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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Feel it healthy goodness.
🎆 Building Smarter Models with Cheaper Tokens. An interview with Benny Chen, Co-Founder at Fireworks AI.
🍰 What’s the story with Perplexity Computer? It's now possible to have your AI cake and eat it too.

PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I’ve been doing a pretty sweet course lately from the team at Ultraspeaking. I stumbled upon them when one of their founders was a guest on Lenny’s Podcast. At the time, I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds cool.’ But the whole thing is actually a little bit more than that. The tagline, as you can see below, reads, “End speaking anxiety once & for all,” and I really feel like they live up to that.

Not just for speaking; for life in general. Knowing that you are confident in front of a group of 100 or an audience of one is equally important, and I’ve been absolutely loving it. I plan to write more about it soon, but in the meantime, you can check the interview I did with the founders, Tristan and Michael. Anyway, onto today’s interview, it’s a real cracker.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises

Bruce Wayne is the Chairman of Wayne Enterprises, a diversified conglomerate spanning defense, applied sciences, biotech, clean energy, and real estate. Founded by his family over a century ago, Wayne Enterprises is the largest private employer in Gotham City. Bruce took control of the company in his late twenties after spending years abroad, ousting the incumbent CEO who had been steering the company toward an IPO. He immediately restructured the business, exited weapons manufacturing, and elevated Lucius Fox to run day-to-day operations.

Outside Wayne Enterprises, Bruce runs the Wayne Foundation, one of the largest private philanthropic organizations on the East Coast, focused on urban renewal, criminal rehabilitation, and education across Gotham. He also manages a family office alongside longtime advisor Alfred Pennyworth, investing in early-stage technology. He is known for being intensely private, rarely making public appearances, and maintaining an unusually small inner circle for someone of his profile.

What does Wayne Enterprises do? Why is it important?

Wayne Enterprises is a diversified conglomerate. We operate across defense and aerospace, applied sciences, biotech, infrastructure, and real estate development. The company was founded by my family over a century ago, originally in railroads and shipping, and it grew into one of the largest private employers on the East Coast. Today, we're the largest private employer in Gotham, specifically. That part matters to me.

The important question is interesting because it depends on who you ask. If you ask the market, we're important because we hold significant government defense contracts and we're pushing hard into clean energy and next-generation infrastructure. If you ask me, the company matters because Gotham matters. This city has been through decades of institutional failure, corruption, poverty, and the kind of compounding decline that most people write off as permanent. Wayne Enterprises is one of the few institutions with the resources and the local commitment to do something about that. We're not a fund that flies in, extracts value, and leaves. We're here. That's the difference.

Why exit the weapons business?

It stopped aligning with who we are and what we're trying to build. My father started the company with a vision to fundamentally improve the city and people's lives. Somewhere along the way, the board drifted toward pure defense contracting because the margins were there. When I came back and took over, I looked at what we were manufacturing, and I couldn't square it with the mission. We were making things designed to hurt people at scale. I didn't want the Wayne name attached to that.

Now, I want to be clear. I'm not naive about defense. I closely follow what Alex is doing with AIP at Palantir, turning an enterprise AI platform into what's basically a defense operating system.

I think there's a version of defense technology that's genuinely about protection, about intelligence, about keeping people safe. I respect those founders. The question for us was whether Wayne Enterprises was the right vehicle for that work, given our history and given the specific risks of our technology ending up in the wrong hands. We decided it wasn't. We still do government work, but it's oriented around infrastructure, communications, and applied research. Not weapons systems.

What were the early days like taking over?

Chaotic, really. I was young, I'd been out of the country for years, and the board didn't take me seriously. Honestly, they shouldn't have. I had no operating experience. I hadn't built anything. I was the founder's kid, showing up after a long absence to say, ‘I'd like to run things now.’ That's not exactly a compelling pitch.

The board at the time, under William Earle, had been moving to take the company public. That would have effectively ended family control and turned Wayne Enterprises into just another publicly traded defense contractor optimizing for quarterly earnings. My first real fight was stopping that from happening. It wasn't pretty. I had to learn very quickly that having your name on the building doesn't mean you have power.

What's your relationship with Lucius? And what does reporting look like?

Lucius is the best operator I've ever worked with. Full stop. He was buried in the company when I found him, running a division that the previous leadership had essentially mothballed because they didn't know what to do with it. I immediately saw that he was the smartest person in the building and the most underutilized. So I gave him room to run.

Today, Lucius is CEO in all but title. He runs day-to-day operations, manages the leadership team, and owns our relationships with government clients. I'm Chairman. I set long-term strategy, I handle the Foundation, and I stay close to Applied Sciences because that's where our most important R&D lives.

In terms of cadence, Lucius and I meet twice a week. Monday is a strategic alignment meeting: what's moving, what's stuck, what needs my attention. Thursday is more operational, focused on whatever the biggest open issue is that week. We run quarterly planning cycles for the company overall, with monthly check-ins at the division level. Goals are set top-down in terms of direction and bottom-up in terms of targets. Lucius is big on letting division heads own their own numbers rather than having me impose them. I've learned to trust that process. The company runs better when I set the destination and let the operators figure out the route.

What happened with the clean energy project?

We built a fusion reactor. Genuinely functional, genuinely revolutionary. It would have provided clean energy for the entire city. I was personally very invested in it, both financially and emotionally. It was supposed to be the thing that changed Gotham permanently, the kind of project that justifies the existence of a company like ours.

Then our research team identified a way to convert the core into a weapon. Not theoretically. Practically. With relatively accessible modifications. I decided to mothball the entire project. Shut it down, ate the cost, didn't ship it.

That decision nearly bankrupted the company. The board was furious, investors were furious, and the press called me reckless. And I understand that reaction. We spent hundreds of millions developing something that worked, and I chose not to release it. But I keep coming back to the same question: if you build something that can power a city but can also destroy it, and you can't guarantee the second thing won't happen, do you ship it? I decided you don't.

What does your week actually look like?

I train every morning at six. Weightlifting, plyometrics, and combat conditioning. Non-negotiable. I'm done by seven-thirty, and that's when the day starts. Eight to ten is my morning block. Alfred briefs me on anything that came in overnight, then I clear comms and set priorities for the day. I protect that window. No meetings before ten unless something's on fire.

Ten onwards is meetings. I see Lucius twice a week—Monday for strategy and Thursday for operations—and do a quick wrap-up with him on Fridays. Division heads get thirty-minute windows throughout the week: Chen on financials, Okonkwo on defense and aerospace, Vasquez on Applied Sciences, Whitfield on infrastructure, and Naidu on legal. I also sit down with the Commissioner's office most weeks and stay close to the Gotham PD liaison. The Foundation has its own rhythm: board lunches, donor calls, grant approvals, site visits. Tuesday or Wednesday usually has a culture interview for a senior hire.

Lunch is always a working lunch. I can't remember the last time I ate without a briefing document in front of me. The afternoons are the grind. Contract reviews, board prep, real estate portfolio, press approvals (mostly declines). By five or six, most people are wrapping up. That's when my second day starts. I block four hours most evenings for deep work. Some nights, that's long-range strategy at the house. Some nights I'm in the Applied Sciences lab. Thursday evenings, I'm usually doing equipment calibration and testing with the R&D team, which can run late.

Saturdays, I train again, then foundation gala planning or reading. Sundays are lighter. I try to keep those for myself. I'm rarely in bed before three or four in the morning. I do my best thinking at night, always have.

How does the company run when you're not around?

Well, and I say that without any false modesty. The company runs well when I'm not around because I hired people who are better than me at operations. Lucius doesn't need me in the room to make good decisions. The division heads don't need me to approve things. I spent years building a leadership team that I trust completely, and then I got out of their way.

I think a lot of founders struggle with this. There's an identity attachment to being essential, to being the person the company can't function without. I had to let go of that early because my life required it. I travel; I have obligations with the Foundation that take me out of the office; and, frankly, there are stretches when I'm just not available. If the company fell apart every time I left, that would be a failure of leadership, not a sign of my importance. The best thing I ever did was make myself optional for day-to-day operations.

What's the hiring philosophy?

Small teams, exceptional people. We are very selective. For senior roles especially, I care less about credentials and more about what someone has actually been through. I want people who've faced real adversity, made hard calls under pressure, and come out the other side with their integrity intact. A resume full of prestigious names doesn't tell me much. I want to know what you did when everything went wrong.

I still do the final culture interview for every key hire. Lucius and the division heads handle technical fit and experience. That's their call, and I trust it. But before anyone joins the inner circle, they sit down with me. It's not a skills conversation. I'm reading the person. I want to know what drives them, what they're afraid of, what they'd do if nobody was watching. You can learn more about someone in a quiet room for thirty minutes than you can from ten rounds of structured interviews. Some people think it's a bottleneck. I think it's the most important thing I do.

We also hire for alignment with the mission. If someone's at Wayne Enterprises for the paycheck, they won't last. The work is demanding, the problems are complex, and there are easier places to make money. The people who thrive here are the ones who genuinely care about what we're building and are willing to sacrifice comfort for it. That's a hard thing to screen for in an interview, which is why we take our time.

Why all-in on Gotham?

Because it's home. That's the honest answer. My family built this city. My parents gave their lives to it, in every sense. Walking away from Gotham would be walking away from everything they believed in and everything I believe in. There's also a strategic argument. Everyone in business right now is obsessed with scale, with going global immediately, with being everywhere at once. I think there's a contrarian case for going deep instead of wide. Gotham is a city of millions with massive infrastructure problems, a complex economy, and real demand for every service we provide.

If Wayne Enterprises can help fix Gotham, if we can prove that a private institution can meaningfully improve a city that everyone else gave up on, that's a model that replicates. But you have to prove it works in one place first. I'd rather be the company that saved one city than the company that had a presence in fifty and changed none of them.

What does Applied Sciences actually work on?

I can't get into specifics on most of it. A lot of our work touches government contracts with confidentiality requirements. What I can say is that the division operates as our internal R&D lab, focused on technology that's five to ten years ahead of what's commercially viable. Advanced materials, communications systems, defense-adjacent infrastructure, and autonomous systems. Lucius runs it with a small team of people who are genuinely brilliant.

The unusual thing about Applied Sciences is that not everything it builds is designed to become a product. Some of it is pure research. Some of it feeds into our other divisions indirectly. And some of it stays internal because the applications are too sensitive to commercialize. I know that's a hard thing to justify to a board, and I've had that argument many times. My position is that a company with our resources has an obligation to push boundaries even when the commercial return isn't obvious. The moment you only fund research with a clear revenue path, you stop making breakthroughs.

Where do you draw the line with surveillance technology?

We built something once. A system that could monitor an entire city in real time. Audio, visual, full coverage. It worked. It was technically extraordinary. And after using it exactly once, I ordered it destroyed.

The capability existed because we had the infrastructure and the engineering talent to make it happen. But capability isn't justification. The question isn't, ‘Can we build it?’ The question is, ‘What happens when this exists in the world?’ And the honest answer was that no single person, including me, should have that much visibility into other people's lives. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are. The tool itself is the problem. Once it exists, someone will misuse it. If not you, then whoever comes after you.

I think about this a lot in the context of what's happening in AI right now. The companies building the most powerful systems are facing some version of this exact question. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And ‘we'll be responsible with it’ is not a sufficient safeguard, because you can't guarantee that the next person in your chair will be.

Tell us about the family office? Any recent investments you've been excited by?

The family office operates separately from Wayne Enterprises. It's lean; Alfred Pennyworth, who's been with my family for decades, manages it alongside me. He handles the administrative side, estate, trusts, and personal allocations. I handle investment direction. We don't have a large team, and we don't want one. Alfred's judgment is something I trust more than any investment committee I've ever sat in front of.

Regarding what we invest in, I keep that private. Part of it is personal preference, and part of it is practical. When the Wayne name is attached to something, it moves markets in ways that aren't always helpful to the company we're backing. What I will share is the anti-portfolio, because I think it's more interesting anyway.

_{*Bruce actually opened sourced his ten best investments to us, but without showing the name of the firm. Apparently, the family office has made 50+ investments this century.}

We looked seriously at Anthropic early and passed. We evaluated Cursor before it took off and couldn't get comfortable with the market size. I've been a personal fan of what Figure is doing in robotics for a long time, but I've never pulled the trigger. Every investor has a list like this. Mine keeps me humble. The misses teach you more than the wins, and I've had some spectacular misses.

You spent your twenties abroad. What did that period shape?

Everything. I left Gotham after my parents died, and I didn't come back for years. I wasn't on vacation. I was looking for something, though I couldn't have articulated what it was at the time. I studied with people across the world. Martial arts, psychology, forensic science, engineering, meditation. I put myself in situations that were physically and mentally extreme because I wanted to find out what I was made of.

What it taught me, more than any specific skill, was discipline. Real discipline, not the ‘wake up at five in the morning' and post about it’ kind. The kind where you commit to something that will take years, and you don't quit when it stops being interesting. I also learned that fear is a tool. Most people experience fear as a stop sign. I trained myself to experience it as information. It tells you where the risk is, and risk is where the important work lives. That reframing changed everything about how I operate, in business and in life.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

Routine. I'm obsessive about it. I train physically every day, without exception. Not because I enjoy it, but because I don't function well without it. My mind is sharper, my decisions are better, and my temperament is more stable when my body is taxed. I eat clean, I don't drink, and I sleep less than most people would recommend, but the sleep I get is structured.

Beyond the physical, I spend time alone every day. Thinking, reviewing, planning. Not meditating in any formal sense, just sitting with the problems I'm working on without distractions. Most of my best decisions have come from those quiet hours, usually late at night, when there's nobody to perform for and nothing to react to. The hardest part of being in a public-facing role is that everyone wants a piece of your attention. Protecting time for yourself isn't selfish. It's the only way to make sure the version of you that shows up tomorrow is worth anything.

Extra reading

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - January, 2024

• We Raised $2.5M To Build Athyna AI - May, 2024

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 20925

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

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See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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