Founder of Conviction. Investor. Startup Helper.
Born and raised in Wisconsin, New Jersey, New England.
First computer ran Linux.
First computer game was XBill.
First thing I ever made with software was a robot dog.
Loved the web, ice skating, books, game theory, markets.
Worked in local/state politics in middle and high school.
Went to Penn, studied a lot: lit, economics, stat, arch.
Been hanging out in startup offices since I was 10.
Briefly, worked at Goldman Sachs.
GP for ~10Y at Greylock (software, infra/sec, crypto, AI).
In 2022, founded Conviction, an AI-native investing firm.
Hosting a podcast exploring the frontier, No Priors.
Live in Silicon Valley. Building family & community here.
I'm currently reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Send me book recommendations!
Intellectual honesty is rare and decisive.
Most people avoid conflict and defend status. If you are willing to tolerate uncomfortable tension in the pursuit of truth, that compounds better than baseline talent.
Curiosity is alpha.
Pull on loose threads! Borrowed narratives dominate thinking. Curiosity is how you step outside them, notice problems, generate ideas, and create a better model of the world.
As institutions grow, coordination costs outpace capability.
Past a certain size, adding people mostly adds friction. AI exponentially increases individual leverage, and the advantage goes toward small, aligned teams.
Talent and competence are unevenly distributed.
That is empirical, not ideological. Markets and competition sort more fairly than any selection committee.
Stagnation is indefensible.
People who oppose economic and technical progress are confused about where prosperity comes from. Entrepreneurship and competition are the only engines we have found that reliably produce progress, and we still need a lot more of it.
The world needs more entrepreneurship.
Progress comes from people who put capital, work, and reputation at risk and let results decide. We need far more of this than we currently have.
Fast feedback beats correct theory.
Meeting the market helps you converge faster than ideas that start out ~right but update slowly.
Conviction filters noise.
Without it, speed makes for thrash. In environments flooded with information and leverage (like today!), beliefs need to be held steady long enough to be tested. Conviction is the temporary suspension of doubt that makes action possible. Sometimes that suspension of doubt needs to last years.
Human potential is massively underutilized.
Many of our systems are built for control and legibility, not leverage. Better tools and abundance expand what individuals can attempt.
People can grow enormously under the right conditions.
Even traits we treat as fixed, like work ethic, ambition, and risk tolerance, respond strongly to incentives, expectations, and social context. Humans are social animals. Put yourself in the right community and game.
Agency is a product of system design.
People act when they have ownership, consequences, and upside. Incentives and inspiration are the highest leverage place to intervene.