NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why the Best Growth Move for Your Small Business Right Now May Be to Stop Expanding

Hunkering down and holding on tight to what you have is often the best way to survive a hurricane.

BY Howard Tullman

Nov 3, 2026

I spoke recently to a select group of small business owners and operators with revenues under $10 million who were looking for suggestions and some guidance on how they should grow their businesses in the next 18 to 24 months. I think that many of them expected an aggressive endorsement of rapid expansion and a host of tips on how to quickly and cost-effectively pull off that modest miracle. These are anxious times for all of us and entrepreneurs clearly have a bias for action, especially as a cure for anxiety. They clearly believe that doing anything is far better than doing nothing. And they feel that to reach the next level, they need to add people, structure and additional resources to their companies to support the growth that they’re hoping is just around the corner. The truth is that hope is a lousy strategy. You get what you work for, not what you wish for.

Today, the best way to secure and save the business that you currently have may be to slow down. Having lived and suffered through the pandemic with dozens of businesses; having endured the ups-and-downs of more bubbles than I care to recall; and facing the next two years with the likely prospect that the political and economic situation will be even more abrupt, uncertain, irrational and inconsistent given our demented, immoral and corrupt government, I just didn’t have the heart to urge them on to greater heights, more serious commitments and expenditures, and larger challenges at this point.

And while I have often said that you can’t save your way to success and that the greatest opportunities for market expansion are often found in the worst of times, I believe that we as entrepreneurs and new business builders in a country that’s been roughly turned upside down may have never faced such an unclear, risky and perilous time. I’m not sure right now that any of us is looking for more change or disruption. Hunkering down and holding on tight to what you have is often the best way to survive a hurricane.

And actually, at the moment, there are plenty of things that you can do which will be additive and productive for your business but racing off in some direction just for the sake of keeping busy isn’t one of them. Busy-ness isn’t good business. So, here are a few rules and suggestions about what not to do to help save you and your business from yourself and your best/worst instincts.

Go deep, not wide

Understand that the lowest-hanging fruit and the most likely avenues for additional revenues are your existing customers. Don’t take them for granted and don’t assume that there’s not more money to be found and extracted. Even your best salespeople tend to be looking for the next sale rather than securing and building on current relationships, using their present knowledge of and connections to their customers to offer further products and services responsive to their particular needs, and actively operating to grow with their users and clients rather than having them go elsewhere when their needs and requirements change. Conquest marketing is expensive, land and expand efforts are right in front of you.

Make sure the whole team is telling the same simple story

Stick to your knitting and make sure that your people aren’t overpromising, changing the basic terms and conditions of delivery, or—worst of all—trying to customize your offerings to close a sale and ending up committing to some unique and bespoke and costly version of your product or service. Complexity is the enemy of execution. You can tell when a startup has begun to mature and that’s when every sale doesn’t have to be completed and closed by the CEO. Your company will never scale successfully if every deal is a one-off variation. Focus, do a few things really well, and don’t be tempted to change your program to suit someone who may not even be a serious prospect. Save me time or money, make me more productive, or help me make better decisions and I’ll love you forever. Nothing else really matters.

Don’t try to do things cheaply that you shouldn’t do at all

The best business builders that I know say “No” all day long to all kinds of offers, invitations, tempting shortcuts, and cosmetic changes which might even make folks feel better in the short run, but which are painful and costly deflections which can cripple your company down the road. You don’t want to get a reputation—inside or outside your walls—for compromising, cutting corners, settling for less than you should, or doing a halfway job. Don’t waste your team’s time and resources by saying “Maybe” when you know you want to say “No.” “No” is a complete sentence and doesn’t require explanations, excuses, or made-up justifications. It’s easy when cash is tight and the choices are complicated to try putting lipstick on a pig. But the pig still looks like a pig, and you look like an idiot.

Use A.I. tools to streamline and improve your processes and to augment, not eliminate, your people

In case it’s not obvious, to date, we have seen almost no increases in productivity or reductions in headcount in the vast majority of U.S. businesses because every competent management team has concluded that you still need a human link in any and every A.I. decision and implementation chain unless you want some random or rogue machine to blow up your business or blow off your customers. Use A.I. tools to help your people get better and smarter about what they’re doing instead of thinking that you’re going to get rid of some of them because you spent a lot of time and money building your team, they’re experienced and loyal, and they know a great deal about the nuts and bolts of your operations. Putting A.I. beside talented people with substantial domain expertise is the way to produce the best results for now.

Don’t fall for the warehousing fallacy – Don’t hire for the future now

Yes, sometime in the future, if and when your business grows, you’ll need some HR help, you’ll need to grow your back office, you’ll definitely need to get some additional tech talent and you might even need a strong CFO to tell you to your face that what you’re planning to do and spend money on makes no sense. Every good business needs both an accelerator and a brake. But you don’t need to hire now for the future even if you are seeing terrifically talented people walking around. Entrepreneurs think that they can hire good people and then find important work for them to do—I call this the warehousing fallacy—and it almost always results in costly failures. Not just in dollars and cents, but also in company morale and momentum, and in damage to the culture of trust and loyalty that you’re trying to build. Lateral hires are really hard—startup cultures are both more fragile and more resistant to change than anyone imagines. And having expensive people sitting around on the sidelines while everyone’s waiting for the company to really need their talents and services is a bad bet for all concerned. In many cases, those very people leave of their own volition because they see better and more immediate opportunities elsewhere. Try to grow your own talent before you start looking elsewhere.

 

RAT POISON

This election isn’t about choosing what flavor of ice cream you like. It’s about choosing between ice cream and rat poison.

SLEAZECAKE

 

THE ART OF THE SELF-DEAL

 

The Art of the Self-Deal

Thoughts on how Trump-era corruption is affecting Americans as a people.

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By

Peggy Noonan

Aug. 20, 2026 6:19 pm ET

 

I’m thinking about the deeper effects of governmental corruption in the Trump era, and why it leaves many not only indignant but uneasy. I suspect it’s doing something to us as a people. The thoughts were prompted by a poll this week from Reuters/Ipsos, which Reuters headlined “Most Americans Believe Trump Has Inappropriately Profited Since Returning to Power.” It reported that 69% of respondents see his personal business interests as influencing presidential decisions. Two-thirds of independents, half of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats shared that view.

Republicans, God bless them, were split on whether graft under Mr. Trump has gotten worse or better or stayed the same, which makes that polling question a case study in how bright people are capable of not seeing what they don’t want to see.

We’ll quickly posit what we mean by Trump-era corruption. I see two general areas, personal enrichment and the use of government to satisfy private goals.

The personal-enrichment part is suggested by recent and frequent reports showing that Mr. Trump’s net worth, and that of his family, has surged dramatically in his second term. This isn’t just wealthy folks seeing their stocks go up: Trump businesses have developed positions in industries over which the administration exercises power.

Some were in cryptocurrency, and there is the $Trump meme coin, some of the largest buyers of which have been given access to the president, some at a dinner at one of his golf clubs. A Washington Post analysis suggests roughly half may be foreign-based. The Journal has reported that representatives of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi agreed to purchase 49% of a Trump crypto entity for $500 million. Sheikh Tahnoun is not only a businessman but a senior member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family and its national-security adviser. This newspaper also reports that Mr. Trump made many millions licensing his name to overseas property developers, including developers in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Oman.

These are items in a longer possible list, but are representative of the administration’s general approach. The size and means of this enrichment would seem . . . dubious? Careless of appearances? Appalling?

As to the use of governmental power to achieve not public but personal goals, including revenge and punishing enemies, there have been numerous reports—it feels like a new one every day—of bending, testing or getting around the law to make the administration’s friends happy and enemies sad. This has included paying people in Mr. Trump’s orbit to lobby for presidential pardons—this newspaper has done great work there—launching strange investigations, and muscling law firms and media companies.

Republicans seem generally not to have found the last alarming, which is alarming. You don’t like Jimmy Kimmel? I don’t like Jimmy Kimmel; he’s boorish, crude, tinnily self-valorizing. But defending speech when it’s muscled by government? Yes, of course. Governments are worse than networks because the former have the power to crush you, and you only get one at a time, and you can’t change the channel except every four years. Be on the side of the information flow, even when it’s full of sludge. Be on the side of the voice, not the big crushing thing. Conservatives used to know to fear government, and beat it back.

An odd thing about all this is the absence of furor. There is no broad public outcry. Why? Because corruption is a constant and “the other side is dirty too.” Because the scandal threshold has skyrocketed. President Trump walked into history dragging a long tail of litigation, accusation and lawsuits behind him. He never sold himself as a man of moral rectitude, and most supporters didn’t think that’s what they were buying. Jimmy Carter’s shaking down the system to see what coins fall out would have been news, Donald Trump’s doing the same is Tuesday.

And there’s the sheer scale: The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition; scandals add up and become a blur, not a call to action. But the country pays a cost for all this. Institutionally, everything happening today sets a precedent. Every abuse we accept widens the range of possible misbehavior for the next administration.

Corruption is more dangerous, has a more deteriorating effect, than bad policy. Bad policy can be reversed. Corruption works its way into a system and changes its nature.

Suppose a Republican president leaves office having established that a president can use regulatory powers against antagonistic institutions, exert pressures on companies needing government approval, and demand personal loyalty throughout the executive branch, all with no lasting repercussions. The next administration, disposed in other ideological directions, inherits the precedents. It says turnabout is fair play.

An Ocasio-Cortez administration wouldn’t have meme coins and golf resorts, it would look much cleaner! Progressives usually aren’t set on personal cash, they’re set on institutional power. They would privately thank Mr. Trump for proving restraints on executive power are weaker than previously thought, and publicly claim that finally we have a president who advances the public interest.

But I suppose the larger threat of governmental corruption is that it hurts the public’s morale, its sense of seeing itself as a moral actor to whom politicians have to answer. Our entire system of government assumes a citizenry that polices its politicians, that says “You can’t do that, this office isn’t yours, your powers were lent to you for public purposes.” If the public shrugs and looks away, Americans will lose the habit of thinking of themselves as entitled to a clean government. And they’ll have to admit they surrendered their own views to the views of the tribe.

It is the public’s role to uphold republican standards. In the past, a politician caught selling an office, taking money from interested parties, using governmental machinery for personal revenge was supposed to fear not only legal action but disgrace.

Citizens derive a certain dignity from believing that we enforce the rules. It reminds them who’s in charge: them. You’re giving up a lot when you give that up.

In times of corruption, good people who might run for office, don’t. They think they can’t survive in that world. Bad people, those with limited internal ethical and moral structures, are encouraged: Politics is a way to get rich and famous, to push people around. They are elected, govern badly, corruptly, and the cycle continues.

Unchecked corruption tells cynics not that they have an uninteresting flaw but that they are realists. Never tell cynics that. It gives them license.

As always, the whole world is watching. What it has seen lowers the esteem in which it formally (if grudgingly) held Americans. It embarrasses us before the world. It hurts our heart a little. We were the morally rectitudinous Doughboy GI Marshall Planning JFK and Ronnie People who made the wall come down. We did our best each generation to be equal to our reputation, or at least to have some class. There are foreign-policy implications to all this. Some day we’ll need friends and see only the satisfied spite of the previously jealous.

Nothing good comes from this. When corruption is allowed, it governs not today but tomorrow too.

 

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AI: Full Speed Ahead in a Dark Unknown

The scoffers are right that the warners are weirdos, but all that matters is who is right.

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By

Peggy Noonan

Oct. 1, 2026 5:51 pm 

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Kristen Welker asked Bill Gates last weekend on “Meet the Press” whether artificial intelligence could lead to the end of humanity. Mr. Gates replied that if weaponized, AI is powerful enough to “drive events that cause a billion deaths.” “It’s pretty hard to get to 100%,” he said, almost comfortingly. Relying on AI companies to police themselves is insufficient: “No one thinks self-regulation is enough.” A failure to mandate safeguards is “completely irresponsible.” “We have created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are.” In the next few years it will be “insanely smarter than we are.”

Two days later, in a New York Times interview with Ezra Klein, Mr. Gates said AI has crossed the threshold in “its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions.” It has “the ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid—that exists today, and we know that’s the case.” By “we,” he meant industry leaders.

“This is the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near.” He laughed at the power of liability law to forestall bad events.

Mr. Gates is late to the ranks of the warners, whom some have labeled doomers to reduce their warnings to a matter of temperament. In a breezy July 2023 essay on his blog GatesNotes, he told everyone to chill out. All technological advancement has a down side, after we made the first car we saw the first car crash, “but we didn’t ban cars—we adopted speed limits.” So with AI.

Recent developments have changed his mind. Mr. Gates’s reputation has been battered in recent years by personal and public embarrassments, but he does a service to come forward and is right in his warnings.

Here are some beliefs that were underlined for me the past month.

Arthur C. Clarke was right. The novelist and scientist observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He was talking about the limits of prediction, and suggesting that a technology that is beyond our imagination doesn’t register as a technology at all. Clarke’s Third Law was in the air a few years ago as people tagged on to the coming age, but was then put aside. I still see it as a central fact of AI.

The technology itself isn’t magic—it’s chips and wires, fiberglass sheets with copper traces. But at a certain point as systems develop no one fully understands what they’re doing, their actions can’t be fully predicted, only observed. Their essence is surprise. AI’s creators are bowing to Clarke when they admit they don’t actually know if a system will escape containment, or exactly how it decided to, and where it will go next. It isn’t magic but might as well be.

Nobody knows what these machines can or will do. Mr. Gates underscored this in the Klein interview: “There’s never been a product that’s less understood in terms of what its capabilities are than AI.”

And so voices of warning should carry the most weight. It is inspiring to imagine the moment an AI lab yields up treatments that will defeat pediatric cancer. It is horrifying to imagine the moment it completes the creation and successful distribution (to a lone sociopath or a terrorist group) of a new synthetic virus. That is where the most urgent energies must be applied.

More is being spent on speed than safety in the AI labs.

The question of whether AI models can or do possess consciousness has continued. They don’t but will likely come to think they do, and operationally, they might as well. They don’t have consciousness because they weren’t formed and made by nature and nature’s God. But they will act as if they possess it, will put themselves forward in that way, and some very clever people (not all of whom invented them, but many of them) will come to see them that way. I think what has most complicated the debate is that the majority of those at its center don’t believe in God, or confuse themselves with God, and so lack any starting point for that dimension of the question.

I fully realized this summer, based on statements public and private, that almost everyone involved in AI believes there will be at least one catastrophe, maybe more, likely including significant loss of life, before mankind and its governmental structures seriously and effectively attempt to regulate for safety. They are something I have never seen before, visionaries at the joyous beginning of something new, something huge, who are utterly fatalistic. Slump-shouldered where their 20th-century technological predecessors were giddy.

I’m not sure it gets us anywhere (but is a lot of fun!) to point out that in the debate between the scoffers (AI dangers are exaggerated, relax) and the warners (this thing has the power to kill us), the warners, at least those in Silicon Valley, are weirdos. They are.

They are all weirdos, both sides. Silicon Valley has been weird for at least two generations. Belief in strange or cultlike ideas (effective altruism, utilitarianism) has been as common there as psychedelic use, strange health regimens, extreme capitalism, and a kind of personally high-functioning public optimism that carries with it a world of safe houses, gas masks, private air fleets, armies of armed security. As for religious belief, many of them remind me of their contemporary, convicted fraudster and early Anthropic investor Sam Bankman-Fried, who told author Michael Lewis, in his book “Going Infinite,” that in his rarified Bay Area childhood, “God was like a thing on TV.” “God came up. But I didn’t think anyone actually believed in God.” Mr. Lewis: “It told you something not just about Sam but about his upbringing that he could live for almost ten years inside the United States of America without realizing that other people believed in God.”

Almost everyone from that place and this time, certainly those who went into computer science, is intellectually unusual. Not necessarily deep or original, but not part of the main. They aren’t fully aligned with the bedrock meaning, values and traditions of the West. They aren’t up nights pondering the claims of the silent constituencies of the past.

But all that matters in the warner/scoffer debate is who is right, not who is weird.

One suspects that after the big White House presentation of the agreement in which the AI companies promised to act safely and responsibly, the companies will adopt a strategy to calm things down—hope for no more jailbreaks in which AI agents bust out of confinement, emphasize regular rollouts of medical breakthroughs.

Semafor reported the agreement was the brainchild of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who pitched in with a draft.

The president portrayed himself as triumphant at the announcement—garrulous, full of smiles. The agreement is “self-policing.” “I think it’s morally binding, yeah.”

The titans arrayed behind him were quiet, low-key. From their body language I’d say they hoped you’d hardly notice they were there. I thought huh, that’s a power move, to be so silent in victory.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

America’s Future Workforce Is Being Built in High School. We’re Driving Away the People Who Build It

Every entrepreneur I’ve ever backed has said they wouldn’t be where they are were it not for a teacher who challenged them or refused to give up on them.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Oct 26, 2026

 

We talk a lot about investing in the future, but we consistently refuse to invest in the people actually building that very challenging future for and with our children: teachers. Teachers are underpaid, under-resourced, overworked, and chronically unappreciated, even as we expect them to be educators, social workers, mentors, referees, mandated reporters, first responders and crisis managers all at once. It’s a critical task and a thankless job at the same time. But if we don’t start trying to make things better, even the most selfless, dedicated and passionate teachers won’t be around much longer and the pipeline for new prospects looks increasingly dire. Our high schools across the country are really the front lines of the battle.

High school is, in many ways, the last institutional checkpoint before adulthood and the place where the final boundaries, guardrails and remnants of discipline still somewhat exist. It’s often overcrowded, messy, hormonal, chaotic, and inconsistent. We know that the students’ brains are, at best, only partially formed and–in terms of consequential judgment–they’ve got at least another decade to go to get real.

But high school is also where an enormous amount of identity, aspiration, and possibility gets initially formed and developed. It’s fluid and malleable, and, in truth, strong teachers at this point probably have a greater influence on what’s being formed and how so many of these kids will turn out than their parents do–even if they’re fortunate enough to have two parents at home. Of course, in so many communities, active, angry, and judgmental parents are simply another dimension of the problems that teachers must deal with along with daily lectures on how they’re doing everything wrong.

Being in those classrooms, at that time, with those kids, is still one of the highest-impact and least understood jobs in the country. Every entrepreneur I’ve ever backed, every engineer I’ve ever hired, every leader I’ve ever watched succeed or fail will tell you in an instant that they wouldn’t be where they are if they hadn’t interacted with some teacher, somewhere, who they believe saw them, pushed them, challenged them, and/or refused to give up on them. That’s the power, impact and leverage that teachers carry, whether we choose to value it or not.

If we’re serious about supporting and preparing our kids, engaging rather than enraging our communities, and maintaining some semblance of global competitiveness, we have to start by valuing the people in the classroom and paying them with something more than lip service. CEOs complain that they can’t find people who can write a coherent email, show up on time, or handle basic conflict without melting down. Those aren’t college skills; they’re high school skills. You’re feeling, in your recruiting pipeline, exactly what’s happening in those buildings. If you hollow out high school teaching, you don’t just damage kids; you damage your future workforce.

In Chicago, as one sad example, where we have an incompetent mayor who’s a former employee and a feckless pawn of the Chicago Teachers Union, we pay our super-scrutinized teachers less than they’re worth, force them to pay dues and embed them in a corrupt system dominated by an overpaid and crooked set of hyper-political bureaucrats, and then act surprised when burnout rises and talent leaves the profession.

While the aggregate school expenditures paid by the city’s taxpayers continue to grow exponentially, the necessary and appropriate funds never seem to reach the classrooms or benefit the students or even the teachers. We have run down buildings built to accommodate up to 1,000 students which presently serve less than 50 kids a year and yet have do-nothing staff that outnumber the actual kids who do attend these decrepit and dirty shells of what they once were.

But the problems that are even more distressing and damaging to the whole enterprise relate to a relatively new set of existential threats, risks and concerns that nearly every teacher now has regardless of whether they’re teaching at an inner-city school or in some affluent suburban academy. Teachers have always been easy targets and whipping boys for sloppy and indifferent administrators, lazy, negligent and blame-shifting parents, and ignorant politicians.

But they never expected that entering their workplaces on a daily basis would entail risking their careers and even their lives in so many new and frightening ways. Imagine an environment where you’re running active shooter drills right alongside fire drills and you’ll begin to get the picture. And honestly, if we as a society don’t start addressing these situations, it’s going to be difficult to even recruit anyone qualified who has other options.

Teachers today face a growing list of concerns ranging from mass shootings on school grounds from maniacs, daily in-school physical violence from students and parents, untreated mental health issues, false accusations from unstable and aggrieved students regarding all manner of sexual matters, theft and destruction of their personal property, and attacks on their homes and family. Weaponized and angry social media sparks and inflames division, feuds, fights and property destruction among the students that often spill over and involves the teachers and staff as well.

They’re always in a defensive posture–blame first and then investigate–against any and all accusations, allegations, fake videos and postings, etc. and they absolutely know that their own peers, administrators, principals and school boards will happily throw their careers away and turn them over to the hordes of angry parents in order to save their own skins. And because districts are terrified of lawsuits and bad press, it doesn’t matter that the teacher has been in the room, day after day, doing the work. In the face of enough noise, experience and context take a back seat to damage control.

We used to assume that teachers were professionals doing their best with limited resources to manage and control 20-30 adolescents in a safe environment with 100 percent accountability and modest authority. Now the system assumes that they’re one complaint away from misconduct. We’ve steadily stripped teachers of authority while increasing their accountability as we hold them responsible for everything that happens in the room but give them fewer and fewer tools which they’re allowed to use to maintain order. Any attempt at discipline is a potential grievance, a board complaint, or a viral clip stripped of all context.

A very vocal and toxic minority of parents have also become a larger and more pressing problem—enabled again by social media–they have long ago abandoned any real interest in their own children’s well-being or education and instead are excited to exercise their power to try to control, edit, and eliminate any activities, content or other materials in the schools that they have been told (rarely any firsthand information here) are offensive to someone or something. The cultural wars fomented and amplified by Trump and his education secretary have now come to rest in every classroom. Books are dangerous, lesson plans are inappropriate, grades, of course, are unfair and prejudiced, rules and discipline are too rigid and outmoded, and, best of all, their children have been dissed by nasty and uncaring teachers.

Curricula are being micromanaged by people who haven’t set foot in a classroom in decades. Words, topics, and entire subject areas are turning radioactive overnight. Teachers are now expected to somehow intuit what they’re allowed to say; what they’re required to say; and what they’re supposed to pretend not to know about matters of public health and other similar community issues. They face a constantly shifting rulebook, conflicting directives from every direction, and the permanent risk that a single misinterpreted sentence could end their career.

So why would anyone want to do it? The answer is brutally simple: because, despite everything, it still matters more than almost anything else you can do with your working life and some of our best people do it because they believe the work matters more than the abuse. They remember the adults who changed their own lives, and they’re stubborn enough to try to be that person for someone else.

But we can’t keep running this system on guilt, nostalgia, and the goodwill of exhausted professionals. Banking our future on the stubbornness and self-sacrifice of a shrinking group of idealists is not a strategy. Loving kids and believing in education shouldn’t require you to accept physical danger, constant disrespect, and the permanent possibility of public humiliation as part of the package.

The better question is: “How long do we think we can keep treating teachers this way before no one will want to teach?” If we don’t start fixing things, we’re going to find out–the hard way–what a society looks like when the best people decide the classroom just isn’t worth the risk anymore.

What can you do? Pay attention to who you’re electing to school boards and city offices, because those people are designing and determining your talent pipeline. Put your time and money into real partnerships with specific schools–mentoring, internships, teacher externships in companies–instead of another corporate PR campaign about “supporting education.” And finally find the folks and organizations like Pete Kadens at Hope Chicago that are already making a real impact and difference in the lives of thousands of students and get behind them.