Milen Ivanov

self-actualizing, curious, egocentric, fireball, changing, self-defined, new-things lover entrepreneur

[Brad @BradleyKellard]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb walked into Google and explained what Antifragility is and how the world actually works:

1. The opposite of fragile is not robust. That is the first mistake almost everyone makes. Robust means something does not care about volatility. The true opposite of fragile is something that actually benefits from disorder, volatility, and stress. He calls it antifragile.

2. If you are shipping something fragile you write handle with care on the box. The true opposite of that package would have please mishandle written on it. Something antifragile wants to be mishandled. It gets stronger from it.

3. Fragility is always about nonlinear harm. Jumping ten meters kills you. Jumping ten centimeters a hundred times does not. The harm accelerates disproportionately with size. That acceleration is the mathematical signature of fragility and it can be measured precisely.

4. Anything that has survived long enough to exist today must have this property. If harm were linear you would be destroyed just walking to the office. Everything that persists is built so that small stressors barely touch it but large unexpected shocks destroy it.

5. Large size creates fragility automatically. A hundred million pound project in the UK had thirty percent more cost overruns than a five million pound project doing the same thing. The bigger the stone the more the harm. Size and fragility are inseparable.

6. Governments and institutions make the same mistake constantly. They chase perfect stability and call it good management. But something organic requires variability to survive. Greenspan tried to eliminate all economic volatility. He called it the Great Moderation. What he actually did was allow hidden risk to accumulate invisibly until it exploded all at once.

7. Small forest fires clean out flammable material and prevent catastrophic ones. By eliminating small fires you guarantee a massive one eventually. The same principle applies to economies, banks, and any complex system. Suppressing volatility does not remove risk. It stores it.

8. The only way to make something genuinely robust is to embrace bipolar strategies rather than medium ones. Eighty percent of your portfolio in something safe and twenty percent in something highly speculative is more robust than putting everything in medium risk. The average of extremes beats the mediocre middle.

9. Everything organic communicates with its environment through stressors. Your body needs the gym. Your bones need stress. Your immune system needs exposure. Depriving any living system of the stressors it needs does not protect it. It weakens it invisibly.

10. What does not kill me makes others stronger is closer to the truth than what does not kill me makes me stronger. When a system gets stronger under stress it is usually because the weaker components were destroyed, not because the survivors individually improved. The system improves through the death of its fragile parts.

11. Trial and error is not the opposite of knowledge. It is a form of knowledge with a convex payoff. You lose little when you are wrong and gain enormously when you are right. That asymmetry is what makes tinkering more powerful than theoretical planning in unpredictable environments.

12. Most of what we attribute to theoretical knowledge actually came from tinkering that was dressed up afterward as having been scientifically planned. The Romans built extraordinary things for centuries without ever having heard of Euclidean geometry. Technology routinely precedes the science that supposedly explains it.

13. The fragilista is Taleb's name for the person who denies antifragility and causes damage through that denial. Bureaucrats, central planners, academics, and policy makers who overstabilize systems from the top down are fragilistas. They remove the volatility that systems need and call it improvement.

14. Seneca, the wealthiest man in the ancient world, trained himself every day to wake up as if he had lost everything. He would deliberately live as if he were on a shipwreck to ensure he always had more upside than downside. Having more to gain than to lose from random events is the definition of antifragility in personal life.

15. In medicine, convexity matters more than people realize. If you are very ill the potential benefit of treatment vastly outweighs the risk, so you should see ten doctors not one. If you are mildly ill the risks of intervention almost certainly outweigh the modest benefits. The problem is that mildly ill patients are five times more numerous than severely ill ones, which is exactly who pharmaceutical companies focus on.

16. Removing something unnatural from your life has almost no side effects. Adding something artificial always has multiplicative hidden effects. In complex systems less is almost always more. The via negativa, improving by subtraction rather than addition, is consistently underestimated.

17. The real ethical crisis of modern times is that the people making decisions do not bear the consequences of those decisions. Bankers take the upside. Society takes the downside. Economists give broken advice and face no consequences when it fails. Nothing improves in any field where the people who are wrong are not harmed by being wrong.

18. Time is the ultimate detector of fragility. Whatever is fragile will eventually be broken by time. Whatever has survived for a long time has demonstrated antifragility and will likely survive longer still. A book that has been read for three thousand years will probably be read for three thousand more. A technology that is forty years old has at least forty more years ahead of it.

19. The only way to know you are alive and not a machine is that you benefit from variability. If you like variation and gain from disorder you are antifragile. If you require peace and predictability to function you are fragile. It is as simple and as profound as that.

Before you go, can we stay in touch?

I'd love to share one email with you every Sunday that'll challenge how you think about business, money and freedom.

Stay in touch here:
https://t.co/VMTlilB7aq

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

If it wasn’t sad it would be funny!

[High Signal AI @HighSignal_AI]

If you have a 9-5, watch this

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

That’s it , folks!

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

My team and I created a food guide (v1). We based it on evidence, using the heuristic that every calorie must fight for its life.

What do you think?

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

CES 2025 just started, and we’re already seeing incredible tech.

Here're 20 most impressive reveals of CES 2025 so far:

1. Halliday Glasses: 3.5-inch AI smart glasses

[Min Choi @minchoi]

NVIDIA just broke the Internet at CES2025.

Jensen Huang dropped some mind blowing announcements.

Here are 10 key reveals you can't miss:

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

Raising seed from angel investors when you still don’t have traction might be the most difficult part of your fundraising journey.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon’s seed round: “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done”

“To raise the first $1 million of seed capital for Amazon, I sold 20% of the company at a $5 million valuation. I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.”

Jeff recalls taking 60 meetings to get to those 22 angels who said yes, which means roughly 40 of the investors he pitched said no.

“And by the way, the 40 ‘no’s were hard-earned ‘no’s… They were multiple meetings, working really hard to get people to write that $50,000 check. And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.”

This was in 1995, and the first question Jeff would always get was, “What’s the Internet?”

So Jeff would patiently explain what the Internet was. He would also always tell them he thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment.

“In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive, but I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think was giving myself better than the real odds.”

Video source: @nytimesevents (2024)

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

How does a 1000 random folks spend their time in a day?

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

A teacher motivates students by using AI-generated images of their future selves based on their ambitions

https://t.co/155fSggnYJ

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

What have you done this week?

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

Имах привилегията да участвам в подкастта на @monydochev. Поговорихме си на воля за стартапи и инвеститори (ангели и фондове) и как да намерим финансиране за страхотния си бизнес…Благодаря за поканата! Мисля, че имаше какво да разкажем.https://t.co/d1mxGNrFVr

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

I am looking forward to getting my copy of "Boardroom Blueprint" (https://t.co/MU3nW0VFXy) by @Callum Laing.

[Poonam Soni @CodeByPoonam]

Goodbye, ChatGPT

Microsoft just released new Copilot plugins, and it's insane.

Here are 15 powerful things you can do with Copilot

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

@Jason Yes, of course

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

@elenko А, Ковид?

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

Напоследък излизат страшно много постове с “уж стари” снимки на гиганти. Сега пък на мумия на Гном! Изчерпаха ли се историите за UFOs?

[svetlinco👻 @svetlinco]

Надписът на шведски език гласи: "Този малък фермерски гном беше намерен от баща ми през зимата на 1866 г. в стената на стария хамбар. По това време той вече беше отдавна починал."

[Philipp @Philipp_onX]

Blue or Red?

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

the new name X and logo are cooler. Always found the previous ones tacky.

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

Sofia Angels Ventures is the lead investor in the HR tech Undelucram (https://t.co/QF9LHvYzUe.) - a leading online employer-branding platform with one of the largest employee communities in CEE operating in 14 countries. If your e…https://t.co/QZb15BiWJb https://t.co/dP5P4OZVS8

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

An interesting workshop by CEO Angels Club - https://t.co/yoXK9ArKyG https://t.co/QAhFPUImXx

[Milen Ivanov @barovski]

Very interesing highlight on Alpha Gen - the largest generation group in the history of the world . It makes you think about 1) what and how will they buy/own/rent and 2) how to work with/partner/lead... https://t.co/nMipCXQwpH