Dialectic

Cyan Banister (Website, X, Substack) is an investor, artist, and co-founder and General Partner of Long Journey Ventures. Previously, Cyan spent four years at Founders Fund and has a legendary angel investing track record alongside her husband, Scott, including early rounds in SpaceX, Uber, and DeepMind. Cyan is as original as they come: she grew up on a Navajo reservation and was homeless by 15,...

Reggie James (Substack, X) is a designer, writer, and entrepreneur. Reggie previously founded Eternal and recently edited and published Hardware 2024, a book highlighting recent attempts at creating a different hardware future. This conversation happened live on stage at FWB Fest 2025 in Idyllwild, CA. We explored Reggie's frame of technology as a mirror and the Kevin Kelly-inspired notion that te...

Linus Lee (⁠⁠Website⁠⁠, ⁠⁠X⁠⁠) is a builder, engineer, and writer who explores how software can amplify our abilities, humanity, and agency. He builds, researches, and advises on AI at ⁠⁠Thrive Capital⁠⁠, a venture capital firm, and continues to write and hack on personal projects. Previously, Linus held research or engineering roles at ⁠⁠Notion⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Betaworks⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Replit⁠⁠, and others, and has bu...

Tamara Winter (X) is the Commissioning Editor of Stripe Press, where she exercises her taste to identify the knowledge and "ideas for progress" that matter most in alignment with Stripe's mission: to increase the GDP of the internet. "Tammy" worked at the Charter Cities Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is chaired by Tyler Cowen. Tammy is obsessed with tacit knowl...

Nadia Asparouhova (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and researcher who has spent much of her career in service of the question: 'what's happening here?' across various parts of the internet. Nadia recently published her newest book, Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. She explores why consequential ideas, unlike memes and supermemes, fail to spread. She also recounts the last several y...

Geoffrey Litt (Website, X) is a designer, engineer, writer, and researcher at Ink & Switch, where he champions malleable software: the idea that ordinary people should be able to mold the digital tools they rely on every day. Ink & Switch is an independent research lab focused on how computers can help us think and work. While researching and writing, Geoffrey and team also build products and prot...

Yancey Strickler (Website, X, Metalabel) is a writer, entrepreneur, creative, and founder of Metalabel, a network and platform that allows creative people to release work together. He is also a board member, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and is currently working on establishing a new kind of corporate structure, the Artist Corporation. Yancey's life and work has revolved around what it...

Full transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/henrik-karlsson Henrik Karlsson (Substack, X) is an independent writer focused on "writing a few good essays." Two of them are among my most consistently recommended: on designing your life and finding your wife (or husband). Henrik's always written, but lived a winding path across software programming, music, poetry, biology, an art gallery, and other o...

Tom Morgan (X, Substack) is a "curiosity sherpa," writer, and podcaster who runs The Leading Edge, a community for leaders focused on personal transformation and authenticity. I first encountered Tom and his ideas during his talk at Sohn on Iain McGilchrist, left vs. right brain, and curiosity. Tom writes about complexity, curiosity, and consciousness, and wades into the deep end of various topics...

Alex Danco (Website, X, Substack) is a writer and Product Director at Shopify. Alex rose to prominence while writing his Snippets newsletter while at VC firm Social Capital in 2015. He wrote prolifically—about markets and financial systems, venture capital, startups, cities, culture, the technology-driven shift to a world of abundance, to name a few topics—through 2020, when he joined Shopify. Sin...

Anjan Katta (X) is Founder and CEO of Daylight, a new type of computer company. Having a conversation with Anjan is a bit like trying reign in a wild animal: his horsepower, wide-ranging philosophical interests, and unbelievable depth in the areas he cares about make him one of a kind. Fortunately, all of that energy is being channeled into his life's work, Daylight Computer Company. Daylight's mi...

D.A. Wallach (Website, X, Substack, Spotify) is an investor, musician, writer, and polymath. Today he co-runs Time BioVentures, backing frontier life-science and healthcare startups. Before that, he was an investor in in SpaceX, Spotify, Emulate, Beam Therapeutics, and Ripple, among others, and toured the globe as half of Chester French. He also released music as a solo artist and was Spotify’s fi...

Alex Zhang (Website, X, Instagram) is a cultural curator, community builder, and creative director. Currently, he's Chief Creative Officer of Powder Mountain, a where he's working with Reed Hastings to create a globally unique ski experience that combines art, architecture, and lots of fresh tracks. Alex loves people and curating spaces and experiences for them: whether that means parties, music f...

Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack) is a writer, entrepreneur, and former Palantir product lead known for his writing on technology, AI, Palantir, culture, and learning. After a brief hiatus writing and researching and spending nearly a decade at Palantir working across government, healthcare, and intelligence, he's now founding a new company. The first half of the conversation focuses on two...

Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy are the founders of CW&T (Website, Instagram, X, TikTok), a Brooklyn-based studio creating products that exist somewhere between art, design, and engineering. The husband-and-wife team met at NYU ITP and shares a background across industrial design, architecture, computer science, film, including time at Pratt Institute and MIT. They won the 2022 Cooper Hewitt National...

Eugene Wei (Website, X) is a writer, product thinker, and cultural observer best known for his essays on technology, media, and social networks, including Status as a Service, Invisible asymptotes, and TikTok and the Sorting Hat. Eugene spent seven years at Amazon in its early days before following a brief detour to pursue filmmaking at UCLA. He then led product, design, editorial, and marketing t...

Josh Wolfe (Website, X) is co-founder and Managing Partner of Lux Capital, a venture firm focused on emerging science and technology at the outermost edges of what is possible. Josh is a masterful storyteller who moves seamlessly between science, culture, and markets. As an investor, he seeks the counter-narrative—what others aren't talking about—and has backed countless breakthrough companies in...

Jacob Horne (Website, Zora, X, Farcaster), is co-founder and CEO of Zora, a platform that allows the tokenization of media. Jacob started his career at Coinbase where he was a product lead and helped create USDC. Five years ago, he left to wade deeper into the waters of internet and crypto-native coordination and creativity and co-founded Zora. His central interest is how people coordinate togethe...

Steph Ango aka Kepano (Website, X) is a designer, writer, entrepreneur,and toolmaker, best known as the CEO of Obsidian, a powerful and flexible writing and thinking tool. Steph's education is in biology and industrial design, but he is true multi-hyphenate creative, working across mediums including software, hardware, supply chain and packaging, words, wood, furniture, ink, color schemes, open-so...

Toby Shorin (Website, Blog, X) is a researcher, writer, consultant, and cultural anthropologist for the internet era. His interests and work include culture, identity, organizational design, psychology, cryptocurrency and blockchains, brands, health and care, spirituality, and social forms and institutions. Today, Toby works on Care Culture, a community and research platform focused on mental heal...

Chris Paik is a General Partner and Co-founder of Pace Capital, a Venture Capital firm in New York City. He invests in technology and internet businesses at Pace, and previously did the same at Thrive Capital, which he joined in the earliest days. At Thrive, Chris invested in Twitch, Unity, Patreon, among others. Chris is a profoundly deep thinker who relies on behavioral economics to build robust...

Tina He (Site, X, Newsletter) is a product designer, entrepreneur, writer, and amateur philosopher. She is a product lead at Coinbase, where she works on developer tools for its network Base. She joined Coinbase through the acquisition of her company, Station Labs. Tina grew up in China before moving the U.S. at age 14. As an adult, Tina has been a dual-citizen of New York City and the internet. A...

Ava (X) is one of my favorite writers. She writes full-time for her Substack, Bookbear Express, and focuses on love, friendship, emotions, culture, and psychology. I'm not sure there's anyone I've more consistently recommended to friends and loved ones in recent years, and it seems like the world agrees: Ava now has over 30,000 subscribers. One of my favorite parts of this episode was reading exce...

Dan Romero (Farcaster, X, Website) is the CEO and co-founder of Farcaster, an open Twitter/X-like social network protocol built on blockchain rails. Before co-founding Farcaster in 2020, Dan previously worked at Coinbase as a Vice President, among many other roles. He joined the company as the 20th employee in 2014 and left in 2019. He's thought about and used Twitter-like networks for nearly two...

Michael Dempsey (Website, X) is an investor, writer, technologist, and Managing Partner of Compound, an early-stage, thesis-driven, research-centric investment firm. Michael and Compound invest in seed and pre-seed science and technology companies in categories like healthcare and biotech, machine learning and AI, robotics, and crypto. He writes prolifically across a range of topics and I've alway...