Every few months, someone asks me what I think is going to happen with rates, or inflation, or the broader market over the next year, with the implicit follow-up being: should that change how we’re building the company. My honest answer, almost every time, is that I don’t know, nobody reliably knows, and the more interesting question is why the business plan depends on getting that forecast right in the first place.
I’ve watched a lot of founders build strategy on top of a macro prediction, whether they’d describe it that way or not. “We’re raising now because rates will keep falling and capital will only get harder to access later.” “We’re delaying the hire because a recession is probably coming.” “We’re pushing pricing up now because inflation gives us cover.” Each of those decisions might turn out fine. But they’re all quietly betting the company’s fate on a macro call that the founder, by their own admission if you push them on it, doesn’t actually have special insight into. That’s not strategy. That’s forecasting dressed up as strategy, and forecasting is a game very few people win consistently enough to build a company on top of.
The businesses I respect most are built to be roughly correct across a wide range of macro outcomes, rather than precisely optimized for one specific macro scenario. That usually means a cleaner balance sheet than the growth rate alone would suggest is necessary. It usually means a cost structure that can flex down without an existential crisis if revenue growth slows. It usually means a default bias toward extending runway rather than assuming the next round will be easy, because “the next round will be easy” is itself a macro bet, even when nobody frames it that way in the room.
None of this is a call to be conservative for its own sake, or to build boring companies allergic to ambition. It’s a call to separate the two decisions that get fused together far too often: the decision about how ambitious to be, and the decision about how exposed to be to a macro outcome nobody can reliably predict. You can be maximally ambitious about the market you’re going after while being deliberately unambitious about how much of your survival depends on rates staying low, or capital staying cheap, or a recession not showing up on your timeline. The founders who make that separation clearly, and build accordingly, are the ones I’ve watched come out the other side of every macro cycle – good and bad – still standing, still building, largely unbothered by news cycles that derailed less disciplined competitors.