Why Distribution Wins: Lessons from 4 Exits and the AI Era

with Raj Singh (VP of New Products, Mozilla)

Episode Summary

This week, Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sit down with Raj Singh, a serial entrepreneur who's built and exited four companies across the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, and now the AI wave. He's currently VP of New Products at Mozilla, where he's building an AI-powered small business suite for the ownership economy.

Together, they break down what it actually takes to build something that wins: how to find insertion points before the market does, why distribution is still the hardest problem in tech, what the "95% rule" means for AI product design, and why the team, not the technology, is almost always why startups fail.

Whether you're a founder, a product leader, or just trying to understand where AI is actually taking us, this conversation is packed with hard-won perspective from someone who's been in the arena through every major disruption of the last 25 years.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• Why distribution is still the hardest problem to solve, no matter how good your product is
• The "95% rule" for evaluating which problems AI is actually suited to solve
• How Mozilla is building a Shopify-equivalent for solopreneurs and service providers
• Why Raj believes it's always the right time to start something and what that really means
• The "explore, expand, extract" framework for knowing which PM archetype your product needs
• Why teams burn out and how that's often what actually kills startups
• What the next 12 months of AI adoption look like inside enterprises
• How the web itself is being rebuilt for an agent-first world

Featured Guest

Raj Singh — VP of New Products at Mozilla, four-time founder with exits spanning the dot-com era through the AI wave. Builder of AI calendars, remote work tools, food communities, and now an AI small business suite (Solo, Trunk, Pencil, Post Full) inside Mozilla.

Connect With Raj

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rajansingh/
• Twitter/X: @mobiletraj

Connect With the Show

• Level Agency — https://www.level.agency/
• Patrick Patterson's LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/pattersonwork/
• Myles Biggs' LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/mylesjbiggs/

How to Support the Show

• Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
• Share this episode with someone navigating the AI wave.
• Rate & review if it brings value — it helps us reach more listeners!

In this episode, hosts Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sit down with Laurie Barkman, succession and exit strategist and founder of Business Transition Sherpa. Laurie has lived a remarkable arc: one of the first professional digital marketers at American Eagle Outfitters, CEO of a 125-year-old logistics firm, and a private equity veteran who now helps founders build businesses that do not collapse without them.

What holds it all together is a conviction she has carried since the start: business is psychology. Whether you are selling jeans for a hundred dollars or guiding a founder through a hundred-million-dollar exit, how people decide and trust has not changed. The tools have.

Tune in to learn why hope is not a strategy, how to build a business that thrives without you, and what the early digital marketing pioneers can teach us about navigating AI disruption today.

Key Takeaways

• Business Is Always Psychology: The fundamentals of how people decide, connect, and trust have not changed. The tools are different. The psychology is not.
• Build a Business That Thrives Without You: Owner dependency is one of the biggest risks to enterprise value. Laurie breaks down the three dimensions of exit readiness: personal, financial, and business transition, and why starting earlier is always the right answer.
• Hope Is Not a Strategy: Most founders do not know what their business is actually worth. Laurie explains how to think about multiples, what buyers really look for, and why working on value drivers every day is just good business.
• Anti-Fragility Is a Competitive Moat: Fragile systems break under stress. Anti-fragile ones get stronger. Laurie unpacks why the human ability to unlock clarity for clients is something AI cannot replicate.
• The Entrepreneurial Gene: Patrick argues for unending curiosity and ego-free humility. Laurie adds risk tolerance. Together they map out what separates founders who scale from those who stall.
• Write Down Your Processes. Now: The businesses that win are the ones with documented decision-making frameworks. If the knowledge walks out the door with one person, you do not have a transferable business.
• The Interviewing Framework That Works: Strengths, motivations, and fit. Laurie shares the framework she used to land her CEO role. The reframe: every hiring manager is trying to hire the least risky person.

Resources and Links

Guest:

Laurie's website: lauriebarkman.me

Laurie's book: The Business Transition Handbook

Laurie's podcast: Succession Stories

Laurie's LinkedIn: Connect with Laurie Barkman

Connect with the show:

Myles's LinkedIn: Connect with Myles Biggs

Patrick's LinkedIn: Connect with Patrick Patterson

Level Agency: Learn more about Level Agency

Special Offer:

AI Visibility Audit: Find out how prepared your business is for the AI Search Revolution. Get your AI Visibility Scorecard today.

In this episode, hosts Myles Biggs and Patrick Patterson sit down with Cody Lee, Principal on the Peak Performance Group at Summit Partners, to trace a career that spans pharmaceutical advertising, poetry, copywriting, growth marketing, and private equity. Cody leads the Marketing Center of Excellence, supporting more than 120 portfolio companies in technology, healthcare, financial services, consumer, and more. His path is anything but linear, and that is exactly the point.

What holds it all together? A conviction that the fundamentals of marketing do not change. How people think, what motivates them, how markets work. Cody introduces one of the most useful mental models in the episode: separating what is valid from what is relevant. It is a framework he learned from his father at 16 in a client meeting, and it is now more critical than ever as AI floods every organization with valid content that lacks relevance.

Tune in to learn how to connect marketing to a financial investment thesis, why the four Ps still win, what generative search is actually doing to your funnel, and how expanding your surface area of opportunity is the best career advice for anyone starting out, especially right now.

Key Takeaways

• Valid vs. Relevant: Learn the mental model Cody inherited from his father and has applied across every stage of his career, from client meetings to AI prompting. Many things are valid. Only a few are relevant. The best leaders know the difference.
• The Liberal Arts Foundation of Great Marketing: Cody never took a single marketing class in college. Instead, he studied psychology, economics, and creative writing, the disciplines that explain how people think, what motivates them, and how words connect to commercial outcomes.
• Marketing Inside Private Equity: Understand how to connect your marketing programs to the investment thesis of your business. Learn to speak the language of value creation levers, lead with what is relevant to the board, and translate marketing impact into financial outcomes.
• AI Amplifies the Fundamentals, It Does Not Replace Them: The leaders getting the most from AI are the ones investing heavily in context-setting upfront. AI is extraordinarily good at producing valid output. The human operator defines what is relevant.
• The Four Ps Still Win: No promotion strategy can save a broken product, misaligned pricing, or poor distribution. Cody makes the case, with a Fyre Festival reference, that the most durable framework in marketing is still the one from the textbook.
• Increase Your Surface Area of Opportunity: Stop treating each career step as final or fatal. Every move expands your access to people, worlds, and opportunities you cannot yet imagine. It is a grounding message for anyone navigating an AI-disrupted job market.

Resources and Links

Guest:

Cody's LinkedIn: Connect with Cody Lee

Marketing Order of Operations article: Read the framework

Connect with the show:

Myles's LinkedIn: Connect with Myles Biggs

Patrick's LinkedIn: Connect with Patrick Patterson

Level Agency: Learn more about Level Agency

Special Offer:

AI Visibility Audit: Find out how prepared your business is for the AI Search Revolution. Get your AI Visibility Scorecard today.