I turn Startups > Scaleups. PMF and PLG. I write about it at growth-goals.com ✉️ - check it out

👋 I'm Andrew. I love fast-growing Startups. Ex-founder, small-time investor, and I write about Growth/PMF/OKRs.  

I've built high-growth companies in London and Silicon Valley. Over the years, I've sat on all sides of the table as a founder, investor, operator, and advisor. Currently, I have an AI and web3 bias, but I have been everywhere. 

During this journey, I created the Growth/OKR process Core & Explore™, which is now used by thousands of Startups and some large companies. 

Previously, I graduated 500 Startups; was an EIR at Seedcamp; led product and growth at my own Startup; mentored and advised VC funds; and helped behind the scenes at the founder community ICE.

Andrew Crump

I help execs and founders build and keep team momentum through 1-on-1 and team coaching, workshops, and leadership or full company offsites.

Expertise in:
➝ C-suite coaching
➝ Exec team coaching
➝ OKRs and goal setting
➝ Feedback training
➝ Manager training
➝ Integrating values
➝ The science of happiness workshop
➝ ACC accredited

I am an entrepreneur, exited CEO of Pollen8 (acquired by PwC), workshop facilitator, and executive and team coach. I ran Pollen8 as CEO for 5 years before selling the company to PwC. I have designed innovation programs and run workshops for the C-suite of some of the world's biggest corporations (Oracle, Vodafone, Grant Thornton, the Red Cross) and have worked with more than 100 founders and 60 management teams. I'm passionate about surfing and climate change, so we can leave this world better for future generations.

Testimonials:
•⁠  ⁠Tamara Lohan, Mr & Mrs Smith CEO:
"Sam brought absolutely what our team needed to our offsite: empathy, insight and the tools to get us all working better together. It makes such a difference being coached by someone who has been in business themselves. Highly recommended!"

• Joachim Horn, SamLabs CEO (Series A):
"The ROI has been huge. Since June - something very special entered SAM Labs. Sam Knight started coaching our leadership team."

• Saasha, OLIO COO (Series B), on the company retreat: 
"Honestly it was brilliant, we’ll work with Sam & Maya again, and if it sounds too good to be true - well, it’s not!"

• Tessa, OLIO CEO (Series B): 
MASSIVE MASSIVE congrats to the organizing team for pulling off a one in a million event that will be remembered forever. Perfection from start to finish. You ROCK :)”

• Product Lead at Contact (Series A): 
"Working with Sam has been absolutely brilliant... helping transform not only our leadership team, but the whole company."

• Jonny Day, Learnerbly COO (Series A): 
"Honestly has changed my life and perspective. The impact it has had on the leadership team has huge." 

• Frederick Martini, Tailify CMO (Series A): 
"Sam has had a huge impact on the founders, the leadership team, the company and my own mindset."

• Michael Pallett, Medispot (Series A):
"Sam is a phenomenal coach.  Sam has changed my life and I'm confident that he will continue to do so."

• Claudia, Tailify Head of People (Series A):
"Sam has had a positive impact on every single one at Tailify. Yes, all 80 of us! The feedback training and workshops have been incredible."

• Segerby, Tailify Co-founder: 
"I cannot overstate the impact Sam has had on our organisation and leadership team."

Samuel Knight

How do you get the most powerful information from other people?

Two steps:

1️⃣ Use statements instead of questions.
2️⃣ Express disbelief.

Chase Hughes explains this brilliantly.

He gives this example:

You hop into an Uber and say, “I recently read that Uber drivers have the highest job satisfaction in the world.”

The driver responds and says something like, “What? Where did you see this?,” proceeding to tell you how badly they treat staff.

You follow with disbelief, “No way. There’s no way that company would treat you like that…”

Now you’ve got them talking. 

And you’ve got them talking in friend mode, without asking them any questions yet.

They’ll tell you everything, what they love, what’s broken, what they wish someone at HQ actually understood.

You didn’t ask a single question, you just created space for the other person to be honest.

This is the bit most people miss.

In business, we talk a lot about empathy and active listening, which is great.

But high performers go straight into it, they make statements instead of asking polite questions. 

They make people tell you a real answer instead of the ‘right answer’.

The same applies to your team. If you want to know how things are actually going, make a statement instead of asking questions.

Try saying, “Sounds like everyone’s happy with how this project’s going.”

If it’s not true, someone will jump in to correct you, and now you’ve got an honest conversation instead of a performance review.

➡️ Next time you’re in a 1:1, throw out one confident statement you’re not entirely sure about.
➡️ Then shut up.
➡️  Watch how quickly people fill the silence with the truth.

High performers use tension and honesty to push forward, instead of avoiding it.

What’s one conversation where someone surprised you by opening up more than you expected?

♻️ Share if you’d rather have honest conversations than polite ones.
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for grounded takes on leadership, people, and culture.

Exec Team Coach | High-Performing Teams | Leadership & full company Offsites | Management, OKRs & Strategic Alignment Expert | Exited Founder (Pollen8 → PwC)

Do you love all versions of yourself?

Or do you look back with regret? 

This poem got me.

It’s about sitting at a table with every age you’ve ever been.

The confident one, the awkward one, the one who tried to hard, the one who didn’t try enough.

Reflecting back on the different versions of yourself, and loving all of them.

How often do we look back and reflect?

How much have you changed from last year? And from ten years ago? 

Most leaders never really think about this.

But those versions show up whether you invite them or not.

That history shapes how you lead far more than any framework does.

➝ It affects whether you avoid hard conversations.
➝ Whether you rush decisions to prove competence.
➝ Whether you overwork because rest feels like risk.
➝ Whether you hold onto control because trust feels unsafe.

This is why two leaders can face the same situation and respond completely differently.

It isn’t because one reads better books.

It’s because one understands their own patterns.

A lot of times, we ignore this part of our development entirely.

The past versions of ourselves give us frameworks, models and processes.

But if an old pattern is running underneath, the framework won't hold under pressure.

The ten-year-old version of you will take the wheel before you even notice.

Here’s a simple exercise I often give leaders before a big decision or conversation:

Take one minute and ask:

• What am I feeling right now, beneath the surface?
• When have I felt this before in my life or career?
• Is this reaction coming from the present, or from an older version of me?
• What would the most grounded version of me do next?

That last question is where clarity usually appears.

Being a good leader is about recognising who’s already at the table, and choosing who gets the final say.

When the pressure hits, do you tend to lead from experience or from old patterns?

♻️ Share this poem with your network.
➕ Follow for grounded leadership ideas that actually change how you show up.

Video credit: Josuaspoetry on Instagram

You’re solving problems that shouldn’t exist.

Most teams optimise what’s already there. 

Elon Musk questions whether it should exist at all. 

That’s the difference between incremental and transformational.

Say what you want about him, but this framework is worth borrowing.

His 5-step framework for solving problems:

1. Make the requirements less dumb
Question the requirement before solving the problem.

Most teams accept constraints as fixed.

Great operators ask: Does this need to exist at all?

If not, you just saved months.

2. Delete the part or process
Remove everything possible.

The rule: If you're not forced to add back 10% of what you delete, you didn't delete enough.

Delete until something breaks. Then add back only what's essential.

3. Simplify and optimise
Only optimise what survives deletion.

Otherwise, you’re just making bad systems more efficient.

Simplify first, then optimise.

4. Accelerate cycle time
Once simplified, move faster. But not before steps 1-3.

Speed on the wrong thing just gets you to failure faster.

5. Automate
Automation comes last.

Why? Automating a bad process makes it permanent.

First make it necessary, then simple, then fast.

The most important thing with this framework is:

➝ First solve the problem that unlocks everything else. 

➝ Then optimise everything around that one constraint.

Instead of thinking about how other people solve the problem, start thinking:

What are you actually trying to solve/achieve, and what’s the simplest path to get there?

Average leaders copy solutions.

High-performing leaders question whether the solution should exist.

Before solving the problem, ask:

Should this problem exist at all?

♻️ Repost if you’ve ever realised the real win was deleting the problem, not solving it.
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for practical frameworks that help you think more clearly, move faster, and build smarter.

Who believed in you when you had no proof?

That’s the power of a coach.

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, wrote Tony Robbins a powerful letter.

Thanking the coach who changed his life.

It’s a powerful moment, and a reminder of the power of coaching. 

These relationships are eternal. 

Most people misunderstand what a coach is for.

They think coaching is about getting answers.

It's not.

It’s about being seen clearly enough that you can finally see yourself.

Here's what a great coach actually does:

➝ They ask the question you're avoiding.

➝ They hold the mirror up when you're lying to yourself.

➝ They believe in the version of you that you can't see yet.

➝ They stay when it's hard—not just when you're winning.

Benioff didn't need Tony to tell him how to build Salesforce.

He needed someone who saw what was possible before he did.

Someone who believed in him when the outcome was uncertain.

That’s the work of a good coach.

To give you clarity that creates the conditions for you to build your own confidence.

Most founders I work with don't have a strategy problem.

They have a clarity problem.

They know what to do. They're just not doing it.

Or they're doing it while telling themselves a story that isn't true.

A great coach dismantles the story and shows you what's actually happening.

Coaching works when both people show up honestly.

One brings ambition, the other brings perspective.

Benioff built Salesforce into one of the world's most valuable companies.

How? Because he had someone in his corner who saw what was possible before the world did.

Someone who stayed through the hard moments, not just the wins.

If you don't have someone in your corner who does this, find them.

Not a yes-person.

Not someone who makes you feel better without making you better.

Someone who sees you clearly. Challenges you honestly. And believes in what you're building even when you don't.

Most people don’t need more information.

They need someone who helps them stop hiding from what they already know.

That’s what good coaching does.

What could you build if you had someone like that in your corner?

Who has quietly shaped your life more than you realise?

♻️ Repost if someone believed in you before the results existed

➕ Follow Samuel Knight for grounded leadership insights on coaching, clarity, and decision-making

Communication is one of the biggest killers of high-performance.

Every team I’ve seen improve how they communicate suddenly becomes more productive, without hiring anyone new.

I’ve also witnessed first-hand how poor communication can destroy teams. 

Simple things, or even complicated ones, that cause big big problems because people don’t talk.

Or if they do talk, it’s not effective.

So what usually gets in the way?

Leaders assume they’ve been clear because they understand what they meant.

Teams don’t talk because questioning sounds like slowing things down.

Everyone leaves meetings thinking alignment happened.

But in reality, everyone is fragmented.

Research shows that improving communication and collaboration can raise productivity by 20–25%.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a 10-person startup or a 300-person corporation. 

Communication should always be your top priority.

Without it, even the best strategy will get lost.

An exercise for leaders:

At the end of your next leadership meeting, ask everyone to write down the top 3 priorities they’re leaving with, then compare answers.

If they’re not almost identical, the meeting wasn’t clear enough.

These 8 TED talks are the ones I come back to most with clients when communication issues show up.

Why? Because they're practical in a way that genuinely changes something.

Swipe through and see which one shifts something for you.

How effective is your team’s communication? When’s the last time you looked in a mirror?

♻️ Repost for the leader whose team keeps mishearing them 
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for the leadership thinking that actually changes how you build

8 Ted talks to master communication

Most execs think they have a talent problem.

They don’t.

They have an environmental design problem.

There's a classic experiment called Rat Park.

Rats in empty cages were given two water bottles:

→ Normal water
→ Drug-laced water

They kept choosing the drug.

The conclusion was that the substance is addictive.

Then researchers changed the setup.

They built a large, stimulating environment with space, other rats, and novelty.

Same two bottles.

The rats mostly stopped choosing the drug.

The chemical didn’t change. The environment did.

This is how most companies operate.

They hire smart people. Then put them in psychological cages:

→ Zero autonomy
→ Decisions bottlenecked at the top
→ No ownership of outcomes
→ Constant context switching
→ Fear of being wrong
→ No connection to impact

Then leadership wonders:

“Why doesn’t anyone think like an owner?”
“Why aren’t people more proactive?”
“We need better A-players.”

What you’re seeing isn’t a motivation problem.

➡️ It’s an environmental design failure.

I’ve seen this firsthand with founders.

It’s rarely the team that’s the problem.

It’s the system they operate in.

➡️ Smart people stuck in structures that make ownership impossible, initiative risky, and impact invisible.

High performance isn’t extracted.

It’s elicited by the system.

You don’t get ownership by asking for it.

You get it when:

→ People control decisions that matter
→ Effort links to outcomes
→ Risk-taking isn’t punished
→ Information flows fast
→ Competence beats politics

Too many execs focus on:

❌ Raising the hiring bar
❌ Adjusting comp
❌ Performance management

And ignore the highest-leverage variable:

The behavioural environment.

People don’t rise to expectations.

They default to what the system rewards and what feels safe.

If your organisation creates:

→ Stress without agency
→ Responsibility without authority
→ Accountability without control

You won’t get performance.

You’ll get burnout, helplessness, quiet quitting, and endless alignment meetings.

The best operators remove friction, increase agency, and design environments where the right behaviour is the path of least resistance.

That’s leverage.

The real question isn’t:

“Why aren’t my people acting like owners?”

It’s: “Did we build a cage, or a park?”

Which one did you build?

♻️ Share this with a leader still trying to fix culture by hiring faster.
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for practical ideas on designing teams, systems, and leadership that actually work.

The Rat Park experiment

The software company with the largest impact on carbon emissions ever…

Just finished another offsite with the team at CarbonRE, and I’m leaving seriously inspired.

This is a company that could become the software company with the largest impact on carbon emissions ever.

Yes. Bigger than Tesla or any other software company you can think of.

Let that sink in.

What they’re doing is fucking mind-blowing.

They’re tackling one of the hardest problems in the world: 

→ Decarbonising cement production, one of the most carbon-intensive industries on the planet.

And using AI to help the world’s largest producers dramatically reduce emissions.

This is impact.
This is ambition.

But what inspires me just as much as the mission is the culture they are building.

Carbon Re is constantly pushing itself to evolve – adapting how they work, how they communicate, and how they execute to meet the demands of AI, their clients, and the scale of the problem they’re solving.

During the offsite we went deep into the things that actually unlock performance:

•⁠ ⁠Radical candour and feedback systems that increase speed and execution

•⁠ ⁠A deep dive into OKRs using my Exhibition OKR framework (which I genuinely love using with teams like this)

•⁠ Hard conversations about customers, product roadmap, and what really matters next

And this is the kind of message that makes the work worth it:

“This offsite was transformational. Thank you Sam.
It feels like the start of a new high-performance chapter.

We’re excited and scared about the task ahead – but we feel more like one united, motivated team than we ever have.”

That’s the real goal of these sessions.

Not just alignment.

Momentum.

Personally, experiences like this push me to keep raising the bar with leaders. 

When you work with companies trying to solve problems this big, incremental thinking just doesn’t cut it.

You need teams that can evolve as fast as the challenge.

Huge respect to the Carbon Re team for the honesty, ambition, and courage it takes to build something like this.

The future needs more companies like this.

Thank you Josh Vernon, Noah Miller, Daniel Summerbell, Buffy Price Kenneth W. Bob G. and the whole team Carbon Re

Image credit: www.samhector.com / @samhctr on insta.

Every problem you solve that your team should be solving is a leadership failure.

Your job as a leader isn’t to solve problems.

It’s to build people and systems that solve them without you.

Problem-solving feels like leadership.

It has urgency, visible impact, and the quick hit of progress.

But every problem you solve removes the opportunity for someone else to grow into solving it.

Every time you jump in, you're telling your team:

"You can't handle this without me."

And people believe what leaders model, not what they say.

Research from Gallup consistently shows that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.

Why? Because of the environment that they create.

The measure of a great leader isn’t what happens when you’re there.

It’s what happens when you’re not.

If your team can’t function without your input for 48 hours, you haven’t built a team.

You’ve built a dependency.

At Amazon, there was a guiding idea often associated with Jeff Bezos:

➡️ If a decision reached him, something had already failed upstream.

The company goal was to build an organisation where the right decisions happened without him.

That’s the standard of a high-performing company and team.

The shift required here is to stop asking “how do I solve this?”

And start asking “who should be solving this, and what do they need from me to solve it themselves?”

That’s real leadership.

Removing the ego and removing yourself from every problem.

Your job is to make the room not need you in order to solve problems.

The moment you do that, you've built something that can actually scale.

How much of your business would break if you disappeared for 48 hours?

♻️ Repost if you’re trying to build a team that runs without you.
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for practical leadership ideas on scaling yourself, not just your business.

The best leaders make themselves unncessary

Your brain is wired to prioritise relief over results.

That’s why smart people still make bad decisions.

Here’s how to interrupt that pattern.

Before making any significant decision, ask yourself:

→ How will I feel about this in 10 minutes?
→ How will I feel about this in 10 months?
→ How will I feel about this in 10 years?

Most decisions are made with only one time horizon in mind.

Behavioural studies show that people consistently overvalue immediate rewards compared to future ones, even when the long-term payoff is significantly higher.

You optimise for what feels urgent right now.

And completely miss what actually matters later.

This forces you to zoom out before emotion locks the choice in.

For example: “Should I take this investor’s money?”

10 minutes: Validation. Security. The path forward feels clear.

10 months: Are they adding value or just pressure? Is the cap table helping me or haunting me?

10 years: Did this investor help me build what I wanted, or did they push me toward an exit I never wanted?

The 10-year lens asks: Does this serve the outcome I actually want, or the one I think I'm supposed to want?

This framework helps separate emotional relief from strategic value.

The 10-year question is usually the one most founders skip.

Why? They’re so focused on surviving the next 10 months, they forget to ask what they’re building toward.

Decisions that feel good in 10 minutes often create problems in 10 months.

Decisions that feel difficult in 10 minutes often create clarity in 10 years.

Next  time you face a big decision, write down all three answers:

10 minutes: How will I feel immediately after?

10 months: What are the second-order effects? What does this create or solve?

10 years: Will I look back with pride, regret, or indifference?

If the answers don't align across all three time horizons, you're not ready to decide yet.

If a decision only works in one time horizon, it’s usually ego, fear, or urgency talking.

The best ones hold up across all three.

That’s usually where the right answer lives.

What decision are you weighing right now?

♻️ Repost if you’ve ever made a decision that felt good short-term and costly later
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for practical thinking frameworks that actually help you make better calls

How to stop making decisions that you'll regret

The wall between you and your team's trust isn't performance. 

It's the thing you decided to keep to yourself.

I’ve worked with hundreds of founders.

Almost all of them suffer from the same thing Dara Khosrowshahi says here.

Uber’s CEO sat down on the Diary of a CEO podcast recently and spoke about losing his father. 

About growing up in a family where feelings stayed inside. 

Where expressing frustration simply wasn't something that was done.

And then he said this:

"I suffer from over-stoicism and then breaking down every once in a while."

This sentence describes almost every founder I have ever worked with.

Including me at some point.

There’s something about vulnerability that those in the leadership space don’t talk about enough:

It isn't something you either have or don't have.

It's a leadership skill. And one of the highest-leverage ones you can develop.

Most founders are actively bad at it.

Because they were taught that carrying it alone was what strength looked like.

We’ve learned how to keep it together, to stay composed.

But what really happens inside a team when the person at the top carries everything and shares nothing:

The team senses something is off but can't figure it out. 

So they fill the silence with their own stories. And those stories are almost always worse than the truth.

Trust erodes over time.

People stop bringing their real problems forward because the culture says that real problems stay inside.

And the CEO ends up surrounded by people who are hiding their problems and disengaging.

Want to be a high-performer?

Start being a human first.

Start expressing vulnerability to your team.

This doesn’t have to mean sharing everything. Just sharing enough so that your team knows you’re a real person!

One sentence can do all of that:

"I'm carrying something personally right now. I wanted you to know so you're not reading it as something about you or the business."

That's it. No details required. 

Leaders, before your next 1:1 with a direct report, check in with yourself first.

What's your honest number today, 1-10?

Then at the start of the conversation, before the agenda, say it out loud.

"I'm at a 6 today, got some things going on outside work. Wanted to mention it so you're not reading anything into me."

Watch what it does to the quality of the conversation that follows. 

The leaders who do this consistently tell me the same thing: 

They stopped being surprised by their team because their team stopped hiding from them.

Model it first!

That's the real work.

What are you carrying right now that your team deserves the context on?

♻️ Repost for the founder who's been strong for too long in silence 
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for leadership thinking that goes where most people won't

Video credit: The Diary Of A CEO

A founder I work with nearly fired his CPO last year.

He was exhausted. 

Hadn't slept properly in weeks. 

The business felt stuck, the relationship felt broken, and letting him go felt like the obvious move.

I asked him to wait two weeks before doing anything.

He hated that.

Two weeks later he came back and said he couldn't remember why it had felt so urgent. 

Nothing had changed in the business. He just slept and recovered. 

The story his brain had been building at 30% capacity fell apart completely when he came back at 80.

That's what exhaustion actually does.

It just starts making decisions for you. 

And it does it wearing the costume of clarity.

The pivot suddenly makes sense, the VP is clearly wrong, the strategy needs a full rethink. 

Everything feels urgent, obvious and real.

Until you sleep. And look again.

I've watched this pattern wreck good companies.

The restructure that felt necessary after a brutal board meeting and looked completely avoidable after a weekend away.

The co-founder conversation that felt career-ending on a Wednesday and totally resolvable by Saturday.

The pivot that made perfect sense at 11pm and looked like madness by Thursday morning.

None of those were strategy problems.

They were a founder making permanent decisions from a temporary state.

The slow degradation of the person making the calls is the most underrated risk in any fast-growth company.

Nobody talks about it because there's no deck for it. 

No framework that looks good at a conference. 

But it's what I see breaking leadership teams from the inside more than almost anything else

Your brain is the most important asset in your business. Not your product, your team, or your investors.

You. Thinking clearly on the problems that actually matter.

Everything else is downstream of that.

The Clarity Stack is four daily practices that keep your sharpest thinking landing on your most important problems.

Swipe through and try applying it to your everyday life.

See if makes a difference for you.

It’s really not complicated and that's the point.

Have you ever made a bad decision from a place of exhaustion? 

♻️ Repost for the founder who's about to make a decision they just need to sleep on.
➕ Follow Samuel Knight for insights on high-performing teams.

The Clarity Stack every founder needs

AD | The most expensive problem in tech isn’t absence.

It’s people being at work… but not really there.

As a CEO and now as an executive coach, I see this constantly.

Founders tell me: “My team is working hard, but something feels off.”

Energy is low.

Decisions take longer.

Small problems become big ones.

That’s not laziness.

That’s presenteeism – people showing up exhausted, burnt out, or unwell.

And the data is brutal:

→ Tech SMEs lose 44 working days per employee every year to presenteeism
→ 69% of employees delay seeking care because of workload pressure
→ 41% experience burnout monthly
 (Bupa x YuLife Tech’s Hidden Health Cost Report, 2026)

Here’s what’s interesting.

When I run offsites and we build in outdoor activity – walks, hikes, movement – I see motivation, honesty and energy go up 10x.

Movement regulates the nervous system.

Nature reduces cortisol.

Blood flow improves cognition.

This is why I like what Bupa UK and YuLife are building together:
 
→ Preventative habits baked into the workday
 → Daily engagement (not dusty policies)
 → Fast access to physio, mental health support, Digital GP
 → All in one simple app

It makes the right thing the easy thing.

Leaders:

Before you book another strategy session… ask yourself:

When was the last time your team breathed fresh air together?

👉 Worth checking out the Bupa UK x YuLife partnership if you’re serious about performance, not just output: https://bit.ly/sam_knight6

Brand partnership • Exec Team Coach | High-Performing Teams | Leadership & full company Offsites | Management, OKRs & Strategic Alignment Expert | Exited Founder (Pollen8 → PwC)

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