You might know David Perell as the creator of Write of Passage or the host of the How I Write podcast. But he also describes himself as an angel investor in companies focused on creators, productivity, and the future of education.
Recently, he was on the Nathan Barry Show (How to Stand Out as a Writer in the Age of AI), where he talked about being an investor in ideas. Here’s the quote that sparked the idea for this newsletter:
I’m like a seed stage investor in ideas.
He goes on to describe what that means: he finds an idea that’s a little messy but really insightful, one that could reach a lot of people — and it doesn’t matter whether it was his idea or somebody else’s. Then he shapes it until it’s clear and concrete.
In this newsletter, I want to unpack what that looks like and share how it can be a valuable perspective for anyone who wants to do their best creative work.
What it means to be an investor
There are a few key concepts we need to understand first about investing:
- Many investors have a thesis. Most seed investors publicly declare what they invest in (for David, this is “companies focused on creators, productivity, and the future of education”). This isn’t a limitation; it’s the focus necessary to find deals worth investing in.
- There has to be a flow of potential deals. Most investors will see hundreds of potential companies per year, which is how they are able to find the good ones. The quantity is what brings the quality. You can’t pick well from a small sample.
- Most of the time, the answer is “no.” The no’s come fast and furious. The overwhelming majority get declined in minutes. Being decisive about passing on an opportunity is a skill, not a character flaw.
- The conviction comes after the diligence. Seed investing is too early for actual numbers most of the time, so you’re investing based on your judgment. You need to be both contrarian and correct, because by the time everyone agrees with the idea, the price will be too high.
- You need a portfolio of investments. Most of the investments don’t yield a return. One or two will power the whole fund, but you can’t tell in advance which ones those will be. So most investors develop a portfolio instead of trying to place one perfect bet.
- You have to be incredibly patient. Often it takes 7 to 10 years before you really find out if you were right. You have to be willing to sit with uncertainty for a long time before you get the payoff.
Notice that none of this is about being smarter than everyone else. It’s about having a process for deciding which deals are worth your time.
What it means to be an investor in ideas
Companies aren’t the only thing you can put money behind. Attention is a currency, and it works the same way with your notes and ideas.
- You need a thesis. Most people capture indiscriminately. They capture anything they think might be important someday, instead of focusing on the things that are interesting and useful. That’s why opening your vault often feels like noise instead of quality source material. Knowing what you’re interested in is what makes certain ideas register as yours in the first place.
- You need volume. The notes you never use aren’t wasted. They’re part of the sample size that makes it possible to recognize a truly good idea when it shows up.
- Most ideas don’t go anywhere. You need to be willing to admit when an idea doesn’t pan out. That’s the equivalent of saying “no” to investing in it. If everything you save feels like it needs to turn into something, you’re not curating correctly. The guilt of an app filled to the brim with notes and ideas is often just an unwillingness to pass on them.
- Conviction comes from working with your ideas. You don’t know what you really have in an idea until you’ve put it next to everything else. And that work isn’t just how you decide — it’s how the idea gets better. Waiting to feel certain before you start developing it is why most drafts never get written.
- You need a portfolio of ideas. Most of the ideas you capture won’t go anywhere. In fact, I estimate that 90% of the things I capture never even make it into Obsidian. But the value of one or two great ideas will do more for you than everything else combined, and there’s no way to know which will pay off in advance. That’s why trying to pick the winner ahead of time doesn’t work. You’re better off developing a lot of ideas than betting everything on the one you’re most sure about.
- You have to be patient with your ideas. An idea sitting in your notes isn’t dead. Some of them don’t pay off for years, until something happens that makes them matter. Your PKM system is a greenhouse for your ideas. Give them the right conditions and the time to develop before you cut them loose.
The Bottom Line: You don’t have to have the idea first in order to own it.
Nobody expects an investor to write the code or build the product. Investors don’t build companies; they make them better. They recognize something worth backing before it’s obvious, and then help it become what they believe it can be.
Often we don’t give ourselves that permission with the ideas we capture. If we didn’t come up with it, we figure we don’t have any claim to it. We feel it has to be completely original for us to make it our own.
I want to challenge this, because nothing is completely original. As Kirby Ferguson says, everything is a remix.
When you own an idea, that doesn’t mean you’re claiming you invented it. Adding it to your system is you saying you want it to reach its full potential. You’re putting your attention and time behind an idea you think deserves more of both.
That’s the real work of PKM — recognizing which ideas are useful and developing them into something new and original.
So this week, I encourage you to pull three ideas out of your notes that you keep coming back to. Write two sentences on each one: the first is why you find it interesting, and the second is who can really benefit from this idea. Then pick the one that’s most interesting and actually do something with it. Connect it to the other notes and ideas in your vault and create something new out of it.
If you do, you’ll discover that you never really had a creativity problem. You just need to invest in a few more good ideas, regardless of where they come from.
