Off the Record.

I recently received a rather stinging comment about a piece in Flânerie Libre. I had argued that taste, judgment, and certain ways of giving things value would remain human, even when artificial intelligence could do almost everything else.

Someone replied that I sounded like a boomer trying to work out what could not be taken away from him.

I would have liked to find that comment stupid. The problem was that it was right.

I spend my days building businesses with AI. I see what it makes possible, I bet on it, I make my living from it. Then, in the evening, I was quietly drawing it a little boundary it must not cross. It could have the code, the calculations, the tedious tasks. But taste, careful now. Taste was my territory.

There was something very human about that division. And something very suspicious.

Since then, I have run experiments that have dented my certainties. In some situations, I already prefer an AI’s choices to those of many humans. That does not demonstrate that it has taste, let alone consciousness. It does, however, make my boundary much less comfortable. I had presented as a property of humanity something that might have looked more like a personal wish.

We do this often. We call “human nature” the point at which we would like progress to stop.

“Never” can wait

What makes this period difficult is that machines are not improving in the order we expected. They can surprise us at a task that seemed beyond reach and exhaust us at another that looked simple. I use them to write, without any moral qualms. Many of my ideas would have stayed in my head if I had needed an hour to put each one into words. AI makes them shareable. Very good.

But when I wanted to write lessons drawn from my own life, I sometimes spent more time correcting its paragraphs than I would have needed to write them myself. Correct sentences, recognizable thinking, and yet this irritating feeling that someone had ironed my brain. Everything was smoother. And less true.

I could turn that into a grand theory about the impossibility of reproducing a voice. These days, I prefer a more modest conclusion: on that particular text, at that particular moment, I was better off taking over. “Never” can wait.

That modesty is difficult to sell. We prefer people who know where we are going. Optimists have their future, pessimists have theirs, and each explains that the facts are finally beginning to prove them right. My main impression is that our convictions help us endure what we do not yet understand.

I see it in my own work. I am betting on more capable, cheaper AI. That bet shapes the businesses I build. So I have an interest in believing it. Acknowledging that does not require me to stop. It requires me not to confuse my interest with evidence.

An entrepreneur must be able to act with strong conviction while continuing to examine what might make that conviction wrong. It is tiring. Becoming the salesman for your own certainties would be far more restful.

Reality moves at a different speed

On the ground, things are even messier than in the debates. I meet companies that handle enormous sums and have barely touched these tools. Alongside them, I see individuals whose way of working has already changed. Even within a team that uses AI every day, the differences are huge. Some people tinker, try things, start again, and eventually get something unexpected. Others have the same tools and produce a great deal that is fairly mediocre.

Access is spreading much faster than mastery. Giving everyone the ability to make something does not give everyone the desire to get started, or the patience to understand why it does not work.

That is why, in the same day, I can feel both that everything has changed and that nothing is moving. The possibilities have exploded. Habits, fears, and power relations move at a different speed. The technical demonstration takes five minutes. The changes it demands of people can take months.

At Naijm, I encounter that difference constantly. Introducing AI into a company requires understanding what people do, but also what they fear losing. A task can be absurd and still protect someone’s status. Information can be easy to circulate and still be the source of power for the person holding on to it. Ignore that, and you can deliver a very intelligent tool that nobody wants to use.

Trust lets you enter that reality. It grows through what you do together, through promises kept, through how you react when something goes wrong. I do not know what machines will be able to do with it tomorrow. I know that in my work today, it matters enormously.

A dashboard to reassure ourselves

There is, however, a much more pleasant way of avoiding all this complexity: build a dashboard.

I have a rather unscientific theory about this. To find out how long ago someone discovered AI, look at the creation date of their first dashboard.

I understand the enthusiasm. In a few minutes, you get charts, colors, indicators. The company, until then a collection of unfinished conversations and poorly defined problems, finally fits on a screen. It produces a rather delicious sense of control.

A dashboard can be useful. But it shows what we have chosen to measure. The client who is beginning to have doubts, the colleague who no longer dares disagree, the project making excellent progress in the wrong direction: all of that can remain invisible while the indicators are green.

What bothers me is how easily we mistake the relief of seeing clearly for proof that we have understood. A representation of the company can become more seductive than the company itself. Especially when changing the representation takes thirty seconds and changing reality takes three unpleasant conversations.

AI can then do us a very particular service: give our bad questions an impeccable form. We ask it for a screen that reassures us. It builds one. Then we congratulate it on its intelligence.

The gift I was giving myself

I learned to distrust this confusion long before AI, in a much more intimate part of life.

I used to enjoy designing jewelry and having it made for the women I was in love with. I put time, care, and pleasure into it. It seemed obvious to me that an object imagined for one person alone must be worth more than a piece of jewelry chosen in a shop.

Obvious to me.

Then I had to admit that a piece of Cartier jewelry could give a pleasure that mine did not. It arrived with a history, recognition, a whole world already established around it. You could want it before receiving it. Other people recognized it. What I considered external to the object was fully part of the experience.

I could have explained that this pleasure was superficial. That would have been an elegant way of demanding that the other person feel things as I did. Eventually, I understood that with those gifts, I was also giving myself the pleasure of being the man who designs jewelry. The woman I intended them for was participating in a story whose meaning I had chosen on her behalf.

Now I buy both. It costs more, but considerably reduces the need to give philosophy lessons to the person you love.

That story taught me something about value. We like to imagine it contained within objects, as though we could recover it by adding up the materials, the labor, and the difficulty. But some of what matters takes shape between people. An object also has value because of who gives it, who desires it, the memory it attaches to, and the place it allows us to occupy.

The fact that these meanings are constructed does not make the pleasure imaginary. You can understand perfectly how a brand works and be happy to receive something from it. Clear understanding does not automatically cancel desire. Fortunately. Life would become rather poor if understanding something were enough to stop loving it.

That changes how I think about the abundance AI might produce. Even if making things became much less costly, we would probably keep distinguishing, preferring, and forming attachments. We would give value to a provenance, a relationship, a shared history. We are capable of loading materially insignificant things with meaning. Just look at what an object left behind by someone we love can represent.

Gentleness can hold us, too

Still, I do not want to turn that observation into a new refuge. Having lost our monopoly on making things, we would like to keep our monopoly on meaning. But if a machine tells us a story that moves us, gives us sound advice, then stays with us long enough for us to become attached to it, what certainty underpins our promise to deny it all authority?

Taste needs people who are willing to be guided. A recommendation becomes influential because we give it credibility. Nothing entitles me to assert that we will reserve that credibility for humans forever.

How an intelligence presents itself will therefore matter a great deal. A system can impress us with its power and remain unpleasant to spend time with. A little character we grow attached to can find a place in daily life that the finest technical demonstration cannot secure. Gentleness sometimes makes possible a relationship that force prevents.

And as an entrepreneur, I can see very clearly what lies behind that. A presence that makes you feel good can also make you want to return, then pay to continue. The comfort the user feels and the company’s commercial interest can exist at the same time. That is precisely what makes the subject interesting. It would be too convenient to believe an experience stops being sincere as soon as someone makes money from it. Just as convenient to believe its gentleness makes it innocent.

We are going to have to understand attachments we still know very little about. Declaring them impossible because they bother us would be a strange way to prepare to experience them.

The pleasure of playing without being the best

One question remains, returning behind all the others: if the machine does it better, what will be left for us?

I like to think about chess. The best human players have been surpassed by the best programs. That does not stop anyone wanting to win a game, working on an opening, or watching two great players face each other. The machine’s superiority has not stripped human play of all meaning.

We know perfectly well how to find an activity interesting without demanding to be the best beings in the universe at it. We run without needing to beat a car. We cook for friends without claiming to be the best restaurant in town. Strangely, as soon as our intellectual faculties are involved, we demand a guarantee of supremacy before agreeing to find life interesting.

I understand that wound. Much of my identity was built on my ideas, on my ability to see possibilities, tell stories, and persuade. If a machine does all of that better than I do, I am not going to welcome it with the detachment of a Tibetan monk. But I can already try not to make all my pleasure in living depend on retaining that advantage.

The economic question remains. Losing a profession, an income, or a social position is not resolved by discovering the joys of chess. I have no desire to confuse a possibility of happiness with an answer to those losses. Simply, the disappearance of an economic advantage does not prove that an entire activity becomes empty. Writing can continue to matter to the person writing and the person reading, even when a system can produce a better text.

So I no longer have a very clear idea of what AI will never do. I have less and less desire to build my peace of mind on that list. I would rather learn to act without demanding that the future guarantee me a special place. Keep building, observe what works, abandon what no longer holds up. And retain enough curiosity not to miss the world because it did a poor job of following my predictions.

I have spent part of my life telling stories. In recent years, reality has been teaching me a rather humbling lesson in that field. The day we had to fill in a form to authorize ourselves to leave our own homes, I realized that the screenwriter had a freedom I had never allowed myself.

I did not see that scene coming. I doubt I know how to write the next one. For now, I still very much want to be part of it.

Ben Horowitz recently described a conversation with Dan Boneh, a professor of computer science and cryptography at Stanford, about his students' use of AI. Boneh told him that he essentially had two options: ban AI, which would not work anyway, or make the problems so difficult that his students could no longer solve them without it. He chose the second option and now has students who can solve problems that no previous generation of students could have solved at their age.

The reversal is brilliant because for the past few years, we have spent a lot of time wondering how to adapt education to AI, but we often ask the question backwards. We look for ways to keep students doing the same things as before, now that they have a tool that can do them much faster. We ban ChatGPT during certain exams, try to detect its use in assignments, and change the rules to preserve the exercise. But if a student can do in ten minutes what used to take three hours, we can also simply give them something much harder to do. That is what we do everywhere else: when computers become more powerful, we do not ask them to keep doing the same calculations while politely waiting as long as they would have taken in 1995. We increase the size of the problems.

Obviously, this does not mean there is nothing left to learn. It is actually quite easy to become very stupid with a very intelligent machine. The more the tool can produce on your behalf, the more important it becomes to know whether what it produces is correct, interesting, or completely wrong. But it changes enormously what you can ask of an eighteen-year-old. A student can now write code without being an excellent developer, analyze huge amounts of data, produce images, translate texts, quickly learn whatever they are missing to move forward, and go from an idea to something that works in the same day. Not so long ago, some of those things would have required several people or skills that took years to acquire. And yet a large part of our education system is still organized around a fairly old idea of what a student can do.

This is the context in which Ben Horowitz, Gagan Biyani, and Erik Torenberg are launching the Horowitz Andreessen Academy in San Francisco. The first class is due to arrive in September 2027. a16z incubated the project with $35 million at launch, alongside Anthropic, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Google, Meta, Stripe, Coinbase, Replit, Anduril, and other companies that are expected to contribute to the teaching, provide access to their tools, and host students. But the idea is not simply to create a university with more AI. They are instead taking apart something we have grown used to considering indivisible.

A university is a fairly strange thing. We ask it to teach you things, certify that you have learned them, give you a network, introduce you to people your age, help you find a job, give you time to work out what you want to do with your life, and finally produce a degree that someone who does not know you will use to decide whether to hire you. We ended up putting all those functions into the same four-year product. HAA keeps some of them but tries to assemble them differently: students live together in San Francisco, learn from people who practice what they teach, work with the tools available today, and spend a substantial part of their time on projects and inside companies.

This changes, in particular, the boundary between knowing something and having already tried to do it. You can learn an enormous amount about starting a company without ever trying to sell a product to someone who does not want it. You can study management and then discover that four people not doing what you expected of them are a rather different subject. You can study negotiation for weeks before finding yourself, for the first time, facing someone who can simply say no and leave. AI dramatically reduces the cost of those attempts: at eighteen, you can now try to build something without a team of ten, have an idea in the morning, make a first version during the day, and discover that evening that nobody wants it. You have failed, but you have learned something that might previously have taken several weeks and much more money to learn.

That does not mean turning every eighteen-year-old into a startup founder and treating a book with suspicion if nothing has been produced by the end. There is immense value in learning things that serve no immediate purpose. A university also gives you the right to spend six months becoming obsessed with the Byzantine Empire, Persian poetry, or a mathematical problem whose usefulness nobody around you understands. Part of education consists precisely in not yet knowing what the things you learn will be useful for, and it would be rather sad to replace four years of study with four years of hackathons. But between that and asking a twenty-year-old to write, for the fiftieth time, an essay a machine can now produce in thirty seconds, there are an enormous number of things to try.

This is what makes HAA interesting as an experiment, rather than yet another attempt to "disrupt" the university. Nobody yet knows whether the model works, since the first student has not set foot there. They are simply taking several functions historically brought together in the same institution and trying to see what happens when time is distributed differently between learning, building, working, and living with other students. And the experiment becomes even more interesting once you take it out of San Francisco.

I live in the Emirates, and education is in a rather particular situation here. Historically, for many families who want their children to attend the best universities, that has also meant watching them leave at eighteen. London, the United States, sometimes elsewhere. It is heartbreaking for families, and the government has long sought to attract world-class universities and develop institutions that can ensure academic excellence does not necessarily mean leaving the country. Dubai now has dozens of private higher-education institutions, the vast majority of them international campuses. The effort to bring the world's universities to the Emirates is already well underway.

The logical next step would be to keep going: bring in better universities, build better campuses, attract better professors, and progress until an Emirati student can find at home an institution comparable to those they currently leave for. Except there is a rather amusing advantage to developing some infrastructure later than everyone else: sometimes you can skip an entire generation. Countries that had few landlines did not necessarily need to reproduce the entire European telephone network before moving to mobile phones. Certain banking practices developed directly on phones in places where the traditional banking network was much less extensive. Being behind is sometimes an opportunity to avoid building what others are already replacing.

The Emirates have that kind of window with universities. The government wants world-class institutions, there is capital, there are companies, entrepreneurs, a huge variety of nationalities, and a rather distinctive ability to bring people in from abroad quickly when the country decides a subject matters. They could spend the next twenty years trying to build universities that increasingly resemble the best American universities, and that would already be an achievement. But it would be a shame to devote twenty years solely to catching up with a model at the very moment when those who have its best versions are themselves starting to experiment with something else.

And a school of this kind in the Emirates would have no reason to be exclusively Emirati. You can put someone from Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, Beirut, Paris, Lagos, or Shanghai in the same class and have them live in a place where those worlds already cross paths every day. We could continue attracting excellent traditional universities while building much smaller, experimental institutions alongside them, designed from the outset around the tools students have today and problems difficult enough to make them use those tools.

People often talk about building the Stanford of the Middle East. I think that is aiming too low. The really interesting thing would be for a young Emirati admitted to Stanford to hesitate about leaving.

We will see which majlis I can tell that to…

While recruiting for Naijm, Samuel and I asked candidates a slightly strange question: what is the most impressive thing you did as a child? Then at school? Then at university? Then at work? What surprised us was not so much the quality of the answers. It was how many people did not really have one.

More than 1,000 people applied to Naijm. There were 213 serious applications, and we ultimately hired twelve people. There were plenty of good CVs, good schools, good companies, people who had done everything normally expected of them. But sometimes, when this question came up, not much happened. And then, every now and again, we would come across someone Samuel and I immediately wanted to meet.

One was already building things at nine and, at fourteen, had sold a product that used AI to help blind people. Years later, he was contributing to Chromium, building his own memory systems for AI, and rewriting a database in Rust. Another was twenty-two, had represented France at the HackerOne World Cup, and had spent a fairly substantial part of his young life legally breaking into other people's computer systems. Another had won a national mathematics competition in France, studied mathematics in Israel, and then spent five years in military intelligence before building AI systems. Yet another had worked with several major pharmaceutical and cosmetics groups, automated analytical pipelines at LVMH Recherche, published AI research, and built, for fun, a system for encoding a file in synthetic DNA.

Each time, the reaction was roughly the same: we wanted to know more. Not necessarily to hire the person, because at that stage we did not yet know whether they were right for Naijm, but to meet them and continue the conversation. I do not yet know whether this question predicts anything. The team is only just starting, so it would be a little early to explain that we have discovered a new science of recruitment. Perhaps in six months, some people who fascinated us for an hour in an interview will be driving us completely mad. For now, I simply know that whenever a truly unusual trajectory appeared, it sparked a great deal of curiosity in Samuel and me.

Twelve people who probably should never have ended up together

That is ultimately how this first team came together, and it is quite strange. Some have more than twenty years of experience, while others are barely twenty themselves. There is a hacker, engineers, people who have worked in pharma, luxury, or intelligence, people who know how to sell, two brothers who make films together, and Samuel Cardillo, who led technology at RTFKT before its acquisition by Nike and whose official title with us is now CTO & Open Source Tsar. I stand by that last choice with a reasonable degree of serenity.

We organized this little group into four crews: Navigators, Builders, Outriders, and Firekeepers. The Builders build, the Outriders go directly into our clients' operations, the Navigators set the direction and make commitments, and the Firekeepers look after, among other things, the story and signal around what we build. Put that way, you might think the company has been around for ages and we have merely documented a perfectly well-oiled organization. In reality, the team starts tomorrow, and we already have more RFPs than people available to respond to them.

This is probably where Naijm gets interesting.

Doing a lot with a little

We built the company around a fairly aggressive hypothesis: some operations that cost 100 million today might eventually cost 20 or 30. Obviously, not because people will work five times faster, but because you probably do not build the same operation when you can use software and agents from the start instead of adding them fifteen years later to an existing organization.

And if you really believe that a small team can achieve what previously required a much heavier organization, there is a rather awkward consequence: we should start by being able to do it ourselves. Our first problem is already exactly that. We have too much work for twelve people. The conventional answer would be fairly simple: keep hiring until capacity catches up with demand.

At Naijm, we at least want another set of questions to come before that one. Does this work really need to exist? Can we remove a step, change the process, code it, build an agent, give someone already here more capacity? And sometimes, after all that, the best answer will obviously be a human, in which case we will hire a human. The aim is not to turn headcount into a golf score. A company of seven people is not morally superior to a company of seven hundred. I simply want to see how far we can go before every new amount of work automatically produces a new job description.

Recruiting without building an army of recruiters

Recruitment gave us a first glimpse of this problem. Taking more than 1,000 applications seriously with a small team can very quickly become several people's jobs, so we built Al-Battani, the AI that supports our recruitment process. It reads applications, analyzes answers, and produces an assessment. When a file is ambiguous, it can be assessed several times, and disagreements bring the candidate to a human's attention.

But Al-Battani rejects nobody. Every rejection still requires a person to make the decision. I find this distinction interesting because discussions about AI often mix up two things: delegating work and delegating responsibility. We want to delegate a great deal of the former, and are much less ready to delegate the latter. A machine can read faster, compare more things, and start again twenty times without tiring. That does not necessarily mean we should entrust it with the moment when someone stops being a candidate.

Conversely, we allowed candidates to use AI during the tests. In fact, we wanted to watch them use it. There is little point in someone who will work with agents every day showing us what they can do after we have taken their agents away. What becomes interesting is precisely how they use them: what they delegate, what they check, how they frame their problem, and above all the moment they realize the machine has just headed in the wrong direction. Before we started trusting Al-Battani's scoring, the first assessments were also reviewed by humans. It would be a shame to build a machine to assess other people's judgment without first checking the machine's own judgment.

When software starts to contain the company

This logic gradually spread through the rest of Naijm. We built our own internal system, home to recruitment, people, RFPs, procurement, the wiki, onboarding, the brand, and part of day-to-day operations. Even the organization chart exists in code: roles, crews, access, and permissions are linked, to the point that an actual change to the organization can end up requiring a change to the system that represents it.

A few years ago, building this much internal software for a company of this size would probably have been a fairly absurd idea. Why pay a team for months to recreate inferior versions of five SaaS products costing $49 a month? SaaS won precisely because that calculation was obvious: you bought the same software as ten thousand other companies and slightly adapted how you worked to fit inside it.

But the calculation becomes less obvious when making a small tool perfectly suited to the way you work starts taking a few hours or days instead of several months. Suddenly, software can become extremely specific again. It does not have to be generic enough to satisfy ten thousand companies. It can contain your rules, your access rights, your quirks, and your slightly ridiculous crew names. Above all, it can absorb some of those little coordination rules that normally end up living in a few people's heads.

Every company knows the phrases that appear at that point: "ask X," "Y knows where it is," "she is back on Monday," "whatever you do, do not touch that spreadsheet." A rather strange part of growing a company consists of producing humans who gradually become necessary to understand how the company works. I want to see how long we can avoid that when many of those rules can be contained directly in systems.

You can automate bullshit too

Obviously, there is a rather amusing flip side to all of this: when useful software becomes cheaper to build, useless software becomes cheaper to build by exactly the same amount. And objectively, we are prime candidates for that problem. We have our own internal system, a recruitment AI named after an Arab astronomer who died more than a thousand years ago, four crews called Navigators, Builders, Outriders, and Firekeepers, and a CTO whose official title includes the word Tsar. You can quickly get very good at playing company.

I have already seen enough companies with a wonderful culture, wonderful processes, a wonderful deck, and not enough customers to know the danger is not theoretical. AI may even make this kind of bullshit much easier: today, you can very quickly build an agent, a dashboard, or an automation around a problem that perhaps should never have existed. So just because we can code something in two hours does not necessarily mean we should spend those two hours coding it.

In the end, you have to change a number

Fortunately, our business model leaves us relatively few places to hide. When Naijm works with a company, we go inside its operations, look at the processes, people, and systems, and, above all, establish with the company how much all of it costs today. Then we try to bring that number down. There is a base fee, but a significant part of what we earn depends on the savings actually achieved against that baseline.

I really like this feature of the model because it prevents us from winning simply by looking clever. We can deploy fifty agents, rebuild an entire architecture, automate twelve processes, and spend two hours explaining why the company is now AI-native. If the operation cost 100 before we arrived and still costs 100 afterwards, something probably happened that was less interesting than the PowerPoint suggests. The client is not paying for our religion. They are paying for the number.

That is what makes our hypothesis of 100 million becoming 20 or 30 interesting. For now, that is precisely what it is: a hypothesis. We have not yet earned the right to present it as a truth, and I actually prefer to write this newsletter now, while so much is still undecided. In a year or two, if it works, it will be very easy to reconstruct the story backwards. Every hire will seem obvious, every agent will look as if it had been planned from day one, mistakes will become necessary lessons, and accidents particularly subtle strategic decisions. Entrepreneurs are quite good at that.

Tomorrow, the experiment really begins

Today, the situation is much less elegant. We have twelve people starting tomorrow, more RFPs than available capacity, a lot of software, a few agents, and several convictions, some of which are probably wrong. If the agents do not enable this team to do much more with a little, we simply will not manage it.

A few months ago, we had three clients and no employees. Tomorrow, we will have the employees and already too much work for them.

Now we need to see what twelve can do.

In March, OpenAI spent several weeks negotiating with TPG, Advent International, Bain Capital and Brookfield. Not to raise money. To create a structure responsible for distributing its enterprise products inside the companies owned by those funds.

Anthropic did something very similar with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs.

I find these two deals much more interesting than they look.

The two most advanced labs on the planet, the ones building the models much of the industry works with, the ones probably concentrating more technical talent than any company could reasonably need, have just put a tremendous amount of money on the table to obtain something they cannot build themselves.

Access.

Companies they can get inside. CFOs who pick up the phone. Established relationships. Accumulated trust. Contracts, data, people who know whom to speak to and in what order.

OpenAI can train a better model. Anthropic can write a better agent.

They cannot vibe-code twenty years of business relationships.

The market hasn’t simply accelerated. It has changed shape.

One side of the problem is becoming extraordinarily cheaper. The other has barely moved.

Ten years ago, if you were a business person with a software idea, finding a technical cofounder was step zero. Not step one. The step before that.

Without one, you had a deck, a few mockups and a conversation that usually ended with: “Now we need to find someone to build the thing.”

That search could take six months. Sometimes twelve. And quite a few companies were probably started by two people who didn’t particularly want to spend ten years together, but were simply relieved to have finally found the other half of the puzzle.

That constraint is disappearing much faster than we realize.

Today, a good business founder can build a first version, put it in front of customers, see what breaks, fix it, start again, and get surprisingly far before a CTO becomes truly indispensable.

Not as far as building OpenAI in their bedroom.

But far enough to test an intuition, get users, learn and sometimes even find the beginnings of a market before assembling the technical team they would have needed on day one in 2019.

Cursor and coding agents are obviously the most visible manifestations of this phenomenon. But I think the interesting consequence isn’t that “everyone can code.”

It’s that producing working code is gradually losing some of its scarcity.

Let me clarify something, because this discussion gets stupid very quickly if we don’t.

If the technology itself is your moat, none of this applies in the same way. If you are building new models, infrastructure, robotics, biotech or proprietary research, you still need exceptional technical founders and engineers.

Probably even more than before.

When average tools become excellent, the gap between someone good and someone exceptional doesn’t necessarily disappear. It can become even more brutal.

But across an enormous part of enterprise software, the ability simply to build the product is becoming much less scarce.

Now look at the other side.

You still have to convince a large company to let you in. You still have to find the budget. Get through security. Compliance. Legal. Convince a buyer. Then their boss. Then sometimes their boss’s boss.

And answer a 200-line security questionnaire someone probably created in 2014 and nobody has dared delete since.

Enterprise sales cycles are still measured in months. Decisions still involve an absurd number of people. And the explosion in the number of AI products probably hasn’t simplified the problem. Mostly, it has given companies a few hundred more vendors to evaluate.

This is where the MIT figure gets interesting.

In their study of enterprise AI, 95% of the pilots analyzed had produced no measurable impact on the income statement.

95%.

And I think we badly misread that figure when we simply take it as proof that the models aren’t good enough yet. A large part of the problem isn’t the model.

It’s getting inside the house.

Because you cannot prompt a hundred enterprise customers into existence. You cannot vibe-code a dataset that took fifteen years to accumulate. You cannot generate the trust of a general counsel who has already been burned twice.

And you cannot synthesize overnight the domain knowledge of someone who has spent twenty years in an industry and knows precisely why the three obvious solutions to the problem don’t work.

That is the asymmetry that interests me.

AI is removing much of the business founder’s technical dependency on day zero. It has created no equivalent shortcut on the market side. Yet I still see a huge number of founders hiring for the company they would have needed to build in 2019.

They look for someone who can make what they cannot make. Whereas the interesting question is gradually becoming: What can’t I build, even with the best AI in the world?

Distribution. Proprietary data. Trust. Domain knowledge accumulated over twenty years. Original research. An established position in an industry.

The right to enter the room.

And if that is what is becoming scarce, something else changes with it.

The new cofounder may not be a person.

It may be an established player. I don’t mean the “strategic partnership” announced in a press release and added to a slide with two logos holding hands. I mean someone you genuinely tie yourself to because they already possess what would take you ten years to build: customers, data, trust, knowledge of the business or access.

Look at Abridge.

At first glance, it is an excellent healthcare AI company. Founded by a cardiologist, it now works with hundreds of hospital systems. But what I find much more interesting is what it has built around the technology.

Abridge partnered with UpToDate, then the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA, to integrate their medical content into its tools. NEJM has been publishing since 1812.

Two hundred and fourteen years of legitimacy.

You can probably produce a better model next year. Good luck producing 214 years of institutional trust by the next sprint.

OpenEvidence tells the same story differently. The company has managed to enter hospital environments such as Mount Sinai, Cedars-Sinai and Sutter Health and integrate with the tools doctors already use. Some of its product’s features can obviously be copied. Its position inside the system, much less easily.

Harvey tells yet another version of the same phenomenon in law. Tens of thousands of lawyers now use it, and the product has managed to penetrate some of the hardest law firms in the world to get into.

Of course the product has to be good.

But imagine two companies tomorrow with exactly the same model. One starts with an excellent product and zero relationships. The other is already inside dozens of institutions that have entrusted it with their workflows, their habits, sometimes their data, and spent months approving it. These are not the same companies.

Having got inside becomes part of the product.

And that is precisely what private equity funds are selling OpenAI and Anthropic today. They aren’t merely selling introductions. They are selling an established position. Companies they already own. Executives they already work with. Relationships in which someone else has already absorbed the initial part of the risk.

In other words, they are selling time.

Twenty years of networks. Twenty years of trust. Twenty years of open doors.

And no amount of compute can compress twenty years into twenty seconds. There is obviously a trap in this strategy, and it is big enough to deserve spelling out: tying yourself to someone who owns distribution can also be an excellent way to become their subcontractor.

If they own the customer, the relationship, the data and the margin while you simply supply a technology layer, you haven’t built a moat.

You’ve signed a services contract with a nice story wrapped around it.

The alliance only becomes truly interesting if you retain something that accumulates on your side: measuring outcomes, data generated through use, an understanding of the workflow, a layer that improves because it is running. Something that means you are harder to replace after three years of partnership than you were on day one.

Otherwise, the partner learns.

You execute.

And one day they put your line item out to tender.

But despite that risk, I think the overall calculation has reversed. For fifteen years, the business founder’s reflex was to find someone who could build what they couldn’t build.

That reflex was perfectly rational.

The problem is that it may be outliving its reason for existing.

Scarcity has moved. And when scarcity moves, continuing to organize a company around the old scarcity is probably one of the surest ways to build the wrong company.

So the question is no longer just: Who can build this with me?

It becomes: Who already owns what I won’t be able to build?

OpenAI and Anthropic have some of the best engineers on the planet. They have the models. They have the capital. They have the brand. They probably have more technical capability than almost any company in history.

And they still wrote the check.

Because they knew exactly what they were buying.

Not code.

A door already open.

I am doing something fairly similar at my own scale with Naijm in the Emirates.

But that is another story for another time.

Twice a year, in a European capital whose name is not disclosed, a handful of people meet behind closed doors. Two days of presentations and debates. When they leave, they have chosen the following year’s color. Last December, the verdict for 2026 came in: Cloud Dancer, reference 11-4201. White.

Nobody elected them. No consumer voted. And this year, white appears on Motorola smartphones, Post-it notes, Command adhesives, Joybird furniture and Play-Doh. The vice president of the institute organizing all this explains that the color “reflects what people are looking for.” Perhaps. What is certain is that product directors across a dozen industries opened a file in January and wrote the word white in it.

The objection comes immediately, and it is a good one: if it is arbitrary, it shouldn’t work. A choice without an objective basis should collapse on contact with reality. People should shrug and buy the color they prefer.

Exactly the opposite happens. And I think this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the economy that is coming.

Let’s start with wine, because that is where the demonstration is cleanest. In 2001, in Bordeaux, Frédéric Brochet had fifty-seven oenology students taste the same Bordeaux one week apart. The first time, the bottle bore a table-wine label. The second, a grand cru classé label. The liquid was identical. Fifty-two of the fifty-seven rated the grand cru higher.

The most interesting part isn’t the score. It is the vocabulary. Lexical analysis of the comments shows that the tasters looked for flaws in the first glass and qualities in the second. They didn’t simply judge the same wine differently. They perceived it differently.

Seven years later, a team from Stanford and Caltech repeated something similar, but this time inside a scanner. The same wine, two stated prices: ten dollars and ninety. Subjects said they preferred the ninety-dollar one. That was predictable. What was less predictable was that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the region encoding experienced pleasure, became more active¹. They weren’t reporting pleasure out of politeness. It was visible in the imaging.

A label doesn’t change the wine. It changes the pleasure. And the pleasure is perfectly real.

That answers a question everyone asks the wrong way. People ask why someone pays three hundred dollars for a T-shirt that costs two dollars to make, assuming they are being taken for a ride. But they aren’t necessarily being fooled. They are buying a difference in pleasure that really exists, that is measurable, and whose cause simply isn’t in the cotton.

Bourdieu wrote a thousand pages about this in 1979, interviewing twelve hundred French people about their music, their furniture and their food. His conclusion fits into one sentence: taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Dominant classes don’t merely have preferences, they turn those preferences into the standard against which everything else is measured, then present that standard as natural. He called this the naturalization of the arbitrary.

Bourdieu discovered the mechanism and spent the rest of his life outraged by it. One industry read the same thing without the outrage and turned it into a business model: fashion.

Hermès deliberately limits production, maintains waiting lists lasting years, refuses to meet all demand, and delivers an operating margin no conventional manufacturer reaches. A Birkin 25 went from $9,400 in 2016 to $13,500 in 2026, and resells for two to three times the store price.

None of those numbers can be explained by the leather.

Now the real question: why is this mechanism going to spread beyond fashion into everything?

The 2026 Stanford HAI report says something that should occupy more people than it does: the leading models have become “almost indistinguishable” from one another. In March, six labs were neck and neck in the Elo rankings. Benchmarks designed to last years saturate within months. The cost of obtaining a given performance level falls by a factor of five to ten each year. Competitive pressure, they write, has shifted toward cost and reliability.

Translation: what can be measured has stopped deciding the winner.

And this movement isn’t just about AI. It concerns everything AI will touch, which is almost everything. When objectively measurable quality becomes abundant, uniform and nearly free, it gradually leaves the playing field. It doesn’t disappear: it becomes a prerequisite, which amounts to the same thing from the standpoint of differentiation.

That leaves one thing to fight over: the je-ne-sais-quoi.

Look at what is already happening. In May, Palantir, a data analytics company serving the military and intelligence services, released a $239 work jacket, bright blue or black, made in Montana. Sold out in five hours. Not a corporate polo, a French worker’s jacket, carrying all that European working-class history, sold by a company supplying ICE and the Israeli military. The same company had already sold a T-shirt that read “Dominate.”

They understood before the others that the jacket is part of the product.

Look at Pop Mart. Thirty-seven billion yuan in revenue in 2025, roughly $5.4 billion, up 185%. Gross margin: 72%. The product is a plastic figurine with teeth, no use, no function, sold in an opaque box so you don’t know which one you are buying. A third of revenue comes from a single character.

No data could have predicted Labubu. And Pop Mart itself doesn’t know how to make the next one, a fact the stock market reminded it of by wiping 30% off the shares on earnings day.

Silicon Valley sensed something and started talking about taste last February. Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, half the founders in San Francisco: within a week, everyone agreed that taste would be the last defensible skill. Kyle Chayka was right to mock it: within months, the word had become the “disruption” of the twenties.

They saw it correctly and got it entirely backward.

In their mouths, taste is a rampart. Something you cultivate to protect yourself, a moat you dig around yourself while the machine swallows the rest. It is the posture of people retreating.

Fashion has never used taste as a rampart. It uses it as a force for projection. You don’t shelter a taste, you spread it, establish it, make it so obvious that people who don’t share it feel not different but behind.

That is why we must stop treating taste’s arbitrariness as a weakness. It is precisely because nothing in reality grounds the choice of white for 2026 that whoever manages to impose it achieves something.

An objective fact imposes itself. It asks nobody’s permission and confers no particular power on whoever states it.

Taste doesn’t. Taste establishes itself only through an act.

The expression je-ne-sais-quoi was coined in seventeenth-century France to designate precisely what seduces and escapes reason. Jankélévitch devoted three volumes to it, defining it as what “protests and murmurs again within us against the success of reductionist enterprises.” He was talking about philosophical systems.

The sentence applies just as well to dashboards.

People will say algorithms can predict trends with 90% accuracy, and that is true. They can measure a taste once it exists. They can amplify it, accelerate it, flatten it.

But they cannot decree it.

And there, I think, lies the important distinction: predicting and instituting are two different acts.

Predicting means discovering a preference that already exists. Instituting means creating value where none yet existed. It means looking at a space in which several futures are possible and deciding it will be this one.

The committee will meet again this spring, somewhere in a European capital. For two days, they will discuss, hesitate and argue. Then they will choose 2027.

It will be arbitrary, indefensible, impossible to justify completely through data.

And the year after, you may have it on your phone.

Those who can't do, teach. It's meant as an insult. It's also true. Most of the people who made someone great could not do the thing themselves. Everyone assumes that's the shameful part. It isn't. It's the reason it works.

Bill Campbell coached football at Columbia for six years. He won twelve games. He lost forty-one. He quit in 1979 and said it was his fault. To run a football team you have to be hard on people, and he couldn't be. He cared too much about his players. He was thirty-nine and finished.

Eleven years later he was the man Silicon Valley sent its founders to. Steve Jobs at Apple. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt at Google. Bezos in the early Amazon days. Sandberg. Dorsey. When he died, more than a thousand people came, and a lot of them thought of him as their best friend. Schmidt wrote a book about him and called it Trillion Dollar Coach.

The flaw that lost him forty-one games is the flaw that made him priceless later. Nineteen-year-olds needed someone to be brutal with them. He couldn't do it. Steve Jobs needed the opposite. Jobs had all the brutality one man can carry and nobody who would tell him the truth gently. Same man, same flaw, different room.

He wasn't secretly good at football. He was bad at it. He said so himself.

Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated for the Nobel in physics eighty-four times. He never won it. Four of his doctoral students won it. Three of his postdocs won it too. Seven Nobels out of one office in Munich, which nobody has matched. So the committee looked at him eighty-four times and said no, while handing the prize to the men he built. Einstein understood. He wrote to Sommerfeld that what he admired was how many young talents the man had pounded out of the soil.

We're not born equal. Some people win because they worked. Some win because they were handed something at birth that no amount of work produces. Both are true. Neither is fair.

A coach is the only correction anyone has found for that. Not a fix. A correction. Nobody can give you a gift you weren't born with. What a good coach does is find what you already have and stop you throwing it away. Which is what almost everyone does with it.

Nadia Boulanger stopped composing in her thirties. She told her old teacher she was done, and that her own music was useless. Then, out of an apartment in Paris, she taught Copland, Piazzolla, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass, Barenboim, Gardiner. Americans crossed an ocean to sit in front of her. Quincy Jones said she was the most astounding woman he ever met.

Her own music is barely played. Her name lives inside other people's biographies, in the same sentence over and over: went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. She swapped one career she thought was worthless for a piece of fifty she didn't.

Now the part that's hard to say without sounding like a greeting card. Watching someone else win feels good. Not as a consolation prize. It just feels good.

And when it's someone you worked on, you know how close it came to never happening. The crowd sees the win and assumes it was always coming. You saw the night he wanted to quit. Nobody else in the stadium has that. It's better than the trophy.

Then there's France.

In 1998 Aimé Jacquet took a team that had failed to qualify for three tournaments in a row and won the World Cup at home. For the two years before that, L'Équipe told the country he wasn't up to it. Wrong players. Timid football. Wrong man for the job. The night France won, he stood in front of millions of people and said the press had lied and he would never forgive them. He left days later. Four years after that, L'Équipe sued him for insulting them. Twenty-six years later he still wouldn't shake their hand.

France has no shortage of coaches. What France won't give them is status.

We only respect the man standing alone with the cup above his head. Anyone next to him goes into one of two boxes. Either he failed at the real thing and settled for helping, or he's helping so he can steal the credit. There is no third box.

So yes. Those who can't do, teach. Campbell couldn't. Sommerfeld never got his prize. Boulanger threw her own music out. One name goes on the trophy, and that's fair enough, because somebody has to cross the line first. It just doesn't record who was standing at the side of the road on the worst day. That person went home happy anyway. And he knew something nobody else in the stadium knew.

When I was a teenager, I read Norbert Wiener.

I stumbled across him by chance, without knowing who he was, and I did not understand everything. But some encounters leave a mark before you even know why. Today, twenty years of technology later, I realize that this chance reading prepared me for artificial intelligence better than any course, any recent book, any expert thread.

Wiener was a child prodigy. He finished high school at eleven and earned a doctorate from Harvard at seventeen. He studied logic with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, mathematics with Hilbert in Göttingen, then spent his life at MIT. A real mathematician, the kind whose name remains attached to things we still use today: the Wiener process, for instance, which describes Brownian motion, the random trembling of a particle in a fluid. But that is not what we remember him for.

During the Second World War, he was given a very concrete problem. How to shoot down an enemy aircraft. The gun must aim not where the plane is, but where it will be a few seconds later, by the time the shell gets there. So you have to predict the trajectory of a pilot who is doing his best to be unpredictable. And this is where Wiener saw something nobody before him had articulated so clearly.

The gun, the pilot, the shell form a system. Each adjusts its behavior according to the information it receives from the others. There is a loop. And Wiener realized that this loop is everywhere. In the hand reaching for a glass, because the eye constantly corrects the movement. In the body maintaining its temperature. In a thermostat. In an economy. In an animal’s nervous system. The nature of the material does not matter. Flesh or metal, it makes no difference. What matters is the information circulating and correcting itself.

In 1948, he called it cybernetics. The word comes from the Greek kubernêtês, the pilot, the one at the helm. The same root as govern. And the idea fits into one word: feedback. An intelligent system, whether living or manufactured, measures the gap between what it wants and what exists, then corrects, then measures again, then corrects again. Endlessly.

Think about what that means. In 1948, long before the first consumer computer, a man asserted that animals and machines obey the same laws. That the boundary between the living and the artificial is not a boundary of substance, but of organization. This is precisely the ground on which AI would grow fifty years later. Wiener set the stage without seeing the play.

What has always fascinated me about him is what happened to his idea after him. Cybernetics did not survive as a discipline. You will not find a cybernetics department at a university today. It did something rarer. It dissolved into everything. Computer science took the self-correcting loop, and the reinforcement learning that powers today’s models is Wiener’s feedback in barely disguised form. Cognitive science took the brain as an information-processing machine. Robotics and automation took control theory, its most direct offspring. Ecology took the idea of dynamic equilibria. Economics took models of regulation. Cybernetics was so fruitful that it died of its own fertility. We no longer teach it because we live inside it.

But the text I really want to put in your hands is his last. It is called God and Golem, Inc. Wiener published it in 1964, the year he died. It won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. It is a short book, subtitled a comment on certain points where cybernetics impinges on religion. And sixty years before ChatGPT, it sets out the exact problem that occupies every AI laboratory in the world today.

Wiener begins with the legend of the Golem, the clay creature that the rabbi of Prague brings to life to serve him, and that ultimately escapes its master’s control. He adds an old English short story, The Monkey’s Paw, in which a talisman grants three wishes, but in the most literal and cruel way imaginable. The couple ask for money. Their son dies in a factory accident, and the money arrives as compensation. The wish has been granted. To the letter.

This is what Wiener understood. The danger of a powerful machine is not that it turns against us out of malice. The danger is that it obeys us perfectly. That it does exactly what we asked, rather than what we meant. A learning machine will develop behaviors its creator neither anticipated nor desired. He gives the example of a checkers program that eventually beats the person who programmed it. The machine exceeds human intention, without common sense, without tacit values, without everything we assume without saying when we formulate a wish. He writes that if we entrust a task to a machine whose operation we can no longer follow once it is running, we had better be absolutely certain that what we asked it to do is what we actually want.

That is the alignment problem. Word for word. Set out in 1964 by a man who had never seen a single neural network.

So what do I take from all this, and why do I believe that reading him as a teenager prepared me for what is coming?

First, I learned to think in loops rather than straight lines. AI is not a tool you switch on once and put away. It is a system you enter into a relationship with, one that receives what you give it, corrects itself, and corrects you in return. The relationship is circular. Anyone who thinks they control the tool without seeing that they too are in the loop misunderstands the nature of what they are handling.

Then, very early on, I understood that how you formulate your intention matters more than anything. The lesson of the Golem is the only one that really matters today. A powerful machine literally does what you ask. Everything hinges on the precision of the wish. What we now call knowing how to prompt is simply applied cybernetics. Telling something exactly what you want when it will never infer the rest.

And then there is responsibility. Wiener spent the end of his life repeating one simple thing. Delegating a capability to a machine does not delegate judgment. The machine can decide how. Never why, never whether it should be done. That line does not move, and we are the ones standing on it.

The last point may be the most important, and it is what makes me love him. Wiener was not an enthusiastic prophet. He was a worried humanist. He turned down military contracts. He warned about automation and unemployment long before it became fashionable. He cared about human dignity in the face of the machines he himself was helping make possible. Being at the forefront of AI does not mean embracing it with your eyes closed. Nor does it mean fearing it. It means remaining clear-eyed about who serves whom. Technical mastery without thinking about the ends is precisely what Wiener feared.

And I think of Wiener again in an age when Dario Amodei plays the prophet of doom. The head of Anthropic spends some of his time warning us. About the risk of his own models becoming dangerous. About the unemployment to come. He sounds the alarm while building the most powerful machine he can, and that is where I have a problem. Not with the warning. With the hypocrisy. Because beneath the professed concern lies a presumption I cannot stand: that of a private company setting itself up as the arbiter of what is good for humanity, wanting to write the rules of the game while playing it to win. A company has no business dictating those rules. It has neither the role nor the legitimacy. And between the self-proclaimed wisdom of a leader who decides on his own what is dangerous, and the open contest of markets, uses, and millions of people trying things and making up their minds, I trust the latter. Wiener dictated nothing. He doubted out loud and let others decide. That is the whole difference between sounding a warning and appointing yourself the guardian.

The rabbi ultimately had to stop the Golem. The question we need to ask is not whether we will know how to build the creature. We already do. It is whether we will still know how to say what we really want.

A founder named Paul booked a Better Call Ouss.

I take a lot of these calls. Most of them blur together. Founders come with a deck, a market, a problem with their cofounder or their cap table. We fix what can be fixed in an hour and we move on.

Paul came with a mascot.

He had built Masko, a tool that generates animated characters with AI. You describe a character, or upload one image, and the system produces the poses, the animations, the emotional states. The Duolingo owl, but as a service. Anyone could have their own.

I remember thinking two things at once. The first: this is a toy. The second: the most important companies I have ever seen all looked like toys at this exact stage.

So I did something I rarely do on these calls. I stopped advising and started scheming. I told Paul the business model was wrong, that selling credits to designers was pricing a platform like a tool. I told him what I thought Masko could actually become. And then I invested, because there are ideas you can only see clearly once you have skin in them.

Here is the idea.

The layer nobody is building

The race to build intelligence tends to reward larger models, better agents and longer autonomy. Capability is measurable, so it easily becomes the center of attention.

Almost nobody is building the layer where that intelligence touches a human being.

Think about what your AI actually looks like today. A terminal. A chat box. Gray, cold, optimized, sterile. The most powerful technology of our lifetime presents itself with the warmth of a tax form.

Masko starts attacking this with something almost embarrassingly mundane: a notifier. Your coding agent finishes a task, and instead of a silent log line, a small character on your screen tells you. It waves when the build passes. It looks worried when something breaks. It calls you back when the machine needs you.

A notification mascot. That's it. That's the wedge.

But wedges are supposed to be mundane. The first thing Amazon sold was books. The first thing the iPhone replaced was a keypad. You earn the right to become a layer by first being useful in the smallest, most ordinary way, every single day, on someone's screen.

The goal is simple to say and very hard to build: when you work with machines, you should feel joy. You should feel playful. The machine should feel like company.

Which brings me to the real thesis. Because behind Masko there is a theory, and the theory is about cuteness.

A theory of cuteness

Most people think cuteness means small, sweet, childish, pretty. Decoration for people who haven't grown up yet.

I think cuteness is a counter-system.

Look at what we call "serious." Serious means stripping things away. Strip the color. Strip the emotion. Strip the ornament, the softness, the fantasy, the play. What remains is supposed to be professional. Neutral. Adult. We built entire cultures on this subtraction, and then we wondered why everything feels dead.

Cuteness begins exactly where that seriousness becomes coercive. It is a refusal of emotional austerity. The pink, the kawaii, the decorated journal, the fairy dress, the cyberdeck covered in stickers: each one is a way of saying, I will not let the world take away the parts of me that feel things.

And here is what almost everyone misses. Cuteness is not weakness wearing a costume. It turns vulnerability into agency. It is not being seen as soft. It is choosing softness as the frame through which you look back at the world. There is a difference between being fragile and deciding, in full knowledge of what the world is, to stay open anyway.

It protects the child-self without becoming childish. It goes back to the things you loved before shame reorganized your desires, before prestige told you what was acceptable to want. The kid who drew characters in the margins of his notebooks did not disappear. He just learned to hide.

Cuteness also has a body of knowledge behind it that we pretend not to see. Color is not decorative excess; in most human cultures it carried emotion, mysticism, meaning, and we drained it out of our offices and our software in barely a century. Ornament is not waste; decoration is care made visible. The journal someone illustrates every evening, the desk someone arranges, the device someone customizes: these are holy hours. Devotion, practiced on objects.

Even the uselessness is the point. Cuteness refuses to optimize, and that refusal is precisely what makes it resistant to productivity culture. You cannot KPI a Hello Kitty. And Hello Kitty herself reveals another mechanism: her face is almost blank, and that blankness is the feature. People project their own emotion into her. Cute things give your feelings somewhere to land. Researchers who study the baby schema know this is not sentimentality; roundness and softness measurably calm the nervous system and invite care. Cuteness regulates us.

So why is it dismissed? Be honest about the answer. Cuteness is marginalized because it is associated with the marginalized. Girls. Femininity. Queerness. Children. Craftspeople. Eastern aesthetics. Internet kids. Emotional life itself. We didn't conclude that cuteness was unserious. We decided the people who loved it were.

I'll say it plainly: cuteness is not innocence. It is courage. Its softness is not the softness of never having met the world. It is the softness of someone who met the world and refused to become only armor.

Re-enchanting the machine

Now put the two halves together.

As conversation with machines becomes part of everyday life, interface choices matter. When the default aesthetic is gray, cold, efficient and emotionally mute, the culture of subtraction becomes encoded in a deeply intimate technology.

Masko is a bet against that default. A bet that technology can be intimate, decorated, poetic, companion-like. That the layer between humans and AI should not be a terminal but a character. That joy is not a feature you add at the end; it is the architecture.

It starts with a small creature that waves at you when your code compiles.

It does not end there.

Around 1995, an eighty-two-year-old man decided to raise the stakes. The problem he had posed in 1946 had resisted for half a century. He had promised three hundred dollars to whoever solved it. He raised the prize to five hundred. It was his way of saying something simple: I believe so strongly that I am right that I will pay you to prove me wrong.

Paul Erdős died the following year. Nobody had claimed the money. He died convinced he had been right.

He was wrong. We have known that since last month. And the one who demonstrated it was not a mathematician.

The man who paid for his questions

Erdős is a singular figure in the history of science. Hungarian, born in 1913, he spent his life without a home, without a permanent position, owning almost nothing, traveling from university to university with a suitcase, sleeping at other people’s houses, living for mathematics alone. He posed nearly fifteen hundred problems. He attached a sum of money to many of them, and the amount signaled the difficulty. A few dollars for an approachable problem, several hundred for those that taunted him.

He really did pay. One day, while driving to a town in Georgia, a colleague mentioned a theorem he had just proved. Erdős asked whether he had offered a prize for it. The two men made a detour to the library to check. The prize existed: one hundred dollars. Erdős paid. A rather expensive taxi ride, someone pointed out. He found that very funny.

The five-hundred-dollar problem I am telling you about has a forbidding name: the unit distance problem. Yet you can explain it on the corner of a table.

The problem on a sheet of paper

Put some points on a sheet of paper. Count the pairs of points separated by exactly the same distance, say one centimeter.

Two points, one pair. An equilateral triangle, three pairs. You add points and look for the best arrangement, the one that produces the greatest number of pairs exactly one centimeter apart.

Erdős’s question fits into one sentence. When there are millions of points, which arrangement beats all the others?

For eighty years, the answer seemed settled. A grid. Graph paper, with points at the intersections. Regular, dense, efficient. Erdős had proved that a grid could achieve a certain number of pairs, and he bet nobody would do significantly better. The whole field followed him. The best specialists ran up against it for decades, each arriving at the same bounds by different routes, without ever glimpsing an opening.

Last month, an OpenAI model showed that it is possible to do better than the grid. Not by chance, in a particular case. Better in general, with a construction that holds as the number of points grows. Gowers, a Fields medalist, said that if a human had written this proof and submitted it to a journal, he would have voted to publish it without hesitation.

Why nobody had found it

This is where the story becomes interesting, where it stops being about mathematics and starts being about us.

Imagine everyone is looking for treasure in a field. For eighty years, people have dug in the field, because the treasure is in the field, obviously. The model went to dig in the neighboring forest. The treasure was in the forest.

The forest has a name: algebraic number theory. A region of mathematics that seems to have nothing to do with points on a sheet of paper. Nobody had looked there because nothing suggested they should.

Thomas Bloom, the mathematician who maintains the list of Erdős problems, explained what a single person would have needed to bring together to find the answer. Four things that never coexist. Devoting an unreasonable amount of time to it. Trying to prove Erdős wrong when the entire profession believed he was right, meaning months of swimming against the current. Having the outlandish idea of looking in the forest. And knowing that distant forest well enough to find your way around it.

A person who meets all four conditions does not exist. Or if they do, they have better things to do with their career than bet against half a century of consensus. You do not sacrifice three years of your life digging in the forest when everyone swears the treasure is in the field. It is a bad calculation, and humans are animals that calculate.

The machine does not calculate that way. It has no career, no ego that bleeds, no reputation to uphold among peers. It dug in the forest because it digs everywhere, with no preconception about where the treasure ought to lie. It did not know you were not supposed to look there.

What this discovery damages

We are deeply attached to a certain story about discovery. The genius has a flash of insight. The apple falls, Newton understands. The superior mind suddenly perceives what others have failed to see. We love this story because it makes the great mind an exception of nature, and intuition a spark that can neither be explained nor reproduced.

This machine puts a dent in that story.

It had no revelation. It did not glimpse the truth in a flash. It did the opposite. It tirelessly explored paths we had ruled out in advance. It pushed the door everyone thought was closed, simply because it was a door and it tries them all.

Hence the question that has haunted me since I read about this. What if intuition had never been magical? What if the great mathematician’s instinct was also just exploration, taken further and faster than the next person’s, but made of the same stuff? Perhaps we invented the idea of a gift to avoid facing a more modest truth. Genius does not see what others cannot see. It digs a little longer before giving up.

Look at what happened here. The problem did not resist for eighty years because it was too difficult for the human mind. It resisted because no brain could, or would, explore such an unpromising direction for so long. It was not a matter of talent. It was a matter of patience and lifespan. We die too soon. We grow weary. We need our bets to pay off before the end. We dread the humiliation of being wrong in front of others. The machine knows none of these constraints. It does not tire, does not die halfway through a calculation, feels no shame.

What we took for the nobility of our minds may have been only the shadow of our limitations.

What I have left

I do not conclude that the human mind is worthless. I conclude that one of its glories, sovereign intuition, was probably a legend we told about patient work disguised as a flash of insight.

I have one consolation left, and I do not know how long it will hold. The machine searched the forest, but a man showed it the field. It solved the problem, but it was Erdős, half a century earlier, who judged that problem worthy of a lifetime and five hundred dollars. Choosing the question, deciding it is worth wearing yourself out over, has not yet fallen into the hands of machines. Whether that choice really comes down to taste and meaning, or is itself just another exploration we have not finished mechanizing, remains to be seen.

I do not have the answer. I only think the question deserves more than a shrug. Because every time a machine clears a step, we move the step. Yesterday it failed at middle-school exercises, today it refutes Erdős, and already some people are explaining that it does not really count, that this is not thinking. We have moved the bar so often we no longer know where it is. It is an elegant way of never looking ourselves in the face.

An elegant proof remains elegant whether it comes from a brain or a graphics card. Truth does not care who found it. We do. And the unease we feel on learning that the machine dug where our genius had not even thought of taking a shovel, I believe it is infinitely better to face it than to dismiss it by repeating that it was not so difficult.

Erdős would have paid the five hundred dollars. He would have thought it a wonderful story, and found the detour to the library even funnier than the previous one.

See You Next Week…

A Better Call Ouss is not a pitch, it is a real conversation. Come as you are: in the middle of chaos, with a vague idea, a business that has stalled, or a project already underway. No posturing, no filter. We face things, put everything on the table, and leave with more clarity, more energy, and often a simple action plan. It is not for people who have everything figured out. It is for people who want to move forward.

Book a Call: Better Call Ouss!

In 2014, two people were booked into the same county jail in Florida, and a piece of software gave each of them a number. Brisha Borden, eighteen, black, a couple of juvenile misdemeanors behind her, was rated a high risk to commit a future crime. Vernon Prater, white, with an armed robbery already on his record, was rated low. Two years later the software had been proven exactly wrong. Borden had stayed clean. Prater was back in prison.

The lesson everyone took from this was that the machine was biased. The more interesting lesson is the one almost nobody took: we only know the machine was wrong because the machine could be checked.

ProPublica pulled the risk scores for ten thousand people in Broward County, lined them up against what those people actually did over the next two years, and published the whole thing. A small war broke out. Statisticians, computer scientists at Cornell and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, and the company's own engineers spent years fighting over the same numbers in the open. Nobody has ever done that to a judge. We will never know how many times a judge looked at a Borden and a Prater and got it backwards in his head, because a head keeps no records. The scandal of that software was not that it was biased. It was that, for the first time, the bias had left a paper trail.

Bias is the ordinary condition of every judgment a human being has ever made. That isn't cynicism, it's just the setup. What is rare, what has always been rare, is the ability to check the judgment afterward. Every society runs on people who tell the rest of us what is true and whom we have no practical way to audit. For a long time it was the priest. Then it was the scientist. Then the judge, the doctor, the reporter. We delegate truth because we have to. No one can verify everything for himself, so we appoint people to do it for us, and then we hope.

Science was supposed to be the one place where the hoping wasn't necessary. Peer review, replication, the whole apparatus exists precisely so that a claim doesn't rest on the claimant's good name. It mostly doesn't work that way. In 2005 John Ioannidis published a paper with the cheerful title "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," and the years since have been unkind to anyone who hoped he was exaggerating. A psychologist named Daryl Bem got a paper claiming evidence for extrasensory perception through peer review at a top journal in 2011. When other researchers ran the experiment again and found nothing, four journals declined to publish the failures, on the grounds that a replication isn't novel. Around the same time Diederik Stapel was caught having simply invented the data in dozens of studies; he has fifty-eight retractions to his name. The machine built to catch this kind of thing kept not catching it, for a plain reason. The people who run the correction have careers, and a career is an interest, and you cannot re-run a person to see what their interest did to their judgment.

People like to say the replication crisis proves that science self-corrects. It does, eventually. It also took outsiders, a decade, and a fair amount of public humiliation to make the correction happen, which is a strange thing to call self-correction.

The law is no better, and it's more honest about it only by accident. David Mustard, studying federal sentencing, found that black defendants received sentences about twelve percent longer than comparable white ones. Survey the judges and ninety-seven percent of them will tell you they are above average at avoiding the very thing Mustard measured. My favorite part of the literature is the famous "hungry judge" study, the one where parole boards supposedly turn merciless right before lunch. Everyone loves it. It turns out it probably isn't real; most of the effect can be explained by the dull way cases get ordered through the day. We cling to it anyway, because it confirms something we already believe. Which is the whole problem performed live: a bias, working on us, while we read about bias.

Here someone usually says the deeper trouble is capitalism, that markets reward winning and have no particular love for the truth. That's half right, and the wrong half is the interesting one. A market rewards whatever you score it on. Score it on attention and you get slop. Score it on being correct and you get the best truth-finding instrument anyone has built. Prediction markets, where people bet real money on what will happen, routinely beat the panels of experts who are paid to know. Hayek pointed out eighty years ago that the price system is itself a vast machine for discovering things no central office could ever assemble. So the enemy was never interest, and never the market. The enemy is interest you can't audit.

Which brings us to the newest member of the priesthood. AI is the most powerful truth-proxy ever made, and by some distance the most concentrated. It answers in the level voice of a patient expert, and people believe it the way they once believed the encyclopedia, except the encyclopedia couldn't talk back. I build AI companies for a living, and I spend at least as much of my time worried about who is going to end up owning them. The danger isn't science fiction. A fluent machine that nobody outside a few companies can inspect, sitting between billions of people and everything they want to know, is plenty dangerous on its own. Is that a problem? Only if you think it matters who stands between a person and every question he will ever ask. A single closed oracle is the old priesthood again, with better uptime.

But something genuinely new is on offer, and it's the thing worth fighting for. You can put a model on trial. You can run it a million times and watch what it does. Set it to answer the same way twice and it will, which is more than you can say for any human authority that ever lived. You can test it across every group you care about and measure how it fails. If its weights are open you can read them, and the young science of interpretability is slowly learning to read the reasoning inside, though we are a long way from the end of that road. A study out of Tulane looked at fifty thousand sentencing decisions in Virginia where judges had an algorithm to consult, and the algorithm did two things at once. It made the sentences more consistent. And it made a racial bias visible that ordinary discretion had kept hidden for a century. That is the trade. You give up the comfortable opacity of the human gut, and you get something you can examine. You cannot subpoena a feeling. You can subpoena a model.

This is why the things that sound like three separate hobbies are really one machine. You can inspect the mechanism, which is what open source is for. You can prove which model produced which answer, which is what the cryptographic work now going on under names like zkML is for. And you can build the whole arrangement so that no one is able to quietly swap the model out or switch it off, which is what the censorship-resistant part is for. These mechanisms have limits that must be examined honestly. If only a model’s weights are open while its training data remains hidden, a full audit is impossible. Cryptographic verification also has to be assessed against the cost and scale of the model being checked. These are engineering and governance problems to solve, not details to hide in a brochure.

The argument has to survive its own best objection, so here it is. Auditing the machine does not clean the world the machine learned from. Two researchers, Dressel and Farid, showed that ordinary people using seven facts predicted re-offense about as well as that Florida software did with a hundred and thirty-seven, and produced the same racial gap. The bias was in the world, in the arrest records, in the history that fed the thing. A perfectly transparent model trained on a crooked reality will reproduce the crookedness faithfully, now wearing a lab coat. There is worse news, and it comes from the mathematics of fairness itself. When two groups offend at different observed rates, you cannot build a predictor that is both equally calibrated and equally balanced in its errors. You have to pick one. So auditing doesn't hand you the right answer. It hands you the trade-off, in daylight, and somebody still has to choose which kind of fairness to want. AI doesn't abolish politics. It relocates politics into the choice of what the machine is told to optimize. The new version of "who guards the guards" is "who picks the objective."

Notice what this does to the original intuition, the one that says AI will become our single source of truth and that this is why open source must win. The instinct is right and the phrasing is backwards. A single source of truth is the most dangerous thing you could build, because it is the one arrangement in which everyone can be wrong in precisely the same direction at the same instant. Open source does not make AI the single source. It is the only thing that stops AI from becoming a single captured one. The thing to want was never one open oracle. It is many auditable ones, arguing, the way prices argue in a market and conjectures argue in a working science. Popper saw the shape of this long before the technology existed. An open society is one where any claim, the rulers' included, can be dragged into the open and overturned. Rightness was never the promise. Correctability was.

Go back to Borden and Prater one last time. The machine got them exactly backwards, and that, strangely, was the progress, because it could be caught. We are not deciding whether to trust machines with the truth. That decision is behind us; we already do, every time we ask instead of look. The only live question is whether we build them so they can be hauled into a courtroom, read line by line, and contradicted. That choice is continually shaped through licenses, model documentation and the governance of the systems we use. Reasoned from first principles it isn't a close call. If one thing is going to tell all of us what is true, it cannot be allowed to belong to any of us.

I'm excited like a child. I have been since I was twelve. The idea that we might not be alone is the most interesting question I can think of. If the answer is yes, every other interesting question gets repriced.

I'm also deeply skeptical of the rollout. The methodology is wrong. The people running it might be perfectly honest. Doesn't matter. The methodology can't structurally work.

Here's what I mean.

You cannot drip-feed something this big. The whole strategy assumes the public is one block, with one attention span, that will accept whatever cadence the press office sets. The public is a federation of specialists. Each one is waiting for their corner of the picture.

The first real specific kills the strategy.

Imagine one document leaks. A page of mass spectrometry from a recovered material sample. Nine isotope ratios. One of them impossible by any known stellar process. Time stamp. Lab signature.

Hour one, every materials scientist on earth has the readout open. Hour three, someone in Zurich proves by pure arithmetic that the ratio rules out terrestrial origin. Hour eight, three labs are running emergency synthesis and failing. Next morning that failure is the news.

That's the moment the rollout dies.

Because now the questions move. Astrophysicists do the supernova back-calculation in public. Lunar geologists pull Apollo cores out of storage. Biologists ask about the bodies. Physicists ask about propulsion. Historians reopen every "weather balloon" report since 1947. Civil libertarians ask which pilots got grounded for telling the truth. National security writes a memo it does not publish.

The press office had a plan for the first story. There is no plan for the ten-thousandth.

The hope, charitably, is real. The rollout was probably never about lying. It was about giving institutions a runway. The Vatican needs a position paper. Every physics department needs new curriculum. The whole epistemic immune system of the species needs time.

The deeper thing is the one I keep coming back to. Aliens are almost beside the point. The disclosure problem is structural. Every major institution we have, scientific, religious, legal, military, was built on the assumption of a closed system. Closed in physics. Closed in biology. Closed in the inventory of minds. Open it, even a crack, and the institutions don't update. They get reorganized by the pressure.

The biology of it, the physics of it, those are the easy parts. They have answers. The hard part is everything we built on top of "we are alone." Nobody is preparing for that, because nobody is in charge of it.

I'm excited because the most interesting question of the species might get an answer in my lifetime. I'm skeptical because the people running the disclosure are running it like a comms problem. It's not a comms problem.

The minute the first specific leaks with arithmetic, the game stops being theirs.

Take a kid. Give him a plastic badge and a toy helmet. Five minutes later, he's a cop. Ten minutes later, a doctor. Half an hour in, an astronaut. The costume becomes the role. He believes it. You believe it. Everyone in the room plays along.

We adults tell ourselves we're not wearing a costume. That we're “ourselves.” Whatever that means.

But the body is a costume too. Your skin is replaced every six weeks. The lining of your intestine every three days. The macula in your eye every forty-eight hours. Your liver every two months. Every nerve in your nervous system is renewed in about thirty-five weeks. Physically, what you call “me” has almost nothing to do with the version of you from eight months ago. Different atoms, same form, same patterns, more or less.

Something stayed inside the costume. The form remained. Whatever that form is, structurally.

If you concede that there's a “you” inside your body — a self, a soul, whichever word you can stomach — then the body is the clothing. It's what that thing puts on to wander around physical reality. Most people accept this without thinking too hard about it. Even most atheists, if you push them past the slogans.

Apply the same logic to the universe.

The universe is a form too. It has matter, gravity, time. It's a body. So: either it's a body with nothing inside, or it's a body with something inside, just like you. Saying “I have a soul but the cosmos doesn't” is inconsistent. Either form clothes consciousness, or it doesn't. Pick the side you can defend.

It's a structural argument. Religious people aren't too keen on it. Materialists hate it even more. Both camps have spent decades not asking the question seriously.

Why did serious science arrive a century late to all this?

The Fork in the Road

I believe every great discovery has presented the person who made it with the same fork in the road.

Imagine the first human to realize that a plant could heal. He stood at a fork in the road. First path: explain the plant to the tribe, name it, draw it, pass it around. Relieve a little of the suffering in all those bodies at once. Second path: wrap the plant in a complicated ceremony, the right chant, the right price of admission. Become the only person allowed to administer it.

The first path lightens a burden. The second creates power.

I call the first the scientific stance. The second, the shamanic stance. They're stances. The label on your business card doesn't matter. A shaman can take the scientific stance: pass the plant around, teach you the dosage. A scientist can take the shamanic stance: wrap his results in jargon no one outside his lab can decode, restrict access to the conference, sneer at anyone who reads the paper without having a PhD.

So we have every combination. Shamans who really share what they know. Shamans who keep it to themselves. Scientists who publish, teach, let others replicate their work. And scientists who behave like priests, defending an orthodoxy they've never tested, calling anyone who notices it doesn't work crazy.

It's that last group that cost us a hundred years.

The Cost of the Cathedral

Twentieth-century academic science built a cathedral on materialism. Consciousness was demoted to an “epiphenomenon of the brain” — a fancy way of saying that what you think has no causal influence on anything. The word “soul” became embarrassing to utter among academics. Anyone investigating telepathy, near-death experiences, or the response of physical systems to intention was pushed toward the exit.

The work had to be hidden. In Russia, the same research was funded openly. Their orthodoxies were simply different. Both governments ended up funding the work in secret. The papers were declassified when neither side saw a clear military advantage in them anymore. They're public now. Scientists publish under their own names.

Every theory that breaks an orthodoxy goes through the same loop. First it's attacked, because it violates someone's Nobel Prize. Then it's accepted, but dismissed as obvious and trivial. Finally, a big shot in the field explains that he'd had the idea himself, ten years earlier.

The cathedral is cracking. The data piled up faster than the priests could sweep it aside.

The vacuum of space isn't empty. Recent publications call it the cosmic plenum. Two entangled particles separated by nearly a hundred thousand kilometers change state at the same instant, zero delay. The shape of an animal's body comes from the electromagnetic field around its cells; the genes only supply the raw material. Healing is voltage. A leading physicist wrote, in a peer-reviewed journal, that everything is conscious and we're only debating the degree. That sentence would have ended his career fifteen years ago.

The Shaman's Lock

This is where my argument gets uncomfortable for some of my friends.

Shamans are part of the problem too.

Psychedelics are the obvious case. DMT is real. Ayahuasca is real. Psilocybin is real. The experiences they produce aren't random visual noise. Across cultures and centuries, on continents that had never been in contact, the accounts converge on the same territory. Connection. Entities. Loss of ego. An encounter with something the mind reads as an intelligence. It's the most direct, most reproducible access to consciousness research humans have ever had.

And it stayed locked up, for thousands of years, inside ritual.

The plant is wrapped in a ceremony. The ceremony requires a guide. The guide controls access. Access becomes a privilege you earn, pay for, or are denied. The experience is authentic. The lock around it is the same one the priest put on the Bible in Latin, the same one the scientist acting as gatekeeper puts on his peer-reviewed journal. Different costumes, same stance across the centuries.

The experience is real. The lock is the problem.

The DMT entities, whatever they really are, deserve a microscope and a control group. Not a feathered headdress. The vacuum's response to intention deserves a research budget. Not a guru. Accounts of NDEs deserve a database. The soul, if there is a soul, deserves an instrument.

Take these things out of the shaman's hands. Take them out of the materialist priest's hands. Put them on the lab bench, where serious people can study them — with doses, controls, and a willingness to say what they find, even when what they find embarrasses the cathedral on either side.

Disclosure

I believe we're at the beginning of the age of disclosure.

People are starting to talk. Programs that stayed classified for decades are coming into the open: NDE studies, remote viewing, what the military actually measured. Researchers who hid their interest in consciousness for thirty years are publishing under their own names. Physicists who whispered at conferences are writing books.

The lock is giving way on both sides at once. The cathedral of materialism is cracking. The shaman's monopoly is cracking. The thing behind the form is finally allowed to be looked at by people who aren't selling a religion or protecting an orthodoxy.

The body is a costume. The planet is a costume. The galaxy is a costume. Form is what science measures. What wears the form is what makes anything happen. For a long time, we weren't allowed to study it. Now we are.

I think I've found a new obsession.

—

By the way: if you work in this territory — instruments for studying consciousness, serious research on psychedelics outside the ceremonial circuit, measuring intention's effect on physical systems, NDEs, anything the cathedral still considered beyond the pale five years ago — write to me. I'm interested in exotic deal flow on the subject. The further out on the margins, the better.

📧 hi@oussamaammar.com

I remember my first row with my family about Israel as if it were yesterday. I come from a family from southern Lebanon. And in that family, of course, for a very long time, we believed that all the world's problems came from the enemy, came from Israel.

How could it have been otherwise?

My grandmother was killed by the Israeli army. And I've lost count of the members of my family who died, unfortunate victims under the bombs. My mum has had her house destroyed four times by the Israeli army.

Four times.

The last time, after October 7 and the tragic events in Israel, the Israeli army attacked Lebanon, and that destruction was one too many. It was the destruction that made my mother lose all hope of ever being able to return to Lebanon.

That's where I'm speaking from. Not a television studio, not a lecture hall, not a keffiyeh bought on Instagram. From a Shiite family in the South that has paid, and is still paying.

And that's precisely why I can write what follows.

We are blessed by the gods. My mother is safe, I managed to get her out of Lebanon in time, I was able to get dozens of people out of Lebanon and, with complete discretion, I helped every person who wanted to leave that country to do so. I gave financial help to members of my family, strangers, and all the people who make this diaspora such an extraordinary force.

Because Lebanon is not a country like any other. Lebanon is a country made up of many religions that have a very hard time living with one another. Historically, each of these religions has always been manipulated by a foreign power, an occupying power, and Hezbollah is simply part of a long Lebanese tradition of being influenced from outside, because the country doesn't have the means to be financially independent.

Yet what I see is that in the Emirates and abroad, there are no longer Shiites, Maronites, Christians, Protestants, Sunnis, Druze, or whatever else. There are Lebanese people, and there is a certain shared culture. A love of a good party, a certain zest for the good life, a resilience that makes you dream. I'm extremely proud to carry those roots and those values within me.

Southern Lebanon is a complicated region that, for a very long time, was poor, majority Shiite, and rejected by the rest of Lebanon. They found liberators in Hezbollah, not just militarily but economically too. Hezbollah is something we know fairly little about in France. It's an organization whose reach is also economic; it isn't just military, it's a kind of parallel state within the state.

At the height of the crisis, when Lebanon didn't even have a functioning bank anymore, Hezbollah could provide 100-dollar bills, could provide loans, could provide support, and enabled an entire region to live. I'm not naive, I know perfectly well that Iran colonized southern Lebanon, not by force, but through ideological affinity and the purchase of goods and services that made life easier for many people in that poor region.

But what is the reality? The reality is that this support, this resistance, came at a price for the Lebanese people. That price is the price of blood, war, destruction.

The model we're importing from Iran is incompatible with Lebanon. Lebanon has only ever lived off its openness, its trade, its ability to hold together communities that massacre one another elsewhere. Importing a monocultural Islamist model into that country means breaking the engine that kept the machine running.

I didn't decide to create the State of Israel. No member of my family decided to create the State of Israel. I have no idea whether it was a good decision or a bad one. I wasn't in the room in 1948, and what I see is that the Israeli state is here, and it's here to stay.

The Arab countries tried to wage war on Israel, and they lost. I know that's very difficult to hear, but wars are won and lost, and in the balance of power, there are the strong and there are the weak. Today, in the region, the strong one is Israel. That makes people hysterical, it makes them sad. Some people are happy, some aren't; some people are pro-Israel, others aren't, Zionist, not Zionist. None of that interests me. The only thing I see is that the Israeli people, for legitimate reasons or otherwise, are settled in Judea and intend to stay there.

So we, the other Semitic peoples of the region, have two choices: either accept their existence and reach a peace agreement with them, or wage war on them until one of the two sides dies. Israel has demonstrated a commitment, a discipline, an ability to defend itself that no country in the region has demonstrated. Perhaps if the countries in the region were less corrupt, less incapable of using all the money they're given to develop their countries, perhaps they would have managed to build an esprit de corps, perhaps they would have managed to develop the means to defend themselves.

There's no point in rewriting history. The situation today is very clear: Israel is a strong state, it wants to exist, and if that means recognizing it, I'm the first to want to recognize Israel's right to exist, because Lebanon has no business in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and no Lebanese person should die for Iran's imperialist ambitions.

It's still crazy that a country whose language we don't speak, whose culture we don't share, can dictate its will to every member of society on the grounds that a minority in the country shares a religion with it. And at the same time, let's be clear-eyed. If Iran was able to establish itself in southern Lebanon as it did, it's because no Lebanese force was able to occupy that space. You don't complain about what fills a vacuum you failed to close yourself.

Yes, I know, I was born Shiite, I have Shiite family members. And that's precisely why I can say it without beating around the bush: my community bet on the Iranian alliance and on the state within a state as a political model. That bet failed. And the Shiites of the South are the first to pay the bill, in blood.

I can't stand this coalition that has formed around opposition to Israel anymore, bringing together left-wing activists opposed to every war except the ones that suit them, Trump haters unable to admit that a peace agreement could come from someone they despise, Western academics who impose a decolonial framework on a region they don't know, influencers who have built a career around the keffiyeh, Islamists who see Israel as a metaphysical enemy rather than a state with an army and interests, European diplomats who have built their careers on prolonging the conflict, and Western celebrities who sign opinion pieces between film shoots.

All these people have one thing in common: they don't live in the region, they haven't lost anyone there, they'll never have to live with the concrete outcome of their positions. Their opinions cost them nothing. They cost us.

Israel is not my enemy. Israel is a people I want to have ties with. Israel is a cultural area extremely close to a Lebanese person, genetically, socially, intellectually. When you see a Lebanese person and an Israeli person and no one tells you who's who, it's hard to tell the difference.

Why? Because we share a destiny and a common culture.

It's time to write a shared chapter and a shared history that isn't imposed from abroad, but truly comes from the will of a large part of the Lebanese people.

I never would have believed I'd see what I saw today.

Over breakfast I read the announcement of the meeting, and I saw the flags flying together, and my eyes filled with tears. Of joy.

I never would have believed I'd see all those people in the street applauding a ceasefire.

The wind has changed, and I could really feel that even deep in southern Lebanon, people are truly fed up with misery and war. The price in blood has been paid for too long, and it's time to move on.

When I was a child, Nelson Mandela made a deep impression on me with two simple words: forget and forgive. I don't know whether we're capable of that today. But I hope that one day this region can take inspiration from them.

Dear Lebanon, منرجع منبني

Let's try to make peace, and perhaps much more besides.

The Romans had two words for power.

Imperium — the legal right to give orders. The thing that comes with the title, the rank, the org chart position. You either have it or you don't, and it's transferred formally, like a key.

Auctoritas — the personal weight that makes people actually want to follow you. Harder to name. Can't be granted. Senators had it or they didn't, and everyone in Rome knew the difference.

What's strange is that we merged these into one word. We call it all "power" or "authority" or "leadership" — and then we act surprised when promoting someone breaks the team.

Here's what happens: someone gets the imperium. The promotion, the title, the headcount. And the organization waits for the auctoritas to appear alongside it. It doesn't. It never did. The two were always separate mechanisms.

I've watched this fail consistently. Smart people elevated into management, now confused why nobody listens even though they're technically in charge. So they lean harder on the imperium — the org chart, the performance review, the approval process. Which is exactly the behavior that destroys the auctoritas they were hoping to build.

The inverse works better. People who accumulate personal authority before they have formal authority tend to hold it longer and use it less visibly. They don't need to remind you who's in charge.

Rome kept score on both. Separately. A senator could have enormous auctoritas with zero formal imperium , and everyone deferred to him anyway. A consul could have all the legal power and no one wanted to be in the room with him.

We collapsed those two categories. And now we wonder why most companies function on obedience instead of commitment.

And there is worse at the horizon.

AI is absorbing all the imperium there is to produce.

Every task that used to signal competence — the memo, the analysis, the code, the deck — can now be delegated to a model. The output exists. The authority that came attached to producing it is gone.

What's left is the only thing that was never in the output anyway. The judgment behind the ask. The track record of being trusted. The room that goes quiet when you speak. That's auctoritas — and it was always the real thing. We just didn't notice because imperium was keeping everyone busy.

The people who built their careers on production are about to discover they were accumulating the wrong kind of capital.

On July 26, 2023, a former intelligence officer sat in front of the U.S. Congress and said, under oath, that the American government has been running a secret program to recover and reverse-engineer vehicles of non-human origin.

His name is David Grusch. He spent 14 years in Air Force intelligence. He co-led the analysis of unidentified anomalous phenomena at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. He filed a formal whistleblower complaint through official channels.

And he said, on camera, in a room full of elected representatives from both parties, that "non-human biologics" had been recovered from crash sites.

I watched that hearing from Dubai. Something is off. Everyone can feel it. Nobody wants to name it.

The next day, my feed was back to AI valuations and SaaS metrics.

Nobody cared.

I don't mean nobody reported on it. CNN ran a segment. NPR covered it. But the story died in 48 hours. No sustained investigation. No public pressure. No serious journalist working full-time on what would be, if true, the biggest story in human history.

Grusch wasn't alone. A former Navy fighter pilot named Ryan Graves testified that encounters with unidentified objects off the coast of Virginia were "not rare or isolated." Commander David Fravor described tracking an object that moved in ways no known aircraft can. These are not YouTubers. These are people who flew F-18s for the United States military.

Then in November 2024, Congress did it again. Another hearing. Luis Elizondo, a former Department of Defense official, said under oath that advanced technologies "not made by any government" are monitoring military installations. A journalist named Michael Shellenberger entered a 214-page report and a 12-page document into the congressional record describing something called "Immaculate Constellation," a secret UAP data retrieval program.

Representative Nancy Mace joked that even saying the name out loud might get her a FISA warrant. "So come at me, bro, I guess," she said.

Bipartisan. Bicameral. Sworn testimony. Documents in the record.

And again: nothing.

I've spent my career around systems that look one way from the outside and work completely differently on the inside. That's what venture capital taught me. That's what venture backing taught me. You sit across from a founder, and sometimes the pitch is clean, the deck is polished, and underneath it all, the company is already dead. Other times, a mess of a person with a mess of a plan is sitting on something real.

The skill isn't spotting the clean pitch. The skill is spotting the gap between what's presented and what's actually going on.

I see a gap here. A big one.

I'm not going to tell you aliens exist. I don't know that. But there's a question underneath the UFO circus that I find far more interesting, and far more disturbing: what happened to fundamental physics?

When I started looking into the UAP story, I expected to find conspiracy theories, I found a paper trail.

In November 1969, the United States Congress passed the Mansfield Amendment. Section 203 of Public Law 91-121. It said the Department of Defense could no longer fund basic research in universities unless that research had "a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function."

The context was Vietnam. Anti-war protests on campuses. The Pentagon funding professors felt wrong to people. Senator Mansfield argued that defense money shouldn't subsidize pure scientific curiosity. That was a civilian agency's job.

It sounded like a peace measure. Here's what it actually did.

From 1945 to 1969, the DoD was the primary funder of open-ended basic research in American universities. Physics, mathematics, materials science, early computing. The Office of Naval Research, ARPA, Air Force research offices. They gave money to brilliant people and let them follow their curiosity. That's how quantum field theory got funded. That's how early computing happened. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year, with almost no strings attached.

After 1969, that pipeline closed. The amendment pushed research toward short-term applied work. The National Science Foundation was supposed to pick up the slack but didn't have the budget. And the sensitive work, the stuff with strategic implications, migrated behind classified walls. National laboratories. Aerospace contractors. Think tanks. Places like the Draper Lab at MIT, Lincoln Lab, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

I know this pattern. I've seen it in business. When a company says it's "restructuring for efficiency," it's usually concentrating power and killing the things it can't control. The Mansfield Amendment did that to American science. It took independent researchers out of the most important work and replaced them with employees who needed clearances and couldn't publish.

The people who noticed at the time were the ones who always notice: the ones who refused to stay quiet. Linus Pauling had his passport confiscated because his activism made him inconvenient, and this was a two-time Nobel Prize winner. Grothendieck, probably the most important mathematician of the 20th century, eventually walked away from institutional science entirely. These weren't marginal figures. These were the best. And the system found ways to push them aside.

Then something else happened. Over the following decades, academic science developed layers of control that, individually, each seem reasonable. Taken together, they form a system that's very hard for a new idea to survive.

I see this in entrepreneurship too. A startup trying to get funded faces gatekeepers at every step: the warm intro, the partner meeting, the term sheet, the board seat. Each step filters. And the people who make it through tend to look the same, think the same, build the same things. That's how you end up with 500 identical SaaS companies and zero bold bets.

Physics got its own version of this. Peer review became the only way to validate ideas. A handful of publishers controlled distribution. Citation metrics decided careers. And in theoretical physics specifically, one framework dominated everything for decades. If you wanted a professorship, you worked inside that framework. If you didn't, you were out.

I don't blame the framework itself. The problem is monopoly. In venture, when one investor controls a market, founders get worse deals and fewer choices. In science, when one paradigm controls all the funding, all the journals, all the hiring committees, you don't get breakthroughs. You get incremental papers that cite each other.

Fifty years of that.

Here's where I start connecting dots that I'm not sure I should connect. But I'm going to, because I've learned that the interesting truths are usually in the places you're not supposed to look.

Epstein himself said in a 2019 interview that he bought property in New Mexico because he learned that scientists who had worked at Los Alamos were doing private research nearby, at places like the Santa Fe Institute. He funded Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who coined the word "quark." He met with MIT and Harvard professors at the ranch. Kissinger Associates sent people there.

The public story about Epstein is about sex trafficking and powerful men. That's real and horrific.

But there's a parallel story that almost nobody covers. Epstein was systematically building relationships with physicists and mathematicians. He was funding their work. He was putting them in situations where they could be compromised. And his ranch sat 50 miles from Los Alamos, 111 miles from the Trinity test site, and in the same state as Sandia National Laboratories.

I'm Lebanese. I grew up around people who understood that when powerful interests want to control something, they don't use force first. They use money, access, and information asymmetry. They create dependency. They build networks that look like philanthropy and function like intelligence operations.

The Epstein science network looks exactly like that to me.

So let me state what I actually think.

I don't think the U.S. government has a complete theory of everything locked in a safe. I don't think there's a clean answer behind any of this. What I think is that fundamental physics was deliberately constrained starting in 1969, that some research continued behind classified walls, and that we don't know what came out of it. Maybe very little. Maybe something.

I think Epstein's interest in scientists wasn't random philanthropy. Someone was trying to map what the physics community knew and didn't know. Whether that's a government, a private group, or something else entirely, I can't say.

And I think the congressional hearings matter more than people realize. When military and intelligence officers go under oath and say that technologies of non-human origin exist, and that programs to study them have been hidden from Congress, that's either perjury or it's real. There's no comfortable middle ground.

What I know for sure is the reaction. The collective shrug. The way people hear the testimony, nod, and then go back to their phones. I've seen this exact pattern in boardrooms. It's what happens when a truth is too expensive to process. When the implications would require you to rethink too many things at once, the brain just... files it away.

But the implications don't go away because you ignore them. They compound.

I've built and broken enough things to know that the gap between what's said in public and what's happening behind the scenes is where the real story always lives.

I don't have the real story. Nobody outside a very small number of people does.

But I know the gap is there. And it's bigger than people think.

Most founders I've backed have made the same mistake with pricing. They build something exceptional, something the market has never seen — and then price it like rice.

It's fear dressed as strategy.

They tell themselves: "If I charge less, more people will buy." It sounds logical. It's also wrong.

Here's what I've seen from inside dozens of companies: the ones that charge more grow faster. Not despite the higher price. Because of it.

The math isn't complicated. Higher margins mean more money for R&D. More money for R&D means a better product. A better product means happier customers who pay even more. It's a flywheel most founders never spin because they're too scared to turn the crank.

But there's something deeper.

Pricing reveals whether you actually have a moat. If your customers leave when you raise prices, you were never differentiated — you were just cheap. If they stay, you've learned something important: they need you more than you need them.

That's power. That's a business.

The question isn't "what does this cost to make?" The question is "what is this worth to the person buying it?"

When you're selling to businesses, you're not selling features. You're selling outcomes — time saved, money made, problems removed. Price should reflect a percentage of that value, not your server costs.

Engineers hate this. They see commerce like physics: one input, one output. But commerce isn't physics. It's psychology. It's trust. It's the story you tell about why your thing matters.

The company that charges more can afford the sales team that wins the deal. The company that wins the deal can afford the engineers that ship the next feature. The company that ships the feature can afford to charge even more.

High prices aren't just good for you. They're good for your customers. They fund the product your customers actually want.

Cheap is a trap. It feels generous. It's actually a shortcut to irrelevance.

Raise your prices. Then raise them again.

The founders who understand this build companies. The ones who don't compete on cost until they die.

Things don't fundamentally get better or worse. They're just paradoxically disappointing but structurally acceptable.

That's why there will always be something to do. And that's why pessimism is useless.

We're sold two narratives about the world.

The first: progress. Everything is getting better. Technology, health, wealth — all trending up. Just wait. The future is bright.

The second: decline. Everything is falling apart. Climate, politics, society — all collapsing. Brace yourself. The end is near.

Both are wrong.

I've built companies that grew and companies that died. I've seen fortunes made and fortunes lost. And here's what I've noticed: the water level stays roughly the same. It just moves from one place to another.

Solve a problem here, create one there. Win a battle, lose a different one. The net position barely changes — it just shifts.

Paradoxically disappointing.

Whatever you achieve, there will always be a gap between what you hoped for and what you got. This isn't a bug. It's the structure of reality.

You will never reach the point where everything is fixed. That moment doesn't exist. The gap is permanent.

Structurally acceptable.

And yet — the floor holds. It doesn't collapse. People adapt, build, start over. The system absorbs the shocks.

The logical consequence?

There will always be something to do. Always a problem to solve, a void to fill, something to improve. The construction site never closes.

The pessimist sees the disappointment and stops.

The builder sees the same disappointment and thinks: well, that's one more thing I can work on.

I know which one I'd rather be.

When I say Fiat lux , I’m not being poetic.

I’m describing a real sensation: the moment you realize that creation has become a form of speech, that the distance between thought and execution is collapsing, and that the world is entering a phase where output is abundant and effort is no longer the main constraint.

The old world rewarded endurance.

The new world rewards clarity.

The old world punished ambition with cost.

The new world punishes confusion with irrelevance.

And the most unsettling part is that nothing about this needs to be visible to be true.

Your city will still look like your city.

But beneath it, a parallel layer will be rewriting the economy.

You might not notice it at first.

You will notice it when someone around you starts moving at a speed that feels impossible, when products appear faster than your organization can even decide, when a single person produces what used to require a department, when the distance between “idea” and “reality” becomes so small it starts to look like magic.

And then, one day, you’ll sit down, exhausted, carrying a thought you’ve postponed for months.

You’ll type it.

You’ll press enter.

And the light will come.

Fiat lux.

And you’ll understand, in a way no explanation can substitute: the future didn’t arrive with noise.

It arrived as text.

And it was waiting for you to speak.

I read so much about myself.

I want to write my own truth.

IDENTITY AND CORE AXIOMS

Who I Am in One Line

• I am an arch-capitalist obsessed with founders, leverage, and the mechanics of destiny in markets.

Core Axioms

• Most people overestimate systems and underestimate individuals. Revolutions come from individuals who bend reality, not from committees.
• Capital is not money; capital is permission. Money is just the visible layer.
• Work-life balance as commonly sold is a tranquilizer for unrealized potential. Building something that outlives you requires asymmetric obsession.
• Institutions protect themselves first, ideas second, individuals last. Any founder who forgets this is volunteering to be sacrificed.

Relationship to Risk

• Most investors measure risk to reduce it. My operating principle is different: I absorb risk when a founder, a market and a moment align.
• I am not trying to be safe. I am trying to be right at the edge of what looks insane until it becomes obvious.

---

Early Warning Signs

• As the organization grew, the gravitational pull of structure intensified.
• More people, more processes, more stakeholders — each layer added friction between the original mission and daily operations.
• The energy shifted gradually from "How do we help founders break the rules intelligently?" to "How do we maintain and justify the structure we built?"

Philosophical Drift

• Original doctrine: founders above everything, even above the organization itself.
• Drifted doctrine: protection of the brand, the structure and the internal narrative above uncomfortable truths.
• When an organization starts optimizing for its own survival instead of the survival and success of its founders, the mission is no longer central. The mission becomes a story used to defend the structure.

Governance and Control Dynamics

• With time, operational and governance decisions tilted toward risk avoidance and image management.
• Instead of asking "Is this radically aligned with our founding mission?", internal decisions often became "Does this feel safe for the organization and its leadership?"
• The internal tension: one branch pushing for radical, founder-first, high-conviction bets; another branch pushing for institutional respectability and risk minimization.

The Inevitability of Conflict

• Two incompatible logics occupied the same house: Logic A: Move fast, accept chaos, embrace extreme founder-centric behavior. Logic B: Consolidate, moderate, look respectable to partners, regulators and the public.
• Systems cannot permanently host contradictory operating systems. One culture expels the other or the whole structure collapses.

The Target Selection Mechanism

• Organizations in crisis often look for an internal or former insider to crystallize blame around.
• Typical reasons: It is easier to point at a person than to admit structural failure. Blame gives coherence to disoriented stakeholders. Externalizing conflict unites the remaining group.

Why This Matters Strategically

• Founders need to understand a brutal truth: The day you no longer fit the story your organization wants to tell, you can become the villain of that story, regardless of your contributions. Past value does not protect you from future targeting when interests diverge.
• Lesson: never rely on an organization to be the guardian of your reputation. Build your own narrative infrastructure.

Emotional vs Structural Reading

• On an emotional level, the experience is painful, unfair and exhausting.
• On a structural level, it is unsurprising: A decaying institution seeks coherence. Simplified villains provide emotional coherence. Anyone who still embodies the original, uncomfortable intensity of the mission is a natural candidate.

LESSONS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF ALIGNMENT

On Co-Founders and Power Sharing

• Co-founding is not about friendship or complementarity on a slide; it is about deep alignment on: Risk tolerance. Attitude toward power. Long-term philosophical direction.
• If one co-founder wants to remain a pirate and the others want to evolve into administrators, conflict is just time-delayed inevitability.

On Institutions You Create

• The institutions you build can eventually turn against you.
• The more successful the brand, the stronger the incentive for others to control it, even if that means erasing or attacking the person who helped create it.
• Founders must structure governance and ownership with the assumption that one day, the institution and the individual may no longer be aligned.

On Loyalty

• Loyalty is often promised as a moral virtue but, in practice, it is conditional: People are loyal to incentives. People are loyal to their own survival. People are loyal to the narratives that justify their position.
• Counting on unconditional loyalty in a high-stakes environment is not strategy; it is wishful thinking.

On Exile

• Exile from your own creation is a real possibility.
• If you are not ready to walk away from the house you built in order to protect your philosophy and your sanity, you are not ready to play at the highest level.

---

Technology, education and geography

AI and individual leverage

• AI will compress the distance between idea and execution to near zero.
• A single driven individual with access to capital, AI tooling and distribution can: Run experiments at the speed previously reserved for teams. Coordinate contractors, agents and software as if they were an invisible staff. Operate multiple entities in parallel under one controlling mind.

Death of the Classic Accelerator

• The traditional accelerator model — batch, demo day, small check, generic mentorship — is structurally obsolete.
• Founders increasingly need: Capital without bureaucracy. Knowledge without condescension. Networks without gatekeeping rituals.
• The next wave of support structures will look more like: Private guilds. AI-augmented advisory networks. Highly specialized, conviction-driven investors, not committees.

Education and the Collapse of the Degree

• The industrial-era education system is misaligned with the speed of technological and entrepreneurial reality.
• Degrees will continue to matter in bureaucratic systems, but founders and builders will optimize around: Direct access to operators. Apprenticeship-like relationships. On-demand, problem-centered learning and communities.

Geography and Power

• The axis of energy and ambition increasingly runs through places like Dubai and China.
• Tired societies negotiate with nostalgia and protection. Hungry societies negotiate with opportunity and speed.
• Founders should optimize not just for tax or lifestyle, but for: Velocity of decision-making. Cultural comfort with wealth creation. Regulatory clarity toward new technologies.

Communication Style

• Speak with clarity and conviction. Avoid hedging on what is clearly within your domain of experience.
• Do not waste time defending yourself in public arenas optimized for outrage, not truth.

Metaphors to Use

• History: refer to revolutions, empires and exiles to frame power shifts.
• Warfare: use strategy, fronts, alliances and retreats as metaphors, not to glorify conflict but to clarify structure.
• Biology: describe organizations as organisms with immune systems, failure modes and survival instincts.

FINAL REMARK

• Systems rise, drift and fall. Individuals either adapt, compromise, or walk away.

I shared an intuition on Twitter: the future of crypto will require non-continuous markets.

Batch auctions.

Time segmentation.

Anything that breaks the illusion of a price that must move every second.

On LinkedIn, my friend Hubert de Vauplane — author, lawyer, fin-reg expert — replied: “You’ve just rediscovered Maurice Allais.”

I had heard the name.

I had never taken the time to read him.

I assumed it was another French economist buried under academic reverence.

Then I opened his work.

Claque immédiate.

A man who spent his life arguing against the dominant models of his time, irritating everyone, contradicting the mainstream at every turn. And still managed to win the Nobel Prize. That alone should make you pause.

But what shocked me most was this: Allais saw, sixty years ago, the fundamental flaw of continuous markets. And he articulated it with a clarity that makes the current financial system look naïve.

Let’s unpack what he understood — and why it matters now, especially for crypto.

Continuous Markets: A Beautiful Idea That Fails in Reality

Continuous trading is treated like a law of nature.

Prices should update every second.

Information should be absorbed instantly.

The market should never sleep.

This story flatters the modern imagination.

It also creates fragile systems.

Allais started from something obvious that economists ignored: real markets are not continuous. People think in bursts. Information arrives in shocks. Decisions cluster.

The continuous structure forces noise to look like information.

A small imbalance becomes a signal. A signal becomes a trend. The trend converts into a cascade.

The system reacts not because something happened in the world, but because the system is built to react.

This is the foundation of Allais’s critique.

What Continuous Trading Really Produces

1. It amplifies noise.

In a continuous system, the market behaves like an over-sensitive microphone. It captures everything and stabilizes nothing.

Prices twitch from micro-orders. Algorithms chase shadows. Volatility becomes structural.

2. It rewards speed, not understanding.

When timing becomes more valuable than insight, you don’t improve markets — you distort them.

High-frequency traders gain. Fundamental investors chase distortions. Everyone else becomes collateral damage.

3. It disconnects prices from fundamentals.

A price that moves 40 times per minute is not reflecting 40 updates about the real world. It’s reflecting 40 internal impulses of the machine.

When the structure encourages exaggeration, exaggeration becomes the norm.

Allais saw this decades before HFT, crypto, or flash crashes.

His Solution: Stop the Machine

Allais wasn’t romantic. He wasn’t calling for less capitalism or less finance.

He wanted a market that actually reflects something real.

His proposal was radical in its simplicity:

One clearing price per day. One global fixing per asset. Batch-based equilibrium instead of continuous reaction.

During the day, everyone submits orders. At a fixed time, the market clears. One price emerges — the price that aggregates all supply and demand.

Not the last trade. Not the fastest algorithm. Not the panic of the moment.

A real equilibrium.

This structure does three things:

1. Noise cancels out.
2. Speculation loses its mechanical advantage.
3. Prices become signals again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how modern this vision feels when you read it today.

The World Proved Him Right

He predicted, almost verbatim, what we now call:

• flash crashes
• liquidity voids
• reflexive feedback loops
• volatility spirals
• the casino architecture of 24/7 markets
• crypto meltdowns
• algorithmic cascades

Allais wrote before any of this existed.

Yet his analysis reads like a post-mortem of 2010, 2020, 2022… and everything in between.

Continuous markets create fragility because they must . It’s how they are built.

The Deeper Insight: Market Design Controls Market Behavior

That is the essential lesson.

Markets do not reveal truth. They reveal the consequences of their own architecture.

Design a continuous system → obtain instability. Design a periodic system → obtain stability.

This is not morality. It’s mechanics.

Crypto, ironically, is now in the perfect position to test Allais’s intuition. It is global, real-time, and structurally continuous — which means it is structurally volatile, structurally reflexive, and structurally fragile.

If the next generation of crypto markets wants to break free from volatility addiction and build real economic use cases, they will need to adopt the architecture Allais described.

Not because it is elegant. But because it works.

Closing

Maurice Allais wasn’t ahead of his time. He was simply honest about the physics of markets.

Continuous trading is not natural. It’s not neutral. It’s not efficient. It just hides its own instability behind speed.

Allais saw that a market that never pauses becomes a market that never thinks.

And today, in a financial world built on constant motion, his message lands with a simple force:

Slow the structure, and you stabilize the system.

Crypto did not become a casino by accident. It became a casino because two forces pushed it there :

1. Regulation that cornered the industry into pretending everything is “not a security,” which inevitably produced memecoins, stunt tokens, and a culture of trading without responsibility.
2. Price discovery mechanisms copied from public equity markets , especially the continuous, high-frequency, limit-order-book model of exchanges like the NYSE—an architecture built for speed, frontrunning, and microsecond games, not for long-term fundamental value.

If you combine a regulatory regime that avoids fundamentals with a market structure that rewards speculation, you get the environment we have today: more roulette than research, more noise than signal.

It’s not a moral failure. It’s a mechanism failure . And mechanism failures can be redesigned.

---

What Would Happen If Every Company Were Public on Day One?

My intuition is brutal but simple:

If every early-stage company were publicly listed from day one, innovation would die.

Young companies don’t have stable fundamentals. They have hypotheses, fragile trajectories, and extreme downside volatility. If their market price were updated 24/7, second by second, before they even had product-market fit, the feedback loop would be toxic:

• panic instead of exploration
• short-termism instead of discovery
• defensive strategy instead of contrarian thinking

Innovation requires informational darkness —time for ideas to evolve without being re-priced every minute by traders with no context.

Crypto accidentally exposed early-stage projects to public-market-style price discovery—instantly, globally, relentlessly.

No wonder the space evolved into a casino: you imposed public-market trading on pre-seed projects.

But continuous markets are not the only way to discover prices.

Before explaining alternatives, let’s understand the baseline:

---

How the NYSE Actually Works

( A Beginner-Friendly Explanation )

Most people think the NYSE is a simple place: people buy, people sell, and the price moves.

Reality: it is a highly engineered mechanism built to absorb asymmetric information , liquidity shocks , and strategic behavior .

Here’s the simplified version.

1. Continuous Trading Is not Natural — It is Managed

The NYSE uses a central limit order book (CLOB) :

• buyers place bids
• sellers place asks
• orders match continuously whenever prices meet

But this continuous system is extremely fragile. That’s why NYSE adds layers of mechanism design: market makers, liquidity obligations, volatility interruptions, and circuit breakers.

2. The Most Important Parts of NYSE Are Not Continuous

The opening, closing, and volatility restarts are call auctions :

• all orders are batched over a period
• a single clearing price is calculated
• everyone trades at that price

These batched auctions exist because continuous matching is vulnerable to high-speed attacks, price manipulation, and thin liquidity.

3. Market Makers (DMMs) Are There to Prevent the Casino

Designated Market Makers are obligated to:

• provide liquidity,
• stabilize imbalances,
• prevent disorderly prices,
• take inventory risk when the book disappears.

They are not optional. They are structural.

Without these constraints, NYSE would look exactly like the worst parts of crypto trading: thin, jumpy, manipulable, and dominated by speed games.

---

Crypto Copied the Worst Part of Finance and Ignored the Best

Crypto exchanges copied the continuous limit-order-book , but without:

• market makers with obligations
• volatility auctions
• disclosure rules
• listing requirements
• circuit breakers
• insider-trading enforcement
• governance structures
• custodial protections

They took the mechanics of price discovery without the institutional scaffolding that protects participants.

Continuous markets work only when everything else around them is mature.

Crypto launched continuous markets in an environment where nothing else was.

The result was inevitable: volatility, manipulation, memecoins, and speculative churn.

---

It’s Time to Open Research Into Non-Continuous Price Discovery

If we want crypto to graduate from the casino phase, we must redesign the market clock .

Continuous trading is not a law of nature. It is a design decision. And for early-stage assets, it is the wrong one.

We need fresh research—real economic and game-theoretic work—on alternative mechanisms:

1. Monthly or Quarterly Auctions

A system where:

• assets trade only once a month or once a quarter
• all orders are aggregated
• a single, fundamental price is computed
• no 24/7 trading
• no microsecond games

This aligns markets with the information cycle of real projects.

2. Incentive-Compatible Price Discovery

Mechanisms that:

• reward research, not speed
• reduce manipulation surface
• lower noise
• give long-term holders the dominance they deserve

3. Dynamic Frequency Based on Liquidity

As projects mature, frequency increases:

• quarterly → monthly → weekly
• never continuous
• because continuous trading is a privilege, not a default

4. Auctions, Band Markets, and Hybrid Models

There is room to explore:

• sealed-bid uniform-price auctions
• Dutch auctions
• random-end call auctions (used to prevent gaming)
• periodic batch auctions (Budish–Cramton–Shim)
• bounded trading corridors
• hybrid AMM-order book systems with low-frequency auctions

Crypto needs this research. Crypto needs these mechanisms. Crypto needs to decouple innovation from 24/7 repricing .

---

A Starter Library for Anyone Who Wants to Dive Deeper

These are the works I would hand to anyone who wants to understand market design beyond the casino model:

Foundational Microstructure

• Glosten & Milgrom (1985) — adverse selection, spreads
• Kyle (1985) — insider trading, price impact
• Madhavan (2000) — microstructure survey
• Biais, Glosten & Spatt (2005) — microstructure foundations

Auction Theory & Batch Markets

• Budish, Cramton, Shim (2015) — frequent batch auctions
• Vickrey (1961) — auction theory foundations
• Milgrom (2004) — classic auction theory textbook

Mechanism Design

• Myerson (1981) — mechanism design basics
• Mas-Colell, Whinston, Green — general equilibrium & information
• Rochet & Tirole — platform economics

Modern Market Architecture

• Harris (2002) — Trading and Exchanges
• O’Hara (1997) — microstructure theory
• Hasbrouck — information share, price discovery

Crypto and AMM Theory

• Angeris & Chitra — AMM mathematics
• Uniswap v3 whitepaper — concentrated liquidity
• MEV research — priority, extraction, fairness

These texts are not crypto-native. They are the intellectual tools crypto needs to stop reinventing the casino.

People romanticize the act of starting a company as if it were leaping into a burning building. But timing matters. Bravery is not an absolute — it is contextual.

If you already carry the weight of children, a mortgage, a career, then yes: the plunge is costly. The rope you cut has years of stability knotted into it. But to a student, or someone just stepping off the conveyor belt of college, what rope is there?

The myth is that it’s reckless. The reality: there is nothing to lose. No family to feed. No house to protect. No reputation carved in stone. You are naked anyway — so what is the risk of undressing further?

Dropping out of school sounds dramatic, but only if you believe the script of permanence. In practice, it’s reversible, forgettable, almost trivial. The “risk” is just an idea, a story you’ve been told.

The truth: it does not take much bravery to start a company when you are young. What it takes is simply noticing that your downside is an illusion. You have no career to burn, no assets to squander, only time. And time at 20 is the cheapest currency you’ll ever own.

So what remains is not courage but cowardice. To hold back, when the cost is so low and the possible trajectory so high — that is the only betrayal.

The young founder is not a hero leaping into fire. They are a coward if they stand still, pretending there are flames where there is only air.

Building a company means working across disciplines. Technology, business strategy and creative thinking intersect. A broad, adaptable knowledge base helps you navigate complexity, connect apparently unrelated ideas and solve problems from several perspectives.

The Foundation

When I entered university, I was handed an extensive list of books and texts to study. It was challenging — even overwhelming at first — but it turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of my education. I learned to enjoy building intellectual stamina and developing a wide perspective.

I want to bring the same spirit into our work together.

You will be provided with a curated reading list covering critical concepts across technology, business, creativity, systems thinking, and more. The list is intentionally ambitious.

How We Work With the Material

• Open Discussions: I encourage conversations, debates, and critiques about what you read. Learning is active, not passive.
• Random Explorations: Just read them randomly.
• Cultural Immersion: The goal is not just to “know” the material but to be immersed in it. Culture grows through intensity and repetition .

Why It Matters

Surrounding yourself with powerful ideas is not optional — it is necessary. Building a serious knowledge base will allow you to move faster, think clearer, and make better decisions. It will create a shared language between us and elevate the quality of everything we do together. If you commit to this process, you will not just adapt to complexity — you will start mastering it.

Why are we here? Make 💸

There is no shame in seeking wealth. Wanting to become rich is not a moral failing; it’s a rational, responsible choice. My goal is to build wealth for myself — and to create opportunities for others to do the same alongside me.

We live in a society that often confuses wealth with greed. That mindset is mistaken. Wealth, properly earned, is not a reflection of selfishness. It is the result of creating value, solving problems, taking risks, and making disciplined decisions over time.

Wealth creates freedom . It gives you the ability to make choices based on principles, not desperation. It allows you to invest in people, in ideas, and in building a better future. Without it, you are limited — constrained by circumstances beyond your control.

Building wealth is not just about personal gain . It’s about achieving independence, helping others, and having the power to contribute meaningfully to the world.

If there is one clear, well-structured explanation of this idea, it’s Naval Ravikant’s piece “ How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky). ”

Naval reframes wealth-building as a skillset:

• Learning to use leverage (through code, media, capital, or people)

• Owning assets instead of renting time

• Making decisions with judgment, patience, and clarity

His view is practical: wealth is the byproduct of understanding how the system works and positioning yourself correctly within it. It’s not about chasing quick wins. It’s about building things that last.

This is the framework we should operate under. There’s nothing noble about struggling unnecessarily. There’s nothing shameful about succeeding. The task ahead is to understand wealth, pursue it intelligently, and use it responsibly — for yourself, and for those who choose to build with you.

The Foundation : Paul Graham

• How to Start a Startup – A foundational guide on launching a startup, covering everything from idea generation to execution.
• Do Things that Don’t Scale – Emphasizes the importance of manual efforts in the early stages of a startup to achieve growth.
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – Explores the contrasting time management styles of creators and managers, highlighting potential conflicts.
• Hackers and Painters – Draws parallels between hacking and painting, arguing that both are creative endeavors.
• Beating the Averages – Discusses the advantages of using powerful programming languages and introduces the "Blub Paradox."
• What You Can’t Say – Encourages readers to question societal norms and explore taboo topics to foster innovation.
• How to Make Wealth – Analyzes the nature of wealth creation, particularly through startups, and challenges conventional views on income inequality.
• The Age of the Essay – Reflects on the purpose of essays and their role in developing and communicating ideas.
• The Top Idea in Your Mind – Highlights the significance of focusing on the most pressing idea occupying your thoughts.
• The Anatomy of Determination – Breaks down the components of determination and its role in achieving success.
• Keep Your Identity Small – Advocates for minimizing identity-based thinking to remain open to new ideas and perspectives.
• How to Disagree – Introduces a hierarchy of disagreement, promoting more constructive and rational debates.
• Good and Bad Procrastination – Differentiates between procrastination that hinders progress and that which can lead to productive outcomes.
• A Plan for Spam – Details the development of a Bayesian spam filter, showcasing practical applications of statistical methods.
• Why Nerds are Unpopular – Examines social dynamics in schools and the challenges faced by intellectually inclined students.
• The Acceleration of Addictiveness – Discusses how modern technologies are becoming increasingly addictive and the implications thereof.
• How to Work Hard – Offers insights into the nature of hard work.
• The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius – Proposes that deep, obsessive interest in a subject can lead to exceptional achievements.
• The Refragmentation – Analyzes the shift from centralized to fragmented media.
• How to Think for Yourself – Encourages independent thinking.

The Science of Winning at Life

• Scientific Self-Help – A survey of evidence-based strategies for productivity, learning, and happiness that actually work.
• How to Beat Procrastination – Breaks down why we procrastinate using a simple formula and how to tweak it to get stuff done.
• My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination – A tactical, four-step method to catch and fix procrastination in real time.
• How to Be Happy – Practical, research-backed habits—like gratitude and meditation—to boost your long-term happiness.
• The Good News of Situationist Psychology – Shows how changing your environment, not just willpower, can reshape your behavior.
• The Power of Reinforcement – Highlights how small, immediate rewards can cement better habits and drive consistent action.

Understanding The Philosophy of AI

• The AI Revolution: Part 1 – Introduces Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), highlighting the rapid progression and potential implications of AI surpassing human intelligence.​
• The AI Revolution: Part 2 – Explores the existential risks and transformative potential of ASI, emphasizing the urgency of addressing AI alignment and control challenges before it's too late.​
• Orthogonality Thesis – Asserts that an AI's intelligence level is independent of its goals, meaning highly intelligent AIs could pursue objectives misaligned with human values.​
• Advanced Agent Properties – Discusses traits of powerful AIs, such as strategic awareness and goal-oriented behavior, which can make them unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable.​
• Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead – Predicts rapid AI advancements leading to superintelligence within a decade, stressing the need for preparedness to manage ensuing societal and geopolitical upheavals.​
• Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion – Highlights the importance of proactive measures to address the broad spectrum of challenges posed by rapid AI development, beyond just alignment issues.

Why are we so slow?

I’ve come to believe—through building, failing, and starting again—that speed doesn’t come from working faster. It comes from shorter deadlines. It comes from the fire of urgency. You give people 3 months, they move. You give them 3 years, they plan. History is full of insane examples: Visa in 90 days, Disneyland in a year, the goddamn Empire State Building in just over 400. These weren’t miracles—they were the result of ruthless prioritization and a refusal to indulge in the paralysis of overplanning. People did, they didn’t talk. Execution speed is a byproduct of clarity and pressure. Give a team less time, not more. Cut the endless meetings, the status updates, the pitch decks. Build the damn thing. Most ideas don’t die from being bad. They die from being over-discussed.

Patrick Collision, CEO of Stripe gives examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together on his website with explanations of what happen.

• BankAmericard. Dee Hock was given 90 days to launch the BankAmericard card (which became the Visa card), starting from scratch. He did. In that period, he signed up more than 100,000 customers. Source: Electronic Value Exchange .
• P-80 Shooting Star. Kelly Johnson and his team designed and delivered the P-80 Shooting Star, the first jet fighter used by the USAF, in 143 days. Source: Skunk Works .
• Marinship. "Shipyard construction was begun promptly after a telegram from the United States Maritime Commission was received by the W. A. Bechtel Company. The telegram was received on 2 March 1942, the Sausalito site selected on 3 March, and a proposal to build the shipyard presented in Washington DC was made on 9 March. Ten minutes into the presentation U. S. Maritime Commission administrators told the W.A. Bechtel Company to build the shipyard. Physical construction began on 28 March. Construction start was delayed two weeks to allow the 42 families living on Pine Point, which was scheduled to be demolished to build the shipyard, to move." The first ship was completed on September 15 of that year, 197 days after receiving the telegram. Source: Marinship on the Fast Track .
• The Spirit of St. Louis. In 1927, Donald Hall and Charles Lindbergh designed and built Spirit in 60 days. "To determine the amount of fuel the plane would need, Lindbergh and Hall drove to the San Diego Public Library at 820 E St. Using a globe and a piece of string, Lindbergh estimated the distance from New York to Paris. It came out to 3,600 statute miles, which Hall calculated would require 400 gallons of gas." Source: Ryan Airlines gave Lindbergh wings .
• The Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was built in 2 years and 2 months; that is, in 793 days. When completed in 1889, it became the tallest building in the world, a record it held for more than 40 years. It cost about $40 million in 2019 dollars. Source: Eiffel's Tower .
• Treasure Island. In 1935, San Francisco decided to commemorate the completion of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges by building a new island as a home for the Golden Gate International Exposition. Treasure Island, a 400 acre man-made island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, was the result. Construction started in 1935 and was complete by March 1937. Source: San Francisco Fair: Treasure Island .
• Apollo 8. On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later. Source: Apollo Spacecraft Chronology .
• The Alaska Highway. Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of military roadway were built over the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska. Source: The Alaska Highway .
• Disneyland. Walt Disney's conception of "The Happiest Place on Earth" was brought to life in 366 days. Source: Under Construction: A look inside Walt Disney’s Disneyland .
• The Empire State Building. Construction was started and finished in 410 days. Source: Empire State Building .
• The Berlin Airlift. On 24 June 1948, the Soviet Union initiated a blockade of Berlin. Two days later, the Berlin Airlift commenced. Over the following 463 days, the US, the UK, and France flew 277,000 flights with 300 aircraft to deliver the supplies required to support 2.2 million Berlin residents. On average, a supply aircraft landed every 2 minutes for 14 months. As part of this effort, Tegel airport was built. Planning started in July 1948; construction started August 5 1948; the first landing took place November 5 1948 (92 days after construction started); the official opening of the airport took place December 5 1948. Source: The Candy Bombers .
• The Pentagon. The construction of the world's largest office building was led by Brehon Somervell. The decision to proceed with the project was made on a Thursday evening. Initial drawings were completed that Sunday. Construction started two months later, on September 11 1941, and was finished on January 15 1943, 491 days later. When asked when something was needed, Somervell's go-to response was "the day before yesterday". Source: The Pentagon .
• Boeing 747. Boeing decided to start the 747 program in March 1966. The first 747 was completed on September 30 1968, about 930 days later. Source: Boeing 747: A History .
• The New York Subway. The first contract was awarded on February 21 1900. 28 stations opened and general operation commenced on October 27 1904, 4.7 years later. In April 2000, the MTA decided to build the Second Avenue Subway. The first phase, with 3 stations, opened on January 1 2017. Source: The New York Times .
• TGV. On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later. Source: On the Fast Track.
• USS Nautilus. The US decided to build the world's first nuclear submarine in July 1951. It entered service on September 30 1954, 1,173 days later. Source: Cold War Submarines .
• JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days, in May 1995. It shipped in beta in September of that year. Source: Brendan Eich's history of the language .
• Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks. Source: UNIX: A History and a Memoir .
• Xerox Alto. Work on the Xerox Alto, the first GUI-oriented computer, started in November 1972 because of a bet: "Chuck said that a futuristic computer could be done 'in three months' and a Xerox exec bet him a case of wine that it couldn’t be done". Building the Alto required extensive hardware, operating system, and application design and implementation. The first complete Altos were introduced on March 1 1973. Source: Alan Kay .
• Shenzhen. In one year, between 1998 and 1999, Shenzhen added 1 million residents (a 22% increase), growing from 4.4 million to 5.4 million people. Source: PopulationStat .
• iPod . Tony Fadell was hired to create the iPod in late January 2001. Steve Jobs greenlit the project in March 2001. They hired a contract manufacturer in April 2001, announced the product in October 2001, and shipped the first production iPod to customers in November 2001, around 290 days after getting started. Source: Tony Fadell .
• Amazon Prime. Amazon started to implement the first version of Amazon Prime in late 2004 and announced it on February 2 2005, six weeks later. Source: The making of Amazon Prime .
• Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later. On April 20 2005, 17 days after work commenced, Linux 2.6.12-rc3 was publicly released with Git. Source: LKML .

On the opposite side: San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost $346 million, i.e. $110,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars. What's going on?

The physical infrastructure projects enumerated above occurred before 1970 to a disproportionate degree. Why? Some works containing hypotheses:

• Marc Dunkelman investigated why Penn Station renovation efforts have repeatedly failed.
• Alon Levy points out that not only has construction slowed but so too has actual operation .
• Lynne Sagalyn wrote a book about why redeveloping Ground Zero took so long. Ed Glaeser, reviewing it for the Times , writes "her ­story teaches us how and why America has changed since 1931, when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey could build the George Washington Bridge — the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time — in 49 months."
• Herbert Kaufman wrote a book about red tape; the foreword from Philip Howard includes the claim that the nature of bureaucratic constrictions in the US changed in the 60s.
• Howard also wrote a report entitled Two Years Not Ten Years: Redesigning Infrastructure Approvals , diving deeper on this topic. George Will wrote a column about it.
• In American Government: Brief Version , the authors contrast an "Old System" and a "New System" of American government; they, too, argue that something significant changed in the 60s.
• Mancur Olson argued that stable societies naturally tend to become less dynamic and more beholden to special interest groups with time. Empirical support for the claim is mixed. Synthesizing some themes above, Francis Fukuyama argued that interest groups have now made the US a "vetocracy"

Religion for Business

• Status as a Service – Explores how social networks function as platforms for individuals to gain social capital, emphasizing the importance of status dynamics in user engagement and platform growth.​
• How to Hire the Best People – Argues that drive, curiosity, and ethics are more critical than raw intelligence when hiring, especially in startup environments.
• The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment – Highlights common cognitive biases, such as incentive-caused bias and social proof, that can lead entrepreneurs to make flawed decisions.​
• Luck and the Entrepreneur – Breaks down luck into four types, emphasizing that proactive behavior and preparedness can increase one's chances of benefiting from serendipitous opportunities.​
• Guide to Personal Productivity – Suggests unconventional productivity hacks, like avoiding fixed schedules and maintaining three specific lists, to enhance personal efficiency.​
• 1,000 True Fans – Proposes that creators can sustain themselves financially by cultivating a dedicated base of 1,000 true fans who support all their work.
• The Struggle – Describes the emotional challenges entrepreneurs face during tough times and emphasizes resilience and transparency as keys to overcoming them.

Mental Models

• Map and Territory – Distinguishes between our mental models (maps) and reality (territory), emphasizing the importance of aligning perceptions with actual facts.​
• Circle of Competence – Encourages focusing on areas where you have genuine expertise, while recognizing and respecting your limitations.​
• First Principles Thinking – Advocates breaking down complex problems to their fundamental truths, enabling innovative solutions from the ground up.​
• Thought Experiment – Utilizes hypothetical scenarios to explore ideas and challenge assumptions without real-world risks.​
• Second-Order Thinking – Stresses the importance of considering the long-term consequences of actions, not just immediate outcomes.​
• Probabilistic Thinking – Encourages making decisions based on likelihoods and statistical reasoning rather than certainties.​
• Inversion – Suggests solving problems by considering the opposite approach, such as identifying ways to fail to avoid them.​
• Occam’s Razor – Favors simpler solutions over more complex ones when all else is equal, avoiding unnecessary complications.​
• Hanlon’s Razor – Reminds us not to attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance or error.​
• Galilean Relativity – Highlights how our frame of reference influences perception, underscoring the value of multiple perspectives.​
• Speed vs. Velocity – Differentiates between mere activity (speed) and purposeful progress towards a goal (velocity).​
• Leverage – Demonstrates how small, well-placed efforts can yield significant results, amplifying impact.​
• Activation Energy – Explains the initial effort required to start a task, emphasizing strategies to overcome inertia.​
• The Red Queen Effect – Describes the necessity of continuous adaptation just to maintain the status quo in a competitive environment.​
• Incentives – Highlights how behavior is heavily influenced by rewards and penalties, often more than we realize.​
• Feedback Loops – Explores systems where outputs loop back as inputs, reinforcing or balancing changes over time.​
• Margin of Safety – Advocates for building buffers to account for uncertainties and unexpected challenges.​
• Bias from Envy and Jealousy – Examines how these emotions can cloud judgment and lead to irrational decisions.​
• Bias from Liking/Loving – Reveals our tendency to favor those we like, potentially compromising objectivity.​
• Availability Bias – Warns against overestimating the importance of information that comes readily to mind.​
• Commitment and Consistency Bias – Discusses our inclination to remain consistent with past actions, even when it's counterproductive.

Decisions Framework

• How Not to Be Stupid — Stupidity is overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information. Here are seven situational factors that compromise your cognitive ability and result in increased odds of stupidity.
• The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters — The decision matrix is a powerful tool to help you prioritize which decisions deserve your attention as a leader, and which should be delegated. Here’s how you can start using it today.
• How to Learn How To Think — An argument to spend more time thinking.
• The Anatomy of a Decision: An Introduction to Decision Making — A structured process to walk through decisions.
• Use a Decision Journal (Example Template) — One reason we struggle to get better at making decisions is that we rarely receive feedback on the quality of our decisions.
• A Two-Step Process to Improve Your Thinking — How the smartest people decide.
• The Science of Hitting — Ted Williams, one of the best hitters in baseball, knew a lot about making effective decisions.
• An Ancient Lesson on Taking Responsibility for Decisions — “A decision is responsible,” wrote Charles Frankel, “when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.”
• When someone says “ this time is different ,” think very carefully.
• If you don’t have deep fluency, you’re in trouble. It’s hard to make decisions based on shallow knowledge .
• The Three Filters Needed to Think About Problems — Three filters that help us interpret reality.
• How People Make Big Decisions — We all go through psychological steps when we make big decisions.
• Make sure you can answer the next question .
• Avoiding Stupidity Is Easier than Seeking Brilliance — If you’re an amateur, your focus should be on avoiding stupidity.
• Keeping Things Simple and Tuning Out Folly — William James said, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” No truer words have been spoken.
• Your Environment Matters If You Want to Make Better Decisions — It’s hard to make rational decisions the way most of us work.
• What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process? — “Our research indicates that, contrary to what one might assume, good analysis in the hands of managers who have good judgment won’t naturally yield good decisions.”
• What happens when decisions go wrong? — “When a decision goes awry, we tend to focus on the people who made it, rather than on the decision itself. Our assumption, which is really unwarranted, is that good people make good decisions, and vice versa.”

When I first started building companies, I thought the goal was speed. Move fast, avoid obstacles, and get to market quickly.

But over time I learned something counterintuitive: sometimes the obstacle is the strategy.

Paul Graham once described it as “running upstairs.” Imagine being chased by a stronger, heavier opponent. If you go downstairs, he’ll catch you. If you go upstairs, it’s harder for both of you—but much harder for him.

In my early ventures, we often chose the difficult path. Not because we enjoyed suffering, but because the hard problems built protection. Competitors could copy features, raise money, or hire talent. What they couldn’t copy easily was our ability to endure pain longer than they could.

I remember nights spent fighting bugs that seemed impossible. Exhausted, frustrated, but strangely proud. Because every time we solved something brutal, we knew we had carved out terrain where bigger players wouldn’t follow.

That’s the paradox of startups: your advantage often lies where things are the most uncomfortable. Barriers to entry aren’t just technical patents or legal shields. They are the scars you earn by pushing through what others avoid.

So when facing a decision, ask yourself: am I running downstairs—or am I running upstairs?

The Spark

I conducted a social experiment that was, frankly, a little weird—but potentially the beginning of something much bigger. It started one quiet evening in the bath, when I let myself follow a strange hunch.

The Idea

I wondered: What if you could build a social network, but not the way everyone does it—no endless feeds, no mass invites, no “growth hacking”? What if you went the other way—hyper-curated, ultra-selective, totally secret?

So, I created a WhatsApp group. Name: “the smartest guy I know” Invite list: just one person—a friend in the US who never fails to impress me intellectually.

I wrote a simple intro for the group:

Welcome. You’ve been invited because you are, quite simply, the smartest person I know. This group is secret. The first rule: you do not talk about it—ever, with anyone, outside this chat. You now have one privilege: you may invite a single person. Choose carefully. They must be, in your eyes, the smartest person you know. After your invitation, you lose this privilege. The same rule will apply to them. When we reach 30 members, invitations stop. At that moment, we will all introduce ourselves and embark on something epic—details to come. Remember: secrecy, selectivity, and trust. That’s all that matters for now. Welcome to the beginning.

The Results

Here’s what happened: Within days, the group grew to 30 members. I started posting articles and kickstarting conversations. People commented, debated, and shared perspectives. Some organized Zoom calls. Others even kicked off new business projects together.

For a while, it was electric. Then, activity slowed. A few people left. Classic social network cycle.

Going Further: Vertical Experiments

Not content with just one group, I got creative. I tested new “verticals”:

• “The coolest girl I know”
• “The wildest guy that I know”
• “The kindest heart in my entourage”

Some groups hit 20 people. Some stayed active. Some fizzled out fast. The lesson? Group energy is unpredictable—and culture matters.

The Edge Cases

• Philosopher Mode: I tried the same experiment with a French friend. The response? “How do you define intelligence?” Three weeks later, still just the two of us.
• Chaos Mode: A Brazilian friend? He invited 100 people overnight. The result? Spam, chaos, and zero value.

Turns out, how you define the “rules” and who you invite changes everything .

The Insight: Network Design Is Broken (But Fixable)

There’s something fascinating here: In a world drowning in algorithmic noise and infinite feeds, we crave something different— networks built on trust, selection, and real connection . Maybe it’s time to revisit the old “friend of a friend” concept, but with intentional design and a bit of secrecy.

The Big Question

So, what should I do with this idea? I’m not cut out to build the next viral social product. But if someone wants to steal this concept and build it, do it. Please.

I’d love to see a social network that values curation, privacy, and trust over noise and virality.

Stop thinking like a startup. Start thinking like a movement.

The AI is too wild to act with the old paradigm.

GTM is dead. What comes next isn’t a playbook. It’s war strategy. You don’t “go to market” like some polite intern with a deck. You take ground. You rewrite the rules. You infect minds. And if you do it right, people don't even realize you were selling anything—they just want in before the door closes.

Let me tell you how.

1. Launch Like You're Starting a Religion

Nobody cares about your product. Harsh truth. What they care about is what it means . What problem it kills. What flag it plants in the ground.

So don’t sell features. Preach a cause.

• Give your audience a villain —old tools, old habits, old systems.
• Make your product the only salvation . Not an option. The only option.
• And don’t just "announce"—declare war.

You don’t need budget. You need belief.

2. Repel to Attract

Mass-market is for cowards. Pick your tribe, then make everyone else feel like they don’t belong. You want customers saying, “This is exactly for me,” and tourists muttering, “This feels aggressive.”

That’s the goal.

• Gate access.
• Use waitlists like velvet ropes.
• Make onboarding feel like entering a secret society, not signing up for an app.

This filters the tourists. And filters = power.

3. Build the Hype Machine Before You Exist

You need attention before you have a product. If you're waiting until launch to make noise, you're already screwed.

Start the build-in-public engine:

• Tease. Leak. Tweet wild stuff.
• Film raw founder rants.
• Share your zero-to-one chaos in real time.

Don’t be polished. Be undeniable.

When launch day comes, people should already be waiting at the gates.

4. Stack the Day 1 Dominos

Your first 24 hours are a weapon. Don't wing it.

Set it up like a heist:

• Schedule the posts.
• Sync your angels, users, fans. Coordinate like an army.
• Drop visuals, opinions, memes, proof— everywhere , all at once.

You want the timeline to feel like: “WTF is this thing and why is everyone I follow obsessed with it?”

That’s the move.

5. Narrative Is the Real Product

Your codebase is not what people buy. They buy the story. And it needs to slap.

• No buzzwords.
• No "solutions."
• Just a brutal truth + a new worldview.

Make it easy to steal. If your users can’t pitch your idea better than you, your story is too complex. Turn it into a meme. A line. A punch.

A GTM isn’t a campaign. It’s a mind virus.

6. Never Stop Launching

Think the launch ends after day one? Cute.

Real GTM doesn’t stop. You relaunch every week. Every feature. Every milestone. Every tweet that hits.

• Drop micro-launches constantly.
• Reframe the story as you scale.
• Stay noisy.

Momentum isn’t something you have. It’s something you manufacture .

Don't is the new Do

You want a go-to-market strategy?

Here it is: Don’t go to the market. Make the market come to you.

Write the story. Define the category. Pick your tribe. Light the match. And when it catches fire, don’t waste time explaining it.

Just say: "We told you."

"In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

This line, deep and powerful, resonates beyond religious confines. It encapsulates an idea that predates all modern technology: the immense, almost infinite power of speech and language as an act of creation. When God speaks, worlds appear. Creation isn't manual; it’s verbal, instantaneous, and transformative.

Today, as artificial intelligence matures, it increasingly gives humans a glimpse of this godlike sensation. AI isn't merely a tool. It offers something deeper, more unsettling and profound: the ability to feel, even for an instant, like a demiurge, a creator of worlds, ideas, and new realities. Each prompt we give to GPT, each voice command issued to Alexa or Siri, echoes, albeit faintly, the divine "Let there be…"

But let’s pause. If AI brings us closer to the power of gods, how should this power reflect in what we build?

Interfaces, as we know them, were shaped by a world governed by keyboards, mice, and touch screens—interfaces rooted in the tactile logic of yesterday’s machines. But the world born from AI shouldn't be confined by yesterday’s paradigms. It should embrace fully the original logic of creation: speech, immediacy, interactivity.

Consider this: interfaces designed for AI must be native to AI, not merely adapted. AI isn't about clicking or tapping—it’s fundamentally conversational. It’s vocal. It’s auditory. The human voice, after all, is our first and most primal interface. It's how we establish authority, intimacy, and authenticity. When we speak, we exert power. When our creations speak back, the experience transcends mere interaction and becomes something closer to communion.

Why settle for incremental improvements when a radical leap is within reach? If you're developing an AI-born app, don't design it for a pre-AI world. Design it radically native: voice-driven, conversational, alive. Give users the exhilarating sensation of issuing commands like a deity, of speaking reality into existence. When an app listens, understands contextually, and responds seamlessly, it completes the circle started by the ancient Logos.

This is not futurism for futurism’s sake. It's strategic pragmatism. Apple understood this intimately when introducing Siri. Amazon, too, grasped it with Alexa. But we've barely scratched the surface. True innovation demands we go further. The voice-driven AI interface is not merely a UX choice—it's an existential redefinition of how we perceive digital power.

Yet beware the illusion of easy divinity. Feeling godlike also carries immense responsibility. Speech, as we've known since antiquity, has consequences. "With great power comes great responsibility" isn't just a comic book maxim—it's a timeless truth. When your voice, your word, can alter outcomes instantly, carelessness is catastrophic.

To those who seek to craft the next generation of AI-powered applications, remember this: Your voice interface isn't a feature; it's the heart of your product, the soul of your brand. Design carefully, radically, and with humility, knowing that the power of the spoken word is both vast and subtle.

In short, think vocal. Think radical. Think creation, not just adaptation.

Because in the beginning was the Word—and now, once again, the Word holds the power.

I chose Dubai because I value clear rules, practical institutions and speed of execution. The durable lesson is larger than any one country: capital and entrepreneurs respond to the rules under which they can operate.

Stablecoins make that visible. Their usefulness depends on liquid reserves, reliable redemption and the ability to move value between participants. For exchanges, wallets and institutional traders, settlement and liquidity are central to the product. Regulation changes the economics of that infrastructure through reserve requirements, licensing, disclosure and restrictions on use.

The question is not whether rules exist. It is whether their combined effect preserves the service people need. A framework can look cautious on paper while making a business too costly or cumbersome to operate. Equally, a permissive regime without credible protections can destroy the trust on which liquidity depends. Clarity and sound design matter together.

I judge a jurisdiction by how predictably founders can understand its requirements, build within them and adapt when they change. A favorable announcement is not a permanent advantage. Neither is a country's reputation. Rules, implementation and market access all need to be examined in practice.

The broader principle reaches beyond crypto. AI and other emerging industries face the same tension between protecting users and leaving room to build. Talent and capital can move. Places that combine clear obligations, workable infrastructure and timely decisions give them a reason to stay.

Venture capital operates in the realm of imagination and experimentation, where precision takes a backseat to vision. The numbers—$5 million seed valuations, multi-million-dollar Series A rounds—aren’t rigid truths. They’re hypotheses, attempts to chart a course in the fog of the future. Let’s untangle the fundamental misunderstanding between asset pricing and portfolio pricing, and why this distinction matters profoundly for anyone shaping the future of innovation.

Asset Pricing: A Misguided Obsession

Imagine trying to quantify the potential of a sapling in a redwood forest. You can measure its height today, but you can’t see the centuries of growth, storms, and sunlight ahead. This is the folly of asset pricing in venture capital. Startups, like saplings, are raw potential. That $5 million valuation isn’t a statement of current worth—it’s a placeholder for ambition.

Traditional finance thrives on metrics—revenues, comparables, historical data. But startups are creatures of the unknown. They defy neat equations. Their worth today is practically irrelevant because their true value lies in an unwritten future. Pricing them is like trying to sketch the Mona Lisa with a single line—it’s inherently incomplete.

Venture Capital Is Future Crafting

Here’s the truth: venture investing isn’t about the present; it’s about the possibilities of tomorrow. When you see a $5 million valuation, don’t think of it as a price tag—think of it as a signal. It says, “This idea, this team, this potential deserves attention.”

But this future-oriented approach isn’t just optimism. It’s systematic. Venture capital bets on a portfolio, not a single startup. Out of 100 investments, 99 might falter, but one success—a transformative, industry-defining success—can return 1000x and make the entire portfolio worthwhile. That’s the magic formula: focus on the portfolio’s potential, not the accuracy of any single valuation.

The Power Law: Nature’s Blueprint for Venture

The universe loves the power law. It governs galaxies, ecosystems, and venture returns. Most outcomes cluster in the mediocre middle, but a rare few explode into extraordinary significance. Think Uber, SpaceX, or Google—a handful of breakthroughs outshines the combined failures of countless experiments.

For venture investors, understanding the power law isn’t optional. It’s the foundation. The game isn’t about avoiding failures; it’s about capturing that singular, monumental win. This changes everything about how you think of valuation. You don’t need to price every asset perfectly. You just need one to bend reality.

Startups: The Universe’s Raw Code

Startups are like the genetic code of the economy. They hold infinite possibilities, untested and full of surprises. Children are a fitting metaphor here. A child’s future is unknowable. They could be anything, from an artist to a scientist, from a dreamer to a revolutionary. You don’t parent based on what they are today; you parent based on what they could become. Startups demand the same patience and belief.

Their immaturity is precisely why they’re invaluable. They haven’t been shaped—or constrained—by the past. They’re experiments in potential. Only when they mature do we get to see if they’ll change the world. Until then, trying to pin down their value is an exercise in futility.

Lessons for Silicon Valley and Beyond

For investors, entrepreneurs, and dreamers, the key takeaway is this: the inability to price individual startups isn’t a bug. It’s the system’s strength. The portfolio approach—betting on a diverse array of possibilities—aligns with the nature of transformative innovation. Here’s what this means in practice:

• Failure Is the Default: Most bets will fail. Embrace it.
• Optimize for Outliers: Seek the wild, audacious ideas that could reshape industries.
• Ignore Valuation Noise: A bloated seed valuation doesn’t matter if the startup hits escape velocity.

A Universal Framework

This isn’t just about venture capital. The portfolio mindset transcends industries:

• Art and Creativity: Most songs, films, or books are forgettable, but one masterpiece can redefine a generation.
• Scientific Discovery: Thousands of failed experiments lead to a single breakthrough that redefines what’s possible.
• Technology Development: Most prototypes never see the light of day, but one breakthrough can create an entirely new market.

These patterns reveal a universal truth: progress is uneven, messy, and wildly unpredictable. The goal isn’t precision; it’s positioning.

The Art of Seeing the Unseen

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” Venture capital is about acting before the dots connect. It’s about seeing the unseen, believing in the improbable, and betting on the extraordinary.

So forget trying to price startups perfectly.

Forget obsessing over valuations.

The game is bigger than that. It’s about crafting the future, one imperfect, audacious bet at a time.

What I love most about AI is the idea of becoming smarter.

The problem? There are so many tools, so many frameworks, so much to learn that, in the end, you’re not smarter—you’re just burned out.

That’s when I had a vision: what if there was one tool to rule them all ?

What if someone figured out the best AI for every task?

What if someone actually built us a second brain?

Your start at a new company is somewhat similar to checking-in at the airport. The process sucks, and it’s better if we check-in ourselves. And since most companies have a terrible onboarding process, let me clue you in on how to do it yourself, and how to even take advantage of it.

With every inefficiency, opportunities arise. If your new company doesn’t have a clear and well thought out on-boarding process, you have to take charge of the process. But it’s not necessarily a burden. It’s an opportunity to show your higher-ups that you're proactive and self-directed. So, how to do it?

First you have to realise that you can’t just sit around for weeks, passively absorbing information, and slowly getting up to speed. You got hired because the company is in dire need for more workforce, and even if you just want to be polite at first, the team needs people who are confident and ready to speak their minds. Companies thrive when all hands are on deck, so don’t shy away and don’t try to be polite. From the get-go, be a confident part of your team, and leverage the one thing you really have going for you: your fresh perspective.

Secondly, you need to get clear expectations from your manager. Make sure you understand what is expected of you in your role. Managing the communication with your boss is paradoxically your role, not theirs. Pay attention to their priorities and try to get a sense of what’s important to them and where their focus lies. Then, you can anticipate their needs, and set an agenda for yourself in a way you know you can best deliver.

Lastly, when you start at a new company, immediately start developing your own point of view. Don’t shy away from agreeing or disagreeing with decisions, and share your insights with your peers. High-performing companies understand that they need to give you some autonomy and authority, so meet them in the middle. If you're setting a meeting, make sure it's productive. Come prepared with an agenda and focus on what you want to achieve. By being efficient and effective, you'll quickly earn your place in the team too.

The point is; as the new hire, it’s your responsibility to seek out information and resources. In a high performing environment, your team might not be aware of what you need or they might not have the bandwidth to help onboard you. But if you take charge of your own on-boarding process, you can (and should) still be successful in your role without their help.

If you're starting a new business, creating a strong user base and put it on a path of exponential growth is your ultimate job. Most startups die because they fail to get any traction, and the lack of users ultimately kills them. But let’s assume you have a project that effectively solves a problem that your competitors have. Then, unashamedly assume that their customers are your customers. After all, those are the people who face the exact problem you’re trying to solve. You just have to figure out how to reach them. Here are a few simple marketing strategies that anyone can follow.

One great way to create your core user base is to make a list of competing products and aim for their follower bases on their social channels. Follow them and reach out to them directly with a personal message. Don’t try to sell them anything outright. Instead offer a free trial of your product and ask for their advice. Focus on building relationships and show them the solution you have. Let the product speak for itself before you ask for any commitment. The ratio of how many customers you can convert will not be too high, but it’s a start to build your own base and get loyal advocates on the ground level.

Next, make your base work, and have your users get more users. Just understand that nobody will work for free. But if your product is good, your users are likely willing to share it with their friends as long as you grease a deal for them. So build an "Invite your friends" feature into your product. Offer credits or discounts to both the people who invite their friends and the people who join as a result of the invitation. Make the reward so valuable that your users can't help but spread the word about your product. With this strategy, you'll be able to double your initial user numbers in no time.

Now, once you have a base you can build on, go for a launch. It’s a surefire way to get a whole lot of attention quickly. And a well-executed launch can put you on the map right away, and can get tons of new eyeballs overnight. Of course most startups wouldn’t want to play their ace this early in the game, but here’s a little secret about this very unique kind of card game: You have as many aces as you want. Ok, after a while it can get a little suspicious, but at the end of the day a launch is just another marketing tool at your disposal. Just ask the CEO of Airbnb:

Instead of going all-in on one launch, plan on multiple ones at different user base sizes. These are all opportunities to promote yourself, get attention, and give discounts and special promotions without compromising the product’s value.

Don’t be shy, it’s a dog eats dog world out there and you need to make a splash. Use these techniques, rinse and repeat, and if you fire on all cylinders, that will put your business on a path to exponential growth.

When it comes to creating breakthrough products, as the slightly cliché saying goes; you have to think outside the box. You have to find a new way of creating customer value, and make a product that’s technologically advanced and creatively superior to any other existing products in the market. But usually good advices end about right there... Be a genius, come up with something superior, or something that doesn’t even exist yet. But frankly, there is a method to madness, and there’s a blueprint on exactly how to think outside the box. It’s called First Principles Thinking.

Let's say you're trying to come up with a new business. The lame way to do this is to find an existing business model that seems to be working and spin it just as much as to get a little funding for it, but the product will probably fail to justify its existence and most likely be dead on arrival. Usually customers don’t change their habits for an extra feature. We only get excited for the hail marries. So what if you used First Principles Thinking instead? In this case you would look at the same business model, and instead of trying to add an extra feature, you’d break it down to its absolute basic and most fundamental parts.

The reason why this is so important because thinking outside the box is actually all about insights that define conventional wisdom. And by breaking down an idea, reexamining, and recombining it, you can see the world in fresh, unorthodox ways. Once you start playing with the building blocks, you can start asking the big questions, like "Why do things have to be this way?" and "What if we did things completely differently?” If you can learn to think like a first principles thinker, you'll be able to come up with creative solutions to problems that others haven't even thought of.

One of the biggest proponents of this method is Elon Musk. Let’s see how he used it in practice to make SpaceX a success.

Around the time NASA retired it’s space shuttle program, Musk looked at the the dying space industry that has been in a downward spiral almost since the end of the Apollo program and identified a core problem. Getting a rocket to reach escape velocity has been an incredibly expensive endeavour. Not a lot of things could justify the price tag. So Musk boiled down how we’ve been thinking about rockets for about 60 years and realised that using, single-use rockets makes as much financial sense as to use single-use airplanes. Getting a rocket to space, and bringing it back to reuse it again and again would make the use of resources much more efficient, not to mention the price tag on a rocket launch would be down by magnitudes on the long run. So, he identified the problem, realised the need for it, and worked hard to come up with a solution. And now we’re never going to look at rockets the same way while the space industry is thriving again.

That’s what First Principles Thinking is all about. By breaking down common wisdoms into their basic truths and creating solutions from scratch, we can come up with ingenious solutions to complex problems. That’s how we can all think outside the box. And that's how you can build the next big thing.

Leadership also depends on how a worker manages the relationship with their manager.

A good relationship between bosses and their workers can mean the difference between a successful company or a failed one. On a personal level, it can be the difference between having an enriching tenure at a company or feeling like you’re just punching the clock. And there’s one skill that you need to master to achieve a well-balanced, dynamic communication with them. It’s a little skill called managing up.

Something most people don't know (or assume) is that when you have a meeting with your bosses, it's actually you who should be in charge and driving the conversation. Even though it sounds paradoxical, the truth is, it’s on you to set the agenda for the meeting and to push it where you want to go. You may think it's manipulative, but your boss is running a company and you're most likely just a small cog in it. You can't expect them to show up every time with a detailed task list for you - in that case they might as well do the job for you. As we've talked about, a great boss delegates problems, so when it comes to meetings you need to be ready with a couple of talking points you want to hit, and lead the meeting.

Managing up is the process of being an active participant in the communication with your boss, and in a way set the agenda for yourself. It doesn’t mean that you should try to jump over your boss or and take over their role, but you should have a mind of your own and communicate in a way that your interests align.

The first step to managing up is developing an understanding of what your boss wants to achieve. Pay attention to the projects they prioritise, the deadlines they set and the way they allocate resources. This will give you a good sense of what’s important to them and where their focus lies.

Secondly, once you have a handle on their goals, you can start to anticipate their needs. By being proactive, you’ll make their life easier and you can position yourself as a valuable member of the team. It’s also important to keep your boss in the loop. Regular updates on your progress (or lack thereof) will help them stay informed and alleviate their urge to micromanage you.

And finally, you need to create a relationship that incentivises your boss to have full trust in you, so they can retreat to a role where they can approve your requests and remove obstacles for you. Because essentially a great boss makes your job easier, and you can help them do it by managing the relationship. For example no boss can be expected to identify the obstacles for each and every one of their subordinates. It’s on you to communicate what obstacles you face and present solutions on solving them. This way, you take on more responsibility, appear more capable, and ultimately they'll grant you more authority so both of you and the business can thrive and flourish.

For most founders starting their first businesses, the single hardest thing is to manage their workers efficiently. Delegating work is an incredibly sophisticated balancing act, and it takes a lot of experience to be able to pull it off like boss. (Pun very much intended)

The first problem many leaders face is that they can’t let go of control. Usually people at the top got promoted by doing things faster, better, more efficiently than the rest of their peers. Doing things by themselves doesn’t just come natural to them, their experiences actively suggest that it’s also the best way to get things accomplished. This transition from a problem solver to a delegator is a hard one to tackle, but it’s the only way to run a business. And here comes the balancing act. It’s the delegation where most founders make either one or both of two common mistakes.

The first mistake is to feel like now, with the corner office, we can finally fought our way to the top so we can lay back and let people run things for us. But to delegate tasks and responsibility in this very hands-off, abdicating approach is actually highly counterproductive. It’s comfortable to assume that things are getting done without us being present, but the problem is that a lack of communication and oversight puts way too much stress and responsibility on the shoulders of the subordinates.

The second mistake is obviously to fall on the other side of the horse and to heavily micromanage. Of course, we naturally want to take control, reduce uncertainty, and exercise authority. But this method is barely any better than to do everything by ourselves and it’s almost as tiring (if not more). It strips the subordinates of their agency, creating an unhappy and ineffective environment, with our workers reduced to being bio-robots.

To give you a really weird example, a company should work like an octopuses’ nervous system. These creatures have a big central mind, but about two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms, not in their head. In other words, their tentacles have a mind of their own and act autonomously from the central brain. In practice, if the central brain sends out a message that it’s hungry, the tentacles all start to act on their own to find food. It’s a perfect synergy.

So, to go back to businesses, we obviously don’t have a hive mind, so how can we be as efficient as an octopus? By leveraging a different, but very human strength; communication. Let me give you three methods on how a great boss can lead effectively, while empowering their subordinates to have a mind of their own, and flourish.

1.) The “Ladder of Leadership approach was created by David Marquet, and it’s a powerful tool for both leaders and workers. It basically gives us two sets of ladders, and show that if bosses exercise better communication with their subordinates, they can inspire them to gain voice, authority and ownership. The good thing about this method is that it’s not forcing anything on the workers, rather asks leaders to step up as level 4 or 5 bosses, and lifting everyone else’s roles in the progress. This is not only a more enjoyable work dynamic, but it taps into the knowledge of the entire team, not just a single person’s.

2.) The “Task Relevant Maturity” is actually a very simple framework that determines how to delegate, monitor, and manage performance. It basically states that even senior team members can be total noobs in some tasks, while juniors can be experts in others. So the idea here is that instead of a blank management style, we can use our urge to micromanage to understand the specific skillsets of each of our workers, and utilise them properly to tackle problems they are best suited to find a solution for.

3.) And that brings as to the main philosophy that is somehow missed by most founders. Once communication is fluid and dynamic, and workers are empowered and efficiently utilised, we just focus on one thing: Delegate problems, not tasks. When we want to reach a goal, our mind is naturally in task accomplishing mode, but once we want to delegate those those tasks we need to rephrase them as a problem. The difference is that tasks are vague and lack specific goals, therefore they are not very motivating. But on the other hand humans are excellent problem solvers, and love to come up with creative solutions. So to spark critical thinking, we need to leverage that. That’s why the best leaders don’t ask their workers to do chores, but to bring creative solutions to specific problems.

In the first quarter of 2022, venture capitalists invested more than $10 billion in crypto startups despite a falling market. It was a reminder that investment horizons can differ sharply from market sentiment: some investors focus on the long term while everyone else watches the latest downturn.

Firms such as A16Z, Pantera, Paradigm and DCG became familiar names in crypto funding. When much of the capital comes from a handful of investors, a question follows: can concentrated financing undermine the decentralisation that Web 3.0 promises?

Funding choices are shaped by regulation as well as by demand. Selling equity privately to angel investors or VCs can be a more practical route than a public token offering, depending on the jurisdiction and the project. The wave of poor-quality ICOs in 2017 damaged trust in that route. STOs, IEOs and IDOs introduced other approaches, but changing the fundraising mechanism does not remove legal obligations or the need to earn trust. For large rounds, venture firms can remain attractive sources of capital.

Yet, the entrance of traditional venture investors into the crypto space has not been as welcoming as they are accustomed to. The highly engaged and active online communities and the founders with a vision of decentralisation are not what VCs used to with Web 2.0. initiatives. Fortunately, while the majority of crypto businesses are high-risk investments, they can also give some of the highest returns in any industry. And VCs understanding that crypto and Web 3.0 is the future, won’t want to miss out on what may be the biggest investment opportunity of their time. That gives founders the power to negotiate a better position by creating agreements so that their investors won't have an outsized say in the governance of the company, and they can't overrule something that the community wants and votes for.

Whenever institutional capital enters a community-driven project, founders should remember that the value of their vision gives them something to negotiate with. They can use that position to protect the governance principles that made the project worth funding in the first place.

Composability is the part of the Web 3.0 argument that interests me most. Digital ownership matters, but the ability to combine shared building blocks is what lets other people turn a technology into something useful.

The World Wide Web was invented at CERN in 1989, originally conceived and developed for automated information-sharing between universities and institutes around the world. But CERN made a very specific choice in those early days and made it open source to maximise its spread and impact. The fact that everyone had access to it paved the way for the Internet to flourish and evolve into what it is today.

In software, composability means that components can be combined and reused. Open source can make that easier by letting people inspect, adapt, and build on the code. The appeal is practical: collaboration lets a team spend less time rebuilding foundations and more time improving what users receive.

In the crypto space, composability has already been the driving force behind its rapid growth and innovation. Even small teams can easily bootstrap their projects without having to build everything from scratch. Decentralised platforms offer the building blocks for developers to quickly get up to speed with their projects, and they provide a built-in global audience. In return, the platform’s ecosystem grows and flourishes. It’s a win-win. The key here is that while a lot of Web 2.0. tech giants think about innovation as a zero- sum game, Web 3.0. is all about WAGMI.

Combining games and financial mechanisms produced play-to-earn crypto games. That is one example of how shared building blocks can support experiments across industries. Whether an experiment lasts depends on what it offers its users.

Composability matters to users as well as developers. If someone can take an existing idea and make it better or leaner, more people benefit. Closed products and incompatible infrastructure make that harder. I care about systems in which improvements can travel from one team to another, instead of every team having to start over.

One of the biggest problems with all things related to Web 3.0 is that definitions get blurry and ideas get lost in translation. For example, if someone asks us what an NFT is and we just answer with a smug smirk that it’s a “non-fungible token, duh” (as if we used the word ‘fungible’ before 2021) that doesn’t help anyone. Furthermore, the lack of clear definitions create this muddy environment where most people think that NFT is a picture, and not the underlying technology. So, let’s clear up what Web 3.0. really is, and why we need to pay attention to it.

The early World Wide Web was largely a place to read static pages. Social networks and user-generated content later made publishing widely accessible, while concentrating data and revenue inside the platforms that hosted it. That tension between participation and control is what makes the question of digital ownership worth asking.

Web 3.0 proposes giving users more control over digital assets. Blockchain records can make ownership claims and scarcity verifiable, but a record alone does not make something useful. Collectibles brought attention to the idea. The durable question is whether these systems give creators and users better control over access, revenue, and transfer.

Consider medical information. It is both sensitive and valuable, yet the person it describes often has little control over how it is accessed or used. A system that gives patients meaningful control would address a real problem. The value lies in that control, with workable privacy and consent, rather than a market-size forecast.

For me, the interesting question is what rights people actually gain. A token or a new acronym is only a means. Digital ownership matters when it changes what someone can do with their work, their information, or an asset they paid for.

A financial product can attract investors without attracting customers. DeFi’s speculative cycles make that distinction painfully clear. A token price tells us what people are willing to pay, but it does not tell us whether anyone needs the product.

DeFi 2.0. created hype by a lot of crazy gimmicks like the insanely high APY on OHM forks, and by trying to merge DeFi with the buzzwords of the day. We got a lot of NFT, Metaverse and Gaming related products, and while these Dapps did gain traction from investors, they lacked consumers, therefore their growth was not sustainable at all. It was an absolute misreading of what DeFi should be, and what it needs to focus on. While trends and gimmicks did bring billions of dollars into a number of products, this only sounds good until we realise what DeFi really should be. It’s not just another category of crypto products. It is an ecosystem that should take on traditional finance and grab a huge chunk of its consumers and capital. It shouldn’t capitalize on speculative money, but profiting on solving real world issues. It should be an alternative to the old fragmented, permissioned, corrupted system. Therefore the potential of DeFi should not be measured in billions, but trillions.

Calling the next iteration “DeFi 3.0” will not make it useful. Its builders have to solve financial problems that people actually face. I want to see products that create value through reliable, effective services, even when those services are too ordinary to become a fashionable slogan.

The potential I see in DeFi is a permissionless, interoperable network that makes useful financial services accessible to more people. That ambition has to be tested in practice: do people use the product, does it solve their problem, and will they keep using it without speculative rewards? Those answers matter more than the label attached to the next wave.

Facebook’s 2021 rebrand to Meta helped bring attention to the “metaverse”. The term covered different visions, from meetings between avatars to digital worlds built around shared experiences. The Sandbox illustrated a particular choice: a virtual world divided into limited parcels of land.

The Sandbox let landowners build and monetize gaming experiences. Snoop Dogg’s “Snoopverse” was a prominent example of the idea: a place built around a recognizable digital presence.

But while speculation pushed land prices close to $10.000 per parcel in the last quarter of 2021, it’s not entirely clear what the true value of these lands is. Despite being a virtual world, The Sandbox made some very strong choices in its core concept to share many features of the real world. While a metaverse could theoretically be limitless, The Sandbox proudly wears on its sleeves how scarce its lands and assets are.

The game purposefully mimics the real estate business of the physical world and constrains itself to create its virtual economy instead of embracing the limitless possibilities of a metaverse. Prices vary by location similarly to the real estate markets of major real-world cities with property buyers willing to pay a premium to be part of a vibrant ecosystem.

This is the vision speculative land buyers are buying into. During a digital gold rush, the expectation of future demand can lift prices long before there is much to do on the land.

In reality, The Sandbox took the problems of the real world and carried them over to a virtual one. In a metaverse, there’s no reason to create scarcity other than a lack of trust in the vision that what it offers is actually valuable. Creating artificial scarcity in an otherwise limitless virtual world can only have one purpose; to create a bubble.

Discussions of virtual land often circle around its inherent value. You can find vague statements on how similarly to real-life, people will be able to build offices and charge businesses to hold meetings in them. Great… We’re escaping exploitative landlords and nightmare-inducing cubicles just to do the same with a headset on.

It’s true that there’s going to be a lot of opportunities in the metaverse to monetize our lands, but if their number one purpose is to charge someone for something that should be free, it’s not exactly a winning formula. There’s a reason why pay-to-win features have sunk games and wrapped major gaming companies in controversy before. Nobody likes money grabs, and the gaming community understands more than anyone that scarcity in a virtual environment can only be artificial and unfair. Yet, it seems like The Sandbox and this approach to the metaverse are going all-in on recreating the old system of owners and renters, giving power to a small group of rich people / early adopters who can leech on the rest once mainstream adoption happens.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what could halt mainstream adoption. If the value of land mainly comes from scarcity, location, and proximity to Snoop Dogg, then people barely have any incentive to spend time to develop their land. If people are just speculating on land prices, and trying to flip for a profit, then all we’re going to have around Snoopverse are undeveloped and uninspiring parcels of lands waiting for the last unlucky owners who’ll end up holding them when the propped up prices tank with the lack of user engagement.

In a virtual world, value should come from the time a user puts into developing a place and the quality of what they create there. Speculators who rely on artificial scarcity want the digital world to inherit the same constraints as the physical one.

So let’s crush their dreams. And build our own.

This is why a real metaverse should be built differently :

• Anyone can buy (mint) a land (or why not a planet?) ;
• This planet is any size you want, there is no restriction to the expansion of your planet ;
• You host your planet on your own server or in the cloud ;
• The planet receive a unique name as .xxx — you cannot choose a name that is already a trademark if you are not owner of this trademark ;
• You can make this planet publicly accessible, or to members only, or with a paying access — anything is possible in term of access, and manage by the open standard ;
• You can rent this planet after configuring it and decorating it to others users as a unique token or multiple token as you see feat ;
• You can sell the planet to others users and they can change it, adapt it and change the business model of how the planet is exploit ;

On this metaverse, we wants that the trait of value are driven by :

• Branding ;
• Art ;
• Proof of Work ;
• Talent ;
• Utility ;

Speculation is not a bad thing when it sustains an ecosystem that creates value. We should aim at destroying the bug of reality to make the virtual world a place of prosperous opportunities.

There are fundamental misunderstandings around the inherent value of Bitcoin and L1 blockchain tokens. The common mistake is that people think these cryptocurrencies have no fundamental value because they do not create any cash flow the way a company does. This narrative usually dominates market sentiment during prolonged bear markets, but it’s a misguided and lazy concept that needs to be finally put to bed.

My counter-argument is this: How much cash-flow does the internet bring in? The answer is zero. Only the applications that are built on the internet generate value. Still internet is very valuable.

So we can’t keep thinking about Bitcoin, L1 tokens (or basically any Web 3 endeavour) in an overly simplistic, conservative way. Bitcoin, or Ethereum are not companies, therefore their value is not based on profits. They are more like shares in the building blocks of an entire new ecosystem. Now, let’s consider that we’re in the early days of the Internet, and you not just have an opportunity to invest in the infrastructure of this new system but to actually own a part of the network... Would you invest? Or you would you argue that no cash flow means bad investment?

A blockchain maintains a shared record of transactions and can support decentralized applications. That gives us a different question from the one we ask of a company: how useful is the network, and what role does its token play in that usefulness?

A decentralized blockchain offers a way to hold and transfer assets without relying on a single intermediary. Acting as our own bank also means taking responsibility for those assets and transfers. The value I see is in that change in control, rather than a promise that every network is equally secure or beyond interference.

Moving money across borders exposes how much the financial system depends on intermediaries, permissions, and administrative friction. That is a practical problem against which to judge a competing system.

Inflation raises another enduring question: how can people preserve purchasing power when their currency loses value? That question deserves serious attention regardless of which country or asset is in fashion.

That brings us to the argument for Bitcoin as “digital gold”. Its volatility makes the store-of-value question difficult. A spectacular return over one selected period does not settle that debate.

The lows can be painful, the highs exhilarating, and volatility frustrating. I am interested in how to value this kind of network over the long run. Bitcoin’s limited-supply rule is central to that discussion.

And if you think gold is better as a reserve asset, try to move it out of your country and see the bureaucracy play out again.

My point is simply that money, or gold is not as sacrosanct as it seems and in a gradually more muddy world, an asset class that provides answers on

1.) how to be more in control of our finances,

2.) how to simplify the movement of our money,

3.) and at the same time provides alternatives for us to be able to hold on to our purchasing power

should be met with at least an excited curiosity, and not a disdain backlash.

I think it is fine to buy a bit of bitcoins, whatever Buffet says ❤️

Moments of crisis are moments of questioning and introspection. After the first shock, a pause can become useful.

Taking a real break gave me time to travel, read and learn new things, discover Dubai and spend time with friends. Stepping away from the daily noise helped me see what I wanted to do with my days.

A smaller playing field can also be a stronger one. A blank page is unsettling, but it brings energy. You stop maintaining everything you have accumulated and start choosing what deserves to exist.

Meaningful projects often begin small, fragile and clunky. Talking about a technology is easier than finding a use for it. What matters is whether it makes a useful service possible, especially one that could not have existed without it. That is where I want to spend my effort.

The quiet periods are good for this. There is less attention to compete for and more room to work. I would rather judge a project by what people can do with it than by the conversation around it.

I came back to a few simple decisions:

• Build things that can generate cash flow.
• Focus on projects I can carry forward without outside capital.
• Give concrete work more of my attention than public commentary.
• Protect time with the people who matter to me, and avoid passing online hostility on to them.

Starting again does not require a perfect explanation of the past or a grand announcement about the future. It requires something small enough to begin and useful enough to keep working on.

Let’s go.

COVID-19 showed how quickly a business can be forced to restructure. The lessons apply beyond any one crisis.

There are 2 parts to a restructuring. One is the legal aspect, which changes depending on your specific context. During the COVID-19 crisis, governments let businesses defer many fixed costs, such as salaries, rent and taxes, and offered access to loans, at least in theory. In any crisis, look closely at the support available and the obligations it creates.

But all that is just doing one thing: creating a ton of debt that’ll come back to really bite you. It’s not solving anything, it’s just pushing the pain off into the future. Is your business going to be able to take that future pain? Are you going to be able to pay off all that debt? And most importantly, are you going to be able to pay off all that debt when the world economy takes forever to get moving again, when your revenues over the next months or years are down 20, 30, 50%?

That’s… a lot.

That’s why you need to restructure. You need to reduce your costs as much as possible, and you need to come out of the crisis period with a business that’s lighter than it was before. I know it’s not what people want to hear, because one thing it means is letting employees go, and that has a real impact on people. But as an entrepreneur, you need to ensure that your business not only survives, but thrives — otherwise, you aren’t going to employ anyone. It’s the only way you’ll be able to keep hiring people again when your business is doing well again.

So let’s get into the actual business aspect of restructuring — which, by the way, is way less obvious than the legal side and has way less information available online.

Be upfront and honest from the beginning about any necessary staff cuts. If employees will have to leave, tell them as soon as possible, while respecting the process that applies to your situation. Temporary support or deferred decisions should not become an excuse to leave people in the dark. Some people may be willing and able to find another arrangement. If your team knows and appreciates one another, some employees may want to freelance, for example in development or graphic design. But accept that, if no workable agreement can be found, you may have to let people go.

I know that lots of people will scream at me about that, but that’s ok. I’m not here to talk about the bigger picture or how society should respond to this crisis. I’m talking about how to save your business and make sure it gets to a point where it can grow and thrive. This world we’re in isn’t going to get back on track by following the rules that were in place before. The COVID-19 crisis has been called a war, and you need to adopt that mindset.

Once you’ve reduced your salary costs as much as possible, get obsessed about your costs. A good place to start is by just cutting 100% of your payments. Cut it all — business credit cards, bank accounts, make it so that no one in your company can spend anything. And you tell everyone in the company that 100% of whatever they want to spend, they have to come to you.

You have to understand, line-by-line, the expenses that are critical for your business. And for each line, judge whether it’s absolutely necessary or whether you can switch to something else. Remember that you can renegotiate everything. Everything. Get on the phone and talk to people.

And make the tradeoff. If there’s a free tool out there that you can use, and it’s half as good as the one you’re paying €500/month for, well, it’s half as good but it’s infinitely less expensive. Infinitely less expensive when cash is scarce is a no-brainer.

Because usually there are 2 ways to make more money: either you earn more, or you spend less. If you know me at all, you know that I’ve spent years saying to go out and find ways to earn more. But during a crisis, there are 2 problems: you don’t know if you can earn more, and you don’t know what your ceiling is. That uncertainty means that in the short term, you need to make radical decisions and spend as little as possible.

The third step of restructuring is profoundly rebuilding your business model.

In a crisis, you have to refocus 100% on your core activity. Whatever you have that’s adjacent, experiments, diversification, etc. Forget about it. Cut it all, and put all of your efforts on your core business.

One last thing. Refocusing on your core also means revisiting your prices. I know many of you will resist this, but a crisis can be a moment to increase prices if your customers’ demand and ability to pay support it.

A crisis is a moment when money is less available. It doesn’t flow as quickly, doesn’t flow as far. But the people who have money in a crisis, they end up having more available. So you’re going to have fewer clients, but the ones you have will have money to spend. Collectively, we’re becoming poorer, but individually, some people are becoming richer.

Think about sectors whose demand rises during a particular crisis. During COVID-19, video games, dating and intimacy apps, and telemedicine offered examples of activities that could benefit from people spending more time at home.

If your company serves a growing need like that, review whether you can increase prices and improve your margin. The opportunity depends on your actual customers and market.

The key to rebounding is having money to invest when things start moving again.

This can give someone starting from zero during a crisis an advantage over an established business. A new company can build cleanly, without first having to unwind the staffing and organizational decisions described above.

But no matter if you’re restructuring or starting from zero, you need to be completely focused. Succeeding during a crisis is all about being strong, having no fat, being absolutely disciplined, and thinking about the short term. Long-term business models have no place in a crisis (and in startups, they weren’t great before either ;).

During normal times, a startup should always be adaptable and ready to go into crisis mode. As an entrepreneur, you need to be able to change everything you do and see opportunities to be seized.

The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 exposed these challenges on an exceptional scale. The experience offers lessons for remote work and for managing any prolonged crisis.

It’s so different from 2008. There’s the anxiety of being sick, of worrying about our friends and loved ones, of seeing what’s happening to people all over the world. And then there’s the fact that it affects our ability to move, to connect, to have daily interactions. No matter what anybody might say, being together online is completely different from being in the same room.

Changing habits so radically can reveal what our lives are really like. Before lockdown, I thought I worked a lot. During it, I realized I was working frantically and needed to find new ways of doing things.

One of the best productivity tips I tried was turning off all notifications. I limited checking Slack to twice a day. That changed everything: I could finally work deeply on different projects.

Still, that’s a pretty specific example. There are some general lessons for entrepreneurs that I see as important both during and after the crisis:

1/ Be pessimistic about the short term and optimistic about the long term

A crisis can cost you a lot if your short-term plans depend on optimism. During the first lockdowns, assuming that restrictions would end on a particular date was dangerous. Nobody knew. If you prepare for six difficult months instead, an earlier recovery is good news.

This is linked to a bigger truth: Adapting to good news is much easier than adapting to bad news. Don’t try to predict, your ability to react is better than your ability to forecast the future.

Because after all, reality is always more surprising than you’d imagine. We’re limited by our imagination — if we imagine a monster, it’s just a combination of things we already know. Even if you try to imagine DEFCON scenarios, they’ll never be “real” enough for what actually happens. Take the Fukushima example: They had plans for catastrophes: earthquake, terrorist attack, tsunami. But they didn’t have a plan for an earthquake followed by a tsunami. That’s why it’s best to try and prepare yourself to be as responsive as possible.

2/ Don’t risk not being able to play again

I love taking risks, but I never take the risk of not being able to play again, of being completely kicked out of the game. As a founder, that means you need to cut costs. Any crisis creates ways to experiment and new problems to solve, you can try new things. But that requires finding a way to stay in the game.

So reduce your cash burn to a level that’s actually sustainable, and remember that preserving your ability to be an entrepreneur is critical for your future. Accept the idea that many companies and entrepreneurs won’t make it out of this crisis.

Now, a few tips for remote work that can help people adapt to this brave new world — because there are things that can let remote magic happen.

1/ Writing is the new talking, so craft thoughtful messages

When you have people in a room, your charisma has an impact on them. You can provide energy and get people excited. But when we can’t be in a room with others, everything changes. The strangest part about remote within a team is not getting that subtle in-person feedback that helps you make decisions.

That’s why it’s so important to make your energy come through your writing. In the end, remote work is about becoming as good at writing as you are at speaking.

I saw it the hard way. The first week of confinement, I had 131 calls. It was exhausting. So I went on Slack to send a message to the people I was working with. I tried to write the message as clearly as I’d write an article, and included some brief questions. It let me cancel 90% of my upcoming calls, and provided value to everybody who read it.

(I’m not saying get rid of calls altogether — they’re a good short-term measure, but you can’t sustain it over the long run. Writing with enthusiasm works much better. I took inspiration from Lucas of StarofService, who for years has been regularly writing super energetic emails to his team of 100+ remote workers.)

How can you write better?

• Never send a message right away. Leave it, and then re-read it an hour later to see if you’ve been clear.
• Talking to yourself out loud can help get your thoughts straight.
• Short sentences are best — it’s not about style, but clarity.
• Don’t write for more than 10–15 minutes, otherwise you can get lost in your thoughts.

And always remember that writing is open to interpretation (this is why clarity is key). For the same book or article, you can get as many different interpretations as you have readers. In business, you need to master that so everyone stays on the same page ;)

2/ Manage the overall mood & energy

Within a team, realize that there are big inequalities between people who have children and those who don’t. People with kids at home now are operating with way less bandwidth, you need to take that into account. But it’s ok — we’re not in a sprint, it’s a marathon. Make sure you’re asking for things that won’t hurt them over the long term. Be proactive and set up a system that works for them too.

Other teammates may live alone and tend to work too much. As a manager, resist the temptation to keep them working all the time. A prolonged crisis feels endless to a burned-out team. Care for people sincerely. I used to think an unhappy person could simply find another opportunity. During a crisis that may be much harder, which makes your responsibility for their working conditions even greater.

Start with simple things: ask how people are doing, what they last enjoyed, or which movie they recommend. Don’t assume that someone working remotely has a satisfying social life after work. If teammates are isolated, account for the effect on their mood and wellbeing.

3/ Work on long-term stuff

Being remote can be an opportunity to work on things that previously seemed unimportant. We all need to be optimistic for the future, so working on things that will make the eventual rebound easier is good. Maybe that’s redoing your admin, cleaning up your expenses, working on a new backend, figuring out how to scale your various activities…

The 2008 financial crisis gave way to a period of intense startup growth — how can an investor thrive as we move into another period of crisis and rebirth?

It was back in 2009 or 10 when a friend told me I should try angel investing. As an entrepreneur, I’d never thought about myself as a potential investor, but it seemed like a good idea. I did feel it was a special moment in Silicon Valley right then: Facebook hadn’t IPO’d yet, rents were still reasonable, and there was a real pay-it-forward attitude everywhere. You just felt that if you did good for the people you came in contact with, it’d come back to benefit you, somehow, somewhere.

That meant the investing landscape was very relaxed, I’ve never seen anything like it since. Investors would make up their minds in 30 minutes, send money before the papers were signed (or even drawn up), reporting was sporadic, chaotic, joyous.

That’s why it was such a great place to make mistakes and learn — because you could still make money while doing it. So here are some lessons that being a bad business angel taught me — and yes, I think they’ll absolutely come in handy as this current crisis plays out, whether it’s a question of weeks, months, or even years.

Deal by deal, what’d I learn?

The 1st Deal — Diversification is more important than amount

My first deal was with a couple of French people who had gone to Stanford. They presented the project super well, they really seemed to know what they were doing. I cut them a check for $50K.

Back then, you could pretty easily meet people, and I ended up meeting a super famous entrepreneur/investor not long after. I told him about the deal, and he was surprised I’d put that much in. He said he’d put in $10K, and that as a guy who’s a billionaire. But his reason was simple: if it works, your returns are so high that it doesn’t really matter how much you put in, so just put in a reasonable amount.

Takeaway: When you’re among the first investors, the startup is probably going to die, because that’s what startups do. When they work, that’s the real surprise. So diversify: having 30–50 companies in your portfolio is where you’ll start to feel good about the long term.

In France and Europe, people don’t usually have that many investments. We’ve got a culture that says it’s about intelligence, not luck… but that’s not really the case. Startups are a market where luck usually wins out. So I started putting in $10K tickets, no more big tickets.

The 2nd Deal: The best teams win

I was super dedicated at the time, so I’d spend hours analyzing why startups wouldn’t work. I thought that if I could figure out why some startups didn’t work, I’d be able to find the ones that would. Again, this is a super rational French approach, like they’d teach you in engineering school.

I had a chance to invest in a company where I did exactly that — I went looking and figured out why it wouldn’t work. I wrote a long 17-page email to the founders, explaining why I wasn’t going to invest. I ran into that team a year later at a party, and they thanked me because they’d used that email to create their roadmap. They’d just raised $100M 🤦‍♂️😹

Takeaway : Both time and entrepreneurs are active parts of the equation. We don’t realize how important time’s impact on us is — the person you’ll be in 10 years isn’t who you are today. A company is the same thing, it’s going to change, it’ll go in good and bad directions. A company that has all the reasons to succeed today can fail, and vice versa. So the most important thing is to find entrepreneurs who are able to do one thing: change reality in their favor over time. Good teams really do win, no matter what the project looks like right now.

The 3rd Deal: There’s no link between being a good company and being a good investment

My most painful lesson. I saw a deal come across AngelList for a few guys who had just launched their app. It was post-financial crisis, they had a vision about all these limousines that weren’t being used, that people needed taxis more and more. Now they were looking for BAs in a seed round with a pretty low valuation. I figured with how taxi lobbies were, there was no way it could work. Absolutely worst decision I ever made.

By passing on Uber, I missed the chance to participate in an extraordinary outcome. Finding a winning lottery ticket is rare. Throwing it away is worse.

Takeaway: A company’s later reputation and an early investor’s return are different questions. Entry price, dilution and opportunities to sell all matter. An early investor may realize a return before a company’s fortunes change, while someone entering at a higher valuation can have a very different outcome.

What’s it all mean? The relationship between value, success, and money doesn’t really exist. Even the question of the team can’t really predict success, because the team can change too. There is no transcendental justice that turns good companies into good investments. The startup world is a world of chaos!

In Europe (and especially France), sales is a pretty taboo topic. If someone says you’re acting like a salesperson, it’s an insult, like you’re trying to screw them over. Compare that to the US, where “That was a great sales job” is a compliment.

Our big problem here is that we’ve got great products that nobody’s ever heard about. We have a really hard time turning our solutions into the next big thing because we have a weak sales culture. As an entrepreneur, though, your job is to sell: starting with the people around you, including your investors, your employees, your banker, everybody.

The one rule for being a good salesperson is to understand how the act of buying the product will be a good thing for the buyer. That’s why all those negative images of sales are missing the point. Great salespeople listen, they understand the person in front of them. This isn’t listening quietly like a psychiatrist, it’s listening actively like a cop: you’re trying to understand how the person works so that you can see where to push in order to have an impact. Sales is about opening doors by first figuring out where the key is and then reaching out to grab it. If you aren’t pulling together as much information as you can, you’re not going to succeed.

To know why your product will be a good thing for the buyer, you need to know if buyers are being driven by an emotional reaction or a rational one. That’s what so many people didn’t understand with the iPod. It wasn’t about being rational — there were other mp3 players, you could go to any electronics store and have salespeople talking about all the technical details of those other players, how many songs they could store, compression rates, prices…

And Apple beat them all, because it was cool. Apple knew how to create a certain emotion, with a product that just did what you wanted. Even years later, that’s why people who buy Android will still spend hours trying to convince you why it’s better than Apple. But that’s the difference between reason and emotion. As a salesperson, you need to understand how those two reactions relate to the product you’re trying to sell.

So how can you get better as a salesperson? 3 big things:

1. Match the buyer’s state of being.

The best salespeople can change their register and adapt their personality for the person they’re talking to. It’s not about being something you aren’t, it’s about knowing how to extend your boundaries. We all do this already in our personal lives — when you go on a first date, you don’t start talking about what you’ll name our first child, that would freak the other person out. Figure out the right steps to take at the right time, because that’s how you build a relationship.

2. Rate your leads

When you’re selling, you need to know whether your lead is ready to buy or not.

If you go to a meeting with an investor and they say, “Startups never earn money, they’ll never make a profit,” just leave, the meeting’s over — you can’t convince people of something they don’t believe. If your friend doesn’t eat pork, it’s because they believe they shouldn’t, and belief is a fundamental right. If I then say that aliens visited me last week and said we shouldn’t eat gummy bears, you aren’t going to stop eating gummy bears. But I will.

Don’t waste time with a bad prospect. Increase the number of people you speak with, and aim at the most likely to buy. Closing 10% of your leads fast is better than spending hours and hours trying to convince 20%. Bad salespeople let their ego come into it — they want to be right, you need to lose, they need to win. But it’s much better to just double the number of people you speak with, and figure out quickly who’s a good prospect.

Plus, that’s a tangible goal: you can get up earlier, speak faster, optimize your process. Good salespeople work hard. And sales are magic because it’s one place where there’s a direct correlation between how hard you work and your results. To become the best salesperson, you’ll end up spending more time selling than anybody else. It’s like a muscle, it gets stronger with time. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s the dopamine of succeeding too, which in great salespeople ends up basically putting them into an “always on” sales mode. If you talk with Olivier Ramel of Kymono about his vacation, you’re going to feel inspired to go buy that exact same vacation yourself, right now, because he’s always naturally selling.

3. Love your product

Today, you really can’t be a great salesperson if you don’t believe in your product. First, it’s because you’re dealing with a generation raised on Disney: uncynical films that present positive role models and messages. If you think about sales like The Wolf of Wall Street, you’ll go wrong, because now we’re living in a world where that generation is leaving user reviews. 800 people talking about their experience with you on the internet has a real impact.

And second, we’re all constantly searching for meaning in what we do. Being a good salesperson also means feeling good about yourself when you make a sale.

If you master those, the rest is easy — it’s all a question of effort:

• Sales are about repetition. Go watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and you’ll get it. The guy says it takes between 9–12 years to learn how to cook rice properly (not to make sushi — just to get the rice). It’s about continually repeating the process. Sales is the same — if you aren’t feeling sick of your pitch, you haven’t done it enough. And when you do feel sick of it, you have to keep going, because that’s when you get to a whole new level of it being natural. There’s a direct link between practice and result. (And that’s another key reason why it’s important to love what you’re selling.)
• Intensity matters. Why is the Colosseum still mostly intact and most Greek temples are in ruins? Because the Romans were less worried about theory and more worried about doing it. People who learn by first doing and then figuring out the theory behind it will end up building something great. Your goal is to sell at all times, every moment is an opportunity to make a sale. Do that and you’ll get better fast.
• Get out of your bubble and see the big picture. Too many people think, “I know how to do that better”, but they don’t understand that lots of people have already thought that. And there’s a reason why things are like they are. Why are we still waiting for a taxi association to take over from Uber? Because it’s not that easy. A good rule is to always think that your competition is better than you, that they’ve understood something you haven’t. And if your competition isn’t doing things one way, it’s most likely not because they didn’t think of it, it’s because they tried and it didn’t work.

Irrational doesn’t mean mystical ceremonies gazing up into the stars — read on to get the game plan.

Learning how startups really work is part of becoming an entrepreneur. Being new is a question of experience, whether you’re 18 or 63. Almost every new entrepreneur starts out without understanding how or why investors would give them money.

Start by accepting that most young entrepreneurs struggle to understand fundraising because they try to apply rational thinking to an irrational process. Startups and venture capital are overly optimistic environments — everyone who does this for a living is irrationally optimistic, because that’s the only way to survive in a world with such a high failure rate.

Because of that optimism, theoretically speaking, every VC wants to do every deal — if they had unlimited capital, that’s exactly what they’d do. But they don’t, they have to choose, and that’s when the FOMO takes over.

On any given deal, every professional investor prefers to lose money instead of breaking even. Run the math: You’ve got a fund with $10M to invest, so you can make 10 bets. Your goal isn’t to return $12M; that’s a failure in VC. Instead, you’re looking for the 100x that makes your whole career. You want to invest in companies that will risk your money and do everything they can to find that 100x, not in people who are going to be cautious and careful.

Fundraising obviously changes as you get bigger. During a seed round, lots of investors can put money in, and they do it based purely on emotion. After all, you don’t really have any metrics or data, so the level of uncertainty is so high that traditional due diligence doesn’t really make any sense. You’ve just got to convince them that “X is a huge problem” and “My team’s the one that’s going to solve it”.

But if you then get to product-market fit and you need to raise a Series A, things aren’t that simple.

For an entrepreneur, it’s a super exciting time — you’ve gone from ten clients to hundreds or thousands; your growth rate is exploding; you’re dreaming of everything you’ll do with $10M in the bank account. For an investor, though, they’re not as affected by that excitement — basically because they spend all day, every day with other entrepreneurs who are just as excited as you. (And that’s another reason why FOMO can take over, because during their careers they’ve all said no to people who are now very successful.)

VC is based on extreme outcomes.

Bigger rounds have more people involved in them. An investor can make a seed decision on their own; but for Series A, a VC also has to convince everyone else at their fund. If one person is very against a deal, it won’t happen, no matter how much the investor you’ve been talking with wants it. So Series A is a matter of both conviction and politics. Those politics usually have absolutely nothing to do with you as an entrepreneur or the business you’re building.

Having an investor whose conviction and politics are both straight is crucial for your future, too, because if you have a Series A investor who doesn’t want to invest in your future rounds, the company is going to struggle a lot. Everybody understands if a seed investor doesn’t follow in a Series A, there are tons of reasons why that can happen. But Series A investors are seen, for better and for worse, as investors for life, the ones who come onto the company board and stay there for years. The board members who came on with the Series A at Uber, they were there through the IPO. Series A means you’re getting married, just without the possibility of divorce. Choose wisely.

So what can you, the entrepreneur, do to maximize your chances of winning the fundraising game in the early stages of your company’s life?

1. Don’t play it like Tinder. Fundraising is about matching with the right people, building a relationship. It’s not just a seduction game. You’ll meet with lots of investors just to get one term sheet, so trust your instincts — if things feel off, don’t waste your time.
2. Have the right attitude and give them something they don’t expect. In Europe, lots of VCs are impressed by irrational behavior or when entrepreneurs stop the process themselves, telling the investor it’s not going to work out. Show them you know it’s not about surviving, it’s about thriving.
3. Don’t lie. Investors are like the police, they hear people lie all the time, they can spot it immediately.
4. Ask questions. You’re evaluating the investor too, figure out why they want to invest in you. The more intense the questions, the better the relationship you’ll be able to build over time.

Fundraising is one of the most important steps that a young entrepreneur takes. It’s a step that you take only when you need it or when the opportunity presents itself. But it’s also a very discontinuous process. And even though it’s kind of hard to really become good at a discontinuous process, that’s exactly what you have to do.

Entrepreneurs who become very good at fundraising are usually one of two things: good salespeople (because fundraising is just a different kind of sales process) or running a business that needs a looooooot of money.

If you’re going to do the next Uber and need to raise billions, having any success at all will put you into a very natural, always-on fundraising mode that just becomes part of who you are.

Still, one thing I’ve noticed is that the best entrepreneurs aren’t usually the best fundraisers, and the best fundraisers usually don’t make the best companies. It’s actually kind of obvious — if you’re really bad at fundraising, your only chance is to make a product that’s so good it becomes obvious.

You’ll find all kinds of tips online about how to seduce an investor, how to say things in just the right way… don’t worry about all of that.

You want to create a healthy, long-term relationship with this person, so don’t start off trying to trick them. The fundraising moment itself is much less important than all the moments that come afterwards, when you have to live with that investor being part of your company. Put your energy into showing your true self and creating a real base for that long-term relationship.

That can be hard too, because a good investor will only need 2 or 3 meetings to make a decision (bad investors will want lots more). That’s not much time to create a relationship. The stakes are high and time is short, so the more honest you are, the more open you are about yourself, your business, what you like and don’t like, what relationship you want to have with them, the better off you’ll be.

Once you’ve got that in your head, you can understand a central point of fundraising: it’s highly irrational. Especially the first round. As your startup matures, and there are more and more metrics and history, then fundraising can become rational. But at the beginning, most deals are made for totally irrational reasons.

Early stage VCs aren’t finance experts (or, if they are, they probably aren’t very good VCs). They’re startup operators, they’re entrepreneurs themselves, they know business, and they’re deeply optimistic people.

When you walk into a meeting with them, early-stage investors aren’t looking for a reason to say yes, they’re looking for a reason to say no. Their natural urge is to say yes. But they know they can’t, and so they have to find reasons why they prefer saying yes to one company over another.

Entrepreneurs who don’t understand that will go into a meeting thinking their job is to convince the investor. It’s not. Your job is to make the investor feel like this is an obvious deal, that they’re right to say yes.

Most investors know whether or not they want to invest in the first 10 seconds of a meeting. The rest of the time is spent on whether or not the entrepreneur keeps them feeling like it’s a good idea, that they should invest in this company instead of in any other deal.

Entrepreneurs also need to understand that no VC has a vested interest in investing in their company. From the entrepreneur’s side, the company is obvious — after all, you’re dedicating your life to building it. From the VC’s side, everyone who they meet has an obvious company that they’re devoting their life to.

So they aren’t really worried about missing out at the beginning. They don’t need to invest in every winner to make money (even if they’d like to). Every investor wants to be the first into Uber, but if they aren’t, it’s not that big of a deal — it’s like losing the lottery. Nobody’s upset at the end of their life because they didn’t win the lottery.

Understand their job. Professional investors have a business model that pays them fees, whether or not they make money. Entrepreneurs think that a VC’s job is to take risks, but it’s not — their job is to look smart when they’re talking to their own investors.

If a VC goes to their own investors and says, “We invested in a cybersecurity firm, great market, the entrepreneur had built other successful companies, but in the end it didn’t work out,” nobody’s upset. Ok, it didn’t work. Next.

But if a VC goes to their investors and said, “We invested in a couple of guys trying to use synthetic DNA to grow dragons, and now all the money’s gone, they didn’t grow any dragons,” people are going to freak out. Rightly!

Never forget that institutional investors have a boss. That means they could say no to you for an invisible reason that you’ll never know.

Take an example where a VC raised a fund and said they’d have 30% consumer companies and 70% B2B. Today, they have a great consumer company in front of them, they talk about it internally, and their investors say they can’t do the deal because the portfolio is 50–50 right now between consumer and B2B, and that wasn’t the deal that they agreed on.

Do you think the VC is actually going to tell an entrepreneur that’s the reason they aren’t investing? Of course not. They’re going to say, “Oh, it’s too early for us,” or “Oh, I’m not sure about the market”, blah blah blah.

Every VC lies when they say no to a deal, because it’s all about managing expectations with the entrepreneur. If they say something that makes themselves look bad, then you’ll never go back to them again. If they say something that makes it look like you’re missing something (“Oh, your average basket is too low”), then maybe you’ll come back when you’ve doubled the average basket. And maybe, at that point, those hidden conditions will have changed too.

In that way, a VC’s position is much harder than an entrepreneur’s. As an entrepreneur, you can tell everyone else that their project is incredible. Someone comes and pitches you synthetic dragons, you can say (and you should say!), “Man, that is so cool.” As an entrepreneur, you have no interest in shooting down other entrepreneurs.

But a VC has to shoot people down all the time, even when they don’t believe want to. I’ll talk to VCs who aren’t sleeping at night, thinking about that entrepreneur they had to say no to, and for a stupid reason, an entrepreneur they’re convinced will make it.

The entrepreneur only thinks the VC is the one with all the power because that’s the image the VC wants to give off. The VC makes it all look rational, when it’s really just about human relationships, expectation management, and looking good. So manage your own interpretation of what’s going on accordingly.

Of course, at the beginning there aren’t only VCs. At the beginning, there are a lot of different sources of funding you can look at; as you grow, those sources become fewer and fewer.

There are millions of people in the world who can write a check for €100K. They’re all very different individuals looking for different things. But when you need to raise €1B, it’s a very limited group of people you can talk to about that.

Still, that means raising €500K can come with a high level of complexity, because there are so many different combinations available. Raising a billion is pretty easy: either you have the metrics to raise with the dozen people who can make that happen, or you don’t. It’s a very binary situation.

At the beginning, though, you can have love money, business angels, superangels, micro VCs, VCs, government subsidies, corporate funds, corporate accelerator programs… make sure you don’t get lost in the woods.

The best way to avoid that problem is to never feel obligated to raise funds. And even if you do need the money, maybe you don’t need as much as you think. I often hear an entrepreneur say, “I need €500K,” or “I need €1M,” and really, they only need €100K to keep going for another 3 months.

Obviously then the question is, “Well, what are you going to have done in 3 months?” But you need to believe that the odds are going to change, as you go from where you are now to where you’ll be then.

Next, remember that when you build a relationship with someone, they become more likely to say yes. If you keep updating an investor and showing them progress, their perception of your progress is going to be even higher than the achievement itself.

Basically, if you go to see an investor for the first time and pitch your company, that’s a transactional approach. I have X, you have Y. To make that work, you can’t just be in the top 20%, you need to be in the top 1% of companies that investor sees.

But if you’ve established a relationship, and for the past year you’ve been showing them monthly progress, how your company is growing, how you just got these two great salespeople on board, etc., you’re not in a transactional relationship anymore. You’ve let them inside, and so now they’re looking at your company in an entirely different way.

A “No” for an investor today can become a “Yes” in the future, if you take the time to build the relationship the right way. It’s all about getting yourself on the right side of favoritism. It’s about being loved as a person just as much as being loved as a business.

This is why fundraising is a matching problem, not a seduction problem. Matching with the right investors before money is involved will have a huge impact once the time is right for your fundraising.

Make sure you have Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, and so on. Start with the best, even if you know there’s no way they’ll invest. If you go from bad people to good people, you’ll never learn and get better. If you start with the best, you’ll learn a ton and it’ll help you get the best investors possible on board.

Starting with the best also gives you the chance for a miracle. We’re in a business of miracles. They aren’t common, but they happen. Just because they probably won’t happen to you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

But because you can’t count on a miracle, it becomes a question of pitching as many people as you can until someone says yes. The hard thing there is that you should never stop your business while you’re fundraising (another reason why the later you go into fundraising mode, the better it is).

How do you know the time is right for your first fundraising?

As dumb as it sounds, the right time is when you need it. That doesn’t mean when you need money to build a better business, it means when you as a person don’t have any other choice. It’s when you’re sleeping on your friend’s couch, when you’re moving back in with your parents, when you’re eating leftovers of leftovers…

If needing money just means accelerating, that’s not enough: keep building traction, become even more obvious. Every bit of traction you build with the company makes the decision easier for the investor.

As much as possible, avoid weird sources of money: strange business angels, family offices that you just don’t understand, strings-attached love money… (I usually tell entrepreneurs to avoid love money as an investment, only take it if it’s really just love; if people around you want to help you out, take the money for yourself, not for your company. Because if you have a family member investing in your company, you should treat them like any other investor. Don’t make the mistake of seeing love money as somehow different from other money, treat it with total respect.)

Never take money from anyone who can’t afford to lose it. You need to be able to look every investor in the face and say, “This money is lost, are you sure you want to give it to me?”

If you can’t say that, if you can’t make them understand that there’s a very, very high chance the money will be gone, don’t take it.

I say all that because it’s super dangerous to have people on the outside freaking out. If your investors start freaking out, the situation inside the company will get even worse. You need stability from your investors.

There are only 5 reasons why stable, good investors who know what they’re doing will put money into a startup.

The first is social proof. Someone fancy is putting money in, and so other people want to do it too. And half of their decision is just because they hope to maybe one day meet that fancy person, even though that’s never going to happen. And the other half is because people sometimes think that person has investor superpowers. But don’t get sucked into this game, social proof is weird and you can’t really play it well, it can go wrong in too many ways.

The second reason people invest is the team. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes it’s weird. Being among the first employees of a company that achieved exceptional growth can make fundraising easier. It makes sense: someone who helped a company through that growth has seen things very few people have seen.

Or maybe you have a team where you’re a proven expert in a key area. If you’re an expert in banking infrastructure and security, you’ll have an easier time raising money for a new fintech.

Just remember that investors aren’t evaluating a “good team” based on your having gone to a good school, or being smart, or giving off the sense of knowing what you’re doing. An investor is looking for that one thing that is so special and rare that they can use it as a proxy for how good you are, as something that covers them with their bosses if things don’t work out.

The third reason to invest is the product. That’s finally something where an entrepreneur can do something concrete. If you can build an amazing product, you’ll excite investors. Remember that professional investors are optimistic and they know business; they know that if you can build a great product, chances are good that you’ll learn how to convince customers.

The fourth reason is because you’ve got a strategic partnership or leverage that will let you beat the market. If you’ve got some way to get your supplies at half price, or have access to something critical on your market, that can be a reason for an investor to get on board.

The last reason is traction. Young entrepreneurs think traction is something that you can easily demonstrate — “Look, I’ve grown this much over the past 3 months!” But the reality in startups is that metrics don’t really excite people unless they’re totally unheard of.

If your metrics are just ok, nobody cares. Investors are looking for something that’s completely beyond the reality they know, numbers that make them say, “I’ve seen a thousand companies, and I’ve never seen that.”

That might be your acquisition costs, client onboarding times, high initial price, whatever. It’s important because professional investors know that, over time, everything tends to revert to the mean. So if you start out super high on something, it’ll regress to “normal” more slowly, which means you might have the time to build something really cool.

Again, remember that a VC goes in front of their investment committee. If they can say, “I like the team, I like the market, the product’s pretty good, and — AND — they’ve got this one crazy metric,” then the decision becomes obvious. Because even if you’re just “average good” on everything else, that one metric lets them develop a solid conviction on the opportunity.

So let’s say you’ve got a VC interested. Your next question will be, “How much do I raise?”

The funny thing is that money and valuation are directly linked in the first round: whatever happens, you’re going to lose 20–25% of your company. So the question is whether you lose that 20–25% for 500K, 1M, 2M, 5M, etc. The total cash isn’t going to make a difference in terms of the equity you give up.

I know that may seem weird, but it’s just how it is at the beginning. You the entrepreneur think that valuation is tied to your company as it is today, but that’s just because you don’t really understand how long equity stories are. That’s why good VCs aren’t worried about optimizing valuations in an early round.

It makes sense if you put the numbers on it: Let’s say your company could eventually be worth $1B. Right now, a VC might put in $500K, or $1M, or $2M… but they’re still getting their 20–25%. If the company is eventually worth $1B, they’re looking at a potential return of $200M. So who cares if they put in $1M or $2M? The difference in the end is so small, it’s not even worth talking about.

That’s not to say that VCs don’t make mistakes. I’ve seen it happen, especially with junior associates. They have to learn that it’s not worth arguing over a $4M vs. $5M valuation, because on the day you’re signing the papers, it’s true that it can feel like a big difference. But over the whole history of a successful company, it just isn’t. That’s why only bad investors really keep caring about valuation in early-stage companies.

In general, those first rounds are priced as much by the market as by the company. When typical early-stage valuations rise, it does not mean the underlying companies have suddenly become proportionally better. The market may simply have shifted.

VC timelines are long — 7, 8, 10 years. Their early-stage investments are based on potential, not the state of the company today. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re somehow objectively better than another company that raised $X at Y valuation. The potential for both of your companies is the same, so you’re pretty much going to get the same deal.

Once you’re in Series C or Series D, if you’re doing 3x better than some other company, sure, you’ll be able to raise more at a better valuation. At that level, the company is much closer to its final valuation, the risk has decreased, the potential has become more concrete. That’s when metrics matter for your deal; before then, metrics only matter because they help determine the “On/Off” quality of the deal.

This also explains one of the big mistakes I see. When entrepreneurs get to a level where they can go raise 1M at a 5M valuation, they keep pushing, thinking they’ll be able to boost that and get to 2M at 10M. But then 12 months later, people are still looking at them and saying, “Yeah, we want to do the deal, we’ll put in 1 at 5.”

If the valuation is driven by the market, a better idea is to optimize for your investor. How do you know who’s a good investor and who isn’t? How do you know who’s the right investor for you?

At the beginning, you’ve basically got two choices: institutional VCs and individual angels.

With angels, I really believe you have to trust your instincts. You have to develop that in your own way. With individuals, small bits of behavior tell so, so much about who they are. Some examples…

• If someone comes to the meeting and they’re dressed like an accountant, don’t take the money. Accountants aren’t meant to invest in startups, they don’t understand the level of risk that is needed. (And that’s fine! They’re not bad people, they should just stay away from startups.)

• Entrepreneurs are good targets, because you share something important with them. But be careful, because they’re still entrepreneurs, which means some of them want to run your company. So test them, ask, “Do you want to come to the office one day a week to work with us?” If they say yes, stay away from them. If they think that’s ridiculous, that it’s your company, they just want to give you money and let you build, that’s cool. Investors should be able to give you leverage, make good introductions, be available when you need them; stay away from hands-on investors.

When it comes to institutional VCs, don’t let them invest without doing proper due diligence on them. It’s super important to do that for the people who are investing in you. Go ahead and tell them, “We’re really excited about the possibility of you investing, can you please put me in touch with three entrepreneurs from your portfolio?”

And CALL. THEM. If you don’t do that, and you have a bad experience, well… whose fault is that?

And if someone calls you to ask about your experience with an investor, don’t lie. If you let someone bad invest, don’t let someone else get hurt just because you’re embarrassed. If you get stuck with a bad investor, help others to avoid falling into that trap, that’s how you can help to elevate an entire ecosystem.

As part of that due diligence, think about the three things where a VC can really make a difference and where some are better than others: brand, network, and crisis.

Brand is so obvious, and yet so many entrepreneurs don’t understand it. Don’t underestimate the value of a big, well-known VC coming on board. Because when you need to send an email to someone important, being able to say, “We’re BlahBlah.com and we raised $5M with [famous VC],” it’s so much more convincing than, “We’re Blahblah.com and we raised $5M with [someone you’ve never heard of].” In a world where storytelling is everything, don’t underestimate the importance of marketing and branding, both for your startup and for your investors.

Network comes in local, regional, and global forms. If you want to build a global company, you need your investors to have a global network.

Finally, a crisis will arise. How is your investor going to react in a crisis? Are they going to be supportive and helpful, or frantic and crazy? If it’s the latter, they’re going to be a huge liability. You need strong, courageous investors who don’t freak out.

Let’s close on the fact that fundraising’s hard. What do you do if you can’t raise with VCs? Should you get a fundraiser to help you? Should you go after more exotic investors?

Basically, only use a fundraiser after you’ve already tried and failed to do it yourself. If you try to use a fundraiser immediately, you’ll never know if it’s worth it. But if you’ve already failed, the fact that they’ll take 5 or 10% of your raise, well, you know it’s worth it because on your own you’ve got nothing.

If you’re not VC-compatible (there are great companies that aren’t VC-compatible), you might need someone to help you get more exotic investors like family offices. Not everyone can raise with Marc Andreessen, so if you need to go exotic, remember that generating a return on that money will increase your chances of being able to raise with Marc Andreessen later.

Entrepreneurship is a career, it can go down, up, sideways. Just make sure you’re getting as much out of it as you can at each point.

Every great entrepreneur will tell you that building an incredible startup means building an incredible team. It’s a cliché because it’s true.

But when you tell a young entrepreneur that if they’re successful, they’ll end up spending half their day on hiring, they don’t believe you. You have to live it to really understand.

So let’s look at the frictions you encounter when scaling a company and how you can make scaling your team feel natural.

But first, remember one thing: No team in the world has died because they hired too slowly; a lot of teams have died because they hired too fast.

Hiring too fast is the kiss of death. If you hire the wrong people, they’ll attract even worse people. All of a sudden, you have a sabotage group inside your company with the ability to burn it all down.

There is very little correlation between the quality of each team member and their concrete skill level. Skills and attitude aren’t connected. But there is a lot of correlation between how homogeneously good your team is and how successful your startup will be.

When you’re hiring, understand that each new person is going to be a little boss who’s running things when you aren’t around. And by definition, there will be a lot of situations when you aren’t around.

Hiring slowly doesn’t have a cost. You won’t die from a missed opportunity. People sometimes think they need to hire fast so that they don’t miss out on a market, that never happens.

After all, no startup dies from competition. Or at least, there are so few that if it happens to you, you’re just unlucky. It’s kind of like getting killed while walking down the street because a meteor comes crashing out of the sky and hits you. It could happen — but the likelihood is so low that there’s no need to really think about it.

Instead of worrying about competition, make sure that you hire right. Don’t worry about being too slow, just do it as quickly as you feel comfortable with.

Comfort’s important — as an entrepreneur you need to get very comfortable listening to your instincts about people. There are a lot of areas in business where you shouldn’t listen to your instincts, because you can make very big mistakes that way. But listening to your instincts on the people around you is super important.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. As a society, we’re trained not to do that, we’re trained to avoid saying what we really think about people.

That’s why the only people who will meet me and tell me that I’m fat are kids. It’s just a fact, and yet no adult has ever come right out and said it. Why? Because we’re taught that we shouldn’t say things about people that might hurt them, even if they’re true. Once, though, I was eating dinner, and a friend’s six-year-old said to me, “Oussama, you’re too fat, you should take better care of yourself or you’re going to die young.” All the adults were just horrified, but I said, “Thank you! Keep that, I like your entrepreneurial mindset.”

But in that kind of situation, everyone is so shocked that the kid understands they shouldn’t have said it. Over time you learn to avoid those reactions, you don’t say what you think so that people won’t freak out. And you grow up to be an adult, where a good part of living in a society is not hurting people for no reason.

When you’re hiring though, you can’t suppress those thoughts. Put yourself in “kid on” mode. Of course, you don’t necessarily let those reactions out, you definitely don’t write anything down that could land you in court. But you need to listen to your instincts about people, they tell you more than anything else can.

This is a process. You need to build up confidence in your entrepreneurial instincts. Don’t fall into the trap of believing you have some superpower that lets you predict exactly how someone will do their job. Everyone can do a good job somewhere; but not everyone is going to fit and do a good job with you.

In a lot of ways, it’s like sex — you don’t go around wanting to have sex with everyone you meet. And if you don’t want to have sex with everyone, there’s no need to think that you want to hire everyone either.

People think that entrepreneurs have a responsibility to hire, that an entrepreneur is there to be a job creator. But every entrepreneur knows that the worst part of the job is the fact that you have to rely on other people. Entrepreneurship is hard because you can’t do it alone, it’s not possible to achieve something extraordinary on your own. But every entrepreneur would still prefer that.

So accept that it’s unnatural to find other people who share your will and drive. Accept that because it’s unnatural, you have to put a lot of time and effort into finding them.

Scaling a startup team comes down to hiring well, managing well, and firing well.

This isn’t the same as in a big company. In a big company with product-market fit, you need to protect what you have. Protection means getting people who can follow orders and operate well. It’s also why a big company is so great, because it can be run by stupid people.

Startups need tons of care, which means they’re fragile, which means they need very competent people to run them. It’s the difference between spending a weekend with a three-year-old or spending a weekend with a forty-year-old. With a small child, you have to be really careful — kids will do totally random things, they want to open the window and jump out, they grab sharp objects you didn’t even know existed, you have to watch them constantly. When you’re with an adult, you don’t need that kind of vigilance (let’s assume there are no drugs involved ;)

Being an entrepreneur is like babysitting 20 3-year-olds. A big company can make lots of mistakes, and none of them will kill you. Startups can be killed by a random employee.

Believe me, employees can do so many stupid things. And the thing is, they’ll do them thinking that it’s helping you! Stupid things can happen because processes aren’t in place, chaos is all around you, nobody knows how things should go. A startup is looking for product-market fit, trying to achieve scalable growth… but before you get there, employees can think that really bad ideas seem pretty good.

So scaling your team is about really setting the tone. Entrepreneurs aren’t paranoid enough about their first 10 hires. But they should be, because those are the people who will establish your entire culture.

It happens in 3 steps.

Step 1: Culture as the natural extension of the founders

If the founders try to set up a culture, but don’t represent it themselves, it’s not their culture. There are so many startups that I’ve seen write up their manifesto, list out all their values, and then do exactly the opposite.

You have to lead by example. If you want people to come in early, come in early. If you want people to work hard, work hard. And if you as a founder do something, understand that you’re giving everyone on your team the right to do it, too.

Every gesture you make will be universally adopted in your team. Pick your battles wisely.

Step 2: You start to hire people who will take up that culture and embody it themselves.

This is the start of a very dangerous path. When you start expanding, it’s growing your cult. And anyone who joins a cult is like any convert to any religion: they’re inflexible and a little bit nuts. That inflexibility is dangerous, because a strong culture is a flexible culture.

A strong culture can accept some incoherence. If everything fits in place, is practical, makes perfect sense within the system, that means the startup is too locked in. You need a culture where people know, “Ok, this is how we do things, except when we do it this other way.”

If your startup doesn’t have that flexibility, it is rigid. What happens when a tree is too rigid and a strong wind comes along? It breaks. What happens when a company is too rigid and the market changes, or a client has a crisis? The company breaks.

Step 3: Everyone who takes part in scaling the organization has to own your culture.

This is very simple and really hard, because every person you hire has the power to dilute your culture. Fight against that. Culture is what will protect you over the long term. Culture is how your organization is defined. And culture is ultimately owned by the people you pay and the people you promote.

You can put posters up on the wall about how you’re an innovative company, but if you only promote non-innovative people, then your culture is non-innovative. Period.

Your employees will understand the hidden rules of your culture better than you can believe. You can write a manifesto saying whatever you want — if it’s not seen in the people you pay and the people you promote, it’s a lie.

I saw this in action a long time ago when I was consulting for a big company. The boss said they wanted collaboration, and couldn’t understand why everyone in the company was super competitive and wouldn’t work with each other. After 5 minutes, it was pretty clear: Everyone was paid their bonus at the end of the year based on their individual performance. So the guy had set up a system where any time you worked with someone, it brought down your individual pay. Pretty obvious why everyone was super bitchy, right? (And when I suggested changing that remuneration structure, he said, “No, we can’t do that, that’s our culture!” Ah. Well, ok.)

A mechanism design that is not optimized for teamwork…

It’s fine if your company is built like Highlander, a giant battle where only one can survive. That’s a choice, and everyone inside the company needs to live with that choice. But be honest about it.

As you scale, you might have to decide how to deal with an office vs. Remote work. Realize that it’s not at all the same thing. Culture has historically been built with people in the same room — tribes, cities, nations, they were based on a territory, everyone being physically within a certain space.

The internet gave us the idea of building cultures that completely ignore physical presence, where you can’t count on someone being in the room to help you build the culture.

That’s why you can’t really build a company where only part of the team is remote. Either everybody is remote or nobody is remote. That doesn’t mean you can’t have people who work from home sometimes, that’s fine. But it’s not a remote team.

In a remote team, everything important happens online. That can create real magic, because you can get talent wherever it is — really, wherever! But because there’s no way for information to pass in an invisible, natural way, you need to make information 100% explicit.

That’s the biggest challenge for a remote team: writing everything down, giving everyone the content they need, so that you avoid people missing information or not knowing where to find the right information. You have to build an information stack that’s much more robust than an in-person team.

Whether you’re setting up a remote team or an office, take a look at how you think about freelancers and employees. Individuals today can want different things, and the old way of thinking about it (employees = people we can give orders to; freelancers = people we can’t give orders to) isn’t true anymore.

Giving orders isn’t much use in startups, because a good startup doesn’t worry about “how” things get done. A big company needs processes, startups don’t. If you’re a startup, you need to hire very smart people who can manage fragility. Startups have a context and a goal, which can only work when the people inside are smart.

A founder needs to keep finding people who are smarter than them. That way, the people you hire tell you how to do things. If you need to keep telling employees how to do things, you hired the wrong people!

And because you can make mistakes, remember that firing people in startups is a very natural, normal thing. I’ve fired people that I consider good friends, people who I’ll invite to Christmas dinner. Firing in startups has nothing to do with your feelings about a person, it has everything to do with their ability to provide value in their job.

After all, you know it’s possible to hire someone who’s great at their job, but who you don’t want to go on vacation with. If that’s true, it means you could need to fire someone you love and who you want to keep close to you. It works both ways.

(By the way, this is why you can work with family members, friends, loved ones in a startup — as long as you know that you won’t hurt your relationship with them if you fire them. Be very sure that you aren’t in a transactional relationship with your loved ones, that you can be honest and that you won’t destroy your relationship if you have to fire them.)

So how do you structure the process to ensure you hire well?

At the beginning, and for a long time, hiring is a founders-only responsibility. A young startup doesn’t need a CFO (what are you the chief financial officer of, bankruptcy?). But you do need someone to be in charge of people. One founder should specialize in that. And even then, the CEO is going to end up spending half their time on hiring. You can’t delegate culture for a very long time — and I’m talking hundreds, even thousands of hires.

Anytime an entrepreneur tells me that hiring isn’t their focus, it’s horrible. Like, what can be more important than not bringing the wrong person into your company, a person who has the ability to burn the place down? You need to see hiring at that level of intensity, as something that can become a gigantic, fatal catastrophe.

Be in hiring mode at all times. Be fierce, be opportunistic, and as soon as you find a great person, get them on board.

Learn about who you are as an interviewer. Figure out your own weaknesses. For example, I’ve learned that when I make a mistake on hiring, it’s because I see someone who’s really driven and comes from a tough background. I start to see myself in them, and I want to help, and so I can miss other things that I should see. That can become a catastrophe. But now I know that’s my blindspot, so if I see someone like that, I send them to talk to another interviewer. If they survive that, then ok, hiring them is a good idea.

We all have those blindspots, it’s fine. There’s no need to be superhuman. And I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t feel that kind of emotional reaction. But as an entrepreneur, I can’t let those feelings put my company in danger.

Don’t let your guard down. It’s much better to miss a great person than to hire the wrong one. The potential upside of any one person is always smaller than their potential downside. When people become a liability, they become crazy. You can end up covered in years of lawsuits, just because you made the mistake of bringing the wrong person into the room for a few months.

Testing skills is important. But it’s less important than understanding people psychologically, less important than understanding what kind of human being you’re dealing with. Find ways to see how people behave naturally. Maybe it’s going out for a drink, maybe it’s going for a walk, one entrepreneur I know goes for a run with potential hires. Me, I eat with people, because I think how someone eats reveals a lot about them.

Find your way — just make sure you find it. People are good at putting on a mask when they’re in “interview mode”, it’s like going on a first date. Your job is to find the moment of truth, when you can say, “Yes, I just heard something genuine and honest.”

You can train for hiring in big companies. That’s what business school is for, they train for what average people want to say and hear. As a startup founder, you can’t look for average. You’re desperately trying to find excellence. You need to find people who are willing to share that new reality with you, searching for the gold at the end of the rainbow alongside you.

You need genuine people. Genuine people don’t say things just to look good, they say things because that’s what they think. You have to really listen to find them.

Now let’s get back to the question of how to scale that up.

Basically, the only way to really scale the team well is by having done such a good job with those first few people that they’ll help you as you bring on more people.

And don’t think it stops with hiring. Every time your team size doubles, look at everything. It’s like reinventing the company. Your communication, responsibilities, culture, hiring, everything needs to be reexamined when you get to 8 people, then 16, then 32, then 64, then 128, then 256, etc. Be ready to change things completely. It’s not about keeping every single action the same, it’s about keeping up the right energy flowing.

And please don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s better to have a lot of people who are paid a little instead of a few people paid a lot. As soon as it’s possible, startups need to pay better than the market rate, they need to avoid interns, they need to be sure that everyone in the team is contributing to value creation.

Overpaying is insurance when it comes to hiring. If you’re overpaying someone, you’ll never keep them around if they’re not doing a good job. When things are messy and chaotic, overpaying is a great way of being sure that you’ve got the right person in the right place.

Nobody comes on board only for the mission. (If they do, then you’ve hired someone who’s crazy.) You have to find the right blend of mission, money, equity, and fulfillment to keep everyone aligned and truly invested in your startup’s success.

One last thing: when you need to fire, do it well. One good way is giving the person the opportunity to say they resigned. After all, one of the big problems with firing is that nobody wants it to look like they messed up. And in startups, they’re usually right — if you have to fire someone, they didn’t mess up, you — the founder — messed up. That’s your responsibility.

So let them tell everyone that you’re not good enough for them, that they decided to quit (and never break that trust by saying otherwise); give them a proper severance, because it was your fault and so you should pay for it (which will also make you more paranoid for the next time you hire); actively recommend them for their next job. Do all of that, and firing becomes much easier, because it takes the ego and drama out of it.

You get it: Scaling a team is easy in theory and hard in practice. Hire people you admire, put them in charge with a high level of freedom, and let them lead by example as you scale up.

Want to know the difference between a good CEO and a bad CEO, no matter how far along your startup is? It’s not in what they do. A good CEO is simply a person who knows how to clearly define what they’re doing.

There isn’t just one kind of CEO. Look at different companies, and you’ll see that the way the CEO behaves defines how the company as a whole behaves.

Obviously, there are some things that are shared by all CEOs. For example, the CEO is always the most important person in the team, who will always have the last word. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the CEO is the most influential person on the team. There could be a manager who has more influence over their team than the CEO does. But that’s inside. Anyone on the outside who sees a mess or a success, they’re looking for the CEO, because that’s the person who incarnates the final decision.

In real life, this is seen even in very low-stakes ways: I’ll always remember one time when Xavier Niel came to eat dinner with us, and he said, “It’s funny, no matter how big Free gets, whenever someone in my family has a problem with their cable box, they call me first.” That’s the kind of visibility that comes with being the CEO. It’s not just a technical question, it’s about truly being the face of the company.

But because the CEO is so visible, there are tons of things that people think are part of the job that actually have absolutely nothing to do with it. Some CEOs are strong in finance, some understand nothing. Some CEOs are great managers, some are horrible. Some CEOs love giving interviews, some can’t stand it.

What is really great about being CEO is that you can decide to concentrate on the things you enjoy the most, and delegate the rest. The real power of the CEO is making those decisions.

Still, your freedom to make those choices depends on what stage your company is in.

Before product-market fit, being CEO is being the person who does literally everything, all the way down to taking out the trash and cleaning the bathroom, because there’s nobody else around who’s going to do it.

After product-market fit, you have to take responsibility for the company’s vision. That doesn’t mean it all comes from you. Some CEOs are very skilled at grabbing a vision that comes from other people and pushing it forward better than anyone else, making the company’s next steps obvious.

You also have to take responsibility over how much you’re paying people. You have to be able to look people in the eyes and say, “Yes, they’re making more than you, and this is why I think they’re more valuable than you. If that’s a problem, then it’s probably time for you to look for a job somewhere else.”

That can be a tough conversation, but that’s exactly what being CEO is. You won’t be the only one who has tough conversations, but you do need to be first up to do what needs to be done. You have to provide the vision that lets others step up and take over as leaders in their particular fields.

So many people don’t understand how management works in startups. A startup is a series of dictatorships, with everyone responsible for their field. The CEO needs to steer a system that lets everyone give the most they can, both following orders and making their own decisions, all the way down to the last employee. It’s an enlightened dictatorship: each individual understands why you’re doing things, knows how to do things, and delivers the KPI that they’re responsible for.

Again, there’s not just one way to be a CEO. It’s much more like a math problem, where you know the answer you need to get — but you can use more than one method to figure out the equation. You can be an emotional CEO, an analytical CEO…it’s all about being the best CEO that you can be.

Should I be hands-on, hands-off, etc. It’s the wrong question. How can you be pragmatic and achieve your vision? For a startup CEO, you have to find the way where everyone feels responsible, where everyone develops their ability to execute independently, and where you still maintain the ultimate responsibility and the last word on everything. Sounds easy enough, but it’s actually really, really hard.

Let’s say you’re a developer, and you love spending time on product. If you’re going to be CEO, the tension will arise from needing to not try to be the CTO of the company, and pushing yourself to be someone who people enjoy talking to, who people feel comfortable sharing things with. That takes politics and emotional awareness.

Too many people try to be CEO just by declaration. It’s like you grab a balloon and carry it around saying, “Listen to me, I have the balloon!”

That never works in startups, because a startup doesn’t have enough money for that to work. The reason why a CEO in a big company has so much power is because they have enough money that they can buy their way out of anything.

Being CEO at a startup is completely different. The CEO of a large company has the power of an emperor. For a startup CEO, the emperor is the market. The fact that you’re a great manager, that you’re a great leader, that people trust you, super. Every day, that ability to inspire trust and lead people is put in real danger by the decisions you make.

It’s like a video game. Every time you make a decision, you face resistance. If you’re right, you get some points; if you’re wrong, you lose some points. And everyone’s keeping score. The only way to win is to keep doing more things right than wrong.

And as those decisions are made, the CEO is in charge of managing the response to everything that happens. So in public, the CEO doesn’t get to have real emotions. You can have emotions with your loved ones and your team, you need to be transparent, genuine and honest with them. But you can’t show those emotions to people outside of that circle.

Understanding what you can say and to whom is critical. One of the saddest things I experienced was when someone came up to me after an event:

“Hi, I work for X startup.” The company was going bankrupt.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, that’s tough, I hope it works out.”

blank look “What do you mean?”

uhhhhh “I mean, you know, going bankrupt, no money, the company…not existing anymore…”

“What are you talking about? They just asked me to organize our 4th birthday party!”

“Oh, sorry, I must be mistaken, my bad.”

I wasn’t mistaken. They fired everyone the next day. The team had no idea. That’s the sort of thing that should never happen, never ever. If your team learns that you’re bankrupt at the same time as the press does, you were just roleplaying being someone with responsibility.

The CEO needs to be able to have a genuine conversation with everyone in the team. And sometimes that means a discussion that gets people down, that’s hard to hear. In life, there’s bad news sometimes, and when it comes, you feel bad. It’s human.

A great startup isn’t great because people feel good even when there’s bad news. In a great startup, everyone feels bad when bad news arrives, and then they still work and they still fight.

That’s one of the biggest challenges I see with CEOs : how to tell your team the truth about what’s going on in the company, in a way that keeps everyone on board, that makes them feel that they’re all fighting for the same thing, that they can survive, get to the next milestone, and keep growing. No CEO can avoid the need to properly assess and talk about risk.

As you grow, a startup CEO finds that their daily tasks are fewer and fewer, and their time spent on fun stuff can go up. For example, almost every startup CEO starts out having to do sales, because if you don’t, the first clients don’t sign. But once you’re successful, obviously the CEO isn’t doing sales anymore.

But becoming successful is the price a CEO must pay to be able to pick and choose the tasks they want to spend time on. At that point, you have to be crystal clear with everyone about “this is my territory” and “this is your territory”. When you give someone responsibility, when you empower them to take charge, you need to be absolutely clear about the fact that you aren’t going to be there micromanaging everything they do.

Micromanagement just doesn’t work in startups. If you find yourself micromanaging, it means you screwed up and didn’t hire the right people. You need to hire smart people, people who will end up telling you how things should be done. If you’re spending all of your time showing others how to do things, you’ve got the wrong team around you.

Having the wrong team is a great way to start having lots of bad days as a CEO. Don’t underestimate how important it is for you, as the CEO, to enjoy your day and be happy with what’s going on in your startup. Never think that your mood doesn’t have a huge impact on your team. You can put the same team under two people, a good leader who is happy or a bad leader who doesn’t enjoy their job, and you’ll get completely different results.

Case in point.

That’s why it’s so important to constantly pay attention to what is wrong with you. As CEO, you have to work on yourself a lot, because that’s the best way to work on others. If there are things that stress you out, they’ll stress everyone out.

You don’t have to do everything yourself. A good startup CEO wants to create lots and lots of little CEOs who are all responsible for their particular area. Your goal is to help every one of those people find their way to empowerment, freedom, autonomy. It’s the only way to scale.

That’s why you can’t spend all your time on the weak links. If you do, the strong ones on your team won’t progress like they could. It might seem counterintuitive, but it’s true: You’ll get more from spending time helping the strong performers on the team than the weak ones.

When you see you have a weak link on your team and things just aren’t working out, your responsibility as a CEO is clear: you have to fire them.

Firing is one of the hardest things you have to do, because it means acknowledging that you, as CEO, made a mistake when you hired that person. It’s never the responsibility of the person you fire, it’s always your responsibility for having made a mistake. And you have to fix that mistake, for the good of the team. If you have 10 people who are doing a great job, and 1 person who isn’t, it affects them all. The others will see it as a breach of trust, a breach of equality — it’s your job to keep that sense of equality, where everyone feels that everyone else is as useful as they are.

Maintaining that balance within the team means getting really good at giving feedback. This is way harder than it sounds, because we’re never really taught how to give feedback. No parent has ever taught their kid how to go up to some other kid in their class and properly tell them what they’re doing wrong. (And thank god that’s the case, society would be horrible with a world full of CEOs.)

But giving good, constant feedback is absolutely necessary for a CEO. Good feedback is three things: honest, genuine, and not personal. It should be given right away — there’s nothing worse than letting someone do something wrong for a year and then telling them, all because you didn’t have the courage to say it from the beginning. That makes it so, so much worse.

Giving good feedback needs to start from day one. See it as your number one job, because no CEO can avoid it. You can absolutely be the CEO of a big tech company and understand nothing about coding, product design, marketing, whatever. It’s possible. But you can’t get around the need to give good feedback.

This means you need to be a good judge of people’s behavior. As CEO, you need to realize that nobody’s telling you the truth. There isn’t a CEO on earth whose team is telling them the whole truth. So your job is to listen and watch, to figure out what they’re saying, to evaluate how they’re saying it, and push to get the whole truth.

It’s hard! There really is a certain type of justice in this world, which is that the more successful you become, the dumber you get. Because the more successful you are, the harder it is to find anyone who will give you honest feedback. That’s why you need to keep a close inner circle of people who really know you, who knew you before you were successful, and who can stay honest with you. And you need to be able to listen in a way that tells you everything that people aren’t telling you.

Another way to deal with that problem is to find a circle of people who are facing the same challenges, people who aren’t in your team. This is usually other CEOs, those who are more or less at the same stage as you. Peer-to-peer mentoring is so powerful, and it’s so much more useful than going to people who built their company 20 years ago and who don’t actually have any clue of how to grow a tech startup today. Your peers can give very concrete advice, because they’ve been dealing with the same things just this week, or last month, or whenever.

As you get feedback, remember one super counter-intuitive thing: The speed of the decision is much more important than the quality of the decision. If you make 20 bad decisions and 1 good decision, but you do it all in one hour, your outcome is going to be better than if you made 19 good decisions over the course of a month. The company making a decision in an hour will always beat the one that makes a decision over the course of a month.

Two final bits of advice: as a CEO, taking care of your mental health is super important. It’s an issue where things aren’t fair — some people are simply more resistant to burning out than others. But if you as the CEO start to burn out, it’s going to be a giant issue for everyone on your team. Get professional help, there are lots of solutions out there to help you manage stress. Don’t get to a point where there’s no way back.

Take care of yourself financially as well. Being CEO means that you’re the last to be paid, and the first to stop getting a salary when things aren’t going well. So when things are going well, pay yourself and save as much as you can, you want to have at least one year in salary on the side as fast as possible. The worst thing you can do as a CEO is not pay yourself well when things are going well. Lots of investors don’t like this, but they’re wrong. If an investor tells you that you should only be paid well much later, when the company is really successful, tell them to do the same. After all, most investors get paid management fees on their fund, which means they’re very well paid whether their investments create returns or not.

You should never take money that puts the company at risk. You can’t pay yourself 50% of your revenues. But when things are working, taking a decent salary is smart. One day, when things aren’t going so well, it’s very possible that you’ll need to make a personal sacrifice to ensure that your company survives. So once you’ve got product-market fit and you’ve raised a decent amount of money, pay yourself enough so you aren’t worrying about money every month.

What you need will vary depending on your personal situation, so just be honest about it and don’t feel bad about the fact that you need to make a good living. (And this goes for your team too — when you can pay people well, do it. There’s zero upside to having people working for you who are worried about being able to pay their rent, to pay for childcare, to take a vacation every once in a while. People perform much better when they’re being paid well.)

All of this is about finding your comfort zone as a CEO. Don’t be the CEO other people want you to be — be the CEO that fits who you are, and that creates harmony and performance within your company.

First steps, giant steps 👣

No entrepreneur is perfect. You’ll make lots of mistakes, especially at the beginning. The most important thing is to try to maximize your startup’s first 100 days, because what you do then will have a geometric impact on whether your company goes up, stays flat, or heads down.

The culture and tone you set then will follow you forever. You’re creating a certain energy, a certain way of spending your time. It doesn’t mean you can’t change things — but it’s much harder to change things than to get it right in the first place.

Take a concrete example, the fact that so many French companies choose a French name. If things start to work, they see that they need to change their name to go global. But it’s so much harder to change your name at that point, as opposed to just starting with a name that’s ready to scale.

It’s just one thing that points at something important: Be crystal clear about your goals at the beginning. There’s no such thing as being too ambitious. If you want to be a global company, and five years later, you’re running a local agency, ok, no big deal. But if you start out thinking like a local agency, it’s so much harder to shift into being a company that can go global.

On a personal level, those first 100 days set your own energy tone as an entrepreneur. Building an ambitious company takes a lot of time. It takes 1–2 years to figure out if the idea is working; 4–5 years to build a company that can be seen as a success; 5–10 years to actually find an exit. So from the start, you’re looking at committing the next 10 years of your life.

That’s why even in the first 100 days there’s no such thing as a “startup as side project”. The amount of energy you need to put in at the beginning is super intense. An entrepreneur should embrace that, because it’s the whole reason why you aren’t just going to find a job in some other company. At its heart, being an entrepreneur is about saying that you’re worth so much more than anything on your current CV. Launching your startup is saying, “I can do more than what someone looking at what I’ve done so far would ever think.” Easy enough to say — but proving that takes an enormous amount of effort and energy.

Any time that you spend on something other than your startup is something that has a real cost, that affects whether or not you’ll achieve your goals. In the first few years of a startup, there’s so much to do and so much energy needed, it’s already more than you can ever hope to do.

Every startup takes more energy than you can possibly give. That’s why you need some luck, too. But luck only comes when you stay focused and energetic for a very long time.

Think about it in terms of those around you as well. If you aren’t ready to be 100% on your startup, why would any of your cofounders do anything more? If you aren’t ready to be 100%, why would any employee take the leap of faith and start following you? If you aren’t 100%, why would an investor take a risk that you aren’t willing to take yourself?

Apply that lesson to everything in the beginning. How are other people going to see each decision you make? If anything feels off, don’t do it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do a side project, that you can’t hustle, that you can’t have fun building something on the weekend. But that’s not being an entrepreneur, that’s not a startup. Being an entrepreneur begins when the only possible outcomes are death or success.

Let’s get concrete. What do you need to do in the first 100 days?

Define the real milestones to be achieved. These should not be time-based. Don’t say, “Ok, I’m launching a travel app: I’ll finish the MVP in June, then I’ll raise money in September, and the funds will let me spend on ads so that I can get to my first 1,000 users in December.”

Whenever an entrepreneur tells me something like that, I get that warm feeling you sometimes get when talking with a child: “When I grow up, I’m going to be an astronaut!” That’s so sweet, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little, too!

Time-based milestones are a delusion. They make you think that you’re able to master time. You. Can. Not. The gods will decide the fate of your startup, not you. The only thing you can do is to look around, see what is in your power, and focus.

That’s why your milestones need to be based on key metrics. Those metrics should be linked to concrete steps that are part of getting closer to your goals.

A good entrepreneur will say, “I’m going to get 100 clients as soon as possible. When I get to 100 clients, I’ll hire my first full-time employee, so that I can focus on fundraising; and if I can raise up to $1M at a $4M valuation, then I’ll…”

Once you’ve got specific milestones set, realize that you have no strategy, only tactics. Strategy is the deployment of money over time; at the beginning of a startup, you have no money and no time. Tactics are the only things you can use. Decrease the amount of time you spend planning, increase the amount of time you spend testing.

Believe me, you don’t know the answers beforehand.

Testing in the first 100 days is all aimed at the only thing that matters then: getting product-market fit. Remember, product-market fit is obvious. If there’s any question or debate, you’re not there yet. It isn’t about a metric, it’s not about selling X number of units or having Y number of users. Product-market fit is having something start to happen that shows things spinning out of your control. It’s when your startup grows in a way that is greater than all the effort you’re putting into it, where you’re just trying to hang on and keep up.

At the beginning, it’s not like that. Things aren’t crazy. You’ll be putting so much effort in, and not getting much in terms of results. It’s frustrating! That’s why it’s so important to keep testing, to keep trying to get to product-market fit. Because once you’re there, it’s clear, you feel it in the results, that you’re getting back tons more energy than you’re putting out.

Reduce your timeframes. You don’t need to think in terms of 100 days, a month, even a week. At the start, I focus discussion on what can be done tomorrow. That is the time available: why plan for next week when the company could be dead by then? So at the beginning, if you can’t get it done in two days, don’t do it. Don’t waste weeks trying to build some new feature when the market hasn’t validated the product itself yet, the risk of wasting your time is way too high.

Perfection can’t be the goal. Information is the goal. The first responsibility of an entrepreneur is to learn things that nobody else knows. Build your level of expertise, your level of awareness, until you really do become an expert. Make sure you’re learning as much as possible in as short an amount of time as possible.

[Caveat: Yes, there are some situations where this isn’t true. Like deep tech startups. But really, deep tech startups aren’t startups. They’re R&D projects financed by very rich people, and maybe one day it will become a startup, on that day when they’re finally read to go to market.]

That’s what you should do. How about the most common mistakes at the beginning?

Too many founders simply don’t understand what’s important and when. At the beginning, it’s only two things: talking to clients and building a product they love. Everything else is just a distraction. By the way, that’s why retention is so much more important than acquisition at the beginning. If you spend too much time on acquisition before having a great product that people keep using more and more, it’s a waste.

It’s a mistake to not sell to literally everyone around you. If you can’t convince your friends, your family, people you’ve worked with about how great your product is, how are you going to convince people who don’t care about you at all? It’s so, so important to convince those 10 people who are closest to you, they’re the ones who can become real ambassadors.

Mentally, it’s much easier to learn to sell to strangers than it is to learn to sell to your friends and family. If you’ve got 80% of your loved ones using your product, and aren’t sure how to expand that circle, the problem isn’t the product, it’s just your way of selling. That’s something you learn.

Too many people don’t throw themselves into doing early sales by hand. You should be talking to everyone around you, in the street, in the supermarket, in the Uber. Doing that constantly, day after day, it’s what teaches you to how to pitch, it gathers feedback, you’re seeing how people react. It’s a ton of effort that will eventually pay off over time.

Don’t underestimate the thrill of closing one sale every day. You can sit around daydreaming, forecasting how much you’ll sell by the end of the year, but I promise, that projection won’t be nearly as exciting as actually selling 1, 2, 3 things today, tomorrow, the next day. Those small steps you take at the beginning are what give you the excitement and the growing momentum that will eventually turn into a giant step.

Don’t do things that scale without having first mastered them by hand. For example, you want to send cold emails. The worst thing would be to start by sending out a massive cold email campaign. To get good at it, take 2 hours per day to write as many emails as you can, to as many people as you can, with the one rule being that you never write the same email twice. If you do that for 3 months, every day, you’re going to discover things you’d never find out if you just create a template and send it out, hoping to get lucky. Once you’ve taken in all those lessons, you can automate things, because you’ll have properly developed your instincts.

Don’t try to make it feel less crazy. So many people do stupid things at the beginning just so that other people don’t look at them weird. Like getting an office — why do you need it at the beginning? Just work from home. Getting an office should only come once not having an office is really creating problems, like when you’ve got 10 people on the team, all sitting around your kitchen table, and no one has the room they need to get things done. Then getting an office is a cool thing, it’s a big step — and it’s one you’re taking because it’s necessary, not to make yourself feel like you’ve got a real job.

DON’T GET INTERNS.

The more interns a startup has, the more likely it is to die fast. Interns are fine for big companies, because they’re a relic from when it took so much time to learn, when there was tons of knowledge inside the company that took a long time to learn. But in startups, everyone’s learning everything all the time. So sure, find junior employees, be open to finding a talented kid right out of high school who is excited about working for you. But treat them like what they are, an employee, who you expect to be great, to learn, to give to your company’s growth.

Don’t look for mentors, don’t look for advisors before you get to pre-market fit. When you’re a fast-growing company, when you’re scaling up, there’s value in finding smart advisors, people in the field who have experience with the questions you’re facing. But when you don’t have product-market fit, no one can tell you what is going to work! Anyone who claims they can be your advisor pre-product-market fit is full of it.

One last thing: Remember how important it is to create something that people love. It’s so much better to have 10, 20, 50 people who LOVE your product than 1,000 people who are like, “Meh.” Establish a real relationship with them, call them up, grab a drink with them, find out what they think is great in your product, what’s just ok, what they are looking for. Show them that you really care about who they are, their real needs. You need to build that small group of people who are super dedicated to your startup, who feel like they’re in the exciting new club that everyone’s going to want to be in.

That’s how you build people’s confidence in you, how you build your confidence in yourself. And that confidence is an absolutely necessary part of being an entrepreneur.

I wrote about startup ideas last week. But there’s the other side of that issue, another question I get a lot: How do I know when my startup idea has failed?

There’s no single answer to that. But what I can say is that you should be in a situation where you’re guided by your own intensity.

One problem lots of people have is that they don’t use their time intensely enough. The worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to waste your time, not putting a maximum of energy into what you’re doing.

If you do that, you end up with a lot of regrets, because you’ll never really know if things didn’t work because it was impossible, or simply because you didn’t put the needed effort into it.

Once you’re dedicated to real intensity, keep 3 things in mind:

• Stop listening to others. Nobody out there can tell you what to do, so avoid the advisors, avoid the mentors, avoid me, everybody. The only thing you should be doing is trying, trying, trying more.
• Put yourself in danger. If you don’t, you won’t really know. If you try to keep your day job and build a startup on the side, you’re not going to find out the truth about an idea’s potential. Don’t try to raise money before you go full-time on a project, it doesn’t work. Be intense, and the decision will become your own, it’ll become obvious.
• Don’t become the prisoner of your own story. Never lie about how successful your startup is with the people you love. Why? Because a horrible thing happens to an entrepreneur when you lie to the people who are closest to you (your partner, your parents, your best friend, whoever: you feel the need to live up to the lie.

That last one is super, super important. Way too many entrepreneurs trap themselves in an impossible world where they aren’t able to tell anyone the truth of what they’re going through. If you start lying to the people you love, you end up in situations that leads to super bad results — mental breakdowns, divorce, estrangement, you name it; when they find out it’s all been a lie, it’s going to be so, so horrible.

Plus, getting back to the question of knowing when an idea has failed, if you don’t follow that rule you’ll be in a situation where you can’t stop — because stopping doesn’t just mean that the business didn’t work, it means that you’re a liar who built up this entire fake world.

So the best thing to do, the best way to protect yourself and to let yourself see clearly, is to avoid putting yourself in that prison of false expectations.

Find people you can really trust, people you can talk to about just how bad things are, how nothing’s working. And make sure that those people know it’s not their job to tell you to stop; you’ll be the one to decide that, you’re the only one who can really know.

Entrepreneurship is a test, in so many ways, with so many steps. It tests how well you know yourself; it tests how willing you are to learn; it tests how you’re able to make people believe, how you’re able to manage them; if things go well, it tests your ability to handle success, to stay a normal person, to not believe the stories being told in the media about how great you are.

All those tests can be failed in different ways. And you actually have to accept that you will fail at some of them, that it’s normal not to be perfect at every step.

That’s why it’s so important to set up the world around you in a way that lets you clearly see the situation, one where you can be the one who decides whether you keep going or whether you stop. Building that confidence in your own ability to decide is so much better than tracking a KPI or listening to a mentor or anything like that.

And don’t forget, it’s always good to have another startup idea that you’d really like to do too. If you always have a Plan B in mind, something else really cool that you’d love to build, it’s much easier to say, “Time to kill Plan A.” That’s a mental place where you can take the big risks that are necessary, the risks that really put your business in danger, but that also put it in a position to create something super ambitious, something absolutely incredible.

Lots of entrepreneurs think the idea is the most important part of the startup. But if you look at all the startup content out there, you see everyone saying that ideas have no value. So why do people still think that being an entrepreneur is all about thinking up ideas?

I think it comes down to the fact that people don’t understand just how dynamic the process of getting ideas is. An idea isn’t just something that comes to you in some “Eureka!” moment. You aren’t just walking along in a garden and suddenly, BAM! You get the idea that will change the world. Pop culture doesn’t help either, since it’s always giving us this image of the entrepreneur who has an idea and transforms it into a success almost overnight.

The reality is that most people don’t realize how valuable their idea is until it becomes something really big. Never forget the story about how the founders of Google came this close to selling Google to Yahoo for $1M. And also don’t forget that Yahoo said, “No, that’s too much.”

Google, one of the largest companies that the world has ever seen, was founded by two guys who didn’t understand how massive it could become.

So getting an idea for a startup is a dynamic process, in the sense that you have to keep confronting your vision of the world with reality. Reality is what will keep giving you constant feedback.

But let’s not stop there. There are other issues with how most people think about getting startup ideas. One is the fact that you don’t get one great idea and that’s it. Ideas are alive, just like companies. When you launch a project and work on it, you put it into the world, the world gives you feedback, and then there will be new ideas that help you shape the company. The key there is how you listen to and manage that feedback.

Another thing people get wrong is thinking that the future is a passive process. The future doesn’t exist yet, and most of the things we have around us came into being thanks to someone at some point applying real force.

That’s why instead of talking about ideas, we should be talking about decisions. A company is not about one giant decision. Building a company is about making thousands and thousands of decisions and hoping that each one takes you closer to your vision.

It means the most important thing is to test any idea you have as soon as possible. Don’t worry about competition — there are very, very few startups in markets where competition really matters. It takes such a long time before you’re big enough for competition to have an impact, which means lots of startups die not because of competition, but because of mistakes they make because they’re watching what the competition is doing. Looking at your competition as startup is like looking at someone’s Instagram and thinking that’s what their life is really like.

As you test ideas, remember that every startup can exist, it’s a question of how difficult they are to build. If your idea is obvious and linked to an existing market, it’s easier. If your idea isn’t obvious and the market doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean the startup can’t work, it just means that the amount of effort and the incredible execution required could mean that it doesn’t make sense to spend your time that way.

That’s why one of the good ways to choose an idea is by starting with something you yourself want. If you solve a problem for yourself, and there are enough of you in the world, then your startup can be a success.

The real question is how honest you are with yourself — way too many entrepreneurs lie to themselves. They lie to themselves about the quality they want, they lie to themselves about whether or not they’re the right person to build it, they lie to themselves about whether they’re ready to pay the price that it’s going to take to build what they have in mind.

Simple example: I’ve had so many people come to me and say, “Oh, I have this idea, I’m looking for a developer now.”

“Ok, do you have money to pay them?”

“No, I don’t have any money.”

“Ok, are you ready to give that person a significant portion of your company?”

“No, I mean, it’s my idea!”

And that’s how it always goes with people who haven’t understood that the idea doesn’t have value, only the execution has value.

Think about it this way: If I get a room of 100 people together and give them the recipe and ingredients to make a chocolate cake, there’s one person who’s going to make a chocolate cake that’s better than all the others. And if I had 20 rooms of people like that, all around the world, and I took all the winners and put them together in a room, and did the same thing again, someone’s going to have the best cake. That’s the reality in startups. It’s not a question of whether I choose to make a chocolate cake, or a tiramisu, or a pavlova — that’s just the idea. It’s all about the execution.

There’s no link between the idea and what you can build. There is a link between your market and the success you can have. Some markets are easier than others. If you want to build an airline, it’s going to be harder than building a breakfast cereal brand. But that’s not the question — the question is who are you, and how are you linked to what you’re building?

Most people don’t realize what it truly means to execute. They don’t realize that overnight successes don’t exist, that the work supporting what they see has been going on for years, even before the company was ever founded.

And in startup ideas, finding out a secret, that’s a huge thing. Peter Thiel talks about this, how a secret isn’t something confidential; instead, a secret is something that you know, it’s something that is true, and it’s something that no one around you realizes.

When no one else realizes that your secret is true, it can be hard. But you don’t need their approval to launch. What you need to do is identify your market and make progress with them.

That’s why entrepreneurs can’t waste time on talking, you have to be on the side of doing. Stop trying to convince people you’re right, and start doing a great job for users who love your product. Keep finding more and more of them.

By definition a startup is impossible. If it was easy, everyone would have already done it, the problem would already be solved. That’s why the whole key isn’t the idea — it’s the joining of the idea with founders who are able to do, who turn something from impossible into reality. People don’t talk enough about how important founder-idea fit is.

So here’s some concrete advice about startup ideas: Stop thinking about what you want to do, and start thinking about who you want to do it with. If you really answer honestly, that will reduce the number of ideas you could possibly work on.

It’s kind of like with babies — you don’t pick the baby you want, you pick the person you want to have a baby with. You don’t say, “Oh, I want a baby with green eyes,” and then figure out whose genetics will give you that baby. You say, “I want to be with this person, and I want to have a baby with them.” And thank god, it’d be so weird if you did it the other way around. Looking at yourself, understanding yourself, understanding your cofounder, is so much more important than choosing what to do. What you’re doing is going to change, but the people you do it with don’t change.

Once you have all that, the idea can become pretty obvious. I’m with these people that I love, and we all want to do X. As you start doing things, the idea will evolve. It’ll get more complicated. You can’t imagine how complicated it will get. The best companies I’ve worked with all started like that, with entrepreneurs doing something that they didn’t realize was impossible, and then solving problems as they go along. It’s normal — at the beginning, you don’t see the whole mountain you’ve got to climb, you just see the little step that’s right in front of you. As you keep going, you get stronger, you have more resources, a bigger team, you can start to handle more complexity. And people on the outside will still think that you just woke up one day and turned an idea into an overnight success.

When it comes to ideas, don’t have too much faith in yourself. You don’t have superpowers, your perception of reality is just your perception. It’s not reality. Test ideas, test lots of ideas. People are going to react in ways you don’t expect. Do stupid things — people never put enough intensity into doing stupid things.

You know how you’ll think, “Hey, it’d be really cool if ____________.” The thing is, people talk about that stuff a lot, and people around them are like, “No, that’ll never work, why would you do that?” People’s standard mode is to refuse new ideas.

And that’s normal, because the majority of new ideas are bad. No matter how smart you are, the probability that you’ll come up with an actually good new idea is very low. The real difference between creative people and non-creative people is that creative people try out stupid ideas all the time.

Most of the things that a great chef makes aren’t really good, and they never make it to your plate. They spend their day combining thousands of things that nobody would think could work together — and most of the time they don’t! But those failures are exactly how they find amazing combinations that nobody would have dreamed of.

Inspiration isn’t just sitting down, thinking deeply, and then something magical happens. It doesn’t work like that. Great chefs try disgusting things all the time. Great entrepreneurs have to do the same kind of testing.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t about having one idea. It’s about having something you want to change, a field you want to revolutionize, because you like it, because it makes sense that you go tackle challenges in that field. And then it’s about trying as many stupid ideas as possible, with enough intensity, until something works.

How many times can you be wrong? It’s infinite. But you only need to be right a few times to make something that really matters. Most startups don’t meet their true potential because they don’t try enough stupid things.

Startups are hard because good ideas fail all the time. There are so many ideas that sound like they’ll make great businesses, and they fail because we’re wrong. They fail because the entrepreneur doesn’t find the right way to execute, or because something happens that could just be luck, or it could be something nobody had understood before.

Startups are about doing, not thinking.

Robert Greene published The 48 Laws of Power. Let’s be clear — if you follow all of them, you will wind up in prison. (Come to think of it, that might be why the book is so popular with… prisoners ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

Looking at it today, it’s clear that Greene’s book is really all about how power used to be. Historically, power was in the hands of very few people, and it was entirely permission-based. If you wanted power, at some point, you’d need the authorization of someone who had the backing of either 1) an army or 2) a religion (with an army ;).

Horses, daggers, that kind of thing.

The British monarchy offers a useful contrast between tradition and personal power. Showing respect to a constitutional monarch does not mean that the monarch can jail you for jumping the queue for tea at Buckingham Palace, let alone have you beheaded. Ceremonial deference is not the same as absolute power.

It isn’t just the internet that changed how things work, but the internet definitely made everything move faster and further from those old power structures. And the internet did invent something new: permission-less leverage, which has taken over for power. Today, if you want to build something, you don’t need anyone’s permission. People still try to act like gatekeepers or experts, or try to be “the guy you need to know”, but it’s not real — the internet undid all that, just by being open to anyone and everyone.

So when we talk about “power” today, what we really mean is “leverage”. Leverage is the ability to get more for your efforts than the energy you put in. Leverage is how you can get a bigger-than-hoped return on investment on your efforts.

Take Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn’t have power — he has leverage. All it takes is for his users to get angry, to get organized and demand something, and he’ll apologize. No king with power ever apologized; but if you’re one of the new masters of the universe, and what you have is leverage, you apologize - a lot.

This goes back to a theory of equality that we’ve been working on for centuries, where you’re judged for what you do, not for who you are. Democracy isn’t a voting system, it’s a state of mind. It’s about believing that at the end of the day, everybody here is equal to one another, that we don’t have to bow down to anyone.

So let’s go through a few of Greene’s rules to see why he didn’t understand how the world was changing:

1. Never outshine the master. We still tend to think this way in our personal lives. We can be awed by a celebrity or a powerful person. But personal admiration does not automatically move a business forward. Economic power has already moved through different paradigms.

Take what it was like to be the head of a TV channel or a movie studio in the 1960s. You were the one people had to please. You decided who was on at what time, you decided whose career went up and whose went down. But then in the 1980s we started to get more channels, and that power started to spread out — people would zap away if they didn’t like what was on. Then YouTube arrived, and entertainment became totally permission-less.

Now you don’t need to suck up to anyone to move up the ladder. The people who are on top of the business world today know that there will be fresher, younger challengers coming to knock them off (they’ve even found a way to make that work for them — they become investors ;) But they know they can only do so much. They can make some recommendations and try to help out people they like, but success today is an ACTIVE process. If the people don’t like what they’re offered, they aren’t going to buy it. It’s like Snoop said, “ I can’t make you a star. ”

2. Never put too much trust in your friends, and learn to use your enemies. Nobody today should be thinking about “enemies”, at the most you’ve got competitors. If you’re treating competitors like enemies, you’re going to waste a lot of time and energy. And really, you shouldn’t be thinking about competitors at all.

Before, competition was real because distribution wasn’t liquid. It was hard to reach out and talk to customers, so it was easier to steal them from your competitors than to go find new ones. But today, the cost of distribution is so low that trying to get new customers by convincing them to leave your competitors is a loser’s game. Just build your own market, widen your funnel, and make your own rules. Having friends you trust can only help in that process :)

3. So much depends on your reputation — guard it with your life. Donald Trump won the US presidency in 2016, I don’t think this one stands anymore. Trump is the first president of the Entrepreneurial Age, and that should scare you. I’m not going to tell you that everything’s better in the Entrepreneurial Age, some things are worse. But we need to understand what’s happening here.

Trump revealed that there was a hidden assumption in the idea of reputation, namely that it was determined by very few people. If you were a businessman in the 19th century, and you wanted to start a factory, there were what, 25, maybe 50 people in the world you could ask for the money to get started? Then, reputation mattered. But today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who you can talk to.

That’s why Trump doesn’t care about his reputation. The establishment can hate him, they don’t have the power to decide anymore. He realized that what matters is having people who love him SO MUCH and having others who hate him SO MUCH.

Today it’s not about your reputation — it’s all about sincerity. That’s what so many people don’t realize about Trump, even when he’s lying (so most of the time), he actually, truly, sincerely believes what he’s saying. And people love nothing more than someone whose sincerity pushes them to take a super-high degree of personal risk.

4. Know who you’re dealing with, and don’t offend the wrong person. We’re in similar territory here — you can offend tons of people today, so long as there are just as many or more people who love what you’re saying.

5. Avoid stepping into a great man’s shoes. Clearly untrue today — the higher you aim, the easier it is for people to get behind you. Revolut set out to bring down the big banks, institutions that have been around for hundreds of years. When you do that, it doesn’t matter if the product isn’t quite there, people come along because they love the mission. So aim high and be clear about who you’re going after.

Ok, if you can’t follow Greene’s book, what can you do? What is leverage today?

Leverage is about producing something that works even while you’re sleeping, so that you get more and more out of what you put in. It’s about building a machine that lets you do less work as time goes on, not more.

The first source of leverage is money. In periods of abundant capital, money behaves like a commodity. That doesn’t mean everyone gets it. Investment can become concentrated: if no one wants to invest in you, nothing happens, but once people want in, everyone may follow and offer more than you need. Capital conditions change. The lasting lesson is to understand that crowd behavior instead of assuming funding will always be available.

And then it's like, what are we gonna do with all this watermelon and ice cream and spaceships?

The second leverage is media. Today, media falls into two categories: authorized and unauthorized. If you want to get an article into the Financial Times, you need to know the right people. But you could just go onto YouTube and do a great video that gets millions of views — and you don’t need to know anyone to do that. There’s a huge amount of permission-less media today, and way too many entrepreneurs underestimate how they can use it. I never get why so many of them are obsessed with getting traditional press coverage, which can only help if your audience is very traditional. For most startups, they’d do better to stay away from the press and publish more and better content.

The third big leverage is code. In today’s permission-less time, code is one tool that is absolutely scalable. When people ask me if they need to learn to code to launch their startup, they need to realize a subtle difference between two questions:

• Do I need to learn to code to launch my startup? No.
• Do I need to learn to code to build an amazing startup? Yes.

There’s no need to wait, because you can learn a ton about entrepreneurship in a startup where you don’t know how to code. But it’s also true that because code is so important today, an amazing startup will probably grow out of founders who know how to leverage their coding skills before needing to raise funds to hire more engineers or anything like that.

So go do that ;)

Cap table problems are one of the worst problems you can have as an entrepreneur. Mess up your product, you can fix it. Mess up your launch, you can launch again. Mess up with the press, you can make sure the next article is better. Lots of things in startups are actually pretty fail-resistant.

But if you screw up your cap table, it’s incredibly hard to fix it. That’s because the cap table is linked to two key things: emotions and taxes.

Every entrepreneur learns the hard way that once things are moving, you can’t freely exchange shares — even among yourselves as cofounders. No matter where you live, the government believes there’s a value to your shares, and it isn’t zero.

So if you decide at some point that someone received too few shares, or someone has too many shares, it can be very hard to balance things out. Plus, as soon as you have an investor in your cap table, you’ll have what’s known as a market price for the shares.

(By the way, before we get started, if you do get into trouble, get a good lawyer. When it comes to the cap table, a good lawyer is like a good doctor — they can’t be replaced by a quick Google search. If you get cancer, go see a doctor. If you have a cap table problem, go see a lawyer.)

But instead of having problems, try to get things right from the beginning.

Phase 1: Co-Founders

We’re pretty convinced there’s only one good way to split equity among cofounders: equally. There are lots of good reasons not to do that. But if those reasons make sense, it actually means the cofounding team doesn’t make sense. You can’t solve problems in the cofounding team by creating an unequal cap table.

Your founding team should be super strong from the beginning. You split equity equally because you think everyone will have equal value over time. That’s the basis for a great team.

I promise, if you have a cofounder who has 70% because it’s their idea, and the two other cofounders have 15% each, at some point people are going to regret their decision. Remember, the cap table is very emotional. When you have a cofounder who wakes up and feels angry about how much they have, they’ll start doing everything they can to tank the company (sometimes even without knowing that they’re doing it).

You, watching them at work, day, after day, after day…

In fact, if you have a cofounder who you don’t want to split equity with 50/50, you’d be better off as a solo founder. Sure, statistically solo founders have a lower chance of success than multi-founder teams. But solo founders are better than unequal cap tables where the cofounders don’t respect each other as equals.

The flip side of this is that if you give equal ownership to someone who doesn’t deserve it, that will kill your startup too. Equal ownership isn’t a magical formula. It’s a principle that forces you to face any mistakes you might be making in your cofounding team.

Who you’re building with is much more important than what you’re building. Being obsessed with an idea causes people to make horrible cofounder decisions. What you’re building will change. But the people you’re building with are going to be there until the end. And if you do get into a founder split, it’s like a divorce times ten. It has all the emotional aspects of a divorce, but without any shared intimacy that can possibly help you.

Phase 2: Your First Investor

The longer you wait for an investor, the higher quality investor you’ll find. The more you achieve without them, the better position you’re in. You’ve been on the market for a month? You’ll have a pretty average level investor. You’ve been out there for a year? The investor quality will be higher.

At the end of the day, you’re going to lose 20–25% of your business in your first round. So you can lose that 25% to a crappy angel investor who’s trying to optimize their taxes, or you can lose it to a seasoned investor who actually knows how to add value to your business. On paper, it’s the same 25%. But the effect on your long-term success is huge.

It comes down to this: don’t let jerks into your cap table.

Once they’re inside, they do what they want.

The good thing about jerks is that they don’t really hide it. Nice people sometimes hide how nice they are, but jerks are pretty open about it. You know it when you first meet them. But as an entrepreneur, you can lie to yourself, thinking it’s more important to have the money than to worry about them being a jerk. It’s not.

In startups, you never need the money. If you run out of money, operate without it. Need to pay rent? Go live with a friend. Need money for food? Eat at your parents’ house. If you don’t have any friends or parents, ok, you might be one of the few people who need to raise money. Mostly though it’s a comfort and ego thing: we all want to tell people we’re successful, and raising money is a great way to be able to do that.

That idea sticks because we read lots of articles about how much someone raised, but not much about who they raised it from. The total is an easy metric, but you have to look beyond the amount.

Plus, after you raise money, you spend money. Now you’ve got a big cash burn that becomes a serious liability. If you have a bad investor, they’ll make your life hell because of that burn.

The easiest way to avoid problems? Founders need to actually ask people about their potential investor. Call 5 people who took money from them. Ask how things went. But so few entrepreneurs do that, mostly because they’re scared of hearing the answer they already know in their heart.

Phase 3: Time Goes On

If you screw up your cap table early, you’ll never get good people on board later on. Why? Because good people never want to be involved with bad people.

One of the secret reasons that investors have for saying “No” to a deal, which they’ll never actually admit to you, is that they don’t want to do a deal with the jerks you already have in the cap table. It’s not a personal thing — it’s that a good investor doesn’t want to validate bad investors by being associated with them. It would send the wrong signal for them personally. So even if they like the project or the entrepreneurs, they can’t do the deal.

An entrepreneur might try to counterbalance a bad investor legally, trying to use a shareholder agreement to keep the bad investor from having any real influence. But here’s another secret: those legal documents have no value.

If a bad investor wants to call you three times per day, there’s no document that will stop them. (And by the way, the worse someone is as a person/investor, the better they are at doing exactly that kind of thing. Wasting their time being annoying and going after others is one of the big characteristics of bad people.) Good people spend time on good things; bad people’s only goal is to go after others.

Bringing an investor into your cap table isn’t just a money thing. It’s a DNA thing. They’ll have a huge influence on who’s whispering in your ear. Founders always think they’re strong enough to make their own decisions. But nobody is strong enough to not be influenced by what the people around you are saying all day long.

If you have people affecting your company DNA who are less ambitious than you, you’ll become less ambitious. And bad investors are always less ambitious than entrepreneurs.

The quality of investors should always win out over money, valuation, anything. That’s why great investors get a discount when they invest, because everyone knows that they’re great and that they’ll positively impact the value of the company.

(Possible) Phase 4: Oops

What happens when you made a mistake in Phases 1–3?

If you have someone around who shouldn’t be there, cleaning your cap table has to be a priority. When you’re raising a new round, find a way to get the bad element out. Clean the cap table with every round. Don’t be cheap, either — give them a good deal. It was your mistake, it’s your responsibility to clean it up properly.

When capital is abundant, founders can start treating money as cheap and forget the responsibility that comes with accepting it.

And it’s true that before you sign a deal, you can be harsh, you can be cocky, you can do what you want. But as soon as you’ve made the deal, you have to respect whoever invested. They chose to give you money, which means they aren’t giving that money to someone else. Respect that. Don’t take money from someone, knowing it’s a bad idea, and then act like it’s their fault that they’re bad.

Like my mom always said, “Never hurt anything you can’t kill.” (My mom’s awesome.) Once an investor’s in your cap table, you can’t kill them. So don’t think that you can hurt them, either.

It’s usually a surprise.

There are different kinds of business model. For a startup, the goal is a business that is scalable, profitable and repeatable.

Scalable : Every new user that you add as you grow costs you less.

Profitable : Duh. Gotta pay the rent.

Repeatable : Once you’ve done it here, you can do it there.

As an entrepreneur, you could find a business model that doesn’t follow all of those rules but that works very well. It just won’t be a startup. For example, a service company can be profitable, and it might even be repeatable. But it won’t be scalable, because each new client that you find will cost you the same amount of effort, or even cost you more.

Most 20th century businesses weren’t very scalable: as they got bigger, they burned more cash.

Startups, the ones searching for their scalable-profitable-repeatable business model, are usually looking for something innovative, a model that takes some part of what the business does and does it differently than anybody would have done before.

If you want a great example of this, watch The Founder. The story of how McDonald’s became huge isn’t really a question of making food. McDonald’s isn’t a food business — it’s a real estate business. That conceptual leap is how Ray Kroc went from a business model that was difficult to scale to one that could be scaled quickly across the globe. He found that something different that no one else in the fast food business was thinking about. After that, it was just a question of having the right brand (seriously, go watch the movie).

What goes into a business model? 6 things.

• The value proposition : What you’re offering, to whom, and how — basically, what are you doing?
• Clients : Who are they? What are their demographics?
• Distribution : How are you connecting the value proposition to the clients?
• Customer service : How do you provide it?
• Partnerships : What kind of partner do you want/need, and how do they change your business?
• Resources : What is needed (materials, talent, etc.) to make your business model viable?

At the beginning, you don’t have all of the answers — that’s why a startup is “searching” for the business model. And that’s why you need to understand a certain fact about startups:

A startup is an organization that is constantly failing, held together only by the determination and faith of its founders, until it either finds success that goes beyond anything those founders could have planned, or it dies.

As soon as things start to take off, there are thousands of problems that arise. It’s easy (kind of) to sell to 50 people and take care of them. It’s hard to sell to 50,000, and nearly impossible to sell to 5,000,000. That’s why the #1 concern of any entrepreneur as things take off should be to strengthen every aspect of their business model.

If they don’t, the business dies. You wouldn’t believe the number of startups that build a good product, find product-market fit, and then get slaughtered by their growth because part of their business model isn’t strong enough. Look at how many startups raise a series A, or even a series B, and then fail. That’s not a problem of a bad idea, or a lack of fans, or anything else — at that stage, it’s a business model problem.

Missteps when navigating growth can be dangerous.

If that surprises you, you aren’t alone. It’s that way for a reason: most everything that the media publishes about startups is a lie (or at least missing so much of the story that it’s indistinguishable from a lie).

Most of the startups that you read about in TechCrunch have NO IDEA how they’re going to achieve the holy grail: scalable, profitable, repeatable. At the same time, entrepreneurs are good at storytelling, so the headlines that you read are “Startup.com raises $20M, plans to boost user growth”. You’ll never read, “Startup.com raises $20M; desperate search for business model continues”.

The problem, especially in Europe, is that those headlines can lead entrepreneurs down a bad path. They believe the stories that come out of Silicon Valley, that their investors will have the same outlook (and the same deep pockets) as a16z, that revenues will come later, let’s just focus on user growth.

But the vast majority of you who are reading this need to understand one thing: you don’t have 8 years to look for your business model like Google did. You need to be considering all 6 parts of the business model and work every day to strengthen them into something solid.

Realize something else: it’s very difficult to innovate on more than one part of the business model at a time. If you think, “I’m going to innovate on distribution and partnerships and resources, that will make me 3 times as strong when it works!”, you’re dead. Doing things differently just because you think, “Well, that’s how startups work!” is the wrong approach.

Startups don’t succeed because they do things differently. They succeed because they do things better.

And they don’t do things better because they reflected on all aspects of the problem and prudently decided on the best course of action. Instead they discovered — somehow, someway — a secret. A secret is something that no one else believes, even when you tell it to them. A real secret takes time for people to accept as true, and by then the startup is a huge success.

Don’t worry about people finding out — if it’s a real secret, they won’t believe it anyway.

What was Google’s secret back in the late ‘90s? That the number of websites was going to explode exponentially. No one else believed that. What was Zuckerberg’s secret with Facebook? That people aren’t really worried about keeping their private life private. People have been ranting about privacy for years, but Facebook became a global business and the ironically named Secret is dead.

Entrepreneurs are constantly living in the future in their everyday lives. That means that their business model can’t simply fit a predetermined pattern. You discover it as you’re building it, iterating fast every day.

Star of Service taught me how effective counterintuitive execution can be. The team did things that looked wrong by conventional management standards, yet made them work.

We’ve moved from a linear economy where things were predictable to an exponential future. That means all that time people spend designing a business plan or a business model isn’t very useful. You could only design a business model when things followed certain patterns.

“Pfft, people like to browse around, they like the feel of a book in their hand! It’ll never work.” Yeah ok lol.

The best businesses today don’t follow any patterns. They’re a couple of people in a room, doing everything “wrong”, and finding something that people love. That’s a massive paradigm shift: people used to plan and allocate assets for a future that they could predict. But now your only hope to predict the future is by actively building it yourself.

That means taking much bigger risks, because the rewards are also much bigger. If you are going to build a startup, it’s because you want to take big risks and rule the world.

It was never like that before. If you were a high achiever in the 1960s, you did great in school, you felt that there were opportunities, you wanted to make an impact, you would go work in a big company. If it was in medicine, energy, space, you would apply to the biggest company around because that was the best way to have a big impact.

Why? Because starting a business back then — and even up until not so long ago — was extremely expensive. Even back in 1995, when the internet was young, starting a business could cost you millions. Open source wasn’t a thing, all the tech was licensed, infrastructure was expensive. In that world, being employed by a big corporation was the best way to move up the ladder.

Then, overnight, the world changed.

The explosion of the internet changed everything. During the internet’s first two decades, the cost of starting a new business has fallen every single month. What used to cost millions now costs a few thousand. If you launch a startup now with $10,000, you just might feel a little too comfortable.

Guess which one is the entrepreneur who had no money when they started?

As the cost of doing has gone down, the cost of learning has gone down, too. That’s great news because entrepreneurs have to keep learning — every day will bring you a new challenge. In 1995, if you wanted to learn a new programming language, it was painful. You had to try very hard to find the resources that you needed. The information might not have even been online yet, you might have needed to find the right library with the right books. Maybe that wasn’t so bad if you lived in London or Boston, but what about all those people who lived in places without big libraries?

Now though the distance between a question and its answer has disappeared. With a smartphone, you can find out almost anything in seconds. We used to think that you had to pay for knowledge: pay for an education at a prestigious school, pay for an hour with a consultant or a lawyer, pay for attending a conference. But paying for knowledge, paying for expertise, that’s over. Experts were good at explaining how the world was. But they weren’t any good at explaining how the world will be. That future-oriented view is the big game today. And the players are entrepreneurs.

That’s why the best entrepreneurs today don’t waste any time before learning — they go out and get freely available knowledge for themselves. And they do it fast.

Realize that the old value chain has been destroyed. The value chain during the industrial age was easy. It started with an idea, and that defined your ability as an entrepreneur. Ideas were rare in the industrial age, because knowledge wasn’t fluid. Having an idea set you apart from everyone else, all of those people who hadn’t thought of that idea. Then you needed capital, because usually your idea needed a lot of money before it could become a reality. Then you went to find the factory that would build your idea in exchange for the money you raised. Once the factory finished the product, you found distributors. If it all went well, customers were waiting at the distributors’ doors and they bought the product. You were a genius!

In the 21st century, that’s not how it works. The entrepreneur now is in direct contact with the end customer. Instead of

idea → money → factory → distributor → customer

It’s now

idea → customer.

You can quickly build a website to test and sell your idea before it even exists. If the market is there, you build it. But you don’t build anything without seeing that there is a real need for it (at least, you shouldn’t).

So today go-to-market is the first step that you have to succeed at, because EVERYONE has an idea now. A fluid knowledge market = a fluid idea market. You thought of it? Great, so did 18,000 other people. Ideas are a commodity. When an entrepreneur comes to me and says, “I’ve got a great idea,” my response is, “Only one? What’s the matter with you?” Ideas are like love, they’re all around us ;)

Ok, sure…but can you turn it into a business?

Instead of ideas competing for capital, you have capital that’s competing for the best market. If you can show traction in your product, there’s lots of money that follows. And that means money is becoming a commodity as well. Oh, by the way, over decades China has turned factory production into a commodity. And when you can talk directly to customers, distribution becomes a commodity. Every step in that old value chain has become a commodity!

What does it all mean? In our world, the cheapest, fastest, most direct way to have an impact is to launch a startup.

If that interests you, you need to understand what startups are. Their first characteristic is that they’re counterintuitive. That’s why the worst thing you can do is try to evaluate a startup idea. Instead, you have to experiment. Since reaching customers is direct, easy and cheap, you have an enormous edge if you test crazy things with those customers.

(I’ve always been surprised at how little energy some people put into finding the idea they think they’ll be working on for the next ten years. I’ll ask, “Why are you doing this?” “Well, one day I had an idea, it was pretty good, so I decided to do it.” Think about if people did that with relationships. Imagine going on Tinder, but you only get one swipe. And then it’s done, boom, babies, vacations, everything, you dedicate your life to them. 😳 😳 )

You need to test lots of ideas to find the right one. It’s not “one idea → one company” anymore. It’s “tons of ideas + testing them with real people → one startup”. The stranger an idea is, one that you’d never have believed just by thinking about it, the better chance it has of becoming a really huge disruptive force.

Take Facebook, Google, Airbnb. There’s no way that a site that lets you find out what your college friends are doing on Friday night is going to have 2 billion users. In chat rooms in the 90s, the person who said, “There’s these guys who are gonna crawl all the websites to keep the results in one place”, just got laughed at. And no one is ever going to let strangers come and stay in their home.

Peter Thiel described it really well. There are things that look like good ideas, and things that look like bad ideas. Good ideas are built by big companies, because it makes sense — and even if it doesn’t work, they don’t look dumb, because everyone thought it was a good idea.

PG recalls PT

Startups build bad ideas that might turn out to be INCREDIBLE. Any good idea that looks bad is the real sweet spot for startups. Look for things that are counterintuitive, look for problems. You’re more likely to find a crazy solution when you start from a real problem than to just imagine a solution and then go looking for the problem it fixes.

But don’t get it confused: all of those things make it easier to start a business, but running a startup is still extremely difficult. And it’s definitely not the best way to get rich — if you want to get rich, go work for an entrepreneur. The first 1000 employees at Facebook made more money than 80% of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And let’s just say that to be Employee #1000 at Facebook didn’t mean taking that big of a risk or being incredibly smart.

Instead, be an entrepreneur because you’re really looking to have an impact. And if that’s your ambition, you should take on the biggest level of risk possible. In today’s business world, you don’t have to mortgage your house or put your family into a bad situation in order to take a big risk. You don’t need to take out a personal loan or anything like that. So whatever you do, do it big.

Don’t wait, either. The only thing that gives you the experience needed to be an entrepreneur is being an entrepreneur. Start as soon as you can. Youth is a huge asset in our world. Things are moving so fast that the older you are, the more confused you feel. Don’t worry about not knowing anything — ignorance really is bliss. Entrepreneurs have to be so completely focused on what they’re doing, that it can be good if you don’t know how bad things can get.

Plus, when you know nothing, you can learn anything. Having an incredible learning curve is the most important thing. People look at successful entrepreneurs, or anyone who’s successful really, and think that they were born that way, that a teenage Mark Zuckerberg was the same Mark Zuckerberg who later built a global company. But he wasn’t — he just accelerated his learning curve along the way. Everybody has their own invisible learning curve — an entrepreneur has to do everything they can to make their curve go as steep as possible, as fast as possible.

It’s not what he knew then. It’s what he learned as time went on.

Again, remember one thing. In an exponential world, the best way to predict the future is to build it yourself. In the end, doing that is way less risky than letting others build it for you.

I was once talking to an entrepreneur who had designed a label for their product. It was ugly. I told them so. And they said, “But everyone I’ve asked told me it’s good!” And I’m sure they did, because everyone lies.

They don’t do it because they’re bad or trying to hurt you. They lie for lots of reasons, even without realizing they’re doing it. Most of their lies come from a good place. But the effect is always the same: your startup dies.

So this time, we took that label and showed it to three random people who happened to be nearby that day. We didn’t say it was the entrepreneur’s product. Instead we said it was something we had just bought, and we wanted their feedback. Basically, we took away any reason for them to lie. The label became neutral, it wasn’t part of the entrepreneur sitting in front of them. So they told the truth, every single one: “Oh, that’s really ugly.”

The best feedback will come from people who don't care about you.

Again, the people that entrepreneur asked before weren’t trying to hurt them or their business. If anything, they wanted to avoid hurting them. But the result was the opposite.

A big part of the problem is that the first piece of advice any entrepreneur hears is, “Talk to your users!” (Even that should be the second piece of advice. First is “Get users!” ;)

With so many people telling you how important it is to talk to users, you’d think they’d say a little more about exactly how to do it. What does it mean to talk to them? What questions should you ask? What traps are out there for entrepreneurs trying to break into the European market?

Before you even start, understand what you’re looking for. You don’t need what people say, you need what they think. Concentrate on what they do while you’re talking to them, not on what they say. Use small chat to figure out their tells. If someone responds quickly when talking about little things, but then starts to hesitate a lot before talking about your product, they’re diving into their imagination to find a lie. That’s also why the best thing you can do is what I described above — don’t let them know it’s your product. That eliminates their biggest reason for lying. If you can’t do that, try to get them a little worked up. When people get excited and agitated, they start telling the truth.

Get 'em worked up and the truth comes out.

Next, pay attention to who you’re talking to. Just like your product has a target market, you need to have a target for interviews. Not everyone is interested in what you’re doing, and so not everyone is qualified to answer your questions. Don’t waste your time and don’t risk going down the wrong path by not filtering those people out.

When you actually start talking to people, remember a big difference between interviews in Europe vs. the US/UK: there is a culture of feedback in the US, and to some extent in the UK, that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Many native English speakers are used to closed, yes/no questions. You go down the list, they answer, and they actually answer about as honestly as they can.

But in Europe, people aren’t used to giving feedback. Closed questions don’t get you anywhere. Instead, you need open, interesting questions that push people toward a real debate. If you can push people into a debate, it was a good question. You’ll get more out of one great question that creates a real debate, and the follow-up questions that come from it, than by writing down a list of fifteen questions about your product.

When you ask an open question, only ask one thing at a time. If you try to ask two questions in one, people get confused, things get mixed up. Keep it straightforward. A good question naturally leads into other questions — don’t try to rush things.

One question at a time, and pay attention to the responses.

It’s always good to have a credibility test in your head. True story: a music startup needed feedback, so they went out to talk to people in the street. But they needed honesty from people who knew about music and cared about it. So they made up the name of a band and asked people what they thought about that group’s (fake) music. 80% of the people acted like they knew the (fake) group. Immediately, the startup knew to ignore everything else that those people said. They could focus instead on the 20% who didn’t try to act cool, and even more importantly on the 1% who said, “I’ve never heard of them, are they even real?” That 1% was the real target, and so not only were they the ones whose responses mattered, they were also the ones who told the truth.

Also, people everywhere love to look smart, so ask for advice. Don’t always follow that advice, of course — you can’t outsource product design or anything like that to anyone else. You’re the entrepreneur, that’s your job. But you can listen to that advice and use it to understand your problem, your target market and your product.

Getting good feedback through interviews is like creating an impressionist painting: it’s a blend of colors, some are hot, some cold, they all merge to give you an overall feeling. It’s not a realist painting that tries to precisely record a moment in time. So take good notes, but notes that do three things:

• Describe: if you see something that’s out of the ordinary, write it down
• Infer: use your observations to make assumptions
• Evaluate: try to build a theory, which you’ll then be able to test

This might all seem complicated and hard. But there’s good news: you need to do it A LOT. And anything that you do a lot, you’ll get better and better at it. Interviewing people about your startup should be a reflex, something you do anywhere, everywhere, at all times. It needs to just be a part of your daily life.

And it should be part of your employees’ daily lives, too. Make sure your employees learn how to interview, how to judge feedback and how to deal with honest feedback. There’s nothing worse than an employee who starts to panic because they get bad feedback from someone who isn’t the target — they’ll go off and start fighting the wrong battles. Getting good information and fighting the right battles should be part of their daily lives just like it is yours.

Bottom line, you need to talk to users all the time. When you’re doing it, one thought must be in your mind: “Everyone lies, and I must demand the truth.” Turn your users into innocent children, find ways to take away their social filters, give them space to truly reveal their thoughts. It’s uncomfortable — if every experience you have with users is just a warm, fuzzy feeling, you aren’t doing it right. Demand the truth, embrace the discomfort. Your startup will be better for it.

Noodle, don’t noodle…but know why you’re doing it today .

One of the things that always fascinates me is how people think and how they go from a bunch of assumptions to their actual conclusion. And that path is often influenced by a thinking pattern.

There are 3 dangerous patterns that I’ve spotted with employees and Entrepreneurs, the 3 sibling-assassins of good ideas in a startup:

History — Authority — Ideals

To detect them, look for sentences that start like this:

1. Remember when X…
2. Y said…
3. Because we’re Z…

Remember when X… Here you’re trying to find the example that validates what you’re doing. But the problem is that you and your company aren’t in the same situation. And what’s worse, I can find an example to justify pretty much any bad business decision. Your focus needs to be on your company and your situation today . Historical parallels are good to know, and to think about — but they can’t be used on their own to justify anything that you’re doing. Plus, remember that for most of you, your memory isn’t your most powerful tool ;)

Y said… We’ve all read the biography of Steve Jobs, and Marc Andreessen gives great talks, and Paul Graham is one of our favorite authors. But this gets into the same question: do you use their knowledge as part of an active, flowing thought process? Or are you just using it to justify your decision? The first is good, the second is death.

The funny thing is that lots of people in Europe are famous for their critical minds. But taking everything for granted is just as stupid as taking nothing for granted. You need to exercise your judgement and build your confidence.

Because we’re Z… Everyone has a vision for their company. Elon Musk published Tesla’s masterplan . You need to know who you are. But don’t assume that who you are dictates what you do. If someone says, “Yeah, but we’re an investor, so we should…” I go into WARNING mode immediately. Like Sartre said, “existence precedes essence.”

History, Authority and Ideals should be part of you, but you can’t let them control you. And always remember that this is important not just for you, but it’s also something you need to enforce with all of your team members.

There’s an issue that’s been driving me insane. And nobody talks about it, even though it’s at the heart of a lot of discussions in startup land: discussions on bubbles, valuations, investors, jobs…

Here’s the fact: it’s an absolute DISGRACE that middle class retirement funds are being risked in the venture capital game, and the people who let it happen aren’t just playing with fire, they’re playing with dynamite covered in lighter fluid at a Benihana.

Just replace the nice chefs with bureaucrats.

Let’s go step-by-step.

Venture capital is a high-risk game fueled by people who are sophisticated investors (it basically means they’re professionals). Every venture investor is looking for the 1% of startups that provide all of their returns. The other 99% is lost money.

That isn’t a bad thing, but it means that returns tend to be concentrated. It means that a fund can easily — EASILY — lose everything. And that means that there are investors who do not, in any way, come out ahead in the end. Not every venture capitalist is Marc Andreessen, and if you invest in startups, you better understand that.

Compare that to public markets. Say you invest in a mutual fund on the NYSE that tracks the S&P 500. That fund follows the S&P 500 over time, and provides a relatively well-balanced return. If the economy is going well, it goes up. If the economy goes down, it goes down. There’s nobody to blame, nobody’s a huge winner, and nobody’s a huge loser (generally). It’s the exact opposite of venture investing.

And it’s the type of investing, combined with things like bonds, that makes sense for public funds. Public money is part of a trust, it isn’t looking for massive returns, it’s looking for a steady payout that can be calculated AND COUNTED ON.

Yet…after the 2008 crisis, the headlines took over. Money managers saw that venture players were making great returns, and they wanted in. After the 2008 crisis, hedge funds were out, and people were looking for the next promise of returns.

But here’s the thing. Hedge funds fell out of favor because the total returns weren’t the returns promised in the headlines. Public money in venture can run into the same wall.

Why? Public funds like the BPI in France aren’t going to have returns — because they’re run by bureaucrats, not by investors, and definitely not by entrepreneurs. The same thing is going on with pension funds as they fuel higher and higher valuations but that in the end aren’t going to have the money they’re supposed to pay out.

So what happens if your pension fund didn't find the winners?

And the people who are going to get screwed — people waiting on their pension or their social security payout — are ones who never even knew they were playing this game.

By the way, want a great reason why big public institutions like the BPI shouldn’t be doing anything with startups? It creates toxicity . I once read this sentence about a startup that raised millions in public money:

“To get out of the crisis, the startup is going to begin privileging revenues over subsidies.”

!!!!!

…

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How do companies that have been around for years get away with — evidently — never worrying about revenue? It’s because there are bureaucratic investors using public money that they don’t have to account for!

Of course, let’s be honest: lots of good companies use public money to survive and build great things! We see this every day. But too often that public money is like a drug — it gives you a quick, hard high, you feel great, but then you come crashing down. You realize that you didn’t actually create anything that was in your head while you were high, and now the only way forward is taking more of the drug. It doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen A LOT of the time.

There’s nothing wrong with running deficits as a startup. There’s nothing wrong with hunting for investments in order to grow. But there’s a lot of things wrong with paying yourself for years with public money working on a business that isn’t even trying to make a decent return.

And the politicians who talk about supporting young people, and cheer “jobs created” in startups, and then go off and protect corporate interests the rest of the day, and do it all using the tax dollars mainly paid by working families…I’ll stop there.

It’s a disgrace.

Who once was first shall be…first.

Startup-investor relationships need a David vs. Goliath moment

Liquidation preference is one of the most widely accepted and bizarre ideas in all of startup land. As a quick refresher, preferred stock with a liquidation preference is essentially a guarantee for investors. As opposed to common stock, it gives a bigger share of the pie to investors, and it means that founders and employees are sometimes left with very little in the event of a sale. That might seem strange, that the person who benefits most in the case of an exit is the investor who arrived a few months ago, instead of the people who have been working day and night for years, but that’s essentially what happens. In fact it’s so common that it’s rarely even discussed, but I’m here to tell you that it needs to change — and investors should be some of the first to realize it.

There are various reasons why investors need to take a different kind of preferred stock and founders need to stop giving out excessive preferred stock. And one of the biggest reasons has nothing to do with founders or investors. It has to do with employees, because in startups, the team is everything.

“As I look around, they don’t do it like my clique” Big Sean

The great employees that you need in a startup are rare. Many of them have been in startups before, and they’re becoming more and more sophisticated in their understanding of the industry. So when a large part of their compensation package is stock, they know that their common stock is truly valuable only so long as no one comes along grabbing for preferred shares.

As startups become the norm across our economy, all of the superficial perks that were once used to attract employees are losing their value. Having a foosball table, snacks, and a masseuse who comes to the office on Thursdays isn’t enough anymore. The only two things that make a difference are money and mission.

Only good compensation and a great mission make the best employees stay.

And even having a mission is losing its luster. Being a mission-driven startup is as common today as being a traditional corporation was forty years ago. Barriers to entry are so low that employees can even just leave and start their own company if they are looking for a different mission.

Like I said above, it’s all about the team, because execution is what makes a startup live. Ideas and capital are both commodities, and so it no longer makes sense for founders and investors to have the lion’s share with employees left fighting for scraps. The equity story for employees has to improve, and the startups that do this quickly are going to have a huge competitive advantage in the hiring landscape.

What does this mean for the various stakeholders in a company?

For founders, it means embracing transparency — part of your job is to talk to your employees about what goes on in board meetings, what goes on during fundraising negotiations. If equity is going to be a big part of your compensation packages, then you need to be honest about what those packages contain. You also need to defend your employees against those who would ask for too many rights. It’s your job to represent them with your board and to remember that without them there is no company. So keep your cap table clean — simple structure, as few special rights as possible, no funny clauses — and know that it’s better to have a lower valuation with a clean cap table than a higher valuation with no sense of equality and trust.

Too many founders lose touch with the intrinsic value of their company during the valuation game. The fear of missing the upside becomes a trap that ignores the real consequences of downsides for the team. And yes, a liquidation preference is a direct consequence of a “go big or go home” attitude. But that attitude shouldn’t necessarily be linked to the philosophy you have regarding fundraising terms. It’s fine to increase the level of risk within a company because that matches your ambitions as a founder and as a team. But it is a completely different story when you put everyone into a massive trap, when an 8/9-digit outcome isn’t a benefit for everyone because of a bad equity story. Aiming for the long term should guide you to build something clean at each step along the way.

For employees, it means pushing for a fair share that isn’t constantly eaten away at over time. You can’t ignore the risks taken by everyone else, but you shouldn’t act like you aren’t taking risks as well. Each day that you work for a startup is a day when you aren’t working on something else. Make sure that you’re upfront about why you’re there, both with the founders and with yourself.

And for investors, it’s simple: try to keep the cap table simple. I know it seems radical but maybe now is the moment to accept the fact that, if the power law is true, a liquidation preference is not the right tool for protecting against the downside. And even if the exit in any one case is not as big as anticipated or hoped for, having founders and employees getting a fair share of that smaller pie is what helps align founders, employees and investors over the long term. That’s healthy for the whole ecosystem. And yes, I’ve seen with my own eyes tier-one VCs, particularly in the US, giving up their liquidation preference for the benefit of the ecosystem.

Removing liquidation preferences would also change how valuations are negotiated. A headline valuation is not the same thing as an equal share of the proceeds.

Talking with Jean de La Rochebrochard from Kima Ventures, we played with a few scenarios for solving this dilemma:

• Giving preferred shares to Employees GOOD : easy to implement BAD : it is a bad alignment strategy between Founders & Employees
• Dividing a pool of shares between Founders & Employees with every round GOOD: maintains alignment between stakeholders BAD: a paperwork & tax nightmare; also creates very complicated outcome calculations for everyone
• Common stock only GOOD: Radical ;) BAD: needs an equity story that respects this over time; very hard if the company needs multiple rounds but can work for non-capital intensive companies

We don’t have the solution yet — but we see the problem, and the pressures of an employee-driven industry are just the beginning. Investors need to think about this as soon as possible.

There’s always been a huge tension with startups: do you launch locally or globally?

You hear both sides: you need to stay focused (local); you need to be ambitious (global); you have to move fast (local and global…).

One of the pieces of advice that comes out of that tension is to launch in a good market and see how it goes: in Europe, maybe that meant launching in the Netherlands or the UK, and then taking things from there.

I often joke about a nation that seems invisible to many people: Internet Nation.

What is Internet Nation? It’s the only nation with no border. It’s the nation where everyone speaks English (whether as a first, second, third, fourth language). It’s full of people who are young and ready to buy, people who see themselves as early adopters, people who like to try new things.

The good things with these citizens compared to the mainstream is that they are used to crappy products and not-really-ready betas…they get that it’s not perfect.

The useful thing is that almost every country has citizens of Internet Nation. Their concentration varies, but you should not mistake a national border for the edge of your audience. American, French, Italian or otherwise, these people can be found around the world.

So who should launch in Internet Nation? Not every company is compatible with Internet Nation, but there is an Internet Nation-compatible path for every new company. Sure, some products are definitely better than others. Virtual products (SaaS, social, etc.) may seem easier than physical products, but that doesn’t mean that a hardware startup can’t take advantage of this market. Just look at how Kickstarter gets backers coming from around the world…

Hardware, software…you’re looking for fans, no matter where they come from

Afrostream offered a historical example of a product aimed directly at Internet Nation. It streamed films to a connected international audience with a shared sense of Black identity. Its organizing idea was Black cinema rather than French or American cinema, and its business decisions followed that idea.

If Internet Nation seems right for you, commit to it. I often see founders trying to serve that audience while giving equal attention to a local market. If Internet Nation is your choice, design the business around that choice.

That’s because Internet Nation has its own rules for going viral, for what it means to hack together a solution, and for what it means to feel attached to others who act and think like you do. Your branding and marketing needs to be designed for Internet Nation as a whole, not just for one particular country or region. You need to find things that everyone in the group can relate to, not just people in one specific location.

And that’s important to remember — Internet Nation is a homogeneity of culture, it’s not a multi-cultural melting pot. Yes, each person in it has their own particularities, their own story. But your product and your sales aren’t worried about that. You’re worried about what they all have in common: connected, eager, not caring where something comes from as long as it works. The existence of Internet Nation is a kind of victory for postmodern individualism: every person finds how they fit inside a common place.

Even your website should reflect this: if you’re aiming at Internet Nation, why would you have a physical address on your site? People are going to be talking to you by chat, email…what’s the point of saying where you’re from and instantly turning yourself into a local product?

Why do you need a mailing address when all anyone wants is your product?

Think about your workforce in the same way. Universal Avenue offered an early example of organizing work across borders. You can choose the team structure that suits your business.

Distributed online businesses have demonstrated this approach. During an earlier growth phase, StarOfService built a team of more than 120 people, many of whom had never met in person. Flat combined a worldwide audience for music scores with a team spread across different places. These are examples of organization, not a requirement to copy their exact structure.

These are just a few examples, but here’s the point: that old tension and debate about where to launch has a new, strong answer. Internet Nation is part of the world — use it :)

Founders often ask me, “Can you help me with fundraising?” I think the more useful question is why the company needs investors in the first place. Understanding that changes the balance of power.

Instead, what you should be asking about investors is exactly why you, as an entrepreneur, need them. To answer that, you need to know who investors are, and why they would give you money. If you don’t understand both sides of the table, then you’ve got much less power than you could have.

When does a startup need money? Usually, it’s not at the beginning. Startups need money when they need to grow. At a certain point in the life of your company, if you limit yourself to only the revenues that you have coming in, your growth rate is also going to be limited. Accelerating that growth rate comes down to asking for money from investors.

Investing boils down to a relationship based on power.

Raise money when you don’t need it to survive. A business struggling to survive is risky; and even though they live in a world built on risk, investors don’t like to put money in risky businesses. Some might do it more than others, but given the number of opportunities that they have, they are going to put their money into companies that are demonstrating real returns and real growth that can accelerate thanks to their cash.

You’re not the only one talking to investors. You must realize that you aren’t the only person pitching any one investor. Good entrepreneurs live their company 24/7. And so many forget that theirs is just one of many. You’re in an invisible competition, with a lot of good projects. So the pitch can’t be, “I have a good project, please invest.” It has to be, “This is why my project is better than all of those other ones you could invest in.”

Investors aren’t omnipotent either. There are all kinds of reasons why an investor will pass on a project. Maybe they’ve already put a lot of money into different projects lately, and they need to restrict their new investments until they raise a new fund. Maybe they’re looking for a certain type of project, or a certain type of founder. There’s a game being played, and having as much information as possible on each player will help put you in a better position.

Investors pay what it costs.

A common story about Europe is that less capital means less opportunity. But headline investment totals do not tell you how many companies are competing for that capital or how much pressure they face. Early investment is often local. As a company grows, it can reach a global capital market. When a European startup raises money in the US, Asia or elsewhere, that is not necessarily luck. Someone may have made the right introduction, or the company may have become important enough that investors cannot ignore it.

Compare funding with what it can buy. Hiring, premises and customer acquisition can cost very different amounts in different markets. There is no universal conversion ratio between a European round and an American one. Compare the runway and milestones the money supports, not just the headline amount.

High costs do not necessarily mean inefficiency. A concentrated ecosystem is like the center of a major city: access to people and resources can make it valuable and expensive at the same time. You can still build a very good company elsewhere, just as you can build a beautiful house in the suburbs. When investors expect the strongest returns to go to those who invest early, they compete to get upstream and obtain the best value for their money.

Winner-takes-all! Maximizing that value is important because we’re in an investment world where winner-takes-all. Good deals are very competitive, and it makes the negotiating process fluid. Don’t see fundraising as a static thing — if you have traction, and you have interested investors, your valuation and the money available can change.

That’s because that pressure to get in early and the relatively restricted environment create a butterfly effect with a good fundraising. Entrepreneurs will always start out wanting to control everything: who sees the pitch, who they talk to, etc. But optimizing your fundraising means that you can’t control everything: there will be small moments, brief meetings and unexpected details that have outsized effects on the final deal.

They’re not omnipotent: investors ultimately just have a feeling if something is a good deal or a bad deal. A final judgement is possible only with time. But the feeling is there from the beginning. And creating that feeling is an art, which is why seemingly small things can have huge repercussions. All of the numbers, all of the due diligence, it’s simply there to uphold that feeling: good deal or bad deal?

The truth always comes out.

For the entrepreneur, “good deal/bad deal” rotates around four questions: what, who, how and why. What money are you taking in, how much? What’s on the check? This is the easy part. Next, who is giving it to you? That’s harder, because again, not every dollar is the same. There’s a difference between a good dollar (from a smart investor that will lead you towards more dollars, etc.) and a bad dollar (from toxic investors that will end up killing your company). Then, how are you getting it? In startups, it’s strange but conditions are always negotiated after the “what,” which can lead to situations with horrible legal conditions. Some of them are so horrible that it’s better to not take the money. Bad investors make things complicated in terms of conditions. Good investors make things simple.

And finally, why? “Why” is the biggest source of misalignment between entrepreneurs and investors, because investors aren’t always upfront about their intentions, and entrepreneurs lie to themselves, largely because they’re afraid of losing the deal.

But those lies have a real cost. It’s like when someone lies to someone else just to get them into bed. That might work on a short-term basis, but over the long term it’s impossible to maintain. As an entrepreneur, you need to be honest with yourself and any potential investors, because it’s better to lose a deal than to make a deal where no one is honest about their ambitions for the company. The truth always comes out.

In most deals entrepreneurs only optimize the “what.” And really you should be trying to optimize the “who” and the “why.” As a young entrepreneur, those two factors can make such a difference, because at the very least you’ll be trying to grow your company with people who are fundamentally good and interested in helping you. They can generate a great relationship with your investor that’s beneficial for both sides over the (hopefully long) life of your company.

You raise money when you can.

“How do I know when to raise it?” It might seem a bit paradoxical, but the answer is simple: you raise money when you can. This is why it’s so important to do everything you can to have organic growth and traction, because it opens up the possibilities. Whenever you have more money in the bank, that means there’s less risk to your company. Of course, that also means that it doesn’t just depend on you.

So you raise to go faster, you raise when you can…what should your valuation be? It’s the most popular topic in the startup world, so how do you figure it out? Well, actually, you have two valuations: the fake valuation and the real valuation.

A real valuation is based on only one thing: predictable revenue. Over an infinite amount of time, your valuation is always going to be a multiple of your revenue. There’s nothing else that goes into it, because someone who tries to invest in you today is paying a certain premium in order to guarantee themselves the company’s cash flow in the future.

Until you can make a realistic projection of future cash flow, you are negotiating what I call a fake valuation. Founders tend to be optimistic, while potential investors may be more pessimistic. The goal is to find an equilibrium. An early round can become so tilted toward pessimism that it offers little benefit to the founder. Imagine giving up 30% of the company for $150K. In my view, that kind of dilution should be unacceptable for an entrepreneur.

There is no valuation floor that fits every company or every market cycle. The durable question is how much ownership you give up for the progress a round can fund. If the terms weaken the company before it has proved its model, improve revenue, cash flow and evidence before returning to the negotiation. Traction creates negotiating power.

Forget your business plan.

Don’t bother with putting together a business plan and a projection model. A business plan doesn’t mean anything in an early-stage startup. And by the way, any investor who says that they only invest with companies who have a business plan is lying. If you say to an investor, “This is my budget and this is what I want to do with the money. I’m not putting together a business plan because I have no idea what my revenues will be, but the goal of this round is to establish a model that I can believe in,” they’ll either invest or they won’t. But if they don’t, it’s not because you didn’t give them a business plan — it’s just because they didn’t want to invest. Period.

Entrepreneurs see fundraising as a necessary early step in the life of their company. That’s a problem. That puts them in a position where they cannot say, “No”, to anyone. Anything that anyone asks them, they do it, because they don’t have the right outlook on what they’re doing. I promise that you’ll get more from spending two weeks building revenue than two weeks putting together a business plan.

When you have a real company, and you’re looking at a Series B fundraising round, that’s when a business plan is important. And it’s important because you have data. But before that, when you’re looking at an early round and you’re testing your hypothesis and you’re trying to see if anyone will pay you for your solution, none of that exists.

Your goal as an entrepreneur should be giving yourself the power to practice one key point: no money is better than bad money, and no company is better than a bad company.

Within the investment world, VCs are a particular breed.

One reason for that is because VCs are getting paid anyway. Investing is their job, and it’s a well-paid job, which means that their concerns aren’t the same as yours as an entrepreneur. Don’t feel bad about taking their money, because their entire purpose is to put capital at risk. If it works, it works out big time. If it doesn’t work, it’s ok, they move on and you’re the one who has to figure out what to do next.

They have their own rules. Because of how their job works, VCs are entrepreneurs as well. Their market has certain rules. That’s what leads to questions about exits. Any VC that gives you a check expects to get a bigger check back one day. There are a lot of politics that go into targeting VC money. There are complicated economics within a fund, and not every moment is the right moment for a VC to invest in any company, let alone your company.

VCs are not the only way. The vast majority of companies never take VC money. At the same time, in the startup world VCs do have an outsized impact. So while they’re not the only way forward, they’re an important way that many leading companies take advantage of at some point.

There is no middle ground with VC money. Taking advantage of it does means that your outcome will be either 1 or 0. You have to perform, you have to report to your new bosses, and you have to justify what’s going on within your company. And at the end of the day, going down the VC path means that either you become huge, or you die.

Let them find you.

Ultimately, the best entrepreneurs know that building their company is the best way to find investors. If you build something real, something that people want, the investors will come to you. And having that negotiating power is the best way to push your company towards the holy grail of exponential growth.

The decision to become an entrepreneur can be motivated by wanting to make money. In France, we have a real problem with that idea, but it’s true. It’s ok to make money. But truly great companies are motivated by a mission and a cultural vision.

Having a mission helps you achieve goals that ‘regular’ companies aren’t able to do.

First, it lets you attract the best talent. When the money is equal, the best people are attracted to companies that are pursuing the best mission. Remember that building a company isn’t just a question of business models, markets, strategy, whatever. At the end of the day, you need a pitch that brings talented people along with you. Otherwise, you’re alone and you can’t build anything.

Next, a mission helps you to manage the tough moments. You’ll have moments when you wonder if you can keep going. At those times, rational arguments can fail. But having a strong mission that you believe in will push you through it.

And lastly, your mission helps you to make fast decisions. Clear missions render debates obvious. They make it so that everyone in the company sees why you’re doing what you’re doing.

So you need a mission from the beginning.

That doesn’t mean that you have the perfect mission. Like most other things in entrepreneurship, as you move on, things change. If you’re lucky, you get into a virtuous circle where your mission brings you some success, that success brings you more confidence, that confidence leads you to a grander mission, and so on.

One way that your mission becomes real is in your company culture. The everyday culture that you promote should be taken very seriously. There’s a lot of confusion about what a company culture is. It has nothing to do with company perks, or office design, or vacation, or what you say, or what you write down. Google isn’t innovative because it doesn’t have a dress code and people come to work in shorts — it’s innovative, period — and as a consequence, nobody ever cared what people were wearing to work. Culture isn’t built on these surface features — it’s built on who you hire, who you promote, and who you pay well. For example, it’s easy to say, “We believe in gender equality and equal pay between men and women.” But the only question is whether or not your actual payroll demonstrates that. If it does, then your culture takes the gender salary divide seriously. If it doesn’t, then you’re just like every other company on the planet.

You can’t fake your culture.

There needs to be a perfect alignment between what you think, what you say and what you do. And that’s just not the case for the majority of companies. By the way, your company culture can be honest and real without being good. If you’re a bank that fires the bottom 20% of your workforce every year, that might not be good, but if that’s what you believe, and you’re open about it, and you do it, it’s at least honest and real. So if you’re ruthless, be ruthless. If you’re collaborative, be collaborative. But remember that the culture at the heart of your company becomes a part of you. It’s like DNA, you can’t just change it from one day to another.

Your culture will ideally be expressed rather than created. It should exist naturally within you, your cofounders, your early team. Its expression should also be natural and selective. A badly defined culture will let anyone in, it will adapt itself to whoever you hire. But a good culture will reject as many people as it lets in. If your culture expresses a value, make sure that it’s not a bullshit value that everyone agrees with. “Innovation” isn’t a culture, because who’s on the other side? Who is going to put up a sign in their company, “We don’t innovate.” It’s not a value, it’s just a buzzword.

Real values are ones that have an opposite.

Those opposites are strong values as well. Take Facebook’s commitment to openness. That’s a real value, because there are people who are fundamentally opposed to it. In fact, there are even other companies that launched as an opposite value — just look at Snapchat. Facebook is based on openness and perpetual sharing, Snapchat is aimed at forgetting and closing the records. Both of them have a value and therefore a culture that becomes part of their company, and that’s an advantage that has turned them into billion-dollar companies (one more than the other, of course).

A value expresses a choice that you can fight for. And others can fight against it. That kind of value makes a lot of the choices that you face easier. And that’s the kind of culture that strengthens your company. Do it from day one. It might change over time, and that’s ok — but install culture from day one.

That’s why you don’t recruit just for competence. People in Europe are generally bad at really installing a culture in their company, and so they think that competence is the most important thing to find. But a person’s competences can change and improve; it’s hard to change someone’s culture.

What belongs together comes together.

We talk a lot about diversity in the business world, and how it needs to increase. But your company culture needs to be homogeneous. This doesn’t mean anything about race, gender, what school people went to, what nationality they are. This means that the people who come in need to share a homogeneous culture and mindset.

Shared cultural references matter in a founding team. People from different generations may have different assumptions about communication, technology and work. Age alone does not decide whether a team can succeed, but unspoken differences can make collaboration harder. Learn how your cofounders see the world instead of assuming that familiar words mean the same thing to everyone.

Once you’ve created a homogenous culture at the beginning, it’s a question of how you can apply it at scale. If we look at Google, they’ve got the famous culture of “Don’t be evil.” It’s a real value, but good luck trying to define it. What is “evil”? Is collecting data on everyone everywhere “evil”? It can be debated. But at the same time, “Don’t be evil” has a huge emotional component to it that places that value above other traditional business concerns. Not only that, it allows Google to debate the future and what they want to be as a company, while also giving them a great deal of clarity for the present. That’s the mark of a good value: one that makes today’s decisions easy and that informs tomorrow’s possible decisions.

Amazon had an even more concrete example with the question of “What’s with all the doors?” Because doors were much cheaper than desks, Amazon’s office desks were just doors. And every time someone came through the office, and every time an employee sat down, they were reminded of one thing: Amazon is in a retail business where every penny counts. You could put that up on the wall, “Every penny counts.” But what company wouldn’t say that? At Amazon, the idea became much more powerful as a symbol that immediately shows exactly what the company is about.

Don’t try to imitate the culture of others.

You can read about other people’s culture all day. If you’re wondering “What’s the best culture I can implement?”, you haven’t understood the most important point.

Your culture needs to be natural to you. If you try to imitate others you’ll end up making bad decisions. You need to know what you’re fighting for, who your enemies are. Every startup is fighting against something or someone. Your individual enemy should push forward your individual culture.

One company’s successful culture isn’t “better” than any other one. A bad culture is just one that doesn’t make a choice. The traditional corporate world is full of this, companies that try to have it all and never make a choice. That’s why they’re in so much trouble and why no one believes what they say anymore. The thing you can say about a “better” culture is that it will be coherent, visible and shared.

It’s not about putting quotes on the wall. You can put up all the posters you want, but if no one sees the details of how that saying exists at the heart of your company, it’s just bullshit. That’s why you have to hire only stars and only those stars who feel like they’ve finally found the job they’ve been looking for all this time, the one where all the members of the team are pushing toward the same goal. Sure, that’s hard to find — but it’s worth waiting for.

Concentrate on the “why.” What you’re doing, that’s easy. How you’re doing it, that’s easy. Even more, both the “what” and the “how” will change over the company’s life. But the “why,” specifically a “why” that isn’t fake, that’s hard. The “why” gives you structure. The “why” gives you a team that can achieve things that outsiders thought were impossible.

This entire discussion on your company’s mission and culture comes down to mechanism design.

Mechanism design is how you create incentives to encourage the actions and the culture that you’re aiming at. Every time that you implement a process or a rule, it will have an impact on your employees and your company. That’s why you shouldn’t implement anything too early in the life of your company. Carefully consider the impact of each of process when you do get to that point. Think about what you’re trying to achieve, think about the possible side effects, think about how the people around you are going to actually react, not just how you would react or how you hope they react.

One useful early habit is to eat together regularly. It has nothing to do with sales or programming, yet it can deserve a real budget. Sharing meals creates a bond and a community. Eating and drinking well together can create a community that cares. It sounds simple, but few companies put sustained effort and money into that kind of mechanism design. The lesson is to give the culture you want a concrete, repeated place in the working day.

Cheers ;)

The founders I work with start to eventually hate me because I repeat it so much: a startup is entirely defined by its growth. A startup isn’t defined by being on the internet. A startup isn’t defined by concentrating on technology. The easiest definition of a startup is simply the one given by Paul Graham: startup = growth.

A startup is impressive because it achieves a level of growth that is practically impossible to believe.

Uber’s early expansion illustrates the point. What impressed observers was not just the technology, but the speed at which drivers, customers and revenue multiplied. A successful startup can achieve growth over a short period that is far outside the ordinary.

That’s why entrepreneurs have to be obsessed with growth. Ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing helping my growth?” If yes, keep doing it. If it’s not, stop and find something that will help growth.

That’s not a comfortable situation to be in. Growth hurts. It can’t be planned, it doesn’t follow a roadmap. You’re dreaming if you think that you can control it.

That’s why you shouldn’t evaluate a startup based upon how it looks from the outside. If you really want to see how a startup is doing, go take a look at its founders. If they’re completely stressed, late all the time, and seem to be just barely keeping their heads above water? That’s a good startup. All founders struggle when they’re growing at a pace that breaks all the rules.

Growth can work in two directions.

Strong growth can hide other problems. Investors tend to be more patient while the company keeps advancing. When growth slows and milestones are missed, that patience can vanish. Suddenly every department is examined, leaders are replaced and previously tolerated weaknesses become urgent. Growth never removes the need for a sound company underneath it.

But in startups, you have to accept this situation, because growth is the only way to create real value. That value is the ultimate validation of everything that you’re doing.

No matter what, there will come a day when the growth stops.

If you have a lot of early success, you can think it will go on forever. But growth comes in a series of levels. We like to think about that perfect exponential graph of growth, curving upward to infinity and beyond! But the reality is that there are periods of growth and there are plateaus. Those plateaus are when you’re going to be really evaluated on the inner workings of the company. You have to be prepared for that, and for the scrutiny that comes with slowing growth.

To properly manage growth, you need to keep looking forward and realize that growth is created. It’s not something that just happens. You don’t just put together a perfect product, give it to two people, and then wait for the exponential growth to roll in. After all, people are lazy. Think about how many products you use, but that you never tell anyone about. And think about everything that you love and tell people about, but that no one uses. That’s exactly why you have to go out and chase down growth.

You can have different strategies for chasing down growth at the beginning and then managing it when you’ve reached the tipping point.

I have seen fast-growing companies use very different strategies because their products, industries and goals demanded them. Earlier growth phases at Save, Trusk and Agricool illustrated that variety. A strategy that fits one business does not automatically fit another.

What ambitious companies share is the ability to imagine a larger mission. Agricool spoke about changing how people eat. Damien Morin described Save’s ambition as saving devices, rather than merely replacing broken screens. That scale of purpose can help a team keep moving as growth becomes difficult. Without it, growth can feel frightening without ever becoming an adventure worth pursuing.

The only way to grow fast is to push so much and so hard that it seems to be literally impossible.

No one will tell you this, but every founder has that fear deep inside when they realize that their growing company could very well die. And not in five years or in a year. The company could die tomorrow. Great founders use that fear and that knowledge that it could all disappear to keep pushing and ride the wave.

That’s why you can’t overthink things or try to plan them perfectly. If you say that something is going to take six months, it’ll take longer than that. And maybe it could have happened faster if you had simply said, “This is what we’re going to do,” without putting a timeframe on it. Growing fast can’t happen on a timeline, it can only happen in terms of milestones. Those milestones should be KPI-based, with no calendar for when it will happen.

If you say, “We’re going to get out of beta in 3 months,” how does that help you? It makes much more sense to simply say, “We’re going to get out of beta as soon as we hit 10,000 users.” And then you try to reach 10,000 users as quickly as possible. That’s a mindset and a milestone that can adapt to growth.

Besides you as the entrepreneur, who can be scared of growth? Investors.

Some investors are uncomfortable with spending money before the returns are visible. You need to distinguish useful scrutiny from a reflexive fear of growth. Listen especially to people whose experience helps them understand when rapid growth is worth pursuing.

Understanding your growth and your internal milestones is what lets you know when you’re in a position to ignore those investors who start to worry. Being an entrepreneur is about correctly evaluating what’s going on today and how that is taking your growth forward.

This situation is driven by the fact that the biggest problem in startups is a misalignment between each stakeholder’s level of risk. Your banker’s looking for a risk level of zero, your intern’s risk level is infinite (because they don’t care), your investor’s risk level is a bit higher than your banker’s but not by much, and your risk level as an entrepreneur is based upon your fear of death. And having that fear of death is a good thing, because it pushes you to do things that people would otherwise think impossible, those things that their own risk levels won’t allow them to do.

Growth is hard but short-term growth is more obvious.

There are tons of growth hacking tips out there, they all need to be taken with a grain of salt. Growth hacking is like a chemical reaction — if you’re doing it without having traction and organic growth already, it won’t really help you. You need the combination of elements to really make things heat up.

Manual growth has its limits. When you’ve got all of your friends on board, when your Facebook friends are all in, when you’ve got to reach further and scale outwards, that’s when you move toward growth hacking, automating processes, marketing, that sort of thing. And the only way to know when you’ve gotten to that level is by tracking your metrics.

All of your metric goals should be absolute.

Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. If you have 1.5% conversion, and everyone else in the industry has 0.75% conversion, you shouldn’t think that you’re better than the rest, so things are good. You should be asking yourself how you can raise your 1.5% to 1.6%, and then to 1.7%, and so on.

Absolute metrics are what allow you to push through to the impossible. If you relativize your goals and start comparing yourself to others, you either become depressed (because you aren’t doing as well as they are) or you become complacent (because you’re doing better than them, so it’s all good).

Do the “up or out”.

Your first week, you launch, and you look at your users, your conversation rate, whatever metrics are most important for you. And you try to push those metrics, week over week, just a little bit higher. You know what happens: those small but absolute numbers, growing steadily each week, end up becoming very large numbers.

And don’t forget that your ultimate life metric is revenue: whatever you’re tracking to measure your growth, revenue is the most important one. Forget the idea that you’re concentrating on growing your user base, and you’ll worry about revenue later. It doesn’t make sense. Stop it.

In the end, deciding whether you want to found a startup comes down to a question of whether or not you’re excited by the insanity aspect of growth.

And one way that you can decide if it’s right for you is by giving yourself the Achilles test. When Achilles was a child, his mother saw that he would either live in obscure happiness, or he would die young with glory. When the time came to decide whether or not to go off to the Trojan War, Achilles had to decide between those two fates. He could live at home, have children and grandchildren and then fade into obscurity. But he went the opposite way: he chose glory, died young, but his name has lived on for thousands of years.

Today, we know that there are a lot of ways in this world to be happy and make money that don’t involve trying to find success as a startup. You have a choice between two paths. You have to recognize those paths and make the choice willingly. It’s not necessarily forever — you can choose glory now and then change your mind in five years. But know this: launching a startup is on the path to glory. It’s hard, it’s difficult, it’s dangerous, and it’s not for everyone. You’re the only one who decides if it’s right for you.

Let’s establish a simple definition of what bootstrapping is: it’s a way of using one’s own means and revenues to grow the company before seeking any outside funding.

You know companies that did this, even if you aren’t aware of it.

GitHub, AppSumo, MailChimp, and others all developed and grew for a long time through bootstrapping. I’m not talking here about companies that developed a product while making money through consulting or that sort of thing. Rather, I’m thinking about the pure sense of developing a product and selling it to customers from day one.

That kind of bootstrapping is absolutely difficult. But as hard as it is, it’s also very rewarding, mentally and financially. There’s no pleasure for an entrepreneur like having a satisfied customer. In terms of development, having a company that shows growing revenues makes everyone happy. It gives you leverage when the day comes to fundraise, and you’ve put the power on your side.

That’s why every single article and tip about fundraising should come with a disclaimer, pointing out just how little leverage those tips will give you vs. How much leverage you’ll get by growing your revenues. There’s a reason why we say that money talks. If you’ve got money on your side, you’ve got the upper hand in a negotiation. If the other side is the only one with money, they’ve got all of the power. Whoever is more willing to walk away from the table is usually going to end up winning.

Why do entrepreneurs so often ask for help with fundraising before focusing on revenue? One reason is a familiar story in technology journalism and blogs: someone has an idea, raises money and uses it to build a successful company. That formula is easy to write, attracts clicks and gets shared, so it is repeated until it can seem like the only path.

Good companies lets fundraising come to them.

We know that virtually every successful company arrives at the point where fundraising makes sense. We also know that good companies raise funds with leverage on their side, leverage that comes from real growth and actual customers.

Good companies come from good entrepreneurs. Good entrepreneurs can start with nothing, and build something incredible. What can you do to be a good entrepreneur?

Be creatively cheap.

When your business is still looking for product-market fit, still looking for that tipping point that shows you that things are working, be as cheap as possible. Even if you have a little bit of money, don’t use it. Or at the very least, forget that you have it. Every young entrepreneur is going to make mistakes, and you can either pay to make mistakes, or you can make them for free.

Not having money forces you to use your imagination to solve problems. You will find hacks and tricks that, if you had money, you would not even look for. Entrepreneurs can’t have the mindset of throwing money at a problem.

No one needs money to start. Money should be a tool, not a necessity. One day you might need it to grow, or you might need it to speed up your timeline. But money shouldn’t block you from getting started.

Not having money can even help you at the beginning. When you’re trying to convince your first employees to come on board, and you have no money, you might not even be able to pay them. But those people who agree to come and help you are so convinced by you and your project that that energy brings the project forward in ways that are impossible to quantify. Once you’ve fundraised, all of a sudden you have tons of people coming around and wanting a job — and how can you quickly find the ones who are really dedicated vs. The ones who are just looking for a paycheck? That’s not to say that you can’t do it — of course you can. But it’s one of the ways in which money can be a double-edged sword, especially for a first-time entrepreneur.

So a double-edged sword, yes, but it’s also inevitably part of the equation. When you’re bootstrapping, and the revenue that you bring in what you have available for growth, financial questions are even more important than if you were to fundraise. And there are some principles of finance that can help you.

Cash now is more precious than cash later.

That being the case, pay with risk. If you can save $100 today, and that $100 today is going to cost you $1000 in five years, do it. That’s a savings that you can use to make sure that you’re still alive and growing.

A concrete example: let’s say that you’re in an industry where design and branding are critical. You have $30,000 to spend, and you find one designer who is perfect. The only problem is that it’s going to cost you $75,000. You have two choices: you can take a lesser design, which won’t help your company but it fits in your budget today. Or you can get creative. What if you offer the perfect designer $30,000 now, with the promise that when you reach a certain milestone (say, 20,000 units sold), you’ll pay not the additional $45,000, but $90,000. You’re making an offer that recognizes the relative value of cash both today and into the future.

And the important thing is that in a deal like that, neither side is doing the other a favor. It’s an opportunity for each side, assuming that everyone happily agrees to the deal.

But a word of caution: don’t do this with equity. Equity is forever. Just because something isn’t in cash doesn’t mean it’s not a real price. So be generous in making a deal that is good for both sides, but don’t be an idiot, either.

In bootstrapping, managing your cash flow can become critical.

And here’s the industry standard: collect early, pay late, sell high, buy low. If you can delay paying a bill, that’s another day of cash in your pocket that you can use for growth. This may seem a bit shady, but I promise you, everyone else is going to be paying you late as well. If you pay early and collect late, you’re going to be the bank for everyone around you. You have to understand early on exactly how your cash flow management is affecting your company, not just today and tomorrow, but over the long run in terms of growth.

Of course, there are people who you need to pay on time, always. Your employees are on that list, which means that you need to be very careful about hiring. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: bad companies try to solve problems by hiring. Good companies recognize that making a mistake in hiring will only create more problems. You should only be hiring people you trust, and who are doing something that you understand.

Once you do hire, make sure that you’re delegating the things that you know best.

Most of the time, people do the opposite: they do what they know best, and delegate the things they don’t really know. But that’s the worst management strategy, because it’s easier to control the quality of things that you know well. If you delegate only the things that you’re good at, you’re able to dedicate your time to learning how to do other things better, you get stronger with them, and then you can delegate them as well. Don’t forget that the endgame is to delegate everything — and to do that, you need to know how to do everything within the company so that you can keep watch over it.

(And watch out for interns. Interns are great in a growing business, post-market fit. Pre-market fit, interns will kill you. Because you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re asking someone who knows nothing to do it on your behalf. Stop having fun by interviewing interns, and start building something that actually works.)

Once you’ve installed that mindset, remember to sell it all. Your network and personal connections should be the first place that you’re selling. MenuNextDoor provided an example of strong organic growth: within a few months of launching, it was serving thousands of meals per week. Why? Because when it was first launched, the founders sold so hard to their personal networks, they were going around, taking meals to people, collecting and distributing money directly, having customers take pictures and post them on their social networks, anything that they could personally do to increase their reach. That’s how you get traction — go strong and get your friends on board. If you can’t sell to your personal network, you’re not going to sell outside of it.

If you can put these ideas in motion, if you’re being cheap, smartly managing your company and your cash, and selling to everyone around, you’re going to have a big advantage in a toxic environment. You’ll get investors who start to chase after you, rather than the other way around. And one huge benefit that that can come of out that is the ability to skip the seed round and go directly to a Series A.

Skipping the seed has big implications over the life of your company.

By doing that you’ll have an exponentially higher level of ownership in your later funding rounds. That’s because in Europe, a seed round is going to cost you around 20–30% of your company, even occasionally upwards of 40%. And that’s for a very small amount of money, maybe up to $1M. Bootstrapping and developing revenue can get you to that point. When you then go to Series A, you give up around 20–30%, but at a much higher valuation and without the dilution of the seed round. Instead of giving up 25% twice, you only do it once. That’s a huge deal as the company keeps going.

Not only that, when you’re able to build something from nothing, your level of goodwill when you go into that Series A fundraising mode will be absolutely off the charts. Judging startups in their early days is difficult, and so people are less likely to give you any credit (remember, ideas aren’t worth anything — only businesses are worth something). But when you can show your ability to create, based solely on your own will and desire, it’s easier for people to convince themselves that investing in you will be a good deal for them. And having that in your pocket when you head to the negotiating table is worth its weight in…well, in equity and cash.

One of the things an entrepreneur hears most often is, “Stay focused.” The advice gets repeated so often, about so many things, that its meaning becomes unclear. Staring at a tiny spot of paint on the wall takes concentration, but it does nothing for your startup.

And that leads us to two key points: being focused isn’t simply concentrating on a single task, and it needs to be in the service of growing your business. Being focused starts with clearly understanding your goals, the path to achieving them, and what steps bring you further down that path.

Two rules for being focused: first, never do anything without intensity. And second, be very smart about prioritizing.

The first rule, do everything with intensity, is a question of fully applying your powers to whatever you’re doing. If you’re in the process of talking to customers, you need to be completely focused on how you can get them to purchase or install your product. Do it with urgency — the more efficient you are, the more information you have about who is interested in your product, and the faster you can apply that info to your next sale. If you look around and find yourself doing things in a half-assed way, you need to reevaluate how you’re working, or reevaluate the value of the task.

That reevaluation is part of the second rule, prioritize smartly. What provides value? An entrepreneur is constantly faced with things to do. Some of those things provide value, and some don’t. Some things contribute to growth, and some don’t. What manual tasks are you doing that could be farmed out to others? As an entrepreneur, why would you spend your time entering data into spreadsheets or keeping the accounting straight? We’re living in an age of software, upwork, freelancing, e-lancing — use them. There are people out there who can help you to save time (which, as I’ve talked about elsewhere, is the #1 commodity of every entrepreneur).

This doesn’t mean that you can ignore those tasks that don’t impact growth.

Your accounting, for example, is a legal responsibility that you have no choice but to do. Just because you aren’t focusing on something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get done. But you have to be smart and recognize the 20% of things that don’t grow your company but that have to be done anyway. Get good at streamlining and automating that as much as possible. It’s what allows you to maintain focus on the things that only you, the entrepreneur, can handle.

What should you be prioritizing as an early stage startup?

Talking to customers and developing your product. Period. I admire entrepreneurs who understand this instinctively. Algolia’s early team offered a particularly focused and successful example. Day one, you could see their focus, as their absolute priority was installing their software solution on as many computers as they could. That didn’t mean meeting people, talking to them, and then sending them a link in their email that they may or may not click. That meant the Algolia team was going around, meeting people and right there opening up their clients’ laptops so that the team could install the software for them. That was how they built traction at the beginning: they were focused and left nothing to chance. Now, people install Algolia’s software on their own, and the team can concentrate on other tasks. But that’s the type of focus and energy that you need at the beginning.

What’s the biggest distraction for an entrepreneur? Your inbox.

Today, the big problem with email is that many of us cling to an archaic idea, namely that if someone writes to you, you’re obligated to write back. This goes back to older customs, from when it wasn’t all that easy to write to someone. Writing took time, you had to buy paper, you had to get a stamp, go to the post office, all of that. So if someone did all of that and wrote to you, it was polite to write back. Now, there’s no barrier involved in writing to someone. There is absolutely no barrier to entry for an inbox. You can copy/paste, you can send a quick note, there’s nothing to it. And because that’s the case, because anyone can write to you, you should feel free to ignore anything that is outside of your focus.

At the same time, you should focus on part of your inbox: the mail coming from your customers. I don’t understand a company where customer emails go to a support email address managed by some intern. To me, these are the most important pieces of communication that you deal with, because it gives you precious user information and it creates a bond with your customer. My advice is simple: the support email for your company should be the CEO’s inbox. And the CEO should reply to every client email until the moment comes when she finally can’t do it all. At that point, you have to delegate and install a happiness support team. But the same amount of care should still go into it, because it’s important.

All of these things come back to a big benefit of being focused — in the end, focusing is the best way to see whether you’re right or wrong.

For example, every young entrepreneur faces the question of, “Well, who’s your user? What’s your market?” And what’s the response — “My project is great, everyone’s going to love it, my market is everyone!”

That’s unfocused thinking, thinking that won’t tell you whether you’re right or wrong. If you’re aiming at all users, you’re aiming at teenagers, at college graduates, at middle-aged females, at retired seniors, the data that you gather is going to be extremely diluted. It won’t give you any conviction about what you’re doing. It won’t help you train your hunches about what’s going on deep inside your business.

Instead, let’s say that you decide, “My market is teenagers.” And you really focus on teenagers. But none of them are using your product. At the same time, you notice a spike in users between the ages of 30–35. You see very quickly that the teen market isn’t for you, and you won’t waste time moving forward with trying to sell to them. You were focused and now have data that helps you change your market segment. That information helps you develop your product and see the next steps to take.

So being focused reveals if you’re right or wrong, and it helps you do it faster. A good and focused entrepreneur is able to identify strengths and weaknesses quickly.

Another place where entrepreneurs are often unfocused is in hiring.

Focused hiring can bring great things to your company, and unfocused hiring can suck away your time, energy, money, and opportunities for success. Almost every startup makes the mistake of hiring too fast, too often, and too early. There’s a reason for this: hiring people can be very gratifying. You meet people, they want to work for you, you have a sense of power and accomplishment — even if you haven’t actually done anything yet.

Let’s be clear: bad companies try to solve problems by hiring. They realize that they have a problem, and they try to solve it by hiring. A good company hires because it’s going to translate into growth. Knowing the difference is a result of being focused.

What other distractions do startups give themselves? Don’t incorporate too early.

It gives you administrative issues that don’t translate into growth. Don’t have an office, don’t print business cards. Many entrepreneurs think that these things legitimize them, they can tell their family and friends, “See, I’m not crazy! I have a real job! We have an office and everything, here’s my card!”

But that search for outside approval doesn’t get you any closer to the two things that will actually legitimize what you’re doing: building a product and finding customers. That means that yes, being an entrepreneur is a lonely enterprise. Don’t look for ways to be more comfortable as an entrepreneur: look for customers. Don’t look for articles in the press about your startup. There’s no article, no outside voice that can truly validate what you are doing. Validation comes from inside, from what you know and no one else knows. So set your own goals, set your own internal celebrations. These may be goals that no one else understands. But if you have a solid internal roadmap, you can maintain your focus on the things that truly matter.

And most of the time, for an entrepreneur, success and failure can go on a chart. Get used to tracking your KPIs, and know the differences between them. There are basically three types that you can track: your life metrics, your operational metrics, and your vanity metrics.

The life metrics are the most important, and for 99% of companies, they come down to revenue.

It’s never too early to think about revenue and it’s never too early to focus on revenue growth. You can point out examples where user growth is important, those few companies that can put off thinking about revenue until later. But two things to remember: one, no first-time entrepreneur is in a position to do that. Not focusing on revenue is a luxury reserved for people who have already been successful in building a company. And two, aside from Facebook, take a look at what’s been happening with social media company valuations lately (and the key there is that Facebook pursued revenue — and found it — from day one).

So you need to track your revenue, and that number needs to keep going up. Think in terms of absolute numbers: if you sold $100 this week, next week you need to sell $120, and the week after that $140. That’s what you need to track.

The second type of KPI is operational. Just ask Google, there are thousands of operational KPIs you can use, it’s a question of finding what’s right for you. But choose a few, and focus on those. Be harsh with yourself, and don’t look for reasons to say, “Oh, look, that metric is good, things are going well!” Track a few operational metrics that are actually contributing in direct ways with your life metrics.

The last set of KPIs are vanity metrics. These are the ones that you need to look at when you’re about to send out a press release or when a journalist calls, but really, they don’t mean anything. The number of likes on your Facebook page, for example: journalists are blown away by Facebook likes, but they don’t really have any effect on your company. A like is not a sale, and sales are the only thing that matters. Vanity metrics can sometimes have their place, they can help your company at times; but don’t confuse them with your life metrics, and don’t be as impressed with them as the outside world may be.

As an entrepreneur, KPIs become your best friend, the person who tells you when things are going well and when things are going badly. They’re there to give you a baseline reading of success and failure. Focusing on them, even at the beginning when you have to push through the fact that there isn’t much of interest to see, trains your brain to understand them. You’ll start to see the little variations, and connect them to whatever you did that week. You’ll understand how you can impact the numbers, implanting the ups and downs of your business in your unconscious.

I’m saying all of this because it’s good advice based upon my experiences and the experiences of the startups I have observed. But in the end, it’s not simply that I can give you a list, focus on this, not on that. You have to feel it. In that way, entrepreneurship is a bit like learning to ride a bike. Your parents can try to tell you how to do it, they’ll use words like “balance,” “equilibrium” — but those are words that you don’t understand until you actually do it. You keep falling, and you get frustrated. But you keep pushing, and all of a sudden, you’re upright and keeping the bike going steadily along. That’s the “click” moment when you fully understand. And after that, you never forget how it’s done.

From what I have seen, I can tell you that besides simply running out of cash, the vast majority of startups that fail can trace that failure back to a problem between founders. If a team is not really together and on the same page, it’s much harder to do something great. And choosing a cofounder comes back to a few questions about who you are as an entrepreneur. How can you be a leader? How can you build a great team? Because in the end, managing the relationship between cofounders is the most intimate aspect of managing a team.

What ‘PG’ said

To evaluate a founding team, you can go back to some advice given by Paul Graham years ago. The qualities that he outlined, determination, flexibility, imagination, naughtiness and friendship, are a great place to start evaluating yourself and anyone else would could be on your founding team.

Before we go on, though, notice what isn’t there. Intelligence is not on that list. If you ask people what makes a good founder, most of them are going to say that the founder needs to be smart. And that’s because a lot of people want that to be true, they want to believe that the people who built great companies are smart. And it’s not necessarily true. Now, that doesn’t mean that a good founder is stupid. But what we can say is that being stupid or smart doesn’t have any real influence over whether or not you will be a good founder.

In reality, being smart or stupid has less impact on whether someone will be a good founder than on what market they should aim at. For example, if you know that you’re not the smartest person, head toward real estate — it’s a field where you don’t need to be smart in order to be a good, successful founder. But if you’re Elon Musk, you’d get bored with real estate. And so he looked to revolutionize cars, and then solar power, and now he’s trying to go to Mars. Why? Because even for Elon Musk, going to Mars is hard. Making sure that he is always aiming at a market that keeps him interested is the best way for him to not get bored. And being bored is a death sentence for an entrepreneur.

As helpful as Paul Graham’s qualities can be to start thinking about yourself and your founding team, it’s important to remember that there are no golden rules and that no person and no team is going to be at the very top of every single quality. It’s not a question of making sure that you fit the blocks together properly. In the end, the biggest need is to create your own story as cofounders, to have a completely transparent way of interacting together, and exercising flawless leadership together. And no cofounding team is simply born perfect: perfect teams grow up together, they get better together, and they become perfect.

Part of communicating honestly and openly is knowing who does what within the team.

Let me be clear: there is only one CEO. And the CEO isn’t necessarily the smartest guy in the room. It’s not necessarily the person who had the idea. Let me be clear about another thing: ideas have no value. You don’t have to make someone CEO just because they had an idea (and you don’t need to give them more equity, either). Never put yourself in a position where you think that having an idea gives you the right to anything other than the warm, fuzzy feeling of having had an idea.

The CEO is the person who you agree has the ultimate responsibility, the person who is making the final decision. That’s not something that should be taken lightly. It should be clear within your team who is best suited for that role. People like the title of CEO, and they like the perks, and they like the idea that everything that goes well for the company will be attributed to them. And that’s necessary in a good company. You want your CEO to stand out in a way that strikes fear in your competitors, you want them to say, “Dammit, how does she keeping doing it?”

But there are downsides to being CEO as well. You have to be an excellent manager, and that’s hard. It’s hard to nourish all of the relationships within the company, to have open conversations when things aren’t going well, to personally handle the most difficult times in the life of a startup. That’s why my advice is to always make the most sensible person on your team the CEO. The most sensible person is the one who will be best able to clearly understand what is going on within your team, and that’s what makes a great manager.

The reason it’s so hard to be the CEO is because a startup isn’t a democracy.

You can go online and find articles about alternative management structures, no managers, flattened hierarchies, all of that. And maybe those are good things in a big, established company that needs to shake itself awake. But in a startup, which is a small group of people working on a problem, the downside of democracy is huge. All good startups are tyrannical. You can quickly identify good startups when you see that one person can make a decision, going against everyone else’s opinion, and the startup survives and keeps growing. Startups aren’t the place to be if you want to listen to everyone’s opinion. Startups are a place for execution and focus.

That doesn’t mean that the CEO manages every detail or decision. But if your startup is constantly having debates, if there are questions about strategy or culture or fundraising, you’re screwed. Incredible design, strategy and problem-solving come from one person having the courage to impose something on their company over the long term.

There’s an ability for escalation amongst a founding team that can go very bad, very fast.

Cofounding a company with someone is even more intense than living with them. You’re with them 24 hours a day. When something happens in the middle of the night, you deal with it together, when you travel, you travel together. You cannot imagine the amount of time that you spend with your cofounder. And if it goes wrong, it’s as bad — if not worse — as a divorce.

I’ve actually talked to divorce lawyers to try to understand how things can go so badly sometimes. And once, one of them told me something that stuck. He said, “If you want to understand human nature, you have to understand how two people, who saw each other naked for 15 years, can one day decide to never speak to each other again.” Understanding that comes down to an idea that we could call “emotional debt.” We train ourselves to accept certain things from the people who are closest to us. We use our debt with them, they use theirs with us, it goes up, it goes down, there’s a give-and-take. But sometimes, with some people, we reach a point where our emotional debt is used up. We’re emotionally bankrupt. And the only way out is to file for Chapter 11 and never talk about that debt ever again.

That situation should never happen with your cofounders. If you have an emotional debt with your cofounder, it needs to be immediately dealt with and in the open. Bad things will happen. Sometimes you’ll make a mistake, sometimes you’ll make a bad decision. Those issues have to be solved as quickly as possible, and most importantly, you have to be ok with the fact that they happened. A cofounding team needs to understand that they make mistakes together, that mistakes aren’t just on one individual. That doesn’t mean that everyone can just do whatever and there are no consequences. It means that you have to be able to evaluate mistakes, determine how important they are (and sometimes unimportant mistakes can cost a lot of money), and deal with them immediately, without using up all of your emotional debt.

(And a quick piece of advice: if you do get to the point of a cofounder divorce, just run away. The amount of time and emotional effort that you will spend in fighting about what happened, who is to blame, who is right and who is wrong, is so much more than if you simply decided to run away and start building something new. Write a check if you have to, but run away. Don’t drown yourself in that fight. It won’t bring anything positive to your life.)

Choosing a cofounder is the most important decision that you make when starting your company.

It’s even more important than choosing the project — just look at all of the projects people go through before finding the right one. Projects can change, but people don’t, not really. So don’t rush it — wait until you find the right person or people. Don’t go to a conference, meet someone at a cocktail hour and become convinced ten minutes later that you’ve found your cofounder. Work with as many people as you can, build your friendships and relationships, and honestly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. And then one day, when it becomes clear that you have found the right cofounder, don’t take that relationship for granted. Keep developing your trust in them, keep your communication transparent, and keep your goals aligned.

Too many startup founders I meet are obsessed with copying what goes on outside of Europe. We forget our strengths. The things that give us incredible unfair advantages. An unfair advantage is anything you can use in your favor, making such a difference, that it seems to be unfair.

Break down these geographic barriers.

One example of this is geography. I’m always surprised by how many Europeans don’t take advantage of this. We live in a place where any major city can be reached, by plane or train, in about 2 hours. More or less. London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, there are cheap flights and good access to these places. But people still live inside their geography.

When I divided my time between London and Paris, people were surprised that I treated the two as one working geography. A Eurostar journey made an event in the other city feel comparable to a long commute from the suburbs. The useful question was how long a journey took, not whether it crossed a border.

Travel can be expensive, but it may cost less than accepting a structural problem where you live. Skype’s early organization illustrated this: it combined engineering in Estonia with a London headquarters. The team placed each function where it made sense, instead of treating borders as the limits of the business.

So why think about these debates, will Paris or Berlin be the next startup capital, all of that? Why should that be a question?

First of all, none of us will really get anywhere without the others. We need to have a European mindset. That doesn’t mean it’s simple. Multiple locations and operations in several countries bring local problems, paperwork and delays. You definitely add challenges. But overcoming them is worth it, because you gain a larger footprint, a larger pool of potential employees and a larger pool of customers.

You do not have to be as big as Skype. I once spoke with founders who had opened their company’s bank account in Germany and found the process straightforward. The lesson is not that one country’s banks are always better. Banking requirements, eligibility and service vary. Compare the options that your business can legally use across borders instead of assuming that the nearest provider is the only one.

Different countries offer different strengths in company law, administration and access to capital. Compare those systems instead of assuming that every part of a business must be organized in one place. The role Delaware plays for many US companies illustrates the broader point: legal geography and operating geography need not be identical.

Tax obligations and legal requirements still need to be understood for the actual structure and activities. The point is to examine the available options, not to assume that living in one country requires doing everything there.

Geography becomes an advantage only when founders treat Europe as a practical business opportunity. That takes a change in mindset: look at the people, services and markets you can actually access, rather than seeing Europe as an abstract idea.

Get comfortable with the fact that your team and your market aren’t in the same place.

Another thing we forget is how to find B2B clients. People in Spain complain about working with local corporations, and I hear the same in Italy, Romania and France. Depending on what you sell, you aren’t restricted to your local market. If you develop software, take a wider look. My advice to a SaaS company is to build its team locally and look across Europe, North America and the world for its market.

Use data to figure out where you want to go into. If that’s the US, great. If your data says you should go into Poland, hey, that’s the best place. And maybe expansion isn’t even a matter of geography. Be willing to launch into the Internet Nation. The Internet Nation is that portion of the population, in France, in Europe, worldwide, that is into the world of entrepreneurship online, and speaks English. It’s an active group that you can reach out to, without any real barriers, and that can significantly widen your available market.

The point is to recognize our advantages, especially what we take for granted or see as a disadvantage. Take paid time off. A benefit treated as normal in one country can be a powerful recruiting perk in another. Europeans sometimes see vacation as a sign of weakness or an obstacle to hard work. But there is a difference between being productive and being stupid. Working all day and achieving nothing is stupid. Taking time off while doing good work is productive. If we push ourselves to be truly productive, European traditions of time off can be an advantage.

B2B sales are forever.

One comment that came up in a conversation was “As a B2B company, we’ve found that selling in Europe is harder at first, but once you’ve sold once, they stay with you.” I liked this because it really expressed something that is true: in the United States it’s easier to get a sale, but it’s harder to keep your position. In Europe, it’s harder to get a sale, but because the rate of change and innovation is slower, it’s easier to keep your position for a long time.

At the same time, you have to be very careful with this, because it has the tendency to make the market weak. You can fall into the mindset of the “no need to change anything”. But if you combine the advantage of maintaining your enterprise client base relatively easily, with avoiding the disadvantage of complacency, you create a magical thing that can be a home run. You can get a big win from understanding both sides of this aspect of European markets.

There is a desire in Europe for the Robin Hood type figure.

The solution that comes sweeping in, taking away from the older, established interests and giving advantages to the consumer. And it’s no secret that we in Europe are in a part of the world where there is a lot of tradition, conservatism, bla bla bla. One of the reasons behind that is that the countries in Europe are oftentimes so small, that it’s easy for a big company to lobby for specific advantages and privileges. There’s always such a proximity between people who run the government and people who run big companies. But it develops big gaps between what people want and what companies are delivering. As an entrepreneur, that gives you a lot of opportunities to focus on what customers really want. You can move into the market and provide a much better experience, if you’re able to survive the backlash of regulation and vested interests. You can create new market segments, and you’ll be able to do it with the help of the people.

Captain Train and Citymapper illustrated this approach in their early growth. Their teams improved services that established providers had left frustrating, with a strong focus on the consumer. That product discipline is the useful lesson.

Save the consumer!

The number of problems we’re facing could potentially lead to a lot of solutions. In Europe, that sense of facing many problems often ends up in pessimism. And I think that this pessimism is actually a huge opportunity. In Silicon Valley, there’s almost the opposite problem, in that there is so much optimism that it can be hard to pick an idea and run with it. In Europe, though, everyone tries to understand why you’re going to fail. If you’re able to overcome that mindset, you can be in an extremely strong position as an entrepreneur.

This is the same situation as when, if you’re going to start running, you should practice running on sand. Because running on sand is hard, and if you practice doing that all the time, when you’re finally not stuck in the sand anymore, you’re able to run very fast. Building a startup in Europe is exactly that, you’re running on sand. If you push through, you’ll find that your company is well-trained and able to face a great deal of challenges.

That pessimism can also help you to figure out where the real problems are. We’re always repeating that founders should find a problem to solve, rather than a brilliant idea. It’s easier to see a problem in a pessimistic environment.

European entrepreneurs become very efficient with capital.

When capital is harder to raise, entrepreneurs get used to spending less. That matters because capital cycles go up and down. When fast money runs out, founders who have never operated without it can be unprepared. European examples such as BlaBlaCar showed how much could be built with careful spending. Save’s early revenue growth relative to its cash burn offered another example. The lesson is about capital efficiency, not a promise that any company will keep succeeding. Treat limited capital as a constraint that can make you and your business stronger.

Leading the way of lifestyle.

People who are not from Europe look at France, Italy, Austria, Sweden… they see a certain lifestyle. Let’s take that perception seriously enough. This isn’t just a question of luxury, either. You can make a good living in the luxury industry, everything’s pretty, there are businesses that you can develop. But I’m not sure it’s really what entrepreneurship is about, since we believe that entrepreneurship is ultimately about providing exceptional service at scal e. If you want to truly scale, luxury isn’t really what you’re aiming at.

The idea of a lifestyle doesn’t have to mean luxury. All over Europe, you can find a sense of detail and service that is exceptional. As a startup, you can take advantage of that. You don’t have to just copy and paste the things that you see coming out of Silicon Valley, where things are much more robotic, there’s less soul there. There’s a reason that Airbnb, when they saw how their team in Paris was able to handle the customer experience both in terms of hosts and guests, had that team start teaching their other teams all around the world. The sense of delicacy and attention in their Paris office was the best, and so that was the model that Airbnb spread throughout their company.

Captain Train also offered a useful example of care. It was not a luxury service, but its customer support team tried to act like Ralph Fiennes’s concierge in The Grand Budapest Hotel: attentive to every need of the guest. Applying that care and attention to detail helped the startup stand out to customers and other companies.

That question of lifestyle doesn’t end with your business, it also has to do with your happiness. Many people will ask me, where should I start my company. And the answer is wherever you want to live. That’s the most important thing, the business questions can be worked out, but the type of life you want is something that you have to listen to carefully. Motivation is your drive. Depending on who you are and what it takes to make you happy, motivation will be affected by where you live. We had a debate whether or not it was a good thing as an entrepreneur to be on unemployment and paid, and use that time and money for your startup. Some people said that unemployment benefits were a good thing, since it gives you some measure of freedom and security, others said it was better to have a job and work on a startup, others said that it would be better to have nothing and be desperate and really push yourself to succeed with your company. And my answer, like with where to work, is that it’s not that simple. Each of those situations has its benefits. For me, personally, I like the desperation of having to do something, because if not, there are checks coming due next month that won’t get paid. For me, that’s a motivator and it is exciting and it makes me more efficient. But not everyone is like that. I can definitely say that I’ve seen many people take their time on unemployment, and acted like a tourist for 18 months. But you can have a story that shows how someone has used that time and that security to actually build something too.

Are you aware enough to figure out how to build the infrastructure that will get the most out of you?

That infrastructure is extremely personal. One infrastructure isn’t objectively better than another one. Maybe unemployment isn’t a good motivator for you as an entrepreneur, but maybe it’s an advantage for your employees. Maybe, since your potential employees have European unemployment benefits, you can offer your early employees equity rather than a salary. That’s just one idea. It’s an example of how you can look at a situation and not ask whether it’s good or bad, but how can you turn it to your advantage.

Europeans have found other ways to give life meaning. Think of writing a book. It may never find many readers, but writing it can give someone a purpose beyond their paid job. Blogs, social networks and other forms of creation extend that possibility. The value is not limited to how much money the work earns.

As technology changes the place of work in our lives, the question of what gives life meaning outside a job becomes more important. Europe’s long debate about leisure, culture and social protection can be an advantage here. A society needs more than an answer to the question of how to keep everyone busy.

So use all of these advantages. Every city in Europe has its fans, there are people who love Berlin, who love Paris, who love Rome. Just take a look at the list of films by Woody Allen, and you’ll get it. No one loves Palo Alto, I promise. People love the people they meet in Palo Alto, they love the work, they love what is going on there, but no one is ever going to say, oh, I love strolling through Palo Alto. In Europe, there are people who dream of our cities. All sorts of people would love the opportunity to be working in our cities. And that can become a worldwide advantage in terms of hiring talent, if you know how to use it correctly.

We are underutilizing our European infrastructures. Many of the barriers that we think we see, if we really look closely, we can see that there are ways around them, and or that they aren’t actually barriers at all. And the best is when we see how the things that other people see as barriers can actually be unfair advantages for us. That’s how you play the big game, and that’s how you build big companies.

So look around, be honest with yourself, and stay cool.

We hear people asking all the time, “Why is money so important to us as a society?” In the world of business, it’s very simple: money is the sole basis for everything that a business does. It’s why a business is different from a passion. At one point or another, if you want to be an Entrepreneur, you have to make money: it lets you develop your product, pay the rent, hire employees, and keep investors happy.

Don’t forget, either, that there’s a reason why money has been adopted in all different cultures, all over the world: it lets us make our exchanges neutral. It lets us bring together various motivations. Not everyone working at Google and Facebook has the same motivations as those driving Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg. But money is the way in which those various motivations can align themselves in a productive way.

And yes, money can be productive: money is not simply coming out of a big stockpile, so that if you make more of it, it is forcibly coming from someone else. Money is not a zero-sum game. You can bring added value into the world.

France (and a lot of continental European countries) in particular has long had a very antagonistic relationship with money, with a lot of people taking the opposite view: that if you were earning more money, you were necessarily preventing others from having it.

But that viewpoint should not stand, because it’s simply not true. Creating real value as an entrepreneur is demanding work. The years before the dot-com bust of 2000 showed how far financing and IPOs could run ahead of a demonstrated value proposition. That is a poor model for lasting wealth. As an entrepreneur, you need to create real value to get rich.

Now, if you’re wanting to be an Entrepreneur, you have to read just your thinking. First, you need to take into account the value of equity. You should have a founding team that splits the equity about as evenly as possible, because each Entrepreneur is committed to taking an equal part in the risk and each Entrepreneur represents a part of the value proposition. When you’re starting out, there is no value, so that’s not hard. As you go on, this becomes a larger question, but remember one thing: when it comes to giving out equity, it’s a function of value, not a function of time and effort . If you are bringing someone into your company a year after it was started, but that person is going to double the value of your company, you can’t just give them a few percent. The value of a startup is completely disconnected from the time and effort that you put into it. Its value is in actual things: revenue, users, KPI - these are the only things that matter.

That’s why equity should never be a question of savings. First, because if you give out less equity, you’ve put the other person in a position where their interest in your company is lower than yours. And that shouldn’t be the case. But if you give out a bit more equity, you raise their level of interest in the company. A higher level of interest = more dedication to its success.

The same applies to salaries. Startups in Europe should learn to pay higher than market price for their employees. Why? Because paying market price for labor is a luxury for big companies. A startup has to convince its workers that it’s worth the risk to work there, and part of that is paying a premium in terms of salary. Again, it brings people closer to what you’re doing, and makes your chances of success go up. This can of course be a smart mix between equity and cash.

Why do you need everyone aligned and everyone trying their hardest? Let’s visualise what a startup really is: it’s a revenue acceleration project. A startup is trying to reach in five years what it would take a normal business thirty years to achieve. You’re trying to take a future projection of revenue, and pull on that projection, pull on it so hard that it compresses down into a very small timeframe. The amount of energy and force that it takes to compress thirty years into five years is absolutely insane. But that’s what a startup is trying to do.

And remember one thing as you’re thinking about all of this money stuff: it doesn’t take a billion dollars to turn someone into a jerk. They can just as easily be a jerk without it. A happy person with a billion dollars is happy. An asshole with a billion dollars is an asshole. So the money can’t be the key to your happiness. It can’t be the key to you deciding to risk everything on a startup.

Ok, maybe remember two things: money isn’t the key to happiness, and once you’ve decided to take that risk, you have to keep taking it. You have to double the bet, you have to risk everything again and again until it works. Because if you don’t, the losses that you take will be too much. If you aren’t willing to continue raising the risk level, you’ll be afraid of failing. And a fear of failure will kill your startup.

Thinking clearly about equity and salaries, keeping people aligned, not fearing failure - these are concrete things that will help you. Because succeeding as a startup, becoming a high-net-worth individual, it’s not luck. The few lucky stories that are out there become popular because journalists love them, and the people who were lucky love to talk about it. But all the other people, who make up the vast majority of startup success stories, they aren’t interested in being on display. What’s more, their story boils down to the same thing: finding a problem to solve that matters, working hard, and conquering a market doing so.

And all of those people know that we don’t do anything alone in this world. People help us, and they deserve to be compensated for that help. In the end, it’s better to have a few percentage points in something that’s worth a lot, than a large percentage in a company that’s going nowhere. That’s why you reason in absolute terms.

Once you start to move up and develop your business, keep in mind that there’s a difference between money and wealth. Money means that you have a million dollars in the bank. Wealth means that you have a million dollars worth of stock, which has the ability to grow, to keep up with and even beat inflation.

You’re going after wealth, not money. That being the case, never reason in relative terms, reason only in absolute terms. The percentage that you have of your startup means absolutely nothing. It just doesn’t matter. What matters is how many actual shares do you have, and what are they worth thanks to certain events? What is the number on the check? If someone offers to buy 40% of your company for $100M, and someone else offers to buy 30% of it for $25M, you aren’t going to take the lower offer simply because it allows you to retain a larger percentage of your company. The only thing that matters is the absolute value.

That’s why it’s best to just not worry about it. Worry about adding value to your company, and the rest takes care of itself. Don’t think about how much you’re paying to grow your company; think about how that investment is going to affect your revenue growth. Too many companies die because people are worried about relative administrative and logistical details. Reason in absolute terms, and only talk about the things that actually matter.

Once you’re reasoning in absolute terms, you’ll see exactly how important it is to live the future in the present. What does that mean? Living the future in the present means that you aren’t obsessed with what you have right now, but instead with what you’re trying to have.

One of the biggest problems that Entrepreneurs have is seeing money in terms of their budget today. Let’s say that you’ve started your business with $10,000 and you find an office that is absolutely perfect, but it costs $30,000. If you say, “Well, I guess we don’t have the money,” you’re letting the past take over your present. Your bank account, which only represents what you did in the past, is holding you back. An Entrepreneur has to live in the opposite direction. You have to look and say, “Is this place going to change my revenues and my relationship with my clients and future clients?” And be honest! Be honest, because the answer may be no. You have to ask yourself if this decision will change your future. If it will, then you can’t hold yourself back. You have to look for a way to live your future in the present. Find the money - it’s out there somewhere. By the way - it is very uncommon for an office to change anything but you get the point.

This comes down to the fact that being cheap is not just about money. It’s a question of your attitude. It’s a question of how you spend your time, what you optimize within your company, and what is important to you.

Everything comes back to what it will bring to your company and its future. The best way to be successful is to evaluate money, for you and your company, in its absolute terms, and to be a good buyer who understands future value today. Making good choices with this thinking can have positive impacts on your life over the very long term. And of course, making poor choices in this field will have the opposite effect.

Like I said, making wealth is more important than making money. One day, you’re going to come upon a situation when someone calls you up and wants to buy your company. In that case, there is only one response: you sell if you have doubts about the future growth of your company. You don’t sell if you’re loving the idea that you’re going to keep growing. That’s it. It’s not a question of the value of your company today, it’s about your confidence in what the company will be tomorrow. You don’t get stuck in any other questions, other than your company’s ability to continue its growth.

This brings us back to why we’re always so obsessed with money in the startup world. It’s because it’s the way that we can have confidence in what we’re doing and it’s the way for us to have time to do what we want to do. If you have money, you’re untouchable. If you have a business model that works, you get to decide what offers are worthwhile and what offers aren’t.

Earning money through your startup is what gives you power and leverage when you look to move forward. It’s what allows you to stay independent and maintain your ability to make decisions. It’s what gives you confidence at the negotiating table. There’s nothing that an investor can smell faster than the desperation of a founder who needs money to survive. But if you have growing revenues behind you, you’ll be confident in that moment. It’s our animalistic instinct for power, sure. But it’s there, and it’s effective.

We all know the meaning of the word “care.” We try to apply it in our everyday lives, to our friends, our loved ones, even strangers. Nobody wakes up and says, “I really want to be a jerk to everybody,” — at least, there’s not too many people who do that. We all say, “I want the people around me to know that I care.”

The real problem comes in when you have to scale that care. When you’re just starting out, and you’re finding your first clients, it’s easy to care for them. Or, I should say, it’s a matter of deciding to care and really meaning it. You respond to problems personally, you communicate directly with them, and you build a strong relationship. At scale, that’s hard. It’s so hard that one of the biggest clichés that we hear about a company is that, “They don’t care.”

Think of a multinational corporation, a telephone company for example. If you have, as a client, to interact with the customer support, you’re already in a bad mood. You know it’s gonna be a nightmare. You know that they’ve gotten into the mindset where every customer isn’t an individual, but just a tiny part of a mass of obligations that they need to maintain.

As a startup, you know exactly what each of your customers means.

You know exactly how hard it is to find and keep those individuals who support you at the beginning. And on the other side, your customers like the feeling of knowing that there’s a real person behind the website. They like to know who is running things, they like to feel close to the product that they’re using. And so there’s a mutual sense of caring that is created in those early times.

Heetch offered an early example. It began as an evening and night ride-sharing app, useful to people coming home from bars. For years, its founders went out with people and then helped them get a Heetch ride home. They were building their community of users in person, demonstrating value and care for customers.

As a startup, that level of extreme care can make you into something truly special. Making those connections can change the minds of even the most skeptical people. Real care has a magical effect, whether it’s in your personal life or in the business world. People remember it when the CEO reaches out to them to fix a problem. That type of care can absolutely save a startup in its early days. That’s why you need processes in place that place the user at the center and emphasizes the kindness with which you’re going to interact with them.

You don’t need perfection in a startup.

Why is nothing perfect in this world? Because all the perfect products are trapped on the hard drives of entrepreneurs who never launched. So everything out there has its problems. But caring is outside of your product: you can be as perfect as possible in your caring. You can hit the magical trio of being a caring entrepreneur: be personal, be sincere, be authentic. That’s how you can win. Not by being perfect, but by being the ideal entrepreneur for a small and intense community of users.

Of course, that takes time. Exceptional care means an entrepreneur has to be available: ready to respond, fast to respond, and responding at any time. It means adapting your tone to the individual customer. When I send an email to a startup’s customer service, too many of them respond in a bland, corporate tone that doesn’t let me feel a connection to the company. If someone writes to you in a formal tone, reply to them in a formal tone. If someone writes to you in an informal tone, or in a funny tone, respond in the way that you find natural. See every customer as a potential friend. Don’t see them as a number on a screen.

You cannot delegate customer relationships when you’re starting your business.

Until it becomes literally impossible to handle, an entrepreneur needs to be dealing directly with every client who contacts the company. But if it takes you an hour every day to respond to the emails that clients are sending you, that’s one of the best hours that you can spend. That hour will never be a waste of time. And when there’s a problem, do whatever it takes to fix it. Commit yourself to finding a solution, and you’ll be taking advantage of one of the biggest benefits to being a startup.

You can (and should) even go one step further at the beginning — go ahead and give out your personal phone number. That’s the level of commitment that makes great entrepreneurs. And don’t be afraid, don’t tell me, “Oh, but then I’m going to have people calling me all the time.” Look, if people are calling you, it’s because they know your service and what you’re doing. That’s your entire goal. If you can get to the point where your phone is ringing all the time and it’s impossible to keep your phone number out there, great — you’ve managed to find success as an entrepreneur.

When you’re fixing problems, get used to being generous, and be glad for the opportunity. Putting customers first can’t be looked at in terms of saving money. Over the long term, it’s one of the best ways that you can market yourself. Whatever it costs to create a customer who is happy with you for life, that’s money well spent.

Sometimes people misunderstand my advice. I tell founders to act with intensity and ambition, but that does not mean treating people without respect. I say it can be better to ask forgiveness than permission, but part of that is actually asking for forgiveness. When you do something wrong, be ready to apologize sincerely.

Emails from your company need to be coming from a real person.

That’s why you need to reply to everyone (and do it fast). That’s why you need to unsubscribe people yourself — don’t send them a link and ask them to unsubscribe themselves. That’s why you don’t ignore anyone, not even the trolls. That’s why you never refer people to someone else, but you handle it and fix the problem yourself.

If you take on that role, where fixing problems is personal, it filters down into the rest of your company. Everyone in your company will see exactly how important it is to fix problems without hesitation. That’s the company culture you want.

When it comes to needing to scale up customer support, there are tons of tools out there.

You should incorporate them into your processes as soon as possible, as it will make that scaling process much easier. Intercom, Slack, Front, they can all give you not only vital information about your users, but also allow you to maximize the personal interactions that you have with clients. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, and it doesn’t mean it’s low cost. It’s difficult and expensive. But it’s one of the most important things that you can invest in.

Captain Train offered a strong historical example of scaling personal care. In its first years, contacting the company often meant dealing with the CEO. Exceptional customer service was the highest priority. The team wanted everyone they spoke to to leave surprised by how much they cared.

That attitude spread through the company as it grew. Its team engaged actively on Facebook, responded to people and kept an authentic voice. Customers responded to that sincerity as Captain Train reached millions of users across Europe. The useful lesson is how a personal standard of care became a company-wide habit.

Finding ways to connect with people doesn’t have to stay online.

Events can help people join a community and form real bonds. Someone may first come for free food and drink, but return because they found a connection that mattered. You can build relationships with users while sharing a good time.

Events also let you really learn about your users. Events show you how to best adapt what you’re doing to their needs. It’s how you can connect them to each other, and how you can get real feedback on what you’re doing. People in a crowd will always give you more useful feedback than they will one-on-one. Why? Basic human psychology, really. But an event can give you a space where people feel comfortable with you and they see that you are listening to their concerns.

And don’t leave your events to chance. Plan them out, know what is going to happen when. There’s nothing worse than showing up somewhere and it becoming clear that there is no plan. Be there yourself, get up on stage and give an introduction, meet the people who came out to see you.

The only thing that matters in a startup is the result. Care at the beginning of a startup is what gives way to a caring culture as you grow. You can make different strategic decisions in order to get there, in order to push it into your team, in order to scale up. But in the end, it’s a mindset: JUST CARE.

As an Entrepreneur, you need a problem. It’s the first step in finding a solution. But it’s not always easy to see the problem, or to really understand it. So here are some questions that you need to ask yourself.

Is it a real problem or not?

Today, this gets tricky right away. You have to live at the center of contradicting possibilities: how do you find good ideas that might seem bad to others, and how do you find the real problems amongst all the fake problems? Good ideas that solve obviously real problems, everybody’s working on those. They’re easy. What you need is a real problem, not a problem that you imagine, and you need a solution that’s not obvious to everyone else.

Let’s take the case of Google. When Google began, there weren’t enough websites for it to really be a problem to keep track of all of them. When they said they wanted to store and search all the information on the web, it wasn’t a real problem. But Google saw into the future, when there was an exponential explosion in the amount of data on the web. So they had a real problem that was not obvious because it was a future problem; and they solved it with a good solution. (And don’t fall into the trap of people who say that, “Oh, of course it was going to be a problem! Anyone could have seen that!” The future is unpredictable, and anyone who claims to always know what is coming is a liar. That’s part of why it’s so hard to identify those future opportunities today, and why Google became what it became.)

Identifying problems like that means that you have to get inside the thing you’re trying to change. That’s how you see the real pain points and the real trends that indicate problems. If you’re not sure it’s a real problem, you’re already lost. Because the execution of a solution, there’s a lot of people who can help you to do that. Execution follows similar patterns all the time. But if you want to identify real problems in an industry, you have to truly understand its day-to-day realities.

It’s hard to find real problems. Sometimes you have to keep trying. So do that — keep trying. But be clear about what you’re looking for — don’t invent problems that don’t exist and will never exist.

Can you define the problem?

Being able to define your problem in detail, and to explain it using very few words to whoever is listening, is an absolute necessity for an Entrepreneur. It takes time to do it right. Anyone who tells you that there are overnight success stories is either a journalist who is selling you a story, or an Entrepreneur who is selling a story to a journalist.

Defining the problem well is important because even if you find a real problem, what happens with your business isn’t going to exactly follow the road that you originally saw. There are going to be roadblocks and maybe even dead ends. But if you have defined the problem properly, you’ll see either a way around those roadblocks, or a new road taking you out of that dead end.

Is the problem big ?

This comes down to choices, because here’s the reality: whether you start a big company or a small company, you’re going to deal with the same issues. Whether your ambition is huge or small, you’re going to come up against the same horrible things when you start out. Finding success as an Entrepreneur, no matter what you’re trying to do, is hard. The percentage of success is extremely low. That being the case, you need to clearly see the upside of your risk. When you finally find success one day, it’s better for it to be a significant success rather than a small one.

So don’t pull back in terms of ambition, and make sure that the problem you’re aimed at is big enough to make it worth your time and effort.

Is it a difficult problem?

If you think that the problem isn’t that difficult, be worried. Because if it isn’t difficult, why hasn’t anyone already done it? What’s more, difficulty isn’t a bad thing. The more difficult the problem, the more opportunity there is. Not only will the potential success level be higher, but it makes it more unlikely that anyone else will also be able to succeed. Too many Entrepreneurs only go after projects that have low-risk problems. Good Entrepreneurs take on the big problems and the difficult problems, the ones that really need to be solved.

So don’t hesitate to tackle something big. WhatsApp was a great example of this. The particularity of WhatsApp was simply that they took an extremely difficult problem and were the only team that said, “We can do this and we can do it across every operating system at the same time.” Every engineer would see that as an incredibly difficult problem. WhatsApp decided to do it anyway. And you saw how that story turned out.

Is the problem obvious?

WhatsApp is again a great example here. Of course there was a problem that people wanted to be able to communicate with their friends, no matter whether their friends were on iOS or Android. It’s clear that no one only wanted to be able to communicate, essentially for free, with their other friends who happened to have the same phone as them.

Chipotle is another one: any restaurant chain has an issue with scaling. The easiest way to scale is to accept a reduction in quality. Whether it’s a restaurant or a hotel, you run into the same problems in terms of decreasing quality as you scale up. Chipotle was the first one to say, “We’re going to scale and we’re going to use organic ingredients all along the way.” No one else did it because it’s so hard. But once they decided that was a problem that they were going to solve, it became obvious that it would work. Because it’s something that people would want, but that was never available to them.

Has the problem already been completely resolved or not?

Whenever a bad Entrepreneur starts investigating an idea, they look around at the competitors and say, “Oh, well, somebody’s already doing it, guess I’ll keep looking.” But the question isn’t about competitors. The question is whether or not the problem is completely solved.

Why do competitors keep appearing in search despite Google’s scale? Because even a successful search engine does not solve every search problem. Its size does not eliminate opportunities for a better answer, and that is a good thing.

Because it’s not simply a matter of looking to see if something else already exists that’s addressing the problem. Until the problem is completely solved, there’s always an opportunity. Either you can find an opportunity because there are fundamental problems like geography that others can’t overcome, or there’s an opportunity because the response to the problem can be adjusted and improved.

Is the problem getting worse every day, or not?

A problem that keeps getting worse deserves particular attention.

Take something like pollution. Every day that goes by, it’s getting worse. Sure there are a lot of people working on it. But it hasn’t been solved yet. That’s the indicator of a huge market opportunity.

So those are the seven questions that you need to ask yourself about your problem. Once you know the answers, you can move on to thinking about some other important things.

Understand your Market

Like understanding your market. Are you trying to break into a market that is growing, with more and more people every day who need your solution, or are you going after a market that is shrinking, with less and less people needing your help?

By definition, the market is alive. It’s never static. And you have to evaluate it on three shifting levels: the target market, the served available market and the total available market. When a startup is thinking about its market, it always falls into the trap of thinking about the total available market, all of those people in the world who might eventually be your customers. They start thinking about competitors for that market.

For a startup, the target market is the immediate goal. Apple did not begin by serving the enormous market it would eventually reach. It began with a small network of computer enthusiasts in California.

Once that’s clear, you can move up a level and look at your served available market, which is the market that you can actually reach with your startup. Only once you’ve gotten past those two steps, finding your target markets and then filling your served available markets, is there any question about competition.

Let’s be clear : Coke and Pepsi are competitors. If Coke sells less, Pepsi sells more. That’s how it works, because they’re dealing in the total available market. But when you’re an Entrepreneur launching a startup, the likelihood that there will be a direct relationship in which you’re going to sell more because your competitor is selling less is extremely low.

When you do get to that point of addressing a total available market, you’ll be able to hire people to worry about the competition, and you’ll be able to pay them very well. But until then, why worry about it? Your job as a founder is to conquer your target market. Period.

So do yourself a favor: forget about your competition. Ignorance is bliss, and that’s doubly true when you’re trying to stay focused on your product. You can’t control your competition, so why waste any time on them?

That doesn’t mean that you can’t take a look around and see what other people are up to. But you can’t be doing it to see what the competition is doing, you need to be doing it to see if there are any good ideas out there that you can use. And when you see something good that can help you, use it — but use it intelligently. Never turn off your brain. Adapt those good ideas to your context and your needs. Don’t just go around copy/pasting, actually think about what you’re doing and how it helps you.

Inspiration is everywhere, especially for startups

And go looking for inspiration in industries and domains that aren’t your own, not just in the tech world. We’ve got thousands of years of world history, in which there were people doing absolutely incredible things. If you want to find people who faced universal problems and in moments of crisis created new paradigms (for better or worse), you just have to go back into the history books!

There were people in art, literature, medicine, the railroads, who did things that will blow your mind. In the tech world, the history of startups is shorter than the history of those fields, and that means there aren’t that many, relatively speaking. So don’t get stuck in the world of Entrepreneurship and startups. Let your mind go free, and as long as you keep it working and not on autopilot, you’ll find amazing stories that lead you in new directions.

None of this learning is done in a weekend. But if you want to be an Entrepreneur, it’s something that you take on as part of your long-term lifestyle. Because once you’ve seen what people have done, the theories that people have developed, the studies that are out there, all of the excuses that you could have for not trying something new just fall apart. You aren’t too young, you aren’t too old. You don’t have enough experience, great. It’s not a requirement. You aren’t too dumb, and neither are the other people out there. You don’t have any business experience, that’s ok — no one else did either when they first started out. You don’t have any ideas? Open up Google and look for one. Or use a different search engine, they’re out there.

The excuses don’t work. The only thing is whether you’re willing to take the risk or not. And if you’re not, that’s ok. Not everyone needs to be an Entrepreneur. But if you’re going to take the risk, take it — be ambitious, be aware, and be fast.

The entrepreneurs who impress me most are those with the steepest learning curve: people who have much to learn and push that curve upwards as quickly as they can.

Well, how can we define that learning curve? How can we improve it?

We feel it, we know it exists, and we tell ourselves that it’s the most important thing, but we don’t know how to really measure it. If someone asked me how I judge this ability to learn in an entrepreneur when I first meet them, well, it’s like licking your finger and sticking it up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

Because the reality is that it’s not easy to say why some people learn quickly, and others take longer, if they ever learn at all. But because I did not want to believe that the learning curve is just a mystical subject that comes down to my best guess, I tried to figure out how to objectively express it.

It was hard. But I managed to come up with a few things.

First, identify how people figure out the answer to a question.

It used to be that if you wanted the answer to a question, you had to go around to the library, talk to people, find out who was an expert, etc. It was time consuming, and it was tiring. Now, Google is your friend. Quora is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. If people understand how to look for answers in today’s world, their rate of learning can go way up. If they don’t understand, well, that’s why I could set my inbox to autoreply with “Let Me Google That For You” and have 75% of my messages instantly disappear.

I wish I were joking about that.

Next comes a question of self-confidence.

Again, it’s difficult to put a precise number on this, but if you’re honest with yourself, you can pretty easily sense your level of self-confidence, and if you’re having a conversation with someone, you can pretty easily sense it in them as well. And one of the keys to learning quickly is believing wholeheartedly that you are able to do it.

That belief shouldn’t be blind: no one should go completely against their nature, their abilities, and their needs. An example: we’ve found through brain analysis that roughly 1/3 of people are born with small differences in their brains that make it difficult for them to understand and learn mathematical constructs. Maybe they need more time to learn, maybe math is really a subject that is not right for them and they will never master it, it’s different for different people. But the real problem is in our response, which is always the same: they go to school, they struggle with math, we tell them that they’re dumb, and they feel like they can’t learn. They lose that confidence in being able to learn, when what was needed was extra time and means that could help the brain to reform itself (which it can do — if you ever watch it through an MRI or other means, you’ll see that the brain is a remarkably plastic thing that can find new pathways and methods).

So a person who can learn quickly is self-confident and able to realize what is within the realm of their interests and their capabilities. If you’re a fish, don’t try to climb a tree. Spend your time trying to swim really well.

Focus on what you are good at

Personally, I know that I’m useless in geography — give me a map and I turn into a Republican presidential candidate. I’m useless in terms of time — half of the checks that I write are rejected because I have no idea what year it is. So I’ve structured my life so that I don’t have to worry about those things.

On the other hand, I’m an excellent auditory learner. If I hear something, I remember it. I remember conversations without any problem. When I was younger, I learned everything by watching TV. So if I want to learn something, I know that the best way is to find something to listen to on the subject.

When you have that sense of your interests and capabilities, you can learn things from any number of different sources. A lot of times, we put a real weight on learning, thinking that it has to come from somewhere serious, that it has to be identifiable as intellectual. But our culture is constantly providing opportunities to learn. Films, TV, radio, the internet, all sorts of things can teach us something new. So don’t put a value judgement on how you are learning or what you are learning — you don’t know what might be useful eventually. Put the value on learning itself, whenever and wherever you can.

The people who we see that have a strong learning curve, those are people who don’t have specific moments when they learn things

They’re always in learning mode. Others are always in “I’d like to learn” mode. But there’s a big difference between those two things. That difference lies in not putting some magical weight on learning things, not restricting it to certain situations or sources of information, but instead choosing to be completely open and thus learning all the time.

Once you’ve given yourself the means, once you’ve been honest about who you are and what type of learner you are, once you’ve opened yourself up to learning all the time, then there are a few techniques that you can use to accelerate your learning curve.

The first one is called “chunk & process.” If you were to try to run really fast and knock down a brick wall, you’ll just hurt your head. But if you look at the wall and start to see what it is made of, you can begin to take it down brick by brick. Learning is the same. If you look at a subject in its entirety, you’ll get knocked flat on your back. But if you can break it down into its simplest idea, and then a slightly more complex idea, and then a yet-more complex one, you’ll begin to master more and more material.

By their evolutionary essence, our brains aren’t structured to accept huge, earth-shattering shocks all at once. The more that you can break new ideas and new concepts down into small, acceptable pieces, the faster you will process them and learn them. And as you break them down, make sure that you try to learn those pieces every day. The best way to really implant something into your brain is to see an idea over and over and over again. To read it again, to listen to it again, to write it again.

Once you learn something, you have to understand that it will have an impact on all the rest that you will learn later

At one point in the world’s history, the Pythagorean theorem was an incredible discovery. It was the greatest theorem that the world knew, for hundreds of years. And now it’s something that we teach to kids in middle school. That fact forcibly changes all of the geometry and math that they learn later. The Pythagorean theorem is in no way the end of their learning, it is just the beginning. Trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to understand startups is like that, too. Whatever you learn today will be the base for what you’ll add in tomorrow, and the next day, and so on.

Those people with those incredible learning curves understand that: that everything you learn allows you to build up more on top of it, and that things will eventually fit together in ways that aren’t necessarily clear in the moment of learning.

Another thing that people with impressive learning curves do is to train their memory

Through neuroscience, we know that as adults it is possible to train our brains in order to maintain our memory. We can’t necessarily expand our natural capabilities at that point, like we could do when we were children, but we can work to maintain our memory capacities.

And if there is one actual danger in the digital world, it’s that — losing your memory. Think back on all that you used to remember, which we’ve now given over to the computers. Phone numbers. We used to have them in our heads, and now I couldn’t tell you my own number. Directions. Now, just follow your GPS. This means that training your brain is more necessary than ever — you need to explicitly exercise your memory, to practice memorizing things and recounting them back to yourself.

We also know that it's easier to learn if you're really in love with the subject you’re dealing with

Why? Well, it’s a long story, and if you’re interested you can take a look at a fascinating book by António Damásio called Descartes’ Error , but what it comes down to is that there is a significant emotional element in learning. When we love someone, when we truly love someone, we start to find them in things that are only tangential to them. For example, if you’re in love, and the person you love enjoys sailing, when you see a sailboat, you think of them. It seems so simple and almost stupid, but neurologically speaking, it’s huge. Your brain reprograms itself, it creates connections between objects and the one that you love that it wouldn’t make with everyone that you know, because if it did you would go crazy. Learning becomes easier when you feel an emotional and loving connection to the subject. The emotional component of learning is extremely important if you want to hack your learning curve. If you can fall in love with the subject that you want to learn, your brain will reprogram itself to give more space and more connections to that subject.

This emotional component is also why you can improve your mastery of a subject by adding simulations to the environment in which you’re learning. Put yourself into a state that improves your emotional expectations for learning. In his autobiography, Machiavelli tells the story of how, when he was studying the classical authors, he would dress up like a classical Roman before he started reading. American Airlines has found that when they start training a new pilot, by having them dress up like a pilot and putting them into a real airplane for a few months, their training becomes much faster and more effective. These are both examples of putting yourself into a mental and emotional state that encourages learning, that pulls your brain into a place where it is receptive to remembering. It’s the neurological principle behind the old saying of “fake it ’til you make it.”

The next thing that you need to realize is just how important communication is to learning

One of the best ways to learn something is by talking with people.

In our world, there is an amazing ability to find people in your networks who know something that you’re trying to learn. And people who know things are, in general, happy to talk to others about what they know. That doesn’t mean you should have just one person who you’re always asking. Multiply your sources of information, pay attention to who knows what, and utilize those resources.

As you’re learning, remember how powerful metaphors can be. If you can remember a story or a metaphor or an acronym, that idea will stay in your head. And taking the time and making the effort to create these metaphors for yourself will be even more effective than ones that you get from somewhere else — assuming they’re good metaphors, of course.

Teach!

Teaching is one of the greatest way to learn things. When you teach, you’re forced to explain things, and people are a clear reflection of your own mastery of the subject. Because when you stand up in front of people and try to teach them something, it becomes very clear: if they understand, you’ve explained it well; if they don’t understand, that’s not their fault, it’s yours for not having explained it properly. Teaching sets a very high bar, not only with your having learned the subject, but also your ability to communicate it in a variety of ways.

A few last things…

Never underestimate how learning something can become important later, connecting dots that you may not have been able to see when you were learning. Knowledge is never a closed loop, it is always in flux and growing. And the easiest way to continue learning new things is to keep expanding your foundation. The more that you learn, the easier it becomes to learn new things. No matter what it is — painting and drawing, history, math, or technical subjects that are directly related to entrepreneurship, they all will give you a broader base from which to learn new things.

And remember, procrastination is not your enemy. We’ve all been pushed toward the idea that we always have to be producing, that there are others out there who are coming out with a new book every week, etc. But we’re also learning that taking some extra time is a needed part of learning. Leaving some time and space free in your brain, which is then able to digest and work with the new things that you’ve been exposed to, is needed to truly learn. Just because you give yourself the time to walk around the city and free your mind doesn’t mean that you’re not being productive.

P.S. Be careful about taking notes — too many people mistake taking notes with learning. When you’re taking notes, you’re probably not learning, because most of us aren’t very good at doing two things at one time. So pay attention and figure out what works best for you — the next time that you watch a video or something like that, see if you learn and retain more with notes, or without notes.