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🌏 How Product Teams Are Going Global In Days. An interview with Minh Cung, Co-Founder & CEO at Hyperlocalise.
📞 Why The Next Interface Can Hear & See You. An interview with Alex Smola, Co-Founder & CEO at Boson AI.
✨ My Favorite Startmate W26 Companies. A look back at a handful of the best and brightest from the latest accelerator cohort.

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You take the calls, Granola takes the notes. Granola transcribes your calls from your computer while you jot down a few bullets, then writes them up. At the end of the day, you have notes on all six, not two good ones and four you meant to finish.

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One of my favorite conspiracies right now is that Trump’s illogical demand to use SI instead of AI is because he and his insiders bought all the best .si domains before the announcement. I actually hate the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and honestly lose sleep over how brain-rotted we are as a society.

All that being said, given the otherworldly amounts of grift and corruption in Trump 2.0, I’m almost certain the reason he’s pushing it is that there is another pile of cash at the end of his corrupt little rainbow. “THE ENEMY” is just another example that we’re living in the actual dumbest timeline.

GUEST POST 💄

The Fine Art Of Disagreeing & Committing

On October 25, Third Age 3018, a gathering took place in the hidden Elven valley of Rivendell. A room full of elves, dwarves, men, and one very stressed little hobbit spent a chunk of time yelling at each other (and creating one of the all-time memes) about a very consequential piece of jewelry: The One Ring.

Boromir was the loudest voice in the room. “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” he warned, kicking a meme that’s still going strong 25 years later. At the height of the shouting, a small voice cut through. “I will take it,” said Frodo Baggins. “I will take the Ring to Mordor.” One by one, the room fell in line. Sword, bow, axe. Even Boromir: “If this is indeed the will of the Council, then Gondor will see it done.” This will forever be the greatest disagree-and-commit meeting in history.

But we don’t see teams disagree and commit only in Middle-Earth. It's a healthy practice in all walks of life. Relationships, family, and today’s context: business. Most startups are full of Boromirs. They nod in the meeting, then quietly run their own strategy in the background. Today, my mate Alexis d’Amecourt, CEO of Mochary Coaching, is back to show us how to fix that. He’s one of the most knowledgeable people in tech, so without further ado, here he is.

Your team doesn't need to agree; it needs to decide

Hey, Alexis here! I’m the CEO of Mochary Coaching, a premier coaching firm that specializes in tactical coaching for hyper-scaling founders in Silicon Valley. Our founder, Matt Mochary, wrote the book The Great CEO Within, which you may have read or heard of. Our team has coached the founders and C-Suite of companies like Lovable, Listen Labs, Midjourney, AngelList, Engram Lab, MatX, and more.

Today, I’m going to share a framework that helps these teams move faster, even as complexity and the number of people involved grow. Somewhere in the world, a startup meeting is going sideways. Product wants to ship, but engineering wants another month, and sales says that the customer thinks the feature is already launched. After 90 minutes, the team reaches the only conclusion available to a group determined not to disappoint anyone… ‘We should keep discussing this.’ A follow-up meeting is scheduled. ​

This is how startups trade speed for sluggishness. As the company scales, it slows down because the team gets confused and thinks a good decision process needs everyone to agree. Consensus feels healthy, but it also gives every meeting participant an unofficial ‘veto’—making it difficult to make the call.

What companies actually need in the decision-making process is a way to say, ‘We recognize that there is a disagreement, and understand the risks involved. We may not all agree with the decision, but will commit to helping execute it.’ And in order to do that, one person has to make the decision and own the outcome. Everyone else gives feedback on the decision, but accepts that the decision-maker has the final say and supports its execution. What was just described is one of the most powerful decision-making tools: we call it ‘disagree and commit’.

Consensus is where decisions go to die

Disagree and commit is closely associated with Amazon, where leaders are expected to challenge decisions openly before fully committing once the call has been made. Jeff Bezos gave a useful example in Amazon’s 2016 shareholder letter. An Amazon Studios team wanted to greenlight an original production. He disagreed with the direction. The team listened to his concerns, discussed them, and still wanted to proceed.

Disagree and commit has two distinct phases. This first phase is before the decision. This is where your team debates openly, surfaces risks, challenges assumptions, and makes the strongest possible case for a direction you feel conviction towards.

The second phase is after the decision. This is where your team needs to stop campaigning and execute the chosen path as though it were their own. Even though they may have chosen differently, they trust their teammates and want to help them execute and win. Below are the simple steps to disagreeing and committing.

1/ Name the decision-maker

Each decision should have one person who actually makes the call. Usually, this is the person who owns the project, process, or function. But it can be anyone, not just the most senior person in the room. In fact, pushing every decision upward is an excellent way to turn your CEO into a very expensive human router. The decision-maker should be the CEO only if the decision is irreversible. And it turns out, there are very few decisions that are actually irreversible.

2/ Write the decision in IPS format

In order to direct the flow of the conversation into something tangible and useful, a decision should typically be presented with 1) the issue and 2) the proposed solution (IPS). Don’t invite the team to ‘discuss pricing.’ Do not schedule a meeting to ‘align on the roadmap.’ Instead, be specific about the actual problem at hand, and write it down. When an issue is not presented with a solution attached, the debate becomes chaotic and unorganized. Give your participants something to critique and react to, something that can tether the argument. So frame the decision in IPS format. What problem needs to be resolved? And what does the decision-maker currently believe the company should do? Below is an example.

Now the team has something concrete to challenge. The IPS should be written before the meeting, so the decision-maker has concretely thought through the topic and put effort and thought into centering the discussion. Then, the meeting starts with all participants reading the IPS presented.

3/ Debate in writing first

Ask all participants to review the issue and the proposed solution, and write out their comments. Have them raise risks, particularly from their perspective and team. Once all the comments are written out, have everyone take a few minutes to read through and upvote the feedback that resonates. Then discuss the highest-signal comments live. ​

Now your job as decision-maker is to field the conversation. Ask the top commenters to verbalize what they wrote, and time-box the discussion. Not everyone may get to speak during the debate, so it’s important for the comments to be written down as well. The loudest person doesn’t necessarily have the best information. The quietest person may have noticed the thing that kills the project six months from now.

This step of active debate, listening, and feedback from the decision-maker is also crucial to creating buy-in. Your team is more likely to commit to a decision they disagree with if they felt like they were actively part of the process, and their feedback was taken in. If you compare this collaborative process against one where your decision is communicated without prior discussion, you can see which one would be the clear preference for a team.

_{*Note that you don’t need to follow this process for every single decision you make. This process is particularly helpful when the decision involves multiple stakeholders and is hairy and messy with no “silver bullet” way forward.}

4/ Confirm understanding

As the decision-maker, it’s now your job to make the dissenters feel heard by summarizing their view. This helps your team feel understood and even more involved in the process. And it also helps you understand their feedback better, of course. ​

For example, ‘What I hear from engineering is that the proposed timeline creates a reliability risk, and that if adoption is higher than expected, the team will not have enough capacity to support it.’ Then ask, ‘Did I capture that correctly?’ Being heard will not make everyone happy, but it makes commitment possible. It shows you truly understand their perspective and are still moving in a different direction despite that understanding. It removes the argument that ‘you just don’t get it.’

5/ Make the decision

Now that you’ve solicited feedback from your team, it’s time for you to make the final decision. Your perspective may have changed since you created your proposed solution, so take a couple of minutes to write it down. Then verbally share what your final call is. This is what the final decision should include. ​

Then say it plainly to eliminate any ambiguity: ‘We are launching the limited version to five design partners this quarter. Product owns the rollout. Engineering and customer success will define the support threshold by Friday.’ You may find that saying the final decision out loud feels uncomfortable because you know it may disappoint the side of your team that disagrees. That’s good, though. Delivering ‘bad’ news is a muscle all leaders need to exercise and build up.

6/ Commit

Once the decision is made, the team has three options. They should elect whether they agree and commit, meaning they agree with the decision that was made, and also commit to its execution.

As a second option, they could disagree and commit. So they still prefer another option, but accept that the decision was made through a legitimate process. They commit to supporting it publicly, executing earnestly, not lobbying or gossiping after, not slow-walking the work, and not reopening the decision without materially new information.

Finally, they could disagree and quit. They vehemently disagree with the decision, so much so that they would rather quit than carry out the execution. This is quite rare, but it does happen. In this case, the decision-maker can reevaluate whether they still want to move forward with it, knowing that someone on their team is so opposed that they would leave the company.

7/ Execute & only revisit with new information

When everyone agrees or disagrees and commits, they also pledge to carry out the execution of the decision ‘without complaints.’ The decision should not be reopened unless there is material change in the information or data used to make the original decision. ​

What ‘commitment’ means

Commitment does not mean the decision is permanent. It means the team will test the decision in reality instead of continuing to test it rhetorically—bias for action, commitment to iteration. It’s important to recognize that a good decision can produce a bad outcome, and a bad process can occasionally produce a good one.

The most damaging outcome is often not choosing the wrong path; it is allowing two paths to operate at once. For example, leadership decides to focus on enterprise customers. Half the company keeps optimizing for self-serve.

This is the shadow decision: the unofficial strategy pursued by the people who never actually committed. It consumes resources, confuses the company, and makes it impossible to evaluate the original call. The organization never truly executes the chosen strategy, but somehow develops strong opinions about why it failed. A decent decision carried out by one aligned team will often beat an exceptional decision executed by five competing factions.

Playbook

• Name one decision-maker who writes the issue and proposed solution: Each decision should have one person who makes the call. They present the decision to the team with 1) the Issue and 2) the Proposed Solution (IPS).

• Collect written dissent before debating live: Ask participants to review the issue and proposed solution, then write comments and raise risks from their perspective. Have everyone read, react to, and upvote the strongest feedback. The decision-maker summarizes the feedback so the team feels heard and understood.

• Write and announce the final call: After gathering feedback, the decision-maker makes the final call. Write down the decision, and then share it plainly and clearly with the team.

• Ask each participant to agree and commit, disagree and commit, or disagree and quit: If the team agrees and commits, or disagrees and commits, they carry out the decision without complaints. If someone disagrees and quits, the decision-maker can choose to revisit the decision with that additional information.

• Reopen only when material new information appears: Do not reopen the decision unless there is a material change in the information or data used to make the original decision. Execute in one direction.

Summary

Back to that startup meeting at the start of this article, product still wants to ship, engineering still wants another month, sales still has a customer expecting a feature that hasn’t launched. Each team sees a different risk, and each perspective deserves to be heard.

Some people would still have chosen differently, but their commitment is to give the chosen direction a fair chance… and bring back new evidence if it needs to change. That’s how a growing company keeps moving: people can challenge a decision and still help make it succeed.

Extra reading

• Why Every CEO Needs Someone To Report To - October, 2026

• The Four Types Of Managers & How To Manage Them - September, 2026

• How I Coach The Top 0.1% CEO's in Silicon Valley w/Alexis d'Amecourt - May, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Alexis on LinkedIn and also check out Mochary Coaching to learn more.

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