Founders who are about to postpone something they should be starting do not, in their own minds, think of themselves as postponing. They think of themselves as reasoning. The reasoning takes a particular linguistic shape, which I have come to recognise across many founder conversations as a small vocabulary of stalling phrases. The phrases sound like analysis. They function as deferrals. And the founder using them is usually the last person in their venture to notice that what sounds like rigorous thinking is in fact a sophisticated form of not yet starting.
I want to write about the vocabulary explicitly, because once you can hear it, you can hear yourself using it, and the hearing is usually enough to break the pattern. Most founders, faced with a transcript of themselves over the previous month, would be uncomfortable to discover how much of their thinking has been organised around postponement disguised as planning. The discomfort is the point. The vocabulary keeps the discomfort at bay; the recognition lets it through, and the through-passage is what produces action.
There are six phrases in particular that I have come to flag in my own thinking and in my conversations with founders. Each one signals a specific form of stalling. Each has a more honest version that, if the founder were willing to use it, would force the action the postponement is avoiding.
Phrase one: “I just need to do more research first”
This phrase appears most often around decisions where the founder already has enough information to act, but acting is uncomfortable, and additional research provides a defensible reason to defer. The research, when honestly examined, is rarely targeted. It is general study, reading, conversation, or analysis whose conclusion will not actually change the decision. The founder is not researching to find out what to do; they are researching to feel ready to do what they already know they should do.
The honest version of this phrase is “I am scared of being wrong, and I am hoping more research will make me certain.” Stated this way, the path forward becomes clear. Certainty is not coming. The decision will be made under the same uncertainty whether it is made today or in six weeks. Six weeks of additional research will produce more confidence in the decision but not more certainty in the outcome, and the additional confidence rarely justifies the cost of the delay.
The discipline is to ask, before any further research, what specifically the research would teach me that would change the decision. If the answer is nothing, the research is stalling. Begin.
Phrase two: “Let me sleep on it”
This phrase is often appropriate for genuinely consequential decisions that benefit from overnight processing. The brain does meaningful work on hard problems during sleep, and a decision postponed twelve hours is not significantly delayed. The phrase becomes a stalling tactic when “sleeping on it” extends to days, and then to weeks, and then to a state of permanent semi-deferral in which the decision is being slept on without ever being made.
The honest version is “I do not want to make this decision today, and I am offering myself a face-saving reason to defer it.” If the deferral is for one night, the phrase is honest. If the deferral is open-ended, the phrase is a deferral dressed as deliberation, and the dress is fooling the founder more than anyone else.
The discipline is to commit, when sleeping on a decision, to make it the next morning. If the next morning passes without the decision being made, the sleeping was not deliberation; it was the entry point to a longer postponement. Set the deadline before the sleep, and honour it the next day, or admit the postponement for what it is.
Phrase three: “I want to wait for the right moment”
The right moment is the most common stalling phrase because it is the most plausible. There genuinely are decisions that benefit from being made at the right time rather than at any time. A founder waiting for a market shift, a regulatory clearance, or a customer’s purchase cycle is not stalling; they are timing.
The phrase becomes a stalling tactic when the right moment is not actually defined. A founder who knows that the right moment is “after the merger announcement closes” is timing. A founder who is waiting for “the right moment to have the conversation with my cofounder” is stalling, because no specific event is going to define the moment, and the absence of specificity means the moment will never arrive.
The honest version is “I am hoping the situation will resolve itself in a way that means I do not have to make this decision.” Stated this way, the founder can see that the situation almost certainly will not resolve itself, and the waiting is therefore a waiting for an outcome that is not coming. The decision must be made at a moment the founder selects, not at a moment that selects itself.
Phrase four: “I need to think about this more carefully”
This phrase signals that a decision is large enough to feel uncomfortable but not large enough to require structured analysis. The thinking, when traced honestly, is mostly circular. The founder considers the decision from one angle, then another, then back to the first, with no new information entering the loop and no progress toward resolution. The “thinking more carefully” is the same thinking, repeated, with the appearance of depth.
The honest version is “I am uncomfortable with this decision and am avoiding it by repeating my consideration of it without resolving it.” The repetition is not analysis; it is rumination. Rumination produces no new information, no clearer judgment, and no resolution. It produces only the false sense of doing work on the decision while the decision remains unmade.
The discipline is to write down, in three to five sentences, the considerations on each side of the decision and the founder’s current assessment of which side wins. The writing forces the rumination to become explicit, and the explicit form usually reveals that the answer is already clear. The rumination was a way of not seeing what was already visible.
Phrase five: “Let me run this by the team first”
This phrase can be honest team consultation or stalling dressed as consultation, and the difference is usually visible in the way the consultation proceeds. Honest consultation has a defined timeline (decision by Friday), a defined audience (the three senior team members whose input matters), and a defined question (do we hire ahead of revenue, or wait one quarter). The team’s input is solicited, weighed, and folded into a decision that the founder makes on the agreed timeline.
Stalling consultation has no timeline, an expanding audience, and a vague question. The founder runs the question by one team member, then another, then the cofounder, then a board member, then a friend. Each consultation produces a marginally different perspective, which the founder uses as a reason to consult one more person before deciding. The consultation has become a substitute for the decision rather than an input to it.
The honest version is “I want someone else to give me permission to make this decision so I do not have to take responsibility for it.” Stated this way, the founder can see that the permission is not coming, because none of the people being consulted has the authority to make the decision for them. The consultation must end on a defined timeline with the founder making the call, not with the founder seeking enough endorsements to feel safe.
Phrase six: “I’ll start once I have the right tools”
This phrase appears around projects that the founder intends to begin but has not begun. The right tools, in this framing, are the technology, software, system, hire, or process that would make the project tractable. Without the tools, the project feels too hard. With the tools, the project will be feasible. So the founder is currently shopping for the tools, evaluating options, considering integrations, and not yet starting the project.
The honest version is “I am uncomfortable starting this project under uncertainty, and tool-shopping gives me a productive-feeling alternative.” The discomfort is real and the tool-shopping is genuine work; it is also not the work the project actually requires. The people who started the projects that became Stay-Up phase ventures rarely had the right tools when they began. They started anyway, with whatever tools were available, and the projects produced their own evidence of which tools would actually be needed once the work was underway.
The discipline is to begin the project with the tools currently available, and to upgrade the tools when the work itself reveals which upgrades are actually needed. Most of the upgrades the founder was shopping for, in my experience, turn out to be unnecessary once the work begins. The tool that seemed essential before starting becomes irrelevant after starting, because the actual work has revealed a different set of needs.
What the vocabulary is for
Listen for these phrases in your own thinking this week. When you catch yourself using one, pause long enough to substitute the honest version. The substitution is uncomfortable, which is why most founders never do it. The substitution is also where the action that has been postponed becomes possible.
The Stay-Up phase founders I most respect have all developed an internal allergy to the vocabulary of stalling. They hear the phrases in their own thinking and treat them as warning signs rather than as analysis. They do not always start immediately when they hear them; sometimes the postponement is genuinely the right call. But they have learned to interrogate the phrases rather than to accept them as reasoning, and the interrogation usually produces the start.
The starts are what the venture is made of. The vocabulary of stalling is what prevents them. Listen for the phrases. Substitute the honest versions. Begin.
For the framework on the specific decision you are postponing, see The Decision You Are Postponing. For why caution is the riskiest posture, see Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Strategy.
