I am interested in the type of interventions and ideas that could improve the lives of millions of people, particularly at the bottom of the pyramid. The highest-leverage way to do this is through policy. A single policy change — a tariff restructured, a licensing regime reformed, a public investment redirected — can reshape the lives of millions in ways that even the most successful product or company rarely can.
But implementing policy requires many stars to align. You need political will, technical readiness, institutional capacity, and sheer timing. The best baseball batters in history hit .300 — they fail seven out of ten times and we call them legends. Policy is harder than baseball. Most policymakers spend the majority of their careers on the bench, and there is a real chance the big at-bat never comes.
Fat Tails
Nassim Taleb talks about fat tails — distributions where most of the action doesn't happen in the average, it happens in rare, extreme events. Most days nothing much changes. Then suddenly, everything does. The Berlin Wall falls. A pandemic rewrites the economy. A new government takes office with a mandate and a window measured in months.
History is not a smooth line. It's long stretches of quiet punctuated by sudden, violent jumps. And the thing about these jumps is that you can't predict when they'll come. You just know that they will.
This has implications for how you structure a career around impact. If the moments that matter are rare and unpredictable, then waiting passively is a losing strategy. You need to be ready when the jump comes, and you need to have enough things in motion that at least one of them is in the right place at the right time.
The Platform and the Revolving Door
So the question becomes: how do you position yourself for a moment you can't predict? You need a platform — a base from which you can dream up big projects at both the policy level and the product level, and actually launch them. The private sector is a more permissionless arena of action — you can build products and organizations without waiting for political alignment. But the policy side requires you to move deliberately between the world of ideas and the world of implementation. Think tank to government and back. Advisory to policymaker and back. Each rotation teaches you something the other side can't: what's politically feasible from being inside, what's analytically rigorous from being outside.
The right platform gives you both. It keeps you in the game — launching enough projects that the fat tail has something to grab, while building the relationships and credibility so that when the window opens, you're ready to step through it. The returns to any single project are uncertain, but over enough attempts, the odds shift in your favor.
The Growth Lab
For me, the Growth Lab is this platform. If I was working here when I am 45 I would still be happy — and I think that's a meaningful test of whether you've found the right platform. These are some of the best policy projects in the world, taking on huge challenges in real countries with real constraints, and working through them rigorously so there is external validity and learning spillovers for everything you do. You're constantly learning and improving yourself. You're contributing to a body of practical knowledge. And you are hopefully hitting a successful policy moment along the way — one that actually impacts millions.
At the same time, when your chance comes around to step into a policymaking role, you are well prepared and well positioned. The revolving door is always there. The fat tail moment could come tomorrow or in ten years, but either way, you're in motion, you're building, and you're ready.