Built the leading ecommerce agency for nearly 25 years before partnering with private equity in 2021. Now working with a select group of founders and CEOs.
Boston, MA
Joined May 2008
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Asked ChatGBT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude to create an advertisement for my dream product. Who won?
100%ChatGBT
0%Gemini
0%Grok
0%Claude
1 votes • Final resultsAre social media apps listening to us and serving related ads? Or are our behaviors, interests, and health milestones just that predictable?
A recent survey of 6,000 senior executives in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found:
1. 69% of firms use AI
2. 89% report no impact on productivity
3. 90% report no impact on headcount
4. Yet they expect AI to increase productivity by 1.4% and reduce employment by 0.7% over the next 3 yrs
Employees expect the opposite on headcount: a 0.5% increase over the same period.
I'd bet that misalignment is a symptom of a larger problem.
Companies are adopting AI without a clear understanding of how it will change the way their people work.
AI won't magically turn into better margins simply because a company buys new tools for their people to use.
Workflows have to change. Roles have to change. Decisions have to change. In some cases, the structure of the organization has to change.
The risk for established companies is that they use AI to improve old ways of working while newer competitors rethink how work gets done.
That is the warning at the heart of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). Established companies often see new technology coming. But they try to fit it into the older version of their business.
The companies that win with AI will be the ones willing to change how they operate. To do that, leaders will have to give their people a real chance to adapt by helping them understand what is changing and develop the skills they will need.
That will not eliminate every hard decision. But it gives leaders and their people a much better chance of moving in the same direction. The company gets stronger, and its people are better prepared for the future.
Survey referenced: "Firm Data on AI," working paper 34836, February 2026
Google's turning satellite data into an AI ready layer for monitoring supply chains, infrastructure.
And the planet.
This is more evidence that AI is getting more specialized and embedded into how companies operate ->
AlphaEarth will combine imagery, radar, LiDAR and other signals into one cloud free view. It can track physical change in 10 meter squares.
Satellite intelligence is moving from pictures people review to data their AI agents can act on. ->
How quickly can your company identify a change, make a decision, act, see what happened, and update the way it works? Getting smarter each time? If the answer is “not nearly fast enough,” AI will not solve your problem. The scalpel does not a surgeon make. It will take leaders and visionaries acting as architects and rolling up their sleeves to design companies of the next generation. AI is a critical tool, but it’s just a tool. Leaders should delegate a LOT, but not this.
“If it is ever proper for men to kneel, we should kneel when we read the Declaration of Independence.” Ayn Rand
archives.gov/founding-docs/d…
Massive transformation or massive bubble? It doesn’t matter.
Massive investment creates massive change, whether it’s a short-lived stimulus or a generational shift.
And where there’s change, there is risk and opportunity.
The choice everyone must make is how quickly they’ll adapt. And whether their posture will lean toward offense or defense.
That choice depends on your view of what the future will look like.
What new problems will emerge?
What role will you play in solving them?
When I was 12, I read a book called Who Moved My Cheese? that changed my life.
Its lesson: change is inevitable.
One of the most important choices we all face, no matter how uncomfortable or uncertain it may be, is whether to resist change or embrace it.
Hire mentors and don’t let your brilliant ideas kill your company.
youtube.com/shorts/3N_oWQCmT…
AI won’t kill SaaS. It will kill generalists.
For a long time, generalists won because building was expensive.
You had to spread one product across a lot of users. One product. Many use cases. Everyone compromised a little.
AI changes that.
Now anyone can build.
So the game changes.
Not to who builds more.
To who understands better.
We saw this early. When we specialized, two things happened:
We got better at serving our clients.
And we got more partners, not fewer.
We stopped competing with everyone and started becoming useful to them.
That pattern kept proving itself. We bootstrapped from $0 to $25M in ARR, growing about 25% a year, 11 of 12 years in a row.
The same shift is already happening in AI.
The early winners tried to be everything for everyone.
Now more focused tools are winning specific use cases.
Coding. Research. Design. Customer support.
Not because they’re bigger.
Because they’re more relevant.
Generalists build. Specialists win.
If you want the full piece:
smigler.com/p/ai-wont-kill-s…
#BusinessGrowth
So says the bond king. You’ve always gotta serve somebody.
Interesting graph. Likely some reversion to mean dynamics complimenting the AI story.
Becoming ever more true at an accelerating pace
"Speed wins."
"You have to be willing to commit to being fast. You can't have long bureaucratic processes. You can't have a risk-averse posture."
@pmarca explains the OODA loop — and why the fastest operator controls the narrative in business, media, and politics:
"There's a framework called the OODA loop, originally developed for fighter pilots and later for broader military strategy."
"It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. It's basically the decision-making cycle."
"If speed is the thing that matters, then the person who gets through that cycle the fastest is the one who's going to win."
"If you can have a sustainably faster OODA loop processing cycle than the next guy — think about what happens… You operate and make a decision within an hour. The other guy is still inside his own OODA loop when you make your decision. He's only halfway through his process and now has to start over. You've changed the parameters of what's going on."
"This is also a big explanation for what's happened in traditional media."
"The New York Times has its own OODA loop, and it's like 24 hours to go through its process."
Most founders I know sleep like crap.
Late nights
Wake up at 4:47am
Scroll
Try to fall back asleep
Can’t
Repeat
Adrenaline covers it when you’re 28.
At 42 it doesn’t.
It just makes you tired and wired.
After years of that pattern, it feels permanent. It’s not.
A new JAMA randomized trial:
- 3 hard 20-minute workouts per week
- Tightened sleep habits
Cut time lying awake by 30 minutes.
112 sedentary women
8 weeks
Group 1: high-intensity bodyweight circuits, 3x/week
-> Sleep efficiency 88% to 90%
Group 2: structured weekly sleep coaching
-> About 90%
Group 3: both
-> 88% to 93%
Wake-after-sleep-onset down 30 minutes
Hard intervals increase sleep pressure.
Better habits reduce fragmentation and hyperarousal.
You need both.
But more high-intensity is not better.
Go hard every day and stress climbs. Recovery drops. Sleep worsens.
You also need lower-intensity cardio for:
- Mitochondria
- Fat oxidation
- Aerobic base
- Parasympathetic tone
So:
A few hard sessions
Plenty of low-zone cardio
Better sleep habits
It sounds obvious.
It’s easy to ignore in grind mode.
You pay for it later.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
