I build companies that make the physical world work better.
I've been building companies since I was 14, including Rent the Backyard (YC S19), a backyard home startup that hit a $10m run rate. Before that, I studied Statistics & Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, where I paid my tuition by arbitraging textbooks.
Enduring businesses, and enduring nations, are built by optimizing the physical world: energy, housing, manufacturing, transportation.
Airline route networks really fascinate me. Walking into one of the great airports of the world you can feel the reach of the place and the people who move through it.
The handful of irreplaceable hubs that every airline wants to fly to:
Impact isn’t only moral philosophy. It’s also pragmatic.
It’s more fun. Building something singular is infinitely more satisfying than being cog #12,428 in someone else’s machine.
It’s better for your head. People who optimize only for money or status often end up restless. Someone else will always have more and when you finally stop optimizing for that, you don’t have much else to show for it.
It compounds. Impact tends to snowball. Choosing to work on something meaningful attracts better people, creates deeper conviction, and sustains you through harder problems.
Everyone says not to start a commodity business. But the truth is, the best businesses are commodity businesses that really own the commodity. The trick is to build a structural cost advantage in production, or differentiate the product enough for customers to no longer view it as a commodity.
Set aside climate for a moment and ask a simpler question: is continued growth in energy use structurally viable?
The classic de-growth argument says “no” because most modern energy comes from hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal). These are finite geologic windfalls, so we’re effectively living off photosynthesis from millions of years ago. As those reserves deplete, the claim goes, society must ratchet back to something closer to nature’s replenishment rate.
In the long run, this is a pretty good argument against hydrocarbons! We’ve probably used around 50% of accessible oil reserves and depletion raises extraction effort [1]. The more oil we pump, the more expensive the next marginal oil becomes [2].
Being a founder requires many skills. As your company grows these skills overlap with those of an executive. To this end I’ve really enjoyed and learned a lot from the following episodes of Tom Henschel’s executive coaching podcast The Look and Sound of Leadership among others.
Last updated October 2025