I turn Startups > Scaleups. PMF and PLG. I write about it at growth-goals.com ✉️ - check it out

👋 I'm Andrew. I love fast-growing Startups. Ex-founder, small-time investor, and I write about Growth/PMF/OKRs.  

I've built high-growth companies in London and Silicon Valley. Over the years, I've sat on all sides of the table as a founder, investor, operator, and advisor. Currently, I have an AI and web3 bias, but I have been everywhere. 

During this journey, I created the Growth/OKR process Core & Explore™, which is now used by thousands of Startups and some large companies. 

Previously, I graduated 500 Startups; was an EIR at Seedcamp; led product and growth at my own Startup; mentored and advised VC funds; and helped behind the scenes at the founder community ICE.

Andrew Crump

I specialise in transforming organisations by unlocking the full potential of their leadership and teams. My journey began with a deep dive into anthropology, fuelling a lifelong fascination with cognitive science, group dynamics, and the powerful role of human connection in organisational success. This foundation, combined with years in innovation consulting, product, and delivery management, has culminated in my passion for the art of the gathering; designing experiences that genuinely connect people to nature, to their purpose, and to each other.

With my brother, I co-founded Momentum Processes. We engineer bespoke offsites for executive teams, leadership groups, and entire companies, as well as founders and VCs. These are not just events; they are strategically designed environments that drive tangible outcomes and deliver significant ROI. We firmly believe that focused time outside the office can save weeks, even months, of burn rate by fostering unparalleled productivity and alignment.

Our offsites are meticulously crafted to achieve powerful results:
- Cultivate a Transformative Feedback Culture: Enabling continuous improvement and growth at all levels.
- Build Inspiring, Accountable Leadership: Empowering managers to drive engagement and performance.
- Foster Dynamic Communication & Collaboration: Unlocking breakthrough innovations and solving complex challenges with precision.
- Ensure Deep Alignment & Commitment to Values: Creating a unified culture where shared principles guide every decision and action.
- Develop an Agile & Resilient Mindset: Equipping teams to navigate change, embrace experimentation, and gain a competitive edge.
- Ignite Proactive Ownership & Deliver Exceptional Results: Empowering individuals to exceed expectations and drive organisational success.

Whether you need expert consultation for agenda design and strategic guidance, or a fully produced event where we handle all the heavy lifting, we partner with you. Our experiences blend strategic workshops (focused on high-performing teams, accountability, and trust) with unique elements like fire-cooking, ice baths, movement practices, and locally sourced incredible food, ensuring deep connection, lasting impact, and unparalleled productivity.

Ready to unlock your team's next breakthrough? Let's design an offsite that delivers beyond your vision.

Contact me directly: maya@momentumprocesses.com
Learn more: www.momentumprocesses.com

Maya Knight

I ask leadership teams the same question at the start of an offsite.

"What do you say you value, and what do you actually reward?"

The silence that follows tells me everything I need to know.

Most teams have values:

➝ Integrity
➝ Collaboration
➝ Psychological safety
➝ Innovation

They're on the website, in the onboarding deck and printed on the wall in the nice font.

And then I watch what actually happens in the room:

➝ Someone speaks up and gets sidelined

➝ The person who hits the number gets celebrated (regardless of how they got there)

➝ The leader who admits they don’t know gets undermined

That gap between what you say you value and what you actually reward is your real culture.

Not the document, the away day or the values workshop from three years ago.

The behaviour you walk past, the person you promote, the meeting you let run the way it always runs.

Patrick Lencioni calls this one of the most common and costly mistakes leadership teams make:

🔴 Confusing aspirational values with operational ones.

I'd go further.

I think most teams don't even know they're doing it.

Which is why having that yearly offsite matters.

It allows you to hold up a mirror to the values you’re already living, and decide if that’s who you want to be.

Have you ever been in a team where the stated values and the lived reality didn't match? What did it cost?

♻️ Culture is built in the everyday moments, not the away days.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for practical insights on facilitation, leadership, and designing offsites that actually change things.

Co-founder & COO at Momentum Method, Director at B+ Collective

The questions that expose your team's real culture

Nobody is thinking about you.

Nobody is thinking about what you’re doing, what you’re wearing, how you act, or whether you try something new and fail…

(Despite what we sometimes think.)

Someone told me this a few years ago and it’s always stuck with me.

We spend so much time conscious about other’s opinions of us, that we often get lost in what we actually want.

Our worry of perception takes over our true intent.

How this worry often plays out:

➝ Not sharing work that isn’t perfect yet.
➝ Not speaking up out of fear of what others think.
➝ Not taking a risk because you’re embarrassed of failure.
➝ Going to events you don’t want to go to because it’s what you’re ‘supposed’ to do.
➝ People pleasing in general.


It links in with our ‘FOMO’ or fear of missing out.

That we get so caught up in what others are doing and what’s perceived as ‘right’ that our passions and desires get lost.

We're optimising for what looks good instead of what actually matters to us.

And the ironic thing? 

The people whose opinions we're so worried about are probably doing the exact same thing, worrying about what we think of them.

What changed for me when I realised this:

➝ I stopped performing as much.
➝ I share work before it’s perfect.
➝ I speak up even when I’m unsure.
➝ I try new things I might fail at.
➝ I say no to things that don’t align, even when it’s “supposed” to matter.

Not because I suddenly became extra confident. 

Because I realised: most people aren't thinking about it as much as I am.

When you really get that nobody’s thinking about you (not in a sad way, but in a liberating way) you can stop optimising for their opinion.

And start figuring out what you actually want.

Not what looks impressive, nor what makes people like you.

What genuinely matters to you.

What would you do differently if you truly believed nobody was thinking about you as much as you think they are?

♻️ Share if you needed this reminder 
🔔 Follow Maya Knight for more honest reflections on building work and life with less performance

Image credit: Sahil Bloom

Just one sentence can make someone feel seen for the first time in months.

Or invisible for the rest of the year. 

It’s the same amount of effort.

The words you use with your team shape: 

➙ How safe people feel
➙ How seen they feel
➙ How much of themselves they're willing to bring to the work

The fifteen sentences in this image are far more than HR stuff.

They're the language of someone who has decided that relationships are part of the job, not a distraction from it.

Credit to Dr. Carolyn Frost for this, it's simple, and it's right on point.

The problem with team communication is that leaders have learned to manage up, present well and hold it together in the room.

They didn’t learn to say:

➙ “I made a mistake and want to make it right.”
➙ “What support do you need from me right now?”
➙ “Thank you for being direct with me.”

And actually mean it. Which is key!

Lesson for all teams/leaders: 

⚠️ You cannot build psychological safety with a framework or workshop.

You build it with each word you say, with communication and real effort.

The language shifts before the culture does.

And it starts in the everyday moments that you’re not measuring.

Pick one sentence from this list and use it this week.

Notice how your team responds!

Which of these is hardest for you to say, and what does that tell you?

♻️ Repost if you think the small moments build culture more than the big ones.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for honest insights on facilitation and communication.

The trap we all fall into:

Confusing personality for character. 

I see this a lot in the teams I work with.

Leaders who are charismatic, strategic, articulate. Impressive in all the external ways.

But when things get tough, when there’s a difficult decision or a tough conversation, something is missing.

That something is often their character.

Personality is external. 

➝ How you show up, present, and influence.

➝ Skills, charisma, tactics that get results. It can get you quick wins, but it's surface-level.

Character is internal. 

➝ Who you are when nobody's watching. Integrity, humility, courage, patience, fairness.

➝ Character builds trust. And trust is what makes teams function.

Personality without character looks like:

➝ Great at presenting strategy but avoids hard conversations.

➝ Charismatic in meetings but talks differently behind backs.

➝ Shifts positions based on who’s in the room.

Character looks like:
➝ Says the difficult thing even when uncomfortable.

➝ Admits when they don’t know instead of performing certainty.

➝ Makes the fair decisions even when it’s not popular.

You can build a career on personality for a while.

But eventually, people (including your team) will see through it.

People notice when your actions don’t match your words.

Character is what people remember when the charm wears off.

What I see in offsites:

Leaders built on personality perform well in sessions. They say the right things, they look engaged.

But when we get to difficult conversations that require vulnerability and risk, they disappear.

Leaders built on character lean in. Even when it’s challenging.

And those are the leaders who people trust.

Ask yourself: Am I optimising for how I appear or who I actually am?

♻️ Stop confusing personality for character.
➕ Follow @maya knight for more on build teams with integrity

Surface level personality 

Want to know one of the biggest time wasters I see at offsites? 

Derailed conversations.

Not because the content isn’t valid (it usually is).

But there’s a difference between a conversation that’s difficult and one that’s derailing.

Difficult conversations make progress. Derailing just takes away time. 

I’m sure everyone reading this can relate.

You’re in a meeting or an offsite, and one comment or question triggers an irrelevant conversation that spirals on for two hours.

All of a sudden, the meeting is over and you’ve wasted precious time debating something that could have been handled with proper structure.

I have two moves I usually use to stop the derailing conversation and get back to the point:

1. Capture it in one sentence
➝ Ask the person driving it: “Can you give me one sentence that captures what you most need us to hear?” 
➝ This focuses the energy without dismissing it.

2. Then, park it
➝ “That’s important and I don’t want it to get lost. I’m putting it on the board and we’re coming back to it at [specific time].
➝ Write it down, give it a real slot, then bring the room back to where it was.

Now, I’m aware this technique seems easy written down, but can be a little difficult in practice.

Some tips for facilitators: 

● Do it early. The moment you feel the thread going, that’s your moment to move.
● Keep your tone neutral, not corrective.
● Don’t ask for permission. Instead of “is it OK if we…” try “I’m going to pause us here and capture that.”

The two-step technique works because it does something most people forget to do. 

It makes the person feel heard without letting the room get lost.

And that’s the whole job really.

Have you ever watched a conversation derail a whole day? What would you do differently now?

♻️ Repost if you think knowing how to hold a room is one of the most underrated skills there is.

➕ Follow Maya Knight for practical insights on facilitation and making the time your team spends together actually count.

How to stop a derailing conversation

A high-performing team isn’t always a healthy one.

This is one of the most uncomfortable things I say to teams at offsites.

Because the numbers look good, targets are being hit, and the board is happy.

Yet underneath it all, people are:

➝ Exhausted
➝ Anxious
➝ Looking for an exit

Research from Gallup shows burned-out employees are far more likely to leave, even when performance is high.

Which means the quarter you celebrate might be the one that costs you your best people.

Because yes, pressure can create results.

But it can’t create trust, and it definitely can’t sustain a team.

Healthy teams aren’t softer than high-performing ones.

They’re just more honest.

They disagree sooner, surface tension earlier, and deal with problems before they become culture.

That’s why Patrick Lencioni says trust isn’t a “nice to have.”

It’s what determines whether performance lasts or collapses.

If your team is performing well but something feels off, pay attention.

Because the best time to fix a culture problem is before the results drop, not after! 

Try this with your team this week (15 minutes):

Ask everyone to write down, anonymously if needed:

1. What behaviour gets rewarded most here?
2. What behaviour gets punished?
3. What’s one thing people avoid saying out loud?

Go through the answers together and see what patterns come up! 

That gap between intention and reality is where your culture actually lives.

Have you ever been in a team that looked successful on paper but felt completely different inside?

♻️ Repost if you’ve ever seen success hide a problem no one wanted to name
➕ Follow Maya Knight for honest insights on team health and what happens behind the numbers

If communication were easy, there'd be no difficult conversations.

It isn't easy.

But it is trainable.

It’s about practicing certain habits so that when high-stakes moments come around, you can handle them much better.

I have a few exercises I practice with myself and with clients.

Here are five:

1. The one-sentence clarity check 
→ Before any important message or conversation, force yourself to summarise what you need in one sentence. 

→ If you can't do it in one sentence, you're not clear enough yet. 

2. The 24-hour rule for emotional responses I
→ If something has triggered a strong reaction, write the response you want to send, then don't send it. 

→ Save it, sleep on it, come back to it the next day. 

3. The listening audit 
→ In your next three conversations, set yourself one rule: don't respond until the other person has completely finished. 

→ No finishing their sentences, no planning your reply while they're still talking, no jumping in with your own experience. Just listen. 

4. The assumption surface 
→ Before a difficult conversation, write down every assumption you're walking in with.

→ Then go into the conversation treating every single one of them as unverified. 

→ Ask instead of assume. 

5. The feedback formula 
→ Next time you need to give difficult feedback, structure it as three things: what you observed, how it affected you or the work, and what you'd specifically like to change. 

→ It's Marshall Rosenberg's NVC framework in its simplest form, and it works every time you actually use it.

None of these are complicated. 

But they do require consistency, which can be the difficult part.

Try just one this week and see if you notice a difference.

Make the decision to show up every day to conversations a little more deliberately than you did yesterday.

Which of these feels most relevant to where you are right now, and which one do you know you need to work on most?

♻️ Share these communication exercises with someone who needs them.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for practical insights on facilitation, leadership, and the habits that make teams work better together.

5 exercises to improve your conversations

Most of us don’t take up nearly the space the universe intended for us.

And for women, that’s especially true.

I rewatched this video by Caroline McHugh on International Women’s Day yesterday, and a few things stopped me.

“Your only job on the planet is to be good at being you”

Simple and obvious. 

Yet somehow one of the hardest things most women I know have ever actually done.

Our jobs here are not to be anything like any other people. 

Your only job on the planet is to be good at being you. 

Because we are taught from a young age to make ourselves manageable. 

To be capable but not intimidating. 

Confident but not arrogant. 

To have opinions, but to hold them lightly enough that nobody feels threatened by them.

We learn to edit ourselves before anyone asks us to.

And by the time we're sitting in leadership rooms, running businesses, making decisions that matter, that editing is so deeply embedded that most of us don't even notice we're doing it anymore.

We speak in questions when we mean statements. We apologise before we disagree.

The minute you were born you were given a life sentence, and you don’t know how long you’ve got.

Stop thinking about what your life expectancy is, and start thinking about:

→ What do you expect from life?
→ What does life expect from you?

That shift from passive to active, from waiting to deciding, is everything.

The women I've seen create the most extraordinary things are almost never the ones performing the most confidently.

They're the ones who have stopped editing.

Who decided at some point that the gap between who they are and who they're pretending to be is too expensive to maintain.

For a lot of women this takes years.

But it starts with one question.

Who am I when I stop managing how I'm coming across?

Link to Caroline McHugh's full talk in the comments. 

Watch it today. 

Share it with every woman you know who is still giving too much of herself to the edited version.

The unedited version of you is not too much.

It’s exactly enough.

Who's a woman in your life who has stopped editing, and what changed when she did?

♻️ Repost for every woman who has ever made herself smaller in a room she deserved to be in.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for honest insights on facilitation and creating spaces where people show up as exactly who they are.

Steven Pressfield has a rule of thumb.

The more resistance you feel towards something, the more important it probably is.

And I’ve never seen it proven wrong.

Think about:

● The email that's been sitting in your drafts for three weeks. 

● The conversation you've rehearsed in your head a hundred times but still haven't had. 

● The decision you already know the answer to but keep finding reasons to defer. 

● The project you know would change things if you'd just begin.

It’s not laziness, and it’s not a time management problem.

It’s resistance. And the fact you feel it so strongly is the most important information available to you.

Resistance doesn’t show up for the things that don’t matter.

It reserves its full force for the work that would actually move something.

In your career, relationships, your team, your life.

Which means the size of what you’re avoiding is a direct signal of the size of what’s at stake.

Most people interpret that feeling as a reason to wait.

Pressfield argues it's a reason to go.

Not when you feel ready, not when the timing is better, not when you've thought about it a little more. 

But now, today, despite the fear. 

Here’s what I invite you all to try this week:

➝ Write down one thing you’ve been avoiding for a long time.
➝ Now, what would happen if you just did it?

The answer is usually the point.

What are you trying to do now that you already know you should be?

♻️ The thing we avoid the most is usually the thing that matters most.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for more insights on human behaviour and doing work that matters.

Nobody leaves an offsite saying "that meeting was too honest." 

They leave saying "I wish we'd gone deeper." 

It’s a problem a lot of teams face.

Leaders, or facilitators, struggle to bring up the tough conversations.

You can organise an offsite or team meeting, plan workshops and activities, and still leave feeling like you didn’t tackle the important stuff.

Why? It’s not because teams don’t care.

It’s because the conditions weren’t there for real conversations to happen.

Susan Scott calls them fierce conversations.

I call them the ones that actually change things.

There are seven principles behind them. And when I build an offsite, every single one is baked into the design.

Here’s what they are (in the slides) and why they matter for your next leadership retreat.

👇 Swipe through.

Psychological safety is the most important trait of a high-performing team. 

This means the ability to say what’s actually true without fear.

These principles create that. 

Have you ever been in a room where a conversation genuinely shifted something? What made it different?

♻️ Repost if you believe the best leadership conversations haven't happened yet.
➕ Follow Maya Knight for practical insights on facilitation, retreat design, and helping leadership teams do their best work together.

Seven principles for having real conversations

Think you’re tired because you’re doing too much?

Try challenging these patterns first.

Then see how much of your energy comes back.

I’ve been realising that when I feel super drained, it’s less my workload and more my defaults.

I started shifting some of my patterns and have noticed a major difference.

Here are five patterns that are probably stealing most of your energy:

1. Checking your phone first thing in the morning
➝ Starting the day reactive instead of intentional.

Try this instead: Phone stays out of the bedroom. First 30 minutes are for movement, sunlight or stillness. 

2. Saying yes before checking if you have capacity
➝ Someone asks, you agree immediately. Then you have to rework your calendar.

Try: “Let me check my capacity and get back to you” instead. Even for small things.

3. Scrolling to avoid discomfort
➝ The addictive part isn’t the scrolling. It’s using it to numb out instead of dealing with what you’re avoiding.

Try this instead: When you catch yourself reaching for your phone, pause and ask: “what am I actually avoiding right now?” 

4. Working through breaks
➝ Eating lunch at your desk, taking calls during breaks, working straight through because “you’re on a roll.”

Try prioritising your breaks. Eat mindfully instead of looking at your screen. Don’t use your break as an excuse to go on your phone. 

5. Having your phone out during conversations
➝ Face-down on the table or in your pocket “just in case something urgent comes through.”

Try putting your phone in another room during meetings and meals. Nothing urgent enough happens that can’t wait 30 minutes. 

The most important thing you can do is design an environment where the addictive behaviour becomes harder and the better behaviour becomes easier.

Phone in another room.

Taking actual breaks.

Prioritising yourself.

All of these small changes build up massively over time.

Try focusing on just one for the next few weeks and see how it helps you.

Which one are you working on?

♻️ Share this with someone who needs to reclaim their energy
➕ Follow Maya Knight for more reflections on designing a way of working that feels sustainable.

5 addictive patterns to break this year

The pressure to know your life's purpose by 35 is one of the most unhelpful ideas we've agreed to take seriously.

What is purpose?

We act as if it’s a thing you locate, like something you misplaced somewhere and just need to look hard enough to find.

Most people who are living purposefully didn't find it that way. 

They just kept paying attention to the moments that made them feel most alive.

And slowly, those moments started forming a pattern.

That's the question worth asking.

Not "what is my purpose". 

Which is so large and so loaded with the weight of getting it right that most people freeze before they've even started answering it.

But "what brings me alive in this moment?"

You already know the answer. 

You know which conversations leave you energised and which ones drain you before they're finished. 

You know which work you'd do even if nobody was watching. 

You know the moments when time disappears.

That's not nothing. That's data.

So here's something worth trying. 

For the next two weeks, keep a note of the moments that made you feel genuinely alive. 

Not happy necessarily. Just alive.

At the end of two weeks, look at what you've written.

The pattern is usually already there.

Purpose emerges as a direction. 

And you find the direction by paying attention to what's already pulling you.

Not by searching in the abyss.

What's brought you most alive recently, and are you paying enough attention to it?

♻️ Purpose is something you notice, not something you find.
➕ Follow Maya Knight honest insights on facilitation and living and working in a way that actually means something.

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