A rule I live by
If you find a secret way into the club, don’t ask for the bouncer.
Said another way: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
Once upon an entrepreneur’s journey, Airbnb co-founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk who were poor and eating their own cereal at the time, discovered a rather genius “hack.” Andrew Chen famously details this growth hack in his legendary online article, Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing.
The principle here is not actually sinister but a methodology for approaching all new environments. Sometimes you don’t have the ticket to get in, you don’t have the budget or a rich uncle, you aren’t qualified, you don’t fit the right profile, you don’t have the right tool set. In any given situation.
This principle is about this: just try and do it first to see if it can be done. Just get in. Hop a proverbial fence. Take advantage of that 30-day free trial. Give it every ounce of effort and creativity you got right up front. It might turn out to be a lot easier than you anticipated.
And when it works, do NOT call yourself out. Or you will have hell raining down on you from all angles, most pointedly from the suckers who are jealous they didn’t think of doing it your way.
When in doubt, be a champion at what you do. If it ruffles a few feathers along the way, smile, apologize if necessary, and go right back to championing.
A thought on obsession
Mindful obsession is art; mindless obsession is annoying.
Podcasts I listened to this week
I got a few for you, and I’ll condense my reviews a bit.
Lex Fridman on Joe Rogan Experience
Two legendary podcasters talked for 3.5 hours on life on Earth, politics, business, technology and viewed the Starship flight test 7 on air. This episode has some cussing and dirty talk.
Rener Gracie on Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast
Rener Gracie is a prominent member of the Gracie family and renowned fighter and BJJ coach, as well as successful inventor. Craig Groeschel is an author, head pastor at Life.Church and host of the Leadership Podcast. This episode is squeaky clean; you could play it in front of your kids.
Twilio, DeepSeek, GameOn Fraud on This Week in Startups
This was an interesting conversation between Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm, about team size, AI replacing workforce, DEI downsizing, and a few other topics. A couple highlights were that Twilio realized unique growth opportunities by restricting its team size; and Meta is building a data warehouse equal in size to half of Manhattan.
Clickbait: epic submission
Watching some old Bellator reruns this week, I saw the AJ McKee v Darrion Caldwell fight. McKee had an unbelievable submission in the first round. Watch it here.
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