Working Through Bold: What Actually Matters and What Just Gets in the Way
I've had the physical copy of Bold sitting on my desk for about three years now. The book itself is fine as a high-level roadmap, but the way most people try to apply it leads to decision paralysis and wasted months. I spent 2019 trying to run a proper ABZ plan for a health tech startup I was part of, and by month four we were nowhere. The framework isn't broken, but it's being used wrong in practice. The core argument is that exponential technologies change the economic math behind starting something new. Moore's Law, the network effect, the cost curves of solar and cloud computing — these aren't abstract concepts, they're actual inputs you should be plugging into your strategy decisions. Diamandis and Kotler structure around the idea that the future is non-linear, so linear business planning doesn't work anymore. The ABZ approach is the practical tool they push hardest. Plan A is your original idea. Plan B kicks in when Plan A hits a wall, which it will. Plan Z is your existential fallback if everything goes south and you need to survive rather than build. I ran into a real problem with this when the B-plan for our product wasn't a pivot, it was essentially a downgraded version of Plan A that nobody actually wanted. The book doesn't really address that distinction. What saved us was treating Plan B as its own independent business case, not Plan A wearing different clothes. That's not something I found in the text, honestly.
Here's the thing people miss about the dematerialization concept in the book. It's not just that products get cheaper over time. It's that the cost structure of entire industries shifts in ways that make old business models unviable overnight. Cloud computing didn't gradually make on-premise servers worse, it made them irrelevant. The same pattern is happening with AI tools eating into service work. If you're building a traditional service business without accounting for this trajectory, you're timing your launch against a moving target you can't see clearly. The book also spends significant time on abundance thinking versus scarcity thinking. This is more philosophical than practical, but it actually maps to something measurable. Abundance-oriented teams make faster decisions because they're not optimizing for survival. Scarcity-mode teams slow everything down. I've seen this play out repeatedly. The teams that operated as if resources would appear turned out to be more resourceful about actually getting them. It sounds like a platitude until you've been in a situation where waiting for perfect conditions meant missing the window entirely. One counter-intuitive point the book makes that took me a while to internalize: having a big vision is not the same as having a big goal. A vision is directional. A goal is a specific target with a deadline. People conflate these constantly and then get stuck because they're treating their vision like a goal and wondering why they can't measure progress. The book mentions this distinction but doesn't give you a clean method for separating them. What I ended up doing was writing my vision on one page and my goals on separate pages entirely, with explicit date stamps. The physical separation matters more than you'd think.
The downsides of the framework are worth being honest about. The exponential technology thesis works really well for software-adjacent or hardware-heavy ventures. It falls apart if you're in a regulatory-heavy industry like healthcare or finance where the bottleneck is compliance, not technology adoption curves. I tried applying the ABZ framework to a project that was fundamentally about navigating FDA approval processes, and the framework was almost useless because the timelines were dictated by government bodies, not by technology cost curves. You need a different model for that kind of environment. Another issue is the level of privilege required to actually execute on some of this. The book assumes you have enough capital runway to run through multiple plans before running out of money. If you're bootstrapping with personal savings and no investor backing, Plan B doesn't become available until you're already in trouble. That gap between the book's ideal scenario and the reality for most independent founders isn't discussed. If you want to read it, the standard versions are available through Amazon, Audible, and most major book retailers. There's no free official version. For people who want the frameworks without the 400-page format, the related Singularity University materials online cover similar ground at a more technical level, though they assume you're already working inside that ecosystem.
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