This year, I am venturing to change the way I view the world and the probabilities I assign to outcomes. This shift was driven by my recent re-reading of several of Nassim Taleb’s books.
Through my experiences in tech and life, I’ve observed that those who achieve success beyond the average person tend to play games that yield exponential returns. However, I have always been drawn to the allure of these outcomes without fully understanding the trade-offs required to attain them. The people who play these games accept repeated losses until they find the one outcome that delivers their desired return.
My goal is to find a middle ground between linear and exponential games. Is there a way to avoid chasing 100x returns and instead make smaller sacrifices in pursuit of more attainable 10x gains?
For example, my first startup was Vitrix Health. Straight out of college, I chose to pursue a venture-backed startup, an exponential game. At Vitrix, we were working on implementing GANs to generate training images for medical students before the success of models like Sora or DALL·E. We spent our AWS credits training OCR and machine learning models to improve the early detection of oral diseases, aiming to surpass the accuracy of trained professionals.
Our bet on AI was driven by our decision to take venture capital. We couldn’t target outcomes that would yield $1–10 million in ARR; we had to pursue moonshot ideas.
However, since shutting down Vitrix Health four years ago, I’ve met entrepreneurs who chose different paths. These individuals never aspired to build venture-backed businesses but were also not content with smaller endeavors like those of Indie Hackers. Instead, their goal was to build businesses in the $50–100 million range, but with no urgency to get there.
This year, I’m going to be on the lookout for problems that don’t focus on large societal issues but rather impact a medium-sized group of people. Maybe something comes out of this.
