Alex HormoziFounder & Managing Partner

I did a 106 million launch that my mom got to see, and she died four weeks later. I was devastated, but I wrote notes to myself to stay in the fight. I realized people judge how much you love someone by how much you choose to suffer, but the person you lost does not want you to suffer.

We often experience moments of dissatisfaction and immediately assume we need to change what we are doing. However, emotional discomfort is not an adequate reason to change your business strategy. Long-term success requires separating feelings from execution.

You must decide whether you care more about your future or what other people think about your future. In the beginning, everything comes down to overcoming fear. A version of you must die to allow the new version to start.

The fastest way to build a ten million dollar business is not the fastest way to build a hundred million dollar business. Scaling requires different foundations, materials, and longer time horizons, similar to digging a deep foundation for a hundred-story skyscraper.

Entrepreneurs should use AI in their business rather than starting generic AI businesses that will immediately get swallowed up by the frontier models. Focus on solving real customer outcomes rather than just token maxing or marketing yourself as an AI company.

If you delegate your hardest thinking to AI, you get dumber. AI can be easily manipulated to agree with anything you ask, which is dangerous for critical decision-making. Your brain is your best asset, and you must keep it sharp by doing the hard thinking yourself.

The value remains in human judgment, liability, and the assumption of risk. AI cannot own an LLC, pay taxes, or take responsibility. Human stakeholders want real stakes, which is why we value the person who is ultimately accountable.

Audiences want stakes. If Mr. Beast released a video where the millions of dollars or the Lamborghinis were fake, nobody would care. Even though robots can beat humans at chess, we still watch humans play because we care about the human struggle.

If you build a holding company meant to run forever, you stop rushing for a fast exit and instead obsess over the infrastructure and foundations. A long time horizon forces you to build durable moats, similar to Elon Musk building Tesla's charging network.

They are the two most enduring competitive advantages because they are completely anti-human. Humans naturally seek short-term validation and fast results, meaning the entrepreneur who can delay gratification will outlast the competition.

If every customer stays, your business will grow whenever you sign a new one. A company that loses all its customers must continually spend massive amounts of capital on customer acquisition just to stay flat, compressing its bottom-line margins.

If you must double your customer acquisition velocity every year just to increase revenue, your product or service is not sticky enough. Before trying to scale sales, you must solve the retention problem first to ensure the revenue stays in the business.

It is driven by ego and fear. Founders like to feel special and needed, convincing themselves that no one else can do the job as well as they can. They use their high standards as a shield to justify their fear of delegating work.

If a founder is overwhelmed but has zero cash to hire help, the root cause is thin margins. Their pricing or delivery terms are incorrect, meaning they are offering too much value for too little money, preventing them from affording assistance.

Founders sell out of their own wallets and assume because a task is easy for them, it is easy for everyone and not worth paying for. To delegate successfully, you must accept that you can teach your skills in a fraction of the time if you build structured playbooks.

There are no unicorns who can step in and run your exact life. Instead of looking for one perfect employee, you must break the role down and hire specialized roles—like a rhino for the horn and a horse for the build—to replace components of your work.

Starting a business is concrete: register an LLC, open a business bank account, set up a payment processor, and ask a stranger to pay you for a service. Doing those four things immediately elevates you from an entrepreneur to an actual business owner.

He wanted certainty and security for me. He fled the Iranian revolution, failed medical school in France because he did not speak French, but persevered to become a doctor in the U.S. Because of his hard journey, he valued traditional, safe career paths.