Early Decisions are Louder than they look

I often meet founders who believe their most important decisions are still ahead of them.

The comforting idea is that early choices are temporary. Code can be rewritten. Strategy can be refined. Direction can be corrected later.

Technically, this is true.

What changes early is not the ability to revise decisions, but the likelihood of doing so.

Early decisions tend to work just well enough. They create traction. They reduce pressure. They unlock the next step. This is precisely what makes them dangerous.

Once a decision works, attention moves elsewhere.

Teams form habits around it. Hiring follows it. Metrics begin to depend on it. Over time, the decision fades into the background and reappears as an assumption. Something the company no longer remembers choosing.

This is path dependence, but it rarely announces itself.

Nothing breaks. Progress continues. The company grows around constraints it does not recognise as constraints.

By the time the limits become visible, changing direction feels expensive. Not only technically, but socially. People have been hired for this version of the company. Stories have been built around it. Reversal starts to look like regression.

This is why early advice is often mistimed.

Founders receive help when something is visibly wrong. The more consequential moment is earlier, when things are working narrowly and defaults are still forming.

The challenge is not to predict the right decision. That is rarely possible.

The challenge is to notice which decisions are becoming silent organisers of the company.

Most early mistakes are not wrong decisions.

They are decisions that were never examined again.