Hi Reader,

Past $10M in revenue, you are no longer hunting.

You are being hunted.

This email is your guide for:

1. Preparedness frameworks to protect your company & team
2. 30-day emergency planning to protect your home & family

Let’s dive in.

But first, why now?

I've mentioned AI is like nuclear technology: incredibly powerful in the right hands, incredibly dangerous in the wrong ones.

Increasingly, it looks like AI is breaking out of containment.

Where there's smoke there's fire, and this does feel like a February 2020 moment when it comes to AI. I hope it's nothing. I hope it's a hurricane that passes in the wind.

But it does not hurt to use this as an opportunity to batten down the hatches to make sure we're ready.

Look at 2026 so far:

• April: Fed chair and Treasury secretary summon major bank CEOs over AI-powered hacking.
• May: CISA warns Chinese hackers have planted access inside US infrastructure and tells operators to plan for running offline.
• August: The NSA, CISA, and FBI warn attackers are using AI to target US power and water.
• August: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and 100+ companies sign a joint warning that AI cyberattacks are coming.
• October 20: A power event at one Google data center disrupts Lloyds, HSBC, and Revolut.
• October 29: Hackers steal $6.3B from Binance in about 20 minutes. The entry point was one engineer’s compromised laptop.

​Whistleblowers are warning about agentic swarms on the US grid. Whether legit or not, the fact that it seems plausible is enough for concern.

Meanwhile, deepfake fraud is on pace to cost businesses $26B this year.

What could happen? Anything. Or nothing.

Either way, the emergency scenario is a possibility. Which means you need to prepare for it.

Here’s where to start.

How to protect your company & team

First, remember this:

Growth is the Operator's job. Protection is the CEO’s job.

Your #1 role is to ensure the continued existence of the company.

At my previous company ($84M), we learned the hard way what single points of failure look like:

• 90% of our revenue ran through 1 Stripe account when a 30-day termination notice landed
• Our 1M-person email list went dark overnight
• Our website was built on depreciated code that needed to be rebuilt fast
• Austin went through a snowpocapyse where 50%+ of our team was affected (we had to send out rescue teams to deliver clean water because pipes were frozen)

I’ve known founders who…

• Lost a $12M e-comm business when Stripe and PayPal banned them simultaneously
• Lost their entire customer database to hackers who extorted $200,000 for its return
• Lost $600k in revenue when their website broke during Black Friday
• ​Lost $230k from a “trusted” employee​
• Lost immeasurable trust when private therapy recordings of top-level executives uploaded by a disgruntled employee went viral
• Lost everything because a developer used open-source code with licensing restrictions that made their product illegal to sell

Many of these scenarios happened pre-AI. Today an attacker only needs 20 seconds of your podcast audio to clone your voice and call your CFO for a wire. Every security control that relied on "I'd recognize his voice" is dead.

Remember all those scam calls and texts your parents get? Now imagine it powered by AI.

It is not a matter of if, but when.

That’s why you need to run this…

The Black Swan Committee

Every 6 months, I make the CEOs I coach run a Black Swan Committee with one question:

Give “the devil” unlimited funds…what would he do to destroy you?

• Shut down your Stripe account
• Freeze your bank account
• Trigger an IRS audit
• File a trademark dispute that forces you to change your name
• Start a war in Ukraine where all your engineers are…

After those near-death business experiences as AppSumo CEO, I developed the Extinction Event Matrix.

The matrix works on two axes:

• Impact Severity: Would this merely hurt or completely destroy your business?
• Occurrence Probability: How likely is this to happen in the next 12 months?

Write down all your threats. Map them on this matrix.

Threats that score “critical” become a non-negotiable priority

At AppSumo, we met quarterly to update our matrix and tackle our highest-threat scenarios first. We assigned each RED ALERT item to a specific exec with a 30-day deadline to implement a comprehensive protection protocol.

13 sample preparedness actions to take in the business

After I run the Black Swan Committee with clients, we lock down the protections in Notion:

• 3 YubiKeys for the CEO (carry, home safe, off-site). Phishing-proof logins, with spares so a lost key never locks you out.
• Zero SMS 2FA on money, email, or domains. A hacker can take over your phone number with one call to your carrier.
• 2 owners on every root account. So if one person is locked out, compromised, or gone, the entire company isn’t.
• Spoken code words for the exec team (and family) for AI fraud defense. AI can clone a voice from a few seconds of audio, but it can’t guess a code word you decided IRL.
• Dual bank approval over $50K. One person shouldn’t be able to move company-impacting money.
• No wires after 3pm Friday. You can’t do anything about it until Monday if something goes wrong. Fraudsters time wires for the weekend.
• Quarterly deepfake drills on finance, engineering, execs. So no one accidentally wires $25M after a deepfaked video call with the CFO. Yes, that’s real.
• 6 months opex across 2 banks. SVB proved one bank is a single point of failure.
• No payment processor over 60% of volume. Processors freeze accounts without warning all the time. One freeze shouldn’t shut off 100% of your revenue.
• $1M+ liquid outside the business (90% boring cash, treasuries, and physical gold/silver across 3 locations). If the business gets frozen, sued, bankrupted, or hacked, your family still has runway.
• Backups of every critical system: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 off-site, 1 that can’t be altered. Tested quarterly. Ransomware goes after backups first. The copy that can’t be altered is the one that saves you, and a backup you haven’t tested isn’t a backup.
• Email list exported to cold storage monthly. Platforms ban and suspend accounts. Your list is the asset, so own a hard copy.
• 72-hour incapacity clause naming an interim CEO. Without it, nobody has the authority to sign, pay, or decide when you can’t.

If you can survive to 2030, you win

Why has the last decade been so dizzying? It feels unprecedented but isn’t.

Imagine you were born in 1910. By your 35th birthday, you’d have lived through:

• World War I
• The 1918 flu, which killed tens of millions
• The Great Depression
• World War II

Four world-altering crises before middle age. We’ve been here before.

We are in the middle of a Fourth Turning.

This idea was first introduced by historians Neil Howe and William Strauss. Recently re-popularized by Van Neistat. It's basically a crystal ball for founders.

History moves in 80-year cycles, like clockwork.

Each cycle has four seasons:

1. High (Spring) - institutions are strong, everyone's winning
2. Awakening (Summer) - people start questioning everything
3. Unraveling (Fall) - institutions crumble
4. Crisis (Winter) - CHAOS (then rebirth)

We're in winter. It started around 2007-2008 (Great Recession?), and should end around late 2020s-early 2030s.

Founders can feel it happening. They tend toward panic: "Should I sell? Should I exit? Will AI kill my business?"

Meanwhile, you're missing the biggest opportunity of your lifetime.

Let's look at the last Fourth Turning (1929-1945):

• The Great Depression
• Global authoritarianism
• World War II

EVERYTHING burned.

But the founders who survived? They owned the next 50 years:

• Decades of economic boom
• Suburban expansion
• Middle-class explosion
• Infrastructure that still runs America

The survivors didn't just win. They monopolized an entire era.

This crisis is a forest fire. And forest fires do two things:

1. Destroy old growth
2. Create perfect conditions for new growth

Spring always comes. The question is: Will you still be alive to see it?

The next 4 years will get uglier before they get better. Every Fourth Turning ends with a climax.

Last time: World War
This time: AI, Nukes, OF, Robot Drones, and our X timeline

The turbulence isn't done. But while everyone else is doom-scrolling, you will prepare.

If you survive to 2030, you'll see:

• 10x higher multiples
• Decades of compound growth
• Competition that's been wiped out
• Infrastructure built for you to dominate

The cycle doesn't care about your feelings.

It doesn't care about your anxiety.

It doesn't care about your exit plans.

It just keeps turning.

How to protect the house & family

The best thing you can do for your household is to prep “30 Days of Not Needing Anyone.”

Here’s my emergency stack:

Water

• 1 gallon per person per day
• 56 gallons for a family of 4 for 14 days
• WaterBOB for the bathtub
• Gravity filter or Lifestraw
• Purification tablets as back up
• Stainless pot to boil water

Food

• Rice
• Beans
• Oats
• Canned meat
• Peanut butter
• Cooking oil
• Instant Coffee
• 2-week freeze-dried reserve
• Camp stove
• 2 months of fuel canisters
• Bars and Candy

Medical

• 90 days of every prescription
• First-aid kit
• Tourniquets
• Hemostatic gauze
• Antibiotics on a standing script
• Anti-diarrheals
• Oral rehydration salts
• Tetanus shot current
• Every adult takes a Stop the Bleed class

Power

• 2 to 3 kWh battery station
• 400W folding solar
• Dual-fuel generator
• 20 gallons of stabilized fuel
• 2 propane tanks
• Cars never below half a tank

Comms

• Satellite messenger
• GMRS radios
• Starlink Mini
• Printed contact sheet
• HAM Radio
• Crank Radio

Documents

• Go-binder
• Copies of IDs and passports
• Deeds, titles, and policies
• Encrypted USB twin

Cash and barter

• $2,000 per adult in small bills
• Junk silver
• Bic lighters
• Soap
• Hand sanitizer
• Coffee
• Batteries
• A Rolex

Home defense

• Firearms every adult is trained on
• Ammo stored safely
• Gun safe away from kids
• Range time on the calendar

The plan

• 72-hour bag per person (packed bag with 3 days of essentials, ready to grab on the way out the door)
• 2 bug-out spots, 2 routes each (two places to go if you have to leave home, and two ways to get to each in case a road is blocked)
• 5 trusted households nearby (neighbors or friends you can share supplies, information, and watch duty with. Community is a resource)
• 24-hour breaker-off drill (family lives with all electricity off for a full day to find what you missed before a real outage does)

Spring always comes. But only for the companies, and families, still standing.

Feel free to forward this one to a founder who needs it.

See you at $100M 🤝
(or the next apocalypse 🫡)

⬇️ To Download

➡️ Extinction Event Matrix for Notion ⬅️

🔖 To Bookmark:

• ​5 email tips: from founder of the world’s largest newsletter on AI
• ​12 months of AppSumo data: what tech product to build if you like revenue
• ​Customer support should report to Product: a hill I’ll die on
• ​Nutrition coaching app for CEOs: created by the best in the game
• ​How to build a context layer: to make your AI more effective (PS: Gonna be doing more on helping you build your AI executive team. Reply to this email with what you want me to know.)

👀 From the Box Seats

Notes from coaching CEOs. The patterns you can only see when you’re outside your own P&L.

💪 Client Love

🛠️ Product Rec

<$100: Woolish Beanie - $10 for a wool(ish) beanie! It looks great and has enough wool in it so it doesn’t stink.

>$100: Side Sleeper Pillow - As a side sleeper, this is one of the best pillows for neck pain. It's adjustable so it can fill all of the space. You're not waking up with neck soreness.

🗨️ Still True

Alright Reader, that’s it for this Sunday! Ayman Al-Abdullah Follow me on X 🤝 3 WAYS TO GROW TOGETHER: ​Download my free Company Wiki. Every company should have a page like this that every employee can reference. ​Join the waitlist for 1:1 coaching. Currently booked out, but joining the list saves your spot in the queue. ​COO Playbook. Give this to your COO to help them onboard themselves and unlock way more leverage for you and your business. ✉️ SHARE THE WEALTH: Forward this to a founder friend. Someone forwarded this to you? Subscribe here.​ P.S. Is there a specific topic you want me to cover? Shoot me a reply to this email. I read every response and value your thoughts 🤝

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