Sunday AirSugar Highlights
A hearty welcome to all the new readers, here are some highlights from the past few weeks.
“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.” Pete Mitchell, Top Gun: Maverick, 2022
Welcome to AirSugar.
This is where I write about the consumer economy, venture capital, geopolitics, product, brand, and culture. The essays are sharp, occasionally opinionated, and always rooted in lived context—whether that’s from investing, operating, or paying close attention over time.
Here are some highlights from the past few weeks:
The symptoms are unmistakable: the investor who dominates board meetings with hour-long monologues about their grand strategic insights (which frequently prove worthless), the partner who chronically arrives late to founder meetings (sending the message that their time matters more), the VC who ghosts entrepreneurs during critical decisions because something more important came along.”
You hear it in every pitch meeting. See it on websites. Read it in partner manifestos. We help with growth. With hiring. With go-to-market. With brand strategy. With fundraising. With pricing. With retention. With performance marketing. With whatever nightmare keeps you up at night, we've got a guy.
It means you’ve designed your business to fund its boldest moves. Every component—formulation, packaging, supply chain, pricing—has been architected with strategic freedom in mind.
Anyone can say, “We’ll improve margin at scale.” What they really mean is, “We’re building the house on a cracked foundation.”
The most superficial people obsess over who knows whom. The most successful focus relentlessly on what matters: ideas that create value.
It's also the clearest dividing line between entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs. The latter name-drop, seek status through association, and angle for credit in conversations where it adds no value. These habits aren't just annoying—they're diagnostic.
Let Me Pick Up Those Names You Dropped
In the world of consumer venture investing, the financial models and pitch decks lie. The spreadsheets mislead. The revenue projections amount to fiction. What matters — what truly separates the extraordinary from the merely good — is taste. Not the taste of wine connoisseurs or art critics, but the visceral, almost primal ability to sense where culture is heading before the rest of the market has caught even the faintest whiff.
That's when it crystallized for me: what separates entrepreneurs from wantrepreneurs isn't skill, connections, or even luck—it's the fundamental difference between building and performing. Like children playing house who mimic family life without understanding its complexities, wantrepreneurs go through the motions of entrepreneurship without creating anything of lasting value.
Playing House: Why Entrepreneurs Build While Wantrepreneurs Perform