Essays
Writing
Essays on how organizations actually work. What cheap software does to the shape of a company, how a market behaves when the rules change by jurisdiction, what a physical supply chain does under strain, why partnerships get decided after the signing, and what any of it means for what we teach. Written from the operating side.
Series · Three parts
When the Map Stops Matching the Territory
Building custom operational software got about a thousand times cheaper in two years. Most companies are organized around the old price. The last time a general-purpose technology did this to a working economy, it took forty years to show up in the numbers — and the reason it took forty years is the useful part.
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Part I · Draft
Running on the Old Map
The playbook said buy software by the seat, keep your engineers on the product customers pay for, and handle the gaps with people. Every line of that was correct, and the assumption underneath it no longer holds.
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Part II · Draft
The Physical Bet
Five American technology companies will spend somewhere around seven hundred billion dollars this year on the physical infrastructure AI runs on. What that money actually buys is concrete, copper, silicon and electricity.
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Part III · Draft
The Missing Layer
Every school in the country is deciding whether to lean into AI, and the two available answers are both non-answers. The cheating fight consumed the oxygen on a false premise.
On the bench
In progress
Drafts in various states. Dates as they land.
- Who gets to fix the map. The people closest to a problem can now build the software for it. What that does to who a company hires.
- The broken proxy. What AI does to assessment, and what school turns out to have been for.
- One experiment, twenty-four arms. A country running two dozen separate versions of the same market, and what that reveals about how rules shape outcomes.
- Not every chasm is the same chasm. Why the standard adoption story is the wrong frame for a category the law keeps redrawing.
- Melting assets. The compute supply chain, and which parts of it depreciate fastest.
- Right molecule, wrong aisle. What the beer industry got wrong when it went after cannabis, from someone who was inside it.
- Decided after the signing. What actually determines whether a partnership works, which is almost never the deal terms.
- What a pre-roll actually costs. Unit economics under a tax code written to make the category unprofitable.
- Thirty-two years in a drawer. A picture book written in 1994, never published, and what AI changes about finishing it.