Some things I learn because they are useful.
Others become useful later.
- The desert.
- The foundation goes in first.
- It rises floor by floor.
- It takes its shape.
- The spire climbs higher than it has to.
- Above the clouds.
- Land that was desert. Now an address.
It stands on land that was desert. The land did not change; someone saw what it could hold.
Underwriting
I do not only underwrite land.
I underwrite what has to become true for a project to work.
Land.Subdivisions.Multifamily.Development projects.Capital improvements.Existing assets.Ground-up.Value-add.
- Market
- Who buys this?
- What is absorbing? What is slowing?
- Product
- What exactly are we creating?
- Land · asset
- What do we actually control?
- Cost
- What does it take to make the project real?
- Operations
- If it already exists, how does it perform?
- Capital
- How is it financed?
- Structure
- Who carries which risk?
- Time
- How long does capital stay exposed?
- Exit
- Who buys it from us?
Different asset. Same question.
What survives after the assumptions move?
Multifamily
Managing buildings taught me to read one four ways.
Physical.Operating.Financial.Human.
- Physical
- roof · MEP · units
- common areas · deferred maintenance
- Operating
- rent · vacancy · maintenance
- vendors · turnover
- Financial
- revenue · expenses · NOI
- capex · return · valuation
- Human
- resident experience
- management · service
A building is never only a building.
Finance and investing
I like markets for the same reason I like land.
They punish stories that do not survive the numbers.
- What changed?
- What is priced in?
- What is the base rate?
- What does history say?
- What assumption explains the current price?
- What would make the thesis wrong?
- Where is capital moving?
- How does regulation change the opportunity?
- How does infrastructure affect value?
- How do population, income and migration change demand?
I am increasingly interested in investing across different markets: Colombia first, and the growth markets of South America around it.
I read them the way I read a county before a project: population, income, migration, infrastructure, regulation, the currency, and what the price already assumes.
I am not a fund manager. I learn a market by studying it, and by taking part in it.
I study markets, and I take part in them.
Statistical thinking
Distributions.Base rates.Historical ranges.Probability.Absorption.
Numbers help me test whether the story I am telling myself survives reality.
A number becomes useful when I know what it is being compared with.
Architecture and construction
Materials.Sections.Joints.The order things were built in.
Construction eventually makes every idea answer to reality.
Structure is where imagination begins negotiating with gravity.
Languages
I learn languages to reach a culture, not a vocabulary.
What people say directly.What they soften.The joke that does not survive translation.The song that opens once the words do.
A culture changes when it stops arriving through translation.
Drawing
I draw to look.
A stem does not bend where memory expects it to.A leaf is rarely symmetrical.An orchid root goes where it wants.
Drawing punishes assumptions.
Code and systems
If I can describe the system clearly enough, I increasingly want to build it.
A scheduled check.A small tool that moves information.The way a paper airplane turns a chapter on this site.
var draw = easeOut(clamp01(f / 0.35)), fly = easeInOut(clamp01((f - 0.2) / 0.75));How I use AI to build it lives in Inside My Mind.
Reading
I read slowly, and I read the same pages more than once.
Kenkō.Krogerus.A county ordinance.A title commitment.
The ordinance and the essay ask for the same attention.
A book I finish quickly is usually one I did not need.
Writing
I write to find out whether I understood it.
A sentence that will not come out straight is usually a thought that has not finished.
A memo.An entry.A note I never send.
Everything here is a notebook. I am in no hurry to call it anything else.
Everything I practise is an outline around something that won’t hold still.
I learn languages badly, and then less badly.
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