Renato Valdés-Olmos

• Opinion is the moat

  Taste selects the work. An opinion decides what you will stand behind when it starts costing something.

  Craft1 September 2026~7 min

• The Head of Design is not the head of design

  Design authority sits with whoever ranks highest and cares most, which is rarely the person with the title. What the job actually asks of a head of design, why AI has made encoding that care the whole role, and what should survive you.

  Operating25 August 2026~10 min

• The archetype is a description of comfort

  A sourcing guide built around an admired profile teaches a hiring team to select for comfortable working conditions rather than ability. What long tenure really measures, and how to write a hiring profile that does not quietly narrow who you consider.

  Hiring18 August 2026~4 min

• The unit of work changed first

  A small senior team now ships what used to take a department, and the usual explanations miss why. What the change asks of leaders, how to shape teams for it, and why the advice I give founders has flipped.

  AI11 August 2026~5 min

• When the growth stops

  What a hiring freeze removes from an organization, which work disappears first, and why scope becomes the only thing you can still give people. What you owe the ones who stay, through the freeze and the flat year after it.

  Operating28 July 2026~7 min

• The function is subordinate to the business

  Leaders fail by believing the function they run is the point. Why accepting that design, product and engineering exist to move the business is what earns you headcount and a seat, a test for where the line sits, and where taking it too far goes wrong.

  Operating21 July 2026~8 min

• What a performance review is actually for

  A performance review does three jobs: development, ranking and money. Why running them through one document ruins all three, what actually happens in calibration, and the one rule that makes a cycle fair to the people inside it.

  Operating14 July 2026~7 min

• The mandate inverts

  What to do when the job you were hired for stops existing and you are still there. How a constrained year arrives, why ambiguity hurts a team more than the constraint does, what a hard year is good for, and what you owe the people whose plans changed.

  Operating7 July 2026~5 min

• Events nobody trained you for

  How to lead a team through a pandemic, a war or a market that closes, when nothing in your training applies. Why the instinct to produce a plan is wrong, how care shows up as logistics, what you will get wrong on tone, and where the line is.

  Operating30 June 2026~6 min

• The 1:1 is not a status meeting

  How to run a 1:1 that is worth thirty minutes of someone's week: whose slot it is, what you are actually watching for, how often to hold it, and what to write down. Also what the meeting cannot carry, and the failure most managers repeat.

  Operating23 June 2026~6 min

• Against the take-home assignment

  The take-home assignment measures spare time, not ability. What to run instead: a working session in the room on real projects. What a portfolio no longer tells you, and what the replacement costs the interviewer.

  Hiring9 June 2026~7 min

• What reference calls taught me about hiring

  How to make reference calls the most informative half hour in a hiring process. Four questions that get real answers, the patterns the calls keep revealing, the obligation that makes them work, and who the method disadvantages.

  Hiring2 June 2026~7 min

• Operating, then allocating

  What a history of running companies lets an investor see in a pitch, and three ways it makes them worse at the job. How a founder should weigh an operator investor's advice, and where their help is actually worth taking.

  Venture26 May 2026~7 min

• Design is founder work

  Most of what a product will feel like is decided in the first eighteen months, by founders, before anyone with a design title arrives. Which decisions those are, why the first design hire rarely undoes them, and what a founder should decide on purpose and write down.

  Founders19 May 2026~6 min

• Meet them where they are

  How to mentor someone so it lasts past the third calendar invite. Ask what they are up against, teach them to ask better questions and to advocate for themselves, show a path rather than a destination, and know the three reasons it decays anyway.

  Operating5 May 2026~7 min

• Options are how a room avoids deciding

  A room full of options is a room avoiding a decision, from the project that unified Lyft's transport modes. How cutting twenty people to seven produced the decision, and how to staff the work that matters at founding-team density.

  Operating14 April 2026~4 min

• A good place to start

  Raising early money in the Netherlands, twelve years after a rude first take. What held up, what did not, the things that quietly decide a founder's next decade (options, box 3, the entity), and how much to discount advice like this.

  Venture1 April 2026~10 min

• Joy, comfort, grace

  Building for home-care workers at Honor: the person we designed for, why designing down to an audience fails, and the landline decision that taught me where familiar interfaces stop working. What carried over to everything since.

  Craft24 February 2026~7 min

• The number next to it

  Why leadership records read as lists of scope and say nothing about results, and how to rewrite yours so the commercial outcome comes first. Three kinds of work and what to write down for each, and how a hiring manager reads it from the other side.

  Operating20 February 2026~7 min

© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos