Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 12th February 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts, my weekly note on the future of work and living, and the decisions that quietly shape both. Before the main piece, a quick thank you.
If you tried Fursa in beta, you helped more than you know. The product has gotten meaningfully better, even if it does not scream “new” in a demo. It’s the kind of progress that feels invisible until it’s missing: fewer dead ends, fewer confusing results, fewer edge cases that make you doubt the whole thing.
We’re now past 150,000 unique jobs, and we’re on track to reach 500,000 by February end. Public launch is close. I’m holding it back for one reason: the remaining problems are not the easy kind.
They’re tradeoff problems.
Every fix forces a choice between accuracy, speed, and scale. Add more checks and you reduce errors, but the system slows. Optimize for speed and you ship faster, but you let more noise through. Push hard on scale and everything becomes more fragile. You can’t “solve” that triangle. You can only choose which corner gets priority today.
And once you see that clearly in a product, you start noticing it everywhere.
The part of leadership nobody says out loud
Early in your career, decision-making looks like getting to the right answer. You do the analysis, you make the case, you argue your way to the best option. That’s real work, but it’s also a simpler world.
As you move up, the job changes. It stops being “what’s correct” and becomes “what are we funding” aka “how to allocate resources”
Not just with money. With time, attention, energy, headcount, morale, trust, political capital, customer goodwill, and the one resource people pretend is infinite until it’s gone: focus.
This is why senior decisions often feel messy from the outside. It’s not always because leaders are vague. It’s because the hardest decisions are not missing information. They’re missing honesty about cost.
A tradeoff is a purchase. You don’t get to choose whether you pay. You only get to choose what you pay with.
You want faster execution. You pay with quality or with burnout. You want higher quality. You pay with time or with scope. You want a bigger system. You pay with simplicity and control.
There is no free lunch. The only question is whether you pay now, in a controlled way, or you push the bill into the future and act surprised when it arrives.
As leaders you have only 2 key jobs: obtaining and allocating resources (capital, talent, runway, energy).
Corporate tradeoffs are just budgets with better clothes
Most corporate dysfunction is not a lack of talent. It’s a refusal to pick a constraint.
Teams get told to be innovative and risk-free. Move fast and never break things. Be customer-obsessed and keep operations simple. Build for the long term while hitting this quarter’s number. Those pairs sound inspiring in an all-hands. In practice they create a slow-motion collision.
When leadership refuses to name the tradeoff, everyone pays anyway. They just pay in random currencies.
One team pays in late nights. Another team pays in churn. Someone pays in trust.
And eventually the company pays in culture, because nothing exhausts good people faster than being asked to achieve two conflicting goals and then being blamed for the contradiction.
The best leaders I’ve worked with do something almost boring, but it’s rare.
They make tradeoffs explicit.
They will say, clearly: “For the next two quarters we are choosing reliability over feature velocity” or “We are choosing growth over margin, and that means support will be stretched” or “We are choosing simplicity over customization, even if we lose a few big customers”,
People can disagree, but at least the world becomes legible. Work stops feeling like a guessing game.
This is also a life skill
Tradeoffs are not just a business thing. They are the adult version of truth.
A life is a budget too. Time, energy, relationships, health, ambition, curiosity, peace. You spend these every day, whether you track it or not.
Most people don’t struggle because they lack discipline. They struggle because they don’t admit the tradeoffs they’re already making. They want “everything” to stay possible. But you can’t have it all at once. Every serious yes comes with a no.
I’m living a small version of this with Fursa right now. People ask for features I want to ship too, like a clean toggle for IC (individual contributor) vs managerial roles. But I’m choosing reliability first. That means disappointing some requests today so the product earns trust tomorrow.
And the higher you go, the more your job becomes choosing what to disappoint on purpose, instead of disappointing everything by accident.
Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.