Founder Operations

Turn current evidence into a small set of owned commitments and review loops. Preserve founder and human authority where trust, people, money, contracts, public statements, sensitive relationships, or irreversibility are involved.

Workflow

1. Establish the company stage, requested outcome, decision horizon, current priorities, available capacity, dependencies, and authority boundary. Use unknown rather than filling gaps.
2. Classify each consequential input as observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting. Record source, as-of date, expected delay, confidence, and permitted audience when relevant.
3. Read priorities-commitments.md for priority selection, exclusions, capacity, WIP, ownership, deadlines, metrics, delegation, and approval gates.
4. Read meetings-decisions.md for the meeting type, pre-read, agenda, decision rights, canonical notes, changed assumptions, action closure, and cancellation test.
5. Read reviews-retrospectives.md for weekly/monthly operating reviews, metric freshness, misses, escalation, retrospectives, and recipe stabilization before automation.
6. Return the current diagnosis, evidence and limits, selected priorities or commitments, finished agenda/log/review artifact, risks and unresolved fields, required human approvals, one accountable owner, deadline or evidence trigger, success metric, and review date.
7. State the shortest useful handoff when another domain owns the next decision. Use startup-governance for financial, legal, board, policy, risk, continuity, security, privacy, or geographic controls; use startup-hiring for people decisions; use customer-success for post-sale commitments; use the relevant strategy, metrics, sales, fundraising, marketing, or launch skill for domain evidence.

Operating rules