"Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all your acquisitions acquire understanding." (Proverbs 4:7)
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“America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.”
America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead. | Bridget Phetasy, Daily Wire
America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.
Let me back up. In 2000, Christina Hoff Sommers published “The War Against Boys,” documenting how American schools had begun treating normal male behavior as something to be diagnosed and medicated. A seven-year-old was suspended for pointing a pencil like a gun at his friend. A boy in California was punished for running during recess and nearly suspended for jumping over a bench. Schools banned tag and dodgeball. Boys were five times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls and accounted for 70% of suspensions — not for anything dangerous, but for roughhousing, defiance, and being loud. Instead of addressing the gap, institutions doubled down, remaking classrooms around female learning styles. They criminalized the “bad guy” play that men have channeled into building civilizations since the dawn of time. Almost nobody listened to Sommers, or they mocked her. For over a decade, the project to dismantle masculinity stayed contained in academia, slowly working its way through education policy like a parasite.
Then it broke containment. By 2015, the national psychedelic trip we now refer to as “wokeism” was reaching its crescendo, and men — specifically straight, traditional men — were its favorite target. “Toxic masculinity” migrated from academic journals to Thanksgiving dinner. “Men are trash” became something people said at brunch without flinching. “Mansplaining” entered the lexicon. Gillette released an ad lecturing its own customers about the sins of manhood. No razors, just shame. Hollywood gender-swapped “Ghostbusters” and sidelined Luke Skywalker for a new female lead. In 2019, the American Psychological Association issued guidelines pathologizing “traditional masculinity” as harmful. The message from every direction was the same: Manhood was broken, and women would fix it.
I had a front row seat as a columnist for Playboy, the most famous men’s magazine in the world, from 2015 to 2017 — the exact moment it stopped knowing how to talk to men. The organization was paralyzed by fear and overrun with young liberal women and gay men, which rendered it incapable of meeting the moment. Everything about the brand signaled apology. Playboy should have held the line. It was a wide-open lane. Instead, it followed every other men’s magazine in the same direction: less for the man’s man, more for the gay man and queer woman. Had it doubled down on unapologetically speaking to red-blooded American men, it could have led a renaissance. Instead, it chose surrender.
And in the space created when the culture forced men to be small, scummy opportunists filled the void. We got the Tates. The Sneakos. Parodies of men. Guys who are what a teenager thinks masculinity looks like when he doesn’t have a good father: flashy Rolexes, rented Lamborghinis, and endless talk. Talk, talk, talk. The guys who screamed loudest about the feminization of America were engaged in an inherently feminine activity. They were podcasting. They were sitting behind desks and running their mouths. And when you put men in a space that’s fundamentally about talking, their conflict becomes female-coded: reputational attacks, betrayal narratives, emotional manipulation, hissy fits. In real life, male interaction is moderated by the threat of getting punched in the face. Online, that’s gone. So the most effective tactics are the ones women use. These guys didn’t fight the feminization of culture. They became it.
I feel privileged to have known men who stormed the beaches at Normandy, who fought in the South Pacific, who came home and never spoke of it. Real men don’t whine about sacrifice. They make it. And I feel sorry for younger generations who haven’t known men like that — men who felt proud to serve, who understood trade-offs, who didn’t see the world in black and white. Young men are desperate for identity, and if you don’t give them Captain America, Ted Williams, and George Washington, they’ll find Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. Jordan Peterson identified this collapse in meaning early; it makes young men terrifyingly easy to radicalize.
And now these same guys — the ones who spent years raging about how pussified America is, the longhouse, the feminization of men, soy boys, turning the frogs gay — are now having hissy fits because America is actually being masculine. Militarily masculine. The real deal. And they’re whining about how they feel betrayed. “We’re not dying for Israel.” You’re not dying for anyone, buddy! You’re not dying for America. You’re not dying for anything except your subscriber count. You spent years cosplaying as warriors, and the moment actual sacrifice entered the conversation, you folded like every other fraud who has ever confused talking with doing.
Compare the Biden-era Army recruitment ad, an animated spot about a soldier raised by two moms marching in a pride parade, with what’s coming out of the Pentagon now. A Special Forces trainer deadlifting 500 pounds: “Stronger people are harder to kill.” Soldiers on a firing range: “We train until we can’t get it wrong.” Enlistment is at a 15-year high. When you stop apologizing for what the military is and start showing men what it demands, they show up. That’s what real masculinity looks like when it’s not being run through the filter of “how is this going to make Karen feel?”
The culture is shifting everywhere, thanks in part to comedian Joe Rogan, who held the line and built a parallel comedy establishment that is unapologetically masculine, irreverent, and enormous. Bud Light — the brand that nearly destroyed itself partnering with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney — signed as its new spokesperson Shane Gillis, a comedian who’d been dropped from SNL only to return as a host. And on February 22 — 46 years to the day from America’s “Miracle on Ice” — the U.S. men’s hockey team beat Canada in overtime for our first Olympic gold since 1980. Those players stood at the State of the Union, grinning from ear to ear, and got a standing ovation. My nephews are obsessed with them. They see those radiant smiles and that pride in America, and they want to emulate it.
In his post-game interview, hockey star Jack Hughes said, “This is all about our country right now. I love the USA. I love my teammates. It’s unbelievable. The U.S. hockey brotherhood is so strong and we had so much support from ex players, and I’m so proud to be American today. So proud.” That’s not some guy ranting into a webcam about alpha males; it’s the real thing, and young men can feel the difference.
The 2024 election was, in many ways, a referendum on all of this. The entire post-election media analysis centered on one question: How did Democrats lose young men? The answer was simple. They’d spent a decade telling young men they were the problem, and eventually, young men believed them and voted accordingly.
Saving this country is going to require things that make some people uncomfortable. It is going to require men who are willing to be strong without apology, to serve without being asked, and to lead without waiting for permission. For 20 years, we told men to sit down. The men who are standing back up — not the talkers, not the grifters, but the ones who actually build and serve and sacrifice — are the ones who will matter.
But I’m not going to speak for men. Instead, I’ll let Sergeant Dan Hollaway, 82nd Airborne Infantry, share his thoughts on the resurgence of American masculinity.
“Masculinity is not a social accessory,” he told me. “It is the backbone of every civilization that has ever endured. Masculinity began as an unspoken contract with reality: I will go where it is dangerous so others don’t have to. If certain burdens are not carried, then people die. This is the natural law of masculinity, and it has never changed. For a generation, America’s masculinity was mocked, undermined, and treated as something dangerous or obsolete — and many men simply withdrew. But that retreat is ending, and as men return to strength, discipline, and responsibility, the benefits are already becoming visible. American pride is on the rise, and we have the unique opportunity to save the greatest country in the history of the world by simply being men.”
dailywire.com/news/america-t…
David Linton retweeted
In many ways millennial white men have been sacrificed on the altar for the supposed sins of their fathers and grandfathers. A lot of Gen X too. But the Boomers and older kept their jobs while this went on. To me that’s the scandal. Old white men sacrificing their own.
A statistic that sounds fake but isn't: Not one single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.
It's not because they stopped writing. It's because The New Yorker has refused to publish them. The publishing industry has blacked out a generation of male writers & then they wonder why boys don't read.
David Linton retweeted
People wonder why I'm so obsessed with donkeys. I've looked into it, and my only finding is that the rest of you are underdoing it.
The donkey was built for the ground where everything else gives up. It lives on thorn and scrub that a horse would starve beside, climbs rock on hooves like chisels, cools itself through those ears, and can lose nearly a third of its body weight in water, carry on eating, then drink 25 litres in three minutes and walk off as if nothing happened. We tamed it 7,000 years ago in the dry country of East Africa, and it has been the animal of the hard places ever since.
So it was the donkey, long before the horse, that carried civilisation on its back. One of Egypt's first pharaohs was buried at Abydos with ten donkeys laid in graves beside him, every spine worn from a lifetime under loads. The grain, the salt, the copper and the news of the ancient world moved at a donkey's pace, and wherever a hill is still too steep for a wheel, they still do.
The same animal fed our babies. Donkey milk is the closest milk on earth to a human mother's, Hippocrates prescribed it, and the foundling hospital in Paris kept a stable of jennies so the orphans could be put straight to the udder. A fair share of Europe's abandoned children owe their first month to a donkey, and most of those donkeys carry a dark cross down the back and across the shoulders, which the old story says was given to them on Good Friday.
It carried our wounded too. On the beach at Gallipoli a stretcher-bearer from South Shields found a stray donkey, and for 24 days the two of them walked up and down Shrapnel Gully under fire bringing broken men down to the boats, until a machine gun got the man. The donkey went back up with the next one. Of everything the Anzacs brought home from that campaign, the thing they chose to remember was a donkey.
Then there is the stubbornness, the one fact everybody is sure of, and it is the opposite of the truth. A horse meets danger by bolting, which is why horses die on cliff paths. A donkey stops, looks at the thing in front of it, and makes a decision, and it will refuse to step into water it cannot see the bottom of because it is right not to. For 7,000 years we have been calling a risk assessment an attitude.
Put one in a field of ewes and it appoints itself. A fox or a loose dog comes through the hedge and the donkey goes at it, head down, front feet first, and keeps going until the thing has gone. Nobody trains that in. It decided they were its sheep.
It remembers a face and a field after 25 years. It will stand over a dying companion for a day. It lives to 40 and outlasts half the people who ever owned it.
There are about 50 million of them alive, carrying water, firewood and children for the poorest people on earth, and close to 6 million a year are now killed for their hides, boiled down into a gelatine sold as a tonic. The animal that did the most work for the least thanks is being melted into a wellness product.
Seven thousand years of hauling us uphill, feeding our orphans and carrying our wounded, and the best we managed in return was to turn its name into an insult.
So no. Not nearly obsessed enough.
David Linton retweeted
I spent a good few years early on in my career working in international oil and gas, and the first company I started (back in 2016) we were training neural networks to predict multiphase flow rates (oil, gas, water, sand) between the wellhead and the separator with a non-intrusive laser interferometer. We accidentally built the Star Trek sensor.
Anyway…
Different industries teach you different things, they obviously have different technologies and markets and touch different parts of the economy, but also they must operate in very different ways that are often not obvious from outside.
What am I talking about?…
The offshore oil & gas industry runs 24/7 and 365 days a year. You work all national holidays, weekends, the full 365. Christmas Day, your newborn’s first birthday, if the rota says you are offshore then you will not be home that day. It’s tough and it’s very conditioning.
You have to staff big complex facilities 24/7 and you have to maintain the capability to make serious interventions 24/7. Offshore nobody goes home when they finish working, you work, eat, you sleep, you get back to work. You’re there for 2 weeks, or 3, or 4, or some times 6 weeks (depending on remoteness).
Working 12+ hours a day for 42 days straight is a learning experience, and if you have senior responsibilities you might be working 16 hours a day everyday. Few people can do this, you must be a stable person.
Some places don’t let you work like that, but it is where extraordinary competence lies.
The other expanse of that industry is that it’s truly worldwide. It operates on every continent.
Companies like Exxon and Shell operate in 200 countries, with big upstream operational footprints in ~30 countries.
This means the corporate intranet never sleeps, there are people online solving problems at all hours of the day in all timezones.
The secret here is that multiple compounding dimensions all stack up, when you have people working this intensely they just become much more competent. It’s just self evident.
The level of competence you can reach as an engineer, whilst working with serious systems for 16x7=112 hours a week is otherworldly compared to the folks doing 60 hours. It’s highly non-linear and compounding. Your brain is plastic and it wires itself far more intently.
When a problem surfaces anywhere, you have more people available at the immediate time, and those people are just more competent because of their intense working practices.
As these people start to tackle the problem, momentum is never lost, the worldwide nature means that solutions can progress around the clock 24 hours a day, the solving team cycles as people drop for sleep, but the effort runs perpetually around the clock until it is solved.
Few people ever experience this. There are probably only a dozen companies in the world where this sort of thing happens.
But once you have lived it, it’s burned into your soul. You start to understand what is really possible.
You intuitively understand how to build and operate your organisation’s problem solving function to the maximal physical limit of what is possible on a spherical celestial body like the Earth.
The solving engine never goes home, never stops, never relents. It’s a swarm that persists perpetually, even as each person in it dips out for 8 hours to eat and sleep.
This is why I personally love AI, it fits so perfectly, it’s a fourth compounding dimension of scaling.
Competence, availability, perpetuity and now full spectrum autonomy.
The scale of execution that’s now possible is really exciting, Earth is a big place with a lot of people who can benefit from it.
Civilisational potential.
As mentioned before my team and I are already doing it, if you’ve experienced the above (maybe as a submariner) and want to use your competence to make the biggest difference on the trajectory of human civilisation. You will immediately recognise what I am saying here.
This is your calling.
David Linton retweeted
I believe that another one of the greatest lies still being told today is that mechanized, petrol-based agriculture is necessary to grow enough food to feed the population.
I always tell people that there is enough scientific proof that small vegetable gardens (750-1000 m² or 8000-10750 square feet) are much more productive than any highly technological field. Plus, permanent tree crops outperform even corn in terms of productivity! Last but not least, if you want to enjoy grains, like rice, wheat, and barley, plant them following Fukuoka’s method.
So, we can save the world by home gardening, planting food forests, and growing “Fukuoka grains”.
That’s the craft of permaculture.
David Linton retweeted
Children need to learn how societies outside of Western civilization and Confucian civilization were never anything near functional.
Learning about the societies that sacrificed children, ate each other, slaughtered each other frequently vs working together, etc and how all of them never generated enough of an economic surplus to create more advanced civilizations is important. It’s a missing building block in the education of so many of our well-meaning leftist friends.
To keep the west functional, and push back on the base cultural appeal of third-worldism, kids need to understand this before they are too exposed to talk about how all cultures should be respected.
(And there is generally something to admire in most cultures - but understanding how to structure interactions with people with different values when you need to engage with them in a heterogeneous world is different from thinking their underlying culture is great!)
When Saladin took Jerusalem, he destroyed all the crosses, including the relic of the True Cross which the Muslims took in battle. They paraded them before Christians before destroying them, even urinating on some of them.
He had 200-300 Christian Knights beheaded while he watched.
He had 8000 women and children enslaved that day alone, including noble women and nuns forced into concubinage. Muslims enthusiastically described the deflowering and r*pe of the Christian women.
Through his entire campaign it's estimated that 40-50k Christians were enslaved.
This is what modern Hollywood films present us instead. Interfaith dialogue and a Saladin who respects the cross more than....the Crusaders.
This is how you end up with CAIR endorsed candidates winning office. A population fed CAIR endorsed films like this one.
David Linton retweeted
91% of all tokenized stocks lead back to one broker.
Tokenized stocks total $4.60B today and $4.17B of that is backed by real shares held at a single US broker called Alpaca Securities.
- 7 issuers use it - Binance bStocks, Ondo, xStocks, Robinhood, Reality, Coinbase and Dinari.
- Alpaca holds those shares at DTC, the central US securities depository. On the company's books, the owner is Cede & Co., and not you.
- Securitize and Backpack take a different path, through RQD Clearing but still ends at DTC.
- Superstate and Securitize’s ISTs are the only one that skips both. The shares sit on the company's own register, with no broker and no DTC.
In total, that’s 4.7M token holders across those 7 issuers, and one broker between all of them and the real shares.
Now you know.
David Linton retweeted
All university rankings are very flawed.
I wondered how we could rank unis as purely as possible? So I looked at the career path of ~100,000 engineers over 10yrs. Universities rank high when its graduates work at companies, ranked PageRank style, that engineers compete harder to join.
Stanford, MIT, Harvard were top 3, but the extent they were above the rest surprised me. Brown at #6, Waterloo at #7!
David Linton retweeted
The Weaponisation of Language
One of the most effective tactics of the modern left has been the corruption of language itself. Words that once had clear meaning have been twisted beyond recognition - redefined to suit their agenda and silence dissent.
They call censorship “safety.”
They call propaganda “education.”
They call perversion “pride.”
They call cowardice “tolerance.”
They call patriotism “hate.”
Through manipulation of words, they’ve managed to reshape moral reality. By controlling the language, they control what people are allowed to think. Change the definition, and you change the debate.
When “man” and “woman” become “identities,” when truth becomes “offensive,” and when disagreement is rebranded as “violence,” reason itself is under attack.
It’s not ignorance - it’s strategy. Because when the meaning of words collapses, truth becomes whatever they say it is. And that’s exactly how control begins.
Language built our civilisation. The twisting of it will destroy it - unless we start speaking plainly again.
“When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.” - Confucius
David Linton retweeted
The men who wrote the Constitution owned guns, distrusted bankers, and believed taxation without consent was worth dying over. They would not recognize the country operating under their name today.
Federal spending crossed $7 trillion per year. The income tax, which the founders explicitly rejected, now reaches into every paycheck you earn before you touch a dollar of it. The Federal Reserve, a central bank of the exact type Jefferson warned would strip citizens of property through inflation, has spent the last two decades aggressively expanding the money supply and handing you the bill through rising prices.
The founders drew the federal government's powers in a short, specific list. Congress could coin money, raise an army, and regulate interstate trade. What it could not do is not in that list, because the founders assumed the limits were obvious. They were wrong to assume that.
Today the federal government licenses your profession, subsidizes your competitor, dictates your health plan, and surveils your financial transactions above $600. The administrative state, staffed by unelected bureaucrats at the FDA, SEC, EPA, and an estimated 430 other agencies, writes rules carrying the force of law without a single congressional vote. Madison called this precise arrangement tyranny in The Federalist Papers(No. 47).
The founders risked hanging to escape a government that taxed tea at 3%. You hand over 30 percent of your income and are supposed to thank the state for the privilege of keeping the rest.
David Linton retweeted
Martin P. Nilsson observing the fall of Rome noted that the major cities had became a mixture of nations, with no chance of assimilation.
Foreign workers replaced natives, and their descendants gained citizenship, and the new citizens entered politics, altering all of the state.
David Linton retweeted
The Onion Theory of Risk by Marc Andreessen:
"I think the single biggest thing entrepreneurs are missing, both on fundraising and how they run their companies, is the relationship between risk and cash.
The relationship between risk and raising cash, and then the relationship between risk and spending cash.
So I've always been a fan of something that Andy Ratcliffe taught me years ago, which he called the onion theory of risk.
Which basically is, you can think about a startup like on day one, um, as having every conceivable kind of risk, right?
And you can basically just make a list of the risks. And so you've got, you know, founding team risk.
You know, do the founders, are the founders gonna be able to work together?
Do you have the right founders? You're gonna have product risk. You know, can you build a product?
You'll have technical risk, right? Which is maybe you need a machine learning breakthrough or something to make it work.
Are you gonna be able to do that? You'll have, you know, launch risk.
Will the launch go well? You'll have, you know, market acceptance risk.
You'll have revenue risk.
A big risk you get into in a lot of businesses that have a sales force is, can you actually sell the product for enough money to actually pay for the cost of sale?
So you have the cost of sale risk. If you're a consumer product, you'll have a viral growth risk.
Well, you get the thing of viral growth. And so, a startup at the very beginning is basically just this long list of risks.
And then the way that I always think about running a startup is also the way I think about raising money, which is it's a process of peeling away layers of risk as you go.
And so you raise seed money in order to peel away the first two or three risks.
The founding team risk, the product risk, and maybe the initial launch risk.
You raise the A round to peel away the next level of product risk.
Maybe you peel away some recruiting risk because you get your full engineering team built.
Maybe you peel away some customer risk because you get your first five beta customers.
And so basically the way to think about it is you're peeling away risk as you go.
You're peeling away risk by achieving milestones.
And then as you achieve milestones, you're both making progress in your business, and you're justifying raising more capital.
And so you come in, and you pitch somebody like us, and you say you're raising a B round.
The best way to do that with us is you say, okay, I raised a seed round, I achieved these milestones, I eliminated these risks.
I raised the A round, I achieved these milestones, and I eliminated these risks.
Now I'm gonna raise a B round. Here are my milestones, here are my risks.
And then by the time I go to raise a seed round, here's the state that I'll be in.
And then you calibrate the amount of money that you raise to spend to the risks that you're pulling out of the business.
And I go through all this, in a sense this sounds kind of obvious, but I go through all this because it's a systematic way to think about how the money gets raised and deployed.
As compared to so much of what's happening, especially these days, which is just, my God, let me go raise as much money as I can.
Let me go build the fancy offices, let me go hire as many people as I can, and just kind of hope for the best."
David Linton retweeted
Elon Musk was once asked to explain first principles thinking in a way that anyone could understand. Instead of giving the business school version (which he has done many times), he gave an example so simple that it revealed something about how his brain actually works, not how he describes it working.
He said: "If you want to make a cheaper rocket, most people look at what rockets cost today and try to make them 10 percent cheaper. That's reasoning by analogy. You're comparing to what exists. First principles says: what is a rocket actually made of? Aluminum alloys. Titanium. Copper. Carbon fiber. What do those materials cost on the commodity market? About 2 percent of the cost of a finished rocket. So the question becomes: why is there a 98 percent markup between the raw materials and the finished product? The answer is: because that's how it's always been done. First principles says that's not an answer."
The 2 percent number is the one that changed SpaceX. When Elon calculated that the raw materials for a rocket cost 2 percent of the finished rocket, the gap between 2 percent and 100 percent became the engineering problem. Every layer of that gap (labor, manufacturing process, supply chain, contractor markups, design complexity, testing redundancy) was interrogated individually. The layers that were necessary were kept. The layers that existed because "that's how it's always been done" were eliminated.
The elimination produced the Falcon 9. A rocket that costs roughly $2,720 per kilogram to orbit. The Space Shuttle cost approximately $54,500 per kilogram. The reduction is not 10 percent. It is 95 percent. The reduction came not from building a better version of the existing approach but from asking why the existing approach costs what it costs and eliminating everything that doesn't have a physics based answer.
The simplicity of the explanation is the vulnerability. Most CEOs explain their thinking in complex frameworks designed to sound impressive. Elon explained his in terms of aluminum prices and percentage markups. The explanation is so simple that it's almost embarrassing for the audience of MBAs who spent two years learning frameworks that a commodity price check renders unnecessary.
The man who thinks in first principles can explain it to a child because the thinking itself is childlike. Children ask "why" until the adult runs out of answers. Elon asks "why" until the engineer runs out of physics based answers. The moment the answer becomes "because that's how we've always done it," the thing being discussed is a tradition, not a requirement. And traditions are eliminated. Requirements are optimized. The distinction between the two is worth $100 billion in rocket economics.
First principles is not a business methodology. It is the refusal to accept an answer that doesn't reduce to physics. Every child does it naturally. Most adults unlearn it. Elon never unlearned it. The man who builds rockets thinks like a five year old who won't stop asking why. The five year old's question, applied with an engineering degree and a hundred billion dollars, is the most powerful tool in commercial space.
David Linton retweeted
Two Muslim cops in New York stopped a nurse for no apparent reason other than that she was walking her dog.
They cornered her and threatened to seize her dog. When confronted, they got angry and couldn’t say what law she had broken.
This is what happens when you give these people power. All I can say is that she was lucky there were passersby, because it was 3 AM and things could’ve ended much worse.
David Linton retweeted
James Fishback: In Mississippi, I saw firsthand disaffected young white men who pledged not to vote. I saw it in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and my home state of Florida. We saw it in the numbers last night, along with what I saw on the ground: a 35-point shift away from Republicans and toward Democrats among young white men.
They don’t see mass deportations. They don’t see accountability for Epstein. And they see a foreign war that Donald Trump swore he would not begin. At the same time, the golden age seems to be accruing only to those who already own assets. It’s not making it any easier for people my age or younger to buy a home.
We’re seeing young people fired from their jobs—or not hired in the first place—because companies are using corporate H-1B pipelines to replace them. It’s pretty dire out there. Young people, and young men in particular, want an America First vision—not America First in name, but America First in practice.
@jamesfishback
“Palantir even launched a paid engineering program recruiting straight from high school, before the credentialing machine gets a chance to smooth them out.”
Alex Karp doesn't want well-rounded people at Palantir.
He specifically looks for "malshaped high aptitude", someone whose intelligence is almost disqualifying everywhere else precisely because it's so extreme in one direction.
The logic is sharp: a super high aptitude doesn't fit into a normal org. It breaks the system. So you build a company that only works with people the system already rejected.
That's not a hiring philosophy. That's a deliberate filter for the kind of minds most companies accidentally screen out during the interview process.
Palantir even launched a paid engineering program recruiting straight from high school, before the credentialing machine gets a chance to smooth them out.
The best technical talent isn't the most hireable. It's often the least.
The full story and what founders can copy: Alex Karp's Playbook for Which AI Companies Survive
theaiopportunities.com/p/ale…
“Agency and taste are now the scarce resource. AI compresses time-to-build. What it can't compress is judgment: knowing what to build, for whom, and why it matters. That's the new moat.”
$0 to $15M ARR in 4 months. 2-3 people. No large team. No series A.
Garry Tan says this is already happening at the frontier of AI-native startups, a few hundred skill files doing the work of a 50-person org.
The playbook he's using to advise YC founders right now:
- Per-seat SaaS is dying and not just the model. The valuation multiple the market assigns it is already obsolete. If your pricing is still seats × monthly fee, you're building on a collapsing foundation.
- The solo founder calculus has flipped. A co-founder still wins in specific contexts, but the default assumption that you need one has crumbled. When AI compresses execution, the advantage a co-founder provided, speed, breadth, redundancy, is no longer the bottleneck.
- Agency and taste are now the scarce resource. AI compresses time-to-build. What it can't compress is judgment: knowing what to build, for whom, and why it matters. That's the new moat.
- The structural shift underneath all of this: AI doesn't just make teams faster, it changes the unit economics of company-building entirely. Headcount no longer needs to scale with revenue ambition.
- Most founders are still optimizing for the 2015 playbook, raise, hire, scale headcount, repeat. The ones currently eating entire markets look nothing like that. They're smaller, faster, and being advised to reorganize entirely around agents before they hit their first $10M.
That's the actual delta between the last generation of startups and this one.
If this was useful, the full playbook is in Product Market Fit: productmarketfit.tech/p/garr…
