Goals vs. Systems

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Peter Walker on how much equity you should expect to sell per round (Link)

Growth

• Greg Isenberg on how to grow your startup (Link)

• Jimmy Kim on the layered launch sequence (Link)

• Elisabetta Torretti on turning your team into a lead gen engine (Link)

• Natia Kurdadze on client acquisition for founders (Link)

ICYMI

• Did you get your taxes filed today? Better Bookkeeping manages your accounting year-round, maximizing deductions and eliminating headaches during tax season and beyond (Link)*

• Michael Seibel on 5 lessons learned from 20 years in startups (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki on acquisition conversations (Link)

• Rohit Mittal on lessons learned about acquisitions from 100+ founders (Link)

• Neil Patel on removing friction from your checkout (Link)

• Michael Girdley’s thread on negative customer acquisition cost (List)

• Sam Parr on Hampton founders’ books recommendations (Link)

PS, I partnered up with Pitchbob and HubSpot to match you with the right investors and accelerators with the help of AI. Best part: it’s free and includes a bunch of other little tools too.

 Opportunity: Audible 2.0

When’s the last time you read a book?

Aside from the Bible I literally don’t know what the answer is for me.

I brought The Brothers Karamazov to South America with me this winter but barely had time to open it.

So even though this doesn’t seem like a great business, I think it could be a great product:

Ryan’s right the licensing would be hard at best, blocked entirely at worst.

Spotify pulled it off for music, but they weren’t changing the fundamental way the end user engages with the creation. In this case, you would be and publishers won’t like that.

For example, who really knows how Dostoevsky would have wanted the AI to summarize his works? Writers got paid per word back then, and now we’re trying to dramatically reduce them.

It’s a long road, but a fun product if you can pull it off.

🧠 Framework: Barbell Value Creation

The biggest question for the last 2.5 years has been “who is most at risk for disruption from AI?”

With the rise of agents, the answer may already be out there if this week’s framework is to be believed.

The proposal from Jacky Dimonte says that, unlike in SaaS, value will accrue in a barbell pattern when you break markets up by the users choose to solve their problems:

This is probably better understood with an example:

• Own → Purchase a car

• Operate → Rent a car

• Outsource → Use public transportation and ride-sharing

In software, there was basically a waterfall of value where companies that allowed customers to be owners were most valuable, operators less so but still valuable, and outsourcing (as a service provider) less so.

But AI seems unlikely to follow that pattern and, instead, more likely to shift software markets to instead follow what’s more common in other industries: a barbell.

Why?

On one end, you have the data. On the other, you have the workflows.

In the middle… you have neither. These are the real “wrappers”, good product experiences but without defensibility.

This is even before factoring in how AI is already making outsourced options more efficient (potentially, with time, efficient enough to eat meaningful marketshare from the middle tier.

📈 Trend: IPO Window Turbulence

Generally, when a tech company IPOs, you hope to see some more follow suit.

But the recent CoreWeave IPO may have not been a signal for too much at all, especially given its meager performance in the public markets so far.

It’s hard to blame anyone else with all of the uncertainty right now.

And the math here is pretty simple:

Delayed IPOs = reduced DPI = less capital for LPs to put back into new funds = VCs start deploying capital more slowly out of existing funds

It’s going to force some tough decisions for VCs, there’s a once-in-a-generation infrastructural shift happening from traditional software to AI-powered software and, while there’s a lot of dry powder out there, there will be less new capital coming into the market.

Some will yolo it, but most will be more selective and/or concentrated with their bets.

💬 Quote: Goals vs Systems

Let’s say you woke up and were 50lbs heavier than when you went to bed.

Which approach would you take to lose the weight?

1. Set a goal to lose it by some future date

2. Build a system with diet and exercise and let it take its course

You might lose the weight faster with the goal and some maniacal focus, but without the system it’d be more likely to come back later.

The same is true for your startup.

I had to actually think about this for a while before including it in the newsletter because goals, especially revenue goals, are life and death, especially early on.

So yes, you can hit an early revenue goal without building a scalable system. And yes, what you need to do after that may not relate too much to what you had to do to get there. In fact, I’d argue you typically shouldn’t invest in scalable systems right away.

But, at that stage, you’re better off building a different kind of system anyway, one that helps you experiment, learn, and iterate. That’s the most likely path to the revenue you want.