For whoever
comes next.

Dear whoever comes next,

I do not know your name yet. You may not know it either, not in the sense that will matter. You are probably young. You are probably not in the room, and the room has probably not noticed. That is fine. The last person who held this job was not in the room either, and nobody trained him for it.

There is a position open. Not the costume: the turtleneck, the black stage, the pause before "one more thing." The role. For fourteen years the industry has held auditions by hiring people who look the part, and it has not once read the job description. So here it is, as plainly as I can type it.

Find the unit. Find the moment when a person decides to hand over money, and understand what they are actually paying for. Name a price a person will gladly pay. Then stand behind it: with a receipt, with your name, with a willingness to be wrong in public. That is the whole job. Everything else is decoration.

The man before you got a great deal right. He came from outside, so he never learned which customs were sacred and which were merely old. He obsessed over the moment of purchase the way other people obsess over the chip. He understood that a price is a sentence, not a number. He also got some things wrong, and the last of them was this: he built a company that could go on without him, and it forgot him first, before anyone else did. Take the lesson. What you build will outlive your attention. Make it something that keeps the promise when you are not looking.

Ignore the benchmarks; they measure how well a thing passes a test it wrote for itself. Ignore the liturgy: the dark backdrop, the thin numbers floating beside a product shot, "incredible" and "magical" said in the same breath. Ignore the people who will laugh, and they will laugh. There is a whole page for that at theyalsolaughed.com; read it on the bad nights. Laughter is what a room does when it cannot yet tell whether it is watching a mistake or the future. It is not evidence either way.

While you are on your way, some of us are getting the receipts ready. We are writing down what things cost, what they sold for, and who was told what. Not to indict anyone. So that when you arrive there is a paper trail to stand on and a price list you did not have to invent alone.

You do not owe us anything for this. You do not have to be the next anyone. Just be the person who finds the unit, sets the price, and stays standing there.

The chair is empty. It is yours if you want it.

Yours, from a little earlier,the Worth Building Institute

P.S. You are reading this some days after it was posted. It will still be true.