WiseTrack Collective

The Advantage

by Mike Wystrach

Issue #37 | September 16, 2026

Fifty Dollars and a Suitcase to Nine Figures & Two Burners, or Three

THIS WEEK'S THROUGH-LINE

You do not get four burners. Name the number and stop apologizing for it.

Welcome Note

Thanks for reading the thirty-seventh issue of The Advantage. This one is brought to you by Proppel. Details and the discount for Advantage readers are at the end.

The watch is my conversation with Kat Schneider, founder and CEO of Ritual. She has one rule, make yourself replaceable, and she runs it in two places, at the company and at home. The second one is the part I had not heard anybody put that way. The Practical Edge picks up the home half and gets specific about what it costs. Let's get into it.

WORTH WATCHING:

Make Yourself Replaceable, Twice

The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Kat Schneider · ~61 min

Kat Schneider came to Brooklyn at four years old, a refugee from the former Soviet Union, and grew up in a welfare hotel. Her parents arrived with fifty dollars and a suitcase. She went on to invest at Troy Carter's AF Square, across a portfolio that included Spotify, Uber and Warby Parker. Then she left, four months pregnant, to start a vitamin company a lot of investors did not want to touch. Ritual announced $250M in sales in 2024. The rule she gives at the end is the reason to watch.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:

The best thing in here is a lesson she had to learn twice. A decade in, Kat hired a CEO coach for the first time. What he gave her was not new information. It was a reminder of something she knew on day one and stopped doing. Make yourself replaceable. Hire the person who is better than you at the thing, then get out of the way. When the business shifted from high growth to growth and profitability, she took the jobs back. CMO. COO. Head of HR. All at once. No single person is good at all of those, and the one least suited to try is the CEO.

My hiring bar is that I would not clear it. Everyone I bring in should be better than me at their role, and their first duty is to hire people better than them. What Kat names is the reflex I have watched in myself and never called out. When something starts going wrong, the instinct is to step back in. That instinct feels like leadership and it is the opposite.

Then she runs the same rule at home. Her non-negotiables are specific. Breakfast, school drop-off, pickup, bedtime. Everything else gets real help, and she says accepting the help was the hardest part.

THE LINE THAT STUCK

"You can either start a business or a family, but there's no way in hell that you're gonna do both."

One of the leading investors in LA told her that while she was pregnant and pitching. She has three kids and a nine figure company. Watch her tell it (30 seconds) →

MY 20-SECOND RECAP

if you do not have the full 61 minutes

→Your missing expertise is not the problem. She had no supplement or science background and says that is why Ritual looks the way it does. You can hire the scientist. Nobody can supply the reason you started.

→Sell one thing until customers trust you. Ritual sold a single multivitamin, one price, subscription only, for two years. The prenatal came in 2018, and she says people had been asking for it the whole time.

→Waiting for a co-founder is a way of not starting. She calls it a cop out. Her husband, who has started several companies, told her a co-founder had never been the thing that saved one.

PRO MOVE

Write down every job you did last week that has a real title attached to it. Marketing, ops, finance, recruiting. Circle the two you are worst at. Hire the first one.

WATCH →

PRACTICAL EDGE

You Only Get Two Burners

WHY IT WORKS

Picture a stove with four burners. One is family. One is friends. One is health. One is work. To be successful you turn one off. To be really successful you turn off two.

Kat runs three. Health, business and kids, and she is direct about the cost. When those are the three, she is not seeing her friends. Three is right for where she is. It is right for where I am too. But if you want to be exceptional at one thing, I do not think you get three. Look at Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Elon Musk. I do not see four burners in any of those lives, and I am not sure I see three.

The number is a season, not a personality trait.

And the guilt does not come from the imbalance. It comes from expecting four lit burners and counting two.

THE DATA SUPPORTS IT

Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 CEOs for thirteen straight weeks each, logged around the clock in fifteen-minute increments, for Harvard Business Review in 2018. The average work week was 62.5 hours. They also worked 79% of weekend days and 70% of vacation days. Small sample, and the only around-the-clock data anyone has. Work will not stay inside the container you built for it.

HOW I USE IT

In the early days of Freshly I was running two. Work and health. That was not a philosophy, it was arithmetic. I was not married and I did not have kids, so there was no family burner to light.

I run three now. Work, family, health. I am up at 4:15, and that is not discipline for its own sake. It buys me the front of the day so I can be home for dinner with my kids every night. Dinner is the non-negotiable. The 4:15 is the price. Friends is usually the one that is off. Then a golf trip comes up, friends gets the burner for a week, and something else goes cold while it does. Pretending that is not a trade is how you end up feeling like you are failing at something you never chose.

THE SETUP

→Count the burners you actually have lit. Not the ones you intend to light. Family, friends, health, work. Be honest about the number.

→Name the ones that are off, out loud. An unnamed sacrifice turns into guilt. A named one is a decision you made.

→Put a date on it. A season is supposed to end. If the same burner has been off for a month and you cannot say when it comes back on, that is not a season. Decide whether you meant it.

THIS ISSUE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY

I was a customer before Proppel was a sponsor, and their free hiring guide is why I keep sending people there. It is the closest thing I have seen to everything I learned the hard way across 700 international hires, in one place. What to hire for. What a role actually costs by region. Where it breaks in the first ninety days.

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Thanks for reading.

Founder · Operator · Investor

→ Know someone trying to run all four burners? Forward this to them.

→ Follow me on LinkedIn for daily insights.

The Advantage | WiseTrack Collective

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