sensemaking the singularity • married to @maggielove_ • did stuff at @yale @harvardhbs @baincapital @aztecnetwork @asylumventures
San Francisco
Joined August 2008
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Travis is an apex predator put on ice in 2017 and only recently reactivated from cryogenic slumber.
Standards for male behavior have moved so far that he's actively perplexed by it.
Our current ecology was last home to performative frat bros nearly a decade ago.
So when Travis tells TBPN he jet skis to work, and Jordi + John ask whether he does his best thinking on the jet ski, he pauses.
You can visibly see him get confused, with an expression like "What the fuck are you guys talking about?"
Then he quite literally voices his frustration: "No guys...it's a fucking notch on the belt. Who else do you know who jet skis to work? Nobody. I'm the guy."
Even the literal technology brothers are incapable of fathoming a man who does things just for the bit.
Travis in 2026 is like the T-rex from Jurassic Park 2 who finds himself in modern day San Diego being like, yo, what the FUCK is this place?
And then just stomps everything in sight.
xitter.cf/tbpn/status/2081039302…
.@travisk's commute takes 5 minutes on a jet ski going 70 mph on Lake Austin.
"Who else do you know is jet skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy."
Jon Wu retweeted
Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own
Your relationship with your wife is fundamentally unequal.
She birthed your child. There is no possibility of ever allocating that line item equally.
The sooner you both accept the inherent inequality of raising a child, the easier it gets for both of you to do your job.
I used to think an exceptional personal brand was a direct predictor of performance in a growth role.
Now I think the correlation, while definitely positive, is something like 0.2.
That number spikes to 0.5 if the person is a category-appropriate influencer for the company.
I think we’ve gotten a bit obsessed with personal brands as a proxy for competence. Now everyone is expected to perform their work on top of doing it.
Some of the best people I’ve worked with have almost no presence online. Their time goes into the work itself and the results show up in the business rather than on their profile. Building an audience and building a company are related skills but not the same one and being good at one doesn’t guarantee the other in either direction.
A big part of most jobs is also making other people the face of it - the founder, the product, the team.
Someone putting their energy into their own feed isn’t automatically better at that, sometimes it’s the opposite
Something's clearly in the air.
I've gotten more inbound from founders looking for X ghostwriting in the last 30 days than I have in the preceding 10 months.
But I don't think done-for-you X ghostwriting works anymore. If you're looking for help on X, here's what to do instead:
First, you have to understand what you really want.
I hear this all the time: "I'm looking for someone to get me from 1k to 10k followers." Unfortunately:
1. Follower count doesn't matter anymore.
Look at my account. ~97k, but my posts have extreme variance. Most posts have dozens of likes, then occasionally I hit a banger.
2. The algo is hit-driven now
Done-for-you ghostwriting assumes consistency is the primary blocker to growth. But you can't just post consistently and get impressions growth anymore.
It's necessary but not sufficient. You need to post bangers. Which leads me to:
3. Bangers are either timeless or timely
The way done-for-you ghostwriting works is:
- I interview you for 30-60 mins
- I extract good ideas and post them for you
This approach is guaranteed not to be timely, and (most of the time) not guaranteed to be timeless either.
Even timeless posts have to be in dialogue with the discourse currently on X. Randomly posting into the void doesn't work.
So what actually works?
For posting: internal transformation via coaching.
Meaning: getting out of your own way so you can post on X in your natural voice.
I've worked with dozens of ghostwriting clients in the past. And in past iterations of the algorithm, I've had great success. I don't do it anymore.
I do know the pattern across clients is inevitably one thing: fear.
People who "need help with X" actually just need help getting over their posting fears:
- my thoughts aren't any good
- what if I piss people off
- it's so cringe
- etc.
That's why clients look for done-for-you ghostwriting. It helps them avoid all these negative feelings.
But here's my analogy: posting is like eating broccoli.
No one can force you to do it if you hate doing it.
A ghostwriter can transform it for you--mash up the broccoli, roast it, cover it in cheese--but if you hate eating broccoli, you will fail at eating broccoli.
If you hate the idea of posting on X, you will fail at posting on X. Simple as.
The simplest way to enjoy posting on X?
Use X as a social network.
Not as a newsletter, not as one-to-many broadcast system, not as a product marketing channel.
But literally as a social network. Use X to interact with ideas you like, people you like, companies you like.
"Authentically." By which I mean, without thinking about it.
Seeing X as a solvable objective is paradoxically self-defeating. Just like having friends.
If you treat every friend you make as a means to an end: "This person will invite me to the Hamptons. That person will advance my career."
You will have shallow friendships.
But if you enjoy your friendships as they are, for what they are, with no further judgment or motive, then you will have fun. And ironically you will make more and better friendships.
X is the same way. If you enjoy using it, it will bear fruit for you. Now go forth and post.
h/t @adam__xyz for the inspiration
We just started night weaning our baby.
Meaning no breast milk overnight.
She is hell-bent on testing our will. Will you withhold the boob if I:
- scream for 3 hours straight?
- kick you in the face?
- cry uncontrollably?
A good tantrum makes you question your convictions.
highly relevant thread: xitter.cf/MindBranches/status/21…
Tantrum throwers are actually the only valuable people in your company because they're the only ones with deeply studied beliefs.
Everyone else is a compliant little automaton who will happily drive your company into the ground one "How was your weekend" at a time.
I call this the diva's paradox
if you tell your manager you have complete conviction in an idea, and they tell you "no," and your response is anything OTHER than leaving the company to do it yourself, you are signaling to them that you don't actually have conviction in the idea. if you're not willing to bet your career on the idea, why should they?
but then if you DO quit to pursue the idea yourself, your manager will get the message that they should take the idea seriously, but it's too late, you've already quit
so you need a way to credibly signal that you have a burn-it-all-down level of conviction in your idea without actually quitting
enter: the tantrum
Inside "operator" there are 3 wolves:
- doer
- thinker
- manager
Great interview question to ask candidates to force-rank their preferences.
A primary failure mode is a thinker doing a doer role, or either of those roles being forced to manage.
Having a child made me love my parents to a degree I hadn't felt in adulthood.
When my daughter was born I knew instantly that I was willing to give my life for her.
And I realized that's how my parents felt about me.
Becoming a father helped me inhabit my own parents' love.
The only effective form of marketing is telling people what you're going to do, then doing it.
Promise + delivery = trust.
not too late! many people get started by advising friends (@ettinger, @creebeauvoir, many others)
I don't think it's long before we see activist marketers:
Taking world-class storytelling capabilities (think: a16z New Media) and applying them to public markets.
Creative capital and media to inflect public company narrative.
Figma
I tend to believe that of all public software companies, Figma is perhaps one of the most underrated in terms of their ability to monetize and have a second act crossing the chasm into being ai-native (after admittedly taking way too long to transition).
I believe in order to do so they must collapse some of the product primitives to allow people to start to think of FIgma as a starting and finishing point for more workflows (Figma Make should be considered the v0 of this, and while they can keep the discrete products, it's possible agentic UI that does multi-product routing on top of each individual one should be pulled to forefront of experience).
It also feels pretty clear that after Weave, the company understands that some M&A could be accretive if they want to own more horizontal parts of asset, product, and software creation.
All of this gets at the idea that that Figma needs to talk and think about the business less as "we are for designers, designers are more important as code commoditizes" (paraphrasing somewhat bluntly) and into instead the narrative surrounding seat and user profile expansion + ai being able to translate creative non-designers into designers (Figma Agent is a clear, just-now monetizing push towards this). There has been some whiplash around this narrative positioning on earnings calls/from exec team as they discuss the importance of being for professional designers, while also touting engineer seat usage growing over designer seats (again, nuance to this but still creates complexity in the story of whether or not this is a slowly dying business versus a company that can kingdom build with AI).
To bring it back to the AI point because that is what matters, as with many companies, you will likely see margin erosion due to AI (as we saw last quarter) and then re-expansion over time, especially as the company has hinted towards training its own models. With that said, my gut tells me that alongside of that, one could expect to see surprise top-line acceleration in 2027 if products can feel more cohesive and ai-first while expanding scope of Why Figma across an org versus a variety of death-by-a-thousand-cuts software/platforms.
Anyways, we are long $FIG at Compound as a disclosure despite many people telling us we are morons for being so.