Field notes for people building companies
Treat take rates as storefront variables, recalculate net IAP revenue, CAC payback, and pricing thresholds, and track dated regulatory commitments.
A four-point test for deciding whether a signed recurring commitment can support your valuation, address concentration risk, and set the next-round bar.
A stable license is the easy part; governance, defaults, parity, and exit cost decide whether an acquired dependency stays in your stack.
A platform-backed exit can hand over people and a license while leaving the entity behind, so founders should price the deal around what the buyer can actually take.
A four-point test for deciding whether a signed recurring commitment can support your valuation, address concentration risk, and set the next-round bar.
Treat take rates as storefront variables, recalculate net IAP revenue, CAC payback, and pricing thresholds, and track dated regulatory commitments.
A stable license is the easy part; governance, defaults, parity, and exit cost decide whether an acquired dependency stays in your stack.
A rate change should trigger a card-mix re-run and a trade-off review, not an automatic re-shop.
A next round is priced by the step multiple, the dated inflection that justifies it, and the line item the money actually buys.
A pre-close audit of renewal timing, pricing multiple, and roadmap dependency tells you whether to lock, renegotiate, or diversify.
Rebase rank-one CTR and Share of Voice before the board mistakes a model reset for a traffic loss.
A profitable company should raise against a named capacity constraint, with proof of demand and a round size tied to that proof.
A platform-backed exit can hand over people and a license while leaving the entity behind, so founders should price the deal around what the buyer can actually take.
A four-call playbook for buying a rival's logos and feature set, keeping the price quiet, and deferring integration until after peak demand.
Treat the AI vendor as a rented capability: price the recurring relationship, keep customer data, and contract for an exit before you sign.
A churn rate is only useful when it names the time window and the ARPA or ACV band it is being compared against.
A short audit separates agent-friendly growth from data-layer lock-in before pricing follows the pivot.
