The success of a founder really is the product of every decision they make over the life of their company. Every day you decide:
- What to work on
- How to improve the product
- How to reach more people
- How to get to product–market fit faster
If decisions are your primary input variable for success, the question becomes: how do you improve them? In my experience, there are two sources of decisions: intuition and thinking.
Building something from nothing requires intuition. Your gut feel on what to build is the spark that eventually turns into world-class companies. Founders need to learn to trust that gut feel and act on it with courage. Almost always you’re working with imperfect information, uncertainty, and ambiguity—and in that context, pure analysis often stalls you. Your evolutionary impulses—that is, your intuition—drive you forward.
But intuition alone won’t get you all the way. Thinking clearly is what transforms that spark into something real—and the only place clear thinking reliably happens is when you write.
- Writing shows you what you don’t yet understand.
- Writing forces you to inspect your own mind.
- Writing lets you iterate—draft, step back, rewrite again and again—until your thinking is clear.
Say you’re weighing which customer group to target next. In your head, your logic feels fine. But on the page, assumptions stick out. You rewrite, you tighten, and you emerge with a strategy you truly believe in.
Look at the world’s best founders and investors—Paul Graham, Patrick Collison, Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, David Heinemeier Hansson—they all write to think. To embed this in your team:
- Write before you meet. No meeting should start without a one-page write-up from each participant.
- Share asynchronously. Read and comment on your own time; meet only to decide.
- Iterate relentlessly. Rewrite until every point is crystal-clear.
Too many companies start strong, then slip back into on-the-spot meetings. “We’re busy,” they say—but busy isn’t an excuse. Writing saves you hours of unnecessary context and keeps everyone focused on real decisions.
Breakthrough ideas still come from intuition—those electric moments born in genuine connection. But they shine brightest on the foundation of clear, written thinking. You need both: trust your gut to point the way, then use writing to sharpen every decision into something you can act on.
At Acta, we commit to this every day: everyone writes before meetings, and no decision happens without a written draft. The result isn’t just faster meetings—it’s better decisions and a stronger company.
Intuition lights the path. Thinking—through writing—builds it. That’s how you turn good ideas into great companies. What will you be thinking (writing) about today?