How I operate.
- xthe target
Clarity and magnitude. Knowing exactly what I want, how much it matters, and refusing to drift into fuzzy ambition.
- ythe force
Intensity, sacrifice, consistency, execution. How much real force gets applied over time.
- bthe multipliers
Capital, relationships, distribution, timing, judgment, luck. Everything that multiplies effort instead of adding to it.
The exact letters matter less than the principle. I organize my life around maximizing the right side.
the target
Work on things that would not happen without me.
Obvious work and consensus work get done whether I show up or not. In 2022 the assumption was that training a language model took a lab, so I built one alone, tokenizer through serving, and that is the kind of work I keep looking for.
Decide exactly what I want, price it, and pay it.
Success comes down to one honest choice: what exactly I want, what it costs, and whether I will pay. Most ambition dies at the price. Mine has survived some expensive ones, the biggest being a product with 2.5 million daily active users that I shut down when the safety arguments changed my mind.
the force
Decision speed is the moat.
Decision speed, truth speed, testing speed, recruiting speed, fundraising speed, product speed, one team on one rhythm. At CoinHomes we closed a home purchase in four days in an industry that took forty-five or more. Nobody typed faster. We removed the places a decision could wait.
Fly to the source.
Reading about a market and knowing it are different things. To find Roam's shape I flew to China and sat with the lidar suppliers themselves, came home and built four applications end to end, and walked whole cities scanning buildings. Slides would have been faster and taught me nothing.
Reduce the latency to truth.
Every expensive mistake I have made was a true thing I learned too late. So I pay to hear bad news early: kill criteria before work starts, premortems before launches. Reviews open with whatever slipped. Cheap insurance, mostly against failures that never arrive.
Sleep and training are production infrastructure.
A company runs on founder output for years before it runs on anything else. I train every day and protect sleep the way production uptime gets protected, because my body is the one piece of hardware I cannot replace.
the multipliers
The people I work with matter more than the product.
Products get rebuilt every few years. The people carry over. One bar for everyone, cofounder or first check: high agency, high integrity, high energy, high intelligence.
Structure reflects reality.
I have turned down equal splits I could not defend and offered earn-ins tied to real commitment instead, because a cap table that flatters intention becomes a permanent mistake. Vesting protects against someone leaving early; it cannot price commitment that was never there. From a partner I do not need perfection, I need reality.
A wrong number is worse than a missing one.
One invented figure poisons every real number around it. So a number goes up when I can stand behind it, and the rest stays off the page. It costs a line of a table and it buys the reader the right to trust the others.
Doors are never closed.
There is always another chance to work with somebody. The industry is smaller than it looks and it remembers how you left the room, so I end everything, including the hard nos, in a way that keeps the next conversation open.