TLDR: Work-life harmony is about having something to look forward to doing in the morning and something to look forward to going home to at night.
If I were a founder right now, I would focus on…
Customer/user validation
Daily milestones; shipping product & making progress every single day
Recruiting world-class, top 1% people, inspiring them to join me
$500k - $1m in funding without 300 meetings
Recruiting a new-age advisory board; low equity, high distribution advantages, and optional investment
AI-native everything; low cost, high margins
Eliminating unnecessary friction; aligning incentives, destroying doubt
Developing an unapologetic culture
Being clear on what we’re doing now, the job from point A to point B
Saying no to everything else, and copying the team so they learn to say no too
Iterating the narrative the way Jerry Seinfeld iterates jokes
Concise and compounding communications; be so good they can’t ignore you
Grinding on something you love is fun, winning is fun, accomplishing crazy shit is fun, leaning into it with your entire identity is infectious
At the end of the day, it’s simply about reducing risk and increasing leverage.
Every time you reduce some risk, you create some value. -Josh Wolfe
Just like you peel an onion and remove each layer in turn, risk in a startup investment comes in layers that get peeled away — reduced — one by one. -Marc Andreessen
There are three kinds of leverage; human capital, financial capital, and technology. -Naval (I would add knowledge and it’s amplification, ie “perception” as a fourth)
That’s it. Keep it simple. Stay present on whether or not you really have the two most important things in life: 1) Something you look forward to investing yourself into every morning, and 2) Something you look forward to going home to at night.
If you don’t have both, it’ll be hard to be happy. Surprisingly, they’re both reliably easy to shift if you’re willing to brave the emotions of change.
See you Monday.