An editorial notebook by Curtis Duggan
Essays on technology, business, society, and the texture of modern life.
Start with AI, business, society, or place, and move through the archive by idea instead of by date.
Latest essay
Business & StartupsThere is a slide that appears in pitch decks now. On the left, the old model: a subscription fee. On the right, the new model: a percentage of value created, uncapped, aligned with outcomes. 'We don't charge for seats,' they say. 'We charge for results.' I think this argument is wrong.
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Browse by topic
Essays about artificial intelligence, software, and the compression of digital work.
Business & StartupsFounder psychology, company design, pricing, finance, and startup case studies.
Society & IdeasWork, status, culture, remote life, and the social questions underneath modern technology.
Essays & PlaceTravel, memory, observation, and quieter essays about the physical texture of life.
AI
Essays about artificial intelligence, software, and the compression of digital work.
Sometime around 2015, there was an office in a WeWork. The walls were exposed brick. The desks were reclaimed wood. They were building a website for a premium dog treat brand. The project would take four months and cost $180,000. And then, very quickly, a large language model learned to do most of it.
It's the second day of 2025. Commercial consumer-facing AI has been around for over two years. Here is a fundamental problem with AI chat.
Startups
Founder psychology, company design, pricing, finance, and startup case studies.
All e-commerce platforms will tell you you've made a certain amount in 'Sales' but especially in today's world of cross-border commerce, it's not sales at all. It's a mess of liabilities, pass-through charges, and fees that would make any accountant wince.
Before you join a startup or accept that co-founder offer, you need to understand what type of leader you're dealing with. The difference between a Value Maximizer and a Lifestyle Architect isn't just philosophical—it's the difference between 80-hour weeks and asynchronous Slack messages from Bali.
Ideas
Work, status, culture, remote life, and the social questions underneath modern technology.
The longevity people think we are going to live a very long time. They might be wrong. But they might be right, and if they are, certain things follow that nobody seems to want to talk about. Female fertility has a biological clock. Male fertility does not. This asymmetry exists now, but stretch the lifespan to 175 and leave the fertility window where it is, and something strange happens.
Artists have always enjoyed calling businesspeople greedy. The suit is the villain. The creative is the hero. The suit wants money and the creative wants meaning, and these desires are understood to be fundamentally different in character, one craven and the other noble. This seems worth examining.
Essays
Travel, memory, observation, and quieter essays about the physical texture of life.
The last time I truly learned a city's anatomy was fall 2004, those four months at UVic when I owned nothing with a screen. No laptop, no cell phone, not even a hand-me-down Nokia.
The journey from Liberia to Nosara is a kind of prelude—a two-hour stretch of road that forces you to leave behind any neat, tidy expectations you had about Costa Rica.
Chronology
The full body of work, still visible by date for readers who prefer a timeline.