Principles

Two weeks apart, two completely different conversations, the same sentence came out of my mouth. On February 24, I told a bidder verification startup to make their pricing model “super simple, my mom can read it.” They’d built a tiered structure with base fees, per-bidder charges, monthly active user fees, revalidation windows, and a bidder-pay option. Smart people solving a real problem. But the pricing had become a mirror of their engineering, not what they were actually selling. I pushed them to kill the MAU charge entirely because customers would think they were being double-charged. Simplify to two price points: one flat fee for new bidders, a lower one for returning. They agreed. ...

Grafe Auction runs about 290 auctions a year across 48 states. Each campaign takes 10 to 14 days from start to finish. I’m the partner responsible for marketing, technology, and operations. That pace doesn’t leave much room for a system that’s clever but doesn’t hold up under pressure. It also doesn’t leave room for losing a thought from January that turns out to be the missing piece in February. The personal knowledge management crowd has an orthodoxy right now: tools don’t matter, just write. The AI crowd has its own: throw everything at the model and let it figure it out. Both are half right. Tools alone don’t create insight. Models alone can’t connect what they’ve never been given. ...

The Synthesis Niche saturation isn’t the opposite of coalition. It’s the prerequisite. Daniel Ek’s principle is right: saturate your niche before you expand. But the card was incomplete. It assumed the niche is a standalone unit. It’s not. Niches that share a method, a market structure, or an identity sit on top of shared infrastructure, like lakes fed by the same aquifer. Auto auctions, livestock auctions, industrial equipment, personal property. Different surfaces, same water underneath. ...

The Observation I didn’t build structured data systems because I predicted WebMCP or the agentic web. I built them because “touch it once, make it findable by any system” is just good practice. “Computers do the mundane, humans critically think” is just a sound division of labor. These are principles, not predictions. But those principles, arrived at independently, produced exactly the infrastructure the agentic web needs. A straight line runs from a thought card I wrote in August 2025 to a platform that’s accidentally ready for a protocol Google announced six months later. ...

Last August, I had a conversation with a colleague that stuck with me. We were talking about whether auctions actually find true market value. My argument was simple: how can it be true market value when maybe 5-10% of potential buyers ever see our marketing? We’re calling it market value based on whoever happened to show up. I wrote about it at the time. My answer was to build communities, find your own lake, pursue smarter marketing instead of more marketing. I believed it. I still do. But six months later, I think I was thinking too small. ...

The Box There are five of us in a rental car heading from the airport to the hotel. A friend is talking about a book. Nikki Erlick’s The Measure. The premise is simple: one morning, everyone on Earth wakes up to find a small wooden box on their doorstep. Inside is a string. The length of the string is the length of your remaining life. The question the novel asks is the obvious one. Do you open it? ...

Every time you drive past a license plate reader, walk by a Ring camera, or carry your phone into a room, you’re producing exhaust. Not the kind you choose to share. Not a social media post or an email or a photo you uploaded. This is the byproduct of simply existing in 2026. A friend called it “digital exhaust,” and the metaphor is almost too good. Car exhaust isn’t a decision. It’s a consequence of going somewhere. You don’t think about the fumes trailing behind you. You’re focused on the road ahead. ...

Five Guys fills your fry cup, drops it in the bag, then scoops another ladle on top. The generosity is staged so you witness it. Jerry Murrell didn’t give customers more fries. He gave them the same fries in a way that felt like more. The question a friend posed: is there an auction industry version of this? Can a business with two customer types (sellers who want maximum return, buyers who want fair access) create a single “fries” moment that lands for both? ...

PJ Fleck has “This too shall pass” tattooed on his Achilles. It’s not just the downs that shall pass, but also the ups. Source: PJ Fleck interview on the Next Up podcast. We autopsy our losses but toast our wins. Both deserve the same scrutiny. “This too shall pass” is almost always deployed as comfort during hard times. Fleck flips it: the highs are temporary too. That reframes the phrase from passive reassurance into active urgency. ...

Why suffering alone isn’t wisdom, and what turns it into one The car was a Mercury Topaz we called the Blue Bomber. The bumper was duct-taped on and wood-screwed to the body. The radio didn’t work. This was before modern cell phones, so there was no workaround, no Bluetooth, no podcast, no Spotify queue to fill the silence. I was in my twenties, and I drove that car ninety minutes each way between my place and my parents’ house. An hour and a half of nothing but the windshield, the road, and whatever was in my head. ...