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Key Takeaways Breakthroughs emerge by collapsing false constraints through integrated science and practical problem-solving.
True innovation lives where deep technical insight meets ignored, convention-bound assumptions.
There’s a kind of arbitrage in innovation that’s easy to miss because it doesn’t look like arbitrage at all. It lives in the gap between what physics allows and what institutions assume is possible. The reason it persists is that exploiting it requires developing genuine expertise in domains where most have neither the background nor the patience.
In 2019, I invested in SpaceX. What caught my attention wasn’t the headline features like reusable rockets or lower launch costs. It was watching them systematically demolish constraints that the entire aerospace industry treated as fundamental.
At the time, many investors, including me, were busy arguing about software multiples and growth loops. SpaceX was doing something much rarer: showing that a large fraction of what we call “impossible” is really just a coordination problem that no one had been sufficiently motivated to solve.
That investment was a turning point. For several years, I’d been a generalist investor, moving where the heat was. Consumer, enterprise, and a little hard tech when it came with enough narrative support. I wasn’t bad at it. But I wasn’t learning much either.
SpaceX clarified something I’d felt but hadn’t yet put into words. The biggest breakthroughs don’t come from optimizing within known constraints. They come from noticing that some constraints aren’t real. They’re habits, incentives, or historical accidents. And they require the technical grounding and nerve to see what happens when you ignore them.
The linearization fallacy
The Vannevar Bush–era model of innovation assumes a pipeline: basic research generates knowledge, applied research converts knowledge into prototypes, and development converts prototypes into products. This maps cleanly to how we organize universities, corporate R&D labs and government funding. It also happens to be backwards.
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