Before joining a company as an employee, ask yourself: is the company in peacetime or wartime? High vibes can be exciting, but that’s not the same as wanting to work on the problem when things get hard

ServiceTitan Pricebook people: Check the last time that Titan updated your material costs. We identified around early April that they hadn't updated a ton of stuff since early February. Your margins might be way off on jobs due to tariff increases.

Almost every single shop owner in HVAC / Plumbing / Electrical I talk to, struggles with their pricebook. There is so much opportunity for margin left on the table with an outdated static pricebook that’s not kept up to date.

What's the weirdest way you've seen someone get rich? I'll go first: a family friend owns a giant breakfast trailer. He makes a 50% margin when non-profits run pancake fundraisers. Makes >$1mm working 80 days/yr.

Most software companies wait until they have "enough" customers to justify a real CX function. We hired for it before we had a product to sell. If you wait until you've "scaled enough" to invest in your users experience, you've already missed the moment it mattered most, at first impression. There's also a belief baked into how we built Dalton Mills: customer experience and product experience aren't two different things. The first time an owner logs in and sees their price book already built, their data already migrated, nothing broken that's not "good support." That's the product (@connork26 🔥 ). I could fly to your shop and spend a week building your price book by hand. That used to be called white-glove service. We'd rather build a product that does this for you minutes, and a CX infrastructure that doesn't act as a safety net for when the product fails, but one that fuels you to reach new levels in your business. At @DaltonMillsAI we are committed to your customer experience from day one! Wrote up the full thinking in this month's Field Notes:

Seeing so many people on the timeline clowning on the Airtable acquisition.. same thing happened early this year when Brex got acquired. Did it reach the heights it wanted to? The founders will be the first ones to probably admit it didn’t. But a $2B acquisition with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and a product that was loved by many is no small feat - and an achievement very very few people will achieve. Congrats to @howietl and the entire team!

I want to build the best business, but also the absolute best place to work. Loving where you work is life changing. Life’s too short to not enjoy the thing you spend 40/50/60 hours a week on. And to not be intellectually stimulated by the people you surround yourself with.

One fun benefit of spending so much time with enterprises is you get to see the array of AI implementation strategies that exist in companies right now. Unlike the early innings of cloud where there were really only a couple deployment patterns available -including being limited by only a couple infra vendors existing- AI actually has a much wider range of approaches in the enterprise. If you ask 10 IT leaders what their coding agent strategy looks like, you get at least 5 different answers. If you ask about their end-user productivity agents, some have standardized on ChatGPT or Claude, others offer a choice of multiple solutions, and many have built their own orchestration layers for employees to use any model. For models, we know the big ones, but increasingly enterprises are experimenting with OSS models, or are at least immensely curious about OSS and would jump at the right offering that felt safe. And increasingly there’s a set of vertical models and agents that equally show up in enterprises for a range of tailored use-cases. For accessing data, some enterprises just have agents take on the role of the user, and others are setting up agent users that have their own identities. Some companies are setting up substantial guardrails on what agents can do, and others are putting responsibility on the user. Given this heterogeneity this early on at the start, it means we’re in for years of landscape changes. Anyone who’s predicting ultimate market outcomes already probably will be wrong as nothing has formally settled in yet. Lots of opportunity ahead.