He Writes the Rules. Then Posts Them for Free.
Julian Shapiro operates on a logic that should make no sense in Silicon Valley: he spends around 500 hours researching each topic, compiles what he learns into a comprehensive handbook, and publishes it at zero cost to anyone with a browser. Growth marketing, writing craft, startup building, muscle science, audiophile speaker systems - each one a distillation of knowledge that consultants charge thousands to deliver. He gives it away and somehow wins anyway.
That paradox is the key to understanding Julian. His currency is not information hoarding - it's the reputation you build by being the clearest thinker in the room. And the room, in his case, has over a million visitors a year.
Today he runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund making roughly one investment per month into hardware, energy, biotech, robotics, and aerospace founders. His Fund I portfolio achieved something almost no seed fund claims honestly: a 100% Seed-to-Series A conversion rate. The companies he backed collectively raised over $600 million. The "improvement of candles" doesn't cut it for him - he wants the electric light.
"Writing is one of the most radical things you can do without money. Skilled writers change the world from their couch."
- Julian Shapiro, Writing Well HandbookBefore the fund came Demand Curve, the Y Combinator (S19) startup that became the largest growth marketing education platform in the startup world. Its clients have included Microsoft, Zendesk, Imperfect Foods, Tovala, and Outschool - companies that wanted to learn how to acquire users the right way rather than burn money on scatter-shot campaigns. Demand Curve's newsletter grew past 62,000 subscribers on the strength of tactical, no-nonsense advice.
And before that - before the agencies and funds and newsletters - Julian built something that still lives in your apps right now. In September 2013, he wrote Velocity.js, an animation engine that became the de facto standard for performant JavaScript animation. Uber, Samsung, WhatsApp, and thousands of other products adopted it. Stripe gave him an Open Source Grant. Forbes profiled him. He was, at that point, still largely unknown outside engineering circles.
A Montreal Kid Who Found His Superpower at 12
Julian Shapiro was born in Montreal, Canada. When his family relocated to a suburb outside Vancouver during his early teens, the social landscape of a new city left him with stretches of unstructured time and a slow internet connection. He filled both with code.
He started with Visual Basic 6 - not the sexiest entry point - and by 14 he was consulting for local businesses, building websites, feeling for the first time that particular sensation of having a skill the world actually wanted. "I learned that I had skills that were in demand; I felt valued. I felt like a specialist."
By age 14, Julian was already charging real clients for real work. Not lemonade stands. Actual web development. He had discovered the feedback loop that would define his career: learn something deeply, produce something useful, ship it.
That loop repeated at scale throughout his career. He didn't study growth marketing in a classroom. He ran growth at Webflow when the company was early (it would later reach a $4 billion valuation). He ran growth at Heap Analytics (which crossed $960 million in valuation). He learned what worked, extracted the principles, and eventually codified them into the frameworks that Demand Curve now teaches.
Every Act Was a Chapter
500 Hours. Free. No Catch.
Julian's handbooks represent one of the most unusual content strategies on the internet. Each one takes approximately 500 hours to research, write, and refine. He refuses to monetize them directly. The result is a body of work that gets cited in startup Slack channels, taught in marketing courses, and referenced by people who have never heard of Julian Shapiro but desperately need what he wrote.
The writing handbook alone draws comparisons to On Writing by Stephen King in how directly it goes at the craft. Julian's framework structures nonfiction improvement around five stages: finding compelling ideas, generating raw insights through drafting, refining for clarity, polishing style and flow, and iterating toward mastery. He doesn't believe in writer's block so much as a shortage of interesting things to say - and he offers a systematic fix for that too.
The Numbers That Matter
Betting on Atoms, Not Just Bits
Julian.capital is a deeptech seed fund with an unusually clear thesis: back the people who are building things you can touch. Robotics. Chips. Nuclear. Biotech. Aerospace. Materials science. The sectors that require physical experiments, expensive equipment, and patience measured in years rather than sprint cycles.
What sets the fund apart is its Deal Checks network - described as the largest proprietary database of scientist-founders in deeptech. Julian and his partners (Jacob Jackson, former CRO at MedStack, and John Forbes, former Dorm Room Fund partner) source deals through this network and make decisions in 7-14 days. That speed matters at the pre-seed stage, where every day of fundraising is a day not spent in the lab.
Why He Writes Like He Means It
Julian identifies three reasons to write nonfiction. The first is leverage - writing is one of the few activities where the cost to produce is near zero and the potential reach is unlimited. The second is clarity - putting thoughts into words forces your brain to expose gaps in logic that sounded coherent in your head. The third is connection - publishing authentic work is a bat signal for people who think the way you do.
His core advice for becoming a better writer distills to a single injunction: have something non-obvious to say. Most writing fails not because of grammar or style but because it merely confirms what the reader already believed. Julian's framework pushes writers to find the counterintuitive angle - not to be contrarian, but to be genuinely useful.
"Writing is a bat signal for your tribe."
- Julian Shapiro, Writing Well HandbookHis Brains Podcast - co-hosted with Indie Hackers founder Courtland Allen - extends that philosophy into audio. The show's stated policy: release only when there's something genuinely good to say. In a media landscape that rewards cadence above quality, that's a small act of defiance.
Notable Brains guests include James Clear and Mark Manson (writing books), Tim Urban and David Perell (nonfiction writing), Jason Calacanis and Shaan Puri (podcasting), and Jason Silva (storytelling). The pattern: people who have thought deeply about one thing and can articulate why it works.
Things Worth Knowing
- #1 His Twitter handle is @Julian - four characters, and in the Twitter economy of scarce short handles, that's more valuable than most domain names. He almost certainly didn't trade for it; he simply registered early.
- #2 Velocity.js, the animation engine he built in 2013 as a personal side project, still runs inside applications used by hundreds of millions of people. He wrote it in a few weeks. It outlasted most funded startups from the same era.
- #3 He actively lists "institutional schooling" among the things he avoids - alongside sarcasm, added sugar, tribalism, astrology, and perfume. That list tells you more about the man than most profiles would.
- #4 His tastes run to experimental music artists, Denis Villeneuve films (Dune, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049), and science fiction television. He plays basketball. He dislikes sarcasm in a city where sarcasm is the primary language.
- #5 He co-founded Bell Curve with two partners and grew it to a nine-person team that ran growth talks inside Google and Y Combinator. The agency's client list includes LinkedIn - a company that employs its own growth team of hundreds of people.
- #6 His fund's investment thesis quote - "The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles" - is originally from management scholar Oren Harari. Julian has made it the operating principle of his entire capital deployment strategy.