← David's Portfolio
THE PATH

You are here.

This is the same climb every writer takes — the one it took your dad about 30 years to walk. Nobody skips steps. But some steps go faster now than they used to, and you're already standing on the first one, one foot further along than most people your age: you've already published something.

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YOU ARE HERE — 5TH GRADE

A published portfolio, at 10

  • You've already written and shipped a real book (Bananas!) with your name on it
  • You have a live site other people can actually visit
  • Most working writers didn't do this until college, if ever
2
MIDDLE SCHOOL

Build the habit, not just the one book

  • Write consistently — a school paper, a blog, short stories, whatever keeps you writing regularly
  • Read widely, outside your comfort genre, on purpose
  • Publish more than once — a second and third piece is what turns "I made a thing" into "I'm a writer"
3
HIGH SCHOOL

Find your specialty

  • Enter competitions and submit to school or youth literary magazines
  • Pick something you know more about than most people your age, and write from that angle
  • Learn the basics of copyright and how licensing actually works — early, not as an afterthought
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UNDERGRAD

Apprentice under people already doing it

  • Research or writing assistantships — get inside how professionals actually work
  • Publish more formally: journals, op-eds, contributions to someone else's project
  • Your portfolio stops being "stuff I made" and starts being "a track record"
5
GRADUATE LEVEL

Original work substantial enough to own

  • A thesis, a book, a body of research — something deep enough that it's genuinely yours, not an assignment
  • This is the first point where what you've made is actually IP: something with your name on the ownership, not just the byline
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THE GOAL

Work that's actually yours to license, publish, or sell

  • A book under your own name, a patent, a body of research others want to license — the specific form matters less than the fact that it's yours

🇧🇷 A path already walked

Mike Krieger grew up in São Paulo, Brazil. He studied at Stanford, and in 2010 he and a friend built an app called Instagram. Two years later, Facebook bought it for $1 billion. Today he's Chief Product Officer at Anthropic — the company that made Claude, the AI David used to make this very site.

Worth being precise here: that's a different kind of outcome than a book or a patent — Instagram was a company that got acquired, not a piece of writing that got licensed. And it's an extreme outlier even among startups; most don't end that way. What it actually proves is smaller and more useful: someone from Brazil, starting young, building something real, can end up somewhere enormous. The specific number isn't the lesson. The starting young and building something real part is.

💰 What's that actually worth?

The honest answer: there's no single number, and anyone who gives you one is guessing or selling something.

Self-published writing Median author income around $12,700/year — but a quarter of authors earn under $1,000/year, and a small top tier earns six figures. Hugely skewed, not a flat rate.
Patents & licensing Typical royalty rates run 3–10% of sales. Deal sizes vary from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions — and most patents that get filed never get licensed for anything at all.

The real target isn't a dollar figure. It's building something good enough, and consistently enough, that it's worth someone paying for at all. The money follows the quality and the track record — never the other way around.

⚡ The real shortcuts

Not "skip the work" shortcuts — these are advantages that genuinely didn't exist 30 years ago: