John Schultz
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The Tool That Breaks You
May 5, 2026
Most leaders don't actually leave doctrine behind. They leave the way people remember them leading. Mission statements claim transparent, equitable,...
We Automated Our Entire Marketing Stack With a Single Skill
April 13, 2026
Grafe Auction runs about 290 auctions a year across 48 states. Each campaign takes 10 to 14 days from start to finish. That's roughly one new marketing...
Acquiring Capability vs. Hiring Headcount
April 9, 2026
I was working through the details of bringing a small team in-house. Purchase price, salaries, org chart, who reports to whom. Normal acquisition stuff. And...
Structure Reveals Strategy
April 8, 2026
The Observation I've been keeping notes in this vault for two years. Hundreds of calls, meetings, emails, references, thought cards. All wiki-linked, all...
The Agentic Shift
April 6, 2026
Definition I've been circling this idea for six weeks, and it keeps showing up in different shapes. The agentic shift is not an upgrade to existing...
Teaching What You're Still Learning
March 30, 2026
The Observation In January I stood in front of 100 auctioneers at a state convention and told them "AI assists. You decide." Three hours of live demos,...
Memory Half-Life
March 29, 2026
The Idea This came up while fixing a bug where stale cached data was silently injecting garbage into every outbound email for a full day. The cache never...
The Person-System Trap
March 23, 2026
I told someone last week that his business couldn't survive him. He'd called to pick my brain. Decades in the auction industry, multiple divisions, good...
The Movie That Matches the Outcome
March 17, 2026
Dave Plummer is a retired Microsoft engineer. He created Windows Task Manager, ported Space Cadet Pinball to Windows, built the ZIP folder support, and wrote...
Ships and Harbors
March 12, 2026
The Observation My cousin texted me this morning with a line I've heard before but landed differently today: "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that's not what...
Users Do the Scaling
March 10, 2026
I was listening to Acquired's Google episode this morning, the Alphabet deep dive, and one detail stuck with me. Google launched Google Video before YouTube...
Building Your Own Scoreboard
March 8, 2026
I've been writing thought cards for the past year. Short pieces, usually a page or two, where I try to capture a principle at the moment it forms. I started...
[TEST] Buttondown API Integration
March 7, 2026
This is a test email to verify the Buttondown API integration is working. You can safely ignore this. If you are reading this, the API pipeline from...
The Mom Test
March 7, 2026
Two weeks apart, two completely different conversations, the same sentence came out of my mouth. On February 24, I told a bidder verification startup to make...
How I Actually Use AI
March 4, 2026
Grafe Auction runs about 290 auctions a year across 48 states. Each campaign takes 10 to 14 days from start to finish. I’m the partner responsible for...
Five Levels of Agentic Commerce
February 24, 2026
Stripe’s 2025 annual letter lays out five levels of agentic commerce, and what makes the framework stick is that each level isn’t defined by what the AI...
Saturation Before Coalition
February 23, 2026
The Synthesis Niche saturation isn’t the opposite of coalition. It’s the prerequisite. Daniel Ek’s principle is right: saturate your niche before you expand....