The Sticker and the Camera

Three rooms, one uncomfortable lesson

I have been thinking, all week, about the difference between what looks like the thing and the thing itself.

It started at a coffee shop. Strangelove, on the east side of downtown Austin, late Sunday afternoon. I came there to clear my inbox and prep for the week ahead. The only sticker on my laptop is a small red dot covering the Apple logo, with the word Leica in white inside it. I was in for a treat! A analog photography meet-up was in full-swing. Within an hour, six different strangers had stopped at my table. They saw my sticker and wanted to show me their cameras. I saw two M6s, an M7, an M10, and someone’s grandfather’s M3 in a beat-up leather case. The guy with the M6 was running the same Walter Mandler-designed 35mm I have been quietly falling in love with for months.

That night, I intentionally left my Leica on the shelf at home. I had decided, that morning, that the responsible move was the to clear out my inbox ahead of a busy work-week.

The whole evening I sat among photographers, talking about light and lenses, without a camera in my hands.

The lesson was small and immediate. The sticker ≠ camera.

I noticed the same theme in two other conversations this week, both of them inside my day job.

The first was on customer calls. RightMatch integrates with dozens of applicant tracking systems, runs AI video interviews, and scores resumes. By any normal yardstick, that is the camera.

But the most candid feedback I heard, repeatedly, was that the AI work recruiters were proudest of was not happening inside their applicant tracking system. It was happening inside Copilot. Inside Claude. Inside ChatGPT. A recruiter writes a great Boolean string with her chatbot at eleven in the morning, closes the tab, and her teammate one floor up rebuilds the same string from scratch the next week. The wins are real but, they die in silos.

So we built MCP into RightMatch this month, so a recruiter can post jobs, source candidates, send Mira interviews, and connect calendar and ATS data without ever leaving the chatbot her CIO already licensed.

The second conversation was over coffee with another exited founder, talking about why so many great pre-seed companies feel stuck. Five years ago, the bar was clear. A working product, a real pain point, early traction, a network. Today those things are the price of entry. Open Threads or X right now and scroll #buildinpublic for thirty seconds. You will see two dozen beautifully shipped MVPs that were built in a weekend.

The product is not the moat anymore. The product is the sticker. The moat is whether you have an unfair advantage no one in that feed can replicate, and a customer acquisition motion that survives contact with the noise.

Three different rooms. The same uncomfortable lesson.

The visible artifact invites the conversation. Only the working practice finishes it.

So this is me trying to pay attention. To the integration count and to the integration. To the sticker on the laptop and to the camera on the shelf I should have brought.

More soon, once the next roll comes back from the lab.

Stay specific, stay honest, bring the camera.

This is part of a series of reflections written while building RightMatch in a volatile market.