I have spent the last couple of months building a proof of concept for a new company. As a solo founder, I've been moving fast by leaning hard on AI. My army of agents both build features for me and act as another pair of eyes as the product evolves. Once I got past basic prototyping, I configured Cursor's Bugbot and Codex to automatically review every code change going into the product. This…
The generational story we're often told is simple: Boomers got houses and pensions, Millennials got the short end of the stick with student debt and a sequence of economic crises, and Gen Z got an even worse deal, but at least they got TikTok. The fact that Boomers have more money today than other generations is obviously right. With decades of earning and compounding on their side, comparing…
I built a new reader for Euclid's *Elements* while studying for the Catherine Project class _"Ancient Greek Writings on Knowledge and Mathematics."_ I wanted to push myself to vibecode something more frontend-heavy than my usual projects, and to see how much of the math the bots already had baked in. Could Codex turn Euclid's arguments into useful interactive figures? Where would its understanding…
This post was written as part of the Catherine Project class "Ancient Greek Writings on Knowledge and Mathematics." This is a lightly edited version of the original. A car and a crashed car contain almost exactly the same matter[^1]. Same steel and glass, same rubber, and same copper. Both have the same inventory of matter, whether or not you believe it's made up of atoms . But one gets you to the…
To celebrate Hannah's birthday, we took a trip to Death Valley. We had planned to go a few years back, and a bad storm forced us to cancel, so it was great to finally make it there. The reports of the superbloom were a bit exaggerated, since in our heads we were imagining our experience at nearly a decade ago at Carrizo Plain , but it was still beautiful. We got big rocks, salt flats, dunes,…
Earlier this year, I traveled to NYC for work and Hannah tagged along. We got to catch up with a few friends, saw two Broadway shows, and enjoyed the city as usual.
This post was written as part of the Catherine Project class "Ancient Greek Writings on Knowledge and Mathematics." This is a lightly edited version of the original. Every hiring and promotion decision contains a paradox: the people choosing usually cannot do the job they are choosing for. A board of non-operators picks a CEO. A VP who hasn't written code in a decade picks an engineering lead. The…
This post was written as part of the Catherine Project class "Ancient Greek Writings on Knowledge and Mathematics." This is a lightly edited version of the original. The internet is full of people selling judgment: how to think, how to lead, how to choose, what to want. Plato's *Meno* asks an older version of the question influencers force us to ask today: can virtue be taught? If so, how would…
An interesting side effect of working with AI agents for personal projects is they force you into professional workflows, even for solo and throwaway projects. Delegation requires confidence, and confidence in agents requires tooling. After raw-dogging my blog on Jekyll for over a decade, my recent blog redesign and migration to Next/React was the first solo project I tried to manage by only…
Este ensayo también está disponible en español . *Solenoid* is surreal autofiction about the man who failed to become Mircea Cărtărescu. Through the eyes of a disgruntled high school literature teacher, we wander the streets of Bucharest, alternating between his gray, dilapidated city of nightmares and the colorful gradients of his childhood memories. The narrator is an alternate version of the…
This post was written as part of the Catherine Project class "Ancient Greek Writings on Knowledge and Mathematics." This is a lightly edited version of the original. Human minds have limited capacity. We can only consciously hold a few ideas at once, so in order to think about the world around us we have to make it small enough to hold in our heads. To think at all is to compress, preserving…
Last month, when my family came to visit us in San Francisco, my sister-in-law commented that people here are obsessed with changing the world. She wasn't wrong, and I gave her an almost twenty-year-old Paul Graham essay as homework to explain the particular citywide psychosis she had noticed: in a city full of smart, high-agency people, everyone is anxious about the ever-rising bar for doing…
After starting out in Johannesburg and Kruger , Hannah and I flew over to Cape Town to continue our honeymoon. We did a lot of walking, ate a lot of great food, and wrapped up with some wine in Stellenbosch. The city is culturally rich, and the natural beauty was stunning. Coming from SF, things often feel cheap when we travel, but the price to quality ratio was especially good, with lots of…
Years ago, I heard the late David Graeber speak about his Bullshit Jobs theory at a San Francisco bookstore. The audience, being the crowd that shows up at City Lights on a weekday evening, had not come to be persuaded so much as to nod along. They wanted to believe that vast categories of white-collar work, particularly the kinds they did not do themselves, were fake. If administrators, lawyers,…
Last year, almost a full year after our wedding, Hannah and I took a trip to South Africa to celebrate our honeymoon. We considered a bunch of different places, optimizing for far-away spots where we couldn't justify going for less than a couple of weeks. Our friend Juliana talked us into South Africa by pointing out that it had a lot of the things we love: great food, great wine, great people,…
Two questions I've been asking myself as I brainstorm my next moves are what truths will still hold 5 or 10 years down the line, and where will language models change cost structures enough to create new opportunities. Unexpectedly, I keep landing on consumer ideas, especially in fragmented two-sided marketplaces compromised by the platforms' incentives and principal-agent problems. In both, LLMs…
I joined AngelList to get the clock started again. After InScope, I knew I needed to recharge my batteries before starting another company, so I looked for a place where I could spend a couple of years close to new problems and find my way to the next idea. AngelList looked like a great spot to do that and to meet people interested in the intersection of startups and finance. AngelList's view on…
It does not take greed, genius, or exploitation for a society to become unequal; randomness can be enough. Eight years ago, I wrote a quick model at a conference to simulate a thought experiment from Uri Wilensky: a closed economy of one hundred people starting with the same amount of money. At each tick everyone who still has money gives a dollar to someone else chosen at random. I liked the…
These days, after a long hiatus, I am attending a couple of networking events per week. San Francisco is alive again. I'm getting invited to more random tech talks, VC panels, and startup marketing events than I used to before COVID and cherry-picking the best ones. As intended, I'm meeting a lot of people, and taking part in the very modern ritual of touching tips with our iPhones to swap…
New information changes our understanding of the past. In fund accounting, you can't just update a record and move on. The system has to preserve provenance, make corrections explicit, and be able to explain what's recorded in the ledger: "This is what we knew yesterday, so we booked X, which explains why the report we ran says Y even though today it says Z, since we also booked W." Getting that…
A cleaned-up backlog post stitched together from abandoned link dumps living on local branches. The dates are wrong, and the most interesting bit perhaps is that I actually remember a bunch but not all of these.
I've been pretty bad about sharing photos recently, particularly when half a roll ends up sitting in the camera for a month or four more than expected. This post has a bunch of odds and ends collected last year. I titled this H2, but I'm pretty sure the first few are from a camping trip in June. Who knows.
I've had the same conversation for years with both long-time San Franciscans and new arrivals. They know I care about local politics, so they innocently ask me about a random headline. *Did you see the news about \ ? Why is San Francisco so dysfunctional?* I end up ranting: many of its problems are structural, beyond the city's jurisdiction, but San Francisco is uniquely incompetent. Most of the…
Este ensayo también está disponible en español . In my cushy 2026 tech bubble in San Francisco, risk-taking is a personality trait. The failure case, for most in my circles, is going back to a six-figure salary. My grandparents would not have recognized this as risk at all. Abraham was a pioneer who, along with his wife, Sarah Rivka, anchored the community I grew up in. Betty, just a teenager,…
Every breakout startup works hard to get the right investors on its cap table. Those venture funds work just as hard behind the scenes: raising capital from limited partners, allocating it with contractual precision, and tracking every mutation over the fund's lifetime. Venture is a database of promises that change over time, and our job at AngelList is to ensure those changes are legible,…
I've been to New Orleans twice. It's always a good time. Last year, I went with a few friends for a bachelor party. We got to see Creed, ate lots of crawfish and fried chicken, and explored the city.
Between 2022 and 2023 I explored many startup ideas, seriously considering 8 partnerships before founding Inscope. Some died as simple prototypes, others first became decks or demos shared in user research calls. In this series, I'm sharing some of the ideas I rolled around at the time, and why I ultimately decided not to pursue them. You can find the previous post in the series here . Anyone…
Between 2022 and 2023 I explored many startup ideas, seriously considering 8 partnerships before founding Inscope. Some died as simple prototypes, others first became decks or demos shared in user research calls. In this series, I'm sharing some of the ideas I rolled around at the time, and why I ultimately decided not to pursue them. Enterprise sales are chains of cross-team handoffs, but…
Happy new year. I'm actually posting my reviews in early January :) This past year, much of my reading was inspired by my travels. Mexico , Vienna , Budapest , and South Africa (photos coming soon) shaped the book list to help me make sense of where I was. That ended up pulling me toward novels and histories about memory, power, and exile. I also read a few classics, and theories of how knowledge…
Following our Vienna visit , we headed to Budapest. We could immediately tell Budapest was the poorer sibling. It felt a lot more run down, but the city is still beautiful, has a lot of history, great wine, and many things to see and do. I wanted to take a boat from Vienna, but instead we took a train ride - I fumbled the departure time, and we had to play musical chairs on the way. Once there, we…
Earlier this year, together with my brothers and their families, we booked a trip to Vienna and followed it up with a few days in Budapest. This was the first time we were all on a vacation together in a long time. After years of asking for it, my mom finally got her wish to do a big family trip where no one was working part time. We took a lot of photos on everyone's cell phones, but I brought my…
At a team dinner a few weeks ago, our CTO asked: *how will the world change in the next five years in ways that aren't obvious?* Answers were all over the place, everywhere from imminent WWIII over rare-earths to humanoid robots at home. My answer was more mundane: ubiquitous hyper-personalization. We're all familiar with the "Facebook and Google are listening" narrative that comes from targeted…
Another round of book reviews, arriving fashionably late, but earlier than last year. While compiling the list I realized last year I'd missed two books I began in 2022 and finished in 2023. I've included them here, together with the books from 2024. The through-lines this time around were people vs. systems; how media and technology mediate our lives and reorganize identity; the ethics of…
Over coffee a few days ago, a friend (YC founder, obviously building agents) told me most people in the space were thinking about it all wrong. His pitch was simple: pick the smartest model, give it the right tools, and call it a day. No RAG, no smart indexing, no embeddings. Just a good prompt and a fat token budget. He referenced Anthropic's Boris Cherny, who took it further speaking about how…
I had a bunch of odds and ends from old rolls of film waiting. The H1 title is kind of a lie, because the first few are from 2024. This set has some expired film experiments, and lots of fun travel photos. First and last here are Hannah stealing my camera.
Good tools give users agency; the best tools take it away and prevent mistakes. This idea, from a decade-old blog post by UC Irvine professor Crista Lopes, has stuck with me. Lopes argues that the real work of programming language design is to constrain. As computers' abilities expand, guardrails become more important. Constraints aren’t limitations, they’re high leverage product decisions that…
A few months ago, a founder in my network reached out for advice as he geared up to raise his seed round. We went through the usual tactical checklist—how to build a solid pitch deck and intro blurb, getting warm intros, managing the calendar chaos, and dealing with rejection. But since we were both technical, I steered the conversation toward a different mental model: treat your fundraise like a…
Over the last few weeks, I've been watching _The Good Place_. It's a sitcom about morality, ethics, and who gets into Heaven. Hannah and I gave it a shot during the pandemic, but we didn't get into it and stopped a couple of episodes in. For some reason, we tried again and it clicked this time around. The show follows a selfish woman who mistakenly ends up in a heaven-like afterlife (the "Good…
Earlier this year, Hannah and I went to Mexico City for a quick trip. Fito Paez, one of my favorite musicians, was playing the Auditorio Nacional, and the tickets were relatively cheap. The concert might have been one of the best shows I've ever been to, and it was a good excuse for a trip. We got to see old friends, eat great food, and generally had a great time.
Since they are trained on human writing, LLMs are fundamentally downstream of existing human ideas. This leads people to believe that all these models can do is remix and interpolate, rehashing what we already know. I don't buy that. This tension came into focus during a conversation with a scientist friend who studies Biological Oceanography. We ended up going in circles about whether AI can…
Nobody wants to use your LLM-powered service. They want you to solve their problems. Great products hide complexity. When a glucose monitor triggers an alert, or a CRM surfaces your next best lead—that's AI. Same with the ad targeting that caused your last impulse buy, the bank fraud notice sitting in your inbox, or the document parser that helped you get through tax season. We notice the results,…
In December, I went to NYC for work. I'm excited that with my new job I have a reason to travel there a couple of times a year. Beyond meeting a few of my coworkers, this time, I got to catch up with a few friends, snuck in a Comedy Cellar show and a Broadway musical (thanks Zack for the rec!), and even a museum visit. It was cold, but we had a great time. Hannah's dad had found some old very…
Still trying to catch up on my lack of writing this year, here's the long awaited list of the books I read in 2023. Less than I wanted, but I'm happy with the mix. On top of a few great fiction books, I read books spanning classics, history, and economics. Unintentionally, I also ended up reading a bunch of memoirs. Some recurring themes were the exploration of memory and identity, the nature of…
I read Augustine's _Confessions_ as part of a Catherine Project class. The book was repeatedly cited by Martin Hägglund in _This Life_, a book I had quite enjoyed reading a few years before , and he emphasized the nuance in understanding Augustine, so I chose to do a guided reading. _Confessions_ is an autobiographical work, recounting Augustine's youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is…
This past Saturday, San Francisco had one of its beloved literary events. Litcrawl is a series of readings and conversations held in bookstores, bars, and cafes in the Mission District, and is part of the annual Litquake festival. Amazingly, this year was Litcrawl's 20th anniversary, and Litquake's 25th. Having lived in the neighborhood for almost 10 years, and having attended their events many…
In October, I got to visit Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a work offsite with our engineering team. I was barely over a month into the new job , and since we're pretty distributed, it was a great way to meet many of my teammates in person for the first time. While Jackson Hole was out of the way for everyone, it turned out to be an awesome backdrop for our time together. The sessions were productive,…
A collection of trips with friends and family in the late summer of 2024. It took me a while to get through the rest of the black and white roll of film I'd started on our Jenner/Sea Rach trip that Nikhil and Rachel planned. I continued to shoot black and white in the city, and got to swap to color on our trip to Sequoia with Amol and Annabelle's crew. Then Gael showed up. Great summer all around.
Naming things is hard. This is not just a technical problem, but a foundational problem that we have as humans when we talk to each other and refer to specific things and people. I have four good friends named Zach – there's a reason we invented nicknames. There are many other such name collisions in every domain. Companies and products can share names, giving rise to trademarks to limit the usage…
Este ensayo también está disponible en español . Finding a meaningful full-time job after founding a company isn't easy. After InScope , I wanted to work on something impactful, with a team that shared my interests and values, and which would help me grow as a leader. I took a short break to recharge batteries, then spent a few months consulting on engineering, data, and AI projects advising…
Este ensayo también está disponible en español . In 2001, as the dot com boom popped, InfoWorld wrote that the rise of B2B software was driving the rebirth of seemingly obsolete enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies. In 2024, we are seeing another such ERP revival, but in this third wave no one is trying to build a monolithic one-size-fits-all tool anymore. The market is becoming…