Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

What goes around comes around. I mentioned the SaaS-pocalypse this Spring as panic hit all public SaaS companies. A little time - like with most tech hype cycles - gives better perspective. Sure, some of the no-code names have been impacted as AI agents logically take over those duties.

But the deathknell for Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and others was misguided. Those companies are infrastructure most likely to not be vibe coded away.

Know which is which.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • The bubble paid for the road

  • Which one do they mean?

  • Four questions that still work

  • Don't fund the bubble. Inherit it.

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

I wrote a blog post in December 1999 saying the whole thing was nonsense.

Not because I was clairvoyant. Because the questions were obvious and nobody was asking them. I wrote that it wasn't the New Economy or the Old Economy — it was just the economy. Supply and demand. That "best to market" beats "first to market." That the whole dot-com hype rested on a dollars-for-eyeballs falsity, the belief that if you bought enough market share, profitability would obviously follow.

And I asked, at the time: how many pets do you know who shop for food on the Internet?

Within eighteen months, Pets.com was a Super Bowl ad followed by a liquidation sale.

Here's the part I got wrong, and it's the plot twist.

Many of those ideas weren't wrong. They were just early. Online pet supplies is now Chewy, a multi-billion-dollar business. Grocery delivery killed Webvan and then came back as Instacart. Same ideas. Same customers. Fifteen years apart.

So what changed?

The bubble paid for the road

Barry Ritholtz made a point on My First Million recently that reframed this for me: bubbles are good for the economy. Not for the people in them — for the economy.

Speculative manias finance infrastructure that a rational market would never bankroll. The speculators get wiped out. The infrastructure stays behind, cheap and abundant, for whoever is still standing.

British railway mania in the 1840s ruined a generation of investors. The track they laid is still the backbone of British rail.

The dot-com bust did the same thing with bandwidth. Global Crossing laid enormous quantities of undersea fiber and went bankrupt doing it. That "dark fiber" is what carries your Netflix and this email. Bandwidth costs collapsed in the years after the crash.

And that is why grocery delivery eventually worked. Webvan wasn't a bad idea badly run. It was a good idea running on infrastructure that hadn't been paid for yet. The bubble paid for it. Instacart drove on the road Webvan's investors bought.

Now it's AI data centers. Hundreds of billions pouring into compute warehouses and the power to run them, on a bet about a future nobody can describe precisely.

History says most of that capital doesn't come back. History also says the concrete, the chips, and the transmission lines don't disappear when the money does.

Which one do they mean?

Here's the distinction almost nobody is making - the road is not the traffic.

The infrastructure layer — compute, power, the frontier models themselves — is expensive, overbuilt, and probably durable. It will likely outlive the people currently funding it.

The stuff being built on top of it is still mostly slop.

Those are two completely different bets, and every "AI bubble" headline mashes them into one word. So when you read one, ask which they mean. If they mean the traffic — the four hundred thin wrappers, the AI features bolted onto products that didn't need them, the pitch decks with a chatbot stapled to the side — they're right, and it's going to get worse before it clears.

If they mean the road, history is not on their side.

The pushback you're seeing right now is real and it's earned. But it's aimed at the traffic. Don't let it talk you out of the road.

Four questions that still work

You already own the instrument for this. It's the same one that worked in 1999, and it doesn't require you to understand fabs.

Who actually pays — and would they pay if it weren't free? Nearly every AI product you've been shown is subsidized by someone's venture round. Usage isn't demand.

Is this best to market, or just first? Google wasn't the first search engine. It was the one that worked. First-to-market was the 1999 delusion and it's back, wearing new clothes.

Is the metric real, or a proxy? Back then it was eyeballs and page views. In 2026 it's tokens processed, seats deployed, "AI-assisted workflows." Ask what business result sits underneath. If nobody can name one, there isn't one.

Take the AI out. Does the product get worse? This is the 2026 addition and it's the fastest of the four. If the thing still works with the AI removed, the AI is a press release. If it genuinely breaks — you're looking at something real. Not all of my AI experiments are going to make the cut.

That's the whole filter. And it will sort more of what's coming at you than any amount of technical knowledge.

Don't fund the bubble. Inherit it.

The anxious version says you're late. You missed it. Everyone else is already building.

The Big Picture says something close to the opposite.

You do not want to be early money in a mania. Early money buys the road for everyone else. That's not a tragedy — it's how the road gets built — but it's a job, and it's already taken. Somebody else is doing it, with somebody else's capital, right now.

The position you want is the one you're already in: still standing, watching carefully, with the questions above and no urgent need to bet the retirement account on a company that has "AI" in the name and no customers.

The people who got rich off the railways mostly weren't the railway speculators. They were the businesses that shipped goods on cheap rail afterward.

The last line I wrote in that 1999 column was that common sense makes a most welcome comeback.

It always does. Usually right about now.

Now go launch something 🚀 

CrowdHealth - Healthcare Crowdfunding

Tired of health insurance policies that are confusing and expensive? Join CrowdHealth and finally break free from the insurance system. CrowdHealth is not health insurance. It's an innovative model to use and pay for health care without insurance middlemen and government influence.

Modern Tools

EDGAR Full-Text Search — free, no account, run by the SEC.

Here's the thing about the four questions above: a public company will say almost anything in a press release, because a press release carries no legal liability. Their SEC filings do.

EDGAR lets you search the actual text inside every filing since 2001 — 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, proxies, exhibits, all of it. So when a vendor tells you their AI product is transforming the industry, go read what they told their investors. Search the company, open the most recent 10-K, and read the risk factors. That's where the quiet version lives: whether AI revenue is actually broken out as a line item, or whether it's folded into "other" because there isn't enough of it to name.

It's slow, unglamorous, and written by lawyers. That's the point. Nobody is hyping anything at you inside a 10-K.

SEC.gov | EDGAR Full Text Search

www.sec.gov/edgar/search

Free Knowledge

Ritholtz.com — Barry Ritholtz's blog, running since 2003, free, no signup.

The source for this week's issue. Ritholtz has been writing plainly about market psychology and why smart people lose money for two decades, and his central preoccupation is exactly our theme: the difference between what's actually happening and what everyone is saying is happening.

Start with his "15 Minutes" post from June, which links the My First Million appearance and the bubbles segment.

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.

Visual Crapshoot

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

We all have threads of experience that are still better than anything the machines can create. I am not a designer, but have been interested in how good design improves business for a long time. My client work, my bookshelves and even my old writing (LinkedIn article) all support this interest.

If you’re still on the fence about your encore career move, check the rearview. Your experience thread is also something that outlives new technology.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Old School Wisdom

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

In 1995, people hired us because we designed pretty web pages.

The early web was ugly — most sites looked like a ransom note built in a hurry — but our designers and developers made them look elegant. Once we had 2 or 3 client examples, that became the whole pitch. You could pull up live case studies that just looked better. Being the shop that could make HTML look good was a legitimate differentiator.

Then the tools caught up. WYSIWYG. Flash. CSS. Suddenly every freelancer, ad agency, and design shop could make pretty websites. And the moment everyone could do it, nobody would pay a premium for it. "Pretty" went from rare to commodity almost overnight.

So we moved the craft.

We took the design instincts we already had, blended them with information architecture and plain common sense, and started asking a harder question than does it look good? We asked: does the thing actually work? Can a customer figure it out on their own? Can they do what they came to do without picking up the phone? Do they abandon shopping carts?

That was the new differentiator — and a more durable one, because it was tied to something a business actually cares about.

Here's the belief that ran under all of it: every online site should do one of two things — reduce costs or increase sales. Good design is simply how you get there. A customer who can self-serve is a support call you didn't have to pay for. A customer who never gets lost is a sale you didn't lose. That's not decoration. That's P&L.

We had a simple screen to find friction — three questions:

Where am I? What can I do here? Where can I go from here?

Answer all three without stopping to think, and you've cleared the user path. Hesitate on any one, and you've found exactly where you're bleeding customers — and money.

That discipline built the case studies.

First Union initiated millions of dollars of new loans through their redesigned web site. Creatas told a similar story. That company had a 147% sales increase after redesign. At EDA, we took a data product people found genuinely hard to use, cut the friction, and the first year came back with a 20% revenue lift — a straight increase-sales win.

Same process - three different industries.

None of that was design taste. It was knowing where the friction was and having the judgment to remove the right piece.

Which brings me to 2026 — because I've watched this movie before, and it's playing again.

Pretty got commoditized by better tools. Design thinking became a whole thing. Now AI is commoditizing the production of the work itself. It'll synthesize a pile of interview notes into themes faster than I can. It'll generate five site structures to react to instead of a blank page. It'll draft personas and mock up wireframes in minutes. That's real, and we should use it.

I haven’t designed web sites for years. It’s a commodity that anybody can do. But lots of people are delivering projects and they’re skipping the information architecture or design thinking discussed above.

And that diagnosis is the part AI still can't do.

It can't tell you which friction actually matters to this customer, in this moment, for this business. It'll hand you five wireframes and cannot tell you which one is right. It has no idea when you've done enough discovery to move, and when you're about to build the wrong thing fast.

That's judgment. It doesn't come from the model — it comes from having done this enough times to recognize the pattern on sight. That’s the durable layer.

You've got that same instinct, whatever your field was. It's the thing thirty years builds and no tool copies. So as you build your second-act thing — the site, the product, the offer — let AI draft, let it be fast, then bring the judgment it doesn't have and decide what's right.

This week, run the review on yourself.

Open your own site — your landing page, your product, whatever you're building — and go screen by screen asking the three questions. Where am I? What can I do here? Where can I go from here? Every place your own answer is fuzzy is a place you're losing someone — and probably losing a sale or eating a support call. You don't need an AI to find those. You just need to be honest about what you see.

Your judgment is the one layer that was never a commodity.

Now go launch something 🚀 

CrowdHealth - Healthcare Crowdfunding

Tired of health insurance policies that are confusing and expensive? Join CrowdHealth and finally break free from the insurance system. CrowdHealth is not health insurance. It's an innovative model to use and pay for health care without insurance middlemen and government influence.

Old School Wisdom

The book that made "user-centered design" a phrase people say out loud. Don Norman's core argument is the one above, made decades early: when a door confuses you, or an app loses you, that isn't your failure — it's a design failure. Good design is invisible; you only notice it when it's absent and you're standing there feeling stupid. He spent his career proving that clarity is an engineering discipline, not an aesthetic one. He's also, worth noting, still working and publishing in his late 80s — which tells you where judgment goes when the job is thinking, not typing.

Design of Everyday Things

Revised in 2013, The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. 

Modern Tools

Relume is the cleanest illustration of this week's whole point. You describe what you're building in a sentence or two, and it generates a full sitemap and wireframe structure in about a minute — turning "how do I build this?" into "what should I build?" You're not staring at a blank page; you're reacting to a draft and ruling options out. Which is exactly the right way to use it: let it produce, you decide. The free plan covers one project with AI sitemap and wireframe basics — enough to feel how it works.

Relume — Websites designed & built faster with AI | AI website builder

Use AI as your design ally, not as a replacement. Effortlessly generate sitemaps and wireframes for marketing websites in minutes with Relume’s AI website builder.

www.relume.ai

Free Knowledge

Nielsen Norman Group is more than two decades of research-backed, jargon-free writing on usability and information architecture — the gold standard for "design as function, not decoration." Start with anything on navigation or forms and you'll recognize the three questions in different clothes. No signup, no paywall on the articles. When you're auditing your own site this week and something feels off but you can't name it, this is where you go to name it.

nngroup.com/articles

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.

Visual Crapshoot

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

When we cleaned out our house to move, I had to make a lot of hard decisions about books. We still probably moved more than we should have, but the business books that made the cut are foundational. (see Greene in Mastery or Maister in Agency of One) That kind of thinking rarely goes out of style.

Another of the keepers is Peter Druckers’ classic, the Effective Executive. He was right 60 years ago, and today his time problem can easily be solved with AI.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Peter Drucker diagnosed this in 1966.

The Effective Executive isn't really a book about managing other people. It's a book about managing yourself, and its central claim is blunt: nothing else you manage matters if you haven't managed your time first. Not the strategy. Not the talent. Not the plan.

Then he handed you three steps.

• Record

• Prune

• Consolidate

For sixty years, most people got hung up during step two.

Record where the hours actually go.

Drucker's instruction was to log it in real time — not from memory — because the gap between where you think your time goes and where it actually goes is always wider than you'd guess. He watched executives swear they spent their days on strategy, then found they'd spent them on scheduling.

I read Drucker and asked 1990’s web designers and coders to record their time in 15-minute increments to better calculate web development pricing. Everybody hated it. I especially hated how few hours per day got recorded against billable client work.

This part is easier today. Your calendar, your inbox, and your browser history already know. Hand a month of it to an AI and ask a cold question: what did I actually spend my time on, and what did any of it produce? You'll get a straighter answer than a legal pad ever gave you.

And it stings a little.

Prune what doesn't need your judgment.

This is the step that always broke. Eliminate it, delegate it, or systematize it — fine advice, except that for most people, most of the time, there was nobody to delegate to. So the low-value work stayed on your desk.

That constraint is gone.

First-pass research. The rough draft. The summary of the sixty-page report. The formatting, the follow-up, the spreadsheet cleanup. None of it requires thirty years of judgment. It requires some simple instructions to the machine.

Microsoft surveyed 20,000 people using AI at work this year, and 66% said it had freed them up for higher-value work. For once the survey matches the experience.

2026 Work Trend Index report: Agents, human agency, and opportunity

As AI and agents take on execution, our own agency expands. The question is whether organizations are built to capture it.

Consolidate what's left.

This is the step that Drucker cared about most.

Freed time is not the same as discretionary time. Ninety minutes recovered in fifteen-minute slivers isn't ninety minutes — it's just noise with better tooling. Real work happens in blocks. He said so in 1966 and nobody's disproved it since.

So the hours have to be gathered, not scattered. One long morning beats five interrupted ones.

That same Microsoft report has a finding buried under the headlines, and it's the most useful thing in it: the biggest predictor of whether AI actually pays off for someone isn't their skill. It's their organization.

Culture, manager support, how the company evaluates people — those accounted for roughly twice the impact of the individual's own mindset and behavior.

Ten percent of the people they surveyed landed in a bucket Microsoft calls blocked agency: sharp operators who'd built real capability and had nowhere to put it. And 45% said it felt safer to just hit this quarter's numbers than to redesign how the work gets done.

Read that as an employee and it's depressing.

Read it as someone building their own thing and it's the entire argument.

You are the culture. You are the manager. You are the talent practice. There's no committee quietly reabsorbing the four hours you just freed up. Nobody books a status call into your consolidated morning. The two-thirds of that equation everyone else is losing to — you own outright.

Drucker was writing for the executive inside the institution, and he knew the institution was the enemy of the calendar. Half his time problem was other people's claims on his hours. He was solving for the person who couldn't leave.

You can leave. Some of you already have.

So the three steps land differently now. Record, because you finally have something that'll tell you the truth. Prune, because for the first time in your career the work that doesn't need your judgment can go somewhere else. Consolidate, because you're the only one holding the pen on your own calendar.

Alan Waxman runs one of the larger credit businesses on the planet and still writes a one-page personal business plan by hand every year — then puts AI to work against it.

Handwritten intent. Machine execution.

That's the whole thing in four words. Drucker's practices were always right. The constraint underneath them was the part he had to concede.

You don't.

This week: run step one. Pull the last thirty days of your calendar, hand it to an AI, and ask what it actually bought you. Everything else follows from the answer.

Now go launch something 🚀 

CrowdHealth - Healthcare Crowdfunding

Tired of health insurance policies that are confusing and expensive? Join CrowdHealth and finally break free from the insurance system. CrowdHealth is not health insurance. It's an innovative model to use and pay for health care without insurance middlemen and government influence.

Modern Tools

Reclaim.ai — the consolidate step, automated.

Blocking focus time on your own calendar works right up until a meeting lands on top of it. Reclaim connects to Google or Outlook and defends those blocks continuously — when something gets booked over your deep work, it moves the block instead of dropping it. It also shows you where your week actually went, which doubles as Drucker's step one.

Free tier is genuinely usable for a solo operator. Owned by Dropbox since 2024.

Reclaim – AI Calendar for Work & Life

Reclaim is an AI-powered app that creates 40% more time for teams — auto-schedule tasks, habits, meeting & breaks – free on Google Calendar & Outlook Calendar.

reclaim.ai

Old School Wisdom

Sixty years in print and still the least dated management book on my shelf. Drucker's argument was that effectiveness is a discipline — five learnable practices, no exceptional talent required. Time management is the first one, because it's the one that gates all the others.

The "executive" language reads dated. Ignore it. He meant anyone whose work is thinking.

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

Amazon.com: Peter Drucker - The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)

Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

Free Knowledge

If The Effective Executive is the full course, this is the twelve-page version — and it's perfect for anyone building a second act. Drucker's argument: companies don't manage your career anymore, so you have to be your own chief executive.

Managing Oneself

As Peter Drucker tells us in this seminal article first published in 1999, it means we have to learn to develop ourselves. We have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution to our organizations and communities. And we have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do.

Harvard Business Review

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

There is more - not less - data that shows that old folks rule.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll, like or comment below to let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Here's a twist for the AI economy: your most valuable asset is the thirty years of judgment sitting behind your eyes.

I've been stewing on this a lot lately. Because in September I’m participating on a panel about AI, and every time the subject comes up, someone in the room — usually someone our age — will ask the quiet question underneath all the others: Is this the thing that finally makes me obsolete?

Short answer: no.

The longer answer is more interesting, and the data is on our side.

Start with the founding myth. We've all absorbed the story that startups belong to twenty-somethings in hoodies. Great story. Factually wrong. When researchers at MIT and the Census Bureau went through 2.7 million company founders, the average age of the most successful ones wasn't 25. It was 45. A 50-year-old is more than twice as likely to build a runaway success as a 30-year-old. A 60-year-old is three times as likely.

The 20-year-old entrepreneur is a lie | MIT Sloan

Data shows the average age of successful business founders is 45.

MIT Sloan

You didn't miss your window.

The fear says AI replaces people. The companies actually spending real money on it are doing the opposite — they're hiring. PwC combed through more than a billion global job ads this year and found the most AI-exposed firms grew headcount faster than everyone else — and paid higher wages while they did it. A separate study of 21,000-plus companies found the heaviest adopters grew their workforce around 10%, entry-level roles included. This isn't the machine quietly emptying the building.

2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer

AI is driving higher productivity, wage, and job growth in leading companies. It’s accelerating skill shifts and transforming entry-level roles, with AI-powered jobs growing faster and requiring advanced skills, creating a two-track labour market.

PwC • PricewaterhouseCoopers

In that same PwC data, the skills getting rewarded fastest are judgment and leadership — the stuff that can't be prompted.

AI handles the codifiable work; it can't make the call. It can't read the room, price the deal, or know which of three plausible answers is the one that won't blow up in six months. That's judgment. It doesn't come from a model. It comes from having been wrong a hundred times and remembering exactly how each one felt.

For the first time in a while, the market is paying a premium for the exact asset you've spent a career accumulating.

The kid with the AI tool can generate ten drafts a minute. You're the one who knows which draft is right — and why.

That's a moat. Not the tool. The tool is a commodity — everybody has it by Tuesday. The moat is knowing what to point it at.

And the tailwind is real. AARP's latest count puts the 50-plus economy at $12.5 trillion a year — big enough, on its own, to be the world's third-largest economy. The market isn't aging away from you. It's aging toward you. (Free Knowledge below.)

So stop treating AI like the threat and start treating it like the junior analyst you never got to hire. Let it do the first pass — the research, the draft, the grunt work. You do the part that took three decades to learn: the judgment call. Your pattern recognition plus its horsepower is a combination a 28-year-old simply can't assemble yet. They'll get there. Not this decade.

You're not racing the machine.

You're the one holding the reins.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

NotebookLM — point the AI at your knowledge, not the internet's.

Upload your old proposals, board decks, contracts, that folder of hard-won notes — and NotebookLM turns thirty years of your material into something you can ask questions of. "What did I argue the last time a deal looked like this?"

NotebookLM

It answers from your files, with citations. It's the closest thing yet to making your own experience searchable. Free to start.

notebooklm.google.com

How 2M+ Professionals Stay Ahead on AI

AI is moving fast and most people are falling behind. 

The Rundown AI keeps you ahead of the curve. 

It's a free AI newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on the latest AI news, and teaches you how to apply it in just 5 minutes a day.

Plus, complete the quiz after signing up and they’ll recommend the best AI tools, guides, and courses — tailored to your needs.

Sign up to start learning.

Free Knowledge

AARP's Longevity Economy Outlook 2026 — the market tailwind in one report.

The headline number: adults 50-plus now drive $12.5 trillion in annual U.S. economic activity, up more than $2 trillion since 2018, projected to nearly double by 2060. If you're building something — especially for the 50-plus customer — this is the demand curve, documented.

The Longevity Economy® Outlook

People age 50 and older are fueling economic growth, stimulating jobs, and creating opportunities for all.

AARP

Recommendations

🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

After months of experimenting and writing about AI, this week’s riff is back to a foundational entrepreneurial canon: accountability.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

I stood in front of a bathroom mirror at 6 a.m., company bleeding cash, and said it out loud: "You messed this up. You need to fix it."

Nobody else heard it. No investors. No board to perform for. Just me and the one person actually responsible for how my company was performing.

That's the whole newsletter, really.

Accountability is having a moment. From the Department of Government Efficiency to Congress creating an ‘AI Accountability Agenda’ to states finally following the law, the political winds are shifting.

It's also all over the founder podcasts. Jocko Willink built an entire doctrine around it. The All In guys keep circling back to it. Marc Andreessen won't stop talking about "agency" and being a live player who takes the shot and owns the outcome.

Here's the thing they're really saying: accountability never went out of style. It just got muted while everyone was busy being victims: blaming the algorithm, the funding environment, the co-founder, the timing, the economy, whatever.

You already knew that. You've been in the room where the finger-pointing started — and watched exactly nothing get fixed. You've also been in the room where somebody finally said "this one's on me," and felt the whole thing lurch back into motion. You didn't learn ownership from a book.

The cleanest illustration is a story Jocko tells. A night mission in Ramadi goes wrong — a friendly-fire incident, the worst kind of failure, a tangle of mistakes made by a lot of different people. When the review comes, Willink, the commander, stands up in front of his superiors and says the failure is his. Not the new guy's. Not the fog of war. His.

The paradox is what happened next: they trusted him more, not less. Radical ownership didn't read as weakness. It read as authority.

That's the part the mirror teaches you that a whiteboard never will. Owning the outcome isn't the humiliating end of a conversation. It's the only credible place to start one.

Andreessen's version of this is all forward motion — be the person who does the thing, take the shot, own the result. I've been a fan since I tried (and failed) to get Netscape IPO shares through my broker. His instincts about technology have been right for thirty years. But his is the outward half of ownership: act, decide, move.

The mirror is the inward half. Act, yes — but first be honest with yourself about why the last thing didn't work. That's the edge you've got that a 26-year-old founder hasn't earned yet. You can look at your own decision and see it clearly, without needing it to be someone else's fault to protect your ego. That's not weakness either. That's thirty years of being wrong often enough to finally afford the truth.

Accountability that stops at the mirror is just a more polite word for guilt. The confession isn't the point. The confession is the starting gun.

If your thing is struggling — the consulting practice that's gone quiet, the product that isn't moving, the newsletter that's flat — "it's my fault" is only useful if the next sentence is "so here's what I'm changing." Owning it means you're also the one allowed to fix it. And fixing it almost never means grinding harder on the thing that isn't working. It means moving.

In the old days of owning a service business that meant cutting expenses, firing people, collecting outstanding invoices and trying to drum up some new business.

As a solopreneur you can:

• Pivot your offer.

• Switch the audience.

• Add the service people keep asking you for.

• Kill the feature nobody uses.

Get in front of what your customers are actually going to buy — not what you decided eighteen months ago. And you can do all of that this afternoon.

The market doesn't care whose fault it is. It only rewards the person who noticed early and turned the wheel. You've turned that wheel before — in bigger jobs, with more people watching. The only difference now is that the wheel is yours.

So this week, one honest question in the mirror: What's not working, and what am I actually going to change about it?

Not "who can I blame." Not "what's the market doing to me." Just — what's the turn?

Own it.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

You can't pivot toward what customers will buy if you're only guessing what they'll buy. So stop guessing and ask them — this week, in under an hour.

Try Tally, a free, clean form builder that doesn't look like SurveyMonkey circa 2009. Build a three-question form:

1. What's the one problem in [your area] you'd happily pay to make disappear?

2. What have you already tried, and why didn't it stick?

3. If I built something that fixed it, what would "worth it" cost?

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Send it to fifty people on your list. You're not looking for a landslide — you're looking for the same sentence showing up three times. That sentence is your next offer.

Bonus move: paste the responses into ChatGPT and ask it to cluster them into themes. Ten minutes of reading turns into a product roadmap.

Talk to your AI tools the way you'd talk to a colleague.

You don't send a colleague a three-word brief. You explain the context, the constraints, what you've already tried. But typing all that into ChatGPT takes forever — so you don't.

Wispr Flow lets you speak your prompts instead. Talk through your thinking naturally and get clean, paste-ready text. No filler words. No cleanup. Just detailed prompts that actually get you useful answers on the first try.

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Free Knowledge

This is where Jocko’s Ramadi story lives, told by the man who was standing there. Fair warning — it's raw, and it's about war. But the leadership point translates cleanly to a struggling practice, a stalled product, or a quarter that missed: when the person in charge takes ownership, problems start getting solved. When they don't, everyone stays busy and nothing moves.

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🏢 Retirepreneur : Your guide to turning decades of experience into profitable consulting, coaching, or course businesses, without risking your retirement security.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🧾 Redefining Retirement : Too Young to Retire, Too Old To Take Orders? Yeah, Me Too.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back from the 250th July 4th weekend! 🇺🇸 

Is the AI race really taking jobs? Not so fast my friends. 3 months ago, I bought the narrative too, but the actual data (Ramp data 21,000+ firms) is showing something interesting: companies who have embraced the new technology have actually grown headcount. It’s nuanced.

And this week’s example – Ford Motor Company – shows exactly why.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Do you ‘own’ your solution?

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Technology should not be the main character.

I've been saying this for thirty years, across four different technology waves: the web, mobile, blockchain, and now AI. It's literally a commodity. It gets hyped early in every cycle, but the value is always somewhere else.

Ford just handed us undeniable proof in a 2026 case study.

Three years ago, Ford went all-in on AI for vehicle quality control — automated design review, smart cameras, the works. Then the results came in:

• recalls up

• dependability rankings down

• warranty costs climbing

So this spring, Ford rehired 350 veteran engineers — what the company itself nicknamed its "gray beard" hires — to fix what the automation alone couldn't catch.

Ford Hiring 350 Engineers After AI Failed Shows Human Value In AI Era

Ford rehired 350 engineers after AI systems failed to maintain quality. The decision is attributed to lead in JD Power's ranking for the first time in 16 years.

Forbes • Joe Toscano

The fix wasn't "add more AI." It was put experienced human judgment back in the loop, rebuild the data feeding the AI, and let the veterans mentor both the junior staff and the machines.

The payoff: Ford topped the JD Power Initial Quality Study for the first time since 2010.

Here's the truth from Ford's own VP of engineering that should be shared in every company chasing an "AI-native" strategy: they'd assumed that feeding design requirements into AI would automatically produce a high-quality product. It didn't.

AI could execute. It couldn't judge.

Ford rehires experienced engineers after AI misses the mark

Ford rehired about 300 veteran engineers after AI tools failed to match human expertise, helping the automaker top the JD Power 2026 Initial Quality Study.

Fox Business

That's the thesis I’ve been trying to write this year. AI execution gets cheaper and more commoditized every single quarter — that's not a prediction, that's just what happened to the web, to mobile apps, to cloud compute, and every other tool before it.

What doesn't commoditize is the judgment about whether the output is actually right. Whether it solves the real problem. Whether you'd stake your name on it.

That judgment is what Ford's veteran engineers had and the automated systems didn't. It's also, not coincidentally, exactly what you're sitting on after thirty-plus years in the room when things went right or wrong.

Launch Key has been expounding on this recently:

• Mastery is in high demand

• How to win when everyone has AI

• Your agency of one

Do you ‘own’ your solution?

There's also an important wrinkle worth paying attention to, even if it doesn't change your week: the AI vendor landscape had its own reminder recently that "rented" and "owned" aren't the same thing.

Anthropic Fable got pulled offline for a few weeks, then restored — and in that window, a wave of open-source competitors, several from Chinese labs, made CIO’s and technologists question the true costs. This preview of regulatory oversight was a warning. Many smart operators quietly asked the same question: what happens to my business if the tool I'm renting changes terms, price, or access overnight?

Are local models the future? And strategically, can the models vendor use my intellectual capital to build a future competitor? Alex Karp, Palantir CEO, unloaded on Squawkbox on corporate being furious about the current situation (Free Knowledge).

We’ve seen similar technology stories in the past. Remember WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3? Once Microsoft deployed the Windows platform they essentially replaced those market leaders with their own Excel and Word.

Or the 90’s new tech, should I build my own web site? And then later, could I trust outside vendors for applications and hosting? And then back to, building internal departments to manage all of that once it had become mission critical. Skunkworks grow to critical. They get moved to some outsource provider. We question security and who owns our intellectual capital and then move those proprietary apps back inside the firewall. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

You don't need to solve that this week. But you should know the answer for your own practice. If your system of record, your consulting engine, your content pipeline, or your product roadmap assumes uninterrupted access to one AI vendor, forever, at today's price — that's a dependency worth documenting, not panicking about.

Here's the actual takeaway, and it's simpler than it sounds: don't confuse the tool with the value.

The tools will continue to change — always have, always will. What you built over thirty years of pattern recognition, judgment calls, and knowing which fires are real and which ones burn out on their own — that's not something any model, rented or owned, can replicate. That's the part of your business worth protecting first.

Bet on your judgment. It's the one thing that was never for rent.

Now go launch something 🚀 

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Old School Wisdom

Greene's core argument is that true mastery — the fused, intuitive pattern recognition that separates experts from true masters — only comes from roughly 10,000–20,000 hours of deeply engaged practice, not raw talent or a tool.

Mastery: Robert Greene

The bestseller author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War - Robert Greene has spent a lifetime studying the laws of power. Now, he shares the secret path to greatness. With this seminal text as a guide, readers will learn how to unlock the passion within and become masters.

Free Knowledge

During the nearly 20-minute segment, Alex Karp launched into a tirade against rival AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, accusing them of an "effing insane" business model that overcharges clients for tokens while harvesting proprietary data and compromising U.S. national security. He stated that "something has gone completely wrong" with how AI is sold, arguing that enterprises are losing their competitive "alpha" and that relying on Silicon Valley consensus for military technology is dangerous. 

‘You Sound Pretty Angry’: CNBC Anchor Left Stunned as Palantir CEO Blows His Stack During Wild Interview

Karp launched into a sprawling broadside on the AI industry as he argued that enterprise and government clients had lost confidence in top AI model developers.

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

Visual Crapshoot

For eighteen weeks, I've run the same poll at the bottom of each newsletter. One question: What's holding you back from building something of your own?

The answer hasn't changed.

Week after week, the same response comes out on top — fear of financial risk. Not wanting to gamble the retirement you spent thirty-five years building. A close second: I'm not tech savvy enough.

Here's the thing. Both of those fears are real. And both of them are built on the same wrong assumption.

The assumption is that starting a business means betting your nest egg on a coin flip — that you have to drain a 401(k), sign a personal guarantee, or learn to code before you can earn a dollar. That's the version of entrepreneurship you see in the headlines. A 25-year-old raises a seed round, burns it, and either becomes a billionaire or a cautionary tale.

That's not your path. And confusing that kind of risk with the kind of building most late-career professionals actually do is keeping a lot of capable people parked on the sidelines.

Let's take the fear seriously — and then let's take it apart.

The fear is rational. The framing is wrong.

I want to be clear: the instinct to protect your retirement is correct. If you're 58, you do not have the runway a 28-year-old has. A bad bet at 28 costs you a few years. A bad bet at 58 can cost you the years you can't get back.

The financial advisors quoted in every "should you start a business after 50" article are right about one thing. As one CFO put it bluntly, the real question is: how much money can you lose and still live the retirement you want?

The honest answer for most people is: not much. And that's fine — because the kind of startups I write about every week doesn't require you to lose much, or risk much, at all.

The mistake is treating "start a business" as one thing. It isn't. There's a canyon between founding a venture-funded startup and turning your expertise into income. One requires capital, runway, and a tolerance for failure. The other requires a laptop and the thirty years already in your head.

The financial risk you're afraid of lives almost entirely in the first category. And you don't have to play that game.

Where the danger actually is — and how to stay out of it

Let's name the genuinely dangerous moves, because they're real and worth avoiding.

The most dangerous is funding a business directly out of retirement accounts. There's a whole industry built around helping you do this — rollover schemes that let you tap a 401(k) tax-free and penalty-free to capitalize a business. They sound clever. They are also how people lose everything. The IRS has tracked these arrangements for years, and some people who used them lost not only the retirement assets they accumulated, but their dream of owning a business, too.

The financial planner's rule on this is one I'd tattoo on the inside of every aspiring founder's eyelids: retirement funds should never be used to fund or secure a business, because that money is typically irreplaceable. Ask me how I know this.

Don’t fall in that trap. Here's how you simply walk around it:

Don't touch the retirement accounts. At all. Not as capital, not as collateral, not as a personal guarantee. Wall them off completely. The business either funds itself or it stays small until it can.

Set a number you can lose. Decide, before you start, the maximum you're willing to spend that would not change your retirement one bit. For most people building the kind of thing I describe below, that number is in the hundreds of dollars, not the tens of thousands.

Watch for escalating commitment. This is the quiet killer — the pattern where you set a budget, things go slower than hoped, and you keep pushing your limit just a little more to avoid admitting it isn't working. One entrepreneurship professor described needing strong-willed advisers who can help you avoid this error. If you don't have an adviser, a spouse, a friend, or a hard pre-committed number will do. The point is that someone or something stops you from chasing a sunk cost with money you can't replace.

Do those three things and you've eliminated the financial risk that keeps people up at night. Not reduced it — eliminated the catastrophic version of it. What's left is the risk of spending a few hundred dollars and some weekends on something that might not work. That's not a threat to your retirement. That's a hobby budget.

The low-capital path is the one that actually fits you

Here's what the fear obscures: the businesses that work best for experienced professionals are also the cheapest to start.

You are not opening a restaurant. You're not buying inventory, signing a commercial lease, or hiring staff. The encore careers that play to your strengths — consulting, fractional work, digital products, a paid newsletter, a course built on what you already know — have near-zero startup cost. Your capital is your experience, and you already paid for that.

This isn't wishful thinking. It's what the data shows about how older founders actually win. One advisor's recommendation for retirement-age entrepreneurs is to focus on ventures that require little to no startup capital. Another points out the obvious-once-you-hear-it move: many older entrepreneurs don't need the financial cushion of outside funding at all, because they can start lean and grow from revenue.

And the irony in the whole "is it too risky at my age" debate? Your age is the asset, not the liability. The research keeps landing in the same place: people launching a business at age 50 are twice as likely to succeed as their 30-year-old counterparts, and the probability of being solidly profitable rises further with age after that. More than half of U.S. small businesses are owned by people 55 and older. The merry-go-round narrative — that this is a young person's game — is not just wrong. It's backwards.

You bring the thing money can't buy and a 28-year-old can't fake: the wisdom, experience and network built up over the course of a long career. Thirty years of pattern recognition. A rolodex. The judgment to know which problems are worth solving. That's the moat.

So the reframe is this: the safest version of starting a business — low capital, revenue-funded, built on existing expertise — is also the version that suits you best. The risky version was never yours to begin with.

A practical way to de-risk: start it on the side

You don't have to leap. The smartest move is also the most boring one — keep one foot planted while you test the water.

Starting lean, as a side project, allows you to limit the risk while building confidence. You keep your income (or your retirement intact), you spend evenings and weekends validating whether anyone will actually pay for what you're offering, and you only lean in once it's working. No bridge burned. No nest egg touched.

This is also the antidote to the income-pressure trap. A lot of would-be founders set themselves up to fail by needing the business to pay them immediately. It rarely does — on average it takes a couple of years to turn real profit. If you're building on the side, that timeline is fine. You're not depending on it to eat. You're letting it prove itself on its own clock.

A simple structure:

• Decide your loss limit — the amount that wouldn't dent your retirement (for most of these businesses, very little).

• Test before you build — talk to potential customers, pre-sell, or run a tiny version before you invest real time or money.

• Build from revenue — let the first dollars fund the next step, instead of fronting capital you can't get back.

• Scale only when it's working — the data is in before you change anything about your financial life.

That's not gambling. That's how experienced operators have always de-risked a decision. You did versions of this your entire career. You're just doing it for yourself now.

"But I'm not tech savvy enough"

This was the #2 fear in the poll, and it deserves a direct answer: you are tech savvy enough. You're reading this, aren't you?

The honest truth is that the tools got radically easier while you weren't looking. You don't need to code. You don't need to be a "tech guru" to run a real business today — the tools are more user-friendly than ever, and there's a wealth of free resources available to help you learn. A website, an email list, a way to take payment — these are now drag-and-drop. The barrier that existed fifteen years ago is gone.

Three things make the tech objection mostly dissolve:

Learn one tool at a time. You don't need to master a stack. The advice that works is to start with what's essential — like setting up a website or managing social media — and build from there. One tool. Then the next. You learned far harder things in your career.

Delegate the rest. You spent decades knowing what to do yourself and what to hand off — that skill doesn't expire. As one guide puts it, that doesn't mean you have to become a tech guru to become a successful entrepreneur. Learn the basics; pay someone (or ask a family member) for the rest. Knowing what not to learn is a senior skill, not a junior one.

AI changed the math entirely. This is the part that genuinely wasn't true a few years ago. A range of low- and no-cost tools — AI assistants, scheduling, design, writing help — can now help you establish, manage and promote your business at no or low cost. The tasks that used to require a hire or a contractor, you can now do yourself in an afternoon. Being "not technical" costs you less today than at any point in history.

The tech objection, like the money objection, shrinks the moment you stop picturing the venture-backed-startup version and start picturing the version that's actually yours.

What this all comes down to

Both fears in that poll point at the same ghost: a version of entrepreneurship that was never going to be your path.

The venture gamble that drains your savings — not yours. The technical complexity that requires you to become someone you're not — not yours either.

What's left, once you set those down, is something much simpler and much safer.

• a business built on what you already know

• started with money you can afford to lose

• run on tools that didn't exist when the fear first took root

• tested on the side before you commit to anything

That's not a bet against your retirement. Done right, it's the opposite — it's a second income stream that protects it.

The fear was never irrational. It was just aimed at the wrong target. You were protecting your nest egg from a risk you were never required to take.

So the question isn't can I afford to start? For the path that fits you, the honest answer is yes — almost anyone can.

The real question is the one you've been avoiding because the fear made it feel reckless: what would you build if you knew your retirement was never on the line?

Because it doesn't have to be.

Now go launch something 🚀 

Every Tuesday morning, Launch Key delivers one practical idea for executives building their next chapter — digital products, AI tools, career portfolios, and the mindset to make it real. 18,000+ subscribers. Free forever.

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Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

I know I keep harping on the fact that experienced professionals have unique opportunities. But this week’s riff is on proactive thinking when a job cut is imminent. And we have all felt when one of those was imminent.

Similar to Keeping Your Day Job, Severance can also be seed capital to the thing you really should be doing.

But only if you stop procrastinating.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Layoff Prep

  • Proactive Movement

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

You know the person who just exploded in a new direction after a corporate layoff?

They saw the writing on the wall:

• the frozen headcount

• the reorg memo with the suspiciously vague language

• the project that went quiet without explanation

Instead of waiting for HR to schedule a meeting, they spent three months quietly getting ready. When the email finally came, it wasn't a crisis. It was rocket fuel.

A thousand people upvoted a similar reddit thread. You already know why.

2026 Tech Layoffs Tracker: 185,894 Workers Impacted

Track 2026 tech layoffs in real-time. 267 layoff events have impacted 185,894 workers so far. See which companies are cutting jobs.

Layoffs aren't just a tech-sector story anymore.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted more than 1.1 million announced job cuts at the end of 2025 — the highest level since the Great Recession — and 2026 is running hotter. What Glassdoor has started calling "forever layoffs" — constant small-batch cuts of fewer than 50 people that don't make headlines but absolutely destroy team morale — now account for more than half of all WARN Act filings.

The restructuring email isn't a one-time event any more, it's more of an operating mode.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. | Outplacement & Career Transitioning Services

When career transitions happen, we deliver the bounce back Help employees land strong Provide the support people need to take the next step with outplacement programs that work for every career stage. Explore company solutions your next move Starts here If your former employer provided...

For workers over 50, the math is meaner. AARP puts 38 million older adults still in the workforce. They hold senior roles, carry the institutional knowledge, and earn the salaries that show up first on a cost-reduction spreadsheet. And while the panicans are all screeching that AI is taking their jobs, the reality is that corporations are bloated. And the fact is that removing larger salaries makes a bigger impact.

Here's what the outplacement industry doesn’t say: waiting for the email is the wrong strategy.

Layoff Prep

Most people hear "prepare for a layoff" and picture updating a résumé or looking across the street for similar jobs. That's not the preparation I'm talking about.

I'm talking about something that takes about a weekend per month spread over the next quarter — and turns the single worst-case scenario in your career into the one you actually planned for. Not by predicting it. By making it irrelevant.

Call it a parachute portfolio. Four components, none of which require you to quit your job or tip off your employer.

A consulting offer. One sentence. Not a deck, not a website, not an LLC. One sentence that says what you do, for whom, and what changes for them afterward. If you can't write that sentence yet, the exercise of trying to write it will tell you more about your next chapter than any career coach.

A product stub. The thing you already know cold — the framework, the checklist, the model, the playbook — written down once and priced. A rough first version beats a perfect someday version by several years and several thousand dollars of foregone revenue. This newsletter started as a rough first version.

A warm list. Not your LinkedIn connections. The 25 people who would actually pick up the phone — former colleagues, clients, collaborators — who'd take a meeting, make an introduction, or send you a check if you told them what you were building. Most people dramatically underestimate how many of these they have.

A runway number. The specific month count you can operate before this thing has to generate income. Knowing it precisely is the difference between building with calm and building with panic. The severance package you're trying to avoid needing? It's already calculated in this number. That's the point.

Proactive Movement

Every piece of career advice aimed at our demographic either treats a layoff as a catastrophe or a reinvention opportunity. Both sides miss the same thing: the people who land best aren't the ones who react fastest after the email — they're the ones who were already moving before it arrived.

It’s far less dramatic than a layoff, but at 60 when I started this newsletter I was limping around on a failed hip waiting for replacement surgery. I used the last 3 months of discomfort to create a new part-time product based on a skill (writing) that had been an ancillary part of my career. 145 weeks later, here we are.

Your severance package, if it comes, is not a settlement for lost income. It's seed capital for the thing you should have been building anyway. The question isn't whether you can survive the email. It's whether you're ready to treat it as a launch date.

Two weeks ago I wrapped up an Innovation series writing that your day job is your funding round. This is the same move with a tighter clock.

But - the funding round doesn't last forever. Use it to build the thing that doesn't need it.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

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Old School Wisdom

You’ve all probably read Spencer Johnson’s book. The mouse who survives isn't the one who waits at the empty station. He's the one who started moving before the cheese ran out.

Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

A timeless business classic, Who Moved My Cheese? uses a simple parable to reveal profound truths about dealing with change so that you can enjoy less stress and more success in your work and in your life.

Free Knowledge

Need more fodder for your late-career startup? An MIT study analyzed 2.7 million startup founders and found that a 50-year-old entrepreneur is twice as likely to build a massively successful company as a 30-year-old. A 60-year-old is three times as likely.

The Late-Career Entrepreneur: Why Starting After 50 Is a Competitive Advantage | Launch Key

A 60-year-old is 3x more likely to build a successful startup than a 30-year-old. The data on late-career entrepreneurship is clear — and the media keeps ignoring it.

Recommendations

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

As we hit peak summer travel, I’m taking a different angle on my opinion to use what you know (See 12 Encore Career Ideas).

Every week my research agent pulls Reddit topics with trending Google search threads. And this one has resurfaced multiple times over the past 3 months. Many people want to learn new things in their late innings.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Apprentice Yourself to Your Next Chapter

  • The Beginner's Mind Venture

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

This isn't really about retirement.

But my research agent keeps surfacing the same r/retirement thread, week after week — and the comments underneath it aren't coming from people who are done. They're coming from people who are restless. Three hundred and ten comments deep, the same sentiment keeps repeating:

Here's the part that should bother you a little: the people writing this spent thirty-plus years becoming the person everyone else learned from. They earned the corner office, the reputation, the "go ask him" status. And the thing they're quietly chasing now is the exact opposite seat — back of the room, hand raised, figuring it out.

There's a name for that pull. Shoshin — beginner's mind. And the uncomfortable research behind it says expertise comes with a tax: the more you know, the more your mind closes to what you don't. You stop asking the dumb question. You pattern-match the new thing to the old thing — and miss what's actually different about it.

How to cultivate ‘shoshin’, or a beginner’s mind | Psyche Guides

It’s easy for the mind to become closed to new ideas. Cultivating a beginner’s mind helps us rediscover the joy of learning

I've watched sharp people pay that tax. The executive who "already knows how this plays out," right up until the market does something it's never done before. Expertise that should've been a telescope quietly becomes a pair of blinders.

Beginner's mind is how you keep the telescope and lose the blinders.

Apprentice Yourself to Your Next Chapter

This translates to a lot of moments well before anyone hands you a gold watch.

I did it at 27 — walked away from the workforce to start over in grad school, deliberately changing direction as a noob. A golden parachute does it. A downsizing package does it. An unexpected layoff does it the hard way. Every one of those is a door marked new chapter, whether you chose it or not.

The reflex in all of them is to reach for what you already know — monetize the expertise, lead with the résumé, find the role that looks like the last role. Sometimes that's exactly right. But the false binary hiding inside "monetize your expertise" advice is that you have to pick: cash in the pattern recognition or feel like a beginner again. You don't.

Watch what the few good articles actually describe. One retiree profiled by Next Avenue (see Free Knowledge below) had run businesses for decades — and went looking for digital marketing and AI training anyway, free courses through LinkedIn Learning. He didn't throw away the judgment. He stayed expert at what matters and went beginner at a new tool.

At 54 I went genuinely beginner on blockchain — built EnergyXchain around energy-commodity provenance, won an NSF grant, learned a technology stack I'd never touched, and came out the other side with a few patents for the trouble. I was the oldest person in my cohort (and one of my co-founders was even older!) Didn't matter. Thirty years of pattern recognition told us which parts of the hype were real and which were noise — that was our edge — and the beginner's-mind curiosity is what got us in the room to begin with.

Same story with this newsletter. I watched my son build an audience from nothing and thought, if he can do it, why can't I? Then I apprenticed myself to a craft — email, audience, the whole creator-economy machine — that didn't exist when I started my career.

That's the idea worth remembering. Apprentice yourself to the new craft — AI, content, community, whatever's unfamiliar — and let the old expertise do the thing it's always done: tell you, faster than anyone half your age, which parts matter and which parts are just noise.

The Beginner's Mind Venture

So here's the test: can you build something that feels like beginner's mind but pays like expert judgment?

Not a $15-an-hour shift to fill the calendar. Nothing wrong with the barista job — but it trades your hours for someone else's dollars, and you've done plenty of that. I'm talking about a small bet where you're genuinely new — new tool, new format, new audience — while thirty years of judgment runs the controls underneath: knowing what to ship, what to kill, what to ignore, who to trust.

That's the part the 25-year-old can't fake. They get the beginner's mind for free, but they're missing the judgment. You have to choose the beginner's mind — and you already own the judgment outright. Put the two together and you've built something neither a kid nor a coasting expert can.

And unlike the hourly gig, the right beginner's-mind venture compounds. A course, a product, an audience, a stake in something — they keep paying after you've closed the laptop for the day. Curiosity pointed at something that builds equity instead of just filling time.

You're not too late. You're loaded and still learning. That's the rarest seat in the room.

That combination is the actual unlock.

Now go launch something 🚀 

The Free Newsletter Fintech and Finance Execs Actually Read

f you work in fintech or finance, you already have too many tabs open and not enough time.

Fintech Takes is the free newsletter senior leaders actually read. Each week, I break down the trends, deals, and regulatory moves shaping the industry — and explain why they matter — in plain English.

No filler, no PR spin, and no “insights” you already saw on LinkedIn eight times this week. Just clear analysis and the occasional bad joke to make it go down easier.

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Old School Wisdom

Henry Oliver’s Late Bloomers book combines wonderful storytelling with fascinating new research, to shift expectations around our life trajectories.

Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Succe…

This book encourages people to think about themselves as potential late bloomers and to discover and encourage and advocate for late blooming in others.

Goodreads

Free Knowledge

Next Avenue

A digital journalism service from Twin Cities PBS dedicated to serving people over 50 with original content and resources on health, money, work, lifestyle, and caregiving.

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Recommendations

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

As if the AI story couldn’t get any faster, last week’s Fable 5 release reshaped how people think about AI agents. The /loop functionality let agents run autonomously with minimal intervention, turning what used to be prompt-response interactions into genuine delegation. And then it was suspended just as fast.

Need help staying abreast of all this stuff? Read the daily Futurist briefing I built to help me keep up.

Meanwhile, you don’t need cutting edge tools to innovate your new new thing. Today’s Launch Key is the continuation of the series started last week.

Take advantage of the cheapest innovation toolkit in history. This is Part 2 of the innovation series — and how to start this weekend.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Don't Disrupt. Create Adjacent.

  • The Cheapest Innovation Toolkit in History

  • The Process, Sized for One Person

  • The Saturday Morning Test

• Modern Tools

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Last week I argued the playing field shifted in your favor.

This week: how to actually move on it.

You don't have to quit your day job. You don't have to burn the boats. You don't have to blow anything up. You just have to start adjacent to where you already are — and use the cheapest, most accessible innovation toolkit in human history to make sure you're building the right thing.

Let's get specific.

Don't Disrupt. Create Adjacent.

Most late-career professionals starting a side hustle assume they're supposed to disrupt something. That's the founder mythology talking — the one Silicon Valley exported and HBR amplified for the last twenty years. Disrupt the industry. Bet the house.

For someone with thirty years of accumulated assets, that's terrible advice. It's also unnecessary.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne — the Blue Ocean Strategy authors — published a follow-on framework called nondisruptive creation. The argument: you can create entirely new demand without destroying anything that already exists. No incumbent loses. No employees get displaced. No regulatory blowback. You're just bringing something new into space that wasn't being served.

Nondisruptive Creation (SSIR)

An excerpt from Beyond Disruption on positive-sum innovation

Late-career operators are structurally positioned for nondisruptive creation in a way younger founders aren't:

• Your salary is the runway. Most twenty-eight-year-old founders don't have that.

• Your accumulated expertise is the innovation input — pattern recognition built over thirty years of being in the room.

• Your network is built. You don't need to spend two years cold-emailing.

• Your reputation precedes you. Not as a founder. As somebody who's been around the work.

Reframe "don't quit your day job" from timid advice to the correct innovation strategy for your situation. Your day job is the funding round. You already raised it.

The Cheapest Innovation Toolkit in History

The frameworks are free.

Doblin's Ten Types of Innovation — free, in the open, with case studies and worksheets on Deloitte's site. Business Model Canvas — Alex Osterwalder gave it away two decades ago. Lean Startup — Eric Ries wrote the book and the methodology is everywhere. Customer development — Steve Blank teaches it for free in Stanford lectures on YouTube.

When EnergyXchain won our initial National Science Foundation grant, their first instruction was to stop writing code, fill out our Business Model Canvas and talk to 50 potential customers. Even though we had a key partner/customer, that exercise changed the direction of our company.

The tools are basically free too.

AI for prototyping — twenty bucks a month gets you Claude or ChatGPT capable of work that required a senior consultant two years ago. No-code for building — Bubble, Webflow, Glide, all under a hundred a month. Newsletter platforms for testing demand — Beehiiv, Substack, free tiers everywhere. Landing pages on Gumroad, Stan, Carrd. LinkedIn for distribution. Zoom for customer interviews.

When I built the Vialogix usability lab in 1997, the one-way mirror alone cost more than what an entire modern toolkit costs today. That simple lab required a dedicated room, scheduled sessions, computer, video recording equipment, and an employee salary for the facilitator. In 2026 you can run a discovery interview over Zoom in your kitchen on a Tuesday night, transcribe it with Claude in seconds, and surface the friction patterns by Wednesday morning.

It has never been easier or cheaper to innovate.

The constraint isn't cost. It isn't access. It isn't even time. The constraint is whether you'll actually use the tools, on a problem you actually understand, with customers you actually know.

That's the part AI can't help you with.

The Process, Sized for One Person

Here's the five-step version of what used to cost a 12-person team and a six-month engagement. Compressed for a solo operator with a day job and a Saturday morning.

1. Pick a customer you actually know. Not "the market." A specific person, or a specific archetype, whose work or life you understand because you spent decades near it. Your unfair advantage is not your idea — it's that you can spot friction in this customer's day that nobody outside the industry would notice.

2. Talk to five of them. Not a survey. Conversations. Forty-five minutes each, on Zoom. You're not pitching anything. You're listening for the moment they sigh, the moment they say "yeah, I just deal with that," the moment they describe the workaround they've built themselves. That's where the friction lives. Five conversations beats a hundred-person survey every single time.

3. Sketch the offer on one page. Use the Business Model Canvas if it helps you. Use a napkin if it doesn't. The point is the structure — what are you offering, to whom, through what channel, for what price, supported by what activities — not the artifact. AI is genuinely useful here as a sparring partner. Show it your draft. Ask where it's weak.

4. Run it through Doblin's Ten Types. Which types are you actually playing? If you're only playing Product Performance — "my thing is better than their thing" — you're in the least valuable silo of innovation. Look for ways to broaden the offer. Could you add a Service layer? A Channel innovation? A Profit Model twist? Three or four types working together is what Keeley calls "playing the chord." A single note is a hobby. A chord is a business.

5. Ship the smallest version that earns real feedback. A landing page. A LinkedIn post. A Beehiiv issue. A Gumroad landing page. The goal is not to sell — yet. The goal is to put something in front of real humans and watch what they do. Do they sign up? Forward it? Reply? Or scroll past?

Iterate. Then ship again. Then iterate.

That's the whole loop. It's not magic. It's just discipline applied to a problem you actually understand.

The Saturday Morning Test

Here's a real example.

You're a 58-year-old corporate procurement lead. You've spent twenty-two years watching mid-size manufacturers struggle to vet new suppliers — endless RFPs, opaque pricing, vendors who oversell and underdeliver. You know exactly where the friction is. You've built workarounds. You've trained three junior buyers in the patterns you spotted that the textbooks don't teach.

This Saturday morning, between coffee and lunch, you can:

• Email five procurement peers asking for thirty minutes next week to talk about supplier vetting

• Open Claude and sketch the structure of a Notion template that codifies your vetting checklist

• Spin up a Gumroad landing page offering it for $99 with a one-paragraph description

• Post about it on LinkedIn — not a sales pitch, just "I've been thinking about why supplier vetting is so broken, here's what I think and here's a tool I'm building"

• Go mow the lawn

By next Saturday, you'll know if anybody cares. If they do, you iterate. If they don't, you ran the loop for the cost of a Saturday morning and a Claude subscription, and you learned something nobody can take from you.

The Bozos are still in their workshop sitting in Herman Miller chairs. You've already launched.

The playing field doesn't favor them anymore. It favors you. Use it.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

I’ve used many email platforms over the past few decades, including things like HubSpot, Marketo, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor. My middle son Clay introduced me to Beehiiv 🐝.

If your business will send newsletters, I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

• They’ve made it drag-and-drop easy

• They have built-in design tools

• They have a very good recommendation engine for other newsletters

• Their Advertiser network is robust and growing

• They continue to add features to improve your newsletter business

Each week I get suggestions of companies who want to boost or sponsor my newsletter. I simply choose the ones I think will make the most sense for this audience.

Everything is automated: scheduling, distribution, payments, sponsorships, recommendation engine - all integrated with easy-to-use tools. And of course you can launch for free.

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Recommendations

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

One of my current projects is purging old files to create one clean Notion knowledgebase. It includes newsletter topics, product ideas, personal reference material, books and old work history. I’ve kept summaries, notes, case studies, business stories and am slowly throwing away detrius while finding interesting connections.

A topic that keeps resurfacing is Innovation. I’ve adapted best practices, changed my attitude along the way and have written about it here before. But it’s time for an update.

This is the first in a series on innovation — examples, what works, what doesn't, and why the playing field has shifted in a direction that finally favors people like you.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • The Bozos Got an AI Upgrade

  • What Two Decades of Customer Interviews Will Teach …

  • The Guy Who Funded my Mac

  • Stop Waiting to Be Picked

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Two years ago I wrote an issue on Innovation titled Don't Listen to the Bozos.

It got solid feedback. A few of you replied with your own corporate-innovation-lab horror stories. One of you sent a photo of actual yellow sticky notes on glass wall. One of you told me to write a series on it. I have updated it, but tabled the series until now.

Then I spent the last few months creating the knowledgebase of my own digital history — Evernotes, links, Vialogix case studies, product features I helped ship at Empowered Benefits, data-product redesign at EDA — and I realized I'd buried the lede.

The Bozos issue (and Guy Kawasaki) was right about what doesn't work. Brainstorming on demand, designated innovators, quarterly innovation pushes — all theater. Still true in 2026. More true in 2026 actually, now that "AI innovation lab" is the new sign on the same room.

What I didn't say then is what does work. I had a thirty-year answer of examples I didn’t use.

The Bozos Got an AI Upgrade

The corporate innovation problem hasn't gone away. It's just got new tools.

In 2018 the Bozos were running design-thinking workshops. By 2024 they were running hackathons. In 2026 they're running AI accelerators — same room, same yellow stickies, now with a Claude tab open and a vibe-coded demo by Friday.

The instinct underneath is identical: we need innovative ideas for product so-and-so by next quarter, and (insert latest) shiny tool will get us there.

It won't. Not because AI isn't powerful — it absolutely is — but because AI lets you build the wrong thing faster.

That's the 2026 trap nobody's naming clearly enough. Vibe-coding a feature in an afternoon does not mean the feature is what your customer needs. The 24-year-old shipping at speed has no idea whether what they shipped removes friction or adds it. They just know it works in the demo.

Adding features, by the way, is the least valuable of Doblin's Ten Types of Innovation. The frame I borrowed from Larry Keeley in the Bozos issue still holds. AI didn't invalidate it — AI just made the bottom-right corner of that matrix cheaper to operate in, while the more valuable corners (Profit Model, Network, Channel, Customer Engagement) still require something AI can't fake…

Judgment about what's worth building.

What Two Decades of Customer Interviews Will Teach You

At Vialogix, we built a usability lab with a one-way mirror at our Charlotte offices in 1997 — at a time when most web design agencies were still pushing digital brochures. I admit we did it to differentiate from other agencies.

But the lab let us literally watch customers use our designs in real time. It led us from pretty HTML to user interface design and ultimately application development. But those interactions taught us that ‘design’ needed to not get in the way of customer needs.

We learned something every week that the client's VP of marketing did not know.

Creatas was a stock-photography redesign — we shipped a custom "lightbox" that surfaced in customer interviews, and sales went up 147% because we removed friction for customers. The redesign won a SXSW award and ended up in a Nielsen Norman ROI case study.

EDA was a data-products redesign I led in the mid-2010s. Discovery interviews showed us customers didn't want more data — they wanted easier access to the data they were already buying. We redesigned around that. 20% sales lift in year one. And 25% more in year two.

Different industries. Different decades. One repeating process.

The Guy Who Funded my Mac

I bought my first Mac in 1987.

I was working as a headhunter at the time — a job that did not, in any meaningful sense, need professional layout tools. But my Mac came with PageMaker, Illustrator and HyperCard. Suddenly I could organize all my paper files into a simple digital database and print candidate one-pagers that looked like a finished product.

That Mac sits at the head of every career move I made afterward. Grad school in 1989, specifically to put me near the creative process. Corporate communications at First Union, where I started as an unpaid intern. Vialogix in 1995. Empowered Benefits in 1999. EDA. EnergyXchain. National Science Foundation grants. Blockchain patents. AI agents. Everything points back to that little Mac.

I met Woz at a data conference ~ 2012

And that Mac existed because a guy named Don Valentine had bet on Apple a decade before my fateful purchase.

I recently listened to the Acquired podcast's deep-dive on Valentine and Sequoia Capital (Free Knowledge below).

Here's what struck me. Valentine didn't invent semiconductors. He didn't write Apple's operating system. He didn't design the Mac.

What he did was spend two decades in sales-and-marketing roles at Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor — the foundational chip companies of the early Silicon Valley era. He learned to read markets. He learned what big inevitable demand looks like before anyone else can see it.

Then in 1972, he founded Sequoia Capital. Not because the venture capital industry needed another firm — it barely existed at the time. He built Sequoia because the role didn't exist yet and he was perfectly shaped to create it. He fit the job to himself. He didn't fit himself to a job.

The result: Apple, Oracle, Electronic Arts, NVIDIA, Cisco, Google, YouTube and a chain of subsequent bets that essentially funded the modern internet.

His advantage was not genius. His advantage was a body of pattern recognition that he'd built one chip-customer-meeting at a time over twenty years, then applied to a vehicle of his own design.

And it's the same move available to you.

AI is not going to replicate Don Valentine's read on the semiconductor industry in 1972. It is also not going to replicate the Launch Key reader's knowledge on whatever industry, customer base, or craft you've spent thirty years inside. Your particular pattern recognition — built from particular meetings, particular failures, particular customers — is not in any training set. It cannot be vibe-coded. It is uniquely yours.

The only question is what vehicle you build to deploy it.

Stop Waiting to Be Picked

Most people don't think of themselves as innovative.

Same way most people don't think of themselves as creative — until you point out they decorated their kid's birthday party from scratch last weekend, or solved a leaking gutter problem with a piece of pool noodle and some zip ties, or rewrote their resume three different ways until one landed an interview.

Creativity got democratized when the tools got cheap. Suddenly everyone could ship a flyer, a song, a video a great picture. People who'd been told their whole lives they "weren't creative" started shipping creative work, and the world got more interesting.

Innovation is going through the same transition right now.

The frameworks (Doblin's Ten Types, Business Model Canvas, lean startup) are free. The tools (AI for prototyping, no-code for building, LinkedIn or newsletter platforms for testing) are cheap. The case studies are everywhere — including, increasingly, in this newsletter.

What's not democratized — what AI cannot give a 24-year-old vibe-coder no matter how many tokens they burn — is the lived experience of watching real customers struggle with real products over multiple decades and across multiple industries.

That's the asset you're sitting on.

The pattern recognition you built by being in the room. The judgment Don Valentine built one Fairchild sales call at a time, applied to a vehicle nobody had asked him to build.

Next week I'll get into the how — what the actual process looks like, where AI earns its keep inside it, and what a one-person Launch Key reader can do next Saturday morning that an entire corporate innovation lab can't.

For now: the Bozos are still Bozos. AI didn't fix them. But the playing field has shifted in a direction that finally favors the operators who've been doing this work for thirty years.

Don't wait for someone to pick you.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

The Free Newsletter Fintech and Finance Execs Actually Read

f you work in fintech or finance, you already have too many tabs open and not enough time.

Fintech Takes is the free newsletter senior leaders actually read. Each week, I break down the trends, deals, and regulatory moves shaping the industry — and explain why they matter — in plain English.

No filler, no PR spin, and no “insights” you already saw on LinkedIn eight times this week. Just clear analysis and the occasional bad joke to make it go down easier.

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Old School Wisdom

Free Knowledge

Sequoia Capital (Part 1) | Acquired

Don Valentine founded Sequoia in 1972 and redefined venture capital. Backing Apple, Atari, Oracle, and Cisco to build Silicon Valley's most successful firm.

www.acquired.fm/episodes/sequoia-capital-part-1

Recommendations

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

My summer reading (and podcast) list is markedly more tech bent this year as AI dominates the news. Plus, Gary Frey invited me to be on a panel discussion in September and I’m concerned that I’ll be outdated before Labor Day!

So this week’s Launch Key is the June update for all of us thinking about AI.

Graphic learners will appreciate the TLDR of this week’s Visual Crapshoot. And a solid reminder that we are still in the early innings.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Useful adoption might require a few grey hairs

  • Real talk on the headlines:

  • I know I sound like a broken record:

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Here's the most under reported fact in tech right now: A tiny percentage of people are actually using AI.

What are you talking about Rob? ChatGPT just crossed 900 million weekly active users. Cursor has 40 million. Claude has 30 million. GitHub Copilot has 26 million. Gemini has 750 million monthly users. Stack them all up, dedupe the overlap, and you land at a number that's roughly 11% of humanity.

But while many have used a chat bot, maybe 80 million pay for access to the best models. And of those who pay, an even smaller slice use agentic tools — the autonomous coding agents, the background task runners, the full agent organizations, the stuff actually doing the work while you're sleeping.

The number of humans who use AI the way Silicon Valley talks about it might be 50 million total. On a planet of 8.1 billion.

That's the whole picture no matter what the pretty news reader is saying from your TV.

I wasn’t super early, but you’ve watched me stick a toe in the water (How to Win When Everyone Has AI, Eat Your Own Dog Food). I have a small local tech sandbox and have built a few personalized projects but now, how do I keep up?

Beside reading my daily Futurist, I spend too much time on X and listen to pods while walking our dog. I’ve always appreciated the technology optimism of Marc Andreessen and listened to his 3 hour stint on Joe Rogan (listen) last week. He thinks we’re 3 years into a multi-decade AI story. His speaking style can be overwhelming - from macro view to historical facts, but trends and big ideas come tumbling out almost every time he speaks.

The a16z co-founder can pick up the phone and reach literally anyone on the planet for answers. But he told Rogan that since late 2025, he gets better answers from AI than from experts in his personal contacts. He claimed 99% of the time!

I found this so shocking that I listened to it twice. One of the most networked humans in tech now trusts the machine over his Rolodex.

Recently there has been pushback on the datacenters for future AI. Kevin O’Leary actually dug into IRS filings of the organizations protesting his Utah data center project to find Chinese backing. John Solomon America's AI infrastructure (listen) and David Friedberg both flagged the same pattern on their respective shows. All of which means the investment absolutely can not slow down if we want to stay in the lead.

I also listened to Ara Kharazian, Lead Economist at Ramp, about what real business spending data says about AI adoption. He gave a level-headed explanation of why the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative is overblown and how companies are actually buying and deploying AI tools.

"Why AI Isn't Killing SaaS Yet" (listen). Remember the doomers take — that AI agents were going to eat every software business? Eighteen months later, SaaS revenue is fine. Retention is fine. New logos are fine. The story we were sold by the chattering class was wrong. Again.

Why AI Isn’t Killing SaaS Yet

Podcast Episode · The a16z Show · May 25 · 40m

Apple Podcasts

Finally, there is growing data that shows many of the tech layoffs used AI as the excuse when the reality was employee bloat. The facts show that there are more tech job openings today than 3 years ago. CEO’s including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have softened their earlier job destruction storyline. And Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon now says the fears of mass unemployment are ‘overblown.’

Stack this insight, the three pods plus actual user numbers and a picture comes into focus that neither the doomers nor the hypers want to admit:

• The technology is more powerful than the skeptics claim.

• The disruption is slower than advertised but moving rapidly.

• And approximately seven billion people still haven't used it.

That's not a story about being too late. That's a story about a wide-open window.

Useful adoption might require a few grey hairs

ChatGPT added 100 million weekly users in the four months between October and February. The curve isn't flattening. It's accelerating. But raw adoption and useful adoption are not the same thing.

A 26-year-old asks an AI to design a customer renewal motion. They get a textbook answer they can't critically evaluate. They don't know which parts are generic, which parts are wrong, which parts will get the deal killed in week three by a procurement department they've never dealt with.

You do.

You ask the same question and you instantly spot the bad assumptions. You know which industries hate that pricing structure. You know what the buyer's CFO will say. You've seen this movie a hundred times.

The AI does the hands-on work. Your judgment steers it. That's the combination quietly running away from the rest of the market right now.

Andreessen is in the tiny slice of humanity that uses these tools constantly. Not because he's young or codes. But because he knows how to question an answer.

None of us have Andreessen’s technical chops, but we know how to question an answer too. We've been doing it in conference rooms for thirty years.

Real talk on the headlines:

Yes, the pushback is real.

Half the country is now souring on AI. The All-In guys spent a whole segment last week on why. The layoffs are real. The anti-human concerns are real. The people worried about their grandkids’ jobs have a point.

But every transformative technology had this moment. The horses-to-cars moment. The craftsman-to-factory moment. The newspapers-to-internet moment. The people who adapted and built lives around the new tools moved ahead. The people who held out on principle didn't.

You're allowed to use a tool you're skeptical of. Skepticism is the whole reason your judgment is worth more than the kid’s.

The doomers got the threat wrong. The threat isn't that AI replaces experienced people. The threat is that the overwhelming majority of experienced people never bother to learn it — and leave the field to the small group who do.

The hype take got the timeline wrong. This isn't flipping in 18 months. It's compounding quietly over the next decade. The people who start now have an exponential head start over the ones who panic into it in 2029. I personally think many of the great companies of the next decade will have a 2026 start date.

And the geopolitics — like them or not — ensure the rails keep getting built. Trump rescinded the AI executive order last week. Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI's co-founders, just jumped to Anthropic. Anthropic itself is reportedly heading to its first profitable quarter (insane run-rate chart below). Investment in compute and energy is exploding. The money is telling you where the puck is going.

I know I sound like a broken record:

First, upgrade to a paid model. Then, pick one workflow. One.

The thing you redo every Monday. The proposal templates, the pre-meeting research, the vendor follow-ups, the analysis you run before every decision.

Spend one hour teaching an AI to do it alongside you. Not to replace you. To work the keyboard while you steer.

That's how you join the small slice of humanity actually getting leverage from all this. Not by just listening to another podcast or reading another think piece. By actually using the tool on a real problem you already know cold. If you’re hung up on tools, start here.

You've spent decades building the judgment that makes this thing actually work.

You're not late.

You're early in a way that most of the planet isn't.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Moda is the AI design agent with taste

Moda's viral launch hit 4.4 million views in two days. Tens of thousands of professionals signed up. Startups, agencies, forward-thinking brands and top firms are now using Moda to create brand-aligned slides, ad creative, reports, social carousels and more.

Most AI tools tend to create what we call "AI slop": repetitions of the same colors, layouts and fonts. And when you try to fix it, you get stuck in a loop of re-prompting.

Moda is different. Drop in your website URL, and Moda learns your brand from the ground up: your colors, your fonts, your visual language. Then it helps you generate pro-quality slides, docs, and marketing assets. 

The best part? Every layer is fully editable on a real canvas, and exports to powerpoint, PDF and more.

Try Moda Free Today

Old School Wisdom

Are you looking for a great business book for your Summer reading? Runnin' Down a Dream is Bill Gurley's debut book, nearly a decade in the making, expanding on a viral college talk into a full-length argument for deliberate, curiosity-driven career design. I’ve had a curiosity-driven career and it is a fantastic read - perfect for a late-career professional contemplating change.

Runnin Down a Dream

Career regret is not fate — it is the predictable outcome of treating your working life as a conveyor belt rather than a design problem. The people who avoid it share a recognizable pattern: they followed genuine curiosity into deep craft, deliberately placed themselves inside the right rooms, sought out experienced mentors, built peer networks with the same obsessive drive they brought to their work, and eventually gave back to the fields that shaped them.

Free Knowledge

The May 22 All-in podcast E274 is worth your time too. SpaceX, Nvidia, and why America turned on AI. Pay particular attention to David Friedberg’s Copernican Revolution analogy. He compares the current AI backlash to how disorienting heliocentrism was for the medieval mind: it knocked humans out of the center of the universe, and the institutions built on that assumption fought it hard. His point is that AI does something similar — it isn't human-centric, and that's psychologically destabilizing for a lot of people. He calls it "almost anti-humanist."

SpaceX's $2T Case, Nvidia's Shock Selloff, America Turns on AI, Trump Pulls AI Order, Bond Crisis?

Podcast Episode · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · May 22 · 1h 42m

Apple Podcasts

Three segments stand out for our tribe:

• (0:30) Karpathy joins Anthropic. A signal of where the talent thinks the next decade is going. Bonus: the WSJ reporting that Anthropic is closing in on its first profitable quarter — quietly torching the "AI is a money pit" narrative.

• (12:42) Why Americans have turned on AI. The most important segment for anyone trying to make sense of where public sentiment is heading. If your friends and family are getting more anti-AI, this explains why.

• (27:22) Trump pulls the AI executive order. What it means for US-China dynamics and the regulatory landscape over the next 18 months.

Recommendations

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

Visual Crapshoot

This represents April data so it’s stale, but the visual reference is still meaningful.

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

Last week’s issue on Mattering must have resonated because it generated unsolicited emails from a number of you. It was the first time I have used a topic that my AI research agent pulled from Reddit, so maybe we’re onto something here.

Patrick McLean was so moved he wrote back immediately that we could start a consulting business helping retirees find what matters. Everybody starts too big when trying to figure out their next phase. I told him to write it up because I’m not starting another consulting business 😉.

So, this week’s Launch Key is Patrick’s view on starting small.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Award winning guest author Patrick McLean has carved a career out of writing well. The entrepreneur has written 13 novels, envisioned plots and characters for Microsoft Game Studio, designed climbing accessories and encouraged yours truly to publish.

Once, a Russian Special Forces guy said to me, as if it were the most natural and expected thing in the world, "You know how to escape from avalanche." It was not a question.

I said, "No."

"If you survive, you are buried. Most people become afraid, struggle with whole body. Start with big movement, from torso."

Yes, I nodded, most people would become afraid.

"But this is no good, you become tired, and then you die. Instead you start with fingertips, make small circles, pack the snow. Little by little you make space. From fingertips to wrists, elbow, shoulders. Little by little, make space for body. Only when you have space, can you know which way is up and dig your way out."

I have never been buried in an avalanche, but I am old enough to have had life pile an avalanche of circumstances upon me.

When reinventing one's self, after a layoff or a resignation, after retirement, or even as a young person trying to find your way in the world as you leave the house -- everybody starts too big and wants to go too fast. They thrash and struggle and suffocate themselves.

When you're young, thrashing is inevitable. It's how you learn and develop wisdom. If any accomplished person has escaped the school of hard knocks, I haven't met them. Thrashing is survivable. But thrashing towards the end of your career -- that's an existential risk.

Have you seen what retirement does to people who don't know what to do with themselves? It's murderous.

If you've been on someone else's clock for 30+ years, you've had a lot of direction given to you. Someone else has pointed which way to go. Even if you were a CEO, you had a board, and the conventions of an industry.

Your real obstacle is knowing which way to go. Which way is up. And it takes time. I watched Rob fumble his way through what would eventually become this newsletter.

First it was a single talk. Then he immediately started to thrash. "I think I could do a little public speaking, maybe make some videos. Old technology guy who has the wisdom." And his mind was already on stage giving the TED talk. Being booked at companies around the country.

Thrash. Thrash. Thrash.

A few years later he said, "I'm thinking about doing a newsletter." And I said, in my best Slavic accent, "You know how to escape from Avalanche."

No, of course, I didn't. I'm not that cool. But I did say, "Write the first one." He posted it on LinkedIn. Got some traction, wrote another one. Paid attention to what resonated.

I don't tell you this because I'm proud of my friend Rob. I tell you this because I watched him wiggle his fingers and toes, make space, learn how to write a newsletter and grow it to 20,000 subscribers.

And I certainly don't tell you this because I think you should write a newsletter.

Maybe you want to start a charity that helps people with the credit counseling. Maybe you want to start something you’ve been turning over for years. Help one person first. Maybe you want to start a small handyman business to have something to do. Ask your neighbor if they need anything fixed.

Don't start with a domain name. Don't start with a strategy statement. Don't incorporate.

Take the smallest real action that will get you feedback.

Then do it again. And again. And don't stop.

That's how you escape the avalanche, figure out which way to go, and get back to the bright sunshine and the bar at the ski lodge. 

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Are you questioning how AI can really benefit you? Are you unimpressed with ChatGPT? Here’s a great first step to reduce friction in whatever you type.

Just talk into any app on your phone.

I started using Wispr a few months ago to streamline adding personal notes. Grocery store items, newsletter topics, To Do’s – the kind of stuff I typically typed into an iphone reminder.

Today, I’m dictating detailed ideas directly into my Notion inbox, framing up complete Launch Key issues.

Easy win making AI work for me.

Wispr Flow | Effortless Voice Dictation

Flow makes writing quick and clear with seamless voice dictation. It is the fastest, smartest way to type with your voice.

wisprflow.ai

Private Credit Belongs in the Fixed-Income Sleeve. Against Those Benchmarks, the Numbers Aren't Close.

For the trailing twelve months ending March 31, 2026:† ·

• Percent ABS: 14.6% net returns after losses

• High-yield bonds: 8.9%

• Leveraged loans: 6.1%

• Investment-grade bonds: 4.5%

Private credit isn't an equity substitute. It belongs in the fixed-income sleeve — and against bond benchmarks, the performance gap is hard to dismiss. A collateralized loan with a fixed coupon and a defined repayment schedule fills the same portfolio role as a bond, with different terms and a different risk profile.

What you access on Percent:†

• 17.0% current weighted average coupon rate

• 93.5% of performing deals pay monthly fixed-rate coupons

• Deal terms 6–24 months

• Full borrower documentation before you commit a dollar

• Starting at $500 $2B+ total issuance. 1,000+ deals. 60,000+ accredited investors. 0.44% lifetime net loss rate on asset-based deals.

Review the performance numbers on Percent.

^{Alternative investments are speculative. No assurance can be given that investors will receive a return of their capital. †Past performance is not indicative of future results. Benchmark indices shown for market context only and are not directly comparable to Percent's performance. Terms apply.}

Free Knowledge

I had two long road trips over the past few weeks and used my drive time to refresh my history for our upcoming 250th 🇺🇸 birthday. David McCullough’s 1776 (Kindle or here on YouTube) is 10+ hours cued up for your next Summer Road trip. It is an outstanding reminder of the most important year in our country’s history.

Recommendations

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

A few months ago, Launch Key subscriber/ author Steven Shorkey shared the enclosed WSJ article believing that it applied to many of us. He was right. And while I agree with the premise of mattering, I think we have much better odds by building something we truly care about.

After faith, family and friends – that might be a book, podcast, newsletter, consulting practice, YouTube channel, digital product or a host of other things that only you can produce. Along those lines I’m sharing a daily tech briefing (Free Knowledge) I built just to help me keep up with the pace of AI. Bookmark it if you like it.

Extend your mattering by building something.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Mattering by Application

  • Stop Renting. Start Owning.

  • What This Means This Week

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

The Wall Street Journal piece started with eight retirees at dinner in Sarasota.

Each had spent thirty or forty years building accomplishments worth pointing at — companies, departments, divisions, careers. They assumed the next chapter would be the easy one. Phone calls returned. Nonprofit boards happy for help. Younger people grateful for mentorship.

The Sarasota retirees had emailed nonprofits. Offered to teach. Volunteered to advise. The emails went unanswered. The doors stayed closed.

The Retirement Crisis No One Warns You About: Mattering

Many of us plan for our future wealth and health. Few prepare for an equally essential aspect of retirement: how to continue to feel seen and valued.

What they were mourning, Wallace argues, wasn't just lost opportunity. It was the loss of mattering — the human need to feel seen, useful, and depended on.

She's right about the diagnosis. She names a thing the retirement industry has been missing for decades.

She's wrong about what to do about it.

Around the same time her piece was making the rounds, a thread on r/retirement crossed 500 comments. The opening question was almost identical to the Sarasota dinner, just in a kitchen voice: "I retired a year ago. I'm learning to relax. Do I still care about my former career?"

482 upvotes. 501 replies.

The Sarasota dinner and the Reddit thread are the same person, twelve months apart, in different rooms, asking the same question:

Do I still matter without the title?

Mattering by Application

Wallace's framework is ok. She borrows a research acronym — SAID — for the four ingredients of mattering: feeling Significant, Appreciated, Invested in, and Depended on. Retirement, she points out, can vaporize all four at once.

The numbers back her up. Eleven thousand Americans turn 65 every day.

By 2030, one in five of us will be of retirement age. A 2020 meta-analysis found that nearly a third of retirees develop depressive symptoms — and the strongest predictors aren't financial. They're psychological. Feeling less valued. Less connected.

Then come the remedies. Say yes to coffee. Join a book club. Find a place to volunteer. Extend invitations. Be the kind of person other people invest in.

All decent advice. All missing the deeper trap.

Every one of those remedies is mattering by application. Mattering you have to ask for. The Sarasota retirees already did that part — they emailed the nonprofits and queued up for the volunteer slots. The doors stayed closed anyway.

Here's the harder truth: an institution-sized career was borrowed mattering.

For thirty years, you mattered because the org chart said you did. Promotions. Direct reports. The Monday meeting where seventeen people waited on what you'd say next. That was rented from a system that didn't actually care about you once your title fell off.

When you left or retired, the lease ended. So you went looking for a new one — a board seat, an adjunct gig, a foundation that might slot you back into a structure. Same shape, lower stakes.

And you're learning the same thing the Sarasota table learned: nobody is holding the door open for you.

Stop Renting. Start Owning.

The things I write about in Launch Key are the other answer.

Stop renting your mattering plan. Build one you own.

You don't need a board to vote you in. You need a thing that's yours that other people show up for. A newsletter people open on Tuesday morning. A small digital product that solves a problem you spent twenty years solving. An advisory practice with three clients you chose — not nine you inherited. A YouTube channel for the niche only you know cold.

These aren't hobbies. They're mattering engines. You own them. Nobody can vote you out. That audience doesn't have an HR department invite you back. That audience will leave if your material sucks.

I felt like I wasn’t quite finished when I started Launch Key. And there will be a time when I’m no longer relevant. But not yet.

More than 19,000 people have opted into a newsletter from a retired guy writing on a screen porch. No employer issued me a permit. No board approved the plan. The only credential anyone is checking is whether something useful shows up on Tuesday.

That isn't extraordinary. The tools are sitting right there. What's extraordinary is how few experienced operators have caught on.

The Sarasota dinner is the wrong scene to belong to. The right scene is the one where you stop refreshing your inbox for the nonprofit's reply and ship the first version of the thing.

What This Means This Week

Three things, ranked by what will still matter in the next few years:

1. Stop applying. Start owning. Pick one thing you can ship in the next 30 days without anyone's permission — a Substack, a Gumroad PDF, a paid Zoom workshop for three former colleagues, a LinkedIn series about the work you used to do. The revenue isn't the point yet. Removing the application step from your mattering plan is the point.

2. Treat your career as raw material, not a relic. Wallace tells the story of Nancy Schlossberg — an academic who didn't abandon her old identity, she adapted it. That's the right instinct. Your thirty years aren't something to memorialize. They're inventory. Somebody out there will pay for a slice of what you already know.

3. Pick one channel you own and feed it for a year. Not five channels. One. The fastest path back to feeling depended on is a small audience that genuinely depends on you. A board seat takes years to land and can be revoked. A hundred email subscribers can't.

Wallace named the disease the rest of the retirement industry has been ignoring. Give her that. But the cure she's writing about — the one delivered through book clubs and unanswered volunteer applications — is still mattering on someone else's terms.

You don't need someone else's terms.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Reply to everything. Edit nothing.

Your inbox is full. Slack is piling up. Client messages need a response yesterday. Typing thoughtful replies to all of it takes hours you don't have.

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text you can send the moment you stop talking. Speak like you would to a colleague — tangents and all — and get polished output. Emails, Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, whatever's open.

89% of messages sent with zero edits. Used by teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Works on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Try Wispr Flow free

Old School Wisdom

With a clear road map and actionable takeaways, Wallace’s book reveals how to unlock this powerful force within ourselves and how to build cultures of mattering in our homes, workplaces, and communities – at any age.

Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose

Free Knowledge

It’s so difficult to keep up with the pace of AI, that I built my own Mac mini-powered daily briefing agent. But who needs another email? (see Eat Your Own Dog Food)

So I had Claude leverage design tools to create a high-end Futurist page delivered daily at 5am to Github. Markets, News, Crypto, a pull quote and a little daily commentary from a techno optimist (think, Marc Andreessen voice).

Its a simple aggregation play and sources (RSS, X, YouTube) are listed in the footer. I wholeheartedly ask for your opinions. Do you find this useful? What else should be included for insight? Comment below or email suggestions.

The Futurist — Archive

What did I miss? Daily aggregation of tech and crypto info

rwn5.github.io/futurist-daily

What happens when the S&P moves 3% during your commute?

We are living in volatile times. While you cannot control the state of international affairs, you can position your portfolio accordingly.

Liquid is one of the fastest growing trading platforms, allowing users to trade stocks, commodities, FX, and more 24/7/365 from their phone and computer.

Trade 24/7 on Liquid

Recommendations

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

I’m back at elevation this week editing this issue from another screen porch. And I’m tying together one of my favorite old books with a new twist: AI agents marry perfectly with David Maister’s thesis of delegating junior work.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • My Junior Staff Doesn't Take a Lunch Break

  • The Part Maister Got Eternally Right

  • What This Means This Week

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

The first agency I built needed six people. The one I run now is just one.

In the mid 90’s I was running a small web design firm. A real one — computers, servers, phones, conference rooms, paychecks, healthcare, the whole production. To deliver a single client web site I needed a project manager, a designer for layout, a developer to create code and a copywriter for content. We had a part-time bookkeeper and I was selling the next projects to keep the lights on. By the time the brochureware site landed on the world-wide web, six paychecks had been involved.

Earlier that decade, a Harvard Business School lecturer named David Maister published Managing the Professional Service Firm. He studied hundreds of service businesses and wrote what became the bible of every agency, law firm, and consultancy that read it. His central idea was deceptively simple:

Senior people should only do work that requires senior people. Everything else gets delegated.

He sorted projects into three buckets:

• Procedure projects — standardized, repeatable, low-novelty. Junior layer.

• Grey Hair projects — familiar problems that need experienced judgment. Mid-senior layer.

• Brains projects — novel, complex, first-principles. Partner layer.

The whole financial engine of a service firm was leveraging cheap junior labor under expensive senior judgment. If a partner ever got caught doing a procedure project, somebody was leaving money on the table.

From consultancies to outsourced IT, that model ran the professional services world for decades.

It just got rewritten.

My Junior Staff Doesn't Take a Lunch Break

Here's the part that applies to what you’re building next.

Launch Key is a one-man operation. Iterated on various screen porches – no employees, no contractors, no agency. It consists of my ideas and some rentable software. And yet there's a real production engine behind it — most of which used to require people I'd have had to hire and pay.

A few examples, all running this week (agents all developed in the last 90 days):

A research agent I built scrapes seven subreddits where potential late-career entrepreneurs hang out, validates demand on possible topics through Google's autocomplete data, then ranks the top three or four opportunities and delivers said topics to my Notion inbox every Sunday night. That used to be a junior strategist's full-time job. Now it costs me less than a dollar in API calls, guarantees I won’t run out of timely topics and runs while I'm asleep.

When I needed a new subscriber lead magnet, I didn't hire a designer. I added my outline and described what I wanted to Claude, iterated on the layout in about an hour, and exported a finished PDF. I showed it to designer friend and he said he was glad he wasn’t competing for my design work today. A 1997 version of me would have lost two weeks and four-figure billing to get to a similar piece.

I started reviewing thelaunchkey.com pages because I had simply procrastinated SEO work. I didn’t hire a consultant to research keywords or structure long-form pieces. Claude did the keyword pull, an outline, the first draft, and where I should be cross-linking. I bring the judgment, edit, publish and now monitor the Google Search Console.

When this newsletter ships each Tuesday morning, a social media agent I created parses the issue, drafts five LinkedIn posts and three Twitter posts in the Launch Key voice, and emails me an approval link. I have potential social media posts I may or may not use before I've even poured my second cup of coffee. Social media also used to be a done by a 3rd party consultant.

Add it up. In Maister's framework, I'm running a leveraged firm – created and served from a Mac Mini running at my house.

My junior layer just doesn't have a salary, health insurance, or parking costs. They also never get the Sunday scaries, quit without notice or call in sick.

The Part Maister Got Eternally Right

Now — here's what Maister couldn’t see but where the most leverage can be applied.

Procedure projects? AI devours them in short order. Analytics, legal boilerplate, design projects, draft emails, keyword research, social repurposing, scheduled scraping — all junior-staff work. All commoditized today.

Grey Hair projects? Still yours.

AI assists. It doesn't decide. It produces options; experience picks the right one. It surfaces a pattern; experience knows whether the pattern means anything this time. Grey Hair edits based on experience and judgement.

Brains projects? Still yours.

Knowing what this newsletter should be about this Tuesday is a Brains project. Knowing which client problems are actually worth solving is a Brains project. Knowing whether a startup idea is brave or stupid is a Brains project. AI has no opinion that's worthwhile on any of it.

Which means the leverage equation flipped in your favor in a way it never has before.

For thirty years, the agency owner needed a roster of juniors to make the math work. Service businesses are hard because you have to feed all those mouths. Today, an experienced operator with an AI stack and a clear strategy can run the same shape of business without the overhead, the management, or the office lease.

You're not behind. You're early to a model the consulting world hasn't caught up with yet. Service businesses may never be the same and can be far more profitable now.

What This Means This Week

Three things to do, ranked by what will matter most in five years:

1. Pick one task you're still doing manually that an AI agent could handle. Analyst tasks. First-draft writing. Research. Article retrieval. Repurposing long-form into social posts. Scheduling. Find one. Hand it off this week.

2. Stop apologizing for not being technical. You don't need to code. You need to direct. Anyone who's run a team can run an AI stack — same job, different vendor.

3. Reserve your brain for the Brains projects. That's the work nobody else can do, and it's the work nobody else is paying for. Stop spending senior hours on procedure work the machine will do for free.

Maister was right in 1993, and he's still right. The model didn't change. The junior layer did.

You spent thirty years earning the partner chair.

Sit in it.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Most AI agents demo well. Few ship real work.

Most AI agents can run a task. The problem is everything around it: setup, memory, context, cost, and figuring out what actually happened.

SureThing turns useful AI skills into autonomous agents with business context, persistent memory, cost-aware model selection, and a live dashboard. Paste a link, assign the work, and your agent reports back like a human teammate: what it did, what it cost, what needs your decision, and what happens next.

Built for founders, operators, and marketers who want AI to ship work, not become another tool to babysit.

Create Your Agent

Old School Wisdom

Maister’s best-seller still applies if you leverage AI correctly.

Professional firms differ from other business enterprises in two distinct ways: first, they provide highly customized services and thus cannot apply many of the management principles developed for product-based industries. Second, professional services are highly personalized, involving the skills of individuals.

Managing The Professional Service Firm

David Maister - Drawing on more than ten years of research and consulting to these unique and creative companies, David Maister explores issues ranging from marketing and business development to multinational strategies, human resources policies to profit improvement, strategic planning to effective leadership.

Recommendations

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

I lived Thomas Wolf’s famous title, ‘You can’t go home again’ last week on a 1200 mile road trip to my hometown of York PA. There were family reunions along with Maryland crab cakes and Pennsylvania scrapple, but change is so visibly obvious when you’ve been gone for decades.

Technology changes far faster than towns. And no matter the time period there is one technology that continues to work.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • The Permission Medium

  • I Watched this Happen in Real Time

  • What This Means This Week

• Old School Wisdom

• Modern Tools

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Last week we talked about writing as the moat. This week, writing into what?

Because here's the thing nobody tells you when you decide, sometime in your fifties, that you'd like to build something with your own name on it: every place you might publish is owned by someone or something else. And that something else has its own interests.

A perfect example is LinkedIn. I’ve got 2+ decades of LinkedIn use and kept my account clean by only connecting with people I knew or worked with. But as I started to publish this newsletter knew I needed additional reach.

LinkedIn decides who sees you. So does X. So do Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Same for whatever Substack-of-the-month replaces them next year.

The algorithm is not your colleague.

It's a system optimized for engagement, velocity, controversy, and youth-culture cadence — none of which is the natural tone of a 55-year-old operator. Thirty years of pattern recognition are lost in the void.

You can post into that machine for a year and have it decide, quietly, that nobody needs to see you.

There is one exception.

The Permission Medium

Email is different.

If someone gave you their address, they gave you permission. If they open the message, you're in. There is no algorithm between you and your reader. There is only a subject line you've earned, or you haven't. And it’s the reason I chose email as the medium for Launch Key.

That's it. That's the whole architecture.

It's also, not coincidentally, the medium your audience grew up on. Late-career professionals have a complicated relationship with social media — and a clean one with email. We’re used to an inbox. I had a CompuServe address in the 80’s. We’ve been making decisions out of it for thirty years.

So when I tell you that email is the only audience asset you actually own, I'm not making a nostalgia argument. I'm making a property rights argument.

The list is yours. Subscribers can unsubscribe, but nobody can change the rules on you. No platform can throttle your reach to sell you reach back. The platforms are disposable and if you ever leave Beehiiv or Substack or whatever you're using, you simply take your list with you.

Try doing that with your LinkedIn followers.

I Watched this Happen in Real Time

Here’s a case study I happen to know personally.

About three years ago I helped my middle son Clay grow his newsletter – Confluence – which he’d already been building for a few years. He started with topics that were relevant to his work as a private markets investor, and he published religiously every week for ~6 years.

Over that time frame, the community grew to more than 20,000 subscribers from over 1,500 of the premier venture funds. He had grown loyal readers, sponsors, a paid community, and - most importantly - deal flow.

He saw a bigger opportunity to convert that attention into something larger than an audience, and that audience became the foundation Clay is now raising a venture firm on top of - Outlaw Fund I.

Newsletter flywheel: ideas → content → audience → trust → opportunities

Fund flywheel: finding (heavily boosted by audience and opportunities created in fund flywheel), picking (improved with ideas strengthened judgement via writing), winning (improved as newsletter asset differentiates from other investors who provide capital only), and helping (talent pipeline, distribution-as-a-service, downstream capital available to portfolio)

Read that arc again, slowly, because he built distribution first. The distribution then acted as the catalyst for something larger to be built on top of it.

Six years.

No algorithm gave him permission. No platform decided his fate by choosing what was worth amplifying. He earned the open, week after week, until the people opening were the exact people he needed in the room to do the next thing.

Then he did the next thing.

That is what an email list is. It is not a marketing channel. It is a coalition you assembled by being useful in the inbox, and it compounds in a way nothing rented ever will.

What This Means This Week

You don't need 20,000 subscribers. (I know — I have 18,000 subscribers, and I'm telling you, you don't need that many.) You need an opening list of people who would genuinely care if you stopped writing. A hundred is plenty to start. A thousand is a real asset. Ten thousand is a business.

Three things to do this week, ranked by how much they'll matter five years from now:

1. If you don't have a list, start one. Beehiiv free tier. Substack. ConvertKit. The platform matters less than the decision. The decision is: from now on, the people who care about what I'm building have a way to hear from me directly that no third party controls.

2. If you have a list, write to it this week. Not "when you have something polished." This week. The relationship is built by showing up, not by perfection. Open rates beat follower counts the way compound interest beats a lottery ticket.

3. If you have a list and you're writing to it, look at your subject lines. That's the entire game. You don't need better content; you need the email opened. Carlton would tell you the same thing. He was right last week. He's right this week.

The algorithm picked its team a long time ago. It wasn't yours.

The inbox still is.

Now go launch something 🚀 

P.S. - Interested in doing something other than a newsletter? Read 12 Encore Career Ideas for Executives (that actually use what you know)

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Old School Wisdom

Seth Godin coined the term permission marketing more than 25 years ago. It’s still pertinent today.

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers

By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness—and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.

Modern Tools

I’ve used many email platforms over the past few decades, including things like HubSpot, Marketo, Constant Contact and Campaign Monitor. Full disclosure, Clay introduced me to Beehiiv 🐝.

If your business will send newsletters, I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

• They’ve made it drag-and-drop easy

• They have built-in design tools

• They have a very good recommendation engine for other newsletters

• Their Advertiser network is robust and growing

• They continue to add features to improve your newsletter business

Each week I get suggestions of companies who want to boost or sponsor my newsletter. I simply choose the ones I think will make the most sense for this audience.

Everything is automated: scheduling, distribution, payments, sponsorships, recommendation engine - all integrated with easy-to-use tools. And of course you can launch for free.

Ready to get started?

Click on the logo below to save 20% off your first 3 months of a paid plan after a complimentary 30-day trial.

You don't need to be technical. Just informed.

Most AI newsletters are written for engineers. This one isn't.

The AI Report is read by 400,000+ executives, operators, and business leaders who want to know what's happening in AI — without wading through code, jargon, or hype.

Every weekday, we break down the AI stories that matter to your business: what's being deployed, what's actually working, and what it means for your team.

Free. 5 minutes. Straight to the point.

Join 400,000+ business leaders staying ahead of AI — without the technical overwhelm.

Read it free today

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📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

With all the AI froth, it is important to start with what really matters – quality input. Any of the efficiencies gained by leveraging these tools all start with your instructions. And while some of those might be existing code or spoken words, the majority are written.

Writing is another skill perfected by professionals over time. You have practiced way more than 10,000 hours. And just another example of why late-career entrepreneurs have the upper hand in the AI revolution.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Enter Carlton

  • The Flood and the Filter

  • What This Means This Week

• Modern Tools

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

I called it Human-Generated content a year ago — that writing is one of the quiet superpowers late-career professionals tend to underrate in themselves. I want to come back to it, because the ground has shifted under our feet in a way that makes the point even sharper.

You've been writing for a living for twenty or thirty years.

Maybe you didn't call it that. You called it proposals. Board memos. Sales pitches. The email that landed the account. The performance review that kept the right person. And the one that let the wrong employee go. The deck narrative your team built the next quarter around.

That's writing.

More specifically — that's persuasive writing under pressure, with stakes, for an audience who could say no.

Which, it turns out, is the only kind that has ever mattered.

Enter Carlton

Copywriter John Carlton has spent the last 30+ years quietly being one of the most influential direct-response writers in America.

Most people outside the marketing world have never heard of him, and that's fine — Carlton himself once said: nothing gets sold until the copy gets written. No copy, no sale. No persuasion, no movement.

No matter how clever the funnel or how shiny the technology stack.

Carlton's whole thesis, which he was teaching long before AI — is that channels change but human psychology doesn't. The medium is whatever is in front of you this decade. The job is the same as it's been since people started selling things (see also Listen to Your Father, or Save your Career) to other people:

1. get attention

2. build trust

3. make a clear offer

4. and ask for the close

Writing used to be a niche craft. Now it's the most undervalued, most-needed skill in the AI economy.

Why? Because everybody got handed the same magic typewriter.

The Flood and the Filter

You've noticed the flood.

LinkedIn posts that all sound like the same vaguely inspirational consultant. Cold emails that open with three em-dashes and manufactured insight. Blog posts that hit 800 words without saying anything. The signal-to-noise ratio of business communication has collapsed in about twenty-four months, and I don’t think the bottom is in yet.

But here's what's underneath all that:

The tools got cheap. Judgment didn't.

The University of Iowa's writing center put it cleanly in a piece worth reading: "AI writing tools can write drafts for you but it cannot think for you." 

That's the whole game. AI can help generate topics or be a fast first-drafter, but:

• It doesn't know which sentence is dishonest.

• It doesn't know which claim your reader will believe.

• It doesn't know the difference between specific and generic.

• It doesn't know that the second paragraph is the one that matters and the first should be cut.

You know all that.

You've known it for decades. You learned it the only way it can be learned — by writing something, sending it to a real person, and learning what happened next.

That's the moat. That's what raises in value when content gets cheap.

What This Means This Week

I'm not going to make this an AI story. I’ve harped on it recently and plenty of other people are doing the same. And many of them sound like they were written by AI, which is its own kind of evidence.

What I want you to take away is more useful:

The skill you've been quietly compounding for the last 35 years — knowing how to say the thing so the right person hears it — just became one of the most leveraged skills in the economy.

• You can use it to create a newsletter.

• You can use it to create social media posts.

• You can use it to launch a digital product.

• You can use it write video, game or podcast scripts.

• You can use it to direct AI tools and immediately spot when they're producing garbage.

• You can use it to charge a premium as a fractional advisor whose memos actually land.

Carlton said it thirty years before any of this was a possibility.

Writing — real, persuasive, specific writing — was the moat then. It's an even wider moat now.

You already built yours.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Don’t have time to write? Try speaking your inputs. And Wispr is the easiest way I’ve found. Grocery store items, newsletter topics, To Do’s – the kind of stuff I typically typed into an iphone reminder.

Now, I’m dictating detailed ideas directly into my Notion inbox, framing up complete Launch Key issues. Try it yourself.

Reply to everything. Edit nothing.

Your inbox is full. Slack is piling up. Client messages need a response yesterday. Typing thoughtful replies to all of it takes hours you don't have.

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text you can send the moment you stop talking. Speak like you would to a colleague — tangents and all — and get polished output. Emails, Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, whatever's open.

89% of messages sent with zero edits. Used by teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Works on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Try Wispr Flow free

Old School Wisdom

John Carlton’s sales writing has been stalked for decades by many of the best (and most successful) marketers on the Internet, who freely admit using his ads as templates for their own breakthrough pitches.

They copy John’s stuff because it works. His blog has plenty of free advice.

John Carlton's Blog - The RANT

John Carlton's blog. Free and damn good insight, advice and cross-talk & mutterings from the most respected and ripped-off marketing guru alive...

The RANT

Free Knowledge

Ultimately, writing is a deeply human craft. It’s about more than transmitting information. It’s about conveying meaning, sharing experience, and persuading or moving an audience. AI can’t do that yet.

Why Writing Skills Still Matter in the Age of Generative AI – Mentafy

Generative AI can aid writing, but it can’t replace it. Like calculators, AI should follow strong fundamentals: teach ideas, structure, and revision first. Writing is thinking and problem-solving; it builds voice, judgment, and insight.

mentafy.com/2025/08/why-writing-skills-still-matter-in-the-age-of-generative-ai

Manual marketing had a good run. The Agentic Marketing Summit (May 4–8) is where the next era starts — free, live, and taught by the people already doing it every day! Register Free Today.

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🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

Visual Crapshoot

Good morning Launch Key 🚀 community!

I hope you all enjoyed the weekend.

I finally stopped procrastinating the creation of a better lead magnet for this newsletter (you’re welcome to download it here) and played a little golf. I find my brain works better when I juxtapose online/offline tasks. Ok – golf isn’t really a task. 😉 

This week’s message is similarly about using old school knowledge for your new school startup.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • The file that keeps getting opened

  • The trap of “when I have time”

  • The one step

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

Sun Tzu wrote thirteen short chapters twenty-five centuries ago.

The business world has since beaten the book into dust looking for warlike metaphors — attack your competitors, defeat your rivals, outflank the market. I'm not here to add to that pile.

One line of his has stuck with me for a different reason: victorious warriors win first and then go to war. Not as a war metaphor, but as a reframe.

The people who actually ship things have already decided they're going to. Everything after the decision is just execution.

Most people I talk to are stuck before the decision.

The file that keeps getting opened

I have an Evernote file where I have gathered ideas since 2011. (yes, I realize that’s outdated – my daily workhorse is Notion integrated with Claude)

Some of the ideas in that file are dead. Some I've already launched. A few are still just sitting there — good ones, ones I come back to, ones I've done nothing about. Every time I open that file I have the same thought: I should really do something with that. Then I close the file.

I'd bet a lot of Launch Key readers have their own version of that file. A Notion page. A literal journal entry. A napkin in a drawer. A conversation you keep having with your spouse on the back porch. The specifics don't matter. What matters is the pattern — an idea that keeps coming back, and the fact that you haven't started.

Herminia Ibarra, who teaches at London Business School and has spent decades studying how people actually change careers, puts it bluntly. "Knowing," she writes, "is the result of doing and experimenting." Not the other way around.

Reinventing Your Career — When It’s Not Just About You

When you decide to change careers, the important people in your life have a stake in what you do, so it’s important to factor them in to your decision process. The challenge is to figure out how to honor your responsibilities to them without allowing yourself to be defined exclusively by what they feel you ought to be.

Harvard Business Review

This contradicts everything the corporate world trained us to do.

We were taught to plan, analyze, build the business case, get alignment, then execute. That sequence works when you're inside a company with resources, quarterly reviews, and a boss expecting a deck.

It's the wrong sequence when the project is you.

Ibarra's research on mid-career reinvention found that the people who actually make the pivot don't plan their way in — they act their way in. Small experiments. Side projects. A draft landing page. A new lead magnet. A conversation with someone doing something adjacent. They learn by moving, and the direction clarifies as they go.

The trap of “when I have time”

Every week I hear some version of the same sentence from readers: "I'll start when things settle down."

Things are not going to settle down.

That's not how it works. The quarter ends and another begins. The travel schedule resets. Your parents get older. Your kids' calendars shift. The window you're waiting for is a window that's not going to open on its own.

The people I watch actually get something off the ground are not the ones with the most free time. They're the ones who stopped treating the idea like something they'd get to and started treating it like something they were doing — even if "doing it" was 30 minutes on a Saturday morning.

Thirty minutes a week can build a business in a year. Zero minutes a week is still zero.

Here's what's different right now, and it's the part worth getting straight.

There used to be dozens of steps between "I have an idea" and "I have a thing other people can see.”

Design it, hire the developer, learn the tool, figure out the platform, write the copy, build the site, sell it, service it, account for it. Each step was its own project, and each one was where most ideas went to die.

Those steps are now minutes, not months. You can describe what you want in plain English and get a working version back while you eat lunch. That's not hype — that's what this week looks like for anyone who's actually using today’s tools.

Which means the excuse that "I don't know how to build it" no longer holds. The excuse that "it would take too long" no longer holds.

What's left is the decision.

The one step

Pick the idea. You know which one.

Don't write a plan. Don't map the next five years. Don't make a list of everything you'd need to learn first. Take one step this week that costs less than an afternoon.

Draft the first page. Register the name. Send one email to someone who's done it. Open the document and write the first paragraph.

That's the whole assignment. Not the launch. The start.

Do you need a little help deciding what to do with your idea? Here are 12 Encore Career examples.

Sun Tzu's water metaphor gets misquoted in a thousand LinkedIn posts, but the actual lesson is simple: water doesn't plan the river. It finds it. You've been reading the terrain your whole career. You know how to flow.

Decide. Then move.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Old School Wisdom

Whether you're navigating boardroom negotiations, competitive environments, or personal challenges, Sun Tzu’s principles remain as sharp and relevant today as they were thousands of years ago. His philosophy champions intellect over aggression, precision over chaos, and clarity over confusion.

The Art of War : Tzu, Sun

Art of War, The [Tzu, Sun] A timeless masterpiece of strategy and insight, The Art of War by Sun Tzu is one of the most influential works ever written on leadership, warfare, and the psychology of conflict.

The 10 Best AI Stocks to Own in 2026

AI is moving from experiment… to essential.

Every major industry is integrating it.
Every major company is investing in it.

By late 2025, AI was already an $800B market — growing at a pace that could push it well beyond $1 trillion in the years ahead.

Cloud infrastructure is scaling fast.
AI-enabled devices are multiplying.
Automation is becoming standard.

But here’s the real question…

When trillions flow into this transformation — which stocks stand to benefit most?

Our new report reveals 10 AI stocks positioned across the backbone of this shift — from the companies powering the infrastructure… to those embedding intelligence into everyday systems.

If you want exposure to one of the defining growth trends of this decade, start here.

Download the Report Now

Free Knowledge

How about a completely new twist on music? Or a classic take on something new.

Have you heard the 50’s soul version of Jump Around?

One of the more interesting AI mashups I’ve heard is rap songs redone as 50’s soul or 60’s motown. Creative indeed. Eminiem, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent and even Michael Jackson and the Bee Gees revised into classic sounds that work!

Jump Around by Soul'd Out on Apple Music

Song · 2026 · Duration 4:16

Apple Music - Web Player

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🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

If you listen to the tech bro podcasts (full disclosure: I do), the pattern emerging is clear: we're in the infrastructure phase of the AI revolution. The Nvidia hype last year. OpenAI and Anthropic racing to be trillion dollar companies while hemorrhaging money. And now data center fights around the country.

It reminds me of previous tech cycles. And the winners in those earlier cycles were companies that simply applied new tech in a way that ultimately reduced costs or increased sales.

It’s a story as old as the gold rush.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • Blue Collar AI

• Old School Wisdom

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

History often rhymes.

In the 1850’s the California Gold Rush lured thousands to leave their farms, shops, towns and go west, young man for the prospecting ideal of striking gold. Samuel Brannan was arguably the first minted millionaire from that gold rush and he earned it not by striking gold - but by selling picks and shovels to the dreamers. Brannan squandered his gold rush lead while Levi Strauss built an empire from the same start.

We’ve watched recent gold rushes with websites ("we don't need one"), then e-commerce, then mobile, then crypto and now AI. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The pattern is always the same: early movers look like weirdos, then they look like geniuses, then everyone else scrambles.

One of the more interesting early moving examples right now, is people in the trades leveraging AI. At first I thought it was a few outliers, but there is mounting evidence of a fantastic trend. Mike Rowe has been right about the trades all along.

Smart people in the trades are applying AI to their daily jobs in ways that will create incredible moats around their businesses. They don’t care if the tools aren’t fully developed. It doesn’t bother them that we need more data centers. They are simply taking charge of their future and improving how they work.

Blue Collar AI

My X.com feed has started to surface really interesting examples:

• A roofing company is using AI agents to pull satellite imagery, cross-reference hail damage, and feed warm leads to their sales team.

• An electrician is using AI to create a panel schedule calculator that reads blueprints and generates load calculations with NEC code compliance.

• A fence contractor is creating a property line overlay tool using GIS data to auto-generate material quotes and permit docs.

• A pest control operator is building a route optimization and chemical usage tracking app with state reporting compliance.

The best part is that none of these guys knew how to code.

They ran businesses that were too small for big software like SAP, Salesforce or ServiceNow. And the tools they did buy couldn’t solve their real problems. So they took it upon themselves to solve them by explaining it to AI. And walking step-by-step through their domain expertise until they had solutions.

These businesses will shed whatever extra software tools they used in the past. A plumber using Claude Code isn't "learning to code." He's building a quoting tool that works the way his business actually works. Because the one he's paying $1,200 a month for doesn't.

Todd Saunders has collected over 200 examples and shares their stories on his feed. But the one that I saw first was Cory LaChance, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he talks to Claude and works with Terminal.

Twitter tweet

LaChance didn’t just solve it for himself, he turned his solution into a new business revenue stream. TakeOffTrak allows customers to automate their own piping takeoffs.

TakeOffTrak

AI-powered pipe fabrication takeoff platform

Nathan Spearing runs Transform NC, a remodeling company in North Carolina. He created his own AI agent to handle email, qualify leads, create estimates, track projects, and manage his calendar — all while he’s on a job site.

He didn't build it because he’s a tech guy. He built it because he was drowning in texts, losing leads, and spending evenings on paperwork instead of with his young family.

Today he teaches other contractors to do the same thing. Not with some generic SaaS — but by creating their own agent that learns their businesses, clients and their way of doing things.

BlueCollarOS — AI That Knows Your Trade

An AI agent that works with your existing tools and gets smarter every day. Built by a contractor, running in real businesses.

Here's the thing – you don't need to be in the trades to see the pattern.

Every one of these guys did the same thing you can do — they took deep domain expertise, explained the problem to AI, and walked it through step by step until they built a solution.

I wrote a longer article for non-technical entrepreneurs that highlights 7 tools you can use to do exactly this.

The pick-and-shovel play of this gold rush isn't selling AI how-to courses. It's being the person who knows what to build with them. You've spent decades learning how things actually work.

That knowledge just became the most valuable input in the room.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Old School Wisdom

Crossing the Chasm has sold over a million copies and is widely considered one of the most influential business books of the past thirty years, particularly in technology and venture capital circles.

The early adopters mentioned in this Launch Key issue have given their businesses a tremendous advantage by jumping that chasm now.

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: The Updated Version of the Insightful Guide on Bringing Cutting-Edge Products to the Mainstream

Crossing the Chasm, first published in 1991 and revised in 1999 and 2014, is Geoffrey Moore's landmark guide to marketing disruptive innovations.

Become An AI Expert In Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.

Free Knowledge

Even if they don’t use AI, the blue collar guys are making money literally using picks and shovels while they build all the data center infrastructure that AI will require.

The Invisible, Profitable, Unsexy Businesses Behind The Trillion-Dollar AI Boom

The Invisible, Profitable, Unsexy Businesses Behind The Trillion-Dollar AI Boom

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📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

Visual Crapshoot

Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀 

This week we touch on a topic that keeps uncovering more valuable data each week – our grey-headed interpersonal skills are very valuable in the AI economy.

Let's get into it.

• Gmail users may wish to read online since some parts may be clipped.

• Take this week’s poll or comment below and let me know if we’re on the right track.

Table of Contents

• Pull to Eject

  • What Elon taught us

  • Company Lifeblood

• Modern Tools

• Free Knowledge

• Recommendations

• Visual Crapshoot

Pull to Eject

I had absolutely no master plan as a senior in college.

An English major who thought he wanted to write for Sports Illustrated. I interviewed with a few publishing houses in New York over Spring Break. Dismal outcome. I learned that my first job would probably be writing obituaries for a small town newspaper.

My father helped me pivot with some excellent advice. He understood that my first job was probably not going to be a career, but simply my first business experience.

His exact quote was about understanding the difference between line and staff positions. Every company has both. Just how did a company make money? Make sure you’re on the side that generates revenue. Sales is the job that matters most.

So I interviewed for sales positions. And landed one. And gave up on the writing career until this late-career side hustle.

What Elon taught us

Line vs. staff has a much sharper lens today — after Elon fired 80% of Twitter employees when he purchased that company. Staff bloat had rendered the platform into a typical 8000-employee Silicon Valley big tech company.

They’ve hired a few hundred people back, but today X.com is working well with approximately 2000 employees.

Twitter Layoffs: How Many Employees Were Fired and Where They Went Next

Explore Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs: how many employees were fired, what happened to the workforce before and after, and where ex-employees went next.

Jack Dorsey, another tech titan who has been right and early multiple times – recently cut 40+% of the staff at Block (formerly Square) a company with a $39b market cap.

Jack Dorsey Is Ready to Explain the Block Layoffs

In an exclusive interview with WIRED, Block’s cofounder and CEO says he axed 40 percent of his workforce so that he can rebuild the company “as an intelligence.”

This time it’s because recent advances in AI tools are forcing Block to remake itself as a slimmer, more nimble entity. Block has removed layers of middle management and is delivering better products faster.

These stories are the canary in the coal mine for the Fortune 500. It’s not just big tech who will benefit from efficiency gains - its Financial Services, Healthcare, Engineering, Retail, Ecommerce, Consulting and more. Shareholders will demand it.

All the ‘Learn-to-code’ people have been wrong for a long time. Coding has become a commodity. High-leverage engineers with AI can do 10x-100x what they could two years ago.

Company Lifeblood

You know what these firms are not cutting?

Sales.

There's a reason for that.

Sales is the original line function. It's how a company touches money. It requires judgment, trust, relationship, and the ability to read a room — none of which a model can own on your behalf. The same goes for anyone who can originate ideas, see patterns before the data confirms them, or walk into a conversation and understand what someone actually needs versus what they say they need.

My father didn't know anything about AI. He knew that companies have a center of gravity — and that gravity is always revenue. Everything else is infrastructure for the people doing the revenue work. That distinction is older than org charts. It just got a lot more visible when Elon fired 6,000 people and the site didn't go down.

You'd better get good at selling

You'd better get good at selling

www.contrarianthinking.co/newsletter-articles/youd-better-get-good-at-selling

You spent decades building the kind of judgment that can't be measured — and according to a February 2026 MIT Sloan working paper, that's precisely what the agentic economy is about to make scarce and premium. The paper puts it plainly: when AI makes execution abundant, the binding constraint becomes verification. The ability to audit, steer, and underwrite decisions. That's not a junior skill. That's forty years of being in the room.

The question isn't whether AI will take your job. The question is whether you're positioned on the line — where judgment, relationships, and ideas create value — or on the staff side, where execution is being handed to machines faster than anyone predicted.

I am grateful that my father gave me that view 40+ years ago. The economy just made it more urgent.

If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on your experience rather than your title — this is it.

Now go launch something 🚀 

You've Spent 30 Years Building Expertise. It's Time to Turn It Into Income That Works for You.

The complete framework for professionals 50+ who want to build multiple revenue streams without quitting their job or betting everything on a startup.

Modern Tools

Are you questioning how AI can really benefit you? Are you unimpressed with ChatGPT? Here’s a great first step to reduce friction in whatever you type.

Just talk into any app on your phone.

I started using Wispr a few months ago to streamline adding personal notes. Grocery store items, newsletter topics, To Do’s – the kind of stuff I typically typed into an iphone reminder.

Today, I’m dictating detailed ideas directly into my Notion inbox, framing up complete Launch Key issues.

Easy win making AI work for me.

Wispr Flow | Effortless Voice Dictation

Flow makes writing quick and clear with seamless voice dictation. It is the fastest, smartest way to type with your voice.

wisprflow.ai

Your Retirement Savings Need to Outlast You

Most retirement plans underestimate two things: how long your savings need to last, and how quietly inflation erodes them along the way.

The 15-Minute Retirement Plan helps you close both gaps with practical guidance on longevity risk, purchasing power, and building a financial plan that doesn't run out before you do.

If you have $1,000,000 or more saved, download your free guide to start.

Download Your Free Guide.

Free Knowledge

Need to refresh your sales skills for today’s buyer? HubSpot Academy has free online tools: Inbound Sales, Sales Enablement, and Frictionless Sales certifications with video lessons and quizzes.

Sales Training | Hubspot

Free sales training courses, lessons, and tools to grow your pipeline and your career.

www.hubspot.com/sales/sales-training

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🗃️ Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.

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