You Are The Bottleneck Now

Hey friends,

I went to bed at two in the morning last week and dreamt about agents.

Not a metaphor. Actual agents, actual task lists, the whole thing playing out behind my eyes while I was supposed to be resting. I woke up and the first thing I did was check whether the overnight run had finished.

I mentioned this to Phaedon Stough, who co-founded Innovation Bay back in 2003 and now runs it as CEO. I half expected him to laugh at me. He didn't. He said he's seeing it across his whole membership, and then he said something that has stayed with me since.

The Bottleneck Was Never The Work

His line was that in most startups, the bottleneck is the founder. One person trying to make thirty decisions at once, and everything downstream waiting on them.

That was always true. What's changed is that we used to blame the workload. Not enough hands, not enough hours, not enough budget to hire the person who'd take it off you. So you optimised for capacity. More people, better tools, tighter processes.

Now the work moves faster than the person directing it. Phaedon described founders getting information distilled back to them in a form that lets them decide faster, and the whole business scaling quicker as a result. The constraint didn't disappear. It relocated. It's sitting in your chair.

What Changed In The Last Three Months

Phaedon put a timeline on it that I think is roughly right.

Late last year into early this year, AI was a thinking tool. You used it to distil an idea, draft some content, work through a strategy problem. Useful, but the doing still landed on you.

The last three months are different. He's now got AI running projects inside Innovation Bay. Outreach to prospective members. Internal team coordination. Keeping accountability, managing comms, making sure every person knows what they own. Not advising on the work. Doing it.

That's the shift that broke the old bottleneck and built a new one. When execution was the slow part, you had natural pauses. Waiting on a draft. Waiting on a build. Those pauses were where you thought. They're gone now, and nobody replaced them with anything.

Five Days In A Day

Phaedon's exact words were that founders are achieving so much that they're almost exhausted by it. You can't keep up. It's like working five days in a day, on a constant basis.

I've been treating that as a win. I suspect a lot of you have too.

It isn't one. Working five days in a day means you're making five days of decisions with one day of judgement behind them. Speed of execution went up. Quality of thinking didn't automatically follow it. Those are separate things and we've started treating them as the same thing.

Point Some Of It Back At Yourself

Here's the most interesting thing I heard, and it's the one I'd actually try this week.

Innovation Bay runs an AI forum for its members, where founders show each other what they're building. Around fifty people on the last call. One founder had built himself a coach.

He gave OpenClaw his ten favourite management books. He told it what kind of leader he wanted to be with his team. Then he hooked it into Granola so it records every call he takes. At the end of each day, the agent hands him a short debrief. What worked. What he did well. Three things to improve tomorrow.

Everyone else in that room was pointing AI at the business. He pointed it at himself.

That's the move. If the bottleneck is now your judgement and your pace, then adding more output to the pile makes it worse, not better. The one thing worth automating is the reflection you stopped having time for.

The Dumb Monkey Move

Mistaking pace for progress.

Feeling the tiredness, noticing you're getting more done than you ever have, and reading the exhaustion as evidence that it's working. It's the same trap as being busy, wearing a better outfit. You get all the way to the end of a very productive quarter before you notice you never once stopped to ask whether any of it was the right work.

A Calm Takeaway

I asked Phaedon how he sleeps, given all this.

He said his community has been through real fear. B2B SaaS founders sitting there wondering whether they'll have a business in twelve months. That fear was genuine and it was everywhere. What he's watching now is people coming out the other side of it, realising they can pivot, that they've got knowledge and IP worth something, that they can bring AI into what they already do.

Then he said this. He's sleeping better because he's more hopeful than fearful.

I've thought about that a lot since. Fear and excitement produce almost identical symptoms. Racing thoughts, no sleep, checking things at 2am. The difference isn't in how it feels in your body. It's in what's driving it.

We've been through the fear. We're in the excitement now, which is better, but excitement without governance is just fear wearing a smile. The state I want to reach, and I don't think we're there yet, is a calm one. Where the pace is real but it isn't running us. Where there's clear ownership, clear safety, and someone has actually decided what all this speed is for.

Get the pace under control before it decides your year for you.

I’ll Be In Docklands Next Thursday

One thing before I go.

I'm speaking at the Business in Heels ls Leadership Summit on Thursday 20 August, at nbn's office on Level 14, 727 Collins Street, Docklands. My session is called How Businesses Are Winning with AI and it runs at 10.45am.

My part is the practical one. Real examples of where AI is actually earning its keep inside businesses right now, how to work out which part of your operation to point it at first, and how to tell whether you're ready. Given everything above, I'll also be honest about the part nobody puts on a slide, which is what happens to your week once it starts working.

If you're going, come and find me afterwards. I'd rather have the conversation in person than write another newsletter about it.

🔗 https://events.businessinheels.com/leadership-summit-climate-technology-energy-engineering/