以退为进：在最无聊的领域寻找最坚实的痛点
在创业初期，许多人追求的是快速行动与爆发性增长，但更健康的发展路径往往是慢即是快（Go slow before you can go fast）。这种策略的核心在于，必须先以极高的痛苦度为代价找齐拼图的每一枚碎片，从而为后续的指数级扩张奠定坚实基础。对于 Tabs 而言，这个过程意味着深耕财务与会计（Finance and Accounting）这一常被投资者视为“最枯燥”的领域。当时有早期投资人质疑为什么要去碰这么乏味的问题，但事实上，这一看似无趣的垂直行业蕴藏着巨大的商业机遇。在供应商管理和财务支付领域，Zip、Ramp 和 Coupa 等明星企业的迅速崛起并在极短时间内催生数十家独角兽，就是这一痛点极具市场价值的最佳佐证。
在正式启动任何代码编写之前，最关键的一步是深入理解问题的本质并培养极强的客户共情力。我们花了将近六个月的时间，与近千名财务专业人士深入沟通，去发掘他们日常工作中最深层的痛点究竟在哪里。这种从第一性原理出发的痛点解剖，而非急于交付某种软件解决方案的心态，成了 Tabs 得以立足的基石。在真正推进规模化扩张之前，创始人必须确保自己售卖并交付的是一个可规模化复制的核心楔子产品（Core product as a wedge），而不仅仅是定制化服务。虽然服务在企业发展的任何阶段都会长期存在，但只有具备强切入性的核心产品，才能真正突破效率瓶颈，在复杂的B端生态中快速破局。
Original English
In order to grow, sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There's a few things in place that if you can get the right pieces together, though very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster. Number one is just understanding the space you want to go after. For us, it was finance and accounting. Remember my first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you want to do that?" Part of it is because I faced that problem and I saw the success of other companies around vendor management in finance with companies like Zip and Ramp and Koopa. And so overnight we saw dozens of unicorns get formed. And I realized this is not that boring of a problem or that small of a business opportunity which allowed us to go after the revenue opportunity here at Tabs. And I think before you scale, you should really feel like you have a core product that is not just services. It's okay. You'll have services in perpetuity but have a core that you are selling and deploying as a wedge to every company. My name is Ali Hussein and I am the co-founder and CEO of Tabs. Tabs is building AI and agents for finance and accounting. The core problem we help our partners solve is helping make their complex revenue more simple at scale. One of the playbooks from Latch that was very important but also something I reflected on a lot before I started the next company Tabs was first in order to grow sometimes you have to go slow before you can go fast. There's a few things in place that if you can get the right pieces together, though very painful, it will make everything subsequently a lot faster. Number one is just understanding the problem statement and the space you want to go after. I've always been very first principles and how I think trying to understand root problems and empathy on what the core challenge is. And a lot of that resulted in how we started tabs which was not writing software and trying to solution right away. It was going back and spending almost 6 months talking to hundreds if not close to a thousand finance professionals understanding what was the root of where the most pain was today which ultimately ties to a lot of how I think and was the backbone of how we started tabs. I think one of the things often when people think are the most boring problems, there's the least investment already in it, but it's often the area that the most spend goes into. Remember my first investor said, "Oh, you're going after the most boring problem. Why would you want to do that?" Part of it is because I face that problem. And that ultimately drives you to want to build something much better. And I saw the success of other companies around vendor management in finance with companies like Zip and Ramp and Koopa, how advanced some of that other tooling had become and how generally left behind finance and accounting technology had become. And so overnight we saw dozens of unicorns get formed. And I realized this is not that boring of a problem or that small of a business opportunity which allowed us to go after the revenue opportunity here at Tabs.从0到1构建高匹配度的早期团队与组织阵地
除了精确切入细分市场，初创期对理想客户画像（Ideal Customer Profile: 适合企业现阶段产品且付费意愿强的核心客户群体）的反复修正，与产品开发本身同样重要。明确知道要把产品卖给谁以及为什么，不仅能帮助企业避免在不合适的客户身上虚耗精力，更能极大地缩短早期的销售决策链条。在这之后，寻找拥有互补技能包的核心团队，则是打破创业孤独感并实现组织提速的下一个关键支点。
对于最初的8到10名核心员工，首要的选人原则是思维与技能的多元化（Diversity of thought and skill set）。创始人如果是技术出身，就必须寻找在销售和运营方面极其敏锐的伙伴。为了最大程度激发团队潜能，早期团队应当避免招募行为方式与创始人如出一辙的“同质化”人才。此外，将这群关键成员物理聚集在纽约或旧金山等核心创投市场，尽管会面临更高的招聘成本，却对迅速凝聚共识、形成高效的协作 Trajectory 至关重要。在此基础上，企业可以通过提供三到六个月的 小组负责人（Pod Lead）职位作为缓冲期，让有潜力但缺乏管理经验的内部员工逐步上手管理工作，并在其证明自己后“押上全部身家”进行提拔，这比直接从外部空降管理层的成活率和对公司文化的契合度都要高得多。
Original English
The second that I would highly encourage people to think about beyond just starting to build is the pattern matching around who your initial customer profile will be. Understanding who you're actually selling to and why is just as important as the product you're building because you may realize that it's a really tough customer. There's only a very narrow set of people who are willing to buy. I put a lot of effort really trying to understand any founder I talk to how much ICP work they've done because that is one of the things that though we move move slow and made some mistakes it has allowed us to unlock the market in which we sell to much faster in the early stages. Just savor the moment. The early days are often some of the most fun and I think there's often this view that oh will I ever get there will the company ever get to a million in revenue. Will it scale to a certain level of brand presence where you're on the subway or finance folks know about you in every community? That moment if you do the right things comes a lot faster than you realize. And it's been incredible to be a part of this journey so quickly with some amazing human beings. I think if I could have looked back, I would have just savored that early moment because it's really special and a lot in your day-to-day changes when you become a large company where you have to further functionalize the organization, the governance, etc. So, savor the early moment. It's a lot of fun. I think it is really important whether it's just your co-founder or your founding team getting the right pieces of the puzzle together. One, building a startup is incredibly lonely. But also, what you don't realize is the number of people when you are early that you are compounding the velocity in which they can move if they're part of the very early journey is incredibly helpful. I think for the first 10 employees, you need to augment skill sets and diversity that you as the founder don't have. And so, it's incredibly important if you're technical to find someone who is very salesoriented or very operational. And so the number one litmus test is if I'm hiring my first 8 to 10 employees, they should certainly not look like me, behave like me, and diversity of thought and skill set is incredibly important. And I think those mixtures together can pull together a really good founding team. The last thing I mean, I've from the beginning been very vocal about this is place and space you built together is going to set the trajectory of the company. Though it may be easy to hire people remote or in different cities or in different markets, getting that initial 10 people together, whether that be in New York or an SF, is incredibly important. And I cannot encourage that enough when you start a company. And one of the ways you can really understand if someone will make a good manager, even if they haven't managed people at the company, is we'll bet on people and we may not give them 100% managerial responsibility out of the gate, but we'll make them pod leads. We'll let them get set up for success in that environment. And if they can crush it in some part, whether it's a 3-month period or six period, we'll bet the farm behind them. To me, I will always bet on someone internal to take roles in leadership than always necessarily to have to go outside and hire that people internally understand the product the best, the culture, the processes. And so the types of people I think can succeed at a successful startup environment obviously baseline come in with incredible work ethic have the acumen to evolve and continue to uplevel their skill set whether they have it from the day they start or as they go through the evolutionary journey.从一线执行到战术授权的CEO角色蜕变
伴随着团队规模跨越30到50人的临界点（甚至到目前的150人以上），CEO的工作核心必须经历根本性的重塑。在初创的前几周甚至前几个月，CEO不得不承担全能战士的角色，销售、客服工单、客户成功、运营乃至市场推广全线压上。然而，当组织进入专业化分工的成熟阶段，CEO的主要职责将蜕变为确立方向并保持决策的连贯性（Decisive and consistent in setting direction），避免因频繁推翻战略或陷入决策疲劳而使团队无所适从。
在这一成长阶段，优秀的领袖需要学会主动让步。通过雇佣在垂直领域远比自己聪明的专家，CEO应当逐步在具体业务上变得“多余”。对于管理，我们需要推行极其清晰的极简指标体系：
- 核心指标聚焦：每个团队聚焦 2 至 3 个不可妥协的核心指标，并确保明确的达成路径。
- 高频共识对齐：CEO 需进行月度或季度的点对点沟通，纯粹从宏观上校验工作重心是否符合公司最大利益，而非插手具体的预算分配或功能细节。
- 放弃长期规划幻觉：在技术迭代极快、产品市场契合度（Product-Market Fit）仍在不断演进的阶段，试图制定长达一年的详尽路线图往往是自缚手脚。拥抱中长期的不确定性，将精力聚焦在当下为客户带来最直接价值的战役中，才是更聪明的防御性策略。
而对于那些渴望从普通员工（IC）走向管理岗位的骨干成员，最具决定性的特质是自我驱动的主动思考能力。我们希望看到的是带着深思熟虑的方案来找管理层讨论的人，即使他们的看法最终被证明是错的，这种强烈的思考Conviction也能帮助企业发现新的盲区，从而在2-5年的长周期里深度参与甚至决定公司的战略走向。
Original English
The two things that further define the leaders from the ones that succeed that don't one is just belief and optimism. I think if you want to grow and go from being an IC to one day running a ops function or a sales function is you just have to have both belief in yourself but also belief in the company. That's incredibly contagious. And then the last thing is some type of perspective that is strategic that could change the course of the entire company. I think if you come in and you believe that the CEO or the founders have all the answers and you just sit waiting to be told what success looks like, it's incredibly hard to shine. But if you come in with strong perspectives and you bring that to me or someone else in leadership and you say look I believe if we change this about our implementation approach or this way in how we think about the product in the market even if you're wrong that conviction that amplifies is incredibly powerful and those types of thinkers to me are incredibly priceless. They're what going to drive the direction of the company over the next 2 to 5 years. And I will always look to keep them here as long as possible and ideally in a place of leadership or deeper strategic thinking within the business. When you're being a CEO is you get to go very wide and look at a bunch of different parts of the business. In the early days, you're doing all of it. you're selling, but you're also handling customer support tickets, success, operations, even marketing. You in some ways have your hands tied to all of them. There becomes a phase later where you're still deeply involved in some of those functions, but you start to hire or work with people who are specialized in their domain. In the later phase, the role just changes a little bit. And particularly in some ways, when you hire amazing people, you almost shrink your role and you go back full cycle. And that's not a bad thing. If you're able to bring on amazing people, you tend to almost become redundant over the phases of the business. The reality of in the early days trying to build and translate knowledge is a very hard thing in a startup because everyone is running around reactively and the ability to document everything and have the perfect kind of onboarding and enablement is just really hard. Even us today at 150 plus people are we perfect at it absolutely not. And it's one of the hardest muscles to build is I believe a lot in direct mentorship and teaching while showing. And so one of the things I've always been comfortable with is hiring just really good people. Sometimes they may not have the perfect domain knowledge, but in the early days making sure that they're getting that toutelage via me or my founding team and knowing that if they can just run that muscle through learning through us, they can then become the right way to cascade that. And so some of our best mentors and teachers at the company, they learn through me or learn through one of my co-founders. And via that they've been able to cascade that domain knowledge and they're the best trainers and stewards of enablement within the company. From an operating principle standpoint, I'm very data driven. Like each team has KPIs that are very important. Every team there are two or three metrics that are must focus and must have a path to. I also think as companies grow, they have more risk that they are getting distracted by way too many things. And so it's really important for me to lay down where I need each of my teams to be hyper prioritized. And so one of the things I often do, if not monthly, certainly quarterly, is I talk to each of my reports and I just do a sense check of where they're spending their time and ensuring that aligns with what I believe is the most impact they can drive for the company. What I spend less of my time is on the the what and the how, meaning like the strategy to get there. If we need to hit a certain metric, I am not in the weeds trying to figure out exactly where marketing spends their dollars to get to pipeline or which are the specific features in payments or billing that my product team is working on. I defer to that to people who are smarter on it, more on the ground and have the domain knowledge that I just don't have in every part of the business. You just got to work with people who are far more intelligent and have the knowledge to execute on that strategy. On the other hand, when it comes to strategy or setting direction, the leader must be decisive and consistent. They can't reinvent the wheel every couple weeks. They can't be stalled by decision fatigue. They must drive then mandates and then rally the org behind that. I think for me you often when you scale you want to get more long-term planning and there often becomes this belief that I hey I have scaled I need to be thinking 12 months out and I think for a fast growing company that's just really hard at the end of the day your road map in what you build has to be a culmination of what is the highest impact for your customers, where you are finding product market fit, but also where the technology is moving. And I think thinking long-term can often be a great disadvantage strategically and competitively. And I've become a lot more comfortable with embracing the uncertainty in the longer term while making sure all my calories go into being incredibly flexible and focused on driving the most impact for our customers in the short term.AI 技术平权与高压力环境下的系统韧性
对于在实际业务中经历过生死时刻的创业者来说，系统运作的高韧性是必不可少的肌肉记忆。我至今对在 Latch 经历的一场危机记忆犹新：在某个晚上11点，一个拥有500名住户的高端核心住宅楼，其智能锁系统突然大面积瘫痪，大量居民被锁在门外，物业管理人的夺命连环 call 让整个团队承受了极高的压力。但恰恰是这种置身于“必须绝对运转”（Mission-critical）的非娱乐性关键工作流（Non nice-to-haves）中的高压淬炼，迫使企业建立起对服务可靠性与危机响应的敬畏。
在当今的技术浪潮下，AI的民主化（Democratization of AI tools）正在彻底改变公司的运作方式。以前各部门需要排队等候研发团队（Engineering）排期开发的功能，现在通过诸如 Claude 等大模型，非技术人员也拥有了直接上手开发自动化工具的能力。在 Tabs，我们的售后团队（Post-sales）、市场和客服部门，都在积极利用无代码/低代码 AI 工具，连接内部产品数据库，自行开发工具来提升工作效率，甚至直接为商户创造价值。这种变化使得非技术职能部门摆脱了传统技能局限的束缚。
因此，在这个AI平权的时代，创始人最核心的思考必须升级为：在AI能够极其轻易地克隆绝大多数软件资产的背景下，什么是你业务中无法被替代的、防守性最强的护城河？ 答案在于直面最艰难的底层现实（Go touch the metal, go build hard things）。不避重就轻，以极强的信念去解决最复杂的现实世界痛点，唯有此，初创企业才能建立起真正坚不可摧的商业壁垒。