Rampant Ranks, Remarkable Rows, Regal Reese ??♀?
TL;DR
BUSINESS
?? Stop Hiring Your Way Out of Problems
Switching from corporate to startups taught me one thing: We tend to fix problems by hiding them under more people.
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Too slow? Hire. Too messy? Hire. No clue what’s going on? Hire. It’s a lazy, expensive band-aid that doesn’t solve anything.
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You can’t fix a skill gap with headcount.?
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Big teams create the illusion of productivity.
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More emails, more calls, more reports, but not more results.
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Decisions drag. Execution stalls. Responsibility disappears.
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When too many people “own” something, nobody does.
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And the worst part? The weak ones blend in. More bodies mean more places to hide. A few sharp people do all the work while the rest sit in meetings, nodding and pretending to contribute.
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In a startup, you can’t afford that. There’s no room for passengers. If something’s broken, you fix the system - not throw more people at it.
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Fewer, sharper people always win over bloated teams.
If your team isn’t delivering, don’t hire. Cut. Train. Reallocate.
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Make people better before you make the team bigger.
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More people won’t save you. More skill will.
SOFTWARE
?? Excel can do anything. Can your tool??
I love Excel. There, I said it. Every FP&A vendor prominently displays that beat-to-death blog about Excel horrors that cost companies billions of dollars. As if bad formulas don’t happen in FP&A software too. Please. That's elementary-school-level marketing.
For our competitors, Excel bashing is the sport of choice.
For us, it never felt right. We see Excel as inspiration, not competition.
It’s hands down the best business software ever made. Our brains are rewired to match the way Excel works.
It’s everywhere. Open. Simple to start, limitless in depth. People use it for everything - from bookkeeping to data science, from painting to music. Excel’s formula language became Turing-complete. Meaning? You can compute anything in it, no extra programming language required. That’s insane.
Spreadsheets are world-building tools. They let people create. Of course, they aren’t perfect for every enterprise process - anyone with half a brain knows that. But treating customers like they’re clueless? That’s just bad marketing.
We’re already seeing it - teams with Farseer experts building their own FP&A worlds. Nothing brings us more joy.
And this is just the beginning. One day, we hope to see an entire army of builders - people who don’t just use Farseer but create with it, making it their own, the way they do with Excel. Using Farseer as an extension of their brain.
Enterprise software should feel more like Excel and less like… whatever it feels like now.
TV CULTURE
?? Reese Witherspoon’s Formula for Turning Stories Into Gold
You probably know Reese Witherspoon as an actress. Legally Blonde, Walk the Line, Big Little Lies.
But she’s also a business powerhouse who built a media empire from scratch.
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For years, Hollywood sidelined female-led stories. Studios saw them as risky. Reese disagreed.
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In 2016, she launched Hello Sunshine, a media company focused on women’s voices. It wasn’t just about making movies. It was about fixing the system.
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Step one: Reese’s Book Club. Every month, it picks a book with a strong female lead. That stamp of approval turns it into a bestseller.
For example, "Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens exploded after Witherspoon picked it. It sold over 12 million copies, became a #1 New York Times bestseller, and was adapted into a Hello Sunshine-produced film.
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Step two: Buy the rights before Hollywood catches on.
Step three: Turn them into hit shows and movies. Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere - all started as books. She produced them, starred in them, and made them global successes.
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This model feeds itself. Every book club pick gets massive exposure, making it easier to secure future hits.
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But it wasn’t just about business. It was about representation.
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Witherspoon created jobs for female writers, directors, and producers. She gave women real screen time, real complexity, and real power. She proved that stories about women sell - and sell big.
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In 2021, she sold Hello Sunshine for $900M while keeping a stake and staying in charge.
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Her motto? "What would happen if we bet on ourselves?"
She did. And she won.
See you in a month ??