Juan.co

Cuban Black Beans

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Authentic Cuban Black Beans take days to prepare properly, but this expedited recipe can get you really close (and some may say, better) results in just around half an hour. I discovered this recipe through trial-and-error in the bachelorhood of my 20s, and have consistently improved upon it with family and friends.

Serves: 4-6 generous servings

Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

One (1) can of Goya Premium Black Beans (15.5 oz.)
One (1) can of Goya Black Bean Soup (15.5 oz.)
One (1) Large Sweet Spanish Onion, diced
Two (2) jars of Goya Fancy Red Pimentos (4 oz. ea.), sliced or diced
Four (4) or Five (5) cloves of garlic, minced or finely chopped
Two (2) packets of Sazón Goya without Annatto
One-Quarter (1/4) cup of Spanish White Wine
- Rioja Blanco (White Rioja) or Albariño, suggested
Four (4) or Five (5) Bay Leaves
One-Half (1/2) cup of Spanish Olive Oil
- Iberia (Extra Virgin) or Garcia de la Cruz (Extra Virgin), suggested
Optional: One (1) Tablespoon (Tbsp.) of Oregano leaves, dried

Preparation:

Minimal preparation required, but spend a couple of minutes properly dicing the onion into fine cubes or very thin slices (if preferred) and mincing the garlic through a garlic press or dicing into super-fine chunks (if you don't have a press). Make sure all skins are removed from both vegetables. You can do this preparation while heating the oil in the first step below.

Directions:

Sofrito: Begin by making the sofrito, or sautéed cooking base, in a medium-sized sauce pan or pot by heating the 1/2 cup. of olive oil on medium-high heat for about 3-4 minutes. When thoroughly heated, add the diced Sweet Spanish Onion (a sweet onion, vidalia, or even a yellow onion are all suitable substitutes if you don't have access to the sweet Spanish variety) and minced garlic cloves. Sauté for about 10 minutes or until the onion is almost transluscent, and then add the pimentos from the jar (with juice included). Continue cooking, stirring occasionally until the sofrito is properly incorporated, an additional 5 minutes.
Frijoles: Add the beans by emptying both cans directly on top of the sofrito. Do not add any additional water; the soup and rue from the sofrito will suffice. Bring the entire mixture up to a boil on high heat, stirring to fold in all ingredients. Once bubbling vigorously, add the 1/4 cup. of Spanish White Wine, the 2 packets of Sazón Goya, and layer on 4-5 bay leaves. (At this time, add any other seasonings, such as the optional oregano if desired; but this is not necessary.) Stir while boiling on high continuously for 1 minute, and then immediately cover and cook on low heat to simmer.
Cuajar: Continue to simmer on low heat for 10 minutes, stirring every 2-3 minutes from the bottom of the pan or pot to ensure beans and sofrito do not get burned. Simmering should produce a light bubbling, but not a furious roar; adjust heat and/or leave the lid ajar to ensure proper temperature during this phase. Upon completion of the 10 minutes, turn off the heat and cover. Let sit for a few minutes to allow for incorporation of all ingredients. Serve with a ladel over or alongside freshly-cooked white rice (jasmine recommended) or as a meal in of itself, and salt or season to taste.

Liberation

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

On April 2nd, 2025, President Trump stepped back onto the global stage and did what few leaders have dared to do in the modern era: he lit a match and threw it directly into the towering haystack of globalization. With the quiet subtlety of a thunderclap, he declared it Liberation Day. A new tariff regime. A new economic doctrine. A 10% tax on everything imported, with extra pain lovingly reserved for our "friends" in China (34%), India (27%), and Vietnam (46%).

Markets promptly did what markets do when they can’t breathe—they panicked. Algorithms trembled, stock tickers bled red, and CNBC anchors clutched their pearls. And yet, somewhere in that chaos, somewhere between the soy futures crash and the Nike earnings call gone sideways, a strange light appeared.

Opportunity.

Because here’s the thing: this isn’t just about tariffs. It’s not just about reshoring or tax codes or any of the traditional fare that gets trotted out on Bloomberg panels. This is about something bigger.

This is about design.

Breaking the Illusion

For the past three decades, we've been sleepwalking through a world where supply chains were optimized for cost at the expense of everything else—resilience, ethics, carbon, sovereignty, soul. It was convenient. It was cheap. It worked.

Until it didn’t.

COVID shook us. War in Europe rattled us. The Red Sea closures whispered something ominous. And now, Liberation Day rips the curtain down entirely. The myth of the frictionless global economy is over. What replaces it is something far more interesting: a world where every business must now choose how to build itself—deliberately, strategically, consciously.

The Era of Intentional Operations

Think of your supply chain. Not as a chain, but as a system of belief. Who do you trust? Where do you place risk? What do you optimize for—margin, speed, carbon, flexibility, national allegiance?

In this new world, sourcing isn't procurement. It's philosophy.

The businesses that win here won't be the ones that grumble and fudge prices upward. They’ll be the ones that treat this moment like the greenfield it is: a chance to reimagine everything. To redesign their go-to-market. To rethink their fulfillment strategy. To decide, boldly, what kind of company they actually want to be.

Do you want to be the cheapest? Or the most reliable?

Do you want to chase every new market? Or double down where your logistics work like clockwork?

Do you want to own your supply chain? Or orchestrate a symphony of partners with shared values?

Strategy by Fire

Make no mistake—this is not a drill. Your margins are on the front lines. Your brand is next. Already, American consumers are being told: your prices are going up. And they’re asking why.

If your answer is, “Because China’s goods are more expensive now,” you’ve already lost the narrative.

If your answer is, “Because we’ve redesigned our product line, switched to local assembly, and made the whole experience better,” now you're in business. Literally.

This is a test of strategic courage. The companies that survive will be those who stop playing defense and instead ask: What can we build now that wasn’t possible before?

The Business Case for Patriotism (Kind Of)

Is it jingoistic to talk about American manufacturing? Maybe. But it's also never been more practical. In a world where shipping lanes are chessboards and container prices spike with every diplomatic sneeze, having your production 100 miles away instead of 10,000 is more than sentimental. It’s smart.

But let’s not get misty-eyed. This isn’t a call to slap flags on boxes. It’s a call to own your architecture. Design systems that serve your customers, your team, and—yes—your balance sheet.

Liberation, Redefined

So what do we do with this so-called Liberation Day?

We liberate ourselves—from dogma, from inertia, from lazy assumptions about how business "has to" be done. We liberate our business models from the tyranny of quarterly thinking. We liberate our ops teams to be designers, not just doers.

We stop importing ideas from 1999 and start building structures that actually serve us now.

This isn’t just a policy shift. It’s an inflection point. One of those rare moments where you can feel the gears of the world shift beneath your feet. If you're standing still, you're already falling behind.

But if you lean in? You might just build the future.

WordPress is entering its "end-stage founder" period

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I exit Founders for a living.

It takes a special personality to bring something into existence: grit, passion, vision. But most Founders lack the self-awareness to embrace the limitations to scale their creations. That's where people like me enter.

WordPress is entering its "end-stage founder" period. And creations of all sizes - startups, established companies, even thriving enterprises - all approach this extremely dangerous period of their lives where they are forced to confront a basic question: Is the Creation more than just the expression of its Creator? Or do the countless contributors - customers, partners, users, audiences, etc. - actually matter beyond just being passive recipients of the Founder's will?

Having been a Founder myself, it's an incredibly humbling confrontation and the petty petulance that we instinctively feel requires profound soul-searching to decide what future fate we seek for the ecosystems we have created. It may be surprising that WordPress, the ostensibly open source content management system, or CMS, that powers about 40% of the web's actively visited and tracked websites, is reaching this moment more than two decades after its emergence onto the scene. But when one looks at the typical factors that lead to end-stage founder periods, you'll see we're more or less right on schedule:

End-Stage Founder Periods

(3 Steps to Recognizing Them)

Go-To-Market repeatedly breaks or stalls out. Typified by either flat-line growth, or by inexplicable and un-reproducible growth curves, that cannot be easily understood or truly explained by founders and their teams. Higher than normal customer churn and employee attrition (voluntary or otherwise) are good signs of this. Jettisoning the clients and people who got you where you are demonstrates not just a lack of alignment, but a failure of leadership and direction.
Competitive threats start becoming the focus, and the Founder starts attacking them rather than driving a unique and differentiated vision for their creations. Truly successful companies have no competitors, and see themselves as such, but the first sign of founder insecurities overcoming commonsense is a misprioritization on external players and going after them.
Work becomes suddenly harder, with no signs of stopping. Founders often panic when they do not recognize the shifting landscape, especially when it's the sand beneath their own feet. They revert to the same core tactics they used to build their creations, which aren't usually fit for purpose, and then drive people, processes, and programs to the brink of failure. They will blame others (usually by faux-blaming themselves), and then search for heroes, both within and without, to support their view and try new (but honestly, the same) motions.

There are no heroic saves to the End-Stage Founder problem. The Vision that they set out for their company was either never shared, or not aspirational enough for others to align. In almost 95% of all cases, founder-led companies collapse. Money has only 2 out of 20 reasons to account for failure (see: CBInsights Post-Mortems, 2021-2023). Wildly successful and profitable companies making hundreds of millions of dollars every year can precipitously collapse in ways that, to an outsider, seem bizarre, but to insiders, was all-too-telling.

Scaling Requires the Founder to Exit

All Founders Exit, but not all exits look the same. For some, they leave the companies they founded and go on sabbatical for years to rediscover their purpose, gain perspective through humility, and decide what they would like to learn and how they'd like to contribute before even deciding whether they want to rejoin their Creations. For others, they are unceremoniously fired by their employees, shareholders, or a commercially-driven legal process (such as a hostile take-over, or an investor revolt). A select few will embrace the change, and step back to take a role where they aren't involved in the day to day, but can help listen generously and aspire to support the next generation of leaders.

Every great company outlasts the life of its founder. Most companies collapse with the demise of the founder, because the founder never truly empowered their teams, listened to their customers or the market, and gleamed a fundamental lesson as to why the Founder and their Vision is fundamentally myopic:

You cannot always know your mission (your plan to execute on your vision), but you must always listen generously to the unknowable needs of future clients and communities in the marketplace of ideas. And in that interchange - of putting the customer at the heart of who you are and what you do - do you suddenly discover your new focus, and your Vision becomes alive again in renewed purpose.

This lesson is what fundamentally leads great companies like Disney to embrace the unknowable future that it is in the business of making dreams come true - leading them to create theme parks, live action movies, and intellectual property across countless lines of production to better drive engagement from generations of customers - whereas not-so-great companies like Hanna-Barbera, who had out-competed Disney for a few years as the number one purveyor of animated entertainment on the planet, never embraced a vision beyond just making great cartoons. And truly great companies, like Apple and Amazon, plan for their own founders' exits long before the confrontation needs to be made.

What should WordPress do?

I've serendipitously built a career out of helping companies rediscover their purpose through the eyes of their customers - past, present, and especially future - and in doing so, help reinvent themselves to aspire to be greater than they could possibly have ever imagined through the original single-person concept that the Founder had espoused. Unfortunately, WordPress' founder, Matt Mullenweg, is going down the path of the majority of founders who encounter the malaise of mediocrity borne of their own limited vision: destroying their own creation. And by some views, it may seem to be intentional in an effort to force some sort of heroic breakthrough. It will fail, because remember: there are no heroes in the end-stage of founder-led cycles.

But there is a solution, and it is one that I've been privileged to learn over the past 25 years as a Chief Customer Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, and even interim Chief Executive Officer of startups backed by great private equity scale-ups such as Vista Equity and Insight Partners, or fueled by investor-conscious market-driven forces. And it's to listen.

(I share this forecast and advice knowing full well that WordPress and Matt Mullenweg will likely block me, despite the fact that I, like so many of the hundreds that they have (or really, he has) blocked, helped build this ecosystem and ushered in thousands of organizations and millions of users to WordPress over the years. This tyrannical block-fest is part of the myopic Founder's last throes before ultimately being displaced into a new normal.)

Do not turn on your people. Your clients, team members, and partner ecosystem are delivering valuable feedback. Don't take it literally, and study it generously. And especially, do not turn on the people who have helped you breathe life to your creation. Doing so will only accelerate their exodus from your orbit, realizing that according to its creator, the WordPress creation doesn't live beyond the Founder's fulcrum.
Step the Founder back. Launching a desperate public relations offensive against WPEngine has emboldened and granted tremendous credibility to detractors when you should actually be building the space for your promoters (and even passives) to start taking control of your creation's future. Moving away from the day-to-day and handing over the operation to a tried-and-true professional can be tempered with a Founder's continuing directional vision-setting and future-casting in a way that doesn't disrupt, but just contributes on equal-footing, the creation's continued evolution. (This is what has recently been termed "Founder-Mode," to allow a modest contribution to strategic direction without overriding the operational agenda of your executives.) For Matt? A Chairman, or even better, Chairman Emeritus role, will be best at this time. Longer term, it may be time to sell Matt's controlling stake to prevent the Founder's impulse to intervene and impose their imperium upon others. It does not end well, always. It will always rear, after all, as Matt has recently told The Verge: "WordPress just belongs to me." And indeed, with that attitude, it is destined to never be more than his plaything.
Reinvent. This crisis would have never come about, honestly, if the original Founder's Vision hadn't met its logical end. The Web has reached mature saturation: the economics have been largely optimized, and now the very essence of what created the fertile soil on which WordPress was founded - user-generated content with view-driven community-building - has been exposed as, sadly, without much commercial value. Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is creating a new generation that is rendering much of the web and its knowledge largely unusable. There isn't much of a future for WordPress, or any traditional content management system, that doesn't prioritize a new form of knowledge sharing and content discovery that is largely immune from the flotsam of fabricated misinformation. But if WordPress can make the leap to a new modality, a new medium, and side-step the mobile wars and AR/VR search-fest, it could become a new brand that transcends - rather than is defined by - the crisis in which we find ourselves. It just starts with listening generously (see Step 1) and finding the problems that people are trying to solve, that no one is yet solving. How will WordPress' core vision, values, and mission help confront those challenges?

Until Matt's war against his own creation's fans ends, we will never know. But history shows that most Founders don't relinquish their control, and unless outside forces (investors, ecosystem magnates, significant partners, etc.) compel them to, they are more likely to bring down their creation rather than stomach the possibility that they actually, finally have to let go in order to see it become what they could never envision.

(Crossposted to Twitter and HackerNoon.)

The Check-In

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

"This meeting could have been an email," goes the professional's lament these days. Far too many leaders in business waste valuable time and money on pointless meetings with their direct reports. The Check-In should be an opportunity for leaders to provide support to their team members, but there are three things they need to do.

Three key elements of a successful check-in consist of the Agenda, Performance, and Discussion.

Agenda

Use a standing meeting agenda or living working document to keep the meeting, which should ordinarily be 30 minutes or less, on track with its intended purpose: making sure your team members are supported and that, as their leader, you understand how to keep them on the track to success. Use the following template for your team member to own and fill out ahead of the meeting:

1. Updates since Last Week
2. Priorities for This Week
3. Issues and Blockers

Updates since Last Week
Summarize major accomplishments, progress, or outcomes against the priorities previously discussed. Include any significant milestones or deliverables against initiatives or projects.
Priorities for This Week
Identify the top 3 to 7 priorities (i.e., outcomes, achievements, or deliverables) for this week. Avoid a discussion of activities (i.e., what you are doing) and instead focus on results (i.e., what you hope to accomplish). These should all be connected with the team member's ongoing performance goals (see below).
Issues and Blockers
Share any problems or concerns, including feedback, you may have. Classify them by severity as follows:
1. Severity 1: This issue or blocker prevents me from moving forward, and I need your help (as my leader) to clear this blocker with me.
2. Severity 2: This issue or blocker has some impact on me moving forward, but I am able to manage this on my own and am just letting you know.
3. Severity 3: This issue or blocker has little to no impact on me moving forward, but I think you should know about it and I welcome your feedback.

Performance

Team members should be updating their performance - the metrics and leading indicators, as well as the measurable business outcomes - on a regular (daily and weekly) basis. You can use a centralized performance management system, or even just a shared spreadsheet or note-taking tool. These should track back to monthly and quarterly goals and objectives - for themselves, their teams, the department, and the company as a whole. Each goal should be reported as follows:

Goal: The measurable goal for the month/quarter.
Metric (a): Quantifiable progress achieving the goal.
Metric (b): Quantifiable progress achieving the goal.
Metric (c): Quantifiable progress achieving the goal.

Goals
Goals should be measurable and specific outcomes that the individual, the team, the department, and the company all find valuable and aligned for business results. Avoid vague qualifiable goals (e.g., "Land some amazing clients" or "Deliver great customer experience") and instead focus on quantifiable goals (e.g., "Close $3M in new business this quarter" or "Maintain an average Customer Satisfaction rating of 4.0 or higher").
Metrics
Metrics should be reportable progress or updates on how the individual or team is tracking towards that goal. While performance is rarely linear, having insight into how much effort remains to achieve the goal is important in a conversation. Focus only on the numerical results that are directly applicable to the goal (e.g., "Closed $1.5M quarter-to-date" or "Current CSAT average is 4.1 quarter-to-date").

Discussion

With an agenda pre-filled out by your team member and performance tracking maintained consistently, the check-in discussion should be anchored principally upon elevating topics where the leader can support the team member. Support should consist of:

Clearing obstacles, blockers, or issues preventing progress or forward-motion
Identifying additional resources or assistance needed to perform on targets

In a typical 30-minute check-in, consider devoting around 20 minutes to the discussion. Leaders should ask questions and listen generously to their team members. Repeat what team members say to ensure that it is being well-understood and properly internalized. Team Members should be actionable and results-oriented.

Example leader talking points:
- "I noticed limited progression against this priority last week. Can you tell me more about this? How can we get this back on track?"
- "You've identified this as a priority for this week, but I'm not sure it's connected with the goals we've previously discussed. Can you tell me more about why you've selected this?"
- "You listed this issue as a Severity 1 item. Tell me more about how this problem is preventing progress, and how I can help remove it as an obstacle."
Example member talking points:
- "We had an unexpected problem last week and it prevented me from making much progress against this priority. I've adjusted this week's objectives to include it, and I do not think it will have an impact on the my monthly or quarterly goals."
- "I've added a new priority this week that aligns with a personal goal we've previously discussed. While we're not tracking this as a top-level goal for the team, it's important to me as a part of my professional development and I would like your support. Here's why."
- "I've run into a serious problem with which I need your help. Until I can overcome this obstacle, I'm a stand-still with this priority or initiative. Can we tackle this problem together?"

Dedicate the final 10 minutes of the meeting to review next steps and action items. Both the leader and the team member will have new priorities and follow-up activities in order to make progress. The leader may need to bring additional resources or support for the team member to be successful. The team member may need to gather further information or deliver a specific outcome in order to continue making progress. Transparency and shared accountability are key, and the plan for the next week - both in priorities and updates - should be reflective of the conversation's topics.

Running a great check-in is about avoiding micro-management (i.e., the leader telling the team member what to do or how to do it) and instead focusing on supporting the team member in their work (i.e., the leader ensuring the team member is able to make progress against priorities that they both find valuable). If there is limited progress, or an issue/problem that arises, the check-in is the right place to call it out openly and honestly. In this way, check-ins can remain outcomes-oriented and can drive a supportive stewardship relationship between the leader and the team member.

Generative Art Prompts

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When you want to use Generative Artificial Intelligence to create artwork, like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or Midjourney, how you structure your prompt largely determines what the large models will produce. Here are a few rules and examples to follow.

How to Prompt

Craft your prompt with the following structure:

[image content/subject, description of action, state and mood],

Your first comma will delineate between subject and style.

[art form, style, and artist references],

The second will influence the way the subject is stylized and allow final framing.

[additional settings, such as lighting, colors, and framing]

Elements of a Prompt

Generative Art Prompts should consist of three elements, in order of your writing:

Subject
Start with the subject or content of the image. Do you want a photo of a city? Or a portrait of a person? Be sure to describe what the subject is doing, how they're doing it, and a mood.
Style
Inform the model towards a specific aesthetic. Is it a watercolor painting? A sculpture? A lo-fi image? Consider typical artforms: photography, paintings, illustrations, digital art or 3D renders, film stills, and countless other forms. Mix and match and experiment with styles to produce starkly different results.
Settings
Finally, add more details to your prompt. Give details about the framing (close-up, background, etc.), perspective (wide-shot, point-of-view, cinematic lens, etc.), lighting (soft light, hard light, dramatic lighting, or times of day, like morning, sunset, twilight, etc.), color scheme (purples or reds, halcyons or magentas, etc.), levels of detail and realism (such as hyper-realistic or mention a specific artist or engine to achieve a clear look).

Without all three elements, you can still produce impressive or arresting images, even if you only list two of the three, but you lose a lot of fine control. The options below described both subject and style but not settings:

Look at what happens to the same four images when you apply all three elements (subject, style, and settings).

Other Considerations

Each generative AI model has its own quirks and commands, so you'll be well-served if you teach yourself some of those parameters because they can really help drive the output. For example, Midjourney considers the following parameters in their prompts:

--chaos changes how varied the results will be, with 0 being the least and 100 being the most. For example, --chaos 80 would be highly varied.
--no handles your negative prompts, things you don't want to see in your image. For example, --no buildings will prevent the model from drawing buildings.
--ar changes the aspect ratio of the image. For example, --ar 16:9 would render the image in a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Midjourney has specific parameters that continue to evolve with each major version and release, while DALL-E is built-in to OpenAI's API and ChatGPT's premium framework that is much more conversational.