Category
Product
- ·3 min read
Running Quarterly Planning Without Losing the Quarter
The worst quarterly planning I ever ran took three weeks, produced a beautiful deck, and changed nothing. The best took two, ended before the quarter started, and the plan survived to week twelve. Here's the runbook: the four input docs, the three sessions, the 70/30 commitment split, and the in-quarter cadence that keeps the plan alive without re-litigating it every sprint.
- ·3 min read
$1.75 Billion of False Validation: Quibi, Juicero, and the Humane Pin
Quibi raised $1.75 billion and lasted about six months. Juicero raised $120 million for a value proposition that a reporter falsified with her bare hands in thirty seconds. Humane sold roughly a tenth of its Pin target and watched HP buy the wreckage for $116 million. Three eras, three categories, one identical discovery failure: each had 'validation' — surveys, investor enthusiasm, demo applause — and none had evidence of the kind a good interview or a behavioral test produces. The uncomfortable through-line is that money made it worse.
- ·3 min read
How to Back the Right Startup: Picking in a Power-Law World
Venture returns follow a power law: a handful of deals produce most of the money, and half of everything you back goes roughly to zero. That single fact inverts every risk instinct a corporation has spent decades perfecting — because in venture, the expensive mistake isn't the startup that failed, it's the outlier you screened out for looking weird. Here's what the evidence actually says about picking: timing, teams, markets, and the anti-portfolio discipline of studying your misses.
- ·3 min read
Agile in the AI Agent Era: The Ceremonies Die, the Principles Don't
Every agile ceremony was derived for a world where writing code was the bottleneck. AI coding agents are ending that world — implementation collapses toward cheap, and review becomes the constraint. Sprints, estimation, and standups start running on fumes; the four values come through fine, because they were never about typing speed. They were about uncertainty and feedback, and those don't move.
- ·3 min read
When the Metric Becomes the Target: Wells Fargo, Zynga, Builder.ai
Wells Fargo's 'eight is great' cross-sell target produced up to 3.5 million unauthorized accounts, roughly 5,300 firings, and a $3 billion resolution — $500 million of it from the SEC, because the ratio itself was the number sold to Wall Street. Builder.ai claimed roughly $220 million in revenue against about $55 million of reality and was insolvent within weeks of the discovery. Between them sits Zynga, an honestly metrics-driven company that lost 40% of its value in a day. Three escalating answers to the same question: what happens when the number stops describing the business and starts being the business?
- ·3 min read
The Planning Stack: Vision to Quarter Without Repeating Yourself
Most companies' 1/3/5-year plans are the same slide deck at three zoom levels — the annual plan is the quarterly plan times four, the 3-year plan is the annual plan with bigger numbers. That repetition is the tell that no planning happened at the longer horizons. Here's the fix: five documents, five different questions, and the smell test that reveals when each one is fake.
- ·3 min read
Corporate Venture Capital: Innovation as Investor
Fred Wilson stood on a stage in 2016 and called corporate investing 'dumb' — and for most corporate venture funds, he was right. But GV, Salesforce Ventures, and Intel Capital keep proving the exception, and the difference isn't intent, it's structure. CVC done well isn't a growth engine; it's a sensing instrument — bought optionality on futures you can't build internally. Here's Chesbrough's map of when it works, the design choices that decide it, and the boom-bust history everyone forgets between booms.
- ·3 min read
The Standup Autopsy
The daily standup has the cleanest derivation in all of agile — peers synchronizing and surfacing blockers in under fifteen minutes — and it's still the most reliably dead ceremony on most calendars. Here's the full autopsy: where it came from, the five ways it dies, three questions to diagnose your own, and the replacements each mapped to the constraint it actually serves.
- ·3 min read
Innovation by Spin-Out: The Sister-Company Play
Nestlé didn't incubate Nespresso — it exiled it. Separate company, separate CEO, separate headquarters, a sales channel that violated everything Nestlé knew about selling coffee, and nearly two decades of patience before it became a pillar. Sometimes an internal unit, however protected, isn't separation enough: the new business's economics are so hostile to the parent's that the bet needs its own company. Here's when to make that call, what a real spin-out requires, and the case histories — Nespresso, Alphabet's Other Bets, Cisco's strange spin-in machine — that the pop versions get wrong.
- ·3 min read
Handling Customer Requests: An Intake You Can Defend
The backlog where customer requests go to die isn't a filing problem — it's a decision problem wearing a filing costume. Here's the intake pipeline I actually run: one ledger, five interrogation questions, clustering by problem instead of by feature, and the exact wording of a no that builds more trust than a silent maybe.