Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with world-class operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

In an era that rewards the “hustle” and the superficial pivot, Andrea Chiarelli stands as a testament to a more traditional, rigorous path.

He is a man who transitioned from the cold, deterministic world of engineering into the nuanced, qualitative waters of high-stakes research consultancy.

The surprising claim at the heart of his philosophy is that structure is not the enemy of creativity but its primary accelerator.

Andrea is a seasoned management consultant based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, where he advises research funders, government departments, universities, and academic publishers.

He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering, an Executive MBA, and an MSC in Nuclear and Energy Engineering, alongside a history as an indie game developer and a passion for coding. He is the quintessential “T-shaped” professional, possessing deep technical mastery alongside an expansive strategic breadth.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Andrea’s journey began in Alba, Piedmont (he is a fellow Italian) at a STEM-focused high school that refused to sacrifice the humanities for the sake of the lab. While other courses at the school focused mainly on a scientific curriculum, Andrea’s training included extra Latin, philosophy, and literature. This broad education contributed to building a holistic way of thinking, one that valued numbers but understood they were meaningless without a narrative.

As a teenager, he was deeply into Linux and open source software, obsessed with the custom assembly of computers and the granular control of his devices. Naturally, he intended to study Computer Science, but a glance at the curriculum revealed a massive deterrent: “too much mathematics.” He pivoted to Energy Engineering at the Polytechnic of Turin, only to discover that the advanced maths was still there, merely hidden under different module titles…

The defining moment of his early career came during his Master’s degree.

Standing in a lecture hall with 250 other engineering students, Andrea performed a cold, internal audit. He realized that if he followed the standard path, he would be one of hundreds of identical competitors in the local market. His first truly independent strategic decision was to seek an “edge” (and he was too young to know that, decades later, he would be featured on Edge!). He asked his thesis advisor to send him abroad.

He landed at Virginia Tech, in the United States, for six months, completely alone, knowing no one. It was a baptism by fire.

While supporting a doctoral student’s research, he observed the PhD lifestyle: the total intellectual autonomy, the ability to walk in and out of the office at will, and the deep pursuit of a single, fascinating problem.

That’s what led Andrea to applying for a PhD himself, and eventually landed him to Nottingham - where he lives now.

Edge

Andrea’s differentiator is his ability to apply the rigorous structural thinking of an engineer to the qualitative challenges typical of the policy sphere.

Most people view structure as a cage; Andrea views it as a map.

He segments vast, complex problems into their constituent elements, examines the structural connections, and explores them one by one.

This “Edge” was forged through a couple of radical shifts that forced him to abandon his comfort zone repeatedly:

1. During his PhD in Nottingham, Andrea studied “energy harvesting”: extracting heat from sun-baked asphalt. While his experiments ran in the lab, he refused to sit idle. He sat in the office programming in MATLAB and wrote scientific articles on the “physics of stone compaction” and “porosity networks”, topics barely related to his thesis.

2. Nearing the end of his PhD, he realized he had no work experience. He found a part-time role at a nascent boutique consulting firm (then just a founder and two part-timers) specializing in the research and higher education space. He was the firm’s first full-time employee.

His engineering background meant that he had to upskill himself and learn the nuances of qualitative research. Eventually, this expanded his toolkit, building a well-rounded “Mixed Methods” approach.

He recently developed a Claude Code pipeline to automate “thematic coding” (a task that usually consumes hundreds of hours of a consultant’s time), thanks to this blend of quantitative and qualitative expertise. By automating the “tagging,” he frees himself to perform the “synthesis”: the high-level storytelling that clients actually value.

Future

As a strategist who reaches the daily usage limits of Claude Pro multiple times a day, Andrea is an heavy user of generative AI, but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

He views Generative AI as a “three-year-old child”: imaginative, fast, but prone to “telling you about a dream as if it were reality.” This comes from his role: as a consultant who needs to take responsibility for each and every claim, trust is paramount.

Andrea identifies a looming crisis in the talent pipeline, but he argues the impact may depend on the size of the firm.

In the world of large enterprises, the crisis is obscured by layers of bureaucracy and short-term thinking. Andrea notes that large companies rarely think beyond a three-year horizon because the life cycle of a CEO is so brief. For these giants, the immediate financial gains of using AI to replace junior labor are intoxicating. However, they are effectively creating a “leadership vacuum” fifteen years down the line. Without the “grunt work” that develops a professional’s critical eye, these firms will eventually find themselves in a war for senior talent that is increasingly scarce.

In small firms, the threat is existential and immediate. Andrea explains that in a boutique consultancy, talent development is not a HR “perk” but an essential “succession planning” strategy. If a small firm fails to coach its juniors, the current directors can never dream of an “exit.” There is no one to take the reins when they retire.

To address this, Andrea’s firm has taken a deliberate step: they now record time in their accounting systems specifically for (human) coaching. They are consciously choosing to spend “unproductive” hours passing on the critical thinking skills that AI cannot replicate.

Grounding and Legacy

Alongside his senior strategic role, Andrea remains grounded through daily rituals that favor the personal over the professional.

He is a voracious reader, a habit formed as a teenager on the beaches of Italy reading stuff like Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. Today, he writes on Substack every morning while his four-year-old son eats breakfast.

His life is a cross-cultural tapestry: his wife is Moroccan, and their household is a blend of Mediterranean roots and British customs. This “openness” and willingness to embrace other cultures is something he considers a hidden asset, a willingness to connect with the world emotionally as well as intellectually.

If granted unlimited resources, Andrea would not buy a tropical island or a million-dollar supercar. Instead, he would build a “Technological Sanctuary”: a home outfitted with every possible gadget (a nod to his early tech days), and spend his days volunteering his time to support his local community.

🔹 What you can steal

Andrea’s approach can be articulated in 3 high-level tactical concepts:

1. When you use AI to “save time,” do not just celebrate the efficiency; audit the cost to your own development. Ask yourself: “Am I skipping a task that is a prerequisite for my future growth?” If the work is “donkey work” (e.g., the mindless tagging of data or formatting of tables) automate it without hesitation. However, if the task builds your “critical eye” (e.g., the drafting of a core argument or the initial interpretation of a client’s needs) you must do it manually. Using AI as training wheels is fine for the first block, but to finish the race, you eventually have to take them off and feel the balance for yourself.

2. When a client presents a complex problem, do not seek a holistic solution immediately. Deconstruct it into its constituent parts. Map the specific elements, the channels of influence (like the porosity networks that Andrea was studying) between them, and the blockages that stop progress. By addressing the granular components individually, as well as their connections, you ensure that the final “narrative synthesis” is built on a foundation of structural integrity rather than superficial eloquence. Clarity comes from the assembly of well-understood parts, not from a single stroke of genius.

3. Never allow yourself to be defined by a single job title or a narrow vertical. Andrea’s “Edge” comes from being an engineer and a programmer and a writer and a student of the humanities. In an AI world, technical skills have a shorter half-life than ever before. Your only protection against obsolescence is the “and”: the ability to synthesize insights from disparate fields that an algorithm cannot yet connect with the same level of depth and understanding. Diversity of thought is your primary strategic asset; seek out the “useless” knowledge that your competitors are ignoring.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Andrea’s strength is rooted in a conscious refusal to “simply do what the system expects.”

He spent years in the “slower, deliberate” world of academia, which he felt was frustratingly stagnant for his personality, yet he recognizes it as the source of a “critical toolkit” that no weekend seminar could replicate. His brilliance was in realizing when the system was no longer serving him.

He rejected the academic mandate to become a “post-doc nomad”—moving to three different countries to meet the expectations of today’s universities—and instead chose to leverage his elite training in the private sector.

In a world obsessed with “minimum viable products,” Andrea is a proponent of the “Maximum Viable Foundation.” He built a moat out of seemingly disconnected knowledge (stone compaction, Latin, complex calculus, business administration) that allows him to see patterns that others miss.

He proves that the most “efficient” path, specialization, can be dangerous, because it leaves you with no footing when the environment changes.

👀 Where to find more about Andrea

• LinkedIn

• The Art of asking questions newsletter

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

⚠ Check these links out

• I had the opportunity to try the AI-slide builder Perceptis ahead of their public launch, and I was so impressed! Unlike other apps I have tested before, this one actually builds good slides with a structure, starting from a simple prompt. Try it for 10 minutes and let me know what you think.

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy;

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with world-class operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

Most “tech gurus” are obsessed with the shiny and new. Mario Peshev is obsessed with what actually works when the bill comes due. While the world treats AI like a magic wand, Mario treats it like a high-speed assembly line that is currently running out of raw materials.

He believes AI is currently cannibalizing itself. Businesses are optimizing internal processes to save costs, but they aren’t actually creating new wealth: if everyone gets 40% more efficient at the same task, the price of that task simply drops to zero. Mario’s story is a roadmap for how to survive the “race to the bottom” by pivoting from a service provider to a “Value Creator.”

Mario is the CEO of DevriX (enterprise engineering and RevOps) and Growth Shuttle (SME consulting). He is an angel investor in over 25 companies—including Substack, Beehiiv, and Doola—and has clocked over 10,000 hours training engineers at the world’s most elite organizations, from CERN to Saudi Aramco.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Mario’s career didn’t start in a boardroom; it started in 1999 with a single website and a passion for engineering. For the next two decades, he wore “multiple hats,” maturing alongside the internet. He watched the era of the home PC give way to the era of the Cloud, and the era of social media transform into the era of the “Growth Loop.”

A big shift for Mario came when he realized that being a “great engineer” was no longer a moat. In the mid-2010s, he saw the agency model fracturing: clients didn’t want to buy “code” or “HubSpot workflows” anymore—they wanted to buy revenue.

This led to the transformation of DevriX from a technical shop into a high-level Revenue Operations (RevOps) firm. He stopped speaking the language of “features” and started speaking the language of the CRO.

Edge

Mario’s differentiator is his refusal to get distracted by “trendy” terminology.

Whether people call it “Smarketing,” “The Flywheel,” or “RevOps,” Mario views it all through the lens of Value Creation. His edge lies in the Agentic Layer, using AI not just for chat, but as a systematic infrastructure that connects marketing leads to sales data to customer retention.

Mario made the contrarian move to bring his team fully in-house in Sofia. He recognizes that while digital talent is globally mobile, “desk job” work is becoming a commodity. By maintaining a physical headquarters, he creates a “security moat” for enterprise clients. Data doesn’t leak between fragmented VPNs across dozens of countries; instead, it lives in a controlled environment where peer review and collective “hacking” happen in real-time. This physical proximity transforms “consulting” into a high-security, high-reliability operation that remote-only agencies struggle to match.

Mario is a Vibe Coding practitioner. He uses tools like Cursor and Google’s Anti-gravity to build prototypes in hours that previously cost $80,000 and took months. He recently rebuilt his company’s entire accounting system from scratch because off-the-shelf SaaS tools like Xero couldn’t provide the granular data he needed—specifically, gross profitability per team and real-time bank statement “leakage” analysis. He didn’t wait for a vendor; he built a local, secure SQLite-based software on a Saturday.

Mario’s differentiator is his recognition of physical bottlenecks.

He points out that while you can use AI to plan a construction project 40x faster, you still need a human to lay the bricks, a government official to sign the permit with a “wet signature,” and a supply chain to ship the materials. His edge is knowing exactly where the digital world hits the brick wall of reality.

Future

Mario isn’t buying into the singularity hype just yet. His perspective is rooted in a sobering economic reality: Efficiency is not the same as growth. While social media and Reddit threads hum with predictions of overnight transformation, Mario looks at the structural bottlenecks that AI simply cannot solve with code alone.

Citing Satya Nadella, Mario argues that for a technology to be truly revolutionary, it must drive at least 10% GDP growth year-over-year. Currently, we are seeing “incremental improvements.”

Businesses are using AI to optimize internal processes—making a team of 4 able to do the work of 5—but they aren’t necessarily creating new markets:

• If every design firm uses AI to work 40% faster, the market doesn’t suddenly need 40% more designs. Instead, the service becomes a commodity, the price drops, and the “pie” remains the same size.

• Real growth requires new revenue streams, not just cost-cutting. Until AI can fabricate new clients or solve the “physical constraints” of production and logistics, it remains an operational tool rather than an economic savior.

One of Mario’s most grounded insights is the persistent friction of the Public Sector and Physical World. We live in a “duplex” reality: our LLMs move at light speed, but our institutions move at the speed of paper.

Mario predicts it will take decades for the most impactful changes (like robotics in construction) to hit critical mass, also due to regulatory resistance. Whether it’s the banking sector’s refusal to trade 24/7 or the government’s requirement for a physical signature on a permit, human systems are designed for stability and safety, not pure digital efficiency.

As AI commoditizes “average” work, Mario predicts a brutal thinning of the herd:

• The bottom 50% of performers in “desk jobs”—those who look for safety and work-life balance without exceptional output—will find their roles evaporated.

• Whether your craft is microbiology, logic, or communication, being “good” is no longer enough. To be safe, you must be in the Top 1%. This is the only level where human intuition and complexity still outpace the machine.

If Mario could travel back to 1999 Bulgaria, he wouldn’t tell himself to learn a specific language; he would tell himself to prioritize Adaptability over Habits. He admits to having “missed the boat” on certain leaps by sticking to old narratives for too long.

In a recession or a tech-led disruption, the first people let go are those who aren’t “helpful.” Mario’s advice is simple: be the person who is used to grinding, staying helpful, and evolving faster than the framework you are currently using.

Grounding and Legacy

Mario stays grounded through a “high-gravity” family life.

Despite managing global time zones and 25+ investments, he treats family time as the primary purpose of his work.

He workouts 3x a week with his partner—a ritual that serves as both a physical regime and a relationship anchor. He stays humble by opening X (formerly Twitter):

“You see everyone doing exciting stuff, and you realize it’s time to get back to work.”

If resources were unlimited, Mario would launch a Proprietary Data Powerhouse.

In a world where AI has scraped the entire “public” internet, the only remaining moat is private, high-fidelity data. He would hire 20 world-class journalists to go into the field and extract the “internal secrets” of the private markets, creating a data source that no LLM can replicate because the data doesn’t exist online.

How cool!

🔹 What you can steal

Mario’s approach can be articulated in 3 high-level tactical concepts:

1. The “Saturday Prototype” Rule: If you have an idea for a tool that would save your team 5 hours a week, don’t put it in a Jira ticket for next quarter. Use Cursor or Replit this Saturday to “vibe code” a proof of concept. If you can’t build a clickable version in 4 hours, your idea is too complex.

2. Audit Your Moat: Ask yourself: “Am I doing work that depends on a desk and a VPN?” If yes, you are competing with the entire world’s talent pool and AI. Find a way to tie your work to local compliance, physical assets, or high-trust relationships.

3. The Language Shift: Stop selling “services” (e.g., “I do SEO”) and start selling “Value Creation” (e.g., “I optimize the marketing-to-sales data bridge to increase EBIDTA”). Move your narrative from the How to the CFO’s bottom line.

   

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Mario Peshev is the “Engineer-Philosopher” we need in 2026 because he refuses to play the game of digital make-believe.

My conversation with him left me with a sharp realization: We are currently building Ferraris (AI agents) to drive on dirt roads (the physical and regulatory world).

If you use AI to do your job 40% faster, but the physical world (permits, construction, supply chains) doesn’t accelerate at the same rate, you haven’t created growth, you have only just created idle time. In a capitalist system, idle time without new revenue leads to one thing: commoditization.

If everyone is 40% more efficient, the market value of that work simply drops by 40%.

This is where Mario and I align most closely.

The “middle” is a dangerous place to be. If your job is a “desk job” that relies on general knowledge, you are competing against an LLM that has read the entire internet. Mario’s strategy of using AI to build highly specific, proprietary tools is a smart way to stay ahead.

The most contrarian takeaway from our talk was his “Legacy Project.”

While everyone else is trying to build the best prompt, Mario wants to hire journalists to find data that doesn’t exist online yet. In an age of infinite synthetic content, truth and proprietary data are the only currencies that won’t inflate to zero.

To survive the next decade, you have to build the proprietary data layer and the high-trust physical presence that makes the funnel irrelevant. If your value can be summed up in a prompt, you have already lost.

👀 Where to find more about Mario

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• DevRix - RevOps consulting

• Growth Shuttle - async advisory for SME executives

• Growth Shuttle Insider newsletter

• Mario’s Website

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

⚠ Check these links out

• I have shared a paper by Anthropic’s researchers Alex Tamkin and Judy Hanwen Shen (How AI impacts skill formation) in one of my recent LinkedIn posts. You can click the image below (and don’t forget to connect with me, I always appreciate it!!):

  

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy;

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with world-class operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

You are likely feeling the weight of the digital world: too much noise, too many buzzwords, and too few people willing to call out the obvious absurdities of modern business. That’s why I sat down with Tom Goodwin, one of the industry’s most influential, and deliberately contrarian, voices.

His philosophy is simple: most companies are built on flawed, historical assumptions, and they are simply not customer-centric.

Tom Goodwin is a highly sought-after writer, keynote speaker, and consultant.

Starting his career studying architecture and structural engineering, he spent a decade in major advertising agencies (including a role in “amateur futurism” sparked by a Nokia client) before setting up his own ventures. He is known for his ability to synthesize complex technological shifts into simple, provocative truths, often challenging the dominant narratives in marketing, technology, and organizational design.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Tom’s career path was less a straight line and more a series of accidental shifts driven by innate curiosity… He started in structural engineering and architecture, a logical choice for someone that “always had a very curious mind.” When he graduated, he failed culturally in interviews for the typical high-status paths like investment banking and management consulting.

“I would look around the room and I would look at the people there, and I remember thinking these were not people that I would enjoy spending time with.”

He was advised to work in advertising, an industry he had never considered, and he quickly found his footing. Over time, his role became the one nobody else wanted: “I got given more and more weird jobs. So, my jobs became about doing the things that no one else knew how to do.”

The turning point was a huge miss. Frustrated that the best ideas developed for clients were outside the CMO’s power to execute, he naively left advertising to set up a consultancy called Tomorrow. It was focused on ambitious problem-solving for senior executives but “failed spectacularly” due to a lack of clients and credibility.

His core belief that emerged from this:

Curiosity is the engine, but public reputation is the fuel.

His writing, which started as a side-muscle on sites like Quora, gave him the credibility to return to the industry as a sought-after voice, transforming failure into a powerful new foundation for his personal brand.

Edge

Tom’s unique edge is his commitment to rethinking assumptions, a practice he defines as the opposite of contrarianism.

His writing process is informal, fueled by the “irritation” he feels when he hears a common industry claim that he knows to be ridiculous (e.g., “no one watches TV anymore”). He deliberately avoids a rigid framework for the world to maintain an open perspective.

His work consistently centers on a critique of what he calls “company-centricity.”

“The opposite of customer centricity is being ‘company centric’... rooted in the industrial revolution’s focus on manufacturing efficiency, repetition, and internal KPIs.”

He argues that most companies treat customers with “disregard,” prioritizing internal process over the customer experience.

This explains why something as simple as buying a printer is an impossible task of navigating confusing nomenclature like “LFP 54 ZJ” vs. “LFP 93 PFQ.”

In his work, he sees himself as the necessary voice of the customer, introducing possibilities and imagination beyond a company’s past performance.

He collects his stimulus informally (e.g., voice notes while walking his dog, photos of signs, scribbles in a physical notepad) then waits for the ideas to “coagulate together” to form an article.

Future

When discussing AI, Tom affirms its transformative potential, but cautions that it’s currently “extremely badly defined.”

He insists that its adoption will follow three stages, moving from simple acceleration to true transformation:

1. Easier and Faster (Next 2 Years): AI will be used to make small parts of existing jobs and processes faster and cheaper.

2. Better (2–4 Years): Companies will “re-orchestrate how they work,” restructuring and improving processes and software to achieve better ERP systems or different ways of handling invoices.

3. Different (Long-term): This stage involves a fundamental rethinking where processes are eliminated entirely. “Maybe we won’t send invoices anymore. Maybe people won’t be on as many meetings.”

He stresses that companies must not delay: every company needs to develop a formal AI strategy through a Global Head of AI or a task force, and every individual must be actively experimenting with the technology.

When asked for advice to his 19-year-old self, he gave a simple, profound prescription for overcoming the paralysis of a curious mind:

“Think a little bit less and do a little bit more.”

Grounding and Legacy

Tom is not a man of formal rituals, but rather a “way of being.”

This includes actively seeking out things that make him uncomfortable, buying magazines he normally wouldn’t, and doing a lot of writing daily. This lack of rigid routine is itself a reflection of his philosophy: a desire to maintain an open perspective and continuously challenge his own assumptions.

If given unlimited time and resources for a project outside his current work, Tom would tackle the problem of environment and well-being.

He would love to design and build “contemporary homes that are somewhat affordable and somewhat modular,” based on his belief that a healthy, green living space is “almost like a human right.”

This ambition reflects his core desire to be a voice for what the customer (or the citizen, in this case) truly needs, blending his initial roots in design and engineering with his developed passion for human-centered problem-solving.

🔹 What you can steal

Tom Goodwin’s approach is a toolkit for action in a confusing world. I will try to dissect it in three steps:

1. Start with Irritation: Instead of waiting for a breakthrough idea, let your writing or problem-solving process be fueled by a clear, specific annoyance at a common, lazy industry claim. Use that energy to question the status quo.

2. Be the Voice of the Customer: When reviewing any internal process or product, ask yourself: Where are we being company-centric? Look for the equivalent of a confusing printer name or a frustrating check-in process. That gap is where your real value lies.

3. Action over Analysis: If you find yourself in the same analysis loop, stop. Take Tom’s advice and “think a little bit less and do a little bit more.”

   Action, even small, imperfect action, creates momentum and prevents the stagnation of over-thinking.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Tom’s true gift is his structural mind - honed by engineering - applied to creative problems. He doesn’t critique per se, he dissects the faulty wiring of organizational systems.

While Tom is skeptical that curiosity can be trained from scratch, he stresses it must be nurtured. Modern life, routine, and corporate dogma all work to “beat curiosity out of people”, so I agree that a good way to maintain it is to seek out what makes you uncomfortable and consume diverse, contradictory information to keep the muscle alive.

The most important takeaway, I believe, is this: Tom has built a career not on finding the “right” answers, but on consistently asking the better questions. Your future as a thought leader and a successful professional is not about what you know, but about your willingness to say: Wait a minute, I don’t think that’s true.

Most companies confuse being customer-responsive with being customer-obsessed.

They design processes to respond to immediate issues and feedback, but they fail to build a system where the customer’s logic is the primary source of design, not the secondary correctional input. This leads to the baffling, frustrating products and processes we all experience daily, where a company’s inability to change is packaged as “just how things are.”

Tom has the sharpest eye to detect such inconsistencies.

👀 Where to find more about Tom

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• Nowism newsletter

• Tom’s book: Digital Darwinism: Surviving the New Age of Business Disruption

• Tom’s Website

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

⚠ Check these links out

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy;

• One of my recent posts on LinkedIn did a lot of views as I offered my views on how I think banks will have to change in the AI era. You may be interested:

  

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with world-class operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

Imagine betting over 50% of your personal portfolio on a single, highly-controversial stock, only to see it crater… and then double down.

That is the philosophy of Arnaldo (Arny) Trezzi, a contrarian investor (and a fellow Italian) who sees market panic as his primary hunting ground.

Arny’s entire investment framework is built on a single, surprising claim: The obsession you develop for a company is your single greatest competitive advantage.

He believes traditional financial analysts are often “fools” for relying solely on quantitative models, missing the fundamental edge that comes from understanding a business’s culture, leadership, and underlying narrative better than 99% of the market.

By the way, using NotebookLM I have created a 4-minute video that visually explains the key concepts of my conversation with Arny: have a look!

Arny Trezzi is an independent investor and the founder of popular newsletters Palantir Bullets (focused exclusively on Palantir) and Arny Trezzi (more recent, covering other high-conviction theses). With a background in Investment Banking and as a generalist equity analyst at the start of his career, he is an admitted obsessive-compulsive who operates outside the traditional fund structure, focusing on a few companies he knows so well he can preemptively debunk every bear case.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Arny began his academic journey in Italy studying Economics and Commerce, later switching to Banking and Finance, driven by a fascination with the psychological component of the stock market: the panic, the emotion, and the opportunities that arise when others are losing their calm.

The major turning point came after his undergraduate degree when he read The Intelligent Investor. The book shifted his focus away from portfolio management and quantitative risk models toward an entrepreneurial approach to investing, rooted in deep business analysis - a skill he realized he sorely lacked despite graduating with honors.

A key failure that cemented his conviction was his attempt to open an investment holding company with a partner, which failed due to “personal incompatibilities.” This left him unemployed with a resume that traditional financial institutions viewed as too rebellious.

When COVID hit, freezing hiring, he faced a fork in the road.

Instead of despairing, he chose to reorient himself during the market crash, seeing the widespread fear as an opportunity to test his newfound conviction by aggressively buying into companies like Amadeus and Apple, whose stocks were hit by short term narratives.

The belief that emerged from these experiences is that true Margin of Safety is not just a mathematical concept but an informational asymmetry you create. He focuses maniacally on “capturing the asymmetry” between the depressed or misunderstood market narrative and the positive reality of the underlying business.

Edge

Arny’s investment style is defined by an obsession with depth over breadth.

He fundamentally rejects the structured process of a traditional fund manager, which aims to find a good idea. Instead, he starts with a few select companies he is passionate about and wants to study - his “basket of high-quality eggs.” His goal is to deepen his “circle of competence” to the point where he can confidently say he is in the “top 1 percentile of business understanding” for those companies.

His philosophy was forged in his investment in Palantir, an obsession that still constitutes over 50% of his portfolio and generated him over 20x return in three years. He initially heard of Palantir when it was private but went “all in” when the stock dropped below $10 amidst peak pessimism. He shared his research online, receiving torrents of criticism, which he used as fuel.

“You’ve truly understood a company when you are able to take every possible criticism and, rationally and calmly, demonstrate how that criticism is actually a non-existent point.”

For Arny, this was a moment of “unhuman asymmetry.”

He had accumulated so many hours of study that he saw the positive, accelerating developments in the business that the market narrative was completely missing. He wasn’t looking for a quick flip: he was accumulating conviction to hold through volatility.

His approach has succeeded in finding value in both Palantir and Robinhood , companies where the stock was depressed despite strong underlying business developments and culture.

Robinhood, Arny’s second biggest position after a 10x return, followed a similar initial recipe: loved by customers, hated by Wall Street. Arny believes his concentrated approach could be expanded to private markets, where he invested as an angel investor in Pillar, vertical SaaS for Real Estate, and participated in the latest round of Bending Spoons, the Italian first decacorn.

However, he emphasizes the limit of quantitative models: while the DCF model is useful for “testing your awareness,” it must never be mistaken for reality (citing his early mistake with Tesla , which he recognized as a powerful business but felt was “unbuyable” based on his rigid model).

He must also always be aware of the Bear Case, but only invests when he is certain the risks are already incorporated into the price.

“I don’t invest in 100,000 things. I take a basket, a few eggs that I know are of maximum quality, and I follow them like a maniac.”

Future

Arny views the explosion of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) as a major filter for the investment world. He believes LLMs are just a tool that can facilitate counter-thesis research, but they don’t change his structural approach.

Arny’s investment thesis on Palantir is centered on the concept of Ontology. He sees Palantir not as a services company, but as a product company that used 20 years of services experience to build the world’s most powerful software platform.

His key prediction is: Palantir is the “operating system for using AI” in the enterprise, and the LLMs themselves are a commodity (the fuel). The real value is Palantir’s Ontology, which provides a holistic, digital twin understanding of the entire company, turning all the outputs of the LLMs into actionable knowledge that compounds within the firm.

He is concerned that LLMs will create a “false sense of confidence,” allowing people to generate investment theses in three hours instead of two weeks.

This shortcut is dangerous because, in his view, it takes a month to truly start understanding a company, and months more for those ideas to “ferment” and overcome confirmation bias.

Grounding and Legacy

Arny’s primary practice for mental clarity is intense physical exercise - specifically, calisthenics 2-3 times a week, and most crucially, “pushing himself to the limit in the mountains” (he is based near the Italian city of Lecco). He finds that this intense physical necessity forces his mind out of negative thought loops and restores the mental lucidity he needs as an investor.

Asked what project he would launch with unlimited time and resources, Arny admits he is currently in a position where the financial urgency is gone.

His priority has shifted to the personal realm: figuring out how to structure his life and compound value outside of just the financial channel.

This answer reflects his philosophy that once a certain financial threshold is crossed, the true value moves to time and experiences.

He notes the importance of “compounding in real life” and ensuring a stable personal foundation before tackling large entrepreneurial endeavors, citing the need to have a “fixed life” to be able to fully engage in an entrepreneurial “new leg.”

🔹 What you can steal

Arnaldo Trezzi’s philosophy offers powerful, actionable lessons for investors and business people alike. Let me summarize my key take-aways:

1. Inverse Your Research Framework: Stop trying to find the best idea by following a structured process. Instead, choose the two or three companies you are genuinely passionate about and whose developments you are excited to follow. Let your passion dictate your focus; the competence will follow.

2. Analyze the CEO and Culture Before the Numbers: Do not lead with the spreadsheet. Focus on understanding the CEO and the company culture first: Arny has met Palantir employees who accepted substantial pay cuts to work there (he also bumped into Alex Karp a couple of times in some Palantir events in the USA). Culture determines success, business translates culture into numbers, and numbers are the last piece of the puzzle .

3. Become Your Own Bear Case: Use criticism not as an attack, but as a roadmap. Actively seek out the strongest counter-arguments against your thesis. You must be able to rationally and calmly dismantle every single one to achieve true conviction and be confident that the risks are already incorporated into the stock price.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Arny is not a value investor in the traditional sense. He is an Information Arbitrageur.

In my view, his “obsession” is simply the modern-day moat for a solo investor. In a world saturated with financial data and models, the only way to gain a true informational edge is through sheer, cumulative time spent on a single target. He has successfully taken the consultant’s lens - prioritizing leadership, culture, and holistic business process (the Ontology) - and applied it to generate alpha where quantitative analysts, who are paid to look backward, fail.

The deepest takeaway is that your investment conviction is only as strong as the work you put in to defeat the bear case. If you let an LLM write your thesis in three hours, your conviction will evaporate in three minutes when the market panics.

This is true in investing, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with an equivalent analogy in your professional field of play: it won’t take long.

The greatest risk in the age of AI isn’t not using the new tools, but using them to substitute the important, time-intensive process of truly digesting a company.

👀 Where to find more about Arny

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• Palantir Bullets newsletter

• Arny Trezzi newsletter

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed above are current as of the date of this document and are subject to change without notice. Materials referenced above will be provided for educational purposes only. None of the above will include investment advice, a recommendation or an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities or investment products.

⚠ Check these links out

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australia and Italy;

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with world-class operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

Brian O’Connor thought he understood how business worked.

Six years in Deloitte. Ops boot camps. Growth and corporate strategy inside Monitor. Multi-hundred-million-dollar programs where a single slide could move a market.

Then a partner told him he had “single-handedly turned around” a $200M+ Paycheck Protection Program project… and handed him a gift card.

That was the moment the glitch appeared in the matrix.

“If I can create this much value under someone else’s logo,” he thought, “I need to know what happens if I try to capture even one percent of that for myself.”

Today Brian is a fully nomadic founder and operator. He runs a recruiting and staffing agency that places remote talent into US businesses, with 115+ placements and a pipeline that throws up 3,000 applicants per role. He and his partner have already built an AI recruiter that screens and interviews candidates, and they are now pushing into “AI After Dark” – AI customer support that takes over when the human clock hits 5pm.

It took some courage: Brian walked away from a high-margin solo CMO / advisory business that was making him very good money, to build a harder, lower-margin, more operationally painful agency… because he cannot stand living in the “advisor only” layer. He wants to build, not just point.

And he thinks most white-collar careers are far riskier than people want to admit in the age of AI.

Origin Story

Brian Fernando O’Connor Gonzalo Rubio grew up in Boston, in a Latin household with a banker father.

Dad was not just “in finance”, he used to talk strategy, balance sheets and deals at the dinner table. Brian jokes that he had corporate finance piped into the womb.

He was addicted to business early: high school and college were already full of small startup attempts. The obsession was there, the direction less so…

His first “real” job was in commercial banking: he thought he was going into investment banking because he did not fully understand the difference (Wolf of Wall Street fantasies, commercial banking reality).

From there he joined GE Capital, underwriting aircraft debt and working through a rigorous finance training program, aiming to sell aircraft debt and leasing. When GE Capital was sold, the program vanished and so did the job, and that forced a choice.

On one side: an investment bank interview in a dingy office with water literally dripping from the ceiling, two computers with no mouse, and an interviewer asking, “How do you feel about sleeping under your desk?”

On the other side: a Deloitte floor full of bright lights, color, twenty-somethings solving problems together. The feeling that “if you are smart and have a personality, you go here.”

He chose Deloitte.

The first three years were an operations boot camp: target operating models, big transformations, messy execution, the next three became a strategy boot camp: growth, corporate and competitive strategy inside Monitor. Brian came out with a very particular blend: half “how to run a business,” half “how to grow a business.”

The turning point, though, was not a promotion. It was that PPP project during COVID.

A major US bank was failing to get PPP loans out the door, and Deloitte’s name was on the line. The project was on fire, so Brian was parachuted in as “the strategist who can actually turn things around.”

They fixed it. Hundreds of people on the project. At the end, the partner pulled him aside and said: “Brian, you single-handedly turned this project around. Thank you.”

Then handed him a gift card. The cognitive dissonance did the rest…

He did not suddenly become “confident.” He was already overconfident by his own admission, but what changed was the question in his head:

If I can create this much value in someone else’s system… can I do it outside the umbrella? Or am I only valuable with a big logo behind me?

That question has been driving him ever since.

Edge

Brian’s edge is simple to say and hard to live:

He is obsessed with solving hard problems, not with preserving his comfort zone or maximizing short-term margin.

He believed, naively but usefully, that if he could operate inside giant complex organizations, then small businesses would be easier.

“These companies are so complex, they must be the hardest things to build,” he thought. “If I can do this, a small business must be easy, right??”

Wrong.

He discovered that his “how to run a business” skills translated well. Systematizing processes, designing operating models, thinking in people / process / tech – that stuff ported nicely.

His “how to grow a business” skills did not translate at all.

In big-corp strategy, growth questions sound like:

• “Do we launch an investment bank in Brazil?”

• “Which products do we roll out in Mexico?”

• “Do we build or buy?”

You think like an investor. You allocate capital. You speak in markets, curves and scenarios.

In a small business, growth sounds like:

• “How do we get someone to click this ad?”

• “How do we build the first funnel that actually converts?”

• “Which channel do we test this week with fifty bucks?”

You think like a scientist in a lab. You run experiments. You learn tactics that no boardroom ever mentions.

Brian discovered he knew nothing about that layer and had to learn from zero.

He also learned how deeply “brand permission” matters. Strategy is interesting to founders only after they hit roughly eight figures. Before that, they do not want your slide about UBS; they want someone who can get leads in the door. His early positioning as “growth strategist” did not resonate. To many small businesses, “strategy” is a luxury item.

In parallel, he accidentally built a high-margin solo business: CMO-style advisory for companies big enough to care about proper marketing systems. Three clients, ten hours a week each, $10k–$20k per month per client, and the rest of the time spent on marketing and content. Very good money for a very light calendar!

But it did not scratch the itch. He wanted to build something real, with people, processes, tooling, and compounding assets, so he leaned into the emerging second business: a recruiting and staffing agency that helped companies find remote talent – customer support, customer success, project managers, and so on. Lower margins. Much more operational headache. Far more scalable. And far more satisfying to him.

The agency now gets ~3,000 applicants per role, has placed 115+ people, and is layering AI across the funnel: from resume screening to an AI interviewer that speaks with candidates and shortlists them.

His girlfriend (and co-founder) is the CTO and builds the AI systems. Brian designs the systems and the offers and then sells them.

He is consciously choosing the harder route.

“If I wanted to make the most money, I would focus on the CMO work. But I had to know if I can build, not just advise. I am making less money doing this than I did in marketing, and I still do not regret it.”

Where does this approach hit limits?

When you confuse mental models from phase three (big corporates, maintain and optimize) with phase one (find product market fit). When you start by building the website instead of talking to the customer. When you assume the “smart slide” is enough, instead of learning how to write a brutal, ugly ad that actually converts.

Future

Brian sees AI not as magic, but as a pipeline with 3 stages:

1. Human takes real-world context and asks the AI a question.

2. AI produces an answer.

3. Human verifies, interprets and connects that answer back into the real world.

AI will dominate stage two. Stage one and three are where humans still matter. Which means the “translation layer” job becomes even more important.

That is the same job the best consultants already do.

He remembers a classic boardroom scene in a big bank during one of his projects. Fifteen executives shouting across the table. Everyone talking past each other. A partner walks up to the whiteboard, draws three boxes, and says:

“You are all talking about this. We actually need to solve this.”

Silence. Alignment. Movement.

The value is not the slide! It is the ability to name the real problem.

Brian’s view is that banking executives who are brilliant at credit cards business but average at problem framing will ask AI the wrong question, in the wrong way, at the wrong time. They will get answers that are precise, fast, and useless.

Consultants are, in his words, the translation layer between subject-matter experts and clarity. And between messy organizational politics and clean decisions.

He sees AI accelerating execution work in consulting – research, modelling, standard analysis – but not replacing the framing and synthesis. If anything, the bar goes up: when research becomes cheaper, you run more tests, you validate more options, and the expectation for quality rises.

On white-collar work more broadly, he is blunt. He likes the framing of AI as “Amplified Intelligence”:

If you are already sharp and high agency, this is an incredible time. The tools give you more leverage than ever. The gap between thought and reality shrinks. You can think something in the morning and have a working version in the afternoon.

If you are average, AI will make you average at scale.

If you are bad at what you do, you are finished.

He also thinks the classic “safe” corporate path is much riskier than it used to be: roles that felt solid can dissolve under you.

If he had to advise his younger self, he would not say “skip college” in some generic hustle-porn way (he knows he needed structure and consulting to learn how to problem solve), but if the goal was entrepreneurship, he would not tell 20-year-old Brian to “go start something from scratch.”

He would tell him to go and work for one rock-star entrepreneur. Hitch himself to someone exceptional, learn at high compression, and build skills, network and resources before striking out.

Grounding and Legacy

Brian’s lifestyle looks chaotic from the outside: fully nomadic, new country every one to two months, no fixed home base, Mexico, Rome, Sicily, Sydney, Tokyo are all just coordinates in a calendar.

His day, however, is brutally simple.

• He wakes up as early as he can.

• He gets to work as fast as he can.

• He works until his energy drops.

• Then he walks, lifts, or stares at a problem until he finds a way through.

• Then he gets back to work.

He is not trying to minimize working hours. He is trying to maximize time spent wrestling with hard problems.

He uses the gym as a 3pm reset button. When his output drops, he moves his body to recharge his brain. He walks to consolidate ideas. He uses music intentionally as a state-changing tool: high-energy when he needs to push, focus tracks or binaural beats when he needs to dive deep.

At night he reads in Italian until he falls asleep, because he plans to go back to Rome and actually hold his own at the dinner table.

He jokes about solving problems in his sleep, but beneath the joke is a serious pattern: his life is built around mental challenge, and the geography is just a backdrop.

When asked what he would do with unlimited time and unlimited resources (a question I always like to float), he does not say “start a fund” or “buy a sports team.”

He wants to attack a hard social problem with the same caliber of talent that currently swirls around hedge funds and big tech.

Violence in South Side Chicago. Food deserts and hunger. Civic problems that have chewed through committees and foundations for decades.

What bothers him is not the lack of money, but the lack of concentrated IQ and problem-solving intensity dedicated to these issues. He would like to bring a band of killers together (the smartest operators and problem solvers he knows) and aim them at one of these problems until it cracks.

He is self-aware enough to know he is not ready yet. He wants more skills, more network, more reps before he jumps in, but the direction of travel is clear: build real businesses now, so he can redirect those muscles later to something beyond his own bank account.

🔹 What you can steal

Treat yourself as the translation layer.

Your job is not to worship AI’s output. Your job is to take messy, contradictory real-world context, compress it into the right question, feed that into the machine, and then judge the answer against reality. Start every AI prompt with “What is the real problem here?” rather than “What can this tool do?”

Know which game you are playing.

Are you in phase one (find product market fit), phase two (scale what works), or phase three (maintain and optimize)? In phase one, you are a scientist in the lab, running cheap experiments and learning tactics. In phase three, you are an investor allocating resources.

Build at least one thing where the work compounds.

Advisory work is fine. It pays well. But copy Brian and choose at least one arena where you are building a system, a product, or an asset that you can improve every day and stand on tomorrow. Even if it is harder. Especially if it is harder. That is where your edge forms.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

I like people who are slightly wrong first and then relentlessly right later…

Brian misjudged how hard small businesses are. He assumed a smaller version of a thing must be easier. He discovered that small business is a different physics, not a different scale.

He also refused to stay where life was maximally comfortable. He had a sweet setup as a high-margin advisor with light hours and good cash, and voluntarily walked into the operational meat grinder of an agency because he wanted to build something that exists when he is not on the call.

His edge is not “Deloitte background plus Spanish plus nomadic Instagram life.” His edge is the willingness to keep putting himself in rooms where he is under-skilled for the problem and then grind until he is not.

On AI and consulting, he lands very close to my own view.

Consultants who behave like deterministic machines are dead. Analysts who think their job is “running the template” are dead. The people who survive are the ones who can look at a room full of executives, a heap of data and a manic AI assistant and say:

“No. The real question is this.”

The more AI we get, the more that skill matters.

If you take one idea from Brian, let it be this: in a world of amplified intelligence, the only safe seat is at the problem-framing layer. Everything else can, and will, be automated, arbitraged or annihilated.

The rest is commentary.

👀 Where to find more about Brian

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• TalentHQ - Brian’s resourcing and recruitment agency

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

⚠ Check these links out

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australian and Italy;

• I recently met with , writer of the newsletter, for a long chat on a bunch of topics, from parenthood to career. If you are interested, have a look at the post!

  Decks and Diapers

  The Coffee Chat (#102)

  Welcome to the new subscribers who have joined us since the last post. Today this email is going out to 2,035 amazing individuals…

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  3 months ago · 2 likes · 4 comments · Rashi

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

Venture capital looks glamorous until you notice the people doing the real work: the ones who do not confuse power with wisdom.

Tak Lo is one of those people.

From the U.S. Army into defense consulting, then a MBA at London Business School, Techstars London to the Zeroth AI accelerator, to then end up running multiple funds across AI and crypto, and finally working as a teacher of kids and MBAs.

The resume is long, and the philosophy is sharper.

The contrarian hook for you: Tak treats founders not as “customers,” but as assets you must steward exceptionally well, while recognizing the actual customer is the LP. And he believes the best VC help is 1% well-timed framing… and 99% getting out of the way.

He is, in his words, a financier and a teacher. That pairing, capital allocation with ethical scaffolding, turns out to be rare, and useful.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Born in Hong Kong, raised across the U.S. and Asia, Tak started in the U.S. Army, shifted into defence consulting, then jumped the fence into startups via LBS and Techstars.

The Army gave him discipline and a blueprint for leadership under uncertainty; consulting gave him the habit of turning chaos into frameworks.

The turning point was not a single blow-up but a slow realization: power warps judgement. In venture, lines blur at late dinners, hot rounds, thirsty egos. Without boundaries, the job will bend your ethics and your calendar until both snap.

That is when he chose a different posture: measured, coach-like, harder to corrupt.

The belief that stuck: intellectual work > interference.

You do not rescue entrepreneurs by becoming their part-time COO. You strengthen them by helping them see, decide, and own.

Edge

Tak’s edge is deceptively simple: allocate capital; allocate attention even more carefully.

He optimizes for two scarce resources in startups:

1. founder focus;

2. ethical clarity.

The first is protected by eliminating performative “value-add”, the second is protected by hard personal rules about time, settings, and power dynamics.

He is blunt about it: the startup founder is not the customer. The LPs who supply capital are. The founder is the asset (the horse you train, care for, and keep healthy) because without that, there is no return.

Confusing the two creates distorted behavior: overhelping, overpromising, or worse, forgetting who actually pays the bills.

His second differentiator is a refusal to operate.

Many VCs drift into acting like part-time executives. For Tak, that is a trap.

99% of the time, the right move is to get out of the way. The 1% is about timing: a frame at the right moment, a push when a founder is on the cusp, an introduction that shifts probability. He tells the story of a peer who held weekly check-ins lasting only 15 minutes, asking two questions: “Did you move the needle?” and “What were your 10x decisions?”

That is the essence of his method: cut through the noise, surface what matters, and walk away.

The discipline comes from the Army (“calm in the fog of war”) and consulting (“frameworks that simplify the mess”). The empathy comes from coaching over a hundred founders across geographies and industries.

His edge is not sector depth, but breadth, resilience, and consistency. He is not the guy who claims to know SaaS sales better than you; he is the guy who will stand in your corner when your world is falling apart, unshaken, asking sharper questions than you dare ask yourself.

Where it succeeds: with resilient CEOs who need a steady hand and a reframed question, not an extra operator in the room.

Where it fails: in companies where the business model itself needs surgery. Tak will not be your interim CRO, and he is fine with that.

Future

On AI, Tak is boring in the best way: ubiquity beats hype. Like the calculator and the PC, AI will be everywhere, but the marginal impact is bigger, faster, and riskier.

He compares it to the printing press and the computer, but with one critical difference: the slope of change is steeper. Generative AI is “the Internet’s knowledge at your command.”

That is power, and danger.

What worries him is not the technology but how humans use it. He teaches AI at schools and universities, and even to his kids’ classmates. His focus is on helping young people learn how to work with AI without outsourcing their thinking to it.

“The Economist wrote that Gen Z can’t think without AI,” he says. “That is the danger. If kids start every question with, ‘Let’s see what AI says,’ then they stop exercising their own mental muscles.”

He argues for installing ethical principles and approaches early. Just as it took 15 years to regulate social media, we cannot afford to sleepwalk into the same mistakes with AI. His mission is to buffer kids’ minds so they can harness AI, but with skepticism, patience, and sovereignty.

Who thrives: operators who can hold two truths at once: use AI relentlessly, but retain independent thinking.

Who disappears: those who abdicate all cognition to prompts.

I always ask a question to my guests. What would you suggest to your younger self? Tak answer is remarkably cool: be ferocious on the daily, but relaxed on the arc.

“Bring effort daily. Zoom out monthly. Let it all work out.” He borrows from football to illustrate: players cut at 12 who rejoin the team at 25, because grit plus time eventually repays.

His own career, jagged as it looks, is proof of that rhythm.

Grounding and Legacy

Sundays in the Lo household are sacred: no nanny and no plans! Boredom is intentional.

There is rugby in the morning, board games, and an Italian kitchen in the afternoon: pomodoro (tomato sauce, for the uninitiated) simmering, guanciale on standby, baked pasta that would pass in Palermo.

Weeknights aim for family dinner, debriefs of high/low moments, and the kind of repetition kids turn into roots.

If Tak had unlimited time and capital, he is very clear on what he would do. He would own a sports team, either an innovative new-sport franchise or a community club in Italy!

Not just for football. For community as a practice: showing up, building belonging, earning dinners. This is the through-line: teach, anchor, compound.

Wealth as stewardship plus power with boundaries.

🔹 What you can steal

First, adopt the 15-minute needle test.

Weekly, ask yourself or your team: “What truly moved the needle? What were our 10x decisions?” Then stop talking. If you cannot name them, you did not have them.

Second, separate customer from asset in your world.

Who actually pays you? Who must be stewarded? Treat both with respect, but optimize for the right one. That single clarification eliminates half of your political confusion.

Third, install ethical guardrails before you need them.

Decide in advance which meetings you will not take, which hours you will not cross, which behaviors trigger a hard stop. Boundaries are easier to keep when they are written, not improvised.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Tak’s edge is restraint with teeth.

In a scene addicted to hands-on meddling and “value-add performance”, he chooses calm framing, hard triage, and moral hygiene.

It resonates with my own view of leverage: real leverage is removing noise, not adding interventions (when in doubt, always go via negativa).

What I find powerful is how his approach in venture capital mirrors what good consultants do in boardrooms. The best consultants do not try to run the client’s business for them. They frame problems sharply, and leave the ownership where it belongs. Tak has simply carried that operating logic into venture.

The other thread worth noting is his obsession with teaching. Whether AI to 10-year-olds or frameworks to CEOs, the through-line is the same: give people mental frameworks, not answers. That is rare in finance, an industry that often rewards opacity. His edge is to make things clearer, not more complex.

There is also something refreshing about his candor on ethics. Many investors talk about returns, few talk about self-awareness at 2am dinners. Tak does. In a field that excuses questionable behavior in the name of deal flow, that matters. He is right: without hard boundaries, power will warp even the most principled operator.

For me, the takeaway is important: the more powerful your tools (capital, AI, title), the more disciplined your boundaries must be. Otherwise the tool starts using you.

One thing I will take with me from the conversation with Tak is that, in a world racing to do more, the scarce advantage is the leader who knows exactly when not to touch the system, and can prove it with outcomes.

👀 Where to find more about Tak

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• The Automated newsletter

• Tak’s book: I, Leader: Leadership Philosophy from the Army and Startups for the Age of AI

• Website

If you enjoyed today’s conversation and read Consulting Intel, please do me a favor: share this post, spread the edge.

👋

⚠ Check these links out

• My first book Beyond Slides became a #1 Amazon Best Seller in the USA, UK, Australian and Italy;

• I had the opportunity to be an advanced reader for the upcoming book by my friend The Strategy Trap. He has done an excellent job at simplifying an otherwise complex subject, that people with decades of experience still do not understand. The book is well researched (which I like) and full of relatable stories. Follow and his newsletter !

  

• The Leaders Toolkit is a deck of 52 tools, frameworks and mental models to make you a better leader (use code CONSULTANT10 for 10% off);

• The Consulting Intel private Discord group with 250+ global members is where consultants meet to discuss and support each other (it’s free).

Big podcasts and large publications chase Bezos-level names who talk about strategy from 30,000 feet: it’s inspiring, yes, but useless if tomorrow you are walking into a meeting with your client and a deck to defend…

EDGE, a format by Consulting Intel, is where I sit down with operators, consultants, and investors working between business, tech, and AI… and where I distill what I learn in something you can read in ~7 minutes.

LFG! 🔥

If you have ever sat through a “strategic re-org” that felt like a very expensive reset button, this one is for you.

Mitch Morris argues you can build a company that never needs that ritual, not because everything gets fixed magically, but because you wire learning into the bones from day one.

That claim grabbed me.

I wanted a practitioner, not a theorist. Mitch has rebuilt universities’ tech stacks, shut down and sold companies, and spent decades in the weeds.

He is suspicious of performative acts, allergic to bureaucracy, and oddly serene about complexity, because he treats it as a system, not a story.

Here is the hook: three pillars to run any organization, a continuous loop that prevents periodic implosions, and a ruthless focus on throughput over optics.

If you lead a team, advise one, or aspire to, you will walk away with a lens you can deploy immediately, and a contrarian idea worth testing: perhaps re-orgs are a tax you pay for not iterating fast enough.

Set-up.

Mitch is a principal advisor at Conrad Alois, ex-CIO, serial founder (8 companies; 4 active), angel since ’98, adjunct professor at Cal State San Bernardino, and co-founder of Inkind Thrift, a thrift store and sustainability venture funding a local nonprofit foundation in Chino, California.

His thing: operational simplicity, continuous improvement from day one, and frameworks that actually work because they start from first principles.

Let’s jump into the conversation!

Origin Story

Mitch did the time in the trenches: PC technician to CIO, then founder.

Some wins, some shut-downs, one very expensive lesson in 1997 that cost him $50K to close. He says it taught him more than his MBA ever did. It also shaped a simple belief that runs through everything he does: operations rhyme across industries. The product changes, but the load-bearing processes do not.

That view translates into how he teaches.

He is the “unlearning” professor, taking students from tidy lecture-hall linearity to the confusing and chaotic execution.

Strategy, for him, is not a slide but a loop: start → learn → adjust → continue. If you do that from the beginning, you do not need yet another re-org at $10m, $50m, $250m, or whatever milestone. You just keep evolving the organism.

Edge

Two frameworks sit under his work: Foundational Thinking and the SIMPL method.

Foundational Thinking

At its core this is Mitch’s attempt to translate first‑principles thinking into the complex world of business operations.

Instead of treating strategy as a grand linear plan, he frames it as an iterative cycle: you start, you encounter friction, you adjust, you continue. That cycle is the foundation.

In practice, it means getting brutally clear about the problem at hand, naming the work that must be done, and breaking it into milestones that can be started immediately. Progress then becomes an act of disciplined iteration rather than waiting for a perfect plan.

His contention is subversive: if you wire this continuous learning process into the company from day zero, you do not need to periodically rip out and rebuild the organization at every growth stage. The re‑org, in his eyes, is a symptom of neglecting iteration.

Foundational Thinking demands humility (the willingness to admit you do not know everything upfront) and merciless follow‑through, because business will always expose new checkboxes that spawn more work.

The framework insists you move anyway, compounding small corrections rather than freezing for the illusion of certainty.

The SIMPL Method (Simple Innovation Management Practice for Leaders)

Not yet fully published, but the bones are clear. A CEO should have only three direct reports, mapped to three irreducible pillars:

1. Brand (including Sales & Marketing),

2. Operations (finance, tech, the plumbing),

3. Product/Service Delivery (even services treated like products).

Strip away the ornamental boxes, and design to reduce ambiguity. Build an organization that is “always sufficient and responsive.”

Where this gets interesting is failure.

Mitch does not pretend frameworks are autopilot. The failure mode is seldom the model but the manager.

Two firms, same product, can yield diverging outcomes because the executive’s judgement, appetite for reality, and willingness to loop fast are different. The work, then, is as human as it gets: establish a common language (“where are we, where do we want to be, what is the gap?”), reduce fear by making progress legible, and keep it moving.

He illustrated this with concrete stories at both ends of the spectrum.

On one side, a retail-service startup led by two brilliant scientists (a psychologist and a bioengineer) with almost no business acumen. They had ambition and budget, but no frame for how to start. Mitch broke it down into visible steps, forcing them to think five years ahead while still acting today.

On the other side, a $200m company where the CFO controlled five departments and choked the flow of information to the CEO. There, Mitch reframed the conversation for the board, built a common language, and mapped the gap between present state and desired future state.

Different scale, same playbook: create clarity, expose the gap, decompose the work, iterate. He is allergic to theater. He is addicted to throughput.

On specialist vs generalist, we sparred.

I argued specialists still need the same meta-skills (eg, framing, persuasion, translation). He agreed the market punishes narrow technicians who cannot explain or own consequences. He has seen too much of the cleanup work from “smart” specialists who yank one lever and break three others...

Future

We had to talk about AI.

Mitch’s view is blunt: it will vaporize the regurgitators. In SMB land, that is most of the “consulting/coaching” market, people who sell compiled internet advice. That tier becomes a commodity bot.

The winners - he believes - will be practitioners with real scars who can (1) query machines well, (2) fuse best-practice with belief, and (3) show up for implementation.

He predicts a return to old‑school consulting, with sleeves rolled up, embedded and accountable.

In his view, AI will wipe out the tier of advisors who simply recycle frameworks and produce decks, because clients will get that from machines at zero marginal cost. What cannot be automated is the credibility and stamina required to sit in the trench with a client and shepherd the execution. That is what old‑school meant: partners who did not just advise from the sidelines, but who carried risk, fixed the plumbing, and saw the plan through to impact.

If he were 22 today, he would join a boutique under a killer operator and learn by exposure, instead of spending three years buried in a 50-person workstream. He recalls that his own career accelerated because a mentor threw him into client meetings at 24, let him make mistakes, and forced him to own them in front of executives.

That exposure (ie, the apprenticeship model) is what he believes will matter even more in the AI era, when analysis and decks are commoditized.

Grounding and Legacy

Mitch spoke to me about the years he spent in martial arts (everything from Tai Chi to full‑contact MMA) and how those disciplines left him with injuries that now prevent sparring but gifted him something more enduring: the internal practices.

Daily meditation, slow intentional movement, and the focus on breath: these, he says, keep him grounded. The manual projects (fixing cars, laying tile, lifting weights) are not just hobbies but counterweights. In consulting and executive work, outcomes can take quarters or years; in manual labor, you see the result instantly.

That fast feedback loop is an antidote to the glacial pace of organizational change, and a reminder that progress can still be tangible, immediate, and personal.

If time and money were unlimited, he would build trade‑school‑style entrepreneurship schools where tuition doubles as seed capital and learning happens by shipping.

Mitch described a vision where students would pay $20,000, and instead of it being sunk tuition, that sum becomes their starting capital. The program would throw them into the act of building (not only theorizing) supported by mentors who had actually done it before. The school would combine the grit of a trade program with the creativity of a startup accelerator.

For Mitch, this is about access more than pedagogy. He wants people who believe entrepreneurship is “not for them” to experience that it is! It blends his philanthropic streak (already visible in his thrift‑store foundation model) with his obsession for practice over theory.

His ideal classroom is not a lecture hall but a workshop where students learn by risking, doing, failing, and adjusting in real time.

🔹 What you can steal

Ship your own Foundational Operating Loop.

Day one of any engagement:

Start by naming the present as it really is. Then name the desired state in words the board can actually repeat without jargon. Expose the gap between the two in plain daylight, and convert that gap into a visible worklist with owners and feedback cadence. Then move. Quick progress creates belief, and belief is the only currency that buys you the next lever.

Simplify your org lens to three pillars in discovery and exec comms: Brand, Ops, Product/Service. If an issue does not map to one, you are probably naming symptoms, not causes. This also kills vague debates. “Is this a sales problem?” becomes “Is this a Brand problem (positioning/pipe), an Ops problem (pricing/finance/tech), or a Product problem (quality/fit/cost-to-serve)?”

Treat soft barriers like any other risk, and operationalize everything: “What is the fear/assumption? Where are we now? Where do we need to be? What is the smallest action that tests the fear?” Put that in the tracker like you would a tech dependency. Humans move when the next step is real and safe.

And if you manage people: think of three directs as a feature. Anything you cannot place under Brand, Ops, Product is either duplication or drift.

🔹 Maurizio’s Take

Mitch’s edge is discipline.

Where many consultants try to dazzle with clever slides and intellectual fireworks, he insists on operational gravity, which is the force keeping the rocket on trajectory when the launch hype has faded.

That distinction is very important: novelty fades quickly in boardrooms, but discipline lasts for far longer.

His frameworks are not designed to impress but to survive in the complex realities he has lived through. They are useful only if they accelerate decision‑making, when managers are stuck between imperfect choices. In my reading, SIMPL and Foundational Thinking pass this test because they reduce degrees of freedom and remove options: in that reduction lies speed, clarity of execution, and resilience over the long haul.

The contrarian bit I loved: the claim that if you wire continuous improvement from day zero, you may never need the dramatic “new org design” performative acts.

That goes against the deeply embedded religion of the periodic re-org, where leaders perform a ritual reset to signal control or progress.

Mitch’s argument is more intelligent: most of those sweeping redesigns are nothing more than a very expensive way to admit you stopped learning along the way.

In his view, and it matches what I have seen, every “big-bang” transformation is a hidden tax on leadership attention and organizational trust, basically a giant detour that could have been avoided with smaller and more disciplined adjustments.

The cost is in money, momentum, morale, and credibility.

Continuous iteration may not be as glamorous, but it keeps the company alive and adaptive without the disruption exercise that eats years of progress.

👀 Where to find more about Mitch

• LinkedIn

• X (formerly Twitter)

• Foundational Thinking method

• The SIMPL method

• Conrad Alois

• Website

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