⚙ Hi {{first_name_tally|Operator}},

I’ve been experimenting with my friend Paras, who builds AI agents on the side (what a crazy hobby).

My goal is to automate my entire workflow using context from my current tools like Slack and Gmail. We’ve been “hiring” a few of these agents like:

These guys have been doing the work automatically, I only get a ping when they run into issues. Has been neat to use!

This got me thinking, what agents would you wanna hire for your team?

Depending on the response, I might reach out to a few of you who vote to see if there’s a way I can help you out with this.

- Rameel

it’s No Ad September baby.

i’ve been getting some weird inbound for ad spots.

(shoutout to the onlyfan creators who thought there was a good fit here.)

i would never sell out like that… unless someone pays me a cool billion dollars.

(then i’ll do anything you want)

Last year, the venture-backed economy wrote $16 billion in checks to consulting firms. McKinsey, BCG, Bain—the usual triumvirate—along with their thousand smaller imitators, all selling the same product dressed in different PowerPoints.

The founders who signed these checks told themselves a story as old as commerce itself: they were purchasing expertise, buying time, acquiring capabilities.

It's a comfortable fiction, one that boards nod along to, one that sounds responsible in investor updates.

They weren't buying any of those things.

What they actually purchased—what that $16 billion really bought—was something far more precious and far more damaging: permission to remain strategically incompetent about the very mechanics of their own businesses.

This is the transaction nobody acknowledges. Not because it's hidden, but because it serves everyone so perfectly. The consultants get their recurring revenue. The founders get their plausible deniability. The investors get their professional management narrative.

Only the company—that abstract entity that exists somewhere between the cap table and the customer—pays the real price.

And here's the beautiful, terrible truth of it: everyone knows exactly what they're doing. The consultants know they're not selling solutions but dependencies. The founders know they're not buying expertise but absolution.

It's a mass delusion maintained by mutual consent, a comfortable conspiracy that keeps half of Sand Hill Road in business and the other half in the dark.

In 2015, Ivan Zhao had no runway and a broken architecture that was killing Notion. Every advisor would have told him the same thing. Raise more money. Hire consultants. Fix the tech stack. Stop the bleeding.

Zhao let go entire team instead. He and his co-founder moved to Kyoto and spent a year coding 18 hours a day in their underwear. Two guys who'd never built this kind of system before, learning by failing.

Notion is now worth $10 billion.

Brian Chesky faced the same choice when Airbnb's listing photos were garbage. Any rational operator would have hired a photography service. Chesky borrowed a camera and personally shot apartments in New York himself.

He understood that outsourcing the problem meant losing his ability to understand what makes strangers trust each other. That capability, once built, became the foundation of Airbnb's entire trust system.

You can't buy that. You can only earn it.

Consultants know exactly what they're selling. They solve your immediate crisis first, then they manage your ongoing ignorance about your own business. The dependency is the business model.

When the World Bank compared businesses, those with owners that built their processes beat consultant-dependent ones by 2x. The trained owners evolved their approach. The others couldn't move without calling their consultant first

The problem is dependency compounding like interest on a credit card you can't pay off.

Taleb writes about systems that get stronger from stress. Most people apply this to markets or training. Almost nobody thinks about organizational competence this way.

Every problem you solve internally makes you stronger at solving problems, period. Every problem you outsource leaves you brittle in that exact spot. Taleb calls the first option developing 'optionality'—the ability to respond to unknown future challenges.

When COVID hit and Notion's usage exploded 10x overnight, they knew exactly where to optimize. Every bottleneck was obvious because they'd built it with their own hands. While competitors waited for consultants to diagnose systems they didn't understand, Notion had already shipped the fixes.

This is the competitive advantage nobody mentions.

Once you outsource understanding, you can never bring it back.

Watch companies start down this path. They outsource pricing strategy and suddenly can't explain why they charge what they charge.

Customer research goes external, now they can't predict what features will resonate.

Technical architecture gets handed to consultants (good luck evaluating engineering talent after that).

Each outsourced decision creates two problems: whatever you originally needed solved, plus your permanent ignorance about that part of your business.

The dependency ratchets tighter. McKinsey explains what BCG recommended. Consultants interpreting consultants all the way down.

Research on "absorptive capacity" reveals why. External expertise only helps if you understand the basics. Otherwise the knowledge bounces off, solutions without learning, answers without understanding.

By now, you've already written the check. Not for a solution—everyone believes they're buying solutions—but for something more precious: permission to remain strategically naive about some essential corner of your business.

You told yourself it was expertise you were purchasing. A reasonable fiction. What you actually bought was exemption from the particular variety of suffering that comes with true understanding.

The consultants, those merchants of borrowed confidence, understand this transaction better than you do. They know they're not selling knowledge but absolution.

The question that matters isn't whether you've paid this particular tribute—every founder has their receipts. It's whether you've mistaken the toll for the road itself.

History's enduring companies share an inconvenient philosophy: they refuse to purchase their way out of difficulty. Instead, they pay in the only currency that compounds—time, discomfort, and that particular species of humiliation that comes from being spectacularly incompetent before achieving mastery.

They understand what the Kyoto apartment taught Zhao: that competence isn't transferable, but the capacity to develop competence is.

In the end, they own their understanding.

And in an economy where everyone else has subscribed to rented intelligence, that's the only advantage that compounds rather than depreciates.

The consultants will always be there, waiting at the margins with their frameworks and their guarantees. They're not selling solutions.

They're selling the most expensive product in the world: the illusion that understanding can be outsourced.

Zhao knew better. Chesky knew better.

The question is: do you?