Legibility

Someone said I'm making people legible and this is a good thing, a needed thing.

I realized just now reading a bunch of my own old blog posts that I'm also making silicon valley culture "legible", and the principles underneath it, as well as stories of how key individuals and billionaires evolve and move over time. In real time.

Nobody else is doing it quite as I want it done. Few people seem to understand when I try to explain my "production function" in philosophical terms, the basics and how it all logically derives... Ayn Rand talks compellingly about how the complexity of the heist of inflation is its best defense (failure of the commons).

I guess this is kind of my moat too. Btw &U has at least 5/7 of Helmer's powers if I'm right, I think.

(Especially counter-positioning, thanks Cedric. Nobody else is tackling the concept of "operationalized trust" so clearly and directly in a metric which means they often misdirect their energies and resources, often digging themselves into big holes. People don't use Doerr's OKRs to measure what matters properly, at least as I've heard him discuss it—from the front row at Martin Trust Center in 2018.)

I'm fundamentally low-confidence in myself, and have historically been quick to suppress my ego. I've asked people for their best ideas and honest feedback, truths. I listen. I try to correct and learn from my mistakes. It's embarrassing when others publish press about me, and it's often missing some nuances.

I've searched for inspiration outside of myself. I haven't been willing to go even close to all-in on any of my own projects or companies historically, always preserving optionality. Deep down, maybe I'm afraid as an orphan without a family safety net.

Yet I can't help but return to recurse and grow inward. I mostly link to myself on this blog. I haven't even read most of Hofstadter but GEB was tiresome to me, so I stopped halfway through. It was his system, not mine. Similarly with Minsky. Just knowing the titles, I can say I am a Strange Loop for sure.

Making myself and all within me legible, telling stories about how I filter the world through my lens of kindness via capitalism, is hopefully a value-creating flywheel worth dedicating one's entire professional career and life work towards. I think I'll end up writing a medium-sized book in 2026, and it will be my only one. I need to use more vehicles to deliver myself properly and create exposure.

I've tested this "legibility" MO, in my own framework, as best I can—like funemployment and every other major decision or concept in my life. At this point, with Shuffle and Senseg behind me, I know I can forecast and plan for a company's investor updates to be reasonable. With &U, I think I've got a handle on the key hypotheses and I'm pretty much right (but still willing to falsify).

The first publicly-sourced &U candidate I interviewed said how excited he was to speak with me, after digging through the internet a bit. I was honestly surprised at his enthusiasm. First of all because he definitely had never heard of me, why would he have?

Then he told me very honestly and directly, "you are a really great writer and a truly excellent teacher." Woah. We just met bro.

I'm actually almost crying as I type this because that's what my hero Seth Godin calls himself, a teacher, and I do too now (as a joke on Linkedin). But it's core to my identity.

I don't want to be known; I don't want to be overly public with my life. If pressed, I guess I'd copy Seth—ideally known by what those whom I have the honor of teaching go on to accomplish in their lives and communities.

I do also want to be the hero of my own story though, my own biggest fan. All men do, biologically, somehow. Main character energy. Women can have it too. But it's subconscious for me. Didn't spell it out until just now. I usually don't blog about being a hero or anything like that.

I think this subconscious leaning towards being one's own hero influences all of one's decisions. And my wise old friend Nikhil told me, "time spent acting under the right principles (say 5 years) ends up being a lot of compounding."

My best one-sentence self-descriptor: "I'm an Engineer, with the heart of an Educator, and the spirit of an Entrepreneur." It's stuck over the years because it's imbued with meaning to me. But I don't think anyone would yet introduce me this way.

My current tool stack is most succinctly described as language + money (no-code lol). But if trust is the asset I'm building, perhaps my heroic superpower and secret Batman assassin-training method is actually legibility.