i'm not succeeding despite being 17. i'm succeeding because i'm 17. and the fact that most investors can't see this reveals everything broken about how silicon valley thinks about risk.
read more →the ai boom is fake. most ai companies are just different-colored buttons that call the same openai api. that's not innovation—that's arbitrage. and the entire industry is pretending it's the former while getting rich off the latter.
read more →high school has convinced an entire generation that analyzing problems is the same as fixing them. while you're writing papers, someone else is building the thing you wish you'd built.
read more →i've heard probably 200 startup pitches in the last year. and i'd say 180 of them are variations of the same 5 ideas. everyone thinks their idea is unique. but they're all drinking from the same pool of "acceptable startup ideas" that vcs have decided sound fundable.
read more →"work-life balance" is advice from people who've already made it telling young people to optimize for comfort while they're supposed to be optimizing for growth. balance is a luxury you earn by working unbalanced first.
read more →gap years are marketed as "finding yourself" or "gaining life experience" before college. here's what they actually are: an expensive way to postpone making real decisions while doing things that sound impressive but teach you almost nothing.
read more →everyone tells you to "find a mentor." and here's what nobody admits: most mentorship is fake. it's regularly scheduled calls where someone 10 years older gives you generic advice that sounds wise but changes nothing about what you're building.
read more →i've been to probably 30+ networking events in sf over the past year. and i've noticed a pattern: the people who show up most consistently are the ones building least consistently. networking events have become procrastination disguised as productivity.
read more →i've asked for feedback on nexus probably 100 times in the past few months. you know how many times i actually wanted criticism? maybe 10. the other 90 times, i wanted someone to tell me i was on the right track. i wanted validation disguised as feedback.
read more →linkedin is a performance art platform where people pretend to be more successful than they are while congratulating each other for posts they didn't read. it's actively making ambitious people less ambitious by rewarding the appearance of progress over actual progress.
read more →i've done internships at yc startups, delphi, and cluely. all legitimate companies. all looked great on my linkedin. and here's what i learned: brand-name internships are resume decorations that teach you almost nothing about building real things.
read more →"follow your passion" is a luxury belief disguised as universal wisdom. here's what nobody tells you: passion follows competence, not the other way around. you know what i'm "passionate" about right now? building ai infrastructure. was i born passionate about it? no. i became passionate because i got good at it.
read more →"just ship it" is the most common startup advice. it's also the most useless. because the people saying it loudest are usually the ones who've never dealt with the actual complexity of shipping something real.
read more →most fundraising advice you read online is from 2019-2021. the free money era. when vcs were throwing cash at anything that moved. that world doesn't exist anymore. but founders are still following playbooks written for it.
read more →i've watched developers spend weeks debating tech stack choices before writing a single line of user-facing code. and here's what i've learned: for 95% of products, the tech stack doesn't matter at all. your users don't care. your revenue doesn't care. only other developers care.
read more →product hunt used to be how products got discovered. now it's just another vanity metric that founders optimize for while pretending it's meaningful distribution. and here's what actually happens after a successful product hunt launch: almost nothing.
read more →"what should i build?" is the wrong question. it's the question people ask when they want to be founders more than they want to solve specific problems. and here's the issue: if you need someone else to tell you what to build, you're already approaching this wrong.
read more →"building in public" used to mean sharing your actual journey—real numbers, real failures, real decisions. now it's just another growth hack. content marketing disguised as transparency.
read more →remote work is making gen z lazy and nobody wants to admit it. remote work promised freedom. what it delivered for most people is an excuse to do the bare minimum while pretending they're working hard.
read more →everyone has a "side project." most of them will never ship it. and the reason isn't time or resources or lack of opportunity. it's that they're waiting for it to be good enough to show people. here's what i've learned: if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to ship.
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