Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Thursday!

Three years ago, Mackenzie Burnett, the founder and CEO of Not Boring Capital portfolio company, Ambrook, wrote the first in a short-lived series we called The Founder’s Letter. At the time, it was basically a dream.

Today, Ambrook is a real business with more than 2,500 customers across the country, helping them realize their American Dream.

And on Tuesday, Ambrook announced that it’s raised $29 million, including a $26.1 million Series A co-led by Thrive Capital and Dylan Field at Field Ventures.

When Mackenzie reached out to talk about how she should start to tell her story more publicly, we decided to have a conversation about what Ambrook is doing, how, and why, and to publish a follow-up to the Founder’s Letter, which we’re re-posting from Ambrook.

She called it, “America, the Beautiful.” There’s no better story to publish heading into Fourth of July weekend. As Mackenzie said in our conversation, “The American experiment is many different experiments actually.” We talk about many of the companies building Vertically Integrated companies to make America stronger; Ambrook is an example of grassroots American Dynamism, making the hundreds of thousands of small businesses who make America strong and resilient stronger.

You can find our full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

God Bless America.

America, the Beautiful

Mackenzie Burnett, Ambrook

On Tuesday, Ambrook announced $29M in funding raised, including a $26.1M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Dylan Field at Field Ventures, with continued support from Homebrew Capital and participation from Designer Fund, BoxGroup, Mischief, Not Boring, and others.

When I wrote our first Founder’s Letter, it was mostly about what we hoped to do. Three years later, this one’s about what we’ve actually done. Thousands of producers are using Ambrook to make better financial decisions, grow their operations, and invest more confidently in their land. And I feel more sure than ever that we’re on the right path.

Ambrook is building the financial infrastructure for American industry – starting with agriculture – and the opportunity in front of us is massive. We’re still early, but the impact is already visible. Now it’s time to grow.

Part I

Let me tell you a story.

Imagine you grew up on a ranch in the Mountain West. Went to school, hoping maybe you can come back one day. To help out, and eventually continue the family legacy.

But then, a family emergency. You have to take over the books from your dad all of a sudden, to keep the operation running. Not to mention run the operation itself.

This is the real story of our customer, Chase. His family runs cattle across 30,000 acres in Utah and Wyoming.

His first year, he had to wrangle the operation’s legacy accounting software. It had worked for the family business up to this point, but it still took up too much time and left him without a clear view of his numbers day to day.

Until he found Ambrook.

Chase’s dad is recovered now. And has come back to a family operation more resilient, not just financially, but intergenerationally too.

Since I wrote my last letter, over 2,500 operations in all 50 states have now used Ambrook to double their business, cut bookkeeping time in half, get better loan terms, and make land management decisions with confidence. Those customers have spent and managed $1.6B with Ambrook and saved an estimated 75,000 hours in the process.

Our customers have told us they feel less anxious and more optimistic about their future. That they feel empowered in ways they hadn’t before. (We had one couple who even told us they decided to get married because of a conversation with the Ambrook team about their finances.)

Because instead of feeling behind on their books, many of our customers can now focus on answering the questions that matter: How much have I spent so far on this herd? What will it cost to finish? Will this actually pencil out? And can my operation and my family thrive?

There are so many stories I want to tell. Stories of our customers, of our team. What we build and how we build it.

But first, let me zoom out.

For the first time in generations, most Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. That type of pessimism is corrosive.

Starting a small business used to be the way to build a better future for your family. Owning your time, owning your labor, owning that identity and tradition over generations. Staying independent.

It was never easy, but it was straightforward enough.

Small businesses are not simple anymore. Especially in agriculture – the first industry we’re building for – survival has meant diversification. A cattle ranch that traditionally sold its commercial herd at the stockyard, might now also run a direct-to-consumer meat program, a seasonal event business, and a trucking arm. These operations are balance sheet-heavy, multi-P&L, and deeply local.

Most financial software was built for simpler business models than that: a single enterprise, clean books. But that’s not the world we operate in. Today’s producers are managing herds, equipment, inventory, and land across long and volatile cycles, both remotely and in person. They’ve taken on more risk, added multiple revenue streams with countless payment methods, and adapted their operations to survive.

In doing so, they’ve outgrown the old tools, but many can’t afford to manage the enterprise resource planning systems built for their newfound level of complexity.

Some are just trying to get organized for tax time. Others want real-time, enterprise-level insights. Both deserve better tools.

Ambrook fills that gap with modern, collaborative financial software that meets producers and their families where they are. Accounting, payments, and cash management built for operators who spend more time in the field than the office.

Operators like Pittman and JoEllen, a married couple who run a grain farming and beef cattle operation in my home state of Maryland.

“The path we were on before, we were like a ship in the ocean with a small hole in it – just getting lower and lower and lower. With Ambrook, that’s been patched and there’s now a pump pumping the water out, and it’s starting to come back up again. It’s been a turn in the right direction for all of my operations.”

Clarity in the now drives confidence in the future. Confidence builds optimism. And that optimism is contagious.

Part II

I think of our work at Ambrook as American dynamism meets the American Dream.

Instead of top-down technological advancement, we’re working from the ground up to enable family-run businesses to become more profitable and resilient.

When one operation succeeds, it lifts up suppliers, neighbors, the whole community. Better land and resources, supply chain and food supply. That’s the America I want to help build.

True optimism comes from seeing real results. Effective land and resource management can strengthen the bottom line and build long-term resilience against shifts in the environment and the economy. We’ve seen that when producers have clarity, stewardship and profitability go hand in hand.

To us, that’s grassroots American dynamism.

Part III

I think how we build is just as important as what we build. The world is changing. How we build technology is becoming increasingly disrupted by AI. Its own adventure.

But when I was thinking about writing about our fundraise, I kept on being drawn back to the quiet moments with the team. The more human moments that make the hard things about building a company worth it. How we work, and how we spend the time in between.

I wanted to share some of those memories with you.

It was Eric’s second week. Do you want to come to a traditional pig harvest? I Slacked him. Sure, he said. What is it?

A few weeks later, we were elbow deep in pig’s blood, helping Howard make blood sausage. Howard’s a customer now.

You can see where I did the controlled burn. Katie’s dad gestured at the grass interspersed with clumps of small yellow wildfl…

Welcome to the 1,000 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 244,199 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Wednesday! Sending this one a little later than usual because we’re timing it with an announcement about a portfolio company and previous Deep Dive subject:

Wander raised $50+ million in a Series B led QED and Fifth Wall

The fun part is, Wander did it by throwing out a lot of what we discussed in the first Wander Deep Dive — which, at the time, I said was the absolute right way to do things — and growing insanely fast while maintaining its high quality bar.

I started doing these Deeper Dives, following up on companies I’d written Deep Dives on in the past to understand what I got right, what I got wrong, and what we could learn from both, in March, with a Deeper Dive on Primer. I gotta admit, I was a little smug: Primer was doing great, in large part because it had gone more vertically integrated, which is exactly my thesis on how these things should be built. “And if you want to fix K-12 education,” I wrote, “you need to build schools.”

Welp… over the past two years, Wander shut down the REIT I praised, went asset-light, grew from 13 to more than 1,000 locations, grew GMV 6x over the past 18 months, and is onboarding over $1 billion worth of real estate monthly. And while growing, its NPS has actually ticked up to 85.

Being wrong and learning is why I do the Deeper Dives! If companies could be built as cleanly as I can write an essay, I’d be a billionaire. You’ve got to play the game; the lessons emerge from the messiness, and from following the best companies as they evolve.

Read the essay below, watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify, and read the transcript.

Let’s get to it.

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Wander: Deeper Dive

I first wrote about Wander over two years ago, in January 2023. The theme of the piece was that Wander was the fulfillment of a couple of ideas I’ve had over the years: Natively Integrated Companies, which I wrote about in June 2019, and Zillbnb (combining short-term rentals and iBuying), which I wrote about in June 2020.

Wander had brought the dream to life and cleverly cheated the laws of marketplace physics. By launching a REIT, Wander Atlas, it had engineered a business that had the product control of a vertically integrated company without the balance sheet intensity. I wrote, “Simply put, Atlas gives Wander a vehicle through which to scale its portfolio in a capital efficient manner while retaining the full control of the experience it believes is required to generate hospitality yields.”

This, I argued, is how a startup should compete with a giant marketplace like Airbnb: vertically integrate to create a more consistent product experience and to capture more of the dollars in each transaction. Ownership, I believed, was a necessary precondition of consistent quality.

John Andrew Entwistle , Wander’s founder and CEO, believed that too. In our conversation, he admitted, “To be clear, that was also my thesis. My thesis was that the actual ownership was totally critical.”

And it might have been! The product was delightful. I invested in the REIT and got a 22% return over a couple of years. There was something magical about owning a piece of the vacation properties you stay in.

“I think that's something I'm really proud of—that the thesis was correct,” John Andrew told me, reflecting on what turned out to be an experiment. “The institutionalization of vacation rentals as an asset class, the idea of guests owning a piece of the portfolio, it was all correct. It was just a question of how quickly it could scale in a really turbulent macro.”

See, when John Andrew and the team conceived of the REIT, interest rates were still near historic lows.

That meant two things: the REIT’s mortgage payments were lower, and the 8% yield it aimed for was more attractive. By the time the REIT launched in October 2022, the 10-year US Treasury yield had jumped up to about 4%. When I wrote the piece in January 2023, it had come back down to 3.5%. Over the next nine months, it marched all the way up to a high right under 5%. Mortgage rates are some spread over treasuries, and investors in a REIT expect some yield over treasuries for the risk they were taking, and so, Wander was squeezed on each side.

As markets crumbled in early 2023 and yields rose, Wander had a choice: grow more slowly with the existing product, or take a risk on a new one. By May, less than four months after the Deep Dive, it had both made its decision and executed against it. Wander launched Wander Managed (which would become Wander Operated).

What Wander Operated hoped to do is the real Holy Grail for real estate startups: maintain consistent quality and control without actually owning the asset. The benefits are obvious: faster scale and software-like margins. The drawbacks… you have to learn those by doing.

It’s what we tried to do at Breather many, many times. Practically each time a new senior person joined the company, we ran it back. They would say, “Instead of signing leases, we should do an asset-light model, like Airbnb!” Genius. We’d have meetings about it. We’d talk to landlords, who would invariably be uninterested in taking risk on a space instead of the certainty of a lease, particularly when they had mortgages to service. We’d talk to people who already had spaces that they were renting out on other platforms and convince them to put the space on Breather, too, which they would, because why not, but inevitably, they would not keep the space up to the standards we set and our customer support team would get frequent calls from our customers who were incensed that the space they had booked with us had been double-booked by someone else. So we’d kill the asset light plan, until the next new person came in with the genius idea to do asset-light, but right this time, and the cycle started over.

That’s why I thought the REIT was brilliant. Assuming a managed asset-light model was impossible, for the reasons listed above and others, then synthetically creating something that looked asset-light but was fully controlled was the best possible option.

And owning homes worked. Although the number of homes was small – 13 at the time of writing in 2023, when Wander financed the homes off its own balance sheet and through a $100 million credit facility with Credit Suisse - occupancy was an absurd 80-90% (compare to ~40% for Airbnbs) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) were in the 80-90 range, too. Homes were profitable and loved. The plan was, with the REIT, to scale up that profitability and love without scaling up the demands on Wander’s balance sheet, one home at a time.

Necessity, however, is the mother of experimentation.

Rates shot up, making home buying at least temporarily untenable. To add insult to injury, Credit Suisse, with which Wander had the $100 million credit facility, blew up and had to sell itself to UBS.

Wander had a choice: grow more slowly or adapt.

To John Andrew, the choice was obvious: “Can you imagine how lame I would have been if it was just like, ‘Yeah guys, interest rates shot up, so we're just going to not grow for the next three years?’ That's not cool.”

So instead, Wander decided to grow, and to grow fast.

It wound down its credit facility with Credit S…

Welcome to Episode 008 of Hyperlegible, a Not Boring Radio production.

To find all of the excellent essays we’ve discussed on Hyperlegible, head to Readwise.

Golden Age with Mike Solana is live at: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

The guest selection process for Hyperlegible is three parts art, half part science, and four parts serendipity.

It boils down to: if someone writes an essay I love, I want to talk to them about it.

Sometimes, I’ve never heard of someone, then they write something amazing and I want to meet them and learn about them. Others, I read everything a person has written, so I have to wait for something that resonates extra, and that encapsulates how I think of them perfectly.

Mike Solana, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pirate Wires, is in the latter camp. I read Pirate Wires every morning when I wake up; its Three Morning Takes is the best-written way to load three things that have happened in the world into my brain. Pirate Wires’ staff is envy-inducingly talented, each with their own voice that all fit the Pirate Wires voice.

Every so often, though, the EIC comes down from his EIC chair, whips out a keyboard, and writes essays of his own. I get an extra little dopamine hit when I see those.

Last week, Solana wrote a piece called Golden Age that sits in the bullseye of the Venn Diagram between things I’m interested in — building new cities, cutting red tape, and painting an optimistic vision for America — and what I love about Solana’s writing — “I took a few days off from the internet last week to spend some time with my family at Disney World, and I found the place, as I have found it since my early childhood trips to Fort Wilderness, almost overwhelmingly inspiring” — that I had to talk to him about it.

In our first LIVE Hyperlegible conversation (thanks to Matt Marlinski at The Manhattan Lab for hosting!), we discuss:

* Solana summarizes Golden Age

* Disney World as a blueprint for charter cities

* America’s building paralysis vs. China’s ability to build Disney’s vision in Shenzen

* Why Disney is the guy for Solana, the one he wants his career to look like

* Rare earths, chips, and regulatory free zones

* Scaling Pirate Wires like Disney scaled Disney

* Why past charter city efforts have failed

* What life in Golden City could look like

* Special development zones vs. regulation gridlock

* Culture change through media and narrative

* Who could be the next Walt Disney?

* Solana on “Moral Inversion” and cultural decay

* Final takeaway: “Where there is no vision, the people perish”

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mike Solana. Links to a transcript, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts are right down below so you can listen early and often.

Thank you to our partners for supporting Not Boring:

Ramp: the official Business Card of Not Boring.

Rox: AI agents to help your best sellers sell better.

Vanta: easy compliance for startups who want to grow their revenue.

Readwise: the best software for smart, curious readers.

There Are Many Ways to Hyperlegible

If you’re the reading type, I used Claude to turn the messy YouTube transcript into something well-formatted and clean.

Hyperlegible 008 - Mike Solana - Transcript

As always, you can find the full conversation wherever you like by subscribing to Not Boring Radio:

YouTube:

Spotify:

Apple Podcasts:

While you’re there, give us a like, comment, and subscribe so we can bring great essays to more people.

You can also find links to all of the essays and conversations at readwise.io/hyperlegible. Thanks to our friends and sponsors at Readwise, you can head there for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account.

If you want more to read, here are two of Solana’s reading recommendations, one of his and one by QNTM. Save them to Readwise and come back to them:

Solana’s favorite essay he’s written:

⁠Moral Inversion⁠

One book Solana thinks everyone should read:

⁠There is No Antimemetics Division

Big thanks to Solana for joining me, and to Jim Portela for editing!

Thanks for listening,

Packy⁠

Nobody on the internet writes about all of the complexity involved in actually building things -- from homes to jet engines -- better than ⁠Brian Potter⁠, the author of ⁠Construction Physics⁠.

I am a huge fan of Brian's writing. I use it as a reference for a lot of my pieces. I once tweeted, "Construction Physics is a national treasure and the president should give Brian Potter a medal or czar job or something."

So I was thrilled to get the excuse to talk to him about a bunch of his essays by talking to him about this one specific one, ⁠50 Things I've Learned Writing Construction Physics⁠.

Here's the one overarching theme he's discovered writing over 600,000 words in Construction Physics: "Things are always more complicated than they seem. Simple explanations very rarely exist."

We discuss that and other lessons by digging into pre-fabbed and manufactured homes, jet engines, gas turbines, windmills, nuclear reactors, batteries, Nobel Prizes, skyscrapers, and even Titanium. Just reading that list, you can probably tell why I like Brian's writing so much. He writes in-depth about all of the topics I love, and I learn so much from him each time.

What impressed me most is just how humble Brian is. He knows 1000x more about this stuff than I do, but when he's not entirely certain of an answer, he says so. That's probably in part due to his background as a structural engineer, and in part a response to the lesson that everything is more complicated than it seems. I

hope you learn as much from our conversation as I did, and that you go back and read everything he's written.

To get you started, here are some of the essays we discuss and that Brian recommends, both his stuff and others'.

Potter Essays

- How to Build 3,000 Airplanes in Five Years

- ⁠Why It's So Hard to Build a Jet Engine⁠

- ⁠What Learning by Doing Looks Like⁠

- ⁠How California Turned Against Growth⁠

- ⁠Another Day in Katerradise⁠

- ⁠The Birth of the Grid⁠

Recommended and Discussed Essays

- ⁠Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail⁠ - John Salvatier

- ⁠Timing Technology: Lessons From The Media Lab⁠ - Gwern

- ⁠100 Tallest Completed Buildings⁠

- ⁠Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation⁠ - Byrne Hobart & Tobias Huber

You can find this and all of the articles we discuss on Hyperlegible in one place thanks to our sponsor, Readwise - Visit readwise.io/hyperlegible for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account.

Big thanks to Jim Portela for editing!

In this timely conversation, Conrad Bastable (https://x.com/ConradBastable) breaks down his epic essay "Forsaking Industrialism" and explores why the West has abandoned manufacturing while China built a world-beating industrial platform over decades.

Read it here: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/forsaking-industrialism-the-most-expensive-thing-you-didnt-buy

We dive into how EU regulations inadvertently benefited Chinese manufacturing, why tariffs alone can't solve America's industrial challenges, and what it would take to rebuild America's manufacturing capabilities.

Conrad explains the concept of "platform economies" that China has mastered, why capital markets naturally push against long-term industrial investments, and the uncomfortable trade-offs between principles and prosperity that nations must navigate. From electric dirt bikes to BMW's battery dilemma, this wide-ranging discussion offers a fresh perspective on the most urgent debate in America.

Conrad's reading recommendations:

- Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007

Conrad's other essays:

- "Full Stack of Society" https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-full-stack-of-society-can-you-make-a-whole-society-wealthier-full-version

- "Escalation Theory" https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/escalation-theory-compliance-violence-and-overachievement-in-society

- "Monetization & Monopolies" https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/monetization-amp-monopolies-how-the-internet-you-loved-died

Sponsored by Readwise - Visit readwise.io/hyperlegible for a free trial and get all Hyperlegible articles automatically added to your account: https://readwise.io/reader/view/hyperlegible Big thanks to Jim Portela for editing!

Pseudonymous writer ⁠Parakeet⁠ joins me to discuss her viral essay "⁠Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization⁠."

I first heard about Parakeet a couple weeks ago when I saw half of my Twitter feed and half of my Substack Notes feed sharing her essay, including a bunch of people I wouldn't expect to share an essay with "Monkey Titty" in the title. I read it immediately, and saw why. Parakeet describes universally applicable ideas with the color turned up to 11 so they stick.

We explore the "dementia personality" - how our core thought loops shape who we are and might one day define us. Parakeet shares insights from working at a dementia facility, explains her Skittle Factory metaphor for personality (and researching Skittle Factories), and reveals her unconventional productivity hack that's transformed her writing output. We talk about her writing process, gifs, why more people should read George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and what she learned from her once-half-paralyzed dance teacher. Plus, hear the bizarre true story behind the "Monkey Titty" portion of the essay title and why Parakeet believes everyone should re-read Atlas Shrugged as an adult.

Key moments:

(5:35) Origins of the dementia personality concept

(10:30) Can we change our core mental loops? (15:18) Skittle Factory Mass Extinction Events

(21:50) Rewiring your brain through Luigi Jazz

(30:05) Why this essay got shared by so many smart people

(31:50) Using gifs(40:31) Parakeet's productivity hack

Reading Recs from Parakeet:

Parakeet: ⁠YOUR EYES ARE LEAKING CORPORATE CUM™⁠

Parakeet: ⁠ALGORITHMIC GROOMING OF YOUR INNER CHILD™⁠

George Orwell: ⁠Politics and the English Language⁠

Ayn Rand: ⁠Atlas Shrugged⁠

Hyperlegible is sponsored by my friends at Readwise, who build software that helps you get the most out of your reading. If you want to give it a try, go to ⁠readwise.io/hyperlegible⁠ where you start a free trial and get all the articles discussed here on Hyperlegible automatically added to your account.

Thanks to Jim Portela for editing and getting the parakeet animation to work!

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Wednesday!

After almost two years, Julian Lehr is BACK to writing.

He wrote a piece called The case against conversational interfaces, arguing that we're not going to be talking to our computers instead of using graphical user interfaces. GUIs work pretty well!

Instead, he thinks that conversational interfaces are going to be a complement to existing workflows. We'll talk to our AI while doing what we do now, to do things like tell other apps to start doing things while we stay in flow.

Julian shares his writing process -- chat through a draft with AI, write ~60% of it by hand, and then pull it together in Figma, or sometimes, Google Docs. He said that like some people need a change of scenery to write, he needs a change of tools.

So why did he come back after two years in the wilderness? Simply: too many people were too consistently wrong on the internet. After seeing one too many "we're all going to be chatting with our computers" takes, he had to write the other side. And he delivered.

We cover a lot, from why he keeps coming back to Kevin Kwok’s Arc of Collaboration to how he uses his "thanks to" section to status signal. For this essay, he thanked Blake Robbins, Chris Paik, Jackson Dahl, Johannes Shickling, Jordan Singer, and Signulll -- an absurdly high signal roster.

Conversations like this one - where I get to nerd out with the people I've read for so long - is exactly why I'm doing Hyperlegible. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

You can find this and all Hyperlegible episodes wherever you watch and listen:

YouTube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Hyperlegible is now sponsored by our friends at Readwise, which builds software that helps you get the most out of your reading. When you go to readwise.io/hyperlegible, you can find all of the essays that we discuss on Hyperlegible in one place. I want this to be the best place to go whenever you’re looking for something fresh and high-quality to read (and listen to).

We’re getting serious over here. I’ve started working with an editor, Jim Portela, so if you notice that this episode is higher quality, that’s why.

As always, I hope you enjoy, and please keep sending me your favorite essays!

We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a Weekly Dose, and I will be back with a fresh Deep Dive next week.

Thanks for listening,

Packy

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! Kicking off the week by sharing Episode 002 of Hyperlegible.

This is a conversation with Utsav Mamoria on his excellent essay, How to live an intellectually rich life, which broke out of containment in India and raced across the globe to the tune of 1,100 likes at the time of recording.

For good reason: Utsav combines philosophy, mathematics, biographies, personal experience, and hand-drawn sketches to create a map – quite literally – for living an intellectually rich life. He takes us on a journey through Moradoom, Igamor, and Evermore, before arriving at Luminspere, the Mountains of Knowledge with tools like the Axe of Satisfaction, Torch of Curiosity, and Oars of Consistency.

Utsav weaves together so many ideas so beautifully that you just need to read it, and then listen. Or listen, and then read it.

His one sentence takeaway: Consistency trumps everything.

But there were a lot of good sentences. Here are a few of my favorites:

"The way to live an intellectually rich life is to focus on two things: Put ideas above sensations, and try to have more diverse ideas than the ones you already have."

On Epistemic Anxiety: "Accept that you don't know everything about everything and you don't need to have a point of view on everything... develop expertise in a few fields while trying to read as broadly as you can."

"Building worlds in fiction is a given, but building worlds in non-fiction is done a lot less."

"Write something which has meaning beyond the current moment. It has to go beyond the zeitgeist."

"All learning requires us to suffer an injury to our self-esteem."

You can find Utsav on X at @utsavmamoria and subscribe to Tumse Na Ho Paayega here.

Going forward, I plan on releasing a few of these per week. This week, I have three killer interviews lined up, and just brought on an editor so we can increase both the quality and the cadence. North Star: when there’s something really great written on the internet, you can expect to find its author in the Hyperlegible feed within a few days.

I likely won’t send you an email every time (still playing with that), but you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, and I may send a weekly roundup on Sundays with all of the conversations in one place. Subscribing helps you curate the internet, and helps us grow this thing to bring the good words to as many people as we can.

Hyperlegible is now sponsored by our friends at Readwise, which builds software that helps you get the most out of your reading. I’ve been using Readwise for years to support my newsletter, my curiosity, and now, this podcast.

I wanted to partner with Readwise specifically for a few reasons. One: I use it every day, multiple times a day. When I find an essay I love, I save it to Readwise, where I can highlight and annotate it to prep for either inclusion in essays or conversations on Hyperlegible. Two: I’m an investor in Readwise. Three: they partner with my favorite written-word-related podcasts, Founders and How I Write.

And Four (and most importantly): when you go to readwise.io/hyperlegible, you can find all of the essays that we discuss on Hyperlegible in one place. I want this to be the best place to go whenever you’re looking for something fresh and high-quality to read.

I am having a blast doing this podcast. It’s an excuse to talk to my favorite writers, and to share the fruits of their hours and hours wrestling with ideas with you.

As always, I hope you enjoy, and please keep sending me your favorite essays!

Thanks for listening,

Packy

For the first episode of Hyperlegible, I talked to my friend Tina He (@fkpxls on twitter) who writes the excellent Fakepixels, which she recently brought back to life after a four year hibernation and on which she’s dropped gems each week since.

Last week, Tina wrote an essay called Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective about something surprising she’s noticed: AI is causing a lot of people to work more, not less. Since you can now do more with each hour, the opportunity cost of each hour not worked is higher! The treadmill spins faster and faster.

Read it, and subscribe to Fakepixels while you’re there: https://fakepixels.substack.com/p/jevons-paradox-a-personal-perspective

If you're wondering how (or whether) to compete in the age of AI, Tina's personal perspective will help. Please let us know what you think and share your favorite essays with me @packym on twitter.

In April 2022, Packy wrote a Deep Dive on Primer:

https://www.notboring.co/p/primer-the-ambitious-home-for-ambitious

Three years later, a lot has changed. Primer is building schools. The opportunity is both bigger and more challenging than it was then.

In this conversation, Packy and Primer CEO Ryan Delk discuss the need to fix in K-12 education. Ryan shares insights on Primer's transition from a software-focused company to a vertically integrated Microschool model. He also addresses regulatory hurdles, the market potential for innovative educational solutions, and the vision for making quality education accessible to all families.

If you want to build a vertically integrated company to solve a really big, important problem, you need to listen to this.

Takeaways

K-12 education reform is a civilizationally important issue.

Primer aims to tackle the hardest problems in education.

The transition to microschools was driven by the need for a more effective educational model.

Regulatory challenges are significant but can be overcome with strategic action.

The market for education is vast, with opportunities for innovation.

Primer's microschool model aims to provide quality education at a lower cost.

The importance of community involvement in launching new schools.

AI and software can significantly improve educational outcomes.

The future of education will involve diverse options for families.

Investors are increasingly supportive of innovative education solutions.

Chapters

00:00The Importance of K-12 Education Reform

02:18The Shift from Software to Microschools

04:04The Pivot to Microschools

06:28Building a New Education Model

09:03Scaling and Integrating Education Solutions

11:43Balancing Control and Innovation in Education

14:18The Role of Software in Education

17:15Future of Education and Personalization

21:56The Future of Education Funding

24:14AI Tutors and Their Limitations

26:12The Shift in Educational Structures Post-COVID

28:59Addressing Concerns About School Choice

31:19Breaking the Narrative of Private Schools

33:58The Vision for Free Education

36:49Navigating the Incumbent Education System

39:15Market Opportunities in Education

41:19The Future Landscape of Education

43:09Growth Projections for Primer