Insights
Productivity Theatre and Building in Public
I started sharing my revenue numbers publicly and people thought I was crazy.
“Why would you show competitors your playbook?”
Because the alternative is what I spent years doing in corporate: crafting decks that hid the truth, writing reports designed to manage perception, sitting in rooms where everyone performed confidence while privately panicking.
Productivity Theatre at the executive level
That’s Productivity Theatre at the executive level.
Harvard’s 2025 CEO Time Study tracked over 1,100 CEOs across six countries. The finding that should terrify every board member: CEOs spend just 9% of their time on strategic thinking. 38% goes to meetings. 21% to email. Only 32% of their entire week qualifies as high-value work.
The people running our biggest companies spend less than one hour a day actually thinking.
The rest? Performance. Status updates. Calendar Tetris. The theatre of appearing in charge.
Building in public is the opposite
Building in public is the opposite of all of this.
You share what’s real — the revenue, the failures, the decisions that actually moved the needle. There’s no deck to hide behind. No committee to diffuse accountability. No “let’s circle back” to delay a decision everyone’s afraid to make.
And it works. Founders who build transparently reach their first milestones 2.3x faster and acquire customers at 60% lower cost than traditional launches.
Turns out, when you replace performance with honesty, people trust you more. Customers, investors, talent — they all gravitate toward the person who says “here’s what’s actually happening” instead of “let me get back to you after I align with stakeholders.”
AI accelerates this. It eliminates the busywork that forces entrepreneurs into their own version of theatre — the admin, the formatting, the coordination tax. What’s left is the real work: building, deciding, shipping, connecting.
The corporate world is terrified of transparency
The corporate world is terrified of transparency because transparency kills theatre.
Entrepreneurship done right is proof that the theatre was never necessary.