The first time someone steals your work, you remember the room. Mine had fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency just below conscious awareness and a conference table scarred by years of coffee rings. Nadya was presenting my distributed systems architecture to the board – not our architecture, not the team’s architecture, but hers. Three…
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Last September, eating a peach with chocolate peanut butter ice cream in my kitchen a little after midnight, I realized I was happy. Not in the way you realize you’ve forgotten your keys – more the way you notice your breathing only after it’s slowed. Nothing special about the combination: cold peach from the fridge,…
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The most profound changes seem to require us to pull away from the very people who could support us through them. Counterintuitive, even cruel – yet this pattern appears everywhere we look – in nature, in personal growth, in creative breakthroughs. The more I’ve explored this paradox, the more I’ve come to see it not…
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The essay “Building Something New” maps the territory of company creation with all its contradictions – patterns that usually hold, except when they don’t. Principles that often apply, except when violating them works better. Mathematics that generally governs, except when exceptions prove more instructive than rules. That essay reveals the fundamental uncertainty at the heart…
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