Founder Fridays No. 170
Luxury Needs Scale -- Pick Placeholder Names First -- Workflows First, Agents Second
Happy Friday.
It’s officially Christmas season. If you’ve been a reader for a while, you may know that I take my Christmas music very seriously. I’ve created The Ultimate Christmas Playlist, a collection of 96 songs and 5 hours 10 minutes of pure joy. I hope you and your family enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.
Luxury Can Succeed at Scale
Most people think luxury brands protect exclusivity by staying small—but Bernard Arnault proved the opposite: the biggest luxury empire wins by sharing distribution, advertising, and talent across 75 brands while keeping each design team independent. LVMH spends $20 billion annually on global ad campaigns, owns its retail channels (Sephora, duty-free stores), and attracts top creative talent by offering career mobility—advantages no standalone brand can match. This week, identify one resource your company is duplicating across teams (customer data, vendor relationships, marketing spend) and centralize it without touching the creative or product work; let teams keep full autonomy on what they build, but share the infrastructure that amplifies it. You’ll cut costs by 15-30% while improving outcomes—the same math that took LVMH from 15% to 26.5% margins and made Arnault the world’s richest person from a $15 million bet. Acquired Briefing (12 minutes)
Pick Placeholder Names First
Most founders waste months agonizing over their incorporation name—but the smartest move is incorporating under something intentionally ridiculous you’ll never use publicly, then finding the real name later when you understand what you’re building. Apps & Zerts Inc. (yes, from Parks and Rec) became Cover; Maven operated for eight months without a customer-facing name. This week, if you’re about to incorporate, pick a placeholder so outlandish it can’t see daylight—your childhood street plus your dog’s birthday—and free yourself to focus on product; if you’re already live, start the real naming process now by writing your positioning statement (who it’s for, what it does, why it’s different) since that’s the foundation for generating hundreds of name options through themed brainstorms, not ChatGPT’s generic suggestions. You’ll launch 2-4 months faster without decision paralysis, avoid getting attached to a mediocre name picked under deadline pressure, and actually build a name that does marketing work for you instead of just existing on paperwork. First Round Review (8 minutes)
Workflows First, Agents Second
Companies are building impressive AI agents that nobody uses because they’re obsessing over the agent instead of redesigning the actual workflow—map your process first, identify pain points, then deploy the simplest tool (rules-based automation, analytics, or gen AI) for each step, reserving agents only for high-variance work where they excel. Insurance companies waste months building agents for standardized tasks like regulatory disclosures when simple rules work better, while the real win is agents handling complex claims requiring judgment across unpredictable scenarios. This week, pick one workflow where you’re considering AI and literally draw out every step on a whiteboard; for each step, ask “what’s the simplest technology that solves this?”—you’ll likely need agents for 20-30% of steps max, basic automation for the rest. You’ll ship 2-3x faster by avoiding overengineered solutions, save 30-50% on development costs by reusing simple components instead of custom agents everywhere, and actually get user adoption because people trust tools that work predictably rather than agents that hallucinate on tasks that didn’t need them. McKinsey (7 minutes)
Founder FAQ: Is it a proper practice to copy someone else’s terms of services & privacy policy?
Founders copy-paste Terms of Service and Privacy Policies from competitors thinking it saves time, but mismatched legal documents create liability nightmares when your data practices, jurisdiction, or business model differs from the company you copied—one wrong clause on dispute resolution or data processing can expose you to lawsuits or regulatory fines you never agreed to. Your ToS and PP must accurately describe YOUR actual practices (how you collect data, where you operate, what happens in disputes), and copying creates confusion when users discover misalignments between what you promise and what you do, destroying trust before you’ve built it. This week, review 2-3 competitors’ legal docs to understand industry standards and note relevant clauses, then schedule a call with startup-friendly legal counsel to draft custom documents—don’t launch without them, even if you’re pre-revenue. You’ll avoid existential legal exposure (one GDPR violation is 4% of global revenue), prevent the expensive nightmare of retrofitting policies after users have already accepted bad terms, and actually build user trust by demonstrating you take their data and rights seriously from day one. Westaway (3 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.
Convertible Note: Guide / Video
Saving Time and Money on Legal
When we met this Series B startup, they were frustrated with their law firm’s slow turnaround and high fees. Contract reviews took four to six weeks, and they charged $250,000 annually for basic work. The startup wanted to reduce sales cycle times and legal spend. They switched to General Counsel at Westaway. In year one, we 1) saved them about $200,000 in legal fees; 2) shortened their sales cycle by about four weeks; and 3) our streamlined processes saved their ops team eight to ten hours per month previously spent managing legal. By switching to Westaway, they expedited deal closures, saved hundreds of thousands in legal bills and regained one day per month in productivity. If you’re curious if we could save you time and money, let’s talk.