9 essays
When most of your workforce is agents, the founder's job shifts from directing people to designing the conditions under which judgment happens. The old leadership virtues survive the translation; the tactics mostly don't.
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For the first time in my career, the most ambitious thing a founder can do is often not to raise at all. The economics that made venture capital mandatory have quietly stopped applying.
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The most honest way to claim how work will change is to build the company that only makes sense if you're right — so the product becomes the proof, and every failure is in public.
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Every dollar of venture money arrives attached to a person, and you will know that person for longer than you will know most of the people you marry into. Choose accordingly.
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The most expensive decision in a raise is not the valuation. It is the size of the round — the number that quietly decides what kind of company you are allowed to become.
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A demo proves a thing can happen once. A product proves it happens every time. The distance between the two is where most startups quietly die.
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A financial model isn't a prediction. It's a structured argument with yourself, and the only thing it really outputs is conviction — or the absence of it.
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In the year after GPT-4, capital chased a sentence. The founders who raised well were not the ones with the best sentence — they were the ones who knew what the sentence was costing them.
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A team's speed is set not by how good its people are but by how few of them have to agree before something ships. Most companies optimize the wrong variable.
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