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.

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.

This week, I met several aspiring entrepreneurs who’ve built software to solve niche problems they encounter daily. None of them knows how to write software code. All used AI to build their web apps in a matter of days. They all have normal day jobs and aren’t in the tech industry. My takeaways:

• The people who understand a problem deeply and have a vision for how the solution should work will build superior products.
• Distribution will be key for these individuals. Making potential customers aware that the product exists needs to be thought through.
• There will likely be a lot more competition. If anyone can build anything with AI, we’ll see more ideas, and good ideas get copied quickly.
• These people building solutions with AI don’t all want to be full-time entrepreneurs. They enjoy building things that solve problems they care about, but they don’t want the stress of being a full-time entrepreneur. These types of projects could be a good source of income to supplement their salary.
• Some of them will need a small amount of capital to grow these businesses; I’m thinking $50k–$100k. A gap in the market for providing capital to the best of these types of projects, as well as an opportunity for a new investment product, probably exist. But the returns will likely come from cash flows, not from selling the business.

AI is moving fast and democratizing the ability to create a product and a business in a way that will benefit people with an entrepreneurial spirit.

I was listening to a podcast today. An entrepreneur shared a quote that got me thinking:

Pessimists sound smart, but optimists get rich.

I’m not sure who said this originally, but I think it’s a great quote for entrepreneurs and investors to keep in mind. A disposition that considers the worst things that could happen or the potentially negative outcomes is valuable because it keeps the What could go wrong? and What risk am I taking on? questions top of mind. Managing downside risk is critical to surviving long enough to get lucky as an entrepreneur or investor, and you can’t survive if you’ve taken on more risk than you realize.

But being mostly pessimistic severely limits you, because you constantly think that things won’t turn out well. Surprise, surprise, when you think like that, things don’t turn out well. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The most successful entrepreneurs and investors I know are neither wholly optimistic nor wholly pessimistic: they’re about 80/20. They’re optimists 80% of the time, but 20% of the time they’re thinking about the downside to make sure they’re not going to do something that takes them out of the game permanently.

I thought about my post from yesterday a bit more. As an entrepreneur’s company grows, the demands on the entrepreneur grow. The brute-force style of work that was helpful when they were doing lots of execution doesn’t work as well as the business grows in complexity, the team grows, and, most importantly, the entrepreneur’s role evolves. The brute-force approach to work becomes insufficient, and the entrepreneur’s productivity declines as the scope and volume of their responsibilities grow.

I think entrepreneurs feel this more than others, given the nature of their work, but it happens to people working for a company they don’t own or lead too. The trigger isn’t the title, it’s the accelerated growth in a role’s complexity, number of reports, and scope and depth of responsibilities. Said differently, the more things and people you’re responsible for and the faster both increase, the faster you’re likely to fall short of expectations of your role if you’re using a brute-force work style. The faster a company grows and/or the faster you climb the ladder, the faster a brute-force work style will fail you.

I’ve chatted with three entrepreneurs in the last two weeks who shared their problems with what I’ll broadly bucket as productivity. How they initially described them varied, and they manifested in various ways. But they’re clearly impacting their business and personal lives negatively. As we peeled back the layers, we uncovered the likely root cause: their approach to work. How they work used to be sufficient, but as their companies and responsibilities have grown, it hasn’t kept up. Said differently, they’ve outgrown their working style.

These aren’t slackers by any means. They’re successful and have been entrepreneurs for several years. But these conversations highlighted for me that most people are never taught how to work. They’re taught skills for particular jobs, but no one sits them down and shows them how to execute by applying those skills day to day.

The more I think about this, the more I suspect that this issue afflicts a large swath of entrepreneurs and likely causes an operating inflection point. How they work stops being good enough for leading a growth company. So, one of two things likely happens: growth stalls (or worse, a decline begins) or the entrepreneur adapts by implementing a new approach to work that allows them to continue working efficiently as the demands on them as a leader grow and evolve. Often, the inflection point leads to their adapting a work style that’s less brute force and more sustainable in the long term.

I wonder what the trigger is for the inflection point? Is it revenue, number of employees, number of customers, or something else? Or a combination of things?

I listened to an interview this week in which an entrepreneur who recently sold his advertising agency shared an interesting insight. He thinks that a new wave is being ushered in for software companies and agencies. His premise is that B2B software is a tool that a customer buys in hopes of achieving an outcome. True value is created by the company that’s willing to be accountable for an outcome. Software doesn’t make that happen; it’s up to the customer to figure out how to use the software tool to get the outcome.

This entrepreneur believes that companies don’t want to pay for tools. They want to pay for results. Right now, the result is detached from their spending. More companies are wising up and saying they want to pay for the result, not the tool. They don’t care how it’s done; they just want the result.

He goes on to explain that when you buy software, you often must hire an employee to use the software to create the result you want. And the other way around: If you hire an employee, you must buy the software that empowers them to get the result you want. He believes that the future is software-enabled agencies. The agency hires the person and buys the software, which work together to get companies the result they want at a lower price than they could achieve on their own and with a higher level of execution because they do this all day across a broader base of companies. The software-enabled agency allows the company to pay for results at a lower cost than if they did it internally.

Now this is where it gets interesting. He goes on to make the case that some software companies will become agencies. These companies will do the work for their clients and focus on delivering results. They’ll use the software they’ve built (and that they’re super users of) to achieve results for their clients in a scalable and efficient manner. The rationale is that some companies don’t know how to use the software tool, so they’re not getting the desired result, which leads them to cancel the software subscription. If these software companies start selling services focused on outcomes, they can retain and attract more customers because their customers are paying for results, not tools.

This is a fascinating take on things that I’m thinking about more. I’m going to chat about this with my friends who are software entrepreneurs.

The interview discusses this concept in much more detail and touches on lots of other great stuff. Anyone interested in this section of the interview can listen or watch here.

In the past week, I’ve had two instances where someone has told me about a new technology or strategy that’s become huge and is gaining lots of traction. In both instances, I realized that they were things I’d learned about a year or two before. At the time, I got the gist of the strategy or technology, but didn’t understand it deeply or why it was different. I also had no idea that they could grow to become as large and important as they are today.

This got me thinking that I need to do a better job of spotting things that have large upside potential. I know it’s not possible to catch everything that will become big that crosses my desk, but I think there’s definitely room for me to improve in this area. I do a good job of finding new stuff because I like to research and learn, but I think I need to do better at understanding the current landscape and why these new things are potentially disruptive and game-changing given the current landscape.