Entrepreneurs, not contract laborers
You need a business not an "internet business." The first gives you a marketable asset you control and build. The second gives you a dependency on a system of software and apps that will seek to control you.
Edition 162
I'm gonna jump right in on this one, if only for the purposes of brevity, so if you're new here - WELCOME! - I usually spend a little more time making funny jokes about our dystopian overlords, but you'll have to be free of that for today for more substantive matters.
16,000 "businesses" per-day
If you look at the data from the Dept of Labor Statistics and the short lived headlines it produces you might believe we are in a renaissance of entrepreneurship. New businesss starts has historically been the lifeblood of the American economy, and so on one hand, if one was interested in being talking head on CNBC, this would be cause of celebration: 16,000 new filings per day in the U.S. Huzzah.
Except that's not where we are. The algorithms, the digital marketing obsessions, the software (Jesus, dear god how many software licenses does one business need???) are all layers in a 20 year religion where we don't make businesses anymore, we make websites which link to marketing funnels which link to social media content engines. Anywhere from 40-60% of a founders life spent spewing stuff onto the internet to get it to spew back a business.
This is not all that dissimilar from a time I'm sure you're all thinking about 1300s England. The French king takes over, a pandemic turns the society into chaos, the king forces all the citizens onto permanent residencies they don't own on land that has fallen into decay, hikes up the price to exist, and sends the nation into subsistence.
Today we call it the creator economy. Or the fractional economy. You pick.
The system that forces entrepreneurs into digital subsistence now demands the outsource of your thinking into AI so that every founder is click by click, prompt by prompt invited into abandoning their own thinking and self-trust into digital dependency and cognitive decline. Thousands are taking the bait.
An LLC wrapper on what is fundamentally a system of contract labor with taxes being paid to Silicon Valley for the right to exist.
So let's solve for "ownership" not "independent work"
I celebrate the thousands moving out of their employee life into business ownership. But I also know what they will be offered in the above Faustian bargain, and what they need to be able to make a different choice. The path into real entrepreneurship - owning a business asset that has real value and that they truly lead and grow out of their vision and skill.
This takes two things: deep self trust and business acumen.
The bulk of the "business" shelf at your local bookstore isn't about business at all. It's derivatives of Tim Ferriss, trying to teach you how to game the internet. There maybe marginal gains to be had by one hack or another, but business acumen, the kind that turns ideas into resilient ventures takes real skill and proven systems, the kind that rarely get written about any more because its easier to sell a book about how to Grab Eyeballs Now, has been ignored for two decades.
Almost every founder under 50 has ben trained not to build a business but to build an "internet business" which is dynamically not the same thing. The first gives you a marketable asset you control and build. The second gives you a dependency on a system of software and apps that will seek to control you.
On the self-trust front, I talk with more and more founders who cannot complete a paragraph without telling me how they "ran the idea through ChatGPT" or "asked my personal AI" or some other cognitively declining thing. The feeling of not knowing what to do next or how to do it well is central to the life of a founder. I don't blame anyone for finding solutions away from the "what the f am I doing here" feeling.
But the only solutions that matter, the only ones that deserve your hours and your money and your time should deepen your self-trust, not make your more algorithmically dependent. When you slide that pointer down to your tray to click on Claude to "run something buy it" I want you to ask yourself - no matter what answers come back, will I have more belief in my ability to make decisions and grow my business after reading it or less? Will I be more able to thrive in my own thinking and point of view or less?
Your ability to present distinct, unalloyed coherent wisdom about your business is about the only real asset in town. And if I were starting a business today, its the thing I would put all my chips in.
To guide that self trust, founders don't need more hacks, they need more wisdom.
Wisdom is the ability to take knowledge and apply it in bespoke ways to unique contexts, seeing the visible and invisible forces of that context, and bringing the right ideas and actions to bear at the right time to produce long-term outcomes.
I wonder if you would consider:
What are you doing right now that is specifically built to deepen your self-trust and sharpen your business (not internet marketing) acumen?
Let's be explicit about business acumen, where wisdom comes from
I covered this the podcast episode that just dropped in more detail but at a high level, there are seven key foundations to a business that works, all of them are digital agnostic:
- Owner Mindset → Fire the employee within
- Design a customer → The discipline required to escape the algorithm
- “Around the block offer” → Kill your darlings (all the other stuff you're trying), then do it again
- Pricing and winning → A revenue model that protects trust and establishes position
- Operating model → Obsessive allocate your most expensive employee (you)
- Relational go-to-market → Defy the frictionless surface
- Build for capacity not scale → Growth mechanisms are human things
I am dedicating much of my time in Q4 to teaching these principles in a variety of v venues to help as many founders as possible, recover ability to be OWNERS not people with LLCs who sell contract work.
A couple upcoming opportunities for you to do this work together:
- If you know you're ready to do this work and to build a business that moves through the $1M and $3M barriers, protects your time and your values, and isn't one more algorithmically dependent web zombie, then you need to take one of our seats in October's VentureStock where I will teach you and work with you on this directly over seven weeks.
- If you just have questions about these foundations or about VentureStock, you want to know more before signing up or you just have questions about what applies to you, I'm hosting an AMA on the seven foundations next Wednesday at noon ET. You can sign up here.
Your training gave me clarity on exactly who we’re building for and what we’re selling them today, after nearly a decade of iterating on both questions. - Will, CEO, recent CultureCraft program graduate
