My 5 Favorite Not Boring Essays of 2025
Electric Slide, Means & Meaning, Cable Caballero, Most Human Wins, Great Differentiation
Hi friends 🎅,
Happy Tuesday!
With Christmas just two days away, and only one day to use the office printer to print very long documents, I wanted to share a few of my favorite not boring essays of the year.
I’ve heard rumors, concerning and thus far unsubstantiated, that not every one of you has read every word of every essay this year; a week or two off should give you ample time to catch up.
I have felt absurdly grateful that I get to do what I do this year, and it’s because you are willing to follow me down weird and seemingly disconnected rabbit holes, to great depths, wherever my curiosity leads.
2026 is going to be bigger and better. I have some fun things planned, including the biggest launch in not boring history since the newsletter started. I’m giddy.
Thank you, and I hope you all have a joyful holiday season.
Let’s get to it.
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Silicon Valley Bank
If you are a fintech, you cannot move fast and break things like most tech startups. Things need to be solid: underwriting, processing, infrastructure, and integrations. Moving money is consequential.
And the level of trust and stringent regulations required when it comes to finances are some reasons that a new report from Silicon Valley Bank found that AI adoption in fintech has lagged other industries. That lag is reflected in venture capital investment; currently, just 30 cents of every VC dollar invested in fintech goes to AI-enabled companies.
Check out the full Future of Fintech report for more on this and other challenges, and opportunities, within fintech.
My 5 Favorite Not Boring Essays of 2025
This year, I changed the way that Not Boring worked in order to write fewer, deeper essays. After publishing relentlessly for five years, it was an adjustment, but once I got the hang of it, I think I wrote better than I’ve ever written. Choosing my five favorite essays was hard.
A couple of things I’m most proud of from this year are:
Even with many fewer company deep dives (Meter, Base Power Company, Ramp, Thatch, and Somos Internet / APD), I think if we look back in a decade, this year’s crop will have the highest combined market cap of any vintage to date. I’m setting the over/under at a quarter-trillion.
I began to form a worldview through writing, even if it meant writing stuff that stretches the boundaries of what a tech newsletter is. This is a newsletter about getting the amazing future. That future will require new research and technology that give humans greater means. I am obsessed with strategy and company building because for any of these innovations to make a difference in the world, they need to achieve scale. But a future in which we’re zipping supersonic around the world unhappily scrolling social media isn’t the amazing future. We need means and meaning.
Next year, I’m going to lean hard into building a little world here in not boring. The first couple of years of the newsletter were about freshness and zeitgeist. This year, I found a deeper, higher-quality level. In 2026, I’m going to try to do both. Stay tuned.
For now, enjoy my five favorite not boring essays of 2025.
(1) The Electric Slide
The history, 99% decline, and future of the Electric Stack with Sam D'Amico
This was, unexpectedly, the most popular not boring essay of 2025 by far. The night before I sent it, after spending a month researching and writing, I told my wife Puja, “It’s so long that I don’t think that many people will read it, but I hope that ten people read it and really love it.” I was off by a few orders of magnitude.
The point of the essay was that the future is going to be electric - that curves are destiny, and all of the curves are pointing to cheaper, better components with which to build electric products, and that electric products either outperform their combustive counterparts or do new things entirely - and that China is eating the West’s electric lunch.
What I loved most though, and what I think people appreciated, is getting to spend a month going unbelievably deep on the research, building my intuition from the ground up (literally, how does an electric motor work), and finding all the way down there the incredible stories of the people behind the curves.
(2) Means & Meaning
We have the technology. Cool, now what?
Honestly, I just reread this and I was kind of surprised that I wrote it. It’s a banger and it’s very different from what I normally write.
The piece describes what might be the core philosophy behind not boring: that technology can and should provide means, but it can’t provide meaning. We need to do that for ourselves.
That’s why the newsletter has become more of a mix of technology and philosophy. We need both:
You could imagine a simple formula for total meaning.
Total Meaning = Number of Human Hours * % of Hours Spent Meaningfully
Technology will increase the number of human hours. More people will be able to live longer lives. The question is whether we spend those hours more or less meaningfully, whether we spend them as the burnt-out, auto-exploiting automatons Han and Baudrillard view us as, or whether we choose to pay attention.
Speaking of Attention, the section on David Foster Wallace’s Something To Do With Paying Attention in this piece was my favorite thing to write all year, because I loved the book, because when I write about DFW I can almost feel myself writing a little more like him, and because it was such a weird thing to put in the middle of this piece but I think it worked.
(3) Cable Caballero
Forrest Heath III’s Joyride to Rebuild the Internet (Then Everything Else)
Cable Caballero is the story of Forrest Heath III, the founder of two companies, Somos Internet and Autoridad Panandina, and the band of pirates he’s brought together to rebuild the world’s infrastructure, starting with better, faster vertically integrated internet in Colombia.
I love this for so many reasons. Forrest will go down as one of the founders of this generation. It is a case study in how to build a Vertical Integrator. And maybe most importantly, it shows that it’s possible to build really hard things lightly and with joy.
In Means & Meaning, I wrote that technology can’t provide meaning. Cable Caballero shows that building it certainly can.
(4) The Great Differentiation
Salvation from Slop
Differentiation has been a core theme in not boring since the very beginning.
Over the past year, it’s gotten so much easier to not differentiate, to do the same thing, to copy explicitly: “make me a landing page that looks like x.”
Which is why there’s so much opportunity in doing the opposite. In putting a little bit of effort in. In taking a few minutes to think about what makes you you in a way that others can’t easily be and then putting care into designing around that differentiation.
Because if you can’t figure out what makes you different from everyone else, then what are you even doing here?
The good news is, the more slop there is, the more value in differentiated craft.
The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
(5) Most Human Wins
A Strategy Memo for Humans, 2025 and Beyond
Those self-correcting mechanisms are really easy to miss.
You see a lot of slop, and you think it’s all going to slop.
And you see AI getting smarter, and you think it’s going to replace all human value-creating activity. You think humans are done, commoditized. That all meaning will be lost as we lose our jobs.
I don’t know.
AI has been both incredibly impressive and underwhelming. So far, 2024’s The Goldilocks Zone is holding up really well. It feels no closer to agency.
The more machine-like tasks humans have been stuck doing that AI commoditizes, the more opportunities there are to move a layer up the stack, to something more interesting that takes advantage of the commoditization.
I wrote this piece in the beginning of the year, and over the past 11 months, I’ve gotten more confident that the future is going to be great for humans as long as we don’t let ourselves get sucked into endless AI generated waifu feeds and instead focus on having novel experiences, developing deeper human relationships, and discovering who we are.
“Most Human wins, not by competing with machines, but by becoming greater and greater versions of ourselves with whatever resources available. The more resources the better.”
In a lot of ways, 2025 was the year of AI. The thing that struck me this year, though, was the importance of people. The game, I think, is to become the best version of you and surround yourself with other people doing the same.
That’s all for today (and maybe for this year). We’ll be back in your inbox soon.
Thanks for reading, and happy holidays,
Packy
Electric Slide was my favorite... regardless, thanks for making my 2025 more interesting and thought provoking