#27 Focus Creates Leverage
February 19th, 2026
Strategic GTM insights for Founders, CEOs, and Investors building AI-driven tech businesses powered by recurring revenue.
Real stories, proven frameworks, and a mindset for healthy, scalable growth.
Manually curated by Luigi Mallardo.
Welcome to the first edition of 2026.
If there is a recurring theme in the conversations I’ve had with founders recently, it’s the tension between ambition and focus.
In 2026, AI has lowered the barrier to build anything.
Which makes the temptation to build everything higher than ever.
But scale isn’t built on infinite optionality. It’s built on sequencing.
The companies winning right now are the ones making the uncomfortable decision to narrow their battlefield before they expand it.
Let’s dive in.
🧠 My Work
The Focus Paradox: Why Reducing Market Optionality Increased Exit Value
Startups are addicted to optionality. We tell ourselves: “If I narrow my focus, I trap my company in a small market.” But in crowded B2B SaaS markets, “wide” is where startups go to die.
A few days ago, I sat down with Greg Head on the Practical Founders podcast to deconstruct the journey we built at Woffu and planned a strategic exit to Visma. We didn’t chase unicorn metrics; we made a series of uncomfortable decisions to reduce our market optionality.
The result?
We increased our business optionality.
In my latest article, I break down the exact blueprint behind that paradox:
The Sequencing Mindset: Using today’s traction to fund tomorrow’s bets.
The 80/20 Rule: How to allocate resources between your Core ICP and structured experiments.
The Exit Reality: Why acquirers pay for predictability, not potential.
👉 [Read the full article here]
🎧 [Listen to the full podcast episode here]
Beyond my own piece, the same focus vs diffusion dynamic is playing out across industries.
🌍 SaaSification of Industries
The SaaSification of consumer platforms continues.
Meta is testing premium subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, bundling AI agents and advanced features. Freemium core, paid upgrades, AI as usage-based value. This is SaaS go-to-market logic, applied at consumer scale. Link.
The billable hour is dying in advertising.
As AI compresses production costs, cost-plus margins collapse. Monks is moving 25% of revenue to subscriptions. Advertising agencies are learning what SaaS learned years ago: recurring value beats billing time. Link.
📈 SaaS Market Moves
SaaS Pricing Is in Constant Motion. And That’s the Signal.
In 2025, top SaaS companies made 1,800 pricing changes. Credits, rebundling, hybrid models. Pricing isn’t broken. Static pricing is. Teams that treat pricing as a continuous GTM lever adapt faster than those treating it as finance hygiene. Link.
🤖 AI, Agents & Robots
Enterprise is now the real growth engine for AI
Sam Altman confirmed that Enterprise growth is outpacing consumer growth at OpenAI. Reliable revenue in AI is being built in B2B, not on consumer hype. Link to the interview.
AI Is Failing at the Basics
56% of CEOs report zero returns from AI. The issue isn’t the tech. It’s the fundamentals: clean data, structured processes, governance. AI doesn’t fix broken execution. It exposes it faster. Link.
Death of Software? Not even close.
AI doesn’t kill software. It raises the bar. As Andreessen Horowitz puts it:
AI changes what we build and who builds it. Not how much needs to be built.
Every tech wave that was supposed to “kill” something actually made it bigger. This one will too. Link.
Humanoid Robots Are Leaving the Lab.
Hyundai aims for 30,000 Atlas robots per year in production lines by 2028. Physical AI is shifting from hardware experiments to scalable human-robot operations in real factories. Link.
🚀 Raising Stars
OpenClaw → OpenAI
Europe built it. OpenAI hired the builder. Not brain drain. Leverage gravity. Talent follows scale, compute, and distribution. Link.
👔 GTM Leadership Lessons
OpenAI isn’t scaling by selling AI features.
They’re aligning pricing, packaging, and distribution to how intelligence is actually used, and letting revenue follow value. Worth reading how their CFO frames monetization. Link.
Hands-on at $330M ARR
Carles Reina scaled GTM at ElevenLabs from $0 to $330M ARR in 3 years. At $300M+, he is still running pipeline reviews, doing outbound, and staying close to deals. GTM leadership is not about managing managers. It’s about owning revenue reality. If you step back from the floor at €5–10M ARR, you’re not leading. You’re escaping execution. Link.
Second-Time Founders Don’t Just Know More. They Decide Differently.
Repeat founders succeed ~30% of the time vs ~21% for first-timers. The edge isn’t fundraising access. It’s sharper GTM sequencing, disciplined hiring, and a distribution obsession over product hype.
Experience doesn’t guarantee a win. It rewires execution: decision quality compounds faster than ambition. Link.
📚 Interesting reads
Discovery is becoming model-mediated.
In the AI era, you don’t convince the user first. You convince the model. Structured data and distribution mechanics become competitive moats. Link.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work. It Intensifies It
A recent Harvard Business Review work shows that AI tools make people work harder because they can do more. Link.
👀 In case you missed it
Two conversations that sparked strong debate:
Disney stopped pretending to be Netflix. Strategy is identity. In SaaS too, depth is winning over breadth. Link.
Stop hiring unicorn CROs before you have a pipeline. VPs accelerate motion. They don’t create it. Builders first. Leadership later. Link.
💬 Let’s Connect
What resonated? What’s missing? What’s keeping you up at night?
Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Always up for a sharp GTM chat.
Thank you!
Luigi