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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

The key for me as a busy founder—and this is incredibly simple—was to prioritise my training. My training happens in the middle of the day, and work falls in place around it. No matter what. At the moment, a typical day looks like: riding to the gym, then 45 minutes of weightlifting, straight into the CrossFit class, and 2-3 times per week, straight into the sauna after that.

For any founder or busy executive out there struggling to make time, as I was a year or two ago, hopefully this spurs you on a tiny little bit. Life is better when you are fit, happy, and healthy. Work will always be there. Anyway. Onto today’s piece.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

1/ Taking a break rocks

Firstly, I’d like to say a big welcome back to writing to, well, me. I took a well-deserved break from shipping any of my own writing through the months of July and August. Lenny did a piece recently that highlighted just how burnt out we all are, really, myself included. So, I went ahead and did that. And I feel fresher and better off for it.

It’s been over two years since launching this newsletter without really taking a break. And the relentless need to ship posts and chase sponsors around the internet gets pretty tiring. I may make this off-season an annual thing.

2/ Alex Karp is the funniest CEO in tech

Tim Dillon went on Joe Rogan just this week, talking about how Peter Thiel is the Antichrist and the powerhouse defence tech company, Palantir, are building an Orwellian police state. I don’t buy it personally. And whatever you say about the firm, you cannot deny Alex Karp’s charisma and smarts. He is easily the funniest (laugh out loud at times) CEO in tech.

And as a left-leaning libertarian, watching Alex building things that he believes in, I largely align with him. And I sure as hell respect him. If you want to learn more about Alex, read his book, The Technological Republic. I thought I’d walk away with biases around Palantir and Karp confirmed. Instead, I walked away with a new (semi) idol in tech.

3/ How I am outcompeting my enemies

Aggressive title on this one for something that’s actually relatively small and incidental. For the past half a decade, I have been waging war against my phone and social media. Greyscale, blocking apps, deleting apps, going 3 years with no SIM card. Some have worked well, while others have not.

But I discovered the Brick recently, and I must say, it’s incredible! You can brick your phone entirely if you like, or have different settings. Mine are: Concentration, Live Better and Total Freedom.

To ‘brick’ your phone, you can tap your brick or lock it manually from the app. To unbrick it, you need to tap it physically. No cheating allowed. As you can see, my recent average was 2:38 minutes, but most of it came from WhatsApp (probably just left it on), Uber (waiting for delivery), Weightlifting.ai (training) and podcasts. If you filtered my phone for negative apps, I really only have the browser and IMDB, which I still scroll often due to my phone addiction. I think I probably have sub-60 minutes of negative phone time now.

4/ My buddy James’ (PostHog) social profile

One thing I am loving right now is founders and leaders in tech who don’t take things too seriously. I firmly believe the more authentic, different, and funny you are, the more people will do business with you. It’s the Law of Allies.

James from developer tool scaleup, PostHog, is doing this super well. His social presence is absurd. Not one in every few posts, but every single post (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.). And he’s growing fast. Every few posts, he hits 300-500-1000 likes. His account is at 26k today, but within a year or so, it will be at 100k and will end up becoming an asset for PostHog long into the future.

5/ This guy’s newsletter rips

Right in time to turn 40 in a few months, I’ve been going super deep on WW2, capitalism v socialism, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, Stalin, and loads of other heavy, dense topics of late. I read every night, and lately, when I stare across at my bedside table, I wish for something a little bit lighter. One of the things I have been going to lately is Tomas Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.

It’s an incredibly well-researched dive into: geo-history, AI, energy and climate, society, sex, space and more. I just read the latest piece, Never Bet Against America, last night. If you are a generally curious person like me, you’ll love this one.

6/ The Free Press getting acquired for $200M

In positive news for all the new media heads and creators out there, independent media entity (if you can call it that), The Free Press, is set to be acquired by CBS for a cool $200 million. Ex-WSJ and NY Times troublemaker, Bari Weiss, founded The Free Press in early 2021 and runs it as a relatively centrist, although firmly right-leaning, new media entity.

Investors in The Free Press read like the cap table of a hot Silicon Valley startup and include venture bros Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, as well as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, and Allen & Company. Some people on the left think Bari Weiss is the devil due to her backing of Israel, ties to Peter Thiel (again, I don’t mind the Antichrist, Thiel) and a handful of other things she has been linked to.

I don’t have a dog in the Bari Weiss fight, and personally have enjoyed a few of her shows lately, like the one linked above with ex-Democratic political strategist, Rahm Emanuel. Regardless of what you think of Bari, it’s a fascinating melding of old and new media. Something we will continue to see more of in the future.

7/ Apple will get mocked more frequently

I recently saw an ad where Google mocked Apple for their frequent broken promises around AI. This trend is something I expect more and more of in the future as Apple continues to fumble the bag on product development.

To me, the real question is how long Apple can sustain their prestige (and market cap) while leaving product development and innovation to literally everybody else.

8/ Atlassian buys a browser

In other news, Atlassian is buying The Bowser Company for $610 million. If you head over to Twitter (I still refuse to call it X), you’ll find a lot of people shitting on this deal. To me, this deal is a thing of beauty. The Browser Company launched two browsers, Arc and Dia, the former of which is my browser today.

Why is it my browser, you may ask? Simple: because it shits all over Chrome in every way. (Even after they stopped product development on it 12 months ago). Atlassian has the distribution, while The Browser Company has the user experience. Win-win.

_{*Announcement: For those of you who don’t want to talk politics, you can scan through the following two subjects, as I am sure they are set to inflame some people.}

9/ The dumbest timeline

Every day, I open Twitter to find someone in this Trump administration saying one of the dumbest things a human could literally say. First, RFK Jr. was saying Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for Operation Warp Speed at the same time he claims the COVID vaccine killed more than it saved.

Then there was the U.S. Department of Energy claiming “Wind and solar are worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing,” a claim that was rightly immediately ridiculed by Elon. And then there was Peter Navarro’s, “Tariffs are tax cuts.”

I mean, come on, guy … you cannot say that with a straight face, surely. And I forgot the best one: Mike Johnson now claiming that Trump was an FBI informant. Epstein files don’t exist → Actually, they are a Democrat hoax → No, no, what I meant was that Trump was a heroic FBI informant.

It’s as if Trump’s cabinet members are either incredibly low on cerebral horsepower, lacking any shred of morals whatsoever, or both. Probably both.

10/ Are the U.S. the global bad guys?

Just this week, I heard British political commentator Alastair Campbell reference a speech he was giving in Singapore last week, in which he polled the audience of around 500 on the question: “Which of the two superpowers (China and the U.S.) do you see as a larger threat to global stability?”

The answer: 79% the U.S. is the larger threat, 21% China. Quite shocking if you ask me. I remember listening to that stat, then pulling my bike up to a cafe, opening my laptop and seeing this video of the U.S. blowing a Venezuelan boat to smithereens.

It only gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. J.D. Vance, when accused on Twitter of this being a potential war crime, responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Republican Senator Rand Paul had different thoughts on the matter.

I know this topic is going to enrage some of my audience, but I want to be known as someone who plays the ball as it lies. Taking over Greenland, abusing Canada, bullying every other nation with tariffs, the deportations, masked ICE agents all over the place. It’s a lot. I’d love to take the pulse of the audience, though. How are you feeling?

Sorry if you are a conservative out there in the U.S. and were offended by these last couple of sections. I don’t mean to be antagonistic. I think we are living in dangerous times, and the best thing we can all do is talk about it.

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

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

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

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