Some companies make lofty promises to investors and never deliver. Others use those dollars to unlock new levels of scale.

That’s Westbound & Down’s story. Already Colorado’s most-awarded craft brewery, they opened their doors to investors for the first time to help open a flagship Denver-metro-area location.

With 2,800% distribution growth since 2019 and a retail partnership with Whole Foods, it’s no shock investors maxed out that campaign in less than 60 days.

But it’s what comes next that’s even more exciting. Fresh off Brewery of the Year honors at the 2025 Great American Beer Festival, W&D is scaling toward 4X distribution growth by 2028.

Become an early-stage W&D investor before their Denver-metro location opens and momentum accelerates further.

Invest in W&D Now

_{This is a paid advertisement for Westbound & Down’s Regulation CF Offering. Please read the offering circular at https://invest.westboundanddown.com/}

Sam Altman didn't become one of the most influential voices in tech by accident. As former president of Y Combinator and now CEO of OpenAI, he's spent years working directly with founders and learning what actually separates winners from the rest.

A few years back, Altman distilled those hard-earned lessons into a personal memo: "What I Wish Someone Had Told Me." It's not complicated—no fancy frameworks or jargon. But that's exactly what makes it valuable. These are the fundamentals that move the needle.

Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.

This seems contradictory until you actually run a company. You need unwavering conviction about where you're going—your north star ten years out. But how you get there changes constantly, updated at a pace of weeks or days.

Here's why: if you optimize for the next quarterly earnings call, you kill long-term optionality. But if you deliberate endlessly, competitors ship first. The sweet spot is unshakable conviction paired with ruthless flexibility.

Inspiration is perishable. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk. While you're perfecting your pitch deck, someone else already shipped and learned from real users. The cost of waiting usually exceeds the cost of being slightly wrong and correcting course.

Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done, not just intelligence.

Most companies hire safe candidates with the right resume. Altman says the opposite: hire people learning faster than their peers, people who've shipped something real, people who might not fit the traditional mold but have hunger and capability.

Cohesive teams with the right combination of calmness and urgency are how things get finished. And here's the practical truth: working with great people is one of the best parts of life. You're spending half your waking hours with these people. Make sure they're people you actually want to be around.

One more thing: long-term orientation is in short supply. Try not to worry about what people think in the short term. Teams constantly checking approval meters move slower and make worse decisions.

Concentrate resources on a small number of high-conviction bets. You can delete more stuff than you think.

A scattered team doing six things at 70% effort each gets dramatically less done than a team doing three things at 100%. You end up with half-finished projects and exhausted people context-switching.

The hard part is deletion—saying no to good ideas and telling your team to stop work on something 80% done because it doesn't matter for your vision. That requires ruthlessness.

Compounding exponentials are magic. Build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.

This is how ten years of work becomes something massive—not through grinding incremental improvements, but by finding leverage points where the business gets exponentially better as you grow. Network effects, better unit economics, accumulated data—these create compounding advantages.

Fast iteration can make up for a lot. It's usually okay to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Each cycle of feedback tightens your decision-making and gets you closer to product-market fit.

Don't fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics. Some things are genuinely hard. But most things that feel hard are actually just slow decision-making, unclear priorities, or weak incentives.

Outcomes are what count. Don't let good process excuse bad results.

This is a shot at a disease in larger organizations: the assumption that following the right process guarantees good outcomes. Meetings that lead to meetings. Plans everyone agrees on but don't drive behavior.

Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it. Don't let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together. Organizations naturally drift toward bureaucracy. Process should serve the work, not the other way around.

Incentives are superpowers. Set them carefully.

Most companies set incentives accidentally. They say "we care about customers" but measure revenue. They say "we want innovation" but punish failure. They say "we're in this together" but equity is locked to executives.

Be intentional. What behavior are you actually rewarding? People will do exactly what you're incentivizing, even if it's opposite to what you want.

Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but evaluate people on their net impact on organizational performance.

A brilliant person who drains everyone around them is less valuable than someone technically junior who makes the whole team move faster. You need to see the full picture: How do they change the behavior of people around them? Do they raise the bar? Do they clarify thinking or confuse it?

Get back up and keep going.

You'll get knocked down. Your product won't work. You'll lose good people. Competitors will move faster. You'll make bad decisions.

The people who win are those who decide to keep going anyway. Not with blind stubbornness, but with clear-eyed realism about what's happening and commitment to the mission anyway.

These principles aren't separate—they're interconnected. Start with unreasonable optimism about a big idea. Recruit hungry, capable people. Align incentives with real outcomes. Decide on a few big bets and cut everything else. Ship fast, iterate, focus on results. Measure plans in decades and execution in weeks. Stay paranoid about bureaucracy. And when things get hard, keep going.

Nothing here requires luck, special talent, or privilege. It's all within your control—decisions compounded over years into something real.