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My first airline investment ever. For investors, aviation is an excellent hunting ground for monopolies: from aircraft parts (Transdigm), to engines (RTX, GE Aerospace), the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing, and the most obvious local monopoly of all — airports.

But airlines as a group are a terrible investment. Warren Buffett once said that from an investor’s standpoint, the Wright brothers’ invention should have been shot down. Buffett got his hands into airlines repeatedly anyway, and mostly failed.

I believe Ryanair has built a great position among them. “When the tide goes out you can see who was swimming naked” — nowhere did this make more sense than in European low-cost carriers. Remember Air Berlin, Lauda, Norwegian? Countless airlines have tried the model and failed. Nobody has executed it as ruthlessly as Ryanair.

€2.2bn profit last year. 80% of fuel hedged until March 2027. If an airport gets too expensive — Germany, for instance — Ryanair simply leaves. And yet it is the largest airline in Europe, by passenger numbers, fleet size, and city pairs served. The share is relatively cheap by its own history.

At least it makes sitting in an overheated plane on the tarmac more bearable. I paid 26 euros for my flight today.

(Not investment advice.)

Geopolitics has fascinated me since studying International Strategy in the 1990s. I still prefer reading The Economist over local news. I enjoy value investing and have joined the annual pilgrimage to Warren Buffett in Omaha since 2009 this serves to recalibrate my thinking around long-term compounding and ground myself.

Although I invested in early-stage AI companies since 2017 I, like most people, underestimated what LLMs would unlock. Trips to China matter to see things firsthand: factories, infrastructure, products, execution speed. Right now, many of these threads seem to converge: The productivity gains from AI are real. The fears around AI-driven job loss seem overstated. AI-first companies will replace incumbents that are merely trying to patch old processes.

The European Union is imperfect, but it is the only path for European countries to remain globally relevant. We may well buy our drones from Ukraine. And real-world AI is probably the next frontier.

More than ever, I believe building beats watching others build.

Creating beats consuming.

One of Warren Buffett’s best pieces of advice – invest in yourself – has become dramatically more accessible through AI.

Many of my entrepreneur friends stay up late to code again.

At the same time, staying calm, focused, and grounded has become harder.

Most entrepreneurs aren’t struggling because they’re not working hard enough. They’re struggling because they’re pedaling uphill while towing a trailer full of stuff they don’t need.
In aviation, designers are obsessed with drag — everything that slows a plane down: weight, resistance, unnecessary complexity. The engineers who build the fastest aircraft aren’t the ones who add the most powerful engines.
They’re the ones who remove the most friction.

Reducing complexity is the number one determinant of success.

Not working harder.

Removing what slows you down.

This is true in business and it is true in life.

Drag hides in plain sight:

• The product line that’s “almost profitable” but nobody really loves.
• The new hire who generates twice as many internal conversations as external results.
• The tool you added to fix a broken process — so now you have a broken process and a tool.
• The customer promise that adds complexity without adding margin.
• The meeting you hold every week because you’ve always held it.

It also shows up at home: The oversized house that consumes your weekends. I know more than one entrepreneur who is genuinely weighed down by a construction project that started as a dream and became an obligation. The vintage car that needs constant attention — I’ve been guilty of that one myself. A travel schedule designed to impress rather than to restore. Kids’ routines that have somehow turned into a logistics operation. A financial position that requires constant management because you stretched too far.

The people I admire most have one thing in common: they’ve made ruthless choices about what they carry:

• One product, done properly.
• Little leverage.
• One weekly meeting, not fifteen.
• Routines that repeat without effort.
• Cars and tools chosen for purpose, not signal.
• Life decisions made based on how easy something is to maintain, not how impressive it looks to others.

A life with less drag is also a more resilient life.

When external shocks come — and they always come — the people still standing are usually not the ones who ran fastest. They’re the ones who were carrying the least.

What are you carrying right now that you wouldn’t choose to pick up again today?