Author name: BJay

Hi Reader,There is an idea doing the rounds again this week, and it is worth stopping on. That there is no such thing as an overnight success. The founders who seem to appear from nowhere were building for years before anyone was watching. The scrapped versions. The dead ends. The features nobody wanted. The late nights and the quiet mornings that never make the headline. The result is the only part that shows. The valuation, the launch, the sudden fame. The effort that built it stays…

Hi Reader,Joe Kudla built two companies. Both failed. His third is Vuori, the activewear brand. It is now valued at 5.5 billion dollars. Same man. Same field, clothing, all three times. So what changed between the two that died and the one that did not? He has said it plainly. The first two were side businesses. He ran them while he kept his accounting job, a safe salary underneath him the whole time. And that safety net, he says, was the problem. The moment either company got hard, he had…

Hi Reader,This week, Meta handed WhatsApp to Kunal Shah, the founder of CRED. More than three billion people use the app. It is one of the biggest jobs in technology. He was not looking for it. Meta’s product chief had called him for advice, to ask who should run WhatsApp next. Shah just gave his honest thinking about the app and where it could go. His answers were so good that by the end of the call, the question had changed. They asked if he would take the job himself. He did not chase the…

Hi Reader,You can look like the hardest-working person in the building and produce nothing at all. This year, some of the biggest companies in the world spent billions of dollars learning that the hard way. It started as a contest. They decided that using artificial intelligence more meant working more, so they put AI usage on leaderboards and ranked their people by it. They called it token-maxxing. And their people did what people always do when a number becomes the prize. They gamed it….

Hi Reader,Roughly 30% of US companies have now ordered everyone back to the office full time, and nearly a third more plan to by the end of this year. They are calling it a productivity decision. It is not. It is a confession. And it is still going to fail. Here is what every one of those mandates is quietly admitting: we cannot see the work our people are doing. We have lost visibility, and we want it back. That admission is correct. It is the most honest thing leadership has said in years….

Hi Reader,The Zomato CEO bought a four and a half crore Aston Martin, and the internet decided to be annoyed. I want to thank him. He just paved the way for the next few hundred Aston Martins in India. He took a number most people will not even say out loud, parked it in a driveway, and made it look possible. That is not something to resent. That is something to aim at. So if you want to be one of the next ones, here is the only thing that gets you there, and it is not the wanting. Want the…

Hi Reader,Do you know why the most valuable startup in India just collapsed, with its founder sentenced to prison this week? There are only two ways a business like that goes down. It was chasing something it could never catch. Or it was running hard with no idea where it was going. Bhagna, or Doudna. By the end of this note you will know both words, you will know the difference, and you will know which one is quietly running your own business right now. Then you tell me which one you think…

Hi Reader,AI was sold to every business on the same promise. Your team gets time back. The busywork disappears. Everyone finally does the work that matters. This year the data came in. It says the opposite happened. One study tracked the real workdays of thousands of people, comparing the 180 days before and after they started using AI. Every category of activity went up. Not one went down. Email more than doubled. Messaging rose 145 percent. Time in business software rose 94 percent. The…

Hi Reader,Three founders did something last week. Could you do it? Most founders won’t. Even when it would be good for the company. Last Monday, the founders of Crumbl, the dessert chain with more than a thousand stores, walked away from running their own company. The CEO. The Chief Brand Officer. The Chief Technology Officer. All three. At the same time. They could have stayed. They chose not to. Not because of a scandal. Not because they were pushed out. Not because they were tired. Because…

Hi Reader,On Tuesday, the Coinbase CEO fired 700 people. Then he posted his playbook on X. His advice to every other CEO: put 15 or more direct reports under each manager. 15 direct reports per manager is where teams break. Every study on this question agrees. He has just advised every CEO in the world to do exactly that. Here are the numbers. Engagement peaks at around 8 direct reports per manager. Above 15, it drops by a fifth. Amazon averages 6 to 8 per manager. Google runs 7 to 10. Most…