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Focused Chaos
A biweekly newsletter on navigating the chaos of building & investing in startups. Topics include venture studios, entrepreneurship, product management, analytics and more, leveraging a combination of best practices & instincts. Click to read Focused Chaos, by Ben Yoskovitz, a Substack publication w
- Posts
- 129 from 13 Dec 2022 to 27 Oct 2026
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- weekly (24 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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2026 22
- Understanding AI Business Models
- Systems Thinking Needs a Scorecard
- The First Version of Your AI Eval is You
- AI Built the Product. It Didn’t Launch It.
- Launching Wordspine: A Fun, Free Daily Word Game
- How I Use AI Without Outsourcing the Thinking
- How I'm Pricing an AI Product
- How Companies Quietly Lose Product-Market Fit Without Noticing
- Lovable, Cowork, Claude Code... You're Asking the Wrong Question
- Facing Failure as a Founder
- How I Ship Real Software with Claude Code (Without Being a Developer)
- Launching Candor: A Synthetic User Research Platform
- Lean Analytics, Reconsidered
- 40 Years Later: Remembering My Brother, Jacob Yoskovitz (May 14, 1977 - April 22, 1986)
- Cannon Fodder: Pre-Seed Investing in the Age of AI
- They Tried to Kill Product Managers. Now Everyone Needs to Be One.
- The 40-Year Old Career Model AI Just Broke
- Introducing Twos: The Conversation Company
- We're About to Lose the Apprenticeship Layer
- We Need More Angel Investors
- Introducing Subtexting, the Universal Translator for What Your Coworkers Really Mean
- Vibe Coding Without System Design is a Trap
2025 22
- The Real Differentiator in the AI Era: A Sharp, Specific Value Proposition
- Vintage Shirts, Pet Rocks and Forward Deployed Engineers
- Beyond the Hype: Building the Real AI Economy
- How I Built a "Complete" Web App in 2 Days Using Lovable
- The Founder Myth: There's No Perfect Founder Type
- 25 Years
- I Reviewed 50 Startup Pitch Decks. Here’s What They Keep Getting Wrong.
- How to Avoid the 5 Biggest MVP Mistakes
- Did AI Kill the Lean Startup?
- The Great Pitch Deck Review: Send Me Your Pitch Deck
- The 10-Step Playbook for Founders When Considering a Micro-Exit
- Venture Studios Aren't in the Business of Building Ventures, They're in the Business of Exiting Them
- 9 Early Metrics That Predict PLG Success (and How to Track Them)
- Product Managers Aren't Growth Bystanders
- The Art and Science of Good Decisions: Balancing Instinct and Data
- OMTM vs. NSM: Why You Need Both to Drive Startup Growth
- The Power of Micro-Exits: My Story Building & Selling Robin
- A Deep Dive on Product Roadmaps
- The Power of Micro-Exits: How I Found Success After Failure
- My Experience Building Simple AI Agents
- Am I Getting a Good Deal from a Venture Studio?
- The Best Is Yet to Come
2024 30
- A Year of (Focused) Chaos
- 5 + 1 Predictions for Venture Studios in 2025
- The Difference Between Product Management and Project Management
- The Importance of Business Models to Building Great Products
- Connecting Dots and Making Decisions: The Importance of Founder Mode
- Differentiation and Specialization Done Right
- The #1 Thing Venture Studios Need to Succeed
- What Comes Before Zero to One?
- Build, Measure, Learn: The Expanded Edition
- Recruiting a CEO for a Venture Studio Startup
- How to Design a Corporate Venture Studio
- Product Management is Communication
- Starting a Side Hustle: A Job Board for Venture Studios
- How to Get a Job at a Venture Studio
- We Need More Founders
- Plowing Through Conventions: Lessons from a Mexican Agribusiness Startup
- How to Price an Early Stage B2B Software Product
- Will AI Automate Everything?
- How to Raise Pre-Seed (and Seed) Financing for Your Startup
- How to Build the Right Venture Studio Team
- 16 Questions I Ask Founders When Investing at an Early Stage
- How To Pick the Right Venture Studio
- From Empathy to Scale: What Stage Are You Really At?
- Growth At All Costs vs. Bootstrapping vs. ??
- How to Define the Right Vertical for your Venture Studio
- When Product Usage is Actually a Bad Thing
- When to Recruit Founders into Your Venture Studio
- The Future of Venture Studios is Vertical
- Yana Welinder: From Lawyer to Product Lead, Founder, Investor & Community Builder
- A Deep Dive into Time to Value (TTV)
2023 51
- The (Focused) Chaos that was 2023
- Startup Opportunity Areas in 2024
- How to Build a Venture Studio: The Checklist
- Deconstructing & Mapping B2B SaaS Business Models
- The Problem with Product Management
- Using Product Requirement Docs for Scoping Features & Uncovering Unknowns
- The Ideal Founder Profile for Venture Studios
- Breaking Down an Early Stage Startup Pitch Deck
- Lean Startup & Design Thinking Aren't Opposing Forces to Big Vision
- Understanding Venture Studio Math
- 4 Ways to Use Customer Journey Maps Successfully
- Corporate-Startup Collaboration Can Work
- There's Nothing Wrong with MVPs
- Moving From Problem-Solution Fit to Product-Market Fit
- How To Jump From One Market To Another
- How Do You Decide to Build a Feature to Close a Deal?
- Testing & Invalidating 15 Startup Ideas in the Eldercare & AgeTech Space
- From Musical Instruments to Legal AI Tech: The Journey of Scott Stevenson
- One of My Biggest Regrets: Wasting Years of My Life
- Small Features, Big Decisions: Unpacking the Myth of the Quick Add-On
- How to Pivot the Right Way
- Data: An Input, A Filter & A Communication Tool
- Exploring the Elder Care & AgeTech Space
- Board Meetings or Bored Meetings? Founders, It's Up to You
- Do You Have an Unfair Advantage?
- Building a Bottom Up Business Model for Your Startup
- 11 Misconceptions Held by Early Stage Founders
- The Many Flavors of Venture Studios
- How to Create a Great Co-Founder Relationship
- Wanna Win? Solve a Boring Problem
- How to Successfully Collaborate with Software Developers
- Shutting Down Your Startup
- The Most Important Question For Founders is "Why?"
- Lessons Learned as an Angel Investor
- Do Big Markets Matter for Early Stage Startups?
- Test First, Build Later: A Guide to Validating Your Ideas With Stimulus & Prototypes
- The DOs and DON'Ts of Startup Advisors
- Your Startup is a System You Can Map to Identify Problems, Align the Team & Win
- Cold Investor Outreach is an Increasingly Viable Way to Raise Capital
- What is Truly at the Heart of Your Product?
- The Startup CEO Job is Intense, Lonely, Rewarding & Crazy
- You Don't Have Product-Market Fit (and that's OK)
- 4 Steps to Building Super Sticky Products Leveraging Your Best Users
- Vanity Metrics: The Numbers We Hate to Love
- How to Apply the Scientific Method to Startups Without Being a Zealot
- Hearts, Minds, Wallets: The Simple Structure for a Successful Startup Pitch
- Early Startup Employees Deserve More Equity
- The Season of Startup Cockroaches is Upon Us
- Revisiting the Standout Jobs postmortem; Part II
- Revisiting the Standout Jobs postmortem; Part I
- How Do You Know You're Solving a Problem that Matters?