Todd Emaus

Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures. - Pierce Brown

Culture isn't soft. It's the operating system that runs everything.

As your startup scales beyond you: Old habits will fail you. Micromanagement will sink you. Control will strangle growth. But evolution will save you. ADAPT The leadership skills that got you here Won't be the ones that take you further.

Decisions without owners are just good intentions.

As decisions pile up endlessly: - Some deserve your full attention. - Most deserve delegation. - Many deserve automation. - A few deserve elimination. FOCUS Your job isn't to make every decision. It's to make space for the ones only you can make.

I thought that leadership meant appearing bulletproof. I never showed weakness or doubt. When I finally dropped the act, something unexpected happened: - My team didn't lose confidence in me. - They trusted me more. - They started sharing their own struggles. And real solutions emerged from real conversations.

You don't have to carry it all alone. Building a company is hard enough without fighting your own mind in isolation. The strongest leaders I know? They all have someone in their corner. Who is in yours?

Breaking the isolation requires 3 things: 1. A mirror - Someone who can reflect back what's actually happening vs. what your brain is telling you 2. A sounding board - Safe space to voice the doubts without judgment 3. A challenger - Person who won't let you stay small

I've worked with leaders at Slack, Notion, and Iterable. They all struggled with the same invisible problem. It wasn't strategy. It wasn't team. It wasn't money. It was something much more personal:

Belonging requires the courage to be fully seen. Most people aren't willing. Thx @ConnorBeaton

@Austen They get ya w those queso, cream, guac upgrades.

I got a pretty straight-forward bowl at Chipotle today. Chicken, salsa, lettuce, queso, sour cream, quacamole, cheese, and a regular drink. The price? EIGHTEEN DOLLARS AND NINETY FOUR CENTS. I’m still wrapping my mind around it. Did I do something wrong? I can’t believe it.

Going through an accelerator as a first-time founder was one of the best life decisions I've made. If you're all-in on your startup and are on the fence about applying to an accelerator, here's the message you've been waiting for: apply. Even if you don't get in, the forcing function of putting your thoughts down on paper will help increase your odds of success. If you do get in, you'll learn alongside ambitious peers and industry veterans alike, plus get a host of other benefits. PearX applications close at midnight on 4/28. It's not too late. Apply! 👇

@kennandavison Icon

Introducing Icon, the world’s first AI CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): it can plan, create, & run 1000s of winning ads end-to-end. We're backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund & execs of frontier AI labs like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Cognition, & Pika. How it works: 1. Connect Icon to your Meta Ad Account & Google Drive. It’ll use your ad account data & existing assets for planning & making ads. 2. Icon finds 100 winning ad concepts daily. It does this by scanning websites (yours & competitors), competitor ads, customer reviews, ad account performance, & more. It comes up with 3 types of ads: "Competitor Clone," "New Concept," & "Winner Iteration." You can copy what worked for competitors, try fresh approaches, & scale your winners. 3. Icon turns winning concepts into ads better than ChatGPT. Say you’re trying to copy a competitor’s before-and-after style ad. ChatGPT would make up random before-and-after scenarios & get your product dimensions wrong. Icon has a reasoning layer on top of GPT-4o that deeply studies the ad for minutes. It understands that it needs to make before-and-after scenarios using real insights from your website, product descriptions, & reviews. Icon gets ad intent, while ChatGPT only sees pixels. 4. Launch ads into your ad accounts with 1 click for less than $1. Before Icon, you’d launch 10 ads per week. Now you can launch 1000 ads per week & get more winners. Everything in my life has led up to this. At 18, I had to support myself. I had to live with my parents to save money. And no one thought I’d go anywhere. I really hated this, so I worked 100-hour weeks until I destroyed coding interviews. Soon after, I dropped out to join Pinterest at 19. After being a minion at Pinterest, I quit cold turkey & started my 1st company Skio. I then fluked into Y Combinator as a solo founder & completely failed during the batch. Thankfully, pivoting worked well ($15M+ ARR & profitable). But it’s not over yet. I have a massive chip on my shoulder that I must fix with Icon. So far, so good: we went from $0 to $5M ARR in our first 30 days. I know I’m not supposed to say this publicly, but I want to make Icon the greatest company of all time. I want to deliver insane value to our customers. I want to create generational wealth for my team & investors. I want to break the $0 to $100M ARR world record. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is: I just bought icon.com for $12M. If you've read this far, I want to say thank you with a gift 👇 We have an internal Google Drive with 1000+ static winning ads & 1000+ winning video ads. These ads have driven >$1.3B revenue in the last 6 months. We trained AI CMO on these ads. I’m pretty sure the right person could make $100K+ by just copying them. Retweet this & comment “Icon” and I’ll send you the Google Drive link for free.

@fortelabs 5 best, 4 ok too.

Which app icon best conveys "a welcoming place to learn about personal knowledge management"?