Here’s to the Crazy Ones: looking at Jobs, Buffett through a new lens

I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me, and I walk alone.

—Green Day, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”

So begins Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” but it could just as easily describe the emotional terrain of today’s clean energy sectors. Companies announce breakthroughs, then vanish. Sectors surge with optimism, only to crash into logistical entropy. Causes are celebrated, then quietly shelved as the political mood shifts.

But beneath the headlines and market cycles, some systems persist. Not because they are favored—but because they are structured to survive.

They align along four vectors: structure, signal, friction, and entropy. They walk alone, yet the best of them have:

A high-symbolism system (the boulevard) with low thermodynamic function (the broken dreams)
An agent (the walker) whose structural path endures, even as support systems fall away
A shadow for company: the projection of heat blocked, not help received
A shallow heart still beating: minimal energy, but active persistence

Our three-part series this week explores how persistence actually works: not as triumph, but as thermodynamic structure. Not as brand loyalty, but as signal coherence under stress. We begin today with a company—Avantium, battered by cost overruns, abandoned by partners, but still standing, finding new partners, on the brink of greatness. In Part 2, we examine a sector—sustainable transport fuels and chemical intermediates, shaken by slow deployment and carbon fatigue, but maturing. In Part 3, we turn to a cause—carbon reduction, now unfashionable in some circles, but still foundational to our collective thermodynamic future.

Today, I’d like also to look at entrepreneurship itself, taking the Boulevard of Broken Dreams as our text, let’s look at why entrepreneurs walk the lonely road, and only the lonely road. I’ll also take a brief GTESI look at two of our most fabled enterpreneurs, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. Why did they persist?

Why Entrepreneurs Walk Alone

1. IPR Is Not Immediate

When a system is truly novel, its information persistence rate is low at first. Not because the idea lacks power—but because the surrounding systems don’t yet know how to compress it, carry it, or repeat it. The idea lacks host structures.

That’s why Gates had to build BASIC for a computer that didn’t yet exist. Why Jobs had to invent the why before the what. Why Edison had to wire a city to prove a bulb. The crowd doesn’t gather early—not because the idea is weak, but because the signal hasn’t matched a structure.

2. Good-Time Charlies Follow Vector Coherence—Not Heat

GTESI tells us that systems only attract the crowd when IPR, SCD, TRFI, and EED align enough to look like a low-friction bet. That’s when the crowd comes, that’s when Greta Thunberg arrives to acclaim you. The stage at the World Economic Forum beckons. Someone from TED calls. The good places to eat near Sand Hills Road become familiar.. Not when a system is new. When it’s:

Familiar enough to compress (IPR)
Built enough to scale (SCD)
Fast enough to respond to feedback (TRFI)
Profitable or performative enough to look like energy export (EED)

Until then? It’s just you and your shadow.

3. The Early Stage Is Entropic

Persistence always begins in a high-entropy state. Signal is weak. Friction is high. Compression is inefficient. You are investing more energy than you can extract. But GTESI also tells you this: If your system holds under entropy—if it persists through high-friction signal decay—then it is not only real. It is built to last. And when alignment comes, it will come not as accident, but as a thermodynamic inevitability. Because GTESI doesn’t reward flash. It rewards structure that holds.

To Those Still Walking: A GTESI Message for the Builders

You don’t need another cheer. You’ve had enough of those—too many, maybe. You’ve lived through the oversimplifications, the funding cycles, the premature articles and the late-stage skeptics. And still, you’re here. Still building. If you’re getting it right, you’re suffering, but the road is not just difficult—it is aligned. It leads through hardship, yes—but not toward collapse. You travel through fine country and there is shade and water ahead.

Looking at Steve Jobs through a new lens

1. IPR — Information Persistence Rate (Symbolic Compression)

Jobs was a master of symbolic clarity. He compressed vast technological complexity into elegant signals that humans could hold:

A bitten apple.
“1,000 songs in your pocket.”
“Think different.”
The black turtleneck. The Stevenote. The silence before “One more thing.”

Jobs understood that ideas don’t persist unless they can be remembered, repeated, and loved. He built culture into code, ritual into hardware.

GTESI says: His IPR was ultra-high. Every product carried a compressed story—and every keynote recharged the signal.

2. SCD — Structural Continuity Density (Infrastructure)

Jobs rebuilt Apple as a thermodynamic fortress. He hated debt, demanded supply chain control, designed Apple Stores as symbolic spaces of trust. He didn’t just make devices—he built a closed-loop architecture for persistent delivery: product, retail, OS, developer ecosystem, brand.

Annual product releases: time structure.
WWDC: developer structure.
Retail glass staircases: cultural structure.
Design labs in Cupertino: physical persistence infrastructure.

GTESI says: High SCD. Apple under Jobs wasn’t just stylish—it was deeply integrated, like a thermodynamic engine with almost no leaks.

3. TRFI — Thermodynamic-Response Friction Index (Adaptivity)

Jobs was famously intolerant of bullshit. But he was also willing to kill his own darlings, adapt, pivot:

He killed the iPod at its peak—to birth the iPhone.
He moved from computers to music, to phones, to content.
He shifted Apple from being a PC maker to the world’s most valuable company by adapting to signal friction faster than his competitors.

GTESI says: Jobs kept TRFI low by decoupling from inertia. He ran hot—but he adapted fast.

4. EED — Entropy Export Delta (Net Benefit/Impact)

What Jobs delivered wasn’t just functionality—it was joy. Delight. Simplicity. A ritual of interaction. The packaging, the fonts, the feeling of peeling the film from a new screen. Every interaction with an Apple product felt less entropicthan what came before.

He exported order.
He reduced friction.
He gave the user a sense of meaningful control.

GTESI says: Jobs’ systems exported entropy by converting chaos into clarity—and that’s what people paid for.

Why He Persisted

Steve Jobs didn’t just persist. He designed systems that wanted to persist. He did it by:

Compressing signal into story (IPR)
Building enduring architecture (SCD)
Adapting under friction (TRFI)
Creating rituals that reduce entropy (EED)

And he wrapped it in belief. Not soft belief. Bone-deep certainty that the future could be better, cleaner, more coherent—and beautiful. That wasn’t arrogance. That was thermodynamic alignment.

Looking at Warren Buffett through a new lens

Buffett is the mirror-image of Jobs in thermodynamic posture—not the flashy conductor, but the quiet engineer of a gravity well so stable that it bends time. Where Jobs built coherence through acceleration and symbolic compression, Buffett built persistence through density, patience, and structural depth.

From a GTESI standpoint, Warren Buffett succeeded not by chasing advantage, but by constructing a system that naturally retained coherence across shocks, decades, and delusions. Let’s analyze:

IPR – Information Persistence Rate

Buffett doesn’t depend on slogans—but he lives by repeatable, transmissible heuristics:

“Be fearful when others are greedy.”
“It’s only when the tide goes out you see who’s swimming naked.”
“Our favorite holding period is forever.”

These aren’t quips. They’re compressed, durable symbolic structures that encode deep adaptive logic. His shareholder letters are IPR artifacts—tightly packed with metaphors, stories, and aphorisms designed to be passed on, not just read.

GTESI Verdict: High IPR by design. Buffett’s wisdom persists not because it’s catchy, but because it compresses truth into trust.

SCD – Structural Continuity Density

Here lies the genius.

Buffett engineered Berkshire Hathaway as a meta-company:

Insurance float creates perpetual liquidity.
Wholly-owned subsidiaries reduce fragility.
Minimal bureaucracy, radical trust in lieutenants.
No dividend—cash stays in the structure.

He built a holding company that functions like a biological circulatory system: always flowing, never overreaching, self-balancing.

GTESI Verdict: Ultra-high SCD. Buffett’s structure isn’t reactive—it’s designed for multi-decade coherence.

TRFI – Thermodynamic-Response Friction Index

Buffett moves slow—but adaptively slow.

He didn’t invest in tech early—not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t understand it yet.
He waited decades to buy Apple—then made it his largest holding.
He tolerates mountains of cash—because timing matters more than yield.

Buffett embraces inertia until conditions change, then moves with unambiguous confidence. Delayed response, not paralyzed response.

GTESI Verdict: Low TRFI once thresholds are met. He doesn’t fight the friction—he waits until the entropy changes.

EED – Entropy Export Delta

This is where Buffett shines most quietly.

Berkshire reduces systemic risk in the markets:

It stabilizes whole sectors with capital infusions.
It keeps legacy businesses alive and honest.
It trains investors to value durability over drama.

Buffett’s presence in a system tends to absorb volatility and export continuity. He’s not just a participant—he’s a heat sink.

GTESI Verdict: High EED. Buffett creates coherence beyond his portfolio. The market is less chaotic because he exists.

Why He Persisted

If Jobs was a generator, Buffett is a regulator—a thermodynamic stabilizer. He:

Encodes signal in enduring language (IPR)
Builds anti-fragile structural systems (SCD)
Moves only when adaptation is low-friction (TRFI)
Exports stability across the broader market (EED)

He succeeded not just because he’s wise—but because his entire investment and leadership strategy is a thermodynamic architecture. It doesn’t just beat the market. It persists.

The Bottom Line

As Apple put it, here’s to the crazy ones. Yep, it’s a lonely road for the entrepreneur. But if you build it to last, I often think about how Pericles put it, “Famous men have the whole earth as their memorial”, everything is changed, everywhere, and for all time. The battle for forever, well, that’s one worth winning.