AI is supposedly making us faster. In conversations with founders and engineers, I’m hearing the same story: Prototypes that once took weeks now take days. Code that required whole teams now gets drafted in an afternoon. Experiments are cheaper, iteration is faster, and the barrier to entry for creating new products has never been lower. But speed in one part of the system often exposes constraints elsewhere. Recently, I’ve been reading Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book on...
16 days ago • 1 min read
The junior employee who says: “Managers are a complete waste of money - they just sit around doing nothing while others work.” The first-time founder who says: “Big-firm lawyers are a total rip-off. I’m paying $700/hour for a contract that should just be a free template.” The nursing student who says: “Ugh, doctors don’t know ANYTHING.” The independent consultant who says: “Those jerks at McKinsey are a scam. People pay them millions and all they do is create a PowerPoint and walk away.”...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
One of the biggest differences when transitioning from doer to manager is how best practices on communication change. When you’re a doer executing for a boss, the best bet is to lead with solutions. Every executer worth their salt eventually realizes that just pointing out problems doesn’t really help the team. That just creates work for someone else (Potentially the exact person deciding whether you stick around to get a raise). So it’s better to carry the ball all the way down the court:...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
For those outside the services world, here’s what a “networking” Zoom often sounds like: Them: “Hi, nice to meet you. What do you do? Cool. Anyway, I provide [insert product/service]. You should tell all your clients about me. If anyone signs, I’ll pay you 10%.” Me: “I don’t do paid referrals. And unless a client specifically asks for what you do and I know you’re good, I’m not going to send you business. We just met.” Them: 🤯 Here’s the thing: This happens to your customers too. When people...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
On a recent client call, we were discussing how to use a new capacity report to make decisions for a firm. Capacity measures an asset's maximum ability. For example, The capacity of a consultant might be that they can perform up to 50 billable hours each week Or the capacity of a 3D printer might be that it can print up to 3 whirligigs per hour The question is: Why is this useful? Because it’s a metric that holds still. What does that mean? It means it’s a known quantity that doesn’t...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
When you transition from being an employee to being a founder, You need to completely rewire your internal performance gauges. As an employee, you're rewarded for meeting or exceeding expectations. You can’t mess up. Your job is to impress your higher-ups. As a founder, the rules flip. Your #1 goal is to iterate as fast as humanly possible. Getting it right every time is completely unrealistic. Your job is to do as many things wrong, as quickly as possible, in hopes of finding the one thing...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Why is the activity of building a financial model so transformational for founders? Because learning how to build a financial model Is akin to learning how to read. And building one for your own startup Is like reading the instruction manual On how your business works. Your Daily CFO, Lauren
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
"When I first started my business, I made a little simple financial model. It really wasn't impressive, but I could use it at least to track what was going on. Then I hired a Fractional CFO. They completely rebuilt my model and now it's much more sophisticated. Which is great, only now I have no idea how to use it. Now I just rely on them to run it and tell me what's going on. I have to ask their "permission" if I want to add anything to it, But mostly, I sorta just stay away from it." This...
2 months ago • 2 min read
For any solo founders out there who haven’t hired a team yet, A vote in the “just do it” camp: I was reviewing our model with a longtime client last week. He asked if we could add some additional functionality to it. I said, “Sure, we can look into that this month.” Wrote a little note in comments, And we moved on with the rest of meeting. This week, we opened up the model to review the weekly numbers And the new functionality was just THERE. Built, clean, and ready to use, As if by magic....
3 months ago • 1 min read