Notes from the studio.
Long-form essays and short notes — on what we are building, what we are reading, what we got wrong. The cadence is irregular on purpose. We publish when there is something to say, not every Tuesday.
The Not-a. Manifesto.
Why the venture-studio model needs to be rebuilt from the economics up — and what we replaced it with. A closed team, AI-native execution, profit before scale, and a real off-switch on every project. This is the document the rest of the site is built around.
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18 Sins of the Venture Studio
Eighteen habits that quietly kill venture studios. Not a theory — a list maintained over years of watching the model fail in slow motion, sometimes in our own building.
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AI-assisted execution: why four people is enough
The cost of building collapsed in 2024. Most studios haven’t restructured around it — they hire around it. We did the opposite. The math, the stack, and the second-order effects on team design.
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Closed format vs. open call: the unit-economics argument
Most studios run on outside founders and spin-outs. We don’t. The reason is not philosophical — it’s arithmetic. What the spreadsheet looks like once you actually plug in attribution and time-to-revenue.
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Why we measure the off-switch before growth
Growth without an off-switch is a hostage situation. Every project we ship has a single number we check before we celebrate anything else: can it stop and still pay rent?
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Why “projects builder”, not “venture studio” or “startup builder”
The labels look interchangeable. They aren’t. Each one carries a different operating model, a different cost structure, and a different relationship with capital. We picked the one that matches the math.
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What we will never invest in
A short list of categories we won’t touch — not because they can’t make money, but because they can’t make money the way we know how to make money. Knowing where you don’t play is half the job.
On translations. Most of what’s here is written in English first and ports later. The Russian-language version of 18 Sins lives at /essays/18-sins-venture-studio-ru — same essay, original wording.