25 years building companies, and I still catch myself reading a good month as proof that everything's fine. The speaker in the video I've linked in the first comment would push back on that, and the point is theirs, not mine. Constant achievement and striving can mask deeper physiological and psychological imbalances, and surface-level metrics, the "everything looks normal" kind, will miss the real problem. In their words: "we want to understand what's happening upstream that causes those things to change." When everything looks normal on paper, the real question is what's happening upstream that's causing things to change. Startup founders, this one lands close to home. The next launch, the next milestone, the next win... the numbers say normal, so we keep going, and whatever is shifting underneath, in us or in the business, might not show up in the numbers until it's expensive. So the next time a good month tells me everything's fine, I want to ask what changed upstream first. The full conversation, and how the speaker thinks about looking upstream, is in the first comment. #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship