As I shared two days ago (see here), I’m helping my friend’s start-up. He created his own brand and products for it, and he’s manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping them to customers. I’ve been trying to help him resolve some logistics challenges. Here are our insights so far:

• Partners – International manufacturing and logistics partners are important, especially when things don’t go as planned, so it’s important to choose reliable, communicative ones.
• Network distance – The more network distance there is (that is, the more companies there are) between you and a shipment, the longer it takes and the harder it is to resolve problems.
• Cross border – Language and cultural differences can affect how fast problems are solved.

It’s still early and I’m sure I’ll learn more, but those are the lessons so far.

Happy Juneteenth!

I hope everyone had a great holiday!

I’m helping a friend with his start-up. He’s created his own brand and products for it. He sells the product directly to consumers online. Because he’s selling his own branded products, he has to manufacture them, warehouse them, and then ship them to customers.

It’s early in his company’s journey, and his product and marketing strategy are great. However, the logistics of moving products between different countries and fulfillment centers and to customers’ doorsteps haven’t been smooth.

When people buy a product, they underestimate how much is involved in going from an idea to a physical product in their hand. Their minds would be blown if knew what was happening behind the scenes, including the number of people who touch the product and the number of times it must be moved.

Creating a branded product is hard. If you’re an entrepreneur considering that path, like it or not, logistics know-how will be a factor in what makes or breaks you (you can choose how much of it is internal vs. outsourced, though).

As I shared last month (see here), I’ve been working with Atlanta entrepreneurs and moderating an accountability group. The group meets once a month for a few hours. I’m aiming for the group to be highly engaged and open to sharing so they’ll learn from peers' experiences and can solve their own problems faster. My goal is to make each meeting a better experience for the entrepreneurs than the last.

We had our second meeting this week. The members rated the meeting highly (this is at the end of each agenda), but the meeting didn’t meet my expectations. “High engagement” means everyone is showing up, being prepared to share, and learning from their peers. During our first meeting, we had 100% attendance. I also had everyone go through their calendar month by month for the next six months. We found dates that worked for everyone and committed to those dates as a group. I sent meeting invites out for the next six months. Stuff happens, but as much as possible, I wanted to mitigate scheduling issues that would prevent a busy, type-A entrepreneur from attending.

This month, two members couldn’t make it. Another member was late. I’ve realized that I didn’t fully set expectations with the group. The expectation related to being late had been set (no admittance after the meeting starts), but I hadn’t crystallized what happens if someone misses a meeting (whether that’s planned or because of tardiness).

My thinking is that A players want to be around other A players. They get annoyed when they’re forced to work alongside less-than-A players and often remove themselves from such situations. I think everyone in this group is an A player, but this week, not everyone gave A-level effort. Three members missed. To maintain the high-engagement, high-effort culture required to make this group a success, I need everyone to give A-level effort every meeting. That means showing up on time and prepared.

Last month, everyone gave A-level effort. The challenge this month is that some members gave A-level effort and others didn’t. I’m pretty sure (though this is an assumption; no one said anything to me) that attendees who did give A-level effort noticed the difference. I need to address this and have the members who missed demonstrate to their peers that they can and will put forth A-level effort going forward.

I’m not 100% sure how I’ll do this, but I’m thinking about having each member who missed explain, in two minutes, why they want to continue being part of the group and what they’ll do to avoid missing future meetings. The members can then vote on whether that person can continue as a member (i.e., do we think this person will give A-level effort going forward?).

Regardless, the second meeting is in the books, and the members got value from it. I’m looking forward to tweaking this format to make the rest of the meetings better than the first two.

I recently caught up with a founder who’s had a rough few months. Money has been tight, and fundraising hasn’t been going so well. The company was down to less than a month’s worth of cash, and it has been operating like this for several months. The founder was forced to keep the company afloat using his personal savings. He was stressed. But he managed to stay alive and keep pitching investors.

This month, he received the largest single check the company has received from any investor since it was founded a few years ago. The $500,000 check was from an angel investor, an entrepreneur who sold his company and believes in this founder’s vision.

Just like that, the fortunes of the company have changed and the founder’s funding worries are over, at least for now.

This story is a reminder of two things: luck plays a bigger role in success than many people realize, and there’s something to staying alive long enough to get your lucky break.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors 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: 119
• Total blog posts published: 798

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 6/14/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin. This is a framework book about improving decision-making in complex and uncertain environments by recognizing and avoiding common mental mistakes.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twenty-four was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• From veterinarian to investing billions and beating the S&P for decades – YouTube interview with Chris Davis of Davis Funds, a Berkshire Hathaway board member. I read a book about his family and always enjoy his interviews. Great info on how he thinks about executing his value-investing strategy in today’s AI environment. The average earnings multiple of his portfolio is 14x, which is much lower than the current market multiple. His biggest mistakes were around selling great companies too early. He bought Amazon around 2002 and sold it in 2004. Culture is also one of the biggest things he considers when he evaluates a financial company.  

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

I’m rereading Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin. One concept he mentions that I’ve been thinking about this week is attributional charity, which means that interpreting others’ behavior empathetically instead of jumping to negative conclusions or morally judging them.

Mauboussin discussed this because he believes that situations play a big role in people’s decision-making processes. Many of us don’t consider or give proper weight to the situation when critiquing other people’s decisions. But when we explain our own decisions, we lead with how the situation justifies them.

Mauboussin shares a few ideas on how to think about the influence of situations on decision-making. One of them is to consider the situation first and the individual second. That is, when evaluating others’ decisions, begin by understanding the situation they’re in and then assess them and their decisions. Not the other way around.

Very interesting concept that I want to incorporate more going forward.

SpaceX completed its IPO offering. According to Bloomberg (see here), SpaceX has raised a staggering $75 billion from investors by selling 555.6 million shares at $135 each. At that price, the company will have a market cap of roughly $1.77 trillion. For context, the second-largest amount ever raised during an IPO was $29.4 billion; that was Saudi Aramco’s IPO in 2019. SpaceX will begin trading on the stock market later today. I’m curious to see how receptive public-market investors will be to the company in the coming weeks and months. Regardless, this is a record-setting IPO.

I read an interview Jezz Bezos gave in which he shared how he thinks about the future. Here’s the section that stuck with me:

I very frequently get the question “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. As you pointed out, in our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,” or “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

The world is changing faster than ever, given AI, and predicting what it will look like in the future is becoming increasingly difficult. But I like Bezos’s point: focus on what won’t change. I interpret that as aspects of human behavior and psychology that will remain true regardless of how the world around us changes. Anchor your strategy on these human traits and you’re likely to build something that customers value for many years to come.

If you want to see a short part of this section of Bezos’s interview, you can watch it here.