The Three Curves That Decide the Next Century
Solar, AI, and biology are riding decades-long cost curves. How to forecast with them, where each bet could fail, and why the missing curve matters most.
Laurie Stach
Entrepreneur, educator, maker
Latest posts
A Thousand Changes, Five Causes
Two centuries of upheaval reduce to five forces: mechanized food, applied medicine, contraception, media revolutions, and financialization. See the causes, not the symptoms.
Why I Stopped Trying to Find My One Thing
For years I absorbed the advice. Find your passion. Niche down. Pick your lane. Be known for one thing. The people giving this advice were not wrong, exactly. Specialization is real. Focus is powerful. Having a clear identity makes you easier to hire, refer, and follow. But the advice never quite fit me. And I [ ]
The State of Youth Entrepreneurship 2026
A snapshot of where the world's young founders are, what they are building, how they are funded, and what AI is changing.
The Questions AI Can’t Answer For You
I have been using AI a lot lately. For research, for writing, for thinking through business ideas, for drafting things I do not want to draft. It is genuinely remarkable what these tools can do. But I keep running into the edge of what they can do. Not a technical limitation that will be solved [ ]
How I Use AI to Pressure-Test Business Ideas
I have been sitting with a lot of business ideas lately. Some exciting, some probably terrible, some that feel interesting but where I cannot tell if that feeling is insight or delusion. For years, the way you would pressure test a business idea was to find smart people to talk to, do market research, maybe [ ]
AI Won’t Replace You (But Someone Using AI Will)
The AI replacement anxiety has become its own genre. Opinion pieces, podcasts, think pieces about which jobs are safe, which professions will disappear, whether the robots are coming for your livelihood. It is understandable anxiety. It is also, in my view, pointed at the wrong target. I want to reframe the conversation entirely. The Real [ ]
Social Health Is the New Mental Health
Think back to 2010. Mental health was barely spoken about in mainstream culture. Therapy was stigmatized. Anxiety and depression were whispered about, if at all. The idea that your emotional and psychological wellbeing deserved the same attention as your physical health was fringe, not mainstream. Then something shifted. A combination of research, celebrity voices, and [ ]
Designing What People Actually Want
Many people misinterpret others' needs, with products failing not from lack of quality but from misunderstanding demand. Effective design requires delving deeper than words, focusing on emotional drivers and unmet needs. Recognizing friction, validating true demand, and testing ideas in real-world scenarios are crucial for creating solutions that resonate.
Adventure: Why Novelty and Discomfort Make You Better
Predictability can lead our brains to operate on autopilot, reducing cognitive flexibility and clarity. Engaging in small adventures, or micro-adventures, introduces novelty that disrupts routine, enhancing decision-making and emotional resilience. This controlled discomfort fosters a sharper mind and deeper connections, ultimately enriching personal and professional aspects of life.
Unshould Others: Freedom in Relationships and Leadership
It is one thing to unshould yourself. It is another to stop shoulding all over everyone else. Even when we liberate our own choices, we often keep trying to script others, expecting them to evolve, react, or understand on our timeline. We call it “helping,” “guiding,” or “leading.” But beneath it all is the same [ ]
Unshould Yourself: Escaping the Language Trap
Most of what limits you is not circumstance. It is syntax.One tiny, well meaning word quietly governs your days: should. I should be further along. I should say yes. I should want this. It sounds virtuous, but should is not discipline. It is fear in disguise.Fear of being wrong.Fear of being excluded.Fear that if you choose differently, [ ]
How to Become an Expert at Hiring Rockstars
I’ve written before about the importance of the right team for your startup. This goes beyond just your co-founders or early employees; it is something you need to continue for the life of your company. Any organization is only as good as its people, because every organization is ultimately a product of its people. That [ ]
How to Choose the Best Management Style for You and Your Team
I’ve written before about how to engage in authentic leadership. One of the key pieces of cultivating authenticity is ensuring that you’re working from a place of relative comfort and not behaving in ways that go against your values and tendencies. You can’t be an authentic leader, or even an authentic participant, unless your actions [ ]
Apps are the Worst (as Companies)
I have a potentially controversial viewpoint to share: Most apps and the companies behind them stink. I don’t just mean the functionality or feature set of the apps themselves (although many are lackluster in that department, too). I mean that they’re terrible as products on which to start up and build a business. There are [ ]
Four Ways Startup Founders Do and Don’t Impress Me
Over the course of my LaunchX experience, through thousands of applications, there are certain qualities that never fail to impress me about startups and their founders. Then there are things that I really wish I could stop seeing. Below are just a few things that grab my attention and impress me enough to want to [ ]