Tag: Emotions

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Startups

Day 826 and Alignment

I think there is this persistent fantasy in startup life that people will always agree with your bets. We forget the discord of every hype cycle but it’s not always clear who is winning and what outcome is certain. Only hindsight is 20/20.

You do get occasional moments of vindication but it’s rare that they ever clearly overlap with a trend or a moment that everyone is paying attention. Media hype cycles and innovation hype cycles are not the same thing. Trust me I’m a pretty good publicist for a hobby.

Your deals aren’t always going to get attention though and a lot of founders want to keep things quiet so you can’t always talk your commitments.

This is a problem that investing has in common with fashion. I earned my stripes making shit cool for money. It’s actually hard. I call it the The Thursday Styles. The problem with tend forecasting is knowing what’s going to be trendy is a temporal bet as well as a cultural adoption one.

It’s a thing happening over time that is unevenly distributed. I learned that from William Gibson. Some of us live in the future but you can’t be too far out because then it’s just you speculating. You got to be right on the thing and on the timing to make any money.

It’s honestly way harder than it looks and anyone who is any good at taking a bet on what the future looks like has to take some variant of this bet. It’s probably why Dune is such a canonical text for nerds. He predicts the future dimly and is also a messiah time lord? Sign me up that sounds like venture capital to me. The sheer hubris of this comparison is honestly nauseating.

Like fuck all the way off you ain’t Maud’Dib. You’ve got to be very skeptical about the charismatic pull of a messiah my friends. That said I bet you’d believe me if I told you I was a Bene Geserit right? Anyways. My point is you don’t always get it right and you don’t usually get to take credit till the end. And mercenaries can co-opt anything. Your shit might hit the skids.

But sometimes one of your deals looks hot and everyone is paying attention and you get to feel like you were cool. You spotted the band. You saw the runway show. The media is hyped about it at the same time and your friends noticed on Twitter. It’s a nice feeling. And yes I invested in the Chroma seed round. I think Jeff and Anton are cool.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 825 and Papered

A bunch of stuff that has been in the works for me for a while all got papered in the last couple of days. If you read any of my zen poasting (misspelled for internet reasons) you’ve probably gleaned that I’ve had a lot going on. Stuff got resolved on time horizons as long as lifetimes and as short as a narrative cycle.

I’d like to celebrate some of the papering (two deals I worked particularly hard for over a long time horizon) and I’m sure I will do so at some point but everything is going by fast and I’m just so drained from the dance. I suppose it’s how you really know if you are living. It’s a lot to live through everyone’s ego death drives and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take a huge toll on me. I don’t yet know how to pay these costs in anyway but energy yet but I’m learning. If I put hard costs on it motherfuckers wouldn’t like the bill.

I’m modestly less sympathetic to everyone else’s bullshit as someone in my extended family passed away (not getting into it as it’s not my loss) and that invariably makes every other problem look inconsequential. Who care about your feelings and your ego and your petty obsessions in the face of death. But also maybe you should care about them even more? Not my call to be honest.

I’m not really able to mourn with them directly but I feel the energy of the loss reverberating for my loved one. And I wish I didn’t want to discuss it at all but I do. Somehow death is the lowest drama aspect of my week. Actual death.

So if everyone else can tone the energy down a little I’d appreciate it. I will absolutely make sure shit is inked, wired, soothed, smoothed and otherwise handled. It will all get papered. Whether it gets celebrated or mourned is a matter of personal discretion and I’m all out of fucks as to what you chose. Just gimme a beat or two to breath. This isn’t what you’d call a nine to five job.

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Emotional Work Finance

Day 824 and Ego Loss Aversion

One of my favorite cognitive biases is loss aversion.

The pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. The loss felt from money, or any other valuable object, can feel worse than gaining that same thing.

The Decision Lab

Isn’t it wild how much we hate loss? The pain of losing $100 is worse than the joy of finding $100. In behavioral economics “loss aversion refers to a phenomenon where a real or potential loss is perceived by individuals as psychologically or emotionally more severe than an equivalent gain.” I guess we don’t like to win as much as we hate to lose.

But we have to train ourselves to tolerate losses. Otherwise you’d never play a sport of any kind. And you’d be an absolutely terrible investor of money. So it’s clearly possible for some of us in some situations to get over loss aversion as we have professional athletes and money making fund managers.

But what if we have to address loss aversion in our own ego? How much do we hate to lose a part of ourselves? What if we stand to gain something significant by letting go a part of ourselves. I don’t think we can always predict where in our own sense of identity our ego will fight against loss.

They say the therapeutic process is just mirrors. You have no real sense of what anyone sees except as a reflection. Everything else is just our faulty sensory equipment. And imagine what a colossal fuck up you could make by ignoring what the mirror says and only relying on the faulty sensory data from your ego.

Stew on that a little bit and decide how much you really want to win and get back to me. Could be you need to see how much you hate to lose before you can see what you stand to gain.

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Emotional Work

Day 823 and Non Attachment

Have you ever read a piece of literature and seen a character described as “a man of great passions?” I feel like it used to be much more acceptable to discuss appetites and the grasping griping hand of man. Perhaps this mentality passed just as Bejamin Disraeli did, unto another era of fallen archetypes. Now we are civilized men with passions well in hand.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

Bejamin Disraeli

I was raised in a family that meditated. We went to ashrams. We had family vacations in silent retreat. We settled in Boulder where Naropa is as much a part of the institutional fabric of the town as your typical church.

Non-attachment was a concept that was familiar to me long before I felt I had any secure attachment style of my own. I’ve written about my recurring nightmare of packing for a trip or a move. Non-attachment may even be my style of attachment. I am fearful avoidant for anyone keeping score.

Being in chronic pain has been a gift for deepening my understanding of non-attachment. In order to survive pain, you remind yourself it will pass. But accepting that knowledge is a double edge sword. You accept that your joy and happiness is also passing. And you are offered a choice to grasp at them with mean jealously or to hold them as lightly as you would hold your agonies.

Non attachment isn’t just practiced on the negatives in your life. It’s an equal opportunity philosophy. The money you have. The things you own. The beauty you possess. All are fleeting. They are rare intangible things we must value as both priceless and worthless in equal measure.

I believe we can act in greatness in our passion, even if, or maybe especially if, we practice non attachment. I am both saved and damned. I am powerful and meek. I am a woman of great passions and I am capable of separating myself from them as reality dictates.

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Finance Startups

Day 820 and Ripped Off

I like doing favors because I don’t care for being overly transactional. I’d rather cultivate something over time to build trust than put a firm price and set of boundaries on what I’ll deliver up front.

And I’d prefer a similar stance from you. Intangibles are hard to price and I’d usually prefer a little time before I settle on them. It’s a trust thing. Everyone gets a fairer deal that way and I only do business if I think it’s win-win.

But once I trust you I generally assume that you won’t fuck me over because I’ve shown that I won’t fuck you over. I’ll value your resources as my own. And I expect you to value my resources similarly.

It sounds a bit old school but I believe we should respect people’s unique styles and contributions. Doing so requires trust and delicacy. We must believe others use us well and we shall use them well.

I find this trust necessary because if I do business with you I’ll use my social capital. Because spending social capital is what gets things done. You make think it’s money, but I can assure you fiat is just a convenience.

Capitalism’s wheels are greased by social capital. If there is too much tension in the system you will never achieve the necessary momentum with only one type of capital. The money is just a stand in for trust. It’s one reason some parties yearn for trustless systems. Because everyone is setting different prices for different currencies and no one likes getting scalped on a forex favor trade. It’s a dick move to undercut social capital.

I’ve found crypto people are some of the worst at understanding this basic social rule as they are the ones most desperate to make all markets legible. The indignation you see across much of technical cultures in general is dismissal of forms of capital that are harder to make legible.

I recently felt ripped off by a transaction I thought I’d priced appropriately to an incentive alignment. It turned out the other side of the deal didn’t have the same understanding of the intangibles. It made me feel like they don’t value my time and work. They’d asked for something, I trusted someone, and then another actor they had vetted spent it in such a careless way I was briefly incensed.

Now you can argue it’s my problem. I priced it wrong. And I had pricing signals coming in negatively from everywhere. I told my counter part this and they took it in stride. And then they went and demonstrated to me exactly why I was getting negative signaling. So I know it’s a risky use of social capital.

Now I’m not sure if it’s a bad trade yet. Maybe I have the tolerance for the volatility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t look at what the numbers were telling me. Someone ripped me off. Reality says it’s probably just as much me as it was them. Which is, I believe, what you call a lose lose. And that means I’ve got to change the odds if I want to run the trade. But it’s hard to justify it to yourself after you feel like you got ripped off.

Categories
Startups

Day 817 and RIP SVB

I hadn’t expected to grieve the death of a bank. It sounds so preposterous. Who the fuck feels sad about a bank failing? But I am genuinely sad that the Silicon Valley Bank name doesn’t appear be living on with its new owner First Citizens Bank.

I guess I look forward to banking with First Citizen. They seem like nice enough folks. And maybe a bank is just a bank. But as I look back on the firsts that Silicon Valley Bank gave me I realize I will miss it. I’m sad they are gone.

The first check I saw with more than one comma was from Silicon Valley Bank. My very first company was acquired by a startup that banked with them. Ironically, right before the 2008 crisis was beginning to come onto the scene. I had a small window of fleeting security where I enjoyed a steady paycheck every two weeks with payroll done by Silicon Valley Bank. I remember thinking I was so rich. Even though I was super pissed my cofounder had a better salary than me as Silicon Valley culture dictated at the time that engineers make more.

If you are a fan of history then you will enjoy knowing that yes I did get fired during the infamous RIP good times affair. Thanks Sequoia! They were our main investors. Still I appreciated the opportunities as I was so young I wasn’t very good yet. I’ll forever have loyalty to my CEO for having treated me much better than I thought I deserved.

I also I also really loved the steady paychecks from Silicon Valley Bank. Now I think to myself why didn’t I take any pictures of it? Why don’t I have that moment recorded anywhere but my memory? Why am I now recounting this fifteen years later.

I’ll never get another check from Silicon Valley Bank again. I just didn’t have the expectations in life that I’d be the sort of person with a bank account with more than a million dollars. Let alone that I’d be in control of one and entrusted to do something responsible with it. Which has now happened multiple times at Silicon Valley bank over the years for me. Guess no one wants to have more than $250,000 in a bank right now though huh?

So goodbye Silicon Valley Bank. I’m so sad I’ve got nothing to remember you but. I didn’t take a screen shot of the bank app on the day Stowaway’s first round closed but I should have. I spent a lot of time in their banking application over the years running my cosmetics startups P&L. I remember being so proud to be the sort of person that even needed to deal with the bank. And I trusted Silicon Valley Bank with my employees because I’d seen it treat me well when I was an employee.

It seems so silly to mourn not taking a picture of a check or a screen shot of a mobile banking app but I don’t really know how to mourn a bank that failed. We failed them. They failed us. And it’s dead and I’ll never ever get a chance to do it all over again, and even if they are a villain, I remember when they were the hero in my life.

Categories
Media

Day 810 and 90s TV

I’ve not had a lot of spare time for entertainment and recovery in what turned out to be a very busy month. This left me in a small quandary as Alex and I finished both a comedy and a hour long drama right before all hell broke loose.

My husband and I tend to always have a short form sitcom and a longer prestige piece in rotation depending on how tired we are at the end of the day. We’d run through all the comfort shows and couldn’t fathom testing a new something more serious.

I’m not entirely sure how but we decided to pick up two classic 90s era shows. For our comedy we picked That 70s Show and for our drama we picked the procedural NYPD Blue. Our expectations were that these would be easy to watch simple shows without much depth. And boy were we wrong.

I don’t recall watching a ton of television when I was a kid and I doubt I would have been allowed to watch gritty cop dramas. But the way folks kvetch about how network television sucks I went in expecting middle brow fare. Millennials have had both streaming and cable for so long we’ve come to expect tv that caters to our preferences tend to look down on anything made for the masses.

As it turns out, having to appeal to broad swaths of people actually has some advantages. Both shows are steeped in deep emotions and relatability. The writing is snappy and straight forward. The characters are multifaceted even as they work through their personas.

The fact that I’m relating to the struggles of a shitty racist balding drunkard detective and a pack of Wisconsin teenagers is probably a positive thing. Shared humanity is getting lost in consumer preferences and social identities.

We think unless we see ourselves on the screen we couldn’t possibly relate. And I’ll say I’ve appreciated more representation in entertainment as I often feel hopelessly un-relatable. A

nd yet I’m enjoying relating to humans that never even existed as portrayed by professional liars. So maybe there is something in that. The human experience is the thing, not that the experience must demonstrate it’s connection to your life.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 809 and Powerful

I’ve been through the gauntlet over the last month. And despite the nauseating rollercoaster of it all, I feel powerful. I am happy that I’ve drawn upon who I am and the boundaries required. It’s been liberating in a professional capacity but I can also see how my personal life got bigger and better as well.

The future is looking as uncertain as a Paul Atreides without the spice. I cannot see how it resolves. I see only hard choices and responsibilities both individual and collective. And I feel ready to hold my ground on what I contribute. But I will be holding others to theirs as well.

We’ve got a long ways to go. Many people do not wish to see things as they are. Issues both material and social are gripping America and by extension the world as the dollar hegemony comes into question over powerful institutional distrust. The power that comes in holding your gaze on what it could all mean and not turning to panic in fear is immense. I am not turning away.

I hold the knowledge that I can do everything right and still fail. I have faced the no win scenario. The Kobeyashi Maru of it all is that sometimes we lose. And we will feel it. And those feelings matter. But then we shoulder the burden and do what needs to be done. The only one who can save you is yourself. And I chose to see the power in the hard choices.

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Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 807 and Hyperinflation

Everyone calm the fuck down and stop panicking while we consider the most dreaded phrase in Silicon Valley: “Balaji was right”.

Sometimes people use a method of persuading you from the extremes. Remember “he means it seriously but not literally?” It works, it nudges the new position into your frame of reference and anything else feels moderate by comparison. But you get to choose what you adopt. You can be optimistic, you can chose new ways of being, you control yourself. But warning: it takes so much energy and effort, which I know because I did a lot of work to adjust my life to tail risks while still believing that you have to live your life.

Also, I’m not going to censor anything, so if you’ve got an inclination to cuss me out for not being on your “side”, I’d ask you to remind you that I’m human and winging it just as much as you are. Let’s all remember our humanity.

So are we going into hyperinflation in the next 90 days with Bitcoin going to $1,000,000?

The Next 90 Days

I mean, an apocalyptic scenario is pretty hard to do in ninety days no matter what is happening. Because life finds a way and as my husband Alex likes to say, people revert to the mean. So while I don’t fucking know and neither do you, I don’t think on balance the physics of hyperinflation in 90 days works from where we are now, when talking about the US in particular.

I’m not doing elaborate math though I’ve read the materials. I can make some good guesses based on logical observations of my available data and on human nature. And I think a shock of that magnitude is basically the end of the world. And as much as I think we’ve got to end denialism about how bad shit is for a lot of people, I’m also not sure it’s going to go sideways that fast. Maybe I’m over indexing on having read Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire”.

And to the idea that “it’s ok, we’ll all just move to a Bitcoin economy: we’ve got a so much work ahead of us to make crypto and in particular Bitcoin work as a viable alternative for a practical economy it’s not even funny. I think I’m reasonably active in crypto (though probably not as much as you think on a day to day basis). I participate in some DAOs, I have bags with Bitcoin. I believe we can build a better future. But we are small and the problem is big and we need more of you to come in and build it with us if you want an alternative economy that’s actually usable by everyone.

I think this is a good thing because I have had some good experiences with how American capitalism works but I think we can do better. I have some money but I’m not .01%. I like capitalism but I’ve experienced the deep lows of navigating a chronic illness in America before everyone became obsessed with fragility. I’m not saying the systems works.

So while I think a change is ultimately coming (and I’ve made plenty of bets to that effect), I’m not so sure I want the apocalypse to come just to further that end.

After all we can’t build software if it’s the end of the world. Which isn’t a huge leap to make if the dollar hegemony collapses before August. Literally nobody wants that. But a lot of people want more options and it’s our jobs to convince them we can provide it.

So we can use Bitcoin but again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Changing Systems

But I want to be transparent about what I am weighing. I believe we have some negative trends that haven’t been addressed in fractional reserve banking. I believe our world has strained trust about state run capital and currency feels inherently political.

We aren’t that far off the church and state separation, historically speaking. And it took a long time for the separation to hold. But even if time moves faster now, I’d be surprised (though not shocked) if we took down money and state in a quarter. Maybe I’m underestimating dramatically on the exponential. I clearly don’t think it’s impossible because I live in Montana and my revealed preferences tell you something. But I also live near a yuppie city and I make investments in a market economy. I’m torn.

So do I think it takes more time to unwind an empire? Yeah I do.

Do the network affects at play impact monetary policy? You tell me.

We poured a lot of cash into a lot of hands and we have the option of gossiping at scale in public. It feels like no one learned anything from GameStop but I can assure you I did. We don’t totally understand emergent behaviors. Egregores are real and we can summon demons, though we probably shouldn’t and I think it’s a little weird to do so because I’m not confident it won’t kill me.

And there’s a lot of new ground to cover. More deeply tied financial systems, and networks magnified 1000x. Last time around we barely had a functional Twitter and now we have, well ok it’s barely functional now (jk but not).

So we shouldn’t in fact continue to do that by building credibility through showing our work and support and investing in that future?I think so. It’s astonishing it’s as cheap as it is now given how much opportunity it provides. But again we have to keep building it out.

Opening the Window

Finally, one tactical issue I want to address is that Balaji may simply be trying to expand our minds on the possible in front of us and how fast we can do it. I believe the most pejorative way of describing it is manifesting but you can in fact apply energy to making a system move in your favor.

One way you do that is by opening the Overton Window on what is possible and seeing if people step up to the plate to build norms and tools that further your cultural view of the world.

So if you really believe that a change is coming and that people need to prepare for it, yes you push even farther than you might think is actually going to happen. That way, even if someone only comes halfway there, they’ve landed right where you think they need to be.

All this to say: chill out everyone – we’re living in the fastest, craziest times there have ever been and it’s damn easy to get sucked into the vortex. So take a step back, breathe, and make your decisions from a place of calm, not panic.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 806 and Inputs

I’ve had a very intense month. In the past thirty days I feel like I’ve lived an entire lifetime of emotions.

I had some exciting but modestly controversial press in Vanity Fair about how chaotic the future looks in America. That brought a lot of attention and new LPs in chaotic.capital who want to invest in solutions for living in a rapidly changing future shocked world.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and I had to grapple with complicated emotions on being present for family and the aspirations I have for a life that doesn’t align with disability.

Within a few days of getting back I had my sense making capacity crash override my brain into a snowblind. I thought I was going a little crazy but no it was because a bank collapsed. Then I heard some dog whistles about euthanizing people like me.

And finally I realized there is no point in doing my own writing in the wake of ChatGPT4 and decided that I’d do it anyways because organic human brewed content from Montana is fun to make.

It’s been an astonishing amount of inputs into my system and I am leaving out a lot of personal life details that I’ll leave folks to guess at. As exhausting as all of the above sounds it only represents a fraction of the work and emotional energy I brought to bear on expanding myself to meet this moment.