Operator's Memo
Product Leadership. AI. Growth. Building enduring technology companies.
Latest memo
Marketplaces
The NFL's Prediction Markets Fight Is About Rights
The league's 'objectionable' framing isn't consumer protection—it's a defense of who gets paid when its games become tradable events.
Recent
Product Strategy
Anthropic's Open-Weights Stance Is Containment
Anthropic's refusal to open-weight frontier models reads as a competitive containment strategy, and it survives only while open models trail closed ones.
Product Leadership
Vibe coding is a PM skill, not an engineering shortcut
PMs who ship a working prototype in the interview win offers because they close the gap between hypothesis and evidence fastest.
Product Strategy
Spending the Audience to Buy the Ecosystem
The FIA optimized the 2026 F1 rules for manufacturers and sustainability, and paid for both with the one asset it can't refill: fan trust.
Product Strategy
The substrate is always rented
Compounding advantage requires a stable substrate you don't control, so the strategic question is how long yours stays stable.
Product Strategy
When the moat becomes the anchor
A shift in the underlying substrate turns an incumbent's greatest strength into a liability, leaving it least able to adapt.
Growth
PQLs Are the New MQL
The signals that predict conversion aren't email opens and webinar sign-ups — they're the sequence of features a user adopts in their first week.
Product Strategy
The Mom-and-Pop SaaS Era and the End of Scale-or-Die
AI-built single-operator software will fragment horizontal markets into thousands of durable niches, proving defensibility no longer requires venture-scale growth.
Organization Design
Product Ops Is Now Load-Bearing
Product Ops stopped being a support function; in an AI-native org it's the structure the whole product team runs on.
Product Strategy
AI Killed the Founding Team, Not the PM Job
The real casualty of a no-engineer SaaS built in nine months isn't the PM or the engineer—it's the technical-plus-business cofounder split.