Idea: Celebrate the history of Black Bottom by investing in the next generation of Detroit leaders. Problem: Current middle and high schoolers don’t see startups, politics, etc. as real career paths. Solution: Create $10K-100K scholarship programs for rising star students in Metro Detroit. Partners: Leverage top centers to give students access to the best facultyContinue reading “The Black Bottom Challenge”
Author Archives: Neil Thanedar
The Positive Politics Accelerator
Idea: An accelerator to help ambitious optimists get into activism and politics. Imagine a campus that looks more like a campground. Many small cabins organized in circles around larger common areas, with the center of campus anchored by a large quad with one large building on each end, a dining room for 100+, and aContinue reading “The Positive Politics Accelerator”
Lowercase Politics
“There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident.“— Paul Graham, The Two Kinds of Moderate, December 2019 What is the opposite of partisan politics? Where everything isn’t defined by Red vs. Blue, or labeled D, R, or I? I call it lowercase politics. A mix of small “l” liberal, smallContinue reading “Lowercase Politics”
How Revolutions Really Start
What Modern Protesters Can Learn From The American Revolution If you watch Ken Burns’ The American Revolution documentary, it’s shocking how okay most early American colonists were with being ruled by the British. Sure, there were protests in colonial America, but most colonists were willing to remain British subjects as long as they got representationContinue reading “How Revolutions Really Start”
You’re Not Burnt Out. You’re Existentially Starving.
“Those who have a ‘Why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘How’.” ― Viktor Frankl quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, Man’s Search for Meaning Let me guess: Viktor Frankl calls this feeling the “existential vacuum” in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychologist who survived the Holocaust, and in this book heContinue reading “You’re Not Burnt Out. You’re Existentially Starving.”
Best Quotes from Ken Burns’ “The American Revolution” Documentary
In this Note, I focus on Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series titled “The American Revolution”. Burns’ six-part, twelve-hour series was released on November 16, 2025. My goal is to review one episode per week until the end this year. I anticipate this will take me 60+ hours of focused work. Well worth it to fully absorb the key ideas and events of the American Revolution!
The Joy and Pain of Writing a Book
You know that feeling when you see someone else succeed in a way you want to succeed? I call it the four stages of jealousy: One of my favorite mental models is to “Explore Your Emotions“. Most people instinctively avoid their emotions, especially negative ones. This mental model teaches you to stop and dig intoContinue reading “The Joy and Pain of Writing a Book”
To My Mom
I never do this for anyone before they die. But I’ll make one exception here. I have a tradition of writing a letter to my loved ones when they die. Dear Mama still makes me cry. To Zeus is my ode to the best dog. But I’ve always felt bad that one of the greatestContinue reading “To My Mom”
To Zeus
“I bid you beware,of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”— Rudyard Kipling, The Power of the Dog I remember how scared you were that first day we met. You were the dog that was “tough to adopt”. We knew your story, how badly you had been treated in a breeding mill, and thatContinue reading “To Zeus”
On Being a Father + Founder
One night after a particularly bad loss in one of my startups, I came home and my wife said, in what she meant to be reassuring but felt crushing at the time, “at least you’re a great dad.”