Peter Thiel has a theory most founders ignore: your company name predicts whether you'll win or fail. "I believe very strongly that the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success." His framework, in his own words: PayPal worked because it felt human. "It was the friend that helps you pay." Friendly, transactional, trustworthy — the name did sales before the product did. Napster was doomed from the start. "You nap" — the connotation was sleep, theft, something illicit. The name telegraphed exactly what regulators and labels would eventually come after it for. The deeper point isn't aesthetics. A name is a compressed signal — about your market positioning, your customer relationship, and how the world will narrativize you when things go wrong. Names expose founder psychology. A name that sounds aggressive or antisocial is usually a tell that the founder hasn't thought hard enough about how their company will be perceived at scale. Most founders treat naming as a branding exercise. Thiel treats it as a predictive test.

a ton easier to acquire books once Amazon picks up the overprints from the original publisher. Amazon Australia does free delivery deals pre Xmas making these almost free 🆓

New Zealand: remote South Pacific location, food surplus, low strategic value. Iceland: top Global Peace Index, isolated island, renewable energy and fishing. Switzerland: long neutrality, Alpine terrain, extensive nuclear bunkers. Argentina: vast agriculture, Southern Hemisphere distance from major powers. Chile: Andes and Pacific barriers, minerals and food self-sufficiency.

In Progress

JUST IN: Anthropic generates over $6.6 million in annual revenue per employee, surpassing every Magnificent Seven company except Nvidia.

A new art primitive for digital art nearly complete. If you’re an artist interested in playing with it first, lmk - going to have a private beta. Broadly, we don’t need marketplaces or platforms, royalties are part of settlement and you’re not restricted to popular art file types. I’ll share the white paper publicly soon.

When 6529 is the third most decentralized crypto project ON EARTH, I may mention it in passing, at a party, if the mood strikes, once.

I spent 20 years helping leaders face massive social crises together: war & peace, drug & gang violence, immigration conflicts, etc One thing I learned is that community is really hard to build & shatters easily The stakes are high. Think about it: there's no other scene like this one. What we have here is rare & precious. We need to care for each other with the bigger picture in mind.

6529 is either existentially important for critical freedoms or it will be nothing at all. That is the scale of this bet.