Every CEO has a paid Claude account. Almost none of them are getting more than a tenth of the leverage. The bottleneck is the chat window. This book takes you from never opened a terminal to five end-to-end workflows running on your own laptop against your own files, in your own voice. 156 pages, 19 chapters, written for a CEO.
The model on the other side of ChatGPT is the same model Claude Code uses. The bottleneck is not intelligence; it is the window. A CEO needs three things the window cannot give. The terminal can.
A chat tab is a fresh start every time. A terminal session opens in a folder on your laptop, reads CLAUDE.md at the top, and already knows who your customers are, what ARR means in your business, and which files are canonical.
Claude Code opens the board memo on your disk, makes the three sentence-level edits you asked for, shows you a diff, and saves it back under the same name. No paste, no regenerate, no reconciliation tax.
claude, in the same folder, on the same machine, every morning. Habits compound. Tabs do not. By the hundredth session, you are in a workflow before the coffee is done.
The terminal is the interface; the model is the engine. You already pay for the engine. The reason you are not getting your money's worth is that you are still driving through the chat window, and the chat window is not built for the kind of work a CEO needs to do.Chapter 1 · What Claude Code Is, in CEO Terms
Written for the CEO who has never opened a terminal and is willing to learn one thing because the leverage on the other side is worth the cost of admission.
/init and CLAUDE.md: Your Project's MemoryCLAUDE.md TemplateThree phases of the same book. By the end of the third, five recurring CEO blocks have moved from drafting time to review time.
Eight minutes to get Claude Code on your Mac. Twelve more to learn the six terminal moves you actually need. By Sunday evening you have typed five 60-second prompts against your own files and felt the loop work.
A real ~/desktheory/ folder on your laptop with your goals file, your last board deck, and a CLAUDE.md that teaches Claude what your company is about. Slash commands, hooks, and the first MCP connector wired.
Five slash commands live: /weekly-review, /investor-update, /competitive-teardown, /hiring-rubric, /board-pre-read. Each replaces a recognizable block of executive work. Each is six to twenty lines of Markdown.
"You have a 'desktheory' folder on your laptop, a CLAUDE.md at the top of it, and five slash commands that run every week. The five recurring CEO blocks that drained your week are down to button-presses with edits. The book ends with you running the workflows, not reading about them."
And, more importantly, who it is not for.
Andrew built and runs Headphones.com, a nine-figure ecommerce operation. Claude Code is the tool he opens before coffee on Mondays. The five workflows in Part V are the ones he runs every week against his own folder. Desk Theory exists because enough other CEOs asked him to teach them the same setup.
Includes the full PDF, every appendix template in copy-paste form, and a twelve-month update window as new chapters and workflows drop.
One short email per update: new workflow drops, chapter revisions, and the occasional behind-the-scenes note from Andrew. No other emails, no promotions.