Writing Sample 09 · Investor · Shareholder Letter
THE ANNUAL
LETTER
A CEO who'd had a brutal year and a board that wanted spin. He wanted the opposite — a letter in the Bezos tradition that told shareholders the truth before they read it elsewhere, and made them want to hold the stock anyway. Investor-grade clarity with founder warmth. We wrote the version he could sign without flinching.
Sample anonymized & shared with permission. Representative of voice & range — your work stays yours.
Last year I told you we would grow revenue 60% and reach breakeven by the fourth quarter. We grew 41%, and we are still not at breakeven. I want to start with that, plainly, before I tell you anything else — because you deserve the number before you get the narrative, and because the story I'm about to tell only matters if you trust that I won't dress it up. We missed. The miss was ours, not the market's. We over-hired into a demand curve we assumed would hold, and when it bent in March, we were three months too slow to bend with it.
Here is what that cost, and here is what it bought. The cost was a hard reset: we let go of 11% of the company, people we hired in good faith and lost through my misjudgment. The thing it bought was clarity. Stripped of the projects we'd been funding out of optimism, the business that remained grew faster, retained better, and spent less to do both. Net revenue retention rose from 104% to 119%. Our best customers, it turned out, never needed the things we kept building for the customers we didn't have yet.
We will be the company that tells you the bad number first. Always. That is not a value statement — it is the only way compounding trust survives a bad year.
So here is what we are doing with FY26, in one sentence: less surface area, more depth, and a P&L that finally tells the truth as fast as I just did. I am not asking you to forgive the miss. I am asking you to watch what we do with what it taught us.
The ask
It had been a hard year — a missed forecast, a layoff, a stalled raise — and the board's instinct was to manage the message. He wanted the opposite. He'd read a decade of Bezos letters and Buffett letters and wanted his shareholders to hear the bad news from him, in his own voice, before they read a colder version in the trade press.
The voice
Candid but never self-flagellating. Specific with numbers, generous with credit, allergic to "headwinds" and "challenging environment." We built the letter around one disarming move — lead with the worst number — and one durable principle that could anchor every letter for the next decade, not just this one.
The result
The letter got picked up by twelve outlets, most of them quoting the same line. Investors who'd been quiet re-engaged; two added to their positions inside the quarter. Internally, it became required onboarding reading — the clearest statement of how the company actually thinks anyone had ever written down.
A principle, not a promise — which means it survives next year and the year after. It reframes a bad result as evidence of a good habit, and it gives every journalist a clean pull-quote that flatters the company for telling the truth. We wrote nine versions of this line. The shortest one won.
WHAT I DELIVERED
- 01
Candor with control
The bad number, stated first and owned outright — engineered so honesty reads as strength, not apology, and never tips into self-flagellation.
- 02
The narrative of the year
What the miss cost and what it bought, told as one clean arc with real figures — the layoff, the reset, the retention that rose because of it.
- 03
The north-star line
A single durable principle, pressure-tested across nine drafts, built to anchor every annual letter for the next decade — not just this one.
- 04
The close
A one-sentence statement of next year's strategy and an ask that earns belief without begging for it — the line he could sign without flinching.