That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity.

Let’s break it down:

People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one?

Pick your people, pick your future.

Complicated: If it can be made simpler and just as effective, then by all means, please do so. If you can tell a more compelling and actionable story, do that as well. But ‘complicated’ just might mean, “we don’t understand it yet.”

Understand: Few people understand how the iphone works, or even the refrigerator. But that doesn’t mean we can’t effectively use it. The people who were moved by The Rite of Spring or Miles Davis or Esperanza Spalding might not have understood the music but it still succeeded.

People walk away when it’s not worth the effort to pay attention. People ignore innovation when the network effect is insufficient to overcome their fear. People rarely understand something the same way the creator does, but that’s okay.

Our first job is to do work that matters for people who care. It helps to follow that up with the scaffolding needed to cause cultural change, so the idea spreads.

But don’t dumb it down to reach people who don’t want to be reached in the first place.

Automating a strategically sub-optimal process or workflow doesn’t make it markedly better. In some cases it’s even worse (eg a low converting marketing funnel can churn through your target list even faster if an agent is doing most of the work). And something that’s been automated – recently ‘improved’ – is even less likely to want to be revisited post-optimization. Human (and organizational) nature that you’re entrenching the process further vs re-examining it.

You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading this blog. There are millions of songs on Spotify that have only been listened to a few times each.

Not only are more humans publishing more often on more topics, but we’ve built LLMs that are always ready to create even more content, on demand, for an audience of one.

For generations, content has created the demand for more content. A few movies increased our desire to watch more movies. AM radio created the demand for FM, which sold more records, and then Napster magnified our desire for even more music.

Until we hit the wall of enough.

The ennui of infinite content is reversing our spiraling desire for more of it.

It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much.

Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.

That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”

The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.  In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’  The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation.  However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.

Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one.  This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history.  This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.

Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).

How do you view the American Indian experience from past to present?

“Certain things capture your eye but pursue only that which captures your heart. “ (Choctaw Indian proverb)

The way I see it, it’s one side to read about the American Indian  experience throughout history by way of textbook facts about the various tribes existing in America. But it’s another matter to see up close the real Native American experience through through real life artifacts and other visual evidence of their actual living conditions from the past to now.  Simply put, as a past history teacher, my students memorized dates and event facts about Native Americans for mandatory testing purposes,  but in doing so they did not feel the real emotional story about the triumphs and tragedies of these people. Take for example the historic time in the early 19th century when the Choctaw were one of several civilized tribes to be forcibly removed by the U.S federal government from  their ancestral homeland in the southeastern lands of early America. In retrospect, why didn’t I adapt my curriculum to help students make personal connections to the hardships Indians faced in journeying thousands of miles on foot along the  famed “Trail of Tears” route to what would later become  the state of Oklahoma?

Take the Choctaw Indian nation in particular then as a teachable playback for this blog. For on our visit to the modernistic Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant, Oklahoma on day seven of our road trip, I of course took  academic interest in key historic events  concerning this Choctaw spanning several centuries of broken treaties, forced homeland movements and legal attempts to disband the Choctaw’s politically and socially as a united  nation. Yet it was quite revealing that I also found a distinct emotional connection to colorfully  designed artwork, symbolic emblems and banners along with some powerfully expressive  human and animal figures representative of Choctaw culture. See examples of these images in my photo set below.

Looking more to the present, it’s clear to me that the Choctaw nation recovered from those tragedies by reestablishing full territory rights and now remain strong and resilient as a fully functioning and united self government for its living residents today. Thus let history be retold in our education system with the positive Choctaw experience in mind to inspire more respect for our  Native American tribes. 

Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw.

After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the job at 1:30 am, he was arrested and charged with a felony.

A hundred years ago, the default was that pedestrians were in charge. Cars were guests, only going where they were invited. But the persistent productivity and cultural force of the automobile carried the day, and the default flipped. The roads must roll.

If it can be paved or straightened or sped up, it is. If the car wants it, the answer is “yes.”

80,000,000 people have died as a result of automobiles over time. (It’s harder to estimate how many lives were saved or enriched by this massive shift in the transport of food, people and resources.) A successful system can redraw our maps and our expectations.

When systems gain momentum like this, it’s because they create urgent and immediate value, enough to disrupt the status quo. And once the status quo has changed, the momentum becomes normal, the way things are, until persistent community action (or another, even more relentless system) changes the defaults.

The system doesn’t care about Joseph Brandlin’s kid. It cares about the flow and the status of those that maintain that flow.

Ironically, his arrest is almost certainly going to result in a stop sign being installed. Using one system (the media) to change another.

We’re all living through the biggest and fastest systemic shifts in a century, whether we want to or not. The internet, healthcare, the aging of populations and now, particularly, AI–they’re changing defaults. It’s possible (even likely) that individuals will go out in the middle of the night and seek to change something in their neck of the woods, but as we’ve seen with system change before, that’s not usually the reliable path to make a lasting impact.

Every system eventually acts as if it’s more important than the people it was built to serve. HAL isn’t going to open the pod bay door merely because you insist. But persistent systemic action often bends the system toward better. And better is up to us.

“The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not.”

This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren’t the same.

Except we’re not mathematicians doing a math problem (at least most of us). Odds are how we navigate the world. When they’re sufficiently low, the useful approach is to assume that they’re zero. Sort of how we deal with invisible signals: There’s sound in a very quiet room, but we can’t hear it. There’s light in a very dark room, but we can’t see it. These never go to zero, but we treat them as if they do.

The story of playing very long odds might give you hope or solace or energize you. That’s what they make movies about, after all. But in practice, you’re buying that story, not a useful chance of winning something.

Paul McGowan points out that the difference between a $500 stereo and a $5000 stereo is enormous. But the difference between the more expensive stereo’s sound and one costing $50,000 is vanishingly small… Soon it becomes a story, not a sound.

Buy the best story you can afford, with all the benefits it comes with. But don’t be confused by the odds or tiny differences. They’re probably zero.

Each morning I hand in my too cool GenX card for a few minutes and go STRAIGHT BOOMER while using Facebook to wish my friends a Happy Birthday. That’s right Birthday Notifications Product Manager, I’m your 365 DAU. Some folks publish their ages while others have them hidden but quite often I’m surprised by how young most people still are – in the sense that maybe we met while they were just out of school or in their first job, and this was 10-15 years ago, so they’re early 30s or whatever in 2026. For context, I’m 52 and have been out in Bay Area since 1998 — many of the folks in my network were born later, the Millennial cohort especially over-represented on Facebook I’d imagine.

It also occurs to me that something different might be happening on the other end of the connection: the Birthday celebrant feeling they are so old. My own projection? Possibly. I’ve written before about my 20s and 30s trying to outrun a ‘failure tiger‘ and then in my 40s coming to grips with moving into an ‘elder’ statesman tier. But conversations among ourselves suggest this cycle repeats itself every generation. Plus the hastening pace of both signal and noise within the AI supercycle has its own exhaustion (exasperation?) for many.

Rarely does it help to tell someone they shouldn’t feel the way they do, so dismissing their ‘I’m getting so old’ without recognizing the power of those thoughts would be ineffective, despite the bluntness of this post’s title. Instead I’ll just reiterate what I said in the first paragraph: the “HBD ” poke you see from me isn’t just a ‘way to go’ but it’s a ‘you’ve got a ways to go.’ Lots done already and lots more time, energy, and cycles ahead.

What’s your favorite road “off the beaten track?”

“Look for chances to take the less-traveled roads. There are no wrong turns.” — Susan Magsam

There are many fascinating towns scattered along the vanishing highway known as Route 66 in the American West. On day nine of our road trip, it was therefore an easy decision to choose Tucumcari, New Mexico, for a two-day stopover.

At first glance, there isn’t much to do in this quiet, almost ghost-town setting. Yet at the same time, Tucumcari feels very much alive—as if I’ve stepped into an authentic 1950s movie set. It’s a version of small-town America shaped by the years following World War II, where hometown diners, classic cars, and family-run motels still define the landscape.

So as I slowly cruised through town, several discoveries stood out. Eye-catching murals stretched across building walls, telling vivid stories of Route 66’s past and its rugged Western surroundings. A gigantic welcome sculpture commanded attention at the edge of town. There was also the full-size teepee at Tee Pee Curios, a giant sombrero jutting out from La Cita Restaurant, and an old Texaco station that felt frozen in time.

Even more striking were the vintage cars—an Edsel, a Buick, and a Chevy coupe—parked outside aging motels, as if waiting for travelers from another era to return and drive them around town.

I do wonder how long Tucumcari can preserve this time-warp atmosphere. But if you’re a cross-country traveler who appreciates places “off the beaten path”, this “Mother Road” town offers something rare—a breath of fresh, unhurried life far removed from the rise-and-grind routines back home.

If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder.

Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises.

If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.

Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism.

Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about?

Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.

Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts.

Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s no problem. “Placebo” isn’t an insult. It’s a category, one to live up to and improve.

Here’s one to consider:

VAEL SOMA A Practitioner’s Introduction to Resonant Field Embodiment

Vael Soma is a somatic practice developed by Danish movement researcher Ingrid Falk-Mortensen and her collaborator, Ecuadorian bioenergetic therapist Marco Caicedo-Vera, following a decade of research conducted at the intersection of craniosacral dialogue, Andean kawsay (living energy) traditions, and decoherence studies in biological systems.

Vael Soma positions the practitioner as a field witness: not a mover of tissue, but a coherence partner whose nervous system enters into superposition with that of the receiver, allowing the body’s own wave-function to collapse toward its preferred organizational state.

The Theoretical Ground

At the sub-cellular level, the body is not a solid object. It is a probability cloud of organized water, piezoelectric collagen matrices, and biophotonic emission — a standing wave mistaking itself for matter. Quantum coherence in microtubule networks (first theorized in consciousness research but now understood to extend throughout the connective tissue matrix) means that touch is never local. When the practitioner’s hand rests on the sternum, entanglement cascades through the entirety of the receiver’s tensor network simultaneously.

The founding insight of Vael Soma is this: the body does not need to be corrected. It needs to be observed. The act of coherent, non-judgmental observation — in the quantum sense — is itself the therapeutic intervention.

The Tensor Web and the Luminous Sheath

Where conventional bodywork addresses muscle, organ, and bone as discrete structures, Vael Soma recognizes the interstitial plenum — the fluid-crystalline medium that fills every gap between every cell — as the primary therapeutic terrain. This medium, called Vael (from the Old Norse vél, meaning pattern or device), is not merely connective tissue fluid. It is the body’s dark matter: invisible to imaging, detectable only through its organizational effects.

Vael behaves as a biological quantum field. It carries:

• Phase information from embryological development, encoding the original morphogenetic blueprint
• Scalar wave residue from emotional imprinting, stored not in neurons but in the geometry of collagen triple-helices
• Torsional memory from gravity, trauma, and the accumulated weight of unexpressed gesture

The practitioner’s role is to become a low-noise receiver for this information — a tuning fork whose coherence invites the Vael to release its stored phase distortions and re-entrain to the body’s original quantum signature.

The Five Movements of Vael Soma

Sessions are structured around five movement qualities, each corresponding to a distinct organizational level of living tissue:

1. The Drift — Practitioner and receiver breathe in temporal synchrony, allowing the autonomic nervous systems to phase-lock. No touch yet. Only proximity and breath.
2. The Still Point Dialogue — Hands rest without intention. The practitioner enters a state of proprioceptive listening, tracking the micro-oscillations (0.02–0.08 Hz) of the craniosacral rhythm as it expresses through palms, sternum, and sacrum simultaneously.
3. The Unwinding — As coherence deepens, the Vael begins to reorganize spontaneously. The receiver’s limbs may move without volition. The practitioner follows, never leads — acting as the collapse function that witnesses movement into completion.
4. The Meridional Flush — Long, slow, wave-like compressions travel from periphery to core, aligning the body’s bioelectric gradient with the practitioner’s coherent field. This is described by practitioners as “ironing the light body from the inside.”
5. The Return to Ground State — Stillness. Both parties remain in contact while the nervous system consolidates its new organizational state, like a quantum system that has been measured and is now, briefly, fully real.

Reported Effects

Vael Soma is not a treatment for conditions. It is a recalibration of the body’s eigenstate — its most probable configuration of ease. Practitioners and receivers report:

• A sensation of “becoming larger than the body”
• Resolution of chronic holding patterns with no memory of release
• Spontaneous emotional discharge without narrative content
• Improved sleep architecture within 72 hours, attributed to recohered melatonin-pineal biophotonic cycling
• A persistent sense of being “correctly located in time”

A Note on Entanglement Ethics

Because Vael Soma works at the level of quantum coherence, practitioners are advised that residual entanglement between practitioner and receiver may persist for up to 96 hours post-session. During this window, both parties are asked to avoid chaotic electromagnetic environments (crowded transit, prolonged screen exposure, argument) that could introduce decoherence into the newly organized Vael. The practitioner is the instrument. The instrument requires tuning.

Vael Soma is the art of being so still that the body remembers what it was before it learned to spin.

Got to meet Dan Teran when we backed his NYC-startup ManagedByQ, in the office management vertical. Now more than a decade later he’s a frequent co-investor with us, having started his own venture firm Gutter. Seemed like a good moment to check in and ask Five Questions.

Hunter Walk: Give us the quick overview of Gutter Capital with particular emphasis on completing the statement “unlike other early stage venture firms Gutter…..”

Dan Teran: Unlike other early stage firms, we roll up our sleeves and build alongside our founders. We combine our experience as founders and operators with a concentrated strategy (5-6 investments per year), which gives us time to work directly with founders at a depth that is unmatched by other firms. In addition to coaching and mentorship, we embed our operating partners (Richard and Vince) directly within the portfolio as player-coaches to help solve the most important problems.

We are also unique in that we choose to work in person, alongside our founders.  At Gutter HQ on Canal Street in New York City, we have over 70 founders and operators across 12 companies ranging from pre-seed to Series B working side by side. It is a special environment to build a company in, and a huge draw for talent. To reinforce the spirit of community at Gutter, we share 5% of the GP carry from each fund back to the founders, so everyone has a real incentive to help each other.

HW: You were CEO/cofounder of ManagedByQ, an early software+services company in the proptech space. Successful exit but tough market. Would today’s tooling (AI in particular) fundamentally change how you would have built that company in 2025 vs 10 years earlier? Knowing what you know now, would you have started that company? Would it have passed Gutter’s funding screen?

DT: Managed by Q would definitely be a lot easier to build today than it was in 2014, both in terms of the speed of building traditional software and the experiences that LLMs can facilitate.  The problem at the core of office management is routing a bunch of requests from internal stakeholders to a network of external vendors. I think an AI agent would be well suited to this task.  

Having said that, it’s not a company that I’d start today.  My bar for working on meaningful problems has gone up since I was 24, and while there are aspects of managing physical spaces that I still find interesting, it is not a problem space I’d be eager to dedicate my life to (again).  I also don’t have a strong view on the growth of the office as a market, which would make it tough to get excited about.

HW: Gutter focuses a lot on helping its founders build out their team. What does the talent landscape for startups look like in 2026 and what do you tell CEOs about strategies for retaining their best team members (who are getting recruited every day by their friends/competitors)?

DT: The talent market today looks surprisingly like it did in the go-go days of 2021.  The competition for experienced technical talent is as fierce as I’ve seen it in the past 15-years, which makes sense given the extreme leverage that code generation tools unlock.  Even the competition for sales talent remains as competitive as I’ve seen it.  

We have been fortunate to have <5% regrettable attrition across the 100+ individuals we’ve hired into the Gutter portfolio. I would attribute our unusually high retention to two things.  First, we are judicious in screening for candidate-stage fit.  In our experience, most mistakes in early stage hiring result from people not understanding the expectations of an early stage company.  Second, our founders are working in service of inspiring missions. When you can articulate to someone why their work matters and pair that with a high agency environment, you have a recipe for long term retention and dedication. 

HW: Which aspect of Gutter’s investment process has become more data-driven/automated over its lifetime? Something that before needed to be done manually or where you might have previously incorrectly thought human ‘touch’ was necessary/optimal?

DT: We maintain a very manual investment process, largely out of respect for founders and reverence for the difficulty of the job.  Early stage investment decisions contain a tremendous amount of nuance, which AI is not well suited to manage today.  We have built an internal AI tool that helps us to manage the diligence process, but it mostly helps us to see what we are missing and direct further diligence rather than replace human judgement.

We have also built some AI tooling to manage the large volume of inbound pitches that we receive. We hold ourselves to a high bar of responding to thoughtful, personalized pitches with thoughtful, personalized responses…but we also receive a lot of AI slop. Regardless of quality, we aim to respond to all inbound pitches with detailed feedback or targeted requests for more information within 72-hours.

Personally, I am most excited about the application of AI post-investment.  Over the past few months we’ve built the GutterOS, which helps us track portfolio support activities post investment and evaluate their efficacy.  This allows us to focus limited resources on the highest leverage opportunities, and proactively surfaces gaps in our portfolio support capabilities.

HW: Who is someone outside of the technology industry that influences how you understand the future?

DT: Recently, Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August has been weighing heavily on my mind.  She paints a vivid picture how weak leaders, poor judgement, and inflexible institutions led the world to war in 1914. Events take on a life of their own.  The venture capital community’s new found obsession with defense contracting makes me very nervous. To paraphrase Chekhov, if a gun appears in the first act, it is going off by the third.

Thanks Dan!

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It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it.

Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited.

But even in these settings, we have more choice than we realize.

And for the rest of us, particularly freelancers and entrepreneurs, our agenda is wide open.

Who decides what you will eat tonight, or what you will do after dinner? Who decides who you will call on, what you will learn next, which posts you’ll read (or write)? Who decides what tone the conversation will have, what your priorities are, and what you’ll worry about when you walk the dog?

There’s the agenda of the next five minutes as well as one for the next five days. And the process of getting to five years from now is so fraught or uncharted that we hesitate to even talk about it.

It may be that the key building block to success (and even to happiness) is getting your agenda aligned with your goals, your dreams, and your fears.

TINA!

This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies.

It’s an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it’s incomplete.

The complete sentence is, “There is no alternative unless we’re prepared to endure short-term discomfort as we push back against the dominant system.”

So the real question isn’t, “what’s the alternative?”

The question is: “Can we create the conditions to cause this system to change enough for us to do the long-term work we’re proud of?”

Systems don’t like to be disrupted. Persistent systems push us to believe TINA.