Data leadership for startups — without building the Death Star.

Two failure modes I see repeatedly in startups. The first: you hire engineers without anyone setting the strategy, and six months later you have beautiful infrastructure that answers none of the questions the business actually has. The second: everything runs through analysts — manual refreshes, spreadsheets, tables nobody designed properly — and what looks like "we have data people" is actually a system that gets more fragile every month, not less.

Both happen because someone technical got hired before someone strategic did.