I started Antematter with 4 other co-founders in the fall of 2021 for reasons that are beyond me. If you were to ask me “why did you start Antematter” once every year since 2021, each year you would hear back a different answer.

When I first observed this pattern, I thought I was being capricious. I thought I was making the answer up every time based on what the listener wanted to hear. Upon further introspection though, I realized a deeper truth.

My answer to the question almost always deeply correlated with my actual beliefs and values at the time of asking. For example, in 2023 I was enamored with the idea of creating wealth. So my answer to the question was: “To generate wealth”.

Then in 2024, I dropped wealth for a more philosophical alternative i.e. the joy of creation. In other words, I started claiming that creation (of art, language, things etc.) is the only thing worth pursuing and creating a business is the most intense form of creation. “And that’s why I started Antematter”.

The earlier part of 2025 had me pursuing the idea of freedom and the latter part will probably see me give more of a religious explanation.

All this to say: these past 4 years have been a roller coaster. I have picked up countless new beliefs and ideas, then unlearned some of them, and then sometimes circled back to variations of what I once discarded. In other words, I have been in a constant cycle of “updates” to my OS.

This process will likely continue forever but at least now, with all this dense experience backing me, I am quite confident about a few things, which I wanted to document in this newsletter today. If you’re running a tech services firm, or working in one, you’d want to pay special attention.

You may be wondering: why is a newsletter about AI suddenly writing an expository essay on lessons learned from running a tech services firm?

The answer is: I don’t know. I felt drawn to writing long-form and since this newsletter was dead anyway (last post was ~8 months ago), I thought I would revive it, but a little diversely.

You may also be wondering: will I write about AI or are the topics now going to be useless ruminations from my life?

The answer is: Yes, I will write about AI but a lot more as well. That said, all of it will share a common motif: stories or opinions from my business life. The reason I’ve kept the newsletter topic broad and unclear is because at this point, I simply want to write long-form without overthinking about what to write on.

Anyway, back to the topic…

Fortune favored us early on. As soon as our firm stood up, we closed 2 retainer clients through Upwork. While one engaged us to build a hiring SaaS platform, the second was infinitely more interesting: a team of fresh grads developing an arbitrage engine on Solana.

Three months into our existence, the first project ended and there was a grave problem with the second one. The client was a scammer and a grifter. Their entire operation consisted of pitching elaborate product concepts, having us build enough to generate screenshots and updates, then promoting these on Twitter/X to drive NFT sales. Once the sales were made, he'd drop the project completely and move on to the next scheme.

Even when we caught wind of what’s going on, we hesitated to cut ties with the client. That client was our Messiah. What were we going to do without him? Shut down the firm? Just 6 months into operations? That sounded like failure.

That was just the first instance of many where we put someone on the pedestal and made a messiah out of them, even when logic and morality said otherwise. Another example is when our most senior employee (tenure-wise) was leaving the firm and we started running around like headless chickens. How would Engineering function without them?

What’s funny is that in almost all of these instances, either we eventually did make the right decision (i.e. cut ties with the messiah) or our fears materialized (for example, someone leaving the firm). But after that, nothing much happened. Mostly, there were short-term pains or very infrequently, small-scale disasters. And the relief of having gotten out of a petrifying situation fully eclipsed whatever pain the disasters caused.

If you learn one thing from this newsletter, let it be this: there is no ONE partner, client, employee or project that is so valuable that you end up walking a path you’re not supposed to walk. Or you end up accepting pain you’re not supposed to feel. Or you end up shortchanging your firm’s future for your present.

The messiah mindset I thrashed above has an interesting consequence. It breeds sloth and an unshakeable desire for comfort. In our case, we chose a Messiah that was supposed to do all business development for us. All we were supposed to do was deliver projects they would send our way.

And just like that, we did away with the single biggest responsibility founders must take on, if nothing else. We traded effort and learning for comfort and illusion. I say “illusion” because

In hindsight, we were incredibly naive to think that you can build a car without an engine, or a boat without a rudder. In a way, we were actually worse off than our peer companies. While they also did not invest into a proper business development engine, at least they leaned on freelancing platforms like Upwork. Whereas we placed our bets on indefinite optimism.

Furthermore, you can not build a service or an offer in a vacuum. It must be in sync with and shaped by market forces. The only way to apprehend these forces is to be in the market, especially as first-time founders. Stated differently, business development’s sole purpose is not just client acquisition, but also generation of market insights. Without these insights, you’re very likely to

Our go-to-market efforts as they are kicked off in mid-January 2025. Up until today, I have taken more than 150 sales calls. The initial ones were terrible and running on training wheels. Then I discovered 30mpc.com and several other great resources, and the iterative process of improvements was set in motion.

First, we adopted weekly sprint planning meetings to assess the past week and conceive a plan for the next week. We tirelessly worked on improving our target lists and trimmed our messaging. We took up agenda setting prior to our calls and crafted discovery trees. We built a list of common objections and installed systems to overcome them. We built rate cards, iterated through 3 versions of our deck and put up prestigious case studies (like our work with The University of Chicago). And so on and so forth.

But in the end, none of the above moved the needle meaningfully, eventually leading to an aching realization that our offer (i.e. custom AI solutions) is very simply a commodity offer without any differentiation that is marketable or defensible. We are cut from the same cloth that every other tech services business is cut from. Every other student, freelancer, contractor and devshops of all shapes and sizes are racing to rebrand themselves as an AI devshop.

That’s not the only conundrum. The tendency to outrun the fundamentals manifests in other ways as well. For example,

Ironically, we always saw our clients not make the same mistakes we were making. We saw them laboriously think and plan about their niche, their USP, their go-to-market and what not. Maybe it was our shortcut mentality or maybe because humans are not automatically strategic, we chose to turn a blind eye to all of it.

The antidote to overlooking fundamentals is relatively easy, at least once you’ve done the mental hard work of realizing your mistakes and committed to finding a solution. This, however, requires a separate article of its own, and one that I may write in the near future (I am deep in the experimentation phase but seeing some initial success). For the time being, simply dissecting your offer for its weaknesses would be a great start.

The quote above holds true for all types of businesses but its intensity and vigor for services businesses is on another level altogether. Even if you’ve built significant Intellectual Property (processes or tech or both), people will remain a significant component of how you fulfill/service clients.

Consequently, to grow, we found ourselves having to recruit more and more people. Even with our modest success, we found ourselves leading a pack of ~30 staff members just three years into our journey. (Real humans, not AI agents. The latter, for the foreseeable future, is impossible).

That meant they came with minds of their own, personal lives that bled into work, and ambitions that could easily outgrow our company. We had days where the team lost motivation to work and days where they were disgruntled at a recent company policy change.

We could still manage (but certainly not lead) those 30 team members haphazardly by constantly entering firefighting mode. This terrible mode of existence had us jump from one problem to another, mandating that our day was never our own, requiring that instead of working on the business, we worked in the business. But it worked.

The problem hit once we reached ~65 staff members: firefighting mode stopped working. Things started breaking, goodwill with clients was affected, and the market handed us a harsh correction. We were beaten back to 45 staff members, and what was most exasperating was that in the six or so odd months we depleted in the firefighting mode, our organization did not grow because all of our time was spent putting out those endless fires.

This is what the cliche “business is all about people” screams to tell you. It’s not a phrase you speak aloud at the company All Hands and then forget its existence. Without thinking deeply about the people aspect of your company, it simply can’t grow. This fact, in fact, is equally as important as having an exceptionally differentiated offer.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, what I mean by “people aspect” is literally just setting up the right systems and processes. Here are a few examples.

And here are two examples of the wrong kind of systems.

As you can imagine, this part alone (i.e. working with people) will consume a huuuuge chunk of your time and attention if you’re not careful, leaving very little to spare for the offer, the go-to-market and other important areas of business.

Whatever luxuries our line of business enjoyed during the 2010s are beginning to fade. And with that, the pressure on us is mounting to innovate our fulfillment models and the way we sell. The immense pressure you feel now is not unique to you. It is the zeitgeist of the entire tech services industry in 2025. The days of skating by on generic talent and low pricing are going to be a thing of the past soon.

But … pain is clarifying and the market has given us our homework. Now that we have paid the price for ignoring the fundamentals, we have absolute clarity on what the future must look like. And that, more than any silver bullet, is the foundation you and I can actually build upon.