I'm an engineer, history buff, and economic development nerd. I previously founded Rent the Backyard (YC S19)
Coding with AI has an entropy problem A few hours into coding with AI, a pattern shows up. The code looks clean. Abstractions make sense. Tests pass. And yet under concurrency, your rate limiter collapses because the counter isn’t atomic. Here’s the formula nobody talks about: failure= error rate × variance Coding with AI massively increases variance. Even if error rate stays constant (big if),…
Airline route networks really fascinate me. Walking into one of the great airports of the world you can feel the reach of the place and the people who move through it. S Tier The handful of irreplaceable hubs that every airline wants to fly to:
Doing the work only you can do is the best way to change the world. Impact isn’t only moral philosophy. It’s also pragmatic. It’s more fun. Building something singular is infinitely more satisfying than being cog #12,428 in someone else’s machine. It’s better for your head. People who optimize only for money or status often end up restless. Someone else will always have more and when you finally…
Vertical integration is a very under-explored modality of technological progress Peter Thiel Everyone says not to start a commodity business. But the truth is, the best businesses are commodity businesses that really own the commodity. The trick is to build a structural cost advantage in production, or differentiate the product enough for customers to no longer view it as a commodity.
Solar keeps getting better. Oil keeps getting worse. Hydrocarbons borrow energy from the past Set aside climate for a moment and ask a simpler question: is continued growth in energy use structurally viable? The classic de-growth argument says “no” because most modern energy comes from hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal). These are finite geologic windfalls, so we’re effectively living off…
Being a founder requires many skills. As your company grows these skills overlap with those of an executive. To this end I’ve really enjoyed and learned a lot from the following episodes of Tom Henschel’s executive coaching podcast The Look and Sound of Leadership among others. Last updated January 2026
How instant quoting is reshaping machine shops — and where the real money is going. Machine shops’ value prop has come unbundled Shops historically offered a bundle of services to their customer around usually a single type of production process (eg laser cutting, bending, powder coating, etc). Since finding, evaluating, quoting, and scaling with a shop was very involved, customers were extremely…
But Rung, you're rich — you’ve got everything. Ladders! Ascots! Why did you need [to steal] a diamond? I inherited a ladder company. We make the one product in the world that no one ever replaces! Ladders don’t wear out like TVs or personal trainers over 40. Oh no. They’re built to last which means no sales. Company’s broke! - Fred Jones & Rung Ladderton, Season 1 Episode 3: Scooby-Doo! Mystery…
I just saw a Tweet for how Basic Capital can help you 5x the size of your retirement portfolio by borrowing money. There’s definitely a way to lose all your money. But more importantly, Basic butchers the entire philosophy of investing for retirement.
If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s, he should have shot Orville Wright; he would have saved his progeny money. - Warren Buffett The airline business is brutal. Your seat availability today depends on aircraft orders placed a decade ago. Your inventory — empty seats — expire the moment the gate closes. Everyone from the mechanics to pilots are unionized. And…
I wrote this essay back in school after spending months interviewing veterans and poring over declassified mission logs from the squadron my grandfather flew 100+ missions with during the Vietnam War. The Wild Weasels were the “first in, last out” volunteers who intentionally drew fire from surface-to-air missiles to protect the strike packages behind them. I’m still struck by how much their story…
I wrote the following essay as a school research project into the Cold-War race for civil supersonic flight. In those times, Concorde’s slender delta wing came to symbolize industrial ambition, national pride, and, ultimately, the crushing economics of the luxury high speed travel against the egalitarian jumbo jet. The first supersonic age ended in defeat when Concorde retired in 2003, but a few…
As politicians on both side thunder about ending, auditing or increasing the President’s authority over the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to forget we’ve fought this war before. Nearly two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson’s populist crusade against Nicholas Biddle’s Congressionally chartered “Second Bank of the United States” toppled our nation’s monetary backbone and set the stage for the Panic of…
I generally believe that good startup (and product) names are short, fairly easy to remember / spell, somewhat distinctive, and you can buy the .com / .ai domain name. I’m also a sucker for things that rank first alphabetically. If you meet (most of) these criteria you get a 4/5.
We wrote this guide to compliment Spencer’s popular “Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines.” It draws upon our personal experiences and insights gleaned from working with talented VAs (virtual assistants) over many years (shoutout to Angeli, Karyn, Rio, and Shang!) as well as observations from other founders who have successfully built remote teams in the Philippines. Rio…
I wrote this guide to help founders navigate the uncertainties of their financial lives. I’m very confident that your startup and its shares will certainty be worth unimaginably large amounts of money at some point, but for now there are bills to pay and tricky situations to navigate. See you at IPO! Updated January 2026
This guide is for a mainly US (possibly Canadian) audience who travels to much less developed countries in (generally) Africa, Asia, and South America and wants to save thousands of dollars by getting their travel vaccines at Costco’s Pharmacy. You should start thinking about this at least a month (maybe two) before you leave. Time gives you the option to use the much cheaper Costco instead of a…
I wrote this guide to help founders get the most from their business and personal spending. As a founder, money has always been tight, but setting up simple systems for my business and personal spending has allowed me to travel the world for free, reward employees, and reduce our company’s burn. See you at the airport!
A cost of $1/m3 for seawater desalination and $0.6/m3 for brackish water would be feasible today. The costs will continue to decline in the future as technology progresses. - A study from 2005. We've more than halved the cost of desalination since then. Much has been said about how wars of the future will be fought over water. This is probably true, but the scope of the conflict seem like they…
I wrote this guide to help founders work with global talent (generally in the Philippines). At my last company (Rent the Backyard YC S19), we built an operations team of nearly 20 based in the Philippines. The team helped us with everything from payroll to sales proposals to procurement. The team helped extend my capabilities as a founder while extending the company’s runway and our chance of…
This is a list of the difficulty I perceive it to be to travel (as an English speaking American) to different parts of the world that I have been to or am familiar with. These rankings are probably most useful if you haven’t done much international travel. There are a lot of pretty easy-to-visit places that are still very interesting, so you should probably start there. I wouldn’t advise going…
Founders spend their days putting out fires. Context switching is constant and it’s important to step back and make sure the tasks you’re doing continue to line up with your long-term strategy. The best way I know of working through these challenges is to be in a clear headspace. Clear headspace facilitates focus and enables you to do your best work. When you are worried about forgetting a task,…
In 2018 I co-founded Pippin, a housing factory startup, and our backyard home (ADU) brand Rent the Backyard. Our goal was to use California’s new ADU laws to build a lot of homes quickly by helping homeowners make the most of their unused land. After 4 years, 10 homes built, and a $10m+ contracted revenue annual run rate, we announced that we’re shutting down.
Gramps died last night. My great-grandfather died last week. He was just shy of 100 years old. Gramps lived up in Otis Maine — a few miles from Acadia National Park. When I was growing up, Gramps would often stay a few days with my family on trips to visit his sister. We’d walk down into the creek near my house and while my brother and I fished, Gramps would tell us stories about growing up in…
I spent a bit of the holiday season in Japan visiting friends and riding the Shinkansen (bullet train). There is a lot to like. From clean, sprawling, dense, and affordable cites, to strangers offering to help an oftentimes extremely lost Gaijin (foreigner). Yet, I leave the Land of the Rising Sun with more conflicted thoughts than I have for my own home. Things are so familiar and so different.…
While the usual suspects ended up buying a handful of A380s due to national pressure (Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways), delusions of grandeur (Malaysia, Thai), or me-too syndrome (Asiana, Etihad, Qatar), there was really only one airline that truly loved the airplane. That was Emirates. - A cool airplane blog I like to read Airlines and their routes are fun because the decision to fly a…
How did all this get financed? Islam doesn’t seem so big on charging interest so bonds wouldn’t be an option. - me wondering about all the nifty architecture and skyscrapers in (relatively) oil poor Dubai I just arrived back in Pittsburgh after spending a week at Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Doha, Qatar. My time on Doha was incredible and something I’ll very much be digesting over the coming weeks…
English please - A waiter at this really yummy pub in Bratislava, Slovakia, the other day after I asked if he preferred English or German I know Slovakians speak Slovak. I just found it really interesting that in Bratislava – less than two miles from the border with Austria that English was the language of choice after Slovak (for both the waiter and the menu). This interest is perhaps misguided…
Do you have a view? - interview the other week I’ve become convinced British Prime Minister Theresa May is playing chicken. The other day, the Tories (Conservative) held their party conference where May declared an end to austerity, called for a softer Brexit and declared that “there are better days ahead.” I fundamentally don’t understand how this can be true given the mindset of its leaders…
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. - New York Times Anonymous Oped this Week
We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted. - Evan Spiegel I’m increasingly receptive to the narrative that Snap is becoming the new Twitter. While the revenue of both are restrained by the…
In China, there are only fifty-six legally defined minzu [hard to translate but basically nationality/race] one indicated on every citizen’s identity card… - Peter C. Perdue - Demystifying China, New Understandings of Chinese History This term I’m taking a class on Chinese History since the Qing Dynasty. Our first reading was from Naomi Standen’s book “Demystifying China and I think the first…
Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade with the country and will reportedly dump its Canadian investments. The kingdom’s ire was raised by a series of tweets from Canada’s foreign minister, in which she called for the release of Saudi human-rights activists. The Saudi government insisted that only a full Canadian climbdown would “fix its big mistake”. - The Economist, Espresso…
The Soviet Communist dictatorship, like any other system, seeks to preserve its own existence. To do this it is forced to stamp out any spark of dissidence which appears, either on its own territory or beyond its borders. — Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army I study Statistics and Machine Learning. Most of the time it’s really exciting to be so close to the frontier, but sometimes it’s…
I’m in Germany this week and the Airbnb we’re staying at in Berlin overlooks the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I was born in this country (in a little town called Wremen at the base of the Jutland Peninsula right on the North Sea) and while not a dual citizen, have always felt a connection to this place. With that being said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the genocide the Nazis…
And I believe we have no choice but to move forward, that those of us who believe in democracy and civil rights and a common humanity have a better story to tell. And I believe this not just based on sentiment. I believe it based on hard evidence: the fact that the world’s most prosperous and successful societies, the ones with the highest living standards and the highest levels of satisfaction…
Interesting post on society’s tendency to focus on successes rather than failures. Quite right about how failures don’t really constitute sexy television or YouTube videos. I’m not entirely sure that the advancement of the likes of YouTube and Facebook (and whatever else there is nowadays) would see an increase in that particular observation… Sure, more people would search for clips of…
In Event of Moon Disaster: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
No one has a Suzuki tattoo" [1] - a nugget from an otherwise so-so Medium article The numbers are clear though. As the article notes, half of Harley Davidson’s revenues come from deals to license their name and the sale of apparel. This is the power of branding — something apparel companies do particularly well (Vineyard Vines, Carhartt, etc) but they all do it — so the comparative gains to be had…
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. - The Unknown Citizen: WH Auden, 1939 WH Auden’s The Unknown Citizen is a cynical response to perceived bureaucratic encroach by western governments in the 1930s so this is admittedly a pretty odd poem to write a July 4th post about but I found it odd that my residential advisor would post it in the hall [1] of my dorm freshman…
People wonder why their daughter is taking 10,000 photos a day. What they don’t realize is that she isn’t preserving images. She’s talking. - Evan Spiegel, CEO Snap Snapchat fundamentally changed the way we think about what a camera is. This is perhaps the natural conclusion of the spread in accessibly and volume of images in the last hundred years. First were the formal portraits you sat for once…
There is no such thing as Rohingya, It is fake news. - U Kyaw San Hla: officer in Rakhine state security ministry.
The South Korean constitution recognizes all Koreans as its citizens. - An interesting Reuters article I didn’t have a quote in mind with which to really start this blog and going from zero to one is tough, so I checked the front page of Wikipedia. Of course, the recent US - DPRK (North Korea) summit was at the top of the list and a search in my doc for Korea revealed this interesting…
Dad I'm going to start a blog. - me the other day I spend a lot of my time reading. The Economist and its English wit is a favorite. TechCrunch somehow makes the show Silicon Valley funnier. And The New Yorker’s longer form articles and works of fiction are just so pretty. As my father knows from his quest through my 700+ email deep inbox [1] for an elusive Amazon security key when I left my phone…