prev @stanfordmbb. writing/investing/community building. growing https://teapawt.org/t.co/ynTzOcCbqd
Joined February 2016
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About a month ago, I laced up my hoop shoes for the last time as a student-athlete.
Here is what I’ve learned in my almost twenty year journey with the game.
My hope is it can be helpful to anyone who dares to dream big and chase greatness in whatever they do.
When I was young and building confidence as an athlete, I’d often repeat in my head before the game:
“Be aggressive. Be aggressive. Be aggressive”
Sometimes this landed me on the bench. But more often than not, good things happened. I’d force turnovers, create shots for myself, or even better my teammates.
By attacking relentlessly, I got more opportunity to attack. And then later learned when to go slow. Play at varied paces.
It looks slightly different off the court, but a warrior-like aggressiveness is surely the best way to compete.
Startups should staff themselves with Warriors, and root out Guardians or Caretakers.
Bad performance is easy to spot. Mediocre performance and complacency is harder to spot. Mediocre performers will never achieve greatness. They will always be Guardians at best.
Warriors become complacent when high performance shifts to autopilot. Metrics may still look strong, but the commitment is no longer the same, and the changes in behavior are subtle. Meeting goals doesn’t mean someone isn’t complacent. Complacent Warriors lose the will to fight and become Guardians themselves.
Startups operate in a highly competitive environment. You are battling both incumbents and other startups, so you need to recruit, retain, and reward Warriors. Send the Guardians and Caretakers to your competitors.
monday night the learning journey continues!
this event series has been invaluable for investors, operators, & company builders.
dm me/rsvp if you want in.
If you want to learn about how top companies use AI internally OUTSIDE of engineering you're going to want to see this. How does Headway think about using AI in a regulated industries? What does Mercor's RL environment actually look like? Come learn with us! luma.com/397kxbdu
Sam Beskind retweeted
@gradypb's recent Loom to Sequoia’s LPs accidentally made the best case I’ve heard for building AI services businesses over product companies.
He details that the best AI application companies have to rebuild their product every 4 months as the underlying models improve.
The part he didn’t get into is that the pace of change leaves these AI startups with two pretty crappy options.
They can ship the rebuild and re-onboard enterprise customers who just learned the workflow & UI. Anyone who’s sold enterprise software knows how painful (or plain impossible) that is.
Or they can hold the rebuild back because customers like the product as is, which is exactly the opening a competitor needs. Cursor probably felt a version of this when Claude Code showed up with a totally different surface (the terminal & agents) aimed at the same developers.
So I’d push founders toward the services-native version, when possible. Instead of selling software your customer has to learn, run it yourself with the best practitioners in the space and sell the outcome. Your cracked team can relearn the product every 4 months. And this way your customer never has to.
It’s often just a better business too. Pick customers where you’ll clearly drive dollars generated or saved, take a cut, and you can charge way more than a seats or usage-based pricing model would allow.
Most people think of outcome-based pricing as a support & sales thing (Sierra getting paid for the upsells it drives), but it’s showing up in healthcare, CPG and a bunch of other places.
SmarterDX (a Floodgate company) helped hospitals capture additional revenue they’d overlooked, took a cut, and got acquired for over $1B in under four years.
Midstream Health is scaling fast by finding rebates health systems earned but never claimed and taking a cut of the savings.
Waystation (another Floodgate company) started as sourcing software for CPG brands, then got pulled into running full-stack sourcing efforts and taking a cut of the found savings.
Are there other companies I should be tracking that do the work themselves and take a cut of the results?
start your engines.
let’s go @CarloWillem !!!
Today Hone launches Engines: AI that owns business outcomes.
Chatbots give answers. Agents do tasks. Engines deliver outcomes, and we hold them responsible for creating real value, measured in actual dollars instead of tokens or vibes.
You point it at a business metric, and the Engine figures out the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, skills, and memories, collaborates with the right people, and gets better with experience.
From AI leaders to global enterprises, our customers have already used Engines to:
• Uncover millions in procurement savings
• Optimize product funnels
• Manage credit risk
• Increase qualified pipeline in new territories
• Accelerate implementations and improve account management
To scale this impact across the economy, we’ve raised a $60M seed led by Benchmark and Index with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align.
AI’s raw capabilities are far ahead of the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will help close the gap.
Here’s how they work…
this is tremendous news
@Dan_Grunfeld let’s gooo!!!
Sam Beskind retweeted
great 7am runs in SF today.
s/o @sambeskind for organizing this 💪🏀
rsvp/dm me if you’re in NY and interested!!
these events have been have been invaluable for operators
Come learn how the best companies are actually using AI internally Monday in NYC:
Seb Goddijn @sebgoddijn (Ramp Glass) on building and maintaining skills across teams. Jai Toor @jai__toor (Deepline) on turning messy GTM work into scoring problems AI can run with.
Then time for you to meet one another and share your workflows
A few spots left. Apply here luma.com/f8gvnpis
