January was a busy month. My parents came to visit Carlisle, which finally gave me a chance to show them the apartment Abi and I have been putting together. Beyond that, I spent a lot of time on calls with customers and deep in the weeds across our various businesses at Third South Capital.

For example, I've been advancing some new features on Git-Zen. It's been a really fun change of pace because it's a completely different product and customer base from EntryThingy, where I’ve historically spent the bulk of my time over the past few months.

As I sit down to write this, two things are heavily on my mind.

1. Doing "Everything" to Win

The first is how much work there is to do at Third South Capital. We're running several different companies at once, and there are so many directions we can take them. There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

It reminds me of a quote my friend Justin sent me recently from his favorite author, Robert Caro. This quote describes Lyndon Johnson’s relentless, unsparing work ethic, and it perfectly captures the mindset required when you realize that to win, you have to do everything:

"As an NYA director to whom 'hours made no difference, days made no difference, nights made no difference'; as an unknown twenty-eight-year-old running his first, seemingly hopeless campaign for Congress against seven older, better-known opponents, a race in which he drove himself so ruthlessly that a fellow politician, a man who worked terribly hard himself, said, 'I never knew a man could work that hard'; at every stage in his adult life... he had displayed a willingness to push to their very edge, and beyond the edge, the limits not only of politics but of himself. In every crisis in his life, he had worked until the weight dropped off his body and his eyes sunk into his head and his face grew gaunt and cavernous and he trembled with fatigue... and whenever, at the end of one more in a very long line of very long days, he realized that there was still one more task that should be done, he would turn without a word hinting at fatigue to do it, to do it perfectly. His career had been a story of manipulation, deceit, and ruthlessness, but it had also been a story of an intense physical and spiritual striving that was utterly unsparing; he would sacrifice himself to his ambition as ruthlessly as he sacrificed others. If you did 'everything, you’ll win.' To Lyndon Johnson, 'everything' meant literally that: absolutely anything that was necessary. If some particular effort might help, that effort would be made, no matter how difficult making it might be."

2. Scaling Ourselves with AI

We want to do everything, but that's obviously hard when you aren't Lyndon Johnson and actually need to sleep.

One of the ways we are closing that gap is by building “background agents”. This allows us to write code while we're not even at our laptops, which is fantastic. I've seen other companies write about these things, but I’m really proud of where we are with our background agents and how close to the frontier our setup feels. It has leveled us up massively, allowing us to accomplish significantly more than we could even six months ago.

A Quick Personal Realization

Visualizing this gauntlet of work and dealing with all the noise over the last few weeks made something pop out to me: I need to be reading more. Over the past couple of months, I've let my reading slip in favor of just working in the businesses. I have to make sure that I'm still intentionally leveling myself up, exposing myself to new ideas, and learning from the people who have already solved the problems I'm currently trying to figure out.

What I Wrote This Month

• The 2025 Vendor Audit: A lot of people were really interested in this. I got some great feedback, especially on X, where people were asking a bunch of follow-up questions. That felt awesome and made me realize this is exactly the type of thing I need to write more about.

• The Creation of an Algorithm: I really enjoyed writing this one. It dives into how we think about building EntryThingy and what's truly important to us there.

• The Language of Shiny Objects: A useful look at how my language has evolved lately, and how we think about doing everything when we actually can do everything.

I hope you all had a great February and are setting up for a fantastic March.