Bread and Butter
This is a ‘Walk and Talk’, where I ramble with feet and words and then collaborate with AI to turn into something readable. So forgive the AI tone; all thoughts and hallucinations are my own.
There’s a question I’ve been sitting with this week, and it came not from a book or a framework but from a string of conversations with founders at very different stages of their journeys.
Every single one of them, in different words, said the same thing: the gap between the business and the technology feels insurmountable.
I hear this constantly. And it’s the gap I exist to close.
The reason the gap persists isn’t cultural or technical — it’s economic. Every software decision is, underneath it all, an economic decision. But the economics get lost in translation long before they reach the person writing the code. By the time it arrives, it’s been converted into “make it extensible” or “just ship it.” The original signal — what is this actually worth to the business right now? — is gone.
This is why optionality matters to me. Not as a technical preference, but as a lens.
Value is a function of flexibility times uncertainty. And there is arguably no greater uncertainty than the present moment. So the trade-off between a dollar today and ten dollars tomorrow has never been harder to get right — or more important to get right.
AI doesn’t dissolve this tension. It rewrites the scales entirely. It can give a CEO the ability to prototype something he’s been sketching on napkins for months. It can give his engineers the time to sit on customer calls and understand the actual problems. The line between design, product, and engineering is thinning. That’s real.
But it requires a mindset shift on both sides. The business needs to understand what it’s asking for when it demands speed. The engineering team needs to understand what it’s protecting when it asks for time.
Sometimes what’s needed is a translator. Someone who can hold both things at once — the shape of the software and the shape of the business — and build a bridge that, eventually, stands without them.
That’s the work I find most meaningful. It’s my bread and butter.
How about you? Are you in a tinkering phase right now, or a bread and butter one?