Essay

On organizational imprinting, strategic pivots, and what business research is actually for I spent the last few days reading six papers on organizational imprinting and strategic change. This is preparation: I am about to start a PhD in management focused on strategic redirection in Chinese deep-tech ventures, after a decade of investing in exactly those companies. Before I let the field’s vocabulary reshape how I think, I wanted to record how I think now — as someone whose undergraduate training was in electronic engineering, with a later detour through strategic marketing at Cardiff, and with a portfolio of hard-tech companies whose founders I have watched pivot, refuse to pivot, and occasionally run out of cash while deciding. ...

An operational epistemology I am not going to argue for anything. On the question of whether human beings can know the world, I have argued many times, and I have learned something uncomfortable: I am weak on that battlefield. The lines I was proudest of — the ultimate truth is faith, human beings cannot know, the world is not built on logic — each has a true first half and a conclusion that does not follow. ...

Prelude: Two Voices On January 3, 2009, someone whose identity no one knows wrote a rule into a piece of code: For every 210,000 blocks produced, the issuance of new coins is halved. The rule gives no reason. It doesn’t explain why 210,000, doesn’t explain why halving rather than some other decay. It simply exists, like an axiom. Seventeen years later, on some night in 2026, I sat in front of my screen and wrote down a rule of my own: ...