Own Your Bets
If someone else can pull the plug, it’s not a slow bet.
Over the years, I’ve had many people want to buy or invest in IdeaMensch.
The pitch was always some version of the same thing. Take the money, move faster, hire people. What might take a decade could happen in a year. One guy took me to dinner in Los Angeles specifically to make this case. His whole argument was that my vision, whatever it was at the time, and honestly, it was all over the place, could happen so much faster with his money behind it.
He wasn’t wrong, exactly.
But speed wasn’t the goal. A slow bet is a slow bet. So I took the decade path.
I may have made more money going the other way. Not guaranteed, but possible. But IdeaMensch is still here. Most of the ideas and peers from that era aren’t. And I think the odds of it surviving would have been a lot lower if I’d handed over control and gone fast.
That’s the trade. Speed for ownership. Most people take the speed.
Same reason I’m cautious about business partners on slow bets. Not always, and this isn’t a hill I’d die on, but most people don’t want to work on something for five years while it makes $100 a month. Can’t blame them. If IdeaMensch had required a partner’s approval to keep going, it probably would have been shut down in year two. Not because it was a bad idea. Because it was moving too slowly for someone else’s timeline.
When you own the bet, you control the clock. You can keep something alive simply because you believe in it. You can let it compound quietly in the background. That flexibility disappears the moment ownership is shared.
First SaaS, now AI. The technical co-founder I never took on now exists as a subscription. The tools that used to require a team have been reduced to one person and a laptop. The argument for giving up equity to get something built has never been weaker.
Look for ideas you can own completely. The ones that don’t require permission or consensus just to keep going.
And ownership isn’t only about business.
Before Carlyn and I got married, we had a real conversation about this. I’d watched too many friends go through divorces where their business became a casualty. Not because the business failed, but because they couldn’t figure out where to get the money to pay out their partner. Sometimes the company had to be shut down entirely. So we set things up so that IdeaMensch’s viability would never be on the table if our personal situation ever changed.
That’s not a lack of trust. It’s clarity.
That guy in Los Angeles made a good pitch. Faster growth, more resources, bigger vision. That was a long time ago.
IdeaMensch just turned seventeen.
Full-blown teenager.
I’m proud of that.