Therapy is a product. In the US alone, it sits inside a behavioural health market worth roughly $89 billion a year (Becker’s). It is sold by the hour, week after week, with no label on the box, no score at the end, and no receipt for whether it worked. I have spent the last week…

Send 7 people to therapy, and about 1 of them gets better because of the therapy itself. The other 6 either improve for reasons that have nothing to do with the room, or they do not improve at all. That number comes straight from the field’s own research, once someone bothers to clean it up.…

Product shape is neither necessary nor sufficient. Where shape correlates with survival, the underlying causes are segment knowledge, workflow entrenchment, and a data loop. Shape is the visible surface of the moat, not the moat. I recently read an essay where the author’s argument goes like this. AI application companies have spent four years rotating…

On the difference between getting considered and getting paid. Most of the people arguing about how brands grow are having two different conversations at once, and almost none of them know it. One camp says brands grow by being easy to find: easy to remember, easy to buy, present in more moments. The other says…

Your words are making your decisions for you. In 1889, an Ethiopian emperor and the Kingdom of Italy signed the same treaty in two languages. The two versions agreed on everything except one word. That one word decided whether his country would stay free. His name was Menelik II. The document was the Treaty of…

Part 3 in The Autopilot Corporation series. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. It’s brutally hard to start a company. Anyone who’s done it knows. You spend years looking for the thing — the product, the wedge, the customer who actually pays — and most of those years are quiet. Nobody writes about you. The…