I build systems, and I study how beliefs form. I write to figure out which is which.

Every product I have built is a hypothesis about how a belief forms or shifts. Ad creative is belief formation at six seconds. A market thesis is belief formation at the scale of capital. A children's story is belief formation before you have any defenses against it. A compliance layer is a system deciding what an agent is allowed to believe it can do. Different rooms, one house.

The theses below are where I think that goes. The frameworks are what I have managed to make reusable. The essays are the part with nothing to sell at the end of it.

• The studio · AI-native creative production An agency where machines do the volume and humans own the taste, priced on the outcome instead of the hour.
• The consumer tool · Software for people who will not type The next hundred million builders will describe what they want out loud, in their own language.
• The compliance layer · Infrastructure for agents that touch money Every autonomous system that moves money eventually needs someone to answer for it. That answer is a product.
• The children's IP · Stories, before the defenses are built The stories we absorb as children are the first belief-forming systems any of us meet.

the work, with the arguments attached →

• The Judgment Premium When making something costs nothing, the money moves to whoever decides what is worth making.
• The Next Hundred Million The next wave of software gets built by people who will never type a line of it, in languages the industry never shipped in.
• The Accountability Layer Capability stopped being the bottleneck. Being able to prove what an autonomous system did, and that it was allowed to, is the bottleneck now.
• STRATA Operationalizing the six-layer AI stack into signals you can actually track.
• Priced Belief A market price is a crowd’s belief made legible. We are about to have that instrument pointed at everything.
• Weakspot Competitive intelligence from your rivals' worst reviews.

all theses →

• The Outcome Loop Belief formation as a product surface: the five beats every product is secretly running.
• The Complaint Ladder Four rungs of customer complaint, only one of which tells you anything durable.
• Chosen Uncertainty A test for which risks are worth carrying: separate the uncertainty you picked from the uncertainty that picked you.

why i love building

I grew up with a disability, and the thing about that is it turns the very next day into a question.

Not the distant future. The next morning. Ordinary things other kids never had to think about, I had to plan for in advance. There was a low, constant uncertainty running underneath everything, a sense that the ground could shift, that what I could rely on today I might not be able to rely on tomorrow. Reality, up close, was heavy. And when you are small and reality is that heavy, you go looking for somewhere to stand where it weighs less.

I found that place by thinking big. Scale was my escape hatch. If I zoomed out far enough, the problem waiting for me the next day got smaller. Ambition was never really about status or money. It was about altitude. From high enough up, the thing I was dreading turned into one small feature of a much larger landscape, and I could finally breathe. altitude is the word i have for it now. at the time it just felt like daydreaming with unusual stamina.

So of course I became someone who builds. Building let me stay in that zoomed-out place and do something with it. You think at the size of your imagination, and then, slowly, you recreate a piece of the world at that size. For someone whose close-up reality was so different from the one he wanted, that is not a career choice. That is oxygen.

And here is the irony I still laugh at. To escape uncertainty, I ran straight into the most uncertain thing a person can choose. But it turns out there are two kinds of uncertainty, and they are nothing alike. There is the kind that happens to you, that you never chose, that just sits on your chest. And there is the kind you walk into on purpose, because the not-knowing is the fun of it. I spent my childhood inside the first kind. Building is how I get to spend the rest of my life inside the second. most of this site is downstream of that one distinction.

read the longer version →

• Living the contradiction of becoming by being A grandfather, a hospital corridor, and the quiet realization that you are made of the fight inside you.
• For the ones who got in the water A long, slow letter for the people who care too much and are noticed too little.
• Instagram quietly built the truest social graph ever made Instagram learned who you actually keep by watching what you send and who you send it to.
• the idea of you My whole life I thought I was chasing a future. I was chasing a person. And that person was me.
• The other version of you, at night We live two versions of ourselves. The one the world sees, and the one that only surfaces when everything finally goes quiet.
• The Two Things That Secretly Run Your Life And mine. And probably everyone you know.

everything i'd point a stranger to first →

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Also: I read prediction markets the way some people read poetry, and I keep a running note of every belief I've changed my mind about and what changed it. It is the most embarrassing document I own.