FAB’S FRIDAY FIELD NOTES – 7 March 2026
A gang isn’t built — it’s earned.
Writing from a hillside. Fresh ski touring tracks below me. Around me, people learning to get down a mountain for the first time. It’s Friday, the field is wide open — the right moment to stop and take stock of the week.
⛰ The week: goals hit, one thing left hanging
The week delivered on its promises. The targets I’d set were reached. There’s real satisfaction in that — not triumphalism, just the quiet confirmation that the system works.
There’s one thing that sticks with me, though: I had to leave the Nurole event early. I couldn’t stay the way I’d wanted to. Madeleine — I owe you an apology. It wasn’t disrespect. If anything, it’s the opposite.
The Nurole community is seriously impressive — senior, professional, the real deal. Paul, thank you for putting me onto them. It’s exactly the kind of room worth showing up for properly. Next time, I will.
🤝 The lesson of the week: building the Gang
A concept keeps coming back into focus: the Gangmodel — not the criminal kind, but the one studied by Sudhir Venkatesh in his work on Chicago’s South Side. Radical honesty, immediate action, collective growth.
It’s not a romantic metaphor. It’s a structure. A gang works because every member knows each other’s strengths and blind spots, trusts completely, and acts for the collective. That’s what we look for on a rope. That’s what we need to build in business.
This week it became clear that now is the time to put it into practice — on three fronts:
Centro Consorzi / Imprese Favolose. We know each other — but we need to really know each other. Strengths, blind spots, ambitions, fears. The Belluno gang gets built that way.
Smart Mountains. I’m stepping into the CEO role temporarily — not as the long-term answer, but because the project needs direction now. Meanwhile, I’m identifying the right people: someone who can live the mountains not just as a backdrop, but as a philosophy.
Fab Campaigns. The positioning keeps evolving. The gang here is me and the partners I choose — and who you choose matters as much as what you build.
🤖 The tech signal of the week: when stated values meet real power
Something happened this week that we can’t look away from. Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the company that built Claude — found himself in one of the most revealing situations the tech world has seen in years.
Anthropic had a $200M contract with the Pentagon. They walked away from it rather than accept terms without written guarantees that Claude wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons. The DoD responded by designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — language normally reserved for foreign adversaries.
OpenAI signed without those guarantees. Hours later, bombs fell on Iran. And Claude climbed to number one in the US App Store.
I’ve been in rooms like this.
Not at Pentagon scale — but the geometry is the same. A contract on the table. Pressure from above. A line somewhere that, if crossed, changes what you are. I’ve faced that moment more than once — at a global telco, at a data privacy company, advising a neuroscience startup. I won’t name them. That’s not the point.
The point is: I didn’t always hold the line. Sometimes I moved with the room, told myself it was pragmatism, told myself the relationship was too important to lose. There’s a version of that story where you call it wisdom. There’s another version where you call it what it is.
I’ve learned from it. The ethical line isn’t abstract — it’s heavy. And the weight of it doesn’t go away. It just teaches you to recognise the moment earlier next time.
What does the Anthropic story tell us? That even those who build with the best-stated intentions find themselves inside forces far larger than themselves.That the distance between values and real power is often shorter than it looks.
For those of us building with environmental data and local governance: this isn’t a distant story. It’s a mirror. What red lines do we never cross — even when the contract is big and the pressure is on?
Breadth of perspective isn’t an intellectual luxury. It’s an operational skill.
🏔 The summit
There’s a peace at the top that can’t be explained. Only felt.
Your gaze opens out — and so does your mind. The horizon expands until it holds everything: every possible descent, every potential adventure, every venture worth taking. Options everywhere. From below, the world looks like a maze; from up here, it’s a map.
And that’s exactly where the hardest question arrives.
Which line do you drop?
The sketchy one is obvious — it calls to you, gets the blood going, but the margin is thin. The easy one you clock straight away — safe, predictable, but that’s not why you got yourself up here. And then there’s the right one: not obvious, not impossible. The one that asks everything of you, and gives back something you didn’t know you had.
With so many lines to choose from, the peace at the summit isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s the ability to sit with doubt without being swept away by it. To look at all the options and commit — with clarity, not fear.
This peace is hard to explain. Hard to pass on. Maybe because it can’t be passed on — it has to be earned. One metre at a time.
📋 Three things I’m carrying into the weekend
→ Reply to Americo and Andrea — I’ve been too quiet, and that’s not my style.
→ A message to Madeleine — owed and meant.
→ Start building the Claude-as-agent system for managing relationships — stop thinking about it, start doing it.
Heads down. Together.
Let’s build the future of entrepreneurship and modern learning.
— Fabrizio