The five currencies

1. Business. The spreadsheet currency: revenue, growth, market position, the company's trajectory. Everything you already measure. It's real; it's just not alone.

2. Money. Yours, not the company's. Personal runway, liquidity, concentration risk, the difference between the company being worth more and you being able to buy groceries. Founders conflate this currency with the business one constantly, and the conflation is how you end up paper-rich and decision-poor, making desperate calls with a valuable company because your personal account has four months left.

3. People. The relationships the call touches: cofounders, team, investors, family, the friend group that stops calling. Some calls are cheap in every other currency and ruinous here. Zuckerberg's refusal of Yahoo's billion was right on the evidence and still cost him most of his management team within a year: even correct calls bill this currency, and the record says budget for it.

4. Health. Sleep, panic, the body's ledger. This currency has a property the others don't: it holds veto power at the extreme, because it's the one currency where the worst case is uninsurable. Money reverses, reputation rebuilds, identity re-forms. A cardiac event doesn't negotiate. The record's standard here is Justin Welsh's highway panic attack: he read it as data, quit the vehicle, kept the game.

5. Identity. Who you are on the other side of the call. The founder who can't sell because "founder of this" is the whole self. The one who can't quit because quitting people don't. This currency is the quietest and decides the most: unpriced identity is what turns sell-vs-hold into an existential crisis and a firing into a year of delay.

Not because it makes deciding softer. Because it makes the accounting honest, and honest accounting changes verdicts.

A raise that's brilliant in the business currency and catastrophic in health-plus-identity is a different decision than the deck says. So is an acquihire the deck calls mediocre, once the money and health currencies get priced. The most common founder pricing error in the record is paying premium prices in health and people for gains in a currency that was never the constraint: buying business-currency wins the life can't cash.

The doctrine's grading rule follows from this: when you review a past call, grade each currency separately and let the verdicts disagree. Sold too early in the business currency, right on time in the health currency: both can be true, and the review that forces a single verdict learns less than the one that doesn't. One guardrail so this never becomes therapy: multi-currency honesty is for accuracy, never for comfort. If the call was wrong in the currency that mattered most, say so plainly first, then name the compensations.

The currencies feed the system's hardest rule. Before weighing what a call could win, price its worst case in every currency it touches, and check that worst case against your ruin line: personal insolvency, health collapse, the loss of people you can't lose, the reputational events you don't come back from.

Notice what's not on the list: company death. Companies die and founders build again; the record is full of them. Ruin is the set of outcomes you don't come back from, and the line between "the company failed" and "I can't recover" is the most important line in the whole system. A bet you can't survive is a bad bet at any odds, because you live one path through time, not the average of a thousand parallel worlds. A 90% chance of doubling means nothing if the 10% ends you.

The Musk December 2008 story is usually told as the counterexample: last dollars split between Tesla and SpaceX, boats burned, legend earned. Look closer at the documented version: the fourth Falcon had already flown successfully, both rescue deals had names and dates attached, and it was his own money, chosen exposure. Bounded downside, then the swing. The legend is the exception that proves the rule, because when you find the receipts, it wasn't the legend.

Take the decision you're circling and write the worst case in each of the five, one line each. Ten minutes. Two things reliably happen: a currency you'd been ignoring turns out to be carrying the real fear, and the ruin check comes back clear, which converts dread into a price. Most hard calls survive the pricing. The few that don't were the ones to catch.