Elsewhere
I post short things on LinkedIn most days, and this is where they live afterward.
A platform can change its mind about your writing, so the copy that matters to me is the one sitting on my own site. Every post here has its own address and a link back to the original.
Longer pieces go up at shiftMode.
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I relaunched Founders' Club at scale in my head. Hundreds of members, fast onboarding, more founders in more places. And I got a feeling I didn't expect...There was no place for me in it.
It ran for years as a local, in-person thing. Going virtual was supposed to open it up, and it did. But somewhere in picturing the big version, I'd designed myself out of it.
I posted recently about building businesses you want to inhabit. This was the test of it. For me the whole thing is people, not projects. Yes, the companies matter but the person across from me is why I'm here.
So I built the one-on-one back in on purpose. An onboarding call with anyone who wants to join. A call with each presenter before they take the mic, working through what they'll bring to the room.
The group calls are going well. The part people keep bringing up is the one-on-ones.
The bigger version would have grown faster. This one has me in it.
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I didn't see my own founder loneliness until I helped friends through theirs. That was the thing that let me finally ask myself...if they're feeling this, how am I not?
You don't have to admit to it or diagnose yourself before you act. The antidote is just good business, so you can start today without ever naming the problem.
In a recent Inc piece, Dave Kerpen lays out moves any founder can test for a single month:
- Join a peer group you can't easily quit. Seek more connection than you have now. Employees and friends are good. You need more than that.
- Stop treating your spouse as your only outlet. This one lands. It's also the reason I hear most for why a founder thinks they don't need more connection. They have a great partner at home, so they figure that covers it. It doesn't.
- Get out of your own head and into someone else's problem.
- Put it on the calendar or it won't happen.
On the third on...it's why I don't split peer groups by stage. Being around founders ahead of you and behind you does more than either alone.
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In the early stages you have to chase anything that smells like revenue, you have no choice.
The scary part is where that success can carry you...in some cases it's a place you never chose to go.
The company hardens around those early choices, and one day you're running a business you'd never have signed up to run. Nobody picks that on purpose, it gets chosen for you, one default at a time. Every step reasonable. The sum is a life you didn't pick.
A small example, close to home. I make nut bars for my family. I've been refining the recipe for years, and people keep telling me to sell them. My own kids ask why I don't. They're probably right, I could make it work.
Here's what stops me. Play it forward, with success, and I'm running a food company, managing staff and chasing investors, spending my days convincing people to pay $5 for a bar. Selling them the exact thing I started making these to avoid.
That's a good business, it's just not the one I want to run.
So I give the recipe away, link in comments. My kids think I'm crazy.
Ask it early, while the choices are still yours...do you actually want to run the thing this is turning into?
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As a founder, are you lonely?
Every time I’ve built my own company, created a new type of event or just had a new idea, I’ve had times I’ve felt alone.
I have an idea, a vision for something new which I can hardly put into words yet. I’ll get there but it’s necessary that I’m always a few steps ahead of the market, of my future customers, my employees and even my friends and family.
That can be a lonely place to be.
As founders, when we feel that, we attack it. The trouble is I misdiagnose it. I read it as tired, or as being beaten down by slow sales. So I attack it with product plans, busyness, hustle. I reach for a technique, a business book, another podcast.
Going from 0 to 1 will leave you lonely at times. When you feel that, because it’s when not if, seek connection…please. Call someone, set up a coffee, DM that person you met at a recent event and share as much as you’re able to.
It’s lonely building. Connection helps.
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I made a mistake with Founders' Club recently.
Someone joined one of our calls without me talking to them first. They came through a referral, which is the best way anyone finds us. So I said yes.
It was the wrong call but it helped me to understand that the conversation before anyone joins isn't a formality. It's where two people come to understand each other. They learn what Founders' Club is and where I hope it goes. I learn how they think and what they're carrying. Both of us leave knowing whether the room may be right for them.
Skip it, and someone forms their read of the room, and of me, from a single group call with no context. I didn't give them one on one time to ask questions and build understanding before the call.
So now everyone gets that conversation first, even people I've known for years. What this is, where it's going, what I hope it becomes, and every question they've got. Then we both decide.
You can't build trust in a room they never got to know. My job to make sure they do.
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I keep hearing we need more ways to connect. Which quickly turns into we need more events.
But an event and a connection aren't the same thing. Big events are great for what they do. You hear a good talk, you feel a full room, you leave with a few cards. What's harder to find is the quieter kind. A room where you get real work done next to someone, and the connection forms sideways because you were there long enough for it to.
So that's this coming Wednesday. I'm hosting another pop-up coworking at Royal City Brewing here in Guelph. Bring your laptop and whatever you're working on. Work next to other people building things. Nobody's working the room. Everyone's just working.
After lunch we sit down with an invited guest. This week, we have someone joining us who's built and sold many companies, and now helps other people build theirs. You'll know the name.
Details and registration in the comments.
And if someone came to mind while reading this, send it to them.
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Attention is the rarest thing you can offer me today.
You walk past the same shoe repair shop every day on your way to work, and you never really see it. Then one morning your sole splits, and there it is, like it appeared overnight. It was always there, you just weren’t paying attention to it.
Most of what’s in front of us gets that treatment. Present in body, somewhere else entirely.
So here’s the most respectful thing you could ask me before a video call…
“Are you ok if we don’t record this call?”
No transcript, no AI notetaker in the corner turning our hour into content. Just the two of us, actually here, working the thing through together. The value was never going to be in the recording. It was in the attention we gave each other while it was happening.
We don’t record any of our calls. We ask for everyone’s attention instead.
When did you last give someone your full attention, with nothing capturing it?
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It's Labour Day. Maybe you're working. Maybe you're moving a kid into residence. Maybe you're the one moving into residence.
Whatever your labours today, I hope you get a good one.
And if the fall push is already on your mind, come spend a day on it in good company. September 16 we're running a pop-up coworking day in #Guelph. Bring your laptop and your real work, get it done in a room full of people doing the same, and stick around for lunch and a fireside conversation about building.
Same spot, same format. Come and go as you need.
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I just spent ten days in the Yukon, four of them backcountry hiking.
After day one, enduring a day of rain, cold and literally hiking through the clouds, I wanted to turn back. It was a slog at times and quitting felt like the reasonable call.
The sun came out the next morning, dried my shoes and socks and allowed us to keep going and finish it. The strange thing is what I came back with. I took tons of photos and they look nice but they don’t include what it took to be there… or the scale, the expansiveness of that place.
What I did come back with is that I’m more prepared for the next hike. I’m more eager, more engaged. That feeling of wanting to quit is the exact thing that built the readiness. It didn’t show up in anything I can hand you but it’s the only part that matters.
Building a company works the same way. We judge founders on the outputs. The deck, the numbers, the launch. But the output is the photo. The real thing is the passage that made you into someone who can tackle the next one.
The output was never the thing, the process and the experience was.
What did the hardest stretch of your build leave in you that nobody can see?
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I worked from home full time long before that global pandemic, before zoom even existed. I loved being in my home, in my community every day. But within a few years the isolation of the work got too loud. So I created the first coworking space in my city, long before the big chains confused what the word meant.
A pandemic was the final inspiration for closing that space, and for rudely introducing everyone to working from home.
Now we all have to figure this out. Virtual matters. It's core to everything we do now. But we have to thoughtfully design and test how and when we lean on it. IRL matters too, and it used to be all we knew. We can no longer assume it will happen, that it has happened.
We don't have to accept new technology as inevitable. We get to test it, learn where it fits, and make it work for us.
My perspective these days is that virtual works best combined with IRL, smartly. A virtual intro can build the energy to make the commute and meet in person. That IRL meeting then lets us work and communicate async very effectively for weeks, months.
But it has a half-life, and it needs replenishing.
How are you intentionally managing virtual and IRL these days?
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I've built a few companies. Every one of them was effectively invisible to any meaningful level of startup support.
The support exists...It's a question of when it arrives.
Most founder support arrives after the risk. Government money shows up once you're tracking to enough T4s to matter. Investors show up once you can generate their returns. The grant, the program, the coaching, most of it waits until you've survived enough to qualify.
Grants are a beauty contest. Not because the funders are lazy, but because they have no other choice. They simply can't be inside each of these companies daily, watching them work. So they staff a team whose whole job is to pick winners from the outside, on paper, before the thing is proven.
You win by being good at being picked. And there's little correlation between being good at that and building a great company. Same as an election: the skills that win the campaign aren't the ones that make you good at governing.
A customer, on the other hand, doesn't pick you. They have a problem, and you solve it or you don't. If you do, that's revenue and growth. If you don't, that's the gold you actually need....direct feedback on why you didn't solve their problem.
That arrives during the risk. When you're still not sure the thing works. And it lands differently. A grant tells you a panel liked your application. A customer tells you someone paid to have their problem solved.
Even the propped-up customers count...including the friend who bought early, doing their best to be a real customer. It's not clean revenue and everyone knows it. But it still builds something a cheque from a program never does. Confidence that a stranger might do the same.. energy to go find the next one.
The earlier you are, the more this matters. The support that comes after you've proven it is the support you needed least.
What was the first bit of revenue that actually changed how you felt about your company?
(photo of glue because like early customers, it holds things together)
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Should I quit my job. Do I need a cofounder or stay solo. Keep consulting or build the product. Take the offer or bet on myself.
You're carrying questions like these right now. Probably alone.
The answers matter. How you get to them matters more.
I hosted a full house this week at our pop-up coworking here in Guelph. My guest was Jesse Rodgers, who has been building communities for decades. He made a point I keep coming back to.
Take pricing a new service. Nobody can hand you the answer. And if your plan is to wait for the accelerator's pricing workshop next month, you're already too late. You need people you trust today.
Tomorrow's questions will be bigger. If you only ever chase the quick answer and move on, the system you use to get there never grows. It buckles under the next load.
Community is that system. A few people you trust enough to lower your armour with. That's the whole thing.
It goes both ways. Keep an eye out for the people looking to you the same way.
You don't need experts. You need a room. That's what we're building at Founders' Club: experienced builders, biweekly, wherever you are. If this landed, come join us. Link in the comments.
(PS...I have to remember to take photos BEFORE the room empties out)
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More than ever, I think we're all working to learn how to truly connect in this hybrid world we've been tossed into.
Our instincts are to chase those connections in the biggest room we can find. The thousand-person conference, the podcast with the huge audience, the event where you collect twenty business cards and remember none of the people.
I understand the pull. But I don't think connection lives there. It never did.
Connection is something you design for. It doesn't scale up by adding people, it thins out. An hour in a small room with people who actually know what you're building will do more for you than a year of big rooms.
Where have you actually felt known lately?
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You don't feel the lack of community until it's a little late. And by then it can feel like a mountain to climb back.
Build it early, before you think you need it.
That's the idea behind the pop-up coworking days I host here in City Of Guelph. Come, have a coffee, work on your own stuff for the day with other people around. Meet people or don't. No agenda, no pressure to perform.
Grow your crew while the stakes are low. So it's already there when you actually need someone to call.
Next one's Wednesday Aug 12, registration link in first comment. Please take a minute and tag someone below who should come.
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Being first feels a lot like being wrong.
You can see the whole thing. It's finished, working, real. The issue is you can't get it into anyone else's head. So you start to wonder if the problem is you.
I've driven myself half crazy on this. Pitching the same concept to my team every way I know, week after week. Then one day a team member grabs me: "ahh, I think I finally get what you've been pushing for." They got there. It took weeks of me walking them to it.
I once heard that the only true map of a place is the place itself. Every deck, every roadmap, is a map. The thing in your head is the territory, and you're the only one who's been there. The gap was never going to close on the first try.
That's what building something new feels like. Out ahead where there's no map yet, cutting the trail as you walk it. The loneliness of that isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's the sign you're first.
Being first is only half the job. The other half is looking back. Run too far ahead and no one can follow. So you walk back to where your team is, and you go again together. The trail becomes a path only if you keep returning to the people working to keep up.
What can you see right now that you can't get anyone around you to see yet?
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Sharing what you’re struggling with is difficult. It takes vulnerability, and some days I catch myself feeling like the squeaky wheel. That thought alone makes me share less, or not at all.
Then I read a line from Brené Brown that recalibrated it for me.
“Hope is a function of struggle.”
Builders need hope. You have to, when you’re the only one holding the vision of a thing that doesn’t exist yet. But hope isn’t a mood you either have or don’t. It’s built, and it’s built out of struggle. Which means the struggle isn’t the thing standing between you and hope. It’s the raw material hope is made from.
So the squeaky wheel had it backwards. Naming the hard thing out loud isn’t complaining. It’s how you keep the hope in working order.
Sharing your struggles is how you build hope, and keep it.
What did you struggle with yesterday that, shared today, might build some hope?
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This week’s Founders’ Club has people joining us from Ontario, Vancouver, Calgary, and LA.
That’s three time zones in a Founders’ Club meeting at the same time. I’m only a few weeks into redesigning this to be virtual…because I realized we were restricted to only people within a 15 minute drive of my coworking space.
Going virtual was about opening up what we’d built. Could the room get wider without the trust getting thinner? Same honesty, more range in who’s sitting across from you.
The founder in Calgary sees something the one in LA is too close to. That happens because they build in different worlds, not the same one.
Who would you want in the room when you talk through the thing you’re actually stuck on?
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When you start a business, you have to believe you’ll win.
Not hope you will, you must truly believe it. You don’t build from nothing to something while holding two endings in your head, so you pick one, and you win. That certainty is what gets you up after the tenth investor ghosts you, after the customer who swore they’d sign goes quiet, after a friend stops asking how it’s going because they can tell.
That belief is your armour. I know because I’ve worn it for years and it has protected me more times than I can count, and I’d never ask you to drop it.
But you should understand everything that it blocks. When your dad asks how sales are really going, your armour answers for you. When your kid asks why you cancelled the trip, your armour answers again. It’s so good at keeping the doubt out that it keeps everything else out too: the honest question, the hard read, the thing someone would tell you if you let them close enough to see it.
90% of new businesses fail. You already know the number, and you’ve already decided you’re in the 10%, because there’s no other option you’ll allow yourself.
I won’t argue the odds with you, so I’ll ask you something instead.
Who in your life do you allow behind the armour? Not to take it off. To stand back there with you and tell you the truth.
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McDonald's can feed my kids in five minutes for ten dollars.
Yet I still spent thirty dollars and two hours cooking instead.
Nobody would call that irrational once we're at the dinner table. We understand that the point was never just getting food into them. Putting our hands to the meal and the process itself offers as much as the nutrition.
I recently built an eight-foot tall bookshelf with my youngest which you can buy at Ikea for a fifth of the price we spent on materials. My oldest spent three days grinding out a rusted truck floor nobody would ever see. Slower, costlier, and completely worth it, and we all knew why.
Then Monday I opened my laptop and started handing things to AI on the exact opposite logic. It's faster, so why would I ever do that myself again.
Maybe that's right for some of it. But we're making that trade on everything, all at once, faster than we've ever made it, and at times we're not deciding at all. We're defaulting and the only number we're looking at is the efficiency one.
The same number that says buy the shelf and skip the truck.
I use these tools every day, so this isn't a don't-use-them post. I'm saying we should at least know when we're choosing the drive-thru, and make sure it's not becoming the only way we know how to eat.
What are you building right now that's slower than it needs to be and worth it anyway?
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What are you choosing to NOT give to your AI?
The answer to that question tells me more about your business than what you're building with AI. I'm more interested in that than in what you're powering with it.
Every company is, or will be soon, issuing the "use AI reflexively" mandate to their people. I get it, that's required. But that makes the other decision urgent too, and it's worth making today: which parts have you decided AI will not handle?
And I mean decided, not the parts you haven't built your AI harness for yet, or haven't learned how, or just don't like. Those are just backlog items. I mean the parts you've explicitly chosen to keep in the hands of your humans because you believe keeping them human is how you out-compete everyone else.
This came up twice this week. Once over lunch with Mike Kirkup at our pop-up coworking day, and again last night at our Founders' Club event.
We already recognize AI slop where AI became ubiquitous first, in posts and comments on social media. It's a gut feel, you can just sense it. If we all blindly hand over every part of our operations, what makes us think businesses will be any different? Within a few years we'll interact with a company and quickly declare, eww, that company is AI slop.
That's not anti-AI. It's that we're still human, and we want to feel that when we deal with a business.
Brands weaken themselves by copying their competition, all in the name of keeping up, and AI accelerates that drift toward sameness.
We're fast foodifying every business, willingly.
True differentiation tomorrow will come from which parts you decide to keep human, and those parts will look like negatives at first, because they're slower and more expensive and harder to scale than whatever your competitors just automated. Strong brands are built on negatives they refuse to apologize for, so hold on to yours and trumpet them.
So, which parts of your business are you keeping human, on purpose?
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You can hand AI the work. You can't hand it the judgment. Knowing the difference is today's work.
That's where the conversation went at yesterday's pop-up coworking day, when we broke at lunch to talk with our guest, Mike Kirkup, about building companies. Everyone building right now is deciding what to hand over and what to keep, and most of us are making that call by feel.
He also shared some great experiences from his years in and around startup land, stories you only hear from someone who was in the room.
Thanks to Mike for the time and to Royal City Brewing for hosting us.
The next pop-up coworking day is August 12, same room. Link in the comments if you want a spot.
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Sixteen years of Startupfest and I've learned the fest doesn't stay inside the venue. Montreal absorbs it, entirely!
In the Old Port I found an iron door stamped NEW BRIGHT IDEA. Somebody's breakthrough, cast in metal, bolted to a wall, a century of rust on it. Every bright idea ends up somewhere like this...since the idea was never the hard part.
One evening I wandered into circus festival. Literally every act was risk, creation, and putting yourself in front of people before you're sure.
And on a walk up Mont Royal I ended up behind a young man telling his friend what he wanted from his working life....to build companies, fail at some, learn, and be surrounded by people who support that pattern. At the top I said hello and told him about the fest and about Founders' Club.
He was describing a room. Those exist when someone builds them.
As always, thanks for hosting me and putting on the show Philippe Telio, Alistair Croll, Rebecca Croll, Katherine Johnsen, Pamela Perrotti, Keon Smith and Adam(someday he'll share his contact deets with me).
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I really need to finally build my 'Please Steal My Ideas' public list....coming soon...
In the meantime....here's one, who wants it?
Many parents enjoy a good coffee in the morning. Most children need a healthy lunch packed for them everyday. Many of those parents despise having to make lunches EVERY morning.
What if a parent could go to their local coffee shop in the morning, enjoy 5 minutes of solace or community while they enjoy their espresso.....and return home a hero with healthy, packed lunches for their kids?
You build a kid's lunch pickup service and use your local coffee shop as the pickup point. The majority of the work is performed the night prior, all purchased lunches are labelled and in the fridge at the coffee shop by morning. All lunches are pre-sold beforehand so you have little to no risk of food waste or having to stock inventory.
For the coffee shop, this drives foot traffic and sales into their space daily. Their barista is already there making coffees, they just need to handout the pre-purchased kid's lunches to the appropriate parents.
If it works in a small test market, it's infinitely scalable since I have a feeling there are an unlimited amount of parents who hate making lunches and love coffee. As well, there's likely a coffee shop or two in every city who's interested in more people visiting their location in the mornings.
Anyone want to work on this one with me or steal it entirely? If you're going to steal it outright, are you brave enough to say that out loud here?