The Knowing-Doing Gap: The Most Expensive Problem in Startups

Here's a calculation nobody does. At €150K monthly burn, the gap between your stated strategy and what you actually decide on Monday morning costs €1.8M per year — not from bad strategy, but from correct strategy sitting in Notion while decisions get made from pattern and instinct instead. Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton documented this across large corporations back in 2000. What's different in founder-stage companies is that there's no organisational friction to slow anything down. No committee. No process. Just a founder with strong conviction, a fast-running clock, and a knowing-doing gap that nobody's measuring.