Making Decisions Like a Musician
What nine years at Grindr taught Bill Shafton about leading through complexity
The best leaders, Bill Shafton says, make decisions the way musicians perform. You study the chords, the structure, the theory. But once you’re on stage, you just play. The research gives you the framework. The experience gives you the instinct.
It’s a philosophy Shafton developed over nine years as the legal backbone of Grindr, navigating a Chinese acquisition, a national security divestiture, and a Wall Street IPO. Along the way, he learned that the quality of a decision isn’t just about being right. It’s about being trusted.
Start with the North Star
In a crisis, Shafton says, the first thing to get lost is perspective. Stakeholders pull in different directions — a CEO focused on quarterly growth, a board member eyeing an exit. His job was always to anchor the conversation around one question: what’s in the long-term interest of the company?
“It sounds obvious,” he says, “but in the heat of a crisis, that’s exactly what gets forgotten.”
Operate in the gray
One of the most important things Shafton coaches his team on is moving away from binary thinking. Legal isn’t about what’s allowed and what isn’t. It’s about how you do something responsibly within the boundaries of what’s possible.
The question isn’t just “is this legal?” It’s “does this meet our users’ expectations? Are we being transparent enough? And does this protect the trust we’ve built?”
Know which doors only open one way
Not all decisions deserve the same weight. Shafton borrows from Jeff Bezos’ framework of one-way doors versus two-way doors. For reversible decisions with low permanent impact, he biases for speed. The cost of being slow often outweighs the cost of being wrong. For consequential, irreversible decisions, he slows down, brings more voices in, and pressure tests every assumption.
The goal isn’t consensus, it’s alignment, making sure everyone understands the decision being made and why, so that when it’s time to move, everyone is singing the same song.
The liver nobody celebrates
Shafton describes the legal function with characteristic self-awareness: it’s like an institutional liver. Nobody celebrates their liver on a daily basis. But without it, things break down quickly.
The best partners in a business aren’t the ones who say yes to everything or block everything. They’re the ones who process the complexity so the rest of the organization can move.
Perfect vs. impeccable
When decisions don’t go as planned — and they won’t — Shafton draws a distinction he returns to often. Perfect isn’t achievable. Impeccable is. Doing the best you can with the information you have, raising your hand when something goes wrong, and staying transparent throughout.
The mistake, he says, is rarely just the mistake. It’s not surfacing it early enough to course correct.
Bill Shafton is a senior legal advisor at Grindr. He joined Mack McKelvey on The Cred Podcast to talk about decision-making, leadership, and operating through complexity. Listen to their conversation below.
