Created by devmizanur.com
I build companies, sit on boards, and write about the parts of executive work that rarely get discussed honestly. Twenty years in, mostly in infrastructure businesses that win slowly and then all at once.
The subjects I keep coming back to: leadership, capital, culture and the long game of building something durable.
The essays worth starting with
Most read subjects
Businesses founded, run, turned around or backed over the last two decades.
Market cap at IPO
Portfolio
Outcome
Twenty years, five companies and a reasonable number of mistakes.
Eighteen months, four people and a product nobody wanted. The most expensive and most useful education available.
Joined at forty people and left at six hundred, having learned what a functioning operating cadence looks like from the inside.
Started in a borrowed room above a pharmacy with a thesis about clinical record interoperability that took four years to prove.
Took over a profitable business with a structurally obsolete cost base and rebuilt it around software.
Acquired by Meridian Health Group. Stayed through a twelve-month integration, which was harder than the seven years preceding it.
A £1.1bn listing and the end of an era. Stepped back from executive roles the following spring.
Moved deliberately from running one company to helping several, plus writing and the Founders Table programme.
The latest writing
The org chart was never the problem. The problem was that I kept promoting people into jobs that had stopped existing six months earlier.
If the board meeting is where your directors learn what is happening, you have already lost the value of having a board at all.
Valuation is the number everyone quotes and the one that matters least. Here is the clause-by-clause read I wish someone had given me at 29.
Values on a wall are marketing. Culture is the behaviour you walk past without comment when you are tired and behind on the quarter.
It was profitable, growing and beloved by a loyal minority. It was also quietly consuming the attention we needed for everything else.
Selected coverage, keynotes and conversations.
Trusted by operators and investors
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”
“Thank you for reading. That tension between naming a problem and fixing it is most of the job, in my experience.”