Building With Soul

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everythin... See more

Things should be costly (either in materials or the effort we put in) because it proves love and sacrifice went into it — for the benefit of all.

We lost our soul and growth was slow and I failed to raise a Series A investment round and Ebay.

If you know to look, you can feel the difference between software crafted with care for its users and systems of vacuous tradition that just happen to be good at producing the vapid fodder of convenience.

Techno-Industrials are addressing larger markets than most software companies can.

They use whichever tools they need to provide better solutions to key bottlenecks with better unit economics than incumbents.

They are more capital efficient than most investors expect.

And they have to be more strategically sound than the average software company.

B... See more

It was then I realised architecture is not about creating structures that are aesthetically pleasing or merely functional: it’s about designing spaces that evoke emotion and resonate with the human spirit. The Farnsworth House may have been a triumph of modernist design, but it lacked the warmth and humanity architecture should embody.

However, as I crossed the threshold, excitement gave way to disappointment. Instead of feeling connected to the natural world, I found myself strangely isolated within the confines of the glass walls. The minimalist aesthetic that I had admired from afar now felt cold and impersonal up close.

every great institution is the extended shadow of a single person.

the right motivation is never a technology trend and always something far deeper and more personal, and the right question is never “What is your AI strategy” and always more like “If I had to solve this problem today given the technologies available, would the solution change?”