Limited by the Unnoticed
As a kid, I often heard my dad say, “Fynn, everything you see and feel is limited by what you fail to notice.”
As I’ve gotten older, and recently become a dad, myself, that simple lesson has become something more like a principle — for thinking, working, and contributing.
For the last ~10 years, I worked to build RootsRated and Matcha. I’m no longer building either company, but the experiences they afforded deepened my interests in several ideas:
using historical and technological cycles to see the world more clearly
applying frameworks to navigate decision making
building stories that remind people of their courage and creativity
Limited by the Unnoticed, named in honor of my dad, intends to explore a broad surface area of history, economics, geopolitics, startups, team building, and technology trends.
As an overview of the topics I gravitate toward, here are a few of my initial posts:
Tell a Big Story - Harari on why we tell stories, Campbell on how we tell stories, and Duarte on the patterns of great stories.
Understanding Venkatesh Rao’s American Cloud — I believe Venkatesh is one of the most important writers at the intersection of technology and history. This piece attempts to synthesize his terrific essay on Hamiltonian vs. Jeffersonian America, uniquely observed through the lens of the Cloud/App technology cycle that characterizes much of post-modern life.
Thank you, Carlota Perez — From Perez, herself, “The golden age of the information revolution is still to come and the pandemic has created the ideal conditions for governments to come back and tilt the playing field towards an environmentally and socially sustainable direction. Except for the VCs, finance is still decoupled from the real economy. Inequality is still increasing. Golden Ages don't pass inadvertently. They obviously improve people's lives; that's why they are called golden ages' and synergy is about finance serving the real economy (not like today's casino).”
David Graeber’s History of Debt — Like Vankatesh Rao, Alex Danco is one of the most compelling observers of technology trends, startups, and investing. His writing on the collateralization of recurring SaaS revenues as a new model of startup financing has been particularly influential, and in this piece, I synthesize his review of Graeber’s history of debt.
The Interfaces of Mythology <> Communication & Collaboration — This post explores the idea of storytelling as our mythological infrastructure and the degree to which communication and collaboration serve as the core interfaces between people and their mythologies.
Understanding Global Finance and Entropy — This post explores finance and economics through the lens of biology. Some of my closest friends in finance told me this received an A for effort, but that I’d fundamentally misunderstood entropy and thermodynamics.
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