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Hi, I'm John.

I like to think of life as an open field.

John Mason

⁠

I’m a product manager. My goal in life is to make some contribution to the progress of humanity.

I have a lot of interests. Among them:

Product Management. I like building useful things. And product is a job where you get to do just that. I want to build lots of useful things in my lifetime, and long-term be a key part of building at least one big useful thing (probably a software company). Product is synergistic with that long-term goal: it lets you practice building, just within a narrower scope.

STEM Immigration Expansion. My parents are immigrants. I believe that expanding STEM immigration is by far the single greatest lever the United States has to improve its long-term prosperity. The ability to attract highly skilled immigrants is America’s greatest advantage - and we squander it. Countless examples of immigrants who had massive impact- Katalin Karikó (messenger RNA/Covid vaccine), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Sergey Brin (Google) show that just one immigrant can drive the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs, technological advancement, and health breakthroughs. But how many potential Karikós and Musks do we turn away each year? Over 300,000. With the current H1B system, each year we get applications from >450,000 world-class minds and draw straws to

choose just a third of them... randomly⁠

. In a lottery. Primarily for political reasons, we choose to leave our prosperity to... luck.

Defense and Security. I’ve long been interested in foreign policy and defense. I spent a summer in Korea with the State Department as part of the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y), studied political science in college, and have long followed foreign affairs closely. Simply put, I don’t believe order is a given. Yet all prosperity is founded on the basis of security; given that, security seems a rather high impact area. At the same time, since the “last supper” in 1993, it appears our superbly consolidated defense industry has become too unwieldy to build the modern and intelligent hardware-software platforms that I think will define warfare.

Renewable Energy and Sustainability. I’ve long had an interest in renewables. Before I started my first full-time job in consulting, I got pretty good at selling cars for Tesla (ask me for my 1 minute sales pitch). In consulting, I worked on EV charging station buildout strategy for Exelon; I also joined the

Clean Energy Leadership Institute⁠

, where I made a lot of friends who work in clean energy. A company I used to work at, Optoro, has a mission to drive sustainability in the retail space by building solutions to efficiently handle returns, which there are rather a lot of as the shift to ecommerce continues.

Today, I believe that without nuclear for baseload generation, we will continue to be wedded to generation via fossil fuels, at least given near-term (pre-2026) lithium capacity limitations and limited hydrogen infrastructure.

Real Estate. My first internship was at a real estate private equity firm, JBG (now JBG Smith, NYSE: JBGS). I also closed in April 2020 on the sale of a SFH I bought a few years ago. I’ve always found real estate a fascinating asset class, not least for its prominent role in American notions of success and prosperity.

Today, I generally believe that in most cases, real estate investing is not a great way for individuals to generate differentiated, risk-adjusted returns¹, especially in most major cities. I think the most compelling case to make for it is on the basis of appreciation (supplemented by income), yet only in exceptional situations.

As Robert Shiller has shown⁠

, at the national level historically there has been no continuous uptrend in real home prices.

Paradoxically, I believe that one can see predictable short-term appreciation, particularly in situations of high intensity migration of high-income workers (LinkedIn’s

Workforce Reports⁠

are excellent for monitoring this). In other words, from simple supply and demand, influenced by local regulation (Shiller’s land restrictions point; e.g., SF). Recent examples include migration to SF for tech and migration from SF to Seattle (Shiller’s mobility point). The next wave appears to be

SF to Austin⁠

- I watched prices in the Westwood high school district in Austin (rated the second-best open high school district in Austin) rise 20-30% in the latter half of 2020.

AI/Machine Learning. I worked on a machine learning-driven product at Optoro. For us, the value of AI came from automation, from labor efficiency in use cases where tons and tons of relatively simple decisions need to be made and the data was already structured.

More recently, I helped my brother launch

Kawaii⁠

, an app that’s reached the top 25 in the Google Play store for Art and Design. It primarily uses a tuned version of Stable Diffusion to generate anime images.

Politics/Economics/Policy. One of my college majors was political science; going into college I actually thought I’d be a career diplomat. To that end, I did NSLI-Y and then took a gap year to serve with AmeriCorps, teaching math and reading to 1st, 2nd, 7th, 8th, and 12th graders in rural Washington State. I spent a lot of that year at the top of a mountain reading philosophy, policy, and politics books. I’m still learning about policy across energy, redistribution, taxation, and the like.

Personal Finance & Investing. See my LearnPF project below. During Covid I also spent a lot more time learning how to assess individual companies as investments. I’m now slightly more confident in my ability to make fewer stupid investment decisions.

1. Real estate investing also involves a host of tax considerations, from the mortgage interest deduction to qualified business income deductions and depreciation, but I omitted those here, focusing purely on the viability from a cash return standpoint. My thinking generally is that tax considerations usually don’t move the needle sufficiently to flip an investment from a “don’t do” to a “do”, especially relative to other investments. I generally prefer to think of these considerations, as well as the availability of leverage, as tailwinds to boost the exceptions I mention vs. reasons to make the investment in the first place.

⁠

Projects

Ozymandias:

⁠

I was walking in the park with my girlfriend during the summer of Covid, and had a sad thought: in just 250 years, no one will remember me, and there will be virtually no record of my existence. So what, if anything, actually lasts- literally?

To answer that, I hired some material scientists from Upwork to help me research what material properties most influence durability on the millennial timescale, and conducted a materials search. I settled on an aerospace superalloy called Inconel that’s used by SpaceX for their rockets’ exhaust manifolds. It’s got high tensile strength, is resistant to acids, alkalis, and oxidation, and is relatively hard. I put out an RFQ to some aerospace suppliers, learned some metalworking to finish it, laser-engraved a piece of it for myself, then built a Shopify site (the image above is the link) for anyone else who might also want something that could last thousands of years.

I will note, rather wryly, that this particular interest runs slightly counter to my interest in sustainability.

⁠

My father passed when I was a junior in college, so my family’s finances became my responsibility. I had to learn a lot. As I was learning, I realized all my friends were similarly clueless, despite being relatively well-educated. So I built a simple Wordpress site to answer their questions and those of their friends or others.

Experience

Product Manager at

Lithic⁠

(2022-present):

At Lithic, I’ve

launched the Lithic Dashboard⁠

, our

Events Platform⁠

Disputes in Dashboard⁠

, and

Tokenization Control⁠

, among many, many other products and features.

Senior PM at

Fluence⁠

(2021-2022)

Product Manager at

Optoro⁠

(2019-2021)

Corporate Strategy and Development Manager at

Microsoft⁠

(2018-2019)

Associate at

the Boston Consulting Group⁠

(2016-2018)

Strategy Analyst at Accenture Strategy (2015-2016)

Product Specialist at Tesla (2015)

What I'm reading

⁠

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