Last year, I shared one of my favorite maxims, which came from the autobiography of John H. Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Company, which published JET and Ebony magazines. See that post, with the backstory, here. Here’s what Johnson’s boss at the time, Harry H. Pace, told him:

If you want to succeed in business, young man, you’ve got to learn how to work with people that you don’t like. And you’ve got to learn how to compromise. After you compromise, you have to forget the past and go on to the future. For in business, you have no permanent enemies or permanent friends—only permanent interests.

Today I shared this with an entrepreneur friend who’s refusing to negotiate with an important supplier because of the supplier’s personality. Because she’s doing this, my friend can’t source the products her customers want and is forgoing some revenue. It’s a lose-lose situation for her and her supplier.

Business is full of characters and people with strong personalities, among other things. You aren’t going to be friends with everyone you need to do business with. Regardless of how you feel about someone, if you need them to accomplish a goal or objective, you’ve got to figure out how to get past personality differences and work with them. Pace put it best: “In business, you have no permanent enemies or permanent friends—only permanent interests.”

This week, while using Claude and Claude Cowork, I’ve noticed something different. The tool is enforcing usage limits. That is, it won’t work if I hit a limit. The interesting thing is that the usage limit is for a given period of time. For example, I was working on something at 11 a.m. and hit a session usage limit. Claude said that my limit would reset at 3:30 p.m. The same thing had happened the night before at 7 p.m., when it said my session limit would reset at 11 p.m. It feels a bit more like throttling than anything, but I could be wrong and have limited data to back that up.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting: I was talking with a friend who’s an entrepreneur. He started a new company and is using Claude Cowork to build an agent to analyze data from disparate sources automatically. It’s pretty complex. In the middle of building the agent, he hit a usage limit. He was frustrated, so he upgraded his plan on the spot. He had no further difficulties.

My takeaway is that if I make Claude and Cowork a part of my normal habits and workflows, I’ll likely have to upgrade to the most expensive plan. Otherwise, my ability to rely on them will plummet, and tasks could stretch over days instead of minutes or hours. At the moment I don’t mind, because I get far more value from the tool than the price I pay. But it shows me that while Claude and similar tools are great, if you rely on them heavily, you must have the proper plans and tokens. If you don’t, they’re like the employee who shows up to work and leaves early, whether or not their work is done.

This week, I met with an early-stage founder who just finished a big project and is thinking about the next strategic thing they should work on. During our conversation, the founder zeroed in on their biggest challenge: getting more customers. The first version of their product is built, and it’s been tested by a handful of early paying customers. No major issues were found, so the founder is ready to get more paying customers to use the platform. The challenge is that how to find them isn’t obvious. In fact, it’s pretty hard, especially since the founder is bootstrapping the company.

Making customers aware of your product or service is a problem that never goes away, regardless of your size. But it feels insurmountable in the early days when resources are limited. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. The tactics that work change constantly as the world evolves. But one principle that underlies many successful tactics is to start by meeting customers where they are.

It’s hard to get people to change their habits, or “flows” as I call them. Instead of trying to get them to come to the site of a new company or to a new platform to learn more about your product, consider meeting them where they already are. I know that sounds broad, but when you do that, you’re forced to think about things from the customer’s perspective. You have to learn their existing behaviors and habits. Once you understand them, you can begin testing tactics that lean into what they’re already doing. Test enough of them and one is bound to work. When you find one that works well, do more of it.

Finding customers is something all entrepreneurs think about. In the early days, they should try to understand their potential customers’ behaviors and habits. Doing so makes it easier to understand how to market to them by meeting them where they are.

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.