Time to Move On – The Reason Relationships End

Posted on February 24, 2026 by steve blank

What Lies Ahead I have no Way of Knowing, But It’s Now Time to Get Going
Tom Petty

This post previously appeared in Philanthropy.org

A while ago I wrote about what happens in a startup when a new event creates a wake-up call that makes founding engineers reevaluate their jobs. (It’s worth a read here.)  Recently my wife and I had something happen that made us reevaluate a 25-year-old relationship.

These two bookends made me realize something larger: reevaluating all types of relationships – romantic, friendship, founders, business partnerships/ventures, and even countries – is a healthy and normal part of growing, getting older and, at times, wiser.

First World Problem
We had a close relationship with a local nonprofit for over a quarter of a century. By close I mean their first executive director lived rent free in a property we owned, we provided resources when they most needed it, I had sat on their board, and when I was a public official I listened carefully to their input and suggestions, and helped them where I could. When I couldn’t do something they requested I called them and let them know why. They did the same for me. When their next executive director took over (he had been the number 2 to the previous director), the relationship continued, but in hindsight was a bit more distant. About a year ago they hired their third executive director. He had none of the history with us. And here comes the wake-up call.

I called to ask for his support on an issue very important to us. The conversation ended with what I thought was “I’ll consider it.” I never heard back. So I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) to discover a public letter from the nonprofit taking the opposite point of view. In the past when we disagreed I got a phone call or email that said, “We heard you, but here’s why we’re going to do X and Y.” This time, and the first time in 25 years, crickets – I heard nothing.

This wasn’t the end of the world and truly is a first world problem – but it was a wake-up call.

It took my wife and I about a week to take stock. We realized that the executive director didn’t do anything “wrong.” We weren’t “owed” a call. The new director was looking forward unencumbered by the past, while we were looking backwards at the 25-year relationship. Anything we did prior to his arrival obviously wasn’t on his radar. But it was a jarring change from how we interacted in the past.

We realized that our relationship had been on automatic pilot. Until then there was no reason to rethink it. Our original support was for work this nonprofit had been doing at the turn of this century. Now that was no longer their core mission. And as we thought deeper we applied the same lens to reevaluate other organizations we were supporting. And no surprise, many of their missions had also changed, or in many cases our own interests were now elsewhere. 

Wake-up calls happen when you realize the contract you believed in isn’t shared anymore.

In the end, we are now supporting a new generation of non-profits.

But it reminded me about the bigger picture and the nature of relationships.

Most Relationships Aren’t Forever
Almost every one of us will go through breakups, either initiating them or being on the receiving end. Rather than thinking that equals failure, consider it a type of a life pivot.

Most of us grow up with a belief that “real” relationships are permanent. That if something mattered once, it should always matter in the same way. That longevity of a relationship alone equals success. It doesn’t. Permanence is comforting, but it isn’t how humans, markets, or institutions actually work. People travel with us for a while then the convoy reconfigures as life roles and needs change.

People change. Leadership changes (in business and countries). Priorities change. Incentives change. Organizations change. Sometimes you change and the other side doesn’t. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes both change, just not in the same direction. None of that automatically means anyone failed. It usually means growth happened.

Why people move on
Moving on is often framed as disloyal or selfish. In practice, it’s usually neither. It’s reality finally catching up with a story you’ve been telling yourself. Common reasons:

  1. The relationship was built for an earlier version of you. At different stages of life we value different things: exploration, stability, achievement, meaning, time. A relationship can be good and still no longer fit.
  2. The relationship was built for an earlier version of them. This happens often to co-founders in startups. Skills needed in the early stages are no longer the ones needed to scale. One of you learns new skills while the other is heads down doing what they’ve always done.
  3. The shared mission expires. Some relationships may be temporal or transactional. They exist to accomplish something specific: raise kids, start a company, survive a hard period, launch a project. When the mission ends, you discover what remains. (For founders it’s often done-and-gone and off to the next one.)
  4. The implicit contract changes. Every relationship has unwritten rules: honesty, reciprocity, respect, no surprises, or, often fatal, a breach of trust. When those rules shift without discussion, friction appears. (Trust takes years to earn, but can be lost in a minute.)
  5. Misalignment becomes chronic. Often there isn’t a single disagreement. It’s a pattern. You keep explaining away discomfort and keep lowering expectations. Eventually you realize you’re managing a declining relationship. You start calculating the lost opportunity cost of not moving on.
  6. The cost of staying rises. As you get older, you become more aware that time is finite. You grow less willing to spend it on relationships that consistently drain more than they return.
  7. People and institutions drift from your goals. Individuals move toward comfort, status, and security. Organizations move toward new goals, new donors, different metrics, and survival at all costs. Sometimes that drift still matches you. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Lessons Learned

  • A wake-up call is an event that shatters your current view of a relationship and forces you to reevaluate 
  • You never know what will trigger a wake-up call
  • As we get older, we perceive time as more limited. We invest more in meaningful relationships and prune the rest.  
    • That doesn’t make us cynical, just more calibrated
  • Time to reevaluate relationships when:
    • Values no longer align
    • You’re doing all the work
    • There’s a breakdown of trust
    • You would not be partnering with them if you met them today

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 6 Comments »

You Only Think They Work For You

Posted on February 18, 2026 by steve blank

When I was a new VP of Marketing I got a painful lesson of who my PR (Public Relations) agency actually worked for. Later I realized that it was true for all of my external vendors. And much later I realized what I really should have been asking them to do.

The lessons still apply even though AI Agents will upend all of this and PR will end up being one of the many businesses that will no longer exist in its current form.

Here’s why.

We were a new public company about to launch our first product. I had given an exclusive story to a major publication whose name is now lost in the midst of time (either the Wall Street Journal or NY Times) to what I thought was an embargo. (An embargo is a fancy term for the publication agreeing not to release the story until a specific date and time.) To my surprise the newspaper published days before the date we had agreed on, screwing up what was supposed to be a perfectly synchronized press campaign.

Furious at my PR Agency, I naively told them to tell the publication that our company would never work with them again. While I don’t remember the exact conversation, today I can just imagine our PR agency’s CEO smiling with amusement on the other end of the phone line. 

It took me years to fully understand who my service providers and consultants actually worked for and the long-term relationships they really cared about – hint it wasn’t me. 

Background
I thought working with a PR agency was pretty simple. My role as VP of marketing was to first, develop a communications strategy that answers, “What are we doing and why.”
For example, our marketing goals were:
– Create demand for our products and drive it into our sales channel
– Create awareness of our company and brand for potential customers
– Create awareness for fundraising (VC, angels, corporate partners)
– Create awareness for potential acquirers of our company
Next I would figure out how to apply this strategy. The “how” required just four steps:
– Understand my audience(s)
– Craft the message for that specific audience
– Select the media where the messages would be read/seen/heard on
– Select the messengers you want to carry your message
Finally, I wrote up my hypothesis of what I thought audience, message, media and messenger should be. Then I used this  to search for and hire a PR agency. I based my selection on the answers to two questions:
1) What did they think about my first pass of the audience, messages, media and messenger.  Hopefully they could do much better than I did on my first pass.
And 2) Could they execute tactically – meaning did they have, or could they acquire the relationships with the right media and messengers to get me press mentions and stories in the media my customers would see.

They Work For Me
I thought the business model between my PR agency and my company was a simple single-sided market –  I was the PR agency’s customer and the PR agency worked for me. Talking to the press was what I paid them to do for me. Their place in the universe orbited around me. Pretty straight forward.

The reality was not so simple.
Yes I was the PR agency’s customer, but their long-term relationships, and the core of their business, were the people in the media outlets – their most valuable assets. I was actually part of a multi-sided market.

Since that was the case, there was no possible way they were going to yell at an important news outlet, regardless of what I demanded as a client.

And I Was Just Another Customer
Not only that, but I was just one of many of the customers for my PR agency’s services. And as I learned later, I was one of their smaller accounts. The agency served multiple companies and while they were happy to take my money and (mostly) liked working with us, if they thought I was too unreasonable or asked them to achieve the impossible, they could just replace my relationship with another client. So the world actually looked like this.

In actuality, my place in their universe was pretty small.

This is true for almost all external vendors and consultants who supply services to companies and individuals. Think of lobbyists – they’re not going to get crosswise with government officials – those are their long term relationships. Or architects and building contractors who have essential long-term relationships with subcontractors, planning commissions, etc.

One Last Thing – Learning What They Know
It wasn’t until much later in my career that I learned my most valuable lesson about service providers and consultants.

I had hired a consultant to set up distribution and manufacturing for our company in Japan. I knew nothing about those areas and got connected to a world class consultant. I made one trip to Japan with them but they did all the relationship building and knew their way around like a native. In our case, the relationship worked out– at least on the surface. But in hindsight, I realized I made an enormous strategic error. I had learned very little about how distribution and manufacturing worked in Japan. 

I got the “service” I paid for, but didn’t realize the opportunity I lost. What I should’ve been doing to make me a better CEO was using them to teach me how Japanese distribution worked, not just doing it for me. That’s a trap I find many founders falling into. If you would have asked me then, my excuse would have been, “I don’t have enough time or bandwidth or even interest.” But the downside is that it not only makes you beholden to a service provider/consultant forever, but also you and your company can never get smarter than that single point of contact. Think of Apple’s dependence on Foxconn and China Inc..

While I was hiring someone to set up distribution and manufacturing, I should have also hired them to teach me how and why what works and doesn’t. This would have made me smarter and  helped me to shape a better strategy of how to use them– and eventually replace them..

In the case of my PR agency, here’s what I didn’t understand: The most successful client-PR agency relationships aren’t transactional. They are partnerships marked by give and take — around messaging, communications strategies and tactics, etc.

Had I realized this early on, I could have asked my PR rep to explain how PR worked and what made for a great story. Understanding things from their perspective would have made me a better client – and a better source for the reporters we wanted to help tell our story. Instead, it would take me decades to learn.

Some service providers won’t share their knowledge claiming it’s their proprietary secret sauce.  More want to sell you their services time and time again. But others are willing to do so if you’ll pay for their time. Find them and hire them to become a wiser manager.

The Future Will Be AI Agents
Here’s why this is relevant to you now, whether you’re fresh out of school or over 40 (or even 30!) Faster than we can imagine, most of these services are going to be done by AI agents. Several already do a competent job and the rate of improvement is staggering.

For our PR Agency example, while the message, media, messenger, audience loop will remain, it will be completely run by AI Agents.

Today, PR agencies already use AI to draft initial versions of press releases, blog posts, and social media updates (thank you ChatGPT.) There are now AI tools that can customize content to target and pitch journalists based on their coverage history and interests. The same AI agents generate personalized email subject lines and body copy. Meanwhile, to proactively manage and protect a company’s brand, PR AI agents can monitor and scan millions of sources to track brand mentions, sentiment, and competitor activity, as well detect emerging negative narratives, and forecast potential reputational threats – weeks before they reach the mainstream.

Meanwhile bloggers and journalists will be using their own AI tools to scan and filter these pitches. The question is whether they’ll trade off the personal connection with PR professionals or welcome making their jobs easier sorting through the noise?

Welcome to the machine-to-machine age of media communications.

PR Morphs or Disappears
Today, these AI tools are standalone, bespoke apps. It’s not long before they are complete workflows where the AI agents perform the majority of tasks autonomously, with humans supervising. However, it’s inevitable that these tools will move to just one more type of  vibe coded apps that internal marketing departments and even small business will spin up themselves. Companies that lag in adopting these tools will be at a competitive disadvantage. PR agencies as they exist today will likely disappear and/or morph into providing higher level services.

This is just the impact of AI on one business that depends on high-touch humans. More will follow.

Most of how these agents will accomplish the tasks we send them out to do will be black boxes. We’ll get great results, but not know how they happened. Currently none of them have an “explain how and why you did this” mode. 

I wonder if this will make us smarter or just create more AI slop.

Service providers who figure out how to use these tools in ways that let them lean further into the critical human aspects of their jobs will be the ones you’ll want to work with. To give your company an edge, find them, hire them and learn what they know — including about how using AI effectively.

Lessons Learned

  • Your service providers/consultants have relationships that are more important than you
    • They will preserve and protect those over you as a client
    • For most service providers/consultants you’re one of many clients
    • You only think they work for you
  • Using service providers/consultants as only a one-way street misses a strategic opportunity to get smarter
    • Pay them extra to teach you how they think
    • It will make you a better strategist
    • You’ll get better results in the long term
  • Future service providers/consultants will be AI Agents
    • They will be black boxes – they’ll get the job done but we won’t know how and why
    • They’ll get smarter but we won’t
    • Welcome to our brave new world

Filed under: Marketing | Leave a comment »

Revisionist History – Aliens, Secrets and Conspiracies

Posted on February 10, 2026 by steve blank

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32

Every once in a while you learn something new that makes you completely rethink how/why an event actually happened. 

And then you consider how it affects the rest of our country and our lives.

This is one of those stories.

Over a decade ago, I was a public official and was at one of our commission meetings on the coast of California. A fellow commissioner and I decided to take a long lunchtime walk along the coast. As we chatted, we realized we had both worked on several of the same very classified programs. His involvement was in acquisition and finance, while mine was more deeply connected to the engineering development of the project and hands-on with the operators on site.

We Got Our Advanced Technology From Aliens
While we both were discreet about not talking about specifics, we recognized the projects we had worked on. So you can imagine my surprise when he turned to me and casually said, “You know this technology came from aliens.” I laughed, thinking that obviously he must be joking. But as we continued walking he continued on, claiming, “You know the equipment you worked on and stuff that followed came from our secret alien investigation site at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. All we did was reverse engineer Alien technology.” This time I stopped in my tracks and looked at him to see if he was smiling. I was puzzled as he looked dead serious. He explained that there was no possible way we could be doing what we were doing using existing technology. Before I changed the subject I asked him how he knew this, he replied with absolute sincerity, “I was head of acquisition on the program. I was briefed on the project. That’s what they told us and they swore us to secrecy.“

I really didn’t know how to process this. He was really a smart and level-headed guy. In fact he was the mayor at the time of Rancho Palos Verde. It took me a mile or two into our walk to rethink everything I knew about the project (even then it had been in decades past), including having sat with a few of the engineers (some strange, but not aliens) as they were designing the system (with me trying to keep up with the revised blueprints in document control), and then watching the system being built and assembled. While it had required incredibly creative engineering, and applying technology on a scale so massive no commercial company could afford it, this system was built by smart people with no aliens involved. But he was equally convinced they were. Over our time together on the commission we took more walks, had lots more to talk about, but we never broached the subject again. 

Every once in a while, for the next few years, I puzzled on how he could have been so sure of something that I was sure was completely wrong.

We Did Tell Them It Was Aliens
Fast forward 15 years, and my world view of that conversation was upended when I read in the Wall Street Journal that the Department of Defense had been running a disinformation campaign, briefing finance and acquisition people that the technology for these classified programs was coming from aliens. (Take a minute and read the article.)

All of a sudden our coast-side conversation from a decade and a half ago made sense to me. Most of our most compartmentalized programs have different levels of what was called “need to know.” I never paid much attention as I was read all the way into the technical and operational details of these programs. I vaguely knew that others got fewer details, but as I was just discovering, others had received active disinformation. In a few cases, security officers were even using fake photos and documents to create the Alien cover-story for secret-weapons programs.

It turns out my fellow commissioner had been briefed by the U.S. government that it was Aliens, and he went to his grave believing it so. 

Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?
What’s interesting is what happened after the news came out that the Alien story was government disinformation. A large percentage of people who were briefed, now “doubled down” and believed “we got the technology from Aliens” even more strongly – believing the new information itself was a coverup. Many dismissed the facts by prioritizing how they felt over reality, something we often see in political or religious contexts. (“Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”)

I wondered how my friend would have reacted.

Secrecy, Disinformation, and a Higher Power
While on its face this is an amusing story about secrecy, it’s really about the intersection of the secrecy’s impact on society and its role in misinformation, manipulation, the creation of cynicism and mistrust, and our need to believe in a higher power.

Manipulation
An example of secrecy used for manipulation in the 20th century was when the National Security Agency Venona project unmasked Soviet spies in the U.S. Even though this was one of the nation’s most secret programs, the FBI leaked its findings to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. They used this classified knowledge to manipulate the American public, fueling McCarthyism and Richard Nixon’s career. 50 years later, when Venona was made public historians substantively revised the history of U.S. Cold War politics. 

In the 21st century Social Media misinformation (e.g. Chinese and Russian influence campaigns, Qanon conspiracies) will look like toys next to the AI-driven manipulation that’s about to come.

Cynicism and mistrust
Secrecy created 75 years of cynicism and mistrust, when the U.S. began launching highly classified reconnaissance balloons (story here), and later the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. These top secret projects gave rise to decades of UFO sightings. Instead of acknowledging these sightings were from classified military projects the Department of Defense issued cover stories (“you saw weather balloons”) that weren’t believable.

Governments and companies have always kept secrets and used misinformation and manipulation. However, things stay secret way too long – for many reasons – some reasonable (we’re still using the same methods – reconnaissance technology, tradecraft, or, it would harm people still alive – retired spies, etc) or not so reasonable (we broke U.S. or international laws – COINTELPRO, or it would embarrass us or our allies – Kennedy assassination, or the Epstein files).  

Secrecy increases the odds of conspiracy beliefs. Because evidence can’t be checked, contradictions can’t be audited, a government “cover-up” becomes a plausible explanation. People don’t tolerate “I don’t know” for long when stakes are high (stolen elections, identity, national crises, the meaning of life, or what happens when we die). That vacuum gets filled by the most emotionally satisfying model: a hidden “higher power” concealing information and controlling events.

Summary
Just as social media replaced traditional news sources, AI-driven summaries of current events are likely to replace our understanding of the world around us. What happens to trust when AI manipulates human’s tendency to embrace conspiracy theories? Who will define the truth in the brave new world?

And by the way, I’m still pretty sure we didn’t get it from Aliens.

Filed under: National Security | 3 Comments »

Making the Wrong Things Go Faster at The Department of War

Posted on February 3, 2026 by steve blank

This article previously appeared in Defense Scoop

The Department of War (DoW) senior Acquisition leadership (the people who decide what and how the DoW buys equipment and services) now is headed by people from private capital (venture capital and private equity.) 

The Department of War is in the midst of once-in-a-lifetime changes of how it acquires weapons, software and systems. The new Warfighting Acquisition System rewards speed and timely delivery of things that matter to the Warfighter. But this new system is at risk of making the wrong things go faster.

Here’s why and what they should do.

What Now?
Acquisition in the DoW is being reorganized how a Private Equity would reorganize a large company. They bring in (or empower) a new operating team, swap executives, change incentives, kill things not core to their mission, cut costs, invest for growth, and restructure to find additional financing.

That’s being played out at the Department of War right now. The announcement of the  consolidation of individual weapons systems (each of which had their own silos of Requirements, Test/Evaluation, Budgeting, and Acquisition) into a unified Portfolio Acquisition Executive, is a classic Private Equity strategy. Instead of 100s of programs operating with separate budgets, across different Program Executive Offices, the intent of the Portfolio Acquisition Executives is to consolidate overlapping programs, eliminate the redundant ones, pick winners, kill losers, get rid of processes that kill speed, and focus on rapid deployment.

What’s Missing?
Organizing by Portfolio Acquisition Executives is a great start, but simply consolidating the parts of the defense Acquisition system that were broken under one umbrella organization won’t make it better. Making bad ideas go faster should not be the goal. However, we’re at risk of doing just that. (Pete Newell at BMNT has been reminding me of this for years.)

For example, many of these new Portfolio executives are managing their programs by holding monthly reviews of proposed investments and current portfolio performance (just like private investors.) Here they’ll decide which programs get funded, which get more funding, and which should stop. (Actually having a regular process to kill programs early is sorely needed.) These are great ideas. However, if the meetings start by reviewing progress of prototypes to show that the technology works or that warfighters want it, and funds progress on those metrics, it misses the changes needed in an effective acquisition system.

The result will be building a faster version of a weapons requirements process that starts with a top-down list of features, or worse, shiny tech products (e.g. “I need drones.”) This “requirements first” process is what will drive the “bad ideas faster” problem.

A more productive approach – one that delivers truly decisive capabilities – would be to build a different process upfront – a rigorous problem identification and validation phase on the front-end of every acquisition program.

This process would start with a wide funnel of problems, ideas, technology, each with a 10-line problem summary that describes the  specific challenge to address; why it can’t be solved currently; what it will take to solve it; and how a solution will be funded and deployed in the field.

The goal would be to 1) consolidate problems that may be different descriptions of the same core problem, and/or 2) discover if the problems are a symptom of something more complex.

Then each problem would go through an iterative process of problem and technical discovery. This will help define what a minimum deployable product and its minimum constraints (security, policy, reliability) should be, such as how long the solution would take to deploy, the source of funding for scale and who needs to buy-in.

This exercise will keep the focus where it needs to be — not on reforming a system but on delivering things to warfighters with speed and urgency so we can actually deter or win a war.

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Filed under: National Security | 5 Comments »