hardware prices are absolutely ridiculous. tariffs are painful. everything you need is made of rare materials. it is all unbearably expensive. are you the CEO? your job is to make absolutely insane decisions. you better be technical because there’s no other way but math to call the shots for the majority of your hardware decisions for the day (there’s also all the other decisions but let’s forget about those for a second) let me give you an example from my personal experience as a founder: (1/🧵)

e.g. today, I had to choose between silicon immersion lenses for our setup. this was a real choice I had to make, and it was fairly straightforward: which of the two lenses should i buy today? the pre-option: just wait around and don’t buy it today. <- trap #1. you have got to make a decision, now. unless you have a great reason, waiting to decide is a non-starter. you need to get used to acting, or your whole team is doomed. Option 1. $10,000 silicon oil lens, NA=1.3, 100x, WD=variable 0.12-0.2mm Option 2. $188 silicon immersion lens (ebay), NA=0.9, 60x, WD=0.3mm

What I would’ve done when I first became a CEO: get option 2, knowing it’s not ideal, and then after “playing around” convince self to actually spend 10 grand on an objective lens. It’s easy to think that option 2 is the better call. After over a year of experience with these kinds of highly nuanced decisions, I now know better it turns out option 2 is FAR more expensive for us.

There’s a risk it doesn’t work - returns are accepted, but the process of receiving and returning such an objective, and then ordering another one, would cost 1-2 weeks and 2-4 days of time on the microscope measuring cells. Not just this, but the working distance is long but not variable; depending on your setup, it might not even be worth $188 for you. Because you might have to spend $10k MORE later in a few weeks, when you realize there is no dollar and working distance is fixed You cannot call these shots without knowing the systems design of your WHOLE system You are the founder, there might be CTOs and engineers who might know better, but you still have to be a student of engineering and science and optics. you need to be able to decide or your team has nothing to do. your whole mission crumbles away, because you couldn’t decide in time

Every single part of your business, as it grows, has a risk of falling into its own little departments, or the opportunity to be even more cohesive together to make your mission coherent, be coherent as the CEO across all the people and fields involved know everything.