Make Room For No Longer Dancing On My Own
Two of the most accomplished people I've ever worked alongside have officially joined Stretch.
Eden Golshani, as CTO, built systems at Twitter that processed content in 50+ languages and led engineering teams at WeWork and Public.com. Hannah Shore, as Head of Product, built Hungryroot's personalization engine from scratch, modernized search at Grubhub and Macy's.
These are not people who need a job. They are people who recognized an idea worth building.
And in the days since, I've felt something I didn't expect.
Not pride. Not excitement.
Humility.
There's a TED talk you've probably seen. (and if you haven't, it's only 3 minutes long!)
A shirtless guy dancing alone at a festival. Everyone around him is sitting. He looks ridiculous. He doesn't stop.
Then one person stands up and joins him.
That's the moment. Not the dancing guy. The first follower.
Derek Sivers, who gave the talk, points out that leadership is overglorified. The shirtless guy gets all the credit. But it's the first follower who transforms a lone nut into a leader. It takes more courage to stand up and join something unproven than it does to start it. The starter has conviction. The first follower has faith.
When I started Stretch, I was the dancing guy. I had a thesis about grocery pricing, consumer intelligence, and what I was calling shopper-side commerce. Most people nodded politely. A few asked good questions. Almost no one said, "I want in."
That's what early looks like. You're not ridiculous. You're just early. The distinction only becomes clear in hindsight.
They say the definition of crazy is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result. This is my second attempt at solving a problem I've been obsessing over since 2013. I am absolutely expecting a different result. But I'm not doing the same thing. The world moved. The technology moved. I moved. Stretch is not Basket. It just starts with the same question: why does the grocery store know more about you than you know about it?
That's not crazy. That's just what it looks like when you can't unsee something.
And then two people who didn't have to believe walked in and said they saw it too.
That changes everything.
Patrick Bet-David said it plainly:
"The less your business depends on you, the more valuable it is. The more your business depends on you, the less valuable it is."
Most founders build a company that needs them and wonder why they can't scale it.
Hadley Harris, a Partner at Eniac VC, put it a different way:
"Founders should be obsessing over talent density. The impact of an A versus B team member is 10x what it used to be because of the compounding effects of AI."
That's not a recruiting talking point. That's a structural argument for why the people on your team matter more than ever.
That's why I say the founder only has three jobs.
- Ruthlessly understand and communicate what the vision is. Not approximately. Not directionally. Ruthlessly.
- Don't run out of money.
- Remove every roadblock so your team can do their best work.
Everything else is a distraction.
If you're doing all three, you don't need to be the center of the story. The vision holds that position. Your team is free to have its own relationship with it. And you're free to keep building all that comes next.
The real test of a vision-led company is simple: what happens when the founder isn't in the room?
That's the goal. A company that doesn't need me to function. A company where the vision is clear enough that anyone on the team can hold it, test against it, and build from it.
The founder is just the first follower of the vision.
I felt the music before anyone else. I stood up before it was safe to. But the vision was, and always will be, bigger than me.
Eden and Hannah didn't join 'Andy's company.' They joined the idea that the shopper deserves agency. That the 90% of American households who feel the squeeze every time they walk into a grocery store deserve the same quality of information that retailers have had for decades.
That idea is the center. I'm just the one who started dancing.
Andy
