Most management books are written by founders. Some are written by coaches. I think the better source of leadership wisdom is the referee — specifically, the football referee who has to make twelve binary decisions in a minute, every minute, for ninety minutes, in front of twenty-two grown adults and forty thousand strangers, all of whom believe with full sincerity that you are wrong.
I have officiated football for eighteen years. The thing officiating teaches you that founder calls do not is the asymmetry of feedback. At the end of a match, half the stadium thinks you cost them three points; the other half thinks you got lucky and should have given them a penalty earlier. The neutral observers think you were okay, and they don’t go home talking about you, which is the highest compliment a referee gets.
You cannot be liked
The first thing officiating teaches you is that the job is not to be liked. The job is to make the right call. The two things are not merely uncorrelated — they are mildly negatively correlated. Players who like you are players whose fouls you have not been calling. Managers who like you are managers whose tactics you have let them get away with. You will be liked the day you let everyone do what they want. That day, you have stopped doing the job.
Founders learn this lesson slowly because there is no whistle. Founder calls happen in private. The team is unhappy with you a few weeks later, in the form of slow attrition or quiet disagreement about strategy, not in real-time at full volume. So founders confuse being liked with being effective, and they make popular decisions instead of correct ones, and then the company underperforms and they cannot trace it back to the decision.
Referees cannot make that mistake because we get the whistle and the boos in the same five-second window. The signal is immediate. You learn very quickly that the boos are not the problem to optimize for.
The decision behind the call
A referee makes ~250 decisions per match. Maybe fifteen of them are actually contentious. Of those fifteen, three are the ones that the post-match coverage will be about. The skill is not getting all 250 right. The skill is being roughly correct on the 235 trivial ones, very correct on the 12 contentious ones, and unflappable on the 3 that will be debated for a week.
The hardest part of all of this is not the 3. The hardest part is the 235. The first fifteen minutes of a match are when referees lose control, not because of any single call, but because they make 60 small calls inconsistently and the players stop believing in them. Consistency on the small calls is what earns the right to make the big calls.
In founder terms: you cannot make a hard layoff decision if you have been inconsistent about small performance feedback. The big call is permitted because the small calls have been credible.
Position, position, position
The single thing that distinguishes a good referee from a mediocre one is positioning. You should be ten meters from the play, diagonal, with a clear line of sight, every time. The right call from the wrong position is still suspect. The right call from the right position is invisible.
Founders are bad at this. They make decisions from their desks, on Slack, on the basis of partial information from the people who report to them. The right call requires moving toward the play. Talk to the customer yourself. Sit in on the support shift. Read the unedited engineering Slack. The information is qualitatively different at ten meters than at thirty. Position changes what you see, which changes what you call.
The whistle is a tool, not a personality
Young referees blow the whistle too often. They want to assert authority. They want the players to know who is in charge. So they whistle every contact, every disagreement, every tactical complaint. By minute 30, the game is in pieces.
Old referees blow the whistle less. They let the game flow when the game wants to flow. They reserve the whistle for the moments that matter. When they do whistle, the players stop, because they recognize that the whistle is no longer an emotional reaction. It is a signal.
Founders should blow the whistle less. Every decision you escalate, every meeting you call, every Slack DM you send to flag a concern — each of those is a whistle. If you use them constantly, they stop carrying weight. If you reserve them for the moments that matter, the team starts paying attention when you reach for them.
How to take the heat
At the end of every match, somebody is unhappy with the referee. That is the design of the role. The skill is to absorb that without retreating, without retaliating, and without internalizing it.
I have watched young referees get visibly rattled by an angry manager in the eighth minute, and then make defensive calls for eighty more minutes to compensate. The angry manager has won. Referees who have been doing this for a decade absorb the same anger and continue to call the game they were going to call. The manager understands within twenty minutes that the heat is not working, and the heat usually subsides.
Founders face the same dynamic. There will be an early investor, an early hire, a vocal customer who will be very angry about a decision you have made. The compensatory move — changing course to placate them — is always wrong. You absorb, you continue, you make your case in calm sentences. The heat subsides. Or the relationship ends, which is sometimes the right outcome.
VAR and the second pair of eyes
Video review changed officiating profoundly. The honest version of what it did is that it took the very-hard calls and made them somewhat easier, at the cost of slowing the game. The unspoken version is that it took some agency away from referees, who now outsource a small percentage of the high-stakes decisions.
I have mixed feelings about VAR. The thing it teaches you that applies broadly is that a second pair of eyes — even a flawed one — on a high-stakes decision is almost always worth the slowdown. In founding, this is the value of a co-founder, a board chair, a mentor who will tell you no. Most founders structurally underuse this resource. They optimize for speed of decision, when the actual scarce resource is correctness on the small number of decisions that matter.
What officiating doesn’t teach you
It doesn’t teach you patience — matches are ninety minutes. It doesn’t teach you long-term thinking — matches reset every weekend. It doesn’t teach you how to build anything — the pitch is built, you just call what happens on it. For those things, the company has been the school.
But it does teach you, in a way no other training does, how to make decisions in front of an audience that is rooting against you. That skill compounds. I would not have made it through the first six months of 2022 with the same composure if I had not been doing league football for fifteen years before it. That isn’t a recommendation that founders take up officiating. It is a recommendation that founders find a hobby in which they are publicly judged, weekly, and required to recover by Tuesday.