A decade ago, Google pulled out of Project Maven to quell an internal revolt against working with the U.S. military. AI was too powerful, the critics said. The military couldn’t be trusted to wield it.

For a while it seemed those days were over. Frontier AI labs (Google included) got back in the fight, publicly committing to help America win the AI race. But there are troubling signs that the Valley is backsliding.

Why is this happening? A few reasons. Partly it reflects AI builders’ deep ambivalence, even pessimism, about the technology they are creating. Partly it reflects their barely concealed loathing of the Trump administration and its policies. But the fundamental reason is psychological.

Andrej Karpathy coined the term “jagged intelligence” to describe how AI is smart about some things but dumb about others. Humans have the same jaggedness—technologists more than most.

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Technology is built by brilliant idealists. Those qualities enable a certain type of person to build the future. But brilliance bleeds into hubris and idealism bleeds into naiveté. Too many assume that technical genius confers a special political wisdom. That building technology qualifies them to control how our society deploys it.

Some of these brilliant idealists have decided America, its leaders, and its employees can’t be trusted with the powerful tools they’ve built. They think micromanaging access is the right way to protect democracy and human rights.

But they’re wrong. So wrong that they don’t realize how their own activism makes the dangers they fear more likely. Restricting AI in America doesn’t make us safer or freer. It simply gives an advantage to actual tyrants—the Chinese Communist Party—in a technology race. America winning this race is humanity’s best shot that AI will be used for good. China winning would be a disaster.

How can I write this so confidently? Because we’ve seen this movie before. Within living memory, Americans debated the morality of building another paradigm-shifting technology: nuclear weapons. Jagged intelligence was on full display in those debates. Smart people argued passionately for policies they thought would make us safe—but that in fact weakened America and doomed millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

Knowingly or not, AI researchers are recreating the debates and errors of an earlier generation. We have to learn from that history. And we have to choose differently by helping America build the technology that will determine whether the 21st century is free or unfree.

Debating The Gadget

Los Alamos during the Second World War had possibly the greatest concentration of technical genius ever assembled. As the scientists raced to deliver an atom bomb—they called it “The Gadget” for security reasons—naturally they started to discuss what it meant for the world. And they were alarmed.

The Manhattan Project was conducted with the utmost secrecy. The public knew nothing about it. Soviet scientists were excluded.

Some feared this secrecy was a threat to democracy and peace. America couldn’t be trusted as the sole arbiters of nuclear knowledge. Niels Bohr, one of the most accomplished physicists at Los Alamos, argued passionately for preemptive disclosure to the Soviets so that Stalin wouldn’t view it as a threat. Sounding like leaders today who call for deeper engagement with China, Bohr believed that only an “open world” based on transparency and international control could prevent an arms race and a more devastating war. Bohr was so committed to these ideas that he considered moving to Russia for scientific exchange. (Winston Churchill found Bohr’s correspondence with Russian scientists about this so alarming that he remarked, “Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.”)

These fears grew when it became clear atomic weapons wouldn’t be needed to knock Germany out of the war. Few had qualms about building the bomb to stop Nazi Germany, which had an active nuclear program. Using it against an almost-beaten Japan—or against Russia later on—was a different matter. Why drop the bomb? Why finish it at all? One scientist resigned over these questions. Others, led by Leo Szilard, circulated a petition urging President Truman not to use the bomb without giving Japan forewarning and a chance to surrender.

Reading accounts, it’s hard not to be struck by these scientists’ earnestness and idealism—but also their naiveté. While they debated, the U.S. government was ordering 375,000 Purple Hearts for an invasion of the Japanese home islands. American lives depended on this technology. Their skin was in the game in a way the Los Alamos scientists’ was not.1

Ironically given his later views, Robert Oppenheimer put his finger on the problem when he dismissed the Szilard petition: “What do [the scientists] know about Japanese psychology? How can they judge the way to end the war?” It was the scientists’ job to build the thing and to inform political leaders about what it could do. But in a democracy, the ultimate decision wasn’t theirs to make.

Edward Teller identified an even more fundamental problem. As with AI today, the real question wasn’t whether to make the bomb or not—it was who would make it first. “Our work was significant,” Teller said, “because it gave the power of the first atomic weapon to Truman rather than to Stalin.” The scientists at Los Alamos couldn’t see that by building The Gadget, they averted a future where one of the bloodiest butchers of the 20th century got a nuclear monopoly. So much for democracy, peace, and an open world in that future.

Two Paths for Technologists

I’ll end with two stories that show two very different approaches to technology and national service.

Air Force Colonel Edward Hall is in the pantheon of American patriots for his work on missiles during the Cold War. During the final days of World War II, he scoured German research facilities for secrets about its missile program. After the war, he led America’s development of Minuteman, the first solid-fueled, instant-launch intercontinental ballistic missile. Ed Hall was no one’s fool. He had seen the horrors of war and he built weapons so America could know peace.

As so often happens, Ed’s genius ran in the family. His little brother Theodore was one of the youngest scientist at Los Alamos. He played a critical role in testing the nuclear device that the United States ultimately dropped on Nagasaki.

Here the brothers’ stories diverge. As Ted worked on the bomb, he had political discussions with other scientists at Los Alamos. He became increasingly alarmed by the idea that the United States would have a monopoly on nuclear weapons after the war. “It seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented,” he recalled half a century later. The peace of the world was at stake—or so it seemed to him.

So in 1944, Ted walked into a Soviet trade mission in New York and announced that the Americans were building a superweapon. He later shared details about the bomb’s design. Combined with information from another atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, Hall’s information accelerated the Soviet nuclear program. The Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb years ahead of schedule in 1949.

Ted Hall’s jagged intelligence led him down a treacherous path. He started down the path in the name of world peace and ended up with the blood of every death from communism since 1949 on his hands.

Genius is no guarantee of wisdom. Ted Hall proves that. The question is whether we’ll learn from the half-century of misery he inadvertently helped create—or repeat the error with technologies far more consequential than the atom bomb.

Will we be Ed or Ted? Faramir or Boromir?

Today I want to talk about a different sort of production. Not munitions, but movies.

We know that countries have “industrial bases,” or networks of factories, warehouses, engineers, etc. involved in bending metal. We spend so much time thinking about the embarrassing state of America’s defense industrial base because that’s what backstops American security. The industrial base puts the “hard” in hard power.

Nations also have what could be called, for lack of a better term, “culture bases,” or networks that make art and culture. These networks may or may not be influenced or controlled by the government, but they nonetheless perform an important political function by spreading a nation’s ideas, influencing other people, and hopefully raking in cold hard cash along the way.

Governments around the world take a serious interest in art because they understand that, whatever else it is, art is useful. It can promote as well as subvert. It can cause revolutions of the mind, which can lead in short order to revolutions in the street. That’s why the Soviets and, yes, the CIA funded their own artists colonies during the Cold War.

For more mundane reasons, nearly all governments try to export their culture, both to make money and to build the “national brand.” That’s why places like Japan and Korea have promotion strategies for things like manga and k-pop, why European countries are so territorial about their terroir, and why countries compete every two years to host the Olympics, despite the fact that it costs a fortune.

America’s biggest “culture base” is obviously Hollywood. The big studios are struggling in the wake of Covid and the streaming revolution, but America is still a heavyweight at the global box office. In 2023, eight of the top 10 grossing films in the world were American (one, the Super Mario Bros. Movie, was a U.S.-Japan joint venture).

That’s power. Whenever people go to the theater to watch a movie, anywhere in the world, it’s likely an American movie. And the messages of those movies set the tone for how our country and its cause are perceived.

Case in point: I remember growing up as an immigrant kid at the end of the Cold War, watching movies like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. These movies were the pump-up material of Peak America. They were awesome, and they instilled a healthy aversion to ushanka-wearing commies, for good measures.

I call this the American Cinematic Universe.

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Movies in this universe were a soft power tool that helped lift the Iron Curtain and accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union. They branded the Soviets in the eyes of the world as icy-eyed tyrants with designs to destabilize and take over the rest of the world for Communism. They were also a window into the American character: scrappy, swaggering, gun-slinging, and with a zeal for liberty. These depictions were obviously caricatures, but they spoke to fundamental truths about the two sides in the Cold War.

They also continue to inspire audiences to this day—and not just American audiences. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian guerillas trained in the Hollywood way of war started tagging disabled Russian tanks with the Red Dawn rallying cry: “Wolverines!”

John Milius, the movie’s late director, was a genius and a patriot. Years ago, he explained better than I ever could why foreign and domestic audiences alike fell for these fundamentally American films: “The only thing [foreign audiences] like about us is that we used to be innocent butt-kickers," he said. "It was a part of American society that was just pure energy.”

But my choice of example, Red Dawn, speaks to a problem. Those Ukrainian fighters were referencing a 40-year-old movie to rally the troops. It’s hard to think of more recent films that could do the same job.

I bring this up not just out of nostalgia but because we need the American Cinematic Universe today. America is in the middle of Cold War II against a communist enemy with more people, more money, and more military might than the Soviets ever had. The CCP is playing a more careful game than the Kremlin, but as the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Taiwanese know, it’s no less tyrannical, even genocidal.

What is Hollywood doing to expose this new villain and inspire Americans? When was the last time you saw the CCP presented as a bad guy in a major motion picture, like the USSR? Cold War II is heating up, yet the American Cinematic Universe is AWOL. Worse than that, it’s compromised by Chinese influence.

As in other industries, the allure of the China market has been so great for so long that Hollywood studios have done a deal with the Devil for a piece of the action. Beijing limits access to its market to strengthen its negotiating position. So, for example, the CCP has a quota on the number of foreign films that can screen in China; it ruthlessly culls and censors films for “subversive” material and perceived slights; it forces studios into co-production with Chinese counterparts to steal American technology and know-how; and it imposes capital controls that make it difficult to repatriate proceeds from the box office. If studios want in, they have to play ball with Beijing.

This toxic trading relationship leads to censorship and content decisions. A few of the most egregious examples:

• The Red Dawn sequel changed the invading bad guy from the PLA to the far-less-plausible Norks “to be more sensitive to one of our world partners,” in the words of one actor.

• The Top Gun reboot initially removed a Taiwanese flag patch from the back of Maverick’s flight jacket (it was restored after an outcry).

• Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan was filmed in China’s Xinjiang region. In the credits, Disney thanked Chinese government agencies that are sanctioned by the United States for human-rights abuses in that area.

• The CCP demanded changes to Men in Black 3 because it thought a scene about erasing peoples’ memory too closely resembled Chinese censorship. The studio caved.

• My personal favorite: the 2013 film adaptation of World War Z took creative liberties on the book to avoid mentioning that a fictional zombie outbreak started in China. Because of course, it would be outrageous to suggest a pandemic could start in China!

Those are just the examples we know about. Hollywood also self-censors. What movies never got greenlit because studios knew they would jeopardize their relationship with Beijing? What scripts never got written because screenwriters knew they wouldn’t get past the censors? What truths have gone unspoken? It speaks volumes about the climate of fear Beijing has created that when then-Congressman (and current Palantirian) Mike Gallagher asked Hollywood studio heads if they would answer truthfully if asked “is China committing genocide in Xinjiang?,” more than a few said they would hesitate.

Hollywood’s capture by a foreign adversary is discouraging, obviously, but we should take heart because it has happened before. Eventually Hollywood came around. It still can.

During the 1930s, it was Nazi Germany that bent Hollywood studios to its will. As the historians Thomas Doherty and Ben Urwand have documented, the Nazis used (eerily similar) coercive diplomacy and market-access restrictions to censor Hollywood films. Before the Nazis even came into power, they fomented a riot during the German premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front and forced Universal Pictures to censor the film—not just in Germany but all around the world.

The Nazi regime controlled market access to force U.S. studios to make increasingly humiliating concessions, from replacing Jewish employees in Germany with “racially acceptable management” to cutting Jewish-composed music from films and Jewish names from the credits. Hollywood’s collaboration was so abject that MGM gave advanced screenings to the Nazi’s representative in California, Georg Gyssling, so he could tell them what to cut. Due to restrictions imposed by Hollywood’s trade association, an explicitly anti-Nazi film wouldn’t be made until 1939, the year German tanks rolled into Poland.

The studios bristled at the Nazis’ demands, but caved to retain access to the German market. As Variety put it at the time, they had “too much coin tied up there and may be able to get some of it back by sticking.” The bitter irony is that the collaborators didn’t actually end up making money. Strict capital controls prevented the studios from repatriating profits. Eventually all American films were banned in Germany. The studios had sold their souls on the cheap. They only came around when war broke out and their investments had gone to zero.

Collaboration was a choice, a fact illustrated by the one studio that took the road less traveled. Warner Bros. pulled out of Germany entirely in 1933 after a brutal assault on its Jewish representative in Berlin. It spent the next decade as practically the only full-throated anti-Nazi studio in Hollywood. As Doherty writes, “No for-profit company did more than Warner Bros. to alert Americans to what Nazism was and where it would lead.”

WB married this anti-totalitarian message with a blitz of patriotic short films that celebrated great events from American history, from the Declaration of Independence to the Underground Railroad. As studio head Jack Warner said, “we aim to do our part in preserving the United States as is and in making Americans conscious of our heritage.” He framed it as a service, but patriotism turned out to be good for business, too. The short films were commercial successes. Warner Bros. made money—and kept its soul for the bargain.

If we’re going to reboot the American Cinematic Universe, then Hollywood—just like corporate America broadly—needs to learn the lessons from its past. In short: companies that collaborate with enemy regimes often end up discredited and empty-handed. Far smarter to get out while the getting is good—and to go long on America.

The writing is already on the wall for Hollywood in China. Beijing is squeezing out American films to promote domestic alternatives, including anti-American war movies. The number of U.S. films approved to screen in China peaked in 2018. Last year, not a single American film cracked the top 10 at the China box office. Studios shouldn’t expect a reprieve any time soon. The cold war is only heating up from here.

Breaking out of our cultural malaise will require the studios to wake up and choose America. But it will also require a new crop of artists who are disenchanted with the status quo and who can re-enchant audiences with new, well-told stories. Something like this happened in the ‘70s, when upstart filmmakers like Milius, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg burst onto the scene. The film industry had fallen into a cynical, downbeat rut in the era of Watergate and Vietnam Syndrome. The upstarts made it fun to go to the movies again. They brought back heroes, villains, and romance. They rekindled the flame of the American Cinematic Universe.

Then as now, we’re going to need new artists, new visionaries, and new ideas to persuade and inspire. I’ll have more to say on this in the future. For now, this is just a rallying cry to all the Wolverines who are still out there.

Cold War II is a culture war, too. We need to be ready for guerrilla war.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about ’s interview with Paul Buchheit in . Paul, of course, is the creator of Gmail, one of the most revolutionary software applications of all time. Gmail has more than a billion active users—which means roughly one in seven people walking around today is using his product. That’s success, on a power-law scale.

It only happened because Google empowered him to build it. They knew he was interested in webmail, so they told him to build an email application. They had raw talent on their hands, so they used it.

It wasn’t always pretty. As Paul describes, he butted heads with people internally along the way. Google didn’t use Javascript; he used Javascript extensively. And the Gmail launch was a PR disaster. Google was building the plane as they flew it. But that itself is evidence of innovation. A company that can tolerate disagreements, setbacks, and embarrassments is a company that can adapt and built world-changing products.

It’s hard to imagine any of the big tech companies allowing its young engineers to launch a work in progress like that today—much less something as consequential as an email service. And that’s exactly the problem. It’s also hard to imagine any of those companies building the next Gmail today, period.

Case in point: Google engineers gave us the transformer deep-learning architecture that’s powering the generative AI revolution… Yet Google’s AI applications aren’t grabbing headlines. Mostly they’re the punchline.

So what happened?

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Paul suggests that Google succumbed to the common fate of bureaucracies over time: it stopped being an insurgent obsessed with innovation and started being a gatekeeper obsessed with preserving its status, image, and incumbency. This change didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual process of entropy and attrition.

Companies like Google start out as ‘insurgents’ looking to make a name for themselves and dethrone Goliath-like incumbents (the IBMs of yesterday… the Googles of today). So they move fast, make bold pronouncements, and gamble furiously. Almost always, they have a founder who is laser-focused on the mission. And they attract lean, hungry insurgent types to work for them. People like Paul who are driven by the organization’s mission and vibe with its ethos.

Then these companies succeed. Before long, they look up and realize they’ve become the Goliath-like incumbent. Along the way, they’ve accumulated—in an effort to minimize friction, fighting, and chaos—a million different rules and procedures and barnacles that slow the organization down and make the kind of innovation they were known for in the beginning impossible. Often they’ve driven out the very insurgents who got them to the top, because at some point their prickliness and risk-taking began to be viewed as threats to the business rather than precious resources to be hoarded.

The fundamental change in mindset between insurgency and gatekeeping is that the organization’s tolerance for risk, messiness, and adaptation goes down. The understandable, human desire for predictability, control, and safety—the rallying cry of gatekeepers from Silicon Valley to Washington—stifles genius and innovation, qualities that are unpredictable and uncontrollable by their very nature.

Paul described the gatekeeper mindset as follows:

Gatekeepers are one hundred percent anchored to stopping bad things from happening, and they have no concept that when you stop bad things from happening, you are inherently stopping good things from happening as well. You can't ever deliver something that's 100 percent good. If you deliver 80 percent good, that's pretty good. But if you try to go for 100% — if you try to be perfect — what you get is nothing. Innovation is inherently not clean.

said as much, as well.

Once you see this insight, you start to see it everywhere, from the macro level on down.

Countries and entire civilizations can be viewed as gatekeepers or insurgents, though usually they’re a mix of the two.

The United States was an insurgent, a startup nation forged in rebellion against the Old World, whose trade and diplomacy were quite obvious forms of gatekeeping to preserve the privileges of incumbency. It was the insurgent spirit that led Americans to go West, launch men into the sky, and ultimately land them on the Moon.

Now we look up in the year 2024 and we’re the incumbent—which is a great thing to be, provided we can keep our edge. But that’s not a given. Already we can see the gatekeeping mindset creeping in, from the EV chargers we’re failing to build to the astronauts we just stranded on the International Space Station. (It might take a genuinely insurgent organization, SpaceX, to get them down again.)

Zooming in, we can see the “gatekeeper vs. insurgent” battle closer to home—including in our own organizations and careers. When reading Solana’s piece, I recalled times when I have found myself turn into a gatekeeper and what I had to do to reclaim my revolutionary zeal. The forces of entropy and attrition that corrupt companies do the same to humans.

I’ve written before about the illusion of the “career ladder.” People have been trained to think that their career proceeds linearly, rung by rung, in a stable and predictable path upward. It’s an attractive illusion, promising stability and security. This year you manage a team of four. Next year, it’ll be a team of eight. The next rung will always be there, safely within your grasp.

But it’s an illusion all the same.

Once you embrace the concept of the ladder, you constrain the many pathways available to your future self down to the single, planned, predictable pathway ascribed by your employer. You are blinded to avenues outside of the ladder. And you will likely start to pick up other bad habits of bureaucratic organizations, like mistaking your title, total compensation, or the head count of employees that you manage for your effectiveness. Or obsessing about safety, compliance, and stopping the bad instead of facilitating the good.

By a slow and subtle process, your mind has been fenced in by the gatekeepers. You have been gate-kept. And you are being assimilated, Borg-like, into the ranks of the gatekeepers.

The truth is that the most brilliant and meaningful careers proceed in fits, starts, zigs, zags, and lateral plays. Your life isn’t about climbing a ladder. It’s about swinging from vines, Tarzan-style.

So knock over the ladder and grab hold of a vine.

Alex Karp likes to say that the best business movie ever made is the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, because it teaches that even once you’ve fought your way to the top and reached the “culminating” point in your career—by becoming CEO, say—there’s always the 36th chamber: the one you have to invent yourself.

(Spoiler Alert): When you reach the final chamber recognized by the orthodoxy—the 35th chamber—you realize only way forward is to go full-on insurgent, invent a new chamber, and democratize Kung Fu for the people. It’s precisely at those moments when you need to examine your motivations and change the game if you’re starting to act like a gatekeeper instead of an insurgent. Insurgency is the pinnacle chamber.

This applies especially to those of us who have the dubious honor of being managers of other people. Precisely because of our position, we have the ability to empower our best employees—or to stifle them like a wet blanket. With great power, comes great responsibility.

I remember when Palantir was just starting our commercial business. We hired two very special engineers. They were the definition of insurgents: 100x talents with a hunger to build. They were raw and difficult and abrasive. But they were brilliant.

I thought it was my job to manage them and smooth their rough edges. But to dull their deficiencies was to dull their superpowers. Eventually I realized I was destroying value. I might prevent a bad idea now and then—but for every one bad idea, I was preventing five interesting ones from seeing the light of day. I was becoming a gatekeeper.

What I really needed to be was a janitor. Sure, I needed to expose them to the gamma rays that raw talent needs to grow into greatness. But really I needed to clean up the messes that insurgents inevitably leave in their value-creating wake, like the Incredible Hulk.

And I’ve seen this pattern repeat in those below me. It is a natural process—the entropy of the universe. The only question is whether that person can come to terms with the need to reinvent themselves as an insurgent or prefers to gatekeep themselves and others. That reinvention is always incredibly painful and dislocating.

So what does it take to reincarnate as an insurgent, when human nature pulls us in the opposite direction?

First, make sure you are a leader that doesn’t say “forward,” but “follow me!” Structurally, you can’t be an insurgent if you aren’t in the details and leading from the front. I’ve committed myself to always attaching to a set of projects I’m personally going to drive forward (as an IC). And this is what I’ve seen successfully transform gatekeepers into insurgents around me. So burn the boats and devote all your time and energy to driving the most important projects forward.

Second, make sure you have an incredibly talented, incredibly independent team that’s focused on the Primacy of Winning. Employees who need, and demand, the freedom to experiment, call audibles, and challenge you whenever you’re wrong. Who resist the gatekeeper forces in themselves and others. I like to say that Palantir is an artist colony, and I chose the metaphor advisedly. Van Gogh was not an easy guy to work with. But he minted masterpieces.

Above all, insurgency requires soul-searching, self-criticism, and honesty about our own motivations. Man isn’t born a gatekeeper or an insurgent. We become these things through our actions.

What path will we choose today?

I say: Viva La Revolución!

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By now we’re all familiar with stories of government overpromising and underdelivering. The promises get bill signings, ribbon cuttings, and ceremonial ground breakings. The failures get GAO reports and dunks on X.

Consider a few recent examples.

In 2021, Congress spent $7.5 billion for a half-million electric-vehicle charging stations. Three years later, only eight had been built.

Not 8,000. Not 800. Eight.

This is EV chargers we’re talking about, not putting men on the Moon. Private companies have built 140,000 charging stations in the U.S. alone; roughly 40,000 of those are fast chargers like the Tesla Supercharger Network. China had 1.8 million public charging stations in 2022. Forty percent were fast chargers. Is it really a surprise they’re eating our lunch on EVs?

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If this were a one-off, we could treat it as an unfortunate case study of waste and inefficiency. But it’s not. It’s systemic. We’ve seen it over and over in efforts to build critical infrastructure.

Congress spent roughly $50 billion to jumpstart semiconductor manufacturing. Billion-dollar grants were announced, to great fanfare. And then? Endless delays, as marquee projects like TSMC’s in Arizona got pushed back to 2027, 2028, and beyond.

Congress spent $42.5 billion to bring high-speed internet to rural America. Three years later, not a single home has been connected.

And of course, no list would be complete without mentioning California’s high-speed rail. The state has spent decades and billions of dollars on a 500-mile stretch of track whose projected cost has swelled to $128 billion. It has little to show for this investment today besides a few lonely stretches of concrete.

These examples are evidence of a nearly terminal cost disease. Worse, they’re evidence of catastrophic failures to produce the things we say we’ll produce. This is a crisis of implementation. It will have dire consequences for our security and quality of life if it’s not addressed, bluntly and quickly.

Projects can fail for many reasons. They can fail for lack of vision. They can fail for lack of resources. And they can fail in the process of being implemented.

The failures we see in the United States are not primarily failures of vision. A nation-wide EV charging network is a visionary project. So is reindustrialization, high-speed rail, and high-speed internet for rural America. Our leaders have grand (sometimes grandiose) projects in spades. The American people respect and reward this kind of vision… when there’s follow-through. We’ve always been a people whose sights are fixed on the horizon. Hopefully we always will be.

Our failures are due in part to resources—though not in the way you probably expect. The United States is an almost unbelievably wealthy country. If you need evidence, compare the average income of the “poorest” U.S. states to countries in the EU.

We are afflicted instead with the pathologies of a rich country. The worst of these is a change in mindset. Complacency and self-satisfaction seep in. The killer instinct and grind-it-out mentality that created the good times go away. Perhaps worst of all, people start to fetishize money as the solution to problems in itself, while ignoring the hard work that money is meant to support and reward. Moving money around becomes the primary focus, while the ability to use money in productive ways—the ability to implement—atrophies like a muscle that’s never used.

This pathology is on full display today. We see it in the career choices of our best and brightest. A couple generations ago, six percent of Harvard Business School graduates went into finance. That made sense. HBS grads were being trained to lead General Electric and IBM. To empire-build, not to wear a green eyeshade. That has changed. Today, about a third of HBS grads go into finance. No doubt they are exceptional at moving money. Do they know how to make things?

Unsurprisingly, we also see this in Washington. Politicians act like their commitment to solving a problem scales in tandem with the funding they can throw at that problem. They think they have a magic money cannon, and that shooting this cannon in the general direction of a problem is enough to batter down the obstacles preventing us from solving it. Not working? Stuff the cannon with a higher-velocity round and fire.

Any successful leader can tell you this is the wrong way to solve a problem. In a properly designed incentive structure, money is an enabler on the front end and a reward for completion on the back end. Money bookends the hard work that actually goes into executing a project and getting results.

Leadership, organization, and accountability are far more important than money in driving outcomes. All are conspicuous in successful organizations—and conspicuous by their absence in high-profile failures.

Bureaucracy is the enemy of accountability. Too many agencies seem structured precisely to insulate key decision-makers from accountability for delivering results. Their sheer size and complexity bewilder leaders, tricking them into thinking the bureaucracy runs on auto-pilot.

The opposite is the case. Effective action requires small teams with complete authority and intense devotion to wrangling the beast of bureaucracy. Kelly Johnson, of Skunkworks fame, said this succinctly in his Fourteen Rules of Management. His first commandment was that a project manager “must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects.” The third was that “The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.” These rules create a bias for action, and leave no doubt where the buck stops if the train goes off the tracks.

I could spend all day talking about failures of implementation. There are plenty of examples to go around. But it’s worth remembering it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries and companies have built the critical infrastructure we are currently failing to build with far less money and time. Japan mobilized to build a TSMC fab one year after we did. The plant is already open. Starlink is beaming high-speed internet to the most remote parts of the world right now from a network of 6,000 satellites. Uzbekistan operates a larger high-speed rail network than we do.

We also know big projects can still happen here, with the right urgency, leadership, and technology. Americans aren’t lazy, indifferent, or ill-equipped for a challenge. Understanding this fact is the first step on the road to reform.[2] 

General Gustave Perna led Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s crash effort to develop vaccines for Covid-19. When he came into the job in May of 2020, one news article reports, “his arsenal consisted of three colonels, no money, and no plan.” By the end of the year, millions of doses of vaccines were rolling off assembly lines and being distributed to more than 70,000 locations across the country.

Operation Warp Speed was the perfect storm of urgency, leadership, and technology. In keeping with Kelly’s Rules, it was a ruthlessly small team with complete responsibility for the task. Warp Speed got top priority and political cover at every level. It also got a geyser of cash. But cutting the check was the start of the hard work, not the end.

Warp Speed was only possible because it had an experienced logistician in General Perna who postponed retirement to serve his country--and who bulled through obstacles standing in his way. It benefited from America’s biotech industry, which is still world-class despite the decline of other areas of our industrial base1.

Operation Warp Speed was implementation on steroids. The challenge is how to replicate this success in peace time, absent a state of emergency. This challenge is more acute when we consider the disparity between us and our greatest adversary, China. We will have to move faster and with greater urgency to make up for disadvantages in population size and industrial capacity. Ukraine’s challenges in dealing with Russia should serve as a warning about how difficult it is to confront a much larger foe.

Breaking out of our national malaise will require a concerted effort to clear away the bureaucracy standing in the way of progress—starting now, before the moment of crisis. If our goal is to build, then non-essential obstacles standing in the way of building need to go.

It will also require leaders who don’t rely on the magic money cannon and who aren’t bewitched by the bureaucracy. Retired SOCOM Commander Raymond Thomas liked to remind his lawyers that they were there to advise him; he was there to make the final decision. We need that kind of command at the very top. Leaders who are neck deep in the implementation process and wrestle the Hydra of bureaucracy until it’s under their control.

If we don’t put in the reps and rebuild the muscle of implementation, we shouldn’t expect different results from the ones we’ve seen in the recent past.

You can forget about flying cars in that world. We’ll still be building EV chargers.

Technological improvements were happening at the margin.  This same sentiment is captured in Founders Fund’s famous saying that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”  

And this tweet captures the perfect banality of most technology today.  We entered a SaaS hole of darkness.

My colleague Ted Mabrey wrote that “Software companies are shipping more, institutions are consuming more and the result of all of that software consumption is productivity growth below the long term trend.”  

Satya Nadella at Davos in January 2024 said; “ ...inflation adjusted, there is no economic growth in the world, I would say and that's a pretty disappointing state. In fact, the developed world may have negative economic growth...PCs were the last time, when actual, economic growth came about, right? So, the last time it showed up in productivity stats were when PCs became ubiquitous.” Satya goes on to argue that AI has the potential to restore productivity growth.

While AI is very powerful, this argument is wrong.  AI alone is insufficient because it fails to diagnose the underlying systemic drivers of the productivity dysfunction, let alone redress them: implementation for advantage.

I propose an alternative cause largely born out of 18 years of experience at the coalface of delivering productivity to governments and Fortune 500 institutions. The Great Stagnation is caused by technology and not despite it. Software in particular is suited to layers of abstraction turned obfuscation in a way hardware is not. AI only accelerates this trend. We are stuck in the era of the cargo cult company:

During WWII, the U.S. used islands in the Southwest Pacific as military bases. The indigenous Melanesians observed with awe as big metal birds carrying all sorts of supplies and cargo magically materialized whenever the soldiers were marching and signaling towards the sky. When the war ended, so did the appearance of the magic cargo. Local chiefs tried to summon the cargo by engaging in the same rituals they believed caused the cargo to appear in the first place. They cleared the forest to look like a landing strip and made wooden replicas of airplanes and control towers. The Americans and their Coca-Cola did not reappear. 

Today, “cargo cult programming” is well known among engineers to refer to ritualistic code practices divorced from cause and effect. It is symptomatic of an engineer who doesn’t understand the underlying problem and tries to pattern match to get at the solution. The analogy is not often extended to describe cargo cult management, but this is an even more pernicious problem. In cargo cult management, a company’s leadership uses the employment of a technology (frequently software) and the achievement of financial metrics as a proxy for actually solving the problem and obtaining ground truth. 

Cargo Cult Companies Rely on Abstractions Turned Obfuscations

There is an old saying in Silicon Valley, “There is the first 80% and the second 80%.” While it is really hard to create new technologies, it is also really hard to implement them for any measurable advantage.  This has always been true: The steam engine didn’t matter until it was put into a ship and locomotive; the Wright brothers’ flight didn’t matter until it moved people; electricity needed to be delivered to the home; and telephony didn’t matter until there was a connection. However, the connection between invention and implementation used to be more obvious. 

In the 1970s, complexity in technology reached a point that it wasn’t possible to move forward without abstractions. I was taught the beauty of abstractions as an electrical and computer engineer. Doped silicon where you are solving physics equations suddenly become transistors where you are dealing with 0s and 1s suddenly become chips where you are issuing instructions, then computers where you are writing code, and then user interfaces where you are clicking. It was a great way to deal with overwhelming complexity. The abstractions made it all manageable. 

But now the abstractions are getting in the way.

We have converged on a world where the people who do the first 80% have no competency or interest in doing the second 80%. The SaaS industry is a frequent target of the Great Stagnation because it is chasing high margins rather than high value outcomes - which, to be fair, is a rational response to a punitive capital landscape that penalizes companies for deviating from a specific set of metrics. And it’s not just SaaS. The Defense Industrial Base underwent a financialization in the 1990s where the focus shifted to dividends and buybacks rather than innovation. I could go on. Lacking the incentives to allocate resources towards implementation, companies instead create an abstraction to define the “right” way to do something. 

But when the abstraction isn’t tethered to empirical results or anything measurable and falsifiable, the abstraction is just an obfuscation, a cargo cult ritual. You can’t prosecute the AI revolution without piercing the abstractions substantially to redesign the application, its code, and the chip (CPU→GPU) it runs on. SpaceX succeeded not because it invented a fundamentally new rocket or law of physics but because it didn’t rely on crusty abstractions that obfuscated what was actually physically possible. 

When I look at the commercial world at large, despite years of investment in technology, it is completely broken. The cargo cult company’s latest billion dollar enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation obfuscates the fact that employees on the factory floor are still running production in Excel. Similarly, the strongest indictment of the software-industrial-complex is COVID. The only technology that companies could point to as relevant to dealing with the disruptions of COVID to their supply chains and operations were videoconferencing software like Teams and Zoom. What about the 100s of billions of dollars invested in the modern data stack, cloud, ERP,  data lakes, data warehouses, and CRMs? 

The problem isn’t that enterprise software doesn’t work - it is that you didn’t make it work for you. The only measure that counts, hidden behind all those layers of abstraction, is the final outcome - decision advantage.  This is often viewed as an implementation detail (the second 80%), and implementation is often outsourced to experts (COVID should have also taught us all something about “experts“). The industry of consultants who themselves have never run businesses but tell cargo cult companies how to execute implementation further obfuscates the lack of productivity gains.

Palantir was ridiculed endlessly for our Forward Deployed Engineering model. Investors would impugn Palantir as a services company simply because we didn’t believe that throwing our software over the wall for consultants to implement was the correct thing for our customers.  In fairness, many of our buyers hated this because they subscribed to a world view where engaging in the correct rituals (e.g., buying expensive ERP) was the only thing that should matter. Like Department of Defense program management, the commercial world often believes implementation is best executed when managed to cost, schedule, and performance by fungible units of “independent” consultants. 

Palantir never charged for our implementation services because we wanted to internalize the cost and the pain.  The only way to make the software implementation better was to commit ourselves to solving the whole problem.  SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, Snowflake, and so many others are responding to what the market wants: high margin software revenue. They rely on a scaled ecosystem of integrators to do services, and that’s exactly why we are consuming more technology and none of it matters. 

John Boyd would reframe this as being about the OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  The technology that matters accelerates your OODA loop by helping you make decisions faster than the competition.  And that compounds.  Everything else is rearranging deck chairs. At best you are smarter, but you aren’t better.  A lot has been written about the OODA loop already, but I think the best summary comes from JRock in his (brutally crass) anthem: Win.  Or more eloquently by former Chief of Staff of the Army McConville: Winning matters.

To say the quiet part out loud: the OODA loop is all about the human.  Technology serves humans.  Instead, we have cargo cult companies such that the mere acquisition of architecturally-ordained technology is perceived to be the solution. The cargo cultist treat the front line users as godless heathens standing in the way of adopting innovation.  

More profoundly, even the purveyors in the software-industrial-complex really believe their technology is working (Satya proves to be the exception with a more clear-eyed understanding of what is actually going on). They too have subscribed to the cargo cult because they don’t go to the factory floor; they don’t own the burden of implementing their technology; and they aren’t accountable to delivering productivity. Management at the company won’t pierce the veil of abstraction to realize they fell for the Wizard of Oz. 

How to Leave the Cargo Cult

We overcome these problems by recognizing that great leadership is more important, not less important, with greater technology.  The more sophisticated and complex our technology become, the more important the greatest leader becomes.  Intel’s road to ruin was when the CFO became the CEO and managed the business by the numbers and abstractions. Former Intel CTO and current CEO Pat Gelsinger might correct the course.  In the meantime, technical founder and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang rewrote the stack around accelerated computing.

In this way, technology has largely had the opposite effect from all the effects anticipated.  The world thought technology would be a great leveling force, but it has led to more winner-take-most, power law outcomes. Technology was supposed to enable the median human to do so much more, but it has actually made the very best much more valuable. The world thought technology would make geography less important, but it has made it only more important by concentrating the relevance, wealth, and share of innovations from a handful of places.  Silicon Valley is more relevant, while Europe lags further behind in Tech. China still has zero global enterprise software companies. Tim Cook says that Apple makes things in China because they are the best, not because they are the cheapest — a consequence of a flawed industrial policy in the West.

Steve Jobs called the Macintosh a bicycle for the mind. Let’s abandon cargo cult “solutions.”. Recognize there is no process, and it will be painful. Technology only works when it is an extension of the human mind and the humans who mind it. Exclusively work backwards from decision advantage. 

But painfully and empirically, I’ve come to realize that the fetish of scaling through structure, process, and legibility are opioids, not medicines, for success. It is comforting to believe that the durability of our work will not depend on the unpredictable humans that come after us but rather on the predictable levers we have agency over to codify the continuity of our creations. Ironically, if success depends on institutional infrastructure and not individuals, it seems more likely to continue working. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

There are two truths that are not widely acknowledged:
(1) There is only content.
(2) When you are doing it right, it is very painful.

Content, not process, is the eternal substance. The artist may be ephemeral, but the art is enduring. I used to cherish systems thinking as a path to conceive of the scalable, systematized solutions that would reliably work far into the future and operate like a perpetual motion machine. It would in fact be better if they did operate like perpetual motion machines, which is to say, not at all, since it would decisively shatter the illusion. Instead, systematized solutions operate more like zombies. Process begets more process. Before you know it, the failed process is all that is left. Instead of working for the content, it sought to be the content2.

We make this mistake because when you are doing it right, it is very painful. We all want to believe that while it might be painful right now, tomorrow it will be less painful. One day, maybe it will be pain free! And the way to achieve this nirvana is to take uncertainty out of the equation and replace the agony with process. Employees clamor for legibility and predictability to waste less time and make the incomprehensible make more sense. People yearn for agency and seek to protect it through process.

A mandate to simply “do epic shit” is wrought with ambiguity and ripe for interpersonal conflict… but it might actually work. A mandate to “oversee TPS reports” is ideally suited for peaceful irrelevance. General Somervell's instructions to Captain Clarence Renshaw for constructing the world's largest building (the Pentagon) were terrifyingly simple: "You've got to build it in a hurry, I'm not going to tell you how to do it." That's as close to "do epic shit" as it gets.

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There is no meaningful process-fix to Defense acquisition because the very problem is the elevation of process over content. So let’s do PPBE reform, but let’s keep in mind that this too is not the content. Process is not how Bill Knudsen mobilized America during World War II. It’s not how John Boyd revolutionized doctrine or how Kelly Johnson pumped out a ungodly number of aircraft in a career. This is exactly why the critiques of Replicator are wrong. Creative, Zero-to-One efforts are going to be marked by seeming chaos and disorder. When President Trump first announced intentions to create the Space Force, it caught most of the DoD by surprise, including the Secretary of the Air Force. However, it was this forceful announcement - light on details at first - that helped DoD overcome almost 20 years of inertia concerning the need for an independent Space Force3.

We do have historical examples of rigorous process implemented on wildly successful government programs. During the late 1950s, the Navy invented the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) system while building submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) for the Polaris program:

PERT was a complex R&D planning and scheduling tool that calculates the probabilistic distribution of the expected time for completing critical program activities, using data from bench engineers as inputs. PERT checked all the right boxes for a fancy management system that would impress bureaucrats and outsiders: it was created by Booz Allen Hamilton and included a custom formula invented by a mathematics PhD. Almost as soon as PERT was announced to the public, it was “hailed as the first breakthrough of management science in a decade (pg 111).” It wowed everyone from Harvard Business School to the Secretary of the Navy and gained the reputation as the primary cause of success of the Polaris program.
The only problem? It didn’t work.
Much as a magician uses misdirection to distract an audience, so Admiral Raborn used PERT to distract comptrollers and auditors from looking too closely at how SPO was actually operating Polaris.

And how was Polaris actually operating? With deep uncertainty and a laser focus on the content. It worked. It might not have, but the process-driven approach certainly would have failed.

Greg LeMond said about cycling that as you get better, “it never gets easier, you just go faster.” Turns out that excellence is painful. Avoiding the pain is avoiding excellence. Much of the process constrains us to mediocre (at best) outcomes. Steve Jobs articulates this in a relatively unknown interview on process versus content:

People get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger they want to replicate their original success. And they start to think that somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to institutionalize the process across the company. But before very long people get confused and think that the process is the content. And that was ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM had the best process people in the world but they forgot about the content. And that’s what happened a little bit at Apple too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process and they didn’t have a clue as to the content. And in my career I found that the best people are the ones who understand the content. They are a pain the butt to manage. You put up with it because they are so great in the content. And that’s what makes a great product. It is not process. It is content.’

Once we accept that Hard things are Hard, we can transcend it. We can abandon the search for opioids and instead focus on what truly matters: Doing the things. Metabolizing the pain into content. Without process we face much more variance - results could be amazing or a flaming failure. But that too is good, authentic, and forces us to learn and evolve.

Jobs practiced what he preached. On the eve of the (now obviously mega-successful) Apple Store launch, Ron Johnson, the executive in charge, told Steve Jobs that it was all wrong. Johnson told him this moments before Jobs was going to take the stage at a large executive meeting. Jobs was understandably very grumpy at Ron’s comments. When Jobs got on stage, he said (paraphrasing), “Ron thinks the Apple Store is all wrong. And you know what, he’s right.” They delayed and launched with a fresh concept that powered them to near tech hegemony. The market cap of Apple is now greater than all publicly listed equities in France combined. Cost, schedule, performance were not the Content. American exceptionality is built on the intuitive and eternal substance of content.

And this is why talent spotting eats everything (e.g., culture, strategy, etc.) for breakfast. The talent generates the content that determines the rest. Here’s Palantir CEO Alex Karp back in 2012 on what this looks like in practice:

Companies typically look for well-rounded people. They want an A-plus in every category. We tend to think it’s better to have an A-triple-plus in one area, which presupposes an F in other areas. So maybe we end up with someone who solves problems very creatively but can’t interact with people. We look for people within uneven IQs, then we build a role around their strengths. I like to meet candidates with no data about them: no résumé, no preliminary discussions or job description, just the candidate and me in a room. I ask a fairly random question, one that is orthogonal to anything they would be doing at Palantir. I then watch how they disaggregate the question, if they appreciate how many different ways there are to see the same thing. I like to keep interviews short, about 10 minutes. Otherwise, people move into their learned responses and you don’t get a sense of who they really are.

The entire hiring setup focuses on the generation and evaluation of content and the elimination of process.

U.S. experiences at the end of WWII illustrate this dramatically. Even before the fall of Berlin, the U.S. had two efforts to incorporate advanced Nazi technology. The first was the Field Information Agency Technical (FIAT), which focused on capturing technical data from sites across Germany. The second was Operation Overcast (and its successor, Operation Paperclip), which sought to capture and repatriate the most important Nazi scientists.

Paperclip was a smashing success with 1,600 German scientists relocating to the U.S. and making fundamental contributions to our nation’s defense. FIAT proved of almost no value, and the operation was considered a failure. This tells us an enormous amount about the nature of content. It does not live in the technical drawing and documents, and it cannot be understood simply by reading it— the exhaust of process. It is only possible to access this content through the humans who possess it.

It has become unfashionable to talk about great people who are uniquely able. But maybe that’s exactly what Ray Dalio is, and what we should all aspire to be. The only thing I can promise you is that if you are doing it right, it is still going to be painful.

There is no process to pioneering.

When you are doing something truly disruptive, you are in a David versus Goliath situation (and this is especially true for technology).  The story of David is highly instructive for anyone who aspires to do world-changing things, and its lessons go much deeper than an inspirational tale of the little guy beating the big guy.  

Let’s begin with the obvious: David wins by not playing by Goliath's rules.  He doesn't out-muscle Goliath, instead fighting a lightweight, guerrilla style insurgency.  David is Exhibit A for the theory that speed, wits, and the ability to adapt can trump size, resources, and heavy armament.  After felling Goliath with his slingshot, he beheads him with his own massive sword (a gory but potent bit of symbolism often left out of the retelling).  

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However, David’s selection as champion of the Israelites and his rise to field commander were unconventional, even revolutionary acts in themselves.  In fact, almost every key event of David’s ascendancy was highly unlikely.  It began when the prophet Samuel sought out Jesse of Bethlehem, believing that one of his sons would become king of the Israelites.  Samuel rejected each of Jesse’s grown sons in turn before Jesse reluctantly presented David, his youngest son and a mere shepherd.  Anointed by Samuel, David went to the court of King Saul, initially as his armor-bearer.  Yet it was as a musician that David made himself indispensable to Saul, healing his afflictions with his sublime harping.  When war broke out with the Philistines, David was not even asked to fight at first, instead going home to tend his father’s sheep.  When David arrived at the front to answer the call, he faced fierce opposition from within the Israelite ranks, chiefly from his own brothers.  I suspect that when Saul, not renowned for his piety, gave David permission to face Goliath, he was not 100% faithful, but instead thinking “this is so crazy it just might work.”

After numerous trials, including his betrayal by Saul, David was crowned King David.  He ruled unconventionally and brilliantly, true to his essence, and in doing so established the House of David and the true throne of Israel.  Famed as a warrior, he never forgot that he was also an artist, and crafted psalms as powerful in their own way as his armies.  This is not to say that David’s reign was a wholly peaceful one, or that his better judgment always prevailed.  He made his share of prideful mistakes, and suffered no shortage of tragedies, none more painful than the deaths of two of his sons.  However, David proved willing to build on his failings, and never stopped bucking convention.  When the time came to choose a successor, he passed over his heir apparent for Solomon (originally the product of adultery with the wife of one of David’s commanders).  Solomon, of course, built the great temple of Jerusalem, composed the Song of Songs, and became synonymous with surpassing wisdom.  Ultimately, the line of David exemplifies the divine ascendancy of the unlikely.

For technology entrepreneurs, the story of David is a highly attractive one, and the modern-day parallels are striking.  You can think of David’s slingshot as one of the original disruptive technologies – it’s lightweight, requires minimal training, and utilizes off-the-ground commodity hardware.  It is likewise fitting that the term “Philistine” has come to mean someone without any appreciation for art and learning, and this is especially true concerning the perception of software, perhaps the most misunderstood and underappreciated form of technology at the institutional level.  Of course, David himself is the most inspiring part of the story, a young, fearless, brash, but supremely talented leader who emerges from the least likely of places with the most counterintuitive blend of skills.  

However, those who would follow in David’s footsteps must beware the catastrophic, yet often subtle pitfalls along the path.  It is paramount that as David wins, he doesn't become Goliath.  For leaders who emerge from the tornado of the hyper-growth phase, this is deceptively easy to do, and the annals of technology are piled with the cautionary examples of companies born from innovation that faded into irrelevance by allowing themselves to become the hated establishment.  David must be true to who he is, not by consciously choosing to remain small and irrelevant, but by resisting Goliath’s arrogance and vulnerabilities - even while embracing growth and influence. 

I spend a lot of time working with large and important institutions to help them solve their biggest problems.  This tremendously rewarding, and as the sense of partnership and investment in their mission develops, it is tempting to want to be of them as well as work with them.  Yet you can only help them if you are true to David, and this requires you to maintain the unique identity and vantage point of the constant outsider.  And this is why massive institutions need the help of entrepreneurs, even if they don’t realize it at first.  This is inevitably a bumpy process, because the cultural bias is to keep David in a limited role, away from the front.  Eventually, though, it becomes clear that in order to do radically different things, they need radically different competencies and perspectives.  If it was simply a matter of finding better top-down management, they could promote from within.  To enlist a warrior psalmist is a different thing entirely.  

Of course, embracing unconventional wisdom is only the first step.   The far greater hurdle is how to institutionalize agile and independent thinking without becoming doctrinaire and inflexible about it – an ironic but all too common mistake.  Interestingly, this applies to both the century-old brand name that seeks to embrace entrepreneurial culture and the scrappy startup that suddenly finds itself with thousands of employees.  Once again, David rides to the rescue.  Consider the fundamental challenge faced by US Special Operations Command, a four-star headquarters with almost 60,000 personnel, charged with maintaining supremacy in lightweight, unconventional warfare.  Former commander General Bryan Brown, who enlisted as an infantry private and retired as one of the great visionaries of special operations, once remarked that USSOCOM needs its poets too. David knew it all along.

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David McCullough’s 1776 is, to my mind, the ultimate story of entrepreneurship.  Starting a company is challenging enough - now imagine starting a country!  Although many orders more complex, America’s founding has much to teach entrepreneurs of all varieties.  And given this heritage, it should also come as no surprise that the United States remains the best place in the world to start something new. 

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One of the most valuable things 1776 imparts is an appreciation for the incredibly hard fight endured by the Continental army.  If your most recent lesson on the American Revolution came from a high school textbook, you might dimly recall a few triumphant battles and Valley Forge.  1776 paints a vivid picture of the sheer misery and constant trials of the war – trials few could have anticipated.  The Continental Army’s perseverance is even more impressive when you realize that the Treaty of Paris wasn’t signed until 1783.  For the modern reader, it’s a nuanced lesson: on one hand, you need to be realistic about the challenge ahead, but at the same time, you have no way of really knowing.

The parallels between startups and the Continental army are fascinating.  Some quick observations:

• Chaos: Compared to the British army, the Continental army seemed completely chaotic. There were no well-defined roles and no visible hierarchy among these ragtag, shoeless countrymen who had taken up arms.  Of course, some of this chaos was real and some was perceived.  The relevant point when starting anything is not how to eliminate chaos, but rather which elements of chaos should be tackled in what order.  Do you address real organizational challenges, or just shuffle everyone’s title? This distinction escaped the British, who underestimated the strength and ability of the “rebels” simply because they looked like a mess. 

• Meritocracy.  Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox are two of the better examples.  Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker who had never been in battle before, became Washington's most trusted general due to his exceptional competence and dedication.  Knox was an obese 25-year-old who rose to the rank of Colonel.  He thought up the mission to secure artillery from Ticonderoga, without which the Continental army would have had no such capability. 

• Talent: Despite Washington’s minor experience in the French and Indian Wars, his principal strength was not military strategy (in fact, his advisors staved off disaster more than once by convincing him not to do something).  His real superpower was his ability to quickly determine who was talented at what. 

• Food: Food was critical to the Continental army.  Certainly there were times where they were on the move and hardly ate for days on end.  While food was always scarce, the fact that the Army was actually able to feed people with some consistency was critical. The modern startup is obviously not directly comparable, but we’ve seen time and again how providing food pays for itself many times over in terms of focus, productivity and commitment.

But more than simple observations and parallels, there are some real takeaways and strategies for anyone who aspires to start something extraordinary:   

Be Ruthless.

I was shocked by how many times during the course of battle the British would halt their movement to rest or make porridge or something completely non-essential.  There were countless occasions where the side with the advantage could have ended the war, had they only pressed on.  Their reasons should sound a cautionary note even now - stop because it is getting dark?  Stop because that was the plan (despite the ground truth)?  Worst of all: stop because we can finish the job more comfortably tomorrow. 

After routing the Americans and forcing them across a bridge, British General Cornwallis decided to rest.  The Americans retreated brilliantly and swiftly into the night. This was not the Continental Army's first such retreat, so it’s hard to imagine how Cornwallis did not realize the significant risk they posed. Why didn't he send out patrols? Most likely, he thought he would win tomorrow regardless, and preferred not to win under uncomfortable circumstances.  After the fact, he said that he would have kept going, whatever the risks, no matter the orders, if he had only known he would have caught Washington.  The lesson:  Be ruthless as a default setting, not just because victory is seemingly at hand.

Don't Get Overconfident.

Nearly every major mistake by either side in the 1776 campaign was a result of overconfidence.  Minor victories would lead commanders to discard their hard-won knowledge, resulting in terrible decisions.  The tendency to let encouraging signs override our better judgment is actually a fundamental human cognitive bias.  If you’re interested in learning how to recognize and defeat all manner of non-rational thinking, make it a point to read Overcoming Bias. 

Don't Waste Time Politicking.

General Charles Lee felt slighted that the less experienced George Washington was given command of the Continental army, and constantly sought to undermine him.  When Washington ordered Lee to bring his forces to New Jersey, Lee dawdled, and was captured by the British while seeking some female companionship in a tavern.  Lee was marched to New York in his nightgown, and soon defected.  Much more devastating, however, was a series of letters to Lee from Washington's close advisor and friend Joseph Reed, detailing Reed’s disappointment with Washington.  Why couldn’t Reed have an honest, face to face conversation with his brother in arms to sort through the issues?  In any vital endeavor, there is too much at stake to have closed communications or privately nurse resentments.

It ain't over 'til it's over.

Time after time, each side thought a specific battle was going to be decisive.  In retrospect, it is amazing how incredibly wrong they were, and how often.  So how do you respond? There is a fine line between being jaded and being realistic. Starting something invariably requires commitment in the face of uncertainty.  For this reason, I’d argue that it’s better to be optimistic (even if slightly naïve) than completely cynical, but again, the key is to be aware of our biases.

One of the most fundamental human desires to believe that something is either A or B, and many complex endeavors are compromised from the beginning by treating the A/B split as a first principle. Binary logic may explain well-understood processes, but eventually the old rules cease to apply, as with the failure of classical physics to explain phenomena at atomic and subatomic scales.  To understand quantum theory, you have to accept the wave-particle duality, and even then, it turns out that no one really knows why light exhibits both wave and particle properties.  We can observe, even predict, but not quite explain.

Startups are subject to similarly misunderstood dualities.  Simple minds want to know if winning depends more on doing A or B:  Should we move fast, or ship quality? Build footprint or monetize?  Optimize on breadth or depth?  The winner, however, realizes that you have to figure out a way to do both.  How this is accomplished is highly contextualized in practice, but it begins with the realization that you cannot have one without the other and hope to succeed.  If it were as simple as doing only one thing well, the success rate of venture capital would be much greater than 10%. And when you do succeed, as in quantum mechanics, recognizing that things work a certain way is more important than knowing why (for the purposes at hand, at least).

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A venture also displays both continuous and discrete elements.  From a wide angle, the growth curve or product lifecycle may resemble a wave function, but it’s also extremely iterative, and is most efficient when individual iterations occur at consistent intervals.  Likewise, one characteristic is often expressed through the other, much as particle emissions are dependent on wave functions. The focus and abstraction needed to go broader also allows you to go deeper effectively.  Similarly, in the course of developing a vertical solution, you often end up sharpening your intuition about how slice the problem horizontally.

When striving to achieve both A and B, you often need to consciously set up opposing forces to achieve your goals.  For example, you need hackers who are relentlessly focused on solving the customer’s problems, even if they’re comparatively poor at productization and long-term code stability, and you need artists who are relentlessly focused on productization and pristine architecture even if their sense of customer urgency leaves a lot to be desired.  How you make them work together productively is an art - there is always some violence, but it starts by recognizing you need both, and accepting that their interactions only need to be productive, not harmonious.  The results of this type of particle collision are very difficult to know ex ante, so the safest bet is to find the best exemplars you can of each type – people you would want to work with individually.

The need to harness opposing forces sometimes extends beyond types of goal orientation to personality types (though these often go hand in hand).  Again, it’s up for debate why this is the case, but the anecdotal evidence is extensive.  The classic example from quantum physics is Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann’s collaboration on the theory of beta decay.  Feynman was famously mischievous and irrepressible, while Gell-Mann was almost painfully serious and methodical.  While they frequently found each other exasperating, their tension was tempered by strong mutual respect – an obvious but sometimes overlooked component in organizational design.

Conventional high-tech wisdom posits that among the qualities of “better”, “faster”, and “cheaper” you can only pick two.  With the right team, you can do extraordinary and counterintuitive things. You can be better, faster, and cheaper – you just can’t be better, faster, cheaper, and also comfortable, which is the true contradiction. At the risk of resorting to truisms, doing hard things is hard - comfort is simply not part of the equation.  As Feynman himself once quipped, “You don’t like it, go somewhere else!”

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“Do important things” is often invoked as a rallying cry in these pages, but this time I want to talk about something more important than innovation, invention, entrepreneurship, and all the rest. I want to talk about dharma. More specifically, I want to talk about your dharma.

Classically speaking, dharma represents both cosmic law and order – our universal duty - as well as reality itself. Upholding your dharma, then, refers to both your ultimate responsibility, and upholding the truth.  It is no accident that I say your dharma. The truth, while in one sense absolute, is also deeply personal, and rooted in the enduring power of the individual.

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With commitment to the truth as the first principle, your code of conduct is simple: When you see something that's broken or bad, you have to say something about it or fix it yourself. Just as importantly, when you hear something, listen. It’s not just about the success of the organization, but also a moral imperative not to let anyone you care about fly off a cliff.

In practice, this is extremely painful. Honest, unadulterated feedback is as emotionally alien as it is intellectually obvious, whether giving or receiving. Confronting the truth together is a social endeavor, yet it flies in the face of all social convention and pleasantries. Unlike you or me, the truth doesn’t have feelings – but that is precisely why it’s the truth.

Of course, it’s easier to face hard truths when we talk about collective failures. These are important to address, and can be invaluable object lessons for the organization writ large. Individual failures, however, are the ones you, and only you, can control. Accordingly, the most painful and most vital incarnation of the truth is individual feedback – all in the service of discovering and fulfilling your dharma.

This matters on multiple levels. In practical terms, nothing happens unless you make it happen. Day to day, the bias towards action is one of the most valuable things you can institute.  Without your concerted action, things like planning, analysis, strategy, et cetera are just distractions from an empty center.

However, dharma is also about the unlocking the essence of the individual. Facing your dharma means stripping away the pretense, delusion, and distractions to reveal who you are and what you are meant to be doing. You uphold your dharma in the service of both the individual and the collective. For the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, the parts cannot seek anonymity and cover in the whole.

Likewise, true feedback comes from a foundation of investment in the individual. The underlying intentions need to include the opportunity to grow from mistakes and the willingness to help someone get there. We all like to talk about investing in people, but it’s important to internalize that hiring isn’t the end of the road. The hard part starts after - especially for the most innately talented individuals. If you don’t give them feedback, you’re just as guilty of coasting on their talent as they are, and you will inevitably reap the consequences.

As many a wise master has observed, there are countless paths to dharma – indeed, there are as many forms of dharma as there are seekers. Everyone arrives at the truth in a different way, as evidenced by leaders as diverse as Ray Dalio, Prof. Carole Robin, and Peter Thiel.

Ray Dalio’s Principles is more than required reading at Bridgewater, and Bridgewater’s culture of “radical transparency” is almost infamous for the degree to which honest feedback is emphasized. Dalio’s most basic principles states: 

“Truth - more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality- is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.” 

It seems simple enough, but the real genius of Principles is how he mediates between the truth as an absolute and the individual experience: 

“Above all else, I want you to think for yourself - to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true and 3) what to do about it.” 

Dalio also caveats that “you can probably get what you want out of life if you can suspend your ego”, and the same can be said of feedback. For most of us, this will be the hardest battle.

One of Peter Thiel’s great maxims is “Listen carefully to smart people with whom you disagree.” Thiel is a renowned contrarian, but he didn’t hone his worldview in a vacuum. One of his greatest strengths has been assembling teams with the built-in structural tension needed to confront bias and complacency head-on and do transformative things. To be frank, this includes the ability pre-select for thick skin.  No one who was at PayPal in the early days would describe it as a touchy-feely place – but factoring in the type of talent it attracted, that was part of the genius of the design. Pre-eBay PayPal practiced a form of directness that probably wouldn’t have flown at most other companies – but look at the record of the PayPal mafia versus any other group of corporate alumni.

Professor Carole Robin of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is best known for her popular “Interpersonal Dynamics” course, affectionately nicknamed “Touchy Feely”. As Professor Robin describes, “"It's about learning how to create productive professional relationships," and feedback is a key ingredient. Robin’s approach may seem like a high-empathy yin to the low-empathy yang of radical transparency or the PayPal model, but many of the basics are the same. Robin advises doing it early, and above all practicing often. She also emphasizes the need to avoid shaming and to “stay on your side of the net” by not making the critique personal – in other words, don’t aim for the ego.  Finally, listening is crucial – in Touchy-Feely speak, “It takes two to know one". 

Recognizing there are many paths to dharma, where do you start? The most important thing is to take that first step, practicing feedback early and often, and making it a non-negotiable component of every consequential effort. To have any chance of sticking, it has to become the new normal. 

One of the great tragedies of working life is the tendency to treat feedback like taxes: a necessary evil to be addressed annually or quarterly. Too often, feedback is also synonymous with either punitive or back-patting exercises. You need to inoculate people against these associations by starting early, before there’s a crisis. Of course, as new people arrive, you will be forced to begin the acclimation process from scratch, because organizations that practice truthful feedback as a way of life are rare, and individuals for whom it comes naturally are rarer still.  

Another complication is that people tend to be lopsided in their feedback. Those with lower empathy have the easiest time giving feedback. It’s intuitive, even reflexive, but these people tend to be terrible at giving feedback in a diplomatic way.  This is your opportunity to suspend the ego, assume it’s not a personal attack, and consider the substance of what is being said. Eventually, you realize that seemingly low-empathy individuals are often just carrying out their dharma. Make no mistake, it is a gift.

On the other hand those with high empathy are best suited to diplomatically give feedback, but struggle to make it appropriately critical because the very thought of doing so causes pain.  An empathetic style can also be a gift, but only when personal sensitivity is complemented by the courage to overcome the inertial bias against criticism. Above all, recall that this is the real world.  There is no perfect Goldilocks balance. The key is to get started with the ingredients you already have.

You should also consider the source – except when you shouldn’t. Remember Peter Thiel’s smart people who disagree with you. With any luck, you will have colleagues who possess deep credibility in areas you don’t, and you should make extra effort to listen to them. On the other hand, sometimes incisive and true feedback will come from people with no apparent legitimacy. When your ego cries out “who the hell are you?”, turn the other way and focus on the substance of the criticism.

What if you’re wrong? This is always a possibility, giving or receiving, but because you are already thinking critically, it’s not a meaningful risk. If there is any possibility in your mind that something is wrong, confront it together. Either you avert disaster, or you discover why it was in fact right. Both are preferred outcomes.

Feedback is especially hard at any meaningful scale. The larger you get, the tougher it is to guarantee a high standard of intellectual honesty, while cracks in the foundation become increasingly subtle and imperceptible. In many ways, it’s good to maintain a healthy reserve of fear of what you might become - look no further than our political system to see what happens when the truth is focus-grouped beyond all recognition.

As with almost any worthy endeavor, the pursuit of your dharma involves constantly raising the bar. It is never easy to ask people to be more than they have been, and to address when something has stopped working, or never did. It is doubly hard because these realizations often come when people are working their absolute hardest. As painful as it is to admit that someone’s best isn’t good enough, it doesn’t make it any less true. In fact, it becomes that much more important.

It’s fine to say failure is not an option in moments of bravado, but you know inside that abolishing failure – at least the lower-case kind – is not only unrealistic, but leads to denial and paralysis. It’s entirely reasonable, on the other hand, to insist that you won’t accept failure without feedback. Only by confronting the day-to-day truth can you hope to unlock the greater truth of your highest potential, as an organization and as individuals. That is good karma. 

If I've learned one thing from observing great individuals (and great companies), it's that greatness is inherently asymmetric. If that sounds dangerous, it is. Any scholar of counterterrorism or cyber war will tell you that asymmetric threats require asymmetric countermeasures, but more fundamentally, they require asymmetric people. When forming a team, I don't want to assemble a polite roster of cross-functional professionals. I want the X-Men: a medley of mutants united for good.

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The Incredible Hulk, in particular, embodies the growth model I've come to believe is necessary for achieving greatness. For those of you who were popular in junior high school, the Hulk began as the mild-mannered, though brilliant physicist Bruce Banner, and was transformed into the Hulk after exposure to gamma radiations from a nuclear explosion. From then on, Bruce Banner would morph into the Hulk during times of extreme stress or exigency. While the Hulk’s ability to retain Banner’s intelligence evolved over the series, it’s safe to say he was was never the same again.

So what does growth for greatness look like? It begins with accepting unevenness, and reaches its potential through a conscious nurturing of extremes. But introspection and diligence are not enough.  Real growth is scary, hard, periodic, and responsive to your environment. The gamma ray might seem like an extreme metaphor for catalyzing growth, but if you want to truly achieve greatness, it’s much closer to the reality than the safe, comfortable models we're taught to accept. You need periodic radiation, not lifting a little more weight every day. In the short term, linear development predictably leads to linear results, and in the long term, factoring in drag and the insidious effects of growing comfortable, the result is decline, as Stephen Cohen eloquently described in his conversation with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Intelligence is compounding all the time, and correspondingly, so are complacency and missed opportunity.

In practice, it's usually not so straightforward to go looking for gamma rays out of the gate, but there are some obvious pitfalls you can avoid along the way. One of the most important: don’t fall prey to the illusion of growth promoted by the corporate ladder.  It’s a crutch as much as a way up (and tech roles/companies are NOT immune - if you see Software Engineer I, Software Engineer II, etc, that’s a ladder). The ladder can be partially explained by convenience, or convention, but ultimately it’s there to assuage your fears – not only of not reaching your potential, but of incubating a potential that doesn’t fit the bounds. While on the ladder, you can only fall so low or climb so high. It's a false frame, not only because hierarchy is such a poor proxy for impact, but especially for lulling you into thinking achievement falls within a standard distribution.

It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that becoming a mutant is not all upside. Make no mistake, gamma radiation can hurt you. There is always the risk of failure, and win or lose, there will be scar tissue. In that sense the ladder is also a safety net. As an aspiring mutant, you shouldn’t let false bravado obscure this realization – just recognize that in choosing the ladder you’re explicitly shorting your potential and putting protecting your ego ahead of your outcome. As an aspiring Professor X, accept that there will be failures, and that you’ll need to make highly imperfect tradeoffs on false positives vs. false negatives when hiring and developing talent.

Mentorship is likewise critical when directing mutant powers towards the greatest possible good. The X-Men would not have become X-Men without Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters. But again, the standard model doesn't apply. To begin with, you need mutants to mentor mutants, and in many cases, to provide the initial dose of radiation. Otherwise, even the best institution of higher learning will predictably devolve into a lemming academy. 

Once mutation is in process, one of the greatest aspects of mentorship is, paradoxically, autonomy. This is especially important because extreme growth doesn't happen on schedule, but is subject to periods of intense activity. As a mentor of mutants, you need to be attuned to these periods, and when they come, confer even more autonomy. Above all, fight your instinct to handhold (hard to do when both hands are always clenched in a fist anyway!).

The final part of the equation is to seek out the greatest challenges you can, both in terms of meaning and difficulty. And this is perhaps the greatest beauty of the gamma radiation metaphor. It's not just about unimaginable intensity. It's about an external reality leaving an indelible imprint on your internal reality. There are some gifts that are only fully formed through creative destruction, and it’s these gifts, in turn, that allow you to create new external realities - in other words, to change the world.

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Given my journey, you can imagine my first reaction to questions of work-life balance is fairly unsympathetic. I want to protest that, by legitimizing such a false dichotomy, you’re pre-empting a much more meaningful conversation. But I suspect that conversation is closer to the heart of this anxiety than most people realize. 

If you’re worrying about work-life balance at the beginning of your career, and you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re not lazy. You’re not looking for an easy life (even if this seems like an appealing concept right after midterms). I’m willing to bet that what you’re really worried about is someone else owning your most precious possession: your future. 

Staring into the abyss of companies that glorify triple-digit hours (never mind the substance of the work), this makes intuitive sense. But having surveyed the landscape of high-tech hiring, I’m convinced you should be just as concerned about jobs that promise high stimulation and total comfort. When you let yourself be sold on easy hours, outrageous perks, and glib assurances about the project you’ll join and the technologies you’ll get to play with, you’ve just agreed to let your future become someone else’s.

I hate the construct of work-life balance for the same reason I love engineering: the reality is dynamic and generative, not zero-sum. It’s about transcending the constraints of simplistic calculations. Creating the life and the work you want are by no means easy challenges, but they are absolutely attainable. What’s not realistic is thinking you can own your future and be comfortable at the same time. Grit, not virtuosity, will be the biggest determinant of your success, for reasons I’ll explore in a bit. 

At the same time, grit and discipline aren’t enough. You need purpose. And I can state categorically that the purpose you discover, with all the sacrifice that entails, will be more motivating and meaningful than the one handed to you in the form of some glamorous project that, realistically, will succeed or fail regardless of your involvement. 

The catch, of course, is that true purpose doesn’t sit around waiting to be discovered. It requires constant pursuit. Here’s what I’ve learned from a decade and a half of sprinting.

There’s no time like now. As learning animals, we’re subject to various ages of cognitive potency. As a young child, your aptitude for acquiring a language or learning an instrument is at its peak. Accordingly, as a professional, your early 20s are the most formative stage. It is absolutely critical to make the most of this time because the pace of learning grows slower and more incremental as you age, whether we care to admit it or not. Of course, you can always learn new things, but most often the wisdom of experience is largely the result of earlier realizations having the time to compound into something richer.

The place of maximal learning is often at the point of significant pain. It’s not just about having a more pliable mind - grit, and its close cousin, resilience, are essential for taking your intelligence further than it can get on its own. And while intelligence compounds, grit degrades in the vast majority of cases. Regardless, grit isn’t something you can suddenly develop after a life of leisure. For these reasons, owning your future means choosing grit over the allure of a predictable pace.

Of course, you still need to hold a pace. Studies show that marathoners/endurance runners do tons of self-talk to push past the pain. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” is a well-worn cliché, but it’s striking how often it’s invoked to rationalize comfort as opposed to promoting sustained excellence. Don’t think for a second that elite marathoners have trained to the point that a sub-six-minute mile pace is comfortable. It’s incredibly painful. What separates the truly elite is having found a purpose that makes the sacrifice acceptable.

At the same time, complete self-motivation is incredibly rare. It’s probably not a realistic goal, and that’s fine. Find the people who will sharpen your resolve as well as your ideas. Again, your first step matters. If you choose a job for work-life balance, chances are, so did everyone who came before. Talent is one thing when evaluating your future teammates, but ask yourself this: when you need models and inspiration to be more than you are, will you be able to find them?  Where will your gamma radiation come from?

You can find your zen in stressful, chaotic times. In fact, I’d argue this is the norm, even the ideal, for 20-somethings. Some adrenaline is good for your performance. Not having time to waste requires you to focus on the essentials and develop an innate sense of direction. That way, when you do eventually get to let your mind wander, it will be in rewarding directions. These days, I build in calendar blocks for “brain space”. That wouldn’t have made sense 10 or even 5 years ago – not because I have more free time now, but because, early in your career, you learn much more by doing than reflecting. And this can be the difference between creating your future and receiving it in a fancy envelope. 

At the limit, you probably should care about work-life balance – it’s not going to remain a static thing your whole life. But at the margin, as a new grad, you should focus on the most important problem. Find the thing that motivates you, work your ass off, learn as much as you can, and trust that today’s gains will compound well into the future – your future.

Working your ass off isn’t bleak – it’s quite the opposite. Provided there’s a purpose, sprinting at an unsustainable pace is an act of tremendous optimism. A mindset of premature retirement might sound rosy, but in truth it’s deeply cynical and extraordinarily insidious – much more so than being overpaid or overpraised, and much harder to correct.

But back to the concept of caring about work-life balance at the limit, how do you know where the limit is? Isn’t life fundamentally uncertain? Here’s what I’ve come to realize: you can’t pre-emptively retire without doing the work that makes you appreciate the chance to rest. Maybe you can, but assuming you have something to contribute, it’s going to be an empty reward. Sacrificing your potential to comfort isn’t a hedge against an early death – it IS an early death. As Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance, "Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” 

We’ve been told over and over to choose life over work in order to achieve balance. I’m urging you, especially at the dawn of your career, to instead choose life over balance, and make the work so meaningful that you wouldn’t want it to exist as a distinct concept. This is how you ensure that your future remains yours.

One of the most enduring values of Western civilization, lying at the heart of the American dream, is the concept of ownership. But in the context of material things, the virtues of ownership too often go unexamined, and the same holds true for ownership in the context of your work.

As an attempt at a definition, the only time you will ever truly own something is as an individual contributor. No one will edit the code out from under you. But as soon as you enter any sort of organizational context, you start to realize that ownership is largely a myth. The more responsibility you have, paradoxically, the more that responsibility is shared with others. From every direction, people will be editing your supposed creations.

That's not a bug - it's just the nature of the thing. As a practical matter, you need to be comfortable with people submitting pull requests against your ideas, and in fact this is part and parcel of growth. Increased responsibility is attended by both a need to drive more, and also to thrive in the shared ownership. The ability to handle this reality is a massive determinant of leadership potential, organizational health, and success as an enterprise. The inability to handle it manifests as stunted growth and pathological distrust.

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Even if complete, individual ownership is largely a myth, it's still an exceptionally useful one in terms of understanding organizations and leadership. The traditional model is that you have a defined position with a defined portfolio. If this sounds stifling, it is. Its chief virtues are predictability and legibility- all other things being equal. And this is why conventional, status-driven organizations are so often ruthless and dysfunctional, more than the existence of the hierarchy itself: things change. You can only be really aggressive and formal about promoting leaders if you are equally aggressive about firing leaders. It simply isn't possible that you are always right. This is how most organizations avoid the alluring, yet messy, challenge of decoupling position and portfolio. They become factories, and as they grow, they become fractals of the old org chart.

The alternative model is the artist colony, in which position and portfolio are not only decoupled, but the position itself is an arbitrary construct. There is only the artist and the work. We see this influence in Facebook's engineering teams, where everyone from new grads to eminent veterans gets the title of “Software Engineer”. We've done the same at Palantir - with the added wrinkle that BD is all engineers as well! As a variation on the theme, recall that the Dalai Lama famously describes himself as just a simple monk.

Within the artist colony, there are leaders - and in fact, they are the rule and not the exception. Their portfolios can and will change radically over time. This decoupling allows the colony to seize more aggressively on the innumerable opportunities for leaders to drive things, without creating a corrupting permanence to whatever is being driven. In fact, I would argue that leadership can only be taken in times of flux. Otherwise, it's just more skillful maintenance. The architect of the palace does not mow its lawns, however necessary a task that may be.

The fundamental fluidity of portfolio and position constitutes the artist colony's greatest inherent advantage (and challenge). In a traditional organization, it's expected that taking away a portfolio implies the loss of position, and vice versa. In the artist colony, it's understood that this would end poorly for all, not just the artist in question. Broadly, the result would be creeping risk aversion and status-seeking. And, more often than not in my experience, just around the corner lies the perfect thing for the artist to create - while also meeting an existential business need.

Meeting these needs is not just a happy side effect of individual fulfillment, but a strategic recognition of the nature of progress. It's a constant struggle and dialogue. We need to force ourselves to the front when the things we are driving push us back, but true leaders are not content to blindly take the next hill. Each success creates the imperative to ask “now what?”. At a certain stage, the logical next step might well be an oversight role. But what's much more interesting, to me, is how often I've seen leaders ease their developmental angst and do great things for the company by pivoting from oversight to owning and executing something meaningful.

On a similar note, we're all familiar with stories of leaders not scaling because they couldn't delegate. But we should be more worried about leaders losing their ownership/execution muscle entirely. In many of these cautionary tales, I'd wager that the real takeaway should have been that Leader X didn't own/drive the right things, not that he/she didn't delegate effectively.

Another benefit of decoupling position and portfolio derives from still another paradox: despite the necessity of joint ownership (or perhaps because of it), some things simply require a dictator to get done. This is especially true in product development, where not only does halving the team often double the pace of progress, but the fulfillment of a coherent vision usually requires one actual visionary. Dictatorship as a set position would never work in an artist colony because it's antithetical to the nature of art and artists. But dictatorship can not only work, but thrive, in the context of portfolio.

It should be acknowledged that the artist colony, like the artist, is a fundamentally restless entity, and this approach is not a panacea of any kind. It requires constant engagement and examination, and betrayals of artistic principles within this world will sting infinitely worse, because so much more is at stake than status and money. Owning your work, then, is the opposite of owning your home: it's only true ownership for as long as you're actively paying it off.

Technology is a wonderfully levered thing, but there is a dangerous temptation to believe that you can change the world without engaging with its institutions, in all their sprawling entropy (setting aside Silicon Valley's frequent delusions about what qualifies as changing the world). When considering how and if to engage with national and global institutions, I've found that people gravitate toward one of two philosophies: 

1. The first holds that the world's institutions are fundamentally evil, and subconsciously people ascribe a certain malicious competence, e.g. the repressive government or ruthless corporate polluter. If this is the norm, your only choices are revolution/anarchy, or much likelier, doing nothing. I disagree, but people are free to believe this.

2. The second viewpoint holds that the world's institutions are not fundamentally evil, but need help to become great - help that must be renewed as institutions change and people cycle through. Trying to be fair-minded, people often attribute institutional problems to incompetence as opposed to malice (though in my experience this is usually inaccurate or exaggerated). 

 What I've learned from my struggles in the second camp is that there are no easy answers - but the goal is better, not perfect. These are the convictions that have helped me to contend with all the complexity that follows.

• My first principle is to get off the sidelines. Complaining is a dead end. The question needs to be “who will help them?” The answer may be you.

• If so, the second principle is to engage with the world as it is: messy and gray. 

• Overnight change is a myth. The goal is to make today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today.

In order to bring about change, you need to cultivate some intellectual humility. But early on, it helps to not have excess amounts. Happily, most people lack humility in youth (not a judgment of millennials; it's just human nature). And this allows you to attempt epic things. Along the way, with any luck, some wisdom seeps in. As a student, I thought everything was dumb. Surely I knew a better way. As I got out into the world, I slowly realized I'd been asking the wrong question. I dwelled on the first order: why is this so broken? Eventually, I realized there was a more meaningful question: what must be true for this to make sense?  From there, you keep pulling the string until you find the underlying condition that requires fixing. 

Politics is a dirty word for idealists and engineers alike (doubly true if you happen to be both!). But you can't address the most pressing problems without also grappling with the common good, which necessitates political considerations. The reality is that politics and engineering each have roles to play:

• Politics is about accepting the tradeoffs. We live on an efficient frontier (or so we hope), forcing us to examine the tradeoffs between X and Y. In the political sphere, preference for X or Y, roughly speaking, defines left and right.

• Engineering is about innovations that push out the efficient frontier – we can have more of X and Y, and the political viewpoint merely serves up false tradeoffs that rip us apart.

• One problem with politics is that in a democracy, both sides are always right, or at least deadlocked. X is important. Y is important, too. Structurally the only good resolution is to invest in more of both. At its best, engineering can render a painful tradeoff false - think power vs. efficiency, human vs. computational acumen, or the former truism that you can only pick two among better/faster/cheaper.

• Beware thinking that engineering is a cure-all for political ills. In reality, engineers cannot recuse themselves from the painful organizational aspects of a problem they're trying to solve. Software is fairly unique as something you can open source for the public interest, but it's exceedingly rare that you get to be Johnny Appleseed, sprinkling free technology on grateful soil. The hard work happens at the intersection of products, problems, and people.

It's also worth unpacking some assumptions about the nature of institutions more generally. We tend to think of them as static, almost by definition. This is understandable, especially in the political realm. If you're graduating college this year, you have probably never known a time when bipartisanship and compromise were considered positives, not accusations to be hurled by primary opponents. In reality, though, institutions require people, and the people themselves are only as static as their motivations permit them to be.

On the flipside, one of the most important questions you can ask is whether you are working for a specific person/administration, or for the historic, enduring ideals of that institution.  This is a core principle of the US military, and regardless of one's feelings about war, it's a tradition worth emulating. In a democratic society, the failure mode is less likely a cult of personality, and more likely an institution that becomes insidiously focused on consolidating power and resources. Sometimes, institutions bloat past the point of no return, and must be broken up or declawed. Often, though, an infusion of new blood can restore focus to the real mission.

While it's clear that governments should advance causes beyond their own prosperity, I would argue this is not only possible but essential in the commercial realm. We don't remember Steve Jobs for making shareholders a boatload of money; we remember him for giving us new ways to communicate, learn, and experience art. There are many forms of value to be created, and striving for the perfect should not preclude exploring different forms of good. But forms aside, an institution's ability to do more than just enrich itself is also a great indicator of its prospects for enduring - and its worthiness of your involvement. 

On a related note, people often discount the ability to work through an institution, not just for it. I don't mean capitalizing on existing channels or infrastructure, but advancing a larger goal. You can think in terms of ceilings vs. floors. Tesla must meet certain safety and efficiency standards to qualify for tax rebates and remain street legal, but these requirements are the floor, not the ceiling. They're catalysts for more aggressive innovations, even those that don't yet have a market.

There is also the truism that if your work is black or white, it probably isn't that important - or worse, you are lying to yourself. The most pervasive problems are subtle, complex, and require deep engagement with both established institutions and emerging forces. It's easy to point to noble aims consumed by unintended consequences and be scared of getting involved. The Arab Spring fueled the rise of theocrats, not democracy. Even seemingly non-controversial developments can force hard choices. Let's say you develop a promising cancer treatment in a startup or research lab. Do you try to take it to market yourself, or through a huge pharma company? Do you optimize on keeping it affordable, or raise prices in order to enable you to expand your reach? Easy answers remain elusive, but to me, these examples are all arguments for more thoughtful engagement, not abdication. You can get off the sideline without getting on the soapbox.

Lastly, when pondering which institutions to join or serve, instead of asking “Why Institution X”, I would first ask, “Why me?” What gifts do I have to offer the world, and what kind of platform would allow me to answer the first question in the most meaningful way possible?

In this return of great power competition, it is clear that we need to continue to innovate to provide deterrence from conflict. This requires military superiority and continuous technological innovation. When Palantir was founded there was no path to working with the Defense Department. Not a difficult path, no path. And there was exactly one path to working with the Intelligence Community, In-Q-Tel.  

In-Q-Tel is a venture capital firm that invests in commercial technologies that are relevant to national security. But this headline confuses that actual value proposition. America has plenty of capital for quality companies. A start up that can’t raise money is probably not a very good startup. It is one of America’s strengths - a deep and wide venture ecosystem. What In-Q-Tel provides that is a game changer is customers. The capital invested is often de minimis to the companies even if it is extremely valuable validation. The customer contracts, clearances, and commitments that In-Q-Tel furnishes are the fuel for innovation.  

Not enough is said about the US Govt as Customer and too much has been said and overstated about the US Govt as R&D financier. It is broadly acknowledged that in the present era the USG cannot outspend industry in R&D, acknowledging that it very much did in the early cold war. But perhaps that spending was never the key enabler outside of basic research.

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Chris Miller’s Chip Wars covers the history of the semiconductor industry. In 1965, Military and Space applications where 95% of the chip market. Bob Noyce, then Co-Founder/CEO of Fairchild and future Co-founder/CEO of Intel, always envisioned a broader market than the military which meant he had to manage his R&D priorities (and he was of course right: the first Integrated Circuit for consumers was used in Zenith hearing aid that was initially designed for a NASA satellite). He declined most military R&D contracts (despite these customers representing 95% of his revenue) so he could stay in control of his R&D roadmap. He never let more than 4% of this R&D budget come from Govt contracts. So 96% of his R&D was self-financed from investors and profits.  

In Noyce’s own words “..there are very few research directors anywhere in the world who are really adequate to the job at assessing Fairchild’s work and they are not often career officers.” Noyce complained about the time spent writing progress reports for the bureaucracy for any of this government funded R&D. Now Fairchild had the unique luxury of being funded by the 1950’s equivalent of a billionaire so they could treat the military as the customer for their products rather than as their boss of their R&D from day one. 

Because of the difficulty of achieving scaled procurement in US Govt it is unfortunately still true that a uniquely hard head and patient sort of mission-driven capital is still required today. SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril all have billionaire founders whose commitment to the cause was required to survive the various valleys of death and incredibly long acquisition cycles. Notably 2 of the 3 had to sue the Govt to ensure the Govt didn’t de facto compete against industry.

Even in Noyce’s era, the Pentagon was more comfortable working with big bureaucracies than nimble startups, and as a result underestimated the speed by which Fairchild would transform the industry. DoD assessment praised RCA for having the best microsystems electronics miniaturization program while dismissively noting that Fairchild only have 2 scientists working on it internally while Lockheed had 50, implying that Lockheed was far ahead. Of course it was Fairchild’s R&D team that made the breakthroughs. 

Defense contractors thought of chips as the final product. Noyce and Moore were already dreaming of computers and phones. Noyce slashed prices to access the broader vision and market. Cost plus government contracting would never have created the price performance the USG needed to create the incredible military deterrence capability. And of course all that commercial innovation led to a semiconductor revolution that created vast American prosperity, the underpinning of our national security. 

We see a very different story with Drones. General Atomics invented the modern drone in the 1990s with the Predator. A Noycian figure would have seen the vast potential for not only commercial drone applications but also the consumer market. Instead for decades that vast R&D focus of these platforms was locked by Govt R&D programs. And with great effect. But without any American prosperity that should have followed GA owning or spinning out a Commercial subsidiary that should have been the DJI of America. Instead the vacuum let DJI fill it to serve CCP civil-military fusion aims. Now the hobbyist consumer’s drone purchase funds CCP R&D against America.

The root problem is that the acquisition system is unintentionally communist (Bill Greenwalt noticed the same). Profits are capped at a very low number on contracts. While the law says the government should favor fixed priced contracts in practice these acquisitions happen cost plus. This means the only way to make more money as a contractor is to find a way to spend more money in your costs. That won’t work. Noyce made MORE money as he lowered the cost with even greater the profit margins. He had the commercial incentive to do that and that benefited every customer, including Uncle Sam. Noyce could not have done that rationally if he was a government contractor - lowering the price would have been lower profit with government regulated profit margins. The reason we lost the market with Drones is that China executed with true capitalism with DJI while, ironically, America pursued communism.

“Selling R&D to the government is like taking your venture capital and putting it into a savings account. Venturing is venturing. You want to take the risk.” - Robert Noyce

Noyce ultimately left Fairchild, a company he co-founded and ran, because the billionaire financier of Fairchild didn’t think anyone but he should have equity in the company. Ironically at the time equity for employees was viewed as creeping socialism. So the talent left. Noyce and Moore left to found Intel. Remember that Moore’s Law is not actually a law at all. It is a goal. To the extent Intel achieved it, and they did for many decades, it is the consequence of incredible hard work in search of equally incredible reward — monetary and metaphysical.  

The problem with defense contracting is not the popular narrative that contractors make too much money, it is actually that they make too little money. The sums are large but the current system only incentivizes spending more money to drive up the fixed percentage of profit the communist procurement policies deem reasonable. Fairchild’s financier thought it was reasonable Noyce earned a salary and had no equity. So Fairchild lost and Intel and a family of ex-Fairchild companies flourished. The USG should focus on price, not profit. If innovators can provide capability for less money, why does the government care what the profit margin is? Innovators will need outsized profits to motivate progress.  

Bill Perry and his Assault Breaker program was only possible because of the commercial success of chips. He needed a 100-fold improvement in performance to deliver that capability. Perry complained that his critics were luddites, favoring DARPA’s continued spend on its own advanced chips... but it was the commercial chips that delivered the capability.

And in the modern era, for today’s great power competition, commercial technologies will be what delivers the future of warfare. We need look no further than the battlefield in Ukraine to see that.