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The last few months have been quite a ride, especially the end of last year.

I founded and bootstrapped two software companies. One was an accounting software combined with accounting services — one always feeding the other. The second was a payment platform, something that surveys would probably describe as “a Stripe for the Colombian market.” That was the idea, at least. Execution is always more nuanced than the pitch. In this very specific case, much more nuanced.

Well, I (we, in the case of the payment platform) managed to sell both businesses in the last few months. And even though the title sounds arrogant, this is not a story about becoming a millionaire. I didn’t.

I just think that bootstrapping up to exit two times taught me many things, hence I will write (some of) them here.

Boredom compounds

Both exits taught me how to make a company “acquirable,” or what buyers say they want versus what they actually care about. It also forced me to confront a few uncomfortable facts.

Disclaimer to the reader, this article will probably go all over the place and lack structure. I am just sharing learnings and feelings en vrac. Sorry if it’s unreadable.

First, I feel there is some flavour of failure in selling a company. Yes, failure. It’s a harsh word, but I mean it.

If you build your life’s work, you don’t sell it. Ideally, you give it to your kids or sell it before you pass away. The company you sell is, in some way, the one you did not want to spend your life building. That sounds grandiose, but I felt it quite viscerally.

Maybe I am too romantic, in the literary sense of the word (I am) — even though it goes beyond the scope of this blog — but I cannot achieve anything without deep, irrational passion, and building FinTech brought nothing close to inner fulfilment. I felt some euphoria sometimes, terror most times, boredom often, but never deep passion. I am sharing this because I think the hardest part of negotiation was hiding my profound boredom with the FinTech world1 and my hurry to leave this world.

Almost a year and a half before the exits, I knew I was going to sell. Not because it was the optimal financial decision but because I was simply getting bored and uninspired. I know LinkedIn crowd celebrate acquisitions and company-flipping like it’s some Graal. I allowed myself a celebratory post, I confess.

Yet I totally disagree on this, the best things in life comes with a deep sense of purpose, and one does not cash out their purpose, they experience it and endlessly discover it. Do not get me wrong, I’m glad I founded both those businesses, and concluded those two transactions along my co-founder in one of them. I just think Entrepreneurship is much more than that.

That’s the first real lesson. Boredom is lethal in entrepreneurship. Once it settles in your daily, your sense of purpose drops. Your energy drops. Your standards drop. You are still operating the company, but mentally you’ve already left. It’s not dramatic if you are operating on VC’s funds and you pay yourself a fat salary, it’s slightly more stressful if your business pay the bills.

This is how I decided to exit.

Now, I’ll tell you how I effectively succeeded.

Incentives.. again

When you sell a company, you are selling two things. You are selling the obvious — the product, the software, the team, the execution, the cash flow. But more importantly, you are selling a future to the buyer.

I’ve been willing to sell the accounting software company for at least two and a half years. I was looking for acquirers through private banks, activating my network here and there. It was a constant cycle of ups and downs. Sometimes I was enthusiastic, sometimes quite depressed. Every conversation felt like it might lead somewhere, and most of them didn’t.

Here, I strongly suggest to contact potential buyers on a regular basis, and use a cold approach. It was, in my case, surprisingly effective, as every single approach I had was primarily the result of some outbound work. I know it may sound weird, but no one is going to buy your average, not-so-great business if you don’t tell them it’s for sale. I contacted those who — in my not so humble opinion — would benefit from adding my software to their stack. Every single time, they would at least take the call. Every, single, time.

When you sell a product — be it Burrata Pizza or software subscriptions — incentives are much simpler to understand. The buyer either sees value or doesn’t. They compare alternatives. They decide. You sell the value of your product and focus on the immediate benefits they will get. When someone buys your company, incentives are even more crucial and more hidden.

In my case, the main asset was never cash flow. It was positive if nothing extraordinary. Barely enough to pay myself a decent salary and live in a relatively affordable country. There wasn’t explosive growth. There wasn’t venture hype. It was steady and it was bound to stay this way. I understood from the first potential buyer I could not orient the talks toward the financial statements, otherwise I would be doomed.

Now, most people don’t have extraordinary companies. Most companies are normal. Mine wasn’t extraordinary either. It wasn’t bad. It was stable. It had positive cash flow and decent technology. In some ways, the tech was much above average. But today, many people have good software. Especially right now. So “good” somewhere is not enough to be attractive. Your value depends on the urgency of the buyer.

You only need one

In the first encounters with potential acquirers, I allowed the conversation to drift away from my value to my weaknesses. I did not focus enough on the potential future I am selling them. I believe I let go higher bidders because of this mistake. The beginning of the conversation should have set the tone around my strengths, not around what made my business average.

Acquirers will disclose chunks of valuable information here and there and it’s vital to catch them. It’s the same for every relationship, for that matter. People disclose information about themselves and their incentives, with their actions primarily, and in their language, and you should not let it slip away.

Like for everything in life: the more someone talks, the more they promise, the less serious and reliable they usually are. The serious acquirers don’t over-explain and don’t try to seduce you with projections and duffle bags full of cash. They protect information because they know it’s leverage and if they don’t like something, they say it early. Serious people know the weight of a promise, and how difficult it is to fulfil just one, let alone several.

Only one thing stayed constant: I knew I didn’t want to keep doing this with my life. I think it was a mismatch from the very beginning. Not a catastrophic one. The company wasn’t failing. The technology was decent, even above average in my opinion. It helped people. Still, something was off. On a more personal note, I believe it’s important to close cycles, especially those filled with negative energy. Selling the company was closing a cycle. Later, deciding to going to live to a new city was part of the same move. I guess it matters especially at a relatively young age when circumstances allow you to be completely free.

After some aborted negotiations, I understood that what my best potential acquirers really seek was time. They simply did not want to build accounting software themselves. They lacked the technical ability or the patience. Buying was faster and less risky than developing internally. Some wanted a team from day one because they were incompetent to hire developers and engineers. That was something I initially underestimated in early negotiations with other potential buyers. I spoke with at least eight. Some were real. Many were not.

If you buy the software, you buy the years it would take to rebuild it. Even in the time of AI, you cannot just spin up a compliant accounting system overnight, especially in a country with complex tax and regulatory structures. It would take at least a year to build something robust and operational. Another year to fully proof-test it. That was the asset: time gained. The ability to operate from day one instead of spending years developing. Once I understood that, I knew what I could defend in negotiations.

If someone wanted me to defend the audience, the marketing, the projected growth, the five-year expansion story — I would be fucked. I would have to sell projections. “In five years we could expand, margins could increase, new markets could open.” But honestly, I didn’t even fully believe that myself. I wanted to fuck off desperately and would not even be here to see those flamboyant dreams come true, so why would I sell that story to someone else? I did not even care enough myself about it in the first place.

If I cannot commit to that vision personally, I won’t package it and sell it as certainty. I preferred defending something tangible such as the technology and the time it saves.

How it went

When talking to a buyer, you need a number in your head. A number you won’t go below. A number that lets you sleep at night. Even if the upside could be higher. Why? Because once you decide to exit, your focus is divided. You are negotiating while still running the company. If you are bored — as I was — you want it done. Not at any cost, but quickly. Without a floor in mind, you waste time in negotiations that were doomed from the beginning.

Another strange phenomenon: nothing happens for months. Then suddenly buyers appear in waves. The first one shows up, and then somehow you enter a cycle. Every few weeks, someone else appears. Most of the early ones disappear. The final buyer is the one you least expected.

Now, about making a company acquirable is, in theory, simple. In practice, it requires discipline most founders avoid. You have to think of your company as a system, not as an extension of yourself. If it needs you constantly, it is not acquirable. If operations collapse when you step away, it is not acquirable. If code, reviews, customer relationships, and key decisions live only in your head, it is not acquirable.

The ideal system should function without you. Especially now, in a world where software, automation, and AI allow for extraordinary leverage, there is no excuse for ultra-dependence.

When you market software, you focus on features, UX, pricing, immediate benefits. When someone buys your company, they look at completely different variables: cost structure, operational clarity, team stability, documentation, recurring revenue, independence from the founder. What you polish publicly is rarely what closes the deal. What you quietly did in private over the years is what suddenly becomes valuable. Acquisition is when you get paid for what you practiced in silence over the years.

More next week, or next month, or never.

Even Elon Musk said he regretted putting too much automation in Tesla factories.

Be careful, it’s a technological revolution but only if you use it intelligently.

Learn more reading this

The last few years have been quite a ride. Generative AI has invaded every single hidden corners of the web. Every LinkedIn member with more than a few followers suddenly claims to be an automation expert. Thousands of start-ups were born, almost out of nowhere, promising to AI-hammer every possible task one can imagine. Some called it a bullish market, others called it a bubble. Personally, I think AI is a revolution, but it still has a long way to go to profoundly change most industries.

A large share of those first-wave companies are ChatGPT wrappers, bound to vanish. At the time of this writing, they are slowly dying, and I believe we will soon be entering into the interesting phase of any technological disruption : the post-bubble era.

The main question, then, is: Why did they die, and how can you survive?

I’m a tech founder and a mathematician by education, I studied GAN neural networks back when it was unfashionable. Yet, I decided to wait before tackling this topic, especially its implementation in business. I think it’s wise to avoid the early low-quality noise, the bubbles, and the endless craze that accompany every technological revolution. AI is, without a doubt, a life-changing breakthrough. But the usual suspects are the usual bullshit makers: big-four consultants, MBAs, and some VC-backed CEOs with no technical background, tons of money, and an obsession with raising a few more bucks. As a consequence, the conversation around AI in business has revolved around the wrong questions, and the wrong persons.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Every breakthrough technology provokes a rush. Everyone suddenly wants to solve every problem with it. The same happened with blockchain — but this time it’s worse. The main difference is that LLMs are incredibly good at pretending to solve problems. They can act intelligent and simulate progress itself. Blockchain was too abstract for most people, even for many of its users. But AI feels tangible: it speaks, writes, reasons, and therefore can convince. It is a technology that flatters human vanity, and that makes its illusions more dangerous.

I faced those illusions in my personal journey. I’ve spent the last few years building an accounting software company. The accounting industry is one of the main targets of the AI revolution. It’s boring, repetitive, and filled with tasks that add zero real value—necessary, yes, but rarely creative.

Unsurprisingly, a myriad of wannabe tech CEOs has appeared out of nowhere with the same promise: “We automate your accounting and reduce your operational burden to zero.” They claim to free every CEO from the administrative noise, leaving only pure purpose and product creation. It’s a tempting lie. Most of them are wrong, and their clients learned that very quickly. The promise will one day be fulfilled, but not by them.

Their failures stem as much from ignorance as from dishonesty. Their approach is flawed not because it uses AI, but because they take the problem by the wrong end : they start with the tool, rather than the problem it’s supposed to solve. Hence they mould the client’s challenges to their solution, which in this case is ChatGPT. A good product does the opposite, it fits to an existing problem. This is a good question one can ask to detect fragile AI companies : does AI really add value and a hard-to-imitate differentiator in their market? More often than not, the answer is negative. Anyone can wrap some AI assistant with a prompt, and AI-only can solve no critical problems without serious pre-requisite work, closer to the data and the infrastructure. In the rare cases it can, then the company will have no moat.

Most bubble-born AI startups try to use AI where much simpler algorithm would do the trick. They operate at the wrong layer. For instance, in accounting, they appear only to read invoices. They don’t build an accounting system, nor do they profoundly integrate into one. They just take invoices, read them, and send them somewhere else. That’s date brokerage disguised as intelligent computation. Others try to solve problems that shouldn’t even be addressed that way: forecasting with two or three months of data, or guessing how much of your money belongs to the tax agency where a percentage suffices. The same thing happens in other industries. In marketing, for instance, most so-called “AI tools” focus on blasting outreach campaigns to the wrong audience. The cost is high, the output low.

In reality, 10 or 20 percent of tasks usually create 90 percent of the value. Yet the naive, brute-force application of AI ignores that logic: companies spend 90 percent of their computing resources on the 90 percent of tasks that barely matter. The result is spectacular inefficiency, presented as innovation.

Take marketing again. AI isn’t useful for spamming thousands of unqualified leads. It’s powerful when it digs deep into the web to “over-qualify” the right ones—the rare leads that actually matter, that align with your product, story, and purpose. Real leverage is precision, not volume. A company willing to improve its sales pipeline must know its customer, and craft a compelling story around their ideal potential buyer. Only then, AI can be useful to target qualified potential buyers at scale.

Generally speaking, process automations should come after differentiation. In the case of sales and marketing, a unique, genuine story-telling, and an outstanding message featuring testimonials and an original brand, should come before outreach automation.

I am not telling you this from unreachable heights, I myself naively sent AI-generated sales message to unqualified leads, then got angry at the rock-bottom conversion rate. That’s fine, sucking at being an entrepreneur is part of the entrepreneur journey.

Differentiation is survival

When a tool becomes a standard, it’s generally wise to consider it is no longer a differentiator, but a pre-requisite for survival. Yet, many entrepreneurs served nicely-packaged LLMs wrappers and thought it would be enough. It can, over the short term, but the closer you are to the original tool — in this case, OpenAI or any other LLM — the sooner you will die.

At some point, your clients will realize they can just use ChatGPT or Claude, and get the same result. In the tangible economy, this dynamic is obvious to anyone : you know the local grocery store charges a small premium compared to the wholesaler. In the digital economy, the same dynamic is hidden behind slogans, scroll-downs, fundraising rounds, and LinkedIn likes. The main point here : AI wrongly used can turn a company’s product into a free commodity.

In other words, ubiquitous and poorly-engineered AI usage can lead to the erosion of a company’s differentiator — and differentiation is survival. If I use AI to interpret financial statements and send tax reports with zero human input, I’m doing exactly what every other firm will soon do. My clients will realize they can pay twenty dollars a month to get the same outcome elsewhere. Why pay three hundred for something built on the same model, the same interface, the same answers? AI should be between humans—not humans between AIs.

Back to my marketing example. Lazy community managers feed prompts to one AI to generate content, then send it to another AI that distributes it to random people. The human becomes a middleman between two algorithms, an anonymous courier in a loop of artificial messages. A good community manager, on the contrary, thinks deeply about who the ideal customer really is—the person with the right incentives, the right context, the right resonance with your story. That thinking cannot, and should never be outsourced.

I find it useful to think as AI as an horizontal layer, just like the internet or the electricity. At some point, its mere usage cannot be a differentiator, but rather a pre-requisite for survival. For example, no serious large-scale retailers can live without e-commerce, and no industry have stayed equal with the advent of those horizontal layers. Nowadays, no one would ever qualify a company as innovative because it has a website. For the same reasons, no one will see your product as revolutionary because it’s got a chat-bot.

Differentiator first, AI then

Let’s summary the most important messages here.

If you’re building a technology company, AI alone cannot be your differentiator. It must sit on top of something hard to imitate—an existing proprietary system, or unique data you already control, such as client interactions, documents, or behavioral patterns. AI should come after you’ve gained access to rare data or achieved an interesting, tedious feat of engineering. If anyone can replicate your product just by plugging into the OpenAI API, then you’re essentially selling hamburgers next to a McDonald’s.

When it comes to sales and marketing, AI cannot replace the most important part: knowing who you want to talk to and what you want to say. Sales and marketing are the most psychological, human aspects of company building. Your offer and your message are you. If a simple AI can define your story and your ideal customer, then it can do the same for anyone—and you’ll end up sounding like the same generic AI sludge as everyone else.

In both cases, AI should catalyze the differentiator, not define it. Ramp, one of the most successful fintechs of the past few years, is a perfect example: they built a world-class, tightly integrated product first, and then added AI to make it even smoother. That’s the right sequence—foundation before automation, meaning before intelligence.

AI should not define and even less answer core questions for you. Intelligence, human or artificial, is only powerful when it’s directed toward valuable targets. Without it, AI becomes noise disguised as information, motion mistaken for progress, and automation mistaken for speed.

The goal is to show how a clear story helps you decide what to build, what to cut, and how to focus your product around one simple truth.

Learn more reading this

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Stories, everywhere

Unless you tell a story, you don’t have a way of convincing people. Unless you tell a story, you don't have a way of transmitting your vision to your clients, investors, or team members. That said, what makes a good story? I believe it has much in common with a good business: it should be focused.

A good story converges onto something : A goal, an intrigue, a character’s quest, an emotion. Even when the goal is to create confusion or a dream-like state, if it is the author’s intent, it must be deliberate and sharp, clear within its own fog, as in the works of Murakami or sometimes Chuck Palahniuk.

Each sentence, or scene, pushes the story forward, and either provides crucial information or helps the story progress. A good storyteller knows how to say a lot without writing much, how to fit a whole story into a single paragraph, how to inspire a whole world in just one sentence.

Ernest Hemingway, Bukowski, Steinbeck : All of them were masters of concision. A good storyteller knows as much about what to disclose as what to hold back.

Hence, a good story-brand captures a company’s mission clearly, and makes it resonate through the experiences of its clients, founders, and back to its origins. When it comes to telling the story of your company or your founder’s journey —ideally the two marrying each other harmoniously— it’s crucial not to overload with details that don’t help people resonate with who you are, and what you’re offering. Every new information can bring people closer, but also push them away.

No fluff policy

The best story-brand examples often come from B2C companies. The best of them are masters at shaping stories, knowing what to focus on and which sub-culture they want to reach. For instance, Dior advertisements celebrate beauty and a high-class aesthetic. They don't explain much about sourcing the plants used for their perfumes. That doesn't matter to Dior. For other fragrance brands, however, it does. It depends on what you want to sell and whom you want to sell to.

A good business story also act as a good filter. It opens the door to potential participants to join in, while those not a good fit simply move on. Just as the odyssey of humankind, it happens in the physical dimensions of the world, and is a matter of space and time.

Your narrative, at a single faint instant in space, invites people to sit beside you—those whose resonance aligns with yours—and to wear your colours in some way. Over time, though, the story feeds followers as much as they feed the storyteller, helping each other converge and narrow the scope of their identity.

Hemingway fed the world with his stories, and the stories of the world fed Hemingway. He lived at the heart of the great adventures of his time: World War I, World War II, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution. In business, the same dynamic exists: Vans and the skater community fit each other, Patagonia and rock climbers fed each other with stories and crucial product feedback. In both cases, you can tie the early identity of a brand to a subculture, a narrow group of people deeply focused on a single activity, usually something most others ignore. Think of early Nike and the runners, back when running was still considered unfashionable.

When you build a company, when you start selling a product and shaping a brand story, it’s mandatory to focus on the people who truly feel your intentions. Why? Because one person who screams your message is worth more than hundreds who only whisper—or worse, stay silent.

The enemy of a good story, and of any brand, is not rejection. It is indifference. Your story should never be met with blank stares. You want at least a few people to resonate so strongly that they can’t help but amplify it. Over time, their passion convinces the crowd that your message is worth listening to. It’s your goal, even if you’re selling something as seemingly dull as B2B accounting software.

What, then, does this have to do with building a great product?

Narrow the scope to go further, get bigger later

If you want to reach a committed minority, your should narrow your goal and your scope, even if it seems counterintuitive. Talk to fewer people and build concentric circles around the core missionaries. Don’t try to convince everyone on day one, and build a clear identity that narrows the focus.

Here lies a paradox: narrowing the story, filtering, and inviting only the right people does not diminish your impact. On the contrary, it extracts the universal essence of a subculture and reveals what’s timeless within it.

Every great story carries a universal truth. It’s a bit like Kantian philosophy: beneath the particulars, every great brand and every great story speaks to something fundamental about being human. If you can make a small group of people feel that truth, they will echo it and convince others.

It also applies to new activities or pursuits.Take yoga, for example. Today its message of peace, relaxation, fitness, and harmony with your body resonates widely. But in the beginning, it took a dedicated community of yogis to carry that message and make it visible.

Every brand should search for what is timeless within its story. Find the people who can extract, commit to, and communicate that essence, then build around them. Only afterward do you reach those who are less committed, but who still feel moments of resonance, sometimes enough to push the message into the mainstream.

Every founder wants the maximum number of people to echo their message. But for that to happen, you need a small group of missionaries at the very beginning to make the message strong and loud enough, like a powerful minority others want to follow because of their passion. Red Bull speaks to the adventurer in you. The North Face speaks to the explorer inside you. Nike speaks to the winner, the great athlete within you. Apple speaks to the artist you wish you had been, and sometimes feel you are. Hermès, when it sells to women, speaks to the sovereign, the connoisseur, the most elevated version of yourself in the realm of aesthetics.

Stories came first

Humans have told stories around the fire for thousands of years. Building products and selling them to large numbers of people, however, is a much more recent practice. And while everyone can recognize a bad story, a bad product is harder to spot. A weak story loses your attention immediately. You don’t critique it, you don’t write about it, you simply stop listening.

With products it is different. People, especially founders, often struggle to know whether what they have built is good or bad. They fall into predictable traps. The most common one is trying to do too much: adding too many features, serving too many use cases, optimizing around too many variables at once.

This is particularly visible in B2B software, where many founders chase breadth over depth. They end up selling products that do everything in theory but solve nothing well in practice. Most bad products are born from excess. The best ones, by contrast, succeed because they do less, but with excellence. They optimize around one variable that ties directly to their brand story.

A good story is not entertaining

Storytelling and product building follow the same logic. To persuade, you must narrow the scope until the right people lean in. That means crafting one strong message and transforming it into the single thing you product is built around.

In B2B software, this often means choosing one variable for one subgroup of users and solving for that alone. Done right, their experience becomes proof, a living testimonial that convinces others to follow. This is why founder stories and early customer stories are so powerful: they are built on something real, something essential, a core issue around which a movement can form.

In my own accounting software company, we chose just one variable: the time lost by bookkeepers. That was the story. Before us, they spent hours. With us, they finished in minutes. Not exactly a bedtime story—but true. And truth resonates, because it carries something universal. Nobody wants to waste time on tedious work. Everyone wants more hours back for the things that matter. Even Amazon, if you strip it down, tells a simple and almost boring story: customer-centric, lowest prices, fastest shipping. Yet it works. A good story does not need to be entertaining. It needs to be focused and to strike a chord.

In product design, this kind of focus usually means removing more than adding. Once you’ve identified your story and the single variable you want to optimize, strip away everything else. If you’re a clothing brand, maybe you begin with one sub-community. If you make perfume, maybe you launch with a single scent. If you run a restaurant, maybe you offer only tacos or only pizza. Story and product must converge on one point.

From there, growth spreads outward in concentric circles. You begin with the people utterly convinced by what you do. They bring in others. Eventually the message expands into something universal. Think of sports brands that started with one product, one symbol. Everlast became iconic because of its association with Muhammad Ali. One fighter, one outfit, one story—yet it grew into a brand everyone wanted a piece of, because Ali embodied the universal struggle of pushing limits and fighting through.

B2B application

For B2B software, this principle is even more crucial. The story must boil down to one clear impact: how business life improves when the problem is solved. Whether it’s fintech or marketing, every feature should serve that story. Everything else must go: unnecessary code, redundant features, extra views, extra buttons, unnecessary stress. What remains is only what moves the story forward. Even hiring should reflect this discipline—bringing in developers who can deliver precisely on the core features that matter.

Too many founders today launch automation platforms that promise everything: automation for accountants, for small businesses, for auditors, for sales. It never works. The AI companies that thrive are those that go narrow, training niche models for specific communities. Technology only makes this truth sharper: niche plus story plus core believers. To succeed, you must be far better at one thing than the generalist competitors who try to do it all.

Consider the real-life example of a legal-tech startup. They trained a model designed specifically for lawyers. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was exact. The story was told by lawyers, for lawyers, rooted in the details of their daily practice. The product was trimmed to the bone until it fit perfectly. From that base, it grew far beyond its niche. The founder became a multimillionaire—not because the technology was miraculous, but because the story fit.

Focus

Every effort you put into your company should push the story forward. Every piece of development should fit the story you are telling. In my case, every feature had to align with the story of saving time.

It’s the same for the great brands. Every development Amazon makes fits its story of giving people instant access to products all around the world, in a single click. Tesla does the same with its story of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. SpaceX takes it even further: every launch, every milestone, moves the story of multi-planetary life forward.

There is no fluff, no wasted time. It sounds obvious, but ask yourself: in your company, does each development, feature, process, meeting, call with investors, sales conversation, or conference appearance really move your story forward? Or are you wasting time with people who don’t care, who only want to sell you a ticket or a slot on a panel? Does this effort help the missionaries in your story?

If it doesn’t, don’t do it. A company, at its core, is built around three tasks: building, selling, and servicing. Storytelling cuts across all three.

It fuels selling, but also servicing, because if your story matters—if your product truly makes life better—then spreading it becomes a moral duty. You owe it to your customers, to your believers, to make that story heard.

Real speed is about focus. It’s about working only on what truly matters, and moving in a straight line toward your objective.

That’s what we’re diving into in this episode.

If you want to learn more, read this, and get yourself a subscription.

Contact me at systematicventure@substack.com

Welcome to this exclusive, subscriber-only edition of TSV. Every week, I share a new entry from my bootstrapper diary along with the lessons I've learned. You can also catch more insights on the TSV Podcast.

Subscribe now

Annual subscribers get access to special episodes in the future. I promise (even though I said don’t promise, only demo, I have no choices here)

A personal story

Back in 2019, when I was working at a bank as a researcher, I got called for an absurd mission. At that stage, I was no longer on the trading desk. I had been transferred to what they named the AI Lab of one of the largest French banks in New York. This was the time between my brief stint on trading floors and before I became an entrepreneur. A time when I understood what was a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and why a rogue team of anti-social programmers working in a dumpy office could run circles around corporate zombies.

My unfitness for the role of trading desk operator was second only to my unfitness as a researcher in the AI Lab. It was not about technical skills. I was technically competent, if far from great. The problem was my attitude: an absence of deference, a rejection of authority, and a no-bullshit manner that simply does not work in the corporate middle-office world. It took me years to realize the danger of becoming good at something you do not actually like. In my case, it took me about two and a half to three years. I was not exactly good, but I was not too bad. At some point, I could actually have slipped into the corporate mode.

One I told a friend my fear of staying at the bank forever. His answer: “Do not feel like you are a unique snowflake. You are going to eventually become exactly like the people you work with And they all looked the same because they all became the same”

That is the danger of the corporate world. It’s a twenty-plus years mold turning people into clones.

I earned good money, more than I had ever earned before (not too hard to accomplish). Yet I was asking myself where does money stop making you fulfilled? As a side note, at the time I was still forbidden to have a credit card in France because I was on the banned-list, but that is a story for another day.

Back to the absurd mission, the manager of the team gave me a task: use natural language processing models, the predecessors of modern LLMs before “attention” came into fashion, to clean up typos in manually written text.

The project was quite vanilla. Some operators overseas, often in India, would frequently mistype client tiers such as Gold, Platinum, or Silver. Sometimes you would get “Gaold” or “Platinuuam.” I had a database of thousands of such lines. My job was to standardize them so data analysts could run algorithms on clean data. The type of task that makes you question your whole existence and want to open a pizzeria in Latin America, which I eventually did.

I suggested the obvious solution: do not let people type freely. Just give them a dropdown menu with predefined tiers. Problem solved at the source. Not exactly rocket science.

Instead, they wanted me to build a real-time NLP algorithm that would normalize and correct as people typed. The algorithm itself was trivial, essentially fuzzy string matching. But the real problem was not the algorithm, it was the bank. For a startup, this would be a one-afternoon project. For a bank, it was a six-month to one-year odyssey. Every small change required authorization from multiple layers of bureaucracy. What should have been a two-person task suddenly involved 20 or 30 stakeholders. Among those people, most of them act like parasites who see any deviation from the standard corporate sloth mode as an existential threat.

I was not exactly thrilled wasting my time on such a trivial problem. I was already ready to leave, and no one at the bank was particularly keen to keep me around anyway. So I kindly suggested the upper management to fuck off with that project, knowing perfectly what it would mean for me. Their slowness to react worked in my favor. They did not fire me on the spot. They waited and waited, and in the end I left voluntarily. This is what happens when a big company wants to implement a small change. They cannot because they have to move too many parts. They have natural inertia. They are slow. They are zombies.

And that, dear reader, is the point of today’s piece: speed, and how to achieve it in your business.

Faster you survive, slower you die

I'm not interested in speed for its own sake. Many people go faster to nowhere. I’m interested in speed as a matter of survival. It means going faster because you're lighter and because you focus on the right things.

Let's dig in.

The lack of speed in big institutions is not because individuals are stupid (some are though), but because layers of authorization, committees, and processes trap them. As I moved through different roles, I saw many founders imitating these layers of bureaucracy. Small companies of less than 10 people behaving as if they were giant organisations. Drown in committees, never actually making impactful decisions. Many seed and series A startups are working like bureaucratic dinosaurs.

There are many consequences to slowness, but I think two of them are the most crucial.

The first consequence of slowness is obvious: nothing gets implemented. The second consequence is worse: if your idea is bad, you only realize it six months or a year later. By that time, it may be fatal.

Speed is survival because speed accelerates the feedback loop. It increases the velocity of iteration and improves the quality of processes. Speed is the difference between a company that wastes time solving the wrong problem and a company that quickly pivots to the right one.

Even if you start with the wrong idea, if you are fast, you can iterate toward the right one before a slower competitor.

Yet speed is badly misunderstood. It is not about rushing or cutting corners. It is about focusing on what matters and trimming away everything that does not. More often than not, achieving speed of iteration means going slower and spending more time on what really matters. Speed is more about focus than velocity. Going fast in a startup means finding the truth of your market as quickly as possible.

Once you find that truth, once you know people are willing to pay, you can then iterate, improve marketing, and deepen your presence in that market.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, a shiny fintech wanted to add my humble accounting software to its suite. They had the right idea and the right distribution, but their development team was glacially slow. They had no feeling of urgency, just a bloated office culture that allowed people to do nothing for months in a row. Their competitors were not all equally slow. As a result, my potential acquirer lacked a real differentiator and was slowly turning obsolete.

As I was talking to the executive team, I realized the bottleneck was not insight but speed. They wanted to move and knew what had to be done, yet they were too slow. It’s still extremely disarming to see CEOs unable to shake up their own companies. My personal opinion is that they don’t really want to do it because they have no incentives. In this case, both executives I spoke to enjoy fat pay checks and company-paid apartments — not exactly a Hunger Games scenario that would force them to move faster.

For a big company, the way out is to create small, independent pirate teams. Give them autonomy. Remove layers. Speed comes from independence and total ownership.

Small bureaucracy

For a nascent business, it means not doing many things at day zero, and trimming the company processes down to the bone. It means every single motherf****r in your start-up must focus on impactful tasks, enjoy an unclogged calendar, and evaluate it success with a clear metrics.

Here is how we do it in my own company. Fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to sound extreme.

1. No meetings. None. No weekly stand-ups, no daily check-ins. Writing culture

2. Everyone has total ownership of one thing: a product feature, a service to a client, or a sales mission.

3. Every task must directly contribute to either building the product, serving clients, or bringing in new clients.

When you give people full ownership, you cut the bureaucracy. At the very beginning, going faster matters more than going further. Later, once you have product-market fit and stable revenues, then you can afford to slow down, bring in more people, and deepen execution.

But early on, speed is life. I even went so far as to prohibit voice messages. In Latin America, people often communicate problems using voice notes. I banned them. I thought they made us slower. It worked, but it also had consequences.

Here is an example of the message I sent.

Hi @channel – I was talking with one of your colleagues and she complained, in a completely incredible way, that I did not want to receive voice notes.

So I thought: if she complained, it must be because you are all sending each other voice notes. Otherwise, she would not have that habit with you, and she would not complain. And if I am wrong, well, you are still guilty, because that is just how it is.

Here are some arguments, and why you should not use this toxic tool if you want to actually optimize your tasks the way you should:

• They do not let you structure the problem, because you are thinking while speaking.

• They make you unable to quickly synthesize a problem and extract the essential part, which is always just 10 percent. If not less.

• When you are the receiver. You waste three minutes listening to something that could be written in two lines.

• They waste the time of the listener, but also of the sender, because the sender has to wait until the other person is motivated to listen, often several times. Response rates are low. You are wasting everyone’s time.

• They eliminate the possibility of keeping a written message, easy to read quickly, and instead create repeated time losses over the long term. You lose traceability and the loss of time compounds terribly over days, weeks, months, years, centuries, until the cosmic death of the universe.

Long live Slack messages.

How to go faster

In my case, my company once peaked at almost 15 employees. Today we are six. And with six, we generate more revenue than before. Why? Because fewer resources force you to decide what really matters. We cut the development team from eight to two (plus me, so two and a half). And suddenly, we move much faster.

Concretely, it means abandoning long roadmaps and product requirements with unclear return on investment. A developer must work on a tool that optimizes the single most important metric of your business: in my case, the north star is time spent per book closure. If the development does not meet critical requirements or optimize the north star metric, then the development is useless and the originator should be called out publicly.

When it comes to sales, it means pruning your offer down to the minimum requirements and iterating fast until you find product–market fit. It means quickly moving price, scope, name, speech, and message without overthinking outcomes, and instead focusing on the gathered data.

If the company already has revenue and is no longer in an early stage, speed means making everyone focus on the single most important task. Usually this comes with removing, deleting, and trimming: remove meetings, delete useless features, and streamline processes down to critical actions that either accelerate building or increase sales.

Speed is not about doing more. Speed is about doing less of what does not matter.

I don’t pretend to have the techniques—I’ve never raised a dime—but I know what failed in my case, and that’s what I’m sharing in this second episode.

This is the second part of a two-episode series on how to fail at raising funds.

You can find the whole article for free, at tsv.blog

I struggled because of that. Today I’m in a better place, but back then I really wished I had some cash to move faster. It would have made things easier, and even now I might be in a stronger position.

Over time I’ve come to understand some of the patterns: the importance of storytelling, timing, VC incentives, and how you craft your company from day one.

I don’t pretend to have the techniques—I’ve never raised a dime—but I know what failed in my case, and that’s what I’m sharing in this episode.

This is the first part of a two-episode series on how to fail at raising funds.

You can find the whole article for free, at tsv.blog

Welcome to this exclusive, subscriber-only edition of TSV. Every week, I share a new entry from my bootstrapper diary along with the lessons I've learned. You can also catch more insights on the TSV Podcast.

Subscribe now

Annual subscribers get access to special episodes in the future. I promise (even though I said don’t promise, only demo, I have no choices here)

Why I sucked at raising funds

Among all my failures as a CEO, one of the most significant came when trying to raise funds.

I tried it a few times, mostly from VCs. At one point—after a few years of running my company, I got offered potential angel investments. But I turned them down because they came with a price: meeting with investors and absurd equity dilution. In the end, I’ve never had any type of external funding.

When I tried to raise a pre-seed or seed round with VCs, it was a giant failure. Back in those times, I did not really understand why. It was frustrating, and I wish someone had explained me a few things before opening a potentially VC-backed business.

Basically, I did not have the fundamentals of raising money. This article is about my failure to raise funds, and how you can fail too if you want to.

Don't let the early bloom fade

Fundraising is a dynamic process. Both your company’s stage and the timing of your investors outreach matter. You’re operating in a complex context: your market, your geography, your pitch, and even the life cycle of the investor’s own fund when they meet you are multiple variables to take into account. I tried to raise selfishly, only focusing on the great potential value my company could offer. This type of approach makes for a great bootstrapping mindset because you focus on what matters most. The problem is that VCs are not interested in it—or, more precisely, not only in it.

When you start a company, the first few months have some freshness to them. There is no proof of success, but there’s also no proof of failure. This short window matters.

This is why you need to decide—before you even start—whether you’re going to raise money extremely early or much later, once you have some proof of market fit. In the early stage—the two to five years between starting and becoming a sustainable company—most VCs will not invest. I think that’s a mistake on their part. They don’t always understand the basics of entrepreneurship. But reality is reality : they don’t invest. That means your early investment offer is made almost entirely of promises.

If you don’t want to start with no cash, you have to leverage the emotional excitement at the very beginning, when you just have an MVP (maybe some AI app) and a few early customers. Later, cracks will show in your story, and investors will use those as reasons not to invest.

They’ll think they now have enough information to decide whether your idea will work, and if you didn’t succeed without their money, they’ll assume their money won’t change that. That’s a chicken and egg problem, and you will end up explaining them that things would be easier if they helped you with some cash. That won’t cut it; a year or two of slow growth is enough for them to decide your company will never be high-growth1.

Early-stage investors

When looking for early-stage investors, you should distinguish between individual investors and institutional investors. Smaller, individual investors often know you personally, and they tend to behave better than VCs because their investment horizon is longer. In my opinion, they’re the ideal people to reach out to when you’re creating a company, because they mainly invest in you. If they have enough trust to give you cash, there’s a good chance they’ll also provide meaningful support.

This remains true even in the event of a major failure. These relationships can be the start of great mentorships and future investments, especially if they see you as someone with strong integrity. Early stages are the perfect time to prove your values and build trust with people who not only believe in you but also did show it with skin-in-the-game.

On the other hand, most early-stage VCs want to find a company that needs their money to grow fast quickly, and keep growing until they sell their equity. Many VCs are short-term by design and want returns within three to five years. This worked during the zero-interest-rate period, when everything moved fast. So be careful when you create your company, and remember that things usually take longer and are harder than you think. You don't want short-term VCs becoming impatient on your cap table.

The most important questions about your market

Raising money should come after answering those questions: What problem you’re addressing, and just as importantly, where and when you do it.

Particularly, if you want to launch a VC-backed company. Ask yourself the following: does your market—at least the one you’re tackling in the next few months—offer a genuine opportunity to raise?

It sounds obvious, but so many people assume a company is fundable simply because it exists. They overlook whether there’s an active VC market for what they’re building. Without it, they’ll struggle. They might get clients, but that can actually make pivoting into a VC-friendly story much harder. I’ve been in that position myself.

The second question, less obvious but just as critical: do these opportunities actually reach you? If you’re an outsider in your market, does that market even accept profiles like yours. Outsiders in this context are people without deep roots or an established network.

Some markets are closed, like France or Colombia. Others are more open, like the US, the UK, and even Mexico or Brazil. I made the mistake of trying to raise funds in Colombia, where all of the previous questions would have been answered “no.” Colombia and France are prime example of ecosystems with two negative characteristics: no outsiders, and VCs who almost never lead a fundraising round.

That leads to another important point: what type of investors exist in your market? In Colombia, most VCs will openly admit they are “followers.” They don’t make decisions based on their own analysis. They usually wait for a big investor, like Kaszek or 500 Startups in Mexico, to lead the way, and then they join in.

They have some money, but little time or willingness to research opportunities themselves. As a result, they never make original investments. And note this: the “no outsider” culture and the “follower” mentality almost always go hand in hand. Because followers tend to always converge toward the same profile. Typically in Colombia, it's ex-Rappi or ex-Los-Andes. In France, it's ex-HEC.

Their laziness usually leads them to an easy solution, and that easy solution is the ultimate insider (same university, same ex-whatever). That's why the US is such a great ecosystem: the diversity of profiles that get funded is amazing. Follower VCs almost exclusively invest in insiders, people everyone already knows, who are seen as obvious, safe choices. In closed ecosystems like this, breaking in from the outside is nearly impossible.

Avoid creating seeking VC funds in a closed ecosystem where almost no outsiders have ever received funding.

These are usually underperforming spots because they don’t accept the best outside ideas. On the contrary, that’s a mark of innovative ecosystems like Brazil or the US. You shouldn’t be angry about this. These people have money, but they raise it through long-standing relationships. Sometimes these family or business networks go back decades, and they’re not going to invest in someone they don’t know. To them, it means risking blame later when that person fails.

So before starting a company where you plan to raise money, ask yourself: what is your market really like? For most people, the honest answer will point them toward the US market. It can also be a niche that matches their profile, where they have a built-in advantage. For example, you might be part of a university incubator with investors already in the room, or you might operate in a specialised niche where your former employer could become your first client or investor.

Ultimately, where you venture and who you are are the same question. Who you are defines what you do, and what you do should define the best place to operate, raise funds, and attract clients. Ideally, the best place to find clients and the best place to raise money should be one and the same.

Once you’ve answered these questions, that’s the stage where you can finally start talking to VCs. If you’ve made your choice wisely and shaped a profile that matches both your personality and your natural skills, you might start getting some calls.

This leads to my next point: what not to expect from VCs when you start. Most pre-seed VCs are not long-term thinkers. Their incentives are not the same as yours, and their horizon is much shorter. Let me explain.

What not to tell them about the future

I think I failed partly because I wanted them to align with my long-term vision: a sustainable, profitable company. Historically, this approach has built billion-dollar businesses.

But here’s the problem: how are you going to convince a 2021 or 2022 zero-interest-rate VC, someone who has seen people get rich, or become rich themselves, through successive rounds of unprofitable and subsidized growth—that your way is better? You’re telling someone with a money-printing machine to shut it down because your vision is “historically correct.” That’s ridiculous.

Here’s the trap: they will almost always say, “Love your vision.” They might even mean it. But it doesn’t change the fact that they make money in a completely different way. They don’t make money from steady profitability and dividends. You can’t blame them.

This applies to almost everything: your market, your technology, AI, blockchain, or whatever the current trend is. In a bullish environment, don’t assume the people raising huge funds all truly believe in the underlying technology over the long-term. Most are opportunistic. Your VCs are opportunistic. So don’t walk in saying, “I’m different; I’m building for the long term,” and expect that alone to win them over.

You should be opportunistic too if you want to raise funds, especially with pre-seed VCs. If you see an opening, take it. I know that’s not the most noble-sounding advice—integrity and honesty are things I deeply believe in—but sometimes you have to be strategic. I’m not saying you should lie. But don’t volunteer information that disqualifies you. There’s no need to shoot yourself in the foot. I say this, yet I never followed it. I failed, never raised a dime, so take it for what it’s worth.

You need to understand your VC’s incentives as clearly as possible. Their core question is almost always: how can this investment bring money back within five years? That’s what they need so they can raise another fund—ideally a bigger one—with LPs.

Look at how they’ve made money before. Then check if your vision and your plan fit that model. If they’ve made money by selling their equity in Series A or Series B of unprofitable companies, don’t walk in saying, “I’m only going to raise once, keep dilution low, and make money through profits.” They won’t care. They’ve never made money that way. They might say it’s a good idea, but deep down, they’ll be too scared and that’s understandable.

Think about it: if I became rich doing “A” and someone comes to me saying, “I’m going to do ‘B’ and make you rich,” I’m not going to care. I’ll keep doing “A” because I know it works. That’s the conflict—more often than not—and over the long term, this misalignment of incentives can be a real problem between VCs and founders.

This is also why the very best investors—or top-quality incubators and accelerators—can be so valuable: they don’t need that five-year turnaround and can take the long view while being agressive early.

That’s one reason I like Dalton Caldwell from YC, who talks about seven or eight years as an “overnight success.” YC is both short-term aggressive and long-term patient. They make money partly because they have a massive surface area for “luck” and are positively exposed to volatility and compounding.

I think one of the fastest and most unnecessary ways to disqualify yourself is to show investors that you’re not aligned with them on how to make money over the next few years. It’s probably the number one mistake you can make.

I suspect this happens more often with bootstrapped founders, but it’s not exclusive to them. There are also other “don’t do this” mistakes—things you simply shouldn’t say about your company or about yourself.

What not to tell them about you and your business

In the early stage, you’re still operating in the world of promises, not demonstrations. That’s the reality. So let’s dig into what that means.

Now, let’s say you’ve made it to a second call. There are still a million ways to fail at raising funds. In the end, it boils down to what early-stage investors are really betting on: you, your track record, and your potential based on your ability. Founders often try to explain that they have a great vision, one that usually includes an exponential revenue curve.

The problem is the implementation. The best way to somehow analyze someone’s potential is to check their track-record. Concretely, don’t try to convince them with vague future visions that will “someday” deliver results. The weakest arguments are those based entirely on strategies you only plan to implement later.

The best approach when starting early is to focus on yourself and your abilities, however meager they may seem.. Always answer VCs doubts with something you’ve already implemented successfully, whether at your own company or somewhere else. Show that it worked before.

I think that’s why ex—whatever-famous-successful-company operators make attractive profiles for VCs. It shows some positive experience, even if, to be honest, it’s often a bit of a stretch to assume that an employee will be a great entrepreneur just because they worked at a high-growth company.

During the conversation, your examples should come from things you and your team have already done. Why? Because at the early stage, fundraising is mostly about getting people to invest in you, not just your company. The project is likely to pivot and change, but the team will remain.

Focus on your differentiator, just like when you sell to your clients. I understood too late that, for your brand, the enemy is not rejection but indifference. That’s why delivering a standard pitch with a forgettable structure is such a mistake.

Your differentiator should be front and center, just like in sales. VCs lose money on most businesses anyway, so they look for something that feels different. Trying to blend in makes no sense. And the most unique element in your company is you.

So again, focus on what makes you the best representative of your company, the strongest differentiator, and the one person they should trust to tackle this problem.

In fact, more often than not, except in a few incubators, VCs will not invest in two companies tackling the same issue. That means they are not already solving the exact problem you are working on. Instead, they are looking for new problems to address and new qualified teams to take them on. If you want their attention, you need to be able to answer four things with complete clarity.

First, why does this problem matter, not in a vague “nice-to-solve” way, but in a way that shows it is urgent, high value, and impossible for your target customers to ignore.

Then, what this problem translates to as a market, how big the real addressable market actually is, who is willing to pay, and why now.

Next, how you plan to make money in this market, showing the clear path from problem to monetisation and proving where the revenue will come from, how fast, and at what margins.

And finally, why you are the best person to tackle this problem in this market and turn it into profit, drawing on your track record, domain expertise, and whatever unique advantage you have that competitors cannot easily copy.

If you can answer all of that with clarity and evidence, you are making a serious case for investment.

On those four previous questions, “Why does this problem matter?” is one that many founders include in their slides, and often they end up disqualifying themselves with the way they answer it. Most, in my view, answer it poorly. I answered it poorly.

Too many make the mistake of explaining why it would be nice to solve the problem: “Oh, people lose time” or “Oh, people lose money.” But guess what? People lose time and money scrolling endlessly, and almost nobody’s going to finance an anti-scrolling app.

Nobody cares about that. What they do finance are ads or products that monetise scrolling. That’s where the money is. If your solution is “nice to have,” especially in a down market, your plan is dead on arrival. Or take process improvement: “They’re going to improve their workflow.” People can improve endlessly and become optimised, but VCs aren’t looking for that either.

Your problem statement should answer two questions:

1. Why does the VC you’re talking to have a strong incentive to invest and believe they’ll make money if you solve this problem?

2. Why does your client have a strong incentive to pay for the solution?

The strongest answers usually come from early proof, ideally your own first clients. It can also be a competitor who has already solved it poorly and whom you’re willing to crush. Other validations can come from other markets (maybe on the other side of the world) where this problem has already been solved successfully and proven at scale.

This is also why your “total addressable market” numbers are often meaningless. A TAM can be passive. I may look huge on paper but will never actually be addressed. The real TAM is about why you’re positioning yourself in a spot where you’re obvious to enough paying customers.

If you can make customers pay for a solution, and in the process make your VC rich, then you’re in the right territory. In fact, your best potential investor is often one who already has similar companies in other regions. They already understand the problem, so you can skip the whole boring part where they check Instagram while you try to explain why your problem “kind of” matters.

Those are my conclusions for now. I’ll talk more about these points in the coming weeks.

entropy. In this podcast, using the mental models of Charlie Munger and Naval Ravikant—crossing multiple disciplines—I explain what makes a good business and how to build a horizontal layers that can make you the market leader in your industry.

If you want to learn more, check out the following article.

If you like the podcast, consider supporting by subscribing to the blog.

If you want to contact me, write at systematicventure@substack.com

Welcome to this exclusive, subscriber-only edition of TSV. Every week, I share a new entry from my bootstrapper diary along with the lessons I've learned. You can also catch more insights on the TSV Podcast.

Subscribe now

Annual subscribers get access to special episodes in the future. I promise (even though I said don’t promise, only demo, I have no choices here)

Dissatisfaction

If you want to create a business, you are usually dissatisfied with what the market is offering. Few entrepreneurs believe everything is perfect before they arrive. You don’t open a shop selling commoditised products unless you want an undifferentiated business. That would be a terrible move, and you wouldn’t be reading this article.

Differentiation drives a successful company, and differentiation grows out of dissatisfaction with the status quo. That is the beauty of business and innovation: nothing is fixed, the status-quo exists only in our minds.

A common mistake most people do when thinking about innovation is to focus on what they can add. On the contrary, the best innovations usually remove existing components. Improving existing products usually comes more from taking things away rather than from adding new features. The best example is the iPhone. Steve Jobs removed … well, everything.

I love exploring multiple disciplines when it comes to understanding businesses because they shape the world more than any institution, even governments. Therefore, a broad knowledge of the world is essential to understand them. Let me get to my point.

When entrepreneurs shamble a market, just as important as the reward of a new product is the removal of the old one. In fact, almost every industry converges to a standard, and that standard is dynamically set by whichever solution wins at a given time. In the process, an infinity of incomplete or unsustainable solutions die. This is Darwinism and survival of the fittest, but for products. When this takes place and a business concentrates solely on a single objective to survive, something fundamental happens: they reduce the entropy in their local network.

Technology locally reverse entropy

Entropy is a fundamental concept in physics, a quantitative measure of disorder (or the number of micro-states compatible with a macro-state)1. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any isolated system—including the universe as a whole—total entropy cannot decrease and, on average, keeps increasing. Over cosmic timescales, this drives everything toward maximum disorder, the “heat-death” state where no useful energy remains and we all turn into cosmic dust. We spend our lifetime fighting against this,

As investor-philosopher Naval Ravikant puts it,

“Humans locally reverse entropy”

Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the Universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. If you look at living things (humans, plants, civilizations, what have you) these systems are locally reversing entropy (Almanack of Naval Ravikant)”

A telephone switchboard once needed armies of operators; a WhatsApp ping now crosses oceans in a blink, showing how every barrier we erase—distance, latency, intermediaries—lowers local entropy and frees surplus energy.

Similarly, traditional payments move through a long list of relays. You swipe a card, the merchant’s bank pings the card network, that network routes the request to your bank, each side reconciles overnight, and settlement finally clears through a central bank. Every extra stop adds virtual paperwork, fees, and points of failure. We can call it monetary entropy, the spread of effort and information across many systems for a single transaction.

On the contrary, peer-to-peer networks and modern cryptocurrency protocols collapse the transaction chain to its bare minimum: two counterparties and an open-source protocol. No banks, no clearinghouses, no paperwork. Each transfer settles on a shared ledger everyone can verify, yet no one controls. Zero-knowledge proofs go further in reversing the entropy. They let you prove you’re allowed to enter a transaction without exposing any other data. The result is maximum entropy reduction: fewer actors, fewer hand-offs, and the least information leaked per exchange. Those technologies are not mature yet and have attracted many scammers in the last few years, but they answer a fundamental question toward entropy reversal.

Of course, the Internet itself may be the ultimate expression of this pattern, a low-entropy mesh upon which we keep layering value. It is likely our first terminal technology, a base layer so universal that every new tool plugs into it instead of starting from scratch. Its neutral TCP/IP stack lets any device talk to any other without special gateways, collapsing communication entropy. Each new wave, web, mobile, cloud, crypto, AI, simply adds a layer, reinforcing the network’s value and making replacement practically impossible. My bet is we’ll keep stacking innovations on the internet to the very end of our civilisation.

The computer industry also shows the entropy-reversal idea perfectly. Internally it is staggeringly complex, yet you turn it on with a single button. Engineers sealed customer-facing entropy behind automated boot scripts; that encapsulation let laptops scale to millions of users. Today's laptops allow you to accomplish more with less effort.

Good businesses do the same. They encapsulate complexity so customers enjoy effortless experience.

Business are entropy-reversal machines

The same law governs companies: every extra distraction, whether an unneeded product line, department, or offer, wastes energy as coordination overhead. The most successful businesses reduce the number of variables to optimize, and route value along the shortest path from technical knowledge to the customer.

For instance, luxury brands reduce entropy locally. Instead of laboriously “becoming” refined, you buy a status item and signal refinement in one move. Instead of spending years cultivating pedigree, you flash a Rolex or pop a bottle of Hennessy and broadcast refinement in seconds. In the past you needed lineage, club memberships, and the right circles; now a Balenciaga hoodie can fake the signal. Of course, this is cosmetic polish. The truly wealthy keep raising the bar—new gatekeepers, new subtler cues—so the mass market keeps chasing yesterday’s status symbols, but that’s another story.

Another great example of entropy-reversal machine is Shazam. It turns a noisy fragment of music into a single line of text : its title. You no longer waste energy hunting for the song. You don’t need to ask DJs or spend hours looking for lyrics you vaguely remember online. Shazam reduces entropy; it lowers disorder and saves you unnecessary hassle.

Then, focusing your company is a fight against decay. Think of your product like a pile of bricks: stack them into a straight, mortar-bound wall and each brick reinforces the next, so you can keep building upward. Throw the same bricks randomly across a vacant lot and they trip you up, erode in the weather, and support nothing. In one case, you reverse entropy, in the other one, you catalyse it. A clean architecture is like a straight wall: a structure that lets you add each new “brick” without it getting lost in the debris.

Legacy actors, burdened by layers of bureaucracy, are high-entropy corners. Start-ups win by removing intermediaries, paperwork, and wait time.

Schumpeter called this the “process of creative destruction” where the old system is destroyed and a new one is created. It is the foundation of Capitalism.

The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process … Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary … The fundamental new impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates … the same process of industrial mutation …
This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in …

Through this process, the most innovative businesses—able to do more with less energy loss—replace high-entropy firms that scatter their bricks and cripple their own compounding. These successful companies set the new baseline until a fresh competitor inserts itself into the cracks. When a dominant business fails to keep reversing entropy, it leaves room for smaller players to enter, just as it is easier to penetrate a liquid than to pass through a stone. In my opinion, this is the bridge between Schumpeter’s creative destruction and local entropy reduction.

Take B2C clothing: fast fashion has converged on the Zara model after Ortega noticed luxury brands were slow and bloated. Zara essentially squeezed time-to-shelf and keeps reversing entropy. In everyday finance, neebanks such as Revolut and Nubank removed branches, paperwork, and waiting lines, slashing coordination costs and forcing traditional banks to adapt.

Each time, a dominant actor establishes a temporary lower-entropy equilibrium—until it becomes bloated, and a new wave of creative destruction begins.

A system always carries within it what can destroy it. A company that once reversed entropy so well can grow so large that it becomes immovable. Its mounting inertia and energy-wasting processes rise at faster pace than its ability to direct innovation. Eventually the drag overtakes the drive, and the very scale that once protected it turns into the force that destroys it. They lose their ability to remove and instead keep adding more energy-losing components, usually in the form of MBAs and McKinsey consultants2.

Via negativa

As explained earlier, breakthroughs usually come from subtraction. Science advances by discarding false hypotheses, not by piling on more assumptions; its strength is the power to be proven wrong and discarded. Its daughter, technology, progresses by removing friction, intermediaries, and wasted energy. Any innovative entity should embrace via negativa: ask what can be eliminated to let value flow with less resistance.

Consider Dyson, which removed the vacuum-cleaner bag; Apple, which removed buttons; and Tesla, which stripped almost everything from the car. When creating your company, ask: what are you not, and what do you dislike about existing solutions? Saying they are slow or bureaucratic is incomplete. How did they become that way? What can you undo for customers, and what can you delete from your product?

For example, many firms insist on a call for every purchase. Fuck no, you do not need that. Why can’t customers just click to buy and self-onboard? SaaS leaders removed that friction; one-click onboarding became the standard. Processes change dynamically. There are opportunities for via-negativa wherever twisted incentives rule, where middlemen manage fear and charge for hassle instead of value. Accountants, for instance, resist automation to protect their certificates and keep work looking complicated.

Ask which gaps in empathy or excesses of comfort have led market leaders to ignore what clients want. Banks did this and neobanks filled the void.

What innovation can you pursue that will take slow actors decades or that they will never even try because no one cares? Which data or leverage do they ignore? Today, AI is that leverage. Knowing these questions and their answers, invert. Build by removing. Why can you be what they are not? Why will you avoid becoming what they already are?

What are you not? What do you refuse to inherit from them? Which wrong hypotheses or twisted incentives shaped them?

Let your differentiator rise from those differences. Begin with removal, and let simplicity speak louder than addition.

We recently crossed one-thousand downloads. For the big shows that’s background noise; for me it’s a concrete sign that strangers in thirty-seven countries have decided the ideas here deserve a slice of their day. I started this feed from absolute zero a few months ago. No audience, no archives, no reason to assume anyone would care.

Knowing that hundreds of individuals have already listened feels like permission to keep going and a responsibility to keep the conversation honest. I would like to celebrate by asking—and answering—why we are entrepreneurs, why we start those silly projects, podcasts, blogs, and startups after all.

Most people will never start a company. It’s an observation. Building something from the ground up asks for uncertainty, risk, and years of work before anything tangible shows up. A salary, a clear job description, and a weekend that truly belongs to you are perfectly rational preferences.

Yet a minority of us still choose the other path. Why? For me—and I suspect for many of you—it starts with a form of optimism that is less cheerleading and more refusal. A refusal to accept that what already exists is the upper limit of what can exist. A refusal to see the status quo as fixed. That small act of refusal grained in insatisfaction is where entrepreneurship begins. It comes long before capital, skills, or market timing. Sometimes it survives long after reason says it shouldn’t.

If you recognize that impulse-when you look at a product, a process, or an entire industry and think, “This could be different, and I’m willing to stake my time and resources on that belief”-then you’re already part of the conversation this podcast aims to host, because you made the most important move of any entrepreneur: betting on yourself.

We talk strategy, execution, lessons from builders who came before us, but beneath all of that is the question of posture: do you lean forward into possibility or settle back into certainty? One thousand downloads tells me there are at least a thousand moments when someone chose to lean forward, even if only to listen. a minute. That’s why the number matters. to me at least.

So thank you. Thank you for each commute, workout, or late-night coding session you’ve allowed my voice to accompany

The plan from here is simple: keep recording, keep working on providing much better content. I want to listen to the podcast of the last few months in a year and think that they are bad, ridiculous because the next one will be so much better. If the show helps you move forward or think about your entrepreneur career, then it's doing its job. If you know someone who is wrestling with the decision to build, pass this episode along. If you want to contact me, send an email to the email in the show notes. One thousand is a modest start, and that’s exactly what it should be. Real things grow deliberately. I’m glad you’re here while it’s still small enough that I can picture the listeners individually rather than as a chart.

Let’s see where the future take us.

Consider supporting the podcast subscribing to the blog.

I explain how to spend more time on leads, especially at the very beginning of a company when you want to close your first clients.

I offer two simple tips:

1. Qualify leads ruthlessly and apply priority principles to your sales pipeline.

2. Second, spend more time reflecting and ask yourself: what would I do if this were my only lead?

If you want to learn more, check out the following article.

If you like the podcast, consider supporting by subscribing to the blog.

If you want to contact me, write at systematicventure@substack.com

Ultimately, in my accounting software company, I realized we didn’t have a lead generation problem—we had a conversion problem. Our marketing pipeline was performing well; we had a steady influx of leads. But we were failing at turning those leads into paying customers.

This is something I briefly touched on in a previous article, but only recently did I understand the core issue more deeply. It comes down to a principle I should have recognized earlier, since I've argued for it before: not all leads are equal, and not all leads represent the same opportunity.

Great companies—the ones that consistently sell—understand this. Yet, most businesses apply this logic post-sale, in customer success: the higher the revenue a client brings, the more attention they receive. But this prioritization should start before the sale, at the top of the funnel.

We only started improving our conversion rate once we stopped treating all leads the same. Instead of scaling effort evenly, we allocated disproportionate time and resources to the leads most likely to convert—and it worked.

Let me explain.

Be their personal shopper

This is something great brands already understand. Walk into a flagship store in Paris—say, one of the ultra-high-end luxury houses—and the treatment you receive depends entirely on your profile. If you’re a wealthy Chinese businessman, or walk in with a referral from someone who is, you’ll likely get a dedicated personal shopper. That may sound discriminatory, but it’s not arbitrary, it’s deliberate prioritization. The brand knows where the real purchasing power lies and adjusts its time and attention accordingly.

Most companies don’t apply that principle until after the sale. The bigger the client, the more customer success resources they get. But that same logic should be applied before the sale, during the lead qualification phase.

We had a full pipeline of inbound leads. Tons of potential. But we treated all of them the same. We used automation to follow up on every single one, often with the same sequence of messages. It was lazy, inefficient, and counterproductive.

Not all leads are equal. Not all leads are qualified. Not all leads want the same thing. And not all leads are worth your time.

Yet personalization in our process came late—right before closing—when the contract was nearly ready. That’s the wrong timing. Personalization should start as early as possible, right when the lead signals interest or asks their first question. That’s when qualification matters most.

Sales pipelines should have two qualification steps:

1. Negative filtering: ruthlessly discard the wrong fits. Leads who ask for something you don’t sell, who can’t afford your solution, or who are terrible persons.

2. Positive selection: Identify the the top 10 to 20% who are actually aligned with your offer, who have urgency, who match your ideal customer profile. Then spend real time on those.

This is the application of Pareto principles: a small number of leads will generate almost all your revenue.

Spend more time thinking about your lead

One of the most powerful habits I’ve developed recently is deceptively simple: spend more time thinking about your lead.

I picked this up not from a sales book, but from reading biographies and philosophy. What struck me was how rare it’s become to think in silence, whereas people in the past would spend great time just thinking. Not scrolling or typing, just sitting in a chair, a pen in hand, a notebook open, and thinking. In the modern world, we’ve lost that. And in sales, almost no one does it. There’s a rush to optimize the funnel, automate the follow-ups, copy-paste the pitch.

A few weeks ago, we started doing exactly that. We shut down everything—laptops, tabs, notifications—and entered the thinking mode. It’s a space for uninterrupted questioning. The goal is not to prepare a deck or edit a CRM note. It’s to sit with the lead in your mind and ask yourself: what would I do if this was the only lead I had?

Once you approach it like that, insights start to emerge. You begin to see the person behind the contact. You think about their frustrations, the software they’re currently using, the reason they haven’t switched yet. You wonder which of their team member actually influences them.

This kind of deep, focused thought gives you real leverage. It’s completely counter to the way we’re conditioned to operate online—where every platform is trying to train us to chase micro-validation through four-second meaningless videos.

So for any key lead, I now take time to ask myself: who is this person? Why is this lead unlike the others? What matters to them? If I had to choose just one argument, what would it be? How should I tell the story? And most importantly: what is the one task I can do for this person that I wouldn’t do for anyone else?

In my experience, that last question is the real turning point

Spend more time working for your lead

So then the question becomes: What does it mean to "spend more time on them"?

When we say “spend more time on the best leads”, it doesn’t just mean calling them more. It means removing as much friction as possible for them specifically. But there’s a nuance here: frictionless doesn’t always mean self-service onboarding. That’s where a lot of SaaS companies get it wrong, that’s where I got it wrong.

Most SaaS teams think onboarding success is about automation, emails, and tours. That might remove surface-level friction, but it ignores a deeper truth: the biggest blocker is client inertia. Not only clients don’t use the product because it’s hard to sign up, but also because there’s no momentum to use it.

This is the real conversion gap: companies don’t fail to close the sale, they fail to activate the user.

And the fix isn’t to use the product with the client—it’s to use the product for the client. Two examples from our own case:

Example 1: Migration as a sales accelerator

In our accounting software, onboarding was painful. Tons of documents, multiple systems, and a traumatic migration process. Instead of asking users to do it, we said: “Just give us access, and we’ll migrate everything for you.” We handled it ourselves.

Then we went one step further: we registered the first documents ourselves. In effect, we did the client’s job.

Why do I think this works?

1. It creates psychological debt: Once someone sees their own data flowing in a system, delivered by someone who took action for them, they’re much more likely to reciprocate.

2. It builds trust : The client doesn’t just believe your promise. they see the product working.

3. It makes you part of their team : You’re not a vendor anymore but a team member.

This isn’t scalable in the traditional SaaS sense. But that’s precisely the point: your best leads aren’t scalable. They’re worth it.

I like treating sales like team integration. Find the leads that have urgency, budget, and a high probability of real usage, then become part of their team. Do the first task. Show them the first success. That unlocks momentum better than any product tour.

Take another example. I'm working with a payment platform that automates invoice sending by connecting directly to the client’s accounting system. It retrieves the accounts receivable and starts dispatching invoices automatically. But here’s the twist: during onboarding, the CEO himself steps in and sends the first batch of invoices for the client. He’s basically acting as a recovery agent for their accounts receivable—before the client even uses the tool themselves.

Yes, it’s a small startup. But that’s precisely why this works. In the early stages, when usage isn’t yet habitual, you can’t afford to wait for clients to figure it out. If they don’t use the product early, they won’t stick. And if they don’t stick, it doesn’t matter how good your pipeline is—they won’t convert in any meaningful way.

This approach also gives you priceless information. By doing the work for the user, you gain direct insight into what blocks them: the hidden complexity, the unspoken assumptions, the moments of confusion. You begin to develop real empathy for your client.

Physical-world example: pizza and clothes

If you're selling a CRM, migrate the data. If you're selling accounting software, register the first transactions. This is especially vital in B2B SaaS, where success depends on recurring usage of a product with zero marginal cost. But it applies to physical products too.

When I work at the pizzeria, I notice something simple but telling: customers often order what they saw on the neighbour table. It’s the same in retail. Walk into a good clothing or food store and the staff won’t hard-sell you—they’ll hand you something to try. They let you use the product before you make a commitment.

All of this collapses into a single insight I’ve become obsessed with: selling, converting, onboarding, and retention are one step. Your job is to make that step as small, fast, and clear as possible.

Reduce to one, always reduce to one.

However, there are strong historical reasons to focus on one thing at the start, especially because entrepreneurs are unlikely to be passionate about thousands of things.

In this episode, I’ll explain why focusing on one thing you’re passionate about makes everything easier, especially when managing people.

The full article is available here

Sources :

David Senra interview on purpose and passion

Steve Jobs speech on Life, failure, and passion

Welcome to this exclusive, subscriber-only edition of my weekly newsletter. Every week, I share a new entry from my bootstrapper diary along with the lessons I've learned. You can also catch more insights on the TSV Podcast.

Subscribe now

Annual subscribers get access to special episodes in the future. I promise (even though I said don’t promise, only demo, I have no choices here)

Scarcity shapes priorities

The beginnings of most businesses1 often include a lack of resources, forcing entrepreneurs to make tough choices. In the very first months and years of your venture, your success lies as much in the fucks you don’t give as in the fucks you do, colloquially speaking.

There are strong historical arguments for not spreading yourself across too many products, and instead concentrating on a single one. Most great companies started with a unique vision that became a tangible differentiator, which then turned into a product. That vision usually sprang from the irascible passion of some nut job, clumsily molded into something resembling a business strategy. More often than not, there’s no formal “business vision” at all, just a passion too strong not to turn into something people actually want to buy. If you’re unconvinced, look at Patagonia’s early days or the way Balenciaga spoke about his dresses.

There are other, maybe less pragmatic reasons not to spread your company across multiple fronts.

The odds that you’re genuinely passionate about several unrelated products are slim. Diluting your offering means diluting your passion in an ocean of lukewarm options, losing the fucks you care about among the fucks you don’t. Passion doesn’t tolerate dilution, and long-term entrepreneurial success doesn’t tolerate casualness.

Passion isn’t just emotional fuel; it’s the company’s oxygen, especially in the early days. Think of your business as a living network where product, marketing, sales, or operations constantly feed back into one another. Change one node and the ripple touches everything else. A single, undiluted passion keeps those ripples aligned, giving each component the same direction. Dilute that passion and the signal weakens, the message blurs, and the company becomes indistinct to busy customers. That’s why a single-minded focus on your core is non-negotiable when you start: it synchronizes every part of the chaos and drives it forward until you’ve got foundations strong enough to build upon.

Symphony of focus

A company is a complex system. Everything you do influences every other part of the organization. The sum of its components does not equal the whole, just like two terrible people can make a great couple, or two great people can have a terrible wedding. One plus one rarely equals two when you add humans into the mix, even less so when there are dozens or hundreds involved, especially when trying to sell a B2B SaaS.

Let’s consider a hypothetical company with only two teams: the building team and the sales team. Any change in one team will dramatically affect the other. For example, if sales start selling something that isn’t ready, the technology team might collapse, rush development without focus, and lose concentration.

On the other hand, if the technical team starts building something that sales don’t understand, know about, or care for, sales will eventually collapse because they won’t be able to deliver a clear and convincing message to potential clients. Now imagine adding an operations team (say, in a logistics company) where sales focus on long-distance trucking, tech on last-mile delivery, and operations specialize in only one or the other. The whole company could become disorganized and ultimately unsuccessful. Even worse, if you need accurate metrics and the CFO or revenue officer must report on margins and profits for each service, an unfocused company like this renders your finance team completely irrelevant.

This is why an unfocused company (and unfocused teams) usually makes great employees less efficient and bad employees even worse. The music doesn’t work. All the musicians should play in the same rhythm. Imagine if trumpets, trombones, and piano played in different keys and rhythms: the whole piece would be a mess, and no one would listen to it. That’s exactly what happens in an unfocused company. This is the idea I’m obsessed with: reduction to one. In this case, it’s reduction to one singular message, turned into a singular mission. It’s a Steve Jobs idea, and I think Steve Jobs was a genius.

Catalytic integration

Fundamentally, it implies multiple things. For instance, sales should have one core message focused on a single differentiator and one clear value that people understand and are willing to pay for. Content should reinforce that core value, and market positioning should reflect that differentiator clearly and, ideally, beautifully.

Most successful companies start from their differentiator and then build outward in concentric circles: the marketing, the sales, and obviously the tech, the product, and the operations. Each team has to move to the tune played by the other participants, and if that tune has a rhythm, dancing becomes much easier. The original company differentiator is key. It is the recording tone and the tempo between the dancers. It sets the band apart and makes people curious about it. Differentiation is survival; the best companies are different for the sake of it.

Unfortunately, customers cannot understand a diluted message, which is why a nascent company should iterate, find a powerful differentiator, and trust it without distractions for a while. The original differentiator must reflect genuine passion; otherwise, compounding is impossible. Phil Knight kept going with his running shoes because he loved them and they were different. James Dyson stuck with his vacuum cleaners for the same reason: passion, soul in the game, and a product that stood apart. Genuine passion, naturally transformed into a unique differentiator, is the ideal starting point for compounding.

In other words, good compounding doesn’t tolerate distractions. At the company level, you cannot compound one day in one direction and the next day in another. Each day your brick must come on top of an existing one, not on top of nothing. At some point, people are going to tell you that many successful companies have different offers. Yes, but a new offer does not necessarily equal a meaningless distraction; it usually comes after years of efficient compounding.

For example, AWS arose from Amazon’s need to have its own servers. That’s different. Good diversification is not a distraction; it actually comes from an existing successful compounding as a form of vertical integration. A good diversification or a good new offer is not a distraction; it should accelerate the company in its original direction.

I’m quite sure AWS made Amazon’s products more successful and even more powerful. They have great servers to extract data from customers and make better recommendations. It’s like a catalyst, but if a new project offers none of these benefits, then it is an external distraction that is likely siphoning energy from your existing company.

Exhaust the passion

Often, the destruction of harmony comes from frustration that growth is going too slowly (like the god-damn number of subscribers on this blog). But when you distract yourself for a quick buck, you trade long-term for short-term, and that’s a poor choice. You finance short-term growth with a chunk of your long-term rewards, when what you really want are those long-term rewards.

Paradoxically, strong focus for years in a row also serves as a great tool to diversify better in the future. Reducing to one actually makes you able to do more things without distraction. That’s the difference between diversification and distraction: one great principle applied several times is very different from different principles applied haphazardly across multiple products.

For example, IKEA added restaurants to their stores only after becoming a successful furniture brand. There was mutual positive reinforcement in their offerings, as the restaurants encouraged people to stay longer in the store. It did not happen by chance. Likewise, Apple first focused deeply on the personal-computer story. They exhausted the resources of their principles first and made sure they were successful. Only then, they started applying them to other products.

That leads me to the core message of the symphony: finding your core principles, mission, and purpose. Early successes result from strong fundamental principles and a well-crafted, single-purpose product.

At the very beginning of a business venture, both mission and product are very fragile. Then they mutually reinforce each other until the fundamental mission is locked into the company mindset and embodied in a product. After that, the company can become more successful doing something else by using the principles discovered during that first, very core product.

For example, the Apple personal computer served to reinforce the core principles. Only then did Steve Jobs build other great products once Apple’s mission was sufficiently refined. Please note that some companies never move or change, and they are still very successful. But at the very beginning, the symphony should be reduced to one note, one idea, one thing that matters. When the underlying truth and core mission of the company surface, the business purpose attracts free-market feedback and offers new opportunities.

Purpose filters people

When you create your company, having one single purpose also serves to filter people, because distractions create room for non-fit people to stay longer than they should. In some way, it creates a protected zone for non-fit species to survive.

There is an element of market Darwinism for ideas. It’s not fitness to reproduce; it’s fitness to grow and sell. One must optimize and meet this fitness.

The company must meet market feedback as fast as possible and with its whole strength, with no regrets, to make sure the idea has been squeezed dry, and the market feedback has given an honest answer about the product’s full materialization.

If you attack the market, this beast, you don’t want to send several small, scattered bullets. You want to sell strategically distanced, full-fledged missiles locked on target, so you can move on to the next idea and discover new fundamental principles.

This is why distraction kills businesses at the very start and why you should strip your message down to the bone.

But I also open more traditional businesses—like what I believe is the best pizzeria in Medellín.

Running a pizzeria taught me fundamentals I never truly grasped in tech: how to win trust fast, how to build something people actually come back for, how to sell with urgency and soul.

In this episode, I approach the passion side of entrepreneurship—the irrational drive behind great products, whether it's code or crust.

If you’re curious about the branding, hiring, and operations behind the pizzeria, check-out the article.

Welcome to this exclusive, subscriber-only edition of my weekly newsletter. Every week, I share a new entry from my bootstrapper diary along with the lessons I've learned. You can also catch more insights on the TSV Podcast.

Subscribe now

Annual subscribers get access to special episodes in the future. I promise (even though I said don’t promise, only demo, I have no choice here.

Note: I initially wrote this article for a friend seeking advice on advancing her career. She wanted to switch fields, leave her job, and was considering starting a restaurant. That’s why I created it as a personal entry in my journal to share with her. Later, I chose to make it available to everyone, made some edits to improve clarity, and posted it on my blog.

Lessons learnt

I’ve always thought I learned a lot building all these companies. For some reason, I decided I was going to write something called “lessons learnt” only when I opened my restaurant. But there were lessons learned all the way along.

The restaurant, maybe because it's very tangible, because it's closer to people, and because I think it touches something more fundamental, eating, taught me more. I approached it with a blank state. I'm a software developer, a math-guy, and I ended up trying to make the best pizzas in Medellín. I can’t say I sell the best pizzas1, but they are as good as I can make them, and people seem to like them. Actually, they are the best in town, but that’s another story.

Also, ultimately, some people, usually slightly younger, asked me for tips because they’re at a breakthrough moment in their life. Or at least they feel like it. I feel extremely flattered, because I think those people are more intelligent than I am. They're smart, they're extroverts, socially very aware and capable, and quite cultivated. That’s nice, though, because they’re younger and asking questions to someone just five years older. Five years is quite close to nothing, but at that age (late 20s) these things matter. Those are the years when freedom, youth, and a nascent self-knowledge cross beautifully, and one knows what they love, and most importantly, what they don’t want in their lives. A few act on it, but again, that’s for another day.

As of now, my restaurant is growing and improving, but there were some lessons I wish I had known earlier. Here are a few.

A restaurant, like any business, should reflect some genuine interest. It should express your soul, your passion, your taste, your way of being, your identity, your authentic self. This is why I never sell a product I wouldn’t consume or buy myself. I strongly believe that’s one of the most important tips. So many people think their restaurants (or any business) as just a money operation: how to extract hard-earned dollars from people without any passion for the product they’re selling. I don’t think this can work. In fact, it never really works.

Even Todd Graves, who sells chicken fingers -the most trivial product one can imagine- is passionate about it. Ray Kroc from McDonald’s was passionate about scaling milkshake production. The In-N-Out founder, Harry Snyder was really into cooking the best burger. I’m really passionate about the best pizza. I love food. I've always loved food. I conquered all my girlfriends, who are much more attractive than I am, also through food, and I have no shame in admitting that.

Most importantly, I’m the first client of my restaurant. I can’t really explain what that matters to me. It just does. I like seeing a clean kitchen while cooking a beautiful Naples-style pizza. I like knowing the Burrata is fresh, the olive oil extra virgin, and basil at best of its flavour. I enjoy seeing people's faces as they bite into that slice and realize they made a good choice entering this place, our place, my place, their place for a short moment. The money is consequential; passion comes first, always. Missionaries always beat mercenaries in the long term and also have more fun and find deeper meaning in the process.

Literally, if I wasn't one of the founder of this restaurant, it would still be the first place I’d think of when looking for somewhere to eat in town or for a date, to bring some friends, to spend time, to listen to music, to talk to the bartender, to flirt with a waitress, and to check on the food. That would be the first place. That’s why we built exactly this place.

I believe in autotelic activities, done for their own sake. You should build your business with that in mind. That means doing things because they’re you. You want the decoration and design that you like, the food you like, the drinks you like. Why? Because when you sell it, you’ll have passion, and passion is contagious. People will buy it because they see you happy and want that kind of happiness.

This is exactly what Phil Knight explained in Shoe Dog: when he sold shoes, he wasn’t really selling, he was transmitting his passion for running in those Japanese shoes. Before that, he couldn't sell jack.

You’re not running a restaurant, you’re running an inventory

On more concrete stuff: a restaurant is an inventory management company and also a sanitary operations company. As soon as you have good inventory and an extremely clean process, things can go well. It does not mean it will go well. It means it’s necessary but non-sufficient.

What makes inventory hard? It's boring and tedious. People don’t know how to do it. It takes time. Also, restaurants usually attract people from other industries who think that cooking something at home is enough to make a good restaurant. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.

Inventory management means knowing exactly what kind of table you're serving and how much money you make from it. You should know the precise margins on every product, whether it's 15%, 20%, 30%, or 70%. You need to know where you’re making money and where you’re losing it. You should also know which items must be sold together -like beers and tapas- if you want to preserve margin across both. Not every item will have the same margin, and that’s fine. Some products have zero margin because they're meant to be consumed with others that carry the profit, like a hamburger paired with liqueur, or a beer with snacks. The key is to keep your inventory clean and your margins clear. Dedicate at least one morning a week to reviewing your inventory, updating the system, and knowing exactly where you stand.

You should know exactly what type of product comes in, what providers to choose for each item, have a list of providers and prices, know the amounts and quantities, and have standard recipes entered into an inventory management system so you can track it.

Even if you’re not in the restaurant yourself, you should do inventory every week. You should know discrepancies -what ran out too fast, what you had to reorder, and what you lost- and how you can negotiate prices if you’re buying more. Always try to find the best product for each item. Inventory is what makes the business work or die. Simply put, when I see a pizza going out, I know exactly how much I make and exactly how much it costs: the waitress bringing it, the electricity and gas, the cook’s labor, the flour, the cheese.

Another thing: strip everything to the bone. Your inventory should be simple, with few products. That will later surprisingly relate to brand strategy. Your inventory should be simple, and so should be your brand. My pizza is flour, water, salt, some cheese, tomato, olive oil, and a few optional condiments like homemade Balsamic reduction or artesanal green Pesto. Fundamentally, everything revolves around that. With those ingredients, I can do everything. Add chickpeas? I get pizza bread with hummus. Add vegetables? Antipasti of Pizza bread with grilled vegetables. Meat? It’s already on a pizza, I can make a meat sandwich with pizza bread. That’s how it works.

Build your inventory clearly with just a few products. Then set good margins and build concentric circles around those core ingredients. Most restaurants fail because they think they’re managing a restaurant, but they’re actually managing five. They have five different identities on the menu with products that don’t work together. Every successful restaurant has a clear identity, and that means tight inventory management.

Identity, and brand

Now, about identity: don’t dilute your brand. Ever. Never sell random shit that has nothing to do with your concept. Yeah, I’ve got a great taco recipe. I love cooking pasta. Still, it doesn’t work. Think simple. Think about the restaurants you love, the places you keep going back to. The most famous, the most successful : All have a clear identity. You are either a wine bar, or cocktail bar. You aren’t both.

This applies not just to food. It’s true for other types of brands too. Here a three examples I love.

• Example 1: Akio Morita from Sony refused to market the Walkman as a tape recorder. He thought it would dilute the brand.

• Example 2: Steve Jobs always reduced things to one : One button on the iPhone, one product in an ad, one word in the copy. Reduce to one. One identity. One product. One north-star.

• Example 3: James Dyson refused to market his vacuum as an air expiration machine, even though people used it that way. Why? Because of confusion. It's that simple.

Brand dilution is very tempting, especially early on, when you have no cash. You want to sell everything. But if you sell everything, you sell nothing. Why? Because few things together don’t compound like one thing that compounds hard. For instance, you sell tacos and pizzas. You’re the second choice for tacos and the second choice for pizza. That means someone else, who only does tacos or only does pizza, will beat you, simply because they’re the first choice.

You should be passionate about a few products, and attract equally passionate clients. In fact, it doesn’t matter if everyone likes your restaurant. If you have 10 clients, you want one to be extraordinarily happy. By the way, Haruki Murakami used to run a jazz bar and he said the same thing. That passionate client will comment, interact on Instagram, know you, leave a review, come back, bring friends. The other nine? Doesn’t matter. That’s the balance. Don’t try to get everyone to come back. Find the one who is extremely happy and build around them. Again: concentric circles. Compound from the center. Have a QR code with the review always ready. It goes a long way and help people find you.

I saw it at my pizzeria. I don’t care if the guy who wants to fuck a new girl brings her here because it’s a trendy spot. Whatever, he’s not coming back. Or not until the next girl. Fine. But someone who shows up and likes the music, the pizza, the food, the vibe, the waitress : They’ll come back. They’ll bring friends. They’ll transmit their passion. Passion is contagious. My restaurant isn’t full every night, but it’s getting close. I like thinking that’s because we’ve got passionate clients, and built in concentric circles around them.

It’s hard to be patient at the start. But be patient. Never, ever trade quality for short-term gain. You’ll kill the long-term game. Even now, when I desperately need cash, I sometimes refuse to let a pizza or a tiramisu leave the kitchen. It happened a couple of weeks ago (as of June 25, so in May 2025) Why? Because it wasn’t perfect. And this pizza is me. I am the fucking pizza. If the pizza is ugly, I am ugly. And if I’m ugly, I’m fucked. Simple as that. And I don’t want to be ugly, I sometimes think I am, and I used to be (more than now), it sucks. So the Pizza is made of my passion, the passion is me, if the pizza comes out bad, I’m fucked, a servile useless idiot, single, ignored by people and women, for the rest of my life, up to the eternity, among all the multiverse, a loser, even a loser at being a loser. That’s how important the Pizza is.

I don’t want someone to see that pizza and say, “Meh, not as good as the picture.” Maybe it tastes good, but not as good as they heard. I don’t want that. So I refused to serve two pizzas. The cooks were outraged. My co-founder was pissed. The waitress was angry. The clients were losing their patience. I don’t give a fuck. I’m not ugly, period. The pizza should be as good as it can be. No trade-offs. Ever. One time, the dough was bad. It was 8 p.m. on a Friday. We decided to close the kitchen. Either it’s the best, or it’s nothing. My co-founder is the same, even worst.

One bad experience for a potential passionate client and you’ve lost them forever. You should take pride in your product. Only the best you can do. Not the best in the world, just the best you can do. Never trade quality. Whatever short-term gain you make will vanish fast and be forgotten. It’ll kill the long term.

And here’s the thing: it’s easier to not trade quality when you only have one thing to care about. In my case, I’ll never trade quality on the pizza. That’s it. The pizza is the restaurant. The dough is the whole game. Just one variable to optimize. Don’t try to optimize 20 things. “Best wine, best pastries, best meat, best fish”. You can do that later when you’ve got a huge operation. For now, pick one or two things that you taste, know, explain, sell, and promote.

It takes time, by the way; that’s why you should be ready for 12 months, 18 months of 60/80% break-even. Also, don’t spend your taxes; please have two bank accounts, one with the VAT and withdrawal, and whatever other taxes provision. Those are government’s pennies, not yours. Don’t spend it. That’s the difference between EBITDA and cash flow. EBITDA is a garbage metric loved by ignorant bankers who never sold even a club soda. It’s what you have in the bank account before paying what you have to pay if you don’t want to go to jail. Great, I’m EBITDA positive in jail, good stuff. That’s useless; you want cash flow.

Promotion

Whatever you do in your restaurant, you have to promote it. Building is only half the job. Cooking is only half the job. Building is only half the job.

Got a new pizza? Promote it. New recipe? Promote it. Better dough? Promote it. New wine? Promote it. Happy clients? Promote it. New ingredient? Promote it.

If you don’t promote it, it’s like it never happened. Promotion is complex because your brand isn’t just food, it’s the whole experience: The atmosphere, the music, the table color, the duck color, the bar, the beer’s taste, the wine, the way the waiting staff looks. Does they have tattoos or long hairs, are they alternative?

Your brand should be treated like a complete world, a universe. Promote every part of it. Why? Because that’s how you go from just serving food to creating identity. That’s how successful places thrive. People don’t just come to eat, they come to be seen, to feel like they belong, to align themselves with others they admire.

Promote. If someone beautiful walks in, take a picture. If people are happy, encourage them to post, repost their stories, go on TikTok, Instagram. Promotion is no longer half the job. In 2025, it’s 70–80% of the job. Once you have a good product and a process, replication is easy. Technology allows it. Just buy the same ingredients and repeat. But branding is how you turn wealth into money, which leads to my next point.

Wealth is what you build, money is what you get

Your restaurant isn’t just a place where food is served, it’s a brand, a feeling, an identity. People should come not just to eat, but because they’re seeking a specific experience, a world they want to be part of. That’s the foundation of real value.

Here’s the key: wealth is not money. Wealth is what generates money over time. It’s your recipes, your know-how, your hospitality standards, your space, your story : Everything that is hard to copy. Wealth is the set of intangible, durable advantages you build: your brand, your culture, your loyal customer base, your location's vibe, your unique atmosphere. The most powerful form of wealth is the one nobody else can imitate, and the best version of that is you.

Money is just the byproduct. It flows from wealth. If you think of your restaurant as a wealth-building engine, you stop chasing short-term profits and start building long-term power. That’s when leverage kicks in. Because once the brand is strong, once people associate your name with quality, consistency, emotion, they spread it for you. You don’t have to spend more. You just have to keep the experience alive and let word-of-mouth, aesthetics, and social proof do the work.

This is non-price-based competition. You're not fighting to be the cheapest or the fastest. You're creating something irreplaceable. Competing on price is a race to the bottom. Competing on brand is a path to compounding advantage, because you are not really competing. Your business is yours, and nobody can beat you at being yourself. A beautiful menu, a memorable wine pairing, the look and feel of your plates, the tattoo on your waitress’s arm, the playlist in the background. This is culture, not cost.

Once you understand this shift, from optimizing for cash flow to optimizing for brand equity, then your decisions change. You stop cutting corners for today’s margin and start investing in tomorrow’s legend. And when you play that game, wealth naturally converts into money. But it does at 10x the scale and longevity.

So never compromise your brand. Never cheapen the experience. Everything you do, every client interaction, every dish, every detail, is an investment in your wealth. That’s the leverage you own. That’s how you build something timeless. The money is consequential.

The kitchen is a sacred space, run by holy warriors

Ideally, hire people who care so much it hurts. People who’d rather throw a plate than let it leave the pass looking mediocre. The kitchen isn’t meant to be comfortable, it’s meant to be real. Brutal. Honest. People yell, curse, sweat, fight. Not because they’re toxic, but because they give a damn. That’s the difference between a dead restaurant and a living one. In the kitchen, there's no space for faking it, no time for corporate smiles. The only thing that matters is the food. Not how you feel. Not how tired you are. Did the plate go out right or not? That’s it. That’s the law. You can insult each other, cry in the walk-in, break down mid-service, but you never trade quality. Not for time, not for ease, not for anything. The kitchen is sacred because it respects one thing above all: the craft.

And as the one in charge, you need to live in that fire. You spend most of your time teaching, fixing, sharpening minds. Because it’s never as good as it can be done. That should be your religion. Every day you walk in asking: how can I push this further? How can I make the sauce tighter, the timing cleaner, the cut smoother, the crust better? You’re not managing people, you’re infecting them with your obsession. Because if you don’t push, it rots. The craft is part of the brand and builds the wealth that creates money. Again, the money is consequential.

And, at last : you will hate it, a lot

I remember one day, we were scared of a potential fire in the air extractor above the cooking station. Some idiot before us had never cleaned it, and years of thick, were dangerously hearing. It smoked. Total chaos. I had a date that night, I wanted nothing to do with it. But no one else was going to handle it, so we did. My hands were black with grease, my co-founder was screaming in the kitchen like a madman, tickets were piling up, customers were getting pissed. And in the middle of all that, with everyone yelling, sweating, falling apart, I realized : This is exactly where I want to be. Not because I enjoy it, but because I finally understood: most people are miserable because they think happiness is a life without problems. That’s bullshit. A good life is one where you fight problems that matter to you. And the real hack is to not waste your life solving problems you should’ve never had in the first place.

That’s what I felt back when I was at the bank. We were all pretending to care about dumb bullshit. Is the model broken? Will the market collapse? Is X getting fired? Did Y cry again? Are their kids depressed? Are the partners dying? I didn’t give a single fuck. These weren’t people; they were plants with suits, transparent sheep going through life and wasting their existence for something bringing nothing but a monthly salary to buy everything but what matters, which are good memories. Good memories are the substance of life. Just imagine if you had amnesia about everything. Nothing would really make sense.

And now? I get to actually live something, not only in my restaurant. But in my pizzeria, it’s to feed people. Feed bitches, feed angels, feed weirdos, feed your friends, and feed the bitch, feed the bitch, feed the bitch, as Adam said. Make them smile. Make them shut up for a second because the food’s too good to talk, or just too hot. That’s something. That’s a life. When it’s hard, when everything’s on fire, just ask yourself: Would you trade this for your old life? Would you trade it for sterile meetings, KPIs, and someone else's fake mission statement? Would you trade something for nothing? Not even a fool would trade something for nothing.

"Feed the bitch or she'll die!"