Business is much closer to improv jazz than conducting an orchestra. Although improv jazz takes tremendous skill and dedication to get good at, and most people will suck at it no matter how much they practice.

I see this argument with every. single. new. technology. Because virtually everything is a commodity when you breakdown the individual components. But differentiated products are often about vertical integration of a specific part of value chain, and then just maxing out customer experience to an obsessive degree - nailing all the little details that pure off the shelf commodities would never bother with.

Montreal has incredible energy today. I really worried post covid that it had lost some its swagger. But it's so back.

It's a beautiful day. But don't forget - you have pending tasks in WorkDay!

“high agency high taste is the unlock these days”

when I moved from Montreal - where the taxes are highest in all of Canada - to NY, my average tax rate went up, not down. And NYC has *way* higher taxes than say, Alberta.

People love to talk about how Canada dropped the ball in commercializing AI, but conveniently leave out fact that Canada dominates when it comes to vape shops per capita

what AI really reveals is how insanely powerful natural language is. you can express so much so compactly

he's 100% correct. being optimistic doesn't mean throwing away base rates and any sort of Bayesian reasoning. the most succesful founders overwhelmingly went to Stanford (and graduated). Go to Stanford.

Your entire life will change when you realize that nobody is thinking about you. I often wonder how many extraordinary people waste their entire lives fearing the judgement of people who were never even thinking about them in the first place. Fearing a spotlight that was never even on. Performing for an audience that was never even there. Because the truth is that you aren't afraid of failure. Not really. You're afraid of other people seeing you fail. You're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But nobody is thinking about you. Everybody is too busy thinking about themselves. So, that thing you've always wanted to do? Go do it.

One of the under appreciated reasons Americans are wealthy relative to the rest of the world: Access to the US financial markets Regular rich people around the world have not had any part of their net worth in an asset compounding 10% annually

first time it's ever hit me that art critics actually do play an important role in culture. we need them to explain why this is shit

Billy Bishop would be the best airport on earth if it just had good food. But I guess you can't have everything

Hell yeah. Social media is a dead end technology that destroys human society. We are slowly learning to adapt to this new technology (by.not using it).

I see little content about using claude code for data science, but it's very good at it and save a lot of time.

if you're claude coding and getting useful output, then give yourself more credit. You're probably doing a lot more and thinking a lot more than you realize.

Want to share more after getting some thoughtful comments from some sharp folks whom I look up to. Going back to @pmarca's “The Only thing that matters”: the market you’re in, and reaching PMF in that market is indeed, the most important thing (even if other things matter too). So this piece is one of the few that stood test of time. The issue: we still have zero formalism around what a good market is, let alone how to achieve PMF in a good market. Reaching PMF is a macrostate description: we recognize the structure of PMF when we see it. The microstate, however, is basically intractable. There are tons of microstates that correspond to the macrostate that is PMF. Worse, the potential search space of microstates that we think *might* lead to PMF (but don’t) is vastly larger than the highly sought after microstates that do. So the issue here is one of observable entropy, and the limits of information processing available to humans today. The entropy, or uncertainty, relating to what *could* work in terms of serving a market is so incredibly large that we lack the computational power to do any sort of useful simulation or measurement without just building an entire damn company. With the advent of ASI and breakthroughs in advanced simulation, we will likely be able to accelerate entrepreneurship success rates in a scientific fashion. Until then, it’s going to feel very mystical.

my hottest of hot takes is that we collectively know extremely little about what makes startups work, and that we're not even making much progress in terms of cumulative knowledge. There do seem to be some outlier founders who have a better intuitive grasp than typical human. But they haven't been able to distill this intuition into anything codified. So by extension, I think it's extremely unlikely an AI system will succeed at entrepreneurship anytime soon.

Offering UBI as a concession is so condescending and demeaning It’s so obvious everyone who suggests UBI assumes they will not need it because they are indispensable

this is the aspect of tech i like the least. It's also just wrong - the most prized cognitive abilities shift a lot over time, and will shift especially quickly with AI. Eg, a lot of folks with most empathy or best taste might not score high on trad IQ measures.