In my experience mentoring entrepreneurs and building Coworking Smart, I’ve noticed something consistent: Many founders love starting things, but very few enjoy managing them. It’s easy to get excited about launching a business. It’s harder to wake up every day and manage it well.

Management doesn’t sound sexy. It doesn’t get you likes on social media. But as I share in my book O Empreendedor Smart, if you don’t master management, you’ll always be stuck reacting instead of leading.

Related: Why Business Management for Startups is Essential for Growth

What management really means

Management isn’t bureaucracy. It’s not just systems, meetings and spreadsheets. Management is decision-making. It’s knowing what matters, who’s responsible and how to track progress.

Peter Drucker defined it simply: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” In The Essential Drucker, he also reminds us that the job of management is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things, as highlighted in this Harvard Business Review article.

To do that, you need clear priorities, numbers you trust and rituals that sustain performance.

An effective management formula

Entrepreneurs need to simplify how they manage. You don’t need an MBA. You need a rhythm. Here’s the three-part formula I use:

1. Numbers tell the truth

If you’re not looking at the right numbers weekly, you’re guessing.

I always ask:

• What are your three most important metrics?

• Are they visible to the team?

• Are you reviewing them weekly?

For us at Coworking Smart, these numbers were:

Numbers create alignment. They end opinions. They allow for faster, smarter decisions.

A McKinsey report shows that teams with clarity on performance metrics are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers. Similarly, a Gartner study emphasizes that companies that align team metrics with strategic goals see a significant boost in employee engagement and overall results.

2. People drive the numbers

The second principle: Metrics are the output. People are the input.

You can’t separate culture from results. If your team doesn’t feel safe, focused and equipped — they won’t deliver.

That’s why we implemented weekly 1:1s, regular feedback loops and team dashboards that show progress visually. These practices create ownership.

As Simon Sinek explains in his book Leaders Eat Last, people don’t work hard because you pay them. They work hard because they feel seen and supported.

Culture is the hidden engine of performance. And management is how you build that engine.

In Drive, Daniel Pink explains that motivation comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose — and it’s management’s role to cultivate those elements (source).

3. Rhythm beats speed

Speed alone doesn’t scale. Rhythm does.

That’s why management needs cadence. At Coworking Smart, we follow a basic weekly cycle:

• Monday: team sync with KPIs

• Wednesday: deep work/no meeting day

• Friday: short retrospective on what worked and what didn’t

This rhythm helps us avoid firefighting and stay focused on what matters.

You don’t need complex tools. You need consistency. As James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Related: The Core Traits of Effective Leaders — Here’s What Every Manager Should Strive For

Tools to get started without spending more

One of the biggest myths in entrepreneurship is: “I’ll focus on management once I grow.”

No. You grow because you manage. You scale what’s organized. You repeat what’s documented.

You can start with:

• A shared KPI board using Trello, Notion or Google Sheets

• Weekly check-ins with your team

• Monthly reviews of your main business levers

You can even use Slack channels for automated daily updates. What matters isn’t the tool, but the discipline behind it.

According to a study by the Project Management Institute, companies with mature project and management practices waste 28 times less money than those with poor practices.

From chaos to control: Our experience

Early on, we ran Coworking Smart with hustle and instinct. It worked — until it didn’t. Once we opened multiple units, chaos set in.

That’s when we shifted to this simplified management system. The results were immediate:

• Productivity up by 35%

• Team turnover cut in half

• Faster, more confident decision-making

Today, we run eight units across Brazil, in cities like Brasília, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. We serve thousands of entrepreneurs through a low-cost, highly automated model that wouldn’t be possible without operational discipline.

And it’s not just about scale. It’s about sustainability. When you manage well, you don’t burn out. You build.

Related: 5 Essential Tips on How to Be a Great Manager

Manage with intention, not just reaction

Entrepreneurship will always have uncertainty. That’s part of the game. But management is how you create stability inside that uncertainty.

Peter Drucker said, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” That’s what management is: the hard work of turning intention into structure.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not exciting. But it’s the reason smart businesses survive and thrive.

As Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons wrote in Seven Strategy Questions, great managers don’t just execute — they challenge assumptions, clarify priorities and create accountability.

So, if you’re overwhelmed, unclear or stuck — it’s probably not your idea. It’s your management. Fix that, and everything else gets easier.

Palantir Technologies has a market capitalization of more than $200 billion. According to its website, the company has extensive defense contracts, building “AI-powered solutions” that “protect soldiers on battlefields, manufacture high-quality products, power hospitals’ operations, and safely deliver aid to refugees.”

But if you want to work there, and apply for one of the dozens of software engineer roles on its website, a degree from a fancy university might not send you to the top of the pack.

Palantir launched a “Meritocracy Fellowship” this week aimed at high schoolers or recent graduates who want to “get the Palantir Degree” and “skip the debt” and “indoctrination.” The role(s) will be earned “solely on merit and academic excellence.”

Related: A Defense Startup With Billions in Contracts Launched a Recruiting Campaign Warning People Not to Work There

On LinkedIn, the company wrote “chaos has ensued on university campuses,” and “admissions are based on flawed criteria.” The four-month (Fall 2025) fellowship is “in response to the shortcomings of university admissions” and pays $5,400 a month.

The job description says the role is in New York, New York, and the company “encourages employees to work from our offices,” though its CEO reportedly often works from a barn in New Hampshire.

“Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence,” the job post reads. “As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos.”

Those who land the fellowship (it’s unclear how many positions would be open) will work alongside a team solving “technical problems that contribute to Palantir products and customer outcomes.”

Dropping at select colleges today. pic.twitter.com/tz62o1A5ql

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 14, 2025

Applicants must be high school grads at the start of the internship with an SAT score of at least 1460 or an ACT score of at least 33. Hopeful fellows can not be enrolled in a university at the time of the fellowship, and experience with programming, scripting, or statistical packages (eg. Python, R, Matlab, SQL) “is a plus,” according to the job post.

It’s not the first AI company with defense contracts to launch a unique recruiting campaign. Last month, a defense startup with billions in government contracts, Andruil, plastered cities rich in tech talent in recruiting ads that said: “Don’t Work at Andruil.”

Can intellectual property survive as AI advances and allegedly uses copyrighted work as training material?

Twitter (now X) co-founder Jack Dorsey recently weighed in on the debate, taking to X on Friday to call for an end to intellectual property law, which covers areas like copyright, patents, and trademarks — and Elon Musk approved of his stance.

“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on Friday evening in a post that has been viewed more than 10 million times. An hour later, Musk responded, “I agree.”

I agree

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Dorsey immediately received pushback from lawyer and former 2024 vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan.

Shanahan, who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin until 2023, told Dorsey that IP law was the “only” barrier between work created by human beings and work by AI.

“IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations,” Shanahan wrote in a reply to Dorsey’s post. “If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”

Dorsey objected, replying that “creativity” is what separates humans from AI and that the legal system is currently inhibiting creativity.

^{Jack Dorsey. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.

AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed “hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet” to become operational.

Related: Jack Dorsey Announces His Departure from Bluesky on X, Calls Elon Musk’s Platform ‘Freedom Technology’

The first U.S. ruling on AI copyright law arrived in February when a Delaware federal court ruled that legal research firm Ross Intelligence was not allowed to copy content from Thomson Reuters.

Ross Intelligence asserted it was allowed to utilize copyrighted material to train its AI under the fair use doctrine, which permits the use of a copyrighted work in specific circumstances. However, the court dismissed the fair use defense because the AI training data was employed in a commercial context.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman commented on fair use in AI copyright law at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June. Suleyman stated then that almost all web content was fair use for “anyone” to copy or recreate, with the possible exception of some news sites and publishers that have asked not to be scraped.

“That’s the gray area, and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts,” Suleyman said, at the time.

Related: A Microsoft-Partnered AI Startup Is Being Sued By the Biggest Record Labels in the World