From the desk of Sean Heilweil
Operator Note
I have a confession to make.
Last quarter I killed four projects. Not "reallocated." Not "deprioritized." Not "paused pending review." Killed. Deleted the repos. Cancelled the tools. Told the people working on them to stop.
Revenue went up.
Three of the four felt like progress. Dashboards. Activity. Things to talk about on calls. They had momentum. They had owners. They had weekly updates and status reports and all the decorations that make motion look like building.
None of them were moving the number.
The fourth was the one I was personally attached to. That is the one that taught me something.
A lot of operators confuse activity with output. I know this because I teach it, I write about it, and I still fell for it. I had a project I loved working on. It gave me energy. It made me feel like I was in the details, close to the work, doing the thing founders are supposed to do. And it was quietly eating resources that should have gone somewhere else.
That is how the most dangerous projects survive. Not because they are justified by the numbers. Because they are justified by how they make the person in charge feel.
The quarter I did the least intentional "work" was the quarter the portfolio grew the most. Not because I got lucky. Because I finally stopped feeding the things that were quietly eating the things that mattered.
Most founders are trained to add. Launch something. Build something. Start something new. The entire culture of operating rewards creation. Nobody gets celebrated for cancelling a project. Nobody writes a LinkedIn post about the dashboard they deleted. Nobody stands up at an all-hands and says "I did less this quarter and it was the best decision I made."
But subtraction is a skill. A real one. And nobody teaches it because it does not photograph well.
The hard part is not identifying the projects that are obviously failing. Those are easy to kill. The hard part is identifying the projects that feel like they are working, that have activity, engagement, and internal champions, but are not actually compounding into anything that matters.
Here is what I have learned about how to tell the difference. The projects worth keeping change a number you care about. Not a vanity metric. Not engagement. Not "awareness." An actual number tied to revenue, retention, or margin. If you cannot draw a straight line from the project to one of those, it is a candidate for subtraction.
That does not mean every project needs to justify itself on a spreadsheet tomorrow. Some things are genuinely pre-revenue or exploratory. But if a project has been running for a quarter and the best case for keeping it is "it feels like it is working," that feeling is the thing worth interrogating.
Subtraction is not minimalism. It is not some philosophical stance about doing less. It is the operating discipline of protecting your best work from your busiest work.
What I’m Seeing
Portfolio companies that grew the most last quarter had fewer active initiatives, not more. The correlation is not subtle.
Founders are using "we are exploring" as a way to avoid killing things. Exploration has a shelf life. If it has been on the shelf for two quarters, it is not exploration. It is avoidance.
The projects hardest to kill are almost always the ones with the most internal narrative around them. Story momentum is not the same as business momentum.
A lot of operators are adding AI projects without subtracting anything to make room. The portfolio gets wider but not deeper. That is how you end up with twelve initiatives and zero leverage.
The best operators I work with have a regular kill cadence. Not annual. Quarterly. They treat subtraction as a recurring discipline, not a last resort.
Behind The Scenes
I have been sitting with an uncomfortable realization since last quarter.
The project I was most attached to, the one I killed last, was not hard to let go of because it was valuable. It was hard to let go of because it was mine. I had built the brief. I had picked the team. I had defended it in two separate reviews.
Killing it felt like admitting I had been wrong for months. Which is exactly what I had been. And the longer I waited, the more expensive that admission became. Not in dollars. In attention. In team energy. In the opportunity cost of people working on something that made me feel productive instead of something that made the business stronger.
I am getting better at catching this pattern. But I am not good at it yet.
Tactical Idea
Run a Subtraction Sprint this week.
Pull up every active project, initiative, or recurring commitment on your plate. For each one, answer two questions:
What number does this move? Not what metric it touches, what number would change if this project disappeared tomorrow?
If I were not already doing this, would I start it today with what I know now?
If you cannot name the number, or if the honest answer to the second question is no, flag it. You do not have to kill it today. But put it on a list. Look at that list at the end of the week and ask yourself: what would happen if I subtracted all of these at once?
The question worth sitting with: How much of what you are building right now exists because it is working, and how much exists because you started it and never stopped?
Closing Thought
Addition is instinct. Subtraction is discipline. The operators who compound are not the ones who build the most. They are the ones who protect what matters from everything that does not.
The bottom line: Stop feeding the things that are quietly eating the things that matter.
— Sean, Cache CEO