Why I left consulting to find out if any of it works
Advising is safer than building. That's the problem. A year in the founder seat has made me a better advisor — because I've been the founder who can't afford another meeting.
Around the end of 2024 I started asking a question that refused to go away. If I'm honest — I mean, really honest — would any of the advice I'd spent the last decade producing survive contact with my own skin in the game? Would I bet my cash runway on it? Would I still recommend the three-quarter roadmap to a founder whose seed money ran out in four months?
The answer I kept arriving at was 'mostly'. Which is a more troubling answer than 'yes' or 'no'. The parts that would survive were the parts closest to operating reality. The parts that wouldn't were the parts that assumed a luxury of time or budget that founders don't have.
What changes in the founder seat
Within a month of leaving, I noticed the calendar change. In consulting, a Tuesday morning with nothing on it feels like an opportunity — space to write, think, prepare. As a founder, the same Tuesday feels like evidence you're burning runway without progress. The asymmetry is real. Founders pay by the week, not the hour.
I also noticed how much of the advisory I'd produced assumed you could delay a decision. 'Let's run a structured experiment', 'let's revisit this in Q2', 'let's book a workshop with the team'. All reasonable in a consulting frame. All unaffordable when the next board meeting is in seventeen days and the previous one ended with a number you haven't hit.
Why this made me a better advisor
The best thing that happened to Marga Haus was that I stopped being able to afford my own frameworks. What's left after that filter is the set of things that actually move the business in two weeks. Not in a quarter. Not after a research phase. In two weeks.
MedClear is live. MVP Guru is live. Both have runway anxiety. Both have had weeks where nothing measurable moved and I had to decide — honestly — whether the thing I was working on was worth another week of cash.
When a pre-seed founder now asks me whether they should spend a sprint on X, I'm not reading it out of a playbook. I'm answering from last week.
Advice you've never had to live by is cheap. Advice you've had to live by is expensive to buy and cheap to take.
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