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Michael Houck.
Michael Houck

Michael Houck

Charleston, SC

My best move was walking away from my nine-figure startup. Now I help founders make good decisions.

58,128 founders read Hard Calls:

Trusted by founders backed by the best

  • Andreessen Horowitz
  • Sequoia Capital
  • Y Combinator
  • Accel
  • Founders Fund
  • Greylock
  • Kleiner Perkins
  • Lightspeed Venture Partners
  • General Catalyst
  • NEA
  • Insight Partners
  • Khosla Ventures
  • Thrive Capital
  • IVP
  • SoftBank Vision Fund
  • Coatue
$4M+
bootstrapped revenue
$23M
raised by my companies
10 yrs
building in Silicon Valley
60+
startups invested in

This week

What I run

What I run

JOLT!Making founders impossible to forget on TikTok, IG, and YT.Ben went from zero to 32K followers on TikTok.
LoreGet cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Google.FollowBuddy went from 0 to 455 AI mentions in three months.
Hockey StickPre-launchAI agents that run your company's memory and ops.

The decision log

What I've decided

The most recent hard calls I've made building my holdco.

  • What do we sell a client after the first 90 days are up?

    Not a flat monthly retainer. We agree a new scope at day 60, once we can see what is working. An open-ended engagement has no natural checkpoint, so we built one in: every stage has an end date and a fresh decision to make.

  • Do I build a brand around the work, or put my own name on it?

    My name. I was about to spin my newsletter out as its own company, with its own site and logo, and stopped. Splitting it off would have meant building an audience twice.

  • Do I launch a fifth company, or make it part of one I already have?

    Part of the one I have. I was eight days from launching a separate business, and two brands means two websites, two launches, and explaining twice why they are related. It became the paid tier of the newsletter instead.