about having a bigger plan. It's about having a shorter one, held with more conviction. Great companies aren't managed into existence through forty simultaneous priorities. They're built the way everything hard gets built — one decision that matters at a time.