Lately, my thinking as a founder has changed.
Not in a clean way.
Not in a confident way.
In a confusing way.
Some days it feels like money is everything.
Without money, nothing moves.
No team. No speed. No margin for mistakes.
Other days, that feels wrong.
Because money without a good product just buys louder failure.
Then I swing the other way.
Product wins.
If the product is strong enough, everything else will follow.
Until it doesn’t.
Because a great product with no distribution is invisible.
And invisible things don’t grow.
This back-and-forth used to bother me.
Now I think it’s the most honest part of building.
Startups don’t reward fixed beliefs.
They punish them.
What finally helped me was stopping the search for a single truth.
Instead, I started thinking in triangles.
A CPM triangle.
If any one side is weak, the shape collapses.
But here’s the part most people miss:
The weight is never evenly distributed.
Early on, the product carries almost everything.
Later, distribution starts pulling harder.
At scale, the business model decides whether you live or die.
The triangle stays the same.
The pressure point changes.
- Some weeks, money feels like oxygen.
- Some weeks, product quality is the only thing that matters.
- Other weeks, none of it works because the model isn’t repeatable yet.
This isn’t inconsistency.
It’s reality.
The job isn’t to pick one belief and defend it.
The job is to stay numb enough to not panic,
and flexible enough to shift focus without losing direction.
A company isn’t built by being right once.
It’s built by adjusting faster than your assumptions break.