Abhi Thanendran

A few surprising things I learned from reading about Eiichrio Oda, the creator of One Piece: 1. He slept 3 hours a night for 15 years. 2. He created the most successful manga of all time with more than 600 million copies in circulation. 3. He said he would have missed his parent’s funeral because it conflicted with his work. 4. He is extremely private. He does not allow his face to be photographed and when he appears on video he has a giant fish avatar placed on his head. 5. When he hires a new editor the first thing he says to them is you need to be willing to die for One Piece. 6. His editor said he might someday encounter a writer more talented than Oda but he would never meet anyone who worked harder. 7. He doesn’t want ideas, he wants criticism. 8. He would hand draw entire Disney animated movies to learn how to give his characters emotion. 9. He said he only saw his family once a week because family time was too relaxing. 10. He holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. 11. He is often described as a maniac due to his unbelievable work ethic and inhuman daily habits. 12. He believes in having the least number of people possible touching the work. 13. He says he gets his best ideas by not sleeping or eating. He says humans can only come up with truly new ideas when they reach their limit. 14. He started working on One Piece when he was 22. He is still working on it at 51. 15. He once spent 12 consecutive hours on the telephone discussing a single story with his editor. 16. He has an extreme tolerance for repetition. 17. Imagination is the organizing force of his entire life. 18. He's a perfectionist who has repeatedly admitted that he cannot make himself work in a more efficient way, even when he desperately wants to. 19. He never finishes before a deadline. He equates using every available minute with giving his maximum effort. 20. He believes it’s impossible to create something great unless you do everything yourself, attend to every detail, and test it exhaustively. 21. He believes the more experience he has the harder it is to create. 22. He was 4 when he decided to be a manga artist. He said he wanted to avoid ever having to get a real job. 23. He creates his work for an audience of exactly one person: himself at 15 years old. 25. He has dedicated his entire adult life to writing a story about freedom and adventure, while accepting an extraordinarily restrictive life in order to create it. 26. To this day he does not feel successful. -- Eiichiro Oda is a relentlessly obsessive creative genius who has devoted nearly every waking hour of his adult life to building one of the most extraordinary fictional universes ever imagined. You don't want to miss this episode:

The nostalgia. The chase. The thrill of finding the one... Meet the new Tilt. Built for collectors, by collectors. All in on cards.

Built like a machine. 30.10.2026 🛸

10 months in the making. One big bet. Launching 30.10.2026 🛸

I think fundamentally we've ~now arrived at the correct form factor for mass consumer AI: It was never going to be Google's search box but with AI, and a left-hand list of Chats was a 18mo experiment that has reached 100M users but won't be the thing that will scale to 1B users for next 10yrs — it will be messaging with a single bot, occasionally split to specific bots for special areas of work/life. Still ton of innovation to be done, e.g., in the bots–bots collab mechanisms, credentials, computer use, and generally optimizing the heck out of everything … … but the form factor has settled; the iPhone Classic has landed; the News Feed has been established.

If you're building / investing in consumer and spend all your time on X, you're in a bubble The mainstream breakout trend of the past 6 months is not agents but...digital repacks of trading cards Monthly U.S. consumer spend on Anthropic vs. @triumpharcade 👇

you must believe you are special and then go so hard, for so long, with such violent refusal to accept any other ending, that reality itself starts running out of ways to tell you no. you must wage a war daily against the ordinary outcome, until the belief you invented out of nothing in a room by yourself has been hammered into the world so many times that it stops being a claim and becomes reality.

BBC: “What was your screen time?” Student: “Nine hours.” BBC: “You’re gong to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?” Student: “Stare at a wall.”