Eric Ries, who created and wrote it, sent me an advance copy of his new book, Incorruptible and I wanted to finish it before getting this week’s issue out.
It’s about why startups tend to drift away from their core mission and values as they get more successful, with specific examples of companies that manage to avoid that and stay true to their principles.
It’s a mix between a moral compass and a practical playbook. Definitely worth picking up or at least checking out his new newsletter.
Anyway, here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → Better Ticketing Solution
Framework → Value Vs Effort Matrix
Tool → Hyper
Trend → Manufacturing Workforce Aging
Quote → The Founder’s Tax
🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
Tom Blomfield on how top of funnel solves most problems (Link)
Peter Kazanjy on how to structure pilots that actually close (Link)
ICYMI
Save 25% on Google Workspace with Gemini this Memorial Day with Anyhouck (Link)*
Zach Yadegari on what being the best CEO really is (Link)
Marc Randolph on how profitable became a dirty word for early stage (Link)
Opportunity: Better Ticketing Solution
For years, everyone and their brother has known that LiveNation / Ticketmaster have operated as a monopoly and used that position to negatively impact customers with ridiculous fees.
What you might not have seen, since the news sort of got buried amidst everything else going on in the world this year, is that they were found guilty of doing exactly that by a federal jury already.
I bring this up because, for the first time, there will soon be an opportunity for an event ticketing startup to become a big company again (once the penalty phase of the trial is done).
Posh.vip has an opportunity here, but their recent $37M Series B announcement doesn’t make it clear they’re going after the enterprise-level deals you’d need to in order to make a dent here.
With all that capital, they certainly could switch their priorities as the penalties for LiveNation are made clear (and executed, which can take some time). But in the meantime purpose-built event software for this segment could jump in while they are focused on other priorities.
🧠 Framework: Value Vs. Effort Matrix
Today’s framework is a classic, that’s been slightly adapted for productivity purposes.
It’s a classic in that everyone who spent the first couple years of their career at a consulting firm, whether it’s McKinsey or Deloitte, knows about the impact vs effort 2×2 matrix.
Here’s a slightly tweaked version for task management, from TaskFord:
Founders have a million todo list items (mine gets longer by the end of the day compared to that morning at least twice a week) and need a simple system to help prioritize them.
So next time you’re going through and prioritizing what’s on your plate, consider how much time, energy, complexity, or resources it will take relative to how valuable it will be for your desired outcomes.
For example, responding to an important email is high value but likely low effort, so just do it, as opposed to organizing files or updating documentation (which are more like nice to haves and fit in the “Fill Ins” quadrant above).
🛠 Tool: Hyper
I’ve talked a lot recently about why more startups should be building company brains (like this, as YC recommends) and spending time making their companies queryable by agents as a core focus.
Hyper is looking to help with exactly that.
They’ve built a tool that collects all necessary context and makes your agents smarter (or turns them from newbies to “veterans” as they say).
Their landing page is also gorgeous and simple, in case you’re looking for some inspo.
📈 Trend: Manufacturing Workforce Aging
Ironically, even though we’ve outsourced a considerable amount of the American manufacturing sector to other countries in recent decades, it’s still facing a bit of a domestic crisis.
Unfortunately, it’s a predictable one.
The second-order effect of outsourcing is that minimal junior roles get hired. When that happens, another second-order effect becomes that as the remaining workforce inevitably ages and retires, their knowledge goes with them.
So why some weird process exists the way it goes, or where the “bodies are buried” so to speak, is literally no longer known by the company when these people leave for any reason.
When I was at Uber we called this “tribal knowledge” and whenever someone with it would leave, it would take some time for people to get up to speed.
The difference was that at these companies there are fewer and fewer amounts of people waiting in the on deck circle.
This is a real risk right now, so I highlight it for two reasons:
There are significant opportunities in the manufacturing sector right now with robotics and LLM-powered automation.
If we outsource too much of our knowledge work, the same thing could happen.
💬 Quote: The Founder’s Tax
Founders see the future.
More precisely, founders see a future.
And then we try to make it the future.
We hope we’ve identified the right waves, we try to be nimble as the world moves forward.
What we give up in exchange for potentially being right is the ability to show we’re right today.
As a result, we have to convince people without proof.
Sales skills help, but true conviction is most important because the right partners can always tell the difference.
Either way, we pay the tax of not having the proof to back us up today and we must push forward regardless.