This post was spurred by 2 things recently. The first was I realized a great way to quickly learn about someone and understand how they approach life is to ask them “what are you trading off?” If they don’t have a clear answer or haven’t thought about it much, that gives you useful info too.

The second was during a call with a friend in the industry, who mentioned that they didn’t feel like their current job provided the highest impact. That got me thinking, I’ve been interested in starting a company in climate tech for quite some time. And I believe the path I chose is both the optimal one for myself, and also the route to the highest impact I can make for society.

But if someone were to ask me why I believe this, why I like startups so much, and why I’m optimizing my life the way I am, I’d have a pretty hard time coming up with an answer on the spot. This is an attempt to crystallize my thoughts.

For me it comes down to a few things:

  • starting a company is permissionless
  • I’m really impatient. startups = speed
  • ability to make full use of all my skills. I get bored easily when I’m only doing one thing. Having your hair on fire and a lot of work to do in all aspects of the business means I won’t be bored. I first heard this from one of my mentors in this space, and I think it’s a great way to describe it.
  • a lot of ownership (& upside) in what you do
  • it’s high leverage. As Naval said in his “how to get rich” podcast/articles, leverage comes in many forms – capital, managing other people, compute, etc. One of my hot takes on this is that optimizing for money/impact/whatever almost always comes down to optimizing for a higher leverage role – whether you’re managing more people, managing more money, or find the right business model with high leverage that creates outsized value for your customers.