Building in Public
Why I started writing Scaling Judgment in 2026
At the beginning of 2026, I started writing on Substack.
A bit late to the party, but paraphrasing a famous aphorism, the best time to start a Substack was six years ago. The second best time is now.
I know what you are thinking. There he is. Another tech exec sharing his unsolicited opinions, blowing his own horn — and wait, what is he gonna try to sell me?
In all fairness, those exact thoughts are why it took me so long to write in public, let alone share what I wrote.
But a few months ago I decided to give it a shot. I dusted off a dormant Substack account I’d opened years ago just to see what the fuss was about, did some homework to sharpen my thinking, and settled on Scaling Judgment as the title.
So why Scaling Judgment? Let me take you on a short tour.
Writing
I’ve been writing since I was young. Very young. Unpublishable short stories, songwriting — writing has always been there.
Then the internet came. In 2008, when blogging was becoming a thing, I jumped on the bandwagon and started a travel blog, collecting cheap eats and cool student bars from friends on their Erasmus semesters.
My biggest win was a post about Budapest’s nightlife, written by assembling tips from the ex-girlfriend of one of my best friends, who spent six months in the Hungarian capital before it was cool. An ad agency reached out and paid me 100 euro to place the link of some online travel agency. Fun to think about in hindsight — I ended up building a career in travel. At that point in my life I had just moved to Denmark for my master’s, and 100 euro was all the money in the world.
Ironically, not long after my first big payday as a professional blogger, I abandoned my travel blog and pivoted to my personal website, writing about topics bigger than myself. Looking back, it took some swagger to write about business with zero experience beyond my studies and a failed blog. By the way, there are still corpses of this phase around the internet.
But I am drifting. The short version: I’ve always written, one way or another. And almost 20 years since my online debut as a travel blogger, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing is something worth working on consciously and continuously — because writing forces me to think, and thinking keeps me sharp.
We live in the age of AI, likely the beginning of the most transformative technology mankind has ever experienced. As LLMs get better by the day, the temptation to delegate our thinking and writing to a superintelligence grows. I am no Luddite. I am a tech optimist. I use AI tools every day. In fact, Claude is my sparring partner and editor-in-chief for this post.
But it is one thing to use AI to refine our thoughts, and another to delegate our thinking and writing entirely.
Furthermore, I believe that our critical thinking and the ability to discern what is true have already taken a hit after 15 years of social media. For me, thinking, writing, discerning, judging are all things that make us human. Thinking and writing are two muscles that I want to grow, and this project is my gym.
But why do it in public?
Staying Curious
I haven’t committed to a fixed cadence for Scaling Judgment.
Since the beginning of this project, I promised myself not to force myself into publishing something just for the sake of it, and rather write when I think I have something to say.
Yet, the moment you go public, there’s an unspoken commitment to an audience, whatever the size. If nothing else, it can be an audience of one — myself.
This is extremely powerful: knowing that there is someone out there watching, and if I am lucky, or delusional, even waiting for my next post keeps me accountable. It forces me to do the reps.
It also challenges me to find something interesting to write about and publish only what I think is my best work.
More selfishly, writing in public forces me to stay curious — to read widely, listen to new things, and, most importantly, develop an opinion about them.
Building something
I think everyone should have a hobby outside of work. I might have a few too many, if you ask my partner.
But again, thinking about staying human in an age where machines are chipping away at so much of what we do, having a place to work on your craft outside of work is a powerful idea.
Also because ideas cross-pollinate, and things that seem unrelated, combined together, can become very interesting, and benefit you in other areas of life.
But there is something more profound to it.
I like the idea of building something that compounds in the long run. Lately, I have been thinking that it would be amazing to have something to work on for the next 30 years or so.
You see, I have no grand ambitions with Scaling Judgment. I want to have a place to write down my observations on what I see in my day-to-day at work, and to document my interests. Since this is basically me observing things that happen around me, it could be something I can work on for some time.
And then, if any of this catches someone’s attention, sparks something, or helps someone — that’s it. Which brings me to the next point.
Have a serendipity engine
I was a networking junkie in my twenties. Living abroad made it a necessity — I wanted to meet other people outside of my study group or work. So I have been to my share of networking events.
Most of the time they sucked. Or maybe I sucked back then. Probably both. Most of the conversations were quick, proceeding to a pathetic exchange of business cards or Facebook details, before moving on to the next most interesting person. Quite a shallow experience.
Over the years I’ve become more selective, and since becoming a dad, the time to mingle with strangers has become scarce.
One goal of this project is to connect with people who share my interests. Reading someone’s newsletter or listening to their podcast for years creates a strange familiarity. If I ever met Tim Ferriss, I’d have a decade of talking points ready — a great conversation, at least on my side.
Scaling Judgment is my version of that. Even if someone reaches out just to tell me the newsletter sucks, it beats a generic introduction.
Preparing myself for the next chapter
The only constant in life is change. Someone said that every decade, you should reinvent yourself.
My twenties were about exploring: living in many countries, backpacking Latin America, starting personal projects, working for a corporation. This decade has been about joining a scrappy startup and scaling with it, learning an insane amount, and finding a career that fits my interests and values.
And when I look at where my free time and mental energy have gone throughout it, there are two things I keep thinking about: building companies and investing — two disciplines that are more complementary and intertwined than they look.
The more I study how great businesses are built and run, the more I see management decisions overlapping with capital allocation decisions.
This is something I have started learning firsthand, using my little savings and deploying them across various assets, with a few wins and many mistakes.
I am not sure what the next chapter is going to be, but I’d like to think it goes in this direction.
So what should you expect from Scaling Judgment?
I write from the perspective of an operator who has helped build a European scale-up.
This newsletter is for operators who want to think like investors, and investors who want to understand what execution actually looks like at scale.
If Scaling Judgment resonates, subscribe, reply, tell me. That’s the serendipity engine at work.
Thanks for reading.
All views are my own and don’t reflect my employer’s.