Abstraction is the scarce part. Everyone is working from the same tools now, and arriving at the same place. Founders, executives, and boards retain me for what no model can produce.
Creativity is the only thing left.
It always was the difference.
The only time I worked inside a big company was after one of mine was acquired. Everything else has been my own, with or without venture capital, so nobody ever trained how I think. That used to be common. Now most people are working from the same tools and reaching the same conclusions, and doubting the consensus is what I get hired for.
I have raised a lot of money and worked with people running very large companies. In those rooms I asked the question everyone else was avoiding.
The same ten questions,
until one of them breaks.
They do not need advice, and they do not need answers. They need the one nobody else got to. Asked in whatever order a company needs, for as long as it takes.
The questions are simple. Answering them honestly is the hard part.
I build,
advise and consult.
My own ventures keep me in the market as it is now, not as I remember it — raising, hiring, shipping, selling. That is the difference between advice and commentary.
The industry changes; the constraints repeat. Board seats, or simply an open line — founders bring me the call before they make it, and I give them the read from someone who has already made it.
A company brings me one thing it believes is wrong. What is actually wrong is usually several things, and rarely the one named. I work inside the team and stay on it until the thing actually starts to move.
Pain gets you a business.
Contradictions get you a monopoly.
Accretive solutions scale inside existing systems. Displacing solutions fight inertia, and in displacement change itself is the primary competitor. If incentives stay the same, you are integrating fragmented systems. That is displacement work, and displacement work competes against human resistance, not technology.
Think: if it is accretive, keep the toys you have and add this to your sandbox. If it is displacement, I am taking away some of your toys and replacing them with mine.
Combinatorial breakthroughs do not create leverage. They reshuffle speed, quality, and cost, which alters incentives, not outcomes. Consilience is different: two or more unrelated substrates have to come together, and what you get is a new explanation. You cannot iterate on a horse to make a car, nor on a candle to make a lightbulb.
This is the classic: did you invent the mousetrap, or make a better one?
By rearranging speed, quality, and cost you are simply changing the incentive: moving the same ingredients around inside an existing substrate. To do this successfully you still need a new explanation. And if you are not changing an incentive at all, you are solving a disparate systems problem, which makes your solution displacing and change your largest competitor.
Put plainly: is your solution some version of better, faster, or cheaper? If so, you are rearranging buyer incentives.
Operator first,
everything else second.
Golf-course software, built around design and ease of use in an industry that had not been asked to expect either.
Video calls on any device, used in almost every country. An unasked-for Fast Company piece took the site down.
An IP company holding patents on strike-face substrates for body armor, in work with the U.S. Department of War.
How a product looks and feels is a
decision about the business.
Not a decoration applied afterward. Design and interface get the same attention here as the P&L, because buyers read them first.
Few companies,
long horizons.