M&A at Enduring Ventures. Former CEO at Dribbble and Creative Market.
Alamo, CA
Joined March 2007
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Zack Onisko retweeted
wife: what are you looking at on your phone at dinner
me: just some shit
wife: what kind of shit
me: well we got that rolling tv so i wanted to see if those rolling nurse workstations are purchasable, which they are and also most hospital equipment like vitals monitors so then i was curious like if you set up a home medical wing, what’s the top 10 substances given to patients, but not by volume but like by occurence, and then its injectable saline by like a large margin, and im like can you buy that and it turns out you can’t, totally prescription but not for like great reasons other than people might fuck themselves up administering it, but like how is it made and who makes it and it turns out one company has like 60% market share (of like 3 domestically) and 20% global market share and that’s crazy their proprietary processes and ip are like national security, fabric of society and civilization type shit how crazy is that?
Zack Onisko retweeted
I've never seen an exceptional product that was designed by committee.
Too many cooks in the kitchen make products that are complicated and diluted. Every compromise feels small in the meeting, and together they water down the whole thing!
Zack Onisko retweeted
Stop lying to yourself.
You know exactly what you need to do.
Over the years, hundreds of people have DM'd me asking for advice. I've met with more than a hundred of them. It's an honor.
Here’s what I’ve observed:
Most people don't need advice. They need courage.
Deep down, they already know what they need to do… they just don’t want to do it.
Humans are world-class excuse generators.
We’re adept at listing out all the reasons we can’t do the hard thing. We read self-help books, attend masterminds, listen to podcasts, go to therapy. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things, except…
They can become a sneaky form of avoidance. It feels like progress, but it’s not.
Don’t read a book about doing the thing. DO the thing. Then you’ll know exactly what you need help with.
The people you admire most have a common trait:
Bias toward action.
They do when others don’t.
I’ve used them all and can settle the debate. Instinct is by far the most capable. It’s actually shocking how quickly Muse gives up on tasks. Trial over. Instinct won.
Finding your friends on @letterboxd is way harder than it should be. I'm using Muse to find my friends on X and Instagram on Letterboxd. It's manually searching every handle I follow. If you're on Letterboxd, reply with your username and save it the trouble.
The American mind cannot comprehend a waiter who lets you sit for three hours and never once asks "are we still working on that." Dinner in Europe isn't a transaction. It's a residency.
Such a great book!
Here’s an interesting fact.
Morgan Housel threw out a third of The Psychology of Money while writing it.
He started with traditional long chapters (4k–6k words). It felt wrong, almost rambling, full of fluff. So he scrapped it and rewrote the book as 20 short, story-driven chapters in the style he’d already mastered online.
Every major U.S. publisher rejected it. A small U.K. house took it with a 5,000-copy first print run.
It went on to sell millions.
Zack Onisko retweeted
I’ve been messing with ai since day one, but when OpenClaw came out about a year ago, I lost my sleep for a while just digging into agents, mcps, different models, memory, markdown setups, all of it. That’s when I really saw where this was heading.
Since then the tools have gotten insanely better, and I use this stuff every day now. Basically taking 20+ years of design experience and plugging it all into much stronger workflows, trying to get our clients better results, faster, without wasting time or money.
And honestly, right now feels like one of the best times ever to be building. The tools are finally catching up to the ideas... the key is not to get attached to things but keep moving forward. I notice some folks get a bit emotional when I mention that tools and workflows that we all used and loved yesterday are a bit of a waste of time today.
I’ll probably share more of what I’m learning and building. And if you wanna make something cool together, hit me up.
Zack Onisko retweeted
Look at him, thats my Qual.
Your what?
My Qualitative! My vibe specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
I'll give you a hint, his name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in bushwick! Yeah I'm sure of the vibe.
Quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants
I've been skeptical about the whole - software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument
But I've seen first hand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads, and generalists
I predict the trend accelerates
Letter from @AQRCapital below
Zack Onisko retweeted
if elon had stayed latched to openai, he’d literally own the entire stack of the post industrial economy:
- cognition (openai)
- locomotion (tesla)
- exploration (spacex)
- connection (starlink)
- communication (x)
that’s not a fucking portfolio, that’s the goddamn civilizational operating system.
Zack Onisko retweeted
I work in the AI industry. I burn about 1.5 billion tokens a week. Between personal and business I have 8 AI subscriptions. And I still think I am falling behind the accelerating rate of change. The last three months alone have been a quantum jump in capabilities. Nobody outside the industry understands how insane this is going to be. Like a whole other industrial revolution, but compressed into 10 years. Nobody is ready for the societal implications. It's going to be a 10.0 earthquake plus an F5 hurricane all at once, globally.
Zack Onisko retweeted
The National Design Studio is doing remarkable work for America.
It is extremely rare for people as accomplished and talented as @jgebbia to leave the private sector to work for the public.
I hope it inspires more people who’ve built extraordinary companies to help build a country where others get that same chance.
Hey @noahrshinn, how is this even possible? My personal data is safe and secure, right? Right?
