15 essays and counting
Everything I've written about business, marketing, human behavior, and the founder journey. Start anywhere.
A depressed brain doesn't produce less energy — it produces more, wasted on idle processes. Most struggling companies have the same problem. The issue is never total energy. It's deployable energy.
Costco loses hundreds of millions a year on a $4.99 chicken. The loss isn't a bug in the business model — it's the business model. The most valuable companies earn trust by losing money in the right places.
Google was the twentieth search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. First-mover advantage is one of the most repeated ideas in business — and one of the most wrong.
In-N-Out has 400 locations. McDonald's has 40,000. Patagonia told customers not to buy their jacket. Revenue went up 30%. The most interesting companies are the ones that chose constraint on purpose.
The Economist offered a subscription nobody bought. When they removed it, revenue dropped 43%. The options you don't choose still shape the options you do.
When AI can produce perfect communication on demand, polish stops being a signal of quality. It becomes noise. The only thing that can't be faked is the thing that was never polished in the first place.
Duolingo's streak makes the product worse — and harder to leave. Salesforce's painful implementation is its moat. The most defensible companies don't remove friction. They move it to the right places.
In 1950, Betty Crocker made their cake mix harder to use — and sales exploded. The products people love most are the ones that ask something of them.
People don't buy products. They buy a version of themselves they haven't become yet. Once you understand this, everything about marketing changes.
Nobody writes about the startups that just slowly stopped. No dramatic crash. No public failure. Just a founder who ran out of conviction one Tuesday afternoon.
You're not asking people to try something new. You're asking them to let go of something familiar. That's a completely different conversation.
Culture isn't what you write on the wall. It's what your first five employees do when you're not in the room.
The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like a favor. The brands that win are the ones that give before they ask.
Balance implies equal distribution. But building something meaningful was never about equal distribution. It's about intentional imbalance.
Raw Notes
No schedule. No fluff. Just honest notes when I have something worth saying.