One founder signs up for Notion. Another starts using Airtable. Someone drops a spreadsheet in Google Drive. Someone else emails an Excel file.
Six months later, the same data lives in four places and nobody knows which version is current.
That's not a tech stack. That's a mess.
The mistake most startups make with their operational tools isn't choosing the wrong ones. It's not choosing deliberately at all. The tools are cheap, mature, and well-integrated. The problem is that nobody sat down and designed the system — which tool owns which data, how information flows between them, and where the single source of truth lives.
I wrote about this: how to think about your Company OS as a deliberate design, not an accident.
You can make operations your company's hidden superpower.