Personal site of
Partner at Palm Venture Studios / Founder of Imagination Publishing / Founder of CheckMyMessage
John Fitch is a partner at Palm Venture Studios, where he works on acquiring and improving established companies and leads AI strategy across the firm. Palm works with a portfolio of over 40 companies.
He founded Imagination Publishing, his publishing company for short books with big ideas, and CheckMyMessage. Before that, he cofounded Ticketbud in Austin.
He writes in Thoughts, and books about what automation gives back to people: time.
01 / Thoughts
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.
01 / Thoughts
Automation was never the point. The hours are the point. On leisure, presence, and in-real-life connection.
04 / Building
Acquiring established companies that are stuck, and giving them a new chapter. Partner and entrepreneur in residence.
The OP–XY is Teenage Engineering’s portable synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer, a complete little music studio that fits in a bag. It is one of my favorite devices to get lost making music on.
Notes, essays, talks, and older writing, all in one place. New pieces sit alongside work recovered from my first site and from interviews, so the whole record lives here. The archive of my posts from X is at the bottom.
Agents — Nov 7, 2026
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.
That changes when the agent gets a canvas built on real HTML and CSS, one it can read and write the way you do. 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.
Time — Nov 6, 2026
Every automation pitch promises to save time. Almost none of them ask what the saved time is for.
If the hours go straight back into more meetings and more inbox, nothing was saved. The machine just moved the work around.
Judge a tool by the free afternoon it gives back, not the task it completes.
Noticing — Nov 5, 2026
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.
We stopped counting those moments, then we slowly stopped doing them.
What a culture stops noticing, it eventually stops doing. Noticing is the first job.
Investing — Nov 4, 2026
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.
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.
Buy things you can explain in one sentence, then let quiet do the work.
Building — Nov 3, 2026
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.
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.
Before you fix a company, check whether it is broken, or just stuck.
Time Abundance
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. 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.
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.
AI Agents
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.
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.
Writing
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.
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.
Investing
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?
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.
From the archive
My old site, john-fitch.com, is no longer up. These pieces come from there, from my writing at Voltage Control, and from interviews and podcasts. They are kept here so nothing worth keeping is lost with the old sites.
From john-fitch.com
Recovered from john-fitch.com, my first site, which is no longer live.
The post argued that advice about AI should not belong only to engineers, founders, and people who already speak the language of the tools. Everyone was going to live with these systems, so everyone deserved a plain account of what they are good at, where they fail, and how to start using them without hype or fear.
That is still how I try to write about AI now: start from a person’s actual work and life, not from the model release notes.
Originally published on john-fitch.com. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
From john-fitch.com
Recovered from john-fitch.com, my first site, which is no longer live.
The post looked at where programming was heading: less time spent writing every line by hand, more time directing, prototyping, and remixing pieces that already exist. 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.
Originally published on john-fitch.com. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
From john-fitch.com
Recovered from john-fitch.com, my first site, which is no longer live.
A small post about 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. The point of the post was that product quality lives in these tiny, repeated experiences far more than in launch features.
People forgive a missing feature. They do not forgive a tool that interrupts a ritual they perform a hundred times a day.
Originally published on john-fitch.com. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
Book highlight — From john-fitch.com
One of the books I highlighted on john-fitch.com: Derek Sivers on what is worth doing.
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.
I kept this highlight because 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.
Originally published on john-fitch.com as a book highlight. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
Book highlight — From john-fitch.com
One of the books I highlighted on john-fitch.com: 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.
It sat naturally next to Time Off on my old site. Both books say the same thing from different doors: how you spend your hours is the business.
Originally published on john-fitch.com as a book highlight. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
Book highlight — From john-fitch.com
One of the books I highlighted on john-fitch.com: Seth Godin on seeing others.
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.
I highlighted it because it is really a book about respect. Good marketing, like good facilitation, starts with the people in the room, not with your agenda.
Originally published on john-fitch.com as a book highlight. Site no longer live; recovered from the Internet Archive.
Talk — Control the Room, Feb 2020
From my talk at Austin’s 2nd Annual Facilitator Summit, Control the Room, at Capital Factory. I opened it plainly: welcome to Workaholics Anonymous. I am a recovering workaholic.
The frame was 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 ranged 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.”
My own reset in that talk 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, I told the room, is some of the most important work you will do.
Original: Voltage Control — Rest Ethic in Facilitation Culture, talk video and transcript
Voltage Control
Most meetings are booked out of habit, not need.
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.
An outtake from The Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings, kept because the test still saves more time than any agenda template.
Original: Voltage Control — Wait, We Actually Don’t Need a Meeting
Voltage Control
One of my Voltage Control posts, on what adults unlearn on the way into the meeting room.
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.
Collected on my author page: Voltage Control — John Fitch, author page and posts
Voltage Control
One of my Voltage Control posts, starting from 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.
Collected on my author page: Voltage Control — John Fitch, author page and posts
Voltage Control
One of my Voltage Control posts. It opens with 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 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. Generosity and steadiness under friction are the traits that survive contact with real projects.
Collected on my author page: Voltage Control — John Fitch, author page and posts
Facilitation
My work in that era, in my own bio line: 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.
That sentence 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.
Original: Voltage Control — John Fitch, author page and posts
Podcast — Control the Room
From my conversation on Control the Room about conversation design: I am a big fan of compartmentalization, with colleagues, with projects, and with the phases of a project.
Name the phase you are in and design the conversation for that phase. Exploring is not deciding, and deciding is not executing. 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.
Two habits from that conversation 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 interviewed for Time Off, treats a run as part of the work of solving a problem, not a break from it.
Original: Voltage Control — Episode 2: Conversation Design and Compartmentalism
Podcast — Control the Room
On Control the Room, I put it this way: 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.
The fix is to get real reactions early, before any expensive commitment. 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.
Original: Voltage Control — Episode 2: Conversation Design and Compartmentalism
Interview — May 29, 2020
From the Compulsive Reader interview about Time Off: 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.
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.
Original: Compulsive Reader — An interview with John Fitch and Max Frenzel
Interview — Oct 23, 2019
On the Time Off podcast, my conversation with Derek Sivers kept circling the same few themes: subtracting to add value, unlearning, play as work, and the difference between shallow happy and deep happy.
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.
Original: Derek Sivers — Time Off by John Fitch, interview and transcript
Podcast — The Culture Factor
From The Culture Factor, where Max Frenzel and I talked through Time Off as a study in rest ethic, work ethic, and noble leisure.
On the show I defined it by the breath again: 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. 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?
Interview — 2018
Talking with Gun.io about my work leading experiments at Animal Ventures: 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 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.
Original: Gun.io Frontier — What’s Next in Blockchain with John Fitch
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. 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.
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.
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.
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
Builds the computing platform of the AI age, GPUs and software for AI workloads.
Moves data inside AI data centers, connectivity for AI racks.
High speed connectivity chips for AI clusters.
Photonics and lasers for AI networking, the optical layer.
Designs and builds AI hardware, manufacturing partner for the AI buildout.
Helps build a better internet, edge, security, and inference.
Secures the world’s data, data resilience and recovery.
Digitizes physical operations, connected operations for fleets and sites.
Cybersecurity, network security and firewalls.
Cybersecurity, cloud native endpoint protection.
Reliable clean power at scale, America’s largest nuclear fleet.
Competitive power generation and retail electricity.
Builds the grid, transmission, substations, and data center power.
Next generation geothermal, firm clean power anywhere.
Bitcoin miner turned AI data center operator.
Industrializes DNA synthesis, the foundry of the bio economy.
Brings AI to medicine through real world clinical data.
Transforms serious and rare lung diseases.
Precision cardiovascular medicines targeting root causes.
Automates warehouses with AI driven robotics.
Opens access to space, launch plus space systems.
Electric air taxis for cities.
Affordable, fast defense technology, drones, hypersonics, space.
Makes life multiplanetary and connects people, via Starlink and launch.
Acquires and scales great software businesses, operator holding company.
Solves water, moves it, treats it, measures it.
Feeds the world with fewer inputs, precision agriculture and autonomy.
The whole US market, the Roth IRA anchor.
Callouts
Global renewable energy developer and operator, origination, acquisition, and management of distributed generation community solar projects.
E-commerce platform that lets creators sell digital products directly to their audience, ebooks, courses, software, music, art, and more.
Global native, biodiverse forest restoration, seed banking, training, technology, and finance to restore native forests at scale.
Four published books. After them, the next ones, now in editing, coming through Imagination Publishing.
Published
Nonfiction — 2020
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.
Nonfiction — 2021
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.
Handbook
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.
Imagination Publishing
Give This Book to Someone
Imagination Publishing — First book
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
Fiction — In editing
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?
Imagination Publishing
Before Everything Was Instant
Fiction — In editing
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 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.
What I have built and what I am building. A parts list, not a resume.
Acquires and improves established companies, giving stuck businesses a new chapter. A portfolio of over 40 companies.
Partner and entrepreneur in residence. Leads AI strategy across the firm: each person operating with a team of agents.
Publishing company for John’s books. Big ideas, short books, strange worlds, human endings.
Founder and author. First title: Give This Book to Someone. In editing: When the Robots Started Praying, Before Everything Was Instant.
A company founded by John Fitch.
Founder.
Online event ticketing, built in Austin. Where the building started.
Cofounder.
Local food and grocery in Austin, Texas, including Farmhouse Delivery. Real food, member households, neighborhood stores.
Partner, working on the business alongside the Palm team.
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.
How to reach me
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.
The favorites board. I collect memes the way other people collect quotes. The ones that earn a permanent spot get taped up here.
New favorites get added as they are found. Send me a good one and it might make the board.