I met him in 2025, right when "agentic" became the word every founder was supposed to have an opinion on.
He stood at the edge of the room at a San Francisco tech event. Everyone else was clustered in the usual formation: the networking huddles, the business card rituals, the posturing that passes for connection in these spaces. He was apart from it, watching. When I walked over, he launched immediately into a pitch. Not a conversation. A pitch. He told me what he was building, who he was targeting, what his thesis was. He did not ask me a single question.
Over the following weeks, his presence on LinkedIn became impossible to miss. Announcing a company. Then a second company. Pitches to prospective customers, narrated in real time. The content was confident, fluent, and relentless. I kept wondering: when is he doing the actual work?
About ninety days later, he posted about taking a break. He had built the cart, he said, before he had the horse. He was pivoting. It was framed as a breakthrough. I read it as a cost statement.
The content was not dishonest. He was probably doing some of it. From the outside, the volume of public activity made me wonder how much capacity remained for the underlying work. When the hard problem arrived, the pivot suggested there had not been enough left to meet it with.
This is not an argument against building in public. Transparency can be a genuine competitive advantage. Showing your work builds trust, creates community, attracts co-founders and early customers.
The problem is not the medium. The problem is what you are burning to perform in it.
Every founder has finite, renewable reserves of cognitive and emotional capacity. The part that gets tracked is the output: features shipped, deals closed, milestones hit. What rarely gets accounted for is the capacity underneath. The part that determines whether you can actually lead when a crisis lands, when someone on the team goes sideways, when you are three days from a board meeting and your best engineer just walked out. Spend that reserve on performance instead, on visibility, on threading every sprint for an audience, and by the time that moment arrives, you will not have anything left to meet it with.
So here is the question. When the crisis arrives, and it will arrive, do you have the capacity for it?
The Rule I Live By
By the time the first dot-com bubble collapsed, I had enough bruises to recognize the pattern. I had worked in advertising, in interactive direct campaigns, at companies moving fast through the early commercial internet. I watched startups that demanded everything go quiet almost overnight. What I noticed, sitting with the wreckage, was that the people who seemed to recover fastest were not the ones who had given the most. They were the ones who had always held something back.
I spent years developing an answer to that question, and the answer is a rule I still live by: never sell more than 70% of what you can actually do.
When you look for a role, or when you hire someone, the job description represents 100% of what the position requires. The goal is to make sure that 100% is only 70% of your real capacity. The other 30% is not permission to coast or sandbag or give less. It is something you hold back so you can give more when the situation actually demands it.
The reserve is not withheld from the work. It is preserved for the work that cannot be predicted in advance.
A founder running at 100% to keep the lights on has already spent the reserve before the crisis arrives. The crisis is coming. The question is not whether you will face a moment that demands more than you planned for. The question is whether you will have anything left to meet it with.
I learned the underlying instinct in art school, where managing your creative energy is part of the discipline. You cannot produce on demand if you have already consumed everything you have. The dot-com crash just made the cost of ignoring that rule visible in real time.
Here is the part that took longer to learn. If you are genuinely good at what you do, especially if your strength is the kind that sees a pathway through fog when others cannot, people will keep discovering your capacity. And once they discover it, they will try to use it. Nobody is trying to drain you. There is just always more work than there are people to do it, and you happen to be good.
The 70% Rule is, in part, a defense against that. More importantly, it is what makes it possible to give everything when it counts.
The Reserve Holds
The clearest proof I have came from a progression at Bayer, where I moved from senior manager IC to design director to director of strategy and research to senior manager of a UX group. Not a founding role. But the mechanics of reserve management do not care about your title. They care about what happens when your capacity meets a demand nobody planned for.
Each promotion consumed the reserve in a new way. The work I did with my hands shifted into work I did through people.
Managing people is not additive to the work. It is a different kind of demand entirely. Some of the most gifted practitioners I have ever worked with are, under pressure, really smart adults who sometimes had the coping mechanisms of a five-year-old. That is not a criticism. It is what happens when skilled, autonomous people are put under organizational stress they did not sign up for. Someone has to hold the container. Someone has to stay steady enough to make a decision when everyone else is too flooded to think clearly.
Because I had the buffer, I could be that person. I peaked the reserve multiple times. Those peaks lasted a week or two, not months. I could absorb the crisis, deploy what was needed, and return to baseline without the toll compounding.
The real test came during the pandemic. I spent more than two years managing a team through something no one had a playbook for, dealing with challenges I had never encountered, while appearing to my team as if I was untroubled by what was unfolding. A lot of very capable people cracked under that pressure, and they cracked because they were already close to their limit before the pressure arrived.
I was not. The reserve held. When the crisis arrived, I had the capacity for it.
Because I had not been operating at my limit before the crisis, I recovered more quickly than I otherwise would have. The reserve did not prevent the difficulty. It shortened the recovery.
Founders face this in every funding cycle. The moment will arrive. The question is not whether you will face a moment that demands more than you planned for. The question is whether you will have anything left to meet it with.
Building the Buffer In
The 70% Rule also changes how you should think about the teams you build.
I now evaluate my time at any role in eighteen-to-twenty-four-month stretches. At the end of eighteen months, I ask three questions: What am I still learning? What am I still getting from this? What do I still have left to give? The answers tell me whether to re-up or start thinking about what comes next.
The implication for founders is direct. The best people on your team are not the ones who will stay forever. They are the ones who are fully present in the cycle they are in, and who have enough reserve to do the hard work when the moment calls for it. You do not want someone running at 100% to meet your baseline requirements. You want someone whose 70% meets your 100%, because their 30% is what gets you through the part of the journey you have not planned for yet.
A team where everyone is already maxed out is not a high-performance team. It is a team with no margin. One unexpected demand, one bad quarter, one person who goes down, and there is nothing to absorb it. You are not just building for the plan. You are building for what happens when the plan fails.
This applies to the people you hire as much as it applies to you. The reserve is a team design principle, not just a personal one.
If I were talking to someone early in their career, or to a founder still figuring out what kind of organization they want to build, I would say this.
Do not sell your 100%. If you are maxed out just doing today's job, you have no capacity to learn tomorrow's. Technology moves, the market moves, the work you are doing right now will look different in three years, and if you have already consumed everything you have just keeping pace with today, you will not have anything left for the shift. The shift always comes.
The comparison trap is just as expensive. Everyone around you appears to be moving faster, closing more, raising more, getting further. What you cannot see from the outside is the financial cushion, the specialized niche, the network that makes someone else's pace possible in ways yours is not. And you cannot see what that pace is actually costing them. The people running hardest right now are often the ones who will need the longest recovery later.
You do not have to do everything in your thirties. If you do, what are you going to do in your forties, your fifties, your sixties?
Be skeptical of the people in your industry collecting silly prizes: the keynotes, the awards, the personal brands built entirely on social proof. Some have genuine depth beneath the surface. A portion have simply learned to spend their energy on visibility rather than substance, and surrounded themselves with people who will not point out the difference. You can be successful without being dishonest, including dishonest about what you are actually producing.
Give yourself the time and grace to grow. Patience isn't the same as waiting. It's knowing which things are worth spending yourself on, and which ones aren't.
When the Crisis Arrives
The founder I watched in 2025 was not a cautionary tale about ambition. He was smart. The work was real, at least some of it. What he had not figured out yet was that visibility had become a substitute for the reserve. And when the reserve runs out in public, the cost is not just personal. It is public too.
Founders who are building in public are spending something real to do it. The question is not whether to spend it. The question is whether what you are spending it on is what will actually matter six months from now.
Protect the buffer. Something is coming that you haven't planned for yet. The buffer is what lets you still be functional when it does.
When it does, you will find out very quickly whether you have the capacity for it.
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