Why footnotes?
Footnotes exist in the margins of a page, where writers slip context that would slow the main argument. They are the asides and clarifications that keep a text honest while letting the story keep its stride. Here, the name footnotes¹ calls on that same affinity for side paths, and the instinct that the most interesting part of an idea often lives just below the boldface line. Each post follows a question that has been tugging at my sleeve: why disciplined investors spiral into familiar cognitive grooves, how market attention bends when patience outruns the news cycle, or where second‑order effects have redrawn what we thought were neat conclusions. The result tries to hold tidy theory in one hand and messy reality in the other.
That perspective comes from spending my days inside a lower-middle-market private‑equity firm, negotiating term sheets and triaging portfolio surprises, and from spending the rest of my time working through the MIT Sloan Executive MBA, borrowing analytic toys from classmates and professors, then stress‑testing them against the stubborn facts of my own deals. The writing grows in that junction where practitioner urgency meets a student’s appetite for context, so it reads more like a weekend column than a punchy LinkedIn post.
What you won’t find here are quick tips or multi‑hour reads. What you will find is an invitation to linger with complexity, to trace decisions back to their hidden assumptions, and, occasionally, to watch those assumptions unravel in real time. If that sounds like the kind of thinking you’d like to keep in your inbox, subscribe below. I try to publish weekly (no promises), reply to every thoughtful email, and keep the noise to a minimum.
