Jason and I have been making the same argument for over a quarter of a century now: Small teams can do incredible things when they embrace their constraints. And when they work in software or media or other intellectual realms, they don't need loads of capital to get going, so they can skip the investor rat race, focus on their edge, and find customers to fund the journey.
With the rise of AI, this argument has never been more potent. When Jason and I got started, you could only do this if you had the skills to build everything with your own hands. You had to be a designer or a programmer to skip taking other people's money. But now, incredibly, The Idea Guy really does have a place and a path.
This old-and-new reality is what I sat down to talk with David Senra about in Malibu. Which was kinda meta, because Senra himself has run our playbook, built an incredible podcast success, and is killing it without investors to answer to as well.
And while it's not just about the money, the money is nice too! That's a central part of this claim. Making "yellow Lamborghini money" is far more achievable when it can be done bootstrapping a business to, say, $5–10M/year in revenue. No venture capitalist is going to let you settle for that! They'd rather kill the business than let it stall out there. It's unicorn or bust.
That's their business model. And it's fine, btw! I've actually come to appreciate far more the fruits of these big bets than I did when we got started. The world needs Shopify, Spotify, and SpaceX, to take just three examples of VC-powered success stories starting with S.
But you have to know what you want. If your aspiration is to run a meaningful part of world commerce or send rockets to Mars, I think you should swing for those fences, knowing that the odds are stacked sorely against you. I'm just not that ambitious!
What I am, at times, is obsessed with quality, control, and independence. And we stayed a "lifestyle business" primarily because Jason and I shared that obsession. Letting nobody tell us no, having zero expectations to carry but our own, and just focusing on building great software with a small team of superb employees with the best odds we could arrange.
Senra and I talk about this in many different ways. Like how James Cameron's original Terminator movie, shot on a shoestring, is a far superior movie to Avatar because of the constraints. Or how this Polish kid Vaxry was able to make a far more compelling window manager from his dormitory than Apple or Microsoft could do with a trillion-dollar market cap. Constraints provide the pressure that produce diamonds.
But we also talked about the bigger threats to business than just whether you take funding or not. How the early 2020s saw a horde of White Walkers march upon the Wall, and how entrepreneurs of all stripes eventually came to see the common threat to capitalism, prosperity, and self-determination in woke menance. And how Marc Andreessen turned out to be pivotal in our personal battle with these malevolent forces. Fate loves irony!
Anyway, if any of these topics resonate, I think you'll appreciate the episode. It's also less demanding on your time than the Lex marathon from last summer, and you'll only be asked for an hour and a half of your time. Enjoy!