The Advantage #17: Bet on the Frozen Aisle, Choosing Your Struggle, Kodak's Cash Cow Trap, and Engineering Daily Delight

Thanks for tuning in to the seventeenth issue of The Advantage. (A lucky number. It is my wife's birthday, and the day my twin brother and I were born.) 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.

Back After a Two-Week Hiatus

First, an apology. I missed the last two issues of The Advantage. I have been absolutely slammed and have been doing my best to keep my head above water. I know your life did not stop without my newsletter showing up on Wednesday morning. I am not flattering myself. But I made a commitment to show up weekly, and I owe you the acknowledgment when I miss the bar. I missed the bar. We are back.

Some good news on that front. I finally hired help on the WiseTrack side, which means The Advantage gets the attention it deserves going forward, and we are moving into production on the podcast I have been hinting at for a while. The Advantage Podcast with Mike Wystrach is officially in motion. More on that in the coming weeks.

A couple of quick updates on what has been keeping me underwater. Cutting Horse made its fifth investment, leading a $2.4M seed round into Ripi, a chef-driven frozen pasta brand launching nationally into Whole Foods and 1,100+ Target stores this month. The product is genuinely incredible. They are taking ravioli, a category that has been stuck in the same form factor for decades, and elevating it into something that belongs on a restaurant menu. Flavors like beef short rib, chicken parmesan, sweet potato, and cacio e pepe. Chef-quality, frozen, ready in minutes. Go buy it today. You can find it at Whole Foods now and at Target later this month. I am not exaggerating when I say it is one of the best frozen products I have ever eaten.

This investment is squarely in line with our thesis on the premiumization of the frozen aisle. The frozen section has been ignored and under-innovated for decades, and I am increasingly convinced it will be the next hot category in grocery. I am going to write a deeper piece on this thesis in the coming weeks because I think most people are sleeping on it.

On the Petfolk side, we just opened our 38th location. The team continues to rock and roll as we push toward our goal of 50 locations this year. The pace is no joke, and I could not be prouder of the operators making it happen.

I have also been spending a huge amount of time on the AI front, building out workflows and infrastructure that I believe are going to fundamentally change how I operate across all three of my businesses. There is a lot to share here, and I will be unpacking it in the coming weeks and months. This is the work I am most excited about right now.

More to come. Thanks for sticking with me.

Choose Your Struggle

Building a company is not just a test of resilience. It is a test of what you are actually chasing. This week's watch is a 17-minute, 52-second clip from Mark Manson titled "How to pull yourself out of a cheap dopamine spiral." Manson wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which is one of the best books I have read in the last decade. If you have not picked it up, do.

His core point is the thing I preach to every founder I meet and every young person who asks me for advice. Stop chasing happiness. Start chasing fulfillment. Happiness is cheap dopamine hits. Fulfillment is hard work. They are not the same thing, and confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make. The better question is not "what will make me happy?" It is "what am I willing to struggle for?"

This is the number one thing I tell young people and the number one thing I tell founders. Stop chasing happiness. Chase fulfillment. I have been preaching this for years, and watching Manson articulate it this cleanly was the reason this clip stuck with me.

I did not always operate this way. Like most young people, I overemphasized happiness early on. The things I wanted to buy. The status I wanted to have. The lifestyle I thought success was supposed to look like. Looking back, none of those things are what I remember. The moments that actually mattered, the ones that shaped who I am, were not the easy ones. They were not the happy ones. They were the hard ones. The ones I had to grind through. The ones that gave me fulfillment. That is the lesson it took me years to internalize, and it is the one I now refuse to stop talking about.

Most people spend their lives chasing the thing they think will make them happy. The fancy car. The bigger house. The exit. The next round. Manson is right. Those are dopamine hits. They feel great for a short window, and then they wear off, and you are right back where you started, hunting the next one. It is a treadmill. And it is the default setting for most of the world.

Fulfillment is different. Fulfillment is built through struggle. It is the byproduct of doing hard work in service of something you actually believe should exist. That is the whole magic of being a founder. The journey is the point. The hard days are the point. The fulfillment does not come from the company being acquired or the wire hitting your account. It comes from the act of building. Creating a product that did not exist before. Solving a problem that nobody else solved. That is the part of the story almost nobody tells correctly.

Look at Elon. The narrative is always "Elon Musk is worth $420 billion." That misses the entire point. Elon is not optimizing for the things he can buy. He is living his life to build companies that solve problems he believes have to be solved. The fulfillment is in the building. Not in the net worth. The greatest founders I have ever met operate exactly like this. The mission is the product. The mission is the company. The outcome is a side effect.

The trap is that startups look glamorous from the outside. They are not. They are a long, repetitive grind of hard problems, hard conversations, and hard decisions. If you are in it for the dopamine, you will quit. If you are in it because you believe this thing needs to exist, the struggle becomes the reward. That is the founder edge nobody can copy. Pick a struggle you actually want, because the struggle is what will define you.

Kodak's Cash Cow Became a Noose

Kodak's modern era began in 1888, when George Eastman put a simple consumer camera in the public's hands and turned photography into a mass-market habit. Almost a century later, Kodak saw the next wave coming before anyone else. In December 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson built the first self-contained digital camera in a Rochester lab. And yet the film engine kept printing money. The decline wasn't immediate, but the future was easy to read. As digital improved, adoption crept in, but Kodak's cash machine ran loud enough to drown out the signal. Revenue peaked in 1996 at roughly $16B, twenty-one years after they invented the thing that would kill them. By then, everyone could see the value was already migrating away from film and toward the endpoint, the device, the software, and the customer experience. The curve eventually snapped. Kodak filed for Chapter 11 on January 19, 2012.

Structural change doesn't reward incumbents. It rewards new entrants. Kodak didn't lose because they didn't see it coming. They lost because their greatness was engineered around consumables, high-margin film, repeat-purchase behavior, and an org chart built to defend that economics. When the value moved, the same system that made Kodak powerful became the thing that held it in place. Adobe Photoshop shipped on February 19, 1990, six years before Kodak's peak. Today, Adobe's market cap is over $100B. Kodak's peak was around $30B, and the company never got back to it.

AI is a structural change to every industry. Software gets cheaper to build. Domain knowledge gets cheaper to access. Work shifts from tools that help humans to agents that do the work. Incumbents will "adopt AI" while still defending seat-based SaaS, services-heavy implementations, and org charts designed for the old model. That's Kodak time-buying. If you're founding now, your edge is structural. Build AI-first from day one, design the workflow around agents, and win at the endpoint by owning the customer experience as the underlying models commoditize. The standard is simple. Don't modernize a legacy product. Build the company, the legacy player can't.

The Free iPhone Setting That Will Make You Smile Every Day

My wife set this up on her phone a few weeks ago, and the first time I saw it, I knew I had to do it too. It is a free setting on the iPhone called Photo Shuffle. Instead of the same static lock screen wallpaper, your phone pulls random photos from your library and rotates them throughout the day. Every time you pick up your phone, you see something different. A photo of your kids you forgot you took. A landscape from a trip three years ago. A random shot you would never have framed or saved as a wallpaper, but in context, on your lock screen, hits you in a way that genuinely delights you.

I am now constantly screenshotting photos that pop up and sending them to my wife. It has turned the most mundane interaction with my phone, the act of picking it up to check the time or open an app, into a tiny moment of joy. Multiply that by the hundred plus times you look at your phone every day, and you have engineered a steady drip of small wins into your daily life. If you have kids, this is a cheat code. The phone surfaces moments you stopped seeing. It is honestly phenomenal.

Small moments of positive emotion are not just nice. They compound. Barbara Fredrickson at UNC Chapel Hill has spent four decades building the science behind this. Her Broaden and Build Theory shows that brief positive emotions (joy, gratitude, awe, amusement) physically broaden your thinking, improve your decision making, and build durable resources you can draw on later under stress. The frequency of these moments matters more than the intensity.

A 2025 Fujifilm survey done with clinical psychologist Dr. Lauren Cook found that 74% of people look at old photos to relive precious memories, with 64% reporting more smiles, 58% reporting reduced anxiety, and 49% feeling uplifted. Earlier UK research found that looking at old photos boosted mood by more than 10% and was more relaxing than meditation. A separate study on personal photographs found they decreased negative mood more effectively than generic images, because personal photos trigger vivid, sensory-rich memory recall that activates the prefrontal cortex and regulates the amygdala.

Translation: your photo library is a massively underused mental health asset, and Photo Shuffle is the easiest possible way to put it to work.

I have mine set to shuffle hourly. I tried On Tap first, but the photo changes too fast. You barely see it before it is gone. Hourly is the sweet spot. You get to live with each photo for a stretch, notice it, sometimes screenshot it and send it to someone, and then a fresh one shows up. Long enough to enjoy, often enough to surprise.

I have not set up any curated albums, and I do not plan to. I let it pull from Featured Photos and choose completely randomly. That, to me, is the entire point. The surprise is the whole experience. You can absolutely build focused albums if you want more control, but I would push you to try the fully random route first. Letting the iPhone decide is what unlocks photos you forgot you took, moments you stopped seeing, and small surprises throughout the day.

The setup takes about 90 seconds.

That is it. Free. Two minutes. Highly recommend.

Thanks for reading.

Mike Wystrach

Founder · Operator · Investor

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