Three posts, written from a 30-minute conversation.

We lost our biggest deal last year to a company with a worse product. Not a slightly worse product. A clearly worse one. Their founder had posted every week for two years. Ours had a profile photo from 2019. The buyer told us afterward: "We felt like we knew them." I used to think visibility was vanity. It is due diligence. Your buyer is doing it whether you show up or not. So now I show up. Thirty minutes a month, on a call, talking about what we actually see in clinical data. Someone else does the typing. The next deal of that size went the other way.

The worst advice I hear given to founders: "Hire a CFO when you raise your A." By the A, your unit economics are already a story you have told investors. If the story is wrong, you find out in diligence, which is the most expensive place to find out anything. What you need at seed is not a CFO. It is four hours a month with someone who has seen fifty cap tables and will tell you which of your three pricing plans is quietly losing money. I have had that conversation eleven times this year. Nine of them changed a price.

Things I am tired of hearing at robotics conferences: "The hardware is the easy part." It is not. Ask anyone who has shipped a unit to a port in January. "We are software-first." So is everyone. Say what the robot does. "Humans in the loop." Which humans, where, paid how much? We run 40 vehicles across two terminals. The hardest problem in the last year was a bolt. A specific bolt, a specific torque, salt air. Nobody puts the bolt on the slide. The bolt is the business.