Max Abram

With the cost of competition in mind (especially amid a euphoric funding environment), I'm drawn to founders who build from one or two delightfully subversive choices. Examples include selling to a consensus bad end market, building on still unproven underlying technology, or selling through unconventional GTM approaches.
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The more these choices fly in the face of conventional wisdom, the more they can seem like reasons to reject a pitch outright. I try to notice that instinct in myself and, when the founder is clearly smart, pay more attention to why they've made that subversive choice.

Office Drop-ins, my nights-and-weekends project, is a video series profiling AI companies that I admire. Each episode features a different company; I tour the company’s office with the CEO and try to capture what makes the company and team distinct. 

I'll often ask: "If you couldn't be doing what you're doing now, and money didn't matter, what would you be doing?" My own answer is long-form journalism. I'm drawn to writers like John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson, and filmmakers like Casey Neistat and Vice's early documentary team (my middle school favorites). Office Drop-ins is my amateur attempt to see and do likewise with a world that I’m lucky to know intimately.

Watch the series here.

My dad was a founder. As a kid, I watched him work under lots of pressure, through plenty of failures, and love it anyway. He would joke that he was a founder because he was unemployable; what he meant is that no W2 could match the fulfillment he found in building.

I love Bukowski's poem "So You Want to Be a Writer?" for how it captures this spirit:

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.

My favorite founders build because something in them demands it. Partnering with these founders is why I'm in this work.

"A new idea is a fragile thing.” The best way to support one is with "yes, and" instead of "yes, but."