This Is Black Horizon
Your GTM engine is actually a sentient predator - and it's eating your company alive
Dear readers,
You’ve clicked in to this email to answer a single question: “What the hell is Black Horizon and when did I subscribe to it?”
The statistical answer:
70% of you signed up for “The GTM Operators Club”. Most of you are in the B2B sales space, probably as an individual contributor, and are here because Joey Gilkey and Tony Brophy recommended you subscribe (shout out to the fellas)
30% of you signed up for “The Convexity Report”. Most of you are here because John Doe of the absolutely first-rate Collapse Intelligence Agency recommended us (alongside Dr. Michael Burry and Cassandra Unchained, no less)
In the beginning of Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs awakens alone, hundreds of years removed from everything he knows, to a world he doesn’t recognize. He looks in to the mirror, desperate for an anchor to what was, and instead finds a stranger staring back.
Tak is faced with an existential nightmare: Who he is and who he is are fundamentally unreconcilable - he runs into people for the first time who know “him” and their reactions create a hyperstitious feedback loop. The only way out is to let go - and embracing the paradox becomes the very means of its resolution.
Seeing our name alongside Michael Burry’s is a signal we simply cannot ignore any longer.
The forward thesis is as follows: In spite of the oceans of capital and “think pieces” from “experts”, GTM engines at the early stage start-up level remain primitive, linear and predatory systems that destroy far more economic value than they create. For a lot who espouse the importance of being “contrarian”, founders, investors and operators alike cluster around a shockingly vapid set of principles that progressively erode trust between buyers and sellers - a reality conveniently ignored so long as the agents involved can be its beneficiaries before the whole ecosystem comes crashing down. Carnival barkers on LinkedIn work backwards from outcomes and construct self-serving narratives on the how - either too epistemically ignorant or too exploitive to care - so long as they can make a few bucks while Rome burns to the ground.
We spend so much time blathering about creating “scalable revenue engines” that we forget to ask the inverse question - How do the very things our hands shape in return mold us? And how does that endless recursion play out in the emergent behavior of commercial organisms?
Black Horizon answers that question.
One dispatch a day. Every day.
I’ll see you on the inside.
CN