Heritage

Steve Kerr’s grandfather, Stanley Kerr and his wife Elsa Kerr were American missionaries who met in the Middle East after World War I. Stanley Kerr worked for American, a U.S.-run humanitarian organization, in the Middle East, serving in Aleppo and Marash (modern-day Turkey) in the former Ottoman Empire. Stanley Kerr arrived in the region around 1919 with the goal of helping citizens in the aftermath of what we now call the Armenian Genocide. A period between 1914 and 1923 when the Ottoman Empire killed over 1.5 million Armenians; while the total number of victims differed, it remains one of the worst mass killings in history. These attacks were carried out amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkish nationalist forces led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Years later, Stanley wrote a memoir of his experiences titled The Lions of Marash. In it, he described the brutality of the atrocities inflicted on the Armenian people (mass burnings of churches, drowning, poison injections, toxic gas).

After the violence subsided, Stanley and his wife Elsa settled in Beirut, Lebanon, where they ran an orphanage for Armenian children. They had a son, Malcolm Kerr, who would go on to become the father of Steve Kerr. Malcolm was born and raised in Beirut near the campus of the American University of Beirut (AUB), where his parents were deeply involved in the academic and humanitarian community for 40 years.

Malcolm would meet his wife, Anne Zwicker at the AUB and soon they would have four kids. The Kerrs lived all over the world while their children were growing up in Beirut. Little Steve was a world traveler traveling from Beirut to Cairo, Oxford, South of France, Tunisia, and Los Angeles. In 1982, Malcolm was offered the presidency at AUB.

“We knew the offer was coming,” said Anne. “It was only a matter of time. Malcolm was so right for the job.” (Steve Kerr Article, Chicago Tribune)

But after Malcolm is offered the job, he’s kept in New York for a while... Why? Because the university’s acting president, David Dodge, was kidnapped during the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

University

Eventually Malcolm heads to Beirut to fulfill his role. Meanwhile Steve Kerr was not receiving any D1 offers.

“The scouting services all had me listed as being too slow,” said Steve. Gonzaga was interested, but he had to play against John Stockton for two hours. “I didn’t do very well,” said Steve. “When it was over, the coach, Jay Hillock said to me, ‘It wouldn’t be a problem if you were a step slow, but you were two steps slow.’” (LA Times, Steve Kerr) Stockton would go on to become a ten-time NBA All-Star, holding the NBA records for most career assists and steals. He is a Hall of Famer and the NBA named him “One of the 50 Greatest Players in History”

Others wrote that he was a “Bright Articulate Kid, who’s recruited next one.” (Steve Kerr Article, Chicago Tribune) His high school basketball coach talked the new Arizona coach Lute Olsen into bringing Kerr on as a high character locker room/bench warmer. Lute Olsen, in his first year in Arizona, was trying to rebuild a crippled program. Arizona had gone 4-24 in their previous season. So he gave Kerr a chance. “We were in dire need of a shooter.” Olsen told the media. After Steve accepted the offer from the University of Arizona, he took a vacation to visit his father in Beirut. On the day he was supposed to leave, he and his mother were driven to the airport. “Sitting in the terminal, they listened as the shelling around the airport intensified. Finally their driver told them there was no chance to get out of Beirut that day and drove them from the airport back to the safety of the United States Embassy. Two days later the same driver took (Steve) Kerr on a terrifying eight-hour car ride through Syria to Amman, Jordan. From there, he flew to Tucson to start his college career. Days passed and Kerr learned that his driver had been killed by a sniper shortly after their ride through Syria.” (LA Times, Steve Kerr)

While he was a freshman at Arizona, on January 18th 1984, Steve tragically lost his father at 52 years old. Malcolm Kerr had stepped off the elevator toward his office in College Hall and was shot in the back of the head. The two unknown assailants escaped, It was subsequently determined that Hezbollah was behind the attack. It was broadcast by virtually every major news network, it was front page news. Anne Kerr learned about the shooting while waiting at a campus guardhouse out of the rain for a friend. She ran to the second floor of the College Hall, where she found her husband on the floor.

For the next two days, he escaped to the basketball court… Shortly after the incident, Steve Kerr was playing against Arizona State. Playing on the floor of their arch rival Arizona State, Kerr heard the unthinkable coming from the crowd. That was one of many things, by the way, that the Arizona State fans chanted at Steve Kerr. Horrible things. Steve Kerr recounted: “When I heard it, I just dropped the ball and started shaking. I had to sit down for a minute.” Even so, Kerr later took that 4-24 program to the Final Four as a senior. Kerr also held the season 3 point shooting percentage record until Korver took it a couple years ago. His career free throw percentage is above 86. (The New York Times).

Career

Steve Kerr was born on September 27, 1965, in Beirut, Lebanon. He attended and played basketball at the University of Arizona. During Kerr’s time at the University of Arizona, he helped the team reach the Final Four in the NCAA tournament (1988) and set an NCAA 3-point percentage record (57%). Kerr was selected in the second round by the Phoenix Suns in the 1988 NBA Draft and went on to also play with the Cavaliers, Magic, Bulls, Spurs, and Trail Blazers. Most notably, while playing for the Chicago Bulls, where he helped the team win three consecutive NBA Championships (1996, 1997, 1998). After announcing his retirement from playing, Coach Kerr became a broadcast analyst for TNT (2003) and for the NCAA Tournament and Final Four coverage on Turner Sports and CBA (2011). Later, he joined the Phoenix Suns management (2004) and then became the General Manager (2007). As a coach, Steve Kerr has won 4 NBA Championships as the head coach of the Golden State Warriors (2015, 2017, 2018, and 2022)...

He carried everything that occurred previously in his life with him. At one point in time with the Bulls he got punched in the face by Michael Jordan, but still it proved something to MJ.

Watch his story on their iconic connection in Game 6 of the 1997 NBA Finals:

Steve Kerr's story about 1997 finals

Teaches Himself to Code From a Dial-Up Modem in Argentina

Guillermo Rauch grew up on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in a province that shared the capital’s name but not its polish, a place of sprawling suburbs where a personal computer was a rare and exotic artifact. His world was shaped by a household humming with his father’s conviction that software was going to eat the world. Both his parents were engineers—his mother in chemistry, his father in industry—and they saw the machine not as a toy, but as a portal. When he was seven or eight, it arrived. Before the simple wizardry of “next, next, next, finish,” his earliest memory was of the challenge itself, the intricate, often frustrating puzzle of just getting new software onto the computer. It was a rite of passage, a mechanical prelude to the magic that would follow.

The true incantation, the first time the world expanded, came through the whining symphony of a dial-up modem. He chased what he would later call the “time to aha,” that gasp of understanding when a complex system suddenly reveals its grace. For him, it was the moment he coaxed a web server into rendering a dynamic PHP file. The web was no longer a static document. It was alive. This initial spark caught fire in the global commons of open source. He discovered worlds built with PHPBB, downloadable forums packaged in a simple zip file. In the quiet of his room, he could uncompress a complete, working piece of software, a blueprint he could actually read. There was a path forward, a theme file he could open, a line of code he could tinker with. Software wasn't an immutable object handed down from distant corporations; it was clay.

He and his brother, two years his senior, entered into a silent, fervent competition over who could master this new universe first. Over time, their paths forked. His brother developed an eye for the aesthetic, for how a page should look and feel, while Guillermo descended into the machine’s logic. He was the one asking how to make it work, how to set up the databases and navigate the cryptic commands of Linux administration. Together, they built their first digital monuments on the free hosting plains of GeoCities, shrines to their shared obsession with Dragon Ball anime.

Here, he felt the first pulse of what would become a lifelong pursuit: the thrill of dynamism. He embedded a visitor counter, a simple animated GIF that, with each page load, sent a signal to a server that bumped a number. A guest book, pulled into the page through an iframe, allowed strangers from across the internet to leave a note, to prove they had been there. It was a profound revelation, the idea that a website could be a conversation, a space that changed with each new presence. These were the same fundamental principles, the same childhood excitements, that would one day animate the core of Vercel.

During an Economic Crisis, At Eleven Years Old, He Built an Online Business to Provide for His Family

At eleven, this digital playground revealed another dimension. He built a simple website, a small engine that did nothing but refer traffic to Mercado Libre, the Amazon of Argentina. For each referral, his account was credited with five pesos. To a child, it felt like infinite money. The realization struck him with the force of a tectonic shift, dislodging his entire perception of this new world. The internet, he now understood, was not just a fun thing. It was an economy. It was a platform where you could meet people, do work, and build a life. The proof came not long after, through a phone call that cut through the Argentine afternoon. On the other end was the program manager for the referral system at Mercado Libre, an adult running a business, calling a young boy because he had been asking so many questions in their online forums. His voice, professional and curious, was the first signal from a future that was pulling Guillermo toward it, faster than he could have ever imagined.

The currency disparity was a constant, low-grade fever in Argentina, a permanent inflation that warped the value of things overnight. His family’s finances moved in cycles, one year a new computer and a feeling of ease, the next a crisis and a tightening of belts. It was in this ebb and flow that the internet’s economy became his anchor. At twelve, he saw a path beyond the peso. If he could make money in dollars, he could help his family. He waded into the nascent world of online freelancing, a digital bazaar where his self-taught skills in building and administering websites were a valuable commodity. His profile on the platform, a kind of early eBay for labor, began to accumulate reviews. Not many, at first—he was competing against entire teams—but his were stellar. Every time, five out of five stars, accompanied by effusive comments from clients in places like the Netherlands who likely pictured him as a seasoned professional in his twenties, not a teenager coding between classes.

He and his brother formed an impromptu agency. His brother, with his flair for design and a natural grasp of client relations, became the de facto project manager. Guillermo was the engine, the one deep in the code. It was here, in the frantic exchange of emails and project briefs, that he learned his first lesson about the seductive danger of ambition. His brother would say yes, yes, yes, yes, committing them to timelines and features that stretched Guillermo’s waking hours to their breaking point. He was excitable, too, eager to please and to build, but the reality of school schedules and teenage life began to collide with the demands of their international clientele. There was a line somewhere, a point where the work had to stop, but he wasn’t sure where to draw it.

For a time, he suspended it all. A prestigious high school, one that required a grueling entrance exam, became his singular focus. He dove into the analog world of math, literature, geography, and history, channeling all his energy into a competition for a coveted desk. He proved to himself, and to his parents, that when he put his mind to traditional education, he could achieve extraordinary results. He got in. But the moment he settled into his new routine, the freelance clients started to return. The world kept pulling him back, the emails piling up with requests for more work, more projects, more of the skill he had so diligently honed in the dark.

The pull became irresistible, and it crystallized around a single object of desire: a MacBook. It was not the sleek aluminum chassis or the Macintosh operating system he craved. He wanted it for a specific text editor everyone was talking about online, a piece of software called TextMate. It was a tool that promised a more delightful, more fluid experience for writing code. For him, the quality of the tool was inseparable from the quality of the work. The laptop was an investment in his craft, a declaration of intent. He got the MacBook, installed TextMate, and felt the familiar thrill of a perfect setup, a beautiful atmosphere for work, even in a small room in an apartment weathering Argentina’s economic storms. The screen glowed, the code flowed, and the demands of high school began to feel like a distraction from his real education. The open-source world was calling, and he was being pulled into its orbit, a force more powerful than any classroom curriculum.

Getting a Job Offer From Facebook, He Drops Out of High School

He found a peculiar pattern emerging in his work. A client would ask for something straightforward—an order-taking form, a system to manage inventory—and he would find himself obsessing over the periphery. He grew fascinated by the speed of the interface, the subtle art of making a webpage respond without the jarring flash of a full refresh. He chased the feeling of fluidity, of an application that felt alive under the user’s fingertips. Technologies like Ajax were the tools, but his real interest was in the texture of the experience itself. It was one of those moments when a side quest becomes the main quest. He started pulling on that thread, going above and beyond on every project to build these amazing interfaces, and the world of front-end engineering, of obsessing over product quality, began to claim him.

The thread led him to MooTools, an open-source JavaScript library for creating user interfaces on the web. At fifteen, he was not just using it; he was contributing, becoming a key figure in a global project that was starting to attract the attention of international companies. It was through this work that he began to make a name for himself, not just as a freelancer for hire, but as a builder of the tools themselves. Around the same time, sitting in a sterile IT classroom in his high school, the future he was betting on flickered to life on a CRT monitor. Gmail had launched, and access was a scarce commodity, an invite-only glimpse into a new digital paradigm. Getting in was a huge badge of honor, but the real revelation was the application itself. This was not a website; it was a desktop-grade application running inside the browser. It was the ultimate validation for the asymmetric bet he was making on the web, proof that it was destined to be more than a simple document transfer platform.

This conviction put him at odds with his father. His dad, the idea guy who had first put a computer in his hands, would read about the industry and come to him with advice. Java is going to be the future, he would say. It’s more of a grown-up language. He saw the burgeoning web technologies, particularly JavaScript, as ephemeral, a fad. But Guillermo saw something else. He saw the agility, the immediacy of creating on the web, the sheer velocity of the developer experience. The world was pulling him toward open source and the web, and he was placing his chips on the underdog.

The pull soon became an inexorable force. The work with MooTools intensified. His reputation grew. And then, at seventeen, the signals from the world outside Argentina became too loud to ignore. An email arrived from a recruiter at Meta, then just a tiny, explosive company called Facebook. These were not abstract opportunities; they were tangible invitations to a world he had only accessed through a modem. The structure of high school, once a challenge to be conquered, now felt like a cage. He loved his education, the exposure to chemistry and physics and accounting, but an idea had taken hold of him. He had to follow it. The decision to drop out was not an act of rebellion against his studies but an act of allegiance to his calling. It was an unclear path, fraught with risk, but he wasn't just walking away from something. He was being pulled toward everything. And his parents, who had watched him build a business from his bedroom and contribute to the family’s finances, saw it too. They gave their blessing, not without fear, but with an understanding that his education was now happening on a global scale, at the speed of the internet itself.

Turning Down a Guaranteed Swiss Job to Remain in San Francisco and Found a Company

His life untethered from Argentina, he became a global citizen by necessity, a teenage programmer navigating the world through a series of temporary visas and transatlantic flights. The work with the Swiss company that had grown out of his MooTools contributions was his passport, a stable gig that nonetheless underscored the precarity of his existence. He was constantly in motion, his journey with entrepreneurship always a little difficult, a constant negotiation with immigration officers and paperwork. The company, a promising startup that had launched in San Francisco, eventually invited him to its heart, flying him into the city that existed in the tech world’s collective imagination as a kind of promised land. He arrived and was immediately struck by the sheer density of ambition, the palpable sense that the future was being actively assembled in the warehouses and coffee shops around him.

The city was a revelation, but it was also the backdrop for a decision that would alter the course of his life. He remembers standing by the Bay Bridge on a beautiful, clear day, the kind of northern California sunlight that makes everything feel possible. It was hard to compete with San Francisco on a day like that. The CEO of the Swiss company, an early champion of his work, pulled him aside. He was direct. They wanted him full-time, in Switzerland. They would handle everything—the lawyers, the paperwork, the notoriously difficult Swiss work visa. They would make it happen.

It was a truly hard decision. The company was amazing, the CEO extremely supportive. He had been to their headquarters in Lausanne, one of the most idyllic, beautiful places in the world, a city of serene lake views and old-world stability. The offer was a ticket to a life of comfort, of meaningful work in a peaceful, postcard setting. It was a secure, predictable, and frankly, beautiful future. He could have taken it, built a career there, contributed to the company’s success, which eventually came in the form of a respectable acquisition. When you join a startup, you’re not betting on the startup, you’re betting on yourself, and he knew he could have had a high degree of agency and influence over the outcome there.

But on the other hand, he’d seen what San Francisco looked like. He had tasted its energy. He had glimpsed the networks, the casual collisions of talent and capital that seemed to happen on every street corner. He had seen how vibrant it was. His temporary office was a desk in a glorious co-working space on the Embarcadero, and the air itself felt charged with a different kind of potential. The offer from the Swiss CEO forced a choice between two fundamentally different ways of living and building. It was the pastoral versus the metropolis, the curated garden versus the chaotic, fertile jungle.

In the end, the jungle won. The decision wasn’t just about the city’s abstract energy; it was about something more specific. Everything in San Francisco just felt so well set up for him to focus on his thing, on his craft. Here, his obsession with open source wasn’t a curious hobby; it was a currency. Investors and fellow founders understood it as a powerful, if indirect, engine for growth and community. The environment was uniquely supportive of his interests and the way he wanted to build. He had to turn the offer down. It was a painful conversation, a rejection of a generous and certain future. But in that moment, standing by the water, he committed to the uncertainty. He would go all in and create his own startup, right here, in the heart of the machine.

Building LearnBoost in the Same Room as the Founders of Instagram and Twilio

The place that held him captive was Dogpatch Labs, a name that failed to capture the raw, makeshift grandeur of its location. It was a glorious co-working space carved out of a cavernous pier building on the Embarcadero, where the salt-laced air of the bay mixed with the low hum of servers and the frantic clicking of keyboards. The physical environment mattered. Just as the pristine glow of TextMate on his MacBook had once created a sanctuary for work in his small room in Buenos Aires, the sweeping views of the water and the sheer industrial scale of the pier provided a beautiful atmosphere for work. It was a space that felt commensurate with the size of the ambitions it contained. And the ambitions were immense. He was breathing the same recycled air as some of the best startups of a generation. In one corner, a small team was building what would become Instagram. In another, the foundations of Twilio were being laid. The future was not an abstract concept here; it was a work in progress, unfolding in real time at the adjacent desks.

He lived a streamlined life, optimized for a single purpose. He was so locked in that he subsisted on two meals: the buffet at the co-working space when it was available, and McDonald’s. People would make fun of this, of his spartan diet, because he was simultaneously in extremely good shape, a disciplined regular at the gym. But he didn’t need the culinary variety of a city celebrated for its food. He needed focus. He found it in the rhythm of intense work and physical exertion, a cycle that stripped away distraction and left only the essential task at hand. Late at night, he would sometimes leave the office and walk out onto the pier to clear his head. He would almost always find the CEO of Twilio there, a working machine who became a quiet inspiration, a testament to the relentless drive required to will a company into existence.

He connected immediately with Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram. They bonded not over business plans or funding rounds, but over a shared history of technical pain. Krieger had worked at Meebo, one of the first instant messengers to run entirely on the web, and had wrestled with the same fundamental set of techniques for enabling real-time communication that Guillermo was now tackling with his open-source project, Socket.IO. It was a moment of deep, mutual understanding—game recognizing game. They knew each other’s struggles in the way only two people who have tried to solve the same impossible problem can. It was the beginning of a connection that would last for years, a thread that would eventually lead to a partnership when Krieger, long after Instagram’s world-altering success, became the CPO of Anthropic.

Life on the pier was a study in contrasts. A few feet from the entrance to Dogpatch Labs, a different world revolved around a different obsession. The building sat right next to the Giants’ baseball stadium, and a group of season pass holders became his friends. He would leave the ethereal world of code and, five feet away, greet them in the tangible world of stats and home runs. He was reminded that their lives were so different, yet they were all there, together in San Francisco, each pursuing their own version of devotion. He, who couldn’t care less for baseball, would listen to them talk, finding a strange kinship in their passion. Then, almost as quickly as it had appeared, this magical place vanished. The San Francisco government, in a move that felt like a perfect illustration of the meme where a cyclist puts a rod in his own wheel, shut the entire location down overnight. It wasn’t up to code. The ecosystem scattered, the moment passed, but the decision had already been made. He was here to stay.

Releasing Socket.io and Mongoose Code to the Public for Free

He started his own company, and in the role of CTO, found himself face-to-face with the jagged edges and missing pieces of the web’s infrastructure. The tools he needed to build his vision simply didn’t exist, so he began to forge them himself. This was not a theoretical exercise; it was a necessity born from the daily struggle of building a product. He needed a way to enable real-time, bidirectional communication between a client and a server, a way to make web applications feel as instantaneous and alive as a desktop program. The result was Socket.IO, a JavaScript library that abstracted away the immense complexity of the task, making the impossible feel straightforward. He encountered another wall when dealing with databases, a need for a more elegant way to model application data. From this friction came Mongoose, an object modeling tool for MongoDB that brought a new level of structure and sanity to the process.

These were powerful tools, potent competitive advantages. He could have kept the code to himself, guarded it as proprietary intellectual property, a secret weapon in his startup’s arsenal. The code would have done its job, and it likely would have died there, its utility confined to the single product it was built to serve. But he had come to believe in a different kind of leverage, a different model for building value. He chose to give it away. He open-sourced the code, pushing it out into the world for anyone to use, critique, and improve.

The effect was instantaneous and profound. He immediately got the world's attention. The act of sharing created a gravitational pull, drawing in developers from every corner of the globe who were struggling with the same problems. Attention, he was coming to realize, is part of all you need when you build a startup. You could build great technology, but without some form of distribution, some way of making the world aware that you exist, it would wither in obscurity. Open source emerged as his distribution engine. It was a way to put himself and his work on the map, to build a community, and to enable a kind of business development that was faster and more authentic than any sales pitch.

He developed a new calculus for measuring impact. A single, well-executed open source project, he believed, was worth ten million meetings. Every download was a conversation started, every pull request a relationship forged, every "star" on GitHub a vote of confidence. That meeting could have been a push, that meeting could have been a PR, that meeting could have been a ship of sorts. It was a new paradigm, one where the act of giving created a return that was orders of magnitude greater than what could be achieved by hoarding. This philosophy, forged in the trenches of his first company, became the bedrock of his next.

Founding Vercel and Working with The Largest Audiences in the World

In 2015, he founded a new venture, initially called ZEIT, with a mission to codify these principles into a platform. The goal was to build the tooling and cloud infrastructure that would give every developer the same feeling of speed and delight he had chased since his earliest days online. It would be a company built on the foundation of open source, with a relentless focus on developer experience. It would be called Vercel.

Building a platform was a daily journey into the unknown, a constant discovery of what people were doing with his tools. It was one of the most rewarding things, this sense of emergent creation, but it came with an unavoidable corollary. To be a true platform for the web meant being open to the web in its entirety. It meant getting the full exposure of the entire noise of the internet, the positive and the negative. The freedom platform was also a vulnerable one, a surface onto which the creativity of a global developer community could be projected, but also one that was constantly under attack. Protecting his customers from that noise, from the bots and the spam and the nastiness, became a core part of the mission, a constant investment in cybersecurity that ran in parallel to the building of new features.

The positive surprises were a powerful fuel. He would wake up one day and find that a brand he admired, Supreme, was now running its site on Vercel. He had never met their team; it was a decision that had bubbled up from within, a testament to the bottoms-up motion that was becoming his emergent, cracked engineering and go-to-market team. Another day, indulging a moment of personal nostalgia, he navigated to the website of Air, the French electronic band whose music had formed a part of his own mental soundtrack for years, and he saw it there too: built on Vercel. These were quiet affirmations, small moments of connection that proved the platform was resonating in the culture, finding its way into the hands of people whose work he respected.

Then came a surprise of a different order, a moment that was less a quiet affirmation and more a public, high-stakes stress test. He learned that the YouTuber MrBeast was launching an e-commerce website, and he was going to do it in the middle of a live stream. It was an awesome day, but one freighted with immense technical risk. This wasn’t just a popular creator; he was an entertainer who commanded one of the biggest audiences in the world. He was about to point that audience, a colossal, simultaneous wave of human attention, at a single website. It was a test of the platform at an extraordinary scale, a scenario designed to buckle even the most robust infrastructure. The live stream began, the link was dropped, and the world’s attention converged on a single Vercel deployment.

The platform held. The wave of traffic arrived, and the website stayed up, fast and responsive. It was a massive, undeniable proof point, a public demonstration that the architecture they had so painstakingly built could perform under the most extreme conditions. But the MrBeast story didn't end there. The initial e-commerce drop was just the first act. The same creator, having seen the platform's power, then used it to build his next venture: a SaaS company called ViewStats, designed to help other YouTubers analyze audience patterns. He went from entertainment to e-commerce to enterprise software, all on Vercel. He even launched a hugely controversial AI feature that could generate video thumbnails, pushing the boundaries of what a creator's business could be. The journey was a perfect illustration of the platform's versatility, a single user’s evolution from a simple project to a complex, AI-driven SaaS business. It was all emergent, a testament to a philosophy of building tools that were powerful and flexible enough to support dreams you could never have anticipated.

He now sees the web on the cusp of another fundamental transformation, a shift in its very nature from a passive medium to an active participant. The evolution is from assistants to agents. The first wave of generative AI was a revelation, a conversational partner that could answer questions, a kind of supercharged Stack Overflow that could kill the need for opening a dozen tabs in a browser. But that was just the prelude. The future, as he sees it, is one where the web becomes agentic, where we interact not with static pages but with intelligent systems that can perform entire tasks on our behalf. It is the difference between asking for directions and being chauffeured to your destination. This vision is the engine behind his latest work, a project named v0, designed to cut straight to the chase. Instead of asking an AI for momentary answers or snippets of code, you state your intent, and an agent produces a full application. It is the logical endpoint of the journey he began as a child, a final abstraction of the distance between an idea and its manifestation online.

To build for a future that doesn't yet exist requires a particular kind of resilience, a carefully calibrated skepticism of received wisdom. He learned this lesson early and often. He remembers an investor, a man who wrote ten-million-dollar checks, echoing the same doubts his father once had. This JavaScript thing, the man said, it doesn't have any enduring power. It was the kind of advice, delivered from a position of authority, that an entrepreneur is compelled to believe. To succeed, you have to be a little bit of a rebel. You have to be able to listen to the authorities, to the people with the power and the experience, and still trust the signals you are getting from the world, from the work itself. It is a delicate balance. The venture capitalists and board members who have backed him have offered incredible wisdom, but they have also offered truly bad advice. The key is to internalize it all, to process it, and to remember who you are ultimately building for. In the early days, when your platform has a lot of rough edges, your customers are your main investors. They are the ones taking a risk on you, and their advice, their pain, is the signal that matters most.

The ultimate expression of this belief came not from a customer, but from a friend. Michael Rogers, a key figure in the early Node.js community and one of the kindest human beings he had ever known, was an early supporter. He had helped with immigration, championed his open-source projects, and one day, took him to a gourmet sandwich shop in San Francisco. In the middle of lunch, Michael pointed out a flaw in the platform. And then he said it, point-blank. And for this thing, I'm going to use your competitor. It was a moment of brutal, crystalline honesty. It was, he would later realize, one of the greatest acts of kindness he had ever received. That is what you want from a friend, from a customer. It is the feedback that provides direction. Speed is nothing without it. The framework he now gives people is not just about speed, but about iteration velocity—speed with a direction. That conversation with Michael gave him direction.

It is this principle that animates the final pitch for Vercel. It is not about the technology, not really. It is a platform where you can make your dreams come true. It is a promise that, in the face of a constantly changing digital landscape, his team will try their hardest to build the best tools, the best frameworks, the best infrastructure, the best AIs, to close the gap between the spark of an idea and its realization. It is a continuation of the work that began in a suburban bedroom on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a lifelong effort to take the crackling, chaotic, and beautiful noise of the internet and shape it into something that works, something that feels alive.

A Mind of Numbers, a Body of Bruises

Dwarkesh Patel’s story begins in the heat and hum of Vadodara, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat, where the dust of the streets mingled with the scent of spices and exhaust. He was a boy of the late 1990s, the son of a doctor who ran a small clinic and a mother who had studied accounting and education but now managed the home. His memories from this time, before he left at age eight or nine, flicker like frames from an old film reel: distinct, potent, and hinting at the man he would become. There was a duality to his childhood, a tension between a mind being sharpened to a fine point and a body that seemed to court chaos at every turn.

His mother, seeing a spark of something in him, enrolled him in UCMass, a program that was a “very Indian thing,” designed to forge a human calculator. The method was intense, a relentless drilling that taught him to memorize and visualize the beads of an abacus, to see the clicks and slides inside his own mind. He learned to summon this phantom tool to perform staggering feats of mental math, to add columns of twenty-four-digit numbers or multiply figures that would send most adults reaching for a machine. He would go to the tutoring sessions week after week, a small boy tasked with mastering an ancient computational art, his mind a silent, whirring engine of beads and wires.

Yet, outside the controlled world of numbers, he was a “rowdy kid.” His knees were a perpetual cartography of scrapes and bruises, a testament to a childhood lived at a full, reckless tilt. He was constantly getting into scrapes big and small, a magnet for minor disasters. Stitches from a fall against a table, bruises from an unseen obstacle—every week seemed to bring a fresh injury, a new testament to his uncontainable energy. It was a pattern of breakage and mending that deeply unsettled his parents. Before the family was set to leave India, they decided something had to be done to fix their son’s chaotic orbit. They summoned a pundit, a Hindu saint, to their home to diagnose the boy’s energy, which, it was determined, was thoroughly “fucked up.” The prescription was not medical but metaphysical: a pilgrimage to the sacred river Ganga for a cleansing bath in a concoction of cow milk and cow dung. He remembers the moment, not with opposition, but with a child’s simple acceptance. He would later recall the surprising softness of the dung, a strange, earthy baptism meant to correct his cosmic imbalance.

His world was circumscribed by these rituals, both intellectual and spiritual. There were the weekly trips with his mother and grandmother to the Haveli, the temple dedicated to Krishna, where they would pray before buying little sweets to “gobble them up” on the way home. His father, for his part, was a devotee of Sai Baba, and the family made pilgrimages to Shirdi, pressing through the immense, shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of other believers. Life was also grounded in the daily errands, the walks to the equivalent of a farmer’s market to buy produce, the colors and sounds of the stalls a sensory overload. His favorite food, then and now, was sev puri from a street vendor. He understood, even then, the central paradox of street food: that the best-tasting morsels were made by the people most likely to get you sick, their hands working quickly with “cold water” and unadorned surfaces. It was a risk you took for a moment of sublime flavor. This was his life: a blend of devotion, calculation, and a constant, low-grade danger that was as much a part of the landscape as the stray dogs and the afternoon heat. It was a world he was about to leave behind, a foundation of memory and sensation from which everything else would grow.

The world he knew—a tapestry of crowded temples, street vendors, and the soft texture of ritual dung—dissolved into the sterile air of international travel. At eight or nine years old, he was unmoored, cast into a migratory existence dictated by the trajectory of his father’s medical career. The first stop was a six-month pause in Canada, a placid, indistinct waiting room where his father searched for a residency in the United States. Then, the pin dropped on the map, landing on a place that could not have been more alien to a boy from Gujarat. His first introduction to the West was not a coastal metropolis shimmering with promise, but Bismarck, North Dakota, a city on the plains that, the year before his arrival, had been entombed under a record one hundred inches of snow. The cultural shock was absolute, a visceral shift from the oppressive humidity of home to a cold so sharp it felt like an assault.

In Bismarck, circa 2008, he became a “conspicuously weird kid.” It was a reputation built from a collage of differences, some subtle, some stark. There was the thick accent that clung to his words, a remnant of another life that immediately set him apart. His English was still catching up, lagging behind the school’s curriculum and landing him in remedial classes where he sat, the boy who could mentally multiply four-digit numbers, struggling to conjugate verbs. While his math was “amazing,” a silent, portable skill that transcended language, his speech marked him as an outsider. He didn’t have many friends. He remembers being bullied, though the memories are hazy, less a collection of specific cruelties and more a general atmosphere of not belonging. He threw himself into games of football during recess, a frantic attempt to find a common language in the rough and tumble of the schoolyard.

The cafeteria became another theater of his otherness. He was a vegetarian, a practice rooted not in a modern ethical choice but in the ancient faith of his Hindu upbringing. In San Francisco a decade later, this would be a commonplace preference, but in North Dakota in 2008, it was a strange and inconvenient fact. The school lunch line offered few, if any, options for him. So his mother began packing his lunches: containers of Indian food, fragrant with spices that were entirely foreign to the unaccustomed noses of his classmates. He knew the people there were “incredibly nice,” not backward as the coastal stereotypes might suggest, but they were also simply not “super used to” a boy eating dal and rice while they had sloppy joes. The packed lunch was a package of love from home that, in the harsh light of the school day, became another wall between him and everyone else.

This state of perpetual motion became his new normal. The family’s life was a series of three-year stints and single-year interludes, a restless journey across the American interior. After three years in Bismarck, from the ages of nine to twelve, they moved to West Virginia. He was there from twelve to fifteen, a crucial, awkward span of early adolescence spent in the hills of Appalachia. Here, he found a more structured social outlet, joining the Boy Scouts, learning to tie knots and build fires, slowly decoding the rites of American boyhood. The itinerant life continued: a single year in Maryland, followed by two more in the stark, flat landscape of San Angelo, West Texas, for the end of his high school years. With each move, each new school and new set of faces, he became “slowly and more socially adjusted.” The sharp edges of the conspicuously weird kid from Bismarck were gradually worn down, smoothed by the constant friction of having to start over, again and again.

It was in the humid hallways of a Maryland high school, and later under the vast, indifferent sky of West Texas, that he found a new kind of discipline, one conducted not with an abacus but with words. He got “super into debate,” dedicating himself to the formal combat of Lincoln-Douglas and the high-wire act of Extemporaneous Speaking, where he had thirty minutes to synthesize a coherent argument from a chaotic stream of current events and deliver it in a seven-minute speech. The activity thrilled him. It was a craft of structure and persuasion, a way to order the world through logic and rhetoric. He spent his weekends at tournaments, living in a bubble of prep rooms, evidence binders, and the clipped, urgent cadence of competitive speech.

This new passion, however, was a source of profound anxiety at home. His parents were “super against” it. From their vantage point, built on the bedrock of immigrant experience, life was a treacherous landscape where the primary goal was “loss minimization.” Their world, and the extended network of their friends and family, was populated by cautionary tales, “horror stories” of children who had stumbled off the prescribed path and fallen into addiction or ruin. These stories, likely “more embellished” in the retelling within the close-knit Indian community, served as a constant, low-humming warning. The parental obligation was absolute; if the kid was “fucked up,” the responsibility to care for him was lifelong. Their dream for their son was not one of self-discovery but of unassailable security. Even back in North Dakota, the refrain had begun: “look, you got to become a radiologist.” It was a profession of certainty and respect, a fortress of prosperity. His weekend debate tournaments felt to them like a dangerous indulgence, time that should be spent on something “more productive or something more useful, something more STEMI.”

He understood their perspective, the logic of their fear. But he continued, unknowingly forging the very tools that would one day define his life. In retrospect, the “obvious transfer” between the skills of debate and his eventual career would become clear, an “interesting lesson about how hard it is to plan life.” But at the time, he was simply a teenager pursuing an interest against the grain of his parents’ hopes.

The Million-Dollar Article

As high school drew to a close in San Angelo, he was still pointed toward their vision, preparing to major in something like biotechnology as a runway for pre-med. The decision to deviate was “very last minute,” a sudden swerve precipitated by a single piece of information. In 2017, he read a New York Times article that pulled back the curtain on the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence. It spoke of a new class of researcher, digital architects who were commanding salaries that seemed to belong to another reality. The figure that lodged in his mind was a million dollars a year. The number was a siren call, a powerful counter-narrative to the stable future his parents had mapped out. The calculation was swift and decisive. “AI sounds cool,” he thought. “Computer science is maybe as lucrative as becoming a doctor.”

It was a pragmatic pivot, a different path to a similar destination of financial viability, but one that felt like his own. He applied to colleges, but not the “super prestigious universities” that were the usual prize in his community. He was accepted into the computer science program at the University of Texas at Austin, a choice sealed by the sheer good sense of in-state tuition. The path to becoming a doctor, once so clearly laid before him, vanished. He was headed to Austin, to study the code that promised a new kind of fortune, a future he had chosen from the glow of a screen in his bedroom in West Texas.

He arrived in Austin with a pragmatic mission, a computer science major chasing the promise of a million-dollar salary he’d read about in the Times. Yet, funnily enough, the very topic that had rerouted his life—Artificial Intelligence—remained a distant concept. He was simply another student submerged in the foundational coursework of his degree, learning “CS 101, whatever,” the practical scaffolding of a lucrative career. But his true education was happening elsewhere, in the quiet hours away from the lecture hall. He was reading voraciously, consuming books that cracked open new ways of seeing the world. One in particular had a profound impact: David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, a dense and exhilarating exploration of epistemology and human potential that rewired his thinking.

This burgeoning intellectual life was largely a solitary pursuit. He felt as if there was nobody else at the university who was “also into it that much.” He found a rare exception in Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor with a generous spirit. After nearly every class, the two would remain, the professor kind enough to spend an hour just “chatting with me personally about current affairs and history, philosophy, etc.” These conversations were an anchor in a sea of undergraduate indifference, a space where his sprawling curiosity was met with serious engagement. To find a broader community, he turned to the digital world, creating a Twitter account sometime in his freshman or sophomore year, a tentative step into the online “milieu” where ideas moved at the speed of light.

At home, in the shared space of his college apartment, another catalyst appeared. His roommate, Andrew Young, introduced him to the essays of Paul Graham. They would “debate and discuss them all the time,” internalizing the central mantra of the startup world: you have to “make something people want.” This injunction sparked a flurry of entrepreneurial activity, a series of earnest and clumsy attempts to will a successful venture into existence. The ideas were often more amusing in hindsight than they were viable. There was Andrew’s project, Tate’s Crates, a plan to pick up furniture that people were throwing away during moves—a free service for them, a potential inventory for him to resell. Dwarkesh remembers one long weekend spent hauling an old woman’s unwanted belongings to a storage warehouse, the physical labor a stark contrast to their abstract ambitions.

His own grand idea was a website called Popper Play. It was an invention born directly from his deep dive into philosophy, heavily influenced by Karl Popper’s ideas of conjecture and refutation, as filtered through his reading of Deutsch. He envisioned it as a forum where users would pose questions, then offer competing conjectures and rebuttals, a grand digital salon where “science will happen.” It was a beautiful, intricate concept. When people rightly pointed out, “hey, you know, Quora exists, right?” he would insist, “no, no, this is a totally different idea.” He was convinced of its unique genius. He emailed the figures he admired on Twitter, people in the “David Deutsch world,” trying to entice them onto his platform. None of them bit. The project, like so many first ventures, faded into obscurity. Looking back on this period, on the naive blueprint for Popper Play, he would see it all as deeply “cringe,” the work of a mind not yet seasoned by the world. It was a time of grand, flawed ideas, but the impulse to create, to synthesize, and to engage was the critical, unrefined ore from which his future would be smelted.

Apprenticeship with Bryan Caplan

It was from the ashes of these early, flawed ventures that a new kind of project emerged, one born not from an abstract desire to build a platform but from a direct engagement with a specific mind. During his freshman year, he had read The Case Against Education, a book by the George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan. The ideas resonated, but more than that, the author himself became a figure of immense intellectual stature in his mind. The thought of speaking to him was intoxicating, an impulse that felt both audacious and necessary. He was, by his own admission, completely “starstruck.” To him, preparing to interview Bryan Caplan was like “talking to Obama or something,” a summit so high that the only way to approach it was with an almost fanatical level of preparation.

So he began to work. This was not the cool, detached research of a seasoned journalist but the frantic, obsessive cramming of an acolyte. He dove into Caplan’s work, dissecting arguments, tracing citations, and formulating questions with the desperate hope that they would be worthy of his subject’s time. He felt an acute awareness of his own intellectual immaturity. Looking back, he would find it “sort of unbearable to have a conversation with myself at 19,” recognizing that his ideas about startups, his life philosophy, his entire worldview, were “super naive.” But in that naivete lay a powerful engine: a profound sense of inadequacy that he could only counter with sheer, relentless effort. He had to prove he belonged in the room.

The interview happened, a conversation conducted over a wire, connecting a teenager in his college apartment to a tenured professor hundreds of miles away. It was a success, at least enough of one to embolden him. He asked Caplan for an introduction to his famous colleague, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen. The connection was made. Years later, he would ask Cowen why he’d agreed to speak with a completely unknown student podcaster. Cowen’s answer was telling. He had been writing a book about identifying talent, he explained, and he thought the interview would be an “interesting way to get a data point”—a low-risk experiment on a young person who came with a referral from a trusted source. Dwarkesh was not a peer; he was a piece of research.

But the connection with Caplan deepened into something far more significant than a one-off interview or a professional contact. The COVID-19 pandemic descended, emptying campuses and disrupting the rhythms of the world. During those strange, suspended summers, Caplan began spending long stretches of time in Austin. An extraordinary mentorship began to unfold, not in an office or a classroom, but over casual lunches. They met “like every day for months on end.” It was an informal, intensive apprenticeship. Dwarkesh, still brimming with the unformed and often clumsy questions of a young man just beginning to build a mental model of the world, found in Caplan an incredibly patient teacher. He considers it “really nice of him to tolerate me,” to sit there day after day, fielding the kinds of “very naive questions” he had surely “heard a million times.” Caplan’s generosity in getting him “up to context on so many different topics” was a formative, and entirely unexpected, gift.

He was being drawn into an intellectual circle that operated on a different frequency. He recalls Robin Hanson, another George Mason economist, visiting Austin and, upon meeting a finance professor, immediately posing a characteristically blunt challenge: “Finance is 9% of GDP. Is that too high or too low?” The professor was flustered, but Hanson “wouldn’t let him go.” This was the world he was now brushing up against, a world of relentless, first-principles inquiry. He was still a student, still just doing an interview “once a month or something.” But these conversations, and especially the quiet, daily tutelage from Caplan, were his real education.

The $10,000 Wire From an Internet Stranger

The informal education he received over lunch tables in Austin was coming to an end, and the scaffolding of university life was about to be dismantled. The fact that he was graduating a semester early had “snuck up on me,” a quiet realization that quickly morphed into a jolt of panic. The future, once a distant abstraction, was now an immediate problem. “Wait, fuck,” he remembers thinking, “I have nothing lined up.” The well-trod path of campus recruitment fairs and corporate information sessions was foreign territory to him. His resume was a document of startling emptiness. The only real job he’d ever had was a summer internship at Protocol Labs, a stint he would later assess with brutal honesty as having been of “negative value” to the company. It was not a real role with concrete deliverables; it was a liminal space where he and a few others would just “talk about meta science.” It was not the kind of experience that filled a young graduate with confidence.

So, he did what millions of students do in their final months of college. He began the ritual of self-invention, “refurbishing my resume and trying to add whatever bullshit” he could summon to fill the white space. The podcast, the interviews, the sprawling intellectual projects—these felt like hobbies, not qualifications. The plan, as it stood, was to fall back in line, to translate his computer science degree into a stable job, to finally satisfy the gravitational pull of his parents’ expectations. He was preparing to surrender to the conventional script.

Then, an email arrived. It was an electronic message from a name he did not recognize, Anil Varanasi, the founder of a tech company called Meter. It was a cold email, but it carried a strange and specific heat. Varanasi had been following his work, the podcast and the blog, and he had a counter-proposal to the life Dwarkesh was about to reluctantly embrace. The message was simple and direct: “don’t do that.” Don’t go looking for a job. You’re graduating six months early anyway. Use that time to keep this podcast and blog going.

The offer was untethered from any logic he understood. It was an act of unsolicited patronage from a stranger on the internet. Varanasi then posed a question that seemed both impossibly generous and deeply practical: “how much would it cost you to keep living for six more months?” Dwarkesh, who was planning to move back into his parents’ house in Austin, performed a quick, internal calculation. He threw out a number that felt enormous to him, an overestimation meant to sound serious. “$10,000,” he ventured. The response came back almost instantly: “Sure.” The money was wired. The first thought that flashed through his mind was not gratitude, but a sudden, sharp pang of commercial regret: “Fuck, I should have asked for more.” He didn’t know it at the time, but he was just one of what would eventually be around a hundred young people to receive such an email from Varanasi, a quiet, one-man venture fund for nascent talent.

He now had a six-month reprieve, a grant to continue being himself. He explained the situation to his parents, framing it in terms they could understand. He wasn’t aimlessly pursuing a hobby; this was a strategic move. This was his “way of networking and then meeting people who will give me a job” or, perhaps, “lead me to start a company myself.” It was a story he told them, and a story he largely told himself. It was a plausible fiction that allowed everyone to feel secure. And his parents, for all their prior anxieties, accepted it. Despite their deeply ingrained belief that a podcast was not a viable career—a belief no “responsible parents” would ever abandon—they were “fine with me loafing around for six months working on this thing.” He was given a runway, paved by a stranger’s belief in his potential, a six-month experiment to see if this strange life he was building for himself could actually fly.

Comment from Jeff Bezos Saved the Podcast

The six months of grace, paid for by a stranger’s belief, were burning away. He was living at his parents’ home in Austin, the $10,000 grant a slowly draining hourglass. The story he had told them, and himself—that this was all a “way of networking” that would eventually lead to a real job—was wearing thin. The podcast and the blog were still just that, a collection of conversations and essays with a small but dedicated audience. The project was balanced on a knife’s edge, a temporary experiment whose funding, and justification, was about to expire. The responsible, predictable world of a computer science graduate was waiting to claim him.

Then, near the end of those six months, he sent a blog post out into the ether. A ripple of attention followed, larger than any before. Marc Andreessen, a kingmaker in the Silicon Valley he was still observing from a distance, tweeted it. And then came the digital thunderclap. He checked his Twitter notifications and saw a new follower: Jeff Bezos. He was stunned. A follow was one thing, a passive act of digital curation. But then came the comment, a public message from the founder of Amazon attached to one of his posts, a direct and unambiguous injunction to “please keep it up.” The words glowed on his screen: “You’re thoughtful and thought-provoking. Gratitude.” It was, he would later reflect, the moment that saved the entire endeavor. He says, “I think genuinely if that hadn't happened, I probably wouldn't have kept doing the podcast.” The validation was absolute, a bolt of lightning that instantly solidified his precarious project into something real and worth continuing.

Cold Emails That Land World-Class Minds

This newfound legitimacy became a key he could use to unlock doors that had previously been welded shut. He was now aiming for the absolute summit, for guests like Patrick Collison of Stripe or Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of OpenAI. At the time he reached out, he was still “a nobody.” To get them to say yes, he knew he had to deliver an undeniable demonstration of his seriousness. He transformed his approach, spending a full week, full-time, on a single potential guest. He would immerse himself in their work, their interviews, their papers, and from this deep well of research, he would craft a bespoke list of questions. He would send this list in the initial cold email, a document designed to prove that the conversation he was proposing would be “nothing like any of the pitches you've heard over the last year,” not from other podcasters, and not even from the legacy media outlets that regularly courted them. It was a strategy of radical preparation, an offering of intellectual labor upfront that made his requests impossible to ignore.

“You Should Charge 5X That”

The project now had prestige, but it still had no real revenue. It was a friend, Dylan Patel, who provided the necessary push to transform it into a business. Dwarkesh was starting to get sponsorship interest, and when he told Dylan how much he was charging, his friend was blunt. You should be charging at least five times that, he insisted. It’s a lesson he took to heart, that from the outside, it is “often clearer that you can charge more for something.” On his next sponsor call, steeling himself, he quoted the new, absurdly high number. The sponsor didn’t even blink at the order of magnitude. They couldn’t do 5X, they said, but they could do 4X. He paused, feigning consideration. “I’ll have to think about it,” he replied. It was a bluff, but it worked. The deal was made. The podcast was no longer just a passion project subsidized by a grant; it was a self-sustaining enterprise. The kid who had been loafing around his parents’ house had, almost by accident, built himself a career.

Why Podcasting Is Not Competitive

The career that had been willed into existence through a combination of relentless preparation, serendipitous validation, and a stranger’s unsolicited faith was now a stable, self-sustaining enterprise. He had arrived. But arrival is not a destination; it is a plateau from which one can see the surrounding landscape more clearly. From this vantage point, he began to articulate a formal mission for the work, a purpose that had been implicit all along but now required a name. The project, he decided, was simply an effort “to develop a better model of the world,” for himself and for anyone else who chose to listen. It was a grand, perhaps unachievable, ambition, but it was the only one that felt true.

He views the work itself with a striking lack of mystique. What he does, he explains, is fundamentally “very simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple.” You prepare a lot, and then you interview people. The surprising thing, he reflects, is that this field, which seems so saturated with millions of podcasts, is actually “not that competitive.” Not in the way that becoming a world-class concert pianist is competitive, where you are pitted against “a hundred thousand Asian kids who have been like practicing six hours a day.” Not in the way that making partner at a prestigious law firm is competitive, a world with immense “optimization pressure.” Podcasting, and even blogging, he realized, were fields where there were not that many people who were treating it with the obsessive, full-time seriousness of a craft. It was a dream job that was strangely available, a career path where you could get to choose a topic you’re interested in, and your full-time job becomes to “understand this as well as possible,” and then share that understanding with the world.

Now, he is looking beyond the limits of the format he has mastered. The interviews will continue, a crucial engine for learning, but he recognizes their ceiling. There are certain questions, essential questions for understanding the future, that simply “cannot be answered extemporaneously.” You cannot simply ask an expert how far away AGI would have to be for China to have a better chance of developing it first and expect a coherent, fully-reasoned answer on the spot. The question requires a careful breakdown of precursor knowledge—projections for energy capacity, for domestic chip manufacturing, for geopolitical stability. These are the kinds of questions that demand the slow, deliberate architecture of a written essay. This is the next frontier: moving from being a skilled extractor of information to a synthesizer of it, publishing his own takes on the grand, complex questions that keep him up at night.

The solo venture has become a small, dedicated team. He is supported by a roster of editors and a general manager who share his deep care for the mission. He sees their collective impact not as a series of dramatic conversions, but as a “very diffuse” influence. It is the possibility that a million people, many of them in “extremely important positions in government or in business,” will have a slightly better, more nuanced understanding of AI, or history, or energy policy. As the stakes of the future intensify, the value of putting “all the cards on the table” feels increasingly urgent.

He often wonders about the other paths, the lives he did not lead. Until just a couple of years ago, he was still planning to pivot, to finally build a company. He had notebooks full of ideas, many of them “shitty GPT wrapper ideas” from the early days of the technology. One was an AI that would perform retrieval-augmented generation over the entire U.S. federal code of statutes. Another involved scraping the entirety of Z-Library to create some kind of novel book search engine. He acknowledges that these initial concepts were “terrible,” but then again, so were his first podcasts. He thinks about the counterfactuals, the other versions of himself. “I wonder if there’s an alternative world where I’m like, business turned out really well,” he muses, “and I’m so glad I didn’t like stay podcasting or something.” But he suspects not. The path he is on feels less like a choice he made and more like a current he was swept into, one that, against all odds, carried him exactly where he was supposed to be.

Jess studied Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and has been grateful to be recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 and Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.

She was the youngest woman accepted into Y Combinator in 2010, the youngest to join YPO in 2013, and the youngest graduate of Harvard Business School’s Presidents’ Program in 2024.

At 11, She Made Six Figures — and Skipped Recess to Code

In the quiet hum of Westchester County, where the 1990s unspooled in a rhythm of tidy lawns and predictable futures, the Mah household moved to a different beat. It was the sound of enterprise, a low thrum that emanated from her mother, an immigrant who had arrived from Hong Kong with just “two suitcases and a dream.” She never went to college, instead finding her footing in the American landscape by building a clothing manufacturing and design business from the ground up. From the minute a young Jess Mah would wake up, her mother was already at work; when she returned from school, she was still there. It was a relentless education in hustle, watching a business take shape stitch by stitch in the space between home and factory. From her father, who spent his days at Sloan Kettering, she inherited the other side of her wiring: a “nerdy engineering side,” a fascination with systems and logic that complemented the entrepreneurial fire.

By age ten, she had taught herself to code, and by eleven, the nascent commercial internet became her first real territory. While other kids traded baseball cards, she launched a business hosting servers wholesale, then another at thirteen selling computer parts on eBay. These were not hobbies; her first venture was soon pulling in “low six figures,” a sum that baffled her teachers. Her blossoming career was a solo pursuit, a world she built for herself in the quiet hours after homework. At school, she was an outlier, she ate her lunch alone, taking her tray down the hall to the computer club, only to find herself an outsider there, too.

The friction between her world and the world of bells and report cards was constant. Teachers would call home, their voices laced with concern, reporting that she was “working on business... during recess and during lunch” instead of making friends. The calls were meant to course-correct, to nudge her back into the box drawn for children. But her parents would listen, turn to her, and offer a quiet affirmation. They'd relay the feedback, then say, yeah, you're right. This isn't actually a problem. You should just do whatever you want, but be respectful. It was a radical form of trust, one that both empowered and emboldened her. It was aggravating that her teachers wouldn’t be supportive, but their dissent only sharpened the clarity of her own path. This dynamic came to a head when the principal called her and her mother in, his face stern. It wasn't just the businesses anymore. She was a moderator for RateMyTeacher.com, approving and deleting comments. This, the principal insisted, had to stop. But her parents stood by her, their quiet backing a shield against institutional authority. That support, she would later reflect, “just enhanced my relationship with my parents,” cementing a foundational alliance that would carry her far beyond the schoolyard.

Throwing College Parties for Billionaires

The walls of high school felt too close, the pace too slow. An insistent internal clock was ticking, a feeling of being in a “rush to get out into the real world” that made the ordinary rituals of adolescence feel like a delay. At fifteen, she made her exit, leaving behind the familiar corridors for an accelerated program: Bard College at Simon's Rock. It was a calculated leap, a way to compress time. By seventeen, she had an associate's degree in hand and was walking the sprawling campus of UC Berkeley, a transfer into its computer science program. California in the late 2000s was a landscape electric with possibility, a place where the line between a dorm room and a world-changing company was perilously thin, and she had no intention of wasting a moment.

At Berkeley, she found her way, not in the lecture halls, but in the spaces between them. When the computer science association held an election for president, she was nominated. No one else wanted the job, so by default, it was hers. She saw it as an opportunity, making it her mission to “raise as much money for the club as possible and throw great events.” Every two weeks, she would conjure a speaker from the burgeoning tech scene, luminaries like Drew Houston from Dropbox or a young Sam Altman, years before OpenAI. She’d buy deep-dish pizza, and in the air of a university common room, the future was being forged. The speakers weren't just guests; they became “friends and mentors,” a network built not through formal introductions but through a shared sense of mission and a willingness to show up.

She chronicled these encounters on a blog, a digital extension of her real-world curation. The posts were raw and observant, and they found their way onto the screens that mattered. One day, an email landed in her inbox from Paul Graham of Y Combinator.

“Hey, you should come by for dinner.”

The Youngest Woman in Y Combinator History

The invitation felt like a summons to the major leagues. The pull to drop out was immense, but a mentor from Rackspace, a veteran of an earlier tech boom, offered a piece of grounding advice: your business ideas they're gonna be there still, but your last year of college... you shouldn't drop out. She heeded the counsel, a rare moment of patience in a life defined by speed. She finished her degree, graduating at nineteen. With her application reviewed and polished by Sam Altman himself, she applied to the program that had become the very center of Silicon Valley gravity. In the summer of 2010, she was accepted, becoming, at the time, “the youngest woman to join Y Combinator.” The real world had arrived.

With her co-founder Andy Su, she moved with the ferocious speed the program demanded. Just one month in, they launched inDinero. The concept was simple: a “Mint.com for businesses.” Mint had just sold for a staggering sum, and the comparison was an easy shorthand for a grand vision, one that promised to bring clarity and control to the chaotic finances of small companies.

The launch was a splash. TechCrunch, Mashable ran with the story, and the sign-ups poured in by the thousands. It was a rush of validation, the kind of immediate traction that founders dream of. But beneath the surface of the glowing metrics, a fundamental misunderstanding was beginning to crack through. She would soon admit that she “didn't really understand the feedback for why people were not investing in the business.” The idea of "small business" was a mirage. While government data pointed to tens of millions of them, the reality was that most were “micro businesses and they have no money. They don't really want to pay a lot.” The napkin math, once so promising, turned brutal under scrutiny. At twenty or thirty dollars a month, building a billion-dollar business required a scale that was almost unimaginable.

The truth arrived in a slow, painful drip of customer data. Churn was devastatingly high. She would get on the phone, calling the very customers who had given the product five-star satisfaction scores, trying to understand why they were leaving. The answers were a lesson in market reality. Oh well, you know, just ran out of money, some would say, the casual confession of a dream deferred. Others were more pragmatic: oh well my accountant wants us to use QuickBooks. They liked what her company did, but it didn't displace the gravitational pull of the industry standard. InDinero was a vitamin, not a painkiller. This was her first encounter with the chasm between a beautiful idea and a viable one, the dawning, terrifying realization that the initial, simple logic was not the “path to salvation.”

She Fired Everyone but Herself

By late 2011, a year and a half in, the money was nearly gone, and the early buzz had faded into the silence of venture capitalists declining to fund the next round. The realization that the company had to be fully rebooted was not a gentle dawning but a violent impact. “Oh, yeah, that’s painful,” she would recall, the memory still sharp. The failure felt personal, a betrayal of the neat, upward trajectory she had engineered for her entire life. She was the girl who had done everything right. Skipped two years of school, made the dean’s list, became president of the computer science club, yet now she was facing a collapse.

The frustration was a physical force. Alone in her apartment, the weight of it became unbearable. She was “crying… punching my pillow I was so pissed.” Beneath the anger was a deep, mortifying fear of embarrassment, a dread that “Paul Graham’s going to be embarrassed by me.” The mentors who had believed in her, the ecosystem that had anointed her—it felt like she was letting all of them down. This, she would later understand, is where true learning begins. “We don't really learn about endurance and grit until we have those super severe setbacks,” a lesson that can't be taught in a classroom or absorbed from a blog post. It must be lived.

In that time of failure, a cold resolve took hold. She had to “lay everyone off and cut the burn... and just fully reboot the company.” It was a brutal, surgical decision, dismantling the very team she had just assembled. The office emptied out, the payroll vanished, and in the quiet that followed, she became the entire company. The pivot was not just a strategy on a whiteboard; it was a complete transformation of her existence. Her days were spent on the phone, selling a new, high-touch service model with large per-client fees she had willed into being. Her nights were spent hunched over a keyboard, designing and coding the product she had just sold, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen. She would wake up in the early a.m. and begin the cycle again, a relentless, all-consuming rhythm of building and selling, selling and building. It was a terrible, isolating period, but in that singular focus, she was building a new muscle, forging a capacity for reinvention that would become the core of her survival.

The brutal, solitary work paid off. From the ashes of the 2011 reboot, inDinero rebounded with a vengeance. The painful pivot to a high-touch service model found its footing, and over the next several years, the company began to scale with breathtaking speed. The machinery of a mature startup began to turn: funding rounds were raised, crossing the ten-million-dollar mark; offices opened in San Francisco and New York, servers hummed with the financial data of a growing empire. The headcount swelled to over two hundred employees worldwide. By 2015, the company had a nine-figure valuation and a place on the coveted Inc. 500 list. That year, her face, young and confident at twenty-five, stared out from the cover of Inc. magazine, the very picture of a founder who had wrestled failure to the ground and won.

But inside the gleaming machine, a different kind of friction was building. The external markers of success, the awards, the valuation and the ever-expanding team were a golden cage. The role of founder had morphed into the role of CEO, and the shift was corrosive. The final years of her tenure, she would later say, were “really miserable for me.” The work was no longer about creation; it was about maintenance. The daily reality was an endless stream of “constant employee problems and customer problems,” human complexities and operational fires that had little to do with the initial spark of invention.

Her passion, she discovered in this period of profound success, was for “building the business at a small scale,” for the raw, zero-to-one sprint. It was not for the meticulous, patient work of guiding a large organization to its next decimal point of growth. The company, now a complex global entity, needed a different kind of leader, someone with a “deeper operational bench” who thrived on the very challenges she found draining. She had built a company so successful that it had outgrown its own creator. The victory was complete, and it had created a job she no longer wanted, a life that no longer fit. The public triumph was masking a private, gnawing truth: she was the architect of her own unhappiness.

Becoming a Startup Factory

The slow burn of her discontent, the quiet misery of running a company she no longer loved, met its accelerant in the spring of 2020. As the world shut down, the machinery of global commerce seized up, and with it, a cascade of her clients. The financial dashboards she obsessively watched began to bleed, the numbers “flashing red” day after day. The stress was immense, a constant, low-grade panic that finally culminated one night in a raw, animal sound, a “five-minute, primal cry” that was the pure expression of a system overloaded. Her boyfriend found her, offering the simple, grounding assurance that would become a mantra: I believe in you. But belief alone could not hold back the tide.

Then, in April of 2021, the abstract pressures of business were eclipsed by a sudden, shattering personal tragedy. Her fiancé died. The loss was an explosion that sent shrapnel through every corner of her life. In the disorienting aftermath, a lifeline appeared. An offer came from one friend, then another, then a small constellation of them. I had so many friends to just offer to place for me to crash, she would recall.

She rotated between their homes, a nomad in her own city, living out of a bag. The act of receiving that kindness was its own kind of education. In the deepest trough of her grief, she was also discovering the true architecture of her relationships, the people who formed the load-bearing walls of her life. The experience, she would later say, was “really beautiful for enhancing my relationships.” The two pressures, personal and professional, the slow grinding away of her spirit by a job she had outgrown and the sharp, definitive blow of grief, had fused into a single, undeniable force. That summer, surrounded by the quiet support of the friends who had taken her in, she made the decision. She would step down as CEO.

Freed from the relentless operational demands of the company she had spent a decade building, the question of what came next hung in the quiet air of early 2022. For a founder whose identity had been fused so completely with her creation, the departure from inDinero could have been an ending. But a parallel track had already been laid, a secret experiment that was quietly proving out a new theory of work and life. While still navigating the final, miserable years as CEO, she had started another company, a legal tech venture, almost as a side project. It was a chance to test a different model.

The results were explosive. In just thirty-six months, she and a partner grew it to mid-eight-figure sales, earning it a valuation north of one hundred million dollars. What was significant was that she had done so while retaining ninety-five percent of the business. The numbers weren't just impressive; they were a revelation, a proof point that shattered the myth of the all-consuming, singular founder journey. Looking at the success of this second venture, the realization landed with the force of an epiphany. Oh, wow. I could do that. Like I could do this again and faster and better. The misery of the CEO role wasn't an inevitable price of ambition; it was a feature of a specific, grueling model she no longer had to follow.

Manufacturing Startups

This insight became the blueprint for her next act: Mahway, a venture builder she founded that year. It was not a venture fund that wrote checks from a distance, but a foundry for creating companies from the ground up. The new playbook was elegant in its simplicity. The key, she realized, was to “partner with other people who were experts in a domain.” Her role was no longer to be the long-haul operator, but the catalyst. She would “help form the company get it going get it funded... and then... pray that it be okay later on.” It was a process she had a “knack for,” a way to harness her talent for the zero-to-one sprint without chaining herself to the slow, grinding marathon of scaling. This was not a retreat from the arena but a redesign of it. She was no longer just a founder, but a creator of startups, liberated to build on her own terms, finally aligning her insatiable drive with a philosophy that work, above all else, “has to be fun.”

Today, Jess Mah operates from a place of earned and radical authenticity. The boundaries that once separated work from life have been dissolved, not by the pressures of a 24/7 startup culture, but by a conscious choice. Her gaze is now fixed on a horizon that stretches far beyond the next fiscal quarter. She plans her life with the assumption that she will live past one hundred, a conviction that reorders priorities and elongates timelines, making decisions about career and family part of a much grander, more patient design. It is the ultimate expression of her journey: a life being built not according to a received script, but one that is being constantly and courageously rewritten from scratch.

Alongside leading DoNotPay, Browder is a solo GP at Browder Capital, his venture fund.

His father was the number one enemy of Putin.

Joshua Browder grew up in a house under siege. In the Hendon district of northwest London, where the 2000s unfolded in a steady, metropolitan rhythm, his family’s life was anything but ordinary. His father, Bill Browder, was a political activist who had become what his son would later call “the number one enemy of Putin,” a man responsible for freezing the Russian president’s money around the world. This was not an abstract political battle fought in headlines; it was a war that came to their door. There were visits from the Russian mafia, a constant barrage of “really scary phone calls,” and a paranoid awareness that settled over the family like a London fog.

This inheritance of paranoia was at odds with the burgeoning digital world of a boy born in 1997. While his father saw danger in every connection, Joshua wanted to build an online presence, to make internet friends, to rebel against the family’s enforced isolation. Yet, the crucible of his upbringing forged a unique perspective. The ups and downs of building a company, the feeling of “eating glass sometimes,” would always be secondary; he knew early that “nothing compares to having dangerous people after your family.” From his parents, he absorbed two distinct, powerful lessons. Though they were not technical people, they taught him to “fight for what you believe in.” His father fought regimes; his mother, the daughter of a woman who fled the Nazis, fought waste. He remembers his grandmother taking salt packets from restaurants, a habit of scarcity she couldn't shake. This ingrained frugality became his own. “My company is called Do Not Pay,” he would later reflect, “it’s not just a company, it’s a lifestyle.”

Josh struggled in school, navigating the frustrating landscapes of dyslexia and dyspraxia. He felt like a failure in English class, a world of abstract words that wouldn’t bend to his will. He had to push himself to find something he was passionate about, an outlet where the rules made sense. Sure enough he found it, at age twelve, not in a classroom, but in the flickering light of YouTube videos. He taught himself to code, watching Stanford iOS development tutorials from an ocean away. Code was his rebellion and his salvation—a logical system that gave a young person leverage, a way to build something without asking anyone’s permission.

Sued for hacking into a major restaurant chain.

Armed with his self-taught coding skills, he looked at the world around him and saw gaps in the digital fabric. He noticed that his favorite sandwich chain, Pret a Manger, lacked an iPhone app. In a world he felt was “so much less competitive back then,” this was an opportunity too obvious to ignore.

So he set to work. He went on their website and simply “ripped off all of their IP, all of their logos, trademarks.” He found a way to hack some of their APIs, pulling the menu and other data into a clean interface he built himself. He put it on the App Store, charging what felt like a fair price—99 cents—and watched as it was featured by Apple in the “what’s hot” section. The sales started coming in. For a moment, it was a perfect, self-contained act of creation and commerce, a testament to the leverage a determined teenager could find online.

Of course, the sandwich chain eventually noticed. This was their brand, their menu, their intellectual property, and some random teenager was making money off it. He started getting “all of these angry letters,” the kind written by a general counsel whose job is to eliminate such problems. They invited him to their office, a meeting he assumed was to “threaten me and sue me and all of this stuff.” But when he got there, the corporate armor fell away. They saw not an evil company ripping off their IP, but a “harmless teenager” who had simply built something they hadn’t. In a surprising turn, they decided to make his creation the official Pret iPhone app. The experience taught him a lesson that would calcify into a core principle, a rule for the road ahead. It was, he realized, best to “ask for forgiveness, not for permission.”

“Robot Lawyer” Dorm Room Project goes viral on Reddit

The decision to leave London for California in 2015 was sparked not by a university prospectus, but by a series of YouTube videos. From a room where it was seemingly always raining outside, he had watched Stanford’s online classes, mesmerized by the introductory shot that zoomed down a sun-drenched Palm Drive. The image was “so magical,” a foreign landscape of warmth and possibility. The initial reason he wanted to go, he would later admit, was simply because of the weather. But when he arrived at eighteen to study computer science, he found the reality was a “dream come true” in ways the videos could never capture.

He had left behind a culture where high schools were measured by the number of students they sent to Oxford, where the “biggest pinnacle of success is if you get a PhD.” The United States, and Stanford in particular, felt “so much more entrepreneurial.” It was a night and day difference. The first thing he noticed was that there were “loads of people like me.” He walked into his dorm and saw them everywhere: people working on startups, coding projects, sketching out ideas on whiteboards. It was a world that didn't just tolerate his ambitions but celebrated them, a place where building things was the default language.

He was immersed in the intoxicating startup culture of Silicon Valley, yet he remained tethered to the justice-oriented mission forged in his London home. While many of his peers aimed for jobs at the tech giants that loomed over Palo Alto, he felt a different pull. He had no desire to work at Facebook or Google; he wanted to work on something that “gives justice to people.” Stanford was his father’s alma mater as well, a small historical echo, but his path was his own. By his sophomore year, the personal frustration with bureaucracy that had followed him across the Atlantic was already crystallizing into a legal-tech project. He was in the right place, one that was singularly focused on building and work. He was home.

The company Josh started from his dorm room, was an accident, born from a mundane and relentless frustration. The move to California did not absolve him of his knack for collecting parking tickets; the problem simply followed him from the streets of London to the manicured curbs of Stanford. The appeal process was a labyrinth of bureaucratic language, a repetitive and costly ritual designed to exhaust the citizen into submission. He had gotten a lot of tickets, and he saw a system that could be automated. He was an “act-stands-all entrepreneur,” a builder who loved doing projects and stuff, but he never really saw himself as a founder of a company.

So, in the summer of 2015, using the coding skills he had taught himself, he built a solution. In a single night, between midnight and three in the morning, he coded the first version of a free web chatbot to automatically contest the fines. He built it just for a few friends, a small tool to solve a shared annoyance. Then he put it on Reddit, and it went viral. He had stumbled into something. He thought, “wow, maybe there is something to this idea.” The project, which he called DoNotPay, quickly gained media attention, branded the “world’s first robot lawyer.”

Still, he saw it as a public service, a piece of civic tech. His initial vision was to make it into a “website nonprofit,” a way to level the playing field against impersonal authorities. But the idea had caught the attention of Silicon Valley’s architects. Soon after the viral launch, he found himself at breakfast with Marc Andreessen. He was still in the “London bubble,” a student “fresh off the boat in the UK,” speaking philosophically about nonprofits versus for-profits. Andreessen, a man who had built empires on the internet, offered a different perspective. The biggest impact on the world, he argued, is made by “capitalist for-profit companies.” He then gave Josh two pieces of advice. First, “you can take it slowly,” a caution against the hyper-growth ethos that consumed so many young founders. And second, a promise that transformed the project’s future: “Andreessen Horowitz will be the first pre-seed investor.” In that moment, the accidental project became a company.

Silicon Valley lawyer advice to raise millions.

The early backing from Andreessen Horowitz and the glow of viral press were not a guarantee. The path forward was a hard lesson in the specific grammar of Silicon Valley capital. In his sophomore year at Stanford, he applied for Peter Thiel’s prestigious fellowship program and was rejected; he was told he had “no direction.” The project was hot, CNN was writing articles about them, but he couldn’t translate the buzz into the fuel he needed. By his junior year, the server bills were becoming “very expensive,” and he needed to hire some of his smart friends to keep it all going. He set out to raise a proper seed round.

He walked the length of Sand Hill Road and one after another, the doors closed. He pitched to eighteen or nineteen firms, a long and humbling procession of no’s. It was a “really stressful” period. He was close to dropping out of school because he was at the end of his rope. He was “not knowing what to do.” The project that had initially felt so inevitable was on the verge of becoming just another abandoned idea, and he feared he might have to give up, to join another company or to change direction completely.

With only one or two pitches left, he met a lawyer he had brought on as an advisor, a partner at Wilson Sonsini named Damian Weiss. He was too young for drinks, so they met for coffee. He laid out the problem, the string of rejections. “What am I doing wrong?” he asked. Weiss had him do a mock pitch right there. After listening, the diagnosis was swift: he was doing it “completely wrong.” The advice was a set of three minor changes that would alter everything. First, no one cares about a deck; a pre-seed company needs a product demo. Second, he had to put the logos of huge companies like Intuit and Honey in his slides to show the scale of his ambition. Third, he needed to leave the business model “more open,” to stop being prescriptive and let investors imagine the future for themselves.

He went home and re-architected the pitch overnight. The next day, he walked into his final meeting. The difference was like “night and day.” They didn’t just like it; they invested on the spot. And in the close-knit community of the Valley, that single yes was a signal flare. The floodgates opened. Suddenly, “everyone, even the people who previously rejected me were flooding in.” He had learned that substance wasn’t enough; you had to master the narrative.

A $10 million IBM campaign.

Two encounters, coming in quick succession, taught him how to operate in a world of giants. The first was a lesson in the strange physics of corporate marketing. In passing, he mentioned to a journalist that DoNotPay used a small piece of IBM’s Watson API to help read parking signs. It was a minor detail, a single technical thread in his larger project. But the comment was picked up by someone on the IBM marketing team, and to them, it was a revelation. It was as if they had been shouting into the void and finally heard an echo. He pictured them thinking, “Wow, someone’s finally using IBM Watson. We finally have one user.” The response was immediate and overwhelming. Days later IBM invested ten million dollars in a nationwide co-marketing campaign. Overnight, he was in Times Square, his project’s name splashed across billboards proclaiming, ‘DoNotPay is powered by Watson.’ It was a surreal lesson in leverage: he learned that aligning yourself with a big company is helpful; the world is a tough place, and “the more allies you have… the better.”

Warren Buffett tells Josh a story he's never told before.

The second encounter was perhaps even more profound. An email arrived, the kind that seems too good to be true, its subject line reading like a fever dream: “Do you want to have lunch and interview Warren Buffett on stage in Seattle?” Josh was still early in his Stanford journey, and he was sure it was a scam, “probably some phishing email.” But he called the number, and it was real. Microsoft was flying a college student out for their annual investor conference, and for some reason, they had picked him. A few weeks later, he was on a plane.

The pressure was immense. He was “really stressed,” consumed by the fear of being forgettable, of asking a question Buffett had heard a thousand times. He did not want to be an “NPC, like a non-player character”; he wanted to be unique. On stage, sitting next to the oracle of Omaha, he defaulted to the only thing that felt truly his own. He introduced himself and shilled his project, then asked, “what is one time that you fought a big company and you fought for your consumer rights?” Buffett, who was likely expecting a question about markets or moats, told a story he had never told before in public: the first lawsuit he was ever involved in. As a young man, long before the days of credit cards, he was a subscriber to Harper’s Magazine. He tried to cancel, but they wouldn’t stop sending invoices. So, he sued them in small claims court, represented himself, and won. The encounter was a direct transmission of purpose, a confirmation from a legend that the fight he was fighting was timeless.

Life's work.

In mid-2018, he formally accepted a bid from the Thiel’s fellowship, a grant that came with a mandate to leave college and build. He was a Stanford senior, but the decision to drop out was less about the money, the $100,000 was nice, but it wasn’t the point, and more about finding a community. For the first time, he was surrounded by nineteen other young people who understood the specific, isolating challenges of his position, who knew what it was like for a twenty-year-old to try and convince a forty-five-year-old engineer to join his cause.

Now a full-time founder, he confronted what he saw as his single biggest mistake. He had started the website in 2015, and for four years, he hadn’t charged a cent. In 2019, he finally implemented a business model, a decision that “supercharged the company.” It gave them a clear, ruthless metric for progress, it tethered their success directly to their customers, a far more honest alignment than the abstract promise of a Facebook-style advertising model. He rejected the prevailing Silicon Valley playbook, the high-burn culture he saw as an “endless Ponzi scheme of hiring,” where capital is raised only to be spent on more engineers who then hire more engineers.

Instead, he embraced the “DoNotPay lifestyle,” a frugal, disciplined approach to growth. He built a machine, not a family. The engine was organic. The company wrote “thousands and thousands of articles and guides on how to fight for your rights,” pieces on how to get an airline refund or dispute a utility bill. These would rank for free on Google, and as frustrated consumers read through them, a simple button would appear every few paragraphs: “Let DoNotPay, do it for me.” And of course, he knew, “everyone’s so lazy, they click the button.” This relentless SEO strategy, combined with the aggressive automation of customer support, allowed a “very small team” to serve hundreds of thousands of users.

The machine was lean and profitable. This efficiency led to a move that was practically unheard of, an act that went “against the system.” He decided to pay a dividend to his employees and investors. He was told by founder friends that a company like Google would never do such a thing. A month later, Google announced its first dividend. It was a moment of profound vindication, a testament to his philosophy that you must remain paranoid and observant, because the world is always changing. He saw that people valued liquidity and profitable businesses, and he had built one that could deliver.

Today, he sees DoNotPay as his life’s work. The company that began as a simple template business has evolved, and now with AI, he feels that “a lot more is possible than previously was.” But alongside this primary mission, a second has emerged: to help the next generation of founders. He is now an interviewer for the Thiel Fellowship and manages his own fund investing in young founders. He believes that these young founders make better investments because “they have everything to lose.” He has seen the alternative play out in real life: give a team of ex-Google engineers five million dollars, and they won’t build the product; they’ll just hire their friends. He would rather back the founder who sleeps two hours a night, who is all in, who will take a fraction of the money and build.

This drive is not just a business thesis; it is the distillation of a family ethos, a “mindset of agency” passed down through generations. He sees it in the story of his grandfather, the son of a communist, who was untouchable in the academic world and had to “scramble to even be a mathematician,” working at a gas station because political prosecution barred him from a military draft exemption. He sees it in his father’s work, passing laws to confront a global superpower. It is the core family belief that “you just really have to push for things he want in the world.” He wants to create more founders because he feels he was in the right place at the right time, and he knows there are thousands of young people stuck in “endless mind-numbing journeys,” waiting for an opportunity.

The relentless push, however, has met with powerful resistance. The “ask for forgiveness, not for permission” philosophy has been tested by the very systems he set out to challenge. In recent years, he has faced multiple lawsuits from prominent class-action lawyers and a government crackdown from the Federal Trade Commission, forcing him to navigate the fraught tension between technological innovation and legal regulation.

Yet his core advice remains unchanged, a direct reflection of his own journey. To the young person learning to code, to the student at Stanford, his message is simple: “please, you should have started yesterday.” He urges them to focus on a problem that is intensely their own. He still, to this day, really hates authority. He is still the type of person who will wait on hold for hours to save twenty dollars. That is the passion he believes in, the kind that can fuel a life’s work. The engine is not the technology; it’s the righteous, personal, and unending fight.

Before founding Lattice in 2015, Altman was an early-stage angel investor in companies like Opendoor, Instacart, Gusto, and Patreon. He also co-founded Hydrazine Capital, an investment firm, with his brother Sam Altman.

Before the world was networked and flickering in every palm, there was a suburb in St. Louis that Jack Altman remembers as a “pretty idyllic, very bubbled, encapsulated thing.” It was the 1990s, a time still blessedly analog. Summers as a kid were all about outdoor fun, from laser tag on well-kept lawns to biking around without a care. He lived right behind the school, and a “cutout in the backfences” served as a private portal, a hole that led straight into the parking lot.

He was one of four siblings in a loving family, a competitive clan anchored by a dermatologist mother and a real-estate broker father. The home was a place of constant affirmation, a consistent message that “you’re awesome, you’re great, you can do anything.” Although this supportive praise was common for his “participation trophy generation,” to Jack it felt deeply personal. He held the foundational belief that his parents were his entire world, and their love was the source of his capability. This support was balanced by a playful, intellectual friction among his two older brothers. They would compete over board games, over who could solve math problems faster at the dinner table. It was never the type of competition that was negative; it was a positive, ambitious way of being, the simple desire that if they were going to play a game, he would like to win the game.

His older brother Sam, set a certain tone in the house… An unspoken example that school was important and to be taken seriously. His parents never pushed, never talked about college until it was time to apply, but that didn’t matter. This precedent set by an older sibling, a quiet pressure, was more powerful than any parental directive.

This upbringing produced a young man of high contrast. He was on the water polo team, a sport he was “reasonably good at,” but he was also in the Rocketry Club, absorbed in science competitions. He was, by his own account, very social but also nerdy, a kid who loved school and had a great group of friends.

In high school, around the mid-2000s, a “big poker craze” swept through the basements of Missouri, sparked by a Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker who had won the World Series of Poker and turned the game into a national obsession. For Jack and his friends, it was an all-consuming ritual. After watching matches on ESPN, they would gather for games where the buy-in was ten dollars, a sum that felt substantial enough to sting. It was a world of calculated risk and gut feelings, played out under the dim lights of suburban homes, a departure from the sunlit afternoons of his earlier youth.

The Ivy League Hedge

When it was time for college, he simply applied. He had good enough grades, so he sent applications to a handful of schools, maybe eight in total. He ended up at Princeton because he visited and it “looked great,” a decision that he admits “kind of just happened.” It was here, on the campus of an Ivy League institution, that he first met his future wife, Julia. They were introduced their freshman year, in 2007, and for the next four years, they were simply friends, a consistent presence in each other's lives as they navigated college.

When it came time to choose a major, he opted for what he thought was the path of greatest potential. He chose Economics, not because of a burning passion for monetary policy, but because it was a “super popular major at Princeton” with well-known professors. He enjoyed the intro classes well enough, but the decision was “not an overly thoughtful choice.” It was, like his first job would be, one of the “high optionality choices” he made as a result of not having definite plans yet. He was simply moving toward things that seemed interesting enough and kept the most doors open for a future he had not yet begun to imagine. He was accumulating options, collecting keys to doors he hadn't yet found.

Walking Away from a Wall Street Bonus

That path of high optionality led, as it so often does for Princeton graduates, directly to New York. After graduation, he moved to the city and began his career as a financial analyst at Gleacher & Company. It was the next logical step on a treadmill he hadn’t realized he was on. His relationship with Julia, had turned romantic, but now it stretched across the country, a bond maintained through phone calls and cross-country visits. He was doing what was expected, following a script written by decades of young men before him. For a time, he found parts of it intellectually stimulating. It was interesting to learn about companies, to think about mergers, to get a glimpse into the machinery of capital. But he was far from the engine room. An analyst is “on an interesting plot of land, but you’re doing the worst work on the worst parts.”

The work was a labored grind, a series of tasks that felt distant from any meaningful outcome. And then, one day, he had a moment of startling clarity. He met with senior people in the industry, men who had reached the apex of the profession he was just beginning. He saw them, saw their lives, and felt a deep, instinctual rejection. A single thought crystallized in his mind, sharp and undeniable: I don't want that life. He realized with a sinking feeling that he was “fighting super hard to climb this hill that I don't want to be at the top of.” The money, which had been a vague, abstract motivator, was no longer enough. On the pro side of the ledger was a high likelihood of a good amount of money; on the con side was a long and growing list of everything else.

This realization became a turning point, an axiom he would carry with him for the rest of his life. The moment you realize you’re playing a game you don’t want to win, you have to get out of the game instantly. He acted on this newfound principle with a conviction that startled even himself. Two months before his first-year bonus was due, he quit. Missing out on a sum that felt like a “huge amount of money” to his 22-year-old self. He walked away from the prescribed path, leaving the security of the well-trodden road for the uncertainty of an open field. He didn’t know what game he wanted to play yet, but he knew, with absolute certainty, that it wasn’t this one.

Leaving His Own VC Firm

The escape from Wall Street led him west, not with a destination in mind, but with a direction. In 2012, he joined his brother Sam to co-found Hydrazine Capital, a small, seed-stage venture firm. He had traded the rigid hierarchy of banking for the freewheeling world of tech startups. He was in the room, listening to founders pitch their dreams, but he felt a profound sense of dissonance. With only a single year of banking behind him, he knew nothing about tech, nothing about building a company. He felt “so silly sitting here with a second time founder.” He was “in no place to be sharing advice,” not equipped to help in any meaningful way. It was a “light baby version” of the real work, and he knew it. This wasn’t a game he wanted to win either; it was just a different kind of sideline. He needed to get operating experience.

The opportunity arrived through the fund itself. Hydrazine led a seed investment in a social-commerce startup called Teespring, a company that had come through the now-famous accelerator Y Combinator. There was a point of connection, the founder also grew up in St. Louis, but the draw was the energy, the feeling that something real was happening there. He moved to California, joining Teespring as employee #10. His first taste of San Francisco was disorienting; he stayed in a hotel in the Tenderloin… It did not feel good. But the company felt different. He was no longer an observer; he was a builder, immersed in the beautiful chaos of a startup hitting escape velocity.

At Teespring, he learned by doing, but his most indelible lesson came from watching the company’s meteoric rise and subsequent struggle. Much of its distribution came from Facebook so when the platform’s algorithm changed, the ground shifted beneath them. It was a visceral education in the concept of “platform risk,” the danger of building your house on someone else’s land. The experience left a scar, but also a conviction. He became attracted to the resilience of B2B, a model where you have to “earn each customer on your own and nobody can take that away from you once you have that machine.” He had left New York seeking a different kind of work; in the trenches of a Silicon Valley startup, he had found it. He was no longer just collecting options; he was forging a point of view.

Founding a a $3B Company

Jack was twenty-six in the fall of 2015 when he and Eric Koslow, Teespring’s former lead engineer, decided to build something new. He knew the problem intimately, had felt its friction in the daily life of a fast-growing company. Employee management was “unnatural, difficult, and it needs structure.” He saw the challenge, but knowing the problem and knowing the solution were two different things. This distinction would define the next several years of his life.

The early days of their new company, Lattice, were a particular kind of painful. It was not the straightforward rejection of “complete crickets,” the silence that tells a founder to move on. Instead, it was a more seductive and maddening “head fake.” They would have conversations, and people would show consistent interest. So they would try what he and Koslow had built, and then… nothing. The initial enthusiasm would dissipate, leaving behind a trail of abandoned trials and unanswered emails. This cycle became a dangerous temptation, a chase to add one more feature, to make one more change, hoping that this time they would stick with it. It was never going to be enough.

In those first years, Jack was hungry for any approval, a hunger he now recognizes as both a strength and a weakness for any founder. It gives you a fire in your belly, but it can also make you “chase the wrong stuff,” to seek validation from the wrong people. The breakthrough came not from a technical insight, but a human one. He realized he had to get past the cordial, superficial relationship of a vendor and a potential client. He had to get to a place where he was friends with his users, a place where they would stop BSing him and deliver the hard news. Only then could he get to the “ground truth,” the real answers about what keeps people up at night, what they’re stressed about, what they need to get promoted.

This all-consuming professional quest was mirrored by a deepening personal commitment. He and Julia were now engaged, their relationship still spanning the breadth of the country. He knew what starting a company demanded. Before diving in completely, he took her out on a lake and laid it bare. He was about to become worse as a partner, he told her. If he was going to do this, it was going to come with a dip. She was, he recalls, “unbelievably supportive.” She understood. In hindsight, the long distance was a strange blessing, a structure that made the intense focus of the early years possible.

Hypergrowth & Rasing Hundreds of Millions

After the lean years of searching, Lattice found its rhythm. Launching from Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch, the company began to move with a new momentum, leaving the painful search for product-market fit behind for the exhilarating challenge of scaling. The following years were a blur of accelerating growth, marked by the steady drumbeat of venture capital rounds that were themselves a kind of public accounting. A Series D in 2020, then a Series E in 2021 that pushed the company’s valuation to a billion dollars. By the start of 2022, after a $175 million Series F, Lattice was valued at three billion. The team grew from a handful of people in a room to an organization of nearly 500.

For Jack the nature of the work changed completely. He was no longer just building a product; he was building an organization, a complex human system. His education came not from business books, but from the act of “doing.” He learned his most profound lessons on leadership when the company grew large enough to afford what he calls one of the “big hacks” of building a business: you get to hire these “really awesome, fancy experienced execs.” He was now the manager of people who had been in the industry for longer than he had been an adult. It was a humbling and powerful dynamic.

This intense, practical education became the foundation of his leadership philosophy. The ideas weren't theoretical; they were forged in the daily work of trying to build a healthy, effective culture amidst hypergrowth. He and his team codified these lessons into a book, People Strategy, a title that was both a mission statement and a manual. It became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a surprising outcome that nonetheless signaled how deeply their message was resonating. In 2019, Forbes had named him to its “30 Under 30” list. He was now a CEO in full, no longer the young man searching for the right hill to climb, but a leader who had reached a significant summit, one with a commanding view of the landscape he had helped to shape. The question was no longer how to get to the top, but what to do once you were there.

Stepping Down as CEO

In the final days of 2023, after nearly a decade at the helm of Lattice, Jack Altman announced he would transition from CEO to Executive Chairman. He had reached the top of the hill he had chosen so carefully after fleeing finance, and found that what he wanted was not a wider kingdom, but a different way of living. He had spent his twenties and early thirties in the “fullest of the grind,” and now he wanted the unscripted time, the simple “time and headspace to be with my kids and to laugh with my friends.”

The stepping away was followed by a quiet recalibration, a month that served less as a vacation and more as an archeological dig into a self that had been buried under years of board decks and product roadmaps. In this newfound stillness, the “big hobby person” from his childhood re-emerged. He went deep down the “espresso rabbit hole,” a meticulous, daily ritual of weighing and tamping, fascinated by the precise mechanics of turning a dark roast from Honduras into a perfect cup of coffee. He got into vinyl records, drawn to the tangible engineering of the medium, the way a physical groove could be translated into the immersive warmth of sound. This was a return to the analog, to the simple, absorbing pleasure of figuring something out for its own sake, a pleasure that had been his earliest and most natural impulse.

This interlude was the necessary preamble to his next act. In early 2024, he founded Alt Capital, a venture firm that was not just a new enterprise, but the physical manifestation of a new life philosophy. He was done playing finite games. He designed this firm to be an “infinite game,” an endeavor built not for a quick exit, but for sustained engagement, something he could still be doing, and loving, when he was sixty-five or seventy. This principle became his new North Star, shaping every decision. The goal was no longer to scale at all costs, but to build something that could last a lifetime.

He found a surprising freedom in this new role, an embrace of the very thing a CEO is paid to eliminate: a lack of control. He now believes that being a great CEO often requires a “maniacal attention to every detail,” a personality trait he feels he had to compensate for. As an investor, he is liberated from that need, able to guide and support without commanding. His focus has turned to finding and backing a new generation of founders, young people who possess a quiet wisdom beyond their years. He searches for the ones who have a deep respect for experience but are not imprisoned by it, who listen intently but are ultimately guided by their own “internal North Star.”

Day-Trading Period & Applebee's Stock Prophecy

This professional evolution is anchored by a deeply settled personal life. His journey is now less about what he is building and more about who he is becoming. He speaks of it all with a disarming frankness, weaving the high-level strategy with the humbling, human details. He can laugh now at the “degenerate period” in his twenties when he and his brothers lived together in San Francisco, convinced they could outsmart the market by day-trading options based on a logic as sound as a “farmer’s almanac.” The memory sits comfortably alongside the story of his grandmother’s prescient gift: paper stock certificates for Apple to his brother Sam, the computer kid, and for him, the chubby one who liked to eat, certificates for Applebee’s. The rich get richer, he can now say with a smile. The stories are not distractions; they are the point. They are the texture of a life lived, not just curated.

Earlier in his career, Qureshi was one of the world’s top-ranked professional poker players, reaching the global top 10 by age 19. He later transitioned into software engineering, working at Airbnb and blockchain startup Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase). His commentary is consistently featured in outlets including Bloomberg, CoinDesk, Bankless, and The Defiant, and he is widely regarded as one of the most thoughtful and influential voices in crypto investing.

The Decorated Cage of Genius

In the era of dial-up modems and the last gasps of the 20th century, a new family arrived in rural Texas, a town of two thousand souls where the Friday night lights burned brighter than any academic ambition. Haseeb Qureshi was one of three brothers, the sons of Muslim parents who had immigrated from Pakistan, their lives a continent and a culture removed from the Hill Country landscape they now called home. The year he entered middle school, the principal felt it necessary to come into his class beforehand to deliver a small presentation on what, exactly, a Muslim was. It was a well-intentioned gesture of anthropology for a student body that had never had one in their school, a place where seeing a brown person meant seeing someone they thought was Mexican.

It was not, he would quickly learn, a place of intellectual flourishing for him. The world of his parents was its own sealed vessel: a snapshot of 1980s Pakistan frozen in amber, held fast by a culture they had carried with them across the ocean. The world of his school was a different kind of vacuum, a place of social studies and English classes where the teachers didn’t care, so the students didn’t care, an endless loop of apathy. He would hear later of rich high schools with courses on philosophy or computer science and feel the phantom limb of a life he never had; in Dripping Springs, there was nothing like that to look at. School was a place he mostly slept through the day, doing just enough to earn the right to go home.

But home was where a third world existed, one that hummed through a phone line and bloomed on a glass screen. The internet was a tunnel out, a secret and far more compelling reality. He would slip into MSN chat rooms and get into stupid arguments with people in their twenties and thirties, acquiring a taste for the heady, intellectual chatter of politics, of philosophy, of history. Those topics were a world away from the boring curriculum of his school day. It was an escape, a place where he could try on ideas like costumes. The biggest draw was the sense of not having consequences; online, you could make a new identity, join a new group, be a devout Muslim one day and an atheist the next. It was a playground where you could question anything, be anyone, a liberating contrast to the rigid environments of home and school, where everything was remembered and glued onto you. This early education in pseudonymous debate and fluid identity was forging the man who would one day turn just $50 into millions playing online poker, and then billions investing in the crypto markets.

At fifteen, Haseeb entered an early college program, the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, a place built for the state’s sharpest young minds. He had read a lot of pop physics and arrived thinking it would be amazing, a portal to understanding the universe. Instead, he found it was just math problems, endless and repetitive. He was good at them, but they didn’t animate him. The world of formal education, even at its most elite, felt increasingly like a decorated cage. He grew disillusioned, the guy fly energy he’d honed in chat rooms found no amusement in the sterile logic of STEM coursework.

A Stolen Identity Became a Bankroll

But one day, some friends invited him to a poker game… He didn’t know how to play, not really at least—he’d only ever played five-card stud with his cousins, a game that was really only gambling, not strategy. He sat down at a tiny table and immediately lost nearly all his chips, not even understanding what chucking or betting was. The embarrassment was acute, but it sparked a familiar impulse: he had to learn how this game works. Back in his room, the glow of the screen became a portal again. He looked up the rules, the strategies, and by mere chance came across an article about a new generation of college-age kids studying statistics and game theory, making a fortune playing poker online. He saw that and thought, “I bet I could do that. That sounds like fun.”

At sixteen, he was too young to deposit money legally. He started with ‘Play Money’ to learn the feel of the game. After finding a rhythm, he called his then eighteen-year-old brother, asking for a cheeky fifty-dollar loan to get started. But his brother went ballistic “You’re gambling? Your supposed to be in school! Never tell our parents this.”

The answer was a hard no. So he found another way. An online site, Party Poker, was running a promotion: scan a driver’s license and get fifty dollars for free. In the very early days of Google Image Search, he found what he needed: an uncensored license of a little old lady from Maryland. The method worked, and the cash from that promo was all the money he ever deposited.

A Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Secret

He started small, grinding at the 5¢ and 10¢ tables, slowly working his way up. That summer, the fifty dollars became two thousand dollars. By the end of the year, it was $100,000. By this point he had started College at UT Austin, a very prestigious school. Of course his grades were suffering since he spent almost all his time playing poker, living in a parallel world his parents couldn't imagine. On a visit home, the night before he was due to return to college, he knew he had to tell them. He came downstairs late and found his father. “Dad, I have something to tell you. Could you come to my room?” As his father followed him upstairs, the color drained from his face. Oh god, my son’s gay. Well, thats what his dad thought was the case.

He sat on the bed and delivered the news. “Dad, I’ve been playing poker.” His father, relieved, was dismissive. “Okay, how much money did you lose?” When Haseeb said he’d made money—a hundred thousand dollars—his father scoffed. He thought his son had been scammed by some fake website. To prove it was real, he showed him the one piece of evidence he’d secured: an iPod, acquired not with cash but with loyalty points from the site. It was the same iPod his father had seen earlier, the one he’d claimed to have won in a raffle. Suddenly, it hit him. My son just made $100,000. It was more money than both his parents were making. The next morning, his father was waiting outside his bedroom. “Look, don’t tell your mom about this,” he said quietly. “Just promise me that every month you’re going to put away $10,000 for your retirement.” The game was real.

The conversation with his father was a quiet armistice, a treaty between the world he was born into and the one he was building. The fights didn’t stop—his father still dreamed of him choosing a technical profession, a stable path far from the chimeric fortunes of a card game. But the foundation had shifted. He was now navigating two lives: the dutiful student at UT Austin, and the nocturnal predator of the online felt. The tension was unsustainable. While his peers were pulling all-nighters for chemistry or math, he was living in a different economy of risk and reward. By nineteen, he had made over a million dollars. The disconnect from university life became a chasm. What was happening in lecture halls felt so profoundly irrelevant compared to the real-time education he was receiving every night, and he dropped out.

The Price of a Million-Dollar Hand

The life of a professional poker player, he soon discovered, is a profoundly isolating one. Success required being completely off-kilter with the rest of the world. He had to align his schedule with when the games were best, which meant his day began when others’ ended. He played when the recreational players in America logged on after work, or when the sun was rising over Europe or Asia and the online tables filled with fresh money. He was a ghost haunting the daylight hours, eating breakfast as his friends were eating dinner.

It was a self-reinforcing cycle; the more his life was dictated by the global flow of players, the more detached he became, and the easier it was to keep the lonely vigil. The financial independence he’d won felt, at times, like a gilded cage. He was a young man with a fortune, but his existence was atomized, the victories silent, the losses invisible. In this strange, inverted world, he found himself getting pretty depressed at various times, the price of mastering a game that demanded he live apart from the very world he was trying to conquer. He had achieved the dream he’d read about in that article, but no one had written about the silence that came with it.

The same intellectual restlessness that drove him to the internet as a boy now chafed against the solitary confinement of his profession. The game had been won, but the victory felt hollow, a mountain of chips in an empty room. So he did what he had always done when a system no longer served him: he found a way out. He retired from poker, a world-renowned pro walking away from the table at the height of his game.

He Walked Away from Millions to Start Again at Zero

The exit was not just a career change; it was a public act of renunciation. In a 2013 blog post that sent ripples through the small, intense world of professional gaming, he announced he would “give away all of his money.” A fortune accumulated in the dark would be scattered between charity and family, leaving only $10,000 for himself. It was a radical gesture, an attempt to sever himself from a life defined by acquisition and to find a new organizing principle. He embraced effective altruism, a philosophy that treated giving not as an emotional impulse but as another system to be optimized, another problem to be solved with logic and rigor.

He arrived in Silicon Valley not as a conquering hero with a bankroll, but as an apprentice. He was determined to learn the new language from the ground up, to understand the machinery of this new world not as an investor but as a builder. He became a blockchain engineer at Earn.com, a crypto startup that would later be acquired by Coinbase, then moved to Airbnb as an anti-fraud engineer. He was back in the trenches, trading the psychological warfare of the poker table for the clean logic of code. It was a familiar pattern: find a complex system, deconstruct its rules, and master it through obsessive immersion. He was swapping one kind of esoteric knowledge for another, proving that the intellectual horsepower that made him a feared poker player could be repurposed to build things, not just to win them.

The years spent as an engineer were a crucible, reforging his identity. He had mastered the game of cards and the language of code. Now, a new system beckoned, one that operated on capital and conviction, a synthesis of his two past lives. He saw a nascent world in crypto that mirrored the wild, unregulated frontier of online poker in its infancy—a place of immense opportunity, fraught with risk, and understood by very few. It was a territory he was uniquely equipped to navigate. He and his partners would eventually found Dragonfly, a crypto venture firm that became one of the most respected in the world, managing billions. The kid from Texas had found his final table.

Dylan launched SemiAnalysis solo in 2020, and has since scaled it into a global operation with over 15 experts across five countries. The firm serves an elite clientele including major hedge funds, leading semiconductor companies, hyperscalers, and AI labs. Under his leadership, SemiAnalysis has garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers and earned frequent citations in prominent publications such as Business Insider.

6th Grade Suspension and a Beating with a Swiffer

A two-lane ribbon of asphalt cut through southwest Georgia, its dusk horizon ruled by the yellow flicker of a VACANCY sign, 24 hours a day. In 2004—in the era between dial-up and broadband—Dylan Patel sat behind the counter of a roadside motel his parents had revived on borrowed caste money.

Dylan’s parents had arrived in America on opposite coasts: his mother in Grants Pass, Oregon, managing a 24-room roadside motel; his father in Los Angeles, scrubbing the bathrooms at a Subway before rising to store manager. A caste acquaintance eventually introduced them at a budget motel in San Francisco, where a two-hour conversation sufficed for an arranged marriage. Pooling every family dollar—and loans from “ten different people in the caste”—they purchased a foreclosed property in rural Georgia.

The young couple, and later their two sons, lived in that motel until Dylan turned ten, rotating through reception, laundry, and the night desk while cousins cycled in to help keep the rooms filled.

Night shift, to Dylan, was freedom: being unsupervised, sitting at a computer while cicadas droned and eighteen-wheelers moaned past on Route 84. On the CRT’s glass he toggled between RuneScape inventories and chip-geek forums—posting, posting some more, and learning how strangers argued.

On RuneScape, Dylan built miniature economies to fund game memberships his parents wouldn’t buy. On forums, he debated Paradox strategy titles, moderated Android and Intel boards, even wrote a script at fourteen to catch suspiciously timed pro-Samsung posts.

On his eighth birthday, Dylan decided he wanted an Xbox. It was a single gift covering both brothers’ birthdays and Christmases—a “long-term” investment by the Patel brothers. But by February, the power ring turned red—with the Xbox thinking it was overheating. A cousin—older, judgmental, already told of Dylan’s new console—was days from arriving. A joint present gone dead would not only bring embarrassment but also ruin the investment of two birthday gifts and two Christmases.

So Dylan scoured forums, trying every non-invasive solution possible before eventually prying off the plastic shell and “shorting the temperature sensor” to allow a few months more usage, as an anonymous post advised.

The ring turned green again. The Xbox lasted through the visit and through spring, until Microsoft finally issued a recall.

The bedroom lights stayed off after dinner so the soft glow of a 19-inch LCD could carry the room. Dylan already knew the math of message boards—“only one in a hundred users ever posts, and one in a thousand holds the ban-hammer”—and by fourteen, he had maneuvered himself into that last decile.

On the Android, Intel, and Nvidia forums, he toggled between an anonymous handle and the straight-up Dylan Patel, scrubbing whichever account risked embarrassing the future adult who might someday be Googled next to “Joseph V. Stalin fan-site.”

He typed fast, skipping vowels (“u” for you, “y” for why) until a stranger refused to “engage if you type like this.” The chastising stung, sharpening Dylan’s keyboard-warrior streak: if syntax mattered, then syntax would be perfected—and every argument would now be won on substance and style.

The first real battlefield arrived when he was choosing his inaugural smartphone. HTC screens versus Samsung cameras versus the shadow presence of Apple—Dylan benchmarked every spec until dawn and defended HTC with missionary zeal. When late-night threads began erupting with oddly timed bursts of pro-Samsung praise, he smelled astroturf. So he wrote a script, watched it flag patterns that no human mod could catch, and silently deleted the shill posts before they reached page two.

The pleasure was less about censorship than proof that a teenager could out-engineer a multinational’s marketing budget.

Those hours soldered a habit: solve the system first, finish the homework later. Leaving the motel for Cairo’s lone public school meant trading the quiet hum of a CRT monitor for the complex social code of a campus that was “55 percent white, 45 percent Black,” and Dylan. He floated between cliques like a neutral piece in Risk: cool Black kids one semester, white football boosters the next, RuneScape nerds whenever the lunch tables reseated. He was an observer, straddling lines but belonging nowhere, an ethnographer taking notes on who to be. Sixth grade was an experiment in finding that fit through friction. It ended with three fights, three wins, and three suspensions: a shove over “yo-mama” jokes with one group, a scrappy scuffle with another, and a broken pair of glasses after a false accusation of Runescape theft. The fights were a way to “stake my claim,” a blunt-force entry into social economies he didn’t yet understand.

Each phone call home from the principal’s office triggered its own escalation. First came the sting of a leather belt, then the sharp rap of an aluminum Swiffer rod once cow-hide lost its deterrent. Finally, after the third suspension, came a school-mandated “anger-management” program, where electrodes taped to his forehead monitored boredom more than rage as a dot drifted across a screen. He learned the lesson, though not the one the school intended: physical altercations were inefficient, a system with diminishing returns and predictable consequences. His aggressions migrated online.

Turning Cheating into a Side Hustle in High School

High school Dylan was just as good at school as he was at fights. He got “all A’s, usually,” a record marred only by a single D earned after he was caught feeding a classmate answers during a final. Cheating was simply a more elegant hack. Freshman year, he discovered the school’s Spanish textbook publisher updated its online answer keys at 1:07 a.m. By homeroom, he had screenshotted verb tables for half the class to earn side money. Sophomore Latin fell just as quickly, then “virtual German” junior year, a district experiment that turned language requirements into downloadable PDFs. “If you cheat, you’re only hurting yourself,” teachers warned. Dylan nodded, then spent his senior spring delivering Quizlet codes via AirDrop. Years later in Medellín he would learn real Spanish at street-vendor speed, proof that shortcuts can coexist with eventual mastery.

Pranks scaled alongside study-hall arbitrage. One Tuesday the cafeteria staff arrived to find every table crowded with water cups—hundreds of translucent barriers that forced students into a single-file maze. Another time he spread a rumor that the state civics exam required a hand-written essay, watching classmates pull caffeine-fueled all-nighters before confessing, “Never mind, I must’ve misheard.” He measured success by panic induced, not damage inflicted; others got detention for checking phones during tests, but Dylan’s record stayed mostly clean, a phantom fingerprint behind the chaos. By graduation, his reputation hovered in no-man’s-land: too clever to pigeonhole, too restless to revere. Friends recalled “the guy who filled the lunchroom with water cups” or “the mod who banned Samsung shills at 3 a.m.” Teachers remembered a student who never missed the point, only the margins. High school merely proved the method; the world beyond Route 84 would test the scale.

Selling Thousands of Dollars of Weed In College and losing out on $100M

College was a different kind of hustle. At the University of Georgia, the social currency wasn't based on who you could out-argue on a forum, but on who knew your name at a frat party. Dylan arrived thinking he was the odd one out, the nerdy younger brother still shaking off the dust of Cairo. He was wrong. His older brother—the one who’d laughed as his friends stuffed him in a trash can in the high school hallway—was “legitimately one of the coolest people” on campus. He was the life of the party, radiating a “regular charisma” that parted crowds. Suddenly, doors opened. “Oh, you’re his brother,” people would say, handing him a red cup, “you gotta come do this or that.” The old dynamic inverted overnight. After years of sibling tension, Dylan found himself looking at his brother with a new kind of awe. He got super close to him, finally admitting what the rest of the world already knew: “wait a second—I’m the pansy. He’s the cool guy.”

This newfound social life had operational costs. The question was the same as it had been on RuneScape: how do you fund the lifestyle? The answer, as always, was arbitrage. It began simply, buying weed and selling it to friends. But campus-level dealing was inefficient, the margins too thin. The real opportunity, Dylan realized, wasn't in the local supply chain but in the digital one. He found the darknet. It was just another forum, a system with its own rules, its own language, and its own exploitable gaps. He started small, buying an ounce instead of a little bit, then scaled.

Soon, packages were arriving, and tens of thousands of dollars were flowing through anonymous Bitcoin wallets. It became a streamlined logistics operation run from a dorm room. The margins were “fantastic,” especially when he started making brownies, turning raw material into a high-value product. He could bake four sheets in a handful of hours, generating “crazy margins” that funded a life of free weed and bottomless party tabs for a widening circle of friends. The thrill wasn't just the money; it was the perfection of the system. Transactions grew from hundreds to “eight, nine thousand dollars” at a time. He was unknowingly sitting on a fortune, a digital wallet whose contents, if left untouched, would one day be worth “fifty, a hundred million dollars.”

But the system had a flaw he hadn't accounted for: his brother. The operation grew too loud, too risky. One day, the life of the party became the enforcer. His brother found out, saw the scale of it, and shut it down. He “kicked my ass and prevented me,” ending the three-month empire with the same finality he used to command a room. It was an act of brotherly protection, a debt repaid for all the years of high school torment. The Bitcoin was cashed out, the party was over, and a nine-figure ghost was left sleeping on the blockchain.

With the darknet venture dismantled, Dylan turned his focus to the final system he had to master: academia. College wasn't that hard; it was just another set of rules to navigate. He drifted through majors, collecting them not out of intellectual curiosity but as a form of strategic hedging. He chose Information Systems, Risk Management, and Analytics—all bullshit, but they were the four majors with the highest job placement rates at his school. He was simply gaming the odds, building a resume that would guarantee a soft landing in the world beyond Athens. He added a Legal Studies certificate just to slow things down, trying to prolong the fun, but the efficiency he'd honed on forums and in backroom deals was hard to switch off. He still graduated a semester early.

Bluffing His Way into a Six-Figure Job

The job hunt was the next logical conquest. After securing a good position, he kept interviewing, a habit born of restlessness. He treated salary negotiations like a bluffing game, tossing out “ridiculous salary demands” just to see who would flinch. Then, someone bit. A brokerage firm in Minnesota, a place he’d only seen on weather maps, met his number. The game was over; he had won. The prize was a plane ticket north.

He landed in a world of alien cold. He was a “rural southern Georgia boy” who had never lived in the snow, now transplanted to a state where blizzards could dump sixteen inches in a single day. The culture shock was absolute. He knew no one. The familiar codes of the South—the slow drawl, the easy nods, the shared understanding of humidity and football—were useless here. To connect, he fell back on a simplified version of himself, a caricature he could perform. He led with where he was from, leaning into the “country bumpkin things” that felt like the only authentic part of him left. He went ice fishing with strangers he’d just met, drilling holes in a frozen lake and staring into the dark water, trying to find an echo of the muddy riverbanks where he’d learned to fish as a child. It was “close enough,” a desperate attempt to map the new terrain with old landmarks.

The job was in insurance, structuring risk for a living, but his own life felt unstructured. The salary was good, the work abstract. Days were spent in a cubicle; nights were a void to be filled. The default setting for a young professional with a good paycheck and no attachments was simple: “oh, yeah, let’s just go party, let’s go drink.” It was a loop of happy hours and weekend benders, a functional numbness that passed for a life. He had successfully hacked his way into the American dream—a high-paying job, a downtown apartment—but it felt like someone else’s code. He was running a program he hadn’t written, and the first signs of a system crash were beginning to flicker on the screen.

The loop ran for years, a predictable rhythm of work-drink-repeat. The numbers on his spreadsheets were clean, the models elegant, but the work felt like arranging deck chairs on a ship he didn't care about. He was doing “fantastic” work, generating millions for the firm, but the rewards felt hollow, the bonuses just more fuel for a lifestyle that was beginning to feel like a cage. He had optimized his life for a specific outcome, and now that he’d achieved it, he found he didn't want it. The system was working perfectly; the user was not.

Then, in early 2020, the system crashed. A long-term relationship ended. His grandmother, the one who had brewed chai for the town sheriff back in Georgia, passed away. He flew to San Diego for the funeral, a fog of grief hanging over him.

Lost in Life After Making Millions

To clear his mind, he rented a bike and rode seventy miles, pedaling until his legs burned, crossing the border into Mexico and back in a single day of punishing sun and wind. He returned to Minnesota just as the world outside went quiet due to the Pandemic. Offices shuttered. The country held its breath.

His brother, now a doctor, called. “Why don’t you come here for like two, three weeks?” It was a lifeline. Dylan packed a bag and flew out, landing in a two-bedroom apartment governed by a new set of unwritten rules. His brother and his fiancée, both from traditional Indian families, navigated a delicate cohabitation. Dylan’s arrival complicated the dynamic. He and his brother, no longer bound by the easy camaraderie of college, began to “confront a lot.” His sister-in-law became the “chill mediator,” a calm center in a storm of fraternal tension.

Days bled together in a haze of shared meals and movie marathons. It was a fragile peace, easily broken. Fights erupted over “fucking stupid shit,” the kind of domestic friction that sharpens when there’s no escape. The angle of a knife cutting strawberries for the French toast he made every morning became a referendum on respect. He was running and working out, chasing a natural dopamine release, but it didn't fix the core problem: he was a guest in someone else's life, sleeping on the couch, generally not happy.

He started watching YouTube videos, scrolling through drone footage of landscapes so vast they seemed to mock the two-bedroom’s suffocating air. A national park. Then another. An idea began to form, a new system to build. “Why don’t I do that?” He ordered a truck tent, a drone, a GoPro. He was building an escape pod, piece by piece, from Amazon. He had a truck back in Minnesota, a relic of his rural Georgia identity. It was time to go home, grab the keys, and drive west, away from everything.

He flew back to Minnesota in late spring. The city was a tinderbox; the smoke from the Floyd riots still hung in the air, a ghost of the fires that had burned just weeks before. He found his apartment ransacked, half his belongings gone. There was no sense of violation, only a strange, clean break. He filed a renter's insurance claim—"hilarious for that reason," he’d later recall—and collected a check that felt like severance pay from a life he hadn't realized he'd quit. He grabbed what was left, threw it in the back of his truck, and pointed the hood west, toward the Badlands.

The road opened up. He drove with the windows down, listening to the random country music he grew up on, then switching to the alt-rock and R&B that had soundtracked college parties. He was a free particle, an identity in motion. At a diner in North Dakota, the waitress asked where he was from. When he said Minnesota, the men at the counter nodded knowingly. “You’re running away from the Floyd riots,” one said. It wasn’t a question. Dylan looked at them, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Yes, absolutely.” In that moment, he realized the power of the blank slate. He could be anyone. Out here, on the open road, he found he could just say whatever he wanted, and everyone’s going to vibe. It was magnificent.

He drove from one national park to the next, a nomad chasing sunsets. He hiked for miles, meeting other wanderers on the trails, talking for six, eight hours at a time with people he’d never see again. The solitude was a balm, the vastness of the American West a corrective to the cramped anxieties of the last few months. He was recalibrating, letting the silence and the scale of the landscape strip away the person he’d been.

The journey’s end came without warning. He was on a long hike in Glacier National Park, deep in the backcountry, when a grizzly bear stepped onto the path. It was three feet away, a wall of muscle and fur. The world went silent. The bear turned, looked at him, and for a long, still moment, he saw his life flat, a two-dimensional printout of a story that was about to be erased. He had his hand on the bear spray, his finger on the trigger, but he didn't use it. The bear held his gaze, then turned and ambled back into the trees. It was a primal audit, a sudden, terrifying encounter with a system he could not hack, a force he could not control. He stood there for a long time after it was gone, the adrenaline a cold fire in his veins. He turned around, walked back to his truck, and immediately did not hike anymore that season. He drove straight to Seattle.

He chilled in Seattle for a couple of months, letting the grizzly’s shadow recede. The road trip had cleansed him, but it hadn’t given him a destination. That came from a friend from college, an “indoors” type who had spent the lockdown staring at the same four walls Dylan had fled. “Yo,” the message came, “let’s go to like Argentina or Colombia.” It was a dare, a non sequitur that sounded like a plan. Dylan’s reply was immediate: “sure, let’s do it.” In late January of 2021, they flew south.

Stranded in Argentina After a Stolen Passport

It was a whole different chapter. Latin America unfolded before him, a vibrant, chaotic continent that felt a world away from the manicured anxieties of the U.S. He and his friend explored Latam, and soon Dylan was traveling with a girl he started dating. There were bilingual trivia nights, long bus rides through the Andes, and slow afternoons in coffee plantations. He began to learn Spanish, not from textbooks but from context, from necessity, from the rhythms of the street. He’d cheated his way through three languages in high school, but here, there were no answer keys. He had to listen, to fail, to try again. The Google Translate app was a crutch, but day by day, he found he needed it less.

He was a tourist, but he was also a student, absorbing the cultural syntax of a dozen different countries. He saw the natural beauties—the otherworldly green of the Cocora Valley, the raw power of Iguazu Falls, which he decided was the “most beautiful waterfall in the world,” a force of nature that made Niagara seem like a gift shop with a water feature. He was collecting experiences, building a new internal map of the world. But he was still himself, a systems thinker in a new environment. He noticed the unofficial exchange rates in Argentina, the gap between the pegged currency and the street value, and carried a thick wad of cash that shrank and swelled with the country’s precarious economy.

The travel was raw, uninsulated. He flew economy, stayed in cheap Airbnbs and shitty motels, and used the “Patel Motel Cartel” to get owner’s rates at the few chain hotels he could find. He was an employee of Hilton and Holiday Inn on paper, a ghost in the corporate machine, a status that granted him a few nights of clean sheets and reliable Wi-Fi. It was a life of “young passion, drive, desire, enjoyment,” a novel existence that hadn’t yet lost its shine.

But even the most beautiful road has its potholes. In the wine country of Argentina, his passport was stolen. His flight back to America was in two weeks. The only embassy was in Buenos Aires, a city he couldn’t fly to without an ID. He was stranded, a foreigner without proof of who he was. He had cash, but cash couldn’t buy him a plane ticket. There was only one way out: an eighteen-hour bus ride across the entire nation, a slow, rattling journey toward a bureaucratic solution, and another test of a system he couldn’t control.

For eighteen hours, Dylan was suspended between a past he couldn't prove and a future he couldn't access, the Argentinian landscape scrolling by like a corrupted video file. He was truly tired—not just of the driving, the flights, the constant motion, but of the friction of it all. The freedom of the road had started to feel like its own kind of confinement. He arrived in Buenos Aires, navigated the embassy's sterile corridors, and secured a temporary passport. The document felt like a parole slip. He was free to go, but the question was, where?

After Shedding Digital Anonymity a Semiconductor Giant Invites Him Inside

He kept traveling, but the nature of the journey had changed. The external exploration began to turn inward. In hostels from Bogotá to São Paulo, the laptop came out. While other backpackers traded stories over cheap beer, Dylan was downloading engineering textbooks, reading papers on semiconductor fabrication, and mapping the intricate supply chains that connected a silicon wafer in Taiwan to a gaming console in Ohio. His day-to-day was a study in contrasts: his body was in a new city every few weeks, but his mind was in the cleanrooms of ASML and the earnings calls of Tokyo Electron. He was still the kid from the motel night shift, finding freedom in the glow of a screen.

He started writing. At first, it was just for himself, an attempt to organize the torrent of information he was consuming. Then he started posting, anonymously, on forums—the old instinct. He’d explain the technical comparisons between different chipsets, break down a company's earnings report, or post a theory about a bottleneck in the supply chain. He wasn’t just an observer anymore; he was a participant. Random people would ask consulting things, DMing him with questions. He was building a reputation without a name, a ghost who knew his shit.

The anonymity began to feel like a constraint. He had a point of view, a conviction forged in thousands of hours of obsessive research. So he finally put his name on it. The blog became a public ledger of his thinking, a signal sent out into the void…

At some point, the void answered. In 2022, an email arrived. It was an invitation from Intel to attend their Vision conference, all expenses paid. It was a summons from the heart of the empire, a recognition from the very companies he’d been deconstructing from the outside. The anonymous moderator from the Joseph V. Stalin fan-site, the kid who’d shorted his Xbox sensor, the traveler who’d spent a year living out of a truck and a backpack, was being invited inside. He booked the flight. The wandering was over. The final frontier was about to begin.

The conference was a disorienting blend of corporate polish and hardcore engineering. He walked through halls of brushed steel and blue-lit logos, a world away from the dusty roads of Latam. He was an anomaly: a young, self-taught analyst in a sea of industry veterans. At first, he was just a “random kid.” He had a blog, a reputation in the digital ether, but in the physical world, he was a nobody. Some people were transactional, their eyes scanning his name badge for a recognizable logo and finding none. They’d turn away, their interest evaporating. “Oh, no, no, you’re nobody.”

But others were different. He found the true believers, the engineers who lived and breathed this stuff. He would ask interesting questions, not about market share, but about the exact intricacies of how a thing worked, why a specific material was chosen, what the real-world failure rate of a component was. No one ever asks with this much enthusiasm. He wasn't networking; he was learning, and his passion was a currency that opened doors the transactional types couldn't see. He’d talk to people for hours, absorbing decades of institutional knowledge in a single conversation.

The Intel conference was a revelation. He realized this was where the real information lived—not just in papers and earnings reports, but in the casual conversations in hallways, the arguments over coffee, the shared language of a tribe. He was hooked. He looked at the calendar of upcoming industry events and saw not a series of conferences, but a map. “Why don’t I go to this conference that’s like two weeks from now?” He didn't need an invitation. He’d just pay to go there.

So began the circuit. From 2022 to 2024, he was a man in perpetual motion, attending forty, then forty-five conferences a year. He went to the big trade shows, but also to the hyper-niche gatherings: a photoresist conference in Japan, where he learned about the photosensitive polymers that were the first step in a chip's long journey into being; an ML conference in Austin; a semiconductor materials symposium in Dresden. He became a familiar face, the young guy who was always there, always listening, always asking the right questions.

He was still living out of a suitcase, but his life had a new organizing principle. It wasn't about wandering anymore; it was about targeted immersion. He’d spend all week at a conference, talking to people, reading the papers, trying to understand the presentations, making contacts. His network grew organically, a web of sources and allies built on genuine curiosity. He was no longer just a blogger; he was becoming an institution of one, a human node in the global semiconductor network, a kid from a Georgia motel who now felt more at home in a Japanese convention center than anywhere else on earth.

The constant travel was a physical grind, but it sharpened his mind. He was cross-referencing insights from a trade show in Taiwan with a paper presented in Munich, connecting dots no one else had the vantage point to see. He was no longer just consuming information; he was synthesizing it, building a model of the industry in his head that was more comprehensive than any single company’s. The blog became a place to test his hypotheses, to put his integrated worldview out into the world and see if it held up under scrutiny. It did.

Consulting requests, which had once been a trickle, became a steady stream. Hedge funds, private equity firms, even the semiconductor companies themselves started reaching out. “Can we consult with you because you’re hosting intelligent things?” It was an inflection point. The obsession, which had been funded by savings and a frugal lifestyle, was now becoming a business. He was making money off it, but the money felt like a byproduct, a lagging indicator of the value he was creating.

He was a solo act, a one-man intelligence agency, but the workload was becoming unsustainable. He needed help. The first hire wasn't sourced from a university or a corporate rival; he was a guy on Discord, a digital ghost Dylan had known for ten years but had never met. He didn't even know his real name, just the handle that would pop in and out of channels, dropping incisive comments and then disappearing. The guy was in Singapore. Dylan sent him a message, a contract, a mission. The one-man shop became two.

The business began to transform. The consulting and paid reports were valuable, but they were services, limited by time and bandwidth. The real asset was the underlying data, the proprietary model of the industry he was building in real-time. He started building data sets, packaging his insights into a product that could be sold, scaled, and updated. By the end of 2022, the business truly flipped. The blog and consulting were the top of the funnel; the data was the engine. Ninety-five percent of the revenue was now from data and consulting on it.

He started hiring more people, pulling them from the same digital ether where he’d found his first employee. They were all over the world—Japan, Taiwan, France, Germany—a distributed team of obsessive nerds he’d met online or at conferences. Vetting was almost all vibes. He wasn’t looking for resumes; he was looking for a specific kind of high-agency passion, the same restless curiosity that had driven him. He’d talk to someone for thirty minutes, and if they were really smart and young, he’d offer them a job. The company grew to twenty-six people, a global network of analysts and engineers held together by Slack channels and a shared obsession. He had built the organization he’d always been looking for, a place where being terminally online was a prerequisite, not a pathology.

A Call from the Founder & CEO of Nvidia

The company scaled, and with it, Dylan’s role began to shift. He was no longer just the analyst-in-chief; he was the CEO, a manager of people and payroll. He started not even working directly with all the people that he’d hired. It was a strange, disembodying feeling. For the first time, he didn’t need to know every single thing about the entire supply chain, top to bottom. He still tried to, driven by the old passion, but the operational reality was that other people could help. He didn't need to go to every single conference, read every single paper, make every single contact. He had built a machine, and now his job was to keep it running.

The top line grew, hitting twenty million, a number that felt both abstract and seismic. The money was real, but it was also a distraction from the work itself. The real measure of success wasn't the revenue; it was the access. He was no longer just a conference attendee; he was a sought-after voice, a name that appeared on the call sheets of the most powerful people in the industry.

He got a call from Jensen Huang. That meeting, with the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, was scheduled for fifteen minutes; it went for an hour. He walked into the room and saw the man whose keynotes he’d deconstructed, whose strategic pivots he’d analyzed from afar. And Jensen knew his work, knew exactly what he did. It was a surreal moment of reciprocity, a closing of the loop that had started a decade earlier with a broken Xbox and a desperate search on an anonymous forum.

The interactions with the titans of the industry became more frequent, more direct. Andy Bechtolsheim, the legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who hadn't had a clue who he was the first two times they’d met, now recognized him at conferences, a familiar face bouncing around the circuit. He’d reply to newsletter blasts, sending back two, five paragraphs on why he thought a specific analysis was wrong. It was amazing, surreal to see billionaires actually care what you have to say, or rather what you have figured out.

The viewership of the newsletter, the public face of the company, grew to 200,000, but that was just the top of the funnel, less than five percent of the revenue. The real influence was quieter, more targeted. The memos they produced for clients were distributed through whole companies, their data products used by every major hyperscaler, AI lab, and private equity firm. He was no longer just commenting on the industry; he was shaping its understanding of itself.

But with influence came a new kind of vertigo. He still felt the sting of imposter syndrome. He’d be on a call, advising a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and a voice in the back of his head would whisper, why do you care about my opinion? Like you’re new. It was a constant battle to reconcile the kid who had started posting non-anonymously in 2020, without ever having stepped foot in a factory, with the man who now held the attention of the people who built them. But he had the right advice because he had a different viewpoint and vantage. The imposter syndrome was real, but also, whatever. You got to do it to learn.

Remembering the Code

The nomadic years were over. After being homeless for four years, a ghost in airport lounges and hotel lobbies, he finally landed. In early 2023, he officially moved to the Bay Area, a place he had long orbited but never inhabited. The move was a concession to gravity, a recognition that even a distributed company has a center of mass. He found an apartment, bought furniture, and for the first time since leaving Georgia, began the slow, unfamiliar work of building a community.

He started to host things, turning his apartment into a salon for the disparate souls he was collecting. He was an engineer of social situations, mixing friend groups with the same strategic intuition he applied to market analysis. This person should meet this person; they’d hit it off. He brought together artists and semiconductor analysts, VCs and philosophers, building bridges between the Bay Area’s various monocultures. The friend groups were so different, a deliberate curation of interests and perspectives. He found that if you can make a lot of different friend groups, and they have different interests and stuff, that’s really cool.

Life, which had been a series of obsessive, three-month deep dives into hobbies like glass blowing and beekeeping, became a more diffuse exploration. He started taking cooking classes, a nod to the culinary traditions he’d encountered on his travels, but cooking for yourself sucks. He found more joy in cooking for other people, turning a solitary act into a communal one.

His favorite days were the ones without a plan. He’d show up at Dolores Park, hang out with one group of friends, then drift to Alamo Square to meet another. A walk to a coffee shop would turn into lunch at another park, which would lead to a long, meandering journey to the beach as the fog rolled in. He would start the day with one group and end it with another, part of an amorphous blob that just kept going. It was the physical manifestation of the serendipity he had always chased online, a real-world network effect.

He was happy, a state that felt as novel and fragile as his new apartment. The constant motion had been a hedge against a feeling of meaninglessness, a way to outrun the solitary confinement of a life that hadn’t felt like his own. He no longer felt that lack of belonging in the world. He was doing something he loved, surrounded by people he loved, learning and spreading knowledge.

But a new tension emerged. He was now an authority figure on certain topics, and with that came an assumption that his life was as meticulously planned as his analysis. People would meet him and see the public persona—the sharp, decisive founder—and not the man who was still just winging it. He wished everyone kind of recognized that about each other. There was an intentionality to his life now, a clarity of purpose, but it was built on a foundation of throwing yourself out there, of letting things happen, of pivoting quickly when the world presented a new path.

That path often led back to the place where it all began. The story of Jerome Smiley, the town sheriff from Cairo, became a kind of internal compass, a reminder of a world built on something other than data and market dynamics. The beauty of this man was a positive force on his life, a foundational memory he returned to again and again. Cairo wasn't just a dot on a map; it was a complex ecosystem of race, history, and surprising alliances. The town’s demographics, its high fertility of land, its deep roots in the legacy of American slavery—all of it was baggage, a historical weight that shaped the present.

Into this world had come his family, outsiders who learned to integrate by showing up. His dad’s friendship with Jerome was a testament to that, a bond forged over daily cups of chai brewed by his grandmother, who spoke no English, while Jerome spoke no Gujarati. Dylan, as a boy, had been the mediator, translating the simple requests and quiet conversations between two men from entirely different worlds.

Jerome had become a second father, a presence as steady as the Georgia pines. He had invited them to his family’s Thanksgiving, taken them to fish, and even disciplined him with a slap once when he was fucking around with a knife. It was a different kind of authority from his father’s, a different kind of love. It was Jerome who had taught him the redneck life stuff, the practical wisdom of the rural South, but also the deeper, Judeo-Christian morals of doing things right.

When his father spoke at Jerome's funeral, he talked about how Jerome was always about doing it right, rather than cheap—a quiet rebuke to the Gujarati reputation for thrift. He recalled the time they had taken Jerome to India, to their rural village, where the six-foot-five Black man had been a figure of awe and wonder. He had wanted to give money to every person who approached him, his principled, God-fearing heart breaking at a level of poverty he had never seen. It had fallen to Dylan to explain that there were better ways to help, that good intentions weren't always enough. He was teaching the man who had taught him so much, flipping the script, showing him how the world worked elsewhere.

The memory was a touchstone, a reminder that the most important systems are human. It was the story he told himself when trying to make sense of his own improbable journey. It was a story of integration, of translation, of finding common ground in the most unlikely of places. It was the story of a Black sheriff and an Indian immigrant family, a small, quiet alliance against the weight of history, a lesson in how to build a life in a world you weren't born into.

The Pursuit Itself

The years of wandering had been a search for solace, a long, solitary journey to figure himself out. It wasn't about meditation or navel-gazing; it was about understanding how he worked, what he was good at, how to leverage that without becoming overzealous. He’d made many mistakes, moved too fast, said too much, and left a trail of unintended consequences in his wake—with family, friends, relationships, business. The solitude was a dopamine diet, a way to strip away the external noise and understand his own reactions, to learn the architecture of his own mind.

He was learning how to enable different parts of himself, to nurture the creative thinker who could see the patterns no one else did. The solace was the foundation; the serendipity was the structure built upon it. It was about letting things happen, about staying open to the unexpected turn, the random encounter, the sudden insight, and then pivoting quickly, acting on it with the full force of the moment.

He'd had revelations on his travels, moments he called a strike of creative brilliance. They weren't grand epiphanies, but small, sudden clicks of understanding. Oh, I just realized how this part of the supply chain works. This is why this technology works this way. This is why X, Y, Z company from a cultural perspective beats this company. It was the thrill of the model in his head suddenly snapping into sharper focus, of a complex system revealing a hidden logic.

But the revelations were also personal. He’d be sitting in a cafe in a foreign city and a memory would surface of a person who was there for him at a difficult time, someone he’d lost touch with. He'd feel a sudden, urgent need to reconnect, to honor the importance of that bond. It's not that you lose contact with people all the time, but there are always revisits, moments when you realize you need to work more perfectly with your family, or your friends, or yourself. The key was to embrace that realization fully, to act on it right then, before the energy and feeling faded away.

That was the ethos he brought to his life in the Bay Area. He was still seeking knowledge, not for any end goal, but for the pursuit of doing it itself. He would still get obsessed with something because he wanted to do that, to learn about it, to know. The business, the money, the fulfillment—that could come afterwards. It was fine. The real joy was in the moment of actually doing it, the pure, unadulterated act of figuring something out. It was a philosophy honed in the quiet of a motel lobby, tested on the open road, and now practiced in the heart of the tech world, a quiet rebellion against a culture obsessed with outcomes, a relentless focus on the process, the journey, the endless, beautiful work of understanding.

Spenser Skates' story begins in 1988. Growing up in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, his world was a blend of academic rigor and diverse cultural influences. His mother, from the small Malaysian island of Penang, and his father, from the isolated city of Perth, Australia, met as academics in Boston. Both biostatisticians, they instilled in Spenser a deep appreciation for the power of mathematics and data in understanding the world, particularly in the realm of cancer research.

Skates' mother actively encouraged him to explore the arts and humanities, steering him away from a singular focus on math and science. He attended a bilingual immersion elementary school, Amigos, where classes were taught in both English and Spanish. "I was the only Asian or half Asian kid in the school," Skates recalls. "So it was a very different sort of environment." While he admits to struggling with languages, he now appreciates the exposure to different cultures it provided.

His family’s roots meant annual trips to either Malaysia or Australia. In Malaysia, he was immersed in a vibrant, food-centric culture. In Australia, the vast, open landscapes of his father's homeland offered a different kind of education. "My dad grew up surfing," Skates says. "And so we'd always go surfing in different places in Australia." These trips to his grandparents' beach house in Margaret River are where a young Skates first learned to ride the waves. These trips offered a different kind of education, one of patience and respect for powerful, unpredictable forces.

Skates' aptitude for technology was undeniable from a young age. At 16, he saw an opportunity. He sat down at his computer to design a simple flyer. In bold text, it advertised "Computer Help," a clear promise to his Cambridge neighbors. He printed stacks of them himself and then hit the pavement, literally going door-to-door.

He would walk to meet folks at their homes, a friendly and capable teenager, and patiently listen to their frustrations with frozen screens and jammed printers. He wasn't just a technician; he was an upstanding kid providing a valuable service.

Spenser charged his customers $30 an hour. A strategic and significant undercut of the then $100 per hour Geek Squad. This early foray into business taught him invaluable lessons. The technical problem-solving was the easy part. The real challenge, and the real thrill, was in getting the word out, building a customer base, and delivering a service that people were happy to pay for.

The Crucible of MIT: Forging a Founder

Skates' path to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was not a foregone conclusion. By his own admission, he wasn't even in the top 10% of his high school class, a key predictor for admission to elite universities. He attributes his acceptance to a "fluke," perhaps a memorable mention of his two years on the rowing team in his application. "You're the guy who did crew," the admissions director later recalled to him.

At MIT, Skates initially pursued a degree in bioengineering, a nod to his parents' academic world. He envisioned a future in biology research, contributing to the discovery of cures for diseases. However, the allure of programming, with its immediate feedback loops and creative potential, proved irresistible. While biology experiments take weeks to yield results, coding offers instant gratification. "You write the thing… and see a website change in seconds," he explains.

This passion led him to the BattleCode competition, an AI programming contest that would become a life-altering experience. For Skates, this wasn't just another club or extracurricular. It was a battle against a gnawing internal narrative of being "medium." He had floated through many activities throughout his life, being good but never great, and yet a quiet resolve had hardened into a fierce determination. His internal monologue was clear: I have to win this. I'm tired of being middle of the pack. I'm going to win.

He shifted from participant to leader, actively recruiting the most talented people he knew. This wasn't just about coding; it was about team building and inspiration. He bought a whiteboard for his dorm room, a physical manifestation of his commitment, and cleared his entire schedule. The outside world faded away. His life became a singular loop: wake up, code from 10 a.m. to midnight, sleep, and repeat. He was fueling himself with the desire to finally prove to himself that he could be the best. The eventual first-place victory was more than a trophy; it was a release of his self-perceived mediocrity. It was the moment he tasted what it felt like to compete at the highest level and win.

The Wilderness: A Starcraft-Fueled Struggle

After a brief, lucrative stint as an algorithmic trader at DRW Trading Group, Skates' entrepreneurial itch became impossible to ignore. He left the high-paying job and moved to San Francisco, but success didn’t come right away. At first, things began to fall apart. He knew few people, and his friend and future co-founder, Curtis Liu, was still working a stable job at Google.

Spenser entered a kind of drift—no clear direction, no obvious path forward. His daily routine sank into a disorienting pattern. He would wake up around noon, his circadian rhythm a mess, and immediately fire up his computer to play Starcraft 2 for hours on end. The strategic battles on the screen were a distraction from the lack of direction in his own life. Then, around 4 p.m., a jolt of anxiety would hit. Curtis would be home from Google around 5:30. "Man, I better show him I've actually worked on stuff," Skates would think, scrambling to make it look like he'd had a productive day.

For a frantic hour and a half, he would furiously code, trying to build something, anything, that looked cool. When Curtis walked in, Spenser would put on a show: "Hey, look what I'm doing, isn't this so cool? You need to work with me!" This desperate cycle—Starcraft, scramble, sell the dream—repeated day after day. His life wasn't fitting together the way he wanted, and the pressure to convince Curtis to take the leap with him was immense. It was only through sheer persistence, and a breakthrough in focus, that he was able to pull himself out of this lull and finally convince Liu to join him.

The Sonalight Pivot and the Genesis of Amplitude

Together, they launched Sonalight, a voice recognition startup with a genuinely clever idea: a hands-free way to text while driving. The concept was ahead of its time, and they were accepted into Y Combinator. At Demo Day, their presentation struck a chord, they secured seed capital and their app was downloaded 500,000 times.

But inside their office, a different story was unfolding. The founders were hunched over their computers, grinding day and night. While the downloads were impressive, the user engagement data told a grim tale. People were using the app once and then abandoning it. The technology, they realized, wasn't yet good enough to create a truly sticky product.

The real breakthrough came not from their primary product, but from a tool they had built out of necessity. To get the insights they needed, they had spent countless hours—perhaps half their total time—engineering their own custom analytics platform. One day, sitting in their office, the realization struck them with the force of a revelation. They looked at the sophisticated dashboard displaying their user data. They were spending nearly all their time there. Other YC teams kept asking how they were coming up with these insights. The analytics tool wasn't a side project; it was the most valuable thing they had built. They could sell this. There were tons of companies that needed this. This was the "99th percentile idea" they had been searching for. In 2012, they made the difficult but necessary decision to shut down Sonalight and pivot to what would become Amplitude. They were soon joined by their third co-founder, Jeffrey Wang, a talented computer scientist from Stanford.

The "Ultimate Founder" Transformation

The early days of Amplitude were a testament to the founders' grit and their commitment to learning from their past mistakes. Haunted by their experience with Sonalight, they made a pact to speak with at least 30 potential customers before writing a single line of code for their new venture. This customer-centric approach became a cornerstone of Amplitude's philosophy.

Skates, the engineer, had to transform himself into a salesman. This didn't come naturally. He sought out the legendary Silicon Valley sales coach, Mitch Morando, who agreed to work with them one day a week. The training was brutal. “He (Mitch) would just beat me up every week," Skates recalled, relentlessly pushing him to learn the fundamentals of selling, qualifying leads, and truly understanding customer pain points. It was an uncomfortable but essential metamorphosis.

A memorable moment in Spenser's journey came from Sam Altman, then the president of Y Combinator. After a grueling nine-month sprint that saw Amplitude go from zero to a million dollars in annual recurring revenue, Skates was completely burnt out. He emailed the YC partners, explaining he wanted to push off fundraising until after the new year to recharge. Sam Altman’s response was immediate: "We got to go talk about this."

They met for dinner, and after Skates laid out his reasonable-sounding arguments for waiting, Altman looked him in the eye and delivered the tough love he needed. "Spenser, stop being pussy. Go raise now," he said bluntly. The shock and directness of the comment galvanized Skates. He went out to raise immediately, and the round was a resounding success, officially closing on New Year's Eve.

This was just one of many lessons in what Skates calls his deliberate journey to become the "ultimate founder." Early on, he read a book called Talent is Overrated, which was deeply influential. It referenced a famous Harvard study detailing the habits of world-class performers. The study identified three key elements for success: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, expert coaching, and enthusiastic family support. Skates decided to reverse-engineer this framework, consciously structuring his entire life to meet these criteria, dedicating himself to the company and making immense personal sacrifices along the way. "I've been very deliberate about sculpting my entire life to allow me to build this company," he says.

Scaling the Summit: The Road to IPO

As Amplitude grew, so did the challenges. Skates had to evolve from a hands-on founder to a leader capable of scaling a large organization. This meant hiring an executive team and empowering them to lead. It was a disorienting experience for a founder who was used to being the best at everything. "As an entrepreneur, particularly a first-time entrepreneur, you're not going to be familiar with how to scale an organization," he admits.

He learned to trust his team, to embrace the discomfort of having people on his team who were more skilled than him in their respective domains. He fostered a culture of ownership, humility, and a growth mindset, values that continue to define Amplitude today.

The culmination of this decade-long journey came in 2021, when Amplitude went public via a direct listing on the Nasdaq. Skates chose a direct listing over a traditional IPO, a decision that reflected his commitment to his shareholders and his belief in a more equitable and transparent process. The move was a success, with the company's valuation soaring on its first day of trading.

For Skates, the IPO was not a finish line, but a milestone. "This was not just a step," he emphasizes. "This was just a tool." He remains as driven as ever, motivated by the vast, untapped potential of digital analytics. "We're still in the early stages of what digital analytics can do for the world," he says.

From the surf breaks of Australia to the trading floors of the Nasdaq, Spenser Skates' journey has been anything but conventional. It is a story of a founder who was willing to abandon a "pretty good" idea in pursuit of a great one, a leader who embraced his own limitations and relentlessly sought to improve, and an entrepreneur who understood that the ultimate product is not the software, but the company itself. His is a story that is still being written, a testament to the enduring power of perseverance, intellectual curiosity, and the unwavering belief that with the right data, you can change the world.

Artifacts:

Call Your Shot

The arc of Brian Distelburger’s story is underscored by an unwavering commitment to doing whatever he wanted to do, on his terms and timeline. It starts with his grandfather, who got his start in entrepreneurship after fleeing Nazi Germany around the start of World War II and settling in Rockland County to start a dairy farm.

Rockland is just far enough north of NYC that the skyline disappeared, but close enough to feel its gravitational pull. A quiet, working-class, commuter-heavy patch of suburbia, more edge-of-the-city rural than upstate pastoral.

In a town called New City, Brian Distelburger grew up on a dairy farm doing “real, hard work” with his distinct NYC bravado: gritty with stubborn, relentless clarity. Amongst his cows and amidst the heyday of the Internet boom, his formative years were defined by a deep, profound urge to build anything that would make money, especially if its on the cutting edge of technology.

While tending to a farm doesn't directly prepare for building a software business, Brian developed a tolerance for quiet, rhythmic, unforgiving work on this farm. It’s the type of work where brutal consistency and obsessive attention to detail are required, and results compound over time.

In the throes of the laborious work, he craved to do something to meet the scale of his ambition. So, in a very Babe Ruth-like manner, he called his shot. At 16, he pointed his bat, vowing to one day build a technology company in New York City.

That was his life’s purpose: 1) build a technology company, 2) in NYC.

He later admitted it sounded “bizarre” at the time. Strange, even. While the tech world was racing west, toward scrappy Palo Alto garages and flashy VC dinners in Menlo Park, Brian was pulled in the opposite direction toward the pulse of something more home to him.

“I always knew I wanted to build in New York,” he defiantly said, contrarian for his time.

Growing Up

A self-proclaimed “oddball,” Brian had a penchant for tinkering with anything that could make him money. His personal ambitions began with a landscaping business, then evolved into buying and selling motorcycles near Cornell’s campus. He founded a motorcycle shop with a few of his buddies, called Ithaca Motorcycle Works, where he received a crash course on everything from starting a real business to co-founder dynamics to customer success.

That later led to building an online storefront for a Ducati dealership, sparking a rebellious urge to leave everything and do a cannonball run on his motorcycle toward the Darien Gap on the border Panama and Colombia, without telling his parents. Dreaming about driving through 80 miles of dense jungle, Brian let it rip. He bought an almost-wrecked BMW motorcycle and rode it around the country for three months. The further he went, the more he yearned for the journey, crossing into Mexico in September 2001.

Like many New York and New Jersey kids, his plans had to pivot after 9/11. New York was calling his name once again, spurring Brian to rush back as fast as he could to get back home. Upon some deep reflection, his commitment to building a tech company in the City compelled him to join Traffix, a small publicly traded advertising and digital marketing company.

In his words, the kindest thing anyone has done for Brian was to tolerate him, specifically his parents, during his childhood.

His parents embodied the notion of ruling with an iron stomach vs. iron fist — they were willing to give freedom to explore and make mistakes, no matter the circumstances.

“[Despite] terrible attendance in school, [riding] a motorcycle around the country for three months without telling them, and a bunch of other stuff, I think it was an incredibly kind thing that they were able to tolerate a lot of that [and] give me the freedom to explore and make mistakes and figure a bunch of things out for myself, which I think is one of the better gifts a parent can give a child.”

Brian’s Way

Long before he built a company, wrote a line of code, or even made it to NYC, Brian spent his freshman year of college in Israel through a study abroad program, somehow graduating despite being deemed, quite literally, the student with the lowest attendance rate in the school’s history.

“I had the lowest attendance rate in the history of the school. Kids with better attendance rates than mine got thrown out, I was excited about [studying in Israel] because I thought it was an opportunity to really travel around the country and really learn that way, [not] sitting in Econ 101.”

How is that even possible? Well, he simply approached the guy running this study abroad program and declared his intentions painfully direct:

“I was like, ‘Look, I want to travel and enjoy the country and experience it, not like sit in class. I’m not going to go to class. I’ll show up and take the test. I’ll pass everything. But I’m not going to be sitting in class. If that’s not going to work for you, I can leave now.’”

Brian was not bluffing, but he also never misled his teachers. He set expectations right from the start. His offer was accepted, and the rest is history.

During his undergraduate years at Cornell, the theme continued. Brian grew tired of the seemingly useless curricula he was forced to engage with. He yearned to capture even just a sliver of the internet and the collective energy around it, to be on the edge of what’s technologically possible.

“Nothing that was being taught in school had anything really to do with the internet,” he recalled. “It was this emerging thing, and it was overwhelmingly obvious to me that that’s what I wanted to be doing.”

So, he said ‘screw it.’ Brian discovered that no one checked IDs in the MBA building and took advantage of that opportunity to sneak into graduate management classes, where entrepreneurs like Bill Trenchard, now of First Round Capital, gave guest lectures about building internet companies from scratch and selling startups to companies like Microsoft and others.

“That was the only place where anything remotely interesting was happening,” he joked. Brian went so far as to declare a General Studies major, a loophole that allowed him to skip required courses and build his own learning plan. Unorthodox, yes, but entirely intentional to chart his own path.

In a very Sinatra fashion, he did it all his way. Brian’s Way.

The GymTicket Era

As an early 20s new grad, Brian made it to NYC to fulfill his childhood dreams, leading a company called Traffix.

The NYC startup arena was a barren landscape, but its early inklings were present. Etsy was getting off the ground, Tumblr was going viral, and Kevin Ryan of Alleycorp was ripping companies left and right with Business Insider, MongoDB, and Gilt Groupe.

Working his way up from low-level operations to running the database marketing team at Traffix, Brian found himself leading a team of 30+ as a 23-year-old and commanding about 80% of the company’s revenue. With a golden opportunity to run a department as a young person, Brian parlayed his seniority to work closely with the company’s leadership, leading him to meet two of his future co-founders, Jay Greenwald and Howard Lerman.

With Jay, Brian started his first large-scale company, specifically a privacy protection software startup, where he would buy security software licenses such as Norton Antivirus and Webroot at wholesale prices, bundle them, and sell them to consumers on a monthly subscription basis. He scaled this business to $20M of revenue in three years.

With Howard, he founded GymTicket, a company selling customer leads to gyms. They functioned as an aggregator of consumers seeking gym memberships, while also serving as an online media buyer for the industry.

Brian did everything right. He knew how to buy the media, drive the traffic, get them to convert, and bring gyms online. He had real momentum until it all blew up due to one unforeseen, overlooked potential disaster.

Most gyms did not have wifi.

Naturally, consumers would sign up on GymTicket, and immediately go to the gym wanting to get their first workout in, while the gym front desk had no clue who they were. Much to Brian’s chagrin, being a founder operating on the edge of technology, GymTicket had to humbly revert to using fax machines.

The fax machine breakthrough brought them to over 4,000 gyms, driving traffic to them on a performance basis at a third of the industry average. The team copied that playbook across veterinarians and chiropractors, and auto repair shops, building a sophisticated model to figure out the best verticals to go after.

25 verticals later, they felt ready to brand the overall company. Yext was born (from a random name generator for 4 letter domains), and started with a bang.

Farmlands to IPO

From humble beginnings in a rented, one-room basement office in Columbus Circle rose a company that would raise over $120 million before its IPO and become one of the earliest glimmers of New York’s 2010s tech renaissance. Brian did it for himself, and his city.

One fateful day after a capital raise led by Sutter Hill, Distelburger brought his company to their third office, finally having the space to work alongside his 25 employees at the time. Yext was barreling through new offices, their third in two years. They were outgrowing their spaces at a invigorating rate. This new one brought a buffer for the team to expand without stepping on each others’ toes.

Their energy was high. The team felt great. They individually lugged their monitors and chairs from their last office as a moving company was too expensive for the scrappy startup. After their collective workout, they celebrated with a quick team lunch, squeezing into a small glass-walled conference room and eating takeout out of paper bags. Someone cracked a joke about an odd smell permeating the new office, and that’s when the light changed.

A yellowish hue suddenly filled the room. Out of the back window, the team saw flames and smoke bellowing up from the restaurant beneath them. In an instant, the Yext crew rushed out of the office as the fire department arrived.

“It’s always a good reminder,” Brian half jokingly said, “that just when you think everything’s all set, you may have flames shooting up in the floor underneath you.”

They survived. And they thrived. Conversations eventually turned from stretching runway to discussing when to go public. An IPO was an inevitability for Yext, about 10 years after its founding. They had amazing customers, a fantastic product, and were notoriously capital efficient. Upon crossing $100M ARR, the management team started to think about what the future held. Going public was just a step on the journey.

In early 2017, the moment finally came. Brian made it. More than a decade of calling his shot led him to this moment: IPOing his New York-based technology company.

“I remember having to get dressed nicely because you're going to like the stock exchange… there's like a big banner on the side of the New York Stock Exchange with your company's name and logo, and they do a great job with all of [the] pomp and circumstance… it was just honestly the coolest thing [to ring] the bell.”

Opening day had Brian feeling like he was “sort of floating through this whole crazy day” with his team. Trading began, confetti flew. The draped YEXT banner looked surreal: showing a scrappy SaaS company logo against the backdrop of a century-old institution. Surrounded by his long time friends and employees that surpassed the capacity allowed by the NYSE, Brian took in the moment second by second.

Back in the office by 11am that morning, he soaked it all in, reflected, and pinged his entire team to call up a bunch of their earliest customers to thank them for their resounding support. And then he partied. But, first came the customers.

“I told everyone that day to just call a bunch of our customers who were very early on the journey, just to thank them. I thought that was an important way to spend the day.”

Spirits high, Brian went headfirst into the first few years as a publicly traded company, seeing very high highs around 2018 and an unfortunate struggle during COVID. With a business entirely predicated on people visiting physical locations, Yext was heavily vulnerable to lockdowns.

COVID disruptions forced Yext to make a decision in light of customers cutting contracts and lost revenue. Brian chose the way of protecting his “extraordinary” employees.

“We made a choice at the early onset of COVID… we saw the business was heavily impacted… and we basically made the choice that we wanted to try to… we had an extraordinary team and we wanted to try to keep the team intact... Even though basically customers were cancelling and we couldn't really sell our product at the time… we tried to pivot our product strategy and our go-to-market… Long story short, that did not work… In hindsight, we couldn't bring ourselves to like lay off a ton of the company at the early onset of a global pandemic, and in hindsight that probably would have been the right thing to do.”

Brian admitted to making a core lapse in judgment during this time. He did not adapt quickly enough. After stabilizing the company upon lockdowns being lifted, there was massive leadership churn, which led to Brian moving out of an operating role and to a Board role, and then stepping down within a few months.

He did the job, and rode off into the sunset.

Broken Promises

After leaving Yext, Brian made a quiet promise to his family: no more companies. At least not for a while.

“In that few month period [after Yext], I promised my wife and everyone I know, [that] no matter what, I just won't start another company. [It is] definitely off the table,”

“Everyone who knows me well was like ‘okay, whatever. I don't believe you.”

His childhood goal of building a tech company in NYC did not just stop after Yext.

Seeing first hand that NYC was still second to Silicon Valley as a startup hub, Brian once again said ‘screw it’. He brought the ecosystem to him, starting and joining the Board of Tech:NYC, a nonprofit advocating for the tech community in the Greatest City in the World. Brian’s knack for programming his reality and morphing his surroundings into his way struck again in a big way.

But he couldn’t sit around idly without a company to build. An intense urge to get back to operating left Brian focusing his attention and energy on what would become Windmill.

The idea came from his Yext days, when he felt the strain of poor HR software that attempted to manage tens of thousands of people. He led thousands of people, yet had no effective tools to scale his people management. Most HR software, in his mind, are “giant flaming piles of garbage,” because it is built for HR teams, not for people. Obsessed with optimizing for talent density, Brian explains:

“How do we make sure we’ve got the right people on the team, in the right roles, working on the right stuff through all our stages of growth? I tried everything in the book, and all I could see was how we were falling short. The answer is, unfortunately, pretty simple. People are terrible managers.”

So he built what he wished he had: an AI-powered assistant for managers. Windmill creates systems for people management, such as weekly accomplishments, employee profiles, real-time feedback, and more.

“You end up with a team that's really focusing their energy and attention in the right way, you're reducing cycle times, and employees can have a better experience because they're actually doing meaningful work, [getting] help, feedback, and coaching.”

Rethinking decades-old management philosophies and systems is no joke. Easily almost every company in our economy worked that way, built upon trial, error, and mundane business textbooks.

But, one thing you can always bet on is that Brian will figure it out, Brian’s Way.

The Byers Bloodline

There were three core values that the Byers household rooted itself upon:

First, “a serious amount of humility”—that luck plays a large role in anyone’s life.

Second, “honesty”—especially in moments when it’s easy to lie.

Third, a “reverence for founders and entrepreneurs”—that the world continued moving because of them.

From his mother’s side, discipline and honesty were the roots. Her father was a military officer turned superintendent, running U.S. military academies as a lifelong educator. His world revolved around discipline, rules, and education, instilling in their household values of honesty and respect. And those roots showed in Shawn (Chad’s mother). She was, by neighborhood consensus, “the most personable person they’ve ever interacted with.”

From the other side of the family tree came a strong sense of humility and a reverence for entrepreneurs. Brook Byers—Chad’s father—grew up alongside two brothers, raised in 1950s Atlanta by their grandmother. Their mother had passed away when Brook was young, and their father worked long hours for a telco that would later be acquired by AT&T. Naturally, adolescent Brook leaned towards the outdoors. He’d spend a large amount of time running through the dense peach forests, enjoying the rush of trees blurring past. But luck was never really on his side. When he was 13, one off balance step sent him into an unseen low hanging branch, leaving him blind in one eye and a thick prescription to compensate. Classmates taunted him as “four eyes,” and Brook’s isolation continued to deepen. Slowly, a resolve took hold—

“I need to get out of here.”

In the early 70’s, after studying electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, he would find his escape out on the West Coast at Stanford Business School. In the Bay, luck would finally turn its way towards Brook, as he stumbled into Silicon Valley right when the Valley’s hardware revolution was taking root. Then by sheer accident, he became a biotech investor despite knowing “nothing related to biotech, healthcare, anything.” Climbing his way up the space, being “fully self-taught,” Brook would go on to found Kleiner Perkins, a Venture Capital firm which became a leading incubator in the biotech sector.

His brothers pursued careers in entrepreneurship too. One brother became a professor at Stanford, running the Mayfield Fellows program and nurturing the next generation of entrepreneurs. The other founded an engineering firm, leading it for fifty years and scaling to hundreds of employees.

A teacher, a builder, an investor—the three brothers took different lanes yet all shared this common theme, pushing each other and all believing “in this spirit of entrepreneurship.”

These were the stories Chad grew up around—and in a household where entrepreneurship “is the North Star,” Chad naturally found himself exploring the space too.

At six, he hawked crayon sketches and art class paintings to relatives. By eleven, he was scaling oak trees to snip mistletoe, tying up bundles with string before negotiating shelf space at the local town grocery store.

Then in his 8th grade, eBay had started to make rounds on the internet. Chad, fourteen, was “obsessed with collecting things,” from international money to Beanie Babies to “all sorts of stuff.” One lucrative hustle came when he began pre-ordering Beanie Babies by the carton through a summer-camp friend in China, then reselling them on eBay with a markup. One of the biggest hauls he got was of “these purple elephants,” the most prized variant at the time. Flipping the stock for five thousand, it left Chad with “all the money in the world” for a 14-year-old in the early 2000s.

But when the client received the package, Chad would be hit with a disappointing discovery. He was still young , and “didn’t know what counterfeiting was.” The client noticed the Beanie Babies were missing something on the tag, refunding the order and leaving Chad to ship them all back.

Luck would have UPS lose the package. But unbeknownst to Chad, his parents had put an insurance on the package. So UPS cut him a check for the supposed value of the goods, leaving Chad with the original five thousand he would’ve gotten if the Beanie Babies were real.

That small stroke of insured serendipity stitched the household truths into one lesson for young Chad: build boldly, respect luck, and operate with humility—because sometimes luck misplaces a package and bails you from a box of unsellable counterfeits.

The Beanie Babies reselling certified the Byers blood in Chad Byers, a bloodline that instilled Chad’s strong “pursuit of wanting to do things in the world and start things.”

The Byers Brothers

Being born and raised in the Bay with a father who had founded a venture fund, Chad was by no means driven by capital.

Instead, Chad’s drive came from his internal competitiveness. He grew up with an older brother—Blake—who would be his “best friend in life.” Blake was “absolutely brilliant”, going on to graduate early in bioengineering, attain a PhD from Stanford, start a longevity company, and invest as a general partner at Google Ventures.

Both Chad and Blake hated losing. Growing up together, there was a “serious amount of competitiveness” between the two—in “a healthy way,” they would find competition in anything they could. Though, because Blake didn’t play sports and Chad was “larger than him by age 11”, physical fighting “got very boring very quickly.” As a result, their primary way of competing as kids came through video games. From Starcraft to Warcraft to Dota 2, video games would be a hobby they “loved and still love” to this day—though Blake would always be “just slightly net better” than Chad.

But while they primarily competed against each other, the Byers brothers also teamed up in moments.

In the early 2000s, the narrative around kids using technology had already begun starting. Parents didn’t “love you spending 10 hours on a Saturday on a screen,” so as Chad and Blake spent extensively more time in their home computer lab, Mr. and Mrs. Byers would frequently intervene to stop the gaming sprees.

But being the “kind of kid who was building kit computers and stuff as a kid,” Blake would architect a work around. He went to Fry’s Electronics and bought the smallest camera he could find, setting it up to point down the hallway approaching the computer room. He lined the cable along the wall of their TV room and under the rug, before hooking it up to a screen under their gaming computers. Then, whenever their parents would go in to check on them, the brothers would see it on their screens, Alt+Tab to a Word doc, and pretend they were writing essays. With this scheme, the Byers brothers got away with spending the “majority of weekdays” gaming.

For the “absolutely brilliant” Blake, the intense gaming schedule posed no issues to his schoolwork. But Chad had trouble following along in class. Being scatterbrained from his ADD, he was a “terrible test taker” and “always preferred to work for stuff and build things”. He knew education was important, but he wanted to primarily enjoy his life and “meet great people”—and for Chad, his passion growing up “was sports and the outdoors.”

So combining the two passions, Chad decided to pursue being a park ranger.

University Days and Early Career

Jagged Flatiron Mountains watched over Boulder—a range of red sandstone giants catching the last light of day. In the summer, their slopes held on to snow long after the campus below had thawed. On the wide, green sprawl of Norlin Quad, students moved in currents: some hurrying to class, others stretched out in the grass with open textbooks and closed eyes, letting the sun press into their faces. The smell of pine hung in the air, cut through by the occasional gust of cold wind rolling down from the Rockies.

The University of Colorado in Boulder was a state school with, in 2005, a student body nearing thirty thousand students from “all over the country.” There were frat houses with American flags sagging on their porches, environmental science classes that took place ankle-deep in snow, and dorm rooms filled with the thrum of electronic music and the quiet glow of laptop screens.

Chad, looking “like a 12 year old kid,” was “pretty insecure and scared freshman year.” He didn’t rush a fraternity, but instead found a close group of five “really smart” friends who also enjoyed the outdoors. They spent their time mountain biking through the foothills, climbing with the CU Alpine Club, and carving the slopes of Eldora multiple times a week. They even built their own tracks, an experience “that was probably very different than the average person.”

Apart from being the “best place in the country to ski,” Chad was also drawn to CU by their strong environmental science program. Being near the Rockies, they had “all sorts of weird classes” in the field, with one requiring them to “catch squirrels in bags and tag their ears.”

It was an amazing experience for a “sports-loving, trying to figure out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do in the world kind of person,” and Chad loved every second of it. But a few years in, he realized that catching squirrels wasn’t fulfilling enough to become his career.

There was a small startup in Boulder called eSwarm, part of the early Web 2.0 buzz that hovered over across the country. eSwarm was “inverse Groupon before Groupon.” Users named a product and a target discount, then if enough strangers clicked “I’m in,” eSwarm bargained with the manufacturer to drop‑ship the bulk order.

Chad began working with them in senior year, caught up in the adrenaline inducing, fast-paced energy of an early stage startup. At eSwarm, he hustled and poured all his energy into the work. He was a “true coffee-getter [and] cold caller,” squeezing in hours at 7 am before his day of classes started until he eventually started skipping them entirely. It was an “incredible experience” for young Chad, giving him an opportunity to develop his sales and outreach skills as well as experience the culture of an early stage startup.

While Chad was still “intellectually interested in the outdoors and the environment,” he couldn’t let go of that taste he’d experienced at eSwarm. “Moving a number, seeing an output that’s real”—it was the same feeling he’d felt hawking mistletoe and Beanie Babies as a kid.

Chad began to feel a sense of clarity. He realized that, while ecology could always be a hobby for him, professionally—he wanted “to start a business.” And “to start a business that could be important and could be big”.

By the time he left Boulder, the boy who once looked twelve had developed a strong conviction that would lead him for decades.

After graduating in 2009, Chad went to mentors asking for career advice. They told him to “go get work experience,” and so Chad moved back to the Bay. Luck would favor him in San Francisco, as a new wave of Valley startups were beginning to form in the rebuilding after 2008’s financial crisis.

In what was “an amazing time to be in San Francisco,” Chad began working for a venture-backed company called Silver Spring Networks. They were “in the early clean tech 1.0 era,” building smart‑meter hardware and Zigbee‑based mesh networks that enabled utilities like PG&E to automatically poll every home’s electricity usage. It was “a really good company”—they built chips and access points in neighborhoods to pull data, going on to IPO a few years later.

But Chad realized—he “hated working for people.” He couldn’t “stand reporting to people” and “doing work just to please someone, even though it didn’t actually move the business forward.”

So in 2012, Chad quit. Then on a whim to explore and see new things, he packed the car up with all his belongings, embarking on a two month, 15 ski resort cross country road trip to New York City.

Nerd Glaze

Eight blocks from Times Square, on March 25th of 2013, studio floodlights lit up a stage as The Daily Show warmed up the crowd. Chad, freshly transplanted to New York, settled into the tiered seating with a few friends. Jon Stewart bantered with Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage about the perils of “binging on too much nerd content” before Stewart squinted at the camera, coining a phrase on a whim.

“That’s called nerd glaze.”

A pause. A grin.

“If someone doesn’t own nerdglaze.com, they should.”

Chad and his friends laughed in cue with the rest of the live audience. The moment was a hit, and would be brought up in conversation again later that evening as the group sat around a restaurant table waiting for their food. Laughing in recollection, they agreed “that part was really funny.” But a realization hit Chad. It was a fully taped show, and they “said a domain on TV—that’s really interesting.” Chad thumbed in the URL on his phone, and luck was waiting for him again.

“Affordable, Reliable Web Hosting Solutions”—the punch-line domain was unclaimed.

Chad bought the URL instantly. Mid-meal, with plates half finished, he “paid the dinner bill and rushed home” with his friend. Scrambling to their laptop, the pair cracked open WordPress and slapped Dinklage’s smirking face across their one-page site: “BIG THINGS COMING.” And with “no plan of what the thing was,” they set up an email submit bar with a call to action: “If you want to be involved, reach out.”

They stayed up that night as the page went live. Soon, the East-Coast airing ended. Then Central. Then Pacific. Google Analytics fluttered like a slot machine gone feral—“tens of thousands of email submits” flooded into their inbox until sunrise. They answered from nerdglaze@gmail.com (no time to wire up custom MX records), fielding pitches from would-be columnists, anime obsessives, and indie-game critics.

Within weeks, the site had grown into a “Reddit-ish Barstool Sports for nerd content.” Categories ranged from anime to movies to RPG mods to “all sorts of content,” and they drew in a decentralized bullpen of volunteer writers slugging out opinion columns and content posts. And whenever a headline went viral on Reddit, the traffic would crater their budget server’s capabilities, setting Chad on a mission to hastily learn the dependencies and attempt to fix the crash.

The project seeped into a full time grind of late nights with a small team of close friends. They worked “on stuff that was a blast,” binged all the content people would write, and learned how to grow a business. It was an invaluable learning experience which reinforced the idea of “jump[ing] on opportunities if you see them,” because entrepreneurial sparks could come anywhere—whether it be local mistletoe trees or an improvised joke from The Daily Show.

But less than a year in, the Nerd Glaze stint had begun “taking up way too much of [his] time.” Chad had already started Susa Ventures in November of the prior year, and realized that Susa was “clearly what [he wanted] to go work on.” So after evaluating a few deals, they sold Nerd Glaze to a Midwestern content farm, closing the journey but having gained lifelong skills and a sizable sum of money.

The Passion Behind Venture

At around the same time he started Nerd Glaze, Chad had begun angel investing—writing small checks to Boulder friends and early-stage founders he met around New York. Days blurred between scaling Nerd Glaze, attending TechCrunch Disrupt events, and cold-emailing established investors to “hustle [his] way into the New York tech ecosystem.”

New York’s early 2010s startup scene was intensely compact. For Chad, it felt like he “could truly meet everyone with a series of twenty emails.” Two of those emails would go to Chris Dixon (building Hunch) and David Tisch (running Techstars), where Chad asked “a bunch of just basic questions” from “How do you evaluate founders?” to “What made your winning investments succeed?”

Venture work and angel investing suited Chad’s instincts as well. Juggling multiple startups let him leverage his “ADD scatterbrain to handle whatever’s most important each day,” and it felt “amazing.”

Chad realized he loved “building the business of the fund—fundraising, people, culture, strategy”—as much as investing. And that clarity led to the founding of Susa Ventures at the end of 2013—a firm anchored in the three Byers family principles from his upbringing.

One—honesty. “You cannot just be a cheerleader.” Be “as honest as possible, even if it’s negative.” Over time, you will “build enough goodwill that people assume good intention.”

Two—humility. “Build everything with humility.” Because “entrepreneurs move the world, and VCs are the supporting cast.” Any success Susa has is “because of the entrepreneur, not because of Susa.”

Three—empathy. “Acknowledge the founder’s grind.” Because “they grind their life down; they grind their health down; they sacrifice social relationships.” To “do it at the very best—it is really hard.”

Those were the “three pillars [Chad] wanted to build a career on.” And venture capital, Chad realized, was the ultimate vessel for all three.

Susa Ventures

“Okay—we started a business. What’s my job?”

“My job is finding startups—I’m going to find startups.”

Chad scoured events and “lived on the internet,” leading him to Canva within the first year of Susa’s founding. The browser-based design tool “wasn’t as heavy-handed as Adobe” and “felt easier to use for the average user.” Despite that, it was still powerful—Chad could see applications in “hardcore real design” while simultaneously also in “making a menu for a dinner party.”

But the company was based in Australia, and Chad was “not going to fly down there.” So instead, he DM’d the founder—Melanie—on LinkedIn.

To Chad’s surprise, Melanie responded, thanking him for reaching out but informing that Canva wasn’t raising at the moment.

“Oh, great! She’s going to ping me when she raises—this job is super easy!”

But Melanie never followed up, as that’s “what happens when people get busy and have more options.” And as Canva grew into a $30 billion dollar decacorn, the lesson of that “hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar mistake” would only “get more brutal every year”:

“It is your responsibility. You have to do the follow-up—no one’s going to do it for you.”

Nevertheless, luck soon balanced the scales. One of Chad’s first VC meetings took him to Sand Hill Road where he met Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt. They pitched an unlicensed prototype—no live trading yet, but a UI starkly different from 2014’s cluttered finance apps. It was “by far and away, the most beautiful thing” Chad had ever seen in a mobile app.

And for a mid 20s Chad, Robinhood’s thesis hit home. Platforms like “E*TRADE, Interactive Brokers, and that wave 1.0 of online brokerages didn’t speak to [young people] as users,” so when Vlad and Baiju declared they would “change how this generation thinks about investing,” Chad backed them immediately.

What followed became a masterclass in focus. Robinhood’s founders vanished into execution—no press events, no conferences, no angel investing side quests. Just relentless iteration. They “truly just focused on company building.” And as such, they “built one of the most impressive companies of the decade”—one that Chad believes will be a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars “juggernaut of a business” and continue to “compound forever.”

Luck had once again favored Chad’s side, offering him a chance “to be part of Robinhood from the seed.”

Robinhood was an anomaly. In the 12 years of Susa since then, Chad would watch companies shatter. He’d see “founders break up and fall apart,” he’d see “fraud in a companies [and] portfolios,” and he’d see market dynamics and all these things that are “nothing to the fault of the team” collapse momentous companies within days.

Just as before, Chad’s three pillars would hold steady. He pushed forward with a strong sense of humility, knowing “you can only control what you can,” and that “there’s an incredible amount of things outside of your control.”

As Susa focuses on early stage, finding rare founders like Vlad and Baiju remains, in a way, Chad’s “entire goal in life.”

Motivations and Future Career

An early mentor of Chad had once told him—

“The reason to be the best in the world at something is not that you’re the best in the world at it. It’s that when you’re the best in the world at something, you interact with the people that are the best in the world at what they [each] do. And that’s what makes life so compelling.”

This philosophy crystallized in 2025 with Susa V—a $175 million seed-stage fund and one of the largest seed-only funds in the US. Amidst all the “buffet venture capital” that the world of “venture [was] obviously going,” Susa V had doubled down on specialization. He had dialed in on a niche—early stage—and was going “to try to be the best in the world at it.”

His purpose centered on three convictions. First came building the firm itself—“creating an environment where people can build careers” remained paramount. Second, backing exceptional founders—doing everything he can to “do right by them,” because it’s a “compounding thing that’s really powerful in the world.” Third, aligning capital with mission. When Susa V “switched the entire LP base to US-based nonprofits in education or healthcare,” it reflected Chad’s deepest motivations—including healthcare investments comprising 20-25% of Susa’s portfolio.

This healthcare focus actually traced back to his father, a profoundly private mentor who’d worked on treatments for the disease that claimed Chad’s grandmother. That legacy manifested through Chad in companies like Viz—a platform Susa backed at the seed. They would then grow to become the “leading platform in the U.S. for triaging stroke patients using CT scans,” being used by over a thousand hospitals in 2025 and “directionally saving lives.” It brought Chad “peak career happiness,” knowing that a product he supported changed the world in a material way.

Now, at 38 years of age, Chad approaches the next decades with a blend of conviction and intentional uncertainty. He firmly believes “you should always evolve yourself,” arguing that since “the market changes—you have to change with it.” For Chad, this philosophy stems from a core principle:

“Every person has a way to have max impact.”

And so the question Chad asks people is, “if you really interrogated your life today, do you actually think you’re on that path? And if you’re not, why are you not trying to change that?”

Chad emphasizes that the constantly changing state of the world demands adaptability. Hence, he doesn’t know for sure what his future might look like. Instead, Chad “decides what [he] should be doing—and if [he’s] on that path—every year.”

Regardless of what happens, though, three pillars remain non-negotiable for Chad.

One—he will continue investing in companies in the same way he does today—“primarily early stage.”

Two—he will persist in investing with people he admires, a practice central to his past 12 years.

And three—his focus will stay on technology, “because technology is [his] passion.”

Those three elements are his constants. Everything else of “other shapes and forms” remains “TBD,” because “the best firms and the best businesses all evolve” with the market.

The Man

Somewhere between mistletoe bundles and mesh networks, somewhere between the late-night WordPress binges and early-morning founder calls, there had always been a common undercurrent.

It’d started in childhood. His brother, Blake, was always a step ahead—from better grades to tighter Starcraft builds to longer patience in Dota. It wasn’t spite, but it fueled a rivalry that made Chad sharper, faster, and hungrier.

Most who feel that edge let go of it as they grow older. But Chad never did. He still feels it in board meetings, in reference calls; it’s there when a portfolio company wins and even more when one doesn’t. It makes him “miserable to play casual games with” and “probably comes from rooted insecurity I should talk to a therapist about.”

But it’s always been there, and if there was ever a book title that captured it all—the grind, the determination, the hunger beneath the humility—Chad Byers already knows what the title would be:

“I live to outcompete you.”

Take Ashby Avenue east out of Alta Bates Hospital, past the clamor of Berkeley’s campus and into the three yawning bores of the Caldecott Tunnel. The atmosphere shifts when you emerge on the other side of the Oakland Hills, away from the “cool, hipster side” of Berkeley and into the “WASPy, middle class, idyllic little neighborhoods and towns.” The fog shrinks away. The air dries out. The eucalyptus trees give away to manicured cul-de-sacs and backyard pools reflecting the California sun. This is where Kevin Hartz’s early stories were born—in “a town called Orinda.”

It was the early 1970s. Orinda had two private high schools and one public—Miramonte High. The town offered a picture-perfect “Americana childhood,” the kind where bikes lay scattered across trimmed lawns and front doors stayed unlocked. Most neighbors shared the same split-level architecture and the same Republican politics, though with the exception of one outlier—the Hartz family.

Kevin’s parents met at a Democratic Party function in San Francisco, and brought that political alignment across the Bay. In Orinda, they “were the one standout weird, strange liberals in town.” It wasn’t at all a divisive identity, but it would provide Kevin an avenue to develop his rebellious character, as his young engagement in local Democratic campaigns accustomed him to deviating from the norm. For what it’s worth, “if you were a Democrat in [1970s] Orinda, you were a rebel.”

For the Hartz family, deviating from the norm was a prevalent theme. In the mid to late 1970s, between Kevin’s first and fourth grade, the family left Orinda for a stint in Miami. His father had taken a job as general counsel for a regional bank—a benign-sounding position, except that this was the money-laundering, cocaine capital Miami of the late 70s. The family would later refer to it, half-jokingly, as their “sketchy Miami years.” Nothing happened of course (his dad “literally was a Boy Scout”), but the story wrote itself. A lawyer at a Miami bank in the middle of a cartel gold rush—“the fact set was just so suspicious.”

Miami, for an elementary school Kevin, was paradise. Days were spent “on the bike... or at the beach... or in the water.” There was a looseness to life there, unstructured and wide open. And something of that stayed with him when the family moved back to Orinda in 1980—something restless and eager.

It reemerged in the backyard, in demolitions that were both impressive feats of construction and concerning hobbies for a teenager to engage in. As a “pyromaniac” by his own words, he’d “make model boats, and so on, and put them in the pool and blow them up.”

“My dad would just be like, ‘What’s wrong with that kid?’”

But Kevin wasn’t content with simple explosions. He and his friends at Miramonte High started producing films, such as the stop-motion spectacle Murder in Smurf Land, where Smurfs were obliterated in “all sorts of ways.” Indeed, “it sounded like a very kind of violent and tormented childhood.” But maybe that was just what founders did back then, as “the [original] PayPal crew had all made bombs in high school too.”

By their senior year in 1987-1988, the Murder in Smurf Land group’s plots grew more sophisticated. As Miramonte High’s Senior Cut Day approached, the group—being in the student body leadership—decided to give it official sanction. They drafted a school-wide letter announcing a formal closure, citing a suspicious “specus” found in the walls. And with their access to student government documents, they forged signatures, printed official notices, and mailed the copies using the school’s own nonprofit postage.

The execution was perfect. Students stayed home and faculty “was left up in arms,” but the crew had one small oversight—the letter was too well-written to be believed by some members of administration. The forgery was caught, and Kevin faced five days of suspension on top of being barred from attending his school’s commencement ceremony. Though—that wasn’t nearly enough to deter his rebellious spirit. To Kevin, the “[experience] was good fun.”

Stanford Days and Meeting the PayPal Mafia

The autumn of 1988 Palo Alto brought a stable, cooler temperature compared to the Orindan extremes. Under sun-warmed terracotta roof tiles, sandstone arches beckoned toward Canary Island Palms that casted long shadows across the main quad. Most students scrambled to secure their status in the economics department, while a curious few explored computer science—a burgeoning major as Silicon Valley tech ambition grew alongside the IPOs of Apple, Microsoft, and other emerging giants.

But Kevin’s rebellious spirit brought him down a different route. He double majored in history and applied earth sciences—a rare, “N of one” pairing born from his ambitions to “save the environment and save the world.” And in a staunch continuation of his political involvement back in Orinda, he also ventured into Stanford’s ASSU Undergraduate Senate.

Kevin was still a freshman senator when he first crossed paths with Peter Thiel, an ambitious graduate senator with a “sharp eye for talent.” It was through that eye in which a student politics friend group coalesced: Peter, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, a handful of other soon-to-be “PayPal mafia” members, and Kevin—their “token liberal friend.”

But there was “no commercial orientation.” Just lofty ideals and the shared conviction to “make a positive impact on the world.” They debated topics like curriculum reform and Affirmative Action amidst the “first big push to change Western civilization,” and they took on internships in the Capitol through Stanford in Washington. The group was a close-knit, “heavy concentration of talent,” and they fed off each other in a way that would go on to produce revolutionary thinkers.

Outside the student senate chambers, Kevin’s pyromaniacal, thrill-seeking instincts were able to resurface in Greek Life. Spring quarter brought fraternity rush, and the fraternity houses staged what could only be described as “barbaric hazing.” Chaotic and relentlessly thrilling, Greek Life gave Kevin a necessary counterbalance to the structured form of student government—a way to continue feeding the rebellious and daring nature in him, though the brotherhood was definitely “more fun than [he’d] like to admit.”

Oxford and Early Career Exploration

In 1992, after four years of student politics and fraternity bonding, Kevin traveled across the Atlantic to study in the stone buildings and cobbled quads of Oxford. It was an “incredible, beautiful place” where the weight of history hung in the air. For Kevin, it was a return to principle—a chance to “delve a bit more into the history side of things,” because “what better place than in Oxford?” He attended University College (the same college that had taken in Bill Clinton during his Rhodes years), where he studied under renowned faculty and met extraordinary peers, including a future Supreme Court justice with whom he wished he stayed in better contact with.

Oxford gave Kevin time to reflect. But in 1993, after just a year abroad, he finished his Masters in History and came back to the states uncertain what to pursue next. It was “easy to take the LSATs and … apply to law school,” but he had also completed many premed requirements during his Stanford years.

Kevin took an interest in pursuing medical school, which led him to work “in this eye research lab … where we’d put them [Rhesus monkeys] in front of a screen and have them follow a dot.” They “effectively [had] a BCI—an electrode in their brains that [was] measuring … this area called the superior caliculi” (the part of the midbrain responsible for visual reflexes). And by “following this dot in a screen, you could coordinate it with the firing of these neurons and better understand the brain.”

But his lab research years were also important years of transition, both in his own life and in the wider world around him. It was 1994—everyone in the lab worked on Unix systems, and “the first web browser [Mosaic] had come out.” Names were beginning to float into conversation—Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark—as Kevin started to see his Stanford friends “go to these different companies [like] Netscape and Silicon Graphics.”

The Valley had begun its gravitational pull, and Kevin was no exception to this migration. As 1995 drew to a close, he joined Silicon Graphics as a product manager—a company that, at the time, was at the forefront of 3D graphics and visualization.

But Kevin’s ambitious spirit sought more. His curiosity wandered towards more thrilling ventures, and just after his second anniversary at Silicon Graphics, Kevin left the company to “meet up with a few friends from Stanford.” With this new team, Kevin would begin his journey into the start-up space.

A Quick Flip

The internet was rapidly growing in ‘97—about a third of homes owned a desktop, though mobile devices and laptops were still a business-class luxury. But even with a laptop, finding internet on the road was its own challenge. A business traveller checking into a hotel might be met with a dial-up desk phone and a coaxial TV with pay-per-view listings—and if there was internet access at all, it came through dial-up modems that whined with painfully slow connections, assuming you brought the right adapter.

High-speed internet was still something you found at university labs or corporate IT departments, not at a Marriott in downtown San Jose.

But the demand was growing. As office work grew faster, more connected, and more reliant on the web, the call traffic from business travelers began overloading hotels’ PBX systems. There was a gap in service and demand, and Kevin—with the Stanford friends he’d met up with—moved quickly.

They began “wiring up hotels with high-speed internet access” under the name “Connect Group.” Floor by floor, room by room, they installed Ethernet ports and ran cables behind the drywall. Guests could now plug in, access the internet without software installation or configuration, and get 50x the internet speed of traditional modems.

And in just a few months time, Lodgenet—a public, in-room entertainment company based out of Sioux Falls—offered an acquisition deal of 5 million in stock (almost 10 million dollars today).

In a clean, “quick flip,” Kevin had sold his first company. He’d gotten his first taste of how fast things moved in the tech startup world, and it left him “hungry” in the way only Silicon Valley can make a person hungry.

Kevin had finally found his passion in tech, and he would only become “further and further enamored” after taking on a Principal role at Outlook Ventures—a firm focused on early stage enterprise software startups. It offered a place to land after the rush of his first exit, where he could invest, observe, and plan for what came next. But the momentum wouldn’t last.

Founding Xoom and Lessons on Talent

In the Spring of 2000, the dot-com bubble burst. Startups frantically auctioned off ping-pong tables and ergonomic Aeron chairs, as reservation waitlists at fancy restaurants disappeared within days. Highway 101 traffic began to ease in the following months, and “the economy was in tatters.”

But the founders and engineers that were truly passionate about tech stayed. And one of those teams was PayPal.

A couple years earlier—during Kevin’s Connect Group days—Peter Thiel flew from New York back to Palo Alto, drawn by the startup heat in the Valley after his brief explorations in law and finance. He was no longer the graduate student senator with a “sharp eye for talent,” but an early-stage investor giving talks at Stanford and looking to claim his piece of the dot com gold rush.

In 1998, during one of Peter’s guest lectures on campus, a twenty-three year old recent UIUC graduate, Max Levchin, happened to be in the audience. The two “hit it off” almost immediately and, after rounding out their team with two other friends, built the first iterations of what would later become PayPal. It started with “smart tokens or VP … some kind of security over early mobile devices,” but evolved rapidly. They narrowed in on money transfers, rebranded to ‘PayPal’ the year after, and before long, it had become “very clear [they] were winning” the digital payments space.

Kevin had been watching closely. It was “always … [part of] a playbook to build adjunct to [winning companies]”—and so in August of 2001, Kevin left Outlook Ventures alongside his coworker Alan Braverman, sketching out the blueprints for what would become Xoom.

Less than a month passed before tragedy struck the nation. In an already “tattered economy” from the ongoing dot-bust, the nation fell into silence. Families mourned lost loved ones, and the economy halted as stock exchanges closed for several days. But Kevin could not be deterred. Alongside Alan, the two moved relentlessly, building “in the wake of 9/11” and becoming “the first developers on the PayPal API.” It was a gamble taken during a moment when the world felt unprecedentedly uncertain—though Kevin knew the one constant they could always rely on. Extraordinary talent. And in an effort to find the best talent possible, he turned to the legendary “talent wrangler”—Peterson Goodwyn Powell Conway VIII.

Peterson Conway had built a name for himself in the recruiting world through the “gift … in his character” and “his way of engaging great talent.” But seeing potential in Kevin and Alan, he “put his recruiting business on hold to become [Xoom’s] primary relationship-builder,” assembling talent for their early teams and flying internationally to establish partnerships with foreign money transmission networks. He was “a colorful character [who was] just a lot of fun to work with”—being unconventional, memorable, and “an amateur pilot … [who] also lands planes on freeways,” among “many other things.”

One of those things was the set of “clever tactics [he used] to really engage top talent and make it fun.”

Engineers “love things like airplanes,” so Peterson would “take them up in his Cessna [and] fly around” the California landscapes, or sometimes “down to Mojave to watch test launches [and] see things blow up”—a spectacle that Orindan Kevin certainly would’ve enjoyed. And during Peterson’s later time at Palantir, he would gamify the interview process by sending out “these embossed, fancy letters that said, ‘You’ve been selected as a top student at MIT’ or ‘top student at Harvard,’ ‘to have the right to [interview at Palantir]’.”

Kevin would later learn from other mentors as well, one notable one being Pierre Lamond. Contrasted to Peterson, Pierre was “hard-driving.” As a physicist from the semiconductor industry and a foundational partner at Sequoia, he was “very wise and … very engineering-centric,” leading unforgettable changes from his first day at Xoom. On that day, Pierre had instructed Kevin to “force rank the E-staff … on a whiteboard.” And when Kevin finished, Pierre “grabbed the pen, walked up, crossed off the bottom two, and said, ‘Fire those two.’”

It was “a revelation” for Kevin. While harsh by modern standards, it made intuitive sense to him: “If everything depends on talent, and you have someone [being the] lowest in there—it's something to really think about.”

Xoom grew steadily through these lessons and strategies, and in 2005, Kevin “moved out of [his] full-time role, relatively early in [Xoom’s] life.” By then, he’d already accrued enough wealth to retire both himself and his then fiance, Julia. But the Oridian restlessness was still there. It wasn’t “a money thing, or anything else” of the sort. There was just that hunger to “build things and do things with really bright people.” And so he would.

Eventbrite and Airbnb Rivalry

By now, the dot-com hangover had finally lifted enough for a new kind of optimism to emerge in the Valley. It was post-Web 2.0 online communities and user-generated everything—a belief that if Flickr could turn photos social, then anything could be turned social.

Kevin, immediately after leaving Xoom in 2005, carried his adventurous spirit two blocks south to a second-floor space that smelled of plywood and fresh drywall. In that shared San Francisco office which borne both wedding plans and wireframes, Kevin and his then fiance, Julia, sketched the blueprint for their “next big adventure.” They would bring in technical cofounder Renaud Visage, together building what would become Eventbrite.

It went against conventional wisdom—never start a business with your friend, let alone family. Even Kevin’s own parents’ who “have always loved each other their entire X number of years” could “never work together.” There was just a “different calculus” required for professional partnership, one that had to “kind of be tested out.”

But neither partner’s rebellious spirit would be deterred. They set up the guidepost—that if the venture ever strained their marriage, one “would step out or do something else.” And with that guardrail in place, they “kept going and going and going”—and against all odds, it “just kept working and working.”

A year passed, and it was clear the newly married Kevin and Julia complemented each other perfectly. They were both relentless, and they both understood that about each other. Day by day, the pair would match each other’s obsession—with Julia not even pausing in the delivery room, answering customer service emails until a worried nurse had to wrestle the laptop out of her hands.

Just down the street from Eventbrite, an industrial designer named Brian Chesky had just moved in. Because the Valley rent outpaced his savings, Brian began filling his space with air mattresses and subletting to short-term guests—a business that would soon turn into Airbnb.

In 2009, Kevin would take interest in the host-and-guest platform, investing during Airbnb’s Sequoia round after they came out of YC. And apart from just being two blocks away from each other, both Eventbrite and Airbnb were GMV-driven businesses with “similar formats” and “around the same net revenue,” inciting “these revenue wars” that challenged the two startups to outgrow one another.

Eventbrite would pull ahead for a moment later that year. But Airbnb had incredible network effects, and “as soon as those network effects took hold, the numbers on the Airbnb side just skyrocketed.” Eventbrite was still growing at a solid pace, but the Airbnb numbers were just “magical.” Kevin had lost the competition, feeling “depressed for about five minutes” before being “very happy” for the success of Brian and Airbnb.

But Kevin’s interest in promising ventures wasn’t limited to Airbnb. In 2010, he backed Pinterest at their seed after being introduced to Silbermann and Sciarra through Ed Baker—an “amazing growth person” from Facebook, Uber, and later Aura. Kevin had also known Uber’s founder Travis Kalanick since his Red Swoosh days, investing in Uber during their 2011 Series B.

By now, Kevin had established a legendary reputation for himself. From co-founding three highly successful companies to successfully betting on what became era-defining companies, Kevin had an undefeated intuition and an insatiable hunger to match. And with the ever growing network that followed, Kevin would institutionalize future investments into his fourth company—A*.

Investments and Sauron

In the modern venture landscape, where funds are being saturated with startups that parrot the “Peter Thiel competition is for losers” mantra but still dive into a Red Ocean, Kevin Hartz emphasizes collaboration—since “the sum is greater than the parts.”

He partnered with Godam and Bennett, more measured investors who balanced out Kevin’s “impulse to shoot from the hip.” Together, they formed A*, an early stage venture capital firm that stood out for being “a collaborative group.” And they approached partnership differently—rather than having a singular lead partner per deal, the entire A* team would work together “on all aspects of understanding the founders and [their] business.”

This collective immersion also meant more selectivity. A* was more “kind of snipers versus a bazooka,” backing ventures like Decagon’s AI customer service, WHOP’s creator tools, and Cape’s “cloaked cell phone,” which Kevin believes might be “the future of telecom infrastructure.”

But Sauron’s origins came differently. A mutual friend at Waymo introduced Kevin and Jack Abraham (from Atomic) to Vasu—a roboticist with a Zipline pedigree and PhD focused on self-driving cars. The three had seen “all this investment and work done in self-driving cars,” and wondered where else the tech could be applied.

The team would then come across a realization after an intruder broke into the Hartz house. Kevin and Julia had “two different systems installed—and neither detected this person.” It was only when the assailant tried to “push their way into the neighbor’s house,” that police came and swarmed the street. Kevin would then realize—that amid all the tech innovation of the 20s, “there’s been zero innovation” in the home security space since Ring. And so the Orindan serial entrepreneur, together with Vasu and Jack, co-founded his fifth and most recent company, Sauron.

Mentorship and Life Lessons

There was a common theme between each adventure—from wiring up hotels for Connect Group, building international money transfer networks at Xoom, or guiding early-stage startups with A*. No matter where he went, Kevin had always been drawn to “extraordinary people who [were doing] extraordinary new things.” He had learned it was “best not to be focused on a particular technology,” but instead to be “focused on people.”

Kevin’s people oriented mindset guided his investments too. When evaluating a “seed-stage company—especially first-time founders—they don’t have a rich history you can pattern match on.” So instead Kevin would ask them “about their families and their parents and their siblings—how competitive they are, how intellectually oriented they are.”

And there was a particular grit that Kevin would notice among founders who were first-generation immigrants. Traveling across borders and coming to the U.S., they had “overcome a lot of obstacles to do great things.” They had “this edge—this drive to want to win and work harder than everyone else.”

But then there were the “really extraordinary people” like Peter Thiel. He was not only “smarter than everyone at Stanford,” but also “had a different way of seeing the world”—the “added sort of X factor which makes him an N of one.”

Peter was one of many mentor figures to Kevin—with Peter’s “few words and insights” being “really impactful and incredible,” Roelof Botha serving on the board at Xoom and Eventbrite for more than a decade each, and Pierre Lamond teaching hard personnel decisions with a single whiteboard exercise.

These mentors guided Kevin throughout his career, helping him avoid common entrepreneurial pitfalls. The one regret Kevin did have, though, “revolved around not staying the course or enduring things for a longer period of time.” It was back in 2015, when Xoom’s billion-dollar sale to PayPal had seemed like “a great outcome” in the moment—but “fast forward ten years,” and the market “just kept getting bigger and bigger.” And now in 2025, Remitly and Wise—two small Xoom competitors who had “stayed in the game and kept compounding”—were now worth over a combined sixteen-and-a-half billion.

The Hartz Values

Throughout the countless ventures Kevin has embarked on, he’s noticed two common values which thread through them all. The two same values that he and Julia emphasize to both their kids and to every founder they back:

One—the drive to learn. The curiosity that pulled Kevin through a history and applied earth sciences double major at Stanford, a Masters in history at Oxford, and now cutting edge hardware at Sauron.

Two—the drive for adventure. The thrill-seeking restlessness of an Orindan teen blowing up model boats, and the dauntless entrepreneur traveling around the world, working with different partners for Xoom.

Those two, for Kevin Hartz, are “the family values that translate over to any founder."