Author: Julie

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 103 and Regret

It’s culturally acceptable to say “oh I regret never having children” but somehow we rarely hear the opposite. I understand that parents who regret having children do not want their children to feel unloved. For that reason perhaps it’s the kind of feeling you take to your deathbed.

Or you post anonymously on Reddit. But for the sake of children feeling loved and wanted, I do think we should discuss it openly and in public with more honesty.

At this point in my life I don’t think I feel joyful about having children of my own, despite having pursued fertility treatments (which if I’m honest about was partially an insurance policy to let me put off the decision). If I have a child, I will need to resolve my anger and regret about how egg freezing lost me a decade of my life. It sent me on a path of severe chronic illness and I wouldn’t want my child to feel that my anger about being sick was ever any fault of theirs.

And maybe this is why we have no cultural space to discuss regret. We don’t want our kids to ever have access to the complex feelings we have as humans about our anger or sadness.

Imagine how a child could extrapolate feeling anger at a sickness that was related to their conception. Jesus fuck. I don’t think I’d regret having children. If I ever bring my health challenges up, I ever hear is “you will regret it if you don’t take the risk to have them” which just isn’t that helpful.

But you know what isn’t helpful? Never discussing regrets till it’s too late. Till you are doing something because it’s culturally normal. What kind of bullshit is that to put on a child? “Mommy got told that she’d regret it if she didn’t have you.” That seems like a recipe for Mommy very much regretting her decision.

I pray that the hormones that bond us to our offspring work well enough that no parent or child is ever put in this position. I pray that evolutionary instincts make it so unlikely that one regrets having children.

I worry some people simply didn’t want to have children but the expectations of life and culture didn’t make that feel acceptable. I hope more people talk about that fear. I don’t know exactly how I feel but I do know that no one should do shit on the advice that “they will regret it if they don’t.”

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 101 and Closed Ecosystems

The One of the most important novellas in the formation of my technical philosophy was actually written by a science fiction author Neal Stephenson. “In the Beginning there was the Command Line” should be taught in every history of computer science course. Go download it now for free and enjoy 70 pages of riffing on the utopian possibilities of open systems, the accessibility of closed systems and who is the ultimate winners of computing becoming a closed system (surprise it’s Disney).

The premise of the essay is simple. There are two core tensions in how computing has been distributed: open versus closed. The basic manifestations of which philosophy you pick have significant impact on what your users can build but also how accessible your machine or application will be to users. Stephenson focuses on the GUI or graphical user interface, perfected by the closed Apple computer universe, and how it has made computing infinitely more accessible to the masses while also taking away some of the power and flexibility of the original command line interface of prior generations.

In the battle for powerful and hard versus easy but more limited, Americans chose easy and the rise of the GUI began. Dicking around with your computer, let alone your phone, almost isn’t possible without graphical representations of computer programs. Even though said programs are ultimately manipulated several systems down on a command line (you know the “hello world” text interface you might have seen on some NCIS dad cop procedural hacker show) most of us have thoroughly bought into the desktop metaphor of the original Apple GUI. And yes this is old news. This problem of the GUI got won in the eighties. But the basic problem of open versus closed still rages on with us.

The current debate is most vivid on in the financial world with crypto, Bitcoin and decentralized finance as we all yammer on about DAOs and NFTs. But you see it in social media as creators become locked into closed platforms from which export of their content is almost not an option as without distribution and audience access their work means nothing. Creator economy businesses can make money from individual closed platforms but struggle to build businesses as they are too tied to one type of revenue stream. If they are big on say YouTube or TikTok but can’t take their audience elsewhere that’s an issue. Imagine a world where they could take their business with them not be locked into one revenue stream for a platform they cannot change.

What I’ve written here is more like an appetizer course for the philosophy debate and not an argument. I have an opinion in the debate which is that open ecosystems are better for more types of people but I’m also writing this on an iPhone. But I’m writing using WordPress on my own domain rather than choosing a closed platform like Substack. So it’s not exactly a simple binary outcome for anyone ever. Which is all the more reason to go read the novella now.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 100 and Rest Days

When I first set out to write everyday I didn’t set a goal. I think in my mind I meant it as a month long exercise to create more. Now I’ve got no idea what will eventually break the streak. I’m sure when it happens (something is bound to occur) I’ll be frustrated and I will just keep going the next day I hope. I’m trying to remember that Banksy “when you get tired, learn to rest, not quit” graffiti with the little girl sitting staring at a bluebird. I know it’s the stuff of inspiration Instaporn but whatever works right?

I’ve managed to write through a fair amount of awful shit in the last hundred days so it’s not that I’m afraid I’ll quit. I’ve become accustomed to simply opening up the draft space and writing. I just start some days with no particular topic in mind. Its more the knowledge that I am going to need to take breaks. Maybe not from writing but from life.

Today is one of those break days. I can barely tell you what happened today. I’ve got a project with a deadline but as I pushed myself physically yesterday I found that I needed today off. Resting today gives me tomorrow. I know this sounds basic but as a workaholic I’ve not traditionally been good at resting when it’s not been forced on me.

Usually on rest days I’m prone in bed as I’m in too much pain and too exhausted to do anything else. I hid this for so much of my illness and now I’m almost comically transparent about it. You’d think I’d be considered a liability and no one would ever want to work with me (or be friends with me) and yet I’ve found that not to be the case.

The empathy I’ve found in almost everyone makes me wonder if we’ve got our reputation building advice all wrong. I was under the impression I needed to hide my illness and always excuse strength. But the more honest I am about my capacity and my limits the better my work and relationships get. I’m slowly leaving behind the persona of “always on” hustle “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” bullshit of my younger years.

I still have a lot of fear about being perceived as unreliable. There’s not much logic to it. I always meet my commitments head on and when I physically can’t people understand. I work with backups plans and teams so that its never a crisis if I simply need to rest. The work gets done with or without me because my reliability is a function of preparedness and collaboration now instead of will force and midnight marches. If anything I think this makes me a better partner to work with ss instead of relying on my “at any cost” personality you can rely on me simply slowly and with planning getting your further than we could have gone alone.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronicle Startups

Day 99 and Swag

My favorite item of clothing in the pandemic has been a Facebook hoodie. It’s the perfect garment for long days indoors, not too heavy but not too light. It zips so it’s easy to get on and off. It has pockets for stowing my iPhone. It’s got a snuggly fuzzy inside but a smooth cool texture outside. I’m not sure I’ve been more dedicated to a piece of clothing.

Years of living in New York, where dragging dirt and debris in from the city was a real concern has made me a almost compulsive aficionado of “indoor clothes” which were not besmirched by the grime of subways and pavement. My Facebook hoodie remains my default “indoor clothing” top layer. At night I unzip it and place it carefully beside my bed. In the mornings if it is cold I put it back on before starting my day. The chances are good that if you’ve been on a Zoom call with me I’ve been wearing this hoodie. It’s just on screen and a strange affectation for someone that has literally never been a fan of the traditional Silicon Valley boy wonder aesthetic. The only item I have gotten more wear out of is a pair of Gucci boots I’ve owned for 12 years now.

To say that they are very different garments is an understatement. One is a thousand dollars worth of black Italian leather crafted into the Platonic ideal of day boots. They are feminine with tight knee high lines that maintain the slightly militaristic echo that typify the Italian school of fashion. The other is a baggy slouching genderless sack of blue with an embroidered white logo that splits with a zipper tight down the middle between Face and Book.

You would not imagine the owner of one garment was the owner of the other. Even when the tech plutocracy decided it wanted to play with high fashion status games (thanks Marissa) the two stylistic poles never really gained much common ground. Still tech has inspired a significant portion of modern fashion and fashion craves the semiotic power of Silicon Valley. I’m sure Willian Gibson could explain the common lineage but I doubt I have the chops. Nevertheless I do consider both pieces to be emblematic of my personal style. Something about utility I suspect. The two garments are not from entirely different worlds

Ironically I don’t use Facebook anymore (though I still have an account) and I don’t even support what the company has become. So you might think it’s odd I own a piece of swag from the company. I got the hoodie after I had already given up on the place. But I got it from a Facebook employee who I consider to be one of the best humans I have ever known. His name his Dan.

I didn’t ask him if I could write this little remembrance so I won’t give his full name. Thanks to the efforts of one of my investors he was an advisor and investor to one of my startups and was unfailingly the kindest person I had the privilege of working with. On a trip to visit him in Menlo Park he took me to lunch on the Facebook campus. We had tacos. Afterwards as we were walking we passed the swag store. I said that I thought it was a brilliant bit of marketing that they sold hoodies. Pop culture has long cemented the status of the hoodie with both the company and with founders in general. To have a specific Facebook hoodie seemed a powerful talisman filled with irony and hope. Without missing a beat Dan bought me one.

There was no way of knowing at the time, for either of us, that this garment would end up a significant figure in my daily routine. It remains an emotional link to Dan and the support he always showed for me. He never wavered in his belief in me. This is a trait he has demonstrated consistently with those in his life. One particular example is a dear friend of mine who worked at Facebook thanks to his efforts. She is also brilliant and kind and at the time Dan worked with her the victim of a deeply Silicon Valley crisis. The kind you might even associate with tech bros who wear hoodies with logos on them. An irony that is not lost on me. The tech industry truly contains emotional multitudes.

I’d encourage you to inspect the garment in your life that holds the kind of significance and emotional resonance that this hoodie does for me. Fashion exists in even the places we think are furthest from style. Like corporate swag. Like a Facebook hoodie. There is always a story and a reason behind what we wear. Indeed this was a topic I thought I’d make my life’s work when I first stumbled onto the internet. I kept a fashion blog on WordPress maybe starting in 2004 or so. I didn’t end up being a fashion critic. But I still get to blog about clothing if I feel like it.

Categories
Startups

Day 98 and Rejection

The other night I got suckered into the infamous Slate Star Codex comment about feminists and nerdy men. If you are already familiar with the general contours of this debate, you can skip the introductory paragraphs and go straight to my theory on the sexual dynamics of rejection in investing. I’ll caveat a lot before that. I read the above piece because I was high and while I would normally not spend an hour on angsty shit, I get tunnel vision with THC sometimes.

I’m an occasional reader of the rationalist community and often enjoy and respect their whole thing. To be honest I hadn’t ever bothered to read the feminist dunking controversies as, frankly, I took Scott Alexander at his word that this post wasn’t really representative of his work, so why would I bother? But again, weed tunnel vision. And boy golly do I regret reading it as I’m writing about it now.

I don’t want to minimize what was clearly a heartfelt and traumatic episode for everyone involved but the TLDR on the piece is basically certain kinds of women do not recognize the trauma of nerdy socially awkward men. Feminists in particular wield a cudgel over nerdy men, who it is argued in this article are victimized. There is some long winded arguments about whether this is a systemic issue. I kinda don’t care and you can judge for yourself. I myself read it as the personal trauma of one man that is being projected out as some kind of theory of power hierarchies. I’m not in the business of scratching up traffic with moralizing on woke politics. If I am, I’ll start charging for the blog.

What I did think was interesting is that we don’t like to talk about how women get rejected and how often we are in the power position to say yes or no. I do believe women to be systemically oppressed by patriarchy. I also think men are oppressed by it. And yes, women cope with sexual violence. That’s not a yes or no situation. Women in patriarchy are granted the upper hand in certain power structures. We don’t really admit this in polite discourse.

Women are the ones that get to say no. It’s a weird fucking system but somehow we have this power. I’d give it back if I could quite frankly. I don’t think it’s biological but I do think it’s true-ish. I fucking hate being the one that says yes or no to advances. I like to pursue but it’s not always an option. I don’t like that women have the power to be desired more than men do. No one talks about the female gaze because lol. Women gain power by saying no. Men gain power by saying yes. How we got here is for smarter people than me.

But I do have a theory that women generally being the ones to grant permission is honestly why pitching capital is such a bitch for women founders and male investors. Women are generally the ones who create desire and say no. Men saying no to women feels weird for both sides. I’ve maybe had one dude say no to me for sex and literally hundreds turn me down for money. It’s a head trip. It’s a personal experience, yes, but it’s also just how pitching works. People say no. Men get turned down a lot and apparently it’s traumatic as fuck for them.

Women aren’t used to it and men like to say yes to women but money can’t say yes to every company as that’s not how investing works. And yes, professionalism exists and, no, it’s never appropriate to wield power over someone’s future with sexual advances. I don’t know why that’s so hard for everyone. Like we shouldn’t be in positions where work feels like sex but maybe we should admit that women aren’t as used to being rejected and men don’t like doing the rejecting. So sometimes this gets grossly out of hand and investors say no to investing money as it’s their jobs (and it’s not personal) but still want to find a way to say yes, so inappropriate shit happens.

I think rejection is just a weird dynamic that’s lopsided with heterosexual cisgendered systems. I’d love to get rid of it. It sounds like plenty of men would too. I’ve always been under the impression that this was the goal of feminism. Clearly we aren’t there yet.

Also don’t read Scott Alexander’s blog comments when high or you too may end up writing about rejection and gender in public too.

Categories
Chronicle Startups

Day 97 and Socializing Professionally

If you know me well then you know I’m not a natural people person. Despite being both an optimist about the human potential for progress and generally being a happy person, I think a lot of people suck. I know it’s a shitty outlook.

Maybe it’s because I just don’t have the energy for socializing. Big gatherings are not my thing, even though if you met me casually at a party you’d probably think I was an extrovert. If I’m putting my time aside for you it’s because I really enjoy it. The people I spend time with have to be great. They teach me something or have a unique point of view or have great emotional capacity. Most folks just don’t seem to enjoy putting themselves out there. Or maybe it’s that they simply don’t want to offend you so never really say anything of interest. I just don’t care what shit you bought or what your constantly over scheduled activities happen to be (though this has become less true in the pandemic).

I really don’t want to go back to socializing as a professional prerequisite. I hate having to tell people how I am. No one actually wants to know. I don’t really enjoy holding my tongue. Professional events generally require you to keep quiet about how much you think someone is bullshitting.

I’m often a huge hit on panels at conferences because I don’t give canned responses but wow does that make more polished people squirm. I once made the mistake of telling the truth at a Goldman Sachs retail conference. The analysts went wild. The poor CEO next to me looked like she wanted to die. It’s easy to tell when someone is using a script and talking points when the person next to them is just talking without a filter. Humans like truth and honesty it turns out.

I really hope we don’t go back to constant networking and prioritizing people who are naturally socializers. I hope the pandemic broke some of that tendency towards rewarding the constant parade of events, cocktails and ever more exclusive gatherings. But I’m sure there will be a massive correction where everyone loves real life experiences again. But once it reverts to the mean let’s all agree to be a little more judicious in our asks to “meet up” in the future. I’ll send you a Harry and David’s gift basket if we can continue to see less of each other.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 96 and Founders Who Don’t Want to Be CEO

My Twitter has been going viral with reply guy friendly topics like taxing high earners and public vaccine demand so I needed to get some niche startup content in today to clear my palette of the reply guys. So I’m going to think about founders, professional management teams and venture’s role in supporting founders. You know, a topic that won’t have strong feelings.

A non zero number of my founder. friends would probably pay to be extracted from certain stages of startup growth, especially later stage scaling, but somehow being founder friendly has come to mean keeping these founders in charge all the way through. Many excellent zero to one founders have to actively change their entire style, skill set and value proposition once they get a company past about employee 25. Obviously there are many inflection points in startup growth and many founders relish the opportunity for constant skill growth. But plenty of early stage founders hate stuff like Human Resources and operations. Shit a good chunk hate sales and marketing too.

Early stage work is a speciality. It’s a professional niche and hard to train folks for as it’s part personality and part dysfunction. I think we should value early stage founding for its disproportionate impact on value creation instead of forcing these early stage specialists to train to become generalists, great managers or scaling operators. Of course it’s more likely they will fail once you take them away from the stage where they are genius.

Recently a friend of mine who works in venture said of another investor “oh that VC is old school” and clarified it meant they like to bring in executive teams for their B rounds companies. Which honestly sounds like a dream to me. There has to be a middle ground between firing visionary but scattered founders once they’ve raised and trying to coach a mediocre manager into great growth CEO.

I think we should normalize founders being churned in on new ideas rapidly and churned out on scaling quickly. Let them get back to founding. Let them create more faster. Great scaling venture funds can provide more value by bringing in a scaling leadership team and easing the founder out to areas where they can focus on vision and direction. I say let the professionals run your team.

Obviously some founders dream of going from idea all the way to IPO but I don’t know if it’s the dominant path they desire. It could just be one of many. I have very little interest personally in shit like operations, process and scaling. I literally married a COO rather get good at it (insert joke about literally anything to avoid therapy). However it shakes out the “founder friendly” venture firm will remain. What it means to be founder friendly may need to be rethought.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 95 and Context Collapse

I have reasonably high social intelligence. Yes I’m willing to flex on this. I’m able to suss out the contours of most situations quickly and code switch my language, aesthetic and context cues. Sure as a white woman in America’s vast “upper middle class” many social interactions and norms are designed for my comfort. But I spend time in spaces that are very much designed to exclude like finance. But I rarely feel out of place as I can find some point of intersection that allows me to find purchase with the leader (or norm setter) that sets a group’s context. To say that this is beneficial is an understatement.

I recently came across a piece of writing titled “A Theory of Collision Spaces” written by scientist who goes by the handle Generativist. The intended audience is folks who think probabilistically or at least have a firm grounding in computational thinking but if you have a head for logic you should be fine. The topic is how social media can do often lead to what is called “context collapse” but you might recognize as “people screaming at each other in bad faith in the comments section.”

The premise of context collapses is that online we may theoretically interact with infinite possible audiences. Infinite contexts makes it much harder for us to adjust or code switch such that we can telegraph that we care about the audience to whom we are speaking. It’s not impossible but it’s much harder. This is how one can make a statement that sounds innocuous but will end up pissing off some group that will come down hard on you. If the reaction is bad enough some audiences call it cancel culture.

Because I have a high social intelligence I’m less prone to getting caught in a context collapse situations. A quick scan of a profile and a few sentences of text is generally enough for me to subtly adjust my language and response. Of course, I cannot adjust for how others respond to me but I can respond to how they respond to me.

Think if it as second derivative social signaling. Limiting the possible permutations enables safety driven actions on my part. While I cannot survive an internet mob (no one can) even a tweet that goes reasonably viral is still bounded by social cues. The more adaptive you are at these cues the less likely you are to instigate a context collapse.

A lot of reasonable people have concluded that context collapse and internet mobs make social interactions on the internet too risky. The likelihood of encountering someone who will go splat against your reality and make a fucking thing out of it is none zero.

But I’d argue you have a weighting bias issue for the magnitude of the risk. You are much more likely to build something of worth from being social than you are to become “canceled” and I think this Theory of Collision Spaces essay just might convince even the twitchiest rationalist groupie. Why? Ensemble learning and computer mediated relationships are super powers for humans. Our ability to extend our thinking has two powerful tools in this era. We can learn from others. And our tools like our computers and their application layer act as extensions of our mind. But don’t my word for it. Nothing I can say will remotely compare to the paper as I’m just not as smart as this scientist.

So you get that social media has many opportunities for expanding our mind. So how do we become comfortable with the perceived risk? One point I want to get across here is that assuming all interactions online are bad makes for poor heuristics. So why is it not as risky as you think?

“Social cues mal-adaptively increase the unconditional variance of expressions while minimizing the group-conditioned variance.

Basically social media makes you lean into identity cues. We fight with negative identity opponents and align with positive identity proponents. The only issue? You might be talking to someone like me that code switches. “You cannot easily distinguish between unreliable counterparties, deceptive ones, and whether or not you are wrong.” So you could be talking to someone deliberately fucking with you, someone who legitimately just misunderstand or you yourself might be wrong. How do you know? You don’t really. All this “in group” signaling doesn’t make a ton of difference. It’s just the environment of the internet honing some badly social engineered aspects that are not inherent to the human mind or social behavior.

So go read that piece. Tell me what you think. And then go enjoy being social on the internet! Don’t let being wrong or being polarized scare you. We are still figuring out how being part machine mediated. A few bumps are to be expected

Categories
Chronicle

Day 94 and Moods

I got some great news today. All my most recent round of blood work came back in the healthy range. After several years of piss poor inflammatory markers I’m thrilled to see it getting back to normal. But I’m somehow I’m a foul mood for the day.

I talked to a friend about some exciting work we want to do together. It’s exactly the kind of work I’m looking to do in the future and their take on the problem is especially creative. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

It’s a beautiful Easter Day and I’ve done nothing but enjoyable activities. I went for a hike. Are a gorgeous meal made up of ingredients from our local dairy share and greens from the hydroponics we grew ourselves. But somehow I’m in a foul mood.

I can’t remotely pinpoint why I should feel angry or sad or in anyway negative and yet I’m just a half a step off from the reality of my life today. Not even a viral tweet is doing anything to cheer me. And I usually love dopamine hits. I only had one minor setback in the whole day. I wasn’t looking at a timer and I had a gaming account get zeroed (it will cost a little money to rebuild). Ironically the last time this happened was over Christmas. Apparently holy days and games are a poor mix. But that shouldn’t account for a mood.

I guess some days are just moods. But I’ve got some nachos and tomorrow is another day. I bet I’ll be happy tomorrow.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 93 and Distrust

I’m feeling pretty good these days. I’ve written about my progress and my biohacking. But one area I’m not improving in is consistency. Despite meticulous record keeping and a routine I maintain assiduously, it’s almost impossible to predict when I’ll have a bad day. They appear at random!

Most days were bad days the past two or three years. The good days really stood out. I noticed them because they were rare. Now I’ve got a pretty consistent pattern of several days on and one day off. Sometimes I’ll even wrack up almost a week of good days. I used to have bad months and bad weeks. Now it’s rare for me to have more than three bad days in a row.

But I’m still regularly caught off guard by bad days. Out of the blue for no discernible reason I’m in pain, exhausted and struggling with basic function. The pain is the first symptom. Radiating out from my upper spine it pins me flat on my back in bed. About all I can manage in that state of pain is my phone over my face and the light gestures required to work a touch screen. But I don’t know why I have these bad days.

I can do everything “right” and be feeling terrific and then I’m fucked up all over again on a dime. Now I’ve got a small pharmacy I can toss at my symptoms now so I can often medicate myself back to a tolerable baseline.

The issue is what should I do once I’ve recovered? Do I rest? Build up my strength? I used to practice “active resting” where I would engage in restorative practices even when I felt well. The idea was I was building up a reserve of energy for the next crash. But was that the wrong approach?

I’m beginning to think I should take advantage of every last moment of health I have. If I feel well then screw the “active resting” I’m going to use every good minute I’ve got to pursue my goals. Active resting doesn’t seem to have any benefits I can reliably track. And it seems no more likely I’ll have a good day if I have rested then it is I will have a bad day. At best it’s marginally related to a poor night sleep but once I’ve woken up to face the day the day is cast there isn’t it?

I hate that I’m unreliable. I hate that I can’t track triggers. Doctors have seemed largely sanguine on the issue. Some days will just be bad. Sometimes your immune response will be off. But I’m feel lost and angry that I don’t know how I can live life without some degree of predictability. The only thing I can rely on is that on good days I feel good. So maybe I should just pack shit in on those days. No restorative crap. Just go hard at my goals. I’m not sure this is a good plan. It’s probably a bad one. It could just be my addiction to work talking now that my mind knows my body can handle my hard living again. At least for a few days. But if hard living doesn’t produce predictable crashes then what should my takeaway be? Fuck if I know.