Hi, I’m Ahmad.

Who it’s for

I write for operators running businesses that already work. They’re the kind that quietly run an entire industry and that nobody outside it has heard of.

What each issue covers

• Founder: The psychology of building something that doesn’t depend on you, and why some founders can step back while others can’t.
• Capital: The decisions behind the cash. When to reinvest, acquire, distribute, or hold when the business is your own.
• Operations: The work that compounds. Hiring, delegation, pricing, retention, and what actually makes a business better over time.
• Technology and AI: The applied kind, not the hype. Which workflows are worth automating, which to leave alone, and what to do with a codebase older than your newest hire.
• Ownership: Building beyond the founder. Succession, governance, and what it takes to last for decades.

I write about these because I’ve watched them decide whether a sale, or a decade of ownership, goes well or badly. The point is to make the pattern visible before it costs you something.

What I do outside the newsletter

The Long Hold is written for everyone, and most readers will never need more than that. For those who do, there are two ways we work with founders:

• Generation Growth Partners acquires founder-led software businesses and holds them permanently. There’s no fund life, no exit clock, and no pressure to flip what took someone a decade to build.
• Quiet Machines is for founders who want to keep ownership and modernize. We embed engineering, product, and applied AI teams inside the business to rebuild software, automate operations, and ship new products.

If either sounds like a conversation you’ve been meaning to have, get in touch.