Aaron Vidas

Safe AI for more customers, profits + time

I’m an AI + ML entrepreneur who’s spent 15+ years founding and scaling 4 big data, strategy, and AI companies; including a VC-backed global data platform. In 2024 my Life split in two: one week I was marathon training; the next I was told “Prepare not to see the end of the month” because of a brain tumour.

What followed was a chain of miracles, a full recovery and level of clarity that changed how I lead.

Today, I helm DASS Services, the world’s fastest-growing AI consultancy. And DASS Group an AI-enabled holding company acquiring extraordinary businesses across the world.

I build companies that create outsized impact, and a lot of joy, along the way.

HOW I HELP

I work with luxury travel groups, building-supply companies, wellness brands, and professional service firms generating $5M–$2B+ in annual revenue to:

• Unlock their first “AI Win” in 90 days so they build belief in AI's actual capabilities 
• Help Founders, Boards, and CxO’s deploy capital, hire, lead, and succeed in the AI Age
• Build enduring companies whose value grows exponentially as ai-enabled systems take over
• Acquire exceptional businesses and elevate them through AI, process intelligence and elevated consciousness

If you want clarity, speed, and ROI in this new era, happy to talk.

WHAT I SHARE HERE

• The AI playbooks behind our average 787% ROI in 1–8 months on AI projects
• What’s real vs. hype in the AI Age
• How-to lead confidently while the world shifts beneath our feet
• How-to build extraordinary companies while staying vibrantly, fiercely alive through the highs and lows of Life

YOUR NEXT STEPS

Want your first AI Win in the next 90 days?

Grab the 90-Day AI Win Playbooks for your industry below and see how companies are unlocking profit, time, and joy through AI-enabled systems.

Then take a visit to dass-services.com 

Want an AI Workshop for your Board or C-suite?
Want me to speak at your event?
Want to explore a partnership or acquisition?

Visit aaronvidas.com

Founder

The first question I ask AI Strategists and AI Engineers I'm hiring? "Walk me through what you've built." 

I'm looking for: 

- How they discovered where AI would be leveraged best in a work process. Usually by it doing the 'boring and tedious' (like downloading info from one software platform, massaging it in Excel and uploading it to another) or providing insights, and information, that would normally take hours/days of analysis so better actions can be taken, creating better outcomes. 

- How they trained staff doing the work daily and overcame objections like "well, the way we've already been doing works for me." 

- How they chose the tools they did to maximize performance, minimize cost or minimize time to value. 

- How they set up monitoring, maintenance and how the AI workflow will live on without them.

If they show a beginners mind to spot bottlenecks, empathy in training and technical acumen to do the above you know you've got a successful AI expert on your hands. 

Courses, credentials, college degrees and "20 years in machine learning" doesn't matter in 99% of generative AI use in business today. The technology's curves are too new for institutions to have caught up and translated that into formal, credentialed learning. 

What you're looking for is passionate people who have learned on their own and translated that into their every day and served others. 


#ai #privateequity #vc #aijobs #singapore

Notion isn't working for me and my team any more. What's everyone using to store ideas, SOP's, content, client work and finance data?

My vision is a flexible database I can stick Lyzr AI, Glean and Vertex Inc. on top of for search to agents doing marketing to financial analysis with a decent UI/UX a non-technical person can input data and find info they need from my content rants in WisprFlow to client's Service Agreements. 

Sara, Reuven, Allie, Wayne what are you using these days? 

#ai #aiengineering #singapore #aijobs

Amazing at surfacing processes, and decisions, and designing #AI-enabled systems that do the boring and tedious? 

Also, a wiz with ClickUp? 

Trolley AI hiring for your dream job. 

Surfaced by the awesome DASS Services NA Job Monitor 

#yvrjobs #aijobs #remotejobs

Open article: Senior AI & Systems Lead | Trolley by trolley-2.careers-page.com

My friend Steve Krueger has created some special for mid-size retail brands. We know AI provides the ability for people to have vastly different interactions with their favourite brand. New forms of content, shopping experiences, one-off sites and communities. But how do you actually manage that, no less build it? 

That's what Compass Commerce has done. From making content to storefronts for 2026 and beyond. All in one spot. 

Good people doing great work. Congrats Steve!


#ai #ecommerce #privateequity #vc

Crafting beautiful ecommerce experiences for better-life brands. | 7x founder | Investor | CEO/Founder @ JIBE 🚀 ECOMsquare 🏠

25 years into my career, 17 years of JIBE, and 6 years building toward this. The world is entering a period of massive change. With that comes volatility. And with volatility comes opportunity. That’s what has me fired up for what’s ahead.

Six years ago we had a theory that consumers would transact in completely different ways than they do today. At the time, we started seeing glimpses of it as companies, like Amazon, experimented with new commerce experiences that felt incredibly future forward, but completely out of reach for most brands to actually build.

That curiosity pushed us to look deeper. We realized the current technical landscape wasn’t built for the pace of change coming, so we leaned into composability. The belief was simple: systems that are modular and flexible give brands the best chance to adapt quickly as the world accelerates.

Fast forward to today, and that acceleration is everywhere. AI, new channels, new expectations. Leaders are trying to make sense of it, and teams are feeling the pressure. 

The gap between the people who understand the systems and the people who don’t is also widening quickly.

The biggest challenge businesses face today isn’t access to tools. It’s making sure the ability to use them is available to everyone on the team. 

That’s what Compass Commerce is about.

What feels like the culmination of the last six years, and honestly much of my career, has been built into what our team at JIBE – building composable ecommerce experiences has been building.

Compass connects the messy reality of a modern commerce stack and turns insight into action so teams can ship faster and adapt with confidence.

At its core, Compass helps teams move from signal to execution.

📈 Signals pull insights from across your commerce stack including ERP, CMS, storefront, marketing and analytics.

🧠 Knowledge brings your personas, brand guidelines, and your durable business context to keep your brand, segmentation, business rules, and KPIs in check.

🛠️ Skills are modular agents that turn those insights into reviewable outputs.

🕸️ Surfaces ship updates directly to the places customers interact with your brand such as storefronts, content, and marketplaces.

The goal is simple. Help teams ship weekly instead of quarterly, adopt new technology safely, and bring everyone along for the ride.

The waters ahead are moving fast. None of us have a perfect map, but we believe the best way forward is to sail it together. The crew is assembled, the sails are up, and the voyage has just begun. We are proudly crafted in 🇨🇦 

Follow along at Compass Commerce.

https://lnkd.in/gv5GtA_F

#futureofcommerce #commerce #commerceai #compasscommerce

Shoutout to Alex Chee with their ForceMultiple GTM credit product. A way for Founders, and the lender, to shoulder risk of acquiring cohorts of customers without the fixed burden of a more traditional ARR-based lending agreement. 

#founder. #ai #saas

CEO at Termina, Co-founding Partner at Tribe Capital

Friends, excited to share ForceMultiple, our GTM financing product at Tribe Capital is LIVE! If you're a founder, we're OPEN!

Over the last few years, Jake Ellowitz and I have seen a consistent pattern across the thousands of companies analyzed through Termina Systems, Inc.: when unit economics work, the bottleneck is working capital. GTM creates a terrible TROUGH — cash goes out today, collections arrive months later. In a tighter equity market, that trough constrains growth, forces trade-offs with R&D or forces dilution.

I've seen this tragedy unfold at EVERY company, and each time, the result is a journey filled with blood sweat and tears. From Lolapps with Kavin Stewart and Kamo Asatryan, to MessageMe with Arjun Sethi, to Joist with Justin Kathan and Brendon Sedo.

As promised, we're here to help folks ELIMINATE that trade-off. We'll work with you to fund your cohorts, so you can focus on growing your business, without all the downsides we've all had to go through.

Interesting? I think so. If you think so too, shoot me a message and we can dig in together.

Open article: Introducing ForceMultiple - Tribe Capital by tribecap.co

Introducing ForceMultiple - Tribe Capital

Event experts in AI get gobsmacked by its abilities daily. We're rebranding DASS Services NA and the team was able to build a new brand identity, standards and component library in a workday. 

While working around the Olympics I built dozens of brands from scratch. #ClaudeCode built what would take dozens of people 8-12 weeks, and hundreds of meetings collectively, just by us giving the LLM's feedback along the way.

This foundation will allow our agents to build 100K's pieces of content, 10K's of microsites, 1K's of ad variations, for us (all while remaining 'on-brand') over the coming months. Because everything is designed for an ai agent to read. 

What I loved most about the project? We could exercise our judgement, and experience, concisely and get something that resonates while we focused on the fun stuff: talking to customers and thinking about weird, valuable ways to leverage AI at work for more time, profit and energy. 

#ai #privateequity #familyoffice

If you want to be hiring great people to implement AI within your company, fund or family office, copy Wealthsimple’s approach. 

Ask people what they’ve built that has AI ‘think’ on its own and produce an outcome in a business process. Ask them to show you how it traces producing that outcome and how it protects customer and company information. 

In 2026 you can’t rely on degrees, certificates or programs to be markers of competence with AI. The bottlenecks are not knowledge. It’s people putting their hands on the tools and having the emotional intelligence, and business acumen, to make something work well. That’s the sign they’ll thrive in your businesses.  

#privateequity #ai #singapore #yvrjobs #familyoffice

We're trying something new at Wealthsimple.

Today we're launching AI Builders — a non-traditional hiring process for a small group of cross-functional builders who want to rethink how work gets done.
No resumes. No minimum experience.

Instead: build and demo a working AI system that meaningfully expands what a human can do. Not AI layered onto old workflows — AI-native systems designed from scratch, with sound judgment about where AI should own the work and where humans need to stay in control.

We'll review every submission within 48 hours of close. Interviews and offers happen the same week.

If you look at legacy systems and think, "This wouldn't exist like this if we built it today" we want to hear from you.

Open article: Wealthsimple AI Builders by wealthsimple.com

A genuinely fascinating looking job if you're passionate about #ai and #health in Ontario. 

#aijobs #aistrategy

Executive Vice President, Performance and Planning & Chief Information and Analytics Officer | Driving Strategy, Digital Transformation & Data-Driven Health System Innovation

The potential of AI is extraordinary. But the real challenge — the hard, meaningful challenge — is figuring out how to deploy it in ways that actually matter. Especially in an environment as complex, high-stakes, and deeply human as healthcare. 

That is the problem our team at Trillium Health Partners is focused on. Not AI for its own sake, but AI designed for human-centred impact — the kind that helps someone living with a chronic disease stay well and out of hospital, that removes friction from the work of a care team, that makes a complex system feel more connected and responsive to the people it serves.

To do this well, we need to bring together the right skills and experience alongside our incredible teams. With that in mind, I am recruiting for a Chief AI and Digital Planning Officer — a newly created role with a mandate to close the gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers.

What I can offer the right person is an organization that is genuinely ready. Executive commitment, a community that wants to solve these problems, a landmark infrastructure renewal underway, and a team already doing serious work. You won’t be starting from zero. You’ll be accelerating something that has real momentum.

If you are driven not just by building powerful technology, but by the harder and more important question of how we make it work for real people in real systems — this role is for you.

Less “Here are the four things I learned after a small flight delay” and more plunge into a cold ocean and contemplate how amazing it is to be alive right now.

#leadership #ai #familyoffice #privateequity #consciousai

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The ‘jagged edge’ of AI is exactly that. It will astound you and utterly frustrate you in the same hour. You discover the limits by doing. 

For example last night several agents created 78 markdown files, and few thousand lines of code, all for my CEO OS system (a process, and app to organize my businesses and Life so I can stay in flow states) all while I stretched before bed. That would normally be ~3 weeks of an FTE software developer's time designing and building. 

This morning I asked Claude Cowork to rename a couple dozen folders on a Google Drive and my laptop. And move them around so the CEO OS knows where to look for certain information and set about my morning meetings. 

4 hours later Claude was still banging away at trying to create the folders. Manually, a 10 minute job. 

It’s a reminder that we’re very much in the infancy of AI and it’s okay for the technology to certain tasks extremely well and others less so. 

That doesn’t mean it’s ‘all bad’ or ‘all good.’ And it doesn’t mean that AI’s capabilities are fixed. 

Quite the opposite, who could have predicted 18 months ago I, a non-coder, could create apps, and systems, that would normally take $1M’s in overhead to create and manage? 

It just means you explore, experiment and double-down on uses where it creates a lot of leverage today. 

Accepting what isn’t working today and checking back periodically to see if AI can now do the task. 

Because that’s where incredible growth happens.  


#ai #privateequity #vc #familyoffice  #singapore

I'm using Claude Skills, and markdown file-based instructions, a lot more than I thought I would to run my business. It's how I see a lot more businesses getting started with AI inexpensively and quickly. 

If you didn't know, Claude has created an elegant way to store explicit instructions on what the AI is to do, what it 'looks' at and the actions it then takes. They call it 'Skills.' You type a specific command in the chat and it starts the process stored in the skill to give you an outcome.

For example, on Fridays I do a Weekly Review of myself and business. It's 20 questions and reviewing of KPI's and financials. I type "Let's do my Weekly Review" and it knows what all the questions are, where to find the appropriate financial info and links to it. Plus, my answers are stored in a database. 

What would be a 1.5 hr process of seeing where I, and my company, is at takes 20 mins. More importantly, an 'AI Aaron' spots patterns repeating over time in my behaviour, and limiting beliefs, and points them out so I can maximize my impact.

I now have 'skills' for creating content; onboarding clients and employees; performing analysis; and managing projects. 

I thought this was all going to require an elaborate agentic management infrastructure. Turns out you just require a Claude Pro subscription and the decision to write down how stuff gets done in your business. 

You're first step in building skills? 

Just pick a boring and tedious task you have to do to keep the lights on and write down how it gets done. Then ask Claude to help you build a skill to do the boring and tedious parts (look up information, put together a presentation, fill out a financial model, etc.) and you're on your way.


#ai #familyoffice #privateequity #aijobs

Are you a full stack AI dev looking to have a lot of fun in the last decade of software development? Stuart Bowness and his team are cooking up something cool.

#yvrjobs #ai

Co-Founder | Building Toyo - AI agents for Founders

We're hiring a founding AI engineer at Toyo.

Toyo is the agent platform for small business. Founders and their teams describe the work that needs to happen (sales, marketing, operations, finance) and agents do it, reaching out via WhatsApp, SMS, iMessage, or voice when something needs a human call. We run it ourselves in production. A team of seven operating at the output of a company three times our size.

We announced CAD $4.3M USD in seed funding this week from Frontline Ventures and iNovia Capital. The founding team has previously built and sold companies to Workday, MessageBird, and Fox.

The role is for a senior AI engineer who has restructured how they work around AI. Claude Code as primary development environment, production agent systems with real scars from it, and strong opinions about what works versus what demos well. The work covers agent reliability, session infrastructure, secure VM environments, and the AI-native development practices we use to build the product itself.

Open article: Senior Full-stack AI Engineer - Toyo AI by apply.workable.com

What 'makes' the AI data stack? How do you architect it well? When do you start using Snowflake vs. DuckDB?

Here's what hit for me at tonight's Vancouver Agentics Foundation Meetup (thanks Robert Ranson and Bill McGraw for hosting):

3 things that'll save backend and AI engineers hours of bad architecture decisions:

1. DuckDB vs Snowflake isn't about preference, it's about thresholds. 

Stay local-first until your pipelines regularly exceed 20-30 minutes, modeled data crosses 50-100GB, or you hit 3+ concurrent contributors. Before that? 

Snowflake is just wasted resources.

2. Business logic belongs in dbt models, not orchestration code. Dagster owns the run order. dbt owns the logic. Mixing them is how "temporary" models become production dependencies nobody can touch.

3. The real "modern" in modern data stack isn't the tools. It's the operating model: code-defined pipelines, automated validation before consumption, and modular components you can swap as scale changes.

We built a game to make this stick: https://lnkd.in/g3vgh6XJ

6 zones. 18 lessons. 15 questions. If you're onboarding data engineers or just want to test yourself, try it.

#ai #dataengineering #analyticsengineering #snowflake #duckdb #dbt  #aiengineering #yvr #aijobs #fde

Nobody is teaching senior developers how to think about the modern ai data stack.

There are docs. There are tutorials. There are courses.

None of them answer the question that actually matters:

Why does this layer exist, and what breaks when you blur the boundaries?

So we built a game at DASS Services NA that does.

It covers the decisions teams get wrong before they open a terminal:

When to upgrade from DuckDB to Snowflake. What order to build a pipeline. 

Where logic belongs and where it doesn't.

Play it here: https://lnkd.in/g3vgh6XJ

#aijobs #aiengineering #vc #fullstack #yvr #singapore #london #switzerland #ai #aws

Former GE Capital Executive | I help founders and executives see what their financials aren’t telling them.

I spent 25 years inside the machine.

GE Capital. GE Vernova. NBCUniversal. Unilever. Structured finance, capital markets, project finance across Latin America. I was the CFO who sat across from banks, governments, and Fortune 500 boards and made the numbers make sense. I closed an $800 million power plant deal. I managed capital market teams and hundred-million-dollar sales budgets. I built financial models that moved real money in real markets.

I was good at it. For a long time, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

I stayed almost eight years past the moment I knew I was done. Eight years of golden handcuffs, institutional momentum, and not having a single person in my corner who could help me think through what leaving actually looked like -- financially, strategically, personally.

When I finally left, I made mistakes. I jumped into a startup that looked great on paper and had no financial foundation underneath it. I learned the hard way that passion without financial intelligence is just expensive optimism. Then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars learning the things corporate never taught me -- how to sell, how to communicate with conviction, how to walk into a room and make people feel what I knew to be true about their business.

That education nearly broke me. And it turned me into something rare: a former Fortune 500 CFO who can read your financials like a surgeon reads an MRI and sit across from you like a partner who actually gives a damn.

That's what I do now.

I work with a small number of founders and executives -- people who've already built something substantial and want a strategic partner with real financial depth. Not a coach. Not a consultant recycling frameworks. Not a bookkeeper calling themselves a fractional CFO. Someone who's been in the rooms, closed the deals, read the balance sheets, and came out the other side with a clear point of view about what actually matters.

If you're a founder past $1M who can feel that the way you got here won't get you to the next level, I can show you exactly where the growth is hiding and where the model breaks.

If you're an executive who knows you're meant for something bigger than the title on your business card, I've been where you are. I made the leap. I can help you think through yours.

I don't work with everyone. I'm selective about who I take on because the work only works when both sides are all in.

One conversation is all it takes to know if we're the right fit.

Cruz Gamboa

Most founders don’t go bankrupt overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From numbers they refused to look at.

Revenue looks good.
Growth feels exciting.
Ego feels validated.

But:

➡️ Cash flow is tight
➡️ Margins are thin
➡️ One client controls everything
➡️ Burn rate is “we’ll figure it out”

That’s how businesses die.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of financial discipline.

Here’s the cheat sheet I wish every founder read earlier.

Ignore red flags early → pay the price later.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Your P&L Is Hiding the Real Problem.

Most founders check 3 things:

Revenue.
Profit.
Growth rate.

Then they relax.

That’s the mistake.

Because your P&L is a scoreboard.

Not a diagnosis.

And scoreboards don’t tell you why you’re winning,
or why you’re about to lose.

Here’s what it’s not showing you 👇

If revenue is growing but cash is tight…

You don’t have a profit problem.
You have a cash flow problem.

If sales are strong but margins are shrinking…

You don’t have a demand problem.
You have a pricing or delivery problem.

If profit exists but stress keeps increasing…

You don’t have a money problem.
You have an operational problem.

Most businesses don’t collapse overnight.

They erode slowly:

➡️ Slightly rising CAC
➡️ Slightly lower margins
➡️ Slightly higher payroll
➡️ Slightly longer collections

Small leaks.

Compounded monthly.

And because the P&L still “looks fine,”
no one panics.

Until they should have.

Here’s what real operators track:

✓ Gross margin trends
✓ Cash runway (in months) 
✓ Revenue per employee
✓ CAC payback period
✓ Churn rate

Those numbers tell you where the fire is starting.

Revenue is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Cash flow is survival.

Read your P&L.

But interrogate it harder.

Because the businesses that scale aren’t the ones with the best revenue.

They’re the ones who catch problems before they show up on the bottom line.

Your financial reports are perfect.

Clean P&L.
Accurate balance sheet.
Cash flow that ties out.

Yet decisions still feel slow, reactive, or unclear.

That’s because reports don’t create leverage.
Interpretation does.

Most founders read numbers like history.
High-performing operators read them like instructions.

Every metric should force a decision:
→ double down
→ fix fast
→ kill it

If nothing changes after reviewing your numbers,
you didn’t review them, you admired them.

This cheat sheet breaks down:

➡️ The questions that actually matter
➡️ The metrics that lie
➡️ And how to spot 1% changes that unlock outsized results

Save this before your next finance review.

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cruzgamboadrive

patagonia-solar-llc

This guy bought one random car dealership.
Turned it into a $5B empire.

No fancy startup.
No venture capital.

Just one smart business move.

Terry Taylor started like most people in the auto industry:

Working inside dealerships.

Climbing the ladder.

But he realized something important:

No matter how hard you work…
You’re still building someone else’s business.

So in 1982, he bought his first dealership in Daytona Beach.

Most people would stop there.

He didn’t.

But the real genius wasn’t buying more dealerships.

It was how he structured them.

Instead of hiring managers, he:

• Gave them 20–25% equity
• Helped finance their buy-in
• Let them run the store

Now managers weren’t employees.

They were owners.

And owners think differently.

They protect profits.
They grow the business.
They care about reputation.

So scaling became easy.

1 dealership → 10 → 50 → 120+ dealerships

Today the network does $5B+ in revenue.

Simple lesson:

People work harder for ownership than salaries.

Build partners.
Not employees

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Terry Taylor

He spent 31 years running Trader Joe’s.
Mastered pricing. Supply chains. Consumer psychology.
But one thing bothered him more than anything else: food waste.

Every year, the U.S. throws away 120 billion pounds of perfectly good food.
Not unsafe. Just didn’t fit profit models.

Millions of families struggle to afford groceries.
Most CEOs see this as “business as usual.”
Doug saw it as broken design.

After retiring, he didn’t join a board. He didn’t consult.
He asked a different question:

💡 What if food waste became the foundation, not a byproduct?
What if access mattered more than margin?

✅ Daily Table is born.
✅ Grocery store built on surplus food.
✅ Affordable meals. Nutritious produce. Dignity first.
✅ No charity branding. No eligibility checks.
✅ Nonprofit by design. Every surplus reinvested in lowering prices.

Critics say it can’t scale. Doug agrees.
It wasn’t meant to dominate. It was meant to fix a failure everyone ignored.

From grocery CEO → noticing waste everywhere → building a store that feeds people, not profits.

If you want to rethink how systems work, look at incentives, not supply.
This is the anti-profit grocery model.

Daily Table

He was a waiter at Red Lobster.

He had $40.

Most people would complain. He built a $6B brand.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a problem: kids in his neighborhood paying too much for hats.

✅ Took action: taught himself to sew, made hats at home.

✅ Scaled smart: sold locally → hip-hop stars wore FUBU → national attention.

✅ Got creative: turned his living room into a factory, raised money when banks said NO.

✅ Played the long game: built FUBU → became Shark Tank investor → mentors hundreds of startups.

Most people chase attention.
He chased problems that matter.

Critics said it wouldn’t work. He did it anyway.

You don’t need permission. You don’t need hype.
You need clarity, hustle, and persistence.

From $40 → living room hustle → global empire → Shark Tank.
That’s how legends are built

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Daymond John

Most people think billion-dollar companies start with experts.

Crumbl Cookies started with two tech guys who had never baked a cookie.

In 2017, they noticed something simple:
Cookies were America’s favorite dessert, but the category hadn’t evolved.
So they focused on a few key moves:

▶ Perfected one cookie first
▶ Kept the menu simple (1 classic + 4 rotating flavors)
▶ Turned weekly flavor drops into social media events

That simple strategy turned a 900 sq ft store and $10K into

✅ 800+ locations
✅ 1M cookies sold daily
✅ $1B+ valuation

They didn’t win by doing more.
They won by focusing on the few decisions that drive everything.

That’s true in finance too.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to scalingcfo.io
Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

Crumbl Cookies

Some people launch snacks.
Some create global empires from leftovers.

Arch West did the second.

➡️ 1960s. Disneyland.

Casa de Fritos. Tons of stale tortillas. Wasted daily.
A small vendor saw opportunity.
“Cut them into triangles. Fry them. Add some seasoning.”

No PR. No hype. No flashy launch.

Just execution.
Just obsession.
Just seeing value where others saw trash.

1966 → Plain Doritos, national launch.
1972 → Nacho Cheese.
From leftover tortillas → multibillion-dollar snack empire.

Scaling lesson:

Opportunities are everywhere. Most ignore them.
Those who see the leverage, execute relentlessly, and scale turn accidents into legends.

Some people chase attention.
Some quietly turn scraps into billions.

#scalingup #ceo #founder #businesslessons

Doritos

$30,000 → $7 BILLION.
No hype. No fluff. Just strategy.

Dennis Washington was 30, broke, and borrowing $30k from a Caterpillar dealer.

He bought one bulldozer and started doing construction in Montana.

Within 5 years? He was the largest contractor in the state.

But he didn’t stop there.

He asked a simple question:
"Where is everyone running from?"

Then he built a formula:

✅ Buy failing businesses that everyone else ignores.
✅ Fix the basics cut costs, improve management, unlock cash flow.
✅ Use the profits to buy the next one.
✅ Repeat.

First test: a worthless copper mine.
Bought for $15M → $100M profits in 3 years.

Next: a struggling global construction firm, merged it → Washington Group International → sold for $2.6B.

Now? Real estate, aviation, railroads, marine services… a $7B empire all from turning broken things into cash.

Most people run from broken businesses. Dennis Washington built a $7B empire fixing them.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Dennis Washington

He had nothing.
No friends. Barely spoke English. ADHD made school unbearable.

At 16, he dropped out. Taught himself to code. Became obsessed with modifying video games.

At 22, he moved to Canada. New country. No network. Just a laptop and a love for snowboarding.

Started an online snowboard store → it failed.

But the software he built to run it? People wanted it.

💡 Lightbulb moment: Forget snowboards. Sell the software.

✅ Shopify is born.
✅ Made e-commerce simple.
✅ Millions of stores. 175 countries. Even Amazon switched.

From high school dropout → coding every week → building the internet’s mall worth $147B.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io
Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

TOBIAS LÜTKE

Most “profitable” companies are one bad month away from dying.

Here’s why.

Profit is an opinion.
Cash is oxygen.

You can look profitable on paper and still miss payroll.
I’ve seen businesses doing 7 figures collapse because one client paid late.

Revenue doesn’t matter if:

• It’s delayed
• It’s unpredictable
• It’s already spent in your head

Growth makes this worse.

You hire early.
Lock in fixed costs.
Sign long-term tools.
Upgrade lifestyle.

Now your burn is permanent…
…but your income isn’t.

That’s the trap.

Another hard truth:
If the founder steps away and sales stop, you don’t have a business.
You have a high-stress job with employees.

Margins won’t save you.
Busy won’t save you.
Brand won’t save you.

Only cash flow will.

Simple rules that keep companies alive:

• Collect faster than you spend
• Keep fixed costs boring
• Build 3–6 months of runway
• Systems before scaling
• Liquidity before vanity growth

The strongest businesses aren’t the loudest.

They’re the ones that can survive a bad month without panicking.

That’s real leverage.

Peter Steinberger could have built “cool” software.

He didn’t.

He built useful software.

PDFs were everywhere. Developers were stuck with messy workflows. Peter asked:

What if developers had tools that just worked? That solved real problems, not just looked good on a portfolio?

✅ PSPDFKit → powers PDF apps across mobile & web.
✅ Open-source projects → simplify workflows, save engineers hours.
✅ OpenClaw → personal AI agent that actually helps you code.

Most people chase attention. Peter chases problems.

Critics say niche tools won’t scale. Peter doesn’t care.
He’s not in it for hype. He’s in it for impact.

From engineer → spotting friction everywhere → building tools that make developers’ lives better.

If you want to build something meaningful, solve real problems.
The market rewards results, not ideas.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.

Peter Steinberger

LVMH is worth $292.9 billion.

You're worth $10M and stressed about payroll.

Same industry. Completely different money game. Here's why.

I've sat inside dozens of $5M–$50M businesses as a fractional CFO.

The pattern never changes.

Founders confuse 3 separate problems:

❌ "We have a cash flow problem."

No. You have a timing problem. Revenue is fine. Your money is just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's fixable in 90 days.

❌ "We have a scaling problem."

No. You tried to grow before your operations could hold the weight. Every single time. Growth didn't break you, the lack of systems did.

❌ "We have a fundraising problem."

No. Investors don't fund vision. They fund numbers that prove the vision is real. You don't have a pitch problem. You have a financial story problem.

Now look at the billion-dollar brands:

Inditex built Zara to $193B by selling inventory before the bill came due.

Hermès built $235B by turning scarcity into a balance sheet strategy.

Fast Retailing scaled Uniqlo globally because they built finance infrastructure first.

None of that is luck.
All of it is decisions, financial decisions dressed up as brand decisions.

The difference between them and you isn't capital.

It's that they stopped running on gut feel and built a machine that tells them exactly where every dollar is going, and why.

You don't need a $500K CFO on payroll.

You need 10 hours a month of the right financial brain in the room.

That's the actual arbitrage most $5M–$50M founders are sleeping on.

If your finances are running you instead of the other way around,

Comment "CFO" below and I'll show you exactly where to start.

Most founders don’t fail overnight.

They bleed slowly.
From decisions they ignored.
From processes they never set.
From metrics they refused to measure.

Revenue looks fine. Growth feels exciting. Ego feels validated.

But underneath:

➡️ Decisions get delayed → chaos spreads
➡️ Processes depend on you → hero culture burns out
➡️ Metrics are “nice to have” → guesswork rules
➡️ Accountability is optional → everyone points fingers

That’s how scaling dies.

Not from lack of ambition.
From lack of rules.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.
If this helped, save it.
#scalingup #founders #ceo

Most people saw a ping pong table.

Max Koehler saw a business.

In 2019, he noticed something strange:

Table tennis is one of the most played sports in the world,
but in U.S. cities there were very few places to play regularly.

Most founders would open a traditional club.

Max built PingPod instead.

Small glass studios.
Open 24/7.
Booked entirely through an app.
No staff. No front desk.

But the real genius?

A camera above every table.

Every rally gets recorded.
One tap → instant replay → share on social.

Players created the content.
The content created the marketing.

Clips went viral.
Bookings exploded.

Today PingPod is valued around $40–60M.

All from one simple observation.

The best founders don’t just build products.
They build systems that grow themselves. 🚀

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities, go to
scalingcfo.io

Take the free assessments and see exactly where to focus first.

#scalingup #founders #CEO

Max Koehler

The trillion-dollar scoreboard isn’t just impressive.

It’s a warning. ⚠️

AI is no longer a feature.
It’s infrastructure.

Distribution beats product.
Platforms compress margins.
Specialisation scales faster than breadth.

And the giants NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple aren’t just companies anymore.

They’re rails.

If you’re a $1M–$10M founder, here’s the real play:

➡️ Build on top of giants, don’t compete with them.
➡️ Own your audience, don’t rent it.
➡️ Go narrow, dominate a micro-niche.
➡️ Push recurring revenue.
➡️ Move faster than anyone with a board meeting.

The economy is consolidating at the top.

But execution speed is still decentralised.

That’s your edge.

If you're building between $1–$10M and want to scale intelligently, not just aggressively

Come to the workshop → https://lnkd.in/efBiFQRg

I keep having the same conversation.

Founder calls me. Revenue is up -- sometimes way up. 

But they're taking home less than when the business was half the size. 

They hired the consultants. They wrote the plan. They pushed harder on sales. And somehow the business keeps snapping back to the same number like a rubber band.

After sitting across from enough of these founders, I started seeing the pattern. It comes down to three things nobody wants to talk about -- and none of them have anything to do with selling more.

I broke it all down in this week's newsletter.
#scalingup #founders #growth #CEO

I talk to a lot of founders. Like, a LOT. And something keeps coming up that I can't ignore anymore. Almost every conversation -- doesn't matter what 

Open article: The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck by Cruz Gamboa • 5 min read

The 3 things nobody tells you about getting stuck

Samsung wasn’t always a tech giant.

It was a tiny grocery store in 1938.

Lee Byung-Chull had $0. Just noodles, dried fish, and ambition.

Most people would stay small. He built a $720B empire.

Here’s how:

✅ Saw a need. Korea needed industry after the war.

✅ Took action. Trading → textiles → heavy industry.

✅ Bet on the future. Electronics in 1969. First black-and-white TV. Then semiconductors. Then global domination.

✅ Built a culture. Quality over quantity. Meritocracy. Vision.

✅ Played the long game. Critics doubted. Scandals happened. Growth didn’t stop.

From noodles → TVs → semiconductors → Galaxy phones → global tech leader.

Most people chase attention. Samsung chased leverage.

Legends aren’t born. They’re built.

SAMSUNG

99% of founders do this backwards.

They try to scale a business
that no one has proven they want.

Then they try to sell a business
that only works because they exist.

Here’s the real order:

1. Start
Don’t build the product.
Sell it first.

If no one pays, it’s not a business.
It’s a fantasy.

2. Scale
Do less. Better.
One offer. One audience. One channel.

Systemize everything.
If it needs you to survive, it’s not scalable.

3. Sell
Buyers don’t pay for hype.
They pay for predictable cash flow.

Clean books.
Recurring revenue.
Low founder dependency.

Start with proof.
Scale with systems.
Exit with leverage.

That’s how you build something that prints money, not something that prints stress.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

Most founders don’t have a growth problem.
They have a focus problem.

Their dashboards are full.
Their results are not.

Tracking more KPIs doesn’t make you smarter.

It just gives you more ways to avoid the hard decision.

Here’s how serious founders think about metrics:

If a number doesn’t change what you do this week,
it doesn’t belong on your dashboard.

That’s why the only startup metrics that actually matter answer 4 questions:

1. Is demand growing?
2. Are customers staying?
3. Are they paying more over time?
4. Are we running out of cash before we figure it out?

Everything else is noise.

The best operators I’ve seen track 5–7 metrics max.
They review them weekly.
And they tie each metric to a clear action.

Everyone tracks KPIs.
Very few track the right ones.

If you want to find your biggest 1% opportunities,
check out scalingcfo.io.

Free assessment.

If this helped, save it.

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Aaron Vidas

Cruz Gamboa

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taplio

The Battle

Aaron Vidas

Cruz Gamboa

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Aaron Vidas's LinkedIn Performance

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