Category: Startups

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Biohacking Medical Startups

Day 971 and Patients Rights With Artificial Intelligence

If you are working in artificial intelligence or medicine I’d like to pleased my case to you. Id just like to pass along a note.

The current “responsible” safety stance is that we should not have AI agents dispense healthcare advice as if they had the knowledge of a doctor. I think this is safetyism and rob’s sick people of their own agency

I have very complicated healthcare needs and have experienced the range of how human doctors fail. The failure case is almost always in the presumption that you will fall within a median result.

Now for most people this is obviously true. They are more likely to be the average case. And we should all be concerned that people without basic numerate skills may misinterpret a risk. Whether it’s our collective responsibility to set limits to project regular people is not a solved problem.

But for the complex informed patient knows they are not average? The real outliers. Giving them access to more granular data let’s them accelerate their own care.

It’s a persistent issue of paternalism in medicine to assume the doctor knows best and the presumption that the patient is either stupid, lying, or hysterical is the norm. It’s also somewhat gendered in my experience.

I now regularly work with my doctors using an LLM precisely so we can avoid these failure cases where I am treated as an average statistic in a guessing game. I’m a patient not a customer after all. I decided my best interest.

A strict regulatory framework constricts access without solving any of the wider issues of access to care for those outside of norms. Artificial intelligence has the capacity to save lives and improve quality of life for countless difficult patients. It’s a social good and probably a financial one too.

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Startups

Day 970 and Be Your Publicist

My day job is as an early stage venture investor. Like most people who do angel investing and pre-seed startup investing, I learned my trade on the job as an operator. I founded and sold some startups. I helped my friends with their startups. We invested in each other. Because startups are primarily about teamwork you tend to hone a specific skill. My super power was getting attention.

That means now one of the ways I support my portfolio of startups is with public relations. I’ve gotten enough personal press over the years I’ve learned a lot about the dark arts. I’ve also had the privilege of being trained some of the best in the business. I’ve picked up skills.

I hope I can help outliers building the next generation of weird companies move past the ‘media is the enemy” phase of public relations.

I’m going to offer up some of my specialty skills outside of my own portfolio. I can’t invest in everyone I’d like to think I can help anyone in the ecosystem who wants to tell a big story about what they are building. I will help you craft a story that can be broadcast far and wide, no matter how outside-the-norm you are.

If your dream is to have a cover story in a prestige periodical, a Wall Street Journal stipple for your expert commentary, or reframe how a story in your space is covered, I can help you plot the course to get there. 

Over the years I’ve done things like

  • Put a VC making her comeback on the cover of a national magazine
  • Secure the keynote slot of the biggest conference in a founder’s industry
  • Guided numerous CEOs through extensive press tours, with coverage blanketing their spaces

I’m not a traditional agency, I’m someone who understands your journey. From financial journalism to trade & specialty coverage to personality driven lifestyle pieces, I can take you from Bloomberg and Vogue to private Discords and influencer group chats. 

During our work together I can help you,

  • Craft your narrative and position 
  • Understand how reporters think and their incentive structures
  • Secure top tier, feature coverage in the places that matter
  • Provide crisis communications support
  • Find an agency (if that’s right for you)

I work on a retainer basis starting at $5,000/month – giving you access to me as your partner through whatever projects or objectives you have.

Consider me your diplomat to the 4th estate. I’m an effective accelerationist capitalist that speaks fluent woke. Reporters know and like me as their savvy crypto libertarian friend that lives on a Montana homestead. 

I’m well known for my doomer optimism, YIMBY advocacy for the Montana Miracle housing reform, my digital futurism and, somewhat weirdly, my years in luxury fashion & brands.

Want to dive right into a conversation about a problem you’re having?

Book time with me on Intro and we can solve it

Ready work with me?

Email me at julie.fredrickson@gmail.com

Categories
Community Startups

Day 967 and Good Moods

Everyone in my social circle was in a terrific mood yesterday. A small company that was widely supported by angels in my ecosystem was acquired by a larger startup that we all like. Happy investors that we were, Alex and I read the cap table over dinner and celebrated each co-investor that we liked.

It was a jubilant moment across my group chats in a darker wider climate for startups. The federal reserve’s inflation fight has meant tighter dollars. And that means less funding for early stage companies at lower valuations.

The focus has been good for the industry. A reminder that we can’t spend our way to innovation. We’ve relied on bigger companies, weaker talent, and unsustainable growth policies while the cash spigot was on.

I enjoyed the win. I’m happy for the founder and the team who will be going to such a great company. I’m happy a lot of investors got a win. But I know that the good mood will have to sustain us through some rough patches. So it’s good we are all banding together and the wins are shared.

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Finance Startups

Day 962 and Milestones

I’ve noticed an distinct uptick in pre-seed & seed startup founders looking to raise smaller rounds. If you think this post is about you, don’t fret I’m into the double digits with examples just this past month. Smaller rounds on reasonably capped SAFE notes are on everyone’s mind.

My account on Twitter AlmostMedia

While not everyone I’ve spoken to has fully thought through what it means to raise less, the market is a muse. And she is always worth listening too. Founders are hearing that raising a round must tied to product milestones. That it is good to raise what is needed to show proof that your idea has demand. In some cases the milestones are proof that your technology or product can be made at all.

When I first got started as a founder a million to 1.5m raise capped at 6m was considered a big and well funded seed round. It was more typical that the pre-seed and angel rounds were done in the half million range and capped at 3m or so if you were dealing with sophisticated angels. The industry was smaller.

It’s fascinating to see that we’ve stepped back to valuations and round sizes from ten to fifteen years ago. The markets have indeed shifted.

But what really got my attention is the undercurrent of planning and go to market strategy work being demanded again. We’d lost some of those expectations during the fervor of the zero percent interest years. Capital has a cost. We’d forgotten that.

Gary Tan summed it up best in response to my original Tweet.

Founders should raise whatever they think is right for their stage and what they want to prove. The pro for less is more discipline. The con is you run out of money and you die.
The rest is overoptimization about dilution which is not the high order bit.

If you are a founder in this market you must know what you want to do, how much it will cost and how long it will take you to get to the first step of milestones that proves you’ve got something of value. Everything else is noise.

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Finance Startups

Day 906 and Resilience Tech

I enjoyed a little moment in the sun yesterday when Axios’ Pro Rata featured my pre-seed venture fund chaotic.capital as part of a deep dive on resiliency technology investing. Or if you prefer disaster tech. It was a proud moment for me.

Because I’ve been trained to never miss an opportunity for reasserting who you are and what you stand for I thought I’d publish a portion of the market insights section of my investor letter for the fund. If you want to see the bets, the behind the scenes (hands on is an understatement), and the founders we back I’d welcome accredited investors to see if we’d make sense for you. Slide into my DMs or for the time conserving decisive HNI hop onto AngelList and apply to be an LP in 2 minutes flat.

What is Chaotic Capital?

In an era of institutional distrust, social change, and global instability, we invest in ideas that adapt humanity to our new chaotic era. What does that mean? We like things that help small groups have the impact of big groups and big groups have the agility of small groups. Enabling resilience in the face of unexpected & rapid change is our lodestar.

I publish an investor letter every quarter and you can always visit jfredrickson.com, where I write every single day about whatever I’m thinking about. You are also welcome to DM me on Twitter @AlmostMedia or text me on Signal. My email is julie at chaotic dot capital.

Market Insights on Q223

The rise of cryptography, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence are overlaid onto a geopolitical reality of resource competition in an increasingly multi-polar world. To use an entirely different metaphor, chaos is a ladder that we are here to climb.

Our thesis at chaotic.capital centered on identifying, investing in, and supporting companies that adapt our lives, businesses & systems to the opportunities and challenges that chaos brings. We call it resilience technology.

We believe these companies will generate outsized returns over the next decade as individuals, companies, and societies look to become more flexible, independent, and sustainable. But it’s bigger than that.  

Most builders remain deeply skeptical of Noble Lies, “for your own good” safetyism, regulatory capture, oligopoly control, and the centralized nation state control as the most effective methodology of innovation for a dynamic pluralistic human future. We are having cultural and financial reformations at a frightening speed. It’s beyond future shock now. 

Twitter critics can stroke their chin with practiced skepticism, but if you believe in American Dynamism as I do, you know that our history has shown that it is resilient, flexible, brilliant individuals coming together which defeats the totalitarian and slays the no-win scenario. You have to enable the brilliant weirdos and trust them to solve problems.

Like Captain Kirk once said to Spock, we must make the best guesses we can.

Spock: Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so… I will make a guess.

James T. Kirk: A guess? You, Spock? That’s extraordinary.

Spock: [to McCoy] I don’t think he understands.

Leonard McCoy: No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.

Spock: Then you’re saying… it is a compliment?

Leonard McCoy: It is.

Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

My best guess? As your chosen doomer-optimist, crypto-libertarian. American-patriot, dynamic futurist, pre-seed emerging fund manager, who has plenty of facts but still has the responsibility of making decisions without full information? Tools for everyone wins the future.

It will take all of us coordinating in freedom to defeat Moloch from sacrificing more of us. Uncle Screwtape wants our egos to believe we can deliver safety and control, we know it is a lie. The Ring of Power tempts us to consider “why not me? Don’t I deserve this power?”

Choose your franchise my fellow nerds and chosen ones; because you know the crown is heavy, the ring perverts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what do we do? We band together. And we enable more of us to join our merry band of future builders.

To balance out centralizing forces, institutional preservation and “we had no choice” moralizing malfeasance, we must give the people tools to build because sometimes our best guesses are demonstrably better than other people’s “facts”

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Startups

Day 887 and Twenty Twenty Four Hours To Go

And I wanna be sedated. Alas I do have something to do and places to go. Namely home. So I better hurry hurry hurry before I go insane.

As I’ve covered at enormous length, I do not care for travel. My reoccurring nightmare is packing for a trip that never comes. A liminal state of impermanence, in which I must be prepared at any moment to grab all my belongings and leave.

My month in Europe flew by. I hardly noticed the time. Some of that is due to tie up and down nature of travel stresses. Most of it flew by because I was having fun.

I learned a lot on this trip. I learned about racism and pluralism and the ever present dangers of populism. I learned about green energy policy failures. I learned that freedom to travel and transact is a privilege reserved for the select few who have good passports. Colonial legacies and festering wounds from resource wars and genocides still keep borders closed. We are not yet one human species and it will get worse before it gets better.

As much as I am looking forward to being home in Montana for our glorious summers, I am leaving behind some pieces of my heart in Europe. I’ll be back soon. But only once the weather has cooled down again. Climate change and chronic illness are not good bedfellows. But in twenty four hours or so I’ll be home. And I hope to recover quickly from the stress of travel.

Categories
Internet Culture Reading Startups

Day 872 and Synthetic Selves

I’ve been writing in public, on and off, for my entire adult life. First it was goofy tween personal made for myself on hosted social media like Livejournal & Geocities.

My younger years were filled with sundry hosted publishers that taught you just enough HTML & JavaScript to be a foot soldier in the ISP and browser war, but never quite encouraged you to gain the more foundational tools to host yourself independent of their network effects. Closed gardens of that era gave you a small plot of digital land to tend in their giant kingdoms. I never felt like I could homestead outside of their cozy walls on my own domain.

Those plots of writing yielded fruit though. And while it feels as if I only saved a small fraction of my writing over the years, I have hundreds of thousands of words.

I do have an archive of my collegiate blog which later turned into one of the first professional fashion blogs and spawned my first startup. I’ve got 872 straight days of writing saved from this daily experiment. And while I mostly auto-delete my Tweets I’ve also downloaded the remaining archives.

Why am I mentioning my written records? Because making a synthetic version of your intellectual self that is trained through your writing is now a possibility. I’d been introduced to Andrew Huberman’s “ask me anything” chatbot that was made through Dexa.AI and I thought I’d like that but for my own writing. So any founder or LP can get a sense of who I am by asking questions at their leisure.

We’ve come so far that it is an almost quotidian project for developers if you can provide enough training data and it looks as if I may have enough. Just by tweeting my interest I was introduced to chatbase.co, ThreeSigma.ai, Authory (great way to consolidate your content) and the possibility of knocking out a langchain on Replit. Aren’t my Twitter friends cool?

A big thank you to 2021 me and 2022 me which wrote so damn much. Click those links for my “best of” round ups. Hopefully I’ll have a synthetic self soon so you will have the option of asking it instead of hyperlink rabbit holing down endless inference threads.

My buddy Sean and I landed on “Phenia” as this synth’s name. He’s tinkering already. My husband Alex is already wondering what the heck is going on. But I see a pattern emerging. Phenia as in apophenia. A synthetic self capable of pattern recognition towards an inward spiral of infinite synthetic selves? Not a bad choice for a name at all. We can figure out a chat bot in a bit.

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Startups

Day 868 and Chunks

Amid all the panic about how artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing human work, we are hiding a dirty little secret. Humans are awful at breaking down goals into component parts. Anyone who has tried to use any type of project management software intuits this. Articulating clear, specific and manageable tasks is very hard.

Humans are inference driven, always integrating little bits of context and nuance. If your boss gives you a goal, the best path forward on it will depend on hundreds if not thousands of factors.

What’s your budget? What is your timeline? Who is on your team? Do you dislike someone? Want to impress another person? Is the goal to be fast? Is the goal to be good? Is the goal to be as good as possible as fast as possible with as little budget as possible? Trick question, quit your job if that last one true.

Knowing what we want, knowing the best path to achieving it, and knowing how the pursuit of those goals affect your family, friends, neighbors, enemies and adversaries, creates layers of decisions in a complex matrix of possibilities. This is easy for a machine to do if we’ve given them the right inputs, outputs, and parameters. Alignment isn’t all that easy.

I personally don’t believe most of us know what we want. Beyond a Giradian imitation of what our current culture deems valuable, and thus worthy of admiration, genuine desire is hard to pin down. And that makes it hard to have goals. Goals are required to have specific tasks. Specific preferences on how a task gets achieved narrow it down even further.

If I could simplify down every detail and desire and nuance and preference set and also align them with my wider goals, ambitions, and critical paths to achieving them you know I’d have it all organized on some kanban board. And if the AI can extract that from me and turn all my goals into discrete assignments and task chunks I’d happily go full Culture and let them run my entire life.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 865 and Permission To Invest In Yourself

I finished a five week nervous system mastery bootcamp last week. I felt like I was failing it for about three weeks as I resisted it’s lessons with excuses and rationalizations, right up until I realized the resistance was the lesson.

When I was a founder I came of age during the hustle porn years. Everything was about doing things faster and harder. Ideally both. And faster and harder was meant to produce “better” because “harder and faster is better!”

We got caught up in the tautology of the hustle. Move fast and break things practically meant we broke as many people as we did things. And I include myself as one of the broken people. It took time to recover.

Now I encourage founders in my own portfolio to prioritize their well being physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. If you aren’t putting yourself first your company will suffer. Trust me when I saw we both benefit from you investing in yourself.

But don’t make just about improving yourself. The point of this kind of work is to unfold yourself into the bigger, broader, most expansive version of yourself. Developing emotionally fluidity isn’t about optimizing for a local maxima, but rather about reaching for an even bigger global view. And we all see better returns on our investments with that kind of vantage point on life.

Categories
Startups

Day 857 and 3 Bag Cascade

I’ve developed a system for travel crisis management that has seen me through many a storm, workers strike, airport security involuntary cosmetics tosses, gate check “full overhead” confiscation, and other ways you might become involuntarily separated from your luggage. Perhaps even permanently at the rate you hear of luggage getting lost on transcontinental flights.

Disability Planning.

My system is pretty simple and a bit sad yet it’s crucial but I cannot be without certain items. I have a medical condition (ankylosing spondylitis) that requires delicate management. I carry a anti-inflammatory that is an injection pen that must be kept refrigerated. I carry a full travel pharmacy including solutions for all major issue from from digestive troubles to anaphylaxis, and analgesics or “forcing function drugs” for emergencies. Most are stored in labeled plastic bags but a few few controlled substances have to remain in their bottles or they can be confiscated by customs unless I can prove the prescription. In other, words. I can’t let the airline ever get their hands on it and it has to be provably mine.

Aer Grey Duffle Backpack

My backpack is my hand luggage under the seat item. In it I keep my travel pharmacy, a basic quart bag of grooming & cosmetic basics, all my electronics & their chargers, and a BagSmart packing cube with a change of pajamas (including under wear, bra, & extra socks). This functions as my purse for the duration of travel so includes wallet, phone, passport, chapstick, hand sanitizer, extra warmth layer, and other essentials. Even if my carry on bag gets checked against my will and lost in transport, I can still survive on what’s in this bag no matter where I end up.

Grey Muji Roller

Alas this bag isn’t sold anymore but it’s a soft top 4 wheel overhead. It’s my typical one week trip companion. It will go overhead unless something happens so this contains a week’s worth of basic clothing, shoes, and purse that could function for an entire trip if necessary. It is all organized and labeled in BagSmart compression cubes. I keep the majority of my secondary cosmetics here as well so I can shave, shower, do some hair and makeup. If I have a checked luggage failure (it’s lost forever) I’d be alright. I also keep a week’s worth of supplements while a month would go into the checked bag. I also keep 2 detergent tablets in this and the remaining in checked. Yes, I bring my own detergent because allergies.

Tumi Alpha Bag

For longer trips like say a month in Europe I do a checked bag. I pack stuff that I’d prefer to have larger sizes of like toothpaste & body lotions and my preferred shampoo, conditioner and styling products. Still 3 oz but no sense in lugging if you have the luxury. I also pack all my professional and going out clothing in here if it’s not absolutely necessary on landing in which case it would go into the grey carry on. I have dresses and separates that can handle anything from cocktail to family office for a month.

How It Works

I have every item listed in a packing template in Notion but I also do a ritual where I write it all out on a note pad and note the placement of each item in the cascade failure packing stage as either backpack, carry on or checked so I always know where everything is at all times. I’ve never been separated from anything critical like medicine or an electronic. Every time I travel I refine the lists and procedures.