Another month at TSC is in the books, and one word keeps surfacing: team.

Two moments stood out.

1. An App Went Down

One of our apps started failing hard. Hundreds of users affected. Over two days the thing kept dropping offline, confusion mounting with every outage.

I tried to fix it alone. I could not. So I called in the reinforcements: Colin and Harrison.

Before they showed up, I was drowning. Debugging, testing, deploying patches, and fielding every customer email at the same time. Nobody was getting my best work. The users were frustrated, and I was stretched past the point of usefulness.

When Colin and Harrison stepped in, we clicked. They compiled a list of every affected user and started hitting the phones. While I traced the bug, ran tests, and pushed fixes, they were responding to emails, leaving voicemails, and reaching users I never would have gotten to on my own.

The chaos subsided. I could focus on getting the app running. They could focus on making our users feel heard. Eventually, we got it all sorted.

The best part came after the dust settled. Several enterprise customers sent us emails thanking us for the hands-on attention. Large customers genuinely appreciate it when you pick up the phone and walk them through the issue. Some of that credit belongs to the charm Colin and Harrison carry into every conversation, but a lot of it belongs to the simple fact that we went the extra mile. That extra mile would have been impossible without them.

Two lessons surfaced from the technical side. First, our exposure when building on someone else's infrastructure is real, a tension I've been working through more carefully. Second, in my haste to ship patches, I made things worse before they got better. Moving fast without thinking is the exact speed trap I ended up writing about a few weeks later.

2. Sales Improved While I Was on Vacation

I spent a few days away with my family. The temptation to break out my phone and fire off ideas was constant. I resisted. Phone off, present with my family, trusting the team to hold the line.

Every evening I opened Slack and saw the same story: Colin and Harrison were landing customers. Organic signups were rolling in from galleries. The two of them had set up a relentless call operation, booking demos with tons of prospects. Meanwhile, two of our contractors independently coordinated a new piece of content without anyone asking them to.

All while I was sitting on the beach.

Maybe I should step away more often if this is what happens to our numbers.

Jokes aside, coming back to that was remarkable. Knowing you can fully trust your team to execute without you hovering is one of the best feelings in business. It is a warm blanket.

Partnerships

During this stretch I read Masters of Doom, the story of id Software and the two Johns, Carmack and Romero, who built some of the most influential video games ever made, then watched their partnership fracture.

The lesson I took away was simple: partnerships tend to fall apart when the people inside them are growing at different rates.

Consider the arc from Doom to Quake. Carmack was inventing a new game engine with each release, operating at the bleeding edge of the industry, pushing it forward year after year. He was compounding.

Romero was designing levels. And from one Doom to the next, the level design work did not change much. He was repeating himself every year.

This mismatch festered. Romero began lashing out, chasing fame, losing focus, and eventually he was forced out of the company he had helped build from nothing, a few "borrowed" computers and zero dollars, into a titan of the gaming industry.

Masters of Doom paints Romero as someone who spiraled out of control. I read it differently. He spiraled because he could see Carmack accelerating while he stood still. The gap between them widened until it became unbearable.

Perhaps the partnership could have survived if both were stagnant, or if both were growing. But Carmack felt he was the only one putting in the hours and had to drag Romero along. Romero felt boxed out, deprioritized, cast aside in favor of Carmack's vision. Neither was wrong. Both were poisoned by the asymmetry.

The lesson for us is clear. The partnership between Justin, Colin, Harrison, and me is an asset that has to be actively maintained. If one node is outpacing the others, we address it. If one is lagging, we address that too. A mismatch in growth rate breeds brooding, friction, and resentment. Especially among people striving toward the same goal. We have to create space and opportunity for everyone to grow, all at a rapid pace.

The antidote to the id Software story is compounding everywhere. Justin self-hosted our CI runners to cut costs and separately published a set of exercises for deliberately breaking your own habits before they calcify. That is what compounding looks like in practice: small improvements, shipped consistently, by a person who is not waiting to be asked.

A partnership compounds when each person does.

Best, Myles