Welcome to my digital abode.

Max Marchione

Welcome to my digital abode.
Musings on company-building, productivity, investing, health, decision-making and life.

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

FOUNDER  |  INVESTOR  |  CONTRARIAN

What am I working on?

Ultraviolet Ventures  —  I run a small rolling venture capital fund. We're a group of  tech creators and founders investing in early-stage startups.

Next Chapter  —  We bring together the most talented young founders and investors in the world into an invite-only community. We focus on potential, not credentials.

Something new —  We asked, if we were building the health care system today, from the ground up, how would we do it?

How did (and do) I learn?

Most importantly, building things.

Also, quite a few jobs.

And lots of books, podcasts and articles.

I believe in self-directed learning. Reading textbooks, building things, and working in the industry trumps formal education — learning isn't the primary output of the education system.  MBAs will increasingly become an anti-signal.

I believe the limits of human ability are higher than we think. I taught myself to read at 1,000wpm and listen at 3.5x speed (here's how).

What else am I interested in?

Food, longevity, clinical language models, metabolomics, genomics, probability in real life, skiing, health optimization (first wore a CGM at age 16, tracked sleep with EEG, ran models on my data), architecture, design, neuroscience, great speeches.

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

MY BLUEPRINT

I'm always trying to improve.

Improving is what energises me. It’s not that I have uncanny self-discipline to learn and build. It’s just doing what I enjoy.

I try to turn learning into action.

I believe in 'learn-do-learn'. Learn a bit. Then do shit. Then learn in the process.

Luck = f(# of tries). Success comes from taking action, continuously improving, and having the courage to try.

All rules are made up. I try to think for myself.

I've always rejected social defaults. I like asking 'stupid' questions and working out new, better ways to do things.

I keep a list of irrational beliefs and contrarian predictions including that software engineers will become redundant, cyborgs are closer than we think, and non-mimetic speaking styles correlate with founder success.

I value radical honesty and direct feedback.

I value directness and get a dopamine hit from hyper-critical feedback.
I've only once received feedback I thought was sufficiently direct + harsh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm energised by helping, teaching and sharing.

‍I want empowering others to be a routine part of how I engage with the world.

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

OTHER THINGS

Before life as a founder

  • Ranked 1st at the country's top law school, then dropped out to study finance/maths/stats/genomics/biomedical engineering
  • Worked at Goldman Sachs then left for VC and to build things on the side
  • Worked in 2 different venture-backed startups at both 0-1 and 1-10 stage
  • Worked in venture capital at Afterwork Ventures and GGV Capital (10bn AUM)
  • Illegally procured a CGM at age 16. Ran machine learning models on CGM, EEG, and other data to optimize my health
  • Started hacking for fun at age 14. Then started coding for more useful things like creating an algorithm to automatically value public-market equities
  • Created profitable 'businesses' running a Minecraft server and selling Alibaba goods on the playground as a lil' kid

Popular articles

Resources

Favourite books, quotes, websites, restaurants, podcasts and more at footnotes.maxmarchione.com

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

WHY I WRITE

Writing = Learning

Writing is part of my learning process. Writing forces me to structure and develop my thoughts.

I love sharing and want to be useful

I have >20,000 pages of notes.
Writing is my way to share these.
I try to keep articles short and meaningful to provide signal in a noisy world.

I want to meet like-minded people

I hope that my writing makes it easier for like-minded people to find me.
I open the doors to serendipity.

Clear writing leads to clear thinking. You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.