Memo#1: The Mortimus Vision
Dispatches from building a media company.
When we first sketched out the idea of Mortimus, it was nothing more than a place where we could put down our ideas. A playground for our conversations, a place to go on tangents and not be penalized for them.
The first time I began work on the blog back in 2021, I had to come up with the right ‘copy’ for our About Us page. Here’s what I wrote back then:
Mortimus is a publication that explores the interconnections between investing and the art of learning via longform writing.
We hope to cover a wide variety of topics including the future of education, economics and global development, finance and capital markets, and the power of technology.
This was a simple statement. We were a publication, and we wanted to explore the interconnections between things. Our tool of choice was long-form writing. It’s funny to see now that I followed that sentence with a list of topics, pretty broad - but in line with the Substack publications I was reading at the time. My thought was, by writing these out explicitly I could create an aura around the publication that matched that of other newsletter-style publications that had started gaining traction.
That initial statement evolved of course. In the first post we wrote, we updated the message a little bit - trying to hone in on the genesis of the Mortimus idea:
At heart, we’re researchers and storytellers, hoping to make sense of an increasingly complex world. We’re students of finance and computing. But we’re also students of the art of learning. In fact, one of our core obsessions is figuring out the best methods to gain a deeper understanding of technical topics, and then applying them. It’s where we thrive.
Through the following two years, that vision has remained true. Mortimus began due to our conversations with each other, conversations that contained multitudes. Speech is a wonderful technology, and the oral tradition since the time of Homer has come a long way and is perfectly suited to encapsulating complex discussions. However, writing is superior. Not only because it allows us to go back in time and review our strands of thinking, but because writing can be disseminated to wider crowds. Threads from our thinking could be transcluded1 in other people’s writings. A collaborative effort of tinkering could potentially emerge.
And so we decided to put more attention towards the craft of writing. It was no surprise that the people we looked up to were excellent communicators, often using writing to convey ideas and feelings in novel ways. Cormac McCarthy, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Feynman, Richard Powers, Hilary Mantel to name but a few modern writers. Our fascination with history and technology demands that we get better at thinking - and writing continues to help us do that.
Writing isn’t done in isolation though, and demands that we engage with others across time, space and scale2. Time means looking backwards and engaging with the writers of old, from antiquity (Homer, Virgil, Thucydides, Dante, Ibn Khaldun) to the modern age (Durant, Braudel, Taleb). Space and scale refers to having a certain ‘ecological sensitivity’3: a three dimensional view of events happening across the globe, and how they interrelate with everything else. As we probed the contours of this ever evolving network, we realised that true value lay in understanding how to research well in order to unlock and make connections across time, space and scale.
Hence the effort to look deeper into the craft of research. We spent a lot of time obsessed about how creatives in all fields conducted research. For me this fascination started much earlier, when I was reading Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell, advisor to Henry VIII at the ripe age of fifteen. I couldn’t wrap my head around it then, but I was mesmerised by the sheer level of detail present in those books. Everything was accounted for. And as Lyndon Johnson says: “if you do everything, you will win”4. That subconsciously sparked an ongoing fascination with the research process of high-value people that are serious about their craft. Years later in university when I was in a rut, I had to shake myself and admit that the only way out was to become a high-value person myself by becoming serious about my craft. Mortimus is that avenue.
Please note that seriousness in research and writing does not imply solemnity. No, it means having a consistent body of work that grows and evolves with our thinking. The quality of this body of work cannot be judged now, it can only be gauged a decade from now. In the meantime, we at Mortimus will continue to write, to engage, to have conversations and figure out how the world works. We will embrace complexity and paradoxes, be solemn and whimsical, and cast a wide net to bring old ideas into the new. I am unsure about the arc of my own career, and I have no qualms in expressing that uncertainty. But I do know one thing that is certain: Mortimus will remain an indelible part of my life, a living, breathing, dynamic expression of our curiosity.
In the short term, expect essays that touch on a very important principle: that of Consilience, and how thoughtful people have used consilient principles to move the needle forward for themselves and their societies.
In the long term, who knows? We want Mortimus to become a media layer that sits atop scientific discussions and brings the joy of interconnected thinking to a wider audience than those who lurk around libraries and research centres, ever hopeful to catch a whiff of the new. As venture firms have started building out their media arms, it’s clear they see the value in information dissemination. We see the value too, but we come with a perspective.
At its worst, Mortimus will be a home for lonely curious cats and antsy autodidacts. At its best, a springboard for innovative thinking that could unlock novel solutions, something that could benefit research labs, think tanks, hedge funds and of course: startups and startup incubators.
But let’s not get mired in visions of the long term. Our work lies in front of us. We’ll be here in the present, hammering on.
I deliberately used the computing term Transcluded instead of included. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion. A lot of our writing is networked, in the old hypertext, blog-style way. Connections are beautiful things.
Time, space and scale are the axes by which John Lewis Gaddis in his book On Grand Strategy advises strategists to look at the world.
Term by John Lewis Gaddis, via the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.