How to Move Faster

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Why you shouldn’t giveaway startup equity to advisors (Link)

• Pitch feedback more pre-seed founders should take (Link)

Growth

• How to scale your company in founder mode (Link)

• 11 growth tactics that work like crazy right now (Link)

• The playbook teams are using to crush viral app growth (Link)

ICYMI

• Discover the DNA of successful founders and unlock your startup potential.*

• 14 ways the tax code is written in favor of business owners (Link)

• Marc Andreessen on the importance of startup timing (Link)

• Positive signals to look for when hiring engineers (Link)

• The 3 things your company needs to make AI act like an engineer (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Starlink Plus

There are good reasons to be anonymous on the internet.

That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but in some circles it still is.

It’s likely that the cohort who wants to be, though, will increase over the next few years.

So why not build an all-in-one bundle service to support them?

You might need a different name than Starlink Plus, but there’s something here.

🧠 Framework: How to Move Faster

Earlier this year Brian Chesky talked about how founders need to be “in the details” — and how this creates less work for them.

This is doubly true when you’re working with a time crunch.

Making something happen faster usually doesn’t mean leaving whoever’s working on it alone — surprisingly, it happens from being along for every step of the ride so you can make the right decisions faster, with a quicker feedback loop:

📈 Trend: Distrust in Legacy Media

This one’s been a long time coming. It’s not exactly a new trend, but it’s likely accelerating due to the US election.

It’s hard to make the case at this point that legacy media outlets are impartial, or even trustworthy, especially if your chosen candidate isn’t theirs.

It turns out that this has lasting impacts. Once you break trust it’s hard to get it back.

So what does this imply?

Put simply: people need somewhere else to find trusted information.

A lot of this is filled naturally by social media, but we’re already seeing companies like 6AM City build hyper-local media at some scale.

💬 Quote: Getting Your Early Hires Right

When the water level’s rising you just want to fix the leaks in your boat.

That’s how hiring feels when you’re either dealing with issues, scaling fast, or both.

The difference is that the wrong hiring decision can seriously set you back — most of the time way moreso than taking longer to plug the leak will.

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