The Dating App Founder | 8M members | Bootstrapped startup with a team of 50+ | Co-founder & COO of Inner Circle | Follow for insights on business, leadership and relationships

I build and scale companies by raising standards, strengthening teams, and scaling execution.

I’m an entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience founding and scaling businesses. 
I’m the Co-Founder of Inner Circle, a dating app founded in 2012, which has grown to over 8 million users across 50 countries. 

As Chief Operating Officer and acting Chief Marketing Officer, I sit at the intersection of leadership, hiring, execution, and growth.

Across that journey, I’ve helped build teams from 0 to more than 50 people across two continents. 
I’ve interviewed 1,000's of candidates and hired 100's of high performers, giving me a front-row seat to what separates teams that scale from those that stall. 

As companies grow, performance rarely breaks because of strategy. It breaks when clarity fades, standards slip, and execution becomes inconsistent. My perspective is practical and grounded in operating reality. High-performing companies are built by A-player teams, clear priorities, and leaders who combine ownership with humanity. 

My leadership principles are:

⟶ Disciplined execution beats complexity. 
⟶ Trust works when standards are explicit. 
⟶ Momentum comes from focus, not motion.

This account is for founders and leaders who want to build companies that perform consistently as they grow, without losing speed, accountability, or their human edge.

To collaborate with me as a creator please contact: enquiries@alecrickard.com

Michael Krayenhoff

Most founders don't have a talent problem.

They have an "overthinking" problem.

The way you frame a hard moment decides everything.
Not your skills. Not your network.

The story you tell yourself.

Every team eventually hits a wall.
A bad hire. A missed target. A product that didn't land.

What separates the ones who recover from the ones who don't?

They see the same situation differently.

Learning to code at 35 wasn't about code.
It was about proving to myself that hard things are learnable.
That discomfort isn't a stop sign. It's a starting line.

That shift changed how teams around me operate too.

When the leader treats hard problems as puzzles, not threats,
the team starts doing the same.

It's not about being positive all the time.
It's about training yourself to ask a better question.

Not "why is this happening to us?"
But "what does this make possible?"

That's the real competitive edge.
Not the strategy deck. Not the funding round.

The mind you bring into the room every morning.

Train it like a muscle.
Push it when it wants to stop.
Question the first story it tells you.

The obstacle doesn't change.
But what you do with it always depends on how you see it.

What's one moment where changing your thinking changed the outcome entirely?

Drop it below. I'd love to read it.

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✅ Follow Michael Krayenhoff for more on building teams, leadership, and careers

➕LEVEL UP YOUR STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP ➟ I share proven systems, actionable tips, and lessons from 20+ years of helping CEOs make better strategy ➕STRATEGY ADVISOR TO CEOs + THEIR TEAMS ➟ Learn more in my ABOUT section👇

Most professionals reach a point in their career where the rules change — quietly.

What used to matter most — execution, reliability, getting things done — stops being what earns trust.

The conversations shift. The decisions get murkier. And you're no longer being asked for your performance only, but for your judgment.

That moment is rarely named. But every senior professional eventually feels it.

It's the moment when strategic responsibility expands faster than your preparation for it.

And that's exactly where most leadership development stops helping.

I built The Better Strategy School to close that gap.

Not by offering more frameworks or theories — but by creating an environment where serious professionals can develop strategic leadership deliberately, while their work is live.

The School is a professional formation environment. Participants work on real strategic challenges, reason through them with peers, and receive direct feedback from faculty who have spent decades at the intersection of strategy practice and strategic leadership research.

It is not a course. It is not a seminar. It is a place to develop the capability to lead strategy — repeatedly, under pressure, with genuine consequence.

Strategy becomes your responsibility long before it becomes your title.

That's the moment this work exists for.

If you're ready to develop strategic leadership deliberately:

📍 www.makebetterstrategy.com 📩 team@makebetterstrategy.com

Marc Sniukas

The customer is not the center of strategy.

Most leaders I meet believe this is heresy.

But the observation keeps recurring in practice.

When strategy is reduced to customer value alone, the firm slowly erodes its own capacity to compete.

What often goes unnoticed is that sustainable strategy requires coherence across three value domains simultaneously.

The customer must benefit.

The firm must benefit.

And the ecosystem — partners, suppliers, adjacent players — must also see advantage in participating.

Collapse this to one dimension, and the system becomes unstable.

In practice, this shows up when a brilliant customer innovation drains resources the firm cannot replenish.

Or when ecosystem partners quietly disengage because the value exchange became asymmetrical.

The most durable strategies I've observed operate at the intersection.

They make deliberate trade-offs between these constituencies rather than optimizing for any single one.

This is not stakeholder theory reheated.

It is a structural feature of how value creation systems actually function.

The uncomfortable truth: many strategy failures look like customer problems on the surface.

They are actually coherence problems underneath.

The firm created value for buyers it could not afford to sustain.

Or prioritized returns that hollowed out the partnerships it later needed.

This tension doesn't resolve with better customer research.

It requires holding multiple value logics in mind at once.

And making choices that feel suboptimal from any single perspective.

Most strategic planning processes are not designed for this.

They optimize one horizon and delegate the others to "execution."

This is where competitive advantage quietly breaks down.

Strategy, strategic thinking, and
strategic leadership are not the same thing.

Most people use them interchangeably.

That conflation is where a lot of organizational confusion quietly begins.

1️⃣ Strategy is the coherent approach an organization uses to overcome its key challenges and make its ambitions achievable.

It is not a document. Not a plan. Not a list of initiatives produced once a year and reviewed quarterly.

It is an ongoing practice of diagnosing situations, making consequential choices, and aligning action — so the organization can move forward despite uncertainty and constraint.

2️⃣ Strategic thinking is something different.

It is an individual capability. The ability to decide what truly matters, when many things seem important.

More precisely: the capacity to diagnose complex situations, make consequential choices under uncertainty, and align action — not as a cognitive style, not as a personality trait, but as applied judgment in a social system.

3️⃣ Strategic leadership is different again.

It is not primarily about deciding the strategy.

It is about making the organization capable of acting strategically.

That requires three things: direction — clarifying what matters most and what trade-offs are accepted; environment — designing the conditions that make the right behavior easier; and mobilization — converting intent into coordinated action.

In practice, most strategies fail not because they were poorly written.

They fail because nobody orchestrated coordinated action around difficult choices.

The strategy existed. The strategic thinking may have been sound.

But the leadership practice — the direction, the environment, the mobilization — was absent.

What often goes unnoticed is that these three things operate at different levels.

Strategic thinking is a capability. Strategy is an approach. Strategic leadership is a practice.

Developing one does not automatically develop the others.

A leader can think strategically and still produce an incoherent strategy.

An organization can have a coherent strategy and still fail to make it show up in daily decisions.

👉 This is where the distinction stops being academic.

– You can have strategic thinkers without a strategy → intelligent discussions, no alignment.

– You can have a strategy without strategic leadership → a document, not behavior.

– You can have leadership activity without strategy → activity without direction.

Make Better Strategy: Which of the three is the weakest link in your organization?

📌 Download the hi-res pdf of this document: https://lnkd.in/dUJwCwUR

👉 Share to help someone in your network make better strategy.

‼️ Follow Dr. Marc Sniukas for more insights on real strategy.

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