The way business is portrayed in mainstream culture has almost nothing to do with what it's actually like. Making money is the most competitive pursuit on the planet. Everyone is trying to put more money in their pocket, from Fortune 500 executives to ascetic beggars.
What you discover once you've been in the game long enough is that the most successful players aren't just competing harder. They don't want to compete at all. They want to own their market and they'll do whatever it takes to accomplish this.
They use regulatory arbitrage to create moats their competitors can't cross. They use legal structures to shift risk onto counterparties while locking in their own upside. They use information asymmetry, lobbying, strategic hiring and market-making to build positions that look like bets but function like toll booths.
The result is a world where variance is distributed unevenly. The people setting the odds absorb very little of it. Everyone else absorbs the rest. That's what "max variance" actually means: the winners push volatility outward while engineering stability for themselves. The house doesn't gamble.
This is true whether you're looking at Wall Street, Silicon Valley, real estate, government contracting or the corner store. The scale changes, the tools change, but the underlying dynamic is the same. Someone is setting the terms and someone is playing by them. The question is which side of that equation you're on and whether you even realize there's an equation.
Seeing the game for what it is doesn't mean you have to love the ugliest parts of it. But you do have to look at them.
My goal with Max Variance is to look straight at reality and not flinch. I'm interested in the convergence of money, power and structural advantage, the space where the sanitized narratives we're given about commerce meet the hard truths that practitioners know but rarely say out loud.
The goal is to make both myself and you, my dear reader, better at understanding how the game actually works and protect yourself along the way. Because no matter how good your intentions are, someone out there has already set the odds in their favor.
-Ace
Max Variance is written by Ace Eddleman.