What happens when every founder reads the same book? Jerry Neumann's Red Queen thesis, William Hockey's boredom moat, Benn Stancil on AI and empathy, and a brutal market reality check from Palm Valley Capital. Issue 17 explores why systematizing what works is the surest way to kill the edge — and what to do instead. Plus: the contrarian case for going slow in a world obsessed with scale.

In power-law worlds like venture capital and AI, the biggest risk isn’t being wrong—it’s being absent. This issue explores why survival, not prediction, is the true strategy, and how antifragile systems position themselves to capture unpredictable upside.

Markets move in cycles. Technology moves in structural breaks. This week’s exploration connected late-cycle euphoria, the rise of the “jobless boom,” and AI’s thin-client architecture. The real challenge isn’t predicting the cycle — it’s distinguishing cyclical excess from genuine paradigm change. Because when output detaches from labor and compute recentralizes, capital doesn’t disappear. It concentrates.