Understanding F5 ownership

You don't own all of your F5

Okay, now, a really important concept. You do not own all of your Foundational Five. Specifically, you do not own your market or your channel.

Channels are owned by external parties. Think of Meta Ads. Literally owned by Meta. Google, literally owned by Google. They set the rules. They can ban you from their channel. Competitors can come flooding in, increasing the costs of the channel. They can change their algorithms. They can control your distribution and reach.

You are not in control of your channel. And the same applies to your Market. We can pick our market. We can change markets, but we cannot control any given market. The market is its own beast. It has external factors: trends, cultural and regulatory shifts. And maybe most importantly, it consists of people. People who you simply cannot control. You cannot "engineer" the people in your market.

So what does this mean? It means we have to build to fit what we don't control. We own our product, our model, and our brand. We must engineer our "owned" foundations to align with those that we don't control. And we're going to explore this a whole lot more in the next chapter around pairing and fit alignment.