The Co-Founder Memo

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Happy Sunday! Today:

1. From the Lab: Shipping is addictive and AI doesn't help
2. From the Trenches: AI go to market is a must
3. From the Chair: How (not) to be a visionary founder
4. From the Feed: Rethinking content consumption

Let's go!

🧠 From the Lab

There's a common saying in the world of entrepreneurship:

People fall in love too quickly with their solution and forget about users real problems.

While this is true in most cases and it's a whole discussion, I've encountered a new truth.

Building is now insanely addictive.

Who didn't open up a vibe coding tool "only to try out something quickly" to then find out 5 hours went by?

Multiple Saturday afternoons had been like this for me.

Vibe coding is the new Netflix for many people.

I even think conversational UIs are addictive.

I've spent multiple hours on one sitting vibe coding or vibe building something.

But it wasn't until last Friday that I discovered this new truth.

I went to a local university from Buenos Aires and gave a talk to young students in their early 20s.

They're about to finish college and their graduation project is building a business.

I went into the room knowing all their projects in advanced.

I talked about entrepreneurship. Sales. Knocking on doors. Getting leads. Shipping product. Leveraging on AI. The skills that are must in today's market.

I tried to convince them that all of these things are really important no matter where they work, either at their own startup, a small business, or a huge enterprise.

After my talk, I started going around the class to check out projects individually.

Every single one of the students I talked to had questions, doubts and concerns about their MVP.

A specific feature. A WhatsApp integration. A PDF scanner. A video prototype.

Should we use v0 or Replit? Is v0 able to have a back end? Why do you use Bubble? Should we learn it? What if we want to really ship this to market? How do we sell something before having it ready? Who can we talk to about all the technical questions we have? How do we move forward without a techy co-founder or person on the team?

The funny thing is that my talk was entirely focused on helping them understand the importance of prioritizing sales and customer conversations over product.

I talked about different types of MVPs and ways to validate and get demand before actually shipping something usable to production, ready to onboard customers.

Non of them paid attention.

They just wanted to figure out that damn WhatsApp integration.

It all came down to me.

Vibe coding is incredibly addictive.

Think about this way:

The thing you've always considered too hard and only for engineers and tech geeks, now's available to everyone.

Write a line of text in natural language, and get a cool new website done for you in seconds.

Or an app. Or a prototype. Or whatever you want to build.

It's a black hole. It's an infinite tunnel. And it boosts your dopamine like crazy.

I'm pretty convinced that most of these kids won't go out to the street to talk to customers.

They'll lock themselves up in their rooms and keep shipping.

They'll be extremely happy about figuring out how to make their app work.

But they'll have zero customers. Zero real world feedback. And no business.

I'm really excited about AI. It's empowering the new generation of founders to create and build.

I even got really excited and intrigued about some of these college projects.

But the challenge is now bigger.

Humans will always care more about their creations than about their customers.

This is how we're wired up. We're too driven by our own ideas.

Learning to unplug from them and put them second takes time.

Now there's a second challenge in front of these founders and creators.

They have to learn to become addicted to customer feedback above vibe coding.

Value prop design and iteration above new features.

Conversion and sales above code.

What I know now is this:

AI enables speed.

Talking to customers enables business.

My next quest after coming up with these insights: figure out how to make talking to customers and looking for PMF addictive.

🔧 From the Trenches

I pitched an MVP development to a group of founders last week.

The sales call went well. Got positive feedback and I'm confident I have a good chance of closing.

But I failed really bad at something:

I didn't do any "AI GTM".

I'm writing this on September 13th, 2025.

Not leveraging on AI to add extra value at this point in history, will cost everyone big money.

In this particular case, I got to pitch a proposal after going through a technical estimate with my team.

So, I'm fully aware of the product these founders are tying to build.

I even have dozens of ideas for it after all our conversations.

I'm already involved.

And yet, I made the big mistake of just showing up with a proposal deck.

The scope. The process. The pricing. The team behind it. The offer.

I missed something important: a sneak peak.

With a bit of extra work, I could have created a pretty damn good prototype using v0.

The most important feature of the product.

I could easily get together all the insights from our conversations (notes and transcriptions) and transform them into a few product definitions, to then go into v0 and spit something cool fast.

Terrible mistake not to take the extra hours to do so.

The look on people's face when you actually show them something tangible is really cool.

Next time you're either:

• doing cold outreach
• giving a talk
• going to a meeting
• pitching a project

leverage on AI, create the thing you're about to offer / pitch / explain, and add it as a bonus.

No one will expect it.

And there are no excuses not to do this.

💭 From the Chair

Business publications are too fancy, sexy and hot.

You read, hear or watch these stories about incredible entrepreneurs and their huge empires.

You learn about startups of impact.

Huge rounds. Insane exits. IPOs. List goes on and on.

Yet I always go back to thinking about this:

What kind of business do I want to build?

How big is too big? And how small is too small?

What's wrong with small? What's cool with big?

I think about this often because I've been building businesses for a long time, and I've never had this visionary spark in me.

The idea of building something big.

Of changing the world.

Of making the world a better place.

Of reaching a huge revenue goal. Or an exit. Or a net worth number. Or whatever metric.

And obviously I question myself.

Sometimes I ask myself if I'm a good entrepreneur for not feeling this way.

Maybe I'm just a scam? Maybe I'm not a serious founder?

It's been an iterative path during the last 10 years.

And I learned the lesson:

When you build a business, you get to decide how it should look like, and how big it should be.

There are no rules.

No step by step.

No minimums. And no limits.

A tiny small business that makes you genuinely happy equals success.

A huge empire that makes you genuinely happy also equals success.

As Naval said:

"If you could sit in a room for one hour in silence and just be happy".

Just know that if you pursue the contrarian way of being a successful founder, Forbes won't put you in the front cover.

If you can't live with that, maybe you are actually chasing status.

🔗 From the Feed

I've been on fun content crisis the past 2 weeks.

I got tired of Instagram. Twitter. LinkedIn.

There's so much crap. And I've been guilty of creating crap too.

So I'm rethinking content consumption.

I've consumed a lot of information during my career.

I devoured lots of books, Youtube videos, podcasts, Twitter threads and blogs.

And after doing it for some time, I now have way less patience.

I consume something that doesn't hit me quickly, and I just drop it.

Happened to me 3 days ago. I got the book Essentialism, read the introduction, and had to totally forget about it.

What a waste of time.

The funny thing is that's probably a good book since so many people recommended it.

And I 100% know that I'd totally devoured it a few years ago.

But not today.

Instead I spent most of my past week listening to podcast episodes from Rick Rubin, Jonathan Courtney, Naval Ravikant and Tim Ferriss. I watched a Foo Fighters documentary (Sonic Highways) about the history of music in cities like Nashville, Chicago and DC.

I'm doubling down on this.

Going back, over and over, to the same foundational contents. Books. Podcasts. Movies. Blog posts.

The "1000 true fans by Kevin Kelly" of content.

Timeless things that work as foundations for life and work.

If you made it this far, really appreciate you.

Until next Sunday,

Juan

P.S. If you know someone who might benefit from reading this, please share.

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