Principles

I learned this in music before I learned it in startups. As Klaud, I had friends who were better producers — pure musicians who believed the music should speak for itself. They never broke through.

I split my time roughly 50/50 between making music and building distribution: brand, audience, fan engagement. That's the only reason I ended up at Ultra and on a tour through Malaysia. The same pattern repeats in every founder I respect. A slightly worse product with great distribution beats a better product with no distribution. Every time. The founders who win treat distribution as equally important to the product itself, not as something they'll figure out after launch.

Every inflection point in my career came from being in a room I wasn't invited to. WeWork hired me after I tailgated through their keycard elevator and wandered around until someone asked me what I was doing. AskNed started from a Craigslist post for a TechCrunch booth helper — by the end of the day I was running pitches. Ultra was a teenager with no connections charming his way onto the lineup.

The mechanism changed when I got older. The physical rooms became digital ones — X presence, content, public work that made me visible enough that opportunities found me. The pattern hasn't. Put yourself somewhere you don't belong. Be interesting enough that someone says wait, stay.

My operating philosophy compresses to three words. At cosmic scale, nothing anyone does matters. We're a microsecond inside fourteen billion years. That's not nihilism — it's the pressure release valve. When the ambition gets heavy, I zoom out to the indifference of the universe and the weight lifts. Then I zoom back in and the drive is still there.

The two balance each other. While we happen to exist, shoot for the stars. Push humanity an inch forward. Pursue curiosity. Have positive experiences. Try to understand as much as possible about what we are and where we are. The meaning isn't in the outcome — it's in the act of pushing.

I don't ship strategy. I ship product. When a customer has a problem, the answer isn't a ticket in a queue — it's a fix deployed the same day. When my brother Mariano flags something broken, the turnaround is minutes, not sprints.

Comp AI's only stated value is “be insanely customer obsessed.” One value, not five. We hit $5M ARR by removing everything between the customer's problem and a working answer. No committees, no decks, no process for the sake of process. Speed isn't recklessness — it's the result of cutting everything that isn't building.

Most founder advice is about processing more information faster. Mine is the opposite: process less, more selectively. The real founder problem isn't missing context — it's drowning in it.

So I built an entire AI assistant stack around me: a Slack CLI, an X CLI, a personal wiki, agents that triage email and surface the three things that actually need a human. I zoom in when something matters and zoom out when it doesn't. The willpower approach to information overload doesn't scale. Building around your bottleneck does.