This week features a powerful lesson from Mat, game-changing AI tools, and the news that matters most to your business. Let's dive in!

After revisiting our conversation with Mat from Marble, a different, more tactical lesson jumped out—a masterclass in business strategy. It’s not about the founder's mindset, but about the genius of where you choose to compete. While his competitors were fighting over massive, high-budget government contracts, Mat built his company by going where no one else was looking: to the customers everyone else had written off.

The market for high-performance surveillance drones is dominated by massive defense contractors selling to countries like the US and the UK. The price tags are astronomical. As Mat explained, one system used by the UK costs more than a million dollar a day to fly one drone. This creates an exclusive club, leaving the vast majority of the world—countries in South America, Africa, and Asia with more limited budgets—completely underserved. They have the same problems with illegal fishing and trafficking but lack the tools to fight back.

This is where Mat’s strategic brilliance shines. Instead of trying to build a slightly cheaper product to compete for the same billion-dollar contracts, he saw an entirely different opportunity. He focused on the customers his competitors deemed unprofitable. Why did this work? Because the big players had no incentive to innovate on cost. Why would you go sell to a country in South America that... can only afford to give you $1 million a year rather than a day? Mat asked rhetorically. Nobody is trying to solve for them because everyone's busy making tons of money selling to defense in large governments. He didn’t enter a crowded market; he created a new one where he was the only player.

This go where they ain't strategy gave his startup, Marble, three huge advantages: zero competition, a desperate and appreciative customer base, and a real-world environment to prove that their technology—which is 100 times cheaper—is just as effective. This is the long-term play. They aren't just winning small contracts; they're building a global track record. The endgame? To eventually circle back to the very markets that once ignored them. As Mat put it, once we prove our system... We're gonna go back to the UK and say, 'Hey guys, we've been selling this thing that is better than what you're buying... Why are you guys spending like a hundred times more on this thing that is updated?'

The lesson for any entrepreneur or SMB owner is powerful and clear. Don't just look at where the money is now; look at where the problems are that no one is solving. Your most powerful competitive advantage might be your willingness to serve the customers your larger, more complacent rivals have ignored. Win there, and you can build the leverage to take on the world.

Gumloop is a no-code tool for building intelligent, multi-step automations that put your marketing, sales, and operations on autopilot. It handles complex jobs like scraping websites for leads, monitoring social media sentiment, creating SEO audit reports, or building an AI Slackbot for internal questions. The platform embeds AI decision-making directly into your workflows, using models from OpenAI and Anthropic to analyze data, understand content, and determine the next action automatically. For teams needing to automate processes that require real intelligence, Gumloop is the engine for smarter, more efficient operations.  

Clay is a command center for go-to-market data, pulling from over 100 sources to build targeted lead lists for sales and marketing ops teams. It automates data gathering, from identifying ideal companies to enriching them with contact details, tech stacks, and real-time buying signals like funding announcements or new hires. Its AI agent, Claygent, acts as a research assistant, scraping websites and public records to find unique details for outreach and helping draft personalized messages based on that data. For GTM teams focused on data-driven, hyper-personalized campaigns, Clay is the essential tool for finding the right person at the right time with the right message.  

Uizard is a design tool for non-designers, enabling the creation of professional mockups and interactive prototypes for websites and apps in minutes. It’s ideal for founders needing visuals for a pitch deck, product managers clarifying features, or marketers designing landing pages independently. You can start with a simple text prompt, a photo of a hand-drawn sketch, or a screenshot of an existing app, and its AI instantly generates an editable, multi-screen design. For anyone needing to turn a rough concept into a clickable prototype at lightning speed, Uizard is the ultimate tool for making ideas tangible.

On October 10, 2025, the crypto world learned a painful lesson about its connection to global events. The trigger was a political announcement: President Trump revealed a plan for 100% tariffs on Chinese tech, which immediately spooked investors. This caused a rush to sell off anything considered risky, from tech stocks to crypto. The crash was especially brutal for digital currencies because many traders had borrowed huge sums of money to amplify their bets on rising prices. When the market suddenly dropped, these traders couldn't cover their loans. This set off a massive domino effect, forcing trading platforms to automatically sell off their assets to pay back the debts. In just 24 hours, this fire sale vaporized over $19 billion worth of these borrowed bets, impacting 1.6 million traders and proving that crypto is now deeply linked to the volatile world of global politics.

Imagine trying to drive down the highway at night, and someone suddenly turns off your headlights. That's what the federal government just did to the economy. The shutdown has halted the release of critical data—like the monthly jobs and inflation reports—that everyone from the Federal Reserve to small business owners relies on to make decisions. Without this information, the Fed is guessing on interest rates, and you're left guessing about hiring, pricing, and expansion. Key decisions that affect your bottom line are now being made completely in the dark.  

The Federal Reserve is trapped, and your business is caught in the middle. The job market is cooling off, so the Fed just cut interest rates to keep the economy from stalling. But at the same time, inflation is heating up again, making everything more expensive. This toxic mix of a weak economy and rising prices has a name: stagflation. For you, it means a painful squeeze from both sides—customers have less money to spend, while your own costs for supplies and borrowing continue to climb.

When Steve Jobs stood before the Stanford graduating class of 2005, he didn't offer the usual clichés about success. Instead, he told three stories from his life, stories of curiosity, failure, and mortality. His first was about connecting the dots. He shared how dropping out of college allowed him to drop in on a calligraphy class that fascinated him. At the time, it had no practical use. But years later, when designing the first Macintosh computer, that knowledge was priceless. It's why we have beautiful typography on our computers today. As Jobs explained, You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

The second story was a raw account of love and devastating loss. At just 30 years old, after pouring his life into building Apple, Jobs was unceremoniously fired from the very company he created. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley, he admitted. But in the ashes of that failure, he rediscovered the freedom of being a beginner again. This period of creative rebirth led him to found NeXT and Pixar. He learned that the only thing that kept him going was his passion. You've got to find what you love, he insisted. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

Jobs' third story was his most profound, a reflection on death. He recounted his battle with pancreatic cancer and the stark moment his doctor told him to prepare to die. Facing his own mortality changed everything, stripping away all fear of failure and expectations from others. He urged the students to understand that their time is finite and precious. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose, he said. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma.

He concluded not with his own words, but with the farewell message from the final issue of a publication he admired, the Whole Earth Catalog. On the back cover of its last edition was a picture of a country road at dawn and a simple, powerful phrase. It was the wish he held for himself and the one he wanted to pass on to the graduates as they began their own journeys. It was a call to never be satisfied and to always be willing to take risks. His final, lasting advice was simply this: Stay hungry, stay foolish.

I recently came across the story of a designer named Thomas Thwaites who embarked on a heroic attempt to build a simple, £4 toaster from raw materials. His nine-month journey involved mining his own iron ore, trying to make plastic from potato starch, and smelting metal in a makeshift furnace. The original toaster, he discovered, was made of over 400 individual parts—a dizzying network of global cooperation hidden inside a cheap appliance. His final product cost over £1,100 and promptly melted itself in seconds. This heroic failure offers profound lessons for anyone in business.  

First, it shatters the myth of "starting from scratch." We love the story of the lone founder in a garage, but Thwaites' melted toaster proves it's a fantasy. No successful entrepreneur mines their own ore. They leverage the incredible, complex systems that already exist—cloud infrastructure, open-source code, and global logistics. The real hustle isn't in trying to do everything yourself; it's in seeing the world's existing components and connecting them in a new way. The mantra for any founder should be to iterate, not originate.  

This brings us to the brutal economics of the project. Thwaites' toaster cost nearly 300 times more than the store-bought version, not because the materials were rare, but because he was paying the true price of bypassing an efficient system. The £4 market price isn't just a number; it's a signal of the immense value created by specialization, economies of scale, and global logistics—value that no single person's heroic hustle can ever hope to replicate. It’s a humbling lesson in the difference between effort and value.  

This is why, if you're a leader, your company is a toaster. It has 400 parts: engineering, marketing, finance, HR. The CEO of the toaster company doesn't know the chemical formula for the plastic casing, and you don't need to be the top expert in every department. Your job is to be the systems thinker. It’s to understand how every specialized part connects and to create the conditions for them to work together flawlessly. Your role is to master the interconnections, orchestrating the division of labor that makes the impossible possible.  

Ultimately, our work as leaders isn't to be the lone genius who can build a toaster from a rock. It's to be the humble integrator who recognizes the vast, interconnected complexity of the world and our place within it. It’s about having the vision to see how hundreds of specialized parts—and people—can come together to create something that works.

What are your thoughts? What are the 400 parts of your business? Are you still trying to smelt the iron ore, or are you focused on designing the machine that puts it all together?

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