A Small Unbundling

Welcome to the attentive and gentle readers of theGreySwan.

There is an old Jim Barksdale line I keep coming back to. Barksdale, then CEO of Netscape, is said to have told investors during the company’s pre-IPO roadshow in London in 1995:

“Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.”

While I am not here to make money from newsletters. But time is also money. Attention is also capital. And after writing for a while at theGreySwan, I realised I was slowly creating a bundle that was becoming too wide.

AI. Credit. Fraud. Data Models. Markets. Human behaviour. Business history. Machines learning. Digital Identity. India. Mental models.

Some of all this are connected, yes.

But not always for the same reader, and not always for the same state of mind.

So I am now doing a small unbundling.

theGreySwan will remain closer to what many of you came here for: mental models, business history, human behaviour, macro markets, decision-making, and those slightly strange patterns where one system starts rhyming with another.

DigitalTrust will be more specific about Indian Financial sector, my work domain for over a decade. So, it will cover: Credit. Fraud. Underwriting. BFSI. Identity. Risk, i.e. plumbing of trust in India’s financial system. And, you will get to know more about what I do for living under AffluenceQ/TrustScore, etc.

You can read and subscribe here:

But, then I am also setting up another Substack: The Machine Room.

That is where the AI-heavy pieces from the Age series will move. The Machine Room will be less about “AI will change everything” and more about the machinery underneath it.

Workflows. Agents. Specs. Loops. Verification. Human judgment. Where the machine helps, where it confuses, and where it quietly starts setting the terms of work.

The first post there will be (in coming 2-3 days):

The Age of the Centaur

The future may split between two kinds of people: those who learn to work with machines, and those who slowly end up working for machines.

You can find it here:

This is not a clean separation. Ideas will still leak across rooms. They always do.

But this unbundling should make the reading cleaner.

If you want the broader pattern work, stay with theGreySwan.

If you want the trust and risk layer of India’s financial system, come to DigitalTrust.

If you want the machine layer of what is happening in AI, agents, workflows, specs, and the next shape of human work, please come to The Machine Room.

Same person writing. Just, the different rooms for different kinds of attention.