About

Notes

1. 1My 23andMe results show ancestry from seven countries: Cuba, Peru, Croatia, Spain, France, Italy, and the United States. My parents are Cuban and Peruvian. The European lines come through both sides, a few generations back.
2. 2I grew up in Miami and went to college at Dartmouth, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where winter runs from November through March. I chose it deliberately: the engineering program, and the liberal arts college around it.
3. 3I have a B.S. from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, and an M.S. in Engineering Management from the same school, finished in 2004. Thayer is unusual in having no departments — engineering is taught as one discipline rather than split into civil, mechanical, electrical, and the rest. Learning it that way, inside a liberal arts college, is most of how I approach problems now: general first, specialized only when the problem requires it.
4. 4I write to roughly a fifth-grade reading level on purpose, the level measured by tests like Flesch–Kincaid. The goal is to distill an idea without losing any of it, which is harder than writing the complicated version. My fifth grader reads constantly and is a hard audience. The essays follow the same rule.
5. 5The Thousand Pound Club is an informal powerlifting milestone: a combined squat, bench press, and deadlift total of at least 1,000 pounds. There is no organization behind it and no membership process. You are in when your three lifts add up to it.
6. 6I ran my first ultramarathon in 2009 — 50 miles. I wrote a full account of it afterward: My First Ultra-Marathon — 50 Miles of Glory. Endurance training, and what it does to the rest of your life, is a recurring subject under Life.
7. 7I am writing a longer piece on shoes: which ones I run and walk in, how I choose them, and how many miles a pair lasts before it stops doing its job. This note will link to it when it publishes.
8. 8I make coffee with an AeroPress. Counting beans, filters, and the equipment amortized over its life, it comes to about a dollar a cup, against roughly five dollars for the same drink bought out. I have the spreadsheet that works this out.
9. 9For several years in Miami, strangers regularly told me I looked like Antonio Banderas. It happened often enough that I stopped correcting them.
10. 10I founded or co-founded three companies before this one: YouCastr, a live sports video platform; Boundless, which built free and low-cost open textbooks; and Blissfully, a SaaS management platform for IT and finance teams, which was acquired. Sports, education, and B2B software, in that order.
11. 11Xandao came after those. The name is "x and o" — to life — and the brand was built around harmony between dualities: physical and metaphysical, art and technology, minimal and maximal. It ran for several years and never reached the scale I wanted. I am writing a post-mortem covering what worked, what did not, and why the underlying idea carried into what I am building now.
12. 12HumanwareOS is an operating system for a human life in the age of AI. Heirlooming records family stories and keeps them somewhere durable; its first user is my mom. Recatalyze is a retreat for founders. Two AI agents, Liv and Max, run my daily operations: scheduling, triage, research, and the systems behind all of the above.
13. 13I record video on a Canon 5D Mark III. It has no autofocus in video mode, so I set focus manually and adjust it by hand while recording, including on live streams. Those recordings end up on Videos.
14. 14I walk most mornings around 5:30 and record voice notes while I walk. They are transcribed automatically and archived. I think voice is the most natural way to capture thinking, which I argue at length in Voice Is Vernacular.

* ridiculous (adj.): unreasonable, absurd, preposterous.

† An actual line from the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign, reproduced because it happens to be true.