Category: Startups

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Aesthetics Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 62 And Who Can Make Art

My ego dislikes debate, but my heart leaps at tension.

Over the weekend, my friend Phil and I decided to make a functional art installation called Illegal.Auction. The premise is simple: we are selling Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) of Culture. 

Unsettled ideas of generation and representations colliding with abstractions like finance are important issues both culturally and practically.

Art is for itself, so who cares either way. A certain dogmatic insistence that “medium is the message” is pervasive in the critiques. Are movies different than books? I don’t think they have anything to do with the price of milk. It reminds me of the classic Annie Hall scene (speaking of artistic intent and harm) where Marshal McLuhan explodes on a chattering group “you know nothing of my work.” Woody Allen’s character concludes the scene if only real life were like this. Well on Twitter you can recreate this scene everyday!

It is funny because commentary is distinct from creation. And a lot of people have takes on McLuhan that he himself doesn’t agree with. But who cares right? Interpretation of art is ostensibly art.

It’s very interesting to see just how angry people get about the worth and value of culture in particular. As if it’s some monstrosity to comment on the abstract financial value of some creation with worth that cannot be extracted.

If it were so easy to make value judgments about art then we would trade it on the Chicago exchange like pork bellies and orange juice. Not that we don’t already sell art and trade it and frankly it has been a massive tension through the history of human creation how we value that work, but now many have decided to insist that art is non-fungible. Not interchangeable on a one to one basis like an apple. And yet we are acting like everything can be valued and traded so easily with NFTs. By making art tradeable on exchanges, we have made some thing inherently non-fungible, fungible.

This is ultimately where Illegal.Auction came from. These conversations are important and transformative. That we choose to represent the tensions with representations of reproductions of jpgs of art is part of the art installation. That it is a functional sale is in inherent to the tension.

There is a part of me that is really worried that because I am not a practicing artist that is paid for work or represented in a gallery, that I don’t have a right to comment on these issues. I am a technologist and I do work in finance and the overlap of disciplines makes this an inter-disciplinary question in my mind. It seems like some people disagree with my right to create art (and certainly the morality of remuneration).

But if we insist that only artists can make art I don’t have any right to make installations remixing software and representations. But I’m not sure anyone reading this is comfortable with that world. I am not.

I think people want there to be simple yes no questions to these things. Is it legal? Did you steal? Is it a transformative remixing of a cultural artifact? Is it worth $1 million? And the truth is is that there is no easy answer to what political system is best or how much some thing is worth. Trillion dollar industries are based around the fact that we don’t have clear answers. Irate commentary doesn’t help any of us understand the infinite questions of worth and creation. It is good to do and helps further understanding but its crucial to remember indignation and moralizing is a function of ego.

Personally I don’t think that wealth has any moral value. I don’t want to have to be wealthy in order to be valuable. Or if a piece of art I make does make money do you have a right to tell me it is objectionable because this isn’t how you make money? I guess you do. Whether you can stop me from doing it is a central questions for the ages and also literally why it is important to create pieces like Illegal.Auction in the first place.

This commentary I think is worth having. Not whether speculative infinite land grabs with financial instruments make you worth more to billionaires. They probably do. That’s fine! I think people are mostly offended by the idea that non-artists can make art. Especially if a transaction takes place. If we had stamped illegal on the jpgs and blocked out NOT ART on them would it have made it better? Conceptually I’m not sure that that’s true and probably reflects the viewer’s own sense of value and worth more than a legal, political or moral reality. Also I personally think it cheapens the point just to make concessions to dogmatic insistence on ownership in a space that isn’t settled because frankly it cannot be.

Much of the narrative and coverage around NFTs is that they delineate ownership, value and origination more cleanly. I’d argue that they are actually having the opposite effect. NFT’s are ripping away edifice and abstractions that we use to assign value and worth. And that makes people uncomfortable.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 59 and Throwaway Days

The worst part of being in your thirties is no one tells you that won’t be able to sleep past 7am.

So this morning, right after sunrise, I’m plotting all the ways I’ll get to work on new projects today. Never waste a good Sunday. As if time has any meaning in the pandemic.

Here I am sliding back into workaholic ways, excited by the pace of change. But then you are reminded that routines and nutrition and supplements need to be done. So the tension between the allure of work and the practicality of needing to care for your body split. So I stop to mix a supplement smoothie and take some stuff. Then the sun is out so a hike up the front range trail is a must. Nutrition and exercise keeping the tension in check.

Maybe somedays it is ok to prioritize the long haul. The body that need to be strong for the next big shifts. That chaos is coming at us so fast a firm anchor for mind is a must. Techno-progressives need to believe in the positive outcome because we must cheerlead for a better future.

It’s nice to feel like even on throwaway days, you can cheer for all the outcomes

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Startups

Day 55 and Promoting Your Loved Ones

I love doing little projects and hacks for my friends and family. I always have a pet project or two on the burner for my nearest and dearest. My favorites are typically leveraging my talent for getting attention. Promoting the work and talent of your loved ones feel great. And it benefits everyone.

My husband Alex Miller has decided to more formally put himself on the job market. Both of us make a living through the wonders and vagaries of start up life. This includes angel investing, advising (which pays in equity), freelancing for the companies we advise (that usually means cash and equity) or if we are very lucky full time work making the rocket ship fly.

It’s hard to capture how someone’s life path qualifies them for a startup job. Typically you are taking on workloads that aren’t fully defined. You bring about whole departments and revenue streams. So Alex and I decided to put together a cross between a resume, a cover letter, a reference check and a compensation package into one website to give founders and startup executives a better sense of what he can help on.

Part of what makes startup life so challenging is that you often have problems more than defined roles. It’s just messy all around. So someone like Alex can say he’d like say operational lead roles or is best with series A to B startup COO roles that doesn’t really capture the full range of problems he can effectively tackle or the types of companies where he would be happy. Nor does it really help founders get a sense of what kind of value he can bring.

So we thought fuck it lets put together a site that can hold as much context as possible and make it easy to share. We put it together in a couple of hours so technically my long form writing for the day was writing up stories on how Alex got into startup work,

The best bit that I’m quite pleased with is a little growth hack to make it easier for venture capitalist or friends of startups that want to help source talent to just hit the email button and send off a referral without having to write a word. So go head and take a look. You might help a friend make some money.

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Chronicle Startups

Day 53 & The Process

Startup land can feel exclusionary and clique driven. Looking in from the outside it can seem as if all the power and money is concentrated into a few groups that only fund and hire their friends. Less charitably it looks like a circle jerk.

While this isn’t an incorrect perception, I believe why we think it is exclusionary is very different from the reality of why it is exclusionary.

Startups are tight knit because successful companies have high psychological safety. We all tend to work together again and again and back each other’s plays because we have built up a high trust environment in order to survive. Even if we don’t exactly see the vision someone else has we trust that they will find a way to make it into a reality.

We don’t trust that this is true for everyone. Ideas are like assholes in that everyone has got one. It’s the ability to turn a formless expanse of ideas and hopes into a company that makes a product it’s customers like. It’s extremely hard to make something new. Harder than you can ever imagine if you haven’t tried it. So people who make a living out of making something from nothing have developed a set of heuristics that let us determine if someone outside our circle is capable of making “a thing” to prove their ideas can become reality.

We tend to overweight people that build tangible things. Even though many of the most crucial skills in business are the less quantifiable ones. We tend to overweight people that have demonstrated any kind of success in zero-to-one work even if what they want to build isn’t remotely related to what was done in the past. This is how despite most of my experience being in advertising tech and e-commerce I was backed to make cosmetics. People had faith that I could flip the bit from off to on.

While this may make it seem hopeless if you are currently not inside the system that’s not what I hope you take away. Startup people love watching newbies make the leap. I cannot overstate the fondness we have for someone gathering up the courage to spring into the unknown. I used to hate the phrase “I’m rooting for you” till I realized everyone actually did want me to succeed. They just rightly realized I needed to learn the hard lessons in my own time. They could give me all the advice in the world (and believe me they did) and sometimes I just needed to make the mistake in order to learn the lesson. The mistakes allowed me to succeed.

Of course, we always hope people will learn from our advice and not require the pain of a fucked up cap table or a growth plan that missed target because we burned our cash position down to three months runway. But most people that are genuinely good at startup work appreciate that only the person actually “doing it” can make the choices that lead to success.

So startup folks will always be excited to give back and encourage those that want to try “doing it” too. If I have a clear ask I find I get an answer from even the most successful and prestigious. Literally CEOs and world famous developers of entire languages will just email you back. It’s honestly miraculous. I have invested in cold emails. Championed them to my nearest and dearest. Because we believe that the process of making something from thing doesn’t exclude anyone. You just have to show someone that you will try to make your vision a reality.

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Chronicle Finance Startups

Day 51 & Unwritten Rules of Startups

I’ve been shifting my working attention towards angel investing. As I talk with more founders, particularly those sent to me by my venture capitalist friends, I’m noticing how much bad advice is circulating in the discourse.

There has been a consistent trend of thought pieces and generalist advice in startup land that gets published by those that find attention helpful to their careers but don’t actually want the risk of sharing the unvarnished truth. Think TechCrunch thesis pieces and founder medium pieces. I’m guilty of engaging in it to a significant degree.

But it’s getting to the point where I feel bad that I’m not doing more to correct some of the bad advice or “true but not in your case” advice. It’s persistent and chronic and doing significant harm to certain communities of founders particularly those that are underrepresented. If you are a founder please DM me on Twitter or email me Julie dot Fredrickson at Gmail for further dish.

Founders regularly get terrible advice on fundraising metrics. Lower your CAC with blending channels (don’t please be honest about cost), you need to show faster growth so increase spend (growth is good but can kill you dead), organic growth is more appealing than marketing spend (it depends organic is hard to replicate and scales unevenly) and my personal favorite stack your MoM growth charts it looks sexier (so does a push-up bra but eventually you get seen naked).

Another area that gets weird is how much bad advice there is in fundraising process. You get told to drive FOMO and excitement but no one tells you just how much investors talk. Founders inadvertently tell white lies that are so transparent it’s the source of constant back channeling. There are so many cliques and power structures you don’t appreciate till you are more entrenched. Startup land lives for it’s petty feuds and rivalries. Be careful trying to play funds off each other as it’s rare for anyone to be fully blacklisted (though it happens) and you don’t know how close to partners may be or if they hate each other’s guts. Some folks look nicey-nice on Twitter but fucking loathe each other in reality. We’ve got cliques for female founders, gay founders, Christian founders, libertarians, fitness freaks, data geeks, retail hounds, SaaS sluts, and yes some of these are just fun to say. Be careful with back channels. You never know who may actually be crucial to your deal or a significant power player. Or who vouching for you can turn an entire deal around. Many of the most respected startup folks don’t maintain social media presence at all. So don’t be rude if you can’t judge how important someone is from their bio. They might tank your deal or get you tracked to a partner who writes a term sheet.

Be carful about optimizing your raise for specific outcomes like valuation or time. I know fundraising sucks but it’s also your job. You will have to do it again and it gets harder each round. You go with a higher valuation and you have to grow into that number. Are you sure you raised enough to hit the metrics? If not you get recapped next round. That only hurts your ownership and the VCs don’t really care. Are you trying to get it done fast so you can move on with your life? Lol guess what now you are stuck with that board member for a decade or till your startup dies. And a bad board can kill you dead. Or make you wish you were. The chances of you slowly sinking because your board has a toxic relationship with you is much bigger than the chance that you will grow so fast you always hit your metrics.

A big part of startup life is accepting that your ego does you more harm than good. This life will humble you. And generally everyone just wants founders to succeed. We want to help you avoid the mistakes we made. But not everything will apply to you. So don’t take every bit of advice or you will constantly be at the mercy of others. Context matters a lot.

But you must learn to listen and adjust your course or you may end up chasing metrics that don’t matter with a board you hate and a valuation that you can’t life grow into.