Blog
Notes on reading the network.
Writing on technology due diligence, decision intelligence, and reading the venture and private-equity universe.
August 9, 2026
The government took equity in four companies this year. Private capital did not wait for permission.
Four companies, one new industrial-policy tool -- and private capital did not move in a consistent order relative to the government stakes.
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August 9, 2026
The rejected 1976 paper sitting inside the steepest line on the Fed's own chart
A Nobel laureate said it couldn't be done. Forty-four years later it's a real, traceable input into how fast the 2020 labor market recovered.
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August 9, 2026
Ray Dalio's cycle is real -- but it never explains why the collapse happened on a specific Tuesday
Four empires, one measurable cycle, three thousand years -- and every hinge was still one person's decision. Both halves matter for timing.
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August 9, 2026
Why a sector clusters where it does -- and which lever actually explains your target region
Geography, government, and culture compete to explain why an industry clusters in one place. Two real cases show the weighting is never the same twice.
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August 9, 2026
Two-thirds of the founders you're meeting didn't choose this -- they were pushed into it
Job scarcity, not opportunity, is now the majority reason Americans start a business -- and the share is still rising, not holding steady.
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August 9, 2026
The founder you're meeting at 28 and the founder who actually breaks out at 45
Two real datasets on founder age point in opposite directions -- and knowing which one you're looking at changes how you should read a pitch.
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August 9, 2026
A funding round doesn't get more real the fourth time someone reports it
We found a single $65 billion round logged four times in our own data. Why that's not just a bug -- and what it says about signal vs. noise in venture capital.
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August 9, 2026
Fifty years of venture capital's own boom-bust cycle -- and the lesson our industry keeps re-learning
Venture capital wasn't always an industry. Two 1978 policy decisions created it -- the boom-bust pattern from then still shapes where capital moves today.
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July 27, 2026
Oluwadi is open now — no account, and anyone can add to it
Oluwadi no longer requires an account, and anyone can propose a company, investor, university, or organization for inclusion.
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June 27, 2026
Introducing Oluwadi — the network, opened to read
Oluwadi is live: a public, continuously updated way to read the U.S. venture network region by region and thesis by thesis. Why a region's single label hides more than it tells -- and what it means to read a place for what it actually builds.
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February 1, 2026
Hallucination Driven Development: Why Desire Path Design Is the Future
Steve Yegge stopped fighting his coding agent's 'hallucinations' and started building the commands it kept guessing at instead. That's just Convention over Configuration for the LLM age -- and it changes what "being right" as a developer means.
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December 10, 2025
The Two-Hour Specification
How writing a genuinely detailed spec -- and following a Research/Plan/Implement discipline with Claude Code -- took a demo from a month down to five hours, and why "Vibe Coding" and "AI Slop" are really just names for skipping that step.
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October 23, 2025
Venture Capital Due Diligence Checklist: 6 Essential Steps
The battle-tested framework we use ourselves to pressure-test a deal across eight domains -- team, product, financials, business model, traction, competition, and legal -- before the check gets wired.
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October 23, 2025
Technology Due Diligence Checklist: A 10-Point Investor Guide
A field guide to technology due diligence, sharpened on the deals we've won and the ones we wisely walked away from -- architecture, security, infrastructure, IP, team, and resilience, down to the exact artifacts you should ask to see.
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September 4, 2025
The AI Breakup: It's Not You. It's Me.
AI adoption is in its honeymoon phase -- and some users are already forming emotional attachments to their chatbots. What that says about the MIT study on failed AI pilots, and what it actually means for how investors should be using AI.
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November 6, 2024
RTO -- At What Cost
Fully remote jobs going back to the office doesn't correlate with productivity -- so why are large corporations doing it anyway? A look at what return-to-office is actually buying, and at what cost.
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July 3, 2024
We Know What to Look For, Because We Build
Osparna's team builds things outside of work too -- and that's not incidental. It's exactly what makes the diligence sharper. I work with people I like.
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April 23, 2020
Who's on Your Team?
Coachability, character, and the ability to work well in a distributed environment now matter more than raw technical expertise -- what COVID-era diligence is teaching investors about what to actually look for in a team.
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February 28, 2020
Moneyball for Investing
Why "Moneyball for Investing" became our catchphrase, why it's the wrong analogy, and what Osparna actually is: the diary you keep to track what you were thinking when you made the call.
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February 23, 2020
How to Buy a...House
Before Osparna focused on investors, the alpha version was general enough to score any decision -- including which house to buy. Here's how establish-weight-rate-review played out on a real move to Florida.
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February 3, 2020
Managing Bias
Biases underpin our intuition about investing, whether we admit it or not. Why declaring your criteria explicitly -- and being able to look back at what you decided and why -- is the real defense against them.
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November 11, 2019
Introducing Osparna
The first post on osparna.com: why we built a platform to bring decision science to investing, and what to expect from this space going forward.
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