Dialectic

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...

Jason Liu (Website, X, Github, Newsletter) is a technologist, consultant, teacher, and friend. He spent the first part of his career as a machine learning engineer, mostly at Stitchfix, only to run into a wall: a hand injury that prevented him from being able to write any software for over a year. Fortunately, he's not so one-dimensional, and spent time reclaiming somatic experience in learning to...