Most founders treat this as a staffing decision. It isn't. It's a transfer-of-knowledge decision — the question of whether what happens in your head during a sales conversation can be extracted, documented, and handed to someone else without breaking. That's why first sales hires fail so often. Founders hire to relieve pressure (too many calls, not enough hours) rather than to transfer a process. When there's no process to transfer, the hire either reinvents one badly or quie

Stepping into the world of entrepreneurship is rarely a straight line. It requires navigating terrifying risks, overcoming industry-wide blind spots, and having the conviction to solve a problem that hits close to home. In a recent episode of Sbur Decision Lab, host Tony Zhang sat down with Projit Aon, the co-founder and CEO of Nucleus RX. Projit shared his compelling journey from leaving a stable, two-decade-long corporate career to developing a patented, connected pill disp

A founder's guide to the instrument that now dominates pre-seed fundraising — and the traps hiding inside it. You just got a term sheet. It's two pages, no interest rate, no maturity date, and your lawyer says "don't worry, it's just a SAFE, everyone uses one." Six months later you're staring at a cap table that doesn't look anything like what you thought you signed up for, wondering how a "simple" document produced such a complicated outcome. That confusion is the norm, not

The Decision Founders Are Actually Making Building an advisory board is a trust-allocation problem under information asymmetry. You're granting someone structured access to your strategic thinking — your unresolved risks, your blind spots, your cap table — often before you have enough evidence to know whether their judgment holds up under pressure. The real decision is who gets to influence you — and what that costs. This is harder than it sounds for three reasons. First, it'

The commercial airline experience is deteriorating at an alarming pace, leaving a growing segment of travelers deeply frustrated with unpredictable and unreliable options. Meanwhile, regional private aircraft operators are burdened with underutilized capacity, often absorbing the heavy costs of flying empty legs because they lack visibility into market demand. In a recent episode of the Sbur Decision Lab, host Tony Zhang sat down with Mike Mitchell, the founder of BasiFly, to

The decision: Keep iterating on the product, or shift resources into scaling distribution. This is one of the highest-stakes calls a founder makes. Scale too early, and the company burns capital, hires ahead of demand, and locks in a go-to-market motion that doesn't actually work — often fatally. Wait too long, and competitors capture the market the founder was building for, while the team loses momentum chasing a "perfect" product that was already good enough. The difficulty

The Decision Beneath the Decision "Should we pivot?" is not really the question founders are asking. The real question is: how much weight should current evidence carry against the plan we already committed to? This is difficult for a structural reason, not a personal one. Founders operate with incomplete information, under time pressure, while personally invested in the outcome. The same trait that makes someone capable of starting a company — conviction in the face of doubt

As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest dilemmas you face is how to completely disrupt a massive market without causing chaos for your customers. In our latest interview at Sbur Decision Lab, Matt Phillips sat down with Yani Deros, CEO and co-founder of CIRQ+, to discuss how his nimble team is doing exactly that in the massive hospitality sector. CIRQ+ has developed an innovative energy management operating system that acts as wireless middleware between utilities and hotel gu

Online reviews are a fundamental pillar of modern commerce. Statistically, 98% of people read reviews before making a purchase decision. Yet, the systems we rely on to guide our decisions are fundamentally obsolete, built more than two decades ago before smartphones, social media, or generative AI existed. Today, less than 2% of consumers actually leave reviews, and of those, over one-third are entirely fake, bought, or artificially generated. In a recent episode of Sbur Deci

Every great startup begins with a moment of sharp clarity—a realization that a widespread problem lacks an accessible, scalable solution. In a recent feature on the Sbur Decision Lab, Pramit Maakoday, co-founder of Relax Infinity, discusses how his team is addressing the global mental health crisis by merging time-tested Eastern wellness practices with modern Western science. For fellow founders navigating the early stages of building a company, the pitch and interview offer