Max's Musings #3

10x growth, ignoring 'most companies', and moving ahead with 50% confidence.

Author

Max Marchione
March 17, 2025

Welcome to Edition Nº 03 of Max’s Musings.

Each week I share my learnings building a $100 billion company in public. I have many crazy conversations, see a lot, read a lot, and learn a lot — I want to share that with you (in <2 minutes).

Today’s word count: 718

Read time: 1 mins 58 sec.

Musings

Just about every growth initiative is a waste of time.

Earlier this week I wrote a memo to our team. The core idea: most growth initiatives are a waste of time. Whilst optimizing a button might drive a 10% improvement, our job is to find the 10x initiatives. 10x > 10%.

And when I spoke with one of Facebook’s first hires, this was reflected:

“We didn’t even need a growth team. A/B testing hardly mattered. What mattered was the product had inherent PMF because Zuck understood psychology from first principles.”

What works on average is very different to what works at the extremes

At Superpower, I try to force us to resist the temptation to copy ‘what works’ for ‘most companies’. Most companies aren’t great. Our job is to obsess over the fundamental truths.

‘Opinionation’, intuition, taste, and conviction are high variance strategies. Our job is to choose the high variance strategy, which is nearly always non-consensus. I’m yet to see a single great thing ever created from consensus thinking.

Move ahead with 50% confidence, not 95%

A common trap: waiting for 95% confidence before proceeding. The reality: you don’t need perfect information. Proceed once you have 50% confidence. Expect things to blow up, and just adapt as you go. You can save around two thirds of the time because the 50% answer gets you more than 50% of the way there.

Health Protocol Update

One of my favorite ways to get a lot of nutrients in quickly is a smoothie with protein, gut supporting compounds, antioxidants and fiber. I’ve iterated on this formula many times, and where I’m currently at is:

I’ve recently added some extras:

Honestly, what you include matters less than the general idea of using a smoothie to efficiently get gut-supporting nutrients. I highly recommend it!

As always, you can find my full health protocol here.

Top Finds

Brand of the Week

Clean water is in right now. Rorra is my favorite brand in the space. I love the synchronicity between their digital identity (simple grey, blue, clean), verbal identity (tap into clean water), and physical product (brushed metal, fluid design).

The brand is simple, clear, and memorable. It focuses not just on utility but also aesthetics, a smart move in space where most water filters are ugly and solely utilitarian.

Space of the Week

Making a small terrace distinctive and viscerally moving is hard. I love how Madeleine has done it here.

Heritage laws mandated a pitched roof. The answer: a brilliant double skylight void which draws the eyes upwards and makes even a kitchen feel unique.

Article of the Week

No an article but rather a Twitter video from Bryan Johnson. It’s perhaps the most important video I’ve seen on Twitter this year. Some excerpts:

It took almost 13.8 billion years, but finally intelligence made intelligence.

Superintelligence will rewrite reality.

The future is not going to be like the past. Every generation before you had the advantage of being able to learn from the past and model out their lives.

For the first time, we cannot look into the past. The zeroth nature of computational intelligence, AI, stills away control from being able to use the past to make future predictions.

If you can make this a staple in how you process information, you can keep your mind in sync with how you think about technological advances.

Other Top Finds

  • What a wild post: "Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund just led a 2nd round into Icon. To celebrate, I'll give you $69,420 if you refer someone I hire. Only hire top 0.01% engineers with no life. 7 day work week. Pay 2-5x above market”. I think this kind of narrative will become more common.

  • Yoni strikes again. “Runway won’t make you safe. Spend the money. If you haven’t done something important in 18 months, the 19th month is very unlikely to be any different. You raise venture to Do Things not buy time.”

Quote of the Week

Everything you seek or want from life lives just outside your comfort zone.

Yen Liow

When I feel uncomfortable doing something, I actively try to do more of that thing.

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Until next time,

Max

(P.S. Reply to let me know what you think. I read all replies.)