Hey Reader, You don’t have infinite time. You have until Friday. I hope I sound repetitive. I’d say it every week, because little else matters. No one cares about your horizontal fluff work. What matters is whether the business is moving exponentially forward in the right direction. Right now. Clock speed. The speed at which you release, get feedback, learn, iterate, release again. Clock speed. The fastest team to learn wins. Clock speed. Getting in traffic and proving what you believe to be...

Hey Reader, At some point, whether you've been tracking Palantir, been in startup, software, or product circles, B2B, B2C, or anywhere in between, you've heard the term forward-deployed engineer. Sounds expensive. Sounds technical. But it's really about something universal. Making your customer’s success inevitable. Many founders stay busy doing horizontal fluff. Universally applicable work that looks productive but helps no one specifically. Forward-deployed founders do the opposite. The...

Hey Reader, Implicitly or explicitly, the most common word a founder ever hears is no. And just to be clear. There’s a difference in no. There’s “no” as a boundary. The kind that protects, that ends the conversation. And there’s “no” as a negotiation. The kind that starts it. I have a six-year-old.“No, you can’t have your iPad” is a negotiation.“No, you can’t climb inside the fireplace and up the chimney” is a boundary. What we’re talking about here is the negotiation kind. The no that shows...