https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/fkpxls-vol61-not-young-enough-to

Happy brunch time. I am sitting by my apartment window in New York City, listening to Tokyo Slow Mixtape 18 by TokyoBike that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present.

What we share is Fakepixels, a space for honest inquiry and bold ideas. Here, we are not afraid to ask bold questions and find invisible forces that challenge the status quo.

"Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty," Mark Twain might have said this. Uncertainty is also romance; in the words of Oscar Wilde: "I am not young enough to know everything."

Jordan and I found the time to sit outside on the patio and reflect on my past month. It felt like a short month, but it also felt like forever. People talk about "turning points" in life—how they might have altered someone's life trajectory by making some minor adjustments to the slope or the direction—it never felt like so at the moment. What was present was just the tender breeze of early fall and an infinite set of possibilities. One of these small incidents, one of these dialogues, would render a whole dream that was once unimaginable.

He gave me a piece of feedback. For the past month, he hasn't yet seen me obsessed with an idea.

"Everything you share is interesting, but what are you obsessed with?"

To level up to the next stage of practicing the craft, I need to develop conviction. After seeing a dozen times what "greats" look like and what it takes to get there, the development of "obsession" became difficult, as it takes a deeper level of insights that can no longer be easily discovered. I'd be nowhere close to getting the full picture by the time a decision has to be made, but I know that's a leap of faith I eventually have to make.

It's when I passed through a block where handcrafted gold chains are being sold and jazz performances being shared and a young man in a suit jaywalking with a Thinkpad that I recognized what I'm deeply obsessed with is, well, the act of obsession itself: how each of these individuals, dreaming their own dreams and facing different battles, can vibrantly coexist with one other and with a global pandemic. They may have different destinations, but they all decided that NYC is the best place to be, at least for now.

NYC is an example of a robust meta-layer that supports many worlds to converge with some shared obsessions and coexist safely and independently. There's an infrastructure, both visible and invisible to me, that motivates, supports, and rewards its members' obsession. The essayist Benedetto Dei wrote about the beautiful Florence in 1472, the city that made Leonardo Da Vinci possible:

Beautiful Florence has all seven of the fundamental things a city requires for perfection. First of all, it enjoys complete liberty; second, it has a large, rich, and elegantly dressed population; third, it has a river with clear, pure water, and mills within its walls; fourth, it rules over castles, towns, lands, and people; fifth, it has a university, and both Greek and accounting are taught; sixth, it has masters in every art; seventh, it has banks and business agents all over the world.

Dei's description of Florence rhymes with what New York feels like at its best. Similar themes can be observed by studying the Internet communities closely. Liberty of speech is encouraged but could cause potential unrest. A global and diverse population is included and also muted. Some of them well-dressed. Rivers of data that are not perfectly clean or pure. Online schools teach everything, from quantum mechanics to how to pose for a selfie. The wonder of the Internet is by being a metalayer for these diverse sets of pursuits. A floodgate of unnamed desire, that's once suppressed by mainstream discourse defined for centuries by some authorities that only resemble truth, has now been unleashed. Yet not all of these desires are being treated equally, nor were they being protrayed fairly.

The deluge of APIs, packages, frameworks, templates, digitally-native marketplace supercharged the construction of the metalayer. Yet the discussion is still nascent around building the Internet as a human system, like the type of discussions an urban designer would have when building a new bridge, a library, or a new playground for the public. The local optimization of workflows can lead to better productivity, yet obsession with the means may also be procrastination to deal with the end. It's like building the ducts and drywalls for a building with no intention of hosting people or designing a perfectly built marvel in isolation with no intention of being discovered. The means can be elegant, but the end is always messy because the end is human. The end is having to ask each other difficult questions, confronting the deepest obsessions and insecurities with deep empathy.

It's much easier to understand a digitally-native SaaS business when both the means and the end exist in the digital world, and the interactions are more machine than human. Some of the hardest problems awaiting to be solved are precisely those that involve the irrationality of reality. To turn this messiness into an opportunity to provide a moment of meaning and delight is precisely the type of enterprise that we would want to support. It requires some additional effort when articulating the thesis to others. It's tempting to outsource this effort to some coined phrases: consumerized SaaS, product-led growth, and so on. To say that I never use those terms would be a lie, but I'm training myself not to. It's sloppy. When conducting research or diligence to understand a space, it's tempting to read some industry reports, podcasts, medium articles, ask friends who have consulted a project in the space, and call it a day. Yet I've been only discovering true insights when talking to people living and breathing in a space that has long been abstracted away in my own world.

Therefore, to develop the conviction needed that stems from unobvious insights, the craft becomes more akin to an investigative journalist's. At the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, Buffet said to the investors:

Essentially, you're being a reporter. I mean, it's very much like journalism. You talk to the competitor, and you say, "If you had a silver bullet and you could only put it through the head of one of your competitors, which one would it be and why?" Well, you learn a lot if you ask questions like that over time. And you ask somebody in the XYZ industry, and you say, "If you were going to go away for ten years and you had to put all of your money into one of your competitors — the stock of one of your competitors, not your own — which one would it be and why?" Just keep asking, and asking, and asking. And you'll have to discount the answers you get in certain ways, but you will be getting things poured into your head that then you can use to reformulate and do your own thinking about why you evaluate this business at this or that. [...]You keep asking those questions. And then you go to the guy they want to put the silver bullet through and find out who he wants to put the silver bullet through. It's like who wakes up the bugler, you know, in the Irving Berlin song? And that's the way you approach it. And you'll be learning all the time. You can talk to current employees, ex-employees, vendors, suppliers, distributors, retailers, customers, all kinds of people, and you'll learn. But it's an investigative process. It's a journalistic process. And in the end, you want to write the story. I mean, you're doing a journalistic enterprise. And six months later, you want to say the XYZ Company is worth this amount because and you just start in and write the story. And some companies are easy to write stories about, and other companies are much tougher to write stories about. We try to look for the ones that are easy.