Business – Sean Shadmand

The Real Lesson from a Flying Tesla: Derivative Doesn’t Mean Unoriginal

Tesla shows off a Roadster that can lift itself into the air, and somewhere an aspiring entrepreneur thinks “I need to invent something even more spectacular to be successful”. I admire the ambition and showmanship. I worry about the lesson people take from it.

The ingredients have histories of their own. The Chaparral 2J used fans to generate suction and grip decades before this Roadster demo. SpaceX developed reusable rockets, tackling the engineering challenges of bringing boosters back to land. These are different applications, but they put the spectacle in context: suction, thrust, and controlled landings each have substantial work behind them.

The same pattern extends to autonomous driving. In 2004, DARPA’s Grand Challenge pushed teams to build vehicles that could navigate a desert course themselves. None finished. Government-backed experimentation helped advance technology that would later find commercial applications. Turning those advances into reliable products required substantial additional engineering and development.

Watch a Tesla demo and you see one company’s vision. Look behind it and you find a much longer history of inventions, experiments, and accumulated knowledge.

Spectacular demos compress that history into a single moment. It looks like someone invented the future from scratch. The aspiring founder walks away thinking that’s the assignment.

What gets lost is the distinction between inventing a technology and combining existing technologies into something extraordinary. Both create value. But they require different amounts of time, money, and patience.

Building on existing work doesn’t diminish what a founder accomplishes. The opportunity is knowing which pieces are ready, which solve problems people care about, and how bringing them together can create something more useful.

When your money, time, and attention are limited, every additional breakthrough your business depends on is another uncertainty you have to fund and resolve. You can spread yourself across so many invention problems that you never get to solve the customer’s problem.

I talk a lot about focus. This is one of its most consequential applications. My advice: choose where you actually need to invent, and limit it to one thing at most.

Which part of your product requires something new? Which parts can use something that already works? Where will the difference matter enough for someone to pay?

Bread and knives existed long before Otto Rohwedder’s machine made commercially sliced loaves possible in 1928. That machine took real invention and persistence. He focused that effort on a specific problem without having to reinvent everything around it.

You don’t have to invent bread and the knife to create the next sliced bread.

Indecision Does Not Preserve Options

Product bloat is often blamed on too many ideas or not enough resources to get speed. More often, it comes from too few decisions catching up with you.

A team delays deciding if a feature is required, who it is for, is the value it brings worth it to the overall product and company stage. The team hopes that time is saved by moving on to the next feature or issue will speed them up or “fix it”. The unanswered question feels like a temporary issue that doesn’t deserve time because there is not enough time for it. The work can continue. But nobody has removed the question. They have simply created compounding overhead.

So, “for now”, the feature will; to serve anyone.

It gains settings for one interpretation, exceptions for another, and workarounds for the cases nobody wanted to rule out. What began as an effort to stay flexible becomes a product that asks its users to carry the uncertainty the team did not resolve. The cost is not limited to one vague feature.

Imagine five possible directions: A, B, C, D, and E. None has been decided. It can feel as if the team has preserved five options. In reality, it has created five active futures.

Each future produces its own downstream work. Each has dependencies, edge cases, and failures. If something breaks deep inside E, the question is not only whether to fix it. The team also has to decide whether E is still important, whether it will matter later, and whether that work should take priority over something developing in A or D.

The original decision has been deferred, but the decisions it created have multiplied. This is why indecision becomes so expensive. It divides attention before it divides the product.

A person can be actively working on a branch that should never have existed. A customer can arrive with a real need for D, but the team may not notice it clearly enough because everyone is already carrying the mental load of A, B, C, D, and E. Attention is scattered across possibilities. Problems demand responses. Opportunities arrive without enough clarity to be recognized.

Eventually, the cost becomes visible in the product itself.

Flowchart illustrating the consequences of indecision with five options (A, B, C, D, E) leading to divided attention, increased work, and ultimately product bloat.

The interface gets crowded. Navigation expands. Settings multiply. A straightforward path becomes a collection of tabs, filters, alerts, roles, exceptions, and competing actions. Each piece may have a history. Each may have made sense at the moment it was added. Together, they create a product that feels fat, difficult, and strangely hard to simplify.

By then, teams often describe the problem as technical debt, feature creep, or complexity. Those descriptions are true, but they are incomplete. The product is carrying the consequences of decisions that were never made. This is also why rebuilding can be so valuable.

Starting over is usually treated as a dangerous impulse. There are real things to lose: working behavior, unusual customer needs, knowledge embedded in old systems. The fear is understandable. The first version contains too much history to dismiss casually.

But rebuilding is not about pretending that history did not happen. It is about forcing history to justify itself.

When a product is rebuilt, every feature has to earn its place again. Every workflow has to explain why it exists. The old assumptions no longer receive automatic authority simply because they have been in the product for a long time.

Some things should carry forward. Many will.

But some complexity only survives because nobody has paused long enough to ask what it was protecting. The things that melt away during a rebuild are often the most revealing. They are not necessarily mistakes. They are artifacts of uncertainty that became permanent by accident.

The first version teaches the team what it did not know. The next version has the chance to decide.

This does not mean every unanswered question needs an immediate answer. Uncertainty is real, and sometimes waiting is the right decision. But waiting should be a decision too. It should have an owner, a reason, and a point at which the team comes back to resolve it.

Otherwise, the product will resolve it for you. And it will do so by getting bigger, slowler, and unruley.

Convenience Is the Product

Look in your pantry.

A surprising amount of what we buy is something we could have made ourselves.

Cocktail sauce is a good example. The basic idea is remarkably simple: tomato-based sauce, horseradish, vinegar, seasoning. (Heinz) Worcestershire sauce is a much more elaborate fermented condiment, but even it is ultimately a collection of ingredients and processes that could theoretically be reproduced at home.

Brownie mix makes the point even more clearly. A typical boxed mix is largely sugar, flour, cocoa, and a handful of other ingredients. Betty Crocker’s current mixes make the composition almost comically obvious on the label. (Betty Crocker)

Yet we buy these things and we fill our pantries with them.

The interesting part is that we are not really buying the ingredients. We are buying the time someone else spent assembling, measuring, packaging, testing, preserving, distributing, and explaining them.

That is convenience. And convenience is a much more fundamental concept in business than we usually give it credit for.

A business exists, in most cases, because there is something someone needs to do that they would rather not spend their own time doing. Even if you are buying a skill you don’t have, you are actually buying the time to have to learn that skill yourself.

Sometimes the thing takes skill. Sometimes it takes equipment. Sometimes it takes capital. Sometimes it takes experience. Sometimes it is simply annoying. And sometimes it takes five minutes away from what you would rather do. So you pay.

It doesn’t matter if it is software, AI, consulting, manufacturing, or physical labor. The implementation changes, but the underlying transaction is consistent.

This may sound like a shameless plug but it is truly the basis for why I published this in a kids book called Erec Makes a Fire almost 10 years ago. The story is intentionally simple because the underlying idea is simple and it is better to ingrain it in a child than repeat it to all the adults. Erec needs to accomplish something, but accomplishing it requires time and effort. The people around him each have different capabilities, and things they spend time doing.

Someone has a problem they could solve it themselves. You make it take less time and they pay you.

This is one of the reasons I think we sometimes misunderstand innovation.

We tend to imagine a business as creating something that did not exist before. That is certainly one kind of business. In reality 99.9% of the time, it’s a derivative. And for good reason – but not this post’s point.

A business takes something that already exists and make it easier, faster, cheaper, closer, reliable and/or understandable.

More convenient.

The product may look like software, a bottle of sauce, a box of brownie mix, or a person showing up at your house with a toolbox. Underneath, the value proposition is the same.

I will spend my time on this so you can spend yours on something else.

And that is actually a beautiful feature of an economy. We do not each have to become good at everything. We don’t need to astound the world with something never seen before. We don’t need to “innovate” beyond what customers have or need.

We are all simply and constantly buying back pieces of our own time. And that has scaled in layers for thousands of years.

The strange thing is that we often forget this when we talk about technology. We ask what AI can create, what software can automate, or what a new company has invented.

A more useful question is often much simpler:

What does this allow someone to stop spending their time doing?

That is where most of the value lives. The product is not always the thing in the box. Sometimes the product is the five minutes you just got back.

Building with AI Is Easy. Choosing What to Build Is Not.

AI Rewards the Bold: Pick Something and Go.

In this new technological era, the decisive and action-oriented will shed the chaff.

Company-building, product creation, even personal capability. None of it is constrained like it used to be. AI has shattered the old limitations. You can build more, faster, and cheaper than ever before. But that’s not the hard part. It never really was.

The real challenge, now more than ever, is deciding what to build.

Decision-making (and actually acting on it) has always been the backbone of entrepreneurship. But compared to what’s coming, the past was a cakewalk. As access to capabilities explodes, the cost of distraction skyrockets. Shiny object syndrome isn’t a cute founder flaw anymore, it’s a startup killer.

The paradox of progress is this: the easier it becomes to build anything, the harder it becomes to choose one thing.

This is where AI breaks the old rules. In the corporate world, bureaucracy thrives on optionality, doing many things slowly, debating endlessly over direction. Startups win because they choose something, even if it’s wrong, and go all in. Most successful companies didn’t choose perfectly; they chose decisively and refined through motion.

Now, with AI supercharging optionality, even sharp founders are getting stuck in the freeze. When I talk to peers, more and more of them say: “I’m still figuring it out.” But it’s not hesitation out of fear, it’s hesitation out of abundance. The question has shifted from What am I capable of? to What should I focus on? It’s sort of like dating apps. With infinite choice, settling down feels harder. Possibility becomes paralysis to commit.

In the AI era, execution still matters, but conviction matters more. The ability to choose early, clearly, and with intent will be the new differentiator.

You don’t need to do everything. You need to do something deeply, consistently, and unapologetically. You don’t have to predict the future. You just have to take the first few steps toward it—with your whole weight behind the decision.

The Studio Era of Startups Has Begun

For decades, the startup game has been a one-shot endeavor. You rally a team, raise money, pick a problem, and commit. If you’re lucky, you pivot when you have to, maybe once or twice. But fundamentally, you’re placing a single bet. Pouring your time, capital, and reputation into one idea.

That world is changing quickly.

The world is focusing on their ability to now code more with fewer people, or allow folks with less coding skill to vibe code to success. The fact is, the amount of code was never what made a startup successful, or the number of coders. If that were they case no startup could disrupt a large, well funded, company. More significantly, a new paradigm of startup is emerging, one that leverages the startup creativity and ingenuity. One that helps founders evolve from creating a company with a product, but for just as much cost and time a studio of bets. One that moves with the agility of a hacker and the creative churn of a film studio. And AI is the accelerant.

Imagine if all the studios and accelerators you know were now able to be run by a few founders, with as little funding and workforce as the typical garage startup.

Every Startup Can Now Be a Studio

What’s different today isn’t the concepts, it’s the economics.

The execution bottleneck has collapsed:

Build v1 of an app in days, not months
Ship a prototype in the time it used to take to write a product spec
Generate research, copy, and flows on command
Test real experiences with minimal investment
Multitasking and directing employees has merged into one skill.

A solo founder can now run what used to require a venture studio’s entire apparatus. A three-person team can operate multiple product lines simultaneously in a pre-seed stage or earlier stage.

This isn’t just “faster iteration” it’s a change in who gets to play and at what breadth an entrepreneur can address a market.

The old studio model was top-down: institutions funding experiments. The new model is bottom-up: individuals becoming their own institutions.

When indie hackers ship 12 products in a year and 2 of them hit, that’s not hustling. That’s systematic creative output.

The Rise of the Experiment Engine

The shift isn’t just technical it’s philosophical.

Traditional startups were binary: succeed or fail. Traditional studios were capital-intensive: big bets, long cycles.

But now you can run a creative system where:

Failure is cheap
Iteration is constant
Signal emerges from volume
Products are hypotheses, not commitments

This is what studios do, but now it has been democratized. Again, it isn’t the amount of code and workforce people should be focusing on as they predict the future, it is the breadth of creative experimentation and lack of wide nets of attempts to fund a winning idea be limited to heavily venture funded organizations.

Pixar doesn’t bet the farm on a script — they storyboard, test scenes, rework characters. Record labels don’t drop millions on a demo — they release singles, test styles, build momentum.

Now individual founders can operate with the same creative methodology at a scale never before possible.

Remember “ghetto testing”? Half-baked landing pages, fake feature toggles, manually faked automation? All just to see if anyone cared.

Today, you don’t need to fake it. AI and automation let you spin up real features, fast with polish, interactivity, and branding.

This isn’t just efficiency. It’s a mindset shift. Testing doesn’t feel like cutting corners anymore. It feels like genuine creative exploration.

From Founders to Creative Directors

In this new world, successful founders aren’t just CEOs. They’re creative directors.

They guide taste. They shape vibe. They ask: “what world do we want to live in, and what prototypes can get us there?”

The core skill isn’t managing or scaling, it’s imagining boldly and moving quickly enough to find signal before the market shifts.

The Individual Studio Playbook

The next generation of great startups will operate more like personal creative studios:

Default to prototyping — Ideas aren’t precious until they prove value
Build multiple product lines — Portfolio thinking, not single bets
Use AI as infrastructure — Not just to code, but to design, write, and explore
Kill fast — Speed means nothing without the ability to stop wasted motion
Treat products as experiments — Hypotheses to test, not commitments to defend

The Democratization of Venture Capital

When the cost of experimentation drops to near-zero, everyone becomes their own venture capitalist.

You don’t need Rocket Internet’s playbook. You don’t need Betaworks’ capital. You don’t need Y Combinator’s batch.

You just need curiosity, taste, and the willingness to ship quickly.

More strange tools. More niche apps. More absurd experiments that just might work. We’re not heading into a world with fewer opportunities — we’re heading into a world where more people get to be entrepreneurs.

The studio era isn’t coming. It’s here.

The question is: Are you ready to be your own venture studio?

The Tension Between Big Visions and Small Iterations

Master the balancing of the two and become a legendary leader for a valuable product.

Every founder I know can articulate their grand vision. They’ll paint you a picture of how they’re going to change the world, disrupt industries, and build the next unicorn. But ask them what they’re shipping next Tuesday, and you’ll watch their eyes glaze over with the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s lost in their own complexity.

The paradox? It’s harder to make something small out of something big than it is to make something big out of something small.

And this single insight explains why 99% of startups fail, why enterprise software sucks, and why the most successful builders seem to possess an almost supernatural ability to know exactly what to work on next.

“Know When to Fold Them” Problem

Do you find yourself six months into your product and still “architecting the platform.” What a user actually does with the product today is more valuable than any genius level architecture or UI you are preparing them to use in the future.

This is what I call the Know When to Fold Them Problem. In poker, you can fold a small bet when you realize you’re beat. But when you’ve already pushed all your chips to the center of the table betting on a massive, interconnected system, folding becomes existentially difficult. In poker terms, you are “pot committed” and your ability to think clearly drops precipitously. Decision branches grow exponentially. Baggage of technology your implementation becomes burdensome. Your small product and company move at the speed of a larger one, and thus you lose one of your greatest advantages – being a mean, lean, nimble machine.

The brutal truth? Most builders and founders are terrible at managing the spectrum between atomic and cosmic.

Product Decisions Live on a Spectrum

Picture a spectrum. On one end, you have the atomic—the smallest possible thing that creates value. On the other end, you have the cosmic—the grand vision that changes everything.

The magic happens in the middle. But here’s where it gets interesting: the middle isn’t a place. It’s a dance.

The best builders I know—the ones who’ve built products that millions of people actually use—they’re constantly dancing between atomic and cosmic. They’re thinking in decades while shipping in days. They’re building cathedrals one brick at a time, but they know exactly which brick to place next.

The Warped Interpretation of “MVP”

MVP has become the most abused acronym in tech. Everyone thinks they understand it, but most people use it as an excuse to ship mediocre products.

The real MVP isn’t about just building the minimum. It’s about building the meaningful minimum. There’s a profound difference. What effs it up is the inability for must humans to understand how small something can be to have some semblance of minimum. It isn’t about know what MVP means, but decerning and being critical about where the line of “need”, “whish”, “want” live and how not to get stuck on your imagination of what the initial product set “should” be.

A minimum product is the smallest thing you can build. A meaningful minimum is the smallest thing that creates a complete experience for your user. One is about you. The other is about them.

The best MVPs you’ve never seen were deployed to tiny groups—AirBnB’s first hosts, Uber’s initial San Francisco cohort. Countless improvements and ruthless decisions to cut features and create focus happened in the shadows before these products hit the masses. The magic wasn’t in what they launched publicly; it was in what they learned and refined privately.

Learn from the Enterprise Trap

This is why software built in enterprises (or governments) are consitantly terrible. Whether you’re building products inside a large corporation or developing software as a direct contract for an enterprise client, you face the same fundamental problem: you’re optimizing for committees, leaders, and people that can express themselves with inherent importance, instead of having an individual procure and transform technological capability, true need, iterations, and robustness as a focus.

If Notion was built by an enterprise and its vocal leaders and wedge their preferences into the feature set, it would probably have ended up just like Microsoft Word. And, ironically, when I talk to most people that work in enterprises they wish they could use Notion – even with its far smaller feature set.

When enterprises build internally, they lose the discipline of starting small because there’s no market forcing function. When you’re building as a contractor for enterprises, you’re trapped by feature matrices and checkbox requirements. In both cases, you end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked features that nobody actually wants to use.

The result? Software that costs millions and makes everyone’s life worse.

Fallacy with Leadership

Leadership involvement is both essential and toxic. You need visionary leadership to maintain the cosmic perspective. But too much leadership involvement in day-to-day product decisions creates the exact opposite of what you want.

I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times. CEO has a vision. Product team starts building. CEO sees early version and says, “But what about this other thing from the vision?” Product team pivots. CEO sees that and says, “Wait, but we also need this other thing.”

Pretty soon, you’re building everything and completing nothing. You’re trapped in the middle of the spectrum, oscillating between atomic and cosmic without ever creating anything meaningful.

A Quality Paradox

Users love quality. They also love completeness. But quality and completeness are often in tension with speed and evolution. This creates another paradox: you need to ship fast to learn fast, but you need to ship quality to create meaningful experiences.

The answer isn’t to choose sides. It’s to redraw the battlefield entirely.

Instead of asking “Should we prioritize quality or speed?”, ask “What’s the smallest thing we can build that feels impossibly good?” Instead of “Should we build more features or polish existing ones?”, ask “What’s the one thing that, if we made it 10x better, would create real value?”

The Hard Truth

Most builders fail at this because it requires two skills that seem contradictory: the ability to think big and the discipline to start small. It requires the vision to see the cathedral and the humility to lay one brick at a time.

It requires saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great execution. It requires disappointing stakeholders who want everything so you can delight users who want one thing done impossibly well.

But here’s the thing: the builders who master this paradox don’t just build successful companies. They build legendary ones. They build products that change how people work and live and think.

They build the future, one meaningful minimum at a time.

The Question

So here’s the question that separates the legends from the graveyard: What’s your atomic experience? What’s the smallest thing you can build that creates a complete emotional transformation for one specific person?

And more importantly: Are you brave enough to start there?

Because if you are, you might just change the world. One brick at a time.

What’s your atomic experience? I’d love to hear about it. The best builders I know are constantly refining their ability to find the meaningful minimum. It’s the difference between building products people have to use and building products people can’t live without.

More tips for early stage startups

Key Strategies for Startups: Control Your Tech, Move Fast, and Value Equity

If you’re a tech company, don’t outsource your core tech to another firm.

Think of your core tech as the heart of your company. It’s what sets you apart and drives your unique value. When you outsource this vital part, you risk losing control and potentially building something unnecessary as you adapt to feedback. No matter how loyal and supportive an outsourcing firm may seem, their primary goal is to grow their own business, not yours. Even if you offer them equity, their interests won’t fully align with yours—they are billing by the hour while you’re focused on trimming down for an MVP.

I’ve seen many bootstrapped firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to end up with an unfinished product they don’t fully understand. By keeping your core tech in-house, you stay agile, protect your intellectual property, ensure everything aligns perfectly with your vision and goals, and invest in your corporate tech culture.

You’re supposed to be a fast, nimble startup. Being stealthy will more often hold you back than set you up for a “blowout” go-to-market strategy.

You are building your startup because something is missing from the market. This inherently means it has yet to be addressed or addressed successfully. Either you will be the one to succeed where others have failed, or you won’t. Rarely does a large firm, which is not already chasing the market you are attacking, suddenly “steal your idea”. Large firms are slow-moving and full of bureaucracy. They have not innovated because their goal is to preserve their brand and existing income streams. If they did “steal your idea” chances are they would do a horrible job. More importantly, if you can’t do better than what they attempt, what’s your “x-factor”?

More likely, those large companies will become one of your investors or try to acquire your business and novel expertise. Why would they risk building a new department or team internally (and potentially fail – bad for the brand) when they can simply buy it after it has proven successful? If you’re still not convinced and think a few months to a year of stealthiness will prevent another company from copying you, consider this: if it were possible to copy you so easily, would you really have a chance of succeeding in the long term anyway?

As a startup, your biggest strengths are your speed, focus, talent, and flexibility. Large companies aren’t built for these advantages. Staying in stealth mode might seem like a smart strategy to build suspense or keep others in the dark, but it will slow you down and limit your options. Early feedback from customers, investors, and the market is invaluable for refining your product and strategy. By staying too secretive, you miss out on crucial insights and an opportunity to build relationships. Instead, embrace openness—engage with your market, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.

You aren’t bootstrapping well if you are paying others cash to do your core work. Your equity is even more precious and should motivate value, knowledge, and culture.

Bootstrapping is all about making the most of your resources. If you’re spending cash on tasks you could handle internally, you’re not bootstrapping effectively. Instead, consider using options to attract and motivate talent who are passionate about your mission. This not only saves cash but also builds upon your value with equity while creating a committed team culture that’s deeply invested in the company’s success. Equity can be a powerful tool when focused on building long-term value. Remember, your cash is limited. Equity will be the foundational element for future rounds, when used wisely it can drive long-term value and loyalty.

You may not yet be a venture business

It’s exciting to think about raising money, but venture is meant to fuel powerful growth and value. If you already have paying customers lined up, and those sales or design partners could lead to changes in the product you may be giving up equity for the wrong business. If you need money to pay for the time between invoices and payments consider debt financing to cover your float. This isn’t always the most exciting feedback to hear, but if you haven’t considered these tactics then you may be doing a disservice to your business’s ability to evolve properly.