Insights
Writing on AI, startups,
and what it takes to ship.
Essays on the production gap, startup strategy, and the founder’s inner operating system. The weekly playbooks live in the AI-Native Founder newsletter, and the running LinkedIn series lives in Field Notes.
Fresh from the newsletter
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Close Your Seed Round in 4 Weeks: 5 Rungs From Soft Commit to Wire, Each With a Verdict
The Founder Library · For a pre-seed or seed SAFE round, lead or no lead: where each investor stands, the true sentence you may send them, one deadline, and every wire landed safely
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7 Exercises That Validate Your AI Startup Idea in 7 Days, Each With a Verdict
The Founder Library · Seven evenings from idea to evidence: the scripts, a pass line set before each exercise, a verdict after it, and the last test most founders skip: can it be copied?
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Building Your Founding Team — Lesson 10: Say It While It Is Small
The Build Log · The weekly founder check-in: a 45-minute agenda your AI prepares from the decision log, four questions only the two of you can answer, and how to raise a problem early
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The Copycat Test: What a Funded Clone Still Can’t Build in 12 Months
A team with your money, the same models and a year can rebuild most of your product. This one-hour test finds what they still won’t have, and what to start building this week.
Read the full issue →
From the archive
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How Outcome Pricing Changes the Scope of an Engagement
Outcome pricing moves every failure and every argument about what counts as done onto your margin. What to agree first, and when it's too early to …
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How to Write an Exit Criterion for a Forward-Deployed Engagement
An exit criterion names the number, the baseline, the date and the person who reads it. How to write one before anyone on the team writes code.
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How to Scope a Forward Deployed Engineering Engagement
How to scope a forward deployed engineering engagement: when to refuse, who has to be in the room, and the one page to agree before anyone builds.
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The Entrepreneur Extinction Event (And How to Be the Asteroid)
The entrepreneur extinction event: GPU scarcity isn't killing startups, it's rewriting the rules so solo founders outbuild teams with 50x their res…
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Economic Trends Speaker
An economic trends speaker for investor and founder audiences. The talk maps the economic, credit, and technology cycles that decide when funding o…
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Entrepreneurial Mindset Speaker
An entrepreneurial mindset speaker for founder events, drawing on The Inside-Out Entrepreneur: the resiliency it takes to last the whole journey.
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AI Innovation Speaker
An AI innovation speaker for conferences and offsites. The talk: why capability stopped being the differentiator, and who can get AI into production.
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Startup Leadership Speaker
A startup leadership speaker for founder audiences and accelerator programs. The talk covers hiring A+ people, real ownership, and pacing to the ma…