Manifesto
Not values on a careers page. These are the rules I make decisions with: about which companies to start, whose cheques to take, and when to go home.
A business is the most efficient machine humans have built for changing something at scale. Grants run out. Outrage runs out. A profitable company that fixes a real problem runs forever. So point the machine at something that matters: waste, food, energy, access. If your company disappeared tomorrow and nothing broke, build something else.
Every single door I've walked through was opened by someone who owed me nothing. There is no way to pay that back up the chain, only forward. Take the call from the 19-year-old. Make the intro before they ask twice. Send the cheque that's too small to matter to you and too big to ignore for them.
Help is cheap for you and expensive for them, and that asymmetry is the best deal in business. But help isn't a transaction you file away. Keep the people. Networks are a spreadsheet, relationships are a life. I'd rather have forty people who'd pick up at 3am than four thousand connections.
Yes, the product is exciting. So is a long lunch, a bad film, a run with no headphones, and a conversation with someone who has never heard the word 'runway'. Founders who only have the company end up with nothing to bring back to it. Your best ideas will arrive when you are not looking for them.
Nobody bootstraps alone. Someone covered rent, took the 6am airport run, tested the first terrible batch, and believed the pitch before the deck existed. They are not a distraction from the work. They are the reason the work is possible, and the only part of the balance sheet that is genuinely non-replaceable.
We brewed batches nobody would drink. We pitched rooms that laughed. For the longest time the industry saw four kids doing a school project. Every one of those was tuition, and it was cheaper than an MBA. The only unrecoverable failure is the one you don't extract the lesson from, so fail fast, in public, and write it down.
Read it again
First Attempt In Learning
Every batch nobody would drink, every room that laughed, every no. Tuition, not defeat, and cheaper than an MBA.
Come build something. Or just tell me what you're building.
