Principles are few

I went to see Huberman speak at HX26 by Healf in London at the weekend, his first talk in the UK. For anyone not familiar, Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast, one of the most widely followed health and science shows in the world. HX26 is a health optimisation event, the same world a lot of founder-led brands are building in. Two of the ideas from his talk apply directly to how a founder runs their finances.

The first was a line Huberman drew from the performance scientist Andy Galpin: the methods are many, the principles are few. The point was to stop fixating on the specific tool and ask what higher-level principle it serves. Breathwork is a technique; engaging the parasympathetic system to bring calm is the principle. Once you hold the principle, the choice of tool gets easier, and the noise around any single one matters less.

Finance has the same trap. Founders accumulate tools, a new dashboard, another platform metric, a fresh spreadsheet someone swears by, without first settling what the business is actually trying to achieve. The work that moves the needle is rarely the tool. It is stepping back to define what you are solving for: protecting margin through a discount-heavy season, funding acquisition against a known payback period, holding enough working capital to survive the next stock commitment. Decide the principle, and the tool becomes a detail.

The second idea was about measurement. Huberman’s framing was to collect frequently but check infrequently, and to make a note alongside the number rather than just the figure on its own. He compared it to equity investments: you do not check stock prices every hour, because the hourly movement is noise and reacting to it costs you.

A business runs the same way. Plenty of founders either avoid their numbers or sit watching the bank balance and the ad account daily, reading meaning into a single day’s swing. The discipline is to capture the data as it happens and then look at it on a set rhythm. A monthly review of the few KPIs that matter, with a line of context next to each, tells you more than a daily glance ever will, because you are reading the trend rather than the day. Cash, margin, channel contribution, the cash conversion cycle. Few enough to hold in your head, looked at often enough to catch a problem early, not so often that you are governed by the noise.

Both ideas come back to the same point. The tools and the metrics are endless. What a founder needs is clarity on what the business is solving for, and a steady rhythm of looking at the numbers that surface it. That is most of what the early work with a founder is: getting clear on the objective, then building the cadence that keeps it in view.