In the fall of 2011, I was standing in the middle of Zuccotti Park during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests. There were tents, handmade signs, Guy Fawkes masks from V for Vendetta, anarchist newspapers, libertarian tracts, socialist manifestos. The energy was raw, unruly, electric. The air smelled of weed and overfilled trash cans. It reminded me of that old scene from The Wild One, when someone asks Marlon Brando’s character, “What are you rebelling against?” and he shoots back, “Whaddaya got?”
It was chaotic, even theatrical — but it was also brimming with a desperate kind of creativity. People were angry and looking for something — something real, something better, something they hadn’t found in the systems they were protesting.
Ironically, I was one of the people they were protesting against.
At the time, I worked on Wall Street. My friend Dave and I had just come from an analyst event and were still in our pressed wool suits. We stood out like Cartier cufflinks in a mosh pit. Dave was nervous. He was further along in his career and had a lot more to lose, carrying a hefty Manhattan mortgage, a house in the Hamptons, and a fleet of private-school tuitions. The financial crisis had rattled everyone. People had been crushed — coworkers and mentors, careers torched, homes foreclosed, families uprooted.
I wasn’t quite in the same boat as Dave. I had rent and credit card debt. But more importantly, I wasn’t nervous because… part of me felt like I belonged there.
Several years earlier, I had been on the other side of the cultural divide. I had moved to New York with my band, chasing the dream of getting signed and breaking out. We rehearsed obsessively, played every dive bar with a power outlet, and hoped that someone — anyone — would hear something in our music worth investing in. We weren’t out to be rich. We wanted to be real. We wanted to matter. Idealistic to the bone.
And that’s when it hit me: What I was doing then, and what I was doing now — these seemingly opposite lives — were actually built on the same foundation.
Both were about hunting for undiscovered potential.
As a musician, I was trying to write the song that would light people up and put us on the map. As an investment analyst, I was looking for underappreciated companies — unsexy, unloved, misunderstood — that could, with time and care, become something much bigger. A&R reps look for bands before they ignite. Startup founders pitch ideas before the market understands the need. VCs bet on futures the rest of the world doesn’t yet believe in. Scouts at college games, book editors searching the slush pile, AI researchers training models with no roadmap, we’re all in the same business: the hunt for exponential growth.
But here’s where it gets deeper. The biggest growth opportunities don’t just come from spotting potential. They come from reframing it. From seeing something new in a familiar context, or something familiar in a new context. That’s the magic trick. That’s the unlock.
When you find a new idea, and you’re able to connect it to something already rooted in your mental model, you transform it. It becomes bigger. Actionable. You’re no longer fumbling around. You’ve found a path. And the same is true in reverse — if you’re struggling to understand something, reframing it using something you do understand can make it snap into focus.
That act of reframing — of creatively linking the unfamiliar with the familiar — is one of the most powerful tools we have for discovery and innovation.
It’s the flash point when two unrelated concepts — like music and finance, protest and portfolio theory, or punk chaos and institutional order — click together in a way that reveals something new. Not just new information, but new meaning.
Singular links are catalytic. They convert obscurity into clarity. They transform the abstract into the applicable. They’re how metaphors become models, and how insight becomes leverage.
In a startup pitch, a singular link might happen the moment the founder says, “Think of us like Etsy for industrial parts.” Suddenly, you get it. In music, it might be the familiar chord progression played with a different instrument — something old made electric again. In investing, it’s when you look at a sleepy logistics company and realize it’s actually a tech platform in disguise.
These links help us understand. They help us believe. They close the gap between skepticism and conviction — and that’s where real movement happens.
That’s what this blog is about. It’s not a commentary on culture, business, or art. Well, ok, it is that, but it’s mainly a framework for singular links — for those moments when analogy, insight, and intuition collapse into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Whether you’re slinging a bass guitar, a pitch deck, a manuscript, or a codebase, you’re in the same line of work. You’re seeking potential. The best way to unlock it isn’t to force something new into the world from scratch. It’s to connect what’s familiar with something new. When you do connect them, you don’t just find opportunity. You create it.