Venture capitalists and business school professors love to preach focus. They’ll tell you to pour every waking hour into one idea, one product, one company. They are wrong.
The single-threaded founder is a model perpetuated to de-risk a portfolio manager's spreadsheet, not a universal law of success. After exiting my last marketing agency for north of £10M, I had the capital and the conviction to test a different model. A parallel one.
Today, I run seven distinct AI software ventures in parallel. This isn’t a story about burnout, context-switching, or a lack of commitment. It’s about a deliberate, systematic approach to building a portfolio of companies, all fuelled by a core thesis in agentic artificial intelligence. This is the anti-playbook, and it’s the only way I know how to build. I’ve written about the broader market shifts extensively in our latest marketing insights, but here I want to lay out the personal operating system.
The foundational error most founders make is tying their identity to their company. They are ‘the founder of X’. This emotional entanglement makes objective decision-making impossible. I am not the founder of Autoemails, or AutoSettle, or Competable. I am the founder of a venture studio that builds and scales these products. It’s a crucial distinction.
This studio model reframes risk. A single-product founder makes one, high-stakes bet. If they are wrong about the market, the timing, or the execution, they lose everything. A venture studio makes a series of smaller, correlated bets on a central thesis. For my studio, that thesis is that agentic AI will replace 80% of manual marketing and administrative work. Each product is an experiment proving a different facet of that thesis.
Knowledge compounds across the portfolio. When Autoemails discovers a novel method for personalising outreach at scale, the learnings are immediately transferred to the go-to-market teams at our other ventures. When AutoSettle refines a legal negotiation model, the framework can be adapted for enterprise sales. This is a compounding advantage that a single-product company can never replicate.
You cannot run a portfolio model with employees who need managing. The traditional hierarchy of founders, directors, and managers is built for a single-threaded world. It breaks instantly under the pressure of parallel ventures.
My rule is to hire ‘Mini-CEOs’. For each venture, I find one individual who possesses genuine founder DNA. They are obsessed, autonomous, and have a chip on their shoulder. I give them significant equity in the specific venture they run, not the parent studio. This aligns their incentives perfectly. Their success is tied to their product, not the overall portfolio.
My role is to serve as the lead investor, strategist, and occasional therapist. I provide the capital, the operational framework (more on that below), and the strategic guardrails. They provide the relentless, day-to-day execution. I am not their manager; I am the chairman of their board. This structure forces a level of accountability that you rarely find in a standard corporate structure.
For more on my background and philosophy, you can find my full bio as Kasim Javed on the site.
My calendar would give a traditional CEO a heart attack. There are no daily stand-ups, no weekly all-hands, no operational check-ins. My time is the most constrained resource in the entire studio, so it must be applied asymmetrically.
Here’s the system: I have one, and only one, 90-minute deep-dive meeting with each venture’s Mini-CEO every week. That’s it. Seven 90-minute blocks. The agenda for that meeting is simple: what is the one and only domino we need to knock over this week to unlock the next stage of growth? We do not discuss operational trivia. We do not review dashboards. We focus entirely on the single most leveraged action.