Future and Happiness

A studio that says it is about two things and is, three years in, mostly about one. The site at the URL says "Future and Happiness." What you find when you read past the homepage is a B2B revenue-engineering practice that does fractional growth work for founders in Dubai. The Future half ships. The Happiness half has not yet, and the longer it does not, the more interesting the question of why becomes.

We named the studio in 2023 with a thesis I still believe. The thesis was that the kind of operator that runs a venture well in the next decade will have to maintain two practices in parallel. One is the practical engineering of revenue — pipelines, acquisition, retention, the things a growth team does. The other is the practice that makes the operator legible to themselves at three in the morning when something hard has just happened — meditation, somatic work, sleep discipline, the slow trades that compound into the capacity to keep deciding well over a long horizon. We built a studio that was supposed to service both. We staffed it for both. The deal pipeline came from one and not the other.

I have watched this with the curiosity of someone who can see the failure mode but has not yet been able to name it precisely. The closest I have come: the market for the Future half is well-formed. A founder with a B2B SaaS at one to five million in revenue and a stalled pipeline knows what they need and knows how to value it. The market for the Happiness half is not well-formed in the same way. A founder with the same revenue and the same private suspicion that they are sleeping four hours a night because their nervous system is somewhere in 2019 does not know what to buy and does not have a budget line for it. The buying frame on the second problem is missing. Build a product for which the buying frame is missing and you have a long, expensive education problem.^footnoteI do not think this is an indictment of the problem. The problem is real and the market is, in time, large. I think it is an honest report on the cost of being early to a category in a place — Dubai's founder population — where the category does not yet have a vocabulary.

What the studio did instead, by quiet selection, was let the Future half subsidize the absent Happiness half. We brought in revenue. We hired against revenue. We rebuilt the engagement model twice. The half of the company that did not have a market did not get killed off; it got slowly relocated into the personal practices of the people who worked there. We meditate before standups. The contractor pool we hire from is selected partly on whether the person actually sleeps. There is a yoga studio next door that almost everyone on the team has been to. The intention that did not become a product line became a hiring filter and a culture. I am still not sure if that is a graceful failure or an early success.

The half of the company that did not have a market did not get killed off; it got slowly relocated into the personal practices of the people who worked there.

What the venture has taught me, and which I am still learning, is that you have to be honest about the difference between an intention and a product. The two are not the same. An intention is a claim about what you want the world to contain more of. A product is a thing a person will pay for. The reason small teams should be allowed to ship an intention without a product underneath it is that the intention shapes the product line you are willing to consider building. The reason this becomes a problem is that, on a long enough horizon, an intention without a product line attached is a brand promise the company is not keeping.

The honest version of the studio's story, on this site, looks like this. The Future half is doing the work it was always going to do. The Happiness half is still searching for the buying frame that would make it a venture rather than a hiring filter. The studio has half-named itself for three years now, and the question of whether the second half ever becomes a product — or whether the second half should be amputated from the name and re-housed somewhere else — is still open. The case for staying patient is that the buying frame for a serious second-half offering is something that the market in Dubai may grow into within the decade. The case for moving faster is that brand promises that do not pay out begin, in time, to act as a tax.

There is a smaller observation underneath this story that has shaped how I think about every other venture I touch. A venture's name is a debt instrument. Whatever you call yourself, you owe the market the thing the name says you do. If you cannot service the debt, you must either ship or rename. Half-shipping for three years is a coupon payment with no plan for the principal.

I do not yet know how this case study ends. The version of it that would be most honest to publish a year from now is one in which we have either built a defensible Happiness offering — a research practice, a fellowship program, a category-creating product — or split the name. The version of it that I am working on is the first. The version of it that I am preparing for, if the first does not arrive in time, is the second. Both versions are work I would be willing to defend. The version that is not acceptable is a fourth year of half-shipping. That is the constraint the venture is operating under now, and it is the most useful constraint a venture has been under since I started building them.