Yesterday I was with friends with a lower-beta ambition than mine. We were heading home together. They wanted to take an uber, I wanted to take the metro. The arrival time was the same. The only difference was comfort. They called me cheap but I stood firm; the €15 was never the point. What I refused was a losing trade. Every spend is a trade: money for something. In most cases, the “something” is health, status, sex, food, safety, comfort. The list is finite. But sometimes what we buy is time. Saved time, borrowed time, bought-back time, time-efficiency. ...

Fetchable knowledge: the things that are known, even if not by you. If you know of them, you can look them up, ask someone, run a query; it’s out there. The known unknown is bounded. Latent knowledge: not just what you don’t know, but what nobody yet knows. The unknown unknown is unbounded. I’ve gotten the chance to pick the brains of a few billionaires, and being the kind to learn how to fish rather than ask for the fish, I always ask about their information diet. ...

Peter Thiel says Elon knows something about risk that the rest of us don’t. Elon says he just has a higher tolerance for it than Peter does. Peter is giving Elon more credit than Elon gives himself. He doesn’t feel. He doesn’t dare. He knows. That one word changes the whole story we tell about risk-takers. The usual version is that they’re just braver; they look over the edge and they jump when the rest of us flinch. Thiel is saying something else. They’re not braver, they’re seeing the edge differently. Bravery is just what’s left over once you’ve seen the situation’s risk clearly. ...

welcome back to me extrapolating trivial things… Chael Sonnen was asked who wins between McGregor and Cerrone. He said: if it’s at 155, McGregor. If it’s at 170, Cerrone. The question didn’t mention weight class, but by introducing it, Sonnen got to seem like someone who sees angles others miss. Here’s a pattern I noticed. When asked a close-ended question, you introduce a condition not present in the question, as a way of signaling that you’re more nuanced than the people around you. ...

I know people who have spent years figuring out their thing. Not unintelligent people. Not lazy people. People with real ambition, real ideas, real capability, just waiting. Convinced that the right thing is out there, and that the rational move is to find it before committing to anything. Passion before commitment as the mark of someone who knows what they’re doing. I’ve been that person. What I think is actually happening is that they’ve confused discernment with strategy. Waiting feels like wise patience, but in reality it’s a lazy paralysis with a philosophy attached to it. ...

Million Dollar Weekend is a refreshing and genuinely practical book about the earliest stages of starting a business, the part most entrepreneurship content skips entirely. The norm in startup culture has been the long hockey stick: stealth build, raise, launch, then figure out if anyone wants it. Noah Kagan’s angle is the opposite. Sell before you build. Don’t write a line of code until someone has handed you a dollar. The fastest possible feedback loop between idea and reality. It sounds obvious until you realize almost no one does it, because hustle culture glorifies shipping and building in public has made output the proxy for progress. Kagan calls that out and gives you a better framework. ...

The Mom Test is a short, sharp, and genuinely useful book about something founders consistently get wrong: how to have conversations with potential customers. Most founders don’t skip validation because they don’t believe in it, they skip it because they do it wrong and don’t notice. They reveal the project, signal what answer they’re hoping for, and the other person (consciously or not) tells them what they want to hear. The Mom Test’s fix is almost too simple: give people plausible deniability. Don’t reveal you’re building anything. Don’t reveal what answer you need. Don’t pitch. Have the courage to ask the questions that could kill your whole thesis. Ask about their life and their past behavior, not about your idea or their future intentions. Strip your agenda from the room entirely and people will tell you the truth without realizing they’re doing market research. ...

AI coding tools have brought the friction from idea to product to near zero. Vibecode a gadget in an afternoon on Cursor or Lovable, or agentic-engineer an app in a week on Claude Code. The cost of building has collapsed. Founders are building more: faster and cheaper. It’s all slop. Here’s why: when building was hard, it was a filter. You had to believe in your idea enough to spend months on it. You had to think hard about whether people would pay for it, because the alternative was a brutal waste of time. The friction selected for conviction. ...

As tech innovations get adopted by the world, they go from highly innovative, expensive, complex, and unproven, to low novelty, cheap, easy, and reliable. The fertile place for adoption goes from sexy industries with high purchasing power for high leverage implementation, to less sexy industries with less purchasing power for lower leverage implementations. We all know the adoption curve: It’s easy to see the opportunity in the upward slope kinetic. ...