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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If you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to wonder:

“What should I spend my time working on?”

Then perhaps a better question is:

“Where am I most afraid to fail?”

When we’re avoiding some path because failure would destroy us, that’s often the path we need to go down.

Because if we aren’t afraid of failing, do we really care at all?

Simplicity is difficult because most of us are overcompensating for uncertainty. Adding something is easy. But removing something is hard, because it requires conviction. It’s easier to hedge against uncertainty, entertain multiple paths, and dilute your focus than to develop a strong opinion about what to exclude.

Vertical Search Aggregators

Google is a great example of how the internet enabled scale and speed: every page on the web returned in an instant. But increasingly, we’re seeing this scale is at odds with a fundamental human need: relevance. Someone who wants to find the best freelance designer, or the best sushi restaurant, or the best NFT to buy wi... See more

“The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,”

At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.

Reasons you should still get into AI

• Broad Potential of AI/Rate of Growth
  
  
  • Jeff Bezos famously quit finance to start Amazon at age 30.
  
  
  • He did this because Internet usage was growing 2,300% a year in 1994.
  
  
  • Rollouts of
    
    general purpose technologies
    
    3
    
    span decades.
  
  
  • Imagine being a “latecomer” to tech in the year 2000 or 2010 and concluding it was “too lat

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Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:

“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”

“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in m

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