Company building is changing. People aren’t.
Deep dives on what actually works when building a team from 1 to 100 — drawn from the research and the operators who’ve lived it.
A library of management competencies
You know you need to “get better at hiring.” But what does that mean?
Domains
Clusters
Competencies
Management Craft is a work in progress. The Recruiting & hiring cluster is in progress (2/8 complete).
I break each hand-wavy domain, like “building the team,” into concrete clusters. Each specific competency is a thoroughly researched deep dive written to help you improve.
Each competency contains a rubric for excellence
Novice
Advanced beginner
Competent
Proficient
Expert
Each competency includes a rubric, based on The Dreyfus Model, with benchmarks at three intervals of mastery: novice, competent, and expert.
Tools that work, cited and sourced
Built for humans and agents
Your AI reads the tool, interviews you, and drafts the deliverable with you.
Handmade figures for each tool
Hand-crafted figures for each tool — shareable as a URL or PNG so your team develops a shared language.
Sort them through the Competency Stack, which separates the role-specific, level-specific, company-values, company-stage, and team-fit abilities. Competencies are not just how you pressure-test the outcomes. They are how you build the interview guide, because how can you really interview if you do not know what you are interviewing for? Once you know your outcomes and competencies, you know exactly what to test for, and you can design an interview loop that gets real signal on each one. If you want to see what a finished MOC looks like, Andreessen Horowitz published a sample one in their hiring-process walkthrough.
In-line context at your fingertips
Name a tool anywhere on the site and a note card surfaces what it is and what it gives you — context at the point of curiosity.
A library that runs from Aristotle to Stripe Press — 70+ sources and counting
I trace ideas to their source
The same idea with three names across thirty years. I trace every idea to its address in search of the most effective tools.
And synthesize convergence
Steven Johnson called this “the multiple,” when independent minds land on the same concept.
New competencies, tools, and sources — monthly, as they ship.
Made by one person
I’ve been an executive coach to 40+ founders and CEOs since 2020.
I’m obsessed with finding the recipes for what works as founders and executives scale from one to one hundred.
Management Craft is a labor of love and my canvas for sharing what I find and honing my craft both as a teacher, designer, and writer.
Previously, I founded Holloway and Mattermark. I wrote The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital. I’m active on Twitter and you can learn more about me here.
Why I made this
Too many organizations fail due to bad management
Watch companies grow from a couple people to a hundred and you’ll see the same story: they never invest in the tried-and-true management principles we already know work, and it kills them. It makes me sad every time.
A lot of management advice is bullshit
There’s a lot we don’t know about what works, and we should admit it (Jerry Neumann’s “We Have Learned Nothing” is right about more than the industry would like). There’s also plenty that gets gussied up to sound correct instead of to work.
But there are tools that actually work
Sit down with founders and executives privately and they’ll tell you: certain tools work. Skill vs. Will won’t predict whether your company makes it, but for diagnosing a performance problem in the moment, it’s terrific.
Operators and academics both offer wisdom
Most management advice leans too hard on operators or too hard on academics. I’m most interested in the places where both agree.
Learning about management should be fun
Most management publishing still wears a suit and a pocket protector. The way we work now has more humor and less ceremony in it, and learning the craft should too.
Small teams are the future
As AI augments teams, I’d bet on fewer thousand-person companies and a lot more 20-to-50-person teams. That happens to be exactly the stage where management is hardest to learn.
The world gets better when this is shared
When more companies, nonprofits, and teams organize effectively, more cool stuff gets built. Sharing what I learn is the most useful thing I can do with it.
And honestly, this is fun for me
I coach founders for a living and I hate watching them struggle. But I also just love this: the research, the learning, the design, the making. I hope the work eventually pays for itself so I can keep doing it, and yes, that means I hope some of you pay me one day.
Questions
- Who is this for?
- The primary audience is founders and leaders of startups scaling from 1 to 100.
- How is this different from management books?
- Most management advice leans all the way on operator war stories or all the way on academic studies. I'm mapping where they agree, keeping what I've seen work first-hand, and citing every source so you can check my work.
- Why not just ask ChatGPT or Claude?
- If you ask an agent, yes, even a frontier model, to answer a question about a management challenge you're having, you're going to get a confident but shallow answer. Believe me, I have tried. But if you point your agent at a page with citations to source material, you're going to get an educated answer. I've built every page on Management Craft with this in mind.
- How often is Management Craft updated?
- I expect to publish new competencies and tools monthly.
- How much does it cost?
- Management Craft is free for you and your agent, for now. That might change, though.
- Can my AI use this?
- Yes! Start by copying and pasting links to Management Craft articles wherever you work with AI. You can also try the Agent Mode on the MOC — your AI reads the tool, interviews you, and drafts the deliverable with you. Others are coming soon.