Welcome to The Next Next

It’s alive!

Welcome to The Next Next.

This is meant to be a vessel to learn in public and create a feedback loop from day zero as I set out to define the next chapter of my entrepreneurial journey. I had great success doing so with MCJ for the last 6 years, and I am eager to take everything I learned and do it again with the benefits of what I learned the last time.

Posts will likely be informal and conversational, and the goal will be to manufacture some accountability for yours truly to get my butt in gear, to crystallize my thinking by forcing myself to write about it, call out questions I am wrestling with, areas I am excited about, etc, and attract a peer group and foster dialogue with people who are interested in the same stuff as me!

Here are a few topics on my mind as I head out on this journey:

Our relationships with work are changing.

How we work, where we work, with whom we work, the meaning behind our work, how we define success, etc — it’s all changing. This has implications in a lot of areas, and I am specifically interested in what it means for how we build/scale/fund startups.

AI is making it possible to do more with less.

The timing on that first thread is well aligned with what is happening with AI and other tools that will enable us to do more with less. Can startups scale revenues bigger with smaller teams than before? Can these companies get funded with alternative capital sources that preserve more exit optionality? Can founders find ways to work that bring more flexibility and control? Can we all spend more of our time in flow state and less of our time shoveling crap?

There are lots of opportunities to innovate within AI as a startup, but there are also lots of opportunities for startups to leverage AI and other emerging tools to build different. We are in the early innings of this evolution, it is evolving quickly, and there is a lot to unpack and stay on top of (and I am just starting out).

Where I fit into all of this.

Selfishly, part of this expedition is to figure out where I fit into all of this. I am feeling as ambitious as ever. But I can’t build my next company the way I have built prior ones, where it took over my life. My kids are at ages where I want to be super present, which means that flexibility and control are paramount. I also want to work on something deeply purposeful, and where I can be in flow state a large percentage of my professional time. And my hope is to prove that what feel like outsized constraints on the personal side are not incompatible with outsized ambition as a founder like they have been in the past. I may be wrong, but I am out to prove that it can be done!

My hope with this expedition is I can unpack what we as humans need out of work in this next era, what is possible with emerging tools, and how they can be applied most effectively to building startups. I am hoping it will lead to my next venture (iteratively, using this newsletter as an important feedback tool), and that if I find success with this new playbook, it can be a template for a new way of company building that many others will follow.

The alternative is that this goes nowhere with a thud, but the potential benefits greatly outweigh the potential downsides, and I am ready to rock!

Asks at this juncture:

• Books, podcasts, articles, videos, and other content reccos that would be useful as I get up to speed in these areas.

• Companies to look at, categories that could be interesting to explore, gaps in the market, etc

• Smart, curious, interesting, ambitious and relentless people to follow or engage with that are building or doing discovery in similar areas and fun to spend time with.

Thanks for tuning in. Let’s see where this goes!