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Imagine waking up every day knowing your job is to suffer on purpose because that’s the price of building something that can dominate a category. Brad Cowdrey (OPM 49) explains why startups aren’t glamorous, why GenAI changes what “coding” even means, and how his company eveoy aims to let brands “fill stores with people” on demand.

Brad describes himself as a deeply hands-on angel/operator often acting as CEO, CTO, and sales driver because he likes control, speed, and talent development. His core philosophy: don’t just write code; build systems that write code, a mindset he learned early while working around supercomputing. Today, he’s pushing engineers to shift from “coding” to higher-level thinking: prompting, agent swarms, and automation patterns that amplify output in the GenAI era.

He traces his start to Colorado Springs’ military-tech ecosystem, where, as a teenager, he got unusual access to hardware, operating systems, repairs, and low-level computing forming a fearless “just learn it” habit: call experts, ask questions, and build anyway. That foundation led to a lifelong obsession with data: he sees data as the exhaust of human behavior and prefers scientific decision-making over intuition dressed up as analytics.

He also shares a leadership model: startups move through distinct phases of construction, prototyping, operations and the CEO must change tools, tone, and org design accordingly. His daily resilience practice is simple but rigorous: reconnect to life goals every morning, pick 1–2 must-win actions for that day, and compound progress. OPM’s lasting value for him is the people, global perspectives, long-term friendships, and even meeting his co-founder.

Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from the conversation:

1. Startups are “pain and suffering” by default—don’t enter if you’re optimizing for comfort.
2. The new edge is “code that writes code.” GenAI pushes developers upward: design systems, workflows, and prompts/agents—not just features.
3. Invest in people, not just products. Brad gets energy from stretching teams from doers into independent thinkers.
4. Fear is usually fake data. His life pattern: stare it down, call someone, learn fast, build anyway.
5. Data = exhaust of human behavior. Use it to decide, not to justify decisions you already made.
6. Go for problems big enough to matter. He’s now only excited by “game-changer / category-creating” plays.
7. Category creation is brutal. If there’s no competitor to copy, expect repeated build-destroy cycles until fit emerges.
8. Sustainable businesses create clear value for every stakeholder. If one side of the system feels like it’s “doing work” while the other extracts value, the model eventually breaks.
9. Know what phase you’re in. Construction vs operations require different leadership styles; mixing them breaks momentum.
10. Resilience is daily re-anchoring. Re-state your life goals each morning, pick 1–2 critical actions, and let compounding do the rest.

 Books: Good to Great