The soldier and the scout

There's this moment that keeps showing up in board meetings. A founder gets challenged on their pricing model, their roadmap, their hiring plan—whatever. And you can see them shift. They start building arguments. Marshaling evidence. Getting ready to defend.

Sometimes that's the right move. Most of the time it's not.

The soldier vs scout thing has been written about before. Soldier mindset: defend your position. Scout mindset: explore the territory. Most people can explain the difference. Almost nobody can tell you which one they're in right now.

I started tracking this about two years ago. Watched founders in real-time decision moments. The pattern isn't that some people are soldiers and others are scouts. It's that most founders default to one mode and don't realize they're stuck there.

Met with a founder last month. Great product, good traction, burning too much cash. We're walking through the burn rate and I ask: "What if you cut the team by 30%?"

He doesn't pause. Just starts listing reasons why every person is needed. Engineering velocity. Customer support load. The roadmap commitments. Built a full case in about 90 seconds.

So I ask differently: "Which three people would you cut if you had to?"

Long silence. Then: "I haven't thought about it that way."

He'd spent six months defending the team size to investors, to himself, to his co-founder. Never actually scouted the question. Never looked at what the org chart could be, just kept defending what it was.

The permanent soldiers don't lose because they're wrong. They lose because they stop looking. Every question becomes a challenge to defend against instead of information to consider.

There's an opposite problem. Founders who are always in scout mode.

One of our companies last year—consumer app, growing fast. The CEO kept wanting to "explore alternatives" to their core mechanic. Not because it was broken. Because someone on Twitter said something. Because a competitor tried something different. Because why not look?

Three roadmap pivots in four months. Team couldn't ship anything because the direction kept changing. Not because the scouting revealed better options. Because the scouting never ended.

Scout mode feels like rigor. Feels like you're being thorough, considering all angles, staying open-minded. But at some point you have to stop exploring and start moving. The permanent scouts don't lose because they're incurious. They lose because they never commit.

I don't think most founders realize they've switched modes. It happens fast. Someone questions your approach and suddenly you're defending. Or you read something interesting and suddenly you're reconsidering everything.

Started asking founders to track this for a week. Every time someone challenges a decision—investor, employee, co-founder, doesn't matter—write down your first reaction. Did you start building a defense, or did you start asking questions?

The ratio matters. If you're defending 8 out of 10 times, you're stuck in soldier mode. If you're exploring 8 out of 10 times, you're stuck in scout mode. Neither is good.

The best founders I know run about 7:3. Seventy percent of the time they're defending their current direction. Thirty percent of the time they're genuinely exploring whether they're wrong.

But here's the thing—they know which mode they're in. They can tell you: "I'm defending this because we just spent six months validating it and I'm not reopening the question unless there's new data." Or: "I'm scouting this because I realized I've been defending a decision I made a year ago without checking if it still makes sense."

Defend when you've actually scouted recently. If you spent the last three months pressure-testing your pricing model, talking to customers, running experiments—and someone in a board meeting says "have you considered pricing differently?"—you can just say no. You scouted. You decided. Now you execute.

Defend when changing course has a high cost. If you're four weeks from launch and someone suggests a pivot, you're not scouting that. You're defending the plan because the switching cost is too high.

Defend when you have information the challenger doesn't. Your investor says you're hiring too fast. You know you just lost two key engineers and need to backfill or the roadmap collapses. You can defend that because you're working from better data.

But most founders defend by default. Every question feels like an attack on their judgment. So they build arguments instead of considering whether the question is actually valid.

Scout when you're defending the same decision repeatedly. If three different people in three different contexts question your burn rate, your roadmap, your pricing—that's a signal. Not that they're right. But that you should actually look instead of just defending.

Scout when your data is old. You picked your tech stack 18 months ago. Someone asks why you're not using the new framework. If your answer is "because we chose this"—that's not a reason. That's defending a decision you made with old information.

Scout when you notice you're getting annoyed. This one's subtle. But if someone questions your approach and you feel defensive—not intellectually engaged, but emotionally resistant—you're probably in soldier mode when you should be in scout mode.

The thing that surprised me: scouting doesn't mean changing your mind. Half the time you scout a question and land on the same answer. But you land there from fresh evaluation, not from defending a conclusion you reached six months ago.

Saw this happen with a founder I know. Spent a year defending their sales model. Every board meeting: "Why aren't you doing outbound?" And every time: defense. The inbound motion is working, the CAC is good, the team doesn't have outbound experience.

Then one day he actually scouted it. Didn't defend. Just looked. Pulled the data. Modeled it out. Talked to three other founders about how they built outbound.

Turns out he was right. Inbound was the right call. But he knew it differently after scouting. Went from defending a decision to executing on validated strategy.

That's the unlock. When you scout and confirm your direction, you defend with more confidence. When you defend without scouting, you're just protecting your ego.