Sarah can quote me on this being a long-held belief: being a social media influencer is a curse. I don't wish it upon my enemies. The more proximate one is to influencing based on their appearance, the worst. Apparently, a cousin of mine is getting divorced. I know about it because the world of TikTok, Reddit, group message, and so forth are all over it. And maybe not. Sarah just told me it might not be true. A waste, most of it.
Perhaps similar in mechanic to the stickiness of wages, communal perceptions of startup value are also sticky -- it's hard to believe said company won't be the darling unicorn that it is today. After a few years in the industry, I'm beginning to feel just how many ups and downs exist for each company. Imagine how the founder feels. Especially when much of that value is out of your control. This year, the supply chain of capital began valuing companies on 3x revenue multiples rather than 30x revenue multiples of yesteryear. This has a drastic impact on every capital owner in the supply chain.
My relationship to hotels has really changed over the years. Once the paragon of rest, vacations, and endless ESPN, now shadowy, unrestful room with no memory foam pillows. The random sounds and lights. The faux cleanliness.
Boston is a dense city. It's thick with character and culture. High-minded yet hard. American-loving yet liberal. Each borough (impossible to track each) is seemingly distinct. I'm in Chelsea, an area known for its high number of immigrants. Cambridge for its students. Newton its academics. Belmont its families. And so on. What a beautiful city of red brick, rife with harbors and inlets, and proximate quaint New England towns. There is no shortage of great sports or food. The Irish Catholic Uber driver could care less what school you went to.
Warnings, without lived experience, carry so much less weight. I'm now about at my 2 year mark as a venture capitalist. What an odd journey -- joinning just post-Covid when the tech world was supposed to fall apart, only to see a strange technology effervesence, resulting in a great harvest. But it's 2022. And now I'm up late figuring out the financial, legal, and personel decisions behind a re-capitalization. Recaps hit different when its a company you recommended. Only then, are the lessons of overpricing a round, of burning too hot, of dilution, of a weak Series A market really settling upon my soul. Raising at too high of a valuation causes serious problems. A VC_backed startup is a momentum journey. Take too much of that momentum in round 2, and you find your business faceplanting. Heed the warnings. I've been reading Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross. It's an excellent read. VCs are part- talent scout, part - therapist, and part - gambler. One of the most honorable values provided by VCs is when we help to raise ambitions, prodding individuals to take risks that change the world, but mostly by creating contagious ambition and mimetic desire with those in their company and circles.
How do you know when someone has taste in a particular area? a website, fashion style, home decor, music choice. I don't have enough taste, but longer I live the more I think it matters. This is an ongoing question for me.
How do you raise your personal ambitions? Lately, I've tried reminding myself. One way may be to fiddle with the inputs of ambition -- i.e., vision, intelligence, connections, open-mindedness, energy. From the outside looking in,
it seems endless reservoirs of energy are requisite for ambition to flourish. A uniquely helpful dimension of business school at Harvard was the ability to *feel* and *experience* the pace at which a somewhat diverse set of individuals
go. And let me tell you -- most MBAers are the go-go-go type. Another helpful element in raising ambition at business school is hearing firsthand from business owners, tech founders, private equity overlords, etc. There is something about being
in the same room, feeling the conductivity of another human nearby that reminds you--yep, they're human, too. Some are standard deviations above the norm in smarts. Most, I'd venture, have high multiplicative intelligence across dimensions but nothing
fancy in one area. Go big or go home.
Out of undergrad I chose between 4 companies: Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Cornerstone Research, and Vivint. I chose Vivint. The thrust of the decision was driven by a spiritual side - I felt I should go there. I didn't want to want to go there. Staying in
Utah, working at that door-to-door sales company while my peers went to Bain, McKinsey, or Google, was not appealing. "Where do you work?", "Vivint", "The sales company?", "Well, I'm on the product side", "oh, cool."
That got old. Now I work in the high status world of venture capital. Where most people want your product, a few really need it, and a few don't want it but you really need them to buy it. By virtue of the money I represent,
I have power in the community. People want to talk to me; perhaps a tiny bit of that is also that as a VC you are unique in a see of startup operators. Interestingly, the power dynamic can switch very quickly if a VC is interested &
there are competitive dynamics at play. Perhaps even more interesting for me is the fact that as a VC, your main public job is to *listen*. Mostly, you aren't the star of the show. The founder(s) is. Even after 20 years in the business,
someone else is talking, and you listen, peppering the pitcher with a few questions. So, status in VC is inherent but capricous. And it's status that brings you to the room; you aren't the center of attention, CEO Bob is... as it should be.
Pair "Revolt of the Public" with the Amazon series "The Boys". My serendipitous consumption of each reinforced the thesis that the information age broke the relationship between the elites and the people. When a revolt in Egypt that led to the overthrow of a 30-year dictatorship was coordinated on Facebook by an ordinary citizen with loose ties to fellow revolutionaries -- something is up. It's the kind of paradigm shift that is *felt*. The Boys plays on these themes perfectly, highlighting sinister feedback loops brought about by information -- superhero missteps, citizen records, social media hosts, superhero coversup, proles redden, elites hide, institutions rot.
"We are as Gods, so we might as well get good at it." - Stewart Brand (see: https://www.weareasgods.film/). I just so happened to pair the trailer of this documentary with an article on how the Great Salt Lake drying up could be a nuclear bomb. Another serendipitous pairing. The lake dries up, dust and particulates come out to play. When different chemicals produced by mining decide to come out of their shell, it's a bad thing. My beloved Farmington is right along the eastern coasat of the lake at the heart of the Great Basin. Lose the lake, lose a lot more than brine ship. It appears we aren't being good gods. I'm quite worried."
I'm not sure if it's more telling about me or about the word -- strategy -- that despite getting a degree in business strategy and an MBA at Harvard Business School, I just looked up the definition for strategy.
According to an HBR article referencing Michael Porter, this will due for one characterization: "Do what everyone else is doing (but spend less money doing it), or do something no one else can do."
(https://hbr.org/2015/05/what-is-strategy-again#:~:text=Strategy%2C%20it%20follows%20for%20Porter,forces%20in%20your%20competitive%20environment.) Why are people so attracted to 'strategy'? Perhaps people love cogitating about how to win competitively, the dream of breakthroughs
on a heavily diagrammed whiteboard. Perhaps, because of what it isn't perceived to be -- the daily grind of execution. The evil eye peering in on someone in Strategy sees one who gets to think about CEO-level problems, without CEO-level responsibilty.
"The Truth is rarely pure and never simple". - Oscar Wilde ... can one say this quote is true? Or is that too simple?
I'm reading too many books right now simultaneously. One of those is Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. Aside: Stripe Press is bringing sexy back with their books. I love the covers, the typography, colors on the pages. What a delightful experience -- why is a payments company my favorite publisher? Tyler argues that focusing on economic prosperity as a *moral*. Previoulsy, I had aligned with the idea of econonmic growth, but hadn't extended the idea so far as an ethic of mine. I think Tyler has converted me to this -- with his same caveat, that human rights need also be protected. One of my friends in Kenya was mugged. The muggers were attempting to steal his personal property. He righteously beat up the skebangas. After getting a picture of them and showing it to the police, they did nothing. An anecdote sure, but that is a highlight of the lack of prosperity on the accounts of the muggers and lack of institutional integrity often associated with low prosperity in the account of the police. I think we miss just how much better life is because of America's general economic prosperity, despite its attendent failings. Try the alternative.
The job of a VC is part talent scout, part inspector sleuth, part journalist, part therapist, part coach. No wonder I have impostor syndrome.
I have a running theory based on a trend I'm seeing -- tech companies as a mini-government. Increasingly, companies are filling the role of job, social network, therapy, financial advisor, retirement specialist, political haven. As previous local, city, state, and federal instituions rot, employees expect business to fill the role. In addition to adding government-instituted 401k plans, where companies match savings rather than simply give employees that cash, I've seen pitches for companies to play a role in matching for a home savings acocunt, an emergency cash account, a travel account, a learning account, a financial advisory, a therapy budget, etc. Instead of giving the employee this cash, we are reducing salary to recieve incentives toward nudges that government and company think we want. Is this the way?
The algorithim was working today--Thanks Matter. Something on ambition, on taste, on Emergent Tokyo (a book I received this week), and a post by a product mind I admire, Ryan Singer. From the article on *taste* "Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”" "Still, taste is closely intertwined with snobbery." "Taste comes in lanes. To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress. -https://www.are.na/blog/notes-on-taste #taste
It looks like its time to experience a real bear market for the first time in my professional career.
Passive or active? Sliding or leading? Consuming or sharing? I find it is so easy to default to conservation - to passivitivy. Whether that be at Church, home, with family, or friends. Waiting for the invite. That's the human default. A few years ago, as I spent time in the Serengeti, it was struck by the lack of movement. Lions lounging. Zebra & wildebeest standing still. Hippos submerged under water. It's a law of nature under scarce resources: conserve. In my world, I know that's the default, and sometimes that is smart. I should take naps on occasion. Or have a lazy weekend night. But the ambitious know, perhaps instictively, that this default must be fought against. I don't know if I'm ambitious. I've always felt naturally lazy. That's only kind of true. Better to try than to sit.
Political prioritization is difficult. Everyone has very different value systems which, theoretically, transform to a set of priorities. I say theoretically because I get the sense that most of us just consume some news media, personality, or source that creates our model of priorities, and works backward to affect our values. From what I can tell, in Utah, we've got to do something about the impending natural disaster at the Great Salt Lake, actively *not* passively.
On abortion -- a very complex topic. Why can't we land on our compromise and move on? Sometime after 1st trimester and before the 3rd trimester.
What would you do if you were more ambitious? What would you do if you were harder working? What would you do if you were more focused? What would you learn if you did rather than observed? What would you build if you had the courage?
In a pitch (pun intended), I look for harmony. It is an understandable mistake to understand a business by only assessing its parts. This is the inherent weakness of Powerpoint slides as a medium. Unless used properly, the 'negative' space between the slides is as important as what is on the slide. How does the customer job-to-be-done related to the incentives of the business model? How does competition respond to the GTM? Why does this team have unique access to a market and the ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage? What I hope to see is harmony -- all the parts and the relations *between* the parts have harmony. Creating a business plan where the parts indivdiually make sense from a VC-perspective is hard enough; now try to create a harmony. As a corollary to this -- while I worked at Nike, I saw firsthand how this idea relates to effective storytelling. I spent the summer working on a presentation about retention. Cleverly (or so I thought), I recorded customer interviews to be played in the presentation. I included research from surveys and other internal data. I added highlights from academic research. In one feedback session, I was told to turn 10 slides of graphic data into 1. In another feedback session, I was told my manager's manager noticed some aesthetic mistakes - on of those being inconsistent fonts. I recall receiving that feedback and being quite bothered -- was that really the most important feedback here? What about the substance of the presentation ... that's where I wanted feedback. (Style > substance at a consumer apparel company, duh.) After simplifying my story, and practicing it in front of multiple audiences, I got to the final key once the individaul parts where right -- I needed to nail the transitions. Each slide needed to end with the so what with which the next slide then begins. Otherwise its chopped salad. Or in other words, the presentation needed harmony. Nail the parts, create harmony. Those causal relationships create the story. And that's what people want to hear, harmonic stories.
With beads of sweat rolling down my back, preparing for savasana, I had the feeling that I'm really lucky. Darby is a happy, expressive little lamb. My wife pushes me to be better. I'm breathing in the smell of boganvillas, fresh salt water air, and colorful architecture. My job is fun. I'm healthy. I've seen some things in the world. I'm truly grateful.
I read a lot each day. I hope this writing helps me encode, synethesize, and compress what I learn (see: https://web.getmatter.app/entry/9002357). Based on Russ Roberts '12 Rules for Life', I would like a rule to be that our family sits down for dinner together. That we enjoy our food. We highlight and notice different ingredients, different taste profiles. More importantly, I'd like for us to also chat about philosophy, religion, questions that really matter.
It's time to improve my personal energy narrative -- I'm a high energy person. A duracell bunny. How can one figuratively re-brand (as in a cow getting branded) a narrative? A question for another time. Where I'd like to start on my own energy revolution is what I do when wake up in the morning. It needs to start with a productive action. Since #dadlife, I generally awake to hearing Darby squirming. What can I do before I check twitter, texts, and Superhuman? Perhaps I should just start by sitting, meditating for a minute.
One idea I learned about today is to perform fermi estimation -- figure out how to approximate a # by creating upper and lower bounds. How can I apply this to investing? One idea I had is forcing ourselves to consider the probability distribution of each investment we make at different orders of magnitude, e.g., what's the likelihood this hits $1M ARR, $10M ARR, $100M, $1BN ARR? To see this distribution, and then compare with other investments would be insightful.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, says, "It is not down on any map; true places never are." That hits deep. Areas I need to learn more about to form opinions - interest rates and their movements - whether or not we are in a lawsuit crisis in the US - how does happiness compare across time and country - what institutions in the US are competent / not competent. I think that's a good start.
There is truly no feeling, no permanent change i've experienced that compares to having a baby.
It's fascinating when I realize that the tails of my curiosity are just one tail. That cluster - of late - has been around the building and disintegration of institutions. Revolt of the Public, a theory about why institutions are crumbling, an article about how we should shut down and startup more, another book about the fed as an institution. Clusters, or as Ryan Holliday calls it, swarm strategy. Now, what if the cluster I swarmed was intentional?
Speaking of, I continue to return to a few questions as of late. 1. Why don't we build beautiful things? 2. How do we fix the institutions that shape us? 3. In what ways are we happier, and in what was are we less happy than your average hunter gatherer?
Perhaps I'm so interested in these questions because I've been so engrained in the train losing the track. What beauty have I built? What institutions have I bettered? Am I living the best life I can?
Listening to Dolly Parton, watching my flailing arms and lame dance moves, Darby kindly gave me some laughs tonight. That was a beautiful moment. One she'll never remember. But I hope to. She is the most beautiful creation I've ever taken part in.