Ben Brown

Founder @Getshopwave Always happy to chat bikes, tech, food & retail.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

Check out my latest post:
Rebooting Britain: Can the UK escape its own grave? https://t.co/YDI6VOGKRD

[PK @paul_k_0907]

If you’re thinking you had a bad day… Polen Capital decided the AI rally was overdone. In June 2023 they told clients Nvidia’s upside was “already priced in,” passed on it and Broadcom, and stuck with “durable” software instead: Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, plus Shopify, CoStar, Paycom, Intuit, SAP — the exact cohort getting repriced for AI disruption.

The bill: ~60% of firm assets gone, almost $50B, in four years. The flagship fund’s down 45% from its 2021 peak during a historic bull market, now 243rd of 249 peers. They finally bought Nvidia in late 2025 — after admitting the bear call was wrong. 💀

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@thatguybg

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@kaseyklimes This happens in restaurant space too. So sad to see. Buy well rated Italian, swap out evoo for cheapest oil going, rip out extraction, stop salting water, serve ready made dishes from central prep. Trade off past reputation for a few years at high margin.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@typesfast Where are you in London? A did this for our American colleagues and partners @GetShopwave https://t.co/2bajy31dhy

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@StephNass 💪 Congrats

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@StephNass Open deck

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@StephNass Investor list

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

To anyone that asks why I don’t eat or drink coffee at Shopwave customer locations with them anymore!

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Major life hack: Don't complain, ever. Nobody likes a complainer. They drain the energy of everyone around them. It's exhausting spending time around someone who constantly complains about things outside their control. If it’s within your control, go do something about it. If it’s not, you’re just wasting energy thinking about it. Complaining gives too much power to the thing. Take back that power.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

Nice message to founders, too easy to quit when things get hard 👊

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

Never quit as a founder. I’m begging you.

It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope.

Then it snaps to 100. You finally find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum keeps building even when you’re not pushing. Something changed.

You didn’t get lucky, you just didn’t leave.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@StephNass Actual blended cost of acquisition in $, LTV in $ at unit level + monthly volume could go nicely on this slide, guess it’s on another or you don’t want to share to the masses. Any kind of acquisition moat you have that makes it hard for anyone else to replicate your GTM strategy.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@GamewithDave @toly

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@StephNass Playbook

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

👊

[Founder Mode @Founder_Mode_]

Tony Xu has a test for every candidate who made it to his final interview at DoorDash.

He'd hand them $20 and an exit clause.

"Here's $20. Go get 100 customers in 8 hours. And if you want to leave right now, there's a plane ticket waiting."

This wasn't about closing deals.

It was about separating two types of people:

The ones who'd actually go knock on doors, talk to restaurant owners, figure it out in the messy real world.

And the ones who'd sit at a desk, pull some data, create a model, and call it a plan.

"Someone who's going to do something to go and collect information as opposed to someone who's going to collect data, scrape information from some internet protocol and then do some magical analysis on it."

The difference is ruthless.

One person figures out that coffee shops between 7-9am have owners who have 15 minutes to listen.

Another person builds a spreadsheet of optimal outreach times.

One learns by doing. The other learns by analyzing.

At a startup with 1,000 days of survival on the line, you can't afford the second person.

Tony knew that the people who'd actually go out, talk to humans, get rejected, adapt, and come back with 50 customers (not 100) were the ones who'd build something.

The rest would optimize their way into irrelevance.

From: @davidsenra conversation with @t_xu

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@andrewchen 🚀

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@jalehr Mutiny

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@greg_harper5 Our best customers WhatsApp or Slack me directly! There is more behind the scenes but if you happen to have an epic RUM product that can beat Datadog, AWS or Dynatrace I’m happy to jump on a call.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

Sometimes you’ve got to put your health on the line to close the deal that makes your year…

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Jensen securing a decade of DRAM while crushing Korean fried chicken and chugging Soju and beer with the Chairman of Samsung in Seoul a month ago was the business move of the year

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@jamiequint @NotionHQ @IndexVentures Where do you see the conflict? To me as an end user:

Notion = Sharepoint but good
Granola = Gong in stealth

They look like they compliment each other.

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@romanbuildsaas Go

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@mikefutia Nano

[Ben Brown @benbrownww]

@b1rdmania @charlierward Love it, can you add us over at @GetShopwave The Bloomsbury Building, 10 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2SL