Jan 20, 2026
In a world where information is increasingly accessible, good judgement is not. With a well-phrased prompt, you can access explanations, frameworks, and opinions on almost anything in seconds. What remains difficult is knowing what to trust, what to act on, and how to respond when reality does not match expectations. That kind of judgement still has to be earned through experience, by doing real work, paying attention to outcomes, and noticing the small signals that accumulate over time into what we loosely call intuition.
You can accelerate this process by reading and reflecting, but there is no way to skip the work itself. Especially early in your career, judgement is formed by being close to the consequences of decisions. By making mistakes, revisiting what went wrong, and understanding why something that looked reasonable in theory failed in practice. This is uncomfortable work, and often slow, but it is also where learning compounds.
This matters more than we tend to admit in business, particularly in startups. We often celebrate rationality, decisiveness, and clean execution, imagining the ideal operator as someone who makes perfect choices based on clear data. In early-stage companies, that image rarely holds. These environments run as much on belief and conviction as they do on logic. People commit to ideas, teams, and products long before the data/evidence is there, and they do so because they trust the judgement of the people involved.
This is where sweating the small stuff becomes essential. When you are building or taking a product to market, you are not simply delivering a feature or solving a neatly defined problem. You are helping someone reduce uncertainty around a decision that actually matters to them. Even in highly automated systems, a person still has to trust what they see, adopt it into their workflow, and commit to using it. That trust is built through attention to detail and a genuine understanding of the context in which they operate.
Understanding who you are serving, and being clear about it, is one of the most valuable disciplines in an early-stage company. It requires looking beyond surface-level descriptors and spending time with how people actually work. How their teams function day to day, where decisions get stuck, who influences outcomes, and what they have already tried to do to solve the problem themselves. Often, people do not fully understand or articulate their own situation at first. Helping them clarify it is part of the work, and it requires patience and care.
Early-stage teams are almost always understaffed, and their first customers are usually working with something unfinished. The work is unpolished by nature. That is not a flaw in the process, but the environment where meaningful learning happens. Building alongside those users, staying close to their progress, and responding to the small frictions they encounter is how judgement is sharpened and direction becomes clearer over time.
This is what draws me to early stage companies. At Querio, we are focused on a problem that tends to appear after the databases are already set up and are relatively organised. The real difficulty emerges in everything that follows, as teams respond to increasing numbers & variations of questions, small changes in perspective, and repeated requests to look at the same data slightly differently. Each individual request feels minor, but together they create friction that slows teams down and fragments understanding.
Querio exists to reduce that friction. It gives data teams a shared place to analyse data, build context, and allow their organizations to safely self-service ad-hoc questions without constantly rewriting SQL for every little request and tweak needed. The aim is not just speed and transparency but continuity and trust in the answers. Over time, this helps teams feel more confident in their work and more effective in how they support the rest of the organisation.
At its core, this still comes back to the same idea. Sweating the small stuff is not about perfection or control. It is about respecting how work actually happens and staying close to the details that shape real decisions. Obsession with understanding, combined with care for the people you are building with, compounds into better judgement over time. Generic thinking and distance from reality do not.
