Minimum Viable - Nov. 6, 2025

🏠 Short Term Rental/Subleasing Agency
📃 Startup Execution Playbook - What Founders Overlook
🥾 Layoffs at Tech Behemoths and Startups Alike
💭 Inspirational Quote I Revisit Every Day
😴 Children’s Books Guaranteed to Induce Sleepiness

🏠 Short Term Rental/Subleasing Agency

IDEA: If you need a place to crash for a week, you can get a hotel or book an AirBNB. No problem. If you need a place to live indefinitely, you can rent an apartment for a year. Again, no issue. What about when you need to stay somewhere for 3 months? I remember being a college student looking for summer internships and having my options limited to just my college town and my hometown which drastically cut the list of cool companies I was actually interested in. My options were only those two places because it was ridiculously expensive and difficult to find a place to sublet. I wanted to try a new city like Chicago, San Francisco, or even go abroad, but there was no good service to find a place to stay.

Sure, you can try to find an AirBNB, but for an extended stay, that can be astronomically expensive. Your only real option is to sublet an existing lease. Do you go to Facebook and see if any stranger has a room? Or worse, Craigslist? There needs to be an agency that allows customers to easily find an affordable extended stay location.

PRODUCT: Create a short term subleasing agency allowing users to find places to stay and giving apartment complexes or AirBNB’s the opportunity to fill vacancies. Focus on college students (internships), travel nurses, or occupational residencies and the companies that hire them. Connect them to openings in their upcoming location. Build a website to handle listings and reservations on the renter side and an additional portal for businesses to work directly with complexes for short term employee placements.

MVP: Subleasing agreement with apartment complexes looking for tenants made available through a website.

REVENUE MODEL: Commission based, have a small take fee between 5-10% for rentals.

EXIT STRATEGY: Sell to a major player in the short term rental market like AirBNB for 4-7x revenue.

Resource: Arcanum Ventures

Link: The Startup Execution Playbook: What Founders Overlook, But Investors Don’t

Summary: The playbook advises founders to focus relentlessly on execution rather than just ideas. It emphasizes establishing an operational rhythm, building clean fundraising and feedback loops, and running disciplined metrics. Founders should prioritize key levers, maintain clear accountability, institutionalize processes (not just ad-hoc effort), and embed execution into daily culture. It highlights that investors often judge startups on operational capability more than visionary pitch. By combining a rigorous rhythm of experimentation, measurable outcome-tracking, and feedback loops with strategic clarity, founders can turn momentum into sustained progress and build credibility with investors and teams alike.

Spin: As big of a fan of ideas as I am… they are just a starting point. Execution is key on every level and even if you have an incredible idea (like all ideas from Minimum Viable) if you can’t deliver, sell, or market the product, it’s dead in the water. This playbook has a lot of information, but it is worth its weight in gold. I highly suggest you read it, pick an idea from us, and follow the playbook to a T.

Publication: Trueup

Link: Tech Layoffs Tracker

Summary: So far in 2025, tech companies have announced 606 separate layoff events, impacting around 178,635 employees (an average of about 576 people per day). For context: in 2024 there were 1,115 layoff events affecting 238,461 people (about 653 people per day). The most recent large layoffs include major names from software, hardware, and services sectors. This is reflecting broad cost-cutting across the industry rather than isolated pockets.

Top Layoffs:

Amazon: 14,000 employees

Applied Materials: 1,400 employees (4% of company)

Rivian: 600 employees (4% of company)

Meta: 600 employees from its AI unit

MyBambu: 350 employees (100% of the company)

Porter: 350 employees

Amadeus IT Group: 400 employees

Spin: Yikes. Some of the biggest names in tech from the giants of Meta and Amazon to the hottest startups like Rivian and Luminar are feeling a financial pinch. It seems like we are hearing about these major layoffs much more frequently this year, but according to the data from Trueup, there have been less layoffs in the tech sector compared to last year. Maybe its because of the names involved. Seriously, I bet you have heard of at least 10 of the companies listed in the last month alone.

Best part of entrepreneurship: I probably won’t fire myself… probably.

Today’s motivation comes from a personal favorite quote of mine. I read this quote every day and while I love a good speech from Denzel Washington or Steve Jobs, there is nothing that makes me want to fight another day like this. It has been credited to several people: Jesse Itzler, Jeffery R. Holland, and even Tom Brady. Truly, it doesn’t matter; it works on me every time. See below:

IDEA: Remember being a kid and not wanting to go to sleep? Even when you got in bed, you’d get excited when your parents picked your favorite book to read. You can’t go to bed then, who wants to miss out on Pigsty (my personal favorite)? Now, as a parent (I am still going to read the awesome books), I feel like I am going to need some backup when my kids are too unruly to go to sleep. Introducing, Sleep Inducing Bedtime Stories.

There not even real bedtime stories. They are tax return examples from accounting textbooks, financial disclosure documents from S-1 filings, encyclopedia entries about the color beige, user manuals from vacuum cleaners, and transcriptions of C-SPAN coverage of senate hearings. Throw in some pictures to trick kids into thinking the book is for them.

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