What if the idea you Love most is quietly draining the business you are trying to build?

Chris Franks, Anthony Franco, and Stephanie Hays dig into idea triage: the uncomfortable founder work of deciding which ideas deserve more oxygen and which ones need to stop consuming cash, time, and attention. They argue through focus, optionality, sunk cost, customer conversations, partner feedback, and the difference between real persistence and avoiding a harder decision.

The episode gets practical fast. A new business is a hypothesis, not a personality test. Before a founder builds the monument, they need to write down what must be true, talk to people who know the market, and decide what evidence would actually change their mind. If an idea cannot survive that process, it probably should not get the company’s next quarter.

Keywords: idea triage, founder focus, startup ideas, business hypothesis, sunk cost, customer validation, founder decision making, entrepreneurship, product validation

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Anthony Franco Entrepreneur and Chief AI Officer

Most AI advice comes from people who have never built anything. Anthony Franco has built seven companies and exited six, including Effective Inc., a UX consultancy that served 40% of the Fortune 100, grew to $50M in revenue, and was acquired by WPP. The rest spanned consumer products, AI platforms, wireless networks, marketing software, and real estate. That track record is why he approaches AI differently: he has seen how organizations actually adopt technology, where they break, and what it costs when they get it wrong.

He coordinates contributions to AI First Principles, an open-source framework that gives teams a shared foundation for AI decisions. He wrote The WISER Method to turn those principles into something practitioners can run in the field. As Chief AI Officer of First Strategy, he works directly with companies on AI automation and go-to-market strategy.

He also co-hosts How to Founder, a podcast about building companies without the mythology.