RIP THE SCRIPT @Nike #Ad

Hot take: don’t listen to anyone’s advice on what your career trajectory should be. Everything is figure-outable. Go work hard on something you’re excited about & become world class at that thing.

I share updates with @GustoHQ investors on a regular basis, and I wanted to publicly share my most recent update (which includes the $1b revenue milestone). It’s the most amazing time of my life to be a builder, and I pinch myself every day thinking about what’s now possible for us to do, in service of our mission. We’re here to help small businesses, and if you’re interested in our mission, please reach out! Either to partner, or join the journey.

Jeff Bezos reveals the moment an early Amazon executive told him he had enough ideas to destroy Amazon: "Early in Amazon's history, Jeff Wilke came to me one day and said, Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon. You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon." "I was like, what do you mean?" "He said, you have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it." "Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. It was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction." "So I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas."

Starting to hire and retrain for new agent engineering roles for *internal* functions to help get more powerful agents working well on critical business processes. I expect this type of role to be a very big deal over time at Box and other companies. It looks something like an internal FDE, whose job it is to wire up internal systems and get agents working with them effectively. The person will be extremely technical and capable of building secure, governed agents for internal workflows that connect to business systems (like Box, Salesforce, Workday, etc.), and codify workflows in skills. In some cases this person may understand the business process well enough to do it fully, but in most cases I expect them to work with the business directly in an embedded fashion. Ironically, that may introduce another new role on the business side that is more akin to agent product management for internal processes. The key is that you need technical process people that can span multiple teams or functions in an organization. It’s not about brining automation to a job, but bringing automation to a process. This is going to be a very big trend in most companies going forward. Fun to watch the early innings of what this will look like.

Eli Goldratt's book, The Goal, was famous for its (then unpopular argument) that keeping every machine running 24 hours a day, the metric most plant managers cared about, was actively making factories worse. I suspect we're seeing the same fallacy in how many people are using AI agents. Goldratt's point was that machine utilization isn't throughput. What you want from a manufacturing plants is making good widgets as cost-effectively as possible. It doesn't necessarily follow that running your machines all the times optimizes that. Picture a three-station assembly line. Stations 1 and 2 each crank out 200 widgets an hour. Station 3 can only handle 100. Running stations 1 and 2 around the clock doesn't ship more product. It just piles up half-finished widgets in front of station 3, ties up cash in inventory, and creates more work managing the pile. He developed the Theory of Constraints to point out that what matters is solving the bottleneck in the system, not increasing machine utilization. I suspect a lot of agent usage right now is the same fallacy at higher resolution. Running 20 Claude Code sessions in parallel can feel productive because something is always happening. But, if the bottleneck in your work is judgment about what's worth doing, more agents just generate more output for you to wade through. This is not to say there aren't workflows running 20 agents in parallel very effectively, I'm sure there are. And, I suspect there's a general retraining we all need to do around evolving historical workflows. But.... The constraint for most knowledge work is deciding what's worth executing and no one is task switching between 20 things at the same time effectively I don't think. I find I can run maybe 2 or 3 things in parallel with maybe 1 or 2 admin-y type things on the side and that is only if I'm very locked in.

AI-Native Service Companies @gustaf The total spend on services is many times larger than the spend on software, and a lot of those services are already outsourced, which makes them easier to replace with an AI-native product. We're excited about companies that don't sell a tool to help you do the work: they just do the work.

In celebration of #SmallBusinessWeek, we're bringing together a small group of business owners (some curious, some already in the process) for a conversation about the acquisition space. If you're a business owner on the East Coast and an exit has been on your mind, DM us!

CHRIS CAMILLO JUST LAID OUT HOW TO MAKE $500,000 A YEAR AS AN "AI GUY" FOR LOCAL BUSINESSES His blueprint: 1. Walk into any HVAC, plumbing, or sprinkler business. 2. Ask where they're leaking money. 3. Build them an AI agent that answers after-hours calls, sends instant texts, and gets quotes out in real time. 4. Integrate it with their CRM for free. 5. Charge them $2K-$3K/month to be their "AI guy." Repeat across 10-20 businesses. "There are people right now doing this."