Andy Dunn

A founder of Bonobos, Pie, Monica + Andy, and Red Swan. Author of Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind. 🎢 Posts on startup, leadership, culture.

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

Let me tell you a ghost story.

My Ghost first arrived in the year 2000 and would haunt me for the next sixteen years. It was a secret, known only to a handful of my closest loved ones.

[Evan Lee @theEvanLee]

Last 30 seconds of the Knicks winning the finals live from West Village FIRE ESCAPE. Best city in the world.🔥👑 #knicks #nyc

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

POETRY

[Nic @ClawForThatInch]

https://t.co/UWgqEzBQRr

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

What do you think SpaceX’s market cap will be in one year?

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

@perksofbeingTH How many are you

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

Who wants six front row tickets to Mumford and sons at wrigley field tonight?

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

@kimessary How many are you

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

@gwhoosier How many are you

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

AI startup CFO, CEO, CMO, and CTO

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

@sulekhat95 thank you for sharing this @sulekhat95. my life lessons learned from joel, a hero - and now one for the ages: https://t.co/BEBINqjtju

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

The late, great Joel Peterson. @JoelCPeterson May his memory be a blessing. He was a professional father to me. Here is what I learned from him: https://t.co/BEBINqjtju

[Sulekha Tripathi @sulekhat95]

INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT.

This 1 hour Stanford lecture by Joel Peterson will teach you more about negotiation and getting what you want than most people learn in years.

Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

what is your favorite AI-powered executive/personal assistant? what great experiences have you had? what not so good experiences have you had?

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

#2 #2 #2 #2... 🙄 feeling this one hard these days... (and makin some moves)

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

reminder

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

The Fast and the Furious

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

https://t.co/hKN0otbeuk

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

your ambition is killing you. 👇

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

https://t.co/Ne2c3Iqkwi

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Christopher Nolan asked IMAX to build him a new camera. They did. Then he and Matt Damon spent four months filming The Odyssey on the open ocean, on the largest modern Viking longship in the world, with no green screens at all.

The shoot ran 91 days, from late February to August 2025. Seven countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Western Sahara, and Malta. Aside from one indoor studio in Los Angeles, every shot was filmed on real ground. In Italy, the cast and crew climbed 900 feet up a mountain every morning. Imagine walking up a 60-story building before breakfast. In Iceland, they filmed the underworld scenes by lantern light while rain came at them sideways.

The four months at sea actually happened at sea. Damon and the actors playing his crew sailed on a real ship called the Draken Harald Hårfagre, used here as a Greek warship. Nolan called the experience "primal." He said the cast and crew were exhausted in a way he had never seen before.

The cameras were the other big problem. IMAX cameras have always been too loud to record clean dialogue, which is why directors mostly save them for big action scenes. Nolan asked IMAX to fix this. They engineered a new soundproof case for the camera, a kind of quiet jacket, that lets the lens get within a foot of an actor's face while they whisper and still pick up clean audio. The new cameras also came out lighter and about 30% quieter than the old ones. To prove it worked, the lead cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema filmed a tight close-up of a child reciting a David Bowie song, "Sound and Vision." Nolan watched the test and called it "electrifying."

Damon went all-in on the role. He dropped to 167 pounds on a strict no-gluten diet. He grew a real beard for a full year because Nolan refused to allow a fake one. The crew built a full-scale wooden Trojan Horse and shot the attack scene at an ancient walled town in Morocco called Aït Benhaddou. Nolan himself climbed inside the horse with the cast and his cameraman to get the shot.

Across the whole shoot they used 2 million feet of film. That comes out to around 380 miles of it, longer than the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. At about $1.50 a foot, they spent roughly $3 million just on the film itself. The full budget was $250 million, the biggest of Nolan's career. They wrapped nine days ahead of schedule.

Tickets went on sale on July 17, 2025, exactly one year before the movie's release. That had never been done before in cinema history. Half of the 22 US theaters offering IMAX 70mm sold out within 12 hours, bringing in around $1.5 million in a single morning.

Nolan called the shoot "an absolute nightmare to film, but in all the right ways." He did not destroy a single IMAX camera. He has wrecked several over his career.

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

Never give up.

Indeed.

Venture capitalists live by the power law. You live by your ethics. Precisely because you are undiversified, the value of unlocking the historical time you spent is way higher for you.

Skin in the game.

By investing your own dollars, this becomes even more clear.

Your life. Your marriage. Your company.

It’s all worth not giving up on.

The whole point is that you could. As Kurt Armstrong points out, the “for worse” in “for better or for worse” is the whole point of the vows. Otherwise why are you standing up in front of all those people with flowers you or someone overpaid for?

You bring meaning to your life — and emotional and spiritual and financial sustenance — by treating the sunk cost fallacy for what it is — when it comes to the big things.

Complete and utter bullshit.

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

companies don't fail because they fail. they fail because the founders give up. don't give up on your startup. you're one pivot away from greatness. a manifesto of sorts. 👇🧵

[Andy Dunn @dunn]

I wrote an essay about its impact on me at the time — a pep talk to myself to not die by suicide. (Bipolar one is legit like that - 60% suicide attempt rate, 19% suicide rate. Statistically the most probably way those who are diagnosed with bipolar one will die).

Here’s that essay.

https://t.co/5BU7LIVuyO