August 2026
Sanchez came on to discuss her book about founders who cannot let go of the companies they built. She casts the pull of being indispensable as a dependency rather than a work habit, which is also how the episode frames the diagnostic question of whether you are addicted to your own business. The line opens the episode, ahead of a conversation about buying boring businesses.
Transcript
You don't need to be smart or brilliant or remember everything to run a really profitable business. You need named frameworks and systems that you can steal from other people in order to take their 10,000 hours and apply it to you.
You know Cody Sanchez as the woman who made buying a laundromat sound cooler than launching a startup. She built contrarian thinking by shouting from the rooftops that boring businesses are the most overlooked path to wealth in America. Today she talks about the thesis of her new book, Own or Be Own, and how to tell if you're addicted to your own business.
If you are a founder and you are trying to be a hero all the time, you will eventually do as Spider-Man says you'll become the villain. You want to be a hero because it tastes like heroin. It is the most addictive substance in the world to feel needed.
We talk about how conventional rise and grind advice is complicated for pregnant women.
There was many a day where I was laying on the floor of my little office and really just thinking, if I don't have the business established, I should not establish a baby. And that was because there weren't other women around me that I saw doing it.
And the step-by-step playbook, if you're thinking about buying a boring business.