Incentives

The spark I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk on The GaryVee Audio Experience, an October 2025 episode about wasting time on people who will never buy from you. He made a comment about bonus structures that stuck with me. His framing was intentionally sharp, but the useful part was underneath the rhetoric: employees often factor the maximum possible bonus into their lives. Once they do, the bonus is no longer experienced as upside. It becomes expected compensation. ...

Two observations stacked on the same Friday morning. The first one I’ve lived. Marketing agencies typically charge a percentage of marketing spend as their fee. The agency makes more money when the client spends more money. The incentive is to grow the budget, not the results. I’ve been quietly dismantling that arrangement in our vendor stack for the last couple of years. The second one I heard this morning. Pavel Durov on the Lex Fridman Podcast (#482, Sept. 30, 2025), making the point that drug companies aren’t actually incentivized to find the root-cause cure. They’re incentivized for you to keep taking the drug. Recurring revenue. Maintenance, not resolution. ...