Run the company like a founder
You're doing every job at once. Here's the kit for making the big calls, nailing the pitch, picking your tools, and building your first team — without dropping any of them.
By RECT · 4 templates
As a founder you make a dozen decisions before lunch — which market to chase, which investor to email back, which of two tools to standardize on, who to hire first. Most of them live nowhere: a Slack thread, a note on your phone, a gut call you'll only half-remember in three months when someone asks "wait, why did we do it this way?" The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough — it's that the thinking is scattered across ten apps and none of it compounds. This kit pulls the founder's core jobs into one place: make the call and keep the receipts, sharpen the pitch, choose your stack, and get your first hires up to speed. Less "I'll remember," more "here's exactly why we did it."
Make the big calls — and keep the receipts
Founders don't get to agonize forever; you decide with half the information and move. But the decisions worth documenting almost never are. A Decision Room is the antidote to the decision that lived and died in a Slack thread: lay out the options, collect input from your cofounder and early team, capture the dissent instead of steamrolling it, and publish a clear call with an owner and a date. Think of it as a Notion doc that actually knows what a decision is — so when the board, a new hire, or future-you asks "why did we go this way?", the reasoning is right there, evidence and all.
Get the pitch deck investor-ready
Your deck is going to sit in a VC's inbox next to fifty others, and a single "traction" typo or a slide that contradicts the one before it reads as sloppy — exactly the signal you can't afford to send. Before it goes out over DocSend, run it through a PowerPoint Proofreader: it checks spelling, grammar, terminology, and wording slide by slide, catches the numbers that don't line up, and tightens the story so every slide earns its place. It's the friend who's raised before quietly redlining your deck the night before — the kind of polish YC partners tell you to get, without having to find that friend.
Pick your stack without the rabbit hole
Every tool decision — CRM, payroll, the analytics thing everyone's tweeting about — can eat an afternoon of open tabs and G2 reviews, and you've got a company to run. A Purchase Comparison puts the real candidates side by side: weight what actually matters to you (price, how fast you can rip it out later, whether it scales past ten people), compare true cost instead of the sticker price, and pull the review signal into one view. You get to a confident "this one" in twenty minutes instead of bookmarking six tabs you'll never reopen.
Get your first hires productive fast
Your first employees join a company with no handbook, no process, and all the context locked in your head — so their first two weeks turn into a hundred interruptions asking where things are. An Onboarding Guide turns that mess into one personalized path per hire: what to read, who to meet, what to set up, what "done" looks like by day 30 — the structure a Rippling or a Notion wiki gives a 200-person company, except you can spin it up for hire number three tonight. They ramp themselves, and you get your focus back.