Andy Dunn

Let me tell you a ghost story. My Ghost first arrived in the year 2000 and would haunt me for the next sixteen years. It was a secret, known only to a handful of my closest loved ones.

The Fast and the Furious

@dunn/note/c-255868496" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@dunn/note/c-2…

your ambition is killing you. 👇

Christopher Nolan asked IMAX to build him a new camera. They did. Then he and Matt Damon spent four months filming The Odyssey on the open ocean, on the largest modern Viking longship in the world, with no green screens at all. The shoot ran 91 days, from late February to August 2025. Seven countries: Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, Western Sahara, and Malta. Aside from one indoor studio in Los Angeles, every shot was filmed on real ground. In Italy, the cast and crew climbed 900 feet up a mountain every morning. Imagine walking up a 60-story building before breakfast. In Iceland, they filmed the underworld scenes by lantern light while rain came at them sideways. The four months at sea actually happened at sea. Damon and the actors playing his crew sailed on a real ship called the Draken Harald Hårfagre, used here as a Greek warship. Nolan called the experience "primal." He said the cast and crew were exhausted in a way he had never seen before. The cameras were the other big problem. IMAX cameras have always been too loud to record clean dialogue, which is why directors mostly save them for big action scenes. Nolan asked IMAX to fix this. They engineered a new soundproof case for the camera, a kind of quiet jacket, that lets the lens get within a foot of an actor's face while they whisper and still pick up clean audio. The new cameras also came out lighter and about 30% quieter than the old ones. To prove it worked, the lead cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema filmed a tight close-up of a child reciting a David Bowie song, "Sound and Vision." Nolan watched the test and called it "electrifying." Damon went all-in on the role. He dropped to 167 pounds on a strict no-gluten diet. He grew a real beard for a full year because Nolan refused to allow a fake one. The crew built a full-scale wooden Trojan Horse and shot the attack scene at an ancient walled town in Morocco called Aït Benhaddou. Nolan himself climbed inside the horse with the cast and his cameraman to get the shot. Across the whole shoot they used 2 million feet of film. That comes out to around 380 miles of it, longer than the drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. At about $1.50 a foot, they spent roughly $3 million just on the film itself. The full budget was $250 million, the biggest of Nolan's career. They wrapped nine days ahead of schedule. Tickets went on sale on July 17, 2025, exactly one year before the movie's release. That had never been done before in cinema history. Half of the 22 US theaters offering IMAX 70mm sold out within 12 hours, bringing in around $1.5 million in a single morning. Nolan called the shoot "an absolute nightmare to film, but in all the right ways." He did not destroy a single IMAX camera. He has wrecked several over his career.

Never give up. Indeed. Venture capitalists live by the power law. You live by your ethics. Precisely because you are undiversified, the value of unlocking the historical time you spent is way higher for you. Skin in the game. By investing your own dollars, this becomes even more clear. Your life. Your marriage. Your company. It’s all worth not giving up on. The whole point is that you could. As Kurt Armstrong points out, the “for worse” in “for better or for worse” is the whole point of the vows. Otherwise why are you standing up in front of all those people with flowers you or someone overpaid for? You bring meaning to your life — and emotional and spiritual and financial sustenance — by treating the sunk cost fallacy for what it is — when it comes to the big things. Complete and utter bullshit.

I wrote an essay about its impact on me at the time — a pep talk to myself to not die by suicide. (Bipolar one is legit like that - 60% suicide attempt rate, 19% suicide rate. Statistically the most probably way those who are diagnosed with bipolar one will die). Here’s that essay. dunn.medium.com/do-not-kill-yo…

companies don't fail because they fail. they fail because the founders give up. don't give up on your startup. you're one pivot away from greatness. a manifesto of sorts. 👇🧵

I realize these circumstances are special — particularly the ability to ruthlessly track down more capital with a track record, and bridge it myself when I needed to. But I have a saying. Companies don’t fail because they fail. They fail because the entrepreneur gives up. There’s always another iteration, or pivot, to try. Sam Altman says the only trait he’s seen in common with successful entrepreneurs versus those who don’t win is that the good ones have a grit level that is several standard deviations outside the mean. Even for entrepreneurs. I agree. The beauty of American capitalism is that you can fail and do it again without shame. It can even be a badge of honor. The limited liability corporation. Bankruptcy. They were created for this very reason. And yet the paradox: winning, building something enduring, real long-term wealth and shareholder value creation often entails not giving up precisely when the data and evidence tell you you should.

I remember meeting the founder of Giphy once. Asked him if he invested in his own company. He said — and he’s also right — don’t invest in your own company, because you’re not diversified while your investors are, and your common stock is your upside. And you can always get more. Refresh grants. That’s the normal entrepreneur mindset. But for a second-time entrepreneur who had some funds, if I didn’t think this was the highest and best use of my own capital, then what the hell was I doing? I also didn’t want to raise OPM until I knew there was a there there. And so the first $500k into the company I split with Erik Allebest, founder and CEO of Chess.com, who became an early advisor and is now our most valuable board member. As our balance sheet dwindled after my last exit, Manuela and I talked to Andy Rachleff — who we admire a great deal — and asked him how much money to put in our own startups. He said no more than 10% of our capital should be in private illiquid investments, and there was no reason to make those our own startups. Make them other startups. In short: diversification. From a math standpoint, I knew he was spot on. But I wanted to bet on us. And so over the next several years, we put 50% of what we had into Pie, into Kadeya, and into Monica + Andy. Fuck the world. Cavalier. Gambling? Fun! And really dumb. But you know what?

when it comes to your company. your marriage. your life. the sunk cost fallacy is bullshit. dunn.substack.com/p/the-sunk-cos…

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

That narrative of elusive satisfaction isn’t just something we’re repeatedly being told; it is a story we’re literally buying into all the time. comment.org/repair-and-rem…

I realized fundraising was the first time in my life I got rejected at scale. And honestly, as a woman, I was not emotionally trained for it. Before the feminists come for me, let me make my point. I think the first real arena where most people experience power, desire, status, and rejection is dating. And dating trains men brutally. A lot of men learn very early that if they want someone, they have to walk across the room, risk looking stupid, get rejected, survive it, and do it again. They learn that rejection is volume, timing, targeting. It’s a numbers game. A lot of women are trained very differently. Especially if you’re a pretty girl, you don’t usually walk into a bar looking at a guy thinking: “Can I have him?” You only think: “Do I want him?”. You don’t build your identity around shooting your shot 100 times and surviving 99 no’s. You don’t get trained to ask directly, get rejected publicly, and act normal 5 minutes later. You get trained to be “chosen”. To be impressive enough that the opportunity comes to you. And then you start building a company. And the whole paradigm changes. Suddenly, everyone can say no to you. Investors say no. Candidates say no. Customers say no. And when your rejection muscle is weak, your brain does the dumbest thing possible: it makes the “no” mean something about you. That you’re not smart enough. Not compelling enough. I think this is one of the most underrated gender differences in fundraising. Not that men are inherently better at it. But a lot of them have built thicker rejection scar tissue earlier. They know how to hear no and keep moving. They know how to make it less personal. They know how to treat it like volume, timing, targeting, iteration. I didn’t. I’ve raised 3 rounds. On the surface, the story looks great: I raised with Sequoia, OpenAI, Khosla. Woohoo. The real story is less sexy: every round wrecked me. I lost 5kg each time. I probably donated a few years of life expectancy to the cap table. Because every round, I only got 1 term sheet. One. EVERYONE else said no. And when almost everyone says no, your body does not care about the intellectually correct explanation. It only hears: Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re not that compelling. Maybe you’re not the founder you thought you were. For a long time, I thought confidence meant learning not to take the no personally. I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe some people are built like that. I’m not. 30 years of being trained to be chosen does not turn into resilience because someone in a Patagonia vest says fundraising is a numbers game. So now I think confidence is something less glamorous. Confidence is taking the no very personally. Letting it ruin your day, losing your appetite, spiraling for hours… And still taking the next meeting. Confidence is just being bothered as f*** and not letting it make you smaller. I still don’t fully believe my own BS as I’m writing this, but I guess that’s the point. Can’t wait for the next round to find out.

Tennis players live 9.7 years longer than sedentary people. Not 9.7 months. 9.7 years. Nearly a decade. The Copenhagen City Heart Study tracked 8,577 people for 25 years and ranked every sport by how much life it adds. Badminton: 6.2 years. Soccer: 4.7. Cycling: 3.7. Swimming: 3.4. Jogging: 3.2. Tennis almost triples jogging. A separate study of 80,000 adults found racket sports cut all-cause mortality by 47% and cardiovascular death by 56%. Swimming hit 41%. Aerobics hit 36%. The question is why racket sports destroy everything else. Three mechanisms stack on top of each other. First, the physical demands. A tennis rally requires explosive sprints, lateral cuts, and sustained aerobic output. You're training fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers simultaneously. Most cardio only trains one system. Second, the cognitive load. You're reading spin, predicting angles, adjusting position, and executing motor patterns in real-time. Your brain is solving spatial puzzles at 80+ mph. That hand-eye coordination and strategic processing builds neural connections that protect against cognitive decline. Third, and this is the one researchers keep coming back to: you literally cannot play alone. Every racket sport requires another person on the other side of the net. That forced social interaction triggers neurochemical benefits that solitary exercise cannot replicate. Strong social connection alone increases your chance of longevity by 50%. Jogging is you and your thoughts. Tennis is you, a strategic opponent, and a community. Dr. Daniel Amen is right. The data is overwhelming. If you want the single highest-ROI activity for a longer life, pick up a racket.