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And after spending a decade coaching young founders, which, let's be honest, is basically a masterclass in watching smart 20 somethings learn that confidence and competence are not the same thing. I felt this one in my bones.

Here's what nobody tells you about the gap between amateurs and pros:

Amateurs perform. Pros prepare.

The amateur shows up to the investor pitch having "thought about it in the shower." The pro has rehearsed it 47 times, including once to their dog, twice to their mirror, and three times to their increasingly concerned Uber driver.The amateur tweets about their "crazy work ethic." The pro is too busy working to tweet.The amateur reads the book summary. The pro reads the book, takes notes, and then applies the lessons, even the uncomfortable ones.

I've watched this movie a hundred times.

Young founder lands a big meeting. Crushes it. Celebration ensues. "I'm a natural!" they think. Then the second meeting comes. Then the third. Suddenly their "natural talent" runs dry because, plot twist that first win was 80% adrenaline and 20% the other side being polite.

Meanwhile, there's always that other founder. The one nobody's betting on. The one still somewhere running through their demo for the fifteenth time. The one who journals their failures like a scientist collecting data. Boring? Sure. Until they're suddenly "an overnight success" five years later or maybe ten.

The unglamorous truth:

The best salespeople I've ever met? They practice objection handling like jazz musicians practice scales. Daily. Obsessively. Until it's muscle memory.The best speakers? They mumble through their talks alone in hotel rooms at 6 AM while the rest of us sleep.The best operators? They've pre mortemed every disaster before you've even finished your first coffee.None of this is sexy. None of it goes viral. But all of it compounds.

So here's my challenge for you this week:

Pick one thing you want to be known for in public. Then ask yourself: What am I doing in private to earn that?

Because the world will eventually call your bluff. The question is whether you'll be ready when it does.

Stay focused. Stay systematic. Get FASTer.

Here's a riddle for you: What do a particle board bookshelf and 8,500 customer service reps have in common?

They both got a new job description.

Let me explain.

IKEA's Billy bookcase is arguably the most successful piece of furniture ever made. One sells every five seconds. Over 140 million have shipped worldwide since 1979. It's so ubiquitous that economists created a "Billy Bookcase Index" (like the Big Mac Index) to compare prices across countries.So when IKEA's parent company Ingka Group deployed an AI chatbot in 2021, they gave it a fitting name: Billie.

Billie's job was simple: answer the repetitive stuff. Where's my order? What time do you close? Can I return this? The kind of questions that make call centre workers develop a twitch.

Billie crushed it. Within two years, the bot was handling 47% of all customer enquiries—3.2 million conversations that no longer needed a human. The company saved €13 million almost immediately.Now, in most companies, this is where the story gets dark. The spreadsheets come out. The consultants start calculating "headcount optimization." HR prepares the carefully worded memos about "restructuring."

IKEA asked a different question.

Instead of looking at 8,500 people and asking "How fast can we cut costs?", they looked at the 53% of enquiries Billie couldn't handle and asked "What are customers actually trying to do here?"

The answer was hiding in plain sight: people weren't just calling about missing table legs. They were calling because they wanted help designing their homes. They had questions about room layouts, colour coordination, which MALM dresser wouldn't make their bedroom look like a sad university dorm.

These weren't transactional queries. They were consultative ones. The kind of conversation no chatbot no matter how sophisticated can replicate.

So IKEA retrained all 8,500 call centre workers as remote interior design advisors. New skills. New service. New revenue stream.

The result? That remote design channel generated €1.3 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2022 alone, 3.3% of total sales. Their target? Scale it to 10% by 2028.

Here's the part nobody's talking about:

The revenue wasn't invented overnight. IKEA already offered design services. But they were undersized for the demand, and limited by geography. What the re skilling did was unlock scale, suddenly they had thousands of trained advisors who could serve customers anywhere, by phone or video, for as little as £25 per session.

A cost centre became a profit centre. People who used to say "Your delivery is scheduled for Tuesday" now say "Have you considered the KALLAX as a room divider? It would open up your space beautifully."

The uncomfortable nuance:

I'm not here to tell you IKEA is immune to reality. Just this month, Ingka Group announced it's cutting around 800 corporate office roles as part of a broader restructuring. The company's CEO said they've "grown too complex in a retail environment that requires speed and agility." Layoffs are real. The anxiety about AI eating jobs is legitimate.

But here's what the IKEA story proves:

There's another question you can ask before you reach for the redundancy notices.

Not "How do we automate this?" but "What could our people do if the repetitive work disappeared?"

Not "How do we cut costs?" but "What are customers asking for that we're not equipped to deliver?"

The chatbot didn't take 8,500 jobs. It revealed 8,500 jobs that were waiting to exist.

The takeaway for founders:

When you implement AI in your business, you'll get efficiency gains. That's the obvious play. The non obvious play , the €1.3 billion play, is figuring out what your people can do now that they couldn't do before.

Because "freed up capacity" is just another way of saying "untapped potential."

The question is whether who sees it that way…Will you?

📚 Book | The Systems Bible by John Gall (1975)

Background: A retired Michigan pediatrician wrote a book about why systems fail. It was rejected by 30 publishers before being self published. It became an underground cult classic among engineers, military strategists, and (quietly) some of Silicon Valley's most successful founders.

John Gall spent decades observing complex systems, hospitals, governments, software, organisations and concluded something uncomfortable: "Systems in general work poorly or not at all."

The book reads like Murphy's Law had a dark, philosophical older brother. But buried in its sardonic wit is a principle that's become gospel in systems design:

Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

This is the intellectual foundation of MVP thinking, decades before "minimum viable product" was a phrase. Every time you're tempted to build the whole thing at once, Gall's Law whispers: start simple, let it evolve. Healthcare.gov's disastrous 2013 launch? Classic Gall's Law violation. The internet itself? A dead simple document sharing system for CERN scientists that evolved into... everything.

🔧 Tool | The Pre Mortem (Gary Klein, 1989)

Background: Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein developed this technique while consulting for the U.S. Army and intelligence agencies on high stakes decision making. It's now used at Google, Goldman Sachs, and endorsed by Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, yet most founders have never heard of it.

Here's the problem: When you present a new plan to your team and ask "Does anyone see any problems?", you get silence. Nobody wants to be the pessimist. Nobody wants to slow things down. Concerns go unspoken until they become disasters.

The Pre Mortem flips this dynamic.

How it works: After briefing your team on a plan, you say: "Imagine it's one year from now. This project was a complete disaster. Take two minutes to write down all the reasons why it failed."

The shift from "What could go wrong?" to "What DID go wrong?" triggers what psychologists call "prospective hindsight" and it increases the ability to identify risks by 30%. People suddenly compete to surface the most insightful concerns. The meeting becomes about who's smartest about spotting problems, not who's most negative.

Why it matters for founders: Your team already knows where the bodies are buried. They're just not telling you. The Pre Mortem gives them permission and incentive to speak up before you've burned the runway.

Klein, G. (2007). "Performing a Project Premortem." Harvard Business Review, 85(9), 18-19.

Decision Bandwidth is the real unlock with AI, not reduction in employees not any thing else. Its the ability to remove all constraints from taking decisions. People pile on noise, AI allows you to do their tasks and remove that noise. AI is the Noise Cancellation for Analysis Paralysis and Enhancing Decision Bandwidth.

AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.

See your AI traffic!

In February 2026, RBC announced it would train all 100,000 employees on AI. Not layoffs. Training.

They've already got 27,000 staff using internal AI assistants daily. Now they're scaling that fluency company wide.

Here's why this matters to founders…

When a company this size commits to upskilling 100,000 people, they're creating a massive pool of newly AI literate workers, many of whom will leave, consult on the side, or look for their next thing within 18 months.

The founder's play:

Every major up skilling announcement is a market being created in real time. Most founders see corporate news and scroll past. The sharp ones see distribution.

Find your (cheap) distribution!

14 years ago, 9 year old Caine turned his dad’s auto parts shop into a cardboard arcade using nothing but boxes, tape, and imagination. He built games, created a $2 “Fun Pass” for 500 plays, and waited. No one came.Weeks went by with zero customers. People walked in for car parts and walked right out.

Then one filmmaker bought a pass, loved the idea, and invited the internet to surprise Caine one Sunday.Hundreds showed up. The street was blocked. Strangers cheered his name.The YouTube documentary “Caine’s Arcade” went viral, and over $240,000 was donated for his college fund.

Most people quit when the early days are quiet.Caine kept building, even when no one was watching.Your first version might get ignored. Your early efforts might feel invisible.Keep creating anyway.The right eyes will eventually see it, and when they do, the response can be massive. Build in silence. Stay consistent.
Your line will form when you least expect it.

What cardboard arcade are you building right now?

Better Outcomes to all…

-Faizan…

P.S. Writing the newsletter takes time and commitment. This week I am trying to try native advertising . Only the things I feel you will drive value from. I have a request. Click and see the 3 ads and share your experience especially if you are an e-commerce player or builder relying on GPT or Agents. Its a replacement for a thumbs up for 4 year of betting on your outcomes!

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