Between August 2023 and the middle of 2024 I went from around 600 followers to over 2,000, sold merch into Silicon Valley, Japan and Canada, and had one of my images reposted by Elon Musk to 45 million people. For most of that period I was working part-time in the flooring department of a Mitre 10 Mega in Wellington, cutting fake grass and lifting heavy tiles.

None of it came from a portfolio, a pitch, or an application. It came from a single idea I picked up in a community called Visualize Value, run by Jack Butcher: permissionless apprenticeship.1

The mechanic

The premise is simple enough to explain in one sentence. You do the work for someone without being asked, publish it, tag them, and see what happens.

No brief, no invoice, no request for a meeting. You identify someone doing interesting work, find the gap between what they have and what they should have, close it, and put it in public. The output has to be genuinely good for them, not for you. That's the whole discipline.

What you're actually doing is engineering luck surface area. Opportunity arrives in proportion to how much of your work is visible and how many people it's visible to. Most people sit inside a closed system: their work goes to a client, the client approves it, nobody else ever sees it. Permissionless work punches a hole in that system and attaches your name to someone with far more exposure than you have. You are not asking for a share of their audience. You are giving them something worth showing to it.

e/acc

In August 2023 the effective accelerationism movement was forming on X.2 It was being driven largely by two anonymous accounts, Beff Jezos and bayeslord, who were writing the founding material for the ideology in public.

They had ideas and no visual identity. So I made them one: profile pictures and profile covers for both accounts, unprompted, and posted them.

They followed me. They reposted the work. That was the door.

Beff Jezos was later revealed as Guillaume Verdon, who went on to found Extropic, building chips that use the analogue noise of physics itself to run probabilistic inference rather than forcing everything through deterministic ones and zeros.3 That is the calibre of person the community was full of, which is worth stating plainly: these were not shitposters. They were extremely bright people who happened to communicate through memes.

The store

On 20 September 2023 I posted a mockup of a black hoodie with ANTI DECEL EACC CLUB across the chest, captioned as nothing more than an idea, and tagged Beff, bayeslord and xlr8harder. There was no product behind it. No store, no supplier, no stock. It was a render.

Less than two hours later Garry Tan replied with the Fry GIF. Shut up and take my money.

Then he did the thing that actually changed the trajectory. He tagged Fourthwall and Walker Williams in the same thread and asked “can we make this happen pls?”

I stood up a Shopify store that afternoon and replied with a link. Got you fam.

That tag is the entire Fourthwall chapter. Garry Tan introduced me to Walker Williams, Fourthwall's co-founder, in public, in a reply, to a mockup of a product that did not exist. I later moved the whole store off Shopify onto Fourthwall with help from the people who built it. Garry Tan bought a piece. Will Depue from OpenAI came through.

Over that stretch I made $4,445.40 USD (about $7,650 NZD) in merch sales, shipping to Silicon Valley, Japan, Canada, and a handful of places I had to look up. It taught me more about e-commerce, positioning and marketing than any course would have, because every lesson cost me real money or made me real money.

I typeset Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto into a proper book, essentially a designed edition of the blog post, and someone at Daylight Computer downloaded a copy.4

Ten minutes

The meme happened on 20 November 2023, in the middle of the OpenAI weekend. Sam Altman had just been fired, nobody knew who was running the company, and the entire timeline was refreshing itself into a stupor.5 I got home from a shift on the floor, tiles and carpet and offcuts, and opened X.

Aravind Srinivas, the founder of Perplexity, posted the meme, the one where he's staring down the barrel of the camera with a fistful of lit cigarettes bunched together in front of his face. Two words: me right now.

Someone in the replies pointed out that the cluster of filters looked like an engine array. That was the whole setup, sitting there unassembled.

So I assembled it. I turned the bundle of cigarettes into Starship's Raptor cluster and lit the plume underneath it, so McConaughey is holding a full static fire between his fingers. Ten minutes in Photoshop, posted, done. It did fine on my account, maybe a hundred likes.

Five days later, on 25 November, Elon Musk posted it himself. One word and an emoji: “Starship 🚬”. No credit, no tag. Forty-five million views, just under half a million likes, thirty-nine thousand reposts.

The man who became the first trillionaire ran my ten-minute Photoshop job in front of more people than will ever see anything else I make. I genuinely don't care that he took it. It's funny as hell, and it's better street cred than an award.

The hard tech meme machine

I kept going. Anduril had just announced the Roadrunner, so I photoshopped Uber Eats livery onto it, purely because the colourway would look sick.6 This was before the image models could do it for you, so it was real compositing work. Palmer Luckey engaged with the post.

On 2 December, Christian Keil, at the time chief of staff at Astranis, posted both memes side by side, said he was buying stock in me early, and called me a “one-man hard-tech meme machine”.

I ran with that label for a good while, because a positioning statement handed to you by someone inside one of the most interesting space companies in the world is worth more than one you write for yourself.

For roughly a year I was a small micro-celebrity in Silicon Valley, while my actual job title was flooring team member.

What it's actually worth

The follower count was never the asset. The asset was proof that the mechanic works.

Taste plus speed plus publishing, applied without permission, gets you into rooms that credentials do not. I had no network in that world, no referral, no relevant employment history. I had the ability to see what a scene needed visually and the willingness to make it before anyone asked. That is a repeatable process, not a lucky run.

The other thing it proved is that the gap between working a retail shift and having your work in front of Marc Andreessen is not a career ladder. It's a single act of publishing, repeated until something lands.

Most people are one permissionless piece of work away from a completely different set of options. They just keep waiting to be picked.