I can’t get into the details but I learned today that there is an internal metric at an institution based around work I was personally responsible for achieving.
Literally none of the credit has accrued to me because ultimately the thing didn’t really work but the downstream effects of the social credibility I brought really benefit someone I am not sure I’d have wanted to benefit. If I’d had a choice which I very much didn’t. Sometimes your social capital accrues to people you don’t even like.
I like having social capital to spare but I didn’t realize that someone was profiting off of it to such an intense degree till today. Power laws rule everything around me and it’s actually good. Just funny how little credit you month get for something and how much it might benefit someone else.
I don’t even know if I can even politely point it out simply because it’s déclassé to do so. I’ll have to enjoy the the little irony on my own. And believe me I am. Maybe it gets shared in a small circle of folks for whom making money for jerks it’s a fact of life. But I’ll take the credit privately.
You may recall the old aphorism about marriage. Men and women have very different goals for the institution and how it will or won’t change them.
“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed”
I don’t recall having any ambitions for changing my husband when we got married ten years ago. I thought quite highly of him when we got married. I still do.
The irony is that we have both changed significantly not because of any goal the other has for each other but because of the work we do together. Fast growing startups simply demand so much emotional change from their people.
A recent piece in the New York Times discussed how coaching has become the hack that drove emotional chances
Venture-backed startups simply must scale faster than all but the rarest of human beings can acquire emotional intelligence. As a result, startup founders and chief executives, many of whom are trained not in management but in software engineering, face extraordinary risk of coming unglued in ways that vaporize immense amounts of capital.
Acquiring emotional intelligence quickly becomes a “do or die” skill in startups. And most of us do die. Ego death in mediation like jhanna are within reach because failure and rebirth are such common experiences for the technologists that build quickly moving companies.
Both my husband Alex and I have done family systems therapy as well as multiple forms of professional and personal coaching. If Alex didn’t want change from me as his wife then he is surely disappointed. As his wife if I wanted change from him I very much did get it.
Neither one of us is disappointed, aphorisms aside. If anything, as we’ve done more work to acquire the emotional intelligence required of us to growth and thrive in our work, we’ve become more ourselves.
There is a real joy in becoming “you-er” as essential personality, skills and ambitions become clearer. It’s well worth investing in therapy and coaching to become yourself. Being “you-er” is quite freeing. It’s hard to be disappointed by that outcome.
I am experiencing a peace about the future I didn’t fully expect to find. I’ve been lucky enough to have a number of long term efforts start to paint a picture of success.
I began a process of examination of my last several years somewhere in the last half decade as I prepare myself and my work the next stage of growth. I’ve made a number of fairly significant decisions as my idea of where the future is headed and how I myself expect to live in it. A lot of these choices are public and revealed preferences. I don’t make it a secret.
I’ve been considered a doomer only because I think one has to look with calm and clear eyes at the problems in front of you. Only then can you really build optimism about your capacity to improve. Being merely positive isn’t a bad thing, but positivity is only driving you towards success if you are planning realistically. A good attitude is just a starting point.
I’ve taken things slowly. Sometimes it feels painfully so. But the intentions I had to be prepared to live in a more chaotic world means I live a stable life now even as daily uncertainties exist for everyone.
My intention is to approach building the future with optimism. The problems are large but I work with many focused and sober minded people who actually can and do build solutions. Fighting the future won’t do much. But who says it’s got to be a fight? Maybe we can bring on better things.
I am so tired. A wave of good news, good startups, good luck and good vibes has been coming my way. Pet Sounds may be Brian Wilson’s best work but good vibrations are a universal broadcasting frequency.
I am choosing to tap into those good vibes even if I’m concerned about well just about everything. There is nothing to be done but work the problems in front of me.
No blackpilling
So I’ll keep nurturing my good vibes. I won’t be blackpilled. I can make a difference and so can you.
If you want to send some good vibes and solutions my way, I’ve got some sort of neck pain from tension in my traps that is messing with me fiercely and I’d like to work through that. That’s the level of problem in front of me that’s solvable. That’s a vibration that can be raised. Maybe you’ve got some stuff you need help with. Hit me up with solutions or problems.
I haven’t been paying too much to the news of the week as there has been too much to do. After weeks of drama in the world of domestic politics I’d like to be doing something more productive than watching. Silicon Valley infighting
I’m always happiest when I’m working with founders and there is slightly more demand than supply at the moment on the Julie . This is a good thing for me but less so for the founders and I’d like more capacity for them.
I’ve been working from my gut (honed from now 18 years in startup land) and the results of our investing honestly so much better than I could have envisioned.
It’s unusual to be able to do real performance driven work in the first 2-3 years of a fund cycle when you are small and pressed but somehow we are here without single zero in even the riskiest of spaces.
It’s all markups and progress and it feels almost too good to be true and I’m so excited to make the case for where chaotic.capital goes from here. But wouldn’t mind being able to catch my breath. Such is the nature of startups. It can be mostly eating glass but we are actually doing the thing.
I am exhausted. A bunch of wins have come back to back to back and I’m doing the “wait are we winning” dance in my head.
It’s strange dance because I want to enjoy the victories of our crew but it’s always a bit of a whirlwind to wonder and second guesss “is this really happening?”
Startup life is not terribly linear. And almost nothing happens quickly. So it’s easy to question if you’ve made the right calls. I am often quite hard on myself as to whether I am working hard enough or long enough or just being enough in general.
And then when you see some evidence that your work actually is enough it can be hard to accept. Especially if things are otherwise dire for others. Somehow it’s never the reverse for me. When it’s boom times I don’t think “why not me” but when tough and things are going well I will often think “wow is this really happening?”
All of which is to say a lot of stuff is going so well that all I want to do is take a nap. But I’ve been on phone calls, texts and in documents all day because working Saturdays is actually fun for me and the people we work with. Which absolutely feels like winning.
I didn’t get enough sleep last night. Between one thing and another I got about five hours of sleep. Adult circadian rhythms being what they are I still woke at the usual time.
I had a busy morning and afternoon so I pushed through it. Unexpectedly a number of pieces of my investing work were happening all at once. So much for a slow August right?
I was able to get through everything on my calendar but I’m I was starring down a bunch of work even at midafternoon. And I found myself unable to keep my eyes open.
I was zonked. Slept from 2 till I was woken up for a bird dinner. I’ll admit I’m planing to sleep as soon as I can wrap up my evening routine.
I’ve got so much to get through over the weekend. I have two rounds I’m working on (if you like hardtech slide into my DMs), juggling a bunch of inbound, and I’m gearing up for the fall. So maybe I need a little extra sleep.
And to think just a few days ago I was completely despondent over fire season, the sadness of American politics and my own seasonal affective disorder with high summer. If things keep up at this pace it won’t be summer much longer.
We are living in the past’s version of the future. The Cyperpunk I read in my youth is now the stuff of my daily life. It’s not as sleek as in fiction but it’s hard not to feel like it’s William Gibson’s world and I’m just living it.
We are only now getting Idoru but we are veering towards Burning Chrome. Half the anime avatars in accelerationist e/acc chats are wearing Mirror Shades and everyone watches for crypto rugs. But we are getting our Mt Gox Bitcoin back right?
What about borderless corporate worlds and mass scale surveillance identity? That’s here too. When William Gibson wrote “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” I wonder if he knew it would be the nexus of the network state debate?
We’ve even got the LoTeks in a Luddite rebellion against a world connected by dubiously transparent artificial intelligence owned by actual Zaibatsu multinationals with more power than nation states. Fact and fiction spinning hyperstition better than Nick Land ever dreamed.
Snowcrash and Crash Override? It’s better. We got amazing memes and elaborate fakes of the Blue Screen of Death. It actually did suck for airlines and banks because regulatory capture is the stuff of systemic risk.
And lest you think we’ve got no biohacking in this Cyperpunk world after the pandemic we have a renaissance in systemic & holistic approaches to medicine. Suddenly everyone is aware of the risk in agribusiness. Seed oils is normie stuff. Instead of turning Luddite the Danish invented advance metabolic medicine to cope. Everyone is on GLP-1 agonists.
Mix in the rise of nicotine and THC and you’ve got a national post prohibition bloom of folklore cures whose research has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies alike. Conspiracy? Maybe but just the sludge of industry.
And in that all of the is our founders are global citizens who have to manage anarcho-tyrannical borders with visas controlled by incompetent governments and live through the geopolitics of wars fought with drones and propaganda. The future is already here. It’s actually pretty cool. Just watch out for nervous system tics.
I see this reflected in my H1 investments. Access to energy, access to compute, and decentralization of both compute & energy are directionally the major trends that I believe will matter over the next decade.
From where we stand, capital serves the founders who make things of real value. That takes time. Regular builders have simpler needs while they do it: the freedom to make what they want with readily accessible tools without interference.
We originated #FreedomToCompute as a tagline that shows our values. Not only has it driven me deal flow, but the coalition of e/acc, crypto, and El Segundo hardware/deep tech autists even changed a political party’s platform.
I’ll admit that I was surprised by the Republican Party’s adoption of innovation in crypto, artificial intelligence, and space as a core policy plank. They must really be courting startups as a constituency but I’m happy to have as many as possible aligned with us.
Science and progress are values traditionally associated with liberalism’s left leaning parties, but it seems the axis of “the best is yet to come” is a wide coalition. My heuristics have thusly been updated so we can remain up and to the right.
The original culture and the commodification of the culture is a spectrum and the Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon is infinite. Who makes culture, who money and who only brings money can be challenging to calculate.
The validation of something “cool” eventually reaches a point of opportunistic acceptance by those merely into a thing for the capital. Sometimes it’s social and sometimes literal currency.
These so called “sociopaths” who follow the momentum often do not realize that they are just in it to capitalize on cool. I don’t want to suggest anyone in a thing for money or cachet is a sociopath just that incentives for status are significant drivers for people.
Often we need the people in it for the money. It’s wonderful that angel investing exists and momentum investors have perfectly rational incentives. Sometimes you will even see significant self awareness about this. If you put resources into a community and don’t cause trouble you are often welcome.
Now you can refer to this type in startup investing as dumb money. The follow-on capital that is riding on the work of others who authentically believed before a thing was cool is a necessary part of the ecosystem.
I don’t at all mind when someone is a follower. You can be “a cringe follower late adopter” or whatever terminology we are now using to describe laggards in the adoption curve.
Unless you are a pain in the ass, actively predatory, or making your contribution more trouble than it’s worth, you should go ahead and lend your support if you can take the risk.
Don’t take it personally when hipsters sneer. They may have been earlier than you but it’s fine to back winners. Just don’t expect the founders to give you special dispensation for getting on board when it was safe to do so. It’s right that the alpha premium applies. I personally love it when not only am I right but I got paid more for the privilege.
