I’m an engineer, investor, and designer. I run a small fund that invests in early-stage startups and public companies. I’m an investor and founding employee at Mashgin, where we’re building the future of retail checkout. I live in California and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In 2013 I worked with Warren Buffett to publish "Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders", a compilation of 50 years of his full letters. Explorist Productions was originally started to publish the book and has since evolved to publish other progress-related media.

The best places to follow me are on Twitter or on FutureBlind, my personal blog/newsletter.

Resources:

• Favorite Books
• Favorite Podcast episodes
• Blog
• Podcast: My friend Eric Jorgenson had me on his show to talk about AI, computer vision, and more in this episode of "Smart Friends" (November 2022)

My primary interests are:

• Fighting entropy by exploring the frontiers of creativity, intelligence, and space.
• Using AI to automate the things life's too short for — particularly visual bottlenecks. Also experimenting heavily with other foundation models in language, sound, and more to truly leverage human capability.
• Researching and investing in good businesses of all sizes.
• Tools that allow creating high production value media with a small crew or budget. (Who will be the new Pixar or ILM?)
• Using storytelling to inspire and promote technical progress, particularly in hard-tech: space, bioengineering, transportation, construction, energy, etc.
• Speeding up humanity's expansion into Space: to improve quality of life on Earth, to ensure the survival of our superorganism, and to push the boundaries of what we're is capable of.
• Modernizing the technologies and practices of architecture and urban design.
• Large-scale environmental restoration (terraforming).
• Using tokenized securities for programmatic ownership.
• Watching great movies! (Series are good as well, but nothing beats a good movie.)

Questions I'm interested in:

• Now that we can represent the physical world in large neural networks (like the LLMs that power ChatGPT), how do we best navigate and explore these latent spaces?
• How do you best measure productivity and prosperity over long periods? It seems that the traditional economic measures don't adequately measure true progress.
• Is it possible to combine the best aspects of both urban and suburban living?
• Related: How can evolutionary biology and traditional wisdom be combined with modern tech to improve living conditions?
• Can large scale construction projects be sped up an order of magnitude without sacrificing safety or reliability?
• Can plants be engineered to improve or replace modern technology? (Buildings, infrastructure, energy, etc.) Ex. could you grow a self-healing house?
• What does the future of VR/immersive storytelling look like? What's the 2-hour-film equivalent to VR?
• What would ubiquitous worldwide sensors and monitoring allow for? How quickly/cheaply can this be accomplished? What are the downsides?
• Are there high-leverage lessons that can be taught in early education (pre 9th grade) to best improve student's future outcomes?

Personal projects, past and present:

• Berkshire Hathaway letters book / poster / kindle
• Berkshire Memorex — A digital archive of Buffett’s letters that you can search by meaning.
• Readspace — Explore your Readwise highlights by semantic meaning.
• BuffettBot — An AI Warren Buffett that answers questions based on his letters, meetings, and interviews.
• Atlastory — An open-source app that visualizes history on a map.
• FutureBlind Podcast — An experiment that combines my own narration with archival audio clips to tell stories of technical progress.
• Generative AI style experiments — First used classic style transfer, then fine-tuned Stable Diffusion + Dreambooth models to emulate the WSJ stipple style (See the portrait above as an example; try hovering over it!)
• Blue Chip Stamps letters — Letters of the company Charlie Munger ran with Warren Buffett in the '70s.
• Caffe Mocha — A drive-thru coffee shop I started in college, and managed for ~3 years.
• HikeHero — map-based trail searching: filter by length, difficulty, proximity to trailhead [shutdown due to loss of the map provider]
• Other random software projects on Github.

Selected writings:

• Mashgin: The Future of Computer Vision — Our vision at Mashgin as of 2016.
• Advantage Flywheels — Competitive advantage can be represented visually as 1 or more feedback loops.
• The Grand Unifying Theory of Design — Design isn't just about how something looks. It's a universal problem-solving process that can be applied to any discipline to create valuable and delightful experiences.
• Atlastory: Mapping the History of the World — A rundown and post-mortem of a project I worked on on mapping world history.
• Let's jumpstart the new industrial revolution — What could a new industrial revolution bring?
• Product Strategy: Falcon 9 — A short product case study on SpaceX's Falcon 9.
• The Restaurant Investor — A long-form article on the turnaround of Stake-n-Shake, McDonalds, In-N-Out, and what it takes to succeed in the chain restaurant business.
• The Real Causes of the Financial Crisis (2009)
• Fumbling the Future at Xerox PARC