Founder Curious Dispatch helps you go from curious to committed

Unfiltered playbooks and early-stage startup realities for ambitious founders and operators. Written by someone still in the middle of it.

What is this?
How it works

Curious about starting something? The dispatch meets you there.

The path from "I keep thinking about this" to "I'm doing this" isn't a straight line. Readers range from operators quietly sketching ideas to founders a few months in. Every issue works in one of two ways:

Dispatches

Every other weekFreeShort reads

Essays on what building actually feels like: retention, distribution, pricing, hiring, and the decisions nobody writes the clean version of. Opinionated, specific, and written while the lesson is still fresh.

Playbooks

OccasionalFreeLong reads

Step-by-step breakdowns of things that worked (and things that didn't) at early-stage companies. Templates, numbers, and the reasoning behind them, so you can borrow what fits and skip what doesn't.

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Recent dispatches
Essay

Retention isn't collapsing. It's all that's left.

Andrew Chen says cheap software means a retention crisis. The barista who knows my order says otherwise. On what actually survives when building costs nothing.

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Essay

We made it across the ocean (because we weren't alone)

Moving a dog across continents is paperwork, panic, and a thousand decisions you're not qualified to make. What got us through was a community, and that's the point.

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Note

AI is expanding the TAM of technology itself

Restaurants, resorts, bicycle rentals, wealth advisories. None of them are tech companies, and every one of them is now being pushed to act like one.

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Note

Build agents vs. grow agents

The cost of building software is heading to zero. The cost of growing it isn't. How the next decade of products gets built and scaled by two kinds of AI agents.

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See the archive
The writer

Ishan

Ishan is a co-founder at Sortment. Before that he co-founded Shopflo, a checkout infrastructure company, and spent time as an investor at Elevation Capital. He has sat on both sides of the table, which is mostly a way of saying he has been wrong in two different ways.

This dispatch is where he writes down what he is learning as it happens: the playbooks that worked, the ones that didn't, and the odd lesson from a coffee shop or a dog on a long-haul flight.

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Hand-drawn sketch portrait of Ishan Rakshit
What you can expect

Specific over general

Numbers, names, and the actual decision. If a lesson can't be tied to a real situation, it doesn't make the cut.

Written mid-flight

Not retrospectives from a comfortable distance. Most issues are written within weeks of the thing happening.

Short, then optional depth

The dispatch is a five-minute read. Playbooks go deeper when the topic earns it. Nothing is padded.

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