2025-11-11 21:03:43
“We’re trying to solve Earth. Some people are trying to go to Mars… but we are trying to make Earth the most prosperous place possible — and that is all about governance.”
GoFundMe Giving Funds: One Account. Zero Hassle.
Guru: The AI source of truth for work
Tezi: The AI agent for recruiting high-quality candidates quickly.
What if you could redesign the rules of society? Not tweak the margins, but start over entirely. That’s the question driving Erick Brimen, founder and CEO of Próspera, a private charter city in Roatán, Honduras. Próspera is a radical experiment in governance: a platform that lets governments and entrepreneurs build cities with new legal systems, regulatory frameworks, and institutions from the ground up. Brimen believes that governance itself can be innovated upon. That cities, like software, can be upgraded. His goal isn’t just to build one new jurisdiction, but to create an operating system for hundreds of prosperous, self-governing communities around the world. In this conversation, Erick and I explore what it really takes to build a modern Singapore from scratch — and why better governance might be humanity’s most powerful lever for progress.
Together we explore:
How Brimen’s childhood in Venezuela shaped his understanding of governance and poverty
The historical precedents for charter cities like Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong
Why common law, trusted dispute resolution, and dynamic governance are essential foundations
How Próspera’s Governance-as-a-Service model aligns incentives between governments, operators, and residents
The current state of Próspera in Honduras, including its three hubs and economic impact
The political challenges Próspera has faced and how international arbitration has protected the project
Why regulatory innovation enables industries like biotech, crypto, and advanced manufacturing to flourish
How the model could be applied to “catch-up growth,” industry diversification, and accelerating growth in developed nations
The vision for a modern Hanseatic League of charter cities operating on shared governance principles
(00:00) Intro
(04:10) An overview of Próspera and charter cities
(06:43) City of Próspera vs. the platform
(08:06) How growing up in Venezuela shaped Erick’s entrepreneurial vision
(12:36) The limits of seasteading and why Erick took a different path
(15:20) The opposing philosophies that shaped Erick’s path
(16:16) The moment that reshaped Erick’s understanding of poverty
(19:57) The limits of learning from Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong
(23:01) Building on the DIFC blueprint
(25:12) From Arizona to Honduras: how Próspera built its first city
(30:36) Why Honduras won
(32:12) Inside the ZEDE framework
(36:56) Próspera’s business model
(43:45) Conditions on the ground in Honduras
(47:14) A quick summary of how it works
(48:24) Quick stats on Próspera’s scale and financing
(50:47) What years of preparation made possible
(52:44) The scale and purpose of Próspera’s three hubs
(58:12) Próspera’s 10-year vision
(1:01:12) The people Próspera was built to serve
(1:04:10) Why less regulation unlocks more innovation
(1:05:58) Próspera’s political headwinds
(1:12:36) Why Erick remains optimistic that things will work out in Honduras
(1:14:44) Addressing criticism of ZEDEs and Próspera
(1:18:08) What’s next, and why the U.S. may be the greatest opportunity
(1:22:30) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickbrimen
Website: https://www.erickbrimen.com
Atlas Shrugged: https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145
Doug Ducey on X: https://x.com/DougDucey
Peter Thiel on X: https://x.com/peterthiel
Marc Andreessen on X: https://x.com/pmarca
Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson
Paul Romer on X: https://x.com/paulmromer
Próspera: https://www.prospera.co/en
Hanseatic League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
Seasteading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
The Seasteading Institute: https://www.seasteading.org
DIFC: https://www.difc.com
ZEDE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_for_Employment_and_Economic_Development
The Federalist Papers: https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text
Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81757532
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-10-30 21:23:43
“I think your Substack contains simply the best writings about venture out there. You provide a kind of storytelling and thoroughness that no one else does. Thanks :)” — David, a paying member
Friends,
There is a certain category of article that I find difficult to name, but which I always enjoy reading. We might call it a collection of musings, a set of opinions, a list of miscellaneous observations. Alex Guzey calls his version “Lifehacks,” Laura Deming refers to hers as “mental models,” and Nat Friedman prefaces his as “some things I believe.”
Each offers a numbered list of thoughts. Some are simple, others deceptively profound. Part of what is enjoyable about these lists is that the things I find simple, you are likely to find profound, and vice versa. Equally, those that I enthusiastically endorse, you may consider absurd.
Whatever one’s take on the individual insights, as a whole, they represent efficient distillations of someone’s mind. Read them and you feel as if you know the person a little better; as if you have gotten a tour of their inner landscape. More importantly, you start to see your own mind reflected.
Today, I’m sharing my version. It is a collection of observations that are true to me. I would be surprised if, in ten years’ time, I don’t disagree with myself, but for the moment, it is an authentic distillation of my mind. My hope is that it sparks some interesting reflections for you and perhaps introduces some new lenses through which you view your work, goals, and interactions.
If you have one truly good idea in your life, that is more than enough.
To improve your mind, read fiction. We spend the vast majority of our professional lives in pure knowledge-gathering mode; there are different, deeper truths hidden in stories.
“Never quit” is terrible advice. Try lots of things, quit lots of things. Your time is not infinite. Sometimes you have to give up an old dream for a better one to emerge.
It’s more impactful to know your most talented contemporaries than your heroes. Meeting a hero is unlikely to change the course of your life. But if you meet the most talented minds of your generation early, you can spend the next fifty years collaborating with them as they scale.
Status transactions are happening everywhere, all the time. If you’re not attuned to this, you will miss half of what’s happening in a given conversation.
Learning how to ask good questions is a legitimate discipline worth studying. We underestimate how much insight, connection, and alpha are unlocked by the right series of words. Exponents of this art form change the texture of a conversation at any moment.
Resist other people’s attempts to categorize you. They are missing too much context to do so well.
If you want to really remember a book, buy the physical version and read with a pen in your hand.
It is possible to reinvent yourself at any moment. Cultivate a loose attachment to your view of yourself.
Debate is one of the least effective ways of making up your mind on a topic. It is only worthwhile as a theatrical enterprise. (Written debate is better.)
“Where is it written…” Assume that most conventions are arbitrary and illegitimate. Rules are more malleable than we believe.
Imagine “pulling forward” skills from your future self into the present. If you wish you were a better public speaker, imagine the future version of yourself giving that ability to the present version of yourself.
Genius is narrower than we tend to believe. It extrapolates poorly outside a given field, era, or context. A genius pontificating on something outside of their discipline is probably less reliable than a regular person.
Even the best of minds suddenly burn out. (See: Newton, Grothendieck, Fischer.) Before you persuade yourself that there must be some hidden brilliance in a genius’s proclamations, consider this.
Learn keyboard shortcuts; use snippets.
Listening to the audiobook is fine for entertainment, not for retention.
The current founder trend of prioritizing attention above all else misunderstands greatness. No legendary company won through stunts. At some point, you actually have to build something valuable.
It should concern you if you have never failed at something. You should fail badly, relatively often. Otherwise, you are playing it too safe.
The pressure to be “well-informed” has made us more ignorant. Unless you work in one of a small number of professions, there is no value in reading the day’s news. It stales quickly, tends toward the histrionic, and underweights relevant historical context. Much better to scan the headlines every couple of weeks and pick a relevant topic to learn about from higher-quality sources.
We overvalue the freshness of information. Read old books. There is usually a reason they survived.
Amor fati.
The finest practitioners of a given discipline are often the worst at articulating their craft. Too much of their skill comes from inherent qualities, or abilities illegible even to themselves. Better to watch these people rather than ask them to explain.
Most modern writing advice is copywriting advice. Be careful.
Striving for legibility is overrated. It is much better to adopt a degree of inscrutability. What you lose in definition, you gain in freedom and flexibility.
If someone tells you to pick between two trade-offs (e.g., speed vs. cost), default to rejecting the premise. Sometimes you really do have to make a choice, but you can find a way to have both more frequently than you expect.
You can neutralize most conversational risks by calling them out. (E.g. “I’m being quite direct here…”; “I recognize this is very persistent of me…”)
There is huge alpha in carefully reviewing the source material. (See: Eli Dourado.)
Question the assumptions and run the numbers yourself. Everyone assumed it was economically infeasible for a private company to build rockets until Elon opened his spreadsheet.
Test out vastly disparate career paths as early as you can. Most people test within an extremely narrow band (e.g., going from banking to consulting to big tech).
If you want to become the best at something, you have to devise a kind of differential training. You cannot achieve something new by adhering to the same path as those before you.
Great things happen at the collision between fields.
The collective opinion on who the “best” is in a given industry is usually spotty or simply wrong. Proximity is often required to assess quality, and the most skilled practitioners may not advertise their approach.
Love is easy. The difference between bad relationships and meeting your spouse is not a matter of degree, but category. Compatibility is unignorable and effortless.
Earning your first $1 on the internet can change your life.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
If you have not changed your mind about something important in the past ten years, you should be concerned.
You cannot have an interesting conversation without an element of risk. One person, or both, must subtly push the boundaries.
Every once in a while, you’re reminded that people perceive the world so differently from you that they may as well be on another planet. This is happening all the time, whether you notice it or not.
Allow yourself to be the dumbest person in the room. You will ask better questions and go to better rooms.
“A Prince who is not himself wise cannot be well advised.”
You become solely responsible for your education once you leave school. You must learn to become your own teacher; most do not.
To make an impact on the world, you must pay a debt to modernity. It is romantic to imagine succeeding just as your heroes once did, but they lived in a different time, in different circumstances. A concession to the present day is necessary.
The same skills that made you a good student may make you a bad employee.
“How you do anything is how you do everything” is a perfect encapsulation of what is not true. Brilliance is context-dependent. Energy is context-dependent. Insight is context-dependent. (See: Jobs’ pathetic job application.)
Set yourself a curriculum. What books do you want to read this year? How can you organize them? What gap in your knowledge still bothers you? These questions are your responsibility to answer.
At some point, you must internalize the fact that people will dislike you through no fault of your own, and that it is not your job to change their minds.
“Real artists ship.”
The first time you think you’ve missed the wave, there are probably still a couple of decades left. (See: the internet, crypto, AI.)
Sleeping on an important decision really does help.
Billions of dollars have been invested in making social media platforms addictive. Relying on willpower alone is a lot to ask. Invest in content blockers as you rewire yourself. Cold Turkey is a good one.
Learn to respect the process of the unconscious mind, especially in creative matters. Sometimes, you cannot chase the answer; you must wait for it to come to you.
You become the stories you tell yourself about yourself.
Respect your process. If you do your best work at 4 AM with a bowl of candied ginger, do that. Give yourself the latitude to be a difficult artist when necessary.
Simply decide that you are willing to go first. That could be raising your hand to volunteer for something, taking the first leap off the high dive, or responding to a question that leaves an awkward silence. You reduce social anxiety and increase your agency by just defaulting to taking responsibility.
2025-10-28 20:03:36
“Psychedelics increase the neuroplasticity in your brain that we can measure. I could look at your brain before and after psychedelics. Before, it looks like an internet map of Africa — some areas don’t have connectivity. Afterward, it looks like an internet map of Europe, with condensed connections everywhere.”
Enterpret: Transform feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence.
Auth0: Secure access for everyone. But not just anyone.
Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.
Often called the godfather of NYC tech, Kevin Ryan is one of America’s most influential entrepreneurs and investors. He co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Transcend Therapeutics, and continues to build and back new companies each year through AlleyCorp. Earlier in his career, he led DoubleClick from a 20-person startup to a global leader, taking it public before its acquisition by Google.
In this episode, Kevin shares his insights on two surprising pockets of the future that he’s betting on: psychedelics for mental health and AI-powered materials science. He unpacks how psychedelics are showing remarkable success in treating depression and PTSD, and why AI may discover revolutionary new materials, from helicopter blades to smartphone glass, that humans never imagined possible.
We explore:
The promising results of psychedelics in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction
How AI is accelerating materials discovery by exploring combinations humans wouldn’t try
The challenges of building successful incubators and why most attempts fail
How MongoDB lost $1 billion before turning a profit (and why it was worth it)
Why e-commerce businesses like Gilt Groupe often struggle against physical retail
How AlleyCorp plans for the future when shaping its investment strategy
What it really costs society to imprison someone for a year
The hard truth about Europe’s tech ecosystem and why it struggles to compete with the US
(00:00) Intro
(04:30) How Kevin collaborated with Scott Adams
(07:11) The origins of AlleyCorp
(08:33) The challenge of incubation
(10:00) Why intellectual flexibility matters
(10:54) What made MongoDB a breakout success
(13:49) How shifting market dynamics hurt Gilt’s business
(16:22) What Kevin would do differently if he built Gilt again
(17:45) Juggling AlleyCorp’s long-term vision with day-to-day demands
(20:26) How to make boards more productive
(22:25) Why Kevin believes investors should also found companies
(24:18) Future spaces Kevin is excited to invest in
(25:52) Kevin’s interest in psychedelics and founding Transcend
(28:20) Psychedelics for mental health
(32:03) How psychedelic therapy is being conducted
(34:11) Transcend’s work and the path to approval for methylone
(37:47) The challenges of psychedelic research
(40:28) How the Trump administration aims to accelerate psychedelic research
(41:50) The size and growth of the psychedelic market
(44:28) Materials science: What it is, its design tradeoffs, and how AI speeds discovery
(49:02) Radical AI’s work creating new compounds
(50:34) The industries Radical AI is targeting
(52:50) The state of European tech and why it still lags behind
(58:26) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinryan3/
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence: https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transcendence/dp/1594204225
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Breakneck-Chinas-Quest-Engineer-Future/dp/1324106034
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: https://www.amazon.com/Outlive-Longevity-Peter-Attia-MD/dp/0593236599
Birnam Wood: https://www.amazon.com/Birnam-Wood-Novel-Eleanor-Catton/dp/1250321719
The Odyssey: https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393356256
Invisible Man: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Man-Ralph-Ellison/dp/0679732764
Abundance: https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Progress-Takes-Ezra-Klein/dp/1668023482
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Optimist-Altman-OpenAI-Invent-Future/dp/1324075961
The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990: https://www.amazon.com/Gods-New-York-Idealists-Opportunists/dp/052551063X
Eliot Horowitz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliothorowitz
Dwight Merriman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmerr
Fred Wilson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredwilson
Jamie Dimon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiedimon
Joseph F. Krause on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephfkrause
Jorge Colindres on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcolindres
James Baldwin: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/introduction-james-baldwin
Dilbert: https://dilbert.com
Peanuts: https://www.peanuts.com
DoubleClick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick
MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com
Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com
Zola: https://www.zola.com
Gilt Groupe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilt_Groupe
AlleyCorp: https://alleycorp.com
Oracle: https://www.oracle.com
SAP: https://www.sap.com
Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com
John Deere: https://www.deere.com
Tech:NYC: https://www.technyc.org
Stepful: https://www.stepful.com
Yale Program for Psychedelic Science: https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/research/clinics-and-programs/psychedelic/
Transcend: https://transcendtherapeutics.com/
A Multi-Site Phase 3 Study of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD (MAPP1): https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03537014
Ibogaine treatment outcomes for opioid dependence from a twelve-month follow-up observational study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28402682/
Methylone: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/methylone
Radical AI: https://www.radical-ai.com
Uala: https://www.uala.com.ar
Noma: https://noma.dk
Revolut: https://www.revolut.com
Monzo: https://monzo.com
Here’s What Happens When You Give People Free Money: https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altmans-big-basic-income-study-is-finally-out
Altered States and Social Bonds: Effects of MDMA and Serotonergic Psychedelics on Social Behavior as a Mechanism Underlying Substance-Assisted Therapy: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11378972/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
2025-10-23 20:32:01
“I’m new to VC and you’ve given me access to learnings from the best of the best! Appreciate you!” — Zhu, a paying member
Friends,
At its core, “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins is about the difference between the drive to define something and the drive to understand it. In a few sparse lines, Collins contrasts the way he wishes readers would appreciate poetry with the manner in which so many do so. Rather than appreciating its contours and marveling over its intricacies, most readers prefer to pummel a poem for information. Instead of holding it to the light “like a color slide” or “waterski[ing]” across its surface, they “begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.” In their drive to define the work in front of them – to analyze and probe it – Collins’ readers neglect its beauty, and miss what really makes it tick.
Though Collins is talking about poetry, he could just as well have been describing any craft. No matter the discipline, there is always this tension between defining and understanding, controlling and observing, grasping and witnessing.
When it comes to the craft of venture capital, Mike Maples, Jr. is one of its great appreciators. Over the past two decades, the Floodgate co-founder has built a remarkable track record by attuning himself to the frequency of great entrepreneurs, observing their quirks, and seeking to understand. As Mike himself describes it, his praxis is not about thinking faster or exhaustively analyzing a market, but simply listening differently. That approach has allowed Mike to make many outlier investments long before they broke out, backing Twitter, Twitch, Okta, and Applied Intuition in their messy infancies.
As part of The Generalist’s “Letters to a Young Investor” series, we’ll explore the nuances of Mike’s craft. To learn how one of the best early-stage investors of the past twenty years spots the future and identifies anomalies, read on. To enjoy the full correspondence and the rest of The Generalist’s exclusive interviews, join as a premium member for just $22/month. For the price of a single business lunch, you’ll unlock the strategies of some of the world’s best investors, founders, and operators.
VC checks may be shrinking, but ambition is on the rise.
Mercury’s 2025 data report, The New Economics of Starting Up, surveyed 1,500 early-stage founders across funding, AI adoption, hiring, and more. For investors, it’s a signal worth watching. Founders aren’t slowing down — they’re rewriting the playbook.
Here’s a preview of what they learned:
Self-funding is the number one avenue for accessing capital — even for tech companies, with half likely to bootstrap.
87% of founders are more optimistic about their financial future than they were last year, despite prevailing uncertainties.
AI isn’t stymying job growth, like headlines would have you assume. 79% of companies surveyed, who have adopted AI, said they’re hiring more because of it.
Mercury believes banking* should do more for the builders of the next great companies. Like, provide the intel you need to adapt in this market.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
Subject: Finding pattern breakers
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Mike Maples, Jr.
Date: Tuesday, October 7 2025 at 4:20 PM BST
Mike,
I’m sitting down with a cup of coffee, a stack of notes, and a well-worn copy of Pattern Breakers to begin this correspondence with you. It’s one that I’ve been looking forward to for some time, admiring your career for many years. That’s as much to do with the respect with which other investors talk about your work, as the formidable string of winners you’ve backed. You have always struck me as a true venture craftsman, with an unfakeable obsession for startups.
Reading Pattern Breakers only makes this sincere fascination more evident. I wish more exceptional investors would take the time to transcribe and distill their insights so thoughtfully. As you know better than I do, so much of early-stage investing relies on intuition and subtle signaling – a reality which often makes it difficult for even great practitioners to articulate their work. That can lead to the impression that venture capital is pure luck. No one can deny chance’s role, but to minimize it to spinning a roulette wheel misses the hazy art that the best have mastered.
Pattern Breakers is an insightful articulation of your version of the craft. It outlines the lessons you’ve deduced across twenty years of investing and countless hours of further research. It contains many wonderful observations I find myself mulling over regularly. One particular favorite is that great startups force a choice, not a comparison. As you note, Airbnb did not try to build a better version of the Four Seasons, but competed on entirely new terrain. While the Four Seasons promises to deliver a high-quality, consistent experience, Airbnb offers authenticity, giving travelers the chance to “live like a local.” Neither is inherently superior. Rather, they appeal to different customers and sensibilities. I’ve found myself returning to this heuristic repeatedly since I learned it.
To set the stage for our conversation, I’d love to dig into Pattern Breakers more deeply and examine the philosophies animating your investing. Rather than asking you to rehash the book’s major points (which I recommend readers enjoy wholesale), I wondered if we might try to understand its ideas “in action,” so to speak.
To paint a familiar scenario: Imagine a founder has walked into Floodgate’s offices to pitch you for the first time. How do you go about assessing whether you might have a pattern-breaking business on your hands?
I am sincerely interested in this at the most granular possible level. Do you prefer to sit directly across from an entrepreneur or kitty-corner to them? Do you prefer going for a walk to a formal pitch? Does it help you ask better questions to review materials beforehand, or do you want to hear everything fresh? To what extent are you analyzing small clues about their posture, attire, speaking speed, and so on? Are there any initial indicia that excite you? These might sound frivolous to some readers, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that these little details really influence the conversation you’re able to have.
We could spend a full other letter on questions alone. Which are among your favorites? (Bezos reportedly loved, “Are you a lucky person?” for example.) Which questions give you signal most frequently? You’ve noted before that you liked to ask, “Is this from the future?” What does that question tell you? How long does it take to realize a business might be truly special? How long do you take to make up your mind? What does your internal process look like to get to conviction? How much still, after all these years, comes down to feel? How much time do you spend analyzing the person versus the idea?
While reading your book, I found myself thinking about the tension between assessing an idea and assessing a person. Pattern Breakers covers both, but at least in my reading, it is primarily interested in the characteristics of game-changing ideas. You elegantly outline the importance of a startup building on (1) an “inflection” – some material technological, commercial, or sociological change, and (2) an “insight” around it. Lyft is a good example: Logan Green and John Zimmer recognized that smartphones with GPS were an inflection point, and then had the insight that this might enable a new kind of taxi network.
But you’ve remarked that 80% of your best investments came from pivots. Which makes me wonder: what signal do you get from a startup idea, knowing that it’s liable to change? Is it simply a proxy for a founder’s insightfulness and acuity? Are you using the current canvas to understand how their mind works? Or do you need to sincerely feel as if there’s an inflection and insight at the heart of it?
More broadly, what do you look for in a person? You’ve written about the importance of disagreeableness. Do you try to test for that explicitly? How so? Are there certain patterns you’ve noticed recur across outlier people? What shared alleles might you find if you put Ev Williams, Emmett Shear, Todd McKinnon, and Logan Green under a microscope? I am certain they have more differences than similarities, but equally convinced that there must be some unifying quality.
With much appreciation from one venture “anorak” to another,
Mario
Subject: When Tomorrow Shows Up Early
From: Mike Maples, Jr.
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Friday, October 17 2025 at 7:40 PM PST
Dear Mario,
I really like your questions, because they get to the messy part of seed investing. It’s not about spreadsheets or pattern-matching. It’s about sensing whether someone is already living in the future and inviting the rest of us to catch up. You’re not just asking about mental models. You’re asking about the feel.
One of the first times I felt the future, I was in a Palo Alto cafe, and a 23-year-old Justin Kan walked in. He had a webcam strapped to a baseball cap and a mess of wires leading to a backpack. I was already skeptical. And that was before he said he planned to livestream his life. All of it. Twenty-four hours a day, like an internet reality TV show. It almost sounded like a prank.
But then he spun his laptop around, and there I was, live on the internet.
Suddenly, it felt different, and my curiosity started to take over. “How did you do that, and what’s in your backpack?” I asked. Justin opened it, and inside was a Linux computer, a video encoder, EVDO cellular hardware, and some Python code held together mostly with duct tape and conviction. But it actually worked, and keep in mind this was in 2007. YouTube had only existed for 18 months. Most people still had flip phones.
The cafe hadn’t changed, but my sense of possibility had. It didn’t feel like a pitch anymore. It felt like stepping through a portal to a different future. He wasn’t selling me. He was already living in a different reality and offering me a fleeting glimpse. And even though there were many pivots and years between Justin.tv and what became Twitch, the basic insight that millions of normal people would want to stream content was right, no matter how heavily disguised it was in the initial idea.
For a long time, I confused being early with being smart. Seeing things first felt like a superpower. But the seed investors that are rewarded most are not the futurists who can predict. They’re the ones who notice. Catching radically new futures feels less like investing and more like witnessing.
There are a few small habits I find helpful when I’m trying to catch a pattern-breaking future described by a founder:
Don’t label startups. The moment you call something “Uber for X,” you lose too much resolution to see what’s truly different about it. Labels turn messy ideas into something that fits into our current understanding, but they make you believe you understand things you don’t. The best startups break the current patterns of our current understanding. When you jump too quickly to a label, you’re more likely to miss the small, magical details that matter most.
2025-10-21 20:03:39
“That’s the scale of the hardware opportunity. It’s not hundreds of millions of dollars when you launch. It’s in billions of dollars.”
GoFundMe Giving Funds: One Account. Zero Hassle.
Auth0: Secure access for everyone. But not just anyone.
Tezi: The AI agent for recruiting high-quality candidates quickly.
Navin Chaddha has spent three decades at the forefront of innovation—first as a founder, and now as managing partner at Mayfield, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest venture firms. A 17-time member of Forbes’ Midas List, Navin has guided generations of entrepreneurs through waves of technological change, from the dot-com boom to the AI era. At Mayfield, he champions a philosophy rooted in the firm’s founding ethos: investing in people, not markets. That approach has shaped his perspective on what it takes to build enduring companies. In this conversation, Navin shares why $1 trillion in infrastructure spending is fueling a new hardware renaissance, how stealth startups are going from zero to billions in a year, and what it means for the future of innovation.
We explore:
How “vibe coding” is democratizing technology creation through conversational, collaborative, and cognitive interfaces
Why Navin believes the “vibe economy” will transform how we work, live, and play
How Mayfield’s 56-year focus on “backing the jockey, not the racetrack” shapes its investment approach
The massive opportunity in AI hardware infrastructure
How stealth AI hardware startups are going from zero to billions in under a year
How India’s tech ecosystem has evolved and where the real opportunities are today
How cricket taught Navin crucial lessons about company building
(00:00) Intro
(04:52) Cricket and its parallels to venture capital
(08:13) Navin’s journey to Silicon Valley
(10:28) Growing up in an entrepreneurial family
(12:00) Early mentors and becoming an “accidental entrepreneur”
(13:46) Navin’s first company and unconventional fundraising approach
(17:35) How Navin moved from founder to venture capitalist
(20:11) What has worked in India’s tech market and what hasn’t yet taken off
(23:31) The future of outsourcing in the AI era
(27:14) How Navin landed at Mayfield
(30:36) How Mayfield’s people-first approach works in practice
(34:50) Why Navin sees AI and vibe coding as the next great wave of innovation
(38:13) Why Navin believes AI will push humans to level up their skills rather than lose them
(44:50) The hardware opportunities that excite Navin and where Mayfield is investing
(48:49) An overview of photonics and why it matters now
(50:06) How Mayfield balances market insight, big ideas, and the people behind them
(52:50) The surprising pace of growth in AI hardware
(54:54) The timeline from idea to product and scale in hardware startups
(56:26) Final meditations
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navinchaddha/
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity: https://www.amazon.com/Outlive-Longevity-Peter-Attia-MD/dp/0593236599
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Essentials/dp/0060516402
Vinod Khosla on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinod-khosla-65387416/
Anoop Gupta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guptaanoop/
John Hennessy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy
Yogen Dalal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yogendalal/
Tommy Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Davis_Jr.#
Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
Qualcomm: https://www.qualcomm.com/
Matrimony: https://www.matrimony.com/
Tejas Networks: https://www.tejasnetworks.com/
Mayfield: https://www.mayfield.com/
HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/
Gigya: https://www.sap.com/products/acquired-brands/what-is-gigya.html
Moore’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/
Apple: https://www.apple.com/
Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/
Broadcom: https://www.broadcom.com/
Mayfield AI Garage: https://www.mayfield.com/ai/
I’d love it if you’d subscribe and share the show. Your support makes all the difference as we try to bring more curious minds into the conversation.
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2025-10-16 20:05:47
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