Happy Friday.
Skip AI, Build Power
Everyone’s racing to build the next AI model — but the smartest founders right now are betting on steel, batteries, and power grids instead. That’s because every real revolution needs three things: power, intelligence, and a way to act on it — and right now we have the intelligence but not the other two, which is exactly why AI feels “trapped” despite the hype. This week, pick one lane and go deep: either build software that squeezes more capacity out of the existing power grid (a $170B opportunity alone), pick one narrow physical-world problem to own end-to-end with robotics rather than building a generalist tool, or take an old industrial process — mining, steel, materials — and rebuild it like a tech company. Do this now, while hyperscalers are busy spending hundreds of billions on models, and you position yourself to own the infrastructure they’ll be desperate to buy instead of competing for scraps at the model layer. Youtube (4 minutes)
Reserve Time, Skip Chaos
The fix for too many meetings isn’t fewer meetings — it’s booking one you might not even use. As companies scale, the real cost isn’t bad decisions, it’s slow ones — alignment that used to happen in an hour now waits three weeks for the right people to be in the same room, while daily fires get “solved” in Slack threads that die overnight and repeat the next day. This week, block the same 30-minute daily slot for your team, reserved only for as-needed cross-functional issues, with a dead-simple trigger rule like “join if you got paged” — and have someone senior own it, cancel it when it’s not needed, and kill it entirely once the team gets autonomous enough that it never gets used. Do this and you trade Slack-thread purgatory for a standing, low-cost insurance policy — most days it costs nothing, but when a real cross-team fire hits, you’ve already got the room booked instead of scrambling to find one. Stay SaaSy (3 minutes)
Speed Kills Sunk Cost
Lovable’s first designer got one piece of advice that broke every instinct from her previous jobs: “I want you to take action on the things you’re confident about automatically, instead of telling me first.” That works because when you can rebuild a product in hours instead of months, being wrong stops being expensive — sunk cost only matters when mistakes are slow and costly to undo, and AI just made most decisions cheap to reverse. This week, pick one decision you’re sitting on because you want more buy-in or more data, and make the call yourself instead — then tell your team you did it and why, rather than asking first. You’ll find your team’s real clock speed, catch bad calls faster because you’re actually shipping them, and build the kind of ownership culture that let a five-person company hit $100M ARR in eight months instead of a year of committee meetings. Firsthand Review (12 minutes)
Founder FAQ: How Risks Can Be Minimized while Negotiating Startup Customer Contracts?
Your lawyer’s instinct to protect you from every possible risk is actually the biggest risk to your deal — because for a startup, the real danger isn’t a bad clause, it’s the negotiation dying before you close. Fortune 500 legal training optimizes for eliminating risk to near-zero, but startups don’t have that luxury: survival depends on speed and closed deals, not airtight paperwork, so a lawyer who nitpicks every term can kill a good deal while “protecting” you from a small one. This week, before your next contract negotiation starts, sit down with your team and counsel and name your five non-negotiable deal points, out loud, in writing — then explicitly agree that everything else is flexible and instruct your lawyer accordingly. Do this and you’ll close deals faster, spend less on legal fees, and build goodwill with the other side, without actually increasing the risks that matter to your business. Westaway (5 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.
