be more cracked

I recently spoke with Ali Algain at Entrepreneur First about what I should do after graduation. I had been recruiting for their talent investor role, one of the few roles that genuinely interested me. Firms like EF and Hummingbird stood out because they seemed to care about founders as people, not just balance sheets. They invested in individuals before there was anything obvious to measure.

During our call, Ali kept asking me the same question in different ways. Why venture capital. Why talent investing.

At the time, I did not have a clean answer. But what I was really trying to say was this. I wanted to be around people who build because they cannot help themselves. The kind of people who reverse engineer apps like Hinge for fun, scrape obscure parts of the internet just to read an unpublished Don Valentine manuscript, or quietly build a 17 million dollar fund at nineteen by acquiring coin laundromats and parking lots. People who are restless. People who are obsessed.

I never wanted a career where I sat still and did work that did not change me. Venture capital felt like a way to stay close to that energy. I thought that by surrounding myself with people building ambitious things, I would slowly grow into someone capable of doing the same.

But Ali asked something that stuck with me.

If your goal is to build a generational company eventually (I told him this would be my eventual dream that I would achieve one day), and the reason you want to do VC is to stay close to the people building them, what is actually stopping you from starting one now?

I gave him the answers I had been telling myself for a while. I said I needed more experience. That I had not yet found the right problem. That the things I cared about were too ambitious and required more knowledge, more capital, more credibility than I had. Venture capital felt like preparation. A way to learn first, then build later.

But if I am honest, those were not the real reasons.

The real reason was that I did not feel ready.

I had this quiet assumption that generational founders must have felt different when they started. That they had more clarity, more confidence, or more permission. I thought there would be a moment where things clicked and I would know for sure it was time.

But that moment does not just arrive.

The founders I admire did not start because they were ready. They started because they cared enough about something that waiting stopped making sense. As Reid Hoffman once said about Elon Musk, "he starts with a mission and then figures out the business later."

That idea flipped something in my head. I had been thinking I needed to figure out the business first, then earn the right to pursue the mission. But the people who change things do it the other way around. They begin with conviction, and everything else follows.

For a long time, I told myself that the things I wanted to work on were too ambitious. That I needed more preparation before I could meaningfully contribute. Now I see that this was just a comfortable way to delay starting. The real barrier was not experience, or capital, or knowledge.

It was the decision to begin.

I know that I want to build a generational company. Something that genuinely changes how people live or what humanity is capable of. Not just something useful, but something meaningful.

If that is true, then my job right now is simple. I need to become someone capable of building it.

That means building constantly. It means going deeper technically. It means reading, experimenting, and putting myself in situations that force me to grow. It means caring less about credentials and more about capability.

I do not know exactly what it will look like yet. But I know that waiting will not get me there.

So I am done waiting.

I want to become a fellow at the Arc Institute to study AI and biotech problems that actually matter.

I want to deeply understand companies like Cellular Intelligence and how they operate, think, and build at the frontier.

If you are questioning what path to take after graduation, you should read this first