Tools for progress #46
AI 2027, How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine, The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025
We (humans) read hundreds of articles on company building, angel investing, and self-management and curate the best ones into a weekly summary—helping founders and operators stay on the top of their game.
Better thinking
Everyone Is Faking It So You Might As Well Too (2 minute read)
That nagging “I’m a total fraud” feeling? Everyone has it. Truth is, feeling out of your depth isn’t bad, it means you’re growing. The best stuff happens when we’re slightly panicking and making it up as we go. So next time that voice speaks up, just keep going.
Why Small Problems Are Worse Than Big Ones (8 minute read)
Small problems often do more damage than big ones because we ignore them until they snowball. This piece explores how minor annoyances in relationships, careers, and daily life silently compound while we’re busy addressing more obvious challenges. Learn practical strategies to identify these ticking time bombs early and develop the courage to address them before they become life-altering issues.
A must read prediction on the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade, which could exceed that of the industrial revolution. The scenario represents a best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
Operational tactics
Development Velocity Is Becoming a Commodity (3 minute read)
As AI reshapes how we build software, development speed is no longer the bottleneck. The real differentiators are now clarity, adaptability, and decision-making. The teams that’ll get ahead will prioritize customer understanding, minimize bureaucracy, maintain a growth mindset, make small testable bets, and focus relentlessly on customer value. Today’s competitive edge isn't how fast you build, but how quickly you determine what's worth building in the first place.
This analysis breaks down Wiz’s meteoric rise to become cybersecurity’s most-hyped company. Discover how they’ve dominated industry mindshare through strategic ARR announcements, high-profile “M&A leaks,” creative marketing stunts, and positioning cloud security as magical rather than technical. Whether you’re in cybersecurity or marketing, this piece reveals the playbook behind turning a 4-year-old startup into a $32B sensation.
A Postmortem of a Startup (40 minute read)
Founded in 2023, Tract raised £744K to fix Britain’s housing crisis by making planning permission less painful. Despite building solid tech that impressed industry folks, they couldn’t turn positive feedback into actual customers. After two years without revenue, they pulled the plug. The post-mortem reveals tough lessons. It’s a long read, but I think any pre-seed/seed founder, or someone wanting to found, should read it.
Refer and we’ll send you our favorite books as a “thank you” for spreading the word.
Angel investing
Early-Stage VC in the Age of Vertical AI (8 minute read)
Vertical AI startups are flipping the VC playbook by hitting serious revenue with minimal funding and time. Unlike traditional software, these industry-specific tools slot right into existing workflows, creating consumer-app growth rates in B2B markets. Smart investors are ditching old funding patterns and getting in at company formation instead of waiting for traction signals. Investors have to adapt to this new J-curve capital model and invest earlier and earlier.
Is OpenAI Worth $300B? (5 minute read)
OpenAI just snagged a mind-blowing $40B in funding, valuing the company at $300B. Those numbers sound crazy until you see they’ve got 500 million people using ChatGPT weekly and are on track for $12.5B in revenue this year. Their new image generator went viral faster than ChatGPT did, showing serious momentum. The big question isn’t the price tag, it’s actually whether they can outrun competitors and dodge regulatory bullets.
What if IPOs Never Come Back? (6 minute read)
The tech IPO market remains severely depressed, with fewer than 10 tech IPOs annually since 2022. This drought goes beyond normal market cycles, reflecting fundamental shifts in how companies approach public markets. The median company age at IPO has increased from six years in 1980 to eleven years in 2021, creating a new category of ‘quasi-public’ companies like Databricks and Epic Games that remain private through their first $20 billion in value creation. While some high-quality companies like Stripe choose to remain private, many ‘zombie unicorns’ from 2021 remain stuck because they’re unable to raise up rounds or achieve public-market viability. Alternative liquidity mechanisms are emerging but remain inadequate at scale like secondary markets (primarily serving unicorns) and continuation vehicles (facing valuation disputes).
Managing your career
Do Not Get Side-Tracked (8 minute read)
It’s easy to lose life’s ‘golden thread’ when overthinking complex decisions but simple questions can ground us: ‘If I had one more year, would I still care?’ and ‘If I loved myself truly, would I let myself experience this?’ The film, ‘The Tree of Life’, warns against getting sidetracked from your true path, a lesson equally applicable to founders chasing market trends instead of their vision. If we view relationships as ‘co-evolutionary loops’ where the right partners can unlock ‘continual expansion’, then we must have the tenacity to find these rare individuals whose vision and working style complement ours even if they’re a rare species scattered across the globe. Founding teams and leaders should show the inside of their heads in public to attract the right partners, investors, and early employees.
The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025 (20 minute read)
This behind-the-scenes look at tech hiring in 2025 reveals a market that’s slowly recovering but with dramatically higher standards. While AI specialists enjoy a hot job market reminiscent of 2021’s peak, most engineers face tougher interviews, more rounds, and even downleveling. Companies now expect mastery of increasingly complex technical challenges while also scrutinising leadership skills and cultural fit more intensely than ever before. We are in an employer’s market for sure.
Old Path vs New Path (2 minute read)
Unconventional career paths are popping up. They centre around doing three things — getting familiar with the newest tools (mostly AI), building an audience which you can use as distribution leverage for anything you launch, and ultimately creating digital assets (SaaS, courses, content) that help you create wealth as you sleep.