The Elevator: The Rise of the Multi-Business Founder
"Humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible"
The Elevator: Curated inputs to elevate your business and expand your lifestyle.
The Rise of the Multi-Business Founder
More Founders in the future run multiple companies, not just one.
Just look to Elon/Sam Altman. The new norm is not just scaling one business, but many. And I see that mentality coming at smaller scales as well. Think about it; the internet has made accessing and organizing resources much easier than ever before. Capital formation is faster, development cycles are faster, as are building and winding down teams. Legal and financial legwork are taken care of with platforms like Stripe.
All of this makes starting and running new companies much easier. I see it in my own practice, where many more of my clients will become multi-business owners.
You buy a company for $1M and scale it to $5M. Then you do it with a second, and you scale operations such that you can easily work across both. I wrote about that here:
What Changes:
More buying and selling. This is good for startup marketplaces and M&A brokers.
Distribution remains king. The simple way to scale an acquired business is to give it new distribution. YouTube creators and social media stars will also run many more companies. As I wrote about recently, media + code go hand in hand. With the code component becoming cheaper.
Financing needs to catch up with the times. We still haven’t seen the right funding model for small, fast-moving businesses. ICOs had the right idea, with the wrong execution. The boom and Bust of smaller companies is more likely to be faster.
Lean teams. You could hypothetically run a few different $ 1-$5 M+ businesses with one small team. Then, you get some economies of scale and talent across those brands.
And we haven’t even talked about AI agents, which will make multi-company ownership dramatically more feasible.
If you’re a founder today, you might not be building one company to dedicate all of your time to. You might be building a set of companies that evolve with market changes.
Owning multiple businesses won’t just be reserved for private equity firms.
It’ll be a new norm, especially for those with networks and distribution...
xx David
On to the links…
Essay on how the world and much of business and content is just about making things more legible: Hyperlegibility, Trading Secrets for Attention. “Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.”
*Highly Recommend* Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective. I saved many passages from this piece.
This is a very good thread, not just because of the answers, but because of what is possible to discuss with these LLM’s. It will expand your creativity in asking questions. “o3 answers the question I ask all new models”
500k people are becoming digital friends with this AI. Video podcast preview included.
Have something to build? Lots of kudos have been given to this AI app-building platform: Lovable
Quotes and Bread Crumbs…
Be a 10x builder!
Replace us ,please?
“3. The Future Will Be Run by Narrative Engineers: The age of institutions is ending; we’re entering the age of egregores—memetic superorganisms made of stories, social networks, and reinforcement loops. Those who can design and steer these narrative structures will become the new kings, priests, and architects. Forget nation-states—think fandoms, cults, protocols, and brands that act like decentralized religions. Not-yet-mainstream hunch: A good storyteller with a Discord server and a transmedia playbook has more soft power than a Fortune 500 CEO.
Have a great weekend,