Brex

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Marketing4 steps

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

Productivity3 steps

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

Innovation3 steps

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Strategy3 steps

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Mindset4 steps

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

Innovation5 steps

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Leadership4 steps

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Self-Mastery5 steps

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

Magic Lenses

Evaluate competing implementation paths by plotting each through the eyes of the advisers you wish you had

Strategy3 steps

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

Self-Mastery3 steps

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

Leadership3 steps

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

Marketing4 steps

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Marketing4 steps

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

Sales5 steps

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

Innovation5 steps

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

Break growth experimentation into four evaluable stages an AI can hill-climb, keeping humans on alignment

Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

Sales3 steps

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

Innovation4 steps

The Design Sprint Scorecard

Break your founding hypothesis into rows and grade each one red/yellow/green after head-to-head customer tests

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

A 10-hour, 3-phase team sprint that turns a vague startup idea into one testable founding hypothesis

The Founding Hypothesis (Mad Libs Strategy Sentence)

Compress your entire startup strategy into one testable fill-in-the-blank sentence — then go prove it

Strategy3 steps

The 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

Leadership4 steps

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

Leadership5 steps

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

The Incognito Cry Test

Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.

Communication3 steps

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

Communication3 steps

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

Mindset3 steps

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

Communication4 steps

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

Strategy5 steps

The Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

Productivity5 steps

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

Sales5 steps

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

Communication4 steps

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

Leadership5 steps

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it

Strategy5 steps

The VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

Innovation5 steps

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

Sales5 steps

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

Productivity3 steps

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Leadership5 steps

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

Communication4 steps

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

Replace group brainstorms with silent individual idea generation, a quiet vote, and one designated decider