Play to Win, Not to Lose Slower

Been writing a lot of technical posts lately, so now it's time for something business-focused!

In the last few months, I've had several conversations with businesses concerned about conserving cash. Like a startup trying to prolong its runway or a large company weathering the current tariff climate.

That's great. A startup and a company facing financial headwinds should not spend recklessly. At the same time, "you have to spend money to make money" is correct. After all, the easiest way to stop spending any money is to shut down the company.

Here's an analogy from soccer: The team that's behind cannot afford to play overly cautiously. If they hunker down with an iron-clad defence, they might prevent losing even harder, but whether the score is 0-5 or 0-1, a loss is a loss. And so it is with our business examples.

For a startup, the length of the runway is irrelevant if there's no path to liftoff, so measures to prolong the runway must be balanced against measures to achieve liftoff. A large company in distress must avoid entering a death spiral where the cost-saving measures make it hard or impossible to extract itself from its challenging situation. Instead, both companies must strategically deploy resources to improve their situation.

This is where we pull it back to AI. It can seem like an unaffordable luxury in the moment: We're already short on cash, and you want us to spend money on this? But in the long term, a well-positioned initiative will more than pay for itself and alleviate the current challenges. Not the vanity AI that looks cute in the demo but doesn't improve anything, but the the down-to-earth AI that cuts hours of manual work each week.

Remember the soccer lesson. You don't win by stopping the bleeding. You win by going out there and scoring goals.