Month: April 2025
I love to read.
As a kid, my idea of a good time was being in the hammock in the backyard of my house in Dallas, Texas, reading a book. My parents supported this, letting me read anything I wanted from their bookshelves (I read The Drifters at much too young an age). I loved buying books, and today, I have an infinite number of unread books on my Kindle. I vary my reading diet and log it all in Goodreads (ignore the stars).
One of my “book heroes” is Ryan Holiday. We met at a dinner at SXSW in 2007 or 2008, and I’ve been a fanboy ever since. I’ve read all his books, happily get his monthly reading newsletter (which motivates me to buy a book or two he recommends each month), and am inspired by his Painted Porch Bookshop.
His op-ed in the New York Times on April 19, 2025, titled The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom stopped me in my tracks. Nothing much is surprising me daily anymore (per my long-time philosophy about my business life, that now applies to a much broader range of things, that I wrote about in Something New Is Fucked Up In My World Every Day.)
The first book I remember reading about censorship was Fahrenheit 451. I remember being repulsed by the idea that a government would ban (and burn) books. I was young (probably less than ten) and followed it quickly with 1984. Yeah, I read a lot of dystopian sci-fi as a kid.
Thoughtcrimes, Newspeak, and Doublespeak were grotesque ideas to me. I hated the idea of the Memory Hole. I grew up feeling like it was important to read everything, even if I didn’t like it or disagreed with it.
I still try to do that in today’s world, but I limit it to reading. I don’t apply the same concept to watching videos or TV. I don’t learn verbally and have trouble synthesizing information when visually stimulated. While my retention from listening is fine, I don’t effectively incorporate ideas unless I read or write something about them. I’ve tried to address this by taking notes when listening to a video or a lecture, but that doesn’t work for me, so I’d rather just read the transcript.
Ryan described a story about James Stockdale, which he would have discussed in his canceled Naval Academy talk on Wisdom. The story aligns exceptionally well with the meta-level of his talk’s cancellation and includes a great ending.
“Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Mr. Stockdale reminded us. I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtue of courage and doing the right thing, as I did in 2023 and 2024, and fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action.
Dinostroids, my first vibe-coded software project, is live.
The last time I wrote any meaningful amount of production software was in 1990. At the time, I was running a software consulting company with my partner, Dave Jilk. We’d reached the point where, as we grew, he became responsible for all the software, and I handled all the network integration stuff we had to do for our clients. Every now and then, I’d have to do maintenance on something I had written in the past, but it was pretty minimal.
After we sold Feld Technologies in 1993, my job quickly changed, and within a year, I was deep in a bunch of M&A stuff and making angel investments with my own money. As the commercial Internet began, I’d fantasize about writing software, but I had no time to do anything other than play around with Perl, and then PHP, and then Ruby on Rails, and … well, you get the idea. I knew enough HTML and CSS to poke around, but I wasn’t doing anything that was anywhere near production.
As the last 30 years have passed, I’ve learned a few new programming languages, including Python (I’m reasonably proficient) and Clojure. But I never learned JavaScript, and everything I did was baby steps beyond “Hello World.” So, my professional coding days ended with Basic+Btrieve, DataFlex, and Pascal.
Over the 2024 holiday break, I started playing around with Cursor after several people, including Quinn McIntyre (my partner Ryan’s amazing kid), told me about it. I was comfortable enough with VS Code, so I just dove in. I started working on a Personal Health Manager project (PHM) using Python, Django, Render, and Claude 3.5. I made some progress, but the holidays ended, and I got busy again.
About a month ago, I started working on Dinostroids. All of a sudden, everyone was talking about this new vibe coding thing, and while I planned to do more on PHM, I thought it would be fun to dive into something completely different. I spent a weekend starting from scratch with Cursor, JavaScript, Vercel, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. By the end of the weekend, I had a functioning Dinostroids game working.
I’ve always learned by doing. When I was in my teens and 20s, I loved writing software. Over the past twenty years, blogging and subsequently writing books (Give First: The Power of Mentorship is my ninth book) have filled this hole for me. But I missed coding a lot.
If you look at my Goodreads page, you’ll notice that my reading pace has slowed significantly in the last 45 days. Instead of reading in the evenings, I’m vibe coding.
It blows my mind that I can create a functional game like Dinostroids without writing a single line of JS. Sure – it’s a pretty simple game. Still, a lot is going on, and working on it using the agent in Cursor, learning how to prompt it effectively, reading a lot of the code (I have “reading proficiency with JS now), getting a mobile browser working without generating absurd code bloat, and figuring out an effective workflow with Cursor, Github, and Vercel has been a ton of fun.
In the video game of software development, I feel like I’m at Level 4 now of an infinite level game after being stuck at Level 2 for 30 years.
Go play Dinostroids and see if you can get on the leaderboard. I expect GEG will be motivated to get going again after losing his fifth-place spot.
Big thanks to the McIntyres (Quinn and Ryan), my brother Daniel, Sam Ritchie, and a bunch of people from my college society (ADP) for being testers and offering feature suggestions to be implemented.
After I wrote my post on Unhibernating, my long-time, empathetic friend Christopher Schroeder, whom I originally met through Ben Casnocha (that story is discussed in Give First: The Power of Mentorship), sent me a short note asking, “Have you been ok?”
I responded with a long email explaining why I decided to hibernate in the summer of 2023 and why this hibernation lasted almost two years. After writing a long email (which I’ve been doing a lot of during my hibernation), I asked Chris if I could post my response to my blog, and he said, “Of course.”
The following is my answer to Chris’s question, “Have you been ok? ” I’ve edited it for grammar.
Yes – I’ve been ok.
A couple of things were going on that converged in the summer of 2023.
- I realized I was completely burned out from public stuff. The inbound requests were endless, and even though I could say no to many of them, I wasn’t enjoying them.
- I was tired of the VC industry and its noise. The endless self-promotion combined with “I know the answer – look at me” mixed with thought pieces ghostwritten by marketing professionals and then endless VC Twitter from the same person, much of which didn’t line up philosophically, got me down. And, well, podcasts are so easy compared to writing – the person blathers on about whatever is on their mind, reacts to a current thing, and influences so many with such thin suppositions that are often nonsense.
- Some people I thought I’d respected had shifted some of their behavior, not as extreme as it is now, but it was increasingly distasteful to me.
- Critical thinking seems to have been discarded in many parts of my world. The view was, “If I assert something loudly or strongly enough, over and over, it becomes the truth.”
- We had closed our latest fund (spring 2023), and I wasn’t enthusiastic about making new investments. After—I dunno—a thousand direct investments, hundreds of fund investments, and a zillion indirect investments, I was cooked.
So, I took a break from all public engagement. It took me about three months to stop looking at anything but I eventually whittled it down to the daily Techmeme email. I also unsubscribed to almost everything, so my inbox became only work and personal emails. I even unsubscribed to Axios Pro Rata (by far the best VC daily) for a while.
I worked plenty (15 boards, supported anyone in our portfolio that needed help), spent a lot of time with Amy, continued not to travel for work, read a few books a week, and ran a lot. I continued supporting philanthropic and government efforts in the background, helping anyone who wanted to lead, but not being public or forward-facing. I also shifted to default no on everything, so I needed a close relationship with someone asking for help to say yes.
I was in great physical shape and planned a three-week, 300-mile run across New York State on the Empire Trail in August 2024. Jerry Colonna would accompany me in an SUV, move my stuff from place to place, and hang out with me when I wasn’t running. And then, Amy and I got Covid for the first time on June 2nd. After being diligent, avoiding it for a long time, and being very hermit-like, I got it randomly during a month in Boulder, where Amy and I were more social than usual. I never figured out who I got it from, and didn’t appear to give it to anyone we were with, so it was as random as it gets.
I tested positive for 21 days and felt extremely crappy for six weeks. I cancelled my run across New York State and, as the summer unfolded, realized I was exhausted all the time. If I went for a three-mile run, I’d have to sleep for a few hours in the afternoon just to be functional. This continued into the fall, after which I accepted that I needed more sleep. Nine months later, I sleep 90 to 120 minutes more a night than I used to (I haven’t used an alarm clock since 2013, so I get up when I wake up.) I’m running a little more (maybe 10 – 15 miles a week), but if I run over 20 miles weekly, I fall apart and need to rest for two to three days. Maybe it’s long Covid, but no one knows what this means. Perhaps it’s sneaking up on 60. Maybe it’s something else.
I picked up Pilates and got disciplined through the winter (twice a week). I’m stretching more (age). I’m trying to get into a weight lifting rhythm (I have inadequate upper body strength – I’ve always been an upper body wimp). But I’m accepting age and know that strength is vital to longevity. I lost a lot of weight (thank you, gila monsters, for helping with that), and all my bloodwork, including cholesterol, is in a normal range for the first time in as long as I can remember.
I worked on Give First: The Power of Mentorship a few years ago after finishing The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, sent it out to about 25 people for feedback, and, after getting the feedback, was pretty unhappy with the state of the book. I decided to put it on the shelf. I took it down in the fall and started working on it again, but slowly. By the end of the year, I had restructured and rewritten a lot of it, and was excited about it again. I felt my internal energy around engaging with people starting to build up again, and upon reflection, realized how depleted I was in the summer of 2023.
Amy and I are doing great. She continues to be an amazing partner, and I’m overjoyed to spend most of my time with her (both waking and asleep!). While I’ll travel a little this summer, maybe she’ll come with me—or maybe not.
Regardless of everything going on in the world, I’m ok. Thanks for asking.
Book: Scaleup Arabia: Journeys & Lessons from Top Founders & Leaders Driving Growth in MENA & Beyond
In addition to writing books, I love supporting books written by friends.
Amir Hagazi has published his newest book, Scaleup Arabia: Journeys & Lessons from Top Founders & Leaders Driving Growth in MENA & Beyond. The image above shows some of the founders highlighted in the book, and the image below shows some of the companies discussed in the book.
While I don’t do book blurbs anymore, I have written forewords for Amir in the past on two of his prior books, Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New Economy and Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global Investors, both of which I recommend.
If you are interested in scaleups (I love that word as a complement to startups) and are interested in companies in MENA, this is the book for you!
I’ve decided to come out of hibernation until at least Labor Day.
While this coincides with the publication of my new book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship, I also have a few things on my mind that I feel like blogging about. If you know me, you probably know that I explore ideas by writing about them, and have always learned a lot when I think out loud by writing in public.
I hibernated in the summer of 2023. I stopped blogging, podcasting, and engaging on all social media. I also stopped giving public talks, both in person and virtual. Sure, occasionally, I’d repost something on my LinkedIn, do a long-form interview like the one I did with NOCD about Mental Health in Entrepreneurship, and I wrote a few blog posts about new books from several friends.
But I stopped engaging. After almost 20 years, I needed a break.
I continued to write a lot. Some of my writing found its way into Give First: The Power of Mentorship and several email lists I’m part of, but most of it was private.
I switched from default yes when asked to do something to a default no. It took a little while to get comfortable with, and a few people were annoyed with me, but it felt great once I got the hang of it. And I badly needed to reset some things.
During hibernation, I continued responding to almost all the emails I got. I’ll keep doing this, as it is the best way to interact with me. I have comments on this blog, so that’s another way to engage. While I’ll be broadcasting stuff on LinkedIn and Twitter, I doubt I’ll engage there meaningfully, but who knows …