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There is a version of success that most founders have been sold without realizing it. More revenue means more hires. More hires means more meetings. More meetings means more complexity. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the reason you started gets so buried under the weight of what you built that you stop being able to find it.

We have convinced an entire generation of builders that the measure of a thing is how large it gets. And in doing so we have created an enormous number of people running businesses they no longer enjoy, living lives that do not belong to them.

This is a story about someone who figured that out. Then did something almost no founder in his position has ever done.

He chose less.

Sahil Lavingia / Gumroad

In 2011, Sahil Lavingia was 19 and employee number two at Pinterest. He left to build Gumroad. Raised a million dollars immediately. Then seven million more. Young founder, big idea, inevitable unicorn.

By 2015 the story had changed. The Series B fell apart. He laid off 75 percent of his team, many of them close friends. TechCrunch ran the headline. He later wrote about it honestly: he had spent months telling himself lies to keep the panic down. When he finally stopped lying, he stayed up all night writing down what he actually wanted his company to be.

What he wanted was not what he had been building.

He stripped Gumroad back to almost nothing. Moved to Provo, Utah. Learned to paint. Ran the company with a small network of part time contractors. No full time employees. No offices. No meetings. No deadlines. No perks. Everything asynchronous. Nobody managing anyone.

And then something happened that he had not planned for.

Gumroad grew.

Not because he was chasing it. Because he had removed everything getting in the way of the product being good. Today Gumroad does approximately $20 million in annual revenue. It is profitable. Sahil works part time. He paints 18 hours a week. He has built what he calls a machine that serves his life, rather than a life that serves his machine.

He wrote a book about it. The central argument is not that you should stay small. It is that most founders add complexity before they have earned the right to, and complexity is almost always the enemy of the thing they were trying to build.

The line that should follow you out of this:

"I have a lot of friends running businesses they don't like working at. They're killing it, it's growing. But they don't like it."

The rarest thing in business is not revenue. It is not growth. It is a founder who has looked at what they are building and asked honestly: does this life belong to me?

Sahil had $8 million in the bank at 19. The team. The press. The full approval of the system that decides who matters. And he would tell you now that the version of himself sitting in that moment was less free than the version painting in Utah with a quiet, profitable company that does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more.

True luxury is not what you add. It is what you no longer need.

The meeting you do not have to take. The hire you do not have to make. The investor you do not have to answer to.

Less is not a consolation prize for people who could not scale. For the people who understand it, less is the whole point.

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Most people who want to build something spend years waiting for the right conditions. The right market. The right moment. The right amount of certainty that the thing they are about to do will work.

Yosuke Masuko and Sanae Takasugi did not wait.

In 2011, they quit their corporate jobs in Japan, took $100,000 in savings, and moved to Ho Chi Minh City to open a pizza restaurant. Not Tokyo. Not London. Not a city with infrastructure designed for people who look like them or speak their language. Vietnam. A country where 90 percent of the population had never eaten artisan pizza in their lives and where the entire culinary identity was built on rice, pho, and ingredients that had nothing to do with mozzarella.

That was exactly the point.

Yosuke had been throwing backyard pizza parties in Japan since 2005, building a wood fired oven in his garden, hosting friends every weekend. He had watched something happen at those parties that he could not explain with logic. People who had never met each other became friends. People who were stressed became calm. Something about making food together and eating it with your hands from a flat piece of dough, with fire involved, did something to people. He called it peace. He called the restaurant Pizza 4P's. Four Ps. Pizza for Peace.

When they opened on Le Thanh Ton street in District 1, 90 percent of their customers were foreign expats. That number flipped inside six months. By the end of 2011, 70 percent of customers were Vietnamese. The city had decided it wanted what they were making.

Then the first real problem arrived. Vietnam had no fresh mozzarella.

Most founders would have found a workaround. Imported it. Used a substitute. Compromised the product just enough that nobody would notice. Yosuke went to YouTube, watched how mozzarella is made, tested milk from more than 25 different sources, and built his own cheese factory in Da Lat, a highland city in the mountains north of Ho Chi Minh City. The cheese facility now produces mozzarella, burrata, and ricotta supplied to all their restaurants and sold wholesale to other businesses across Vietnam. Cheese accounts for approximately 15 percent of Pizza 4P's total revenue today.

The constraint became the competitive advantage. It almost always does.

They lived in a small room above the first restaurant with their young daughter. Some nights after a 16 hour shift, Sanae could not make it up the stairs to bed. She fell asleep halfway up. Yosuke found her there and carried her the rest of the way.

That is what the early days of building something real look like. Not a pitch deck. Not a launch announcement. Someone asleep on a staircase who chose to keep going anyway.

By 2019, Mekong Capital, one of the most respected private equity firms in Southeast Asia, invested. By 2022 they had exited and Cool Japan Fund, backed by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, put in $10 million. The company posted $4.6 million in after tax profit in 2023, up 38 percent year on year. They now operate 40 plus locations across Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.

This summer they open at 50 Norman Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

New York. The city that invented the pizza slice. The city where pizza is not food, it is culture, identity, and religion with a foldable crust. They chose it specifically because it was the hardest possible test. Masuko visited more than 20 local producers in New York himself, including vegetable farmers, wheat growers, dairy producers, and cattle farmers, to build a sourcing network before the doors open. The kitchen will be led by Chef Ken Sakamoto, owner and chef at Michelin-starred Cenci in Kyoto.

If we can succeed in New York, Masuko said, we can demonstrate to the global market that 4P's has the substance and originality to stand alongside the very best.

Here is the thing that should stay with you after you finish reading this.

Yosuke and Sanae did not have a food and beverage background. They did not speak Vietnamese when they arrived. They did not have local networks, local knowledge, or a roadmap for what they were attempting. They had $100,000, a belief in what they were building, and the willingness to go somewhere unfamiliar and figure it out from scratch.

The Global South is full of markets like this. Cities where the infrastructure gap is the opportunity. Where the fact that something does not exist yet is not a warning sign but an invitation. Where being first matters more than being perfect and where the relationships you build in the early days compound for decades because you showed up when nobody else would.

The most successful version of what Yosuke and Sanae built could not have been built in Japan. It required the discomfort of somewhere new. It required the problem with no mozzarella. It required the room above the restaurant and the staircase and the 16 hour shifts. It required all of the things that looked like obstacles and turned out to be the foundation.

True opportunity rarely lives in the obvious place.

Go somewhere harder. Build something there. Watch what happens when the constraint becomes the thing that sets you apart.

📚 Book | The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad (2004)

C.K. Prahalad was a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and one of the most influential management thinkers of the twentieth century. He topped the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers in both 2007 and 2009. He died in 2010 at 69. This book is his most important and least read by the people who need it most.

The central argument is deceptively simple: the biggest untapped commercial opportunity in the history of business is not at the top of the income pyramid. It is not the affluent few in developing countries, nor the emerging middle class. It is the four billion people at the bottom, joining the market economy for the first time. Prahalad called them resilient entrepreneurs and value conscious consumers, not aid recipients and charity cases. The distinction matters enormously.

When he wrote the book in 2004, this was a radical idea. Most multinationals dismissed bottom-of-pyramid markets because they measured them by Western income metrics rather than purchasing power parity, local context, or the extraordinary resourcefulness of people operating in constrained environments. Prahalad spent the book dismantling that dismissal with case studies from Brazil, Mexico, and across sub-Saharan Africa. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Cemex's Patrimonio Hoy housing programme in Mexico. Company after company that had built enormous profitable businesses by treating poor consumers as sophisticated, demanding customers rather than recipients of inferior products at reduced prices.

This book will not teach you tactics. It will change the lens through which you see where opportunity lives. For any founder thinking seriously about building in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America etc, it is required reading. Most of your competition has never heard of it.

🔧 Tool | Google Market Finder

Google Market Finder is a free tool built by Google that almost nobody uses. It is not new. It is not trending. It does not have a viral thread about it. It is quietly one of the most useful pieces of intelligence infrastructure available to any founder thinking about taking their business into an unfamiliar geography, and it costs nothing.

Here is what it does. You enter your website and your product category. It analyses your existing Google traffic, identifies which international markets are already showing organic demand for what you offer, and gives you a ranked assessment of opportunity by country. For each market it surfaces: search volume for your category, average monthly searches in that language, suggested cost-per-click for paid acquisition, ease of doing business scores, GDP per capita, internet penetration rates, and a broad competitive landscape overview.

For a founder evaluating whether to enter Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, or Colombia, this is not a nice to have. It is the starting point of a serious market entry conversation. It takes 15 minutes. It is free. And because it pulls from Google's own global search data, the demand signals it surfaces are real behavior, not survey responses or consultant projections.

The reason it is underused is that it does not look exciting and it has never been properly marketed. It lives in a quiet corner of Google's tools ecosystem and most founders discover it by accident if at all. The founders who do use it tend to use it once, get a useful answer, and then reference it regularly in conversations about international expansion without ever naming the tool.

Every one needs something.Review your addictions. Make them better.

Jaime González Fernández / Pickup Coffee / Manila, Philippines

Jaime González grew up in a small town near León in northern Spain. He played handball for the Spanish national team. He studied aerospace and mechanical engineering, then aeronautics and avionics. He went to work at Airbus. Then McKinsey. Then Harvard Business School for his MBA. Then back to McKinsey, this time based in Manila.

He had fallen in love with the Philippines somewhere in the middle of all of that.

After McKinsey he ran investments at a local venture capital firm and started a real estate development company. Then he met Diego Lorenzo, a Filipino entrepreneur who had spent 12 years in finance and private equity, earned his MBA from Wharton, and come home specifically to build something that would prove to the brightest Filipinos studying abroad that it was worth returning.

Diego had noticed something obvious that nobody had acted on. According to the Philippine Coffee Board, eight out of ten Filipino adults drink an average of 2.5 cups of coffee every day. The market was worth over $1.3 billion and growing. But quality espresso cost ₱170 at Starbucks, roughly three dollars, in a country where that is real money for most people. The gap between what people wanted and what they could actually afford was significant.

They launched Pickup Coffee in February 2022. No physical stores. Just delivery. A few months later they opened their first kiosk at a mall in Bonifacio Global City. Every drink priced under ₱100. Double shot of 100% Arabica, freshly ground per order.

Their signature drink, the Kape Kastila, a Spanish latte developed partly as a nod to Jaime's heritage, has sold over three million cups.

By April 2023 they had raised $40 million in Series A funding, valuing the company at $130 million. Today they operate 404 locations across the Philippines, averaging 135 new stores per year. Every single one is company-owned. No franchising. Full quality control across every cup.

In December 2023 they opened in Mexico. Thirty-seven stores as of 2025. The playbook translated.

A Spanish aerospace engineer from a small town near León, who played handball for his national team and learned to love a country that was not his own, is now one of the people reshaping how an entire nation drinks coffee.

He built it in a market he chose to understand. He found a co-founder who had a reason that went beyond money. Diego did not just want to build a company. He wanted to prove something to an entire generation of Filipinos who had left and were not sure whether to come back.

Both of those things turned out to be enough.

Yosuke moved to a country where nobody knew his name, spoke his language, or had ever eaten his food.

Jaime moved to a country where nobody expected a Spanish aerospace engineer to build a coffee empire.

Neither of them waited for permission. Neither of them waited until it felt safe. Neither of them waited for the obvious market, the obvious city, or the obvious idea.

They went somewhere harder. They paid attention. They built something real.

The most dangerous assumption in business is that opportunity lives where everyone is already looking.

It almost never does.

The room nobody has walked into yet is not empty. It is just waiting for the person willing to walk through the door first.

Better Outcomes to all…

-Faizan…

P.S. Writing this newsletter takes time and commitment. The Last 2 weeks and again this week, I have included 3 ads only ones I believe are truly relevant.Quick ask: please click through and check them out. Think of it as a simple “thumbs up” after years of betting on outcomes that matter.Just 3 clicks. I’ll share results over the next month and eventually explain the test.

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