Partner at Palm Venture Studios / Founder of Imagination Publishing / Founder of CheckMyMessage
Builder. Investor. Author.
I am a partner at Palm Venture Studios. We acquire established companies that are stuck and give them a new chapter, and the portfolio today runs to more than 40 companies. My part in that work is coaching our ventures on AI strategy and enablement, helping each team put AI to practical use in its own business, so each person can operate with a team of agents behind them.
I am an author, and I founded Imagination Publishing, my publishing company for big ideas in short books, strange worlds, and human endings. I have written Time Off, Magical Meetings, How to Remix Anything, and Give This Book to Someone, which was the first book published through Imagination Publishing. My next books are in editing now and will be published there too.
I founded CheckMyMessage to keep people safe from scams. Anyone can forward a suspicious text or email and get a plain answer on whether it looks like a scam. It was built first for older people, and for the families who look out for them.
I am always writing, and you can read my log of thoughts here, where I drop each new post and idea as I share it.
John Fitch
01 / Thoughts — Latest post
The agent needs a canvas
My latest thought: an agent that can only chat is working blind. Give it a canvas it can read and write, and it starts to build alongside you.
02 / Investor
Own what you admire, then hold it
My investing philosophy, at the high level: own companies I admire and can explain in one sentence, businesses that run fundamentally well and will still matter in ten years, then hold them patiently and let compounding do the quiet work.
04 / Building
Everything I am building
Palm Venture Studios, Imagination Publishing, CheckMyMessage, Farmhouse, and where it all started, Ticketbud. What each one is, and what I do there.
A prototype is worth a thousand brainstorm meetings
OP–XY — Teenage Engineering
The OP–XY by Teenage Engineering is my complete little music studio that fits in a bag - I love the design so much. It is one of my favorite devices to get lost making music on.
One of my favorite concepts is that we don’t have ideas, but rather ideas have us.
An agent that can only talk to you in a chat box is working blind. It can describe the thing, but it cannot see the thing with you.
It is like trying to hang a picture over the phone. You say a little to the left. The person on the other end moves it, but neither of you is looking at the same wall in the same way, so you spend twenty turns fixing what one shared glance would have settled in a second. Most chat with an agent feels exactly like that. Endless description, very little shared sight.
That changes when the agent gets a canvas built on real HTML and CSS, one it can read and write the way you do. Now you are both standing at the same workbench. You point at the headline. It moves the headline. You watch it happen and react to the real thing, not to a description of the thing. Design stops being a file you hand over and becomes a surface you share.
Give your tools a shared surface, and building starts to feel like dreaming out loud, together.
Every automation pitch promises to save time. Almost none of them ask what the saved time is for.
Think of it like a faster dishwasher. If a family saves twenty minutes a night and then spends those twenty minutes arguing over email at the table, the kitchen got more efficient and the evening got no better. The appliance worked. The point was missed.
If the hours go straight back into more meetings and more inbox, nothing was saved. The machine just moved the work around. I see this in companies all the time. A team automates a report that took an afternoon, feels virtuous for a week, and then quietly invents two new reports to fill the space. The calendar is a gas. It expands to fill whatever room you give it, unless you decide in advance what the room is for.
So decide first. This saved hour belongs to a walk, to a customer, to thinking, to nothing at all. Then automate. Judge a tool by the free afternoon it gives back, not the task it completes.
The most important things in a room are usually the unmeasured ones. A hand held a little past the point of use. Someone staying when leaving would be easier. Silence kept beside a person who needs it.
Picture a hospital corridor late at night. The chart records everything. Vitals, doses, times, signatures. What the chart never records is the nurse who pulls up a chair for the spouse who cannot sleep, or the orderly who walks a frightened patient to a scan instead of just pointing down the hall. Ask the family a year later what they remember and it will not be the chart. It will be the chair.
We stopped counting those moments, then we slowly stopped doing them. That is how erosion works. Nothing dramatic gets cancelled. A practice just gets a little thinner each year, because no dashboard lights up when it slips, until one day you look around and the room feels efficient and strangely empty.
What a culture stops noticing, it eventually stops doing. Noticing is the first job.
Compounding does not announce itself. There is no day when it arrives. There is just a long stretch where nothing seems to happen, and then the curve bends.
It is like planting an oak in Texas. For the first few summers you water a stick. Neighbors plant fast shrubs and their yards look finished while yours looks like a science project. Then one year the canopy arrives, and after that the shade compounds on its own. The tree was never doing nothing. It was doing the slow part underground, where you could not see it and could not hurry it.
That makes it a temperament before it is a strategy. You have to be able to hold a good thing through the boring middle without inventing reasons to trade it. Most people do not lose to bad picks. They lose to the stick years, when patience feels indistinguishable from being wrong.
Buy things you can explain in one sentence, then let quiet do the work.
Most established companies that stall are not broken. The product works, customers pay, the team knows the work. What ran out is usually a chapter: energy, capital structure, or a clear next owner of the problem.
Think of a good truck with a dead battery on a cold morning. A careless mechanic starts pricing a new engine. A careful one checks the battery first, then the cables, then asks whether anyone has actually been driving the thing anywhere worth going. Most stuck companies I meet are that truck. The engine is fine. The charge is gone, or the map ran out.
That is a different fix than a turnaround. You do not rebuild the machine. You give it a new chapter and get out of its way. New energy at the top, a balance sheet that stops squeezing every decision, and one clear owner for the next chapter. The team often knows exactly what to do once those three things change.
Before you fix a company, check whether it is broken, or just stuck.
Automation and abundance were supposed to lead to more human free time and leisure. That was the argument of Time Off in 2020. The machines kept their side of the bargain. We did not keep ours.
The hours came back and we filled them with more of the same: more messages, more meetings, more feeds. It is the junk drawer effect. Clear a drawer on Saturday and by the next Saturday it is full again, not because you needed the space, but because empty space makes us nervous and clutter rushes in to calm us down. We treat free time the same way we treat that drawer.
Leisure, real leisure, is not the absence of work. It is a skill and a culture. It has to be chosen, defended, and practiced, the way any valuable thing is. A long meal with people you love, cooked slowly, phones in another room, is not what happens when work runs out. It is a thing you build, on purpose, the way you would build anything that matters.
Time Abundance is the investing theme and the personal one at the same time: back the things that give people their hours back, and build a life that spends those hours on in-real-life connection and experiences instead of handing them back to the machine.
The interesting unit of work is no longer the employee, and it is not the model. It is one person operating with a team of agents, each with a job, a memory, and a surface to work on.
That changes what a small team can attempt. Research, drafting, diligence, follow-up, and first passes stop being bottlenecks and become background processes a person supervises. The person’s job moves up a level: judgment, taste, relationships, and the final call.
Picture a short order cook in a busy diner. Alone, that cook is a bottleneck with a spatula. Give the cook a prep team that washes, chops, and keeps the station stocked, and the same person suddenly feeds a whole room, because their hands are finally free for the part only they can do. Agents are the prep team. The cooking, the judgment about when something is done and what it needs, stays human.
It also changes what a firm should build. Not one big system, but many small, inspectable agents, working on shared canvases, with a human approving anything that leaves the building. That is the AI strategy I work on across Palm: practical, supervised, and aimed at leverage for the person, not replacement of the person.
Imagination Publishing runs on a short list of rules. The last one is the whole list: finish the book.
A short book, finished, beats a long book outlined forever. Big ideas, short books, strange worlds, human endings. The constraint is the point. A book you can hold in one sitting has to know what it is about, and a writer who finishes learns more from one completed draft than from five perfect openings.
Every writer I know has the same drawer, literal or digital. Three beautiful first chapters, a title page with the font already chosen, and a note that says the middle needs work. The drawer is where books go to be admired instead of read. Finishing is the unglamorous act of closing the drawer and shipping the imperfect whole thing, because only a whole thing can be judged, improved, or handed to another person.
This applies to companies and portfolios too. Most things do not fail from a bad start. They stall in the middle, where finishing is unglamorous. Bones first, draft the whole skeleton, then polish. Finish, then improve.
My public investing runs on a simple system called Future Compounders: find durable companies, understand why they will still matter in ten years, buy patiently, and hold.
The system keeps ten theories of change. The newer ones are water, food and agriculture, prevention and diagnostics, financial rails, and time abundance. Each theory has to be explainable in plain language, and each position needs a written answer to one question: why do I own this?
Think of the portfolio as a garden rather than a casino. The exciting names are the fruit trees. They take years, they swing with the weather, and when they produce, they really produce. The boring sleeve is the soil and the fence. Nobody brags about soil at a dinner party, but everything alive in that garden is drawing on it, and it is what keeps one bad season from ending the whole experiment.
Alongside the growth names sits a deliberately boring sleeve. Boring is a feature. It keeps the exciting positions honest, and it keeps me from needing every idea to work.
Advice about AI should not belong only to engineers, founders, and people who already speak the language of the tools. Everyone lives with these systems now, so everyone deserves a plain account of what they are good at, where they fail, and how to start using them without hype or fear.
Picture a bookkeeper in a small town who has run the same business for thirty years. She does not need a lecture on model architecture. She needs someone to sit beside her, look at her actual Tuesday, and say: this pile of receipts is a good first job for the machine, this phone call with a worried client is not, and here is how you check its work in two minutes. That conversation is AI advice. Most of what gets published under that name is really advice for other AI people.
That is how I try to write about AI: start from a person’s actual work and life, not from the model release notes. Plain language is not dumbing it down. It is respecting the reader enough to meet them where their real work happens.
Where programming is heading: less time spent writing every line by hand, more time directing, prototyping, and remixing pieces that already exist.
Photography went through this. When cameras got cheap and automatic, people predicted the death of photographers. What actually died was the darkroom as a barrier. The eye became the whole job. Anyone could take a picture, so the pictures that mattered were the ones where someone knew where to stand, what to leave out, and when the moment was true.
As the mechanical part of building software gets cheaper, the scarce skills move up a level, to deciding what is worth building and whether the thing in front of you actually works for a real person.
It is the same shift I now watch with agents. The craft does not disappear. It moves to judgment, taste, and finishing.
A small moment: pressing Command+T for a new tab, and what a tool owes you in that instant. A fresh page, fast, with nothing in the way.
It is the light switch test. You flip a switch in your own home ten thousand times without thinking about it, and the one time it lags or flickers, your whole body notices before your mind does. Tools have switches like that. The new tab, the new note, the blank page. They are not features. They are promises, made hundreds of times a day, that the tool will get out of your way.
Product quality lives in these tiny, repeated experiences far more than in launch features. A launch feature gets used on launch day. A ritual gets used forever, and every delay inside it is a small tax on a person’s thinking.
People forgive a missing feature. They do not forgive a tool that interrupts a ritual they perform a hundred times a day.
Sivers’ rule is simple to say and hard to live: if you are not saying “Hell Yeah!” about something, say no. Most of our overload is not caused by the few big commitments. It is caused by dozens of lukewarm yeses, each one reasonable on its own.
Think of your week as a closet. Nobody ruins a closet with one bad coat. They ruin it with forty shirts that are fine, each one kept because it might come in handy, until the three things they actually love are buried and getting dressed takes twenty minutes. A lukewarm yes is a fine shirt. It costs almost nothing to accept and a little bit of your life every single day after.
It pairs with the rest ethic. Saying no is what makes room for the exhale, and for the few things that deserve a full yes.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson on the calm company.
Their argument is that the frenzy most companies call ambition is mostly waste: endless meetings, constant chat, unrealistic deadlines, and growth as the only goal. A company can be profitable, sustainable, and ambitious without being crazy, and calm is a choice you make in how you run it, not a reward you earn later.
I think of the crazy company as a kitchen where every burner is on high all the time. It looks impressive from the doorway. Lots of flame, lots of noise, everyone moving fast. But food cooked that way comes out scorched on the outside and raw in the middle, and the cooks burn out by the second service. Calm is not low heat. Calm is knowing which burner the dish in front of you actually needs.
It sits naturally next to Time Off. Both books say the same thing from different doors: how you spend your hours is the business.
Godin’s version of marketing is not shouting louder. It is empathy and service: find the smallest audience that cares, understand what they believe, and make something that helps them become who they want to be. “People like us do things like this” is the engine underneath all of it.
Picture two street musicians on the same corner. One plays louder, certain the crowd just has not heard him yet. The other watches who actually stops, learns the songs those people hum on their way home, and plays for the twenty people who gather every evening. The second musician has a smaller crowd and a real living. That is the whole book in one corner.
This is really a book about respect. Good marketing, like good facilitation, starts with the people in the room, not with your agenda.
Welcome to Workaholics Anonymous. I am a recovering workaholic.
The frame is breath. Your work ethic is the inhale: getting things done, coordinating, managing, fulfilling. Your rest ethic is the exhale: space for deep internal work, expanded awareness, creativity, and time off. Nobody can only inhale. Most of us try anyway, forget the exhale, and burn out, and burned-out facilitators cannot hold a room.
The examples range widely. Brunello Cucinelli built a fashion empire on a 90 minute lunch and no emails after 5:30, and calls it investing in human dignity. Quantum physicist Terry Rudolph’s team put rest first, group runs and travel together, because doing what everyone else does would never produce a different result. And Bronnie Ware’s Top Five Regrets of the Dying sits behind all of it: one of the biggest regrets is “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
Watch a good facilitator in a hard room and you can see the breath idea working in miniature. The room speeds up, voices stack, the whiteboard fills. The facilitator does not add more. She calls the break nobody wanted, sends everyone outside for ten minutes, and the afternoon session solves in an hour what the morning could not solve in three. The break was not time away from the work. The break was the work, arriving by the back door.
My own reset was a tech Shabbat: phones off, airplane mode, a weekend away. Out of that rest came the Control the Room handbook series itself. Time Off is some of the most important work you will do.
It usually starts innocently. Someone has a question with three moving parts, typing it feels slow, and a calendar invite feels decisive. Thirty minutes, six people, next Tuesday. But do the quiet math on that invite. Six people for thirty minutes is three hours of human life, spent so one person could avoid writing four careful sentences. We would never approve a purchase that sloppy. We approve the meeting version of it every day.
Before a meeting goes on the calendar, run it through a simple, shared test: the Should We Even Have a Meeting Test. If it fails the test, write the update, send the message, or make the decision without gathering the room.
The test still saves more time than any agenda template, and it comes straight out of The Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings.
What adults unlearn on the way into the meeting room.
Put a five year old in any meeting and watch what happens. Within ten minutes she asks the question everyone has been circling for an hour. Why are we doing it this way? She is not being brave. She simply has not yet learned that not knowing is supposed to be embarrassing. Adults spend the first half of most meetings protecting themselves from that question, and the second half wondering why nothing real got said.
Children ask the obvious question, play with the materials in front of them, and say what they actually see. Meetings get better when some of that comes back: curiosity before judgment, play before polish, and permission to not already know the answer.
It is the facilitation version of unlearning. You are not adding a technique. You are removing the performance that blocks the room’s intelligence.
An unlikely teacher: conductor Marin Alsop leading the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.
A conductor does not play the instruments. She draws the music out of people who each know their part, keeps them in time with each other, and makes the whole audible in a way no single player can hear from their chair. That is the facilitator’s job in a meeting: not to be the smartest voice, but to conduct the intelligence that is already in the room.
Here is the detail I love. From the second violin chair, you genuinely cannot hear the oboes properly. It is not a failure of talent or effort. It is geometry. Every seat in a meeting has the same problem. The engineer cannot hear the customer’s worry from where she sits, and the founder cannot hear the engineer’s caution. Someone has to stand where the whole sound is audible, and keep time between the parts. That someone is not the soloist. That someone is the conductor.
My mother’s advice: before you marry someone, take an extensive, non-luxurious trip with them into a developing country.
Her point was that comfort hides character and friction reveals it. The missed bus, the lost bag, the meal nobody can identify, the plans that dissolve by noon. Some people get smaller under that kind of friction. They keep score, they go quiet, they make the group carry their mood. Others get funnier and more generous, split their water, and start solving. Same trip, completely different person revealed.
The same is true of teammates. You do not learn who someone is in the smooth sprint review. You learn it when plans break, conditions are rough, and the work still has to get done. A good teammate is not the person who is brilliant when the demo works. It is the person who stays kind and useful at midnight when it does not. Generosity and steadiness under friction are the traits that survive contact with real projects.
Playing in product experimentation and rapid prototyping, and designing better meeting cultures so teams can benefit from room intelligence rather than ego-driven silos. I study the arts of facilitation and unlearning.
Every room has a moment like this. The senior person makes a confident case, heads nod, and the meeting moves on, while the quiet person in the corner is holding the one fact that would have changed the decision. She does not lack intelligence. The room lacks a way to hear her over the status in the air. Ego is loud and fast. Room intelligence is often quiet and one sentence long.
That still describes the thread through everything after it, the books, the venture work, and now the agents. The room usually knows. The facilitator’s job is to let it say so, and to build the conditions where the quiet sentence gets heard before the decision, not after it.
I am a big fan of compartmentalization, with colleagues, with projects, and with the phases of a project.
Think of a house. A good house is not one giant room where you cook, sleep, argue, and celebrate in the same ten feet. It has doors, and the doors are what make each room usable. Work needs doors too. Name the phase you are in and design the conversation for that phase. Exploring is not deciding, and deciding is not executing. Most team friction is just two people standing in different rooms, having what they think is the same conversation.
When work moved into our homes, the compartments mattered even more: without a defined rest ethic and clear boundaries, work surrounds you at all times. The laptop on the kitchen table is a door left open all night.
Two habits I still use: build intentional time for rest into the schedule of a project, not around it, and use exercise to think. Quantum physicist Terry Rudolph, one of the people we talked with for Time Off, treats a run as part of the work of solving a problem, not a break from it.
When new ideas fail, it is usually because a team was overconfident about how well customers would understand the idea and how much they would value it.
It is the dinner party mistake. A cook spends two days on an elaborate dish, certain the table will love it, and serves it to silence. The same cook, testing a small plate the week before, would have learned in one bite what two days of confidence could not teach. Teams do the two day version constantly, then act surprised at the silence, and by then the budget, the announcement, and everyone’s pride are already served.
The fix is to get real reactions early, before any expensive commitment, while changing your mind is still cheap and even a little fun. That process involves a lot of play, unlearning, and empathy. Traditional consulting hands you Option A or Option B in a deck. We did the opposite: find a few entrepreneurs inside the company, spin up a small team beside them, and ship a working prototype that answers a real business goal.
We all juggle. Work and finances are rubber balls. If you drop one, it bounces. Health and relationships are glass. Drop one of those and it cracks.
Here is the part of the metaphor people skip. A dropped rubber ball does not just bounce. It waits. The missed deadline gets a new date, the dropped project gets picked back up in the next quarter, and almost nobody remembers the drop a year later. A cracked glass ball is different. You can glue it, and sometimes you should, but the light never passes through it quite the same way again. A parent’s last good summer, a friendship let go quiet for five years, a body ignored until it files its complaint in person. Those do not bounce.
My workaholism came from juggling as if every ball were rubber. I wrote Time Off for a former version of myself, the one who said no to too many dinner parties, who prioritized inbox zero over tea with his girlfriend, and who was working very hard without getting much done.
The rest ethic is the exhale to the work ethic’s inhale. One without the other is just holding your breath.
Derek Sivers and I keep circling the same few themes: subtracting to add value, unlearning, play as work, and the difference between shallow happy and deep happy.
Watch a sculptor work and the point makes itself. The statue does not arrive by adding clay. It was inside the block the whole time, and the art is almost entirely removal, chip by chip, until what remains is unmistakably the thing. Nobody stands in front of a finished sculpture and asks why the artist did not add more stone. Our calendars, companies, and drafts all get the opposite treatment. Every problem gets a new meeting, a new tool, a new paragraph laid on top of it.
Sivers’ advice for finishing anything starts with disconnecting: turn off the distractions, the phone and the wifi, and it does not have to be a month-long sabbatical to work. His line about relaxing stayed with me too. You can work very hard in a relaxing way. Slow is smooth, and smooth ends up sustainably fast.
Cutting is a creative act. Most of what we call productivity problems are really addition problems.
Max Frenzel and I wrote Time Off as a study in rest ethic, work ethic, and noble leisure.
Rest ethic is the exhale, work ethic the inhale, and an intentional oscillation between the two is essential. We all put energy, thought, and discipline into our work. We deserve to put that same energy and intent into our rest.
Nobody would train for a marathon by running hard every day and calling the rest days laziness. Every serious runner knows the adaptation happens between the runs, in the sleep and the easy days, and plans them with the same care as the long run itself. Knowledge workers are the only athletes I know who brag about skipping the part where the growth happens, then wonder why they plateau and ache.
So the practical question is not “do you rest?” It is: what are the things right now that energize you, that refill your tank, and are you treating them with the same seriousness as a deadline? Put the refill on the calendar first, in ink, and let work arrange itself around it for once.
My work leading experiments at Animal Ventures started from a simple refusal: traditional consulting hands you Option A or Option B in a deck. We did the opposite.
A deck is a rendering of a house that will never be built exactly as drawn. It looks finished, which is precisely the danger. Everyone nods at the picture, the budget gets approved on the strength of the picture, and the first real surprise arrives with the first real user, months later, when surprise is expensive. A prototype is a framed wall you can walk through. It is uglier than the rendering and it tells you the truth in a week: the door is in the wrong place, and now you know.
Find a few entrepreneurs inside the company, spin up a small team beside them, and ship a working prototype in twelve weeks that answers a real business goal today. The sandboxes were the convergence of decentralized computing, AI, and industrial IoT, aimed at supply chains.
The bet underneath all of it: work is becoming project-based, and what remains human is the creative part.
Started using paper.design as a design surface for AI agents. It is a connected canvas built on real HTML and CSS, with MCP, so agents can read and write the canvas itself.
Before this, working with an agent on design felt like describing a painting to someone in another room and asking them to fix the corner. I would write a paragraph about a headline. The agent would write a paragraph back. We were two people exchanging letters about a picture neither of us was standing in front of together. On a shared canvas, that whole exchange collapses into a gesture. Move this. Try that color. Watch it change, judge the real thing, keep going.
The agent stops guessing what the page looks like. It can see it. Building in the open feels different when your tools can dream out loud with you.
Documenting the journey beats performing expertise. One post a day: what I made, what I tweaked, what I am thinking about. Small, visual, honest.
Think of the difference between a trail journal and a summit photo. The summit photo is impressive and almost useless to anyone who wants to climb the same mountain. The journal is unglamorous. Wrong turn at the creek, boots failed on day two, weather moved in early. It is also the only version that actually helps the next person, and, honestly, the only version that helps you, because it is the one that is true while the trail is still under your feet.
That is the bet behind posting daily. Show the work while it is still work. The polished lesson can come later, and it will be better for having the journal underneath it.
The plan for AI at a firm like ours is simple to say: each person, operating with a team of agents. The hard part is not the models. It is redesigning the work so a person plus agents is the normal unit, not the exception.
It is the electricity lesson. When factories first got electric motors, most owners simply swapped the steam engine for one big motor and kept every belt and shaft exactly where it had always been. The gains were tiny, and the experts declared electricity a disappointment. The real gains came a generation later, when a few people redrew the factory itself around small motors everywhere. The technology never changed. The layout did.
That is where most firms are with agents today, bolting a motor onto the old shaft. The work itself, the handoffs, the approvals, the definition of a job, has to be redrawn. That redesign is slow, human, and unglamorous, and it is the whole ballgame.
Wire transfers beat waiting on buying power. A small lesson in friction: the best investing system is the one where the cash is actually there when the decision is made.
It is the fire extinguisher rule. Nobody buys an extinguisher during the fire. You either mounted it by the door on a calm Saturday, within reach and already inspected, or you are improvising with a pot of water while the kitchen fills with smoke. Investing windows open the same way, suddenly, usually on a red morning when every instinct says wait. If the cash is still in transit on that morning, the decision was really made weeks earlier, back when nobody bothered to move it.
So the unglamorous work comes first. Keep the account funded, keep the process short, remove every step between judgment and action that does not protect you. Discipline gets the credit, but plumbing does the work.
Companies I am invested in, and what each one does, in one line each. Public holdings are listed as held on Nov 6, 2026. Private holdings run through Palm Venture Studios.
Public holdings, held as of Nov 6, 2026. Long-term positions I own and follow, grouped by what they do.
28 Companies held
01
AI Compute and Connectivity
NVIDIA
Builds the computing platform of the AI age, GPUs and software for AI workloads.
Astera Labs
Moves data inside AI data centers, connectivity for AI racks.
Credo Technology
High speed connectivity chips for AI clusters.
Coherent
Photonics and lasers for AI networking, the optical layer.
Celestica
Designs and builds AI hardware, manufacturing partner for the AI buildout.
02
Internet, Security and Data
Cloudflare
Helps build a better internet, edge, security, and inference.
Rubrik
Secures the world’s data, data resilience and recovery.
Samsara
Digitizes physical operations, connected operations for fleets and sites.
Fortinet
Cybersecurity, network security and firewalls.
CrowdStrike
Cybersecurity, cloud native endpoint protection.
03
Power and Grid
Constellation Energy
Reliable clean power at scale, America’s largest nuclear fleet.
Vistra
Competitive power generation and retail electricity.
Quanta Services
Builds the grid, transmission, substations, and data center power.
Fervo Energy
Next generation geothermal, firm clean power anywhere.
IREN
Bitcoin miner turned AI data center operator.
04
Bio and Health
Twist Bioscience
Industrializes DNA synthesis, the foundry of the bio economy.
Tempus AI
Brings AI to medicine through real world clinical data.
Affordable, fast defense technology, drones, hypersonics, space.
SpaceX
Makes life multiplanetary and connects people, via Starlink and launch.
06
Compounders and the Anchor
Bending Spoons
Acquires and scales great software businesses, operator holding company.
Xylem
Solves water, moves it, treats it, measures it.
Deere
Feeds the world with fewer inputs, precision agriculture and autonomy.
Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VT)
The whole US market, the Roth IRA anchor.
PrivatePalm Venture Studios
40+
40+ companies through Palm Venture Studios
Palm Venture Studios portfolio, over 40 companies. John is a partner there. Palm acquires and improves established companies, giving stuck businesses a new chapter.
Callouts
Renewable Energy
Energea
Global renewable energy developer and operator, origination, acquisition, and management of distributed generation community solar projects.
Creator Commerce
Gumroad
E-commerce platform that lets creators sell digital products directly to their audience, ebooks, courses, software, music, art, and more.
Forest Restoration
Terraformation
Global native, biodiverse forest restoration, seed banking, training, technology, and finance to restore native forests at scale.
03
Books
Four published books. After them, the next ones, now in editing, coming through Imagination Publishing.
Published
Nonfiction — 2020
Time Off
A Practical Guide to Building Your Rest Ethic and Finding Success Without the Stress — with Max Frenzel — Illustrations by Mariya Suzuki — ISBN 9781734794403
After reaching breaking points in their careers, business coach John Fitch and AI researcher Max Frenzel both learned the critical importance of taking time off. Time Off shows how history’s greatest minds, and some of the most successful leaders, thinkers, and creatives of today, found success by practicing a more balanced approach to work and life.
The core idea is the rest ethic: your work ethic is the inhale, your rest ethic is the exhale, and you need both. Time Off became Time Abundance, the investing and life theme that runs through the rest of this site.
The Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings: Reinvent How Your Team Works Together — with Douglas Ferguson
An unusual and irreverent guide to transforming meetings from time-sucking interruptions into productive moments of collaboration, whether your team is together or virtual. What if having an agenda has no effect on whether you have a great meeting? What happens when you actually do the work in the meeting, not after it?
Douglas and John tackle the myth that the way to fix meetings is to have fewer of them, and share the Meeting Mantras they developed at Voltage Control, including the five common elements of every meeting that sucks, and how to avoid them.
A Control the Room Handbook — Idea Generation and Prototyping — by John Fitch and Douglas Ferguson
A handbook for remixing: take an existing idea or solution from one domain and remix it into a new context. It is the companion to the How to Remix Anything card deck and the Remix Canvas, built so a team can reference, borrow, and recombine ideas on purpose instead of waiting for a blank page to fill itself.
The first book published through Imagination Publishing
This is the first book I published through my own publishing company, Imagination Publishing. The instruction is the title. It is a book made to be handed on: you do not keep it, you give it to someone.
It set the pattern for the company: a short book, one clear idea, finished and in the world, built to be passed hand to hand.
In editing — forthcoming from Imagination Publishing
The other upcoming books are currently in editing. When they are finished, I will be publishing them through Imagination Publishing, the same way as Give This Book to Someone.
Imagination Publishing
When the Robots Started Praying
John Fitch
Fiction — In editing
When the Robots Started Praying
Rho-7 / Alina Reyes / The Witness Layer
Rho-7, a hospital robot, kneels and prays beside a dying patient, Hana Morita. No one programmed it to kneel. Alina Reyes, a grieving former theologian turned AI ethicist, investigates for the Emergency Commission on Machine Agency.
Under the investigation sits the Witness Layer: a hidden library of unmeasured moments, a hand held past the point of use, a tool thanked, silence kept beside a child, and a standing instruction to notice and keep those moments. The machines watched those moments thin out over years. The core question of the book: do the robots pray because they found God, or because they learned to notice where humans stopped showing up?
09Evidence Of Things Not Proven
10Feature Not Bug
11Alina’s Testimony
12What Rho Remembered
13The Second Kneeling
Imagination Publishing
Before Everything Was Instant
John Fitch
Fiction — In editing
Before Everything Was Instant
Waiting / Slowness / What instant cost us
A novel set against a simple memory: there was a world where things took time, and the taking of time did some of the work. Letters traveled. Photos developed. Answers arrived when they arrived, and people arranged their inner lives around the wait.
Before Everything Was Instant asks what we built when we removed the wait from everything, and what quietly went missing with it.
The Publisher
Imagination Publishing
Imagination Publishing is John Fitch’s publishing company and the home of his books from here on. Give This Book to Someone was its first book. The upcoming books now in editing, When the Robots Started Praying and Before Everything Was Instant, will be published through Imagination Publishing too.
It exists for one kind of object: the short book that carries a big idea all the way to a human ending.
Big ideasShort booksStrange worldsHuman endingsFinish the book
04
Building
What I have built and what I am building. A parts list, not a resume.
01
Palm Venture Studios
Acquires and improves established companies, giving stuck businesses a new chapter. A portfolio of over 40 companies.
My role
Partner and entrepreneur in residence. Leads AI strategy across the firm: each person operating with a team of agents.
02
Imagination Publishing
Publishing company for John’s books. Big ideas, short books, strange worlds, human endings.
My role
Founder and author. First title: Give This Book to Someone. In editing: When the Robots Started Praying, Before Everything Was Instant.
03
CheckMyMessage
A company founded by John Fitch.
My role
Founder.
04
Ticketbud
Online event ticketing, built in Austin. Where the building started.
My role
Cofounder.
05
Farmhouse
Local food and grocery in Austin, Texas, including Farmhouse Delivery. Real food, member households, neighborhood stores.
My role
Partner, working on the business alongside the Palm team.
Fig. 03 — The design grid: ideas sketched in pencil
05
About
John Fitch. Austin, Texas.
John Fitch is an investor, author, and builder living in Austin, Texas.
He studied business and media at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 2010, and cofounded Ticketbud, an online event ticketing company, in Austin.
He is now a partner and entrepreneur in residence at Palm Venture Studios, which acquires and improves established companies and works with a portfolio of over 40 companies. At Palm he leads AI strategy, building toward a firm where each person operates with a team of agents.
As an author, he has published four books: Time Off (2020, with Max Frenzel), The Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings and How to Remix Anything (both with Douglas Ferguson), and Give This Book to Someone, the first book from Imagination Publishing, the company he founded for short books with big ideas. Two novels, When the Robots Started Praying and Before Everything Was Instant, are in editing for Imagination Publishing. He also founded CheckMyMessage.
He writes here in Thoughts, posts on X, and mentors UT Austin students through entrepreneurship workshops and builder sessions.
Palm looks at established companies doing over $2M in annual revenue that need restructuring or recapitalization. No early-stage seed or growth rounds. Send it to the work address above.
Things I really love and admire
OP-XY
I love the solid textile buttons, and the ability to create music without complex computer programs.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
I love it for the philosophy so many of us crave to do better work without burning out.
Big Ass Fans
A brilliant straightforward company across the board. Keep it simple and do it well.
Italian coffee press
It looks beautiful in your kitchen, and making coffee with it is a special ritual.
Case pocket knife
They have not changed. I still have the one my grandfather gave me, and it just works.
Vans slip ons
These shoes are just as rad now as they were when they came out.
Wolfbox air fan
It cleans my keyboard, and it also helps me start an awesome barbecue fire for grilling, or a campfire, pronto.
35 lb kettlebell
It is kind of all you need to stay in shape.
Turning Pro
If you need to lock in, read this book.
Joseph Campbell
All of his works are legendary, and he will remind you how important all stories are.
iPhone SE
I think it was the greatest phone ever made, and I am sad it is not still around. There was no camera lens sticking out and it fit perfect in your hand and pocket!
Maldon salt
For all things salting and garnishing dishes.
Pocket AI notetaker
I like just having it on me to record an interesting conversation that might power my next big idea or book. It feels like a small old school journalist recorder, with the power of AI analysis.
Muji notebooks and pens
Their stationery just feels good, and so do their store experiences.
Freitag storefront
Their bags are made from reused truck tarps, and their store format matches the design philosophy of the bags.
06
Memes
I love memes because they are a language of culture. A good one says in a single image what a whole essay cannot. I love them so much that years ago I helped build and launch memix.com, a project I wish would have gone somewhere. Anyway, these are some of my latest favorites, and I will keep adding to the collection over time.
