Max Beauroyre

Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.

I so often meet people who focused on maximizing a narrow set of life outcomes instead of forming their identity, and that becomes much harder to do when you’re locked in mid-career. Youth is a privilege: use it to experiment, test the boundaries of the world, and make stupid mistakes.

Chris Sacca shared recently on Dialectic: “Only play rigged games.” He avoids public markets because he’s just a spectator there. In venture, he can shift the odds. “It may be lucky,” he says, “but it’s not an accident.”

Unfair advantages come in three flavors: product insight, go-to-market edge, technical moat. One gets you in the game. Two means... See more

But young people are facing a double disruption - (1) technological creative destruction in the form of AI combined with (some form of) political creative destruction in the form of the Trump administration. When I talk to young people from New York or Louisiana or Tennessee or California or DC or Indiana or Massachusetts about their futures,... See more

In that same Strategy essay, I tried to show why strategy - a diagnosis (there is an opening for a financial software company that helps customers save time and money), a guiding policy (“For every product we build, and everything we do, the goal is always, ‘How can we save more time for customers?’”), and coherent actions (all of the specific... See more

pursue extraordinary intentions rather than comfortable lives. your life’s trajectory should reflect your unique values rather than external expectations