At its core, a business is deceptively simple... A business is simply a carefully orchestrated set of systems and processes that enable the safe exchange of value between parties. Yet in practice, building these systems requires extraordinary discipline and awareness. When I'm teaching business to new founders, I
I was on the founding team that made digitalocean a thing. It died a lot in the early days, here are the most important tech things I learned from that time: * Minimize external dependencies, especially for critical functionality. Each third-party service or library you integrate adds a small but compounding
Time and time again I talk to a founder who can't get a single VC to take them seriously. And time and time again they don't know why, and think it's about the business or the product, or even their hard skills. The communication
When Growth Curves Break Expectation. You're standing at the foot of a staircase. You look up and realize that each step isn't just higher than the last, it's exponentially taller, wider, and intimidating. You take a step, the first step and you begin your
Navigating Hubris, Ambition, and Acceptance in the High-Stakes World of Startups The line between visionary thinking and delusion can be razor-thin. We all want to "cross the chasm" - a special place in hell familiar only to those who have successfully scaled startups to post IPO. Attempting crossing
Birds fly by flapping wings. Planes fly with engines. Both achieve flight, but through completely different means. Similarly: Humans think via complex biological processes. AI generates responses based on data patterns. While both produce outputs, the mechanisms are fundamentally different. Who cares? A bird is not a plane, a plane
Accelerationism is a philosophy that seeks to leverage rapid socio-economic and technological change as a driving force to radically transform society. Effective Accelerationism, in particular, advocates for actively accelerating these trends through strategic interventions to catalyze paradigm shifts beyond the constraints of our current systems. As Canada grapples with challenges
A Guest Post by Joe, The Mailman. The philosophical concepts around accelerationism can seem abstract and detached from the daily realities of most Canadians. As a mailman going about my appointed rounds each day, talks of rapidly advancing technology, "epochal socioeconomic shifts", and upending our institutional frameworks may
All startups begin as a spark, an idea that's usually the brainchild of an inventor, often because of some really annoying problem they require to be solved in this world. I've yet to meet an inventor who wasn't extremely cool and extremely annoying, but
"Hey John, do you read? What do you read?" Printed books are not for me, but audio books I love. Here is a dump of my audible library, I'm guessing I've listened to most of them twice: https://h4x.zip/books Enjoy! <3
I was recently sitting by a hotel bar in Atlanta for work when a young man in his early 20s asked me what it was that I thought he should consider as he grew into an adult. Outside of the astute nature of this question, I was myself drawn to
The technology of a "GPT" (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is really just a storyteller with an infinite imagination. Just as a human writer crafts stories, Any GPT (a GPT is a technology, not a product by OpenAI "ChatGPT" is their product) can generate coherent and engaging text