Hey friends, it’s Martin.
I’m going to try something slightly different today. This newsletter is about AI. It’s also one of the projects I launched after leaving my previous role as CEO of a vertical SaaS company about a year ago.
I want to share some thoughts from my experience of the past year, and it all comes down to this thing I call serendipity maxing.
Most people see luck as random.
Sahil Bloom, the speaker/investor who somehow became a mentee of Tim Cook, would disagree.
Here's his version of the Tim Cook story:
they met at a gym. Sounds lucky, right?
But Sahil worked out at a high-end gym at 5 a.m.—a choice that does three things simultaneously.
One, it filters for a specific type of person (busy executives who can't work out during normal hours).
Two, it creates an intimate environment where the same people show up repeatedly.
Three, it makes actual conversation possible instead of getting lost in a crowded room.
He didn't engineer a meeting with Tim Cook. But he engineered an environment where something like that could happen.
I call this serendipity maxing: systematically increasing your surface area for luck.
Most of the best things in my life came this way. When I stepped out of my CEO role about a year ago, I went all in on this approach. Not with a rigid master plan, but with intention.
Here's what that looked like:
Every time I met someone, I'd follow up with something concrete. A report I mentioned. A book I'd recommended. A specific angle on a problem they were wrestling with.
Yeah, it sometimes meant spending 20 minutes hunting down that exact resource. I did it anyway, within hours of the meeting.
I asked for intros constantly. Not in a networking-event way. Just, "Who should I talk to?"
I wrote publicly. A lot. First a newsletter about AI's impact on entertainment. Then this one. Writing on a schedule isn't just about sharing ideas—it's a beacon. It puts you in front of people you'd never meet in a room.
But the real leverage move: side quests.
Side quests are the projects, ideas, and explorations you pick up outside your main gig. They won't pay you tomorrow.
They expose you to new ideas and people. Most of the cool things I've gotten involved with—early stage investments, advisory gigs, co-founder relationships—came from side quests. And if you look at the people doing interesting things, they all have them.
Writing was mine. Volunteering. Small projects that seemed tangential but kept pulling me toward interesting people and ideas.
Here's where AI comes in.
AI isn't a lottery ticket. But it is a bandwidth multiplier. If you want to write that newsletter, hunt down those resources, research new ideas, have more conversations, and run your side quests—AI makes all of it faster. Not just faster. Possible.
This year I started asking: what if I could operate with the bandwidth of two or three people?
That question led to an AI-first agency. Which led to conversations with subscribers who all said the same thing: "I want to do this but the landscape is too chaotic." That frustration, plus a co-founder I'd met through this exact process, led to Glassboks, our new company.
None of that happens without systematizing luck first. AI just accelerates it.
The mistake most people make: they treat serendipity as something that happens to them. Random. Uncontrollable. So they don't build for it.
But you can. You can choose the gym. You can send the follow-up. You can start writing. You can take the side quest. You can ask the introductions.
And now you can do all of it faster.
PS: A few weeks ago I shared how I built a synthetic audience panel with AI that I use to pre-test newsletter subject lines (and, increasingly other things like ad copy etc.).
Many of you reached out, asking for more details.
Here’s a doc, exclusively for you. A behind the scenes deep dive into how we built this.
(I’m also working on another gift for you: Turning the synthetic audience mechanic into a Claude Skill, so you can easily drop it into your own projects. I need some early testers, reach out if you’re interested.)
That’s it for today. If you have ideas you want me to write about, hit reply!
Until next week,
Martin
PS: feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and say hi! It’s always fun to chat with new readers.
PS2: want to accelerate AI adoption in your business? Book a free 30-min disovery call here.