I help early-stage founders find PMF and build a successful go-to-market motion.
Salt Lake City, UT
- Tweets 2,126
- Following 720
- Followers 624
- Likes 4,479
If an employee was at a startup for 10 years, promoted 6x, but the founder is out there giving them negative back channel references does that say more about the employee or the founder?
1
2
91
Doug Regner retweeted
Averaging all my different rankings for best overall state for families.
Ranked best to worst. Save this cheat sheet for your future.
23
29
200
29,397
Doug Regner retweeted
My takeaway from Anthropic rebuilding its source control for agent-scale work: the unit of autonomy has to be bigger than a coding task.
Writing a change is one step. A software factory has to carry it through integration, testing and release, then use failures to improve the next attempt.
The hard part is how changes interact. Two can pass separately and fail together. A passing result describes one version, not every version after it. With more agents, keeping that evidence tied to what ships gets harder.
I’d measure how much work reaches production correctly, how often engineers step in to fix or unblock the work, and how quickly the system recovers. Counting agents or generated code doesn’t tell me that.
Faster coding is valuable. The bigger leap is making the whole lifecycle capable of absorbing it.
2
2
9
1,423
Doug Regner retweeted
If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights.
265
360
6,196
304,544
Initial (not ideal)
Customer
Profile
In the early stage your ICP ≠ TAM. Start winning narrowly focused and then expand.
1
68
Be profitable and run your company with maximal agentic loops
You don’t need to sell more of your co anymore
$10M profit per year reinvested is like an annual Series A no dilution
The best startups do this now. No whinging about the Series A/B crunch.
You don’t need saving.
Series A and Series B are the hardest rounds for founders today.
Founders launch a vertical AI SaaS company. They reach $1M-$3M ARR in 2 years or $5M-$10M in 3-4 years.
They go out to market with their 1x-3x growth. Almost no interest from investors.
If it's not the right category or a deep, long-term conviction bet, most investors stay away.
Founders are stuck with large pref stacks and a market that doesn't value this growth. They are neither sustainable (at their current burn) nor venture-fundable (without growth).
The exit options (if available) don't leave much for the team. In most cases, founders are required to join the acquiring company (but they aren't interested).
I talk to many founders who have been misadvised, and they keep grinding without making progress.
The Series A or B that didn't happen won't magically happen in 1 year with a little more progress. If the market moves much faster than your company progresses, you will always be behind. If you are told today to hit some metrics and come back, the market will have already moved by the time you return.
187
167
2,852
310,970
Distribution and data
I'd expand the moats left to:
- Proprietary data or content: data nobody else has, or unique content you can create
- Network effects / community: users make it more valuable for each other
- Audience / distribution: you can get attention on demand
- Physical component: hardware, locations, real-world operations
- Capital: owning assets and investing (esp into the AI companies as they are and will suck up large parts of the economy)
- Regulatory: licenses and legal barriers
65
"Really cool, let's circle back after Q1" is a no. Most founders hear it as a maybe.
I built a free diagnosis for that: upload a sales call, get a 1-100 desperation score with the buyer's own words as evidence.
1
1
50
Chase wins not titles. No one cares if you’re CRO of a dead end company
What should sales talent focus on when deciding which company to join?
“If you are a seller looking to join an early-stage company, thinking about equity, cash and comp is actually the wrong thing to index on.
The right thing to index on is the market, the talent density of the business, and the founders.
If you want the VP title and a ton of equity, but you are going to work at a mediocre business that might grow 20 to 30% a year, who cares? You are making the wrong trade.” @max11free
Love to hear your thoughts @ryan_c_walsh @Chris_Orlob @HackItMax @scottleese
6
164