Don't Look For Permission

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Roy Korner on the truth about founder follow up messages (Link)

• Milad Alucozai on on how casual investor meetings don’t exist (Link)

Growth

• David Park on the 3 things it comes down to for short-form marketing (Link)

• Jon Brosio on the 3 audiences you should create content for (Link)

• Peter Kazanjy on how you should block your calendar for demos (Link)

ICYMI

• Find out if your company is enterprise-ready with this practical checklist for B2B SaaS apps (Link)*

• Jake Stein writes a piece to read if you think you’re too far along for YC (Link)

• Chris Tottman on building vitamins vs. painkillers (Link)

• Matt Watson on what it means if you’re managing your co-founder (Link)

• Arjun Mahadevan’s hack when meeting someone at an event (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Global Cash Rescue

In 2019 I ran out of money while traveling through Southeast Asia. I’d been on the road for 2 months and just landed in Fiji for the final leg of the trip.

But my AMEX wasn’t being accepted anywhere and the ATM was broken.

I managed to get to my hotel, but the situation easily could’ve gone the other way.

If you travel internationally a lot, especially as a digital nomad, you’ve probably run into something like this once or twice.

It’s not a common problem, but it’s a very painful one and people will pay for peace of mind.

So why not build a simple subscription service to offer emergency access to funds (up to a certain amount) with no questions asked in extreme situations?

The hard part would be building the local partner networks of merchants who would be willing to participate. They’d physically hand out cash on demand to travelers, and bill you for it.

And, then, you’d set terms for the timeline the user has to pay you back.

Obviously, you’d need to vet for trust and leverage their credit score among other indicators. But at a low cost, this is something folks would pay for just to not worry about it.

You’d be betting that the subscription fees would cover the theft caused by bad actors who make it through.

🧠 Framework: 7 Pillars of Leadership Agility

When you hear the word “agility” you probably think about speed.

But, really, agility is your ability to move. Not actually the act of doing it.

That seems subtle but it means agility is actually a closer parallel to adaptability than speed.

And founders need to be adaptable above most else.

And one of the best ways to be adaptable is to have principles and frameworks to fall back on during times of chaos, or when you do actually need to move quickly.

I saw this list of 7 different principles you can use and wanted to pass it along to y’all:

• Quick thinking → Can you stay focused and be creative when you need to?

• Diverse decisions → You don’t need consensus, but do spend time gathering viewpoints

• Continuous learning → No matter how senior you are, learn like a child forever

• Collaborative action → Don’t lead with your ego

• Strategic problem solving → For one-way doors, take the time you need

• Emotional intelligence → IQ brings initial results, EQ makes longterm ones possible

• Reflective leadership → Learn from your failures

📈 Trend: Data Analytics Agency

Surprise, surprise: in an era with datasets growing exponentially, more people are looking for agencies to help them process and extract meaning from that data.

Look at this huge search interest spike in 2025 as companies have more aggressively adopted AI and realized the data they are sitting on:

Honestly, you could build an MVP of the agency entirely off the back of ChatGPT.

A critical piece: in order to do this well though, you have to actually understand the niche that your customers are in, so a verticalized approach is likely best if you’re going to tackle this.

💬 Quote: Don’t Look For Permission

Stop reading this.

Go get to work. It’s the morning of a new day to grow your startup.

Or the morning of the day to finally jump into one.

Either way, you don’t need me to tell you that.

Founders don’t need permission.

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 75,000+ founders.