Earning Secrets

The call of any creator is to keep making things, not to make any sense of what you create. Just dive down deep into the ocean of awareness and see how long you can hold your breath. What I know is that most days I wake up with an question in my mind, some thought that begs an answer, without the slightest clue where the urge originated. On a good... See more

I’ve always believed the best early-stage founders are artists – they're obsessive about new and unusual things, they feel compelled to bring creation into the world, and they are often misunderstood for long periods of time–even lifetimes. Building businesses is their art.

The idea is that reasoning from first principles is reasoning like a scientist. You take core facts and observations and use them to puzzle together a conclusion, kind of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to try to make them into something good. By doing this puzzling, a chef eventually writes a new recipe. The other kind of... See more

But I like this model of bootstrapping entrepreneurs as foragers: living off the land as hunter-gatherers until they can find a market to homestead. Bootstrappers have to start from where they are and search for opportunities. Pasteur advised that “Chance only favors the prepared mind” so you have to open yourself up to possibilities and be... See more

Vibe coding shines brightest in the discovery phase—letting you translate hypotheses into clickable prototypes almost instantly. But speed alone won’t uncover genuine pain points. Instead, weave AI-powered prototyping into a structured discovery loop:

• Customer conversations before you “vibe” a feature. Use AI to mock up screens that bring your

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I started off by asking him whether there is a unifying theme to his seemingly diffuse life’s work, which has included old-school magazines and books, bleeding-edge technology, conservationism, photographing Asia, and teaching. “Following my interests,” he said simply.