From today onward, we will pause the FIP Journal for some weeks to enjoy holidays time. We will return around the back-to-school period. Happy summer!
Patrik
Wise words of the week
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it. — Henry David Thoreau
If AI cannot solve it, it’s probably not possible—or you’re holding the wrong manual.
Journal
This week I want to reflect on something different: my thoughts about having a company.
I’ve spent 20 years in a company that became a big successful corporation. This meant two things: on the one hand everything we did had a huge leverage given the established products of the company, but also everything became much more bureaucratic and slow. And bureaucracy didn’t replace the active work, it added to it. It was exciting and it was tiring. A lot of it was execution driven from external needs.
At a certain point, it was obvious that I wanted to slow down and take back control of my life. Starting a company was a good opportunity, in particular as the agreement with Marc was to make it a calm company, far away from the Silicon Valley stereotype of the nerds living in a garage, working 120 hours a week, and eating only cold pizza. It is possible to start a new company and keep the amount of work manageable. Obviously there are peaks but it’s not all the time.
As a founder, I was faced with a few practical employment questions. I haven’t found an answer to all of them yet. Do I hire myself as employee or not? What is the most efficient solution? Sadly, the answer is ‘it depends’ on a lot of other factors. Here are my thoughts from a FIRE perspective. Note that this is not financial advice.
There are multiple options.
Own the company and make the money by selling the company in a SpaceX IPO style. That probably works for a fancy startup but FI Planner is not really that.
Own the company and extract income through dividends. It’s an interesting way, also because company owners are taxed at a lower rate in Switzerland. This is fine with a large business. But with a small 2 persons company this can raise a few eyebrows with the OASI. First I would have to pay my OASI dues as non-gainfully employed anyway. And second I’ve heard of cases where the OASI sued people as it was perceived this was an avoidance of paying the dues on the income.
Own the company and hire oneself. This means being employed. But there are many ways to do it.
- External contractor could be one option, but as self-employed one must be recognized by the OASI and they require at least 3 different customers.
- Employee has some more advantages. The OASI contributions are covered (assuming the salary is “within reasonable range”). There are a few thresholds to keep in mind:
- around CHF 7'000 / year: this is the minimum to qualify for family contributions.
- CHF 22'600 / year: pillar 2 affiliation becomes mandatory
Bottom line: which option is better depends on your wealth (which drives the amount of non-gainfully employed OASI contributions), and the amount on your pillar 2 vested account (whether you make more money by investing it).
Being employed also allows to have some of the expenses being covered by the company, first and foremost the accident insurance. But also for office supplies and equipment like a laptop.
In the end, this is an optimization with lots of potential if done right.
How did I use AI this week?
I had terrible internet connectivity for most of the week, so my usage was very very limited. It’s quite a reminder that we take internet for granted, but it’s not always there. And when it’s not there, there’s no AI either.
I spent some time trying to debug an issue, but I couldn’t come to a solution. I just installed a Bora 408H dryer in the cellar. H stands for ‘heating’. I was a bit surprised that the heater would run in auto mode, turning my cellar into a 26°C sauna. I asked Gemini for help to fix it. After 90 minutes I was fiddling with the firewall configuration of my router, to try to connect to the dryer from my mobile phone.
Eventually I gave up and put a postit on the dryer “always switch off heating”.
There was a time we used to say that if Google couldn’t find it, it would not exist. The updated version of this is, if AI cannot solve it, it’s probably not possible.
Marc
The build
Last week was a pure “behind-the-scene” week as I focused on consolidating all the user feedback we received so far.
We stored it in Notion so far. I know I could use Notion AI to make the best out of it, but it would mean yet another AI subscription to pay for, while I already have Claude and Cursor.
Instead, I migrated all things from Notion (and also others stored in Gmail) into a new GitHub repo dedicated to everything product. At first, it will contain only user feedback and verbatim. We will see if and when we extend its usage. But it will clearly help to use a LLM to surface the most critical pain points to fix.
Because collecting is one thing, but acting upon that feedback is what moves the needle.
For the most product-geeks out there, I thought about subscribing to Canny, but resisted so far. We will see if it becomes needed at some later stage once we’ve grown enough for it.
Note to self: this makes me think of potentially stopping our Senja subscription for some months, and use the same GitHub repo to store our testimonials. One step at a time ;-)
The edge
What feels uncomfortable is to accept (I tell this to myself, as Patrik already agrees with it) our Calm Company principle. Cool to claim it, hard to live it.
Why? Because I know what needs to be done about our roadmap’s next step (pricing topic discussed last week), but I need to beat myself to not kickstart this new topic before leaving for holidays (moreover as Patrik won’t be there sometimes too).
I need to find a word for the practice of building patience, one rep at a time!
Note to a friend
Motivation comes with action. Never the other way around.
This week was tough for various reasons, and several mornings in a row, at 5:30am, I was not motivated.
Yet I woke up, and went to the keyboard, and just started to write. And the flow came. Followed by the motivation.
Same with sport and everything in life.
Motivation comes with action. So start to act, and motivated you will become. Magically.
Tool of the week
Socratic Prompting. Or so I’ve seen it called, but there may be other names.
The idea: LLMs are pros at filling the void in your questions.
Imagine you’ve got a client complaining about one aspect of your product, very brutally to say the least.
So instead of starting an agent with: “how should I reply to this email?”
You go in two steps:
- What are the best practices for answering a client complaint about a product, in the most constructive and polite way?
- Once you got the answer, you simply tell to the LLM: “apply this to this specific email with all its context”
The quality of your final answer will improve quite a bit.
The best proof is to actually run both prompts side by side, and compare the outputs.
Quite useful tip!