For years, I've been connecting with interesting people and documenting insights that might help my clients and myself. What was once private is now (mostly) public.
People often ask: "How do you know all these people?" and "How do you connect these (re: random) ideas?" The answer is simple: consistent relationship cultivation and thoughtful note taking. My north star is trusting my instincts, my maps are the constellations in these reflections.
This approach to multidisciplinary networking has helped dozens of clients, colleagues, and friends strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. Feel free to steal these ideas directly - that's what they're for! I can't promise you'll learn FROM me, but I guarantee you can learn something WITH me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4!
Introducing... D.A. Wallach!
Do you know D.A. Wallach? He's a musician who was in the indie rock band Chester French, toured with Weezer and Lady Gaga, met the founders of Spotify while the company was still being built in Europe, invested in Spotify's US expansion as an "artist in residence," and then pivoted entirely into venture capital - where he now focuses exclusively on biotech investing as co-founder and general partner at Time BioVentures.
If not, allow me to introduce you. D.A. has spent his career making sense of fields that seem to run on chaos and intuition - music, tech, drug discovery - and finding the hidden architecture underneath. He's the kind of person who asks good questions about uncertainty, who understands that mastery comes from depth not breadth, and who genuinely believes that some things are worth doing simply because they're good for people, not because they'll make you rich.
I wanted to connect with D.A. because he represents something increasingly rare: an investor who chose a niche that demands craft, depth, and decades of learning - and who refuses to let money culture be the only story we tell about what matters.
Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel. Listen and you'll hear two people from completely different worlds (radio and culture, venture capital and biotech) discover they're both wrestling with the same question: How do you build something meaningful in a world that wants everything to scale infinitely?
THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons
In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with D.A. to share with you (and drop into my Personal Archive).
Read on and you'll find a quote with a lesson and a reflection you can Take to work with you, Bring home with you, and Leave behind with your legacy.
WORK: The Uncertainty Isn't In The Market Size - It's In Whether Your Approach Actually Works
"In drug discovery, the markets are basically defined by patient populations. So you know, there's some percentage of people in America with psoriatic arthritis, you can actually know exactly how many of those people exist and you can understand what drugs, if any, they're currently taking and what kind of results they're getting from taking those drugs. In biotech, the uncertainty is very rarely around the size of the end market. It's all around the probability of a particular technical approach actually working to remediate the biology that's been deranged by some disease process."
Key Concept: Most founders and investors obsess over market size - TAM, SAM, SOM - but D.A.'s insight flips the priority. In biotech, the market is knowable. What's unknowable is execution. This distinction matters because it forces you to invest deeply in understanding your core technical risk instead of chasing a bigger addressable market. The lesson transfers: clarity about what you don't know is worth more than certainty about what you do.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: One of my absolute favorite investing quotes is "Risk is the idea that more things COULD happen than WILL happen." It's the idea that you won't know what future you've arrived at until that future is the present. Today is yesterday's tomorrow, and - stuff. So the risk is all about understanding where you might end up and doing your best to make sure it's not terrible, with some extra positive skew where you can.
The only factor you can actually focus on, once you understand what risk really is, is the types of outcomes you want to stay positioned for. In this weird way, D.A. makes biotech feel even less risky than I've ever heard it explained. But when it's mostly just a rare win or a regular failure, it's not like the risk is gone - it's just a very different spectrum of outcomes.
When I think about work, it's a lot like picking a general industry or career where you know the upside aligns in some way with your personality. You don't try to be a dentist when you think people's mouths are gross. You have to look for places where the upside is in the execution, where you won't hate putting the work in. And yeah, maybe you'll fail. But much like in music, if you succeed, the sky's the limit (extra Tom Petty).
Work question for you: In your own work, what's the uncertainty you're actually trying to solve - and are you organizing your efforts around it?
LIFE: The More You Do The Thing, The Better You Get - And It's Demonstrable
"I like as an investor being in an area where the more you do the thing, the better you get. It's demonstrable that you get better the longer you do it. Biotech has similarities to the music business in that it is very hit driven - a drug that works is kind of a miracle in the way that a hit song is. Just a lot of things have needed to go right for something to work. But there's also a kind of altruism to it, that when these companies are successful, they're solving a significant unmet need in human health."
Key Concept: D.A. chose a field where practice compounds - where years of deep work actually make you measurably better, not just older. He's drawn to domains that are hit-driven (so luck matters) but also purposeful (so it's not pure gambling). The insight here is about choosing your life's work carefully: pick something where mastery is possible, where luck still plays a role (so you stay humble), and where success means solving a real human problem. That combination keeps you sharp without burning you out.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Practicing so you can perform is the least abstract detail of being a musician. You don’t just get to sit behind a drum set and do an “I know Kung Fu” thing and start rocking. Unfortunately and fortunately, for the record. There’s a scarcity of people who can do those special things.
A (very Santa Fe Institute) idea behind D.A.’s idea here, is that you get to pick areas where practice leads to something you can perform with increasingly greater odds of success. I think you can spot that across any field, or even start to understand it better the more you practice within a role or particular job.
You don’t get good without practice. And yes, practice can suck, but the better you get, and the bigger the opportunities practice puts you in front of, the more fun that challenge can start to be. Because you haven’t de-risked “luck” from the equation, so much as you’ve made sure unlucky outcomes, the farther you get ahead, they’re less and less likely to end your career.
Life question for you: Is the field you're in one where you demonstrably get better the longer you do it? Or are you treading water?
LEGACY: Craft Requires Depth, And Depth Requires You To Do One Thing For A Long Time
"Biotech is a very unique niche of the investment universe. It's much more of an artisanal, craft-like style of investing. Unlike generalist tech investing, you really have to become deeply knowledgeable in drug discovery and drug development in order to make sense of the companies you're looking at. The people who do it, it tends to be all they do, and they've done it for a long time and gotten good at it and developed this kind of deep knowledge."
Key Concept: In an era of platform-hopping and perpetual pivots, D.A. chose the opposite path: one domain, deep expertise, long commitment. He's describing a kind of investing that's become rare - artisanal, in the truest sense. It's not scalable in the way venture capital usually wants. It's not something you can learn from a podcast. It demands that you pick it and stay with it, decade after decade, until the domain becomes part of how you think. That's legacy work.
Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I think a secret to life is knowing you’re a nerd at something. Or even at some things. Plural can help you out. But you have to reach nerd-level love to see what that feels like. You have to try to talk to somebody at a party about something and realize, “Oh, I am way too deep in this and they don’t care.”
That’s the specialist muscle in your brain. That’s how you know it works. When most people don’t care, but you still really care. It’s a secret to a full life. I’m convinced of it.
Showing others you have something that you care about this deeply, like D.A. sharing these stories with us, or the time he did it on Excess Returns with me, or even me sitting here writing these Cultish Creative notes for all of these years now, this is the rarefied grounds of nerd-dom. We can sexy it up and say its a specialization, and in some cases they are, but they key is here that you develop a taste in life for how to practice all the way into this corner.
If the world ever decides to place a premium on something you and you alone specialize in, that’s the lucky side of the life lottery. If the world doesn’t, you’ll still feel like the luckiest person alive.
Legacy question for you: What would your life look like if you committed to one thing long enough to become actually, demonstrably good at it?
BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…
Learn more about Time BioVentures - his biotech investment fund
My Excess Returns interview with D.A. is an excellent overview of his investing philosophy
Follow his thinking on why depth, craft, and long-term commitment matter in a world that wants everything to scale infinitely
You have a Personal Network and a Personal Archive just waiting for you to build them up stronger. Look at your work, look at your life, and look at your legacy - and then, start small in each category. Today it's one person and one reflection. Tomorrow? Who knows what connections you'll create.
Don't forget to click reply/click here and tell me who you're adding to your network and why! Plus, if you already have your own Personal Archive too, let me know, I'm creating a database.
Want more? Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and listen to Just Press Record on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X) - now distributed by Epsilon Theory.
You can also check out my work as Managing Director at Sunpointe, as a host on top investment YouTube channel Excess Returns, and as Senior Editor at Perscient.
ps. AI helped me pull and organize quotes from the transcript, structure the three lessons, and sharpen the Key Concepts. If you're curious about how I use AI while keeping editorial control and my own voice intact, I wrote about my personal rules here: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules
