Most people look at a system and see what it produces. Revenue. Leads. Dopamine.
I look at a system and see how it breaks.
It’s a miserable way to live. But it’s a profitable way to build.
$2 is really fucking expensive
In high-consequence environments, you learn very quickly that it is almost never the catastrophic external event that kills you.
It isn’t the enemy you see. It isn’t the competitor. It isn’t the market crash.
It is the $2 plastic switch that melts because someone bought the cheap version. It is the unverified API key buried in a footer. It is the single checkbox in the ad account settings that was left on “Default.”
We obsess over the strategy. The creative. The big, sexy, expensive variables.
And we ignore the plumbing. But the plumbing is where the pressure lives.
The curse
I have a hard time sleeping when a new campaign launches. Not because I’m worried it won’t work.
But because I’m worried it will work, and the infrastructure won’t hold the weight.
My brain is wired to scan for the anomaly. To hunt for the single point of failure.
In a social setting, this is called anxiety. In operations, it’s called redundancy.
And redundancy is the only thing that separates a business from a gamble.
The cascade
Here is what “One Bad Config” looks like in the wild:
A tracking pixel is installed incorrectly. It fires twice for every purchase. The ad platform thinks you are twice as profitable as you are. It scales the budget automatically. You spend $10,000 in a weekend chasing an audience that doesn’t exist. Your inventory runs out because the forecast was based on bad data. Your support team drowns Your reputation cracks.
All because of one line of code.
It is a cascade. A domino effect of entropy. And more often than not, it happens in silence.
Optimism vs. survival
Founders are fueled by optimism. They have to be. You have to be slightly delusional to start a business in the first place.
You have to see the rocket going up. It’s your job.
I see the O-ring freezing. Rupturing. And $150M turning into heat and ash and smoke.
That’s my job.
You need the optimism to start. You need the paranoia to survive.
Harnessing
You cannot turn this thinking off. If you’re like me, you check the lock on the door three times before bed. You check the passport is in the bag before you even leave the house.
The trick isn’t to cure the paranoia. It’s to deploy it.
Into a checklist. Into a stress test. Into a system that assumes things will break, and builds a safety net before they do.
Because eventually, the $2 switch will fail. The config will be wrong. The human will error.
And when it happens, you don’t want to be the one panicking. You want to be the one who already bought the spare part.