breaking: how i dropped out of college and scaled the #93 fastest growing company in america and #3 in marketing. my story on working with the largest companies in the world and why now is the most important moment in the history of media. + how to win.

“How locked in are you” Me:

Incredibly excited about this one. TCG quietly becoming a major asset class.

So let me get this straight. - VC funds Company A. - Company A uses that capital to buy AI services from Company B. - Company B uses that revenue to justify a higher ARR multiple and raise more capital. - Company B spends its new funding on AI services from Company C. Rinse and repeat. If the estimates are accurate, roughly 70–75% of AI spending is coming from unprofitable, VC-backed companies. How much of the AI industry’s explosive revenue growth is ultimately just venture capital circulating between companies? And more importantly, how much of today’s AI valuations are being supported by revenue that disappears when the funding cycle slows?

We need to bring back calling people. Why have we normalized Calendly culture? You want to talk to someone, so you send them a scheduling link, coordinate availability, and somehow end up speaking three weeks later. Just pick up the phone and call them. 90 seconds. 120 seconds. That’s all you need to make an introduction, solve a problem, or move a deal forward. We’ve created so much unnecessary bureaucracy around basic human interaction. Call more people.

This is the second day this week I’ve woken up after two hours of sleep. It’s kind of annoying, but I keep getting violently awakened by this piercing sense of excitement. I dream about our clients. I dream about UGC marketing. I am genuinely fascinated by the magnitude of the opportunity in front of us. We are witnessing one of the greatest transformations in how human beings form opinions in history. And I think the opportunity is much larger than most people realize. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan built their empires by controlling the infrastructure that enabled America to become the largest economy in the world. Oil. Steel. Railroads. Capital. They understood where the world was going and positioned themselves to own the infrastructure it would depend on. I believe a similar opportunity exists today. The goal should be to build a monopoly. AI will create enormous companies, but the democratization of technology will make many software advantages increasingly difficult to defend. Meanwhile, entirely new industries are emerging, and with them, opportunities to establish extraordinary concentrations of power. I believe the next generation of monopolies will emerge from two economies: The attention economy and the distribution economy. Why? Because attention and trust are two of the most valuable assets in the world. You can replicate software. You can generate content. You can automate virtually every component of a marketing operation. But no amount of code can simply manufacture the biological foundations of human trust. People trust people. They trust familiarity. They trust reputation. They trust the people they admire, the communities they belong to, and the experiences they share. And as AI makes content infinitely abundant, authentic human attention and trust become increasingly scarce. This is where I believe the next generation of media empires will be built. Companies capable of consolidating creators, personal brands, distribution networks, communities, live events, and media properties into a single enterprise. Imagine controlling the infrastructure through which millions of people discover products, develop preferences, and ultimately make decisions. The implications extend far beyond marketing. Commerce. Finance. Politics. Entertainment. Culture. Every industry depends on the ability to influence human behavior. And whoever builds the infrastructure that reliably earns attention and trust across these industries will possess an extraordinary competitive advantage. That is the opportunity I am obsessed with. Extremely bullish on personal brands. Extremely bullish on creators. Extremely bullish on live events. The next great empires will be built around human attention.

The biggest hack to scaling an agency: Sell outcomes, not services. We have done over $500M in revenue for our clients, generate over 300B impressions annually, and will coordinate tens of thousands of influencer posts this year alone. I’ve seen hundreds of agencies die and some succeed. The successful ones all practice one thing: They sell outcomes. Clients are often clueless. They are very passionate people looking for a dire fix to a problem. Sell them the dream. Think about what they are actually longing for. If it’s a trading platform, maybe it’s more traders. If it’s an AI CRM, maybe it’s qualified B2B leads. If it’s a crypto project, maybe it’s developers building on-chain. If it’s a consumer app, maybe it’s thousands of people organically talking about the product. Paint a picture in their head of what the world looks like when this is true. This will help you sell, but it will also help you know what the fuck you actually need to do lmao. I’ll give you a concrete example: One of our clients is one of the world’s largest casinos. The question is simple: How do we get them more depositors? My thought process: a.) What method are we attempting? In this case, influencer promotion. b.) What needs to be true about the influencer promotion for it to actually work? c.) It needs to feel organic. d.) Influencers need to be incentivized to continuously push the brand, rather than treating it like another one-off promotion. e.) Okay, let’s create a leaderboard that rewards influencers based on their performance. So what I end up selling isn’t: 50 posts from 10 people. It’s a beautiful deck depicting high-quality influencers organically promoting the brand. We mock up what the content actually looks like. We show the client the backend of the leaderboard. We show how creators compete, how performance gets measured, and how the entire system ultimately drives toward the thing they actually care about: More depositors. What this does in reality is three things: It sells the outcome and the end goal. They aren’t buying posts. They are buying a system designed to acquire depositors. It communicates that we know what the fuck we are doing. We aren’t handing them a menu of services. We are showing them exactly how we intend to solve their problem. It demonstrates a deep level of care for the client. We go above and beyond by creating mockups, systems, and additional material before we’ve even closed the deal. They can see how much thought went into solving their problem. And, frankly, it creates a level of indebtedness. They know a lot of time went into creating the proposal—because it did. Sell the world that exists after your work is successful, not the work itself.

Every year, I somehow convince myself that a slightly better battery and camera justify upgrading my iPhone. In reality, I just want to experience the Apple unboxing again. The sound of ripping off those paper pull-tab seals is genuinely one of life's greatest pleasures. SUPERIOR. The greatest unboxing experience of all time.

I've noticed an inverse correlation between how long it takes someone to make their money and how much of it they spend on discretionary luxuries. After traveling to 40+ countries and meeting people across just about every income bracket: The people spending the highest percentage of their net worth on watches, clothes, cars, purses, and other material possessions tend to fall into two categories: a) People who inherited their wealth. b.) People who made an extraordinary amount of money in a very short period of time. Conversely, the people I've met who spent decades building their businesses, accumulating assets, and enduring the blood, sweat, and tears required to build an empire tend to be far more conservative with their spending. And I'm talking about spending relative to net worth. I've met people who made a few million dollars practically overnight and have 30–40% of their entire net worth tied up in discretionary purchases. Meanwhile, I know billionaires who spent 30–40 years building their fortunes and have perhaps 1–2% of their net worth allocated to those same luxuries. Of course, there are exceptions. I know plenty of self-made billionaires who spend extravagantly. But the underlying psychology is fascinating. My theory is that the longer it takes someone to accumulate wealth, the more intimately they understand its opportunity cost. Someone who spent 20 years building a $100M business sees a $500K watch very differently from someone who made $5M trading a memecoin in three weeks. Same dollar. Entirely different perception of its value. The speed at which money is acquired seems to have a profound influence on the speed at which someone is willing to part with it.

The easiest way to settle the debate between miles, pounds, kilometers and kgs, and what side of the road you drive on, is simple. Whatever country has the highest GDP and strongest military gets to set the universal rule for the world. 🤷

My uncle has started and sold 4+ companies. He told me the #1 red flag in any acquisition is when absolutely no drama comes up during due diligence. No lawsuits, no threats, no enemies, no ugly disputes, no battle scars. Whenever a founder paints a picture of their company as some perfectly clean operation, he immediately gets suspicious. Because anyone who's actually built something meaningful knows how ugly it can get. You will get threatened. People will lie about you. Former partners will turn into enemies. You'll deal with lawsuits, defamation, betrayal, and people who genuinely want to see you fail. Sometimes you'll have to fight back. Every company has skeletons in its closet. The question is whether the founder has the integrity to be transparent about them. I think the internet has sold an incredibly distorted picture of entrepreneurship. Everyone wants the success story, but nobody wants the scars that come with it. If you're building something ambitious, expect conflict. Expect enemies. Expect days where everything feels like it's falling apart. That's part of the territory. The people who've actually been through it can usually tell pretty quickly who else has.

I remember listening to Ben when I was in college, and he is part of the reason i dropped out of school. As a 22 y/o its always been hard to get my inspiration from peers. I would often look to history to find commonalities in the best leaders, entprenuers, and builders to motivate me. His work is incredibly important/impactful. I encourage everyone to consume his content, and please if you can help him through this incredibly though time.

One of the great gifts to humanity was the gift to create. “The greatest improvisation of the human mind is that which gives existence to the nonexistent.” — Napoleon To will something into existence that didn’t exist before. At 22, I have built a pretty cool company (a mere 1% of what it will be), but any success I have (not much) I attribute to writing. Why? 1. The ability to storytell is a superpower. When you can tell a good story, you can get virtually anyone to buy into your mission. Humans are deeply biological, and our tendencies are rooted in millions of years of ancestry. We WANT to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, and we can immediately discern the attention, care, and intimacy someone has put into their mission. We communicated with words long before language, so it has an allure that is almost irresistible. When a mission is articulated carefully, and the benefits illustrated with intention, you can convince anyone of anything. 2. The mental acuity that comes with it. In today’s day and age, our minds are poisoned with consumption. It’s the easy way out of critical thinking, which is increasingly hard. We outsource our opinions to phones and are entirely molded by the culture we consume rather than the thoughts we create, which is a sad reality considering that many of the greatest inventions, catalysts, or social movements have come from an individual using immense first-principles reasoning to envision a reality and work backwards from it. Not following a path. In my experience, writing allows the average person to capture the blueprint of free thinking. Like an artist with a canvas, you begin to create. New pathways are created, new models get formed, and instead of defaulting to a societal norm, you create your own that is forged by genuine interpretations, habits, and beliefs.

How our clients are preparing for a post-labor world. The next 20 years will be dominated by two things: Consumption Discretionary spending We manage eight-figure marketing budgets for some of the world’s largest companies, and while we haven’t hit a post-labor world yet, we are already seeing these trends accelerate. The average American already spends an extraordinary amount of their waking life consuming media. Mobile usage alone is approaching four hours per day. Social media has continued to consume a larger share of that attention. In 2021, 21% of American adults used TikTok. By 2025, that number was 37%. Among Americans under 30, 95% use YouTube, 80% use Instagram, and 63% use TikTok. The same thing is happening with our money. U.S. spending on recreation reached roughly $1.98 trillion in 2025, up from $1.53 trillion in 2021. And that isn’t just inflation. Inflation-adjusted consumption of recreation services increased roughly 17% over the same period. We are consuming more, spending more on things we want rather than strictly need, and increasingly living our lives through digital channels. I think AI accelerates all three. So I want to cover three things: a.) What does that mean? b.) What is the future’s impact on this? c.) How do you win as we transition to a post-labor life? I want to preface this: this is a HATE THE GAME, NOT THE PLAYER essay. I’m not saying this is everyone. I’m saying this will be most people. In the United States, we live in the most beautiful capitalistic democracy, where the electorate gets to decide the future. The average person is overweight, in debt, and divorced. Regardless of your feelings, these people shape the future and ultimately fuel the revenues of companies. 1. What does this mean? It’s quite simple. People will spend more time: 1. Consuming media → Cell phones, podcasts, live events, etc. Because if you can’t work, what else are you gonna do? 2. Spending their money → What’s better than consuming? Acting on it. As AI drives the cost of goods and services toward zero and creates maximum abundance, people will have an almost infinite number of things they can buy. And buy a lot of shit they will. They will spend less time: a.) Using first-principles thinking. People will increasingly outsource their decision-making to alternative parties: algorithms, influencers, AI agents, what have you. b.) Practicing financial responsibility. When you have less reason to save, you will spend. And when you have an even bigger reason to fit in, and status becomes the ultimate hierarchy of our culture, you will spend even more. 2. What is the future’s impact on this? We are rapidly accelerating toward a world that I like to call “The Great Equilibrium.” And we are already seeing it. There are fewer and fewer moats. The two that matter most are: Technology — making the product. Distribution — getting someone to use it. From a technology standpoint, anyone will be able to create almost anything. Sure, the everyday Joe can’t go and create a lithography machine like ASML. But within the next 10 years, virtually any software, consumer product, media concept, or business idea he has, he will be able to act on. Which means the market will be absolutely FLOODED with new businesses, ideas, products, opportunities, shiny objects, and places to spend money. Distribution gets even more interesting. A commercial that used to cost a clothing company $500K in production and marketing budget will eventually cost $5. The beauty of the $500K commercial was that you probably assumed the product must be damn good if they could afford it. That signal disappears. Ads will flood the market. Anyone can create anything. No one will know what is real. And the value of traditional advertising will collapse as the quality of the advertisement can no longer be indicative of the quality of the product. 3. How to win as we transition to a post-labor life a.) Advertise with creators. People with personal brands that audiences genuinely trust will become exponentially more valuable. If AI collapses the signaling value of advertising, people will increasingly outsource their judgment to other humans. That’s deeply biological. Bullish on influencers. b.) Appeal to status and identity. When people spend money, an increasing amount of it will be spent on status. If basic goods become abundant and cheap, people will worry less about acquiring the things they need and more about acquiring the things that differentiate them. Perception becomes the scarce resource. People will buy products not out of necessity, but out of an attempt to gain something they don’t have: Looks. Status. Access. Belonging. Sex appeal. Exclusivity. You need to sell status. c.) Optimize for experience. If technology is no longer the moat, experience is. Whatever can stimulate our brains the most will win. If every trading platform can execute a trade instantly, the underlying technology matters less. If every shopping agent can buy whatever you want, the agent matters less. If every food delivery company can get your food to you, the courier matters less. The question becomes: Which product makes me feel the most stimulated, understood, and satiated while I’m using it? That is why I am very bullish on IRL experiences. d.) The less friction, the better. Sell outcomes. The gap between doing something and getting what you want needs to get as close to zero as possible. Your advertising should communicate the same thing. The less technical jargon, the better. The more “do X and get Y” marketing, the better. People will have less patience and more alternatives. Making them work for the outcome is not ideal. e.) Understand that attention span is literally zero. Not only can we barely pay attention anymore, but we are becoming increasingly good at deciding almost instantly whether content deserves our attention. That fundamentally changes how marketing budgets should be allocated. A disproportionate amount of marketing spend should be devoted to the initial touchpoints a consumer has with your brand. The hook. The thumbnail. The creator. The first sentence. The first three seconds. The first interaction with the product. Those moments should be engineered for maximum stimulation on initial contact. Because in a world with infinite products, infinite content, infinite advertisements, and effectively infinite choice: Attention becomes the scarce resource. And whoever controls attention controls distribution.

It was an honor to speak at the LINE event in Korea. With over $15B+ in revenue, and 193M users they are on the cusp of breaking out of Asia into global markets. Arcadia is excited to help them on this journey.

Whos in Melbourne? Just touched down in the "down unda" and will be here for a few days. Exciting posts ahead, after wrapping up an amazing Token 2049.

I think one of the most undervalued assets in the world right now is proprietary company data. LLMs are fundamentally probabilistic systems. They're trained to recognize patterns and predict outcomes from enormous datasets. The problem is that much of this data represents conventional thinking. And conventional thinking rarely produces extraordinary outcomes. Every successful company is effectively an N=1 experiment. Its decisions, failures, internal processes, founder intuition, organizational dynamics, and accumulated institutional knowledge create a reasoning system that is almost impossible to replicate. This is precisely the type of intelligence that AI struggles to reproduce. As foundational models become increasingly commoditized, the real moat will be access to the proprietary decision-making processes that produce exceptional outcomes. The next frontier of AI is learning how exceptional organizations think. And the companies that own that data are sitting on an extraordinarily valuable asset.

There is an inverse correlation between how many people attend an event and how good it is. Hosting some of the most curated events out here in Singapore. Our goal has always been to build incredible brands digitally and physically! More to come!

STOP LETTING LLMs AUTOMATE YOUR THINKING. Just as TikTok, Instagram, and automated dopamine hits erode your attention, LLMs erode your cognitive autonomy. It’s literally killing your brain. Every time you: Let it alter a word in an essay. Let it choose your action. Let it dictate your reasoning. Let it prevent you from making a decision. Don’t push back on a change. Allow attention to detail to be automated. You are slowly but surely killing the parts of your brain that exist for the sole purpose of net-new creation, which has been one of the most consequential focal points of humanity for centuries. LLMs are literally probability matrices that give you the MOST LIKELY outcome. It’s the most probable. AKA the most normal. The best outcomes ever have been purely a result of unlikely things, non-consensus thinking, and immense atypical behavior. The creation of AI itself was literally a result of peculiar reasoning.

Why I bought Introduction.com and why IRL events might have the best ROI of the next decade: Last year, I acquired numerous digital networking communities and an amazing domain name to combine them into what I think is an increasingly important aspect of the years to come: In-person connection. We operate under the fundamental belief that the most consequential decisions in human history have been, and will always be, made in person. From the Manhattan Project, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the moon landing, all resulted from human coordination and mind-bending cooperation amongst some of the world’s most fearless individuals. This community boasts members from Fortune 500 companies, exited founders, governments, UHNW individuals, and so many more changemakers from around the world. We convene monthly in cities across the world, from NYC to Doha, Hong Kong to London, or even Tampa to SF. And until today, there has never been a platform that allows high-signal connection to happen physically and then transcend into a digital reputation that encapsulates the value of the individual. It’s very simple: Winners crave other winners. They long to connect with those who meet their intellectual bandwidth and build amazing things together. Finding those types of people is hard. You have to rely on a warm introduction or bank on a serendipitous connection at a supermarket, both of which rarely happen. Our goal is to automate the connection of these types of individuals to create a framework that produces irrefutably positive outcomes in business, personal life, and humanity. We are social creatures by nature. We long to feel understood, we strive to create with like-minded people, and we deeply crave intellectual stimulation from others. We are delusionally confident that these traits will be accelerated by AI and become increasingly more valuable as: The 1% of thinkers become more scarce. A premium accrues to outside-the-box individuals. The average person erodes their intellect, creating a greater delta between those who are free thinkers and those who are not.