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The future of healthy living: A $16.4 trillion opportunity
By Hemant Ahlawat et al., | McKinsey & Company | September 22, 2026
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Faced with aging populations and a growing burden of preventable diseases, government officials have a transformative opportunity to create healthier, more prosperous societies. Healthy living is no longer only a social objective; it is an economic imperative and a cross-government delivery challenge.
Modifiable health risk factors represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for governments to improve population health while strengthening economic performance. In 2050, eliminating behavioral, metabolic, and environmental risk factors could add 12 years of life expectancy at birth and generate an estimated $16.4 trillion in annual GDP uplift globally, according to a McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) analysis. This is equivalent to nearly 9 percent of total GDP in 2050.
Some governments are already making healthy living a strategic priority to capture the human and economic benefits of healthier lifespans. In Abu Dhabi, for example, a healthy-living strategy demonstrates how governments could mobilize a broad, cross-government agenda for healthy living. As healthy longevity increasingly becomes a priority around the world, scaling progress will require governments to lead action across the sectors that shape health, supported by stronger evidence, tools, and meaningful opportunities to learn from others.
Healthy living means two things: thriving in good health today and living in a way that also maximizes the years of great health still to come. People who are thriving have strong physical, mental, social, and spiritual health. They have high levels of energy, resilience, connection, and a sense of purpose across the life course. Over time, healthy living is the foundation for healthy longevity.
Unfortunately, as MHI has previously explored, healthy living remains out of reach for large parts of the population. Globally, people spend roughly half of their lives in less-than-great health, including years marked by pain, limited mobility, impaired senses, cognitive decline, or loss of independence.1 The reasons are widespread. There are six reasons why governments may consider making healthy living an overall priority: Individuals’ health could substantially improve. The economic opportunity is substantial. The cost of inaction is too high to ignore. Most health drivers sit outside healthcare. People want it. There is now a window of opportunity.
A practical healthy living agenda could start with a small set of priority drivers (for example, diet, physical activity, and clinical interventions targeting metabolic diseases) that are both highly influential and actionable at the population level. The objective is to build a coordinated portfolio that makes healthier choices more available, affordable, and easier to sustain, rather than prescribe a single intervention.
The execution of a healthy living agenda relies on cross-government leadership. Many of the most important drivers of health are shaped by ministries and sectors that do not define themselves as part of the health system, including education, transport, urban planning, food, technology, labor, finance, and community development. A top-of-government perspective is therefore essential: Leaders benefit from identifying where the burden is greatest, which risk factors are most addressable, which drivers can be shifted, and which accountabilities can be created to deliver results.
So why is this not happening in far more places? Because the agenda—reducing risks to human health so that everyone can prosper—cuts across silos. For example, health sits within one ministry, but most of what determines health, such as transport, education, housing, agriculture, and industry, sits elsewhere. Companies compete on products whose health consequences fall on public budgets decades later. As a result, almost everyone in government affects healthy living, but nobody owns it. National ambitions require cross-cutting and cross-sector agendas, supported by global evidence and engagement.
That agenda can’t simply restate what health systems should do—that’s the healthcare matrix MHI has described: a worldview where real health happens in clinics and everything else is filed under “lifestyle.”19 The harder, less charted work lies outside it, in science, measurement, technology, economics, and the social fabric. Five shifts can help make healthy living realistic at scale, and they hold regardless of a country’s starting point: Science: Build the evidence base for what actually drives health. Transparency: Agree on what healthy living means and measure it for individuals and populations alike. Technology: Put healthy living within reach of the individual. Economy: Make healthy choices affordable, available, and desirable. And society: Make healthy living socially supported rather than individually heroic.
Almost all of this would likely need to be delivered at a national or state level to achieve meaningful impact. That is where cross-sector coordination happens and where accountability for a population’s health sits. But that level cannot carry a cohesive, multisector agenda on its own, and the support it most needs could come from two collaborations: one among governments, and one among companies.
3 key takeaways from the report
- Faced with aging populations and a growing burden of preventable diseases, government officials have a transformative opportunity to create healthier, more prosperous societies. Healthy living is no longer only a social objective; it is an economic imperative and a cross-government delivery challenge.
- Modifiable health risk factors represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for governments to improve population health while strengthening economic performance. In 2050, eliminating behavioral, metabolic, and environmental risk factors could add 12 years of life expectancy at birth and generate an estimated $16.4 trillion in annual GDP uplift globally, according to a McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) analysis. This is equivalent to nearly 9 percent of total GDP in 2050. Some governments are already making healthy living a strategic priority to capture the human and economic benefits of healthier lifespans.
- Five shifts can help make healthy living realistic at scale, and they hold regardless of a country’s starting point: A) Science: Build the evidence base for what actually drives health. B) Transparency: Agree on what healthy living means and measure it for individuals and populations alike. C) Technology: Put healthy living within reach of the individual. D) Economy: Make healthy choices affordable, available, and desirable. And E) Society: Make healthy living socially supported rather than individually heroic.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Healthy Living, Longivity
Strategy & Business Model Section
How to Outcompete Your Client’s AI
By José Parra-Moyano et al., | MIT SMR | September 29, 202
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Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing legal documents, market analyses, creative assets, and software in situations where a capable in-house team equipped with AI can credibly replicate what an outside provider had been supplying. Service providers must find ways to ensure that there is still a need for their work.
Services firms have traditionally built their value propositions around the specialized expertise and experience of their staff, as well as their proprietary methods. Generative AI has changed that by providing access to a fair degree of knowledge that was once the sole province of human experts. This is not the first time technology has changed the economics of what companies handle in-house and what work they outsource.
Calculating Customer Costs. Service providers must rethink existing sales strategies that are based on expertise alone, now that generative AI is changing the economics of the decision to outsource higher-level knowledge work and making it cheaper to bring it in-house. They need to focus on how to win based on cost as well. Here are three ways they can do so.
- Improve unit economics. Cheap production pulled the work inside; cheaper production can pull it back out. This requires a fundamental shift in how professional services firms think about their business, to service productization rather than bespoke delivery. Generative AI has made that shift both more urgent and more achievable. Providers that have already begun the journey — by standardizing workflows, training models on proprietary data, and packaging expertise into repeatable systems — are best placed to win on unit economics.
- Make buying as easy as asking. The second move targets a different cost: the effort of buying itself. Hiring a provider has never been free of effort. The customer has to find the right expert, negotiate terms, explain its needs, review drafts, and integrate the result into its own systems. Every hour spent on that strengthens the argument for doing the work in-house. Agentic AI lets providers eliminate that friction, with agents that take the request, do the work, and deliver the answer directly into the tools the customer is already using.
- Own the operational burden. The third move targets the cost that clients encounter last: quality assurance and maintenance. Bringing work in-house with AI looks easy at first, but someone has to check every output before it can be trusted, fix mistakes, rewrite prompts and workflows as models change, and clear outputs through compliance. The costs accumulate quietly — in staff hours, in rework, in constant maintenance — until they rival the fee the client was paying the provider in the first place. The service provider’s move is to make that burden visible to the customer and be able to carry it for them.
What Service Providers Under Threat Can Do Now. Service providers survive when they win the client’s full make-or-buy comparison: cheaper to run, easier to buy, and less painful to manage. Here’s how to get started on each of the three moves.
List which of your deliverables generative AI can already produce just as well as a skilled person, because those are the ones clients will pull in-house first. For each, compare what one output costs you, all in, against what the client would pay in tools, tokens, and staff time to produce it internally. Wherever your numbers win, package the system and sell it.
Count the steps and the days between a customer asking you for something and getting a usable answer. Every step is a reason to build instead. Cut those steps to deliver your expertise as close to the customer’s use case as possible. Agentic AI can help here.
For every customer considering building in-house, write out what running the work would actually cost their business: the hours checking outputs, the rework, the model updates, the compliance reviews, and the salaries behind it all. Put that total next to your fee. If the customer insources anyway, stay close and reopen the conversation two quarters later, once those costs have appeared in its books.
Generative AI has not made expertise worthless. It has raised the bar for what providers must offer alongside it. The firms that thrive will be those that make buying cheaper, easier, and less burdensome than building in-house.
2 key takeaways from the article
- Generative AI has lowered the cost of producing legal documents, market analyses, creative assets, and software in situations where a capable in-house team equipped with AI can credibly replicate what an outside provider had been supplying. Service providers must find ways to ensure that there is still a need for their work.
- Service providers survive when they win the client’s full make-or-buy comparison: cheaper to run, easier to buy, and less painful to manage. Here’s how to get started on each of the three moves. A) List which of your deliverables generative AI can already produce just as well as a skilled person. For each, compare what one output costs you, all in, against what the client would pay in tools, tokens, and staff time to produce it internally. Wherever your numbers win, package the system and sell it. B) Count the steps and the days between a customer asking you for something and getting a usable answer. Every step is a reason to build instead. C) For every customer considering building in-house, write out what running the work would actually cost their business: the hours checking outputs, the rework, the model updates, the compliance reviews, and the salaries behind it all. Put that total next to your fee. If the customer insources anyway, stay close and reopen the conversation two quarters later, once those costs have appeared in its books.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Outcompeting Your Client’s AI, Strategy, Consultancy, Service Business
How social media remade the luxury watch market
By Adam Erace | Fortune Magazine | October-November 2026 Issue
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Cartier, the founder of modern men’s wristwatch, debuted the delicate, square-faced Santos in 1911 and has been producing versions ever since. They range from svelte relics to a showy platinum-cased 90th anniversary edition with a salmon dial and indigo Breguet hands that fetched nearly $48,000 at Christie’s last year.
“Collectibility-wise, Cartier is probably one of the biggest brands that exists,” says Tom Collins, owner of vintage watch dealer the Wrist Watcher Ltd., “but there are so, so many variants, it’s hard to pinpoint which is a collector’s piece.”
There are clues horologists look for, like the number of grams of gold engraved on the back of the two-tone Santos Carrée, a piece Collins recently acquired for his tiny counter in London’s tony Mayfair. Debuted in 1978, this particular model represents a significant inflection point in design and mechanics for Cartier. The house recast the Santos in a chunky, sportier silhouette; squared the face (carrée is French for “square”); exposed its screws; and integrated a bracelet in stainless steel and 18-karat gold. It also went automatic.
Today you essentially can see every watch that was ever produced just by searching on social media. From a nostalgic birth-year Casio to a “Grand Seiko that only three people in the world have ever heard of,” an heirloom that was passed down through generations can be yours in just a few clicks.
Luxury watch brands have long looked down their noses at e-commerce, leaving the secondary market to gladly take the crumbs and make them into cake. The reseller market hit $10.5 billion in value in the first half of 2026, a 37.2% increase year over year, according to research platform EveryWatch. Even for dealers like Collins and Golden who maintain physical spaces, social media is a growing gateway for buyers under 50.
Over the past decade, a few brands have noticed the trend and jumped into social media. One pivotal moment was Omega’s “Speedy Tuesday” watch—a limited edition produced in 2017 as a tribute to online fans of Omega’s Speedmaster line. A community spun off from a weekly column in the digital magazine Fratello Watches had created a weekly social media ritual around the #SpeedyTuesday hashtag.
“For those that don’t get or believe that social media can have real impact,” says Paul Croughton, an impeccably dressed London editor-in-chief and watch enthusiast, “that was one of the most prestigious watch brands on the planet being directly influenced by a bunch of watch nerds.”
Social media has since melted the line between dealer and influencer, collector and creator, and there’s a flavor of watch content for every consumer.
A slightly manic note can creep into this corner of social media. The mostly male, mostly young consumers of this content came up in the pandemic days of meme stock windfalls, speculative crypto investments, and hypebeast product drops. This is how you get imbroglios like last spring’s Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop launch, which generated headlines like “Global chaos triggered by a limited-edition watch collaboration” (ABC World News Tonight) and “Swatch psychos stampede Long Island mall for special AP release as cop pepper-sprays mob”—a doozy, even by New York Post standards. For this mob, watches are as much assets to flip as trophies to collect. In a K-shaped economy with an evaporating entry-level white-collar job market, can you blame them?
Golden doesn’t. He recognizes that social media is probably the path to building a community of watch lovers. “For this industry to thrive and exist in the next 10, 20, 30 years, there needs to be a younger generation,” he says.
And while the platform and culture may have changed, the thrill of the hunt—and occasional buyer’s remorse—has not. “Sometimes the chase is more thrilling than that moment of ownership,” Croughton says. “You put it on the wrist, and you’re kinda like, ‘I like it.
We do put an awful lot of pressure on luxury goods to transmogrify our mortal bodies. Whether it’s a rare Vacheron, Vuitton luggage, or a Zegna suit, the costumes we put on contain their own stories, which in turn tell stories about us.
With his social media watch drops, Collins says, “generally, 80% to 90% will go within the first 30 minutes. Some even go within 60 seconds.” Then came a stroke of serendipity that no social media algorithm could replicate.
3 key takeaways from the article
- Luxury watch brands have long looked down their noses at e-commerce, leaving the secondary market to gladly take the crumbs and make them into cake. The reseller market hit $10.5 billion in value in the first half of 2026, a 37.2% increase year over year.
- Over the past decade, a few brands have noticed the trend and jumped into social media. One pivotal moment was Omega’s “Speedy Tuesday” watch—a limited edition produced in 2017 as a tribute to online fans of Omega’s Speedmaster line. A community spun off from a weekly column in the digital magazine. Social media has since melted the line between dealer and influencer, collector and creator, and there’s a flavor of watch content for every consumer.
- With his social media watch drops, generally, 80% to 90% will go within the first 30 minutes. Some even go within 60 seconds. That’s a stroke of serendipity that no social media algorithm could replicate.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Social-media Marketing and Luxury Watches, Strategy, Business Model
How Brands Can Deliver Impact Through Experiential Marketing
By Alvin Stafford | Forbes | October 01, 2026
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For years, experiential marketing has been misunderstood. People have reduced it to events: a pop-up, launch or branded moment built for a recap video and a few social impressions. But today’s market reflects a very different reality. Global experiential marketing spend reached $128 billion in 2024, finally surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Brands are investing in experiential because they recognize that consumers are seeking connection.
That shift emerged from a real gap in the market – disconnect between brands, culture and consumers. Brands wanted access to culture but often lacked the proximity or lived experience necessary to engage communities authentically. Campaigns targeting communities of color, e.g., were frequently being built without those communities having a seat at the table. The language, nuance and emotional connection were often missed.
Experiential answers that disconnect by creating environments where brands can engage people more meaningfully. Today, experiential exists everywhere a consumer comes in contact with a brand, threaded through product, media, social, digital, talent and culture. It serves as the connective tissue between these elements and should be one of the first considerations in a marketing strategy, not the final chapter.
That is the difference between marketing that gets seen and marketing that gets remembered. When experiential is done correctly, nothing feels disconnected: The experience creates content, content extends into social and social drives deeper engagement. As the marketing landscape continues to evolve, lasting brand impact will increasingly be determined not simply by how many people a brand reaches, but by the depth of the relationships it builds.
The Olympics may technically be considered an event, but people experience the impact for years through storytelling, partnerships, memories, community pride and cultural influence. The same is true for brands. When companies fail to think beyond the activation itself, they waste momentum. They create isolated moments with no continuity, no larger narrative for consumers to tell their story. Experiential is most powerful when brands stop talking only about what they sell and start understanding what their consumers feel.
Experiential requires brands to think beyond the moment itself: what people feel before they arrive and what they remember after they leave. The most impactful work happens when experiential has a seat at the table from the beginning, helping shape the strategy—the event is only one chapter inside a much larger experience.
Consumers are increasingly prioritizing value alignment when making purchasing decisions. People no longer want brands that simply show up during the biggest cultural moments. They want brands that feel aligned with who they are. That requires a relationship. Brands get experiential wrong by chasing. They chase immediacy: immediate impressions and immediate virality. Then they disappear. But communities remember who stays.
When brands think beyond a single experience, it signals to consumers their commitment. It communicates that the company understands the audience and intends to continue investing in the relationship. That trust is especially valuable when brands inevitably make mistakes. Companies that have built authentic relationships are often given room to recover. Brands built entirely on transactions rarely are. And ultimately, the relationship is the reason people choose to stay connected long after the experience is over. The experience opens the door; relationships are what keep it open.
3 key takeaways from the article
- For years, experiential marketing has been misunderstood. People have reduced it to events: a pop-up, launch or branded moment built for a recap video and a few social impressions. But today’s market reflects a very different reality. Global experiential marketing spend reached $128 billion in 2024, finally surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Brands are investing in experiential because they recognize that consumers are seeking connection.
- That shift emerged from a real gap in the market – disconnect between brands, culture and consumers. Experiential answers that disconnect by creating environments where brands can engage people more meaningfully. Today, experiential exists everywhere a consumer comes in contact with a brand, threaded through product, media, social, digital, talent and culture. It serves as the connective tissue between these elements and should be one of the first considerations in a marketing strategy, not the final chapter.
- When brands think beyond a single experience, it signals to consumers their commitment. It communicates that the company understands the audience and intends to continue investing in the relationship. That trust is especially valuable when brands inevitably make mistakes. Companies that have built authentic relationships are often given room to recover. Brands built entirely on transactions rarely are. And ultimately, the relationship is the reason people choose to stay connected long after the experience is over. The experience opens the door; relationships are what keep it open.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Experiential Marketing, Strategy, Business Model
Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section
The 4 Stages of the CEO-Board Relationship
By Claudius A. Hildebrand and Douglas L. Peterson | Harvard Business Review Magazine | September–October 2026
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It’s a central quandary for CEOs: How can you deliver transformational leadership when your ability to execute depends on a group of people you don’t hire, can’t fire, and have to influence without direct authority? That is, your board of directors.
Navigating the CEO-board dynamic is one of the most critical and underappreciated challenges of executive leadership. Given the high stakes, it’s surprising how little attention has been paid to the way CEOs can manage it over time—as the CEO grows in the role, as the composition of the board of directors evolves, and as new business challenges arise.
S&P 500 CEOs serve for an average of nine years, a period during which they face sweeping changes in both their businesses and their relationships with directors. Yet most new CEOs are caught off guard by how much time and attention the board relationship demands. To be successful at it CEOs have to recognize that working with the board will involve a shifting approach during the course of their tenure: gaining trust in the early days, when they’re under the microscope; developing the board into a strategic ally as the relationship matures; maintaining a posture toward the board that encourages debate and engagement; and ultimately shaping the board’s future leadership.
There’s a significant price to pay for getting it wrong. Allow the board to become too involved in short-term performance and you’ll spend your tenure fending off counterproductive strategy pivots; fail to engage the board sufficiently and you’ll lack the oversight needed to guard against complacency and excessive risk.
Based on their extensive knowledge of CEO and board performance, the authorsl lay out a four-stage framework designed to help CEOs build a productive partnership with the board that creates the healthy tension essential for effective governance and strong company performance. Each stage requires pivotal shifts in a CEO’s thinking and behaviors.
Inheriting the Board. New CEOs often are unsure about what to prioritize. Feeling pressure to make a mark right away, many think they don’t have time for the “soft” imperative of building a relationship with the board. That’s a mistake, because it means they’re forgoing an early opportunity to develop and accumulate social capital, which they’ll need to rely on later. When assuming the new role, CEOs tend to know little about the board’s internal dynamics or individual members’ views. new CEOs often don’t know how decisions get made on the board and where influence lies. Adding to the challenge for incoming CEOs, today it’s increasingly common for their predecessors to remain on the board of directors as executive chairs. In their first couple of years CEOs can take several actions to address directors’ skepticism and build trust: Map the board’s hidden dynamics. Honor the past while asserting independence. And define the rules of engagement.
Shaping the Partnership. After weathering several earnings cycles, navigating investor scrutiny, and building credibility, the CEO has typically earned enough trust to begin shaping the board’s composition and engagement style. This period, usually starting in the second or third year, is the crucible where leadership is forged. With that dynamic resolved, the new CEO’s relationships with directors will have matured, which means the CEO can exert a growing influence on board discussions. This is also a time when the CEO may seek to pursue the chair role or redesign board committees to better support the company’s priorities. During this stage CEOs must listen with humility, build consensus for change, and develop the courage to challenge the status quo. It’s a delicate moment: Advocating for too much change too soon can be destabilizing, but letting board membership stagnate can hinder the cultivation of new ideas. To successfully manage this stage CEOs should build lasting alliances by doing three key things: Refresh the board strategically. Manage the full spectrum of directors. And orchestrate influence.
Navigating the Trust-Oversight Paradox. As the board’s trust in the CEO deepens, hidden risks can emerge, including overconfidence on the CEO’s part and risk aversion on the board’s part. Call it the trust-oversight paradox: Although CEOs typically welcome the shift from intense oversight that comes during this stage, it can signal a weakening of constructive pushback from the board. Additionally, by this point new directors have gradually joined the board and power has transferred to the CEO, who now has a harder time hearing dissenting voices. Several CEOs shared the feeling of being trapped in an echo chamber. The result is often complacency on all sides, with an unfortunate bias toward the status quo. Such dynamics can pose real risks to the business. Here are key actions that CEOs need to take at this stage: Combat complacency. Keep the board current. And Engineer ways to hear hard truths.
Paying It Forward. The final years of a CEO’s tenure bring a dual challenge: maintaining strategic momentum while setting up the future leadership of the board and the company. CEOs at this point may be experiencing a complex emotional tug-of-war between driving today’s business performance and looking to the future—both theirs and the organization’s. This stage requires a mental shift from personal achievement to institutional legacy—and with that shift comes a focus on paying things forward and some deeper reflection on long-term impact beyond financial metrics. CEOs can successfully navigate this stage by relying on three main approaches: Break the succession silence. Shape the board for your successor. And let go of control.
3 key takeaways from the article
- It’s a central quandary for CEOs: How can you deliver transformational leadership when your ability to execute depends on a group of people you don’t hire, can’t fire, and have to influence without direct authority? That is, your board of directors.
- Navigating the CEO-board dynamic is one of the most critical and underappreciated challenges of executive leadership. To be successful at it CEOs have to recognize that working with the board will involve a shifting approach during the course of their tenure: gaining trust in the early days, when they’re under the microscope; developing the board into a strategic ally as the relationship matures; maintaining a posture toward the board that encourages debate and engagement; and ultimately shaping the board’s future leadership.
- Based on their extensive knowledge of CEO and board performance, the authorsl lay out a four-stage framework designed to help CEOs build a productive partnership with the board that creates the healthy tension essential for effective governance and strong company performance. Each stage requires pivotal shifts in a CEO’s thinking and behaviors. A) While inheriting the board, the CEO should address directors’ skepticism and build trust by: mapping the board’s hidden dynamics, honoring the past while asserting independence, and defining the rules of engagement. B) Shape the partnership, once the CEO has earned enough trust by refreshing the board strategically, manage the full spectrum of directors, and orchestrate influence. C) Navigate the trust-oversight paradox, as the board’s trust in the CEO deepens and hidden risks emerge, by combating complacency, keeping the board current, and engineering ways to hear hard truths. And D) finally look forward to pay when the final years of a CEO’s tenure bring a dual challenge: maintaining strategic momentum while setting up the future leadership of the board and the company. He or she should break the succession silence, shape the board for your successor, and let go of control.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Board and CEO Relationship, Board of Directors, Strategy
Entrepreneurship Section
FFounders Who Sound Perfect Are Making a Leadership Mistake Their Teams Notice Immediately
By Sneha Saigal | Inc | September 25, 2026
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AI is entering every part of our workflow and transforming how businesses start, run, or grow. It has streamlined tasks and reduced company overhead, but at the cost of rising work slop. With each rising level of AI slop, you spend more cognitive dollars, leaving you depleted.
While most slop is confined to our computer screens, it’s starting to affect how leaders show up in person, communicate with teams, and lead organizations. As a result, it is now easier for leaders to show up more polished but less present. Here’s how you can spot this executive presence slop and keep it from affecting your workplace performance and communication.
People notice the “polish over mastery” before you realize it. AI has made appearing prepared cheaper than actually being prepared. It has increased access to tools that make it easy to compose talking points, get comfortable with industry jargon, create pitch decks, and write meeting summaries with far less effort or knowledge than before. Founders pitching to investors, sales teams pitching to clients, and internal teams are all prone to AI work slop, which can reduce in-the-moment thinking through overreliance on superficial preparation. Teams who run all their communications through AI fail to factor in the human elements of a conversation. It doesn’t matter how perfect your pitch deck is or how polished your responses are if you can’t read the room when an investor has mentally checked out. Every business is a people business, and ultimately the purchasing or investing decision is always made by a human who notices the slop created by an over-dependence on AI, or spots the lack of substance in your preparedness, or sees your inability to go off script when needed.
Investors don’t fund the best ideas; they bet on the person with those ideas. Founders who skip the deep work of mastery and overindex on AI polish are easily caught off guard in term sheet negotiations or enterprise sales. They nail the delivery but fall short at active listening and mistake polish for presence. They struggle to pivot their responses and keep steering back to their script, or rely on their review material without letting expertise or lived experience lead. You cannot package weak domain knowledge with fancy wrapping by relying on AI polish alone.
AI tools cannot replace human-centered leadership. The skills that will stand out in an increasingly AI-assisted world are discernment and deep thinking. Founders who leverage that and lean into the three Ps will have an indefensible moat.
Presence to be fully aware and actively engaged in a conversation. The ability to use your presence in conversations as an opportunity to listen more deeply and closely to your audience, your investors, and stakeholders.
Preparation, not to come across as perfectly rehearsed, but to be confident in your expertise.
Pause to reflect, play back, clarify, or articulate a response, not merely to fill a gap.
3 key takeaways from the article
- AI is entering every part of our workflow and transforming how businesses start, run, or grow. It has streamlined tasks and reduced company overhead, but at the cost of rising work slop. With each rising level of AI slop, you spend more cognitive dollars, leaving you depleted.
- While most slop is confined to our computer screens, it’s starting to affect how leaders show up in person, communicate with teams, and lead organizations. As a result, it is now easier for leaders to show up more polished but less present.
- AI tools cannot replace human-centered leadership. The skills that will stand out in an increasingly AI-assisted world are discernment and deep thinking. Founders who leverage that and lean into the three Ps will have an indefensible moat: Presence to be fully aware and actively engaged in a conversation, preparation, not to come across as perfectly rehearsed, but to be confident in your expertise, and pause to reflect, play back, clarify, or articulate a response, not merely to fill a gap.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Startup, Communication & AI
5 Startup Rules We Broke on the Way to Building a Successful Company
By Malte Kramer | Entrepreneur | October 02, 2026
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Every founder gets advice, and most of it comes with conviction. Find a clear market gap. Raise as much as you can. Get a technical co-founder. Much of it is useful, but very little of it comes with the context that made it true in the first place.
Why startup advice turns into rules. Most startup advice comes from pattern matching. Someone succeeded doing X, so X becomes gospel. The advice travels faster than the context behind it. The problem isn’t that the advice is wrong; it’s that it stops being advice and becomes instruction.
Wisdom specific to one situation gets turned into a rule everyone follows, whether it fits or not. According to the author, his compnay chose its own route, knowing they didn’t fit the pattern the advice was designed for. Here are five startup “rules” they broke.
- Raise at the highest valuation you can get. The conventional wisdom is to take the best terms available. There’s logic to that, but raising at 200 times revenue means spending years trying to grow into numbers that were never grounded in your actual business. The author’s startup raised at valuations that let him keep the right partners, limit dilution and run a company that worked. Some companies in his market raised too much at valuations that were too high, and they’re now stuck because their last round set a bar that may take a decade to clear. He doesn’t want that to be.
- Raise as much as you can. This is a related trap. The argument is that more capital means more runway and more options. In many cases, it actually produces waste and a company that never has to make the hard choices that force you to understand what matters. The author raised what he needed to reach the next milestone, plus a buffer, and that discipline paid off.
- You need a technical co-founder. The author is a solo founder who hired great engineers instead. For a long time, investors flagged that as a structural weakness. He dones’t think it is, and with what AI makes possible now, the argument has only gotten weaker. You do need strong technical talent, but you can hire for it.
- Move fast and break things. This piece of startup doctrine has aged poorly faster than almost any other. With AI coding tools, anyone can ship software quickly, so the supply of mediocre products is now essentially unlimited. The only way to win is to build things that are actually great: well-designed, well-tested and genuinely useful. That’s especially true in high-trust industries. In real estate, customers are making the largest financial decisions of their lives, so the tolerance for broken things was never high. Trust takes years to build and can be lost quickly. Moving carefully where it matters isn’t a concession. It’s a product strategy.
- Disrupt from the low end. The classic playbook says to enter at the bottom of the market, undercut on price and work your way up. You can start at the top and built from there.
None of this was the “right” approach according to startup playbooks. It worked because we understood our customers and market well enough to know where the standard rules applied and where they didn’t.
A better habit is to treat advice as a prompt for questions rather than a directive. Why does this advice exist? What conditions made it true? Do those conditions apply to my business, my market and my customers? Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won’t. The answer is almost always more valuable than the advice itself.
3 key takeaways from the article
- Most startup advice comes from pattern matching. Someone succeeded doing X, so X becomes gospel. The advice travels faster than the context behind it. The problem isn’t that the advice is wrong; it’s that it stops being advice and becomes instruction.
- Wisdom specific to one situation gets turned into a rule everyone follows, whether it fits or not. According to the author, his compnay chose its own route, knowing they didn’t fit the pattern the advice was designed for. Here are five startup “rules” they broke. A) Raise as much as you can. No, raise what you need to reach the next milestone, plus a buffer. B) You need a technical co-founder. No, you need strong technical talent, and you can hire for it. C) Move fast and break things. This piece of startup doctrine has aged poorly faster than almost any other. Moving carefully where it matters isn’t a concession. It’s a product strategy. D) Raise at the highest valuation you can get. But you can get stuck because your last round set a bar that may take a decade to clear. And E) Disrupt from the low end. You can start at the top and built from there.
- A better habit is to treat advice as a prompt for questions rather than a directive. Why does this advice exist? What conditions made it true? Do those conditions apply to my business, my market and my customers? Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won’t. The answer is almost always more valuable than the advice itself.
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Topics: Entrepreneurship, Startup
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