i’ve been reverse-engineering the world since i was eight - melting pencil lead into makeshift lightbulbs using drill batteries I pulled from the garage. my experiments got more technical (and often more problematic) with time: tearing apart school computers for parts, jailbreaking iphones in elementary school for cash, a soldering iron-induced fire that almost took out my parents’ house, and arduino-based automation system that turned my room into something between a rube goldberg machine and a surveillance state. i was the kid who only raised his hand to fix the teacher's projector, and who spent more time in the computer lab than i did in class. my entire life, I’ve been a tinkerer and technologist.

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the tools have changed - no more solder flux all over my bedroom carpet or recurring ebay deliveries of drone ESCs - but the obsession hasn’t. i still believe, maybe more than ever, that technology is humanity’s most powerful lever for a healthier, happier, and more productive world.

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software is eating the world, but AI ate software

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i’ve always been drawn to things you can touch and take apart. hardware forces you to understand how the world actually works. the longer i’m in tech, the more i believe that great software only exists because great hardware allows it. every leap in ai, sensing, mobility, or interfaces sits on top of someone building a better physical layer.

 

AI and LLMs just make this more obvious. as models improve, software moats collapse. UIs get cloned instantly, entire apps can be rebuilt with a few sentences, and the cost of software trends toward zero. when anyone can recreate a product in minutes, the real defensibility shifts down the stack - to sensors, chips, power systems, materials, manufacturing, and everything built in atoms instead of pixels.

 

as everything around us gets more digital, the tangible starts to matter more, not less. devices that move, measure, lift, track, or change something in the real world feel like the shifts that actually push society forward. but tangible, not analog.

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the undeniable human

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here's something i keep coming back to... AI is getting scary good at the stuff we used to pay people a lot of money to do: analysis, writing, code, design, strategy. and it's only going to get better. so what's left?

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the stuff that makes you a person.

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i've built my career (and most of my life) on relationships that started with nothing. no ask, no agenda, just two people getting along. no matter how much automation, integration, or inference there is in the world, that feeling of a shared relationship is something that's inimitable.​

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think about the people you actually trust. it's almost always because you went through something together, or you've both been through something painful enough that you don't need to explain it, or there's some piece of who you are that just overlaps... where you grew up, what you believe, how you see the world. those things, that's what makes someone pick up the phone when your name pops up. and no model is going to figure out how to fake that (at least not any time soon).

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i think about this a lot because i'm watching it erode in real time. everyone's cold outreach sounds the same now. every deck looks the same. every newsletter reads the same. the tools got so good that the output got generic. and when everything is generic, the person who actually picks up the phone and says something real is the one you remember. the one who breaks away from the script that all the bots use.

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a lot of people think distribution is the moat. i don't. the moat is being memorable. and you don't get memorable by being polished and optimized. you get there by being weird, being unorthodox, being so specifically yourself that people can't forget you. in a world where every output is converging, the people who stand out are the ones who refuse to smooth out their edges.

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the most defensible thing you can be right now is someone people actually want to talk to. charisma has never been more valuable.