Written for the younger founder who missed dinners he cannot get back.
Italo Campilii has been building businesses for more than twenty-five years — starting at thirteen, selling candy out of his backpack, then flipping penny internet domains into two thousand dollars at fifteen while his classmates clocked into part-time jobs.
He learned the names of these two states from his co-founder, John Vargas, who spent twenty-four years inside Apple watching the world's most successful builders cross the same chasm: what looks like a hundred different business problems almost always collapses into one of two diagnostic categories.
Indigestion: more demand than you can fulfill. Starvation: capacity but not enough demand. Both feel like failure. Neither one is.