The other day I came across a small clothing brand. I did some digging and learned it was Atlanta based. Since I enjoy supporting local founders, I ordered a few pieces.

A few days later I got an email saying my order had been refunded. No explanation or additional information. I wasn’t sure why I’d been given a refund and decided to email the company for more information. My hope is that I’ll understand what happened with this order so I can place another order or find some other way to support this local brand.

Having built a company that sold physical products online, I know how hard (and expensive) it is to acquire a customer. Lots of great brands are competing for customers’ wallets. If you acquire a customer, you want to think about it as an acquired relationship. Not a transaction. You want to manage the relationship as best you can to increase the probability of their ordering again (thus increasing their lifetime value) and telling others about your brand (word of mouth is the best and cheapest marketing). If you can’t deliver on the product or service the customer has paid for, an explanation goes a long way and often opens the door to the customer accepting a comparable substitute product. But this is possible only if you manage the relationship . . . not the transaction.

One of the things that annoys my family and friends is that I’m vague when it comes to details. If they ask me questions about granular details, I usually don’t have an answer. If they ask a high-level question, I likely can answer. For example, what was the keynote speaker’s main point? I can answer. What personal examples did the keynote speaker use to support the main point? I may not remember (unless I took notes).

Over time I’ve realized that I’m not wired to remember granular details or live in granularity. It takes lots of energy and sometimes frustrates me to try to remember and process granularity. Having lots of conversations about granular things can also feel challenging. I have done these things in the past, can do them now, and will likely do them in the future. But it’s not my preference. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with granularity. Many people enjoy it. It’s just not a good fit personally.

In the past, I’ve compensated for this shortcoming by taking detailed notes. More recently, I’ve learned to embrace my wiring and focus my energy on really understanding the big picture. My notes are less detailed, and I don’t view my tendencies as a negative anymore. I’ve realized that I naturally seek to understand the big picture, to understand high-level concepts. The big picture and high-level concepts are where wisdom usually resides. As a curious person who enjoys learning, that wisdom is exciting; it’s what I seek. As I’ve shared with my friends, I enjoy seeing the forest, not each individual tree.

Today Bloomberg reported that Tiger Global and Accel sold their remaining stakes in Indian e‑commerce company Flipkart in a $1.4+ billion transaction. The acquirer was Walmart, who had purchased a 77% controlling stake in Flipkart in 2018 for $16 billion. The transaction was completed at a reported $35 billion, down from the $38 billion in Flipkart’s 2021 funding round.

I don’t have any insider information on this deal or this company’s metrics, but it appears that Tiger Global first invested in Flipkart’s 2009 Series B round by investing $8.6 million at a $42 million valuation. In subsequent years, it invested an additional $1.2 billion. It began exiting its position in 2017 when it sold part of its investment to Softbank, and it then sold more to Walmart in 2018. Tiger is reported to have made $3.5 billion in profits on its investments in Flipkart.

This is a large secondary transaction and likely will allow Tiger to provide LPs in its prior funds with much-desired liquidity.

I’m curious to see whether this transaction is a one-off or we’ll start to see more VCs get liquidity by selling stakes in growth-stage companies to large corporations.

All last week, I thought about how to solve a problem. I felt like I was missing something, but I couldn’t figure out what I was missing or how to solve the problem.

I called a good friend from college to vent and get his opinion. He’s in a totally different field than I am and sees things from a different perspective, which I value. Over the next hour he gave me feedback on my thinking, and we talked through various ideas. Eventually, we landed on an insight that felt significant. We searched for data to support or contradict it. The data supported our thinking, and we realized that we’d uncovered what could be an important insight. Now I’m excited to dig into this key insight this upcoming week.

Knowing credible people with diverse perspectives whom I can call is helpful. These sounding boards can accelerate good thinking, highlight flawed thinking, or help me formulate unique insights.

Some founders take the approach of shielding their teams from the realities their start-up faces. They want the team focused on building a great solution and serving customers. I caught up with an early-stage founder who recently updated his small team on strategic direction and the state of the company during a team meeting. He decided to leave their current runway out of his update because he didn’t want them to worry.

They didn’t let that slide, though. One of the first questions was how much runway they had to execute what they’d just heard. Having been asked, the founder answered candidly: four or five months to make it happen.

The founder wasn’t sure how the team would respond to such a short runway. He assumed some would worry. Their responses surprised him:

• “Thank you for being transparent.”
• “I was giving 100%, but now I’m going to give 120%.”
• “I did the calculation on my equity, and if this works like we think it will, I’ll make a lot of money, so I’m going to do all I can to make it work.”

This founder learned that he doesn’t have to shield his team from the unpleasant realities of working at a start-up. People don’t expect everything to be roses. They know start-ups will have ups and downs. They want to be kept in the loop, good or bad. Sometimes, sharing the bad can energize the team to push harder to make the impossible happen.

This is my one-hundred-seventy-fourth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Sounding boards – It’s helpful to have smart, credible people to get candid feedback from and share ideas with. Sometimes they can accelerate good thought processes or highlight flawed thinking.
• Knowledge costs – Knowledge is never free. There’s always a cost. Everyone pays tuition (time, energy, or money). If you want knowledge, get comfortable with the idea of paying tuition and identify the form of payment that suits you.

Week one hundred seventy-four was a week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Over the past few months, I’ve listened to a few early-stage founders pitch marketplace start-ups. Their pitch begins with a focus on connecting buyers and sellers. During the pitch they also say they have tools to help sellers, who are small businesses, manage their operations. They’re building marketplaces with workflow management embedded in V1 of their solutions.

This approach gives me pause because I struggle to understand the core problem they’re solving. Are they solving the inability of buyers and sellers to connect? Or are they helping small sellers manage their business operations?

Many of these founders point to large marketplaces (Airbnb, Etsy, etc.) as having inspired them. These mature marketplaces offer workflow management tools to sellers, so the early-stage founders believe they should build these features too. But mature marketplaces didn’t offer workflow management to sellers from the get-go. They solved their core problem (connecting buyers and sellers) first. After they achieved product–market fit and looked at scaling the platform, they added workflow management features. If they had done both at the same time, I’m not sure they would have had the same level of success.

Building a marketplace and achieving product–market fit is really hard. Getting the supply and demand dynamics to work is no small task. Early-stage founders should be crystal clear on the core problem they’re solving and allocate resources to build the best possible solution to solve that problem before building additional features that don’t solve the core problem.

One of my personal goals is to acquire knowledge daily. I focus on knowledge related to concepts I want to better understand so I can attempt to develop unique insights about them.

One of my favorite tools for consuming knowledge is YouTube. I subscribe to the premium membership to avoid ads and to access extra features. I start by deciding what concept I want to understand better. Then I identify people who have a deep understanding of it and search for videos of them sharing their knowledge. I add those videos to my watch list. During my daily treadmill walk, I watch these videos (usually at 1.5X speed to challenge myself). I’ve found that consuming videos while walking is the best fit for me. It feels productive, as I’m exercising and learning at the same time.

I’m a fan of the YouTube platform. It’s been a helpful tool in my quest to learn daily.

I’m a pretty even-keeled person. A friend recently asked how I’m able to stay so calm in most situations. Part of it is my personality and upbringing. But also, I’ve learned to quickly filter out things others may choose to worry about—specifically, things outside my control.

When I encounter something that could be worrisome, I ask myself, “Is this within my control?” If the answer is no, I simply don’t worry about it. It doesn’t make sense to waste my mental real estate or time on something I have zero control over. I can’t influence the outcome, so I shouldn’t worry about it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of it or that I ignore it. I take note of the situation, but I don’t go further than that.

Not worrying about things I can’t control is a helpful mental trick that’s allowed me to allocate more mental bandwidth to what matters most: things I can control.

I caught up with a friend who’s working for an investment firm in New York City. In a wide-ranging conversation, we compared housing and transportation costs in New York and surrounding cities with those in Atlanta. New York is one of the top real estate markets in the world, which factored into my expectations, but what my friend shared today surprised me (especially regarding transportation). The cost of housing in the areas he frequents is still rising significantly, as is the cost of commuting into, around, and out of the city.

It’s one conversation with one friend—anecdotal for sure. But it reminded me how attractive Atlanta is from the perspectives of affordability and quality of life. And this is after the city has experienced some of the worst inflation in the nation.