This newsletter is for founders and sales leaders who want to build great businesses.
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Each week (or so) I share a short essay and a few interesting links from the week.
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In this weeks issue:
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- Good or Lucky?
- Price's Law
- A dog food company that sets the standard for customer care
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Now onto this week's newsletter:

Good or Lucky?​
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People ask about my time at Levelset since we were acquired. They see the outcome and want to know how we got there.
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I've talked and written a ton online about my journey and the many things we learned along the way.
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But the honest answer is… I’m still not sure which parts were skill and which were luck.
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I know we worked hard. I know we were intentional.
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I know built a strong team and a world-class culture.
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I know we had thousands of happy customers and tens of millions in revenue.
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I also know that getting acquired for a good price is incredibly rare.
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So yes, we built a real business. But a lot of things had to break our way.
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That part is easy to forget when you’re only looking at the ending.
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What I’ve learned since then:
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You can’t build a company hoping for a lucky break.
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You have to build toward good. And that means you have to know what "good" looks like.
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Some parts are objective, like a strong company culture or a healthy revenue stream.
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Other parts are subjective, like how fast you should grow each year or how you profitably you can monetize your product and services.
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To define what "good" looks like for you means choosing a model to emulate.
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Curating your standards by reading and observing other companies and individuals who are ahead of you.
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You have to be a lifelong student with a voracious appetite for learning and growth.
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Moving deliberately toward a version of the business you’d be proud of, even if the market never rewards it the way you hoped.
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The irony? That’s usually when the market does notice.
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Luck still plays a role.
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I’ve read before about the four types of luck:
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Dumb luck
Luck from hustle
Luck from insight
Luck from reputation
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You can increase your surface area for luck, but you still don’t control the timing.
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The only thing you control is whether the thing you’re building is actually good by your own definition.
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What matters most is what comes from within your business.
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A good company doesn’t need an exit to validate it.
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A good team doesn’t need a headline to prove their worth.
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And a good outcome is often just a byproduct of years spent making honest decisions and holding a high bar.
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That’s what I try to optimize for now.
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Not the exception.
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Just the work that earns it.
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Sometimes I joke that its better to be lucky than to be good.
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But in my experience, if you are good then you are often lucky. Or at least it appears that way.
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So focus on being good. Start by defining what that means to you.

What's got my attention right now:

• I recently learned about Price's Law and it's fascinating. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago at the GTMfund AGM, I watched an interview with Dennis Lyandres (former Procore CRO) where he talked about the power of Price's Law. It states that in any scientific field "half of the published research comes from the square root of the total number of authors in that field." When you apply that to running companies, you will find that it's generally true.
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  In a 10 person organization, there are 3 people that do about half of the work. This makes send and you can see how this is true. But in a 100 person organization, that number is only 10 people. And in a 1,000 person organization, that number is 30 people. It's mind-blowing to think about this as a leader and hiring manager. It also motivates you to find the people on your team who are delivering so much more work than anyone else.
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  Considering Price's law, the idea of a "one-person billion dollar company" seems more likely with high performers getting more leverage from agentic tools.
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• I saw this beautiful story the other day about how Chewy, the pet-food company, finds out when your pet passes away and sends you flowers with a card. What an incredible gesture and a great example of taking ordinary moments and making them extra-ordinary.
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  It reminds me of the Chip Heath book Power of Moments and how you can leverage moments to elevate your brand in the mind of the customer.
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  There are so many ways to be memorable, and of course it is better to be remembered than to be forgotten. I want to find more ways to deliver these experiences across my life: personal and professional.

That's it for this week. One more ask before you go: Can you please forward this email to one person that might find it useful?​
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Have a great week!
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Martin

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