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Sabrina Halper Show · 3 min · Sep 2, 2026

String theory taught Grinberg to decide with incomplete information

Matan Grinberg · Co-founder & CEO, Factory

Research required him to absorb a vast literature without mastering every field.

In this episode

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  7. 38:37Agents could cause a billion-dollar security incident this decade2 min
  8. 8:54String theory taught Grinberg to decide with incomplete information3 min
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“good judgment with minimal information because at the end of the day like to write that paper i didn't become”
Matan Grinbergat 10:22 · Sabrina Halper Show
10:22

Takeaways

  1. He aimed to gain intuition rather than master every field.
  2. Time pressure forces a choice about what to learn.
  3. He connects that research habit to company decisions.

About this segment

Research required him to absorb a vast literature without mastering every field. He says finding the essentials and acting on them also applies to company-building.

Matan Grinberg

Matan Grinberg is cofounder of Factory.

  • Sabrina Halper, Host · Host, Sabrina Halper Show

    Has worked as an investor at HOF Capital and founded SHS Media.

From “Factory’s Matan Grinberg on Recursive Self-Improvement, Chinese Models & Lessons From String Theory”, Sep 2, 2026. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 9:07

    math looks like atrocious and just like infinity pops up everywhere and like you can't make any predictions and obviously what you're doing today has nothing to do with that yes but being so deep in in that world in that frame of thinking for like over a decade if at all how is it shaped like the way you view the universe or building AI or just like everything around you yeah well I think so the one good skill set of so like in the the kind of the best paper that I ever produced so like I didn't do yeah with Juan Maldesena but the best paper I produced was about basically 10-dimensional gravity which is very abstract because you know look around we're not in 10 dimensions right so that's you know it's very much abstract but I think despite the like actual you know things that we were working on maybe being a little bit more abstract it's very

  2. 9:59

    applicable just to any work that you do because in order to even produce something in theoretical physics there's like hundreds of years of literature that you need to catch up on and also every day there's like 100 new papers that come out and before you can contribute to theoretical physics you need to know basically all of math like algebraic topology differential differential equations like uh algebraic geometry and these are all things that people will spend their careers going in on and yet to do the physics you need to at least have like a pretty deep understanding of these things and so it really teaches you how to have um good judgment with minimal information because at the end of the day like to write that paper i didn't become you know the world's best algebraic geometer to do that it was just like okay what can i

  3. 10:46

    like read through these textbooks as quickly as possible just to get the gist and get the intuition and then know that i'm not going to be able to read you know all these thousand seminal papers that are really exciting but just there's no time for and so it's like trying to parse out the essential information from what is like there is no way you're never gonna have perfect like literally never and that's very true to company building and yet you still have to make big decisions yes so you write this paper with juan baldacena um you're in a phd what's the moment