About

Hi, I’m Spencer!

I’m an engineer, history buff, and economic development nerd. I previously founded Rent the Backyard (YCs19).

I have a degree in Statistics & Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where I stayed up all night writing algorithms that arbitraged textbooks to pay my tuition. Before, I attended Phillips Exeter Academy where I stayed up all night writing 40-page history papers about the confluence of technology and geopolitics (some favorites were the Anglo-French development of the Concorde to try and leapfrog US dominance of the jet age and the creation of the Wild Weasel mission to suppress surface to air missiles during the Vietnam War – can you tell I like airplanes?). These disciplines seem pretty different but I view them on a continuum that informs and empowers the other.

While I’m not quite a geographic-determinist, my framework for understanding the world starts with geography, continues through history and economics, before being interpreted and empowered by statistics, computer science, and machine learning.

Geography → History → Economics → Statistics → Computer Science / Machine Learning

Choosing a college was a pivotal moment in my life and I made it an exercise in discomfort. Most people expected me to continue to develop as a historian or economist, but I worried I wouldn’t be able to make the impact I wanted without quantitative tools. I chose CMU and got those tools, but leaving history, economics, and softer contextual understanding behind felt wrong. Today, I work to find a balance between “provable” theory and messy empirical or intuitive “truths” — combining these skills to build and run technology businesses.

I have been building and running technology businesses since I was 14 years old.

• I first built an Uber Eats-style food delivery business at my boarding school, which sold more than $15k in McDonald’s and tacos.
• Next, I paid all my tuition at CMU by arbitraging textbooks from Facebook groups at my college, Facebook Marketplace, and Craigslist to Amazon and eBay. I continued in e-commerce and sold imported electronic accessories, outdoor supplies, and other products via Shopify, eBay, and Amazon.
• In 2019 I left school to start Pippin, a house manufacturing company, and our backyard home (ADU) brand Rent the Backyard. We grew the business past a $10m contracted revenue run rate but ran out of money before we hit a profitable scale. The business really benefited from a large team I built in the Philippines. I wrote a guide for how you can start your own team there here
• I’m now working on a new company to make running deep-tech companies like Pippin easier.

I’m a deep believer that we need to make more progress in the physical world.

• Physical infrastructure like energy generation, factories, and transportation networks are the primitives of our society and its wealth. We need to invest in and develop our industry, our technology, and our communities to enhance this foundation and build our society’s arsenal of tools to overcome any challenge. This strategy works! Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the world has nearly eliminated extreme poverty, reduced child mortality by 10x, and nearly doubled the average lifespan.

• Today, I’m focused on how to continue building our physical world so we can face and solve today’s greatest challenges. For the past five decades, Western society has focused on outsourcing, and economizing – letting its physical capabilities stagnate or even diminish. Over the past few years, it feels like that’s started to change and a new ecosystem is emerging. My last company was part of that early ecosystem and while talent was pouring in and capital increasing available, it felt a lot like building software before AWS and Stripe. Our team spent countless hours looking for factory space, building ERP systems for our use cases, and specifying / comparison shopping the items we needed to buy. All these things were essential to do well but were not the dimensions that defined the success of our company. Building this infrastructure was both table stakes and a distraction from our core focus. I’m now spending most of my time exploring how to reduce this overhead and enable hard tech startups to go further with fewer resources. If that sounds interesting, or you want to talk about anything in the physical world, please reach out! spencer dot burleigh at gmail dot com

Some of my core interests and favorite material from each include:

Updated May 2024

Economic development policy: essential to get right and perhaps the highest leverage work anyone can do.

How Asia Works – Kind of unfortunately titled, but perhaps my favorite book. The Korea, Malaysia, and Philippines chapters are incredible.
Asian Godfathers – Same author as How Asia Works. This one dives into how trading hubs like Singapore / Hong Kong are so rich, the effect of Chinese emigration across Southeast Asia, and how captured banks have kept the region’s equity yields so low.
The political economy of industrial policy in Korea – As good as you’ll get to a how-to guide on making your country rich and important.
MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 – A guide to highly efficient bureaucracy and increasingly relevant as America considers more heavy industrial policy.
Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines – More about how captured banks are OP.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours – Super fun if you went (or probably should have gone) to law school.
The End of the World is Just the Beginning – Zeihan is super polemical and I don’t agree with that many things he says (trading between far away lands going away because of more pirates / risk is silly given how shipping costs could 5x and barely affect the price of most things) but he makes nice maps, talks about commodities/geography an appropriate amount, and has a fun tone.

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia – Russia’s population is crumbling but as we’ve seen with the war in Ukraine they still have an enormous geopolitical effect. More importantly, the Chinese government seems to have really studied how Soviets missteps led to the collapse of their empire. I don’t think you can have a good mental model for the Chinese government without studying the USSR.

The Gulag Archipelago – Smuggled out of the USSR. A thorough (sometimes overly so - read an abridged version) accounting of the Soviet concentration camps that killed >1 million of the up to 17 million people imprisoned. (Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement speech)[https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/a-world-split-apart] – Author of the Gulag Archipelago. Required reading to understand Russia.
The Bronze Horseman —- An 1833 Pushkin poem about a statue in St. Petersburg set atop the largest stone ever moved by humans and the power of the Russian state. Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania – Watching (the speech where dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu realizes his regime is ending)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRWiz1PhKU] is chilling.

AI & machine learning: a new industrial revolution

Becoming a wealthier world will enable humanity to earn our way out of many of our most basic problems.

Economic growth comes from gains in productivity (increased specialization and technology that enables workers to do more) and growth in the size of the workforce. As birthrates decrease and workforce sizes stabilize, technology will be increasingly responsible for growing the economy and increasing our standard of living. Our modern frontier is AI and machine learning systems that help augment human capabilities to produce, consume, and facilitate collaboration.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism I generally disagree that people will stop working but the Star Trek vibes are fun
Snow Crash

Housing policy & urban planning: the source of many of the West’s most serious problems

Reduced birth rates, political instability, reduced growth in real wages, and income inequality all have housing at their core.

If NYC, San Francisco, and San Jose relaxed their zoning rules, US GDP would be 8.9% higher. This means wages for every American would be nearly $9,000 higher per person each year.

The only way to fix this problem is to build more housing.

The Housing Theory of Everything
The Housing Crisis is the the Everything Crisis (video with very similar thesis as above)
BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System

Military history: strongly correlated to technological progress

I think most people today misunderstand that most modern conflicts have been decided by technological progress which has subsequently transformed society. This effect is particularly noticeable after 1850.

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War – Volunteers from around the world fighting against Franco and the Nazis.
Logistics in the Falklands War: A Case Study in Expeditionary Warfare
Cryptonomicon – Fiction that touches on the impact of technology at Bletchley where the allies cracked the German’s Enigma encryption machine.

The airline industry: a really hard business that’s worth learning from

The airline business has some of the most technically difficult and costly questions to answer:

• If you have a 180-person 737 based in New York on Monday (let’s forget about how you choose to own that plane or the number of business vs. economy seats), how do you choose whether to fly vacationers to Orlando, business travelers to Chicago, or sports fans to Dallas?

It is an incredible story of competition and markets that the industry is so poor at capturing the value it creates.

Fortunately, airlines found a real business with 50%+ margins to support all this airplane loss-leader stuff: selling a fake currency they create to companies who offer co-branded revolving lines of credit to make people more excited to buy new shoes since it might help them get a free trip to Jamaica.

The airline industry terrifies me but I can’t look away. Everything is so complicated, everything is so difficult, but it all works, and pretty well too.

Hard Landing
Cranky Flier.com
View from the Wing.com

Management, strategy, & company building: a craft you can learn

I’ve never really liked the term “entrepreneurship” — it feels too shiny and polished for the gritty work of operating a business. After running a few businesses, I have come to better appreciate the commonality they have shared and that management, strategy, and company building are crafts that I can develop and hone with practice and dedication.

The 7 Powers
High Growth Handbook
The Great CEO Within
Predictable Revenue
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea or if everyone is lying to you

Commodity markets: powering the world from supertankers to Teslas

Oil 101
The World for Sale
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
Private Empire: Exxon Mobile & American Power
Nuclear Power: A Very Short Introduction
Coal a Human History

Fiction: I ignored it for a while but it makes me more creative

The Bonfire of the Vanities
The Fountainhead
The Godfather – I rarely do audiobooks but this one is exceptional.

Some new interests I am exploring

updated May 2024

• Infrastructure to help hard tech companies succeed. I spent >30% of my time on tasks like procurement at my last company. It’s hard to succeed when you have to learn a bunch of orthogonal skills.

• Chaos theory and designing systems to be antifragile: building a life / company / society that is very robust to change.

• The Global North / Arctic: geopolitics will be different when the Arctic is ice-free in the summer.

• Globalization 2.0: If you’re fine with hiring someone 500 miles away, why not 5,000?

Some former interests I resolved and am not so worried about anymore

• Access to fresh water – at least if you’re anywhere near an ocean…

• Population dynamics. We clearly won’t have the “population bomb” of the 1970s but I also think the self-inflicted extinction of the Koreans is overblown. China will really struggle. Things will be reshuffled and the world will be more interesting. America looks pretty good and will be great if we can keep people excited about moving here.

Personally

I’m very active. I cycle, play squash, scuba dive, and ski. One of my favorite things to do is to walk or ride a bike / public transit around a new city.

I fly ~100,000 miles / year for approximately free using points and miles. I wrote a guide and do consulting to help other founders / business owners do this too.

My favorite destinations have been places with interesting economic or political stories: Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, Ukraine before the war), Malaysia, Japan, Korea, and Argentina. The more I travel, the more I appreciate places that are very different and places that have cool wildlife (above or below the ocean’s surface!). A recent trip to Kenya’s Masai Mara was perhaps my favorite trip ever.

Botswana and Ethiopia are at the top of my list. I want to explore the former Soviet Republics more – let me know if you want to go to Turkmenistan on a transit visa sometime.

Best avgeek brag: I was one of the last passengers on the Concorde.

I’m very Bayesian at heart and see most of work / life as a constant hunt for the best version of the “truth.”

I’m fairly private and rarely use social media. I try (as much as possible) to avoid news except for The Economist which I’ve listened to the audio edition of each week since I was 15.

I grew up (mostly – born in Germany to military parents) in New Hampshire and hiked all 48 of the state’s mountains over 4,000 feet (with my grandfather!)

I was a Boy Scout and earned the rank of Eagle Scout.