Happy 4/20. Here’s your Monday Letter for April 20th, 2026.

Geno Is Score

I’ll start by saying something controversial: I like sports. You might think that is not controversial at all, but I’m not sure it’s safe to say in San Francisco. There’s a place called “Sports Basement” where you can, sure, buy hiking boots, but good luck finding a football (of any variety). I get visceral enjoyment, and real inspiration, from watching a bunch of sweaty dudes I’ve never met try to put an object into a target. I’ll never forget waking up at 7am Pacific to watch Lionel Messi take his final step and earn World Cup glory. Or the heartbreak of rolling out of bed at five in the morning to watch Team Canada get crushed in this year’s Winter Olympics. There’s nothing like sport.

As a kid, the Edmonton Oilers (my hometown hockey team) were miserable. They finished dead last in the NHL year after year, and despite a litany of first round draft picks, nothing really changed (…until 2015, that is). So I spent a lot of time watching my hockey hero: Sidney Crosby. But I’m not here to talk about Sid the Kid. I’m here to talk about Crosby’s long-time teammate: Evgeni Malkin.

Malkin plays Russian hockey: he’s angry, he hits hard, and he scores goals. To get what I mean, spend five minutes and watch this: Angry Geno is Score (a video with 1.8M views from an account with 633 subscribers). Malkin gets pissed, and that makes him better. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t get chippy. He doesn’t whine. He digs deep and plays harder. That entire Pittsburgh Penguins roster was always no-quit, and that attitude carried them to three Stanley Cups.

Anger is caring. Caring is cool. Now it goes without saying: anger can take you down a bad path. Blind fury is not what I’m talking about here. I’m after the ability to recognize that emotion, use it as fuel, and steer it positively.

I’m not much of a hockey player, but I can tell you this: right now, the technology industry feels like a blood bath. If you’re a college grad, every day you wake up to a new Dario quote telling you you’ll never get a job. (I’m cheaply paraphrasing him here, but you know what I mean.) How could you not be angry? Being angry means you care. Guide that emotion. Get in the mix, compete, and do something great. This is a cherry-picked example from my universe, but Lord knows there’s a lot you could be angry about today. Feel that feeling, and take a page out of Geno’s book: go score.

And, as always, what I’ve been consuming as of late.

• Lots of great movies. I finally watched Project Hail Mary (2026) starring Ryan Gosling. It was so, so good. I managed to catch it on 70mm at AMC Metreon here in San Francisco, and that was absolutely the right call. As many have said, it stayed true to the book, which Andy Weir’s writing thoroughly earned. The movie release had nice timing with the Artemis II launch as well, and you have to wonder if somehow, some way, that was intentional.
• I had a friend visiting from out of town this weekend and wanted to pick a very San Francisco movie for us to watch, so we finally watched Zodiac (2007). (Spoilers ahead, be warned.) My main takeaway from the film was that there’s probably more ongoing mystery around the Zodiac killer than there needs to be. It seemed… quite clear it was that guy who, with a bit of good fortune and the fact it was 1970, miraculously got away with it. Slightly disappointed to see Ted Cruz not make an appearance.
• I’ve wrapped up The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Greene, and I’m now on to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. Not much to say yet, but I’m very excited for this one. It’s been recommended to me a lot.
• I read a two-page essay, The Bitter Lesson, by Rich Sutton. The core thesis is that humans have baked how we think we think we learn into machine learning (e.g., domain knowledge and feature engineering), and this has mostly been unhelpful. Citing case studies of ML advances in Go, chess, speech recognition, and computer vision, Sutton argues that a basic learning algorithm, lots of data, and letting compute do the rest is unreasonably effective. This essay was written in 2019! I still think humans do this too much with LLMs. Sure, they ‘speak’ like us, but they do not think like us. They’re intelligent in their own right, and that should be understood and respected.
• I’ve also started reading Designing Data Intensive Applications (2nd ed.) by Martin Kleppmann at work with my book club. It’s led to some great discussions so far, and I’m excited to dig in deeper!
• The Edmonton Oilers take on the Anaheim Ducks for game 1, round 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, tonight. I will be watching.

Have a great week!