Built to Last Is Dead
When we were building RepeatMD, Jim Collins’ Built to Last sat on my desk. Not as decoration — we actually ran the playbook. BHAGs. Core ideology. Clock-building, not time-telling.
And here’s the thing: it worked. We scaled to hundreds of employees, teams of engineers, real venture money, real outcomes. I’m not a guy who tried the old way and failed and now has a grudge against it. I ran the old playbook faithfully and won with it.
That’s exactly why you should listen when I tell you it’s obsolete.
The honest accounting of what the old way cost: years of hiring, management layers whose whole job was managing other layers, dilution to fund headcount, and complexity taxes on every decision. We built a machine that required hundreds of people to operate — and the day it was finished, the ground had shifted underneath it. The same outcomes were suddenly achievable by a founder and an AI workforce.
The dream isn’t the high-rise full of employees anymore. The new dream is small, nimble, and AI-native — built to fund a life, or built to sell.
To be clear about what AI-native means, because the term is getting abused: it is not a wrapper around a chat window, and it is not passive-income grift. It means the org chart itself is designed around agents from day one. Agents doing the repetitive, expensive work — supervised, verified, in production — and humans kept where judgment and relationships actually matter.
Two honest tracks come out of that. The floor: a business with real profit and a tiny team that gets you out of the rat race and provides for your family. The ceiling: a 9-figure exit, because acquirers pay for margin and AI-native economics change what margin looks like.
I think 2026 is the greatest arbitrage window for normal people I’ve seen in my career. Not because AI is magic — because the incumbents in every boring, expensive-labor industry are still hiring their way through problems that agents already solve.
I’m writing a book about this — the full story and the blueprint. It’s called How to Build a Business Now. You can join the waitlist here.