Categories
AI AI: Inference Semiconductors Uncategorized

5 Critical Management Lessons from the Founders at Etched

How two young founders are building what could become one of the most important companies in the AI era — and what their story teaches about leadership, execution, and building at the edge of the possible.

I recently listened to the latest Invest Like the Best podcast from Patrick O’Shaughnessey which was a remarkable conversation with Gavin and Rob, the founders of Etched, the company building specialized AI inference hardware that’s aiming to be radically better than existing solutions. Their story — starting as very young founders against massive skepticism, raising serious capital, and now shipping full rack-scale systems — is packed with hard-earned wisdom.

One of the comments Patrick makes at the beginning was how during his due diligence on the company he kept being told that semiconductor technology wasn’t a place for young people. You need seasoned, middle age experts to master this domain. Exactly not these founders.

Note: the following is based upon an AI’s analysis of the conversation transcript with me asking “What are the five most important management lessons from this conversation?” These lessons are relevant whether you’re leading a team, building a product, or simply trying to do meaningful work in our fast-moving world.

1. Velocity Compounds — Prioritize Speed Ruthlessly

In hardware, and increasingly in any deep-tech endeavor, speed isn’t just an advantage; it’s often the deciding factor.

Etched didn’t just design a chip — they built the full inference solution (chip, board, power delivery, interconnects, cold plates, and production processes) in parallel. They sent engineers to live in Bangalore for months to unblock vendors. They ran 24/7 shifts and did massive pre-work (including putting full chip designs on FPGA clusters) so that when the silicon finally arrived, they had working inference in racks in just 40 days.

Key takeaway: Look for every opportunity to parallelize. Accept higher short-term costs if they buy meaningful time. As they put it, “You win by shipping.” The best part is often no part — and the best vendor is no vendor, when vertical integration lets you move faster. Velocity, velocity, velocity.

2. Build Teams with Legends + High-Drive Talent

One of the most distinctive parts of their approach is how they recruit. They seek out “Legends” — people who have done the hardest versions of the problem before (like the engineer who built Nvidia’s HGX and DGX systems) — and pair them with exceptionally driven, somewhat naive high-performers who refuse to accept conventional limits.

They use “project-based recruiting,” mapping the hardest technical problems ever solved and persistently pursuing the actual people who did the real work. Their culture self-selects for people willing to move their families to San Jose to bet on two young founders taking on the world.

Key takeaway: For breakthrough work, average talent doesn’t suffice. The combination of deep experience and raw, first-principles energy creates magic. Invest heavily in finding and retaining these people — even if it takes 20 conversations. You can also learn a lot if the best in the world talent turns down the opportunity to work with you!

3. Assume It’s Possible, Then Solve the “Unsolvable” Problems

Repeatedly in their story, experts told them certain things were impossible. Their response? Assume it is possible and figure out how.

The most striking example was a clock domain crossing issue that required aligning signals to within 50 picoseconds — something many engineers said couldn’t be done. People quit. They solved it in about two weeks during a very dark period.

Key takeaway: When you hear “impossible,” treat it as the beginning of the investigation, not the end. Cultivate a “find a way” mindset across the team. The moments when things feel hopeless are often when the most important progress happens. I’m constantly struck by how often persistence results from simply realizing (or assuming) that something is actually possible.

4. Production Is the Real Product

Etched’s mantra is “Production is the product.” They obsess over not just technical performance but manufacturability, supply chain resilience, serviceability, and the ability to scale to gigawatts.

They made deliberate choices around process nodes and memory to avoid zero-sum competition. They built their own factory processes and test infrastructure early. Future designs are being simplified specifically for faster production cycles and higher reliability at massive scale.

Key takeaway: In any business that hopes to reach real scale, think end-to-end from the beginning. Technical excellence without production excellence is just a prototype. Optimize for output (tokens, units, whatever your metric is) at volume. There’s a lot of “zero to one” thinking here.

5. Bet Big and Stay Existentially Focused

Building in semiconductors requires enormous capital. Etched raised roughly $100 million early on when they were still very young and pre-tapeout — after most traditional investors had passed. They knew half-measures wouldn’t work.

This existential focus (this one product determines whether the company lives or dies) creates a different level of intensity that attracts talent, suppliers, and customers who believe.

Key takeaway: Match your ambition with appropriate resources and commitment. Clear existential stakes help filter for the right people and partners. In a world of distractions, singular focus on what truly matters is a superpower.

Final Thoughts

Gavin and Rob’s story is the combination of technical sophistication and deep human resilience. They faced a tough personal battle with cancer (in Rob’s case), widespread doubt, brutal technical challenges, and fundraising pressure — and kept moving forward with curiosity, determination, and humility.

In an age of AI and accelerating technology, the ability to build teams that can solve seemingly impossible problems at speed may be one of the most valuable capabilities a leader can develop. Their example reminds us that the future belongs not just to the smartest, but to those who can execute with urgency while maintaining clear principles. Velocity, velocity, velocity.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Aircraft Memories

The Wire and the Three Wires

I read this morning that the Navy retired its last C-2 Greyhound. It took me straight back to a deck fifty miles off San Diego, thirty-two years ago, and a young woman I never knew and watched anyway.

The deck comes up fast at sea. That’s the first thing nobody tells you about a carrier — that an airfield can ambush you, can rear up out of the ocean looking smaller than a parking lot, gray and pitching, while the C-2 you’re strapped into backward drops its gear and aims for four wires stretched across forty thousand tons of steel. You hit the third wire if you’re good. You hit anything if you’re lucky. Either way your body keeps moving roughly sixty miles an hour after the airplane has stopped, and the harness across your chest reminds you of that fact with some violence, and somewhere behind you a sailor a quarter your age in a yellow shirt is already waving the next plane in, because the ocean does not wait for you to catch your breath.

This was July of 1994, the USS Constellation rolling gently under a sky that hadn’t decided what color it wanted to be. There were four of us. We’d flown out of North Field that morning the way you’d catch a bus, except the bus had a tailhook, and we spent the day being shown around eighty acres of moving city — the flight deck, the hangar bay, the nuclear reactor spaces, the wardroom where men twenty years younger than us ate dinner with the particular speed of people who might be back at work in an hour.

One of the men with us had commanded that ship once, in 1966, when most of his year was spent on Yankee Station, running air strikes into a war the country back home had already begun arguing about. We were guests. We were, by the time the sun went down, members of something called the Tailhook Club, which is the kind of honor that means everything to you and nothing to anyone you’ll explain it to later.

That night we went up to the flight deck for the carrier qualifications, and somebody put us right next to the meatball — the lens of amber light a pilot chases down the glide path in the dark, the only thing standing between a good landing and a very bad one.

Four instructor teams worked the deck around us, grading each approach, calling out deviations nobody but a trained eye could see. Every airplane that came aboard came in close enough to feel — gear down, hook down, throttle slammed to full the instant the wheels touched, because if you miss the wire at night on a moving ship, you don’t get to think about it, you just fly.

One of the pilots qualifying that night was a Lieutenant named Kara Hultgreen, twenty-nine years old, finishing third in a class of seven — solid, unspectacular by the numbers, which is exactly the kind of detail that becomes unbearable in hindsight. She would go on to become the first woman to serve as a carrier-based fighter pilot in the United States Navy. Fifteen months later, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1995, attempting to land an F-14 aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, she would die, the first female fighter pilot in American military history to be killed flying. We didn’t know her. We knew her the way you know anyone on a flight deck at night — as a set of running lights and a sound, judged the same as everyone else by the men standing next to us with clipboards.

The next morning we were up before the sun because the ship had a refueling to do, the carrier and an oiler closing on each other from miles out, two enormous vessels pointed straight at one another like they meant it, until at the last possible moment both turned in tandem and the oiler slid in alongside, parallel, close enough that the lines shot across between them looked almost casual. We watched it from the bridge with the executive officer. Afterward the captain — a man who’d led the Blue Angels before he’d ever commanded the Constellation, and who still had the jacket with the right patches to prove it — called up the two sailors who’d run the operation and thanked them in front of everyone, the way a good leader does when he wants the rest of the crew to notice who deserves it.

Then we stayed on the bridge to watch the air wing leave. Eight F-18s — six Navy, two Marine Corps. The Navy pilots flew it the way you’re supposed to: catapult stroke, climb out, gone. The Marines went last, and the moment their wheels cleared the deck they hauled the airplanes into a vertical climb, straight up, like the sky owed them something and they intended to collect. The executive officer laughed beside us. “There go your tax dollars for this year,” he said, and none of us argued.

Then it was our turn. Strapped into the C-2 again, facing backward, braced against a catapult stroke that takes you from zero to flying speed in about two seconds. And then you stop in mid-air or so it feels. Disneyland never built anything like it.

I think about the wire sometimes — the one you catch, the one that stops you. Hultgreen caught it that week, while I stood close enough to hear the engines roar past us in the dark, indistinguishable from the five other sets of lights that came down before her. You don’t know, standing there, which ones you’re watching for the last time. I didn’t, that night. The airplane that carried us home is gone now too, and somehow it’s the airplane’s retirement, not anything grander, that brought all of it back.

Categories
AI Learning Photography

Autopilot

“Superb photographs are not just taken with cameras. They come from within you, your eyes, your mind, your heart, not ice cold equipment.” Fan Ho

There’s a half-second on the street, somewhere between seeing a frame and shooting it, that used to take me whole minutes. Early on, with a camera in my hands on the streets of San Francisco or on the subway platforms in New York, I’d see something — light falling a certain way, a gesture about to resolve into a gesture — and I’d think my way through it. Assess the composition or the angle. Worry about the background. By the time I’d worked it out, the moment might be gone, replaced by some lesser version of itself.

That doesn’t happen to me anymore, and I couldn’t tell you when it stopped. Somewhere along the way the thinking disappeared and the shooting stayed. I see the frame and the shutter goes, and only afterward, looking at the file, do I understand what I saw. I didn’t explicitly decide to skip the thinking. It just stopped showing up, the way a habit eventually stops asking your permission. Or how driving a car becomes second nature.

I think about this because of a problem the AI labs have been calling continual learning. The AI models we use are like brilliant interns. They can solve a hard problem at nine in the morning and a harder one by five, and they’ll astonish you doing it. But every session starts over from zero. Whatever they got right on Tuesday evaporates by Wednesday, the way a dream is gone by the time you’ve found your slippers.

The industry’s first answer was to give them a longer memory — let the window hold the whole case file in front of them, all the time. This works for a while, the same way it would work for me on the street if I stopped and re-derived the exposure math for every frame. But that isn’t how I shoot anymore. I don’t have the math open. I have what’s left after thousands of frames did the math for me and then got out of the way.

Based on some exploration I did this morning using AI I found three different AI research efforts that are now chasing that gap, from different angles, none of them all the way there.

A team out of Stanford and NVIDIA built something called TTT-E2E, which lets a model keep adjusting its own internal weights while it reads — not just holding the page in front of it, but being changed by the page, a little, as it goes. It runs thirty-five times faster than the brute-force method of remembering everything, because it isn’t remembering everything.

Google’s research arm published something called Nested Learning around the same time, built on the idea that a mind isn’t one system learning at one speed, but several systems nested inside each other — some updating by the minute, some by the year.

And a scrappier strand of work called self-distillation has models teaching cheaper versions of themselves, not by handing over a transcript, but by training the cheaper model to arrive on its own at whatever the well-informed version would have concluded.

None of this is what happens when I make a photo. Not yet. But it’s aimed at the same gap I live in every time I shoot before I understand what I’m shooting. The gap between having the math and having the eye.

I once asked Doug, a good friend who’s spent as many days on the street as I have, how he knew when to press the shutter. He didn’t have an answer, not really — just a shrug, and something about the moment feeling complete before he could explain why. That shrug took him years to earn. He didn’t keep the years. He kept the shrug.

And then a few years ago Doug did something I still don’t fully understand. He abandoned digital and went back to film. Not for any project, not for the look of it — he could get that in post if he wanted it. He went back to the actual mechanics: loading a roll, metering by hand, often using a tripod, etc. I needled him about it some, the way you’d needle a cigarette smoker who’d taken up a pipe instead, as if the inconvenience were the point. He told me he wanted to slow down, and that film was the only thing that reliably made him do it. Twelve frames and then you stop and reload and you can’t fix it later. The very friction he’d spent decades shooting his way out of, he went looking for again, on purpose.

I don’t know what to do with that, except to notice that he’s the same man who can give me the shrug and also the man who walked back toward the thing the shrug had replaced. Maybe that’s the part the labs haven’t gotten to yet, underneath all the vocabulary of weight updates and meta-learned initializations. Compression is the whole point, until the day it isn’t.

Note: This line of thinking started with a recent essay by Dwarkesh Patel on what he calls continual learning. It’s become a real focus of his thinking about how we get to a better future with AI.

See: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

Categories
Cuba Photography Street Photography

Havana, In Deep

Dangling Conversation - Havana - 2013

There is a box between them with a screen in it, and to this day I do not know what it is for. It could be for sifting. It could be for rolling. It sat on the table in that Havana market like a piece of furniture too tired to explain itself, and the man rested his forearm on it the way men rest their forearms on things that have been useful to them for a long time, without needing to look at it. A couple of guys a few steps off were selling meat, and somewhere a radio was losing a slow fight with distance.

He was asking her something. You could see it before you could hear it, if you could have heard it at all, which I could not, standing twenty feet away with a camera and no Spanish worth the name. His eyebrows were doing the work. His mouth was doing the work. The cigarette in the corner of his lips had gone unlit and forgotten, a prop in a scene that had moved past needing it.

She had not expected the question. That was the whole of it, the thing the photograph is actually about. Above and behind them the light came down through warehouse glass gone frosted with age, softened, the hard edges sanded off. It had been falling on that table for years before either of them sat down at it. A woman’s face has a setting it returns to between thoughts, and hers had been somewhere else — the work, the heat, the cigarette she’d just lit, which she now held between two fingers like a held breath, smoke rising into that same light, catching it, going from invisible to visible to invisible again. Then he spoke, and the setting changed. Her eyes came around to him sideways, the way eyes do when the rest of the head hasn’t decided yet whether to follow. Caught. Not afraid — caught, the way you’re caught remembering something mid-sentence, or caught by a question that arrives at an angle you didn’t see coming.

They had stepped away from whatever the work was — the particular slackness of people on a break, elbows down, shoulders forward, the posture of two people who have stopped doing the thing they get paid to do and have not yet decided to start talking about anything in particular, except that he just had.

Neither of them knew I was there, and I have never quite settled how I feel about that. I took something from two people who never agreed to give it. I have made my peace with it the way photographers do, which is imperfectly, but I have not stopped thinking about it. This is the only kind of photograph worth making all the same, the kind where you are not in the room, not really, where the camera has gone as invisible as the screen on that box, recording a question and an answer that the two of them will forget by the end of the day and that I will keep for the rest of my life, lit by a window neither of them ever turned around to notice.

What they were talking about, I will never know. I have looked at this photograph for thirteen years now and I still want to know.

Categories
Living New York City Serendipity

The Grammar of Looking Up

The apartment was across from Penn Station, which meant that for one stretch of months in the mid-1970s, the architecture of my days was decided by trains I never took. I walked east instead, every morning, toward the United Nations, where a man named Frank Smith ran a personal development course that IBM SRI had decided its young people should sit through. I don’t remember most of what Frank said in that room. I remember one thing he said about the street outside it.

He told us we should start looking up. Literally — on our walks back and forth across midtown, Penn Station to the East Side and back, twice a day, rain or not. Not all the way, usually. Mostly it was a floor or three: the window line just above the awnings, the cornice on a building you’d never once registered had a second story, let alone a sixth. The full climb to the rooflines — gargoyles, setbacks, terra cotta lions — was the occasional reward. Almost no one looks up in New York, he said, not even a little. The city trains you out of it. Too much at eye level demands your attention — the cabs, the steam, the man asking for change, the woman walking too slowly in front of you — so everything above your own eyeline disappears by consensus, not just the tops. Habits can be replaced. Look up enough times, even just a floor or three, and you’ll see a different city than the one everyone else is seeing.

I tried it. Walking up past the Pierpont Morgan stretch, or wherever the route took me, chin lifted some small number of degrees, feeling slightly foolish. Most days that was the whole of it — a window line, a row of air conditioners, a sign painted directly onto brick decades before anyone called that vintage. Every so often the chin would tip back further, and there’d be something up there worth the extra degrees. A gargoyle with its mouth open mid-roar, forty years before air conditioning made gargoyles decorative rather than necessary. But that was the rare find. The habit was the floor or three. Nobody else on the sidewalk was seeing any of it, because nobody else on the sidewalk was looking at all.

The chin came back down on its own a couple of times a week, somewhere around a street corner with a slice joint on it, because New York seems to put one on every corner whether you need it or not. You smelled it before you saw it — that specific combination of tomato, oregano, and hot grease that has no name I’ve ever found. Looking up was Frank’s discipline.

The pizza smell required none. It just reached out and took your head by the chin and turned it level again, toward the window with the steam on the glass and the guy folding a slice in half before he handed it over.

It is a small thing Frank Smith said in a room near the UN fifty years ago, and I have carried it around since the way you carry around a key to a house you no longer own. I don’t know what happened to the course, or to IBM SRI’s faith in such courses, or to Frank himself. I know what happened to the habit. It outlived the year, outlived the apartment across from Penn Station, outlived several cities I’ve lived in since that didn’t have the same vertical drama to reward the looking. I still do it. I did it last week on a walk that had nothing to do with midtown at all, tilting my head back on a street in California to find whatever was up there worth finding, and catching myself mid-gesture, thinking: that’s Frank’s, that one, still running fifty years later on the program he installed.

Most of what we’re taught to notice, we’re taught by people who wanted something from us — a sale, a vote, a grade. Frank wanted nothing, as far as I could tell, except that we see more of the city than we’d been seeing. It’s such a small ambition for a teacher to have. Look up. That’s the whole curriculum. And it’s the only thing from that course, the only thing from that whole strange year of being instructed in personal development by a man whose face I can no longer quite reconstruct, that I still do, unbidden, on every street I’ve walked since.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation

Sutter’s Balloon

At Pinal Airpark, in the desert north of Tucson, the airplanes sit in rows the way old men sit in rows at a clinic, waiting for something that isn’t coming. A great many of them are 747s, parked here because the engines are worth more than the rest of the airframe and somebody, someday, may want the engines. Somewhere among the rows is one that’s shorter than its neighbors by nearly fifty feet, the line of its fuselage interrupted just behind the wing as though a piece had been folded in and stitched shut. This is a 747SP, and there were only forty-five of them ever built, because the airplane was, from the moment it was conceived, a compromise built to solve one problem and no other.

The problem belonged to Pan American World Airways. In the early seventies Pan Am wanted to fly nonstop from New York to Tehran, a route that did not then exist because no airliner Pan Am owned could cover the distance with a full load of passengers and still land with fuel in the tanks. Iran Air had the identical problem in reverse. Boeing had, at the time, the 747-100, an airplane that could carry nearly everybody in the world somewhere, but not necessarily that far. McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed had the DC-10 and the L-1011, three-engine widebodies built expressly for the medium-haul market the 747 was too big to serve efficiently, and Boeing, watching two competitors carve into territory it had assumed it owned outright, needed an answer that did not require designing a new airplane from the keel up. There was no time and, after the financial near-catastrophe of developing the original 747, no appetite for one.

The man who supplied the answer was Joe Sutter, the engineer who had led the 747 program from the start and who brought to it an instinct for solving problems by subtraction. Sutter’s idea was not to add a third engine, which several engineers in the room had assumed was the path, since removing one engine entirely was reckoned to save a third of the fuel burn and nearly seven tons of weight in one move. Sutter’s idea was to leave the engines alone and shorten the airplane instead. Take fuselage out fore and aft of the wing, forty-eight feet four inches of it, lighten the structure to match, simplify the flaps from the standard triple-slotted design to a single-slotted one, lengthen the tail surfaces to keep the shorter airplane stable, and let the weight savings buy range instead of payload. Boeing’s engineers called the result, informally and a little affectionately, Sutter’s Balloon. The company filed it as the 747SB, for Short Body, before settling on a name that did the marketing for itself: 747SP, for Special Performance.

The first one, manufacturer’s serial number 21022, rolled out of the Everett plant on May 19, 1975, and flew on July 4th, ten days ahead of a schedule that was already tight. Jack Waddell, who had flown the maiden flight of the original 747 six years earlier, was in the left seat again, and on that first flight he put the shortened airplane through a stall and a run up to Mach 0.92, a speed that had no business being associated with anything called a jumbo jet. In November, Boeing flew the fourth airframe nonstop from New York to Tokyo, 6,927 miles, with two hundred passengers aboard, and landed in Seattle’s backyard with more than thirty thousand pounds of fuel still in the wings, a fact Boeing’s marketing department repeated for years the way a man repeats the one good thing a difficult relative once said about him. The FAA signed off in February of 1976. Pan Am took delivery of the first production airplane, named Clipper Freedom, on March 5th, and put it into revenue service in April.

What the SP was for, it did well. A South African Airways SP flew nonstop from the Boeing plant in Seattle to Cape Town on its delivery flight in 1976, a record for an unrefueled commercial airplane that stood for more than a decade. Pan Am flew SPs around the world in well-publicized record attempts, and for thirteen years, until the 747-400 arrived in 1989, the SP held the title of longest-range airliner in the world. It is a title that means something only to the small number of people who keep track of such titles. Boeing had once projected sales in the neighborhood of two hundred. Fuel prices rose through the back half of the seventies and into the eighties, and the SP, despite its range, cost more to fly per seat than the standard 747 it had been built to outdo on a narrower set of routes. Twin-engine widebodies were coming that would solve the same range problem with half the engines to maintain. Production ran from 1976 to 1982, paused, and then opened once more in 1987 for a single VIP-configured order from the Abu Dhabi Amiri Flight, after which Boeing closed the line for good. Forty-five airplanes, full stop.

A handful of them found second careers that outlasted anything the airline business had planned for them. One, a former Pan Am airframe, was hollowed out by NASA and the German Aerospace Center and fitted with a hatch that opened in flight to expose a reflecting telescope two and a half meters across, an arrangement that let astronomers fly above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere and look at the sky the way the ground never quite allows. It flew as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy until 2022. As of this year, the airplanes still capable of flight number three: two belong to Pratt & Whitney Canada, which uses them as flying engine test beds, bolting experimental turbines onto a wing built half a century ago to prove an idea about subtraction; the third belongs to a casino company in Las Vegas, configured for fifty passengers, which is roughly the inverse of what Joe Sutter had in mind. The rest are scattered in places like Pinal Airpark, sitting in rows, shorter than their neighbors, waiting on engines somebody might still want.

Categories
Monochrome Photography New York City Photography Photography - Black & White

Bookends

Bookends - New York City - 2010

The tile is the first thing, and it should be. Count the squares if you want — institutional cream, grouted in a pattern nobody alive remembers choosing, the kind of tile that has been absorbing the heat and noise of trains since before anyone on this bench was born. This line has been running since 1904. The platform across from it, the old City Hall stop, closed in 1945 and now exists only as a rumor riders pass through without seeing, a loop the express makes for no reason except that turning around takes track. Everything in this photograph is standing on top of something that used to be a destination and is now just a curve in the dark.

Seven people are sitting on a bench that has nothing to do with any of that history, and everything to do with it.

Start with the one who’s still here. T-shirt, checkerboard skull, gym bag held against his ankle the way you hold something you can’t afford to lose track of. His hands are clasped between his knees, not relaxed, not nervous — occupied. Everyone else on this bench has gone somewhere else. He hasn’t. He’s looking off toward the tunnel mouth with the specific stillness of a man doing arithmetic about how late he already is, and the bag at his feet is doing exactly what gym bags do at that hour, which is stand in for whatever he’s actually carrying.

To his left, a woman reads a paperback — Wilde, from the spine, which is its own small joke on a subway platform, a story about a man who doesn’t age sitting in the lap of a woman waiting on a train that’s already late. Her purse, gold, sits on her knees like a paperweight holding her place. Next to her, a woman in a cream jacket has wired herself into something private through a pair of earbuds, hands folded over a small plaid pouch she’s guarding like it’s worth more than its size suggests. Two men at the far end have given up on consciousness altogether — one with his chin dropped into the posture every commuter eventually perfects, the other with his head against a fist and a phone somewhere near his ear, gone in whatever direction that call is taking him.

This is what a downtown platform in lower Manhattan does to seven strangers at whatever hour this was: financial district behind them, City Hall and the courthouses above, the bridge somewhere overhead carrying its own century of foot traffic — and none of it matters to the bench. The bench doesn’t know what borough it’s in. It just holds people until the train comes and takes the holding away.

The photograph is called Bookends, for the two men slumped at either end, and that’s the obvious read. But look again at who’s in the middle — the reader with her book, held between two men who have shut the world off completely. She’s the only one inside a story while sitting inside someone else’s. That’s the trick of the title. It sounds like geometry. It’s actually about who, on a bench like this, is still willing to be somewhere other than gone.

The train would come. It always does, eventually, on a line that’s been doing this since 1904, two minutes or eight minutes late, and it would take all seven of them in whatever direction they were waiting for, and none of them would know they’d spent four minutes on a bench old enough to have held this exact scene ten thousand times before — six people who’d left, and one who, for reasons of his own, hadn’t gone anywhere yet.

Categories
Travel

The Marquee Beside the Mission

The hotel was three blocks from the Alamo, six in the morning, nobody else on the sidewalk, the city still deciding whether to wake up. The marquee stopped me first. MAJESTIC, gold on red, neon ropes looped along the underside like a county fair nobody took down — forty, fifty years running. And on the reader board, where you’d expect coming attractions: STEVE MARTIN & MARTIN SHORT IN A VERY STUPID CONVERSATION. JULY 10. 8PM.

Someone had sat down and typed that into the letters on purpose, knowing it would just hang there above the sidewalk all month, making people smile before their coffee.

A woman was bent over a rolling suitcase in front of the dark theater doors, untangling a scarf, a strap, something — the absorbed patience of someone catching an early flight. She didn’t look up at the sign. She’d probably walked past it a hundred times. That’s the thing about the landmarks you live near: they go invisible. It takes someone who flew in this morning to actually read the marquee.

I kept walking and found the Alamo doing the thing the Alamo does — holding still under the weight of everything people have decided it means. Texas independence, the thirteen days, Travis’s line in the sand that may or may not have happened the way the movies say. Solemn, in spite of the gift shop. I stood in the plaza and felt the appropriate things. Then I thought about the marquee again, three blocks back, still making its joke to an empty street.

The Alamo has to mean something. The marquee just has to make you laugh on your way to the thing that’s supposed to mean something. Reverence is a posture you adopt on command, the way you lower your voice in a church whether or not you believe in anything. The joke asked nothing of me.

I still think about the woman with the suitcase more than the cannon emplacements. Untangling a scarf under a hundred-year-old sign advertising a stupid conversation, three blocks from where men died arguing about a flag. Both buildings still standing. Both still pulling people in off the same street. One asks you to be quiet. The other asks you to keep walking and see what’s funny about being alive in a particular city on a particular morning, before the heat sets in, before anyone else is up to see it with you.

Categories
AI Anthropic Economics Stanford

Weak Links, Powerful Ideas

I’ve been thinking about bottlenecks. Not the frustrating kind you encounter in traffic or while debugging code, but the deeper structural constraints that determine how progress unfolds in our lives, organizations, and economies. A single slow step can limit an entire system, regardless of how rapidly everything else improves.

It’s an idea that feels especially relevant today. While AI capabilities continue to advance at a remarkable pace, real-world productivity gains often appear far more gradual.

Enter Chad Jones—the Stanford economist whose work has become increasingly important for anyone trying to understand AI’s long-term economic impact. This week he announced that he will join the Anthropic Institute on leave from Stanford beginning June 30.

The move is noteworthy not simply because of who Jones is, but because of the ideas he brings with him.

The Economist Who Sees Growth Through Tasks and Bottlenecks

Chad Jones (Charles I. Jones) is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been one of the leading scholars studying long-run economic growth: how ideas accumulate, why innovation matters, and why growth rates have remained relatively stable even as the number of researchers worldwide has expanded dramatically.

His influential work helped explain a central paradox of modern economics: adding more researchers does not automatically produce ever-faster growth because, over time, new ideas become increasingly difficult to discover.

More recently, Jones has turned his attention to artificial intelligence. Papers such as A.I. and Our Economic Future and his 2026 collaboration with Chris Tonetti, Past Automation and Future A.I.: How Weak Links Tame the Growth Explosion, examine how advances in automation may reshape economic growth in the decades ahead.

The central insight is deceptively simple:

Economic output is ultimately constrained by its weakest components.

Weak Links: The Economic Version of Amdahl’s Law

Anyone with a background in computing will recognize a familiar pattern.

Amdahl’s Law tells us that even if part of a program becomes infinitely fast, overall performance remains constrained by the portion that cannot be parallelized. Accelerating 90 percent of a workload by a factor of a million still leaves the remaining 10 percent as a hard limit on total speedup.

Jones’ “weak links” framework applies a similar logic to the broader economy.

In task-based models where tasks are complements rather than easy substitutes, every task matters. Extraordinary progress in a handful of areas does not automatically translate into extraordinary gains for the system as a whole if critical bottlenecks remain.

Historically, a large share of productivity growth has come from automation—the transfer of tasks from human labor to rapidly improving machines and capital. Jones and Tonetti argue that much of past productivity growth can be understood through this lens. The breakthrough is not merely building better machines; it is expanding the range of tasks that machines can perform.

The AI Timeline Paradox

Looking ahead, the same logic applies to AI.

Even as advanced models automate larger portions of cognitive and physical work, growth may continue to be constrained by:

  • Tasks that still require human judgment or participation
  • Regulatory and institutional frictions
  • Physical-world coordination challenges

As a result, Jones’ modeling suggests that economic growth may accelerate substantially while still unfolding more gradually than either enthusiasts or skeptics expect.

This perspective offers a useful middle ground between two popular extremes: the belief that transformative AI-driven abundance is imminent and the belief that AI’s impact will prove largely illusory. Progress can be both real and constrained. The chain remains only as strong as its weakest link.

From Theory to Practice

One reason Jones’ work resonates with me is that it extends beyond economics.

Many successful builders and leaders instinctively operate according to a weak-links philosophy. Whether in engineering, manufacturing, logistics, or organizational design, the greatest gains often come from identifying the single constraint that limits the system and focusing disproportionate effort on removing it.

Consider how Elon Musk has approached challenges at Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Across very different domains, a recurring pattern emerges: identify the binding constraint, concentrate resources there, remove it, and then move to the next bottleneck.

Jones’ framework provides an economic explanation for why this approach can be so effective. In systems composed of complementary tasks, relieving a key constraint can create benefits that ripple throughout the entire system.

Why This Resonates

What I find most compelling about Jones’ work is its intellectual balance.

It neither dismisses the remarkable capabilities emerging from frontier AI systems nor assumes that technological progress automatically translates into social or economic transformation. Instead, it directs attention toward the frictions, constraints, and complementarities that determine how change actually unfolds.

At a time when conversations about AI often oscillate between utopian abundance and existential catastrophe, this framework offers something rarer: a disciplined way of thinking about progress.

The weak-links perspective reminds us that the future may be shaped less by spectacular breakthroughs than by our ability to identify and address the constraints that prevent those breakthroughs from creating widespread value.

A Chain and a Compass

There is a quiet power in recognizing weak links—whether in economies, organizations, projects, or our own lives. The places where progress feels slow or frustrating are often where the greatest leverage resides.

Jones’ research provides a language for understanding those constraints, and his move to the Anthropic Institute suggests that some of the most important conversations about AI’s future may increasingly take place at the intersection of research, policy, and real-world deployment.

For that reason alone, this is a development worth watching.

If you’re interested in exploring the underlying ideas, I recommend starting with Jones’ recent papers on his Stanford faculty site, along with Anthropic’s announcement of the Institute and its mission.