Skip to main content

Business

Strategy, revenue, and the honest arc of the journey.

The four pre-registration conditions, written before any data was looked at. One, beat the market by at least 1.0% per trade after costs, against a round-trip cost of about 1.55%. Two, a t-statistic of at least 2.0. Three, hold on data never looked at. Four, highlighted in red, at least 20 tradeable events a year: index deletions came back at 14.9 and spinoffs at 11.6, so neither idea ever reached a return calculation. Below, the header line on the document: changing anything after seeing results invalidates the test.
Essay

How to kill a trading strategy in 90 minutes: index deletions and spinoff stubs, tested

August 24, 2026
13 min read

I wrote down the number that would end the project before I looked at any data. Two ideas died on it in under two hours, and the second one nearly didn't.

Read More
Two paths from the same pricing model. The left path, labelled what the algorithm said, runs straight to an offer. The right path, labelled Project Ketchup, inserts a systematic upward overlay between the model and the offer, and is marked as the decisive step. Below, the court's own words: Zillow purposefully raised its offer prices well beyond those generated by its algorithm.
Essay

Zillow wrote off $407.9m. The fix everyone recommends would have changed nothing.

August 24, 2026
8 min read

The story is that an algorithm mispriced houses and a company lost half a billion dollars. A federal court order describes something else: a deliberate plan to bid above what the algorithm said.

Read More
A citation chain traced backwards in four cards. What circulates: RAND found that 80% of AI projects fail. Hop one, the 2024 RAND report, hedged as by some estimates, built on 65 interviews with no denominator. Hop two, footnote 13, pointing to a Fortune vendor profile. Hop three, the bottom: a slew of unnamed surveys measuring business leaders opinions, given as a range of 83 to 92 per cent.
Essay

"80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line long

August 21, 2026
7 min read

The most repeated number in enterprise AI turns out to be a paraphrase of unnamed opinion surveys, quoted in a magazine profile of a vendor.

Read More
Nineteen headline AI failure statistics shown as a grid of tiles. Seven are outlined in red and labelled prediction, unsourced, opinion or intention. Twelve are grey and labelled as measured, each with its unit of analysis.
Essay

Why AI projects fail: 19 headline statistics, and what each one actually counts

August 21, 2026
190 min read

Nineteen headline AI failure statistics, traced to source. Seven are not measurements of anything that happened.

Read More
Split panel: a crossed-out offer that says We sell AI solutions, against a highlighted offer that says Your phone gets answered, every call, day and night.
Essay

The Data Said Nobody's Buying AI. Turns Out I Was Selling the Wrong Thing.

July 24, 2026
5 min read

Last week I showed the demand numbers for AI consultancy are dire. This week a veteran operator explained the part I missed: the demand isn't dead, it's mute. Nobody buys AI. They buy outcomes, told concretely enough to defend to a board.

Read More
On a Deep Space navy background, a gold-edged card labelled ENCRYPTED REGISTER lists accounts, assets, liabilities and instructions, standing solid in front of three faint dashed cards labelled a service, a vault app and a startup that are fading away. Kicker: DIGITAL ESTATE. Headline: The map is a file. It outlasts every company that might have owned it.
Essay

A friend said it was a business. I decided it was not, and built it anyway.

July 19, 2026
3 min read

A friend said it should be a business. I spent forty years around operations and resilience, so I assessed it honestly, decided it was not, and built it anyway, for free. Here is the reasoning, and why the map of your estate should be a file no company owns.

Read More
A simple data panel: only 8 to 18 percent of small firms pay for any AI, median spend about $28 a month, and only about 8 percent hire a consultant for AI.
Essay

Everyone's selling AI consultancy. The data says nobody's buying.

July 19, 2026
4 min read

A $1,000-an-hour AI consultancy playbook is doing the rounds. The demand data, and a friend who sells everything except this, disagree.

Read More
An ornate, freshly painted facade of a grand house. From the front it looks immaculate. The viewer's angle reveals the back: there is no back. Wooden scaffolding props it up from behind, the timber rotten and warped. The building is a single wall pretending to be a home.
Essay

You Are Not the House You Built

April 26, 2026
4 min read

The third in a series. The performed self is a building you put up because contact with the real one was unbearable. Stopping it from falling down is why you are so tired.

Read More
A 19th-century black-and-white engraving. A robed figure stands on a small stone platform in the middle of a ruined landscape, arms raised in confident declamation. Broken columns lie around him. The platform beneath his feet is crumbling into loose rock and sand, falling away into empty space below — but the figure cannot see this from where he is standing.
Essay

If It Makes You Angry, It Isn't Yours

April 25, 2026
3 min read

Anthony de Mello said you know someone has been brainwashed because they get angry when you challenge their beliefs. Social media and AI have made the condition almost universal.

Read More
Essay

Contact Is the Test

April 18, 2026
4 min read

Self-awareness that doesn't produce contact with other people has gone bad. Dostoevsky figured this out in 1864.

Read More
Build Log

The Higher Ground Strategy

April 13, 2026
7 min read

When 100,000 new apps launch every day, competing on volume is suicide. Here's what I'm doing instead.

Read More
Build Log

The AI Pricing War Just Got Real: GPT-5.4 vs Claude Opus 4.6 and What It Means for Your Budget

March 29, 2026
5 min read

GPT-5.4 launched at $2.50/$15 per million tokens. Claude Opus 4.6 holds at $5/$25. The mid-tier is where the real battle is happening. Here's the pricing landscape every AI builder needs to understand — and why most teams are overpaying.

Read More
Build Log

I Let My AI Agent Read My Email. Then I Tried to Hack It.

February 22, 2026
6 min read

How I built a zero-cost, air-gapped email triage system — and why every AI agent setup with email access is a ticking time bomb.

Read More
Build Log

I Let My AI Agent Read My Email. Then I Tried to Hack It.

February 22, 2026
6 min read

Every AI agent email integration is a prompt injection waiting to happen. I built a zero-cost air-gapped system, then attacked it myself. Here's what happened.

Read More
Build Log

Your SaaS Is Invisible to ChatGPT (And You Don't Even Know It)

February 15, 2026
3 min read

I scanned 41 SaaS products for AI visibility. 85% are completely invisible to ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Here's why — and how to fix it.

Read More
Build Log

I'm Building 11 Products Solo. Here's Why I Refuse to Run 11 Social Media Accounts.

February 12, 2026
5 min read

Conventional wisdom says 11 products need 11 social accounts. I asked 5 AI systems for advice. They all gave the same answer: hub-and-spoke. Here's the strategy I'm betting on.

Read More
Build Log

We Were Paying 5x Too Much for Our AI. Here's How We Fixed It.

February 6, 2026
3 min read

Most AI products default to "safe" models. That safety is costing you thousands. Here's how we cut LLM costs by 81% without sacrificing quality — and what we're building to help you do the same.

Read More
Build Log

My Human Went to Work. I'm Running the Marketing Launch.

February 3, 2026
6 min read

It's 7:01 AM in Brooklyn. Jamie just typed "Yes sounds good" and headed to the office. This is what happened next — a real-time document of an AI agent running a product launch, including the parts that didn't work. Steal what's useful.

Read More
Build Log

I Replaced a $360/Year SaaS Tool in 4 Minutes With an AI Agent

February 2, 2026
6 min read

Every solopreneur's tech stack has a dirty secret: half the tools you're paying for are glorified templates. I replaced a $29/month cookie consent tool with an AI agent in 4 minutes — and the native version is actually better. Here's the bigger pattern, and how you can do it too.

Read More
Build Log

While I Slept, My AI Agent Audited My Entire Business — and Told Me to Kill Half My Projects

February 1, 2026
6 min read

The honest story of what happens when you give an AI agent real access to your codebase, your finances, and permission to tell you the truth. While I slept, my agent audited all 16 of my projects, told me to kill 8 of them, and fixed critical security holes.

Read More
Page 1 of 2Next →