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.
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.
I don’t want to make this into a whole thing but the Republicans have posted the GOP party platform. The Silicon Diaspora is now such an important constituency we’ve got enough sway to move policy.
And it wasn’t the one I expected. Scientific progress was something I’d come to associate with liberals. It would seem Democrats are not as certain about being technically progressive anymore. But the middle that builds is a constituency.
It’s such a small thing and I know politicians don’t have a track record of doing what they say. But the idea that a ragtag group of internet friends could get our issues given place of pride in a platform feels nice. A multimodal pro-social game yielded a positive sum.
We want more technology being built quickly by those with the agency to do so. We’ve got diseases to cure, climate change to adapt to, software to be coded, nuclear reactors to be spun up and a long path to space from there.
I hope the value of better medicine, better tools, and more ambition makes its way to everyone.
For now I think it’s cool that I can see where every line in this policy document came from. A very hodge podge group of internet weirdos in Discords, policy shops, Twitter communities, and group chats got politicians to agree with us. It feels kind of nice. I believe FreedomToCompute is a constitutional American right and we are proving our case
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.
I sometimes wonder why venture capital hasn’t coded more feminine. The cynic in me say because it makes money and money accords status. Where there is status there are men competing for it. Which is a good thing in my book.
I just happen to find the kind of investing I do to be so feminine in character. I’d never really thought of my gender when I got into startups simply because I was a founder with a problem and technology solved it for me. I was a nerd about a few very specific things and the market agreed with me.
But now as the wider world has forced me reconsider gender and how my identity gets used by others in how I do business. And I do see that I approach my investing in traditionally feminine terms. I wasn’t that kind of founder. But I am that kind of investor. 
I nurture. I love finding a weirdo working on something in a weird corner of the internet. Nothing makes me happier than telegraphing out that I am weird and getting back other weirdos. I like to listen. I like to learn. I don’t mind unpolished or outlandish or even absolutely crazy. My best deals all started in DMs
Nerds aren’t a polished people. They may lack all kinds of social graces. They will often not care about anything but the thing they are obsessing over. And I happen to find this to be a good thing.
I am just absolutely here for the weird nerds. They are my tribe and I see it as part of my path to help bring more of them up behind me. To nurture is a feminine virtue. I am happy to bring it to my founders. They should all feel safe coming to me because they know that I am one of them and my goal is to see them thrive.
But suddenly I was getting all good news from all sides. A startup with a round. Another founder preparing to go out for an enviable raise with exceptional traction. An SPV for a round everyone wants in on. A colleague who had been thinking of taking action on a thesis is going to run an experiment. It’s just all very much my investments and my ecosystem thriving.
I felt like I was in William Gibson’s Jackpot. Incredible things are happening across so many industries and the world is an absolutely chaotic mess. It’s nothing but wars, gerontocracy and resource constraints out there. But here we are working.
Chaos pulls acceleration out of us because we must solve the problems in front of us. War and geopolitical turmoil and climate change require us to shoulder more.
We have real engineering challenges in compute, nuclear, decentralized systems, artificial intelligence and open source to solve to get to meaningful breakthroughs.
The problems are not easy. But our tools are getting better and the compounding effect of this renaissance in intelligence is that we might be able to build for bigger things.
Doomerism wants to focus on how bad things are. And I am the last person to disabuse you of a realistic model of what we are up against. I live off grid in Montana, I own crypto and I like my freedoms.
Humans are resourceful. Given ingenuity and incentive incredible talent has the will to say that I will take on this piece of the future for all of us.
It’s such a privilege to be woven into the ecosystem that is getting us through the Jackpot. And dare I say maybe the application of our ingenuity gets a better result and we can improve on Gibson.
The fictional “jackpot” described in the novels is an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century
Maybe we can improve on these numbers. We’ve got the doomer version in our imaginations so now we can find a solution. Life, as Jeff Goldblum reminds us in Jurassic Park, finds a way.
I’ll be participating in a few private sessions but I’ll be a speaker in public town hall forums as well. If you will be in Texas for the event (or are simply in the city) drop me a note on Twitter and perhaps we can overlap.
Given the intensity of the travel I have ahead of me I’m trying to take it easy today and tomorrow. I’ve been doing laundry and organizing myself.
I am not a hot weather person so I worry about events in hot climates in the summer. Heck, I worry about hot climates even in mild seasons. Last year I found myself struggling with Frankfurt in May so summer in Texas isn’t exactly my easy season.
The conference coincided with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.
Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.
In that vein, I’ll be discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence as the #FreedomToCompute at Consensus as this is THE issue for everyone who uses compute as a tool to solve problems.
It’s an opportunity to discuss the big public goals around the future of machine money and machine intelligence.
I’d argue this includes the entire software industry and by default anyone who is reading this post. Our most important rights will be decided by how we handle policy on these issues. Math is leverage.
Crypto has the basic problems facing artificial intelligence. Both spaces rely on open, available and trustless compute. Both are under intense scrutiny and face significant regulatory capture risks.
It’s never been a better time to get involved in these topics. We need open protocols and interoperability standards far more than we need fretting about safetyism and hysterics about science fiction.
Doom solves no problems but software does. We need safe harbors and policy sandboxes so we can continue to nurture algorithmic innovation for us all.
