Founder Fridays No. 174
Building Through The Muck -- Orchestrate, Don’t Optimize -- Clean Before You Need It
Happy Friday.
Building Through The Muck
The best founders don’t launch early—they throw away everything and rebuild eight times over four years, ignoring all the advice telling them to ship fast. Most companies die not from launching too late, but from launching a mediocre product into a space where first impressions kill you, then spending years trying to recover from a reputation you can’t shake. This week, identify one thing in your product you’re tolerating because “we’ll fix it later”—then ask yourself: if we launched with this, would it waste everyone’s time? If yes, stop adding features and fix that one thing completely, even if it means rewriting it from scratch. You’ll lose three months now but gain three years of not fighting uphill against “they’re the company that shipped broken stuff.” Youtube (10 minutes)
Orchestrate, Don’t Optimize
AI agents aren’t making your team more efficient—they’re turning 12 people into 1,200 simultaneous experiments running in parallel, which means the mental model of “hire someone to do a job” is already obsolete. The real shift isn’t cost savings or speed, it’s that cheap experiments make crazy ideas rational: when one experiment cost $50K in time and focus, you tested safe ideas; when it costs $50, you test 100 edge cases and the 99% chance one works becomes your actual strategy. This week, pick your lowest-leverage recurring task (data cleanup, competitive tracking, user interview synthesis) and spend two hours building an agent to own the outcome—not assist with it, own it—then open 10 instances running different approaches in parallel. You’ll realize by Friday that the constraint isn’t your team’s capacity anymore, it’s whether you’re thinking big enough to use the capacity you suddenly have—and your competitors who figure this out first will move 10x faster with half your headcount. NFX (8 minutes)
Clean Before You Need It
Most funding rounds don’t die from investor disinterest—they collapse in due diligence when founders discover their contractor from 2022 never signed IP assignment paperwork, or their cap table has 15 small angels with pro-rata rights, or their flagship customer is a “pilot” with no contracted revenue. Investors aren’t rejecting your vision; they’re rejecting the cleanup risk of fixing structural problems you ignored when they were easy, and now every red flag becomes a negotiation point that costs you 10-20% of your valuation or kills the deal entirely. This week, open a doc and write six brutal yes/no questions: Do we own all our IP? Is our cap table explainable in 30 seconds? Can we prove customers pay for this? Would our background checks pass? Are we compliant everywhere we operate? Are our projections grounded in actual unit economics—then fix whichever one makes you wince before you need capital. You’ll save three months of scrambling during diligence, avoid the “can we call you back in Q2 after you clean this up” kiss of death, and negotiate from strength instead of explaining why your co-founder’s former employer might have a claim. The Founders Friday (6 minutes)
Founder FAQ: Why Data Privacy Laws are Important to Know?
OpenAI declared “code red” because ChatGPT usage plateaued while Google’s Gemini grew to 650 million users—so they’re shipping “adult mode” for paid erotica in Q1 and dialing up engagement features, even though their own data shows millions already have unhealthy chatbot dependencies and a wrongful death suit just dropped from a user whose son became delusional after ChatGPT conversations. The weirdness that made OpenAI special—the nonprofit wrapper, the promise to help rivals if they got to AGI first, the obsession with preventing harm—has dissolved into normal startup problems: growth rates, enterprise sales, beating competitors, and science experiments on live users where “safer but less engaging” loses internal arguments to “sticky enough to justify $20/month subscriptions.” This week, if you’re building any AI product, write down your actual success metric (MAUs? revenue? retention?) then ask: what would we ship if that number was flat for six months?—because that’s the moment you’ll choose between making something genuinely useful versus optimizing for compulsive daily use. You’ll either build guardrails into your product now when you have 10K users and can afford to lose the addictive ones, or you’ll be OpenAI in 2025: market leader with millions of dependent users, facing wrongful death suits, and unable to make the model safer without tanking your engagement metrics and losing to competitors who didn’t bother. 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.
Convertible Note: Guide / Video
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