The Power of Anomaly

There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it’s time to topple that tired paradigm. I’ve spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can p... See more

1. Start with a Structural Analogy

Identify a complex system in one domain (LLMs in language) and map it to a well-understood system in another (index funds in finance). Ensure the analogy is not superficial—seek systemic parallels in behavior, incentives, and emergent dynamics.

2. Establish Historical Precedent

Introduce a real-world, data-backed p... See more

Serendipity needs unlikely collisions and discoveries, but it also needs something to anchor those discoveries. Otherwise, your ideas are like carbon atoms randomly colliding with other atoms in the primordial soup without ever forming the rings and lattices of organic life. The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these

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