Fabian Thorpe

The Notebook

Field notes on building the operating layer for founder-led businesses.

Essays

  1. The founder is not the operating layer

    Most founders at one to ten million pounds revenue are not the bottleneck. The absence of a system is.

Subscribe

One essay every two or three weeks. No cross-posts, no roundups, no announcements. Just the field notes.

What’s coming

  • The thirty-day install: what actually happens in week one
  • The four roles a £5m business is debating, and the layer underneath all of them
  • Five minutes a day, or it won’t survive contact with Monday
  • What we’re learning building Signal