Life Update, New Beginnings

In March 2024, Diamond Kinetics acquired the company I co-founded, sidelineHD. I’m proud of what we accomplished. Last month, I left to do something new!

One day I’ll write more about that, but this is about what’s next: after years of building web apps, I feel burned out—especially seeing how AI is changing software engineering. At an individual level, outsized productivity gains go to people with good taste (I don't think I have that). And at an org level, smaller teams can probably get a lot more done if everyone fully embraces these new tools. Sure I can write way more code with Cursor, but I didn't really want to spend more time on something that I think isn’t going to be as valuable in the future.

So now I'm betting on sports. @sprotzbettor and I started PY Research — sounds fancy and official but we’re really just clicking into a bunch of sportsbooks and betting what our models tell us. I like this intellectual challenge. I get to do sports analytics and there is a real tangible scoreboard. Touched on it when I talked to Owen last fall (his newsletter is amazing btw, DM me and I can gift a sub). Besides that, it’s legit a really good financial opportunity. We’re betting a lot of NBA — we can compound daily, sometimes even multiple times a day. iykyk

Timing feels good too. Yeah, all the AI stuff is exciting, but I'm too dumb to work on anything foundational, and a lot of the fun new stuff seems to be at the application layer...which I am sadly currently burned out on. I'm just happy being a user of these new tools. Luckily, gambling is so in the zeitgeist. Not only are more states legalizing sports betting, people just love speculation in general. Shitcoins are going crazy, prediction markets might actually work, options / derivatives volume just keeps going up. People just want to escape the 9-5 rat race, and social media amplifies people mooning 1000x on $cumrocket and hitting +100000 7 leg parlays. Really stokes the fomo.

It doesn't hurt that there's dumb money flowing in. The legal US sportsbooks make a lot, so there should be opportunity in taking from them. I get to write code and think about sports problems every day which I love. I'll be happy to never grind leetcode and never have to deal with workplace politics shenanigans. There's a ton of variance in each bet, but in some ways I feel like I have so much more agency in my financial outcomes compared to working at / starting a startup where the feedback cycle is far longer and dominated by so many things outside your control.

I’ll share occasional updates, but for the most part, I’m heads-down doing something that I'm really enjoying. I don’t think I can avoid saying this: if you have accounts and want to make some money, DM for partnership!