This past week, I listened to a founder describe their business. I’ve talked to them before and noticed a significant change in tone and confidence. They had more clarity on the problem they’re solving, how they’re going to solve it, and why they’re better suited than most to solve it. This wasn’t the case a few months ago. So what changed?

The founder spent a few weeks putting together a pitch deck. During that time, I provided feedback on how the deck should be structured and the questions the deck should answer. The result: a polished deck. But more importantly, the founder’s thinking is crystal clear.

Pitch decks are great for trying to raise capital. They quickly give potential investors an overview of your business. But the real value in pitch decks is that they are a great thinking tool for founders. When you create a pitch deck, it forces you to think about the business logically. Seeing your thinking on paper exposes the gaps in your thinking, which forces you to think deeper to close those gaps. Equally important, it allows you to communicate your thinking to someone in writing. This can be a game-changer because others can easily identify errors in logic and provide alternative perspectives. Also, when you write something down and share it, assuming it’s high quality, people put more effort into critiquing your thinking.

If you ever want to think through your business at a deeper level or have others provide feedback on your business, consider creating a pitch deck. The output is helpful, but the exercise of creating the deck is a powerful thinking exercise.

Today, in a podcast I was listening to, a VC investor said you can’t have outsize success as a technology entrepreneur in a city like Atlanta. He argued that the network isn’t as strong, dense, or focused as in San Francisco (SF), so information doesn’t flow as freely. And he gave a bunch of other reasons too.

In his defense, homophily and network distance play a huge role in entrepreneurial success and in success in life for that matter. Being in or close to the right networks that have the right wisdom or resources can accelerate things drastically. But that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed if your circumstances are different.

Technology entrepreneurs can build and achieve outsize success in a place like Atlanta. We have a density of talent (GA Tech, Morehouse, Spellman, Emory, etc.), but the city is more spread out than SF. The capital ecosystem is smaller. And we have fewer people who’ve achieved outsize success in tech than SF has. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means it’s different and likely a bit harder. Any founder who’s willing to put in the extra work, is working on the right idea at the right time, and has a little luck can build a massive company in Atlanta. It’s not easy, but it’s been done before.

Years ago, when I was an early-stage founder, I was basically on an island. I was a solo founder and didn’t know many other founders. I was grinding away by myself with no one to talk to about what I was going through. Fast forward a few years and I was in EO, doing several million dollars in revenue.

One of the things that accelerated my progress the most was simple: accountability. Every month, I met with peers and presented my metrics. Good, bad, or ugly, I had to share what happened, why it happened, and what I planned to do the next month. My peers asked me pointed questions that highlighted blind spots, perspectives I hadn’t considered, or mistakes I’d made. It wasn’t always comfortable, but those sessions were invaluable and changed my trajectory as an entrepreneur and that of my company.

My lesson learned from all this was that when I’m trying to do hard things, accountability and pointed feedback (or questioning) from peers help me tremendously. That process forces me to face things I don’t want to face and to level up. It often puts me outside my comfort zone, but that feeling usually means I’m growing, as I want to be doing.

Today, I learned about two entrepreneurs who have built interesting (separate) businesses based on their passion. They create 30-second to 1-minute videos in which they review board games and card games, explain how to play them, and record themselves playing them.

The interesting thing is their revenue model. These entrepreneurs each have millions of followers across various social media platforms. Their followers, I assume, are interested in finding out about new games. With a reach to consumers with a high interest in games, these entrepreneurs have become vital to companies looking for exposure for their games. They charge these companies up to $15,000 for a single post. And they create three to five posts per week. You do the math.

Whatever you’re into, other people are into it too. Your interest may seem niche, but the internet allows you to connect with enough people to turn a niche interest into a large business. These two entrepreneurs have built audiences who have the same interests they do and, in turn, created businesses around charging companies who want to access and market to those “niche” audiences.

I was having a chat last week with someone who invests in public markets. I was curious how he approaches valuing the companies he invests in and determining how strong they are financially. During our conversation, I realized that he doesn’t understand accounting or the financial statements of the companies he invests in. He could recite metrics like net profit, revenue, and debt, but he didn’t really understand how they work together and the picture they paint of a company’s financial health and trajectory. For example, he didn’t understand how a company could have negative net profit (i.e., negative GAAP net income) and still be generating a large amount of cash (i.e., have positive free cash flow).

I was fortunate to have taken accounting classes in college, and I applied those learnings as the CEO of my company. But for people who don’t want to be entrepreneurs and haven’t taken accounting classes, I want to discover whether there’s a book or something else that can help them understand the accounting basics applicable to public companies.

That’s my goal. I found a few books. I’ll read them and share the ones I think are useful for public-market investors.

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.

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.