The Advantage #18: Hiring Is the Highest-Leverage AI Play, Seth Godin on Promise Over Spend, Nike's Twenty-Year Focus, and the $800 Test I Take Every Year

Thanks for tuning in to the eighteenth issue of The Advantage. A short, weekly note where I share what I am working on, something worth watching, a lesson from history, and one practical edge you can try right away.

This week is about earning leverage by doing one thing exceptionally well, then doing it again. The companies winning with AI in hiring did the unsexy work of defining great first. Seth Godin says the same thing in marketing language: a brand is a promise, and performance only compounds when the product keeps it. Nike spent twenty years being a running shoe before anyone let them sell a basketball shoe. Even the $800 health habit at the end of this issue works the same way. Pick the thing that compounds. Then keep showing up.

AI Did Not Replace Our Recruiters. It Made Them 10x Smarter.

This week, I am sharing a long-form piece on what I think is the single highest-leverage place a founder can deploy AI right now. Hiring.

Most companies are pointing AI at marketing, customer support, or internal productivity. Those are fine. But the compounding return on AI in hiring is larger than all of them combined. Every great hire produces years of value. Every bad hire produces years of drag. A 10% better hiring process does not give you a 10% better team. Over a few years, it gives you a fundamentally different company.

The piece walks through the framework we are running at Petfolk. Four parts: Define, Source, Score, Synthesize. AI shows up at every stage, but it shows up differently at each one, and getting that right is what separates the companies pulling away from the ones still calling AI “interesting.”

I am also honest about what AI does not do. It does not know your culture. It does not replace judgment. It does not absolve you of the work. Garbage in, garbage out has never been more brutal than it is now. The companies winning with AI in hiring are the ones who did the unsexy work of defining what great looks like first, then deployed AI on top of that clarity.

If you are scaling a team right now, this is the one I would read.

How to Build a Remarkable Brand in the Age of AI

This week's watch is a 37-minute conversation with Seth Godin titled “How to Build a Remarkable Brand in the Age of AI” on the Entrepreneur Studio podcast. I am a performance marketer at my core. My default is CAC, LTV, payback periods, and channels that scale. But the number one piece of advice I give founders has nothing to do with any of that. Marketing is a promise that your product needs to live up to. If you do that, you build a great business. If you do not, you are building an acquisition engine that will eventually run out of fuel. That is exactly the conversation Seth is having in this clip, and it is why I keep coming back to his work.

Seth's definition of a brand is the cleanest I have heard. A brand is a promise. Trust is whether you keep it. If Hyatt launched sneakers, no one would know what to expect. If Nike opened a hotel, you already do. That gap is the brand. And that gap is what performance marketing alone can never create.

The line I keep coming back to is this. “When AI is the buyer, you're going to lose.” If you are the cheapest answer to an RFP, AI will find cheaper. The companies that win are selling something AI cannot evaluate. Trust. Story. The thing your customer is willing to pay more for because they know you will deliver.

That maps directly to Petfolk. The promise is world-class medicine delivered with compassion, transparent pricing with no surprises, modern clinics open seven days a week, and a care team you can message 24/7 through the app. We built the product to live up to that promise, and the proof shows up in an NPS of 90+ across every market we serve. That is what makes the acquisition engine work. The paid channels compound because the product earns the next customer through the last one. Take the promise away, and no amount of spend saves you.

Nike Was a Running Company for Twenty Years

Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman started Blue Ribbon Sports out of the trunk of a car at track meets in 1964. They became Nike in 1971. For the next two decades, they did one thing. Running shoes. Not basketball. Not tennis. Not lifestyle. Running. In 1973, Nike signed its first athlete, Steve Prefontaine, for a $5,000 annual stipend. Pre was an Oregon distance runner who held every American record from 2,000 to 10,000 meters and had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated as “America's Distance Prodigy.” Inside the running world, he was a god. Outside of it, most Americans had no idea who he was. Distance running was a niche cult following, mostly in the Pacific Northwest. That was the entire customer base. Nike obsessed over winning that customer. Bowerman was hand-making shoes in his garage with a waffle iron. Pre was personally mailing pairs and handwritten notes to elite runners around the world. Through the 1970s, Nike became the most trusted running shoe on the planet. Then, and only then, did they earn the right to expand. The Air Jordan signing did not happen until 1984. Twenty years after founding. Eleven years after Pre. Nike was a running company first. Everything else came after.

Every founder wants to be Nike. I see it in pitch decks constantly. “We are going to be the Nike of pet care, the Nike of frozen food, the Nike of dental.” Then the next slide shows fifteen lines of business launching in year one. They forgot the part where Nike was the best running shoe in the world for twenty years before anyone let them sell a basketball shoe. They earned the second line by dominating the first. They won the trust of the most demanding customers in a small market before they ever asked a different customer for permission. The promise was not “we make all athletic footwear.” The promise was “if you run, this is the best shoe on your foot.” When that promise was repeated, kept, and proven over two decades, the brand finally had enough equity to extend. Most founders try to skip that step. There is no skipping that step.

At Petfolk, we do one thing. We build and operate pet care clinics. That is it. We do not run emergency hospitals. We do not buy existing clinics and rebrand them. We do not sell food, supplements, or insurance. Our 10-year plan runs through 2036, fifteen years after we opened our first clinic, and that plan has us doing exactly one thing the entire time. Opening Petfolk clinics. Getting better at the model every year. Driving NPS higher. Earning the trust of pet parents in every market we enter. I told the board we are willing to look at what comes next in 2036. Not before. Until then, we are heads down. We believe we can build a $1B+ revenue business doing this one thing, and we believe the only way to earn the right to do a second thing is to be undeniably the best at the first. Nike took twenty years to earn the Jordan deal. We are 5 years into a 15-year plan, and the work right now is the same work it was on day one. Open the next clinic. Deliver on the promise. Repeat.

The $800 Test I Take Every Year

I get the Galleri test once a year. It is a multi-cancer early detection blood test from GRAIL that screens for signals of more than 50 different cancers from a single blood draw. That 50+ list includes the 12 deadliest cancers in America, which together cause roughly two-thirds (~67%) of all cancer deaths in the US. Pancreatic, liver, ovarian, esophageal, stomach, and several others on that list have no recommended screening test today.

Today, the official USPSTF-recommended cancer screenings cover only 5 cancers: breast (mammogram), cervical (Pap smear), colorectal (colonoscopy or Cologuard), lung (low-dose CT for heavy smokers), and prostate (PSA blood test). Most people also add an annual full-body skin check with a dermatologist, which catches melanoma early. Combined, those screenings cover the cancers behind roughly 40 to 45% of US cancer deaths. Critical, life-saving stuff. Do every single one of them on schedule.

But that still leaves the majority of cancer deaths in a screening blind spot. The cancers that kill people (pancreatic, liver, ovarian, esophageal, stomach, and dozens more) have no recommended screening at all today. Galleri closes a big chunk of that gap by screening for 50+ cancers from a single blood draw, including the 12 deadliest that cause about two-thirds of cancer deaths.

When you stack Galleri on top of the standard screenings and an annual skin check, you are screening for cancers responsible for roughly 80 to 85% of US cancer deaths. That coverage jump, from 45% to 85%, is what makes the $800 a year decision easy for me.

I have no family history of cancer, and I hope it stays that way. But cancer rates are climbing globally, especially in adults under 50, and 1 in 3 people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. I am not willing to leave that to chance when the technology to screen for it exists today.

The logic is simple. The earlier you find it, the higher the survival rate. The harder part is actually doing it.

The 5-year relative survival rate is the gold standard in cancer outcomes. It is the number every major institution (the NCI, the American Cancer Society, SEER, Johns Hopkins) anchors on, and it is what oncologists use to compare stages and treatments. The numbers on early detection are not subtle.

Pancreatic cancer is the most extreme example. At stage 1A, the 5-year survival rate is over 80%. At stage 4, it drops to roughly 3%. That is not a marginal improvement. That is the difference between a treatable disease and a death sentence. Today, about 80% of pancreatic cancer cases are caught at stage 3 or stage 4 because we have no routine screening for it. Same story for ovarian, liver, esophageal, and most of the other deadliest cancers.

Galleri's clinical data is strong. Adding Galleri to standard screening can detect 7 times more cancers than standard screening alone. For the 12 deadliest cancers, Galleri has a sensitivity of 76.3% across all stages, with 53% detected at stages 1 to 2. Specificity is 99.5%, meaning the false positive rate is around 0.4%, the lowest of any multi-cancer early detection test on the market. Modeled data suggests annual testing could reduce stage 4 diagnoses by 53% in adults aged 50 to 79.

Cancer rates among adults under 50 are rising fast. Colorectal cancer in particular has been climbing in younger adults every generation since the 1950s. The default assumption that cancer is an older person's problem is no longer true.

Once a year, every year. Same week each year so I do not forget.

The hardest part used to be the ordering. Galleri is a prescription test, which means you need a physician to order it. A few years ago that meant either bringing it up at your annual physical (and hoping your doctor would order it, since most are still unfamiliar with it) or finding a telemedicine provider on your own. Friction killed a lot of intent.

That has changed. You can now request the test directly on galleri.com and they connect you to an independent telemedicine physician who reviews your request and writes the prescription. Start to finish, the order takes about 10 minutes. They then schedule a blood draw with a partner lab near you. Results come back in about 2 weeks.

The list price is $949, but the self-pay price through most providers is $799 or less. You can use HSA or FSA dollars. It is not currently covered by most insurance or Medicare, so you are paying out of pocket.

If you are over 50, the case is straightforward. If you are under 50 and have a family history, elevated risk, or you just want the data, I would still do it. $800 once a year for the best multi-cancer screening tool available today is one of the highest ROI line items in my entire health budget.

Thanks for reading.

Mike Wystrach

Founder · Operator · Investor

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