Founders get confused about vision. I think it's because they read too much HackerNews and too many blog posts from people who saw stages but not zero to IPO, and somewhere along the way the word "vision" got tangled up with the word "dream."
Founders ask it as a market sizing problem. Policy people ask it as a program design problem. Twenty year olds ask it with the kind of clarity that only comes from having nothing invested yet in the polite fictions: If genAI and robotics automate away most labor, what is the
“I love you” is a declaration, a headline, a headline without the article, a piece of language that points toward a reality but it does not create it. It is a prior, not a posterior. It is "cheap talk" in the game theory sense, it costs almost nothing
We only have this, the playground right in front of us. No clear evidence of any other life or meaning beyond simply being here and now. Are you attempting something ridiculous, perhaps even absurdly ambitious? Honestly, who cares? Be true to yourself, explore something new, deeply engage in creating meaning
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
I don't usually like Johnny Harris, I find him kinda annoying, but I do watch his stuff sometimes. This morning he released a video on boredom, and that lead me down a long road of research to learn this: Boredom consistently predicts sadistic behavior. Across nine studies with
We talk about business as an arena, a competitive space where ideas clash, fortunes are made and lost, and human ingenuity is put to the test. For a long time, I've thought of it as something more: a kind of wrapper. A surprisingly decent, if imperfect, container around
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is
The fundamental truth of human existence has been masked by the very systems we created to reveal it. Both our analytical frameworks and our religious traditions have grown so intricate and self referential that they have become barriers to the simple path toward collective liberation. This is not about good
Consider the possibility that something has gone fundamentally wrong with human development - not in a moral or religious sense, but in a practical, observable way. The evidence surrounds us, yet we rarely step back far enough to see the pattern. Begin with a simple observation: despite unprecedented material progress,
A fun story. Our fundamental misunderstanding of existence begins with it's opening. Our misunderstanding is in how we read the opening chapter of Genesis. When explored through its original Hebrew, the Book of Genesis reveals something deeper than a story of moral obedience and sin. The phrase traditionally
In recent years, as economic pressures have forced companies to scale back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, a familiar debate has resurfaced about the relationship between business imperatives and social responsibility. While many view these cutbacks as a moral failure or a retreat from progress, such perspectives often
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? Using "think" for AI is misleading.
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