Okay, if you had infinite time, what would you build?”

If you’ll indulge me, here’s my list of potential projects, with light editorializing.

Energy supply

• Synthetic fuel.


• Better polysilicon production tech. The Siemens process feels paleolithic.


• Flexible silicon solar arrays, ground mounted and ultra cheap (<$30k/MW).


• Radioactivity applications

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How to convince people to join your startup

I actually researched and covered this in a previous issue, so go read that post. Here’s the high-level summary of what you need to get right:

1. Captivating vision —Make it easy for candidates to visualize what you are building toward and to feel like their work will be meaningful.


2. A++ early team —The best

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One of my favorite Ben Thompson posts is "What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong" in which he built on Christensen's theory of disruption to note that low end disruption can be avoided if you can differentiate on user experience. It is difficult and perhaps even impossible to over-serve on that axis. Tesla came into the electric car market with a car t... See more

High-Level Categories: What’s Working for Your Inspiration

The easiest way to come up with those ideas is to look through those five to ten accounts you liked and then see what topics of theirs have performed the best. Don’t copy what they say. But if a certain topic did well for one of them, especially if it did for multiple, your take on that top... See more

Curators, Curators

It has become popular to say we live in the information age, and we need curation to help us sort through the mess. But thus far, the conversation around “curation” has been too focused on the content and not enough on the structure. We seem to have accepted the job of the curator as providing a product review, a list of links, a... See more

Filming & Cadence

Alright, let’s make some videos.

First, I think you should aim for two or more videos per day for the first few weeks until you get some hits . That might sound insane, but, it’ll give you a lot of data very quickly on what’s working and what isn’t, and you can slow it down to one video per day once you have a good backlog of ... See more

Finding Your Anchor Task

Doing more things does not drive faster or better results. Doing better things drives better results. Even more accurately, doing one thing as best you can drives better results.

Mastery requires focus and consistency.

I haven’t mastered the art of focus and concentration yet, but I’m working on it. One of the major improveme... See more

Finding Your Niche

You want people to eventually be interested in you for you, to “be the niche,” but you’ll need to start with some focused topic to get picked up by the algorithm.

Finding the right niche on TikTok is a combination of:

1. What topic do you have a meaningful competitive information advantage in?


2. What topic are people already following?

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To me, online content consumption seems to exist on a pendulum of sorts: we love content to the extreme — Unbundle!! Give us more! — until we are overwhelmed with choice and analysis — It’s too much!! Bundle it back up again! — and swing to the opposite side. In the end, we always end up somewhere in the middle... but it’s a lot of swinging back an... See more