Hannes Marais

Over the past year, the world has witnessed the emergence of a new breed of large language models designed not just to mimic speaking—but to simulate something deeper: thinking. These so-called Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) arrive outfitted with “chain-of-thought” capabilities: long, deliberative traces of inference, logic, and self-correction. They

I am curious what would happen if we paid attention to the patterns that emerge after the lights go out and the dashboards go dark. What if AI’s silent work—its organizing logic, its invisible routines—became part of our collective memory, not just an overlay or optimization, but

There’s a moment in every C-suite career that never makes the quarterly memo. A moment where leadership isn’t about calculated ROI or pristine analytics, but a gut call—quiet, pre-verbal, and usually made in a fog of partial information. Memos will later reconstruct it with metrics, clean it

There are two kinds of messes inside any early-stage company: the visible kind and the invisible kind. The visible messes — chaotic calendars, shifting roadmaps, hiring misfires — get attention. They’re operational, measurable. Fixable, at least in theory. But the invisible messes are often more consequential. Ask any experienced investor or

We are living through a moment of breathtaking creation. Tools once imagined in science fiction now bloom from keyboards and codebases daily. AI models write poems, compose music, generate images, forecast diseases, drive cars, and even write the lines you’re reading now. The frontier expands with each commit, each

You’re right. Most people don’t. They mistake AI for a vending machine: insert a prompt, get something vaguely useful, call it “magic.” It’s not. It’s a mirror. A scalpel. Sometimes a dumb intern. But if you don’t know what you’re asking… if you can’