Recent Posts
Social•Jan 23, 2026
Key Tech
Today's Operator Links: https://lnkd.in/gMYc6eW5 1️⃣ Why AI Systems Are Easy to Trick - Barath Raghavan & Bruce Schneier 2️⃣ Search Traffic Didn’t Fall Off a Cliff - Ethan Smith 3️⃣ AI Rewards Structure Before Talent - Gabe Mays 4️⃣ The End of Borrowed Attention - Lulu Cheng Meservey 5️⃣ The Hidden Cost of Not Asking - Jessica Roy
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 19, 2026
Ads Must Align With Real‑Time User Intent
For decades, digital advertising has trained marketers to optimize for interruption. You buy attention, compress a message into a few characters, and hope the click carries enough intent to survive the landing page. That model works when discovery and evaluation...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 15, 2026
Most Companies Mismanage AI Adoption—Here's Why
"You're Likely Screwing Up AI Adoption..." & more in today’s Operator Links, full post + sources in the comments.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 14, 2026
Stop Overusing ‘Pivot’: Distinguish Real Evidence‑Driven Shifts
Startup people reach for the word “pivot” when they want a decision to sound intentional. I’ve seen teams use it for everything from a careful course correction to quietly walking away from a plan that stopped holding up. Same word....
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 14, 2026
Real User Feedback Cuts Illusory Product Busywork
Most product work feels busy because it hasn’t touched reality yet. Real feedback compresses time. Internal activity stretches it. The longer you delay contact with users, the more convincing the fake progress becomes.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 13, 2026
Testing Daily Signals to Boost Operator Decision Speed
For 11 years, I’ve sent a weekly newsletter. Five hundred seventy-two issues built around links people consistently tell me they actually read. That cadence works. I’m keeping it. But frequency isn’t the same thing as usefulness. A lot of operator...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 12, 2026
Thinking in Public Drives Alignment, Not Just Polished Performance
Building in public became a performance once everything was edited. Thinking in public is what building in public looked like before polish took over. Building in public used to create shared context. Now it often creates admiration. Thinking in public...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 12, 2026
Post‑crisis “Diligence” Masks Underlying Process Gaps
I keep seeing the same thing after teams realize something important too late. The impact shows up in how work gets done. Extra checks get added before meetings. People start keeping private notes. Someone is asked to manually watch competitors....
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 10, 2026
People, Not AI Tools, Drive Real World Change
AI is a tool. Tools don’t change the world by themselves. People do.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 8, 2026
AI Speeds Site Building, but Can't Replace Strategic Judgment
Building a website with AI is faster than it has ever been. That speed exposes a problem most people miss. The reasons websites fail are rarely technical, and AI does not fix the underlying ones. At Crazy Egg, we built a site...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 8, 2026
Invite the Right Stakeholder Early to Solve Problems
Most work problems are easy to solve once they reach the right person. The trouble starts when they don’t get there directly. I was on a call yesterday where a small, solvable issue had already picked up unnecessary weight. I’ve...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 7, 2026
Burnout Arises From Unrealistic Work, Not Just Workload
Burnout is often framed as too much work. In practice, it comes from work that never meets reality. Teams stay active, calendars fill up, but nothing is tested. That gap creates slow burnout.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 7, 2026
AI Speeds Momentum, but Direction Now Matters Most
AI compresses the time between action and visible results. Momentum becomes cheaper, faster, and more fragile. You can get moving instantly, but direction matters more than ever.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 6, 2026
Stop Parenting Your Startup; Treat It as an Organization
Your business is not your baby, child, or another human you are in a relationship with. It is an organization. That distinction matters more than founders want to admit. Organizations exist to convert decisions into outcomes at scale. They rely on clear...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 6, 2026
Real‑World M&A Lessons: Offer Private, Objective Guidance
I’ve been around long enough to see how most M&A paths actually unfold. Some work exactly as hoped. Others resolve quietly. A few fall apart late for reasons that never make it into a postmortem. I’ve been on the acquiring side, the...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 5, 2026
Productive Meetings Require Pre‑existing Context, Not Just Discussion
Meetings feel productive when they recreate context. They move the business forward only when that context already exists.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 5, 2026
AI Erodes Speed Advantage, Judgment Now Matters Most
AI removed the natural friction that used to separate thinking from output. Writing, design, analysis, code, and planning now move fast enough that effort is no longer a credible signal. When anyone can produce something quickly, speed stops being impressive. What...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 5, 2026
Top Operators Guard Conviction Like Capital Preserves Cash
The best operators conserve conviction the way capital allocators conserve cash.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 5, 2026
When a Product Becomes Daily Habit, Users Market It
Products move through people before they move anywhere else. They spread in passing comments, side conversations, and offhand recommendations that were never planned. That only happens when a product alters daily behavior enough that omission feels strange. The improvement becomes...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 5, 2026
Tags Trump Folders: Let Meaning Emerge via Search
Scott wrote this and it finally clicked for me. Credit where it’s due. “Gen Z is right to not care about folders.” The reason this is correct has nothing to do with age. It’s about how information actually behaves. Folders force premature certainty....
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 4, 2026
When Execution Is Cheap, Judgment Becomes the Bottleneck
Execution is no longer the constraint. As building gets cheaper, judgment becomes the scarce resource. Models can generate options endlessly. What they don’t accumulate is lived consequence. They don’t carry the memory of failed bets, abandoned paths, or tradeoffs that only made...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 4, 2026
AI Accelerates Mediocre Ideas, Reveals True Judgment
AI changes how fast mediocre ideas get shipped and how quickly real judgment is exposed. There’s no hiding behind effort anymore.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 4, 2026
Outsourcing Thought to AI Erodes Your Judgment
The more you outsource thinking, the more expensive it becomes to get it back. The AI model will keep going day by day, happily producing plausible answers and polished reasoning. It will never say when you’re slowly losing the ability...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 2, 2026
Scale AI by Embedding Feedback Loops, Not Flashy Demos
In 2025, a lot of teams treated AI like a feature multiplier. Bolt it on, ship a demo, call it progress. The hard work of designing systems that learn, degrade gracefully, and hold up under real usage was quietly discounted....
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 2, 2026
Sales Need Marketing Copy to Align Teams
If sales can’t reuse your marketing verbatim, alignment is broken.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 2, 2026
Setbacks Shape Founders by Their Meaning, Not Reality
Most first-time founders believe the hardest part is the situation they’re in. A missed deadline. An investor who passed. A launch that didn’t move numbers. A hire that didn’t work out. In the early days, progress gets interrupted in small, unglamorous ways...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 1, 2026
Instagram’s Memo Signals Shift From Growth to Control
Adam Mosseri just shared a twenty-slide year-end memo on Instagram. If you skim it, it sounds like familiar talk about AI, authenticity, and creators. If you read it closely, it lands very differently. This isn’t really about growth. It’s about control. The memo...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Jan 1, 2026
Stop Predicting, Start Acting: Build, Write, Think Publicly
I keep seeing people try to predict their way out of uncertainty. That instinct is understandable. It’s also misplaced. What landed for me here is the shift away from prediction theater toward agency, intuition, and learning through action. When speed is...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 31, 2025
Prioritize Learning Over Being Right to Empower Teams
The most important thing a founder can give a team is confidence that learning is valued more than being right. That single belief changes how people act when no one is guiding them.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
Focus, Not Imagination, Has Become the New Bottleneck
I’ve been noticing a drop in focus. Not in any one person, but across systems and conversations. There was a time when a meeting could hold many ideas at once. We could explore tangents, test half-formed thoughts, and let unexpected connections...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
Treat Your Roadmap as a Hypothesis, Ship to Validate
A product roadmap is a hypothesis about user behavior. Shipping is how you interrogate it.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
Founder-Led Sales Succeed when Commitment Outlasts Quick Fixes
Founder-led sales works when the founder sounds like someone who will still be there when the easy answers stop working.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
Understanding AI Wrappers: Real‑World Examples Demystified
AI wrappers explained IRL
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
Messaging Debt Escalates Faster than Technical Debt
Messaging debt compounds faster than technical debt.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
AI Erases Friction, Amplifies Polished Mediocrity Everywhere
AI makes mediocre taste catastrophic. For most of history, mediocre taste had limits. It cost something to produce, took time to distribute, and required someone to stand behind it. Friction filtered a lot of junk. AI removes the friction and...
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 29, 2025
AI Reveals How Strong Our Judgment Really Is
AI is a stress test for judgment.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 28, 2025
Scaling Founders Excel at Editing, Not Just Creating
Founders who scale well are better editors than creators.
By Hiten Shah
Social•Dec 28, 2025
Founder Advice Misses the Emotional Burden They Bear
Most founder advice fails because it ignores what the founder must emotionally carry.
By Hiten Shah