---
title: "Founder Execution"
type: concept
tweet_count: 8
created: 2026-04-01
updated: 2026-04-22
tags: [concept, calibration-fixture, holdout]
---

# Founder Execution

## Summary
Patterns in how high-performing founders ship versus how struggling ones
stall. Synthetic anonymized holdout page — NOT seen during prompt tuning.

## Timeline

- **2024-03-04** | The best founders ship a working version within the
  first 4 weeks of starting. Everyone else negotiates with the problem.
  Strong conviction.

- **2024-07-11** | alice-example shipped the acme-example MVP in 11 days
  from idea-clarity. That kind of velocity correlates strongly with
  eventual scale outcomes in my data.

- **2024-11-19** | charlie-example is going to struggle with the
  widget-co rebuild. He's a strong engineer but I don't think he's
  willing to ship the rough version. Moderate conviction, ~0.6.

- **2025-02-28** | The fund-c portfolio's median time-to-first-paying-
  customer is too long. I bet they re-rate down at next mark-to-market.

- **2025-05-15** | charlie-example proved me wrong on widget-co. The
  rebuild shipped faster than I predicted and the architecture choices
  look strong. Good update on my prior.

## Bets

- I think alice-example outperforms her seed projections by year 2.
- I bet at least one fund-c company hits a meaningful revenue milestone
  by mid-2026 despite the slow start.
