Strategy sounds clean on paper until it hits real markets, real customers, real competitors and real time pressure. I’m joined by Andreas Panayiotou from Notion Capital to unpack what venture capital actually optimises for, why VC is a long-horizon game, and how that reality shapes startup strategy, leadership, and decision-making from day one.

We get specific about the scaling journey and the uncomfortable statistics behind it: the power law of venture returns, why many companies stall at key revenue thresholds, and what founders often misunderstand when early traction stops growing. Andreas explains the £3m “chasm” where product-market fit is not enough, and why the hardest move is turning founder-led selling into a repeatable go-to-market engine. We talk positioning, focus, sales motion, and the practical need to document what works so a team can execute it consistently.

Markets do not sit still, and AI disruption makes that painfully obvious. We explore how timing and luck can reshape viability, why some businesses get leapfrogged, and what it takes to pivot without losing the plot. That leads into a sharper theme: speed and judgement. We debate explore versus exploit, Andy Grove’s “let chaos reign” approach, one-way door versus two-way door decisions, and why hiring for intuition and good taste can matter more than perfect data.

If you’re building, investing, or leading strategy in a fast-changing environment, you’ll take away concrete lessons on startup scaling, go-to-market strategy, and adapting to AI-driven change. Subscribe, share with someone building a startup, and leave a review with your biggest question about scaling past the first revenue ceiling.

Find Andreas here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anpanayiotou/

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Your strategy can look brilliant on paper and still be totally disconnected from reality. We talk with Dr Alice Jing Shan, who is the originator of Relational Dynamics™, the founder of ScholarLand Ltd, and an independent researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh. Her work examines how human systems form, stabilise, drift, adapt, and sometimes collapse under constraint over time. Relational Dynamics™ is her original lens for understanding these system trajectories.

Her work moves across complexity, language, culture, leadership, governance, strategy, risk, and AI as a condition shaping human systems. Across disciplines, scales, and narrative forms, she traces how relational dynamics shape stability, adaptation, meaning, judgment, and collapse over time.

We unpack a practical distinction many organisations blur: strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are the specific moves, who does what when. When teams obsess over competitor activity or internal productivity without tracking relationships and feedback loops, they can become “busy” while making no strategic advance. We also go deep on the variables most strategy documents ignore: constraints, tempo, and timing, not as calendar dates but as thresholds and developmental time. If the interface is missing, there is no entry, and no amount of effort turns a good idea into real impact.

Language is one of the biggest interfaces in any organisation, and AI is rapidly reshaping it. We explore why “more communication” is not the fix, how power dynamics show up between native and non-native speakers, and how large language models can produce fluent, confident text that still drifts away from intent. We finish on a question that matters to anyone using AI for strategy, analysis, or planning: are we still in relationship with reality, or are we just getting better at responding to representations of reality?

Subscribe for more conversations where strategy meets reality, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with your take on the closing question.

Find Alice's work here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanjingalice/

Substack: https://alicejingshan.substack.com/

Here is one of her latest works: From AI to AIR: Augmented Intelligence Reasoning · v0.2

A reframe of the AI discourse, shifting the focus from AI as an abstract object to reasoning, relationships, and real-world conditions.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20436861

Send Mike a Message

Enjoying the show?

Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast.

🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Your organisation might have a polished strategy deck, a neat org chart, and a backlog full of “agile” work, yet decisions still stall and accountability still blurs. That is the gap we tackle with our guest Martin Pfiffner, author of The Neurology of Business. He identifies the missing third dimension of structure. Beyond anatomy (boxes) and physiology (process), we dig into organisational neurology, the real wiring of decision rights, control, and communication. When that wiring is unclear, work escalates, leaders overload, and you end up with what Dan Davies calls an unaccountability machine.

We bring cybernetics into the boardroom without the jargon. Martin explains why communication never works perfectly, and why viable systems rely on negative feedback loops and closed-loop control to correct mistakes quickly. We connect that thinking to the Viable System Model, recursion levels, and the very practical question most organisations avoid: who steers whom, and which dimension actually leads, product, region, customer, or something else. That clarity is often the difference between moving at speed and getting stuck in endless consensus.

We also challenge common strategy habits: confusing planning horizons with strategy, treating strategy as a one-off project, and ignoring constraints created by past investments and relationships. Instead, we talk about real-time strategy cycles, essential variables that simplify complexity, and how to navigate uncertainty without pretending you can predict it.

We finish with a sharp warning and a hopeful path for AI. AI will not fix a broken organisation; it will accelerate it. Fix the decision and governance structure first, then use AI to strengthen organisational memory, sensing, and learning. If you find this useful, subscribe, share it with a colleague who wrestles with decision bottlenecks, and leave us a review with the one structural question your organisation needs to answer next.

Find Martin's Work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-dr-pfiffner-07534459/
His book The Neurology of Business: https://amzn.eu/d/046UympH

Send Mike a Message

Enjoying the show?

Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast.

🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality

Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/