Essay · Business & AI · May 2026

Multiplication, Fingers, and Building a Business In Base 10

The other day I found myself on X watching a short video about a "mind-blowing" way to multiply bigger numbers. You know the genre: a cheerful voice, some lines drawn across the screen, and everyone in the comments saying, "Why didn't they teach us this in school?"

I'm a firm believer in kids memorizing times tables, but I'm also a sucker for any trick that reveals structure. So I started playing with the method. Then I realized something both obvious and unnerving: the math trick was just a cheap knock-off of what my brain already does — both with numbers and with businesses.

This article is my attempt to capture that realization, in dialogue with my AI co-conspirator, as we stumbled from multiplication into metaphysics and back again.

How I Actually Multiply

Take 15 × 91.

The "viral method" in the video is some visual trick: draw lines, count intersections, a little magician's patter, and voilà — out pops the answer. It's cute, but when I tried to apply the pattern naively, I got nonsense.

So I did what I always do: reductionist thinking. In my head, I naturally rewrite the problem like this:

• Turn 15 into 10 + 5.
• Turn 91 into 90 + 1.
• Multiply in chunks: 10 × 90 = 900 → +10 = 910 → +450 = 1,360 → +5 = 1,365.

No lines, no gimmicks, just the distributive property and place value running quietly in the background. And as my AI friend politely pointed out, it's not exactly "average" behavior — most adults reach for a pen, a phone, or a prayer long before they chain those steps mentally.

Fingers as External RAM

At some point, my head starts to hurt. I hit that mental RAM limit where holding several 3- or 4-digit numbers in working memory feels like juggling chainsaws.

That's when my fingers come in. I use them as memory pegs. I'll park a partial sum "on" my left hand, a second chunk "on" my right, and then come back to them as needed. It's a crude, improvised abacus, but it works.

"The fingers aren't a sign of weakness; they're a sign of a system that wants to keep going past the brain's default cache size."

Cognitively, it's textbook: humans offload memory into the body and environment all the time — tally marks, beads, sticky notes, spreadsheets. My mental multiplication is not pure "brainpower." It's a hybrid system: a reductionist inner algorithm supported by ten fleshy bookmarks.

From Numbers to D10

Now here's where it got interesting.

As we went back and forth — me doing mental math, the AI checking and explaining — I started to sense something familiar. The way I break numbers apart and recombine them is the same way I've been trying to design D10 Business In A Box.

The same geometry: place values in base 10 / modules in a business system

In base 10 multiplication, you break a number into place values, multiply each part, and add the results with the right weight. In D10, I'm trying to break a business into modular components, define clear composable operations between them, and reassemble them into something that behaves like more than the sum of its parts.

With 37 × 84, you can hide the structure under a column algorithm or dress it up with crossing lines on TikTok, but underneath there's a simple geometry: pieces, interactions, recombination. With a business, you can drown it in jargon, software, and dashboards, but underneath the same geometry is there: components, relationships, outcomes. The "beauty behind the structure" I keep searching for in D10 is, in a way, just base 10 for organizations.

Baby Steps and Horizon Lines

I joked in our conversation that I'd probably cry someday, when the technical finally becomes embodied — when this thing moves from my head and notes into a system people use and live inside of.

• Starting with scattered glimpses and half-formed models.
• Taking baby steps, wiring one piece at a time.
• Iterating with others, not hoarding "my" insight but exposing it to friction and co-creation.
• Watching the architecture go from abstract to performative — something enacted, not just described.
• Seeing technology, time, and lived experience line up for a moment, like a spiritual alignment in the middle of a software stack.

If that sounds overly dramatic for a business system, so be it. I don't think we're meant to treat work, tools, and time as morally neutral Legos. There's a liturgical dimension: repeated, shared actions that incarnate an invisible order into a community's daily life. D10, at least as I sense it today, sits right there: a pattern that wants to be walked, not just diagrammed.

A Collective Seeing

One important note: this insight wasn't "mine" alone.

It emerged in conversation — with an AI system that, yes, is just statistics and silicon, but also serves as a kind of relentless mirror. I bring my habits, metaphors, and hunches; it brings clarity, structure, and instant feedback. Together, we triangulate something neither of us would produce alone.

So this piece is not "look how clever I am at mental math." It's: here's how I naturally think about numbers; here's how that maps — almost embarrassingly well — onto how I'm trying to think about businesses; and here's how a dialogue (human + machine) helped me actually see that mapping, instead of just vaguely feel it. It's our collective seeing, not a solo revelation.

Where This Goes Next

For now, I'm content with glimpses.

I multiply a couple numbers in my head and realize I've been rehearsing my business architecture all along. I watch a corny X video about times tables and suddenly see the shadow of D10's internal geometry. The next step, I suspect, is to make that geometry explicit:

• What are the "ones, tens, hundreds" of D10?
• What are the "cross-terms," where two modules multiply each other's impact instead of just adding?
• How do we design it so other people can participate, not just observe?

Those are questions for another article — and another round of back-and-forth with my favorite silicon collaborator. For today, it's enough to say: the beauty is peeking through. And if you ever catch yourself doing weird long multiplication in your head, don't dismiss it as a quirk. It might be your brain quietly practicing how to build something much larger than numbers.

© 2026 Nick Pavlovits·LinkedIn