Company Culture is Easy

Hey y’all — I’m hiring!

To apply or refer someone, just email me. I’ll give you $1,000 if I hire someone you introduce me to.

The two roles are:

• Social Media Manager (for Megaphone’s ghostwriting agency)

• Account Executive (for Founding Journey + more brands)

Anyway, here’s today at a glance:

💡 Opportunity: Legal Loophole Finder

Everyone’s talking about Deepseek and how OpenAI might be in trouble.

But let’s put that on hold til Saturday’s deep dive.

No matter which model you’re using, there are a surprisingly high amount of business ideas, like this one below, where cheap AI can power high-priced vertical SaaS:

If you pair it with a well-run cold email campaign to get in front of lawyers, this is a quick and easy business that could maybe become something larger, if that’s the route you want to take it.

These AI kernels are in basically every industry now, even 2+ years on from the launch of ChatGPT.

🧠 Framework: The 50% Rule

How much time should you spend building your product vs growing it?

The 50% rule says half, for both.

You probably can, and maybe should, push it even further towards traction early on. But for founders who have a natural bias towards product (there are a lot out there) then 50/50 is probably the best that can be reasonably expected.

But I’d caveat it by saying that if you’re making money without a product, you have a business. If you’re building a product without making money, you have a hobby.

📈 Trend: vLLM

There are only so many ways to improve LLM performance.

It’s not just about more data = better output, though.

Inference speed and efficiency are a big bottleneck.

vLLM is an open-source library that optimizes how memory is allocated, leading to increased efficiency. It’s super scalable and cost efficiency, further driving down the cost of intelligence.

💬 Quote: Company Culture is Easy

In the HBO show Succession there’s a minor scene where the operator who runs the Roy family’s news network, Cyd Peach, responds to a quip about how the network’s viewpoints seem to align suspiciously closely with those of its owner, Logan Roy.

She bites back with: “we hire people who want to work here” and then spews various insults, in the spirit of the show.

In a show filled with dark comedy, it’s a surprisingly resonant moment because she’s absolutely right — a well-run company has emergent, cultural values that are immediately obvious and attract the people who will further reinforce those organic values.

It’s like a magnet, or a network effect for your company culture.

I’ve always felt there are two reasons founders create a list of cultural values at their startup:

1. They want people on the team to behave and act certain ways

2. They’ve noticed that people on the team are behaving and acting certain ways

Those sound similar but they couldn’t be more different.

Founders choose #1 when they’re nervous those cultural network effects won’t happen, but the best startups are all #2.

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg’s early priority was making sure to come up with “move fast and break things” because in reflected the culture he WANTED to build?

No, of course not.

It became a cultural value at Facebook because that’s how he and the people he liked working with naturally operated. And, at some point, they codified that.

We saw this happen when I was building Launch House — one of our most loved values was “always be launching.” We codified it because that’s what the people in our founder community were already doing. It felt like there was a member launching a product every 3 days.

Your job isn’t to instruct your team or community how to “be” — your job is to celebrate their unique characteristics. That’s your culture.

Basecamp’s Jason Fried agrees:

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