'I didn’t want anybody shooting me': Five Guys...

So we've been obsessing over "the moat" at my startup lately. It's the classic question: what actually protects us long-term? Nothing tunes the senses on this like watching somene else's moat disappear. In our weekly eng meeting, we were figuring out how to handle customer bug reports post-launch. One idea was routing them straight to Linear for triage. Normal stuff. We tabled it. More important stuff to do. Here's the thing though, my co-founder has basically stopped using Linear. We have a coo

I started a Junk Removal company at 21 and grew it to $500k in revenue within 2 years. The market I was in was very small, so I moved to a bigger city after year three and started my second branch. 1.5 years later, and this new branch is at 200K in revenue, but the first branch is struggling. We're 1.5 hours apart, and I keep a manager to run things, but this week he went on vacation, and the entire thing fell apart. The guys aren't showing up; when they do, they're not wearing uniforms, and nob

Everyone's obsessed with the startup lifestyle right now. "Be your own boss." "Build your own thing." All over social media. But nobody talks about what it's actually like. I've learned first hand. You're the first one to get hit when something breaks. Last one to get paid. Every problem is yours. Customer cancels? Your problem. Employee quits? Your problem. Something fails on a weekend? Guess who's fixing it. You never clock out. I've taken calls at 11pm from panicked employees. Fixed payment p