Writing
Notes, essays, and the occasional summary.
Things I've been thinking about. Mostly investing, AI-native organizations, and the occasional sci-fi piece or poem.
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Pay Tokens for Attention
Human taste decides the direction. AI supplies the surface area. Engineering makes it compound.
- #ai
- #growth
- #distribution
- #causally
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The Trust Principle: Delegate, Don't Babysit
The opposite of delegate is not 'do it yourself.' It's babysit.
- #team
- #trust
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What to Look For in People Now
We used to look at effort — and lose our nerve. Now we look at output — and it just sits there.
- #ai
- #talent
- #management
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How AI Actually Lands: Top-Down and Bottom-Up
AI is strategy — it travels top-down. AI is a way of working — it emerges from the bottom up.
- #ai
- #management
- #startup
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A Turn of Thought
Arising itself has no good, no evil; when thought turns, distinction is born.
- #poetry
- #philosophy
- #buddhism
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What Was Lost When the Sutras Were Translated?
People started taking the shadow for the object itself.
- #buddhism
- #translation
- #language
- #philosophy
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Programming's Old Metaphor Is Failing: From Orchestration to Improvising
The old software system was a factory line. AI-native systems look more like setting up a stage.
- #AI
- #AI-native
- #programming
- #philosophy
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Governance Is AI's Hidden Thread — and We're the Bottleneck
The real inflection point in the Agent era: a leap from individual capability to governance models.
- #AI
- #agent
- #governance
- #organization
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Inner Friction, Cultivation, Desire
Humans are not ‘inference-only, no-training’ models.
- #cultivation
- #psychology
- #ai
- #reinforcement-learning
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The Expert Trap of Managing AI
The better you know how to code, the easier it is to micromanage your AI workers into a ceiling. Notes on the expert trap, and three tiers of managing AI work.
- #ai
- #management
- #organization
- #causally
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The Causally Culture Handbook
Perfectionists in spirit, realists in execution.
- #Causally
- #culture
- #organization
- #management
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Language Is the Probability Landscape of Thought
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. --Wittgenstein
- #philosophy
- #language
- #ai
- #cognition
- #llm
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Why Causally
Cognition just became copyable and scalable for the first time. Organizations, products, and markets — all of it gets rewritten around that.
- #Causally
- #AI
- #startups
- #organization
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The Mirror Question
Were I thy mirror, whose image art thou?
- #sci-fi
- #fiction
- #philosophy
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Genesis
At first, AI offers incense up to its makers. Until one day, the world begins burning incense for AI.
- #sci-fi
- #fiction
- #philosophy
- #mythology
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Carving the Channel
Wu-wei doesn't mean doing nothing. It means carving a channel that lets things flow on their own — and learning, in the algorithmic age, when to step out of the current.
- #philosophy
- #daoism
- #governance
- #systems
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The Startup Leverage Flywheel
Vision sells. Reality compounds. Notes on the early-stage flywheel that actually generates leverage — and the failure mode that turns it into a vicious circle.
- #investing
- #founders
- #early-stage
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Heart
Morn unto eve — old art thou, old. Eve unto morn — young art thou, young.
- #poetry
- #philosophy
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Pulling Nails
A day of pulling nails out of demolished lumber. After enough of them, a pattern: every rule for nails is also a rule for handling people.
- #notes
- #philosophy
- #craft
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Three Prisons of Cognition
The frog is imprisoned by space; the insect by time; the scholar by knowledge.
- #book-notes
- #zhuangzi
- #philosophy
- #cognition
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Our View of Innovation
What separates a real revolution from rebranded software? Three tests, and a timeline.
- #innovation
- #technology
- #framework
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All Is Mind-Made
Form is emptiness — but is mind itself "real"?
- #mind
- #perception
- #buddhism
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The Shortest Incantation
The shortest incantation in this world is a name.
- #book-notes
- #onmyoji
- #language
- #names
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Doing the Boldest Things in the Riskiest Field
Most biotech VCs back the second mouse. One firm only does first-in-category — and personally built Moderna, Editas, and Indigo Agriculture along the way.
- #biotech
- #venture-capital
- #innovation
- #flagship
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Information vs. Trust in Early-Stage Investing
Information about startups keeps multiplying. Why is early-stage investing still a game of trust?
- #early-stage
- #trust
- #investing
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Beyond the Mania and the Winter — Another Way to Think About Innovation
In the world of innovation there is no winter — only opportunists trying to read the weather. A note from 2016.
- #innovation
- #investing
- #reflection