About Plainly Put

Plainly Put is a collection of short essays, and each one starts from a single sentence said by someone who built a company or put money into one. Sayings like these get passed around because they fit on a slide, and they are rarely tested. Each page here takes one and asks what it actually claims, when it is good advice and where following it would lead a team astray.

The quotations

Before an essay is written, the line is checked. The wording comes from the earliest source that can be traced, such as the speaker’s own essay, book or talk, and the speaker is named from the same evidence. Popular lines drift over the years. A word gets added, a clause gets dropped, or a remark by someone obscure gets pinned on someone famous. Where that has happened the page says so, and where no speaker can be established the line is marked unattributed. Each page carries exactly one quotation, credited to the person who said it, and everything else on the page is commentary.

What the pages leave out

There are no bylines, no ads, no scripts and no cookies.

Corrections are welcome, and misattributions most of all. A reader who can show that a line was said by someone else, or worded differently, can send the evidence through the contact page, and the page will be fixed.