Articles - 2026

i wish i could have an integration between my calendar, a gantt chart and possibly folders in my email inbox, so that i can actually see individual events in a gantt chart format as well as use it to block out hours (time blocking) for projects that last a defined period, and finally, within a projects timeblock, allocate time based on emails into the projects folder in the inbox. 

What helps candidates pass the Navy SEAL BUD/S? resaerchers have studied this for years, with the aim of trying to understand why some people succeed where others fail. Turns out this is related to something called Identity based automaticity, basically the TL;DR is what drives them is achieving their goal IS their identity, meaning, its not discipline or willpower motivating or pushing them, but rather a connection to their identity, its argued this is more powerful a driver, since its no longer about choosing to achieve something, instead its about living in alignment with the identity, given the kind of mindset of "its just what i do, its who i am".

basically "desired behavior runs on autopilot because it matches your core self-concept, shifting action from effortful willpower to effortless identity expression. "

To this end, it can be argued that quitting becomes more of a risk or take more effort than living with the identity, arguably, failure can also result in trauma, since quitting or failure would essentially totally distrupt and bring the individuals identity, and therefore world and self view into question, a traumatic crisis of identity.

I think what can be gleaned from this in a business setting is to see how this can be identified, or even developed in team members.

I've been doing CrossFit in some form since 2012, having done my L1, L2 and a variety of specialist coaching qualifications under CrossFit, at one point i was even a partner in a Gym and CrossFit Affiliate. So the sport is very near and dear to me, it helped me believe in myself and show me that an old dog can learn new tricks and learning and growth never stop.

 But in this post, i actually want to focus on CrossFit shoes, my 3 Favourite ones in particular. Shoes are weirdly important, its not just about aesthetics, but about comfort and purpose-focused functionality, and for me, these three shoes are awesome enough that i need to talk about them.

Reebok Nano 2 - this was the shoe that started it all for me, the shape, the sole were both perfect, it was wide enough, and heightwise high enough that it was like a skateshoe, but with less padding, that made it soft and light enough for running, then the sole was also flexible and didn't wear down too fast, and the material was breathable, whilst having areas with additional abrasion resistance, the lace eyelets were also well positioned, and well fitted you didn't need to lace them up, finally, the colours were fun and iconic. I miss these shoes, they never gave me blisters and i wish they would bring them back as i'd happily buy several pairs!

Reebok Nano 4 - this was like the nano 2, the shape and colours where the same, but they had this added plastic mesh over the upper that looked so cool and helped protect with ropeclimbs, they were awesome. i would say this was the point where both Reebok and CrossFit peaked. the Nano 6 was ok, but looked like they were trying to bring back the nano2 and kind of failed. still the sole and shape of the nano4 kept the same sole and shape of the 2, and that really made a big difference. it was downhill after then.

Nobull Outwork - these were amazing, like cool, simple versions of the nano2, turns out some of the designers from Reebok actually started Nobull, which explains the consistency with the nano2 in shape, sole and overall feel, these are truely amazing, they came in all sorts of patterns without changing the shape or sole, and whilst NoBull has released new shoe models, i'm glad they've preserved the Outwork, even if the colours have less variety.  what sucks about Nobull however is how US centric they are, its almost impossible to get them outside the US, and shipping can take even months. amazing shoes, annoying international business strategy. 

My Macbook pro from 2021 finally kicked the bucket, sure, i know if i'd taken better care of it, it would well have lasted longer, but after amortising it over 5 years, i'm happy it was time to change.
But, what i'm sad about is Apple removing the touchbar, the mini-screen that replaced the function keys on the keyboard, if you've never see it, the image shows what it is.  Initially, like many, i didn't think it was all that useful, all it would do is change the buttons based on a software applications assignment of buttons, which most software pretty much neglected to do. and so, it was kind of a featureless feature. 

That is, until i discovered Pock https://pock.app/, this was free and open source, and basically allowed you to have the horizontal dock showing in the touchbar, and effectively make each apps icon a clickable button, it was awesome for working between apps without having to unhide the dock or lose screenspace having the dock permanently showing.

Having upgraded to a Macbook Air now, the touch bar is no more. i feel like i've gone back a (mac) generation, loosing a functionality that i enjoyed. and on reflection, it had so much potential - for example, it could have show each tab of a spreadsheet as a button, or all the different powerpoints you had open as buttons, or in gaming, specific action controls,  the control bar of word, excel, powerpoint could all have been in the touchbar, as could the adobe controls, sliders for mixing and volume those too. it could have show download file progress, or give various key stats. 

but, i guess i'm in the minority who found it useful, since now, we've reverted back to clicky buttons. 

There's a pre-seed / seed stage venture fund which has spent quite some time trying to launch its own ad network. An ad network comes in many forms, at the basic level, it allows advertisers to put ads on media partner sites, usually paying on a CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions), CPC (cost per ad click) or CPA (Cost per acquisition/sale), this venture funds version was on something called a revenue share, so it takes the CPA (Cost per acquisition/sale) model, and extends it to the total life time customer revenues - meaning if the media partner acquires a customer and that customer pays $10 a month for 12 months totalling $120 a year, and the revenue share is 10%, this means the media partner gets $12 for that customer (10% of the total $120 a year), not 10% of the first month ($1), so this is great for the media partner.

Ad networks fundamentally rely on concentrated volume, media partners can only really generate meaningful revenue at scale, and advertisers will only gain sufficient customers at volume.

Which is why, a venture capital firm running its own ad network is, strange, to say the least, especially at the the pre-seed and seed stage. The idea was the venture capital firm would control the ad network, and the startups it invested in would populate both the media partner and advertiser, basically maximising the customers within the network of startups and elevating the value of the entire portfolio, newer startups would benefit from the volume and maturity of older startups. 

At the heart of the issue is a simple mathematical problem a venture capital firm investing in pre-seed and seed stage have startups that may or many not have initial traction, certainly not at the numbers needed to be viable media partners, next whilst these media partner side startups, could potentially get to the scale needed, this isn't assured, and venture capital  power law suggests its not very likely. next, the media partner would also need the users to be in the right countries and right demographics for potential advertisers, again, this just shrinks the pool of compatible pairings dramatically. Lastly, and most significantly however, is the commercial structure for the advertiser, where a CAC cost becomes a lifetime margin cost, which for a startup is a big issue since startup retention math and LTV:CAC calculations generally rely on marketing costs being a one off and amortised over the lifetime of the customer, with high margins that can create strong CAC multiples, but because revenue share means this cost continues and is proportional to the revenue generated by and individual user, it makes the whole thing a margin business which works against startup math, and may even make the user more expensive than other channels.

Of course, this is on top of underlying operational issues a concept like this would have of requiring the right team to support these kind of deal between advertisers and media partners, and the right technology to address attirbution, deduplication and potential fraud issues, not to mention effective data tracking, transparency and privacy and security.

A quick note - normally, we can find journal articles on Researchgate or science direct, and through google scholar, can rank them via Q1 being the best quality, and the number of times the article has been cited, same goes for the author. but if the article is paywalled https://www.pismin.com/ (sci-hub) may have it public, if not then try anna's archive or Libgen. connectedpapers can help with finding associated journal articles, as can Jenni.ai, https://open-slum.org/ shows any online pdf libraries.

I came across this as a result of recent news where David Beckhams  IM8 supplement brand just got funded through this fund. from what i can gather instead of taking equity or venture debt, the fund provides a form of Debt that is repaid through " a capped share of the revenue/income generated by the specific customer cohorts acquired through the funded marketing spend." - in other words, my interpretation is that the investment is ONLY (Ideally) for companies with clear revenues, ideally high margins and recurring (i.e. long LTVs), formatting that there is a large upfront payment by the customer e.g. monthly subscription paid upfront as an annual lump sum. The mechanics being that this money funds marketing, which due to high margins and upfront payment means that the money can be repaid rapidly back to General Catalyst with 'interest'. in laymans terms, basically General Catalyst is providing CAC (i.e. marketing) capital, under the guise of a venture fund, really, its providing a cashflow mechaism that only really works with high margin, strong retention unit economics.

I actually think its really smart and what Venture Capital 'should' be about, injecting capital that can help buffer that window in a business where cashflow gets tight due to fronting marketing costs and actually receiving the LTR revenues. When i was in marketing this was always a constraint for the smallar clients i worked with, to compete they needed big marketing budgets upfront to get the best price on marketing adspend, and they could do this, but, they would need to cashflow to surivive the window from marketing ad spend being spent and when the the total revenues from a customer would come in. 

If General Catalyst, know what they are doing with this, they can even consolidate the buying power of their portfolio and negotatate better rebate and payment terms from the media providers, which, in simple terms was what WPP, Publicis and other media buying companies were ultimately doing.

what i'm wondering now, is, is there a varient of this that would be more suitable and offer similar structure, but for much smaller seed and pre-seed startups?

Relevant links -

Pitchbook fund performance - https://pitchbook.com/profiles/fund/23436-55F#investments

General Catalysts fund website - https://www.generalcatalyst.com/capital

Its taken me about 6 months to do my thesis, and its been a long and interesting experience. Frustrating at times. and i'm not entirely sure, how useful it will be in terms of work, but its been a challenge and pushed me, and i've grown in terms of grit and learnt more about how to manage myself as well, so its still somewhat of a win.

I found 3 parts particularly challenging -

1. developing a clear model - given i'm not from a academic background this was hard as i was learning from scratch, but it took my several interations to finally have a clear model - were  i to do it again, i'd start with someone elses inital model and build off that, instead of what i did which was to try and combine two models, had i found someone who had already done what i was planning to do, it would have been signficantly easier.

2. the literature review, this was extremely long, but not hard, i just felt lost for much of the time, until i finally realised what i was trying to do. i think the issue here is to do with how we are taught to write an essay, which follows the structure of the essay, rather than the structure of how best to approach research, more on this later.

3. the last item was both the most frustrating, least useful and took the longest, i literally pulled two all nighters to fix it. that was the formatting, i was so frustrated because its something that should be easy, the tools should help you, but instead it was like trying to build a house on a stack of jenga, fix one thing, 3 other things break, what people call templates really aren't templates, they are formatting they've done without consideration of how someone can quickly replicate the format over a 30k thesis. things like labelling figures and tables, adjusting  fonts, even numbering, at scale, without the use of a well planned stylesheet and a strong understanding of microsoft word, it was literally hair-pullingly frustrating. enough that i'd never want to repeat this experience.

How i approached my thesis 

I'm certainly no expert, and definitely not an academic. but if i were to approach this again, knowing what i know now -

• first i'd start with finding the topic and themes i'm most interested in. e.g. entrepreneurship and personality.

• I'd start with a google scholar search, sorting my recency and paper quality aiming for Q1 journals and highly cited papers as my priority

• Once i found a few papers that really interested me, i would look in the papers for a diagram of the conceptual model they used, and the questionnaire questions used.

• from here, i would either narrow down to my main source paper, or continue until i find my main source paper.

• Once i have my main source paper i would use connectedpapers.com to find all the referenced and cited papers - here's where my source of literature review papers would come from

• At this point i would also be downloading all the papers and keeping them in a folder, flagging the really important ones

• I would also be building my reference list (in APA) format) so i can go back and look for each paper later and its quick and easy for me to do citations.

• I would now read my main paper in detail, along with a few of the other papers, properly, so i can better understand the main issues and themes.

• From here, i would start with developing my own model and idea of what i want my study to focus on, i would brainstorm this with AI, i used Gamma

• Next, with my idea outline and source papers. i would put all of it into NotebookLM, i like NotebookLM as the team are made of experienced Acadmics so it works well for research.

• I would ask NotebookLM to help breakdown and identify the key themes, issues and topics, and provide me with guidance on how to strucutre my thesis, what sections to include and what things to cover in each section. this would form my outline

• from here, i would ask notebookLM to go through my sources and verbatum, with accurate citations give me specific quotes that fit into each section.

• from here, this would form the basis of my literature review section. which for me was the main area where i leaned on AI and where i found prior planning would have made a big difference. 

• TL;DR - find your idea, find a main paper with a strong conceptual model and questionnaire to use as a lynchpin, pull sources from that main paper, throw it all into notebooklm to help you organise and pull key insights.

• all this also means you're starting with part of chapter 3, before moving to chapter 2 and chapter 1, you've basically already got a clear idea of your model, your target respondents and your questionnaire before you start your literature review writing.

• beyond this, collecting survey respondents, i would focus my work on the group that is easiest to collect insight from, in my case, students was easiest, i also wouldn't hesitate to incentivise respondents, since so much time can be sucked up just trying to get responents, which it could be better spent on writing (and formatting)

So, there you have it,a brief, but hopefully useful approach to doing the thesis.

Every few months i try to pick up writing again, it almost always trails off, life takes over, i get busy and other things take priority. I'm not a natural writer, but, I'm trying again. this time - no commitments or format, i'm just going to write whenever, on whatever i want without any pressure, the goal, just to write for now.