705: (Solo) How Success Made Me Neglect the Thing That Built Everything

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan · Sep 14, 2026 · 11m

I am going to tell you about the dumbest thing I have done in 12 years of building Foundr. It is not a bad hire or a failed launch. It is something far more dangerous, because I did not even realise I was doing it. For four years I took my eye off the thing that built this entire business, and by the time I noticed, I had left years of growth on the table.

Here is the trap: when your monetisation engine is printing money, it gives you permission to be complacent about the thing that is actually feeding it. The better the downstream business performed, the less attention we gave the upstream…