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.
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29 Aug 2018
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blog
We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication — things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.
- Evan Spiegel
I’m increasingly receptive to the narrative that Snap is becoming the new Twitter. While the revenue of both are restrained by the limited degree to which they have information in the user (and such can’t charge advertisers a premium for really direct targeting like Google and Facebook), Snap also suffers from the lack of a feed users can be sucked into.
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22 Aug 2018
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In China, there are only fifty-six legally defined minzu [hard to translate but basically nationality/race] one indicated on every citizen’s identity card…
- Peter C. Perdue - Demystifying China, New Understandings of Chinese History
This term I’m taking a class on Chinese History since the Qing Dynasty. Our first reading was from Naomi Standen’s book “Demystifying China and I think the first chapter is one of the best introductions I’ve seen to Chinese History and the mindset of its current leaders.
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15 Aug 2018
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Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador, froze trade with the country and will reportedly dump its Canadian investments. The kingdom’s ire was raised by a series of tweets from Canada’s foreign minister, in which she called for the release of Saudi human-rights activists. The Saudi government insisted that only a full Canadian climbdown would “fix its big mistake”.
- The Economist, Espresso 8.11.18
Kind of continuing from last week’s theme about authoritarianism, the Saudis are demonstrating how liberalization requires harsh stances to be taken to prevent a slippery slope away from government control. [1]
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08 Aug 2018
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The Soviet Communist dictatorship, like any other system, seeks to preserve its own existence. To do this it is forced to stamp out any spark of dissidence which appears, either on its own territory or beyond its borders.
— Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Soviet Army
I study Statistics and Machine Learning. Most of the time it’s really exciting to be so close to the frontier, but sometimes it’s terrifying because you understand how (relatively) easy it will be for totalitarian regimes to apply really powerful open-source software to do things like track their entire populations and automatically predict who might act out.
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01 Aug 2018
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I’m in Germany this week and the Airbnb we’re staying at in Berlin overlooks the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I was born in this country (in a little town called Wremen at the base of the Jutland Peninsula right on the North Sea) and while not a dual citizen, have always felt a connection to this place.
With that being said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the genocide the Nazis perpetrated here during the late 1930s/1940s.
~17 Million people died.
~6 million of them Jews.
I think it’s important to give space to the stories of those who died - either in concentration camps as a persecuted minority or as those fighting the tyranny against their fellow citizens.
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