Builder & PE advisor with a bent for anthro & philosophy. I study what people actually do, then build for it. Acquired AI founder. Building from Lisbon.
Lisbon & SF
Joined April 2009
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Anthropology trained me to switch lenses: ask better questions, hold several worldviews at once, and genuinely enjoy how differently people see things.
I've built products for 15 years. My last AI startup was acquired, and now I build AI that helps PE firms diligence and turn around companies. After hours I make art and hardware that visualizes what's happening in the world, in real time.
I'm looking for people who skip the small talk, go deep fast, and make things happen. If that's you, say hi.
The Railway security breach and outage have been a crash course in how NOT to handle outages:
- No status updates for an ENTIRE day
- Eventually they get their act together and start doing token updates every 45 minutes but without a resolution ETA
- Then they share an expected resolution time and proceed to blow past it with a flippant opaque status update afterwards
- Then they post an engineer’s name in the status updates “don’t be alarmed if you see his name in your logs” lol
- Eventually at the end of the day they announce it’s a security breach and that you need to rotate all keys - except all deployments are blocked!!!
- A haphazard security email goes out another 4 hours later with typos, unfinished sentences…
Having handled major outages before it’s clear they’re scrambling internally, and the quality of handling the situation speaks to the likely quality of the organization and the product - not much to trust for an infra provider, unfortunately.
Oh man, RIP. This app was the first major real world/virtual world cultural status gamification zeitgeist. Tough to monetize with consumers, and cannibalizing when switching to enterprise revenue.
What would be the paid consumer version of this today?
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
The Wright brothers flew in 1903. Five years later, people still thought they were bluffing.
Then Wilbur flew around a racetrack in France. Less than two minutes in the air turned skeptics into believers.
The art of a product demo publicity stunt.
Any business that thrives on the opacity and friction associated with a particular space (eg healthcare, taxes, dark patterns, etc) is going to get wiped out by commodified AI.
Miroslav Lysyuk retweeted
after switching our approach to building a "FirmOS", I'm increasingly confident that the future of agent collaboration within organizational settings is going to be a "company operating system" or CompanyOS, designed for agent and human collaboration
instead of a "company brain" that holds everything, the OS is for storing rules, processes, decisions made, which tools to use and how. it can mirror some data, but the source of truth is often best held in your existing tools (CRM, etc.). it's continuously updated and used by your agents
i think of this as a "flipped playbook" where instead of writing down the company rules first and following them (which is kind of like waterfall development), you're constantly updating the playbook as you decide or learn new things day-to-day running the business
I think a severely under explored part of the hardware space is electronics and machinery that never need plug in charging.
Imagine a whoop style health tracker that never needed charging.
We peaked here at automatic and solar watches.
Miroslav Lysyuk retweeted
75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species.
TIL you can 3D print a QR code and it works!
Showtime. Ghost in the Shell is now on the streets of Lisbon. A graffiti AI project that tracks trends from a street corner for the community by the community.
A couple of optimizations: Removed the eink display since it’s redundant to using the QR code to communicate with Ghost. Now it should be able to stay alive for months before accounting for solar.
See more at ghostintheshell.art
Showtime. Ghost in the Shell is now on the streets of Lisbon. A graffiti AI project that tracks trends from a street corner for the community by the community.
A couple of optimizations: Removed the eink display since it’s redundant to using the QR code to communicate with Ghost. Now it should be able to stay alive for months before accounting for solar.
See more at ghostintheshell.art
I made this weird idea I find interesting: What if a random street corner had intelligence and memory? A year ago I built v1 of Ghost in the Shell, a self-contained AI “spirit” of a place.
Solar powered. Internet connected. Stick it somewhere and it lives there.
The first version was interesting, but it was missing something: it couldn’t actually experience the place it inhabited.
So I came back to it a year later and gave it eyes.
Every so often, it wakes up, looks around, and takes a photo. Those observations become its memories.
Scan the QR code and you can talk to the ghost of that place.
Ask it what’s changed.
What happened yesterday.
What it keeps seeing.
What’s interesting lately.
Basically: a public-facing camera you don’t watch, you talk to its memory.
First ghost hits the streets of Lisbon this week.
ghostintheshell.art
I made this weird idea I find interesting: What if a random street corner had intelligence and memory? A year ago I built v1 of Ghost in the Shell, a self-contained AI “spirit” of a place.
Solar powered. Internet connected. Stick it somewhere and it lives there.
The first version was interesting, but it was missing something: it couldn’t actually experience the place it inhabited.
So I came back to it a year later and gave it eyes.
Every so often, it wakes up, looks around, and takes a photo. Those observations become its memories.
Scan the QR code and you can talk to the ghost of that place.
Ask it what’s changed.
What happened yesterday.
What it keeps seeing.
What’s interesting lately.
Basically: a public-facing camera you don’t watch, you talk to its memory.
First ghost hits the streets of Lisbon this week.
ghostintheshell.art
Who would have thought 10 years ago that the cold start content hurdle that kept VR from succeeding would get solved by AI decompiling the entirety of the global gaming catalogue from other consoles via a chat window ask.
Miroslav Lysyuk retweeted
it’s honestly insane how much of the modern tech tree has been unlocked because of a single guy
thanks to Elon we have
- online payments
- mass market electric cars
- batteries and grid-scale energy storage
- self driving cars and robotaxis
- humanoid robots
- advanced brain computer interfaces
- next generation tunneling
- reusable rockets
-global satellite internet
- basically the modern space industry
- Moon and Mars transportation
- orbital compute and space data centers
- frontier AI
- gigantic AI supercomputers
- physical world AI
and the wildest part is that these branches are now starting to merge
there is a very real chance that this one guy ends up being the reason humanity reaches Kardashev II
genuinely the man of the millennium
