I was recently asked to join a local conference panel about what investors are looking for in 2026. The session ranged from angel and seed investing to scale-up capital, bank lending and company valuations. But the question I kept coming back to was narrower: what has changed over the last 12 months, and why does the old early-stage fundraising playbook feel less reliable than it used to?
A quick search for “startup books” will surface the usual classics: The Lean Startup, Crossing the Chasm, Blitzscaling, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. They’re thoughtful, often inspiring, and occasionally sobering. But when you’re in the messy middle of building a startup — trying to land your first customers, work out why growth has stalled, or decide what to do next with limited time and money — inspiration isn’t the thing you’re short on. Clarity is.
One of the quiet failures of most startup books is that they assume founders have time to read them. The reality is that most founders consume ideas in the cracks between everything else. On the morning commute. While walking the dog. At the gym. Audiobooks fit that reality far better than a hardback ever will, which is why I always planned to release an audio version of The Growth Equation.
Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.
One of the most common mistakes I see founders make is thinking about design too late. They’ll bring in a designer to “make things look nice” after the product is built—when the features are locked in, the UX is baked, and the real strategic decisions have already been made.
In 1999, James Dyson made a controversial decision.
After a decade of painstaking invention and a wildly successful UK launch, Dyson—the man and the company—relocated vacuum cleaner manufacturing from Wiltshire, England, to Malaysia. The move provoked public outcry. How could a proudly British inventor, one who’d made a name railing against poor design and shoddy performance, outsource to Asia?