Last month, I stood in front of the entire company with a slide that had nothing on it but eight words:
“I’m going to punch you in the stomach.”
The reactions were about what you’d expect. Confused looks. A few nervous laughs. Someone glanced toward the exits. After an awkward silence, I said, “Aiden Cline, come to the front of the room.”
Aiden walked up.
I punched him in the stomach.
Not hard enough to injure him. Hard enough to clarify the slide.
He folded slightly at the waist and returned to his seat. The room was completely silent.
Then I called up the next person.
And the next.
Slowly, people started to understand.
I was going to punch every single person in the stomach.
The idea came to me a few days earlier at Whole Foods.
I was standing in the produce section inspecting an avocado when I noticed Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, a few feet away. He was holding a small plastic container of blueberries and reading the label very carefully.
I walked over and punched him directly in the stomach.
There was no warning.
I didn’t introduce myself. I didn’t ask whether he had a minute. I didn’t explain that I was building Anomaly or attempt to establish mutual connections first.
One moment, Brian Chesky was examining some blueberries. The next, he was folded over beside a refrigerated wall of herbs.
He looked up at me and said, “Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
And at the time, I genuinely didn’t.
I left the store without buying the avocado.
Later that evening, I started thinking about what had happened. Not because I felt guilty. I was mostly thinking about how cleanly the punch had landed.
Brian hadn’t seen it coming. His hands were occupied. His attention was on the blueberries. His core was completely relaxed.
It was, mechanically speaking, an almost ideal stomach punch.
That’s when I realized I could do the same thing at Anomaly.
So I made the slide.
The first few employees had questions.
One person asked whether this had been reviewed by legal. Another wanted to know whether participation was optional. Someone in the back asked whether employees with existing stomach conditions could be punched somewhere else.
These were reasonable questions.
I ignored them.
I called the next name.
Then the next.
No one volunteered. No one corrected my form. No one began to understand the deeper purpose, because there was no deeper purpose.
I was simply punching them in the stomach.
By the sixth person, everyone had stopped laughing.
By the tenth, people were sitting with their arms crossed over their midsections.
By the fourteenth, someone tried to leave through the side door.
I called his name next.
The process took longer than expected. We had forty-three employees, and punching forty-three people in the stomach is more physically demanding than it sounds.
There are also logistical issues.
People are different heights. Some tense up too early. Some instinctively turn sideways. One employee wore a puffer jacket, which absorbed most of the impact and forced me to punch him again.
Aiden asked if he could go home.
I told him yes.
Then I remembered he had already been punched, so it didn’t matter.
At around the halfway point, someone ordered lunch. This was a mistake. Nobody wanted to eat because approximately half the room had just been punched in the stomach and the other half knew they were about to be.
The food sat untouched on a folding table.
I had a salad between punches.
The room remained silent except for the sound of names being called, shoes crossing the floor, and the brief involuntary noise each person made when the punch landed.
Some made no sound at all.
Others made sounds I had not heard before.
One employee said, “Jesus Christ,” despite having watched twenty-seven other people go through the exact same process.
Another asked me to remove my ring.
I did.
I’m not unreasonable.
After forty-seven minutes, everyone had been punched.
I returned to the front of the room and advanced to the next slide.
It was blank.
I had not prepared anything else.
For a while, nobody moved.
Eventually, someone asked whether the meeting was over.
“Yes,” I said.
People began leaving in small groups. Several were walking strangely. Aiden was sitting alone near the back, trying to eat a banana while breathing very carefully.
That afternoon, very little work was completed.
This was understandable. Most of the company had abdominal pain, and several people were searching things like “internal bleeding symptoms” and “can your boss legally punch you.”
The following morning, I received a message from our head of operations asking whether this would happen again.
I said I hadn’t decided.
That was not true.
I had already made another slide.
“I’m going to punch you in the stomach again.”
This one had nine words.
The second meeting was more difficult to schedule. People suddenly had dentist appointments. Several employees claimed to be working remotely. One person changed his Slack status to “at a funeral” for three consecutive days.
Eventually, I got everyone back into the room.
I began with Aiden again.
He asked why he always had to go first.
I told him it was because his name came to mind first.
He said that didn’t seem fair.
I punched him in the stomach.
From there, we continued alphabetically.
We had not gone alphabetically the first time, so this felt more organized.
Some employees attempted to negotiate. One offered to take two softer punches instead of one normal punch. Another asked whether he could nominate a colleague to be punched on his behalf.
I rejected both proposals.
The slide said “you.”
Our remote employees presented another challenge. I briefly considered flying them to New York, but this seemed expensive. Instead, I scheduled individual video calls and asked each person to find someone nearby who could punch them while I watched.
Compliance was mixed.
One engineer claimed his roommate had punched him, but the camera was off, so I made him do it again.
A contractor in Poland misunderstood the assignment and punched his roommate.
We still paid the invoice.
Word began to spread.
Candidates started asking about the punching during interviews. Customers mentioned it on calls. One investor sent me a text that said, “Hey man, hearing some weird stuff.”
I invited him to the office.
He arrived the following Tuesday.
I punched him in the stomach.
He has not followed up.
The practice has now become part of normal operations at Anomaly.
Every Monday, I review the company roster and decide who has not been punched recently enough.
There is no formal cadence.
Sometimes I go several weeks without punching anyone. Other times, I punch the same person twice in one afternoon.
I don’t keep records.
That would make it feel bureaucratic.
New employees are generally punched during their first month, although I prefer not to tell them exactly when. They usually hear about it from other employees, but the descriptions are inconsistent.
Some say it happens during onboarding.
Some say it happens after your first major mistake.
One person told a new hire that it only happens if you leave food in the office refrigerator overnight.
None of these things are true.
I just call your name when I feel like it.
People have asked whether the punching represents adversity, urgency, resilience, sacrifice, or the inherent discomfort of building something ambitious.
It does not.
There is no metaphor.
There is no framework.
There are no principles to take away from this.
I saw Brian Chesky in a Whole Foods and punched him in the stomach.
Then I punched Aiden.
Then I punched everyone else at Anomaly.
Eventually, I am going to punch them all again.
