Introducing The Work

A brief note before we get started: I haven’t sent one of these in a while. If you’re receiving it, you’ve subscribed to something from Global Venture Network, Global Accelerator Network, or Morrow - or we’ve chatted before.

Either way, welcome.

The Work is for the people running and building venture ecosystems — accelerators, studios, hubs, platforms. The operators. The investors.

This work is hard to explain to people outside it. The Work is for the people inside it — a regular note on leading, building, and staying sane while you do both.

With love and trust,

Pat

Every year, I spend a week on a farm in Kansas. And usually, there's at least one field left fallow — no crop, no output, nothing to show.

But underneath, the soil is restoring itself. The compaction is releasing. The nutrients are coming back.

The fallow field isn't passive.

It's preparing. So that when the season comes, it can produce what the worked fields can't.

Something shifts when you get quiet enough.

I'm not talking about the routine kind of quiet you find on an empty afternoon. A deeper kind — quiet that takes days or weeks to arrive, and only after the notifications stop mattering, the mental to-do list runs dry, and your brain finally accepts it's not going anywhere for a while.

I stepped back from the Global Venture Network eighteen months ago — first to see what it would be like to have a new CEO at the helm, then just to rest. And somewhere in that stillness, looking at the venture ecosystem from a slight remove, I started seeing things differently. The same way you see new aspects of a painting when you step back from the wall. Some of what came into focus surprised me.

Not the things everyone's writing about. The AI disruption, capital contraction, the accelerator model under pressure — those are real. They're the known unknowns, the questions already on the whiteboard, already getting plenty of ink.

What I kept returning to were the assumptions so entrenched in how founders have been taught to build that they can't see them at all. Here are six.

These aren't things I'm saying to founders. These are things I'm saying to the people who sit across from them every day.

Except when it comes from a one-time spike — a campaign that hit perfectly, a partnership that opened a door, a moment of timing mistaken for a repeatable model. The founders who built on that foundation and called it traction are everywhere. You've met them.

Often, it's actually a customer selection problem that started at the top of the funnel six months before anyone noticed. By the time churn shows up in the metrics, the real decision was already made.

It's not consideration; it's deferred cost. Paid later, with interest, at the worst possible moment — when the company needs the team to be cohesive and discovers it never actually was.

But investor-ready and built-to-last often point in different directions. Investor-readiness is a pitch. Durability is a practice. The programs that optimized for the former and forgot about the latter have the alumni outcomes to prove it.

The most transformational thing any program can offer is a person with real experience giving a founder their full, unhurried attention. Not the curriculum. Not the cohort calendar. The moment when someone sits across from a founder and says: I've watched this play out. Here's what I'm seeing.

Usually, what they actually need is someone to name the thing they're not yet willing to say. The strategy that stopped making sense six months ago, the dynamic on the founding team nobody's addressed, the market signal they've shrugged off for two quarters. Sometimes the founder doesn't need more — they need someone who's been paying attention to say the quiet part out loud.

That person can be you — the operators and investors in this community. Maybe you don't have more answers than anyone else, but you've been watching long enough to see the pattern underneath the behavior. To ask the question underneath the question.

The other investors see the deck. The mentors share the war story. The advisors show up for a quarter.

You stay.

And staying — committing to close observation, season after season — is how you earn the right to name what nobody else in the room is willing to say.

That's what the quiet gave me: a renewed conviction that the job of a venture operator isn't to be louder than the noise, but to sit with a founder in the middle of all of it. To help them see what they can't see yet. The assumption beneath the strategy. The pattern they've lived inside so long they've stopped questioning it.

That's the unknown unknown.

And naming it — quietly, from years of watching — is the best gift we can give.

The whole piece is about naming what nobody's willing to say. So let me ask it directly.

And the one that keeps me up:

These are the questions I actually want answered. Not for content — because I think what you're sitting on is worth hearing.

Hit reply. I read every one.

MIKE MICHALOWICZ · BOOK · MIKEMICHALOWICZ.COM

A thank-you to Max Anderson for this one. Most founders run the standard equation: revenue minus expenses equals profit — whatever's left over is the reward. Michalowicz flips it. Revenue minus profit equals expenses. You protect profit first and run the business on what remains. It reframes profit not as an outcome but as a discipline. Worth reading cover to cover. If you'd rather start with a conversation, search Profit First in your podcast app — several strong episodes out there.

KRISTIN NEFF · HIDDEN BRAIN PODCAST

Self-criticism can feel like accountability, but according to researcher Kristin Neff, it's actually the thing most likely to get in your way. People who practice self-compassion take more responsibility for their mistakes, not less — because they're not burning energy on shame. The connection to your work: the founders you coach are often their own harshest critics, and that inner voice is costing them more than they know. This episode will change how you hear it when you sit across from them. Find it in the Hidden Brain feed — the episode is called "Being Kind to Yourself."

RESEARCH · SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY + TU MUNICH

A meta-analysis of 47 studies kept coming up in my reading during the sabbatical. The finding: ADHD traits — hyperfocus, impulsiveness, high activity, a different logic for decisions — are directly tied to entrepreneurial performance. The same traits that create friction in structured environments generate an edge in ambiguous ones: faster pattern recognition, higher risk tolerance, the ability to hold multiple threads at once. The founders in your programs who seem scattered, move fast, and can't sit still in workshops may be exactly the ones most likely to build something that matters.

The nuance worth noting: these traits help most at the launch stage. Post-launch, the same founders often need more support, not less. Worth keeping in mind before you design your next cohort — and before you write someone off in week three.

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