We're Building an AI-Era Company. The Decisions That Matter Most Are About People.

In every job I had before Gondola, I inherited the people. The team was already there. The values were already there. The way decisions got made, the unspoken rules about which customers we prioritised, the things people would and would not say in the difficult moments - all of it was set before I walked in.

That is not a complaint. Inherited teams are how most work in the world gets done, and I learned an enormous amount from people I worked alongside. But there is a particular thing that only happens when you start a company from nothing, and it took me a while to recognise it.

You get to choose. Every single person in the room is there because you, or somebody you trust, said yes. The values are not inherited; they are instilled, decision by decision, often slowly and sometimes painfully. The team that walks in each morning is not somebody else's team. It is the team you built. And what you build, for better or worse, is a reflection of you.

That sounds romantic on a slide. The work of doing it is anything but. But the choosing - of staff, of partners, of customers, of investors - is, in my view, the most quietly important privilege of being a founder.

It is also a privilege I have been thinking about more, not less, in the noise of 2026. Every founder conversation right now comes back to AI within ninety seconds. Every investor question is about defensibility against models. Every customer demo includes the word "agent" at least twice. The implicit pitch underneath all of that is that smaller teams are now possible - and that is true. But I think the conclusion most people draw from it is wrong.

Every employee can now go further than they could a year ago. One engineer ships what a small team used to. One operator runs workflows that used to need a department. The efficiency is real, and it cuts in two directions. Yes, it means smaller teams, leaner companies, more leverage per head. It also means each person on the team is now a much larger slice of the company. Their judgement carries more weight. Their ideas form a larger share of the idea set. Their lived experience represents a bigger slice of the audience you are trying to understand. A team of ten with AI is not the same as a team of fifty without it. But the room of voices forming the company is smaller, and every voice in it counts for more.

There is a sharper version of the same point when you build with agents in the loop. Agents need humans to tell them what good looks like. They need someone to write the validation rules, define the edge cases, decide what to escalate, decide what to never do under any circumstances. The output of an agentic system is, in the end, a reflection of the people pointing it. A team of well-chosen people with a clear mission can ship like a much larger company. A team of less-well-chosen people can propagate their blind spots at exactly the same speed. Hiring well was always important. In an agentic era, it is the rate-limiter on everything else.

The team you choose, and the team that chooses you

The part of starting a company that snuck up on me is how much of it is simply the people in the room. Not in a "culture is everything" sort of way. More literally than that. The values the company will eventually have, the decisions it will make under pressure, the way the team responds when something is breaking - all of it is downstream of a handful of early choices about who to say yes to.

Every hire is, in effect, a vote on what kind of company you are willing to become.

The thing that matters alongside the choosing is the north star. Smart people do not need step-by-step instructions. They need a destination clear enough that they can plan their own path toward it. The founder's job, more than any other, is to keep that north star pointed at the same thing every morning, and then to trust the people you have chosen to get there their own way.

The most quietly satisfying thing about getting that right is watching the shared mission take shape in the small choices. People wear the company merch without us ever asking them to. People decide to work on a weekend because they understand what a particular deadline actually means. Not because the date itself matters, but because they know the chain behind it. One deadline unlocks something real for a customer. That customer feeds a growth narrative we take to investors. That narrative helps us raise on better terms. Better terms let us do more of the next right thing for the next customer. None of that sits in any job description. It only happens when the north star is shared, and the people you have chosen actually care about where it points.

There is another version of the same thing that has nothing to do with deadlines. The moments where people feel safe enough to talk openly about themselves - their families, their health, the things they are wrestling with outside of work. People asking for help without dressing it up. That kind of openness does not arrive on day one. It is the sign that real bonds have formed, and that the team has become somewhere people can be themselves rather than a version of themselves. That, on its own, feels inherently good - and it is also one of the clearest signals that the choices about who to bring in were the right ones.

And we want this to compound.

The other thing nobody quite prepares you for is how much the early team compounds. The first few hires do not just build the product. They land your first customers. Those customers feed back to the roadmap, which shapes what you build next, which shapes who you need to hire to build it. The first ring of people you bring in is, in a quiet way, choosing every person and every customer who will come after them. Get the first ring right and the next ten years get easier.

The story of our first ring is a series of choices that were not obvious at the time. Before we had a team, we pitched Gondola to Paloma and were lucky enough to be one of two ventures selected from around 500 applicants for their venture arm. We took the place for the technical resources, but mostly for a values alignment that the early conversations had already made obvious. That decision is the reason the Gondola team today is what it is. Paloma allocated people to the build who reflected the values we had picked Paloma for in the first place. When the time came to formalise the team, it made sense for them to come aboard with Gondola directly.

Every one of those people I would build the next company with, too. That is not luck. It is the downstream effect of a single, earlier choice about who to start with.

The way we treat that founding team has to match the choice we made to bring them in. We try to include them in everything. They come to industry events with us - IFCBAA, customer visits and dinners - to soak up the atmosphere and meet the operators we are building for. We share company data with the team without limitation, with the obvious carve-outs around individual employment matters. Investor updates and financials sit in shared folders for the whole team. The goal is a team of owners - people who can make the same decisions on the same information that anyone else around the company has.

We are nearing the end of the start now. The platform is live. The first customers are paying. The next twelve months are about deliberately growing the team - and the bar, if anything, has to go up, not down. Each new hire is now joining a culture that has already taken shape. The cost of getting it wrong is no longer one person; it is everything they then influence around them.

The privilege is the choosing. In a job, you mostly do not get to pick your colleagues. As a founder, every single person in the room is someone you said yes to.

The customers you sell to, and what that quietly does to the company

The same is true of customers, in a way that took me longer to internalise.

In the early days, the temptation is to take any customer who will pay. That is a perfectly defensible founder strategy, and I do not begrudge anyone who runs it. Over time, I have come to think it is simply higher leverage to be a bit more intentional than it looks.

The customers you take on shape you. They shape your roadmap, because their requests become your sprints. They shape your tone, because the conversations you have with them become the conversations you assume customers want to have. They shape your team, because the people you hire have to be the ones who can do good work with these customers on the days when something is breaking.

We have been deliberately careful about which customers we sign. Not because we are precious - we very much want to grow - but because we have learned that an early customer whose needs pull you off-course can cost more in focus than they repay in revenue. We have passed on a few conversations where the work would have been real, but the alignment would not. I do not regret those calls.

The case for choosing well also runs in the other direction. The customers who align with you tend to share networks with other people who would also align. A well-chosen early customer is not just a contract - it is the start of a referral chain that runs through their peers, their suppliers, and the operators they sit next to at industry events. Referrals from inside that kind of network convert at a rate nothing else in the pipeline comes close to. If you choose early customers who are a clean fit, you end up inside the circles you actually want to be in. And those circles tend to introduce you to more of the same.

The privilege is, again, the choosing. You almost never feel it on the day. You feel it eighteen months later.

The people who back you, in money and in trust

The same logic, only more so, applies to the people who back you - in capital and in commitment.

The wrong investor on your cap table is harder to remove than the wrong hire. The wrong partner on your build is harder to untangle than the wrong customer. These are long-dated, often irreversible decisions made under pressure, with incomplete information.

We have navigated the early stage of that well, and I am genuinely delighted by what our cap table looks like today. Serious investors who chose to back us, and who help us in ways that go well beyond the capital they put in - opening their networks, making introductions we would not otherwise have reached. We chose them, and they chose us, on the basis of trust and values, not just terms.

We have been lucky here, but the luck has had a structure. We built Gondola hand-in-glove with Paloma rather than recruit a CTO and an engineering team in isolation. We chose investors who were either deep in logistics or deep in B2B SaaS, not generalist tourists in our space. We kept the cap table tight enough that every conversation around the table is one we actually want to have.

A few people I respect did not respond to investment outreach earlier this year. I felt the sting at the time. With the wrap-around our final group has given us since, I am quietly relieved. There is a version of this story with a more famous logo on the cap table and worse-shaped Saturday mornings. We have the better version.

The next raises will be larger and the stakes higher. The rule does not change. We are not chasing cash from anywhere. We are looking for the next group of investors who can help us realise and grow the ambition we have already set - people who share the values, who open the doors, and who we will be proud to have around the table in five years. The foundation is in place. The job now is to keep choosing well.

Close

Most of what I would tell a new founder about building in the AI era, if they asked, is actually not about AI at all. It remains about people. The ones you build with. The ones you build for. The ones who back you.

If anything, AI has not made those decisions less important. It has quietly made them weightier. Smaller teams do more, but each person in the room is forming a larger share of the company - the culture, the ideas, the audiences represented, the lived experiences shaping every product call. The platform we are building is genuinely AI-native and I am very proud of it. The thing that will decide whether it lasts is not the platform. It is the people who choose to build it, and to keep building it, with us. Here's to choosing well.