Michael Fajardo

CEO @buildwithporter. Writing about AI, business, finance, fashion, tennis, philosophy, and whatever I’ve recently become curious about.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

Every business owner eventually wants a finance teammate they can just ask. Now you can. If you're on quickbooks and curious, DM me and we'll get you set up.

[Porter @buildwithporter]

Porter is now in Slack.

Ask anything about your finances: cash balance, open invoices, what caused last month's revenue spike. You get an answer from your actual records, right where your team already works.

An entire finance team, at your fingertips.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@eladgil I can work much longer on something difficult that I chose than something easy that I resent. The problem is that being CEO oftentimes means owning a lot of work you would never choose.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@mattdeitke I wonder how much of this is Muse creating value versus Muse choosing partners the market already wanted to reward. I guess we’ll find out at the next earnings call.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@andyhelbig The most Claude thing is telling it that a sentence sounds like Claude and getting a beautifully organized explanation of why you’re right, written in the exact same voice.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@shawngorham A second exit might understate success. I’d also want to know how many are still producing enough cash that the owner has no reason to sell again.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@gabepereyra @harvey Going from -50% gross margin to positive while usage doubled is pretty remarkable. How much came from routing and harness improvements versus customers moving onto consumption pricing?

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

Some complicated companies are held together by a spreadsheet built by one very capable person over many years.

It can work remarkably well. Then one day nobody remembers why a formula works, a manual adjustment becomes permanent, or the person who understands it leaves.

The useful question is not whether your company uses spreadsheets. It is how much of the company would stop working if one disappeared.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@Colette_Kemp_ How do you decide what to standardize across the platform without stripping out what made each founder-led business work? It seems easy to buy good companies and accidentally make them worse.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@irentdumpsters And margins usually tell you whether operations are actually keeping up. A home service company can keep adding leads while losing money on the wrong jobs, crews, or customers.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@vxanand @clay I think founders can delegate marketing, but they can’t delegate having a point of view. If the founders don’t believe anything distinctive, the CMO has nothing real to turn into a brand.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@emollick Does a guide like this make a difficult poem more approachable, or does it make it easier to feel like you read it? I’d want the guide to keep sending me back into the poem instead of becoming a substitute for it.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

One thing I hear fairly often from founders is that they are not entirely sure what their accountant does every month.

Some of that is understandable. Good accounting involves reconciliations, adjustments, and close procedures that should be largely invisible to the owner.

But the work should eventually produce understanding. What changed? What looks unusual? What deserves attention?

Otherwise the finance function can become an expensive process for producing reports nobody reads.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@SecretCFO How do you handle accruals and estimates in a true zero-day close? Better metadata removes most of the repair work, but someone still has to declare a cutoff and own the judgment.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@thdxr What happens once every applicant knows AI is screening? Every resume will be rewritten for the model, so the problem may shift from missing good details to distinguishing real signal from details optimized for the screener.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@paraschopra I’m less worried about replacing the classes than replacing four years where you can try on different identities without every experiment needing to become a business. What gives a 17-year-old that same room?

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@brookeleblanc You’re describing my cofounder Ben. Want an intro? :)

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@andrewchen The privacy case may matter more than the model quality. People might let an assistant read every notification, message and calendar entry if it all stays on the phone. Sending that context to the cloud is a much harder sell.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@brian_lovin How do you keep joy-reading from becoming another inbox you feel guilty about? I save things constantly and eventually end up with a graveyard of articles I intended to read.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@ben_sage I think every time AI saves me an hour, I immediately find three things I wouldn’t have attempted before. So the work expands faster than the time it saves.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@coryalthoff I’ve felt this. Although sometimes 2AM just means I made bad decisions at 2PM.

[Michael Fajardo @mkfjord]

@coreyganim I think the workshop probably works, but what happens a month later? If nobody inside the business owns the automations, I imagine half of them stop working the first time a tool changes.