Last year, my neighborhood in Seattle was hit with a bomb cyclone. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds: 80 mph winds and 150 ft trees that can crush a house like a toothpick.

This particular night, the wind was wailing louder than I’ve ever heard it before or since. Whole branches were flying across the yard. Huge trees were swaying violently, bending farther than seemed possible. I remember looking into my neighbor’s yard and turning to my wife to say, “If I don’t get them out of their house, they’ll be dead by morning.”

I can’t tell you why I felt this so strongly. I just knew it in my gut.

Related: How to ‘Trust Your Gut’ With Confidence, According to an Expert on Intuition

The risks of ignoring your gut usually outweigh the price of following it

With that, I ran to my neighbor’s house. Going out in the dark was risky, but nothing compared to what I feared would happen if I didn’t.

I finally persuaded them to come over, insisting they bring the whole family, including their dog. They probably thought I was being ridiculous. But I was right to warn them.

That night, a falling pine split their house in half. It came down on top of their king-size bed, one of the branches even flattening the dog’s mattress.

After seeing the damage, my neighbor hugged me with tears in her eyes and thanked me for saving their lives. It was an emotional moment — one I’ve thought about many times since.

I travel a lot for work, and I’ve often wondered what if I hadn’t been home that night. But the far bigger “what if” was: What if I’d ignored my gut?

When your intuition is screaming at you to act, you’d better listen.

Related: How to Unlock the Full Power of Your Intuition

Instinct can save your business when strategy isn’t enough

Twenty-four days after I became CEO of PhoneBurner, the FCC issued a public notice instructing carriers to block traffic from one of our clients. We immediately removed that client and took every necessary step to mitigate the impact, but the notice’s broad language led carriers to block all PhoneBurner calls. Within hours, our entire platform was offline.

This was a crisis. Thousands of real estate, insurance, mortgage and other professionals relied on our power dialing platform to connect with their contacts daily. If we couldn’t connect their calls, we could go under in a matter of days.

So I started emailing and calling everyone I knew, trying to find someone who could trust me enough to give us a dial tone. I’d be lying if I told you there was some grand strategy at work. I was acting on instinct, doing whatever it took to keep us alive.

The notice was published on Tuesday. By Thursday night, I still had nothing. I hadn’t eaten or slept. I’d been calling everyone I knew, from Seattle to Singapore, looking for someone, anyone, who might be able to help.

Finally, my wife insisted I go out and get a pizza. She knew I needed to eat, but also that I’d lose my mind if I didn’t take a few minutes to get out of the house.

On the way over, I pulled into the parking lot of a nearby park. Needing a moment of solitude, I took out my phone and opened it to a bible verse that brings me comfort during troubling times:

“And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him.” (Romans 8:28)

As I sat there, I suddenly had an overwhelming sense that I should go through every contact on my phone again to see if I’d somehow missed someone related to telephony who could help. My gut was screaming that I knew the right person. I just hadn’t found them yet.

Finally, I came across an industry contact in Miami I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. It was already 9 p.m. on the East Coast, but I texted and asked him to give me a call.

When he did, I explained the situation, and to my surprise, he knew someone in Santa Monica who might be able to help.

That person was in the middle of a fundraising event when they answered. But I put everything on the line to ask if they could get us a dial tone by morning. He said he’d have their co-founder call me back.

At 2 a.m., I received his call. His first words were that his attorneys were opposed due to the risk. But he said he’d been moved by my sincerity and tenacity, and that he was going to take the chance.

By 4:30 that morning, we had a dial tone again.

Related: How to Ask People for Favors, When You’re Uncomfortable Doing It

You can’t rely on instinct alone (but you can’t ignore it either)

Of course, things didn’t just go back to normal right away. To say the recovery was difficult would be putting it mildly. It was more like running a marathon after open-heart surgery. But thanks to my team’s dedication and the reputation we’d built with customers over more than a decade of service, we were able to take PhoneBurner from the edge of that cliff back to solid ground, more focused and united than ever.

I believe my little detour that night — guided by nothing more than intuition and a generous side of desperation — helped us survive so we could keep running. And once we were back on our feet, a careful strategy kept us moving in the right direction.

The moral of the story is this: You can’t run a business on instinct alone, but you also can’t afford to ignore it. Instinct isn’t magic. It’s experience, pattern recognition and wisdom showing up faster than your brain can explain it. Some of the best decisions you’ll ever make start that way — as feelings you can’t quite explain but know you should trust.

Related: Embracing the Unknown: Understanding Faith

Last year, my neighborhood in Seattle was hit with a bomb cyclone. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds: 80 mph winds and 150 ft trees that can crush a house like a toothpick.

This particular night, the wind was wailing louder than I’ve ever heard it before or since. Whole branches were flying across the yard. Huge trees were swaying violently, bending farther than seemed possible. I remember looking into my neighbor’s yard and turning to my wife to say, “If I don’t get them out of their house, they’ll be dead by morning.”

Getting people to try something new is hard. Getting skeptics to lie down inside a $160,000 device is harder. Brian Le Gette learned that early while demonstrating his recovery chamber to an NHL player who didn’t want to be there.

“His wife made him do it,” Le Gette recalls. The player climbed in reluctantly, expecting little. When the session ended, he didn’t come out. After several minutes, Le Gette and a colleague checked in. The player looked up and said, “Oh my effing God, I was flying through the sky.”

It was reactions like this that led Le Gette to build Ammortal, a wellness technology company centered on an immersive recovery chamber that looks like something out of Architectural Digest.

How it works: Users lie flat on a padded table inside the enclosed chamber while panels of red and near-infrared light illuminate around them, low-level electromagnetic pulses cycle through the body, and synchronized sound and vibration play through the table. Some sessions also include optional hydrogen inhalation.

Ammortal has attracted attention not just from high-end spas and training facilities, but also from athletes, biohackers, and lifestyle influencers.

Related: The Future of Wellness Is Happening IRL — Not on Your Feed

Jumping into the unknown

When Le Gette began working on Ammortal, there was no clear sign this would be a money maker. No one was asking for a six-figure recovery chamber, and there was no obvious playbook for selling one. “I just built it, put people in it, and watched what happened. When the reaction was consistently positive, that told me more than any market research could,” he says.

Instead of rushing to scale, Le Gette kept putting different people into the chamber—athletes, executives, skeptics—and watched for consistency. “I kept putting different people in it to see if the experience held up,” he says.

The reactions weren’t identical, but the pattern was. People emerged calmer, quieter, and more grounded than when they went in. For Le Gette, that repeatability mattered. If the experience worked across personalities and expectations, he believed it could support a business.

Related: This Entrepreneur Turned a Dry Skin Problem Into an Eight-Figure Business After Asking, ‘Why Doesn’t This Product Exist for Men?’

Risky business

But that belief came with risk. This was Le Gette’s fifth company, following a career that included both costly failures and big wins. He had built a business that landed on the Inc. 500 fastest-growing companies, and he had also “driven one straight into a wall,” losing millions.

Those experiences shaped how he approached Ammortal. Rather than chase rapid growth or outside validation, he stayed focused on building something that worked first, trusting that demand, if it came, would follow.

Building the chamber was technically complex. They missed deadlines and doubts crept in. At one point, Le Gette says, even his own team began questioning whether the project would ever come together. Le Gette told his team they were free to walk away if they’d lost confidence in the vision. Meanwhile, investors and advisors questioned whether anyone would pay six figures for a recovery device that didn’t fit an existing category.

Early on, Le Gette assumed he would need to lower the price to make the business viable. “I thought we’d have to sell this for $80,000,” he says. But as the chamber took shape, he changed his tune. Stripping out components to hit a lower price point, he believed, would weaken the very experience that made the product work.

Experiential marketing

To get the word out, Ammortal invested early in an Airstream trailer outfitted with the chamber, allowing potential buyers to try it before they buy it. “The experience sells it,” Le Gette says. “Once people get in, if they can afford it, it becomes a very easy decision.”

That approach also shaped who Ammortal chose to work with. Celebrity interest and athlete endorsements followed, but Le Gette resisted complicated deals and long contracts. “We only do the easy deals,” he says. If a partnership required heavy negotiation or diluted the product’s focus, he was willing to walk away.

Spas also emerged as a natural customer. “If someone walks into a spa, they want to leave feeling calmer than when they arrived,” Le Gette says. A single session, he found, reliably delivered that reset, making the chamber easier to understand in an environment already built around relaxation and recovery. The model gave Ammortal access to customers who didn’t want to own a $160,000 device, but were open to returning to a spa to use it.

Today, Ammortal’s chambers are placed in a mix of spas, training facilities, and private settings, with Le Gette continuing to prioritize controlled growth over rapid expansion. In a market often driven by speed and scale, he chose patience and restraint instead. “If you stay focused on making the best version of the thing,” he says, “and you let people experience it for themselves, the rest tends to take care of itself.”

Related: This Gene Therapy Startup Wants to Change the Way We Age

Getting people to try something new is hard. Getting skeptics to lie down inside a $160,000 device is harder. Brian Le Gette learned that early while demonstrating his recovery chamber to an NHL player who didn’t want to be there.

“His wife made him do it,” Le Gette recalls. The player climbed in reluctantly, expecting little. When the session ended, he didn’t come out. After several minutes, Le Gette and a colleague checked in. The player looked up and said, “Oh my effing God, I was flying through the sky.”

Verizon is paying the piper after a catastrophic outage that left millions unable to make calls, send texts, or use data for 10 hours. The company announced Thursday it will issue $20 credits to its affected customers.

“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can,” Verizon said in a statement on X. “But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.” Customers can claim the $20 by logging into the myVerizon app. The company advised anyone still experiencing problems to restart their device.

The outage triggered over 175,000 complaints on Downdetector at its peak and prompted emergency alerts in New York City and Washington, D.C., warning that some Verizon customers couldn’t reach 911. Meanwhile, rivals seized the opportunity to poach customers. T-Mobile posted on X that its “network is keeping our customers connected.” AT&T’s Instagram didn’t hold back, posting: “Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us….it’s the other guys.”

Read more

Verizon is paying the piper after a catastrophic outage that left millions unable to make calls, send texts, or use data for 10 hours. The company announced Thursday it will issue $20 credits to its affected customers.

“This credit isn’t meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can,” Verizon said in a statement on X. “But it’s a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.” Customers can claim the $20 by logging into the myVerizon app. The company advised anyone still experiencing problems to restart their device.

The outage triggered over 175,000 complaints on Downdetector at its peak and prompted emergency alerts in New York City and Washington, D.C., warning that some Verizon customers couldn’t reach 911. Meanwhile, rivals seized the opportunity to poach customers. T-Mobile posted on X that its “network is keeping our customers connected.” AT&T’s Instagram didn’t hold back, posting: “Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us….it’s the other guys.”

Read more

I sit on trade association committee meetings with other CEOs and have noticed that sometimes it’s hard to follow the leader when the room is full of them. Everyone is so used to being in charge that collaboration suffers, especially when a consensus is needed within the given time period to allow the committee to move forward with some decisions. In the end, we risk little actually getting accomplished.

Sitting around those tables got me reflecting on how being a leader doesn’t mean you are always the leader. Situations have their own structure where someone else might be the chair, the owner, the one responsible. And if a leader cannot read that — and they walk in assuming their usual role — it creates a problem.

Please don’t equate that with arrogance. The real issue here is identity confusion, where the need to be seen as a leader overrides the need to be useful, because it is expected. As leaders, half the time, we may not even notice we are stepping up when we should be stepping back.

Here is what I have learned about reading the room for who actually owns the situation and what to do instead of defaulting to leadership mode.

Related: To Be a Leader, You Must Know When to Follow

Reading the room

Too often, leadership is misidentified as control, which creates unrealistic expectations. There’s pressure to act quickly and always be right. However, if leaders don’t let go of control in situations that they should, we risk stunting people’s growth and creating a bottleneck in our own organizations. Let me give you an example.

Say you’re a CEO visiting one of your manufacturing sites and an emergency hits. You are technically the most senior person there, but the GM runs this site, and it’s her crisis. What do you do? Even if she’s struggling, you don’t grab the wheel. You may act as a good advisor of hers to support, but you should definitely give her room to own the decision-making because that’s how she grows.

That sort of restraint is the job now. Deloitte’s 2023 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that 34% of leaders are “not at all ready” to lead in a world where solutions are cocreated. The report defines cocreation as leaders sharing problem-solving with their teams. That means ceding control of the answers, too.

However, as Deloitte notes, leaders may take this as a challenge to their authority and even personal failure under the old hierarchical model. The definition of good leadership has shifted, and many of us are still catching up.

Related: 5 Reasons Why Good Leaders Must Be Great Followers

3 questions I ask myself

In times of uncertainty, trying to command outcomes too soon can limit the collective intelligence already forming around you. Before I step into any situation where I’m not in charge, I ask myself three questions that will help me know what this moment needs from me.

Each sounds simple, but they require awareness that doesn’t come naturally to people used to running things. I’ve watched CEOs talk past each other for an hour without recognizing that what they consider important may be completely out of scope. These three questions force a reset:

1. Who has the leading role in owning the situation here?

This might be the sales director in a client meeting, someone two levels below you in a cross-functional project or simply the chair at a board meeting. Misreading who owns the room means you will focus on the wrong priorities.

2. What are we trying to accomplish?

If you don’t consciously bracket your usual concerns, they can leak into every contribution you make, and you will end up leading when you should be following.

3. How do I support?

This is where leadership experience actually becomes useful. You have probably seen when things are going off track many times, but the discipline is intervening without taking over, contributing without hijacking the topic and supporting the person in the leading role without creating possibilities to diverge. A few examples:

• Asking a question that surfaces what the group is missing, instead of providing the answer yourself.

• Taking insights from unexpected sources seriously, such as a junior team member.

• Backing the designated leader’s call publicly, even if you would have done it differently.

• Pulling them aside afterward with perspective, rather than correcting them in front of the room.

Contrary to the traditional leadership model, enabling others in this manner is a must-have skill in modern leadership.

Leading as a follower

The hardest scenario is when the designated leader is visibly struggling when you have the expertise to fix it. If you step right in, you have just taught everyone that when things get hard, they don’t have your trust to lead.

The alternative is to offer support in a way that keeps the spotlight on them. In that manufacturing-site scenario, it might require asking the GM a question that helps her see what she’s missing or reinforcing a decision so the team gets behind it. Wherever possible, give people room to recover from a misstep.

These moments are the perfect training ground for emerging leaders as long as you can keep the risk profile in check. How else are they going to develop leadership muscle if their superior steps in the moment things get tough? Ultimately, leading as a follower builds organizational resilience.

Related: Reading The Room: Building An Awareness Of Others In Order To Strengthen Relationships (And Elevate Your Influence)

Leadership for a “boundaryless world”

Back at those trade association meetings, the problem isn’t ego or arrogance. It’s that everyone walks in with their own criteria for what matters, but not everyone stops to align — not to mention that not everyone keeps in mind all the time the purpose of the discussion outlined in the agenda for the alignment. Building alignment may sometimes fall to you, but it often means following the designated leader.

The Deloitte report describes a “boundaryless world” where leadership is no longer contingent on position, hierarchy or number of direct reports. Knowing when to lead and when to follow is about more than moving through an impasse or crisis. It sets the stage for greater agility at a time of near constant disruption.

I sit on trade association committee meetings with other CEOs and have noticed that sometimes it’s hard to follow the leader when the room is full of them. Everyone is so used to being in charge that collaboration suffers, especially when a consensus is needed within the given time period to allow the committee to move forward with some decisions. In the end, we risk little actually getting accomplished.

Sitting around those tables got me reflecting on how being a leader doesn’t mean you are always the leader. Situations have their own structure where someone else might be the chair, the owner, the one responsible. And if a leader cannot read that — and they walk in assuming their usual role — it creates a problem.

Last year, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski predicted protein, AI and sauces would dominate food trends — and he was spot on. Now he’s sharing his 2026 predictions.

In a video shared on Instagram this week, Kempczinski outlined three trends he expects to gain momentum: fiber-focused offerings, sweet-and-spicy flavor combinations and beverage innovation. “No. 1, fiber is going to be big,” he said. “No. 2, sweet and spicy, together, is going to be a big food trend. And No. 3, you’re going to see a lot of beverage innovation.”

The McDonald’s chief boasted about his 2025 predictions, claiming he “went three-for-three” and that “I do have to do a little bit of a victory lap.” This year’s predictions offer insight into where the fast-food giant may focus menu development and innovation in the coming year.

Read more

Last year, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski predicted protein, AI and sauces would dominate food trends — and he was spot on. Now he’s sharing his 2026 predictions.

In a video shared on Instagram this week, Kempczinski outlined three trends he expects to gain momentum: fiber-focused offerings, sweet-and-spicy flavor combinations and beverage innovation. “No. 1, fiber is going to be big,” he said. “No. 2, sweet and spicy, together, is going to be a big food trend. And No. 3, you’re going to see a lot of beverage innovation.”

The McDonald’s chief boasted about his 2025 predictions, claiming he “went three-for-three” and that “I do have to do a little bit of a victory lap.” This year’s predictions offer insight into where the fast-food giant may focus menu development and innovation in the coming year.

Read more

The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report surveyed over 1,300 global leaders and experts to list their top short-term fears. “Geoeconomic confrontation” topped the list as the most pressing risk over the next two years, followed by misinformation and disinformation, then societal polarization.

The survey shows a departure from recent years, when climate dominated executive concerns. That doesn’t mean climate is off their radar. When asked about risks over the next decade, the environment still comes first — extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and critical changes to Earth systems topped the long-term list. Adverse outcomes from AI technologies are seen as a longer-term threat rather than an immediate danger.

The survey captures perspectives from political leaders, CEOs and experts charged with shaping policy and setting corporate strategy, not general public opinion. The findings will be discussed at the World Economic Forum‘s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next week.

Read more

The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report surveyed over 1,300 global leaders and experts to list their top short-term fears. “Geoeconomic confrontation” topped the list as the most pressing risk over the next two years, followed by misinformation and disinformation, then societal polarization.

The survey shows a departure from recent years, when climate dominated executive concerns. That doesn’t mean climate is off their radar. When asked about risks over the next decade, the environment still comes first — extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and critical changes to Earth systems topped the long-term list. Adverse outcomes from AI technologies are seen as a longer-term threat rather than an immediate danger.

The survey captures perspectives from political leaders, CEOs and experts charged with shaping policy and setting corporate strategy, not general public opinion. The findings will be discussed at the World Economic Forum‘s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next week.

Read more

Most people think fundraising is about convincing others. In reality, it’s about confronting the truth. Not the polished version in your deck — the underlying mechanics of your business that become impossible to ignore when you repeat your story dozens of times to people who know how to find weak spots instantly.

What surprised me is how transformative this pressure can be. Fundraising, when done right, becomes the fastest way to evolve your narrative, your model and your strategy. Here are five lessons I learned that I want to share with you today.

Related: What I Learned From the First 3 Months of Fundraising My 6-Figure Business

1. Fundraising only works when you treat it like your full-time job

For years, I behaved like most founders do during fundraising: I tried to “fit it in.” I squeezed meetings between product reviews, sales calls and operations. It never worked. Conversations dragged on, feedback loops stretched into months and there was no momentum.

This time I approached it differently. For six weeks of active meetings, fundraising was the only thing I allowed myself to do. I blocked half of every day exclusively for investor calls. The other half was for processing what I heard — revising the deck, reworking the story, updating the numbers or questioning assumptions I’d been carrying for too long.

This focus changed everything. When you compress meetings tightly, the story evolves faster because you hear patterns sooner. The objections repeat. The weak points reveal themselves. You don’t wait a week between conversations to “get back into it.” You stay in the mindset continuously.

The biggest effect of this pressure was clarity. It became obvious that our SMB narrative didn’t match the scale of the problem we were positioned to solve. The more feedback I integrated, the more I realized the product was naturally enterprise-ready — but my pitch wasn’t.

2. Preparation takes months, but the sprint itself should be short

My full fundraising timeline took a little over six months:

1. Three months of preparation.
2. One and a half months of active meetings.
3. Three months of closing, due diligence and documents.

Most of the emotional intensity sits inside that six-week active window, but it only works if the foundation is ready before you start. I spent three months building a list, warming contacts, polishing messaging and mapping every fund that could realistically be a fit.

I didn’t rely on chance intros. I treated it like a sales funnel with a conversion rate of roughly 1 in 100. That removed the ego from the process. It also helped me stay disciplined: Even if someone seemed “perfect,” I didn’t anchor on them.

By the time outreach began, we already had hundreds of contacts ready. A teammate helped with emails, booking and follow-ups. The founders we worked with made introductions. Some investors connected me to others. But none of this would have happened if I hadn’t prepared before the sprint started.

Related: How to Navigate Fundraising Challenges Like a Pro and Win Over Investors

3. The more investors you speak to, the clearer your company becomes

I ended up taking around 70 first meetings. When you talk about your business dozens of times in a row, something interesting happens: You start hearing yourself with fresh ears. Patterns appear. Assumptions crack. And in my case, the entire model began to rearrange itself.

At first, I was still thinking in “SMB mode,” explaining our acquisition strategy and why I planned to raise $2 million to fuel it. But after repeating the story enough times, I had to face the reality I had been glossing over. One day it hit me that the SMB segment simply didn’t scale for us. The unit economics were weak, marketing costs were high and the payback was too unpredictable. The whole idea of spending $1 million on SMB acquisition suddenly felt wrong.

The next day, almost abruptly, I saw something else: The operational depth of our product wasn’t clear for SMB at all. The workflows, the complexity, the coordination layer — everything about it looked and behaved like an enterprise platform. It wasn’t something I needed years and millions to grow into. It was already there.

A few days later, another realization landed: The real, painful problem we were solving wasn’t an SMB pain point. It was an enterprise coordination problem I had been underestimating. And if that was true, then the dual-track plan I had — one million for SMB growth and one million for a gradual enterprise transition — made no sense. I didn’t need two tracks. I needed one clear decision.

By the end of week three, the picture was obvious. If we committed fully to enterprise, we could execute much faster and with far less capital. The raise didn’t need to be $2 million. It needed to be $1 million — all focused on the enterprise path.

Fundraising didn’t just bring capital. It forced me to listen to myself, repeatedly, until I could no longer ignore the mismatch between where the effort went and where the business had real leverage. The moment I embraced the enterprise angle, everything clicked — including investor interest.

4. The most underrated skill in fundraising: consistent investor updates

One of the biggest reasons the round came together at all was something that felt almost trivial at the time. For three years, I sent quarterly updates to every investor with whom I’d ever had a warm conversation — anyone who didn’t explicitly say that our business was completely outside their interest.

The updates weren’t complicated. A few paragraphs, a couple of highlights, one or two challenges, maybe a metric or two. But they kept the connection alive. They created familiarity. They gave people a sense of progression.

When I finally started raising this round, a part of the warm conversations came from people who already knew our timeline, our pivots, our mistakes and our improvements. They didn’t have to start from zero. They weren’t evaluating a stranger. They were updating an internal model they had been following for years.

Our eventual lead investor came from this group. There was no magic intro. No perfect pitch. Just three years of lightweight, consistent communication. As a result, iPNOTE secured a $1M seed round led by AltaIR Capital, a firm with more than 350 tech investments across B2B SaaS, Future of Work, FinTech, InsureTech and Digital Health. Their portfolio includes 10 unicorns — six of which (Miro, Deel, PandaDoc, OpenWeb, Socure and Turing) they backed at the early stage.

If I could give only one practical fundraising recommendation, it would be this: Send updates to every investor who didn’t categorically reject you. Momentum compounds long before you need it.

And now, after closing this round, I suddenly have more than a hundred new contacts — people I’ve met, pitched or synced with during the process. All of them will be receiving updates from me as well. A year from now, booking meetings will be dramatically easier, simply because the relationship-building is already happening today.

Related: How I Won Over Investors and Raised $1.5 Million Without a Network or Experience

5. Fundraising is not just capital — it’s a forced strategic reset

Looking back, the money was only part of the outcome. The bigger result was clarity. Fundraising forced me to rebuild the company on a stronger foundation. It pushed me to narrow the ICP, update pricing, rewrite the story and focus exclusively on the segment where we delivered disproportionate value.

If you allow it, fundraising becomes an accelerator for strategy, not just financing.

Treat it as a focused sprint. Cancel everything else. Compress the meetings. Let the feedback reshape you.

The capital will follow.

Sign up for How Success Happens and learn from well-known business leaders and celebrities, uncovering the shifts, strategies and lessons that powered their rise. Get it in your inbox.

Most people think fundraising is about convincing others. In reality, it’s about confronting the truth. Not the polished version in your deck — the underlying mechanics of your business that become impossible to ignore when you repeat your story dozens of times to people who know how to find weak spots instantly.

What surprised me is how transformative this pressure can be. Fundraising, when done right, becomes the fastest way to evolve your narrative, your model and your strategy. Here are five lessons I learned that I want to share with you today.

Have you ever thought about what happens to your company when you stop teaching people how to think?

I keep coming back to that question as more teams hand entry-level work to generative AI. Yes, the output still shows up. The spreadsheet is still built. The dashboard still updates on time. And yes, on paper, productivity looks better than ever.

However, the quiet cost sits somewhere else. The junior employees who used to earn their judgment through that work are not getting the same reps. They are not wrestling with messy inputs anymore. They are not making the kinds of small mistakes that create instinct. They are not getting coached through the blind spots that turn “smart” into “reliable.”

When I look at the A-players on my own teams, they did not become great by avoiding mistakes and foundational work. They became great because they did it anyway, got feedback, did it again and learned from real people’s experiences. If you remove that path entirely, you create a dangerous kind of organizational short-sightedness. The knowledge may live inside systems and prompts, but fewer people are learning how to produce it, challenge it and pass it on.

This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for using it with intent.

The work that teaches judgment is not the same as the work that wastes time

A lot of entry-level tasks take time. They are repetitive. They often sit at the bottom of a process. Leaders see that stack and instantly think, “Automate it.”

That is where the mistake starts.

Some entry-level work is mechanical. It needs to get done, but it does not build much judgment. For instance, formatting decks, pulling standard reports, cleaning up recurring spreadsheets or drafting a first-pass template that follows the same pattern every time. If AI can handle those tasks well, you should let it. Protecting busywork does not build talent. It burns it out.

Other entry-level work is where judgment forms. It is the moment someone learns to separate signal from noise. It is the moment they realize that a familiar approach does not fit a certain situation. It is the moment they learn why the business cares about one metric and ignores another. This work builds future leaders and is exactly the work you cannot handle via AI without replacing it with something equally developmental.

If you treat both categories the same, you get the worst outcome. You remove the training ground, then you wonder why your bench has become weaker two years later.

What AI changed for us

After decades of building and scaling teams, I have learned that new technology is rarely the real challenge. The challenge is redesigning work so that the technology absorbs the mechanics while people grow into higher-value contributions. That is where scale comes from, and that is where resilience lives.

Here is a simple example.

A junior analyst used to spend hours pulling data and formatting spreadsheets, then they would get a short window to interpret what the numbers meant. That is backwards. AI can often handle the pulling and formatting quickly, which means the analyst can spend their time on the part that actually teaches them something. They can test assumptions. They can spot what looks off. They can explain what the data suggests and what it does not.

The same shift applies across functions.

If AI drafts an internal memo, the junior employee should not be graded on how fast they can hit send. They should be taught how to evaluate whether the memo answers the right question and whether the recommendation holds up when the context changes.

If AI summarizes research, the junior employee should be expected to find what is missing and to surface what conflicts. A clean summary is not the same as a reliable conclusion.

This is not about doing less work. It is about doing different work and doing the work that builds capability.

How to get this right without slowing down

Look at your team’s entry-level workload with fresh eyes. Separate the purely procedural tasks from those that require trade-offs. If a task can be completed by following a checklist, automate it. If it requires judgment, delegate it to people.

What comes next is where most organizations stall. You cannot remove the mechanical work and hope development happens on its own. You have to redesign the judgment-building work so that juniors still get reps, coaching and responsibility. That means putting review standards in place. It means requiring juniors to explain why an AI output is correct and what would make it incorrect. It means giving them ownership over the thinking, not just the deliverable.

Finally, track more than productivity. If your only scoreboard rewards output and efficiency, you will optimize for the wrong future. Pay attention to whether your junior team is getting better at analysis and decision-making over time. If they are not, you are not building real capability.

Have you ever thought about what happens to your company when you stop teaching people how to think?

I keep coming back to that question as more teams hand entry-level work to generative AI. Yes, the output still shows up. The spreadsheet is still built. The dashboard still updates on time. And yes, on paper, productivity looks better than ever.