Intensity

December 23, 2025

I will admit I am not Paul Graham. My track record is currently not something that people admire.

But part of building yourself up is to reflect on traits etc that are actually required to succeed. This is a never ending debate. Every yapper on YouTube Shorts that has made their first 10k talks about what is needed to succeed. I mostly never listen when people talk about this, (with exceptions to people I actually look up to of course, e.g the godfathers of SF, Paul Graham, you name it). BUT I have always had my own strong opinion: "intensity".

What does intensity even mean?

I like to think about intensity as the famous story regarding how Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey fought regarding the acquisition of Instagram. Jack Dorsey always considered Twitter to be a failure to him in the sense that it did not really fulfill its mission to become the number one social platform in the world, it got beat by a mile by Facebook. Famously, when asked in an interview what was the point where Twitter failed, Jack Dorsey referred to when Facebook and Twitter both fought about acquiring Instagram. It was a bidding war, and Twitter had the obvious lead, Twitter and Instagram had agreed on an offer, everything was maybe 1-2 weeks from finalizing, the "check mate" that changed this was something that is the epitome of intensity, it was a Friday, and Zuck called the founders of Instagram and said the following: "What can we do to make this deal happen THIS WEEKEND." This was unheard of, selling a company for a billion dollars, and it would happen in just two days? What about paperwork, what about negotiations, well Zuck did the impossible, he went with his lawyers and team to Instagram, and Instagram was his by Monday.

This to me is inspiration, being this aggressive about business is what drives growth, SO many times, I have found myself in the position of listening to yappers, with grand plans, that is just "pretending" to run a startup, "Team, lets run a ad campaign where we focus on XX with a budget of NN", months go by, and the "team" has a meeting where some buffoon says "Lets start planning the campaign we talked about in January". What the fuck? If we discuss something we should start doing it the same day or MAX the same week. Action and speed is one of the ONLY advantages you have as a startup compared to an enterprise. Only a fool would not use it.

Also in the term "intensity" I am also encapsulating "action" for me intensity is about, figuring out what to do and doing it. Another example is the story about the Reddit founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.

In 2005 they were students at the University of Virginia, and they took a train to Boston to attend a talk at Harvard from Paul Graham with the title "How to Start a Startup".

They pitched the original idea of an app to order food and applied to YC, but got rejected because Graham thought mobile was too hard, with no app store, deals with vendors etc. So they were on the train back from Boston when Graham called them and told them that they really liked the founders but didn't like the idea, and they wished for them to come back and pitch a new idea. The story goes that they jumped off the train at the next stop, and booked a new train back to Boston, where they pitched Reddit as the front page of the internet, and got in to the first batch of YC; once again, most people would just try to arrange a meeting later on, and continue pretending. Only a few winners would go on the train back. This story might as well be a little Hollywoodized, but you get the point.

Sadly intensity seems like it rarely is learned, it seems it takes years to develop and might not even be a skill that people can pick up, it might be as much genetics as you can develop it. But lets hope not.

So I am writing this December 23rd 2025, my goal for 2026 is being uncomfortably intense in everything I do.

So takeaway: Be intense