The power of deciding what to drop
Hi there
I have been thinking this weekend about how much of good business is subtraction rather than addition. The instinct, especially when you are building something, is to keep bolting on: more products, more markets, more people, more meetings. Yet the sharpest operators I watched this week were doing the opposite, deciding with real conviction what to keep, what to buy, and what to walk away from entirely. So here is the thread running through today’s issue: focus is a choice you have to make on purpose, and it is often the most valuable one on the table.
Enjoy!
HSBC decides an entire market is not worth keeping
After more than three decades, HSBC is pulling out of retail banking in Australia, closing its nineteen branches in phases and selling a $36bn book of home and personal loans to Blackstone. It is a striking piece of subtraction from one of the biggest banks in the world, and the logic is simple: this was a business it could never make big enough to matter, so it is redeploying the capital somewhere it can. For any owner, the lesson is uncomfortable but useful. Not everything you have built deserves to survive the next chapter, and the discipline to exit a decent business in order to fund a better one is rarer than it should be. Read the article here.
A $6bn deal that is really a bet on focus
Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to buy the bond-trading platform MarketAxess for around $6bn in cash, a 33 per cent premium on where the shares had been sitting. ICE is not chasing something shiny here, it is buying its way to a dominant position in fixed income, the plumbing of the debt markets. What I find instructive is the pattern: rather than spreading itself across a dozen new ideas, ICE is concentrating hard on owning one thing properly. Acquisitions like this are less about growth for its own sake and more about deepening an advantage you already understand. Get the story here.
Okta buys a narrow capability, not a broad one
Okta has agreed to acquire Permiso, an identity-security startup, for a reported $200m or so. The interesting part is how specific the target is. Permiso does one thing, detecting threats across human, machine and AI-agent identities, and Okta is buying that precise capability rather than a sprawling platform. As companies switch on more autonomous software, the question of who, or what, is allowed to do things inside your systems becomes a real problem, and Okta would rather own the answer than build it slowly. For anyone thinking about acquisitions of their own, this is the cleaner model: buy the exact thing you are missing, not a vague adjacency you hope to grow into. Find out more here.
Babylist chooses a founder over a safe pair of hands
When the founder of Babylist, Natalie Gordon, decided to step up to executive chair, the company could have hired a polished operator to run the next phase. Instead it handed the chief executive job to Jennifer Hyman, who spent eighteen years building Rent the Runway. The choice says something about what the board thought the business actually needed: not a caretaker, but someone who has carried the weight of building a company from nothing and knows what that costs. Founder transitions are where a lot of good companies wobble, and the decision about who inherits the seat matters more than almost anything else on the agenda. Read it here (paywalled, Archive).
Retailers discover that data alone does not sell
For years, retail media networks sold advertisers on one thing: the enormous pile of shopper data they were sitting on. Now, as Adweek reports, the likes of Dick’s, LiveRamp and Adobe are realising that data by itself does not move product, and they are moving into creative services, helping brands turn all that targeting into messages people actually respond to. It is a familiar arc. Knowing who your customer is has never been the hard part, saying something that lands has. For founders, it is a reminder that insight and execution are different skills, and the businesses that win tend to be the ones that pair them. Check it out here.
The most encouraging thing I read about AI adoption
Amid a run of gloomy surveys about AI failing to pay off, Axios made a point that cuts against the mood. The bottleneck for most companies is not the technology, it is enablement, and it turns out to be far easier than expected to find, train and redeploy existing staff to make AI work. In other words, the people you already have are more adaptable than the doom stories suggest. This matters especially for smaller firms, who cannot hire a team of specialists but can absolutely teach the team they have. The interesting shift is not whether to adopt AI, but recognising that the constraint is human capability, and that is something you can invest in directly. Read more here.
What we lose when AI does the junior work
Harvard Business Review has a thoughtful piece on a side effect of AI that few people are pricing in. A lot of judgment, the kind senior people take for granted, was built through years of unglamorous entry-level tasks: spotting the weak argument in a memo, reading an ambiguous set of numbers, sensing what a client is really worried about. Hand that work to a machine and you remove the training ground where instinct is formed. The authors argue companies now have to rebuild that development deliberately, through mentoring, rather than assume it happens by osmosis. It is a genuinely important point for anyone growing a team: efficiency today can cost you capability tomorrow, in a way nobody notices until it is missing. Read the article here (paywalled, Archive).
Design the company you need, not the one you have
Fast Company ran a sharp bit of advice this week, aimed squarely at founders who have grown attached to their org chart. The instinct, when something is not working, is to shuffle the people you already have into new shapes around them. The better move, the author argues, is to start from a blank sheet and ask what roles the business genuinely needs, then work out who fits, rather than the other way round. It is harder, because it forces honest conversations, but it stops you from designing a company around individuals instead of around the work. Worth reading if you have ever built a role to keep a good person rather than to serve the plan. Read it here.
As AI floods the internet, proving you are human becomes a business
There is a neat signal in a small funding round this week. Pangram, a New York startup that detects AI-generated text and images, has raised $9m on a simple bet: the more synthetic content there is, the more valuable it becomes to prove what is real. It is the same instinct that makes a stamp of authenticity worth something. As machine-made everything piles up, provenance, the ability to show that a person, a source or a track record is genuine, turns into a competitive asset. For anyone building a brand, it is a useful frame. The scarcer real gets, the more it is worth being visibly, verifiably it. Find out more here.
Inside London’s answer to the founder house
On a lighter note, TechCrunch went inside one of London’s growing crop of founder houses, shared homes where entrepreneurs live, work and swap notes late into the night. The one it profiles is run by a founder who sold his last company and now builds applied-AI tools, and the appeal is less about the rent and more about the company you keep. There is a real point buried in the fun of it. Building anything ambitious is lonely, and proximity to other people who understand the specific madness of it is genuinely valuable. You do not need a house in London to get it, but you do need to find your version of that room. Get the story here.
AI prompt of the week: the subtraction audit
Most of us are far better at adding than removing. This prompt turns that instinct around and helps you find the products, activities or commitments that are costing more than they return, so you can decide what to drop before it drags on the rest.
Act as a pragmatic operating partner who has helped owners simplify their businesses. I run a [business type] and I want to identify what I should stop doing. My context is [rough revenue, team size, main products or services, and where I feel most stretched].
Create:
A shortlist of the products, services, customer types or activities that are most likely draining time, focus or margin relative to what they bring in, with your reasoning for each.
For each one, the honest reason it probably still exists (habit, a single loyal customer, founder attachment, fear of the gap it would leave).
A simple test I can apply to decide whether to fix it, shrink it, or cut it entirely.
The one thing that, if I stopped doing it this quarter, would most likely free up energy for the parts of the business that actually compound.
Base this on how experienced operators think about focus, they know that saying no protects the yes, and that a smaller, sharper business often outperforms a broad, busy one. Be direct about what I am probably avoiding.
Drop me a line
Feel free to drop me a line if you have any comments or questions, I always enjoy hearing what is on your mind. Until next Sunday, I wish you well in everything you are building, and in the small, deliberate choices that keep a growth mindset alive.
Cheers!
Adam