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... Pablos Holman!

Do you know Pablos Holman? He's a hacker, inventor, and founder of Deep Future - a venture fund investing in deep tech startups. He's been responsible for getting 6,000+ patents filed through his work at Intellectual Ventures Lab, co-founded Blue Origin's experimental division, and has been ahead of the curve on computers, cryptocurrency, AI, and nuclear power by roughly a decade each time.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Pablos grew up in rural Alaska as one of the first kids with an Apple II computer - giving him a haphazard, self-directed education in what would become the cornerstone of his career: trying everything, keeping what works, and moving forward.

I wanted to connect with him because he embodies something I value deeply: relentless curiosity married to the willingness to be wrong in public, consistently, across multiple decades.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Intentional Investor YouTube channel (and this Intentional Investor Playlist). Listen and you'll hear a deep dive into what it means to be an inventor in a world obsessed with software, the Alaskan maker mentality, and why we've collectively underinvested in the creative class that actually builds new things.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Pablos Holman 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 Problem With Solving Problems Too Early

Key Concept: Being right too early is functionally the same as being wrong. Pablos spent decades seeing around corners - cryptocurrency before Bitcoin solved the mint problem, AI trading systems before the dotcom bubble cleared, on-demand manufacturing before the technology was cost-competitive. The lesson isn't about intelligence; it's about timing and positioning. In work, we often valorize the visionary who sees the future, but the real skill is knowing when the future is ready for you to build it. This is the tension between being a founder and being an investor: founders have to be right at exactly the moment the market can absorb what they're building. Investors can afford to wait and invest in the moment when the timing catches up.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I’ll never forget my friend Kate coming up to me, sometime in the late 90s, all excited to tell me that one of her field hockey friends just discovered this cool new band, and she remembered me showing her the same band several years earlier. Now, there’s some important context here, like A. nobody really thought that band was cool a few years earlier, B. even my friend Kate clocked it up as something weird Matt was into, and C. her friend would later not think it cool or remarkable in any way that I knew about them before their friend group did.

I didn’t even get bonus status points or anything for being early. Not even bragging rites amongst my friends because - no status was gained by me being in the right place at the wrong time. It was so weirdly frustrating. I can still tap into that emotion 25 years later. Life is so weird.

When Pablos talks about the technology and ideas he’s been around, it’s humbling. He gets the status bump I never got from Kate’s friend in my mind. But he mostly gets it because he can separate where his smartness ends and his excitement begins. 

He's rationalized being early (and likely missing a chunk of the financial upside) by cultivating an ability to get genuinely excited in ways most people don't or can't. In my much less potentially profitable musical experience, I remember thinking I wasn't interested in being right about the band - I was interested in having been excited about it first. The external validations are great when they come, but the internal excitement is everything about who I am, and clearly who Pablos is, in his way, too.

Work question for you: What problems are you solving that might be three to five years too early? How might you reposition them or wait?

LIFE: Your Network is Just People You've Been Curious About

Key Concept: Pablos accidentally stumbled into one of the most valuable networks in deep tech and venture capital by treating every speaking engagement as an excuse to hang out with the other speakers. He didn't optimize for networking - he optimized for meeting people smarter than him. The magic wasn't in a strategy - it was in consistency and genuine interest over 25 years. He wasn't collecting business cards; he was building friendships with people doing interesting work. Now, when one of his portfolio companies needs advice, he can make a call to someone who just left a Fortune 500 company or who built the thing that inspired the new company. That's not networking. That's friendship compounding.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I was sitting in a marketing meeting, and we were talking about refer-ability and networking and - all sorts of normal marketing meeting type stuff, and I was hung up on this idea. I said it out loud. It was painfully obvious but sometimes painful meetings need obvious reminders. “The best way to be interesting is to be interested. And, the best way to be worth talking about, is to start by being worth talking to.” This is what Pablos did.

He tells an incredible story in the interview about how he stopped giving regular presentations and started doing the stuff he would do at hacker conventions, like live on stage hacking into a conference hosts personal device. It was a crazy and audacious magic trick. Even if he wasn’t the fanciest most accomplished person in that room or on that stage, the trick never failed to make people want to talk more to him.

Whatever makes us weird, if we position it right, makes us not just worth knowing but worth talking about. I know what makes me weird! I’m overly excitable to learn about people. And not just their accomplishments, I want to know about - weird stuff, like what growing up in Alaska was like, or who the adults were hiring some crazy computer kid.

I want to know that because context is everything. By the time we get to Pablos's stage act, we understand why it worked so well. That’s what came out in my marketing meeting. That extra background, and my insane desire to draw it out of people, is my own lesson in why if we want people to talk about us, step one is making sure people enjoy talking to us. Does this podcast do that? I think it does!

Life question for you: Who are the "other speakers" in your world? Are you consistently showing up to meet them, or are you only showing up for the main stage?

LEGACY: Invention Matters More Than We Let Ourselves Believe

Key Concept: The single most important creative class in human history - inventors - is the one we've collectively decided to ignore. We celebrate artists (who often curate existing work) while ignoring inventors (who bring entirely new possibilities into being). There's no career path to becoming an inventor. Your parents don't encourage it. Venture capital historically didn't fund it. And yet, every single advancement that has allowed humanity to survive and thrive came from someone doing something for the first time: fire, wheels, nuclear reactors, AI. Pablos is attempting to fix this by creating Deep Future - a fund that invests in inventors and their inventions at the moment they're ready to move from lab to startup. The legacy question isn't whether we appreciate inventors; it's whether we're building systems and capital structures that allow them to exist and thrive.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: You can probably read my face while he’s saying this going, “Oh no, I do this. And, can I name any inventors, really?” He’s right. And even if I have some quibbles about the creative craft and where repurposing, repositioning, and collaging comes in, he’s absolutely correct that we don’t spend much time celebrating the people who go zero to one with truly original ideas.

I’m thinking about being early again. I’m thinking about how it feels like you’re wrong when you’re early, because you don’t get the status-boosting win of nailing the timing. But there’s another layer there. A communal layer that’s easy to overlook.

Like me with my high school music story, or like Pablos with all the industries he’s touched at nascent stages, there’s a scene of early adopters. They, almost by definition, are never going to get that status boost, in full.

However, they can’t do it alone. They need friends and supporters and people to be excited about it. Those scenes are special - and, those scenes are never for everyone. I look at what Pablos is doing now with his fund, his book, his podcast, and I think - this is about that scene. This is about that community.

Yes, it’s right to get the timing right once in a while. But, it’s amazing to be part of a small community doing something new that you know is really, really cool. Having Pablos in the mix of podcast guests now, I don’t care if I’m early or late, I just care how excited I am to share this conversation with the world.

Legacy question for you: What would change if we treated inventors with the same cultural reverence we currently reserve for movie stars? What's one inventor - living or dead - who changed your world?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Connect with Pablos on LinkedIn

• Check out his book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters

• Subscribe to the Deep Future Podcast where Pablos has long-form conversations with other nerds and builders

• Join his email list at deepfuture.tech for inspiring and interesting updates

• Take a moment to reflect on all these ideas!

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.