I listened to a podcast recently in which a founder said something that stuck with me. Building a software or digital product is easier than ever. With AI tools, you can build with a fraction of the engineering team you needed 5 or 10 years ago. Or you can have AI write your code for you. Therefore, he thinks that distribution is the most important thing now. How you reach and convince potential customers to buy is the most important thing, or so he thinks.

I partially agree with this, but I’d add something else: Because everyone can build products faster, better products will have an edge and resonate more with customers. To build a better product, you must understand the problem deeply so you can solve it better than the competition can. Deeply understanding the need of the customer is vital.

If you have a superior understanding of the problem and have built a superior product, then capturing attention is critical. Capturing someone’s attention is harder than ever these days, given the amount of content and the number of ads the typical person sees in a day. Entrepreneurs who know how to get in front of the right people with a message that resonates will have a huge advantage.

Overall, I think the entrepreneurs who do well going forward will have a deep understanding of the customer’s problem and how to best solve it, be able to communicate the problem and how to best solve it concisely, and know how to distribute their solution in a creative and cost-effective way.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 106
• Total blog posts published: 707

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/15/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read The Laws of Trading, a framework book about making decisions in highly competitive and uncertain environments. The title is misleading because the book is about improving decision-making and understanding how markets work.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred eleven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

Today I was looking at my decision journal and the post I wrote about it (see here). Just looking at the journal made me see a recent decision more rationally. It was a small decision, not worthy of being recorded in my journal. But thinking about how I would describe it if I did write about it in the journal helped me think about it more clearly and quickly conclude it wasn’t the greatest decision.

I think that knowing I have a decision journal forces my brain to think more rationally. I guess physically seeing the journal may activate certain frameworks around decision-making. Not totally sure of this yet, but something I’m definitely watching.

This week, I had a long conversation with a founder. He’s been building his start-up for several years, and he relies on government grants for a large part of his operating budget. He’s getting paying customers too, but not enough of them that he can rely solely on that revenue to fund his operations. He has a multiyear grant from the federal government, but those funds can’t be disbursed to him until a certain act that allows a particular agency to disburse funds is passed. The founder was banking on that money to fund 2026, but he hasn’t received the funds yet and won’t until the legislation passes. He’s in a tough spot. He has about 30 days’ worth of cash left. After that, he’ll have to start reducing expenses and headcount.

This isn’t great, but it’s not unheard of for entrepreneurs. Being short on cash, for whatever reason, happens a lot. I’d argue it’s more the norm than the exception. While the times we’re living through can be stressful for founders and their teams, opportunities exist. When everyone knows that the survival of the company (and their job) is on the line, they get laser-focused. People quickly buy into any changes that align with survival and put their all into making them successful. Alternatively, these moments force founders to think about sources of capital from perspectives they hadn’t considered before. Said differently, the crisis forces founders to think creatively about how they can fund their business. I know founders who, faced with cash crunches, launched new products and services that became so successful that they generated most of the company's revenue.

Being short on cash is no fun when you’re an entrepreneur, but when it happens, consider how you can use the situation to think creatively and get your team focused on what matters most.

Today, I read a Bloomberg article about Inditex SA (see here) that interested me. Inditex, which owns retailers, including fast-fashion juggernaut Zara, was founded by Amancio Ortega sixty years ago. The company is publicly traded, but he owns more than 59% of its shares, according to the article. Ortega is the fifteenth-wealthiest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and has a net worth of around $126 billion as of this writing.

The article I read caught my attention because of the dividend Inditex is about to pay to shareholders, including Ortega. Based on the number of shares he owns, Ortega will receive $3.7 billion. I assume the dividend is based on the prior year’s financial results.

This article highlights that selling your company isn’t the only way to generate cash, even outsize wealth, for yourself. If you build an amazing company that generates a ton of cash, you can maintain your ownership in it, which increases your wealth, and receive dividends (or distributions) from it, which provides cash flow that you can use to pay living expenses or invest in other assets.

Building to sell is popular, but building to hold forever is how many of the world’s wealthiest people created their wealth.

I was listening to a founder describe his hiring process. One of the things he looks for is people who are naturally curious and learn about new things in their free time. I thought this was a great trait to look for in team members (or people in general), but I wasn’t sure how you identify it in an interview. Then he shared what he calls his most important interview question: “What’s the last Wikipedia rabbit hole you went down?”

I instantly thought about the last thing I researched, and sure enough, Wikipedia was part of it. Because of AI, this might change a bit, but I think this is a great question to quickly gauge someone’s level of natural curiosity and how motivated they are to satisfy it.

For over a year, in every Sunday’s post, I shared what I’d learned from a personal project I was working on. This past week, I changed the format of that post, making it broader and sharing where I learned things. More about my thinking on this change here.

It’s early, but one effect of this change was noticeable to me immediately. Creating the new type of post forced me to review all the pieces of content I consumed that week, evaluate which ones added value, and synthesize my big takeaways from each (I need to work on this). This stood out to me because although I often save pieces to review again later in my GTD system, I don’t consistently go back and synthesize them. Creating the post was a forcing function for the review and synthesis of the most-value-added content I learned from.

Not something I thought about before making the change, but definitely a benefit.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 105
• Total blog posts published: 700

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/8/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Big Money Thinks Small, a framework book about biases, blind spots, and how to think to be a smarter investor. This book is helpful for decision-making, but it’s tailored more for thinking like a probabilistic investor.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred ten was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

I’m trying something new this week. I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

·      No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• 19-year-old makes $400,000 a month – Bloomberg article about how teenagers are becoming millionaires by creating games on Roblox. This is a big market and a trend that isn’t widely known or understood.
• A Wall Streeter bought one of NYC’s biggest clubs – WSJ article about a club that was doing a shocking amount of revenue. After the owners borrowed money, they ended up losing control of the club.
• “College Freshman Sells $50M AI Company” – My previous post includes links to the TechCrunch article and the founder’s X account post about the sale.
• Howard Marks memo: AI hurtles – YouTube video of Howard Marks’s latest memo on AI. This complements his December memo on AI’s ramifications for investing.
• My First Million: The product is you – YouTube video from My First Million, which is about entrepreneurship. Ideas that stuck with me: the concept of the product you’re uniquely suited to build, being you pushed out. Also, I like the impatient-with-action, patient-with-results mindset.
• Alpha Comes from a Differentiated View – YouTube video about investing from someone who worked at hedge funds like Steve Cohen’s Point72. I liked the hit rate vs. slugging thought, being right vs. getting it right, questions to ask when tracking change, and thinking in frameworks.
• Neil Howe on the Fourth Turning – YouTube interview of Cem Karsan and Neil Howe about how differences in generations lead to big societal changes and impact public markets.
• Cem Karsan’s views on current state of stock market – YouTube interview with Cem Karsan. He shares his thoughts about the current stock market and Citrini’s infamous AI report.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.