Live your life like Tarzan

Literally the only thing I wanted for 10 years of my life was to get selected for the Greek national basketball team. And I ended up running an AI startup in London. What the hell?

I turned 30 recently. No idea when/how that happened, but nevertheless I found this to be a good point for reflection.

Steve Jobs has this quote:

This resonates deeply. If you had told 10-year-old Dimi that at 30 he’d be leading a team of ~20, working on Audio AI in London, he’d probably have asked:

1. That’s cool, but what’s AI?

2. Why London? Why Audio? How did that even happen?

And only 30-year-old-Dimi, looking backwards could explain. As it wasn’t an intentional, well defined plan that got me here. It was more of a loose framework—one I never explicitly named or followed—it simply unfolded.

This post is all about that very framework, which I now call “Live your life like Tarzan.”

If you don’t know too much about Tarzan, neither do I. The one thing I do know though is how Tarzan lives life / moves through the jungle by grabbing a sequence of vines (branches).

In my life, branches have represented the next attainable step—something familiar that I could reach for and pursue. To preempt a confusion**, what I mean by branches is not opportunities that were presented to me, but rather individuals who achieved what I knew was within my grasp just a few years later.**

When I was ~8, I started playing basketball in Greece. Coincidentally, my mother happened to be a teacher at the school with the best basketball program in Greece - crazy life defining event… Anyway - my first branches were the bigger kids, that played for the first team.

And I obsessed about becoming them - after all, they were in my shoes 2-3 years ago, so that seemed quite attainable. How much did they train? How and with who? What shoes did they wear and what did they eat.

(If you want to dig deeper, this way of living likely started even earlier, by me obsessing to mimic my earliest idol, my 3.5 years older brother).

Through this obsession, I’d grab that branch, sway on it and without even knowing it, it was time to grab another. And another branch always appeared.

One branch got me to the first team, another to be the captain of the school, and 10 years later I was playing for the youth national basketball team - a completely foreign, crazy and unattainable goal from where I was starting. It was through grabbing branches that I got there.

Driven by that obsession, I'd latch onto one branch, swing forward, and before I knew it, another branch appeared. The first branch was kids from the first team, the next was the captain of the school team, and down the line, the one older kid from my school that had made the squad for the nation team.

And sure enough, ten years later, I was playing for the youth national basketball team (photo below)—a goal that once felt completely out of reach. It was by emulating well-achieved-older-individuals that kept advancing me.

I could have continued grabbing branches within the familiar territory and likely ended up as a mediocre pro basketball player. Momentum is tough to break in Tarzan life, so having someone to provide an outside perspective is invaluable. In my case, my father showed me what was possible if I chose to study in the US/UK.

Again, fortunate by the circumstances around me, there were a few kids in older classes that had made it to great schools abroad - many branches available to me. And following that path, I got to the UK.

During undergrad, I found many different paths available, and as a result many branches appeared—some led to explorations (like spending a year at a hedge fund), while another branch guided me to a CS master's at Imperial College.

Imperial was life-defining—not just through the people I met, but also because it turned out to be a feeder school for Palantir. A ton of Imperial CS alumni were recruited there, offering many branches for me to grab. So I seized the branch in the form of Osama, who would eventually become my manager at Palantir.

At Palantir, the idea of leaving to start a company still felt out of reach. But there were branches to lead projects and larger teams, and after that the branch to start my own company became apparent. I took that leap, found myself at Y Combinator, and a short pivot later, Youssef and I launched Wondercraft.

And of course Tarzan life has not ended. If anything, now that I recognise it I’m more intentional.

The beauty is that the people that you view as branches, don’t even have to know about it. You can just observe behaviour, study their steps. In fact, I hope that I can act as a branch to some younger people - that would make me really proud.

I'd usually be a bit reserved about sharing my current branches, but I'm happy to do so if it might help you identify your own. For me, an ultimate branch is Melanie, Canva’s founder—although she remains just out of reach, a bit of an unattainable next step.

That said, there are branches closer to me that I can grab, that I respect and learn from: Sabba from Veed, Tyler from Beehiiv, and my friend Mati from ElevenLabs.

So for the first time, I’ve grabbed that branch publicly and with more intention behind it. We’ll be here to see where that takes me.

Who’s someone in your life/career that could be your branch, if you dare to admit? 👀

Dimi

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Hot tip - listen to this playlist to enter the Wonder zone.