“If I were to try my hand at entrepreneurship again, what would be the keys to success?”

And if I were to advise the young founder that I was at the time of Lion-up? What would the more seasoned version of myself say to him? When my founder friends tried to warn me about paths to avoid, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the scars to understand them; without experience, their advice sounded like empty aphorisms, and I still made costly mistakes.

I still have a lot to learn, but the journey has already provided me with answers that I was desperately seeking before diving into entrepreneurship. I can’t simply package these insights into answers that can only be understood after failure. What I want to convey are reflexes, flashes of lucidity, keys to understanding: little beacons that lodge themselves in your memory, ready to flash when you reach a similar crossroads.

Hence the idea of a professional novel, in the style of The Goal or The Phoenix Project. A story where the method is told through characters, where we experience dead ends before discovering the clear path; a book that we turn the pages of as we complete iterations, where theory appears only in passing, always subordinate to the story.