Works in Progress: Coming soon

Some current working drafts are below. If any of these pique your interest, Shoot me a note!

You can learn more about this site here, and you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new notes are published.

  • Ideas and Radical Thoughts
    • What Dating Apps, Nigerian Scammers, Guerrilla Insurgents, and Asymmetrical Warfare All Have in Common: Lessons for Computer Security and Growth Hacking
    • Chinese Occulus Knockoffs and Mail-Order Brides: A Pro-Social Proposal for Virtual Reality
    • I Traveled for a Month on the Worst Public Transit in the US
    • Could You Bear Being a Side Kick?
    • Surfer Mentality in Business and Life
    • Fame is Playing Capitalism on Easy Mode
    • What is Your Hammer?
    • Five Types of Friends
    • Great Opportunities Are Found Top Down. Great Problems Are Solved Bottoms Up
    • Consumer is Like Playing Music. Enterprise is Like Serving at a Restaurant
    • The Mind Has No Firewall
    • Low Status
    • Proximity is Power
    • Software for the Mind
    • Structural Intelligence
    • Elites make the rules. Laypeople Break Them. How Latin Became French
    • Plausible Social Deniability
    • Dumb, Like a Fox...
  • Tech Trends
    • New York's (Consumer) Tech Revolution in 2024
    • Bay Area Tech Is Dying. Long Live Bay Area Tech.
    • Rise of AI Enable Vertical SaaS 2024
    • A Revolution in On-Premise Software and AI's Acceleration of the Self-Hosted Movement
    • AI is The CPU of Modern Knowledge Work
    • Boston Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Stanford vs. Harvard vs. MIT and Silicon Valley vs. East Coast
    • Themes on Excel for Fun and Profit
    • Product vs. Project Management
    • The Rise of First-Party Data
    • Bitcoin as a Battery: Steel Smelting, Renewable Energy, and Three Letter Agencies
    • Five Types of Power
    • Legitimate Expectations
  • Startups
    • Different Ways to Understand Product Market Fit (PMF)
    • What to Do as a Non-Technical Founder (From Someone Technical)
    • What I Wish People Told Me About Fundraising
    • How to Make a Pitch Deck that Raises Eight Figures
    • What I Wish People Told Me About Founders' Agreements
    • What I Wish People Told Me About Startup Advisor Agreements
    • The Best B2B Conference and Exhibit Booth Marketing Hacks
    • "The Full Product"
    • How to Write (the Best) Job Ad (in the World) and Ernest Shackleton
    • Advice for a Company Just Out of YC Demo Day
    • How to Write a Founding Story
    • How to Save Money, Win Cases, and Have Your Startup Lawyer Love You
    • First, Unique, and Different: What Startups Can Learn from Jean-Claude Biver
    • Building Enterprise Systems for Old Chinese Filipino Families in Southeast Asia
  • Technical
    • How I Started at Data Center in My Basement (And Why You Should Consider Doing It Too)
    • Using rclone on a Personal Gmail Account for Backups
    • Using Cloudflared Tunnels and Docker for Residential Hosting
    • The 80/20 basics of Docker
    • How to Tame Any Nontechincal Executive as a CTO: The Simple Feature Matrix
    • MVET - "Minimum Viable Enterprise Test"
    • The Five E's of Product Development
    • "I could do that in a weekend"
    • Programmers are Nice
  • Travel
    • Roman Recommendations
    • Tokyo Tips
  • Bookshelf
  • Other
    • Indiana Jones's Original Screenplay
    • Lessons from Living in the Desert
    • Dropshipping in the 1979
    • The Time I Connected The Founder of One of The World's Largest Crowdfunding Sites to an ASIS Agent to Help Exfiltrate Refugees from Afghanistan
    • How to Find Anyone's Information Online
    • The Unsung Heroes of Life Science
    • Everything I Know About Selling
    • All Things Equal, Choose the Better Story
    • Good, Stable Dinner Party Gifts
    • What I Wish They Taught Me at the World's Best Boarding School
    • What I Learned at Business School
    • How to Write a Recommendation Letter
    • How to Apply to YC
    • How to Prepare for Your HBS Interview
    • How to Ace Harvard Business School

Rev: 2020-12