Ricky W

newcastle, business, and other thoughts

[Aporia @aporia9n]

This is why so many rich kids become obsessed with unusually hard hobbies (HYROX, Ironmans, ultramarathons, survival expeditions, extreme sports, Everest, etc.)

They’re not necessarily masochists. They need a result where observers, and more importantly themselves, can���t immediately say “yh but your dad…”

Money contaminates most conventional achievement because it can buy you the introductions, runway, education, safety net, first customers and endless second chances. Physical suffering is different. Your dad can hire the trainer, buy the bike and fly you business class to the race, but he still can’t run the last 30km of an ultra for you.

And then you get this funny achievement inflation. Once normal difficulty becomes accessible, you need increasingly absurd difficulty to produce the same clean proof of competence:

A 10k stops feeling exceptional → marathon → Ironman → 100km ultra → Marathon des Sables / UTMB → whatever is sufficiently painful and scarce to still mean something.

Same for mountains: Everest with oxygen → without oxygen → harder mountain → unsupported → faster, etc.

It’s especially funny because their normal life has usually been optimised to remove exactly the things they then seek recreationally: cold, danger, physical exhaustion, uncertainty, getting lost, carrying your own stuff, sleeping badly, not knowing whether you’ll make it. Generations of family wealth go into eliminating friction, then the descendants spend their weekends putting it back in.

And of course an entire luxury industry now exists to package the hardship nicely. Black Tomato sells a “Get Lost” experience starting around £20k per person where they privately transfer you somewhere remote, give you equipment and training, then make you navigate back to civilisation while an expedition team invisibly tracks you as a safety net.

Basically the final stage of wealth is paying a lot of money to recreate problems your grandparents spent their lives making sure you’d never have.

[Lumen @lumenxbt]

https://t.co/3hWKMIBJcw

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/t5TW3Rbzlj

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Marc Andreessen: “I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices.”

“We spend a lot of time working with our companies on pricing,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen explains. “It’s really this magical art and science that a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough.”

Marc continues:

“A core principle of pricing is that you don’t want to price by cost if you can avoid it. You want to price by value. Especially when you’re selling to businesses, you want to price as a percentage of the business value you’re creating.”

He gives the example of building an AI that can do the job of a programmer, a lawyer, or a radiologist:

“Can you price by value and get a percentage of what otherwise would’ve literally been a person? Or equivalently can you price by marginal productivity? If you can take a human doctor and make them much more productive because you give them AI, can you price as a percentage of the productivity uplift?”

Marc argues that high prices are under-appreciated by founders:

“The naive view on pricing is the lower the pricing, the better it is for the customer. The more sophisticated way of looking at it is that higher prices are often good for the customer because the higher price means the vendor can make the product better, faster. Companies with higher prices and higher margins can actually invest more in R&D and make the product better. Most people who buy things aren’t just looking for the cheapest price. They want something that’s going to work really well.”

Marc also emphasizes this point in an interview in Elad Gil’s High Growth Handbook:

“What I hear from companies is, ‘Oh, we have an awesome moat, and we’re still going to price our product cheap, because we think that’s somehow going to maximize our business.’ I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices. I’m always urging founders to raise prices, raise prices, raise prices.

First of all, raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat. If you do have a moat, the customers will still buy, because they have to. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more. And so number one, it’s just a good way to flesh out that topic and really expose it to sunlight.

And then number two, companies that charge more can better fund both their distribution efforts and their ongoing R&D efforts. Charging more is a key lever to be able to grow. And the companies that charge more therefore tend to grow faster.

That’s counterintuitive to a lot of engineers. A lot of engineers think there’s a one-dimensional relationship between price and value. They have this mental model of commerce like they’re selling rice or something. It’s like, “My product is magical and nobody can replicate it, and I need to price it like it’s a commodity.” No, you don’t. In fact, quite the opposite. If you price it high, then you can fund a much more expensive sales and marketing effort, which means you’re much more likely to win the market, which means you’re much more likely to be able afford to do all the R&D and acquisitions you’re going to want to do. And so we always try to snap people into a two-dimensional mindset, where higher prices equals faster growth.”

Source: @a16z (Jan 2026)

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

If you even slightly entertain the thought of failure, you give your mind a chance to start noticing reasons to fail. But if the only option on your mind is to win, then the world seems to conspire in your favor, because your mind will notice opportunities it wouldn't have before. Become delusionally optimistic, not because it's realistic, but because it's effective. It drastically increases your chances of success.

[Tran Mau Tri Tam ✪ @tranmautritam]

Where I go when I run out of design ideas. Save this 👇

- https://t.co/MxeRSvBDxr - best of social post design
- https://t.co/5SM6zQRHrH - daily web design inspiration
- https://t.co/21RG68ReVa - minimal websites directory
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- https://t.co/ru7zu4VJhD - branding & editorial projects
- https://t.co/O58AD1CIyO - real brand guidelines library
- https://t.co/OPC3oYmGIe - best of recent design, daily

What am I missing?

[Cern Basher @CernBasher]

https://t.co/zW5xNPk39w

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

A slide from our last all hands.

I've also started to call out this behavior publicly in Slack channels.

Tired of consuming workslop

[Mustafa @oprydai]

you need four hobbies. no more, no less.

create
bring something into existence. write, build, draw, code, cook. creation grounds you. it turns thought into reality.

consume
read books. watch films. study art. this feeds taste and perspective. good input sharpens good output.

cavort
move your body daily. walk, lift, run, dance. motion stabilizes the mind. a stagnant body distorts thinking.

commune
have a community. friends, family, peers. isolation corrodes judgment. shared reality keeps you sane.

miss one, and the system degrades.
keep all four, and life stays balanced, generative, and human.

[Ricky W @Rwidjajakusuma]

Good points!

[Amanda Orson @amandaorson]

The faster technology moves, the more I think about Bezos' question

What won't change in the next 10 years?

Things I've been writing down over time:

- Humans will always need shelter, food, energy, and healthcare.
- The desire for ownership and the accumulation of wealth.
- The physical world will move more slowly than the digital one.
- Every increase in technological capability, especially AI, will require more energy.
- People and businesses will continue to need access to capital.
- Capital will continue to seek returns that exceed inflation.
- Underwriting methods evolve, but demand for credit (loans) is persistent.
- Trust remains scarce and becomes increasingly valuable as content, code, and fraud become cheaper.
- Verified identities and reputation becomes more important as information becomes abundant and synthetic.
- Long-term wealth creation and dynastic (multi-generational) thinking predate modern technology, and will persist.
- Coordination and transaction costs never fully disappear; market friction will continue to justify the existence of firms and intermediaries.
- People will continue to compete for status.
- Consumers will pay a premium for products and services that confer status.
- Time remains fixed at 24 hours per day.
- But attention is a finite resource and an enduring constraint.
- Products that credibly save time (or enable delegation) have a perpetual market.
- Inaccessible, proprietary data will be a persistent moat. The more inaccessible and difficult to aggregate, the deeper the moat.
- People want accountability, recourse, and clearly identifiable responsibility when things go wrong.
- Regulation consistently lags technological innovation.
- Compliance requirements, licensing, and regulatory moats persist even when machines can perform the underlying task.
- Local knowledge remains valuable and difficult to replicate.
- Heterogeneous markets (like real estate) continue to reward people with deep contextual understanding.
- Incumbent organizations tend to underinvest in disrupting their own businesses, which always creates opportunities for challengers.

Bezos' insight on what wouldn't change in 10 years was "Customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery."

It's boring/ true, but I think that's the point.

Everything we build today can and will be rebuilt more cheaply, faster by someone else.

Build on the invariants, not the trends.

What have I missed?

[Ricky W @Rwidjajakusuma]

@DRTnky Non Christians hv their own way w coping w their “ugly bf” too but they just nv post n nv try to make “shareable lesson” out of it. They share bcs they blv it’ll “bless” someone. But yea, too cringe at times 🤣🤦

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Many people are saying.

[Ricky W @Rwidjajakusuma]

@CoachMeron Sounds like another Elanga…

[Alex Lieberman @businessbarista]

I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.

It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.

It says there are 5 levels of work:

Level 1: “There is a problem.”

Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.”

Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.”

Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.”

Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”

Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee…

You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5.

Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee.

Plz feel free to steal it as well.

And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!

[Polymath Investor @polymathinvest1]

Early in his career, Tom Brady got benched and overlooked at Michigan.

His performance coach, Greg Harden, helped him to look at it differently: control the controllables.

Brady took it literally.

He started treating every practice rep like the Super Bowl.

Same intensity.
Same precision.
Same professionalism, whether anyone was watching or not.

Coaches noticed. Teammates noticed.

He turned routine reps into the most important audition for him at that time.

Luck favors the person who shows up at full strength when the stakes look low.

Rule 29 of 33, more below:

[The Swedish Rumble ��� @SwedishRumble]

A few notes of what is going on financially in the PL and especially Newcastle.

Newcastle is restricted by UEFA’s spending rules. The focus around Newcastle is to criticize those rules. But that is not what I would focus on if I were a NUFC supporter. Why? Newcastle has a revenue issue — which is very clear from the below graph (@SwissRamble). Why can Tottenham spend big? Tottenham does not have a revenue problem.

The last three financial years, Tottenham’s aggregate revenue is £1,638m. Newcastle’s £905m. Facts are that the winning the CL each of the last 3 financial years still does not bridge the gap for Newcastle up to Tottenham. That is an issue, no matter how you twist and turn it.

But what about Tottenham’s massive debt? Why are they not restricted by UEFA due to it? Tottenham has done what UEFA wants clubs to do. The debt originates from building the Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium. The Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium generates their relatively high income. Hence costs related to building a new stadium is excluded from FFP. Same as investments in the academy, which has enabled much of Chelsea’s spending over the years.

So what would I focus on if I was a supporter of NUFC? Facts are that the club is not making the investments a club with ’unlimited money’ normally does. Some things have been done and some initiatives are on the way.

Under FFP, you can spend unlimited money on buying revenue. Once you have done that, you can spend that revenue on buying players. It is not entirely without effect. Man City could be sold to a hedge fund today and still be a powerhouse for decades. It survives by itself. Player sales of youth players for ~100m every year. Those investments into the academy and the stadium would never have been done if it wasn’t for FFP.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

[Ricky W @Rwidjajakusuma]

@shiri_shh Heard China has done just that. Off the shore of Shanghai

[Polymath Investor @polymathinvest1]

33 rules for engineering your own luck.

1. Volume is better than perfection. You can't predict which attempt pays off, so take more shots.

2. Bridge disconnected groups. The gap between two worlds is where you add value.

3. Seek asymmetric bets. Small downside, big upside, over and over.

4. Never risk total ruin. To win the game, you have to stay in the game.

5. Keep slack in your life. A fully optimized schedule has no room for luck.

6. Break your routines. Returning to the same café, route, and people gives diminishing returns.

7. Treat every situation as an audition. Go above and beyond even when the stakes look low.

8. Persistence outperforms talent. The winners are usually the ones who didn't quit.

The other 25 are below.

[Karun Pal @karunpal]

The older I get the more I realize a calm nervous system is the most powerful thing a person can have. When you are calm, something shifts. Every action becomes intentional. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is forced. Nothing is performed for anyone. No anxiety. No stress. No thinking about "what’s next". You flow with this unhurried certainty that what needs to get done will get done. And when you create from that state, work from that place, love from that place... it has no match.