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I’ve made my share of bad predictions. I’ve had plenty of good ones too. But being right often doesn’t matter, because few people will remember if you were right or wrong, and when it comes to placing bets on your predictions, timing is incredibly difficult to nail down. Some of my best predictions include my general bullishness on software and the internet since the 90s (when the dot-com bubble saw the NASDAQ rise over 400% from 1995-20001), betting on Airbnb (now valued at $86B+), and Bitcoin (up over 30,000% in the last decade). In the case of Bitcoin, I was right about the bet, but got the timing wrong. Bitcoin’s journey from $0.09 in 2010 to nearly $69,000 in November 2021 represents a staggering 76,000,000% return, making it the best-performing asset of the decade by orders of magnitude. For context, an investment of just $100 in Bitcoin in 2010 would have been worth over $76 million at its peak.

Once upon a time, the US government enforced antitrust legislation. One of the most famous examples of this is the case of Standard Oil, which remains the textbook example of monopoly breakup taught in economics and law schools worldwide. To understand what happened to Standard Oil, we need to take a short walk back in time through history. The year is 1890, and the US Congress is a well-functioning body with rational officials whose brains still function at a high enough level to pass sensible legislation.

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with someone from a big tech company about their interview process. They wanted to put me through the funnel to run the gauntlet and see if I “had what it takes” to make it to the offer stage. I declined, but (against better judgement) I gave them 30 minutes to pitch their company to me anyway.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai Imagine a technology so destructive that it kills 1.3 million people annually, consumes vast portions of our cities, and contributes significantly to climate change—yet we’ve designed our entire society around it. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the reality of our car-dependent world.

Humans are pretty bad at intuiting about exponential growth. Whether it’s pollution, population growth, or the way a virus spreads, our brains struggle to grasp the impact of such growth.

You’ve probably heard about the “labour shortage” everywhere. But what’s really happening in the job market? There are many theories floating around—early retirements, COVID deaths, government stimulus making people flush with cash—but the data tells a more nuanced story than these simple explanations suggest. Let’s explore what the numbers actually show about the current state of the labour market.

In our current cultural landscape, there’s a fascinating phenomenon worth examining: the growing obsession with self-promotion and personal branding. Perhaps the most visible manifestation is the rise of “influencers”—a term that itself reveals much about our values. What many who adopt this label might not realize is that true influence rarely announces itself so boldly.

I’ve noticed a trend amongst startups (particularly those in the financial-ish space) which amounts to some variation of “hey guys, maybe we can get customers if we use memes?”. This is not dissimilar to the “viral” craze of the early 2010s in startup land, where a number of companies raised mountains of VC cash entirely on some silly app gaining millions of users overnight. One of my favourite examples is the Yo app.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between friendship and therapy in our modern world. It’s become increasingly common to suggest therapy as the default solution for nearly every emotional challenge—as if paying a professional to listen will magically transform our circumstances or instantly resolve our deepest struggles. To be clear: therapy can be valuable and even essential for many people, particularly those dealing with clinical conditions or processing trauma. But I wonder if we’ve overlooked something fundamental in our rush to professionalize emotional support—the irreplaceable value of genuine friendship.

Software engineers are likely familiar with the CAP theorem, coined by Eric Brewer. In essence, the CAP theorem states that distributed databases can have at most 2 of 3 attributes: consistency, availability, or partition tolerance (fault tolerance). In other words, you can have a database that is consistent and highly available, but not fault tolerant. Or, you can have one that’s fault tolerant and highly available, but isn’t always consistent (especially during network failures).