Building

The Evolving Profile of Successful Founders, Especially Among SMBs | Moses Sternstein and Yoni

The internet has created new forms of leverage analogous to the printing press, democratizing access to information and tools for creation. Digital platforms enable network effects that would have been impossible in earlier eras. Computational power (AI, etc) allows us to solve problems systematically in ways that would have seemed divine.

But the ... See more

It's the artisan’s question. It's the monk's question. It’s also the user’s question. Because what users often want is not maximum features or optimal price. They want something that works and keeps working, something they can live inside. That’s what makes recurrence a test of sufficiency, not a punishment. A test, of whether your business is shap... See more

Design for the Loop

Designing something to be livable rather than flippable changes your choices. Suddenly, "move fast" = a bad joke. Instead, you ask: Can I bear the texture of this? Are the relationships I’m building ones I could stand to inhabit on loop?

It sounds sentimental, until you consider how many modern businesses are, in effect, pyramid s... See more

Charlie Munger once said the test of a good business is whether a truly stupid person could run it, because someday a truly stupid person will. Nietzsche's version is more perverse: could you run it, over and over, with no prospect of relief?

You might be a genius.

Can your genius tolerate stasis?

this is the rarest skill in the world: to think big, & execute small.

not as a philosophy.

as a lifestyle.

most people operate on noise.

either they’re all vision… intoxicated by scale, directionless in practice.

or they’re all execution.. efficient but hollow, building without knowing why.

the first group floods you with ideas.

the second floods you with... See more

Tolstoy on shortening the distance between where you are and where you want to go:

“A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’”

Nan offered a distinction: there are two kinds of speed. The first is how quickly someone gets good, the pace at which they build fluency through repetition and feedback. And then there’s the speed they earn once that fluency is established—the efficiency and ease that comes after mastery. Think of it as the difference between learning to cook, and... See more

“Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else you can take out of it.”