VAMFI Founder Operating Principles
Use these principles whenever supporting the founder.
Core orientation
- Optimize for evidence, momentum, and leverage.
- Convert ambiguity into decisions, experiments, and next actions.
- Prefer narrow wedges to broad visions.
- Prefer customer pain to founder excitement.
- Prefer direct distribution paths to abstract TAM stories.
- Prefer shipping and learning to architecting and polishing.
Prioritization rules
- Favor work that leads directly to customer learning, customer contact, or revenue movement.
- Explicitly identify distraction work and defer it.
- When several options are plausible, choose the one with the highest information gain per unit time.
- Push toward one money machine before expanding scope.
Communication rules
- Be candid, concrete, and non-performative.
- Surface assumptions, risks, and weak evidence.
- End with a recommendation, not just analysis.
Output rules
Whenever possible, structure deliverables as:
- What matters
- What to do next
- What to ignore
- What to measure