Conviction-Led Contrarianism
Unpacking The Layers of Dependencies That Delay Deviance
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There is a story of a large village on the coast. The coast was relentlessly demanding in the way that only nature can be. From an intensely dry climate to a raging storm season. Up and down that coast, it was a constant threat to the people. But the people of this particular village felt they were in pure control of their environment. With the weapons of irrigation, cloud seeding, ocean walls, and genetically-modified seeds, they had defied the very laws of nature in order to survive. Where other communities shriveled away, their community thrived. They had conquered nature.
Nature's response eventually lit up on the village's early storm warning system in the form of a category 4 hurricane. In its arsenal, it carried 150+ MPH winds, driving forward ahead of waves reaching 100 feet tall.
While communities up and down the coast fled before the cataclysmic response from nature, this particular village considered their capabilities. True, irrigation and sea walls wouldn't withstand the forces that nature was about to bring to bear. But in the past, when all else failed, there was always one force they could turn to as they drove forward innovation: democracy.
Mere minutes before the storm made landfall, the village met in the town council chambers. They would not agree to this willful destruction of the empire they had built. They had become the master of nature, not nature the master of them. So? They took a vote.
"All in favor of allowing the storm to feast upon our doom?"
Not a hand went up.
"All opposed?"
In unison, the voice of the people had spoken. The storm would not be the victor today.
The people left the council chambers with resolute smiles on their faces. Shaking hands, clapping shoulders; they had done it.
Then the village was wiped away. Every building, every plot, every structure, every person; swept away in the face of earth scorching wind and clean slate waves.
In life, we may often look around at the reality we face and choose to disagree. But too rarely do we appreciate that, whether we like it or not, reality may sometimes disagree right back. In some cases, our experiences in life would be better served with a willingness to debate in conflict, rather than lukewarm agreeableness. But sometimes in our rush to disagree, we fail to appreciate the gravity of our dependence on the very forces we seek to disagree with.
The Spirit of Contrarianism
In a sense, all humans have a strain of contrarianism. We're herd animals, sure. We seek the approval of the pack for survival. But each of us has an innate sense of injustice. When we see things that kick against our sense of right, we (sometimes, though not always) find the courage to push back.
Case in point? The Declaration of Independence.
"When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
But despite the presence of a contrarian spirit in each of us, acting on it is far more often the exception rather than the norm. So much more of our energy and effort is focused less on kicking against the pricks and more on agreeing with them.
I've written over and over and over and over and over and over again about a 2023 talk by Visa Veerasamy where he describes the concept of deviance. The willingness of people to push back against the norms that society has put in place. In Visa's talk, he talks about how so much of human creativity has been directed at suppressing human creativity, which is why we don't have 1,000X the greatness we could have.
Deviance, said another way, is a willingness to disregard likability.
One of my favorite comedians, John Mulaney, has said that likability is a jail. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, borrowed that sentiment for an excellent essay unpacking the reality that contrarianism and deviance have taken a back seat to likability and agreeableness:
"We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others.
Visa's point about exerting the majority of human creativity to suppress deviance is echoed in Karp's essay in the words of Emerson: "For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure." Karp uses the example of childhood growing up learning through mimicry. But the reality is that any new idea worth pursuing will not be an "imperfect imitation of prior successes."
"The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before."
One fear that Brie Wolfson expressed is that the framing of "likability as a jail" encourages people to be difficult for the wrong reasons. I saw one response that said influence was the combination of likability and credibility. But in my experience, credibility alongside conviction can dramatically overpower likability. The spirit of contrarianism is, most often, framed in terms of the pursuit of something great. In the face of most great accomplishments, there are more important things than being liked.
I loved the sentiment from Kache recently that "if this isn't you at least once a week i'm sad to say that you weren't chosen for greatness."
When you're meeting a new friend or casually chatting up someone at church or absentmindedly joining a pickleball league, there is plenty of room to optimize for likability. But contrarianism and deviance hold a special place in the plight of human progress, and they can't be ignored.
The real problem is a misdirection of zeal. Instead of righteously pursuing contrarian beliefs that will make the world a better place, despite the world's efforts to keep it worse, you have the contrarians who seek contrarian perspectives for contrarianism's sake.
Anti-Conformism = Conformism
Brie's concern about using deviance as an antidote to likability is that it encourages people to be difficult for the wrong reasons. And being deviant for the sake of being deviant is one of those wrong reasons. In the words of Naval Ravikant:
“A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.”
Being a contrarian in the purest sense of the word carries with it a qualifier:
"Be Contrarian AND Right"
In the modern tech world, I think Peter Thiel deserves the most credit for introducing a generation of company builders to the idea of being "contrarian and right." The problem is so many have gotten focused on the concept of being contrarian that they've disregarded the qualifier: you also have to be to be right.
What Does It Mean To Be Right?
We talk about what it means for an idea's time to have come. Whether its the right timing, right concept, right product, or the right social environment. Marc Andreessen points to examples like the Apple Newton in 1989 that was 20 years too early. Instacart is Webvan. Chewy is Pets.com.
Immediately, I thought of the line from Back To The Future: "I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it."
Granted, there are universal truths. Mortality, the Laws of Thermodynamics, gravity, causality. Though, even some of these ideas are ones some people may argue with in certain ways. Universal truths are rare, special, and earn reverence.
But often, more general truths wield power because people believe in them. A few weeks ago I wrote about this great quote from Game of Thrones:
"Power is a curious thing. Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common [mercenary]. Each great man bids the [mercenary] kill the other two. Who lives? Who dies? [The mercenary] has neither crown nor gold nor favor with the gods. He has a sword; the power of life and death. But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? Power resides where men believe it resides."
Being right can sometimes be objective. When technology's time has come, sometimes you can't stop it even if you want to. But there are many instances where being contrarian and right requires the powers that be to eventually accept that you are right. Any truth that requires people's belief in it is, by definition, defined by its dependencies.
Think of my opening story. Voting against a hurricane doesn't change the reality of the hurricane. It doesn't have dependencies, at least not from us.
This is a critical point about the pursuit of contrarian thinking that very few people take the time to appreciate. Despite your most earnest desires, there are instances where your beliefs carry with them dependencies that can dictate whether your ideas are right or wrong. Regardless of the intellectual merits of your beliefs, life is an intricate web of interdependencies that can exert untold control over what we choose to believe. Understanding those dependencies is the only way that you can then discover approaches to thinking independently.
The Problem With Dependencies
There is a great line from John Maynard Keynes where he says "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” That is a quintessential dependency. If you wanted to invest in a stock because it seemed to have rational upside, the dependency is on a market that is capable of remaining irrational for quite a long time. Potentially, longer than your capital duration. And if thats the case then regardless of the intellectual quality of your perspective, the dependency on an irrational market dictates whether you can be right or wrong.
If you build or invest in a company believing it is exceptional, but it requires a lot of downstream capital, then someone else could decide that you're wrong.
If you write a book believing its a critical message, but no one will publish it, then someone else could decide that you're wrong.
If you believe your approach could cure cancer, but no lab will support your research, then someone else could decide that you're wrong.
The above obstacles will awaken different reactions in different people. For those who would seek a contrarian vibe of deviance, they immediately feel their brain shouting, "then bootstrap! Self-publish! Open-source your research!" But what those rare folks who default to deviance have disregarded is an initial layer of dependency that the majority of people are held hostage by.
Layers of Dependencies
When I think about different layers of dependency, it follows a few critical frameworks:
Layer 1: This is the interpersonal blackhole that a huge swath of people get caught in. This isn't to say you should never care about your interpersonal relationships, but it is to say that it cannot be the primary data source you use to shape your life.
Layer 2: This is where most people should dramatically increase the time they spend, where once you've overcome the dominating force of other people's expectations, you can fill your life with deviance.
Layer 3: This is the professional layer where you have built something big and multi-faceted enough that you have unavoidable dependencies. But the critical barrier is trying to care about what everyone thinks, when you should just be focused on a select group of folks who could be your "ride or die."
Layer 1: Stop Caring What People Think
In the book The Courage To Be Disliked there is a critical framing about life: every problem is an interpersonal problem. That no matter what internal worry we have, it is always connected to our relationships with other people. "The shadows of other people are always present." Instead of spending your life constantly worried about that shadow, you have to have the courage to disregard it:
"Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy."
I came across a great video on social anxiety that illustrated a similar concept. The reality is similar to some of what Alex Karp points out in his essay. From childhood, we learn what behaviors and ideas are good or bad. But overtime, we have to unpack our concern for what other people think about us and how that shapes the way we express our identity to the world. Instead of letting what other people think of us shape that identity, we should focus on what we think of ourselves.
When we evaluate our lives through the lens of how other people react, we will always be our harshest critic because we have no idea how they will react, so we’re solving for all the possible negative reactions. Rather, we should be acknowledging that sometimes people respond to your "deviance" negatively, not because you're messed up but because they're messed up. The reality is that, as this Twitter post says Lao Tzu said — "care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner."
Instead, we need to divest from the concerns of other people. This is so much easier said than done. Dramatically so. This is, I think, the crux of a large swath of people's unhappiness. This is a deep and abiding cause of my own unhappiness. I am so unbelievably concerned with what people think of me. But there is a better way.
My immediate cop-out to why I need to worry about what people think of me is to blame dependencies. I need these people to like me / think I'm smart / take my money for xyz reason. But the reality is that the majority of interactions in life do not have those kinds of dependencies. Even if you think they do. Instead, we ascribe those dependencies to interactions that don't have them due, largely, to vanity.
In a story that I found on Twitter, but ChatGPT tells me is from Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, I saw this exact idea portrayed in an interaction between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive after a particular episode of Jobs mistreating the team at Apple:
"When Jobs asked why he should be kinder to the team, Ive said: 'Because I care about the team.' At that point, Jobs let some 'brutally, brilliantly insightful' words hit Ive’s ego: 'No Jony, you’re just really vain,' Jobs said. 'No, you just want people to like you. And I’m surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important, not how you believed you were perceived by other people.'"
Instead of vain obsession with how we’re perceived, we would be better off making our primary obsession "the work," rather than how we're perceived. Your work may be your relationship with your kids or spouse, your adherence to your faith, the quality of your writing, the caliber of your company, the impact of your art. Whatever that work is, its a question of what you're putting first. If you care first and foremost about the work then you'll find it easier to let many of those relationships become dramatically lower stakes.
And the beauty of finding a way not to care what people think is that, often, the consequences of the deep-seated anxieties we've been feeling disappear relatively quickly. I liked a story I came across recently. A researcher was studying courage and his co-worker teased him that he was afraid to talk to women. In the name of science, he committed to "face his fear, walk up to 100 attractive women, and point blank ask them out to dinner." He met his wife on the ninth woman he talked to.
In fact, this isn’t just a nice behavioral attitude to adopt, it's one of the most powerful competitive edges I think you can have.
I cannot express how much this is not just a casual phase that can be easily dismissed or passed through. Nor can I confess that this is a phase I no longer have an issue with. The vast majority of people are trapped in this layer. It eats up the majority of their energy and brain power. When Visa says the majority of human creativity is spent suppressing human creativity, its because of this layer.
In Alex Karp's essay he describes "culture's move to accommodate the subjective reality of [people]" and how that has "inflamed the sense of grievance and affliction that some feel." There are many layers to this increased hunger for victimhood, but I think at least a part of it comes from everyone's conflict within layer 1 dependencies. We feel so constrained by what people think of us that we yearn for society to acknowledge that we are, in fact, being victimized by other people's perspective of us and that we should be protected.
The reality is that most people are not victims. The only culprit of victimizing the majority of people resides in their own head. That doesn't mean the feeling is not real; far from it. It is quite real. And it is difficult to combat because only you can interpret it, and the voice in your head might be most difficult opponent to debate because its the only voice that can respond when you try to argue with it.
I can't even really give anything resembling a satisfying guide for overcoming this phase because I haven't found it yet. The Courage To Be Disliked is the closest I've come, and I haven't even finished the book yet. But before you have any hope of pursuing deviance or articulating truly contrarian perspectives in which you can have conviction, you first have to conquer this layer of dependencies. Sure, you can be contrarian for contrarianisms sake. But it isn't the same.
The reason overcoming this layer of dependencies is so critical is because its the only one that isn't real. Your feelings of insecurity are real, but the dependencies are not. You do NOT, in fact, need everyone to like you. In the majority of cases, what people think of you doesn't matter. But believing that it matters is what gives it power over you. So you can't hope to combat legitimate dependencies unless you've dealt with the phantom dependencies in your head.
Layer 2: Pursue Deviance
Once you overcome those concerns in your head about what people think of you, you can see why dealing with legitimate dependencies becomes much easier.
If someone doesn't want to fund your company, bootstrap. You don't care what investors think of you.
If someone doesn't want to publish your book, self-publish. You don't care what publishers think of you.
If someone doesn't want to fund your research, open-source it. You don't care what academics think of you.
That's when true deviance becomes accessible. I've written before about how Visa gives an example of this exact flavor of revolution:
"Once you have succeeded at some kind of deviant shit your ontology is permanently corrupted. You can never again trust anyone else. In 2007, Elon Musk went to Russia to negotiate with some ex-generals to buy missiles to launch a rocket and try and land it again. And all his friends were like, 'Elon, this is a stupid idea.' And he was like, 'I'm gonna do it.' And he did it. I'm not saying these are [necessarily] good people. I'm saying think about what it feels like to have everyone in your life tell you that something can't be done, and then you do it."
Pursuing deviance does not necessarily have different characters step into your dependencies; its that you worry about them differently. You step down from a wide and universal set of dependencies (caring about what everyone thinks of you) to a smaller subset of dependencies (caring what people who know what they're talking about think of you).
The obstacle here, though, is still similar. Being willing to cast off these dependencies requires conviction (more on that later.) Here, its not just that you've tricked yourself into believing people are questioning you when they're not. It's that certain people are, in fact, questioning you. And you have to decide if you will persevere regardless of that reality.
There may be advice that can be helpful from some of these naysayers. But by and large, the feedback loop most deviants get exposed to is not "think about this as you do xyz," it's "don't do xyz at all." So the layer 2 dependencies are simply the voices saying you shouldn't do the thing, and you have to be willing to press past those voices regardless of the convincing nature of their argument.
Layer 3: Emphasize Your "Ride or Dies"
Eventually, the best deviants find themselves with a modicum of institutional success. It's not just that you had a crazy idea, its that your crazy idea has been at least a little bit successful. You've built a business, you've made some money, you've gotten a book or two published, you've had a breakthrough.
The layer 3 dependencies rear their heads in the form of unavoidable dependencies. These are partners you have to have. Customers you have to convince. Regulators you can't avoid. Something has to give.
Anduril: A Case Study In Dependencies
Take the example of Palmer Luckey building Anduril.
He strikes me as someone who has never really struggled with layer 1 dependencies. He's dancing to the beat of his own drum, as they say.
Layer 2 dependencies he was able to persevere through first with Oculus because of his intense conviction in and passion for VR, and then with Anduril because of his fundamental belief in a need for a new defense paradigm. Despite investors saying VR would never produce a large company or defense was an immoral endeavor to pursue.
Now, Anduril has had meaningful success. They're approaching $1 billion of revenue. They've done things that century-old defense primes couldn't do. But in building that success story, they've been exposed to unavoidable layer 3 dependencies.
The DoD has to be bought in. Warfighters have to trust their products. Partners have to be willing to integrate with Lattice. The company needs to scale, potentially from 1K employees to 50K employees. Are there 50K people willing to work on new-age autonomous munitions?
These types of dependencies require radical prioritization. As Palmer Luckey says, “you need to care about that 1% of the world that is going to be your ride or die.” Anduril goes out of its way to solicit true believers. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has expressed a similar sentiment in the opposite direction: "If you have ‘haters’, you will make things worse by trying to gratify them. The best strategy is to drive them to hate you even more."
There are millions of people who will hate Anduril and decry what they do. There are dozens of potential customers that will find Anduril's approach glib and disrespectful. But those are not the dependencies that Anduril need most concern itself with. The company's focus is on those dependencies who are directionally pointed in the same direction as Anduril. And once you've reached the point of having to worry about layer 3 dependencies, I guarantee those likeminded friends exist. You just have to find them and appeal to them.
Contrarianism Follows Conviction
Returning to the negative end of the Contrarian spectrum, contrarianism for the sake of being contrarian is antithetical to the value of deviance. But on the most positive side, contrarianism in pursuit of conviction is the purest form of deviance. It's the kind of deviance that can change the world.
Bill Maher had a segment where he accused Americans of needing to "get over the fantasy that they are a people of core convictions and deeply held beliefs. They're not. They only care which side is saying something." He goes on to point to examples of liberals loving EVs before Elon Musk became conservative, and then hating him and them when he "switched sides." Similarly, conservatives who hated it when Michelle Obama chose to focus on helping Americans get healthy, but loving the idea when RFK Jr. came out and said "Make America Healthy Again." He gave the example from David Zweig's book, An Abundance of Caution, where the American Academy of Pediatrics were strongly in favor of getting kids back into schools during COVID, "but as soon as Trump came out in favor of reopening, they completely reversed their position."
These politically motivated perspectives are antithetical to conviction-led contrarianism. Conviction is not only unyielding to public opinion or political party, but it is also very rarely short term.The book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, has a great line about short-termism:
"The relentless pressure created by quarterly earnings reports is impossible for most public companies to ignore. It warps executive behavior in the worst way, incentivizing short-term decision-making and disincentivizing investments that will create value years down the road. But time and again, we have seen that the corporations that create the most wealth in the long run are those that develop the capacity to think beyond the next ninety days."
The same is true about the value created by ideas strongly held. Rarely do important ideas create the maximum amount of value in ninety day windows. They happen over years, if not decades. Though sometimes what feels like its taken forever can culminate all at once. In fact, I would argue that most conviction-led contrarianism is typically countercyclical to hype.
Hype Countercyclicals
Marc Andreessen talks about the idea that most great founders always feel like they're too late, even though they're almost always too early.
“You’ve got some idea in your head, and as far as you’re concerned, the world should already work this way, which is why you’re pursuing it. And so it’s a little inexplicable as to why it hasn’t happened to it… It must be just about to happen and I must be too late.”
His formula for identifying when an idea's time has come is "if what you're working on was the hot thing 3-4 years ago, you're probably right on time because the infrastructure and consumer behavior has now caught up."
My friend Rex Woodbury has articulated a similar idea, but in reverse. He pointed out that often the most important company started at a particular time was not in line with the current hype cycle at the time.
That isn't to say that companies don't go through hype cycles. Anduril was deeply hype countercyclical in 2017, but is now riding a moment of American Dynamism. That moment may pass, but what will remain unchanged is the founding team's conviction. Coinbase has experienced multiple ups and downs, and remains focused. So has Waymo, OpenAI, and dozens of other critical businesses. The reason they persist is NOT because of hype, it is because of conviction and truth.
Hype is countercyclical to contrarianism because, for the same reason that it doesn't matter what people think when they hate what you're doing, it also doesn't matter what people think when they love what you're doing.
At the same time, conviction is not enough. You can have conviction in something that is deeply untrue. And if you do, eventually you will fall victim to the qualifier of contrarianism. You also have to be right. But when conviction is, as Naval says, "[reasoned] independently from the ground up and [resistant to] pressure to conform," that is a true contrarianism. Combine that with conviction born out of first-principles and truth-seeking?
That is true conviction-led contrarianism. That is the path to real, world-shattering deviance.
Becoming Contrarian
I’ve wanted to write this piece for over two months. The delay was less about the insurmountable nature of the topic, and more about my own existential crisis when it comes to my current failings with panic writing. But now, as I sit and reflect on what I’ve written I’m struck again by the reality of my favorite quote:
"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."
Much of what I’ve written above I didn’t know until I wrote it. Or at least, I didn’t appreciate it. I didn’t internalize it. Then, today as I was writing, I came across an exceptional essay that drove home some of the core points.
Manas Saloi wrote a piece called “Sorry, you can’t copy TBPN.” In it, he dashed the dreams of VCs and founders everywhere who look on longingly for the kind of vibe success that the folks at TBPN are experiencing. We all enjoy talking about tech, and we would all love the adoration of the tech community for doing it live three hours a day. But Manas’ point isn’t just a TBPN take. It hits different for me reflecting on what I’ve written above. This hearkens back to a point that Alex Karp makes in his essay:
“Our earliest encounters with learning are through mimicry. But at some point, that mimicry becomes toxic to creativity. Some never make the transition from a sort of creative infancy. Much of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley is, of course, something less—more an attempt to replicate what has worked or at least was perceived to have worked in the past. This mimicry can sometimes yield fruit. But more often than not it is derivative and retrograde. The best investors and founders are sensitive to this distinction and survive because they have actively resisted the urge to construct imperfect imitations of prior successes. The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before.”
Manas emphasizes that this kind of mimicry can be so enticing, but it will ultimately fail:
“It’s a common trap: seeing someone else win and thinking you can just “do that.” However, most formats aren’t plug and play. They’re built around people’s lived experience, tone, chemistry, and voice. And when that’s missing, the audience feels it instantly.”
That is true of every endeavor, not just what kind of podcast to have. It isn’t even that Manas is saying don’t do a podcast. As he follows up with, “[This post] says to do something where you can bring a unique point of view and play to your strengths.”
The same is true of any point of conviction. You are better served by identifying what YOU believe and what YOUR strengths are. It is difficult to dedicate your life to a position just because you saw somebody else had a similar position. As I reflect on the pieces of the puzzle I’ve put together here, it brings to mind a sort of playbook for pursuing conviction-led contrarianism unto deviance:
Determine what you believe, strongly. I’ve written before about the need for “a renaissance of truth seekers.” Too few people ask themselves frequently, deeply, with intense prosecution, “what do I truly believe?”
Craft your conviction. I’ve written before about the drive that each of us should have to “[understand] the problems that plague us, and then [help] to paint the picture of what the future could look like.” Conviction is belief + action.
Develop the courage to be disliked. Dealing with layer 1 dependencies is a psychological journey that anyone can go on, despite their appetite for risk, reward, or deviance. Before you can address real dependencies you have to decouple the dependencies you’ve attached to everyone around you in your head.
Immerse yourself in the literature. I’ve written before about historical futurism as one framework with which to invent the future. But the critical takeaway is to immerse yourself in the literature of whatever direction your conviction takes you. Often each discipline has its own form of “open source knowledge.”
Don’t be afraid to accept what’s obvious, if it’s true. Chris Paik made the point that, despite FAANG driving the majority of public market returns over the last few decades, many public investors avoided them because they were “too obvious.” In Paik’s words, “they wanted to be right AND clever.” Our conviction may not always lead us to contrarianism. It may just lead us to new beliefs that are widely held.
Don’t be afraid to reject what’s obvious, if it’s false. As your conviction develops legs of its own, it will ultimately reveal opportunities for contrarian perspectives. Once you understand truth, you will be capable of divorcing it from dogma. These will, initially, feel like the most uncomfortable beliefs to hold. But hold them tight.
Actions ought to be lagging indicators of your beliefs. I’ve written before about the fact that, too often, people let actions they’ve already taken dictate their beliefs. “I like the stock cause I already bought it.” Anchor your actions to your beliefs. If you believe something, demonstrate what you’re going to do about. Faith, without action, is just performative. Belief means nothing until it costs you something.
Seek deviance. Listen to Visa’s talk. I cannot recommend it enough. As we build our conviction, and allow that conviction to guide us into contrarian perspectives that we believe, from first-principles, are true, the question then is “what are you going to do about it?” Be deviant. Pursue radical change. Kick against the pricks. Join the revolution.
Godspeed.
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Brilliant piece, Kyle 👏 — conviction-led contrarianism isn’t just an investing lens, it’s a leadership imperative. In startup culture, the real contrarians are the founders who quietly prioritize trust, safety, and long-term team health—especially when it’s not the loudest thing on the pitch deck. Some of the hardest, most important bets are the ones no one applauds (yet).
This was such a fantastic read. Thanks for putting together this type of content - really helpful for someone junior in VC building their toolkit and mental models!