Topics
Every story, sorted by theme. 19 topics across the archive.
Funding
The half that isn’t AI
Roughly half of every venture dollar in the world went to AI last year. For the founder building anything else, the number that matters isn’t that one — it’s the deal count underneath it.
Funding
The fifty-billion-dollar hangover
More than $51 billion is parked in roughly 150 software companies that haven’t raised in four years and mostly can’t. For the founders who never took the money, the reckoning reads less like a warning than a vindication.
Funding
Halyard passes $6M ARR, still no outside capital
The sailmaker crossed $6M in recurring revenue in June with 31 staff, two declined term sheets and four straight profitable years behind it.
Company Profile
The company Halyard didn’t build
Ana Ferreira and Tom Aldous have run a sailmaking company to $6M ARR and 31 staff without outside money. The interesting decisions are all the ones they declined.
Company Profile
Fieldnote, the two-person startup rebuilding farm logistics
Maya Okonjo and one engineer route produce for 60 co-ops. They have turned down every offer of money that came with a plan to hire.
Company Profile
The company Priya Nair priced into existence
Loom&Co finished last year at $9.6M with 34 people and a 61% gross margin. Every structural decision in the building traces back to one sentence about queues.
Craft
The apprentice who bought the workshop
Eli Nakamura swept the floor at Brenner Woodwork for two years before he was allowed to cut anything. Nine years later he bought the place from the man who hired him — on a handshake, then on paper.
Craft
Heritage brands, new hands: apprenticeships as succession plans
Craft owners in their late sixties are handing companies to the people who swept their floors, and structuring it as a sale. The maths is worse than private equity and they’re doing it anyway.
Craft
Eleven years is the strategy
Brackwood took eleven years to reach twenty people, and Martin Oduya is tired of being asked what went wrong. The slowness was not a constraint he suffered. It was the plan, and he can show you the arithmetic.
People
The headcount was the vanity
For a decade the size of the team was the proof the company mattered. Then venture money started buying half as many people per dollar, a handful of AI startups cleared nine figures with staff you could seat at one table, and the number quietly changed sides.
People
Daniel Kwame leaves Nexa to launch a climate-logistics venture
Nexa’s eleventh employee is leaving the 4,000-person logistics company to build refrigeration monitoring for the freight lanes he helped design.
People
Leaving a unicorn to start over: Daniel Kwame’s second act
He was employee eleven at Nexa and watched it grow to four thousand people. At thirty-nine, he is starting again in a rented warehouse with two engineers and a spreadsheet.
Markets
Micro-factory permits up 40% across mid-size US cities
The Sherwood Index counted 40% more small-scale manufacturing permits in converted retail space last year — and found the buildings cheap for a reason.
Markets
Why micro-factories are coming back to Main Street
Permits for small-scale manufacturing in converted retail space rose 40% year over year, according to the Sherwood Index. The reasons are unromantic: rent, freight and the person who lives four streets away.
Markets
Short chains: the quiet retreat from four continents
Small manufacturers are pulling their supply chains in on purpose, paying more per unit and getting something back that doesn’t appear on the invoice.
Growth
The first ten customers: five founders on how they really got them
No growth loops, no launch days. Five founders describe the unglamorous work that produced the only ten customers that ever mattered.
Growth
I roasted for free for a year
Marcus Reeve gave away 4,100 kilos of coffee to cafés that had not asked for it. He was not buying goodwill or market share. He was buying the right to stand behind the machine at six in the morning and watch.
Hardware
Prototype cities: where physical products get built in 2026
A handful of mid-size cities have quietly assembled everything a hardware founder needs within a twenty-minute drive. The ingredient nobody can buy is the machinist.
Hardware
The factory said no eleven times
Joon Park needed 500 light meters built. Every factory he could find wanted an order of 10,000. The twelfth conversation worked, and it worked because he finally stopped asking the question the first eleven had answered.
Product
Fieldnote opens its farm-routing API to co-op partners
Maya Okonjo’s two-person company will let co-ops build on the routing engine directly — free under 40 member farms, priced above it.
Product
The Tuesday we killed it
Halyard spent fourteen months building a sensor that worked. Ana Ferreira ended it nine weeks before the trial units shipped, on the strength of three weeks spent watching riggers ignore the number it produced.
Profile
The Business of Patience
From a nursery in Calabria, Roberto Liccardo has built WeBonsai into a company that sells a living product across Europe — and treats teaching the buyer how to keep it alive as part of the thing being sold.
Profile
The Slow Build
For more than sixty years, Vitsœ has sold essentially one idea: furniture you buy once, add to slowly, and take with you when you move. Its managing director has spent three decades refusing the faster ways to grow — and treats that refusal as the product.
Retail
The shop was the marketing
Everyone told Della Marsh that a lease was a liability and the internet was free. Six years on, the rent on her ceramics shop works out cheaper per customer than any advertising she has ever bought.
Retail
Shops are back, and they are not really shops
Small companies are opening physical space that loses money by design. Judged as retail it is a bad business. It was never being run as retail.
Tools
Back to paper: why analog planning is beating dashboards
Founders are cancelling the analytics stack and buying notebooks. The argument isn’t nostalgia — it’s that a dashboard measures and a page decides.
Tools
The quiet machines: automation that nobody announced
The dull half of small companies is being automated by people with no mandate, no budget line and no interest in telling anyone about it.
