Field notes on growth you can bet on.
What we've learned putting our own money behind other people's pipelines: performance models, AI acquisition, attribution, and the economics of sharing the upside.
The Q4 fork: cut the agency, or cut the risk?
Every founder hits the same three options in October. Two of them are usually wrong, and the one everyone is tempted by is the most expensive.
Six terms that tell you whether a performance deal is real
Pay-for-performance is having a moment, and most of the offers are retainers wearing a costume. Here's how to tell, with our own answers on the record.
The ante is the ad budget
Anyone can say they share your risk. Funding the media is the part that costs real money, and it changes which channels we're willing to run.
January pipeline is built in November
Count backwards from the close and the math is blunt: a November start and a January start are one full quarter of revenue apart.
The attribution problem nobody wants to talk about
Every performance deal lives or dies on one question: whose revenue is it? How we answer it before a dollar is on the line, and why we under-claim.
Why we'd rather take equity than a retainer
Cash is the worst thing a great company can give away. A points-of-equity trade can beat it for everyone at the table.
The math that makes pay-for-performance work now
It didn't pencil out for labor-heavy agencies. Here's the line where AI delivery flips the economics.
Adverse selection, and how we dodge it
The companies happy to pay cash are the strong ones. Here's how we keep from only backing the weak ones.
Being the answer ChatGPT gives
Buyers ask AI before they ask Google. What it actually takes to be the company the model cites.
What a proof sprint actually proves
Two things, really, and only one of them is about us. Why we never sign an upside deal blind.
The day we stopped sending invoices
The decision behind Ante, and the kind of company that made us want to own a piece instead of bill for it.
Reading about the model is fine. Betting on it is better.
If your only bottleneck is pipeline and the upside is real, let's talk.