Max Beauroyre

The need for work-life balance hints that there has to be a trade-off and that work cannot be fulfilling. It is predicated on two assumptions: 1) Work and life are distinct entities, and 2) The “life” elements are equally, if not more, important than the work elements

That we must strive to live according to truth. Every action we take or word we speak or thought we think that is not in accordance with the truth creates friction and suffering for us and others. We must live our true authentic lives. This is incredibly hard and everyone dies before the end of that journey.

I’m a fan of companies that operate like studios with the awareness that they’ll create a series of seasonal hits and try to capture value along the way. The assumption of seasonality could be wrong (and one or more of these hits endures much longer), but that ends up being a good problem to have.

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

As The Diff author and all-around genius Byrne Hobart emailed me in a reply to a Not Boring essay a couple years ago: “For any fintech product the question always comes down to: do they have a sustainable advantage in low CAC?” 

With the proliferation of banking APIs in the two years since, and the fierce competition in the financial services... See more

People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

I think the main reason I didn’t realize my problems were solvable was a lack of imagination. I’d never seen anyone solve problems in an agentic way, and I failed to imagine that things I hadn’t seen done could be done by me.

my entire investment thesis is that startups have the opportunity to overtake sclerotic incumbents with vertically integrated offerings that are better, cheaper, faster and higher-margin.