Startup
After a decade of working as a designer and developer in digital agencies, I left behind my full time job as a lead developer in December 2019 to found my first self-funded startup.
The mission is to reduce the distance between design and production closer to zero by building design automation tools that are 10x simpler and 1000x faster than the "best practices".
Talks
I've given a few talks on DesignOps and my thoughts about the future of design and development, including:
Bookshelf
I read mostly non-fiction, some fiction or comics/manga, and a few things online.
These are some that I found worth reading or have read multiple times:
Non-fiction
- 1 Liter of Tears
Aya Kitō - 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith
Sonia Arrison - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Al Ries and Jack Trout - The 4 Hour Work Week
Tim Ferriss - 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer - AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order
Kai-Fu Lee - Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense
Rory Sutherland - Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built
Duncan Clark - All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
Seth Godin - The American Challenge
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber - American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web
Nick Bilton - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Neil Postman - Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Robert Nozick - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
Derek Sivers - Art of Living: The Classical Mannual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness
Epictetus & Sharon Lebell - The Art of War
Sun Tzu - Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
James Clear - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Alex Haley and Malcolm X - Average Is Over
Tyler Cowen - Becoming Steve Jobs
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli - The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry
Marc Benioff - Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson - Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance
Felix Oberholzer-Gee - Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
Tyler Cowen - The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
Reid Hoffman - Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
W.Chan Kim and Renee A. Mauborgne - Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
Steve Martin - Bronze Age Mindset
Bronze Age Pervert - Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
John Warrillow - Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It
David Graeber - Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire
Dan Martell - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Mark Fisher - The Case for Trump
Victor Davis Hanson - Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
Antonio Garcia Martinez - Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress
Christopher Ryan - The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt - Competing Against Luck: The Story Of Innovation And Customer Choice
Clayton M. Christensen - Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business
Paul Jarvis - The Compound Effect
Darren Hardy - A Confession
Leo Tolstoy - Confessions Of An Advertising Man
David Ogilvy - Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
Annaka Harris - The Consolations of Philosophy
Alain de Botton - Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue
Ryan Holiday - The Courage To Be Disliked
Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi - Creative Company: How St. Luke′s Became "the Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies"
Andy Law - Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
Ken Kocienda - Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
John Cleese - Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Ed Catmull - Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
Mason Currey - The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Ross Douthat - Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Cal Newport - Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Tony Hsieh - Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress
Bob Moesta and Greg Engle - Democracy - The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order
Hans-Hermann Hoppe - Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Cal Newport - Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
Bill Perkins - The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions
Scott Adams - Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm
Dan Charnas - Discrimination and Disparities
Thomas Sowell - Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
Daniel Lyons - The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture
Heather Mac Donald - The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus
David Sacks and Peter Thiel - Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink - The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
Michael E. Gerber - The Effective Executive
Peter Drucker - Ego Is The Enemy
Ryan Holiday - Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson - Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Ashlee Vance - Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life
John C. Bogle - Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
Melissa Perri - Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Greg McKeown - The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Brad Stone - Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Kevin Kelly - Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users (And Losing $78 Million)
Cliff Lerner - Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin - Finite and Infinite Games
James P. Carse - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Driving Predictable, Recurring Revenue
Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop - Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Oliver Burkeman - The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
Jimmy Soni - Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt - Free Will
Sam Harris - From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life
Arthur C. Brooks - A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations
Mencius Moldbug - Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen - Getting to Yes: How To Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In
Roger Fisher and William Ury - Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Michael Lewis - Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
Fumio Sasaki - The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building
Matt Mochary - The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
Tyler Cowen - A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
William Braxton Irvine - The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz - Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
Nick Bilton - Hate, Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another
Matt Taibbi - High Output Management
Andy Grove - Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal - How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Scott Adams - How Google Works
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg - How to Be a Stoic
Massimo Pigliucci - How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
Sarah Bakewell - How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
Donald Robertson - The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?
Seth Godin - Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World
Chantal Delsol - The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Kevin Kelly - Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B. Cialdini - Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success
Ken Segall - Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI
Everett McKay - The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Daniel J. Boorstin - It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy at Work
David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried - Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Walter Isaacson - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
Anthony Bourdain - Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
Dan Lyons - The Lean Startup
Eric Ries - Letters from a Stoic
Seneca - Levels of the Game
John McPhee - The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom
David Boaz - Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Max Tegmark - Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
George Gilder - Life: The Movie - How Entertainment Conquered Reality
Neal Gabler - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Marie Kondō - The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
Meik Wiking - The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
Marilyn Manson - Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
Scott Adams - Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
Rand Fishkin - Lying
Sam Harris - The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom
James Burnham - The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism
David Friedman - The Magic of Thinking Big
David J. Schwartz - The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Julie Zhuo - The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985 - 1993
Jordan Mechner - Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl - Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace
Ricardo Semler - Meditations
Marcus Aurelius - The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything
Matthew Ball - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck - The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less
Sahil Lavingia - The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You
Rob Fitzpatrick - My Morning Routine: How Successful People Start Every Day Inspired
Benjamin Spall and Michael Xander - The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Fred Brooks - The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
Michael Malice - The News: A User's Manual
Alain de Botton - The Nineties: A Book
Chuck Klosterman - No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
Sarah Frier - Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Marshall B. Rosenberg - The Obstacle Is the Way
Ryan Holiday - Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
April Dunford - Ogilvy on Advertising
David Ogilvy - On The Shortness of Life
Seneca - On The Suffering of the World
Arthur Schopenhauer - On Writing
Stephen King - The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
Gary Keller - Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company
Andy Grove - An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives
Mencius Moldbug - Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
Adam Grant - The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
Barry Schwartz - Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration
C. Northcote Parkinson - The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
Eric M. Jackson - Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts
Ryan Holiday - Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers
Seth Godin - The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
Laurence J. Peter - Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works
A.G. Lafley & Roger L. Martin - Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity
Scott Galloway - The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change
Charles Duhigg - Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility
Patty McCord - The Practice: Shipping Creative Work
Seth Godin - Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely - Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Douglas Rushkoff - The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli - Principles: Life and Work
Ray Dalio - The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Jon Ronson - The Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Seth Godin - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Susan Cain - Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success
Scott Adams - Rework
David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried - The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons in Creative Leadership from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
Robert Iger - The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe - The Road to Serfdom
Friedrich Hayek - Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians
Joe Quirk with Patri Friedman - Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Phil Knight - Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
Bo Burlingham - So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
Cal Newport - The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg - Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson - Stillness Is the Key
Ryan Holiday - Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
Johann Hari - Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert - Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
Mike Isaac - "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character
Richard P. Feynman - Sweat the Technique: Revelations on Creativity from the Lyrical Genius
Rakim - Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth
David Clark - The Tao of Pooh
Benjamin Hoff - That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
Marc Randolph - Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
René Girard - Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman - This Is Marketing
Seth Godin - The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell - Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares - Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
Ryan Holiday - The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships
Neil Strauss - The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future
Ted Kaczynski - The Unpublished David Ogilvy
David Ogilvy - Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
Rolf Potts - The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
Ayn Rand - Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Sam Harris - Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Henry David Thoreau - Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
Luke Burgis - The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
Steven Pressfield - White
Bret Easton Ellis - Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Spencer Johnson - Why Liberalism Failed
Patrick J. Deneen - Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
Matthew Walker - Win Bigly
Scott Adams - Wisdom of Life
Arthur Schopenhauer - Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock - ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands
Marty Neumeier - Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
Fiction
- 1984
George Orwell - The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho - American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis - Animal Farm
George Orwell - Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand - The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino - Brave New World
Aldous Huxley - The Course of Love: A Novel
Alain de Botton - Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crooked Little Vein
Warren Ellis - The Curse of Lono
Hunter S. Thompson - The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy - Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card - Eumeswil
Ernst Jünger - Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury - Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson - The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand - The Greatest Salesman in the World
Og Mandino - Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams - Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton - The Last Question
Isaac Asimov - Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov - The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - The Lottery
Shirley Jackson - The New Atlantis
Francis Bacon - On Love
Alain de Botton - Post Office
Charles Bukowski - Pulp
Charles Bukowski - The Rum Diary
Hunter S. Thompson - The Silver Eggheads
Fritz Leiber - Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut - Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang - The Woman in the Dunes
Kobo Abe
Comics/Manga
- The Boys
Garth Ennis - Daytripper
Fabio Moon - Ichi The Killer
Hideo Yamamoto - Preacher
Garth Ennis - The Punisher MAX
Garth Ennis - Uzumaki
Junji Ito - Y: The Last Man
Brian K. Vaughan
Online
- IT'S TIME TO BUILD
Marc Andreessen - The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
Marc Andreessen - The Pmarca Blog Archive
Marc Andreessen - Why AI Will Save The World
Marc Andreessen - Why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve
Zhengdong Wang - Fast
Patrick Collison - 2020, the year of everything fake
Curtis Yarvin - Rise of the neutral company
Curtis Yarvin - The Cathedral or the Bizarre
Curtis Yarvin - Stanford Commencement Speech
Steve Jobs - Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs - On Creativity
John Cleese - Lessons from Keith Rabois
Keith Rabois - Maker's Schedule, Managers Schedule
Paul Graham - How To Think For Yourself
Paul Graham - Do Things that Don't Scale
Paul Graham - How to Get Startup Ideas
Paul Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind
Paul Graham - Keep Your Identity Small
Paul Graham - Crazy New Ideas
Paul Graham - What I've Learned from Users
Paul Graham - How Not To Fail
Jessica Livingston - YC’s Essential Startup Advice
Y Combinator - E Pur Si Muove
Sam Altman - How To Be Successful
Sam Altman - Moore's Law for Everything
Sam Altman - Kung-Fu
Jason Cohen - The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
Jason Cohen - Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas
Jason Cohen - Fixing the ROI rubric
Jason Cohen - Navigating the unpredictability of everything
Jason Cohen - The practical application of "Rocks, Pebbles, Sand"
Jason Cohen - Every Software Company Has a 'Natural Size'
Balsamiq - What Is ChatGPT Doing… and Why Does It Work?
Stephen Wolfram - Intro to Large Language Models
Andrej Karpathy - The History of the Board Ho
The Alphaville Herald - Why I Am a Bad Correspondent
Neal Stephensonn - Risk, decisons, and scarcity
Jason Fried - The Day You Became A Better Writer
Scott Adams - Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
Derek Sivers - If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no
Derek Sivers - My favourite fable
Derek Sivers - Relax for the same result
Derek Sivers - I Beg to Differ
Howard Marks - The Tail End
Tim Urban - Britain, 2049
Sam Ashworth-Hayes - Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation
Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein - 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
Kevin Kelly - 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice
Kevin Kelly - 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
Kevin Kelly - 82 Commandments for Successful Living
Alejandro Jodorowsky - "No handshakes, please": The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus
Vox (February 2020) - Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne
Nature (April 2022) - U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science’
Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H. and Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D. - The Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis Is A Conspiracy Theory, Not Science (June 2021)
Forbes - COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab (October 2022)
Katherine Eban and Jeff Kao - Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Jonathan Haidt - The Noonday Demon — Our Metaphysical Laziness
Luke Burgis - Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class
James McElroy - Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana
Newsweek (February 1995) - Why Dall-E will not steal my job as an illustrator
Medium (August 2022) - WTF Happened In 1971?
WTF Happened In 1971 - The Age of Average
Alex Murrell - All the nerds are dead
Sam Kriss - Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols
Rob Henderson - Overwhelming and Collective Murder: The grand, gruesome theories of René Girard
Sam Kriss - Crony Beliefs
Kevin Simler - Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup
Blake Masters - The Education of a Libertarian
Peter Thiel - The Optimistic Thought Experiment
Peter Thiel - Back To The Future
Peter Thiel - The End of the Future
Peter Thiel - Spending The Future
Peter Thiel - Against Edenism
Peter Thiel - The Diversity Myth
Peter Thiel - Peter Thiel is taking a Break from Democracy
The Atlantic - The Straussian Moment
Peter Thiel
Contact
I'm protective of my time, so I rarely do meetings, and I'm not on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
