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.

A friend started a new company. It’s not a tech company; he makes physical products to sell to consumers. The products are traditionally sold through big box retailers as the main method of distribution (think Walmart or Target). This poses an interesting problem because consumers don’t interact with my friend’s company. The big box retailers sell tons of stuff, and they aren’t going to spend time trying to understand or get insights from their customers who buy my friend’s products. They’ll share information like sales metrics, and if my friend’s products aren’t selling they’ll tell him that, but they won’t be able to tell him why.

My friend recognizes that not being connected to the end consumer will be an issue. He wants his finger on the pulse of his customers so he can adjust as needed to keep his products relevant to them. Otherwise, their tastes could change, and he wouldn’t know it until his sales at big box retailers decline materially. Even then, he wouldn’t know why.

So, he’s considering adding someone to his team whose entire job is to be the voice of the customer. They’d be responsible for staying in touch with end users of the products, gleaning insights from them, and translating those insights into data that their team can use to make decisions.

I’ve heard of voice-of-the-customer-type roles in software and tech, which I think is much easier to accomplish. There’s often a direct relationship with customers because they’re buying from your website. And there are plenty of tools that help you gauge how customers are using (or failing to use) your products. But I’ve never considered how you keep a finger on the pulse of customers who buy physical products through retailers like Walmart.

I’m really curious about this and can’t wait to see how this plays out for my friend. I think he’s on the right track with his voice-of-the-customer role.

When I was in college, I took a course that was 100% based on group presentations. The goal of the class was to turn people into better team members. The idea was that if you work better in a team, your chances of success in most careers rise. But one thing they had to solve was helping people understand where they stood. Am I a good team member and just need to stay the course? Or am I a not-so-great team member who needs to make serious changes?

Their solution: stack ranking.

At the end of each project, every team member had to rate the rest of their team. The catch was that we had to order group members from best to worst. Each person submitted something that looked like this:

1. Sue
2. John
3. Bob
4. Mary
5. Tim

Sue got the most points, and Tim got the fewest. After several projects, you began to see a pattern. If you were consistently ranking low, you had to look in the mirror and ask yourself why your peers were consistently giving you low ratings. Your class grade was heavily dependent on your overall ranking at the end of the semester.

That experience was eye-opening. It showed me the power of group members stack ranking each other. Getting a low rating from a teacher was different than getting one from your peers, with all your peers seeing it. The latter felt much worse, partly because it was public but mostly because it came from peers, not an authority figure. No one wants their peers to think less of them. So, what happened was that the stack ranking caused people who weren’t great team members to change their behavior and try to become better team members.

The stack ranking also fostered a competitive dynamic that elevated the effort of the entire class. There could be only one person in the top spot, so everyone dialed it up a notch, hoping to become #1. Ranking highest was a direct result of your ability to be a better team member than everyone else. If someone was ahead of you, you had to try harder. The other person would then try harder too, hoping to hang on to their position. The result was a bar that was continually being raised by group members.

I’m a fan of stack ranking and publicly displaying the results in group settings. It’s a great way to raise the quality of the group effort, and it gives members feedback that’s hard to ignore.

Today, I read an article about a 19-year-old college freshman who sold the start-up that he and his friends started two years ago while they were in high school. Its product is a calorie-tracking app that allows you to take pictures of food to track the number of calories you consume. The founder says the company has a $50 million annual-recurring-revenue run rate. It’s reported that it generated in the neighborhood of $30 million last calendar year. This founder embraced AI technology early and used savvy social media marketing to get customers. All while being a full-time student.

This story isn’t the norm and likely won’t become the norm, but I think it demonstrates that we’ve entered a new era of entrepreneurship. Building a product and distributing it have gotten many times easier (though still not easy).

Entrepreneurs who are driven and understand how to best solve a painful problem can now build a solution faster than ever with AI. You don’t have to be technical to build a software- or internet-based solution. If you can describe the problem and the solution, AI will literally write the code to build the product and will do it quickly, perhaps in just a few minutes. To get customers and distribution, entrepreneurs can create content that resonates with their potential customers on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X using a smartphone (fancy equipment isn’t necessary). If they’re successful, their company can scale rapidly.

Now, to be transparent, the stickiness of customers of AI solutions and the durability of AI revenue are yet to be determined. Regardless, it’s clear that starting and scaling a company rapidly is now a viable option for anyone considering entrepreneurship.

If you’re interested in reading what the founder said about the sale, see his post on X here.

You can read more details about the deal and the CEO of the company that acquired the students’ app here.

This past week, I had the chance to attend a celebration. It was an “exit” party. My friend recently sold a majority stake in his company for over $1.5 billion and threw a party to celebrate the milestone. It was a ton of fun, and one thing he shared with the guests has been replaying in my head.

He had over 600 employees at the time the transaction closed last month. He shared that over 160 of them became millionaires when they received their proceeds from the transaction. That’s an amazing statistic—it’s life-changing money for over 160 Atlanta families. It’s also a testament to working for a great company that’s selling a product or service in a fast-growing market and getting equity (i.e., employee stock options, restricted stock units, etc.) in the company.

I’m delighted for my friend and his employees. I especially tip my hat to him for sharing the pie with his team, which isn’t something all entrepreneurs embrace. Some have an I-want-it-all-for-myself mentality, which, in my opinion, limits their ability to attract and, more importantly, retain high-quality people. My friend took the opposite approach and was able to create a tremendous amount of wealth for himself alongside a great team who also became wealthy.

This week I caught up with a friend, an entrepreneur who sold his company and has advised founders for over a decade. He pointed out something that differentiates entrepreneurs from others. Entrepreneurs get excited by the potential of an idea and how big the end result could be. That’s enough to get them started. They’re totally focused on the end and the one next thing they can do to move forward. That’s it. That’s all they need to press go.

When they talk with non-entrepreneurs, they can become frustrated because many non-entrepreneurs focus on something different. Non-entrepreneurs can’t wrap their head around the end result because the path to it is unclear or has imperfections. They want to labor over details, achieve clarity, and resolve imperfections before they even think about starting down the path or think about how big the idea could be. The entrepreneurs feel like they’re being dragged into the details and asked questions they can’t answer and that don’t matter yet. They want to talk about the big, high-level opportunity, but they’re being beaten up over the small details of the plan. It’s annoying.

I agree with my friend. I’ve been in this situation many times. Someone asks me detailed questions about something I want to do, and I get frustrated because I don’t think the things they’re asking me matter yet. They’ll be figured out in due course.

A lot of the disconnect is in how entrepreneurs approach getting things done. They’re problem solvers by nature and often must do things they haven’t done before. The way they do that is by focusing on their next action, not all the actions or steps they’ll need to take. They know that with every step they take, they’ll learn something (good or bad) that will help them figure out what the next step should be. Then they’ll act again. This continual process of acting, learning, and acting is essentially an iterative approach to reaching the result they want without starting with a clear path or plan.

When entrepreneurs are asked to provide a detailed plan or path, they become frustrated because they know it isn’t necessary. Things aren’t likely to go as planned, even if there is a plan. Solutions to problems will reveal themselves along the way. The best way to reach a big goal is to get started on it and figure things out along the way.