Now
The bets I am making this month.
Most personal sites look frozen in the moment they were written. This page is the opposite. It tells you what I am actually changing, focused on, and being changed by this month. It is not a task list. It is where the work is.
Last refreshed · 2026-07-16 · Las Vegas
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What I am changing this month.
The bottleneck is no longer building.. it is trusting what builds
For a year the constraint was writing the code. This month it flipped.. hundreds of agents now build across hundreds of repos on the same rails, and the hard problem is no longer production, it is trust. The bet I am making is that the winners of this era will not be whoever generates the most.. it will be whoever can verify the most. Autonomy is worthless the moment you cannot trust what it hands back.
Autonomy is earned through verification, not granted by hope
I am pulling friction out of everything.. every approval, every handoff, every place a person waited on another person. But the deeper position is that you cannot give an agent real autonomy until its work is provably safe, so the friction I remove on one side I replace with evidence on the other. Alignment is not something you install once, it is a discipline you run every day.
The company is becoming a system that runs itself.. and that changes what a founder is for
Formation, ownership, legal, finance, memory.. all of it is turning into versioned artifacts the organization can read, watch, and act on without me in the loop. The bet is that the future of work is not humans replaced by machines, it is fewer humans holding judgment at the top of a system that executes itself. The real question that opens is what I am actually for once the work no longer needs me to move it.
Survival mode is a design failure, not a human one
It breaks my heart how much of the world still runs on survival.. and the position I am taking is that this is not human nature, it is a broken distribution of an abundance that already exists. The same instinct that makes me pull friction out of a company is the one that says the friction keeping billions in scarcity is removable too. The technology to end survival mode is already here, the will and the design are not.
The questions
What I am focused on.
What will it actually take for humanity to wake up?
Survival mode is not serving us, and I do not think we grow while we are still braced for the next threat. I keep asking what the unlock is.. whether it is technology, or trust, or some shift I cannot name yet that lets a whole species stop being afraid.
Can you grant autonomy without losing alignment.. and is it the same question for people as for agents?
I spend my days deciding how much to trust something I cannot fully inspect. It is starting to feel like the oldest question there is, only in new clothing.. how do you let something act freely and still trust where it is going.
If the work can run without me, what is the founder actually for?
Everything I am building is designed to not need me. I do not yet know whether what is left when the execution leaves is emptiness or the actual point.. taste, direction, and the nerve to say what the whole thing is for.
Reading
- The Seven Meanings of Life.. Thomas Hylland Eriksen
- Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.. David Eagleman
- The open feed on X.. still the sharpest real-time classroom I have
Thinking about
- Cringe mountain.. the long unglamorous middle nobody posts about. I wrote the whole climb down: the climb up cringe mountain
- Whether removing friction and removing meaning are the same motion if you are not careful
- What trust even is once you can no longer inspect every action yourself
- Why so much of the world still runs on survival when the abundance is already here
- Whether alignment is a technical problem or a human one wearing a technical costume
- How to stay a person and not a position while the system scales past me
About this page
This is a /now page in the tradition Derek Sivers started. It refreshes monthly on purpose.. and the refresh is a forcing function to tell you what I am actually betting on, not what I shipped.
Every month stays on the record. You can follow the trail and watch the bets change.