September 2026 One of the most useful heuristics I have when doing office hours with startups is to ask: what would make this company more powerful? Asking how the company could make more money is a good heuristic too, but it tends to yield incremental improvements. Whereas thinking about how to make it more powerful will sometimes make it orders of magnitude more valuable.

There are a lot of different variants of this question, depending on the type of company. Is there a way to transform the company from a mere component supplier into the one that owns the relationship with the customer? Or the related question: is there a way to make the money flow through it? It's always good when money flows through you.

[ 1 ] Is there a way to create something akin to an app store, where other companies can build upon your product? Then all their efforts to create valuable things make you more valuable too.…