Line zero
The Foundry. It’s how I think.
Businesses generated, built and spun out. Nobody buys this line. It exists because the fastest way to keep judgment sharp is to keep using it on real problems with real consequences, and because a practice that advises founders should be able to show its own work.
The floor is running while you read. Ideas arrive at lab cadence and fall through the five questions; most stop, and are kept.
Cadence
A lab, not a venture studio.
A studio is measured by how many companies it launches. The Foundry is measured by how many ideas it takes far enough to know whether they are any good, which is a different and much cheaper thing to be right about.
Most ideas stop at the frame below, because the frame kills them. A few get built far enough to be used by strangers. A smaller number find a co-founder or capital and leave. I keep optionality on the rest rather than pretending they are dead.
The output that matters most is the thinking, published, so that a founder reading it can see exactly how the judgment was arrived at and argue with it.
0 built · 0 kept
The frame
Every idea is worked to the same five questions.
The frame is the point. Comparing ten ideas is only possible if they were all interrogated the same way, and an idea that survives all five is worth building even when it sounds unpromising.
- I
Market
Who has this problem, how many of them there are, and what they currently do instead. If the honest answer is that they live with it, the idea has to explain why that changes.
- II
Advantage and loop
The thing this business gets better at with every use, and the loop that makes it happen without anyone deciding to. An advantage that needs a marketing budget to stay true is not one.
- III
Wedge
The narrow first job it does better than anything else, small enough to ship and specific enough that someone switches for it alone.
- IV
Moat
What a well-funded competitor would still be missing a year in. Usually accumulated data that only exists because the product ran, never the code.
- V
Free tier as strategy
What is given away, and why giving it away is the acquisition plan rather than a cost. The artifact people share is the advertisement.
Most ideas stop here.
The machine
One command, and the idea has somewhere to live.
Provisioning a new idea takes a single command. It creates the repository, wires up hosting and a database, and inherits a business template that every spin-out starts from, so the setup work that usually eats the first fortnight is already done and identical each time.
That matters for one reason. When standing something up is nearly free, the decision to build it stops being a commitment and becomes an experiment, and I stop arguing about ideas that could have been settled by shipping one.
It is also the clearest demonstration of the claim the rest of this site makes. The advice runs because the person giving it keeps a running system behind every part of it.
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A rehearsal, in this browser. No repository was created.
What gets published
The reasoning, in turn, including the ideas that failed.
Worked ideas are being prepared for publication here, each to the frame above, each with the reason it lived or died stated plainly. One good teardown is a blog post. A body of them is evidence, and evidence is the only honest way to sell judgment.
The ones that stopped while you were reading, by gate
- 0I Market
- 0II Advantage and loop
- 0III Wedge
- 0IV Moat
- 0V Free tier