This essay reframes the brutal truths about building companies laid out in “Building Something New,” – the relationship costs, the technical debt, the isolation of living in futures others can’t see. Those truths are indeed real and worth understanding. But they tell only half the story. What that essay presents as inevitable – the suffering,…
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If you studied thousands of companies – the ones that succeeded and the many more that failed – what patterns would emerge? Not the glossy narratives we tell at conferences, but the uncomfortable realities that determine whether something survives or disappears? I’ve been exploring this question, and what emerges isn’t particularly inspiring. It’s more like…
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Picture this: You’re in a dream, seated in an ornate concert hall with burgundy velvet seats and golden baroque molding that seems to breathe with the music. A stranger approaches, apologetic – you’re in their seat. You stand, move aside, and exchange a brief glance of mutual acknowledgment. The moment passes. You wake. Somewhere else,…
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Often, I think about our effort at permanence – how we construct cities, nations, and entire civilizations as though they were eternal fixtures rather than brief arrangements of matter in an indifferent cosmos. There’s something both terrifying and liberating in contemplating the immense scale of time, in recognizing that Earth spins not just on its…
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