Recently, I read a comment from a startup advisor peer about the lack of women in VC-funded startup leadership. Essentially: "Maybe this is just a product of preference. Maybe women are just more risk-averse. And maybe men are simply dumb enough to try." While framed as flattery, it disguises something ugly- It’s a tidy explanation for the funding gap That promotes a dangerous narrative Which is also - blatantly - wrong. Women do start venture-backed companies - many of them. About 1 in 5...

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...

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.”...