What I'm Reading, Saving, and Rethinking - June 20th, 2025

Happy Friday! Every week, I save dozens of posts, articles, and newsletters that challenge my thinking. Here's what stood out this week and why I think it's worth your time too.

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🔥 This Week's Saves

🔗 The Doordash Operating System, part 0

Summary: Steve Kenning puts a name to the feeling you’ve probably had working in any high-functioning vs. high-dysfunction company: discomfort is the point. While most companies gradually contort themselves around comfort (bureaucracy, groupthink, statusism) DoorDash built an OS that did the exact opposite. It enforced discomfort by design: hard goals, ruthless clarity of ownership, no title games, public accountability, and zero room for coasting. Why? Because their business model demanded it. When you're delivering $12 chicken wings with no margin to angry customers in 30 minutes or less you can't afford a bloated, comfortable culture.

Why It Matters: Most companies don’t fail from a lack of talent. They fail from a surplus of comfort. DoorDash understood something most orgs don’t dare admit: the human instinct is to avoid pain. So we build padded cultures: layered with consensus, fake collaboration, vague goals, and enough status games to ensure no one ever sticks their neck out. DoorDash did the opposite. They made discomfort a feature, not a bug. They set immovable goals you could miss. They made one person own the outcome and be on the hook for it. They gave that person real authority (not just a Slack channel). And they forced everyone to face the scoreboard weekly, in public.

My Take: This hit me at my core, especially “We avoid failure with ‘shiny object syndrome’: you’ll never fail at your current thing if instead you just keep starting new things.” I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, and I’ve built systems to fight it. In the early days of a team or startup, everything feels urgent and nothing feels owned. So instead of committing to the hard, boring thing that moves the needle, we chase the dopamine hit of new projects, new tools, new decks. It's activity theater dressed up as progress.

Bottom Line: This is why I built the Growth Marketing OS: to force discomfort into the process on purpose. To make sure there is a hard goal. A DRI. A red/yellow/green status. And no hiding behind “collaboration” when no one’s actually driving the bus.

DoorDash didn’t scale because they were brilliant. They scaled because they suffered on purpose. And they built an operating system that made sure everyone else did too.

🔗 The Next Great Distribution Shift

Summary: Balfour drops a monster of a post mapping out the evolution of distribution channels and how the next great distribution shift is coming and will reshape how products find users just as dramatically as search engines and app stores did before it. He then identifies a consistent 3 step playbook that every major platform goes through (with examples):

1. Identify the moat: start by figuring out what will make you unassailable

2. Open up the gates: create “open” ecosystems, beg developers to build on them

3. Close it for monetization: monetize once users have no choice but to stay

Why It Matters: Every generation of platforms gets better at pulling up the ladder behind them. Google gave us 20 years of SEO. Facebook gave us five. ChatGPT? We’ll be lucky to get two. Maybe less.

And this time, ChatPGT is building the destination. The new App store, the new search engine, the new operating system. Their moat is context and memory rather than a social graph professional data. And we don’t get to opt out.

My Take: I’ve seen this movie before. Platforms open up, early adopters reap the rewards, and then the gates close. The rules get rewritten, the taxes go up, and if you didn’t make your move early, you’re negotiating from weakness. And when the platform turns hostile (and it will) you’ll need to have already built something that can stand on its own. Honestly, it’s no different from when Google or Facebook increased their rents and tried to turn its renters into undifferentiated commodities.

Bottom Line: Platform shifts don’t reward the best product. They reward the best timing. The window to build on top of ChatGPT is open but it won’t stay that way.

🔗 Every marketing channel sucks right now

Summary: All marketing channels initially suck. Before Uber cracked Facebook Ads their CAC was a disaster. Before Airbnb nailed Craigslist it was awkward and borderline spammy. The pattern? Every channel starts off looking like a dud: high cost, low scale, no fit. And as a marketing channel matures over time (i.e. SEO has been a concept for 25+ years, you old fart) consumer engagement goes down, costs go up, competition goes up, ROI craters. How do you break out from the level of competition and the rate of customer fatigue? Andrew Chen’s advice…do something different.

Why It Matters: Because today’s marketing sucks your product has to be killer. Shitty products paired with amazing marketing and growth strategies are still…shitty. Great marketing is simply a product multiplier. An amplifier. A shitty product multiplies into, wait for it, more shit.

My Take: Everyone’s busy chasing Big Channels like they’re vending machines: put $1 in, get a user out. But for startups, those machines are already owned by giants with better CAC math, more brand equity, and a lot more patience.

Little Channels are the answer, not because they scale (they usually don’t), but because they work. Cold DMs, niche forums, hand-to-hand emails, one-person events with free pizza and awkward RSVPs. If it moves you from 100 to 500 users, it’s a miracle. At Uber scale? It’s a rounding error. But that’s the point.

What hits hardest is the call to be weird while you still can. Leverage novelty. Weaponize surprise. Launch the gimmick, try the stunt, write the spicy ad. Before you’ve got brand guidelines and lawyers, you’ve got freedom and that’s your real unfair advantage.

Bottom Line: Early-stage marketing is about traction, not efficiency. So stop trying to be impressive. Be effective. Be unscalable. Be loud. You can optimize later.

This newsletter is for you. What marketing challenges are you facing in your marketing journey? Reply directly to this email with your questions or topics you'd like to see covered in future issues.

Until next week,

Adam

P.S. Found this helpful? Forward it to another founder who might benefit—we're all in this together.