The systems lesson that cost me my company

I keep coming back to a lesson I learned as a founder — one that’s now about to crush a number of companies across many industries.

The bet that made us

In 2012 I built the first version of Pantreeco, a mobile app idea that later became a fast-growing SaaS platform in the supply chain of hospitality. By 2016 I was CEO of one of the first Australian companies accepted into Techstars. By 2018 I had to close the company down.

We were trying to digitise the hospitality B2B ordering chain, and the early bet that made us successful was a strange one. We treated communication between a venue — think a cafe — and their suppliers — think a coffee roaster or a milk supplier — as a multi-threaded piece of unstructured data.

A 50kg coffee order in hospitality doesn’t arrive like a standard order in ecommerce. It arrives as a text that says “hey Frank, how are the kids?” and somewhere in the next two lines, the order gets placed. That’s how the supply chain actually worked in a lot of places, and it’s what holds the fabric of hospitality together.

Everyone in food-tech before us had focused on ecommerce efficiency, and it hadn’t worked. We didn’t want to strip the real value out of the trade — and that’s exactly why we got traction with key parts of the industry.

What I didn’t see

What I didn’t see as a young CEO — and what eventually cost us the company — was that I didn’t know how my own company needed to work.

I had built a product that honoured the unstructured nature of the industry, but I was running the company like every problem in front of me was a product problem. I didn’t apply systems thinking to my company. I overhired, overpaid, and made one unstructured decision after another. The weight of our success became the thing that crushed me, and then the company.

What made me great as a founder was also my downfall. The level-up I missed was a systems problem, not a capability problem.

And it’s true for 90% of founders. I see it every day in my work.

Why AI is about to repeat it

I keep coming back to this lesson now, because I’m watching the same reality repeat at a different scale — inside the enterprise, in how AI is being adopted.

Everyone inside a company is using AI from inside their own context, prompting from their own corner, generating their own version of leverage. And it all feels amazing, right up until the weight of decisions starts to stack exponentially too.

If there’s no system underneath a company catching what’s being produced, understanding it, and improving what “good” looks like as growth happens, then the team will be stuck forever at the level that made them great in the first place.

Build the system underneath

I’d encourage every CEO and team to build the system underneath the unstructured power we now have — before it crushes the speed it’s only temporarily providing you.

The companies that do this will survive. The ones that don’t will be taken out by their own success — the same way I was.

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