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Disney’s Three Business Models
In 1984 Disney was worth more broken up than whole, with film and TV earning about $2M against roughly $250M from parks and consumer products. Two turnarounds later it runs three businesses that work in completely different ways. 1) The flywheel, Walt’s model: a few great films, released as events, earning for decades through home video, merchandise, Broadway and parks. Scarcity is the point. 2) The cable bundle, ESPN’s model: paid monthly by nearly every household whether they watch or not, with live sports forcing price hikes. The affiliate fee went from under $1 a month in 1995 to $9.42 today. 3) Streaming, the Disney+ model: win subscribers directly, then hold them with constant new content while paying for your own technology, marketing and churn. For twenty years Bob Iger ran the cash from model two into model one, buying Pixar for $7.4B and Marvel and Lucasfilm for about $4B each. Cord cutting is shrinking model two, and model three took its place in revenue without its margins. The trap is that streaming’s appetite for constant output pulls against the scarcity the flywheel depends on. Take a deep dive on Disney in my other newsletter Acquired Briefing. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
The Mission Pod
AI solved going from 0 to 1, so the bottleneck has moved to 1 to 2: prototype, test, ship, learn, repeat. The structure NFX sees winning is the mission pod, teams organized around an outcome instead of a job function, each owning the whole loop from customer to result. Five cardinal rules: 1) Hire generative people: everyone should create net-new output, but the rarer trait is low ego and high EQ. 2) Agents belong on the org chart: every team should know which work is human, which is AI and which needs review, and if that map does not exist you do not have an AI-native org, you have people with subscriptions. 3) Ask whether AI can do it: before defaulting to a hire, check whether an existing person with AI can do it well enough to ship. 4) Build eval culture: if AI produces ten times more output and your quality bar does not scale, you have automated your own decline. 5) Everyone talks to the customer. The costliest trap is measuring the wrong kind of speed. Two minutes to write a blog post is still a rough draft. What counts is learning speed. NFX (9 minutes)
The Product Manager’s Artifact
What is the artifact that a product manager produces? Not the spec. It is the story: who will use this, why it will matter in their lives, told so it survives being passed around without you in the room. Josh Elman answered “the spec” in his LinkedIn interview with Reid Hoffman, then wrote a 120-page one and spent years deciding he was wrong. AI has inverted the loop. It used to run idea, spec, scoping, then build, because you got six or eight turns a year. Now you build it fast to see how it feels, then design it, then ship and learn. The cost of making things collapsed. The cost of judgment did not move at all. His framework for vision is three questions: purpose, why someone puts your product in their life; core actions, what they do when they pick it up; and cycle, how often each happens. LinkedIn’s purpose was to find and be found, and for most people the core action happened once or twice a year, which is why the early team focused on profile accuracy instead of daily engagement. If you cannot define your core actions, you do not have a product. a16z (12 minutes)
Founder FAQ: How Do I Wind Down My Startup Gracefully Without Burning Bridges?
Most founders treat shutting down as an admin task, when it’s the single most closely watched thing you will ever do in front of your investors. The expensive mistake isn’t failing, it’s waiting too long to call it, because every extra month of denial burns cash you owe creditors and goodwill you owe your team. Build the exit plan before you announce anything: a financial analysis of debts and assets, a legal review of contracts, leases and employee agreements, and a communication sequence that runs investors, then employees, then clients, then partners and suppliers. On the Delaware side, ask the Division of Corporations for the alternate franchise tax calculation if your bill tops $400, get board and stockholder consents signed, file the Certificate of Dissolution through Ecorp, distribute what’s left after liabilities, then file IRS Form 966 within 30 days and a final Form 1120. Handle it this way and the investors who just lost money on you become the first check into your next company. Westaway (12 minutes)
Startup Funding Guides
I’ve put together a series of guides to equip founders to excel at fundraising. These guides break down the deal term-by-term and give you negotiation tips so that you can speak to investors with confidence.
SAFE: Guide / Video
Convertible Note: Guide / Video
Seed: Guide / Video
Series A: Guide / Video
Control Legal Spend
Startups suffer from unpredictable legal bills under the billable hour system. Fees fluctuate month to month without warning. Law firms drag out billable hours, but startups foot the bill. Even basic work can lead to surprisingly high legal bills. This unpredictability cripples financial planning. Budgets rarely match actual spend. With utter uncertainty around legal spend, startups cannot forecast or manage burn rates effectively. The antiquated billable hour system fails them. Our General Counsel flat, monthly fee service gives startups cost certainty. Legal spend becomes predictable with bundled services and no surprise overage bills. By switching from hourly to our flat-fee model, startups finally get confident budgeting, accurate forecasting and predictable legal spend. If you’re sick of getting surprise legal bills and are interested in controlling your legal spend, let’s talk.