Seattle is a Great City
Date notwithstanding
Human Invariant
Opinionated, sometimes cynical essays on work, markets, status, incentives, and other topics that interest me.
Latest posts
The Story of Axiom and the Future of $100M Companies Built in Under a Year
The fastest YC company to $100M and the evolving metagame for elite startups
A Retrospective on 30 Days of Daily Blogging + Updates
Onwards
On Learning Through Presence
Connecting the invisible dots
Scale of the Internet
Inspired by Scale of the Universe
The Era of Data-Driven Ideas
Legibility creates velocity
Ideas to Incentivize and Scale More Blogs
Scaling new blogs and alleviating blog decay
Where is the blogosphere?
Decline or diffusion?
The Anti-Straussian Ceiling
Solve for the ___
Notes on Meeting Successful Bloggers In Person
17 observations on habits, personalities, and worldviews
The YouTube Search Bar as Deliberate* Incompetence
On cultural polish and care
An Interview With a YouTube Writer Behind 500M+ Views
Understanding YouTube's Platform Mechanics, Content Dynamics, Talent, and Market Structure
Why am I more productive late at night?
6 anecdotal explanations
Why are late night conversations better?
5 explanations
the lowercase aesthetic as cultural liberation
messages from a typewriter
Prediction Markets as a Libertarian Black Box
AI is communist, prediction markets are libertarian
Intent-Based Aggregators for Prediction Markets
Why intent-based aggregators will dominate retail prediction market volume
Novel Interface Designs for Prediction Markets
Problems and potential design solutions for market interfaces
The Future of Play Money Prediction Markets
The Wikipedia model
Prediction Market Prices != Probabilities
Context is that which is scarce
Why did it take so long for prediction markets to find product-market fit?
7 explanations
The Case For Alternative Ordering Mechanisms in Prediction Markets
Priority batch auctions as one better market structure to create more liquid prediction markets
Prediction markets are leaking $78M annually
15 million free riders and counting
Blame as a Service (BaaS)
Productized scapegoating
Markers of High Agency
38 observations
Against the Agency-Maxxing Industrial Complex
The Structure, Incentives, and Negative Externalities of “You Can Just Do Things”
Derivative Work Level Notes
21 assorted thoughts on derivative levels
Why do people who get paid the most do the least?
Third derivative work
Financial Markets 2
12 observations and opinions on financial markets
Financial Markets
Exchanges and brokerages from first principles
Incentive-Compatibility is Overrated
Path-dependency protects us from ourselves
Never Reason from a Price Change, Culture Edition
Save us, Sumner
Architecting Reality
The best way to predict the future is to build it
Title Arbitrage as Status Engineering
How novel titles reshape talent allocation
Lessons From Poker
12 learnings and takeaways
Steelmanning The Case For Consultants, Affirmative Action, and Alcohol
The strongest counterarguments against increasingly popular beliefs
Omniscient Entities
Thank you for increasing my blogging ambitions
Why hasn’t there been a new major sports league?
The market structure and incentives of US sports leagues
How to scale a venture fund, lessons from FTX Ventures
Investing in Anthropic, Cursor, Figma, Circle, Solana, Sui by breaking the rules
Notes on Shadowing a Hospitalist
16 observations on hospital culture and incentives
Don’t Build an Audience
Great work always finds the people who matter
Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
Work harder, bet bigger
Hyper-Optimized Children
For many parents, hyper-optimization is the preferred method for brute-forcing their children out of mediocrity.
No One is Really Working
No One is Really Working: Justifying the High Salaries of Early-Career Professionals
Why You Should Be More Cynical
Clinton Foreign Policy, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, and the Foundations of the Internet
Your Life is More Over Than You Think
Nonlinear Perception of Time