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Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Faster Than Normal, exploring one short story about a person, a company, a high-performance tool, a trend I’m watching closely, and curated media to help you build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself. 

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Today’s edition:

Cheers,
Alex

P.S. Send me feedback on how we can improve. I respond to every email.

Stories of Excellence

Person: Henry Singleton

Henry Singleton, the enigmatic founder and former CEO of Teledyne, Inc., is widely regarded as one of the greatest capital allocators and strategic thinkers in corporate history. Born in 1916 in Haslet, Texas, Singleton's early life was marked by a love for mathematics and a keen interest in the emerging field of electronics. After earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT, Singleton co-founded Teledyne in 1960 with George Kozmetsky, embarking on a remarkable journey of acquisitions, divestitures, and value creation.

Key Lessons from Henry Singleton:

• On capital allocation: "There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high."

• On long-term thinking: "I ask a lot of questions. I want to know how things work and what's going to happen 10 years from now."

• On focus: "I'm not a big fan of diversification. I believe in doing a few things and doing them well."

Read More.

Company: Mailchimp

Mailchimp, the email marketing giant, was founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius as a side project of their web design agency, Rocket Science Group. The idea for Mailchimp came from their clients' need for an easy-to-use email marketing tool. Chestnut, with a background in industrial design, and Kurzius, a coder, bootstrapped the company for the first decade. In 2007, they made the bold decision to focus solely on Mailchimp. The company grew rapidly, reaching 450,000 users by 2010 after introducing a freemium model in 2009. By 2014, Mailchimp was sending over 10 billion emails per month. In 2021, Intuit acquired Mailchimp for $12 billion.

Key Lessons from Mailchimp:

• On customer acquisition: "The key to marketing MailChimp was to let people use it — for free — so they could see for themselves how amazing it was." Mailchimp's freemium model fueled rapid growth.

• On competition: "The company's secret weapon against large companies was its deep knowledge of how small businesses operate."

• On building product: "Building features was one thing but conveying them to users was another. To convey their features to users, Ben stumbled upon a way of getting the word out by blogging and tweeting about them."

• On business model innovation: "The major breakthrough came in 2009 when they shifted to the freemium model, allowing small businesses to try the services, make them happy, and then ask for the money."

• On sustainable competitive advantage: "Mailchimp's success stems from that fact that it had 'a proximity to its customers that its competitors lacked.'" Being a small business itself gave Mailchimp unique insight into customer needs.

Read More.

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Accelerants

High-performance tool

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DiSSS Learning

The DiSSS framework was developed by Tim Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Chef." It's a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition — "a recipe for learning any skill."

The DiSSS acronym stands for Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes.

1. Deconstruct the skill into minimal learnable units — the building blocks.
2. Selection involves identifying the critical 20% that will yield 80% of the desired outcome.
3. Sequencing is ordering those units logically — sometimes counterintuitively — to reduce complexity.
4. Stakes are consequences, positive or negative, to ensure follow-through.

This framework makes sense because it breaks down daunting tasks into manageable steps. It focuses efforts on high-impact areas. It customizes the learning process. And it provides accountability. Do you currently apply any elements of DiSSS? If not, which skill could you use it to rapidly acquire?

A trend I’m watching

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Healthcare organizations are increasingly moving their applications and data to cloud-based platforms, enabling them to access and manage software and information online without physical servers. Healthcare Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products are service packages that provide healthcare organizations, medical device manufacturers, and pharma companies with a full suite of medical-grade infrastructure solutions, including server space, IT support, cybersecurity, medical-grade cloud, and more. This allows healthcare providers to focus on their core competencies of delivering care.

Potential opportunities leveraging healthcare PaaS:

• Developing vertical SaaS solutions tailored for specific healthcare niches like telehealth, medical imaging, or practice management. Companies like Practo, Doctolib are already finding success here.

• Creating platforms that enable seamless data sharing and interoperability between disparate healthcare IT systems. Redox is a great example of a startup streamlining healthcare integration.

• Building low-code/no-code app development environments so healthcare organizations can rapidly build and customize their own applications without extensive coding. Startups like Unqork are pioneering this approach.

Tactical reads

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> When you need to build internal documentation
Investing in internal documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for startups (Read it here)

> When you need to evaluate past decisions
Challenging the Process (Read it here)

> When you need to learn something new
The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything by Josh Kaufman (Read it here)

> When considering problem spaces to work on
Assume you get paid $1M per year no matter what you do. What would you pick to work on? (Read it here)

> When evaluating whether to build an online presence
The Great Online Game, Not Boring (Read it here)

1 question

That’s all for today, folks. As always, please give me your feedback. Which section is your favourite? What do you want to see more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know.

Have a wonderful rest of week, all.

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Why Faster Than Normal? Our mission is to be a friend to the ambitious, a mentor to the becoming, and a partner to the bold. We achieve this by sharing the stories, ideas, and frameworks of the world's most prolific people and companies—and how you can apply them to build businesses, wealth, and the most important asset of all: yourself.

Faster Than Normal is a ‘state' of being’ rather than an outcome. Outlier performance requires continuous, compounded improvement. We’re your partner on this journey.

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