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Nothing I hate more in life than a wasted green light while driving.
Meaning the cars in front of you for one reason or another cause you not to make the green light.
I’m sure there is some business metaphor or learning in there somewhere, just can’t think of it at the moment.
Change is the only constant.
Not the kind you plan for on a calendar.
The kind that shows up anyway, whether you’re ready or not.
This time of year always reminds me of something uncomfortable but true:
If you don’t disrupt yourself, life (or the market) will do it for you.
So instead of making “more goals,” I’m focusing on making more space:
- Space to delete what’s no longer working
- Space to say “no” faster
- Space to look dumb as I learn something new
- Space to build the next version of me before I’m forced to
Innovation rarely arrives when everything is full.
It shows up when there’s room to experiment… and permission to be wrong.
My end of year question is simple:
What do you need to stop doing to make room for what’s next?
Hardest lesson I've had to learn in my entrepreneurial journey is leadership has phases.
When you’re early, you have to be the on-field general... think LeBron in the fourth quarter. You’re calling plays in real time, taking hits, making decisions on instinct. The team feeds off your urgency and clarity. That’s what a business needs in month 1–12.
But as the team grows, that style stops scaling.
You can’t be everywhere. You shouldn’t.
Now your job shifts from playmaker to architect.
This is where you become Phil Jackson:
• Build the system
• Coach through others
• Create culture
• Win by elevating the team, not by dominating the ball
The best operators evolve their leadership style.
They know when to step on the court… and when to step off it.
You can’t debate a persons humanity.
There is a lot of talk about the importance of open discourse and debate which is great but not if it is at the risk of dehumanizing groups of people.
The hardest choice in business isn’t product vs. distribution, it’s Growth vs. Profitability.
Why tech skews growth: near-zero marginal costs + data/network effects mean moats unlock at scale, so teams rationally trade margin for speed (think Amazon’s “long-term market leadership over short-term profits”).
Why real world busiensses skew towards profit: each new dollar drags inventory, labor, leases. Discipline on unit economics and cash conversion is the moat (Costco, Southwest-style playbooks).
A fast barometer: the Rule of 40 (growth % + profit % ≥ 40) balances speed and efficiency; many operators now weight growth a bit more when it’s efficient (“Rule of X”).
When to favor Growth (offense)
- Network/platform effects; category land-grab
- Cheap capital; flywheel needs scale
- Watch: LTV/CAC, CAC payback, NRR
Examples: Amazon (early decades), Uber, Salesforce, Shopify.
When to favor Profit (defense)
- Tangible-unit businesses; tight credit cycles
- Operational moats; self-funded options
- Watch: contribution margin, CCC, ROIC
Examples: Basecamp/37signals (“we choose profit”), Costco, Southwest (historically).
Common failure modes
- Growth theatre: vanity metrics hide churn and weak retention.
- Profit theatre: starving R&D & GTM; “profitable, but irrelevant.”
- Price to win, not to last: discounts create CAC mirages and fragile cohorts.
- Ignoring working capital: revenue grows, cash dies.
tl;dr
1. Tech often must chase growth to unlock moats.
2. Real-world businesses often must chase profit to stay alive.
3. The right answer changes over time great operators know which game they’re playing this quarter and set metrics, budgets, and culture accordingly.
If you’re torn right now, start with retention > payback > scalable channel.
Once those three lock, you’ve earned the right to step on the gas.
Interested in learning more about growth vs profitability read these resources: Amazon’s 1997 letter on long-term leadership; Sequoia’s Adapting to Endure memo; BVP’s Rule of 40/Rule of X; 37signals on choosing profit.
Maddy retweeted
New episode: "The Stubborn Genius of James Dyson"
A few notes from the episode:
1. Copying is for losers.
2. They only come to you because you're eccentric. They can get conformity anywhere.
3. Be different and retain total control.
4. Great work is just the vision of a single person, pursued with dogged determination that is nothing less than obsession.
5. The best founders are obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts.
6. Hire blank slates: Young people who haven’t been ruined by the bad habits of subpar organizations.
7. Be fired by an inner strength and self-belief that is almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age.
8. Vision is just long-term stubbornness.
9. The root principle is to do things your way. It doesn’t matter how other people do it.
10. As long as it works, and it's exciting, people will follow you.
11. Demand difference from what exists.
12. Extreme success comes from doing something no one else is doing.
13. Learning from history is a form of leverage. Have an interest, verging on obsession, with the past. (Dyson literally wrote an encyclopedia on history's greatest inventions)
14. Do not sell a half-finished product.
15. People do not want all-purpose; they want high-tech specificity.
16. Don’t lose the direct connection to your customer.
17. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence — and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.
18. You simply cannot mix messages when selling something new. Customers can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several.
19. You want a single message expressed clearly.
20. Appeal to a specific need. Don’t make your product too wide. Narrow it down.
21. You have to think about the incentives of the people you’re selling to. You can’t sell a bagless vacuum cleaner to people that make $500 million selling vacuum bags.
22. No one is ever eager to fix a cash machine that isn’t broken.
23. The more you’re able to control, the better your product— and then your company— will become.
24. Don’t copy the opposition. Don’t worry about market research. Follow your own star. This is what success entrepreneurs do.
25. The opposite of following your own star is following the herd. That is a path to dull conformity.
26. For innovative, intrinsically excellent products, the markets are often larger than you can predict.
27. The entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer.
28. No one ever got an idea starting at a drawing board.
29. Founder led sales is the most powerful tool.
30. The inventive mind knows that there is always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made.
31. A clever person doesn’t spend 14 years building 5,127 prototypes of the world’s first cyclonic vacuum cleaner. A determined person does.
32. If you have an idea for a new product, you engineer, prototype, manufacture, market, and sell it yourself. Retain total control.
33. If it’s not beautiful you’re not done.
34. The founder is personally accountable for every product sold.
35. People buy stories. Invest heavily in storytelling. Why your product exists. How it is made. Who made it.
36. Control is more important than money.
37. When you own the whole company all decisions are your own.
38. How bad do you want it? Dyson made a new prototype, every day, for more than 1,000 days. Alone.
39. Perseverance is not cheap.
40. A project will die if the original mule doesn’t stay on it. The self-belief is not there to press through the hard times.
41. Your company should be the most exciting adventure of your life.
42. If you make it, sell it yourself.
43. Only the person with the closest relationship with the product can make a success of it.
44. There's nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or afraid.
45. You need the confidence — and the stupidity — to do things differently.
46. One decent editorial counts for 1,000 advertisements.
47. Difference for the sake of difference and the continuous improvement of products simply for improvement’s sake.
48. Persistent trial and error allows you to wake up one morning, after many, many mornings, with a world-beating product.
49. Seek out originality for its own sake.
50. Companies are built, not made.
51. You are more likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined than by being brilliant.
52. Never sacrifice quality for speed.
53. Magic — the unique way a product does what it does — is never to be underestimated.
There are 100 more ideas in the episode. I hope you listen to it. 50 years of Dyson's career + 70 hours of reading (and simplifying) and me just ripping through idea after idea at 2x speed for 90 minutes.
It will be hard to find a better use of time.
Life was much better when everyone didn't feel the need to publicly announce their political affiliation.
This post reads like Lebron getting traded to another team.
We are approaching cult status with political parties.
Here’s a take most founders won’t say out loud:
Raising venture capital can be the least risky way to capitalize your business for founders.
Why? Because equity financing caps your personal downside. No personal guarantees. No monthly debt service choking cash flow. If the bet doesn’t work, you lose equity not your house. Meanwhile, the business gets fuel to win where speed matters.
A lot of entrepreneurs look down on VC and claim “venture destroys businesses.” What destroys businesses is misalignment and starvation, not capital.
Over-bootstrapping after product-market fit (PMF) is a great way to get out-executed competitors ship faster, hire better, and build moats while you ration oxygen.
When VC makes sense
- You’ve found PMF and the market is moving fast.
- Distribution, hiring, or infrastructure are the bottlenecks not demand.
- There’s a credible path to venture-scale outcomes (big market, defensibility, speed advantage).
When it doesn’t
- You’re still searching for PMF.
- Niche or lifestyle outcomes are the goal.
- Capital efficiency is your core moat and speed isn’t the deciding factor.
Founder risk vs. business risk
Debt = founder risk (personal guarantees), fixed obligations, less room for error.
VC = dilution (business risk), but flexibility to pursue outsized opportunities.
There is no one-size-fits-all path. Success is a cumulative set of decisions stage, market, timing, team, capital stack not a single ideology.
Blanket advice is lazy; context is everything. Choose the capital that best matches your goals, risk tolerance, and the tempo your market demands.
This is great marketing to YC.
Fluently just hit $5M ARR 🤯
0 to $500k ARR: 627 days
$500k to $5M ARR: 126 days
Super grateful to @t_blom for believing in 2 cracked slavic founders 🙏
Why so many startups go from $0 → millions in months (and what will actually matter next)
We’re living through an unusual go to market moment:
AI budgets are opening fast, procurement cycles are compressing, and buyers are actively looking for automation wins.
In McKinsey’s latest study, 92% of executives say they plan to increase AI investment over the next three years.
Why $0 → millions can happen so quickly right now
1. Acute pain → instant value
Point-solutions that kill a specific bottleneck (support deflection, lead routing, QA, data cleanup) get approved quickly, often for entire teams within the org.
2. Distribution is native
Short demos + proof runs spread via Slack, app marketplaces, and social. No long enterprise theater required.
3. Usage based pricing.
Clear ROI per task/run lowers friction and invites rapid land and expand.
But here’s the part that will separate early hype from market dominance: retention and customer success.
GenAI adoption is way up (McKinsey saw a sharp rise in regular use through 2024), yet many initiatives struggle to deliver durable value once the pilot glow fades.
There is a new super villian in B2B and it's called “pilot purgatory” where less than 30% of pilots ever start to scale, and most stall for a year or more. If your product can’t break through this wall, early revenue won’t stick.
Meanwhile, budgets keep expanding IDC expects worldwide AI spend to reach $632B by 2028 so there will be plenty of early wins. The winners will be the teams who turn pilots into production and usage into outcomes.
How to escape pilot purgatory:
- Bind every feature to a business KPI and show lifts in product.
- Design onboarding around one canonical job to be done; expand only after the habit forms.
- Instrument CS playbooks (templates, checklists, health scores) like you instrument code.
- Treat change management as a feature: roles, training, and guardrails built in.
Early revenue is easy right now. Durable revenue is not.
Optimize for outcomes, expansion, and proofs to production, and you’ll still be growing when the budget honeymoon ends.
Here’s the pricing lesson I wish I’d learned sooner:
Price to share the win, not take it all.
Great pricing captures a slice of the value you create and leaves clear surplus for the customer. That surplus is what funds renewals, referrals, and expansion.
Why “percentage of value” beats “capture it all”
- Adoption unlocks: When customers keep most of the gain, buying is easy to justify.
- Low regret: Surplus lowers buyer’s remorse and churn.
- Room to expand: As value grows, your revenue scales with it without constant renegotiation.
- Trust signal: You’re aligned with outcomes, not extraction.
A simple rule of thumb
Estimate the economic value you create, then price at ~10–30% of that value.
Quick example:
Your automation saves a team ~10 hours/month at $50/hr → $500/month of value.
A healthy monthly price: $50–$150.
You’re sharing the win, and it scales as usage grows.
Make value-based pricing practical
1. Quantify value: Time saved, revenue lifted, risk reduced. Convert to dollars.
2. Pick the right pricing metric: Seats, tasks run, contacts enriched, credits, API calls tie it to the value driver.
3. Design a curve, not a point: Offer Good/Better/Best plus usage or credits so heavy users naturally pay more.
4. Anchor & de-risk: Publish a higher “compare to” value or annual ROI example, then pair with a trial, guarantee, or pilot.
Measure & adjust: Track payback period, realized ROI, expansion revenue, and churn. Reprice when value proof improves.
Common traps to avoid
- Pricing from costs instead of outcomes.
- Copying a competitor’s tiers without your own value math.
- Overcapturing early (feels great at close, hurts renewals).
- Making plans so complex buyers can’t self-serve.
- Never revisiting price as your product’s value rises.
Quick worksheet you can use today
Customer segment: ________
Main outcome: ________
Value math: units of impact × $ per unit = $V/month
Target share captured (10–30%): ________%
Proposed price: $V × target share = $______/month
Pricing metric that scales with value: ________
Good/Better/Best tiers + usage caps: ________
Bottom line: If your customer can clearly say “we keep most of the gain,” you’ve likely found sustainable pricing.
Capture a fair percentage of value, prove ROI fast, and let expansion do the heavy lifting.
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