Jordan Bibla

You don't get to call yourself a founder just because you started building something. That's the biggest lie in startups. We’ve glorified the act of starting to the point where it obscures the only thing that matters: whether anyone wants what you're making. Founders confuse activity with purpose. They fall in love with building. They get addicted to progress that only exists inside their walls. Lines of code. User flows. Team rituals. Pitch decks. It's all insulation. A startup doesn’t exist to be built. It exists to manufacture demand. The only reason to write a line of code is to unlock a reason for someone to pay attention. And yet, most early founders don’t actually talk to customers. They talk about talking to customers. They hide behind metrics. They obsess over conversion rates before they’ve earned any attention. They A/B test the shade of a CTA button instead of figuring out what problem someone would crawl across glass to solve. They ship, but they don't listen. They launch, but they don’t learn. Here's the hard truth: you can raise money, hire a team, get press, hit a milestone, and still not be doing the actual job. If you're not creating customers, you're not running a company. You're roleplaying one. You’re not a founder until you’ve created something people want so badly that they ask you for it. That’s it. That’s the bar. It's not about innovation. It's not about vision. It’s about demand. Raw, unprompted, unpaid demand. Something so painful or exciting or magnetic that people would feel the absence of it if you disappeared. And this is why most founders quietly burn out. Not from lack of effort, but from building for too long without making contact with reality. It’s easy to believe you’re on a journey when you’ve never been forced to face the market. But the market doesn't care how hard you worked. It only cares whether you solved something it gives a shit about. So start there. If you can't make one person care, you're not ready to make ten. And if you can't make ten care, what are you doing asking a team to build for a hundred? The job is to create a customer. Every other job flows from that. Until then, you're just practicing.

66% of Parisians voted today to create 500 additional pedestrian streets, replacing over 10,000 parking spots with green space and enhanced pedestrian infrastructure. 📍 Paris 🇫🇷

After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't: Having a full-time designer in the room at all times I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll. This makes product development broken: 1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time 2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work 3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution. There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team. At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.

Alan Watts:

Sage advice from Charlie Munger:

"Guys, what are you doing? You’ve been at this for three years, and every time we talk, it’s the same problem. You don’t know who your customers are. You don’t care enough about them. You’re building a product for nobody and hoping people will use it. You have no larger vision for this business." It hit hard.

Steve Jobs famously said customers don't know what they want until you show it to them. Yet at Linear, we just built a feature specifically designed to collect customer requests. Here is why: linear.app/blog/building-wha…

The classic software startup writes code to solve users' problems. If AI makes writing code more of a commodity, understanding users' problems will become the most important component of starting a startup. But it already is.

SpaceX Earth to Earth Transport will enable: LOS ANGELES TO NEW YORK 5 hours, 25 min —> 25 min BANGKOK TO DUBAI 6 hours, 25 min —> 27 min TOKYO TO SINGAPORE 7 hours, 10 min —> 28 min LONDON TO NEW YORK 7 hours, 55 min —> 29 min NEW YORK TO PARIS 7 hours, 20 min —> 30 min SYDNEY TO SINGAPORE 8 hours, 20 min —> 31 min LOS ANGELES TO LONDON 10 hours, 30 min —> 32 min LONDON TO HONG KONG 11 hours, 50 min —> 34 min

Take the pledge: I will never again eat french fries.