Trillion Year Plans and 2023

06 Feb 2023

Every year I zoom out and look at whether I’m tracking along the roadmap of my life. I do a mini check-in every half, quarter, month, week, and day as well but this is the time where I see whether the big picture has changed.

For the first time in seven years, I’ve published this yearly outlook and a synopsis of my life’s roadmap for background.

I hope it’s interesting!

My View of Life

I view life as a rogue-like Infinite Game.

There are three game over moments that we need to avoid:

the furthest we can see right now (we think) is the heat death of the universe. That’s trillions of years away but a truly “hard” problem. It’s game over unless an intelligence figures something out. Awesome Kurzegesagt video on the topic here and a time lapse of the universe here
More “mid-term” is the death of the sun. Spaceship Earth is default dead 7 billion years from now — that’s a long time, 2x as long as life has existed on the planet — but it’s still a deadline.
The “near term” concern for the next century or two is the risk of self-destruction i.e. a black swan disaster smacking us back to the stone age. The fact is we are default dead in the next few hundred thousand, if not the next few centuries, unless we change alongside our tech. Be it climate change or war or an asteroid or a caldera or a rogue neutron star, etc. etc.

Strategy

We have hard problems to solve:

long term challenges i.e. decades, centures, millenia, and beyond
planet sized problems
species spanning problems
solar system spanning problems

To even begin to tackle these I believe we need to focus and continously invest in fundamental people enhancing tech multiple times more intently than we have so far. Why? The more fundamental the technology the more impact and compound returns over time which brings our time curve forward which minimized our risk of getting aborted by some black swan event.

There is no more fundamental technology then our own biology.

These are the areas of interest for me to help people enhance themselves:

tier 1: short term enhancements
- Continue to enhance information processing by extending the human “exo-cortex” with silicon. Better tools and tighter collaboration with machines == more productivity. This includes software, “AI”, XR, neuralink-esque tech, etc.
- Belief and behavior change. We vastly underutilize what we can already do by building poor beliefs, limiting beliefs, and underutilizing ourselves this can be simple things such as studying logical fallacies, how the brain works, how people work, and building awareness so people can take make use of what they have already
tier 2: long term enhancements
- Opt-in human engineering for performance — why? (1) people should be able to control their own destiny and not be victims of the genetic lottery, and (2) our bodies, our biotech, will become the bottleneck due to being mal-adapted to an information-based society
- Increase longevity — why? (1) I want to see what happens! And (2) lack of long-term thinking is a major peril e.g. we seem to think because no big extinction event has happened in the last several thousand years that they don’t happen but a Black Swan will come

There are many ways I could approach tackling these but I decided seven years ago on an indirect approach. I considered getting my phd or becomming an educator or policy maker. Instead, I decided it’d be better to fund 1 million scientists, social activists, and educators.

I’ve determined that foundership is the highest leverage way, that suits me, to build financial capital which I can redeploy into other people and initiatives. Plus I can do some good along the way.

For those reasons, my goal is to, initially, build a small billion-dollar company. This will give me resources to double down on more ambitious ideas I have in mind and/or become a VC (to control capital flows). Somewhere between 10 - 100 million cash in my pocket would be sufficient to meaningfully impact tier two objectives.

I’m less interested in other strategies such as getting off planet right now, unless it’s framed as a device to drive human engineering but I’m glad other folks are working on that problem.

Right now, I’m committed to the “exo-cortex” approach. Building software people can use to make their life better as a vehicle of capital accrual to funnel into the long term strategies.

Now, for the first time in many years I may need a fundamental strategy shift. When I set out capital was the constraint for longevity and human engineering. That is changing as billionaires have come around and started funneling money into synthetic bio and longevity. It’s no longer fringe and is becomming mainstream.

For those reasons, talent may now be the constraint. I will be chewing on this over 2023 and will be attending a few conferences to gather intel.

So, what does this have to do with Used Cars!?

I chose Used Cars because: (1) it’s a billion dollar opportunity (2) it is a great way to deliberately practice foundership — there is only execution risk, not product risk (I don’t want to invent a new market for my first startup).

I don’t really care what market startup number one was in other than opportunity size and that skills learned would transfer. For me, the learning is as valuable as the $$$. Expect future domains to be more targetted.

Alright, now that we know how I view life, the broad strokes of my approach, we can talk about this year at a high level.

2023 Roadmap

When I do this yearly outlook I have four personal swimlanes that I look at:

Foundations — health, fitness, sleep, and other activities that maximize my output as a productivity engine
Meta Skills — this is my bucket for the study of general skills, mostly cognitive, that compound in value such as understanding cognitive error, project management, strategy, negotiation, and other social skills
Founders Path — the name of the current life milestone – talk about internal planning and stewardship of my companies
Ruddering — the framework I use to keep myself on track including my journal process, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews — letters such as this fall under this swimlane

Foundations for 2023

Theme: Get back to baseline to ensure I can go the distance over the next 30 years

For the first time in the better part of a decade, I’ve had moments where I felt tired. For the first time in several years, I missed my birthday marathon. I’m out of shape. This chart sums up where I am at:

I have let my health slip and it’s captured by the epigentic aging kit. In early 2021 I was doing p90x3 and was diligent about my diet. Fast foward and many of my healthy habits have fallen to the wayside and it’s starting to manifest as fatigue.

Working N hours a day is not the issue, my age is not the bottleneck, the issue is that I have stopped taking care of my body. I’m not actually working more hours than I have the last 7 years — though more of my working hours goes to LeftLane than to study these days.

There is no excuse for neglecting the fundamentals and there is nothing more fundamental than a healthy body.

Next Steps:

You can see the project doc here
I’ve also created a slack group focused on health and longevity. Feel free to DM me if interested in joining.

Founder’s Path 2023 - 2025

This year is important, this is where the company will transition to a growth company. We will move out of that 0->1 stage. But before we get there we have a complex build. Success here is critical – in my mind $100 million of my future cash is on the line, not to mention another $900 million of partners, employees, investors, etc. we just need to walk the narrow path to go get it.

Themes:

demonstrate ability to make and execute on multi-year high stakes plan
dominate the role of being a technical founder to be the example others point to

Outcomes

this decade -> O(billion) exit
next 2 years (2025) -> $40 million plus Series A
2023 -> 500 k live ARR

Next Steps What does that path look like? Well, the company plans I will need to keep somewhat private. This is my personal blog not the companies. Suffice to say, we have a big customer that when we ship to by end of year we will have proved we will work for the broad market and that our software is so much better that a eight-figure (closer to nine) revenue company will switch to us – a virtual unknown (they’ve already committed to it we just need to fulfill that promise).

Meta Skills for 2023

Theme: Practice Leadership, Mentorship, and Teaching I’ve studied broadly for the last 7 years. At this point, I’ve read plenty. I would guess at least 500 non-fiction books and courses. It’s time to put what I’ve learned into practice.

What!? But that’s 71 books a year. Sure, I’ll show you how that’s totally doable. First, one book is not equivalent to another, a textbook is 10-100x as meaty as some soft book you can read in a day. Soft books I can get through in as little as one long training run. An 18 mile run can take a few hours. Many books are 3-5 hours when listened to on 2x speed. 5-10 hours of running a week, plus dedicated study time on Saturday’s, drive time for commutes or trips, down time in line/at the airport, and intermittent time during the week can add up to 20-30+ hours of study. 20-30 hours of study can easily be 3-5 soft books a week.

If we assume 15 hours a week on average, and one book every 5 hours that’s 3 books a week x 50 = 150 books a year * 7 is 900 books.

That said, I’ve taken meaty courses and read text books as well. But usually less than 10 a year so it’s definitely less than 900. But I feel pretty confident about that 500 number.

Another key consideration is I may read a book but choose not to apply it. Early on, I also put in many “junk” reads where I didn’t embody the content or even recite it. Learning happens during active recall – not during reading! Getting exposure and reading something alone has minor value. The real value is putting it into practice and changing who you are. Part of the reason I keep a blog is just to have a public place to post book reviews

The number of books/courses applied is more in the ballpark of <200. The number truly embodied are <50 and maybe closer to a dozen or two. I have a HUGE backlog of drafted but unpublished reviews, recitals, and demonstrations. I typically write in books as I read them and do active recital now but it feels more real when some artifact or proof has been produced.

Outcomes:

recommit to not consuming a book/course without writing a “proof” of understanding of one kind or another
use the Feynman technique i.e. expand and share topics of study with others instead of keeping them to myself.

Ruddering for 2023

Theme: Minor optimizations I’ve been good about this by and large for 7 years, will keep it going. That said, sometimes recently I lose a day in my journal where I was purely reactive. Yes, things happen, but that’s not acceptable. I will stamp out any reactivity trend hard and fast.

New Outcomes

Daily and weekly pre-planning. Recently, I’ve triaged my day in the morning but it’s infinitely better to do it the night before so the subconscious can work it over for you.
backburner item — be clear on my next step, post-exit by continuing to make micro-investments to understand technology trends by continuing to play/investigate new technologies specifically (1) gene editing in my garage,(2) reinforcement learning applications, and (3) XR applied to robotics

Final Note

I know this whole post may seem unusual.

In my defense, I find it puzzling folks don’t look to the future like this! It seems to me there should be a whitepaper for humanity, some charter, for those who want to hang out and die with the dolphins, and those who want to build better spaceships to go to interesting places (and maybe take the dolphins with us).

How can we get anywhere otherwise? I want the game to go on! If you feel the same love to collaborate! Don’t hesitate to shoot me a message.

Regardless, thanks to this framing, I got my psychological ducks in a row and I’m well utilized. I’ve become one of those strange obsessed people who like to work.

Thanks for the read! Till next time.