Dear Founders: A Post on December 31st

Ignore the noise. Trust the work. The rest takes care of itself.

“I am not here to fight. I am here to win.” — Frank Dux, Bloodsport (1988)

It’s December 31st and we just wired more capital to one of our portfolio companies. A 3x markup in 120 days. I’m using their product as I write this. Given our conviction, we did super pro rata, increasing our position.

That’s the kind of bet you make when you’ve watched a founder do the work, quarter after quarter, no shortcuts, no theater. When you’ve seen enough to know the difference between building and performing.

The beginning of a new year does something strange to founders. Suddenly everyone has predictions. Trends. Advice. The feeds flood with certainty from people who’ve never built anything telling you exactly what to do.

Ignore it. Almost all of it.

The founders I admire most aren’t chasing trends or timing markets. They’re running their own race, at their own pace, focused on the thing right in front of them. They’ve learned what took me too long to learn: the work is the strategy.

This year I lost forty-five pounds.

I wrote about it earlier this year. GLP-1 medications, a complete transformation in how I relate to food, to my body, to the daily choices that compound into who you become.

But here’s what I didn’t fully understand until I lived it: there was no moment. No breakthrough. No day where everything changed.

There was just Tuesday. And then Wednesday. And then the next week. Small choices, made consistently, that only revealed their power in retrospect. I didn’t feel the weight coming off. I just kept showing up. And one day I looked up and I was someone different.

Building a company works exactly the same way.

The myth is that startups are about big moments. The launch. The fundraise. The press hit. The acquisition offer. Founders wait for these moments, orient around them, measure themselves by them.

The truth is that companies are built on ordinary Tuesdays. The customer support ticket that reveals a product insight. The awkward conversation with an underperforming hire. The tenth iteration of a landing page no one will remember. The spreadsheet that finally makes sense.

The founders who need the big moments to feel alive burn out. The founders who find meaning in the ordinary work can sustain for decades.

Transformation is daily. That’s the whole secret. There is no other secret.

Build for the customer in the room, not the investor in your head.

I see this constantly. Founders making product decisions based on what they think will impress in a pitch deck. Adding features because a VC mentioned them. Chasing metrics that look good in a fundraise but don’t reflect whether anyone actually loves what they’ve made.

The customer doesn’t care about your narrative. They care whether your product makes their life better.

The best companies I’ve backed weren’t optimized for fundraising. They were optimized for obsessive customer focus. The fundraising worked out because the product worked. Not the other way around.

That company we just wired money to? They didn’t build for us. They built for their customer. We just got to come along.

Protect your attention like it’s equity. It is.

Every founder I know is drowning in inputs. Slack. Email. Twitter. News. Podcasts. The endless stream of takes about what’s coming, what’s dying, what you should be worried about.

Most of it is noise. Almost none of it will matter to your company.

The founders who build enduring things have learned to be ruthless about what gets their attention. They check fundraising Twitter once a week, not once an hour. They skip the conferences that are really just networking theater. They create space to think.

Your attention is the raw material of everything you build. Fragment it across a thousand inputs and you’ll build something fragmented. Protect it and you might build something whole.

What would change if you spent the first two hours of every day on your most important problem, with your phone in another room?

Comparison will kill you.

Someone will always be raising more. Growing faster. Getting more press. Launching flashier products.

So what?

Their race isn’t your race. Their company isn’t your company. The founder who just closed a massive round might be three months from implosion. The founder getting glowing press might be losing their best people. You don’t know. You can’t know.

What you can know is whether you’re doing your best work. Whether you’re getting better. Whether you’re building something you’re proud of.

I’ve watched founders destroy themselves chasing someone else’s scoreboard. I’ve watched other founders, quieter ones, build extraordinary companies by simply focusing on getting better every day.

The market sorts this out eventually. The companies built for show fade. The companies built with craft endure.

Run your race.

The window is real. But so is the long game.

I do believe this is a moment. The consumer economy is shifting toward health and function. The M&A cycle is opening. The incumbents are searching for what you might be building.

But moments pass. What remains is what you built and how you built it.

Lisa and I spent fifteen years building POPSUGAR. There were seasons of intensity. But what I remember most, what I’m proudest of, isn’t the exit. It’s how we built. The culture we created. The people we brought up. The decisions we made when no one was looking.

You’re writing that story right now. Every day. Every ordinary Tuesday.

Make it one you’ll want to tell.

The year ahead will be noisy. Let it be noisy.

The advice industrial complex wants you anxious. Anxious founders consume more content, attend more conferences, buy more solutions.

Don’t be anxious. Be focused.

You started this company because you saw something others didn’t. You’re still here because you have something others don’t. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

The work is the strategy. The ordinary days are the extraordinary ones.

You have work to do.

Do the work.

Happy New Year.