flâneur

Christian Levan

6 followers · 33 following · 1450 views

on the atlas — 65

highlights — 117

  • nstead, use LinkedIn sparingly—for these three plays: Monitor case study company pages. When someone in your ICP engages with a post from your case study company, reach out. Don’t say “I saw you liked Clay’s post.” Say “I’m a video agency and I do the video stuff for Clay. Would love to talk.” Website de-anonymization. Install every tool—Leadfeeder, Snitcher, RB2B, Visual Visitor. Use their free trials. Whichever gets you the highest reply rate, keep it. Automate LinkedIn messages to people who visit your site. Competitor content engagement. Anyone in your ICP engaging with your competitors’ c…
    Inside Eric Nowoslawski’s AI-Powered Cold Outbound Machine
  • The system tracks: How many domains are active across all customers Reply rates over 7-day and 14-day windows Which domains are underperforming (below 0.7% reply rate) How many backup domains are ready to rotate in
    Inside Eric Nowoslawski’s AI-Powered Cold Outbound Machine
  • So for GTM teams, this might looks something like this… L0 is the SDR who uses ChatGPT to rewrite a cold email. Fine, but not compounding. L1 is the RevOps lead who has built custom GPTs for objection handling and started using Clay for enrichment. L2 is the GTM Engineer (or the ambitious ops person) who has automated a signal-based outbound workflow end to end, from trigger to personalized sequence. L3 is the person who builds the internal systems that make every rep more effective: the enrichment waterfalls, the scoring models, the automated QA on pipeline (infrastructure running revenue org…
    How to Get Your GTM Team AI Pilled - by Brendan J Short
  • Yet, to make anything good, you have to cross the chasm of cringe.
    You should probably post more | aadil pickle
  • the only person I should be comparing myself to is the person I was yesterday. Instead of asking “Am I better than him?” I started asking “Am I better than I was yesterday?”
    lessons from 2 years as a conscripted soldier
  • If you want to be great, you often have to take the road less traveled.
    Be Like Mike - Bottom Up by David Sacks
  • Don’t brood over the passes. If you want to be great, focus on proving it on the court — with your performance.
    Be Like Mike - Bottom Up by David Sacks
  • When it comes to building a company, mission-driven companies just do better. You can’t staple a mission onto a company if it’s inauthentic. It has to be truly authentic.
    54 Books to Read In 2026 - by Mario Gabriele
  • The firm operates “nomadically,” with “hubs” in North America, Europe, and Asia, but the freedom to chase one’s curiosity.
    The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
  • pursuing a very specific kind of entrepreneur – someone with unreasonable ambitions, astonishing clock speed, and a frightening hunger that portends a deep, personal unease
    The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
  • It’s done so without hitting the buzziest startups of the past cycle, instead capitalizing on a roster of relatively under-the-radar giants, including Peak Games, Gram Games, Kraken, BillionToOne, and FPL Technologies.
    The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
  • There is more to the pleasures of the earth than what can be marketed to you.
    Viscerality - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • The danger of all this convenience is that one begins to live inside a very narrow band of the visceral world.
    Viscerality - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • More broadly there is a pleasure in comfort but also a pleasure in discomfort. They give a different shape to our spirit.
    Viscerality - by Simon Sarris - The Map is Mostly Water
  • “I asked Jacob, ‘What is, in your opinion, the merchant banker’s most important single requirement?’ This time he didn’t hesitate. ‘If you ask for one requirement only, it must be integrity. Without complete integrity there cannot be complete confidence. This confidence, our good will, is our most important asset’
    the great investors of history - by Rohan Kanti
  • I've become so convinced that clear writing is clear thinking, and I want to think more clearly.
    Panic Writing - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • Increasingly, I feel like an inadequacy in my ability to write is an inadequacy in my ability to think.
    Panic Writing - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • Mostly I have no repeatable process, I just wake up and panic until there’s a newsletter. I have been doing it long enough that the panic feels less overwhelming; I figure I have a good track record of producing a newsletter every day, so the odds that today’s the day it stops working are low. But I do text my friends most days saying “help I have nothing to write about” or “help I have forgotten how to write” or “help—today’s the day it stops working.”
    Panic Writing - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • "My process has changed a few times, but pretty consistently these days I only write on Saturday. I wake up at 4 or 5 AM, and just panic write until my kids wake up. Then, maybe I stumble through another hour or two after they wake up, trying to write while multi-tasking, getting them breakfast, and all that."
    Panic Writing - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • You asked about the feel of it, Mario, so I will give it a try: It’s like meeting someone who makes tomorrow feel more real than today. Not because their idea is polished or perfect, but because their insight lets you glimpse a future you can’t unsee. A new reality that’s arrived early, even if it’s wearing sneakers and a nervous smile.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • All these moments point to the same truth about seed investing: The founders who change the world rarely sound like they’re guessing. They talk about something they’ve already seen that the rest of us haven’t noticed yet. It doesn’t feel like they’re pitching. It feels like they’re describing something inevitable that just hasn’t happened yet. You can sense they’re speaking from a place of discovery, not speculation. You don’t just end up believing in them. You start believing through them.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • I think it’s because breakthrough ideas require a kind of attention our modern world no longer appreciates
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • This reminds me of something from mythology. The Greeks believed inspiration came from the Muses. These divine figures whispered creative truths to a chosen few. But my non-consensus take is that people have it backwards. The Muse visits all of us. But she only whispers, and from unexpected places.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • I’ve learned that discipline can hide fear, especially the fear of looking foolish for backing something that looks crazy. But the future cares more about what could go right, and how big it could get if it does. By the time the consensus catches up, the future no longer needs you.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • Intuition points you toward what might be true. Discipline tells you when your wishful thinking might be fooling you.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • A pitch deck tells you what founders think will work. A demo shows you what already does.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • Seeing things first felt like a superpower. But the seed investors that are rewarded most are not the futurists who can predict. They’re the ones who notice. Catching radically new futures feels less like investing and more like witnessing.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • e. It felt like stepping through a portal to a different future. He wasn’t selling me. He was already living in a different reality and offering me a fleeting glimpse. And even though there were many pivots and years between Justin.tv and what became Twitch, the basic insight that millions of normal people would want to stream content was right, no matter how heavily disguised it was in the initial idea.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • It’s not about spreadsheets or pattern-matching. It’s about sensing whether someone is already living in the future and inviting the rest of us to catch up.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • You elegantly outline the importance of a startup building on (1) an “inflection” – some material technological, commercial, or sociological change, and (2) an “insight” around it.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • . One particular favorite is that great startups force a choice, not a comparison.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • As Mike himself describes it, his praxis is not about thinking faster or exhaustively analyzing a market, but simply listening differently.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Mike Maples, Jr.
  • When LLMs have this valuable and ongoing context about our goals, our role, our projects, our team, and our wider org, they become our “AI copilot”—a real thinking partner for long-term, complex work
    Build your personal AI copilot - by Tal Raviv
  • audit your inputs. what you consume shapes what your brain expects. if you’re feeding it constant noise, it forgets how to sit in stillness.
    how to pay attention again (the neuroscience of focus in the age of everything)
  • Consent to being bored.
    Lesser Apes - by Mario Gabriele - The Generalist
  • Consumer AI interfaces are not like this. They don’t want to think with you, but for you.
    Lesser Apes - by Mario Gabriele - The Generalist
  • , makes a distinction between “competitive” cognitive artifacts and “complementary” ones
    Lesser Apes - by Mario Gabriele - The Generalist
  • It requires non-consensus investing, but that’s only part of it. I think courage is thinking independently, and betting BIG on something when it feels really really hard to do it
    Courage – Nicholas Chirls
  • If you were one of the few that simply had read “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital” or “7 Powers” and knew how to reasonably apply the lessons (as USV and IA Ventures did), you had an edge.
    Courage – Nicholas Chirls
  • But for many, many others, they simply want to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." They seek conviction
    Conviction Capitalists - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • The conviction was the magnitude of the bet.
    Conviction Capitalists - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • Consensus. People want to invest in what other people will invest in because that will attract consensus. Stamps of approval that those incremental outcomes are coming.
    Conviction Capitalists - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • Consensus. People want to invest in what other people will invest in because that will attract consensus. Stamps of approval that those incremental outcomes are coming.
    Conviction Capitalists - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • Conviction is putting up 76% of your first fund yourself. That's what Peter Thiel did.
    Conviction Capitalists - by Kyle Harrison - Investing 101
  • . You should live your life however you want, but if you want to do great things, you have to choose life over balance and commit to work so meaningful that you wouldn’t want it to exist as a concept distinct from your life.
    The Primacy of Winning
  • It doesn’t get any easier, you just go faster.” You can’t build greatness if your primary feedback loop is built around pain avoidance. In reality there is no process, and it will be painful.
    The Primacy of Winning
  • The warning signs are flashing bright red that the venture market has never been more consensus-driven.
    We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us - by Euclid Ventures
  • More than ever, investors are outsourcing conviction to a handful of signals: Y-Combinator, elite pedigrees, mega-fund co-signs.
    We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us - by Euclid Ventures
  • so this is the first faulty pillar of the “costs will drop” strategy: demand exists for "the best language model," period. and the best model always costs about the same, because that's what the edge of inference costs today.
    tokens are getting more expensive - by Ethan Ding
  • A commitment system is built out of forcing functions: mechanisms that make failure harder than success.
    Tying yourself to the mast - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions