If you pay attention to the patterns in your life, you'll notice that everything always works out. You've survived every difficult situation. You've weathered every storm. So trust the design. The universe doesn't give you what you can't handle; only what you need to grow through
Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail.
She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage.
Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists.
She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment.
This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action.
Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call.
A Venture Fund for the AI Cold War
I’m deeply interested in today’s geopolitics — and I am unapologetically pro-America.
With prior experience in private equity and venture investing, and as a serial entrepreneur, I see a possible business opportunity emerging in America’s AI landscape.
China Captures Talent. America Should Back It
The Manus episode proved that Beijing will reach across borders to claim its ‘talent assets.’ America should not push Chinese-origin AI talent back into those arms. Instead, America should give the best founders a credible third path: build here, raise here, own your upside here — under American law, American capital, and American governance. I am suggesting a fund that turns a geopolitical vulnerability into a venture opportunity and strengthens U.S. AI supremacy at the same time
1. Cap-table hygiene
Help companies avoid PRC state-linked money, ambiguous Hong Kong capital, problematic SAFE-linked structures, or legacy China investor exposure.
2. IP audit
Confirm that IP was developed cleanly, assigned properly, and is not entangled with Chinese universities, labs, employers, state grants, or prior company agreements.
3. Data architecture
Ensure sensitive data is stored, processed, and governed inside trusted jurisdictions.
4. Export-control and CFIUS review
Offer early legal screening so companies do not become uninvestable later.
5. Immigration support
Help founders and key engineers navigate O-1, EB-1, NIW, H-1B, STEM OPT, and green-card pathways.
6. Customer access
Introduce portfolio companies to U.S. enterprise buyers, hyperscalers, government-adjacent customers, defence primes, and strategic corporates where appropriate.
7. Narrative support
Help founders explain who they are:
“I am not a China proxy. I am an American-system founder building with American capital, American governance, and American legal commitments.”
This is enormously valuable. Many founders do not merely need funding. They need to become legible to the American establishment.
I put together a draft investment memo for a venture fund: Open Systems Ventures.
Maybe someone may find it useful — and run with it.
https://t.co/djAjhe29yY
Saw a post on LinkedIn about “How to Decode Chinese Business Communication Etiquette” (written in English). Cracked me up…
Twenty years ago, what people studied was “how to understand American/Japanese business communication conventions” — full of standardized over-generalizations and oversimplified tips.
But China’s regional diversity and sheer human variety are so vast that any text trying to “teach foreigners to decode Chinese business etiquette” ends up so distorted and overfitted it borders on absurd… There’s simply no “lowest common denominator” that can capture the business cultural characteristics across China’s north, south, east, and west.
For instance, they’d never understand why, even after all these years, I still don’t want to pick up any call starting with 010-