The Do Cool Shit Budget

Shaan Puri's observation is that intent is not the constraint — teams genuinely mean to do interesting work, and then a month later the budget feels tight or the numbers are being missed, and the first thing cut is whatever doesn't map cleanly to this quarter's result. His fix is structural: carve out a separate budget, 15% of the total, ring-fenced for work whose defining criterion is that it has no measurable immediate payoff. The inversion is deliberate — an activity is disqualified from this budget if you can attribute revenue to it, because anything attributable will survive on its own merits and doesn't need protection. He ran this at Bebo and attempted it again at Twitch, and cites a mock Apple-style commercial made for the Milk Road rebrand that would not drive subscribers or revenue. His justification has two halves. Internally, it keeps him amused, engaged and a fan of his own business, which he believes pays off indirectly through his own effort. Externally, customers read it as status: a company visibly doing cool things for their own sake looks like the cool kid at school, whereas constantly running discounts and begging for subscriptions reads as low status. Girdley and Sam supply the same instinct from other angles — Black Rifle Coffee sponsoring rally cars because 'what's the point of having this company if we can't do dope shit', and The Hustle sending an email that was a picture of Johnny Cash telling 120,000 readers to close the browser and get back to work.