Loose Ends
More signal than a Silicon Valley boardroom on double espresso.
Today’s Loose Ends cuts through the noise: why revenue flatters but margin tells the truth, how staying uncomfortably close to customers sharpens decisions, and a banana phone that’s more instructive than it looks. Practical signals over vanity metrics.
📈 Growth Feels Good. Efficiency Pays the Bills.
There’s a reason founders talk about growth more than efficiency.
Growth is loud. It creates charts, milestones, and momentum stories. Efficiency is quiet. It lives in spreadsheets, margins, and decisions nobody applauds.
But they pull in opposite directions.
When growth is the goal, complexity sneaks in. More customers means more support, more edge cases, more operational drag. Revenue goes up — but so does fragility.
Efficiency asks harder questions:
💰 which customers actually make money
🧹 which features cost more than they’re worth
✂️ which activities look productive but don’t compound
Founders who chase growth often postpone these questions. Founders who chase efficiency can’t avoid them.
The irony is that efficient businesses scale better. They know their constraints. They understand their unit economics. They don’t need heroic volumes to survive.
This matters more in slow markets.
When capital is scarce and demand softens, growth slows whether you like it or not. Efficiency is what determines whether that slowdown is survivable or fatal.
The strongest companies aren’t the ones growing fastest.
They’re the ones that can afford to wait.
Tangled Wisdom: John D. Rockefeller’s Discipline Over Excitement
John D. Rockefeller believed success came from discipline, not drama. While others chased speculation, he focused on efficiency, cost control, and doing a few things exceptionally well.
🧠 Rockefeller’s core belief:
“I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.”
⚖️ Why this matters for founders:
Excitement is often mistaken for progress
Calm, repeatable systems outperform bursts of effort
Boring decisions compound quietly
🔧 What this looks like in practice:
Obsessing over unit economics early
Building processes before scaling
Saying no to growth that isn’t profitable
🛠️ Try this:
Audit where your time and money are leaking. Fix one inefficiency before chasing a new opportunity.
In a tangled startup, Rockefeller’s lesson is unfashionable but powerful: discipline creates freedom.
(Insight inspired by John D. Rockefeller)
A USB-powered desktop punching bag designed for people who want to take exactly one swing at their computer without HR getting involved. The Desktop Punching Bag suctions to your desk and invites low-stakes violence between meetings.
🥊 Suction-cup base grips most desks
💢 Built for quick, impulsive stress release
🧠 Zero setup, zero mindfulness required
Pointless? Absolutely. Effective? Weirdly so. It exists because sometimes the fastest productivity hack is hitting something and getting back to work.
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That’s All Folks
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Until next time,
Connor / Loose Ends