Alvin Thomas K

On a quest to increase founder agency

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

I am a fully grown man with responsibilities.

And yet very little could derail my week faster than the Ocarina of Time release.

Priorities.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

I still have a soft spot for building ridiculously unnecessary tech.

Give me a boring process, three tools that probably should not talk to each other, and an afternoon with nothing urgent happening and I am gone.

Some people relax by watching Netflix.

Apparently I relax by creating problems for myself with APIs.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

There was a stage where I could finish a day completely exhausted and still struggle to explain what I had actually moved forward.

I had answered messages, reviewed work, fixed problems, joined calls.

Busy enough to feel useful.

But very little of it changed what the company could do tomorrow.

So I started paying more attention to the days where I built something that kept working after I stopped.

A clearer process. A better decision rule. Something the team could now handle without me.

Those days felt different.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

The automations I value most now are usually the boring ones.

Not the demos with ten tools talking to each other.

The useful ones quietly remove a question, a handoff, or a check that used to come back to me.

That changed how I judge technology.

I stopped asking, “What can this automate?”

I started asking, “What gets lighter if this works?”

A good system should leave the business more capable, not just more automated.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

Blank spreadsheets hide a lot.

For a while, I thought they were just part of running a business.

Then I started noticing how often we were rebuilding things we had already worked out before.

Someone would find the old project, ask around for the latest price, remember three of the five things we normally included, then send it to someone senior to fill in the gaps.

Do that across a few hundred jobs and you realise how much time gets spent reconstructing the company’s own memory.

We started looking for ways to make the next person begin with what we already knew.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

I’ve seen a million n8n automation posts lately.

It reminds me of myself in my corporate job, sitting in the corner happily building tech and convincing myself the hard part was the build.

At some point, the market interrupts you.

Can you explain it simply? Can you get people to care? Can you sell it? Can you distribute it?

That’s usually when you find out whether you built something marketable or just something technically impressive.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

One strange thing about AI is that it can save you time without changing your life.

You write emails faster. Proposals get cleaner. Research takes less time.

But if the same approvals, the same questions, and the same decisions still end with you, the business is still leaning on the same person.

That was a useful distinction for me.

Getting faster is nice.

Building a company that needs less of your attention is better.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

@N_and_ni There’s something genuinely brave about removing the safety net before you know exactly where you’ll land.

Wishing you the very best. Hope going all-in gives you a life that makes the risk feel worth taking.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

You can finish work and still not be done with work.

I noticed this most in the small moments.

Dinner with one eye on the phone. A walk where half your brain is still solving something. A weekend away where you keep mentally checking what might break.

Nothing is happening, but you are still carrying the business.

That made me realise something:

Free time is not the same as a free mind.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

One thing I didn’t notice for a long time is how much “being helpful” can train a business to stay dependent on you.

Someone gets stuck, you jump in.

A client needs an answer, you respond.

A number looks wrong, you fix it.

Each one feels too small to matter.

But after a few years, you can end up with a company that has learned a very simple rule:

When in doubt, ask you.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

For a long time I thought being involved meant I was protecting the business.

If I checked the proposal, caught the mistake, or answered the question, things moved faster.

And they did.

But I was also teaching the company where the answer lived.

That was the part I missed.

Every time I solved something that could have become part of the system, I made myself a little more useful and the business a little less independent.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

Sometimes the reason you can’t switch off is not because you have too much work.

It’s because too much of the business still lives in your head.

You remember which client needs extra care, which supplier is unreliable, which number looks wrong, and which exception is safe.

That memory feels like experience.

It’s also infrastructure.

A company gets lighter to lead when more of what you know stops depending on you remembering it.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

@_Chemist1 Being misunderstood gets much less uncomfortable once you stop treating everyone’s opinion of you as something you’re responsible for correcting.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

We may be confusing the disappearance of buttons with the disappearance of interfaces.

The moment AI gives you five options to compare, something to edit, or a decision you want to inspect before committing, an interface becomes useful again.

Conversation is brilliant for expressing what you want.

It doesn’t follow that conversation is the best way to experience what comes back.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

I think one of the hardest parts of growing a business is that competence creates its own trap.

You get good at solving problems, so people bring you more problems.

You get good at making decisions, so more decisions wait for you.

The better you become at being useful everywhere, the harder it is to become useful only where it matters.

At some point, growth asks you to stop proving how much you can carry.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

It’s weird how you can hire more people and somehow become more needed.

The team gets bigger. More work gets done. But there are also more questions, more exceptions, and more things that need someone to connect the dots.

Eventually you become the thing holding all that extra capacity together.

This is why adding people does not always create leverage.

If every new hire needs more of your brain, you are also scaling the number of people who can interrupt you.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

A job taking eight hours of your day is one thing.

Letting it decide what kind of person you are for the other sixteen is another.

Maybe the point of having a life outside work isn’t just balance. It’s having enough places to belong that a bad Tuesday at work can never become a verdict on your whole life.

[Alvin Thomas K @alvinthomk]

Kindness has a strange coordination problem.

Most people become warmer when someone is warm to them, more generous when someone is generous to them, and more patient when they’re given patience.

But we often wait for the other person to provide the evidence that they deserve it first.

So two perfectly decent people can meet each other with their guard up and both walk away thinking the world could use kinder people.

Maybe kindness requires going first more often than feels fair.