Tech exec/advisor/investor
Bay area
Joined August 2009
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Critical point. My Kellogg prof @HarryKraemerJr wrote his advice for leading in these times:
“Mantra 2: You’re going to tell people what you know, what you don’t know, and when you’ll get back to them to discuss what you didn’t know before.”
Great read: insight.kellogg.northwestern…
The last line is the key to everything
Shoot your shot…🔥💥👊🏻
Before Hollywood, I was living in a van in Hawaii and waiting tables at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. One day, the incredible Rae Dawn Chong walked into the restaurant, and naturally, I went up to her table and said, “Hey, you’re a movie star! What are you doing here?”
She asked if I could act, and I said, “Fuck yeah, put me in your movie!”
She asked for my phone number. The only problem was I didn’t have one. So I gave her my buddy Mike’s number instead. A couple days later, Mike casually mentions, “Oh, by the way, someone called you.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MIKE?!
I called her back, and sure enough, she was serious. I drove over to pick up the script, went back to Mike’s house, and read all 120 pages three times in a row. First script I’d ever read. My character's name was Devon, and I remember thinking, “Sweet! I could totally play a Devon!”
I showed up to the audition with every line and inflection mapped out in pencil. Rae told me I could act and offered me the part. I asked if we were shooting in Hawaii. Nope. Los Angeles.
I had about $60 to my name, a bag of clothes, and some rollerblades.
Then Rae told me they'd fly me out. And I remember thinking right then and there, my life just changed forever. I'm going to be an actor.
That little movie was Cursed Part 3, a low-budget horror comedy that opened the door to Hollywood for me.
I'll forever be grateful to Rae for taking a chance on a kid working at a shrimp restaurant. Everybody starts somewhere, and this is where it all began for me.
Busy being busy is the worst type of self-delusion and often driven by lack of clarity on what is actually strategic...simplicity drives clarity, clarity drives conviction and conviction drives focused, strategic action.
Taylor Barada retweeted
Austin was the 4th largest US startup market in Q3 with $6.4B in venture capital raised, passing Boston.
For context, Austin was 5th last year with $7.5B.
We are accelerating. 🤠🚀🦾
Taylor Barada retweeted
One of the most compelling parts about working at an ElonCo was the agility to pivot to whatever the most important problem was.
One day I said: I wasn’t hired to go after spam, but a tsunami is coming and I’m going to drop everything to focus on that.
The org is so flat and agile that your title is basically meaningless. Anyone can sound the alarm about a problem and solve it themselves—or rally the team to join them.
This is how startups work but it’s very hard to make it work in a larger company.
Taylor Barada retweeted
Berhalter’s ascent has been phenomenal to watch.
Too many soccer players are trained like cross country athletes. But speed and explosion is the tide that lifts all boats.
Feed the cats…even in soccer! @pntrack
At 21, Sebastian Berhalter was struggling in MLS. Then his dad Gregg Berhalter asked athletic and performance coach Les Spellman to work with him.
Les helped Seb get faster, stronger, and more athletic. Seb has taken his game to a new level since. #USMNT
[Video via Whistle]
Hard work pays off...Simple, not easy. 🔥💥👊
At 21, Sebastian Berhalter was struggling in MLS. Then his dad Gregg Berhalter asked athletic and performance coach Les Spellman to work with him.
Les helped Seb get faster, stronger, and more athletic. Seb has taken his game to a new level since. #USMNT
[Video via Whistle]
The ripple effects of this step change are far beyond the “SaaSpocalypse” freak out of earlier this year…
Hmmm, generally try to stick to one a day and feel guilty when it creeps up but maybe it's a "feature not a bug"?? 🤔
People who drank more coffee had less body fat, less visceral fat, and more lean mass than less-frequent or non-drinkers.
The biggest benefit was seen at 5 or more cups per day.
And for men, every extra cup per day was associated with a ~10 ng/dL higher total testosterone. Higher coffee intake was also associated with better glucose and insulin regulation in men.
This was an observational study, but mechanistic and experimental evidence actually supports coffee's benefits on metabolic and hormonal health. I'm willing to believe there's a real link here rather than draw a conclusion such as "coffee drinkers live healthier lives in general."
Taylor Barada retweeted
Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week:
1. Austin is a serious f*cking city.
SF is still the center of gravity.
LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials.
But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate.
People I've met here seem to have one primary objective:
Build.
Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor.
Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work.
Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality.
2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage.
Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week.
Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion.
When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography.
When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table.
Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution.
Texas understand that speed matters.
3. The coastal migration isn't over.
SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages.
But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working.
Now you need 100,000 square feet.
Power.
Testing.
Manufacturing.
Suppliers.
Technicians.
Hundreds of employees.
Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive.
And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume.
4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here.
Historically the playbook has often been:
Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas.
I think that increasingly becomes:
Texas → Texas → Texas.
More technical founders will move here before starting the company.
More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here.
More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1.
And that's when the flywheel gets interesting:
Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups.
Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop.
5. Austin feels significantly less distracted.
There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit.
But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here.
Less worrying about who raised what round.
Less optimizing for appearances.
Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to.
More:
Does the thing actually work?
That cultural difference matters more than people realize.
6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument.
Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane?
It's 2026.
If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane.
Great companies don't travel to capital.
Capital travels to great companies.
Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds.
More capital will follow the companies.
It always does.
7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been.
Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure.
Factories.
Energy.
Robotics.
Defense.
Space.
Advanced manufacturing.
Data centers.
Industrial systems.
Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world.
And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed.
Texas has a lot of all six.
SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine.
But Austin doesn't need to become either of them.
It may be building something fundamentally different:
A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it.
That's a much more interesting proposition.
Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem.
Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated.
Ingredients are here.
Talent is coming.
Capital will follow.
Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here.
That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸
Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!
Taylor Barada retweeted
The job of a coach.
“My job is to always be opposite at the moment.”
Calm when chaos comes.
Confident when doubt creeps in.
Demanding when standards slip.
Encouraging when confidence drops.
Patient when frustration grows.
Give your team what the moment needs.
This is the way. Build a life you don’t want to escape…one day at a time. 🔥💥👊🏻
Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from
“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”
“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”
“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”
“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”
“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”
“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”
There are no extra gold stars for "doing it alone"...
Figure out how to do the thing...do the thing.
Repeat. The End. 🔥💥👊
Michael Jordan, Angela Duckworth, and Why We’ve Made Competition a Dirty Word
Michael Jordan famously said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” That always made sense to me.
Angela Duckworth has an excellent new essay in The New York Times arguing that successful people share an important habit: they ask for help. As she writes, “Without exception, every high performer I’ve studied credits a host of supporters for success.”
She’s right. Nobody gets very far alone.
But after years of working with Olympians, professional athletes, coaches and other high performers, I’d put a slightly different name on what the best of them do:
Competitive resourcefulness.
“Asking for help” can sound to a fiercely independent person like an admission that they can’t handle something themselves. Great performers tend to see it differently. If a coach, teammate, expert, better data, another set of eyes or a good conversation can help them improve, they use it.
I often hear world-class performers ask me questions that less secure people might be embarrassed to ask. They’re not trying to look like they know everything. They’re trying to get better.
If there’s gold there, why would I ever leave it sitting on the table?
I also think we’ve made the word competition unnecessarily loaded. Too often it gets reduced to conflict, domination or beating somebody else.
At its best, competition is about striving, sharpening your game and finding out what you’re capable of.
Many of the fiercest college and professional athletes I’ve worked with are also terrific collaborators. They want to beat you on game day and are perfectly happy to learn from you the following day.
That’s why competition and cooperation are not opposites.
Collaboration can be one of the ways a champion competes.
MJ didn’t become less competitive because he needed teammates and coaches. Knowing how to use the talent and intelligence around him helped make him formidable.
So Angela’s advice to ask for help is good advice. I’d just broaden the question:
"What could help me get better that I’m not using yet?"
Maybe it’s a person, an idea, a different approach or a conversation you’ve been too proud to have.
Go find out.
That’s competitive resourcefulness.
It’s also the kind of practical mental-game thinking behind my new book, "The Daily Champion’s Mind," arriving November 3, 2026. Preorder now.
Champion the day.
#AngelaDuckworth #MichaelJordan #NewYorkTimes #HighPerformance #MentalPerformance #SportsPsychology #Leadership
Taylor Barada retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Much of sales...much of life in fact, is a battle of frames.
A core frame battle that matters deeply is that of Abundance vs Scarcity...and the beauty is once you step into abundance others meet you there.
This is how you move from win-lose to win-win...
