This week features a battle-tested lesson from Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, game-changing AI tools, and the news that matters most to your business. Let's dive in!

If you pull Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things from The Founder’s Bookshelf, you aren't looking for advice on how to set a 10-year vision or optimize your funnel. You are likely in "The Struggle." While most business literature is written for when the charts are going up and to the right, Horowitz wrote the manual for when the walls are closing in. The book solves a specific, terrifying problem: most founders try to solve existential crises using "best practices" designed for stable growth, and in doing so, they accelerate their own demise.

here is the dichotomy between the Peacetime CEO and the Wartime CEO. Management theory usually teaches us to be Peacetime leaders. In Peacetime, the company has a large advantage in a growing market. The goal is broad expansion. In this mode, leaders prioritize culture, foster creativity, and build consensus. A Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals and empowers their team to find the best way to achieve them. This is Google in 2004—20% time, free food, and bottom-up decision-making.

But Wartime is different. In Wartime, the company is fending off an imminent existential threat—be it a massive competitor, a macroeconomic shift, or a dried-up runway. Horowitz argues that applying Peacetime techniques here is fatal. A Wartime CEO doesn't have time for consensus. They care about one thing: survival. Where a Peacetime CEO defines the culture, a Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.

The most famous example of a successful switch is Intel in the 1980s. For years, Intel was a "memory" company, dominating the DRAM market. This was their Peacetime. But when Japanese competitors began producing better memory chips at lower prices, Intel faced an existential crisis. The Peacetime approach would have been to iterate, improve morale, and fight for market share. Instead, Andy Grove (Intel’s President) entered Wartime mode. He famously asked CEO Gordon Moore, "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do?" Moore replied, "He would get out of memories." Grove ruthlessly shut down the memory plants, laid off 7,200 people, and pivoted the entire ship to microprocessors. It was brutal, non-consensual, and strictly top-down. But it saved the company and created the Intel we know today.

Contrast this with RIM (BlackBerry). When the iPhone launched in 2007, it was a declaration of war. But RIM’s leadership stayed in Peacetime. They relied on their existing moat (enterprise security), focused on gradual iteration, and mocked the iPhone's battery life rather than mobilizing a radical defense. They sought consensus and "stayed the course" of their previous success. By the time they realized they were in a war for the future of mobile computing, they had already lost.

The lesson is that leadership is not a personality trait; it is a strategic choice. Being a Wartime CEO feels "wrong." It feels dictatorial. It violates every modern HR principle about psychological safety. But you must look at your P&L and your market position and ask yourself: Am I building an empire, or am I defending the castle? If the arrows are flying, stop trying to be liked and start leading the war.

You can finally move beyond basic transaction tagging and actually automate the logic of the month-end close. Truewind acts as a digital accountant that integrates directly with your general ledger to handle the heavy lifting of accrual accounting, including managing prepaid schedules and fixed asset depreciation. Instead of just flagging expenses, the AI analyzes transaction context to categorize entries with high precision and drafts natural language explanations for financial variances, effectively writing the narrative portion of your board report for you. It combines this generative capability with a human-in-the-loop review process, ensuring you get audit-ready financial statements by the tenth of the month without the usual manual reconciliation work.

Legal teams often spend hours manually cross-checking definitions and clauses, but this tool handles that granular review in seconds. Robin AI plugs straight into Microsoft Word to review contracts against your specific "playbooks," automatically suggesting redlines and highlighting risks based on your company's preferred legal positions. It leverages Anthropic’s Large Language Models to process massive documents in their entirety—rather than in fragmented chunks—allowing it to understand context and spot inconsistencies across hundreds of pages. This approach allows lawyers to focus on high-level negotiation strategy while the software enforces consistency and handles the tedious mechanics of contract review.

Recording a meeting is easy, but extracting usable data from that conversation and getting it into your systems is where the real work happens. Fathom sits on top of Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams to transcribe conversations in real-time and immediately generate summaries and action items without you lifting a finger. It uses AI to parse dialogue for specific "deal intelligence"—like budget details or decision-maker objections—and automatically maps that information into the correct fields in Salesforce or HubSpot. By turning unstructured conversation into structured database entries, it eliminates post-call data entry and ensures your team retains a searchable institutional memory of every client interaction.

The small business sector faced a significant contraction in November, shedding 120,000 jobs while larger corporations continued to hire (according to the latest ADP National Employment Report). This divergence highlights the disproportionate impact of current economic headwinds on Main Street compared to larger firms. While the data indicates a challenging labor market, small businesses have historically been agile in recovery, and this period may present an opportunity to strategically restructure workforce needs for greater efficiency.

Inflationary pressures have led to a historic shift in pricing strategy, with a net 34% of small business owners raising average selling prices in November (per NFIB survey data). This represents the highest single-month jump in the survey's history, signaling that owners are actively passing through elevated input costs. While raising prices is a difficult decision, calibrating them to reflect current market realities is an essential step to protect margins and position your business for stability in 2026.

Starting January 1, 2026, a new 1% excise tax will apply to international remittance transfers made using cash, money orders, or similar physical instruments (as mandated by the OBBBA). This policy change is designed to capture revenue from specific types of cross-border flows. However, business owners can legally avoid this additional cost by transitioning to bank-to-bank wire transfers or credit card payments, which remain exempt from the new levy.

This video has clearly struck a nerve, racking up over 15 million views by condensing a lifetime of entrepreneurial wins and losses into a single sitting. Because there is simply too much valuable material here to cover in one go, we are going to return to Simon Squibb’s masterclass in future segments to unpack different modules. For today, however, we are focusing on perhaps his most counter-intuitive piece of advice: the idea that the best way to sell is to stop trying to sell, and instead practice radical, sometimes uncomfortable, honesty.

Sales often carries a stigma of manipulation—what Squibb calls the "99-cent rule," where businesses price things to look cheaper than they actually are. He argues that this mindset is a trap that ultimately repels customers. Instead of learning psychological tricks or high-pressure scripts, he insists that "in sales, the thing that's not said enough is: be brutally honest, be authentic." He believes that if you feel the need to trick someone to get a "yes," you aren't really selling; you are just delaying a failure.

He illustrates this with a powerful story about a salesperson at a Mini Cooper dealership. When a couple walked in with specific needs that the dealership couldn't perfectly meet, the salesperson didn't try to force the sale. Instead, after listening to them, she honestly told them: "You probably should buy a Tesla." It sounds like bad business to send a customer to a competitor, but Squibb notes that this act of transparency "made us connect to that salesperson" in a way a brochure never could. They didn't buy a car that day, but the dealership gained something far more valuable: their absolute trust.

This approach converts a transaction into a relationship. Squibb recalls applying this himself when he worked in a clothing shop as a young man, where he would tell customers bluntly if a suit didn't look good on them. He found that "from that moment onwards, they trusted me... I only worked there for the summer, but they trusted me forever." By being willing to lose the immediate sale to preserve your integrity, you signal that you are an objective advisor rather than just a vendor looking for a commission.

Ultimately, this lesson is about playing the long game by removing the pressure to "perform." Squibb advises that you must "make sure that what you're selling, you believe in" and never say something isn't true just to close a deal. When you stop trying to extract money and start trying to add value through truth—even when it hurts your bottom line temporarily—the sales eventually follow, often with much higher loyalty.

The defining aesthetic of our era is "frictionless." We tap a glass screen, and food appears; we press a pedal, and an electric car silently glides forward. It feels like magic, or at least like a clean break from the smokestacks of the past. But the physical reality of this technology is heavy, and it is far from clean. The lithium-ion batteries that power our guilt-free EVs and indispensable iPhones rely on cobalt, a mineral that largely comes from the red earth of the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, the "green energy" revolution is fueled by 19th-century conditions: armies of "artisanal" miners, often children as young as six, digging in toxic tunnels with no equipment, risking collapse and lung disease for a dollar a day. to feed a supply chain that ends in our pockets.

This casts a different shadow on the story of Thomas Thwaites and his melted toaster. We previously looked at his £1,100 homemade toaster as a lesson in complexity—how hard it is to replicate the global machine. But looking at the Congo, we have to ask a darker question: Is the global machine "efficient," or is it just exploitative? The reason the store-bought toaster—and your phone, and your clothes—is so cheap isn't just because of economies of scale. It's because the true cost of production is often subsidized by the health and safety of someone you will never meet. The system works because the messy, dangerous part happens far away from the shiny retail box.

This dynamic isn't limited to hardware; it haunts the "magical" world of AI, too. We tend to think of Artificial Intelligence as pure code, but it requires massive amounts of human training to be safe for public use. Before an AI like ChatGPT is released, it has to be taught what not to say. This job falls to data labelers in places like Kenya, who earn less than $2 an hour to review the internet's most toxic, violent, and disturbing content. They act as the digital world's filtration system, absorbing the psychological trauma of the worst of humanity so that the chatbot on your screen remains polite and helpful.

So, we arrive at the uncomfortable mechanics of the modern world: Mass production is an engine of distance. It separates the consumer from the producer so effectively that we can consume without the burden of conscience. We are not paying the true price of our lifestyle. If the price tag on an iPhone included the cost of fair wages, safe mines, and psychological care for data trainers, it wouldn't cost $1,000—it would cost $10,000. The "efficiency" we worship is often just a fancy word for our ability to ignore the human beings who make our lives possible.

What are your thoughts? If you had to pay the "true cost" of your phone—moral and financial—would you still buy it? Or are we all just comfortable enough with the distance to keep swiping?

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