Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

If you started a company more than two years ago, it’s likely that many of your assumptions are no longer true. You need to stop coding, building, recruiting, fund raising, etc., and take stock of what changed around you. Or your company will die.

A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.) Recently my wife and I had something happen that made us reevaluate a 25-year-old relationship. These two bookends made me realize something larger: reevaluating all types of relationships – romantic, friendship, founders, business partnerships/ventures, and even countries – is a healthy and normal part of growing, getting older and, at times, wiser.

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do. The lessons still apply even though AI Agents will upend all of this and PR will end up being one of the many businesses that will no longer exist in its current form. Here’s why.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32

Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened. And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives. This is one of those stories.

The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.)

In November 2025 the Department of War (DoW) unveiled the biggest changes in 60 years of how they will buy weapons and services. This month Congress, with bipartisan support, rapidly made them into law in the National Defense Authorization Act (the NDAA) – 3,096 pages of legislative text and 636-page Joint Explanatory Statement.

The Department of War Just Shot the Accountants and Opted for Speed by Steve Blank

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders best practices – in a language and process that was easy to understand and implement. All from a practitioner’s point of view.

The October 2025 PEO Directory – Update 2. The Department of War (DoW) is one of the world’s largest organizations. If you’re a startup trying to figure out who to call on and how to navigate the system, it can be – to put it politely – challenging.