Tech exec/advisor/investor
Bay area
Joined August 2009
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Critical point. My Kellogg prof @HarryKraemerJr wrote his advice for leading in these times:
“Mantra 2: You’re going to tell people what you know, what you don’t know, and when you’ll get back to them to discuss what you didn’t know before.”
Great read: insight.kellogg.northwestern…
Busy being busy is the worst type of self-delusion and often driven by lack of clarity on what is actually strategic...simplicity drives clarity, clarity drives conviction and conviction drives focused, strategic action.
Taylor Barada retweeted
One of the most compelling parts about working at an ElonCo was the agility to pivot to whatever the most important problem was.
One day I said: I wasn’t hired to go after spam, but a tsunami is coming and I’m going to drop everything to focus on that.
The org is so flat and agile that your title is basically meaningless. Anyone can sound the alarm about a problem and solve it themselves—or rally the team to join them.
This is how startups work but it’s very hard to make it work in a larger company.
Taylor Barada retweeted
Berhalter’s ascent has been phenomenal to watch.
Too many soccer players are trained like cross country athletes. But speed and explosion is the tide that lifts all boats.
Feed the cats…even in soccer! @pntrack
At 21, Sebastian Berhalter was struggling in MLS. Then his dad Gregg Berhalter asked athletic and performance coach Les Spellman to work with him.
Les helped Seb get faster, stronger, and more athletic. Seb has taken his game to a new level since. #USMNT
[Video via Whistle]
Hard work pays off...Simple, not easy. 🔥💥👊
At 21, Sebastian Berhalter was struggling in MLS. Then his dad Gregg Berhalter asked athletic and performance coach Les Spellman to work with him.
Les helped Seb get faster, stronger, and more athletic. Seb has taken his game to a new level since. #USMNT
[Video via Whistle]
The ripple effects of this step change are far beyond the “SaaSpocalypse” freak out of earlier this year…
Hmmm, generally try to stick to one a day and feel guilty when it creeps up but maybe it's a "feature not a bug"?? 🤔
People who drank more coffee had less body fat, less visceral fat, and more lean mass than less-frequent or non-drinkers.
The biggest benefit was seen at 5 or more cups per day.
And for men, every extra cup per day was associated with a ~10 ng/dL higher total testosterone. Higher coffee intake was also associated with better glucose and insulin regulation in men.
This was an observational study, but mechanistic and experimental evidence actually supports coffee's benefits on metabolic and hormonal health. I'm willing to believe there's a real link here rather than draw a conclusion such as "coffee drinkers live healthier lives in general."
Taylor Barada retweeted
Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week:
1. Austin is a serious f*cking city.
SF is still the center of gravity.
LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials.
But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate.
People I've met here seem to have one primary objective:
Build.
Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor.
Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work.
Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality.
2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage.
Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week.
Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion.
When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography.
When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table.
Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution.
Texas understand that speed matters.
3. The coastal migration isn't over.
SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages.
But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working.
Now you need 100,000 square feet.
Power.
Testing.
Manufacturing.
Suppliers.
Technicians.
Hundreds of employees.
Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive.
And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume.
4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here.
Historically the playbook has often been:
Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas.
I think that increasingly becomes:
Texas → Texas → Texas.
More technical founders will move here before starting the company.
More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here.
More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1.
And that's when the flywheel gets interesting:
Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups.
Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop.
5. Austin feels significantly less distracted.
There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit.
But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here.
Less worrying about who raised what round.
Less optimizing for appearances.
Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to.
More:
Does the thing actually work?
That cultural difference matters more than people realize.
6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument.
Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane?
It's 2026.
If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane.
Great companies don't travel to capital.
Capital travels to great companies.
Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds.
More capital will follow the companies.
It always does.
7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been.
Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure.
Factories.
Energy.
Robotics.
Defense.
Space.
Advanced manufacturing.
Data centers.
Industrial systems.
Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world.
And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed.
Texas has a lot of all six.
SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine.
But Austin doesn't need to become either of them.
It may be building something fundamentally different:
A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it.
That's a much more interesting proposition.
Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem.
Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated.
Ingredients are here.
Talent is coming.
Capital will follow.
Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here.
That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸
Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!
Taylor Barada retweeted
The job of a coach.
“My job is to always be opposite at the moment.”
Calm when chaos comes.
Confident when doubt creeps in.
Demanding when standards slip.
Encouraging when confidence drops.
Patient when frustration grows.
Give your team what the moment needs.
This is the way. Build a life you don’t want to escape…one day at a time. 🔥💥👊🏻
Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from
“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”
“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”
“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”
“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”
“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”
“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”
There are no extra gold stars for "doing it alone"...
Figure out how to do the thing...do the thing.
Repeat. The End. 🔥💥👊
Michael Jordan, Angela Duckworth, and Why We’ve Made Competition a Dirty Word
Michael Jordan famously said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” That always made sense to me.
Angela Duckworth has an excellent new essay in The New York Times arguing that successful people share an important habit: they ask for help. As she writes, “Without exception, every high performer I’ve studied credits a host of supporters for success.”
She’s right. Nobody gets very far alone.
But after years of working with Olympians, professional athletes, coaches and other high performers, I’d put a slightly different name on what the best of them do:
Competitive resourcefulness.
“Asking for help” can sound to a fiercely independent person like an admission that they can’t handle something themselves. Great performers tend to see it differently. If a coach, teammate, expert, better data, another set of eyes or a good conversation can help them improve, they use it.
I often hear world-class performers ask me questions that less secure people might be embarrassed to ask. They’re not trying to look like they know everything. They’re trying to get better.
If there’s gold there, why would I ever leave it sitting on the table?
I also think we’ve made the word competition unnecessarily loaded. Too often it gets reduced to conflict, domination or beating somebody else.
At its best, competition is about striving, sharpening your game and finding out what you’re capable of.
Many of the fiercest college and professional athletes I’ve worked with are also terrific collaborators. They want to beat you on game day and are perfectly happy to learn from you the following day.
That’s why competition and cooperation are not opposites.
Collaboration can be one of the ways a champion competes.
MJ didn’t become less competitive because he needed teammates and coaches. Knowing how to use the talent and intelligence around him helped make him formidable.
So Angela’s advice to ask for help is good advice. I’d just broaden the question:
"What could help me get better that I’m not using yet?"
Maybe it’s a person, an idea, a different approach or a conversation you’ve been too proud to have.
Go find out.
That’s competitive resourcefulness.
It’s also the kind of practical mental-game thinking behind my new book, "The Daily Champion’s Mind," arriving November 3, 2026. Preorder now.
Champion the day.
#AngelaDuckworth #MichaelJordan #NewYorkTimes #HighPerformance #MentalPerformance #SportsPsychology #Leadership
Taylor Barada retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Much of sales...much of life in fact, is a battle of frames.
A core frame battle that matters deeply is that of Abundance vs Scarcity...and the beauty is once you step into abundance others meet you there.
This is how you move from win-lose to win-win...
Taylor Barada retweeted
Keith Rabois on the 3 most important lessons he learned from Peter Thiel
“I’ve been working with Peter professionally for 23 years… The most important [lesson] in building a company is the importance of finding undiscovered talent… Back then we were competing with Yahoo and Microsoft for talent, but fundamentally you can’t compete on talent by going after the exact same people that companies with infinite profits will pay and overpay for. So Peter had a lesson that you basically had to hire people under 30 — and the point was not to be agist. Instead he realized that by the time you’re 30, everyone who runs a hiring algorithm should be able to roughly come to the same conclusions… It’s a little bit like sports where when you draft athletes for the NBA out of high school — there’s more alpha there than in signing a free agent who’s been playing in the league for 10 years.”
The second most important lesson Keith learned from Peter was the value of time:
“People systematically — in Peter’s words — undervalue their time.”
You have to be extremely disciplined about where you’re allocating your time because it goes hand in hand with the third lesson, which is the value of focus:
“Peter can be extreme when he has a view — he takes it all the way to the polar extreme. He had this mandate at PayPal about focus that every single person in the organization — when we had 300 people in the Bay Area — was allowed to do exactly one thing. And Peter would refuse to talk to you about any topic that was not that one thing, period… But fundamentally, the discipline of only being allowed to do one thing led to significant breakthroughs.”
Keith explains:
“What basically happens is there are really hard challenges at any startup and it’s easy to divert your attention to the problems you know how to solve. But those are not the breakthroughs or 10x ideas. And when Peter would say to me, ‘I need you to fix this and I literally won’t talk to you for the next month or two until you fix it,’ it would force me to bang my head against the wall every single day, and once in a while it would lead to a, ‘holy cow there’s an answer — we can do this.’ Now imagine that across an organization of 300 people — 5 or 10 ideas that probably wouldn’t have happened are a direct result of Peter’s managing philosophy.”
Source: @khoslaventures (Jun 2023)
Taylor Barada retweeted
I’m sitting in the food court when this little boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old, accidentally knocks over his slushee. Blue and red goop explodes everywhere......all over the table, the floor, his shirt, you name it. The kid freezes, looks up at his dad with big scared eyes and immediately says, “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…”
I’m expecting the usual frustrated parent reaction, but instead the dad just kneels down to his level, puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder and says calmly, “Hey, it happens, buddy. Accidents are part of life. Come on, let’s go grab some napkins and I’ll show you how to clean it up.”
They walk over together, get a big stack of napkins, and the dad gets down on the floor with him. They’re both wiping up the mess while the dad talks him through it like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
When they finish and throw the napkins away, the dad squats down again and tells him, “Listen, you’re going to be a human being for a long time. You’ve got a really smart brain, so it’s important you learn to be more aware of what’s around you. Next time just pay a little more attention so accidents like this don’t happen. But even if they do, it’s okay. As long as you take responsibility and help clean it up, it’s no big deal. The cleanup is easy when you own it.”
The little boy nods, looking relieved, and says, “Okay Dad… I’ll try to be more careful.”
The dad smiles, ruffles his hair and goes, “That’s my boy. Now let’s get you another slushee.”
Man… no yelling, no shame, no making the kid feel small. Just calm teaching, accountability, and love all in one. That’s exactly how you raise a good human.
I really hope I’m half the dad that guy is one day.
Taylor Barada retweeted
Adrenaline Math
(R.I.P. Sketchy Andy)
In my 20s, I climbed a big route in the Rockies with a well-known mountain guide named Eli.
I noticed that Eli placed several pieces of protection on an easy pitch, where his chances of falling were near zero. I asked him why and I’ll never forget his answer:
“It’s a numbers game. I figure I’ll climb 5,000 days in my career, so extremely unlikely things are going to happen.”
Eli’s math checked out, so I took it to heart.
Years later, I was leading an easy route that I had climbed at least a dozen times before. I noticed that the rock was a little wet, so I placed an extra cam in a spot where I normally wouldn’t. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Eli crossed my mind as I slid that cam into the crack.
Sure enough, a few moments later my foot slipped and I fell. That extra cam saved me from a life-altering accident.
This week, “Sketchy” Andy Lewis—a beloved character in the outdoor community—died in a base jumping accident. He was an accomplished climber, slackliner, and base jumper. He performed with Madonna at Super Bowl XLVI.
As his nickname implies, Andy was notorious for pushing the limits in a sport that is already statistically one of the deadliest. He opened several tricky sub-100 foot exits in the Moab area.
The world needs people like Sketchy Andy who push the limits of what’s possible. It’s important to follow our passion and live while we’re alive.
But don't ignore the math.
As Eli told me all those years ago, everything is a numbers game. Math is coldly indifferent to our passion, and even skill has its limits.
It’s one thing to take a one-in-a-thousand risk once or twice. But if you make it a lifestyle, the math eventually catches up with you.
R.I.P. Sketchy Andy.
Taylor Barada retweeted
Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.
Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now.
If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons. Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
Going into a project or job without defining when worthwhile becomes wasteful is like going into a casino without a cap on what you will gamble: dangerous and foolish.
“But, you don’t understand my situation. It’s complicated!” But is it really? Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon. The problem and the solution are usually obvious and simple. It’s not that you don’t know what to do. Of course you do. You are just terrified that you might end up worse off than you are now.
I’ll tell you right now: If you’re at this point, you won’t be worse off. Revisit fear-setting and cut the cord.
