Stories & Field Notes

What we've learned building well.

Real stories from the trenches of early-stage company building — the decisions, the mistakes, and the hard-won learnings behind finding the market problems worth solving.

Don't build a tech company without a builder

When we started Strongroom in 2004, nobody could build the thing. Two years stuck, no income. Does that lesson still hold in the vibe-coding era? Half of it evaporated — the other half matters more than ever.

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The cost of building the wrong thing

AI dropped the cost of building a product to near zero. So why are more startups failing, not fewer? Because the expensive part was never the code — it was building something the market actually wanted.

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