Silicon Valley

Absorb the Pirates

When a fraudulent clone steals your users, ship its best features instead of fighting its code

Accountable Equals Decider

Whoever owns the result owns the decision — everything else is a communal slowdown

Self-Mastery4 steps

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

Alpha-Beta People and Process Design

Borrow finance's alpha/beta to decide where you want upside and where you want boring reliability.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Be Known For Something

Pick one thing to be excellent at, get a reputation for it, and let responsibility flow to you

Influence4 steps

Be Someone's Favorite, Not Everyone's Okay

Aim to be a small group's absolute favorite rather than a large group's forgettable option — and measure it.

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea

At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Binding-Receptor Theory of Product-Market Fit

Your market's demand is a fixed fact like a drug receptor — you find it, you can't market it into existence.

Brain-Dump, Group, Vote, Single-Author (Company Values Workshop)

Crowdsource the raw material for values, but never write the definitions by committee

Brand as Physical Proof of Service

The best brand assets don't just show your logo — they demonstrate your value prop while people watch

Build for Where the Models Are Going

Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.

Building Your Own Social Radar

Turn people-reading from a mystery gift into a deliberate practice: checklist, conscious questions, and follow-up calibration.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

Championing Big Bets Inside a Company

To win support for audacious product bets, repeat the vision relentlessly, state your intent, and optimize for impact.

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

Communication5 steps

Clear Is Kind: The Three-Sentence Correction

State the failure, state your belief in them, hand them the responsibility — starting tomorrow

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

Context-First Agent Debugging

When a coding agent won't do what you want, treat it as a missing-context problem, not a model problem.

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Deliberate Understaffing

You can't size a project right, so err toward too few people on purpose.

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Disagree With the Founder Via the Spirit

Never say no to the idea — say yes to the spirit and come back with a better path

Mindset4 steps

Don't Stop Until You Reach the End

Distrust expert answers and drive every problem to ground-truth yourself

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Do the Job Badly to Learn What Excellence Looks Like

Founders in talent-poor markets should personally hold each role until they can recognise someone better

Double Down on Why People Love You

Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it

Dual-Track Category Building (Sell Into Today's Budget, Build Tomorrow's Category)

Rank in the funded category you already fit while running a long-tail campaign to shift the market to your new one

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

Execution Beats Strategy

Perfect strategy with poor execution teaches you nothing. Good-enough strategy with perfect execution compounds.

Expand, Don't Shrink

Insert a step between receiving feedback and acting on it — then answer it by adding tools, never by getting smaller.

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Communication3 steps

Feedback and Escalations Are a Gift

Withholding feedback is the most selfish thing you can do — and escalations are a gift you chase to true root cause.

Communication6 steps

Feeling-First Product Metaphor

Pick the feeling, name where you last felt it, and let the metaphor make a thousand small decisions for you.

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

Productivity3 steps

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Productivity3 steps

Hand the Toil to the Model First

Delegate the boring, repetitive parts of engineering to agents before anything else, and collapse the path to production.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

Hard Things Are the Only Moat

Every moat gets crossed eventually — the one that lasts is a willingness to do what rivals won't

Hire Founders (Eyes Open to the Costs)

Recruit ex-founders for outsized output and truth-telling, budgeting for high attrition

Hire the People That People Pick

Win great hires over months by adding value first, long before there's a role

Know When to Quit (Anti-VC-Persistence)

Winners hit big fast; if year 4-5 isn't screaming growth after a pivot or two, reset the clock.

Mindset5 steps

Leader Emulators

Build runnable models of the sharpest people you've worked with, then boot the right one when you're stuck.

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

Lowercase-c vs Capital-C: AI-Proofing Your Skill Stack

Sort every task into what AI does 80% well and what only a human can do — then invest accordingly

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

Manufacture the Room (Bending the Universe)

Decide which room you must be in, then engineer a legitimate reason to be standing in it

Mirror the Founder's Intensity (Fight Entropy)

Every management layer leaks intensity; your job is to mirror the CEO's, not buffer it.

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Mindset4 steps

Mission-Over-Minutiae Opportunity Choice

Choose your next big move by passion, mission, and team — not by optimizing every minor variable.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Network Effects vs Network Economies: The Materiality Test

Almost everything has some network effect; only ask whether it's large enough to change your margins.

Northstar Problem Commitment

Pick one foundational building-block problem and commit years to it, not a scatter of trendy ones.

Objective-Data Alignment Test

Before betting on an AI capability, check that your training data is the same shape as your desired output.

One Click Faster (Clock Speed Management)

Three tactics to raise an organization's pace without lowering its bar

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

Dream big, but chunk the bet into named learning phases with quarterly go/no-go gates

Physical-System Reality Check

For anything embodied, budget for three things — a brain, a body, and real application scenarios.

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Putting On the Coat of the Job

Run the spreadsheet, then tear it up — and simulate a Tuesday in the job instead.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Marketing6 steps

Rebrand as a Product Development Process

Run a rebrand with sprint teams, owners, and transparency — not as a marketing reveal

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Spirit-First OKRs

Write down qualitatively what crushing it looks like before you pick any number

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition

Trust your gut on candidates, then use six traits to translate that gut into words others can act on.

Startup Power Progression: Eliminate Three, Sequence Four

Cross off the three powers a startup can't have yet, then pursue the remaining four in sequence — counter-positioning first.

Startup-Within-a-Company Team Design

Build new things inside big companies with small, senior, trusted teams and manufactured discipline

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

Communication5 steps

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

Innovation3 steps

The Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

Productivity3 steps

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

Mindset4 steps

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Benefit-and-Barrier Power Test (To Be or Not to Be)

Only call it power if it delivers a cost/price benefit AND a barrier competitors can't erase.

The Castle-or-Shack Audit

Go capability by capability and separate the ones a rival can copy (shack) from the ones they truly can't (castle).

The Category Creation Go/No-Go Test

Four checks — budget, buyer language, competition, and vision scope — decide whether to invent a category or win an existing one

The Cheap-Ad Funnel Diagnostic

Use a small paid ad to isolate whether your packaging or your content is the problem, via click-through vs subscribe.

The Clip-Distribution Flywheel

Podcasts have no built-in discovery engine — borrow one by seeding high-quality clips on TikTok, YouTube, and Reels.

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

Communication3 steps

The De-Buzzword Test

Ask people to explain their idea without using the buzzword — if they can't, they haven't thought it through.

The Differentiation Stack

Four ordered tests a product must pass to matter, not just exist

The Dinner-Table Topic Test

Find your podcast's niche by noticing what makes people lean in at dinner — then force the decision with a deadline.

Leadership6 steps

The Dinosaur Brain Product Review

Executives hold three facts. Bring a recommendation, not a catalogue — and leave with principles, not answers.

Communication5 steps

The Fascinating Reframe

Convert the visceral urge to be right into a question that harvests the information you're missing.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

The Four-Channel Category Rollout

Customer language, PR testing, analyst/directory validation, and content — the mechanics of making a category real

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Golden Recipe of Modern AI

Every AI breakthrough sits on three legs: big data, the right neural architecture, and enough compute.

The Hill Climb

Name whether you're optimising a local hill or crossing the valley to a bigger mountain — then price the valley.

The Impossible Shared Case Study

Give every candidate the same unsolvable problem and grade how far they drill and how they react.

The Launch Momentum Playbook

Podcast charts reward subscriber velocity, not downloads — stockpile episodes, spike the launch, then bank the rank.

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

Ship five things people love, not fifteen things that merely work

The Org Chart With Your Name On It

Win the promotion by solving your boss's org problem, not by asking for your next title

The Outside-Silicon-Valley Playbook

Compete with global giants from a talent-poor market: go ops-heavy, go remote early, and refuse to clone

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

The Pickle: Iterated Product Quality List

A lightweight, memorably-named ship checklist you grow one line at a time from every miss.

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

The Process Power Qualifier: Material and Opaque

Operational excellence is only power when it's both material AND impossible for rivals to copy.

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

Lead with themes and a narrative; link out to the systems for the granular how

The Should-You-Start Reality Test

Before launching a podcast, prove to yourself you'd do it for free forever — then commit to a finite season.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Social Radar Founder-Read

Read the human signals in a founder interview to catch red flags the idea-focused people miss.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

The Surgeon Management Model

Spend over half your time making your top 10% feel like a supported surgeon who can't be blocked.

The Technology Wave Specialization Ladder

Ratchet down on a new technology while it's still weird — teardown, no-code, then fun build

Leadership6 steps

The Time-Boxed First 90 Days

Build context 5x faster, leave a plan behind, and don't spend trust you haven't banked

Communication4 steps

The Trust-First Interview Method

Talk less, promise review before publishing, and follow the tangents — so guests open up and the conversation goes somewhere real.

The Two Paths to Opinionated Software

Either encode a best practice that already exists without technology, or teach a better way and enforce it in the product

The Unifying Concept Test

Before adding a service to your app, check it fits the one mental model customers already hold of you

The Values-Encoded Brand System

Build the brand as a system whose elements each encode a company value, so every touchpoint stays on-brand without training

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Zone of Genius Calendar Audit

Bucket last quarter's calendar by joy, then ask what only you can do

Leadership6 steps

Toddler Soccer Goal Detangling

Goal every team on the same output metric and they swarm the ball. Detangle the customer journey into lanes.

Two-Sided AI Adoption

Pair top-down executive buy-in with a bottom-up tiger team of excited power users.

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

Innovation3 steps

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.