Founders make more high-stakes decisions per week than most executives make in a year. And they make them with incomplete information, sleep deprivation, and real money on the line. Most founders wing it. They trust their gut, lean into conviction, and move fast. Sometimes this works. More often it produces decisions that look obvious in retrospect but felt unavoidable at the time — a hiring bet that didn't pay off, a pivot that was actually just panic, a pricing strategy that chased the wrong customers. The founders who compound their judgment over time aren't smarter. They have better systems. Frameworks that filter out the noise, force explicit thinking about trade-offs, and catch obvious mistakes before they compound. These five are the most useful I've encountered. They're drawn from ancient Stoic philosophy, military doctrine, and modern cognitive science. Together they cover most of the decisions a founder actually faces. 1.…