Tag: Entrepreneur

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 852 and Give A Damn

For long involved reasons, I am an Arlo Guthrie fan. The involved reasons are my parents are hippies and my godfather had the good fortune and bad sense to be his touring agent. So I was lucky to see Arlo perform Alice’s Restaurant in my own hometown of Boulder Colorado.

If you’ve not heard of it well it’s the missing 17 minutes in the Watergate tapes. If you don’t know what that is you probably don’t have Boomer parents.

Anyways, I’m not sure if my favorite line was from Arlo’s anniversary show or if it was part of a rendition of Alice’s Restaurant. It’s stuck with me my entire life and I’ll paraphrase it here.

There are two kinds of people in this world. People that give a damn and people that don’t. And sometimes you find you’ve got a lot in common with people you thought you would hate.

Maybe Arlo Guthrie as recalled by young teenage Julie Fredrickson

I’ve had the good fortune to meet a lot of people that give a damn over my life. And as the quotation suggests, occasionally I was quite sure I’d hate them.

I know commies and fascists, and so long as they aren’t absolute fucking morons enthralled by ideology (rare admittedly), I can probably find a common ground. Politics doesn’t have to be existential if you can be a human and empathize. We only find our boundaries by collectively working together to find cultural consensus.

Lots of folks love various coercive ideologies and will give all kinds of rationale for why their side is good. But in reality the only good side is actually giving a damn about the problems in front of you that you are solving with other people. The rest is details.

If you believe yourself to be a person who gives a damn and wants to work on investing your resources into weirdos who give a damn I’d love to have you as a limited partner in my pre-seed venture fund. Click here to learn more. We mostly have high net worth individuals that have earned their money starting, running and investing in startups. And we mostly fund weirdos taking really early stage high risk high reward bets.

If you want to build a better future find the people that give a damn and enable them by letting market forces work. Markets are muses for people that give a damn. They will hack and build and change things to better fit what they believe should exist. And there is no better time to find those long haul builders than when everyone else is freaking out. So yeah if you are a qualified investor I think you should come do it with me.

Categories
Community Startups Travel

Day 849 and “Oh I Follow You!”

I’ve been in Austin for Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference. I’m flying home to Montana today after five intense days of work. But if the on the ground reception is any indication, I nailed this year with my talks and vibes. I might actually be good at my job.

Conferences can be tricky if you are a speaker. You’re obligated to hold attention & entertain while also getting across complicated topics like governance contracts. It takes energy and preparation to do it well.

This year I was a bit less academic than last year as Marc Hochstein and I hosted an interactive town hall which was spicy as hell and my loud carnival barker voice carried. A bit bigger than just a talk and I think it was a hit.

By the end the room was packed with folks passing by and stopped to see what we were discussing. A bunch of smiling energetic faces and a loud lady in a full length dress is a bit eye catching out on a convention floor stage. I got so much positive feedback.

Heck, I was in a bathroom where I overhead an attendee discussing the panel the next day with a gentleman who was also panelist. The attendee raved to the panelist and said “that chick” really held everyone’s attention on topic. A good performance all around.

I called Consensus a “summer camp for adults” as it all your crypto friends get together for it. An expensive paid conference with a lot of talent and speakers makes for excellent serendipity. I felt like I made new connections and even a new friend or two.

It felt easy as in a small community someone like me gets to enjoy the benefits of niche fringe micro-celebrity. I kept hearing over and over “I follow you on Twitter” along with “she’s so funny on Twitter she says the shit you are thinking.” I’ve got to admit it feels good.

And I think it was fun for Alex who spent part of the week hearing folks tell him that while he’s great (and everyone loves his homesteading adventures) but they are really more excited to meet his wife. Dare I say I’m a trophy wife?

It’s super fun when your internet frens and parasocial relationships come together in actual reality. We were all happily saying “oh I follow you” to each other all week. I miss everyone already. But I’m happy to be home in Montana.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.

Categories
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.

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
Startups

Day 816 and S Tier

I fancy myself as someone who enjoys playing games. I mostly play the great game but I enjoy a good stupid grinder. Pokémon Go, Duolingo, and Fitocracy all appeal to my sense of hard work mattering.

But, of course, games have exploits. Some of them are significant. Sometimes leveling up is just a matter of getting lucky. A side quest dropped you an s tier item and the game engine smiled on you. Yay!

Silicon Valley mistakes luck for skill pretty regularly. And we don’t take it that well when other people use the same exploits as us because damn it that’s just not fair!

So rules tend to get rewritten and the hacks get patched and the economy in grinder games reliably defaults back to rewarding repetitive work. It’s not that different from the real economy. Gamers want to know clever game play works but not as much as they want to keep the value of what they have earned. It’s a real tension those sunk costs! Even if starting over benefits you the tendency to cling is understandable.

You’ve got to know when to spot when an activity is worth more than the general perception. You used to have to do this sort of work on your own but thanks to the internet we’ve got cheat codes literally everywhere for everything.

Don’t confuse the fact that cheat codes work for the fact that grinding came be the right approach for the game you are playing. Sometimes putting in the work means being a team player is valuable. Sometimes you are the glass cannon. Sometimes your style of play will offend others. Don’t take it all so seriously that you cannot stomach making a move. What’s the worst thing that happens?

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 815 and Kayfabe

Here is a mindfuck for you. Pretending works. The mimicry of the thing occasionally, though not mostly, can lead to having the real thing. Fake it till you make it” works if you’ve got a long enough runway to allow for take off. If you’ve judged the resources correctly is more art than science but you should still be able to do the math.

There are, of course, laws of physics to account for in all of this but your reality is more fungible than you realize. I wouldn’t try manifesting a whole fantasy world, but if you are Brandon Sanderson you might have a shot. That guy rocks.

In discussing whether it is better to fire founders or product managers on Twitter today I got to see a lot of the cargo cult culture of Silicon Valley coming off a high. A lot of people can perform innovation and we’ve maybe even got it down to being well liked by financial markets. But sometimes you actually do have to go and do the thing. And you can’t fake it.

If you aren’t familiar with kayfabe, it’s a term used in wrestling. It means you don’t break character loosely. You keep the secret even if everyone is in on it. You can take things a bit too far and the blending of fiction and reality has now given us a reality tv president.

But what happens when you don’t make the jump? Does reality crash in? Will the market punish you for not delivering on a convincing enough value proposition? Do you have to keep your ambition within some scope that can exist in our agreed upon reality? Yes of course. Fuck you it’s called civilization. But every once in a while someone goes from vapor ware to the Revolution. Don’t be so sure you can spot the difference though. Kayfabe doesn’t just fool rubes.

Categories
Startups

Day 814 and Odd Hours

I’m a little bit of a work fetishist. I’m into shit like routines and the Protestant work ethic and I avidly participated in hustle culture. But I regret to inform you that most of it is a lie.

So much of your professional life ends up getting wasted to slavish gestures to productivity porn. It’s just not how real life works. But it sure looks sexy when you lay it out like an Instagram reel.

But maybe it’s not always just for show. Maybe there is something you don’t understand about how things do or don’t work. So you accept some social norms to fit in with others and you find their advice on shit like sleep more and get high quality protein is sort of first principles.

You have the basics of being a responsible adult and learning from others while you do it. We have a grand shared culture and some of it is useful and some of it is superstition and sometimes it’s not clear which is which. But shared meaning is how humans organize. Maybe there is value to meetings.

Point my dear whacky zoomer autists is you need to be able to be a functioning member of civilization despite what Covid may have revealed. You have to accommodate other people’s lives even if you don’t like everything. Welcome to the herd.

And honestly you should have to learn to fit in a bit of life that overlaps with real humans. Even though we have total access to our most niche nerd fandoms online, we deal with normies in real life.

But I’ve also come to realize that performance is a game. And you can train yourself to go from zero to halfway decent if you just make an effort. But the real art of it all the tip and tricks and how-to guides comes down to just doing the work and figuring it out. The intangibles make you an expert. That’s the stuff you spend a life refining and it doesn’t ever take a break. It’s why all the super successful people are also kind of fuck ups.

Sometimes the weird is genuine as they have rethought a an assumption about the world and intend to make their vision known in the world. And that’s not done on bankers hours.

I work on Sunday when something happens and the momentum shifts and you know that adding your gravity to the matter could make a difference. And so you go the extra mile for someone else because it’s about us trusting each other to work with reality but also see each other as we are. And most of us are weird and it’s fine and you’ve got to work the way to makes your weird shine.

If you are good at your niche and you apply your knowledge and tell it straight then sometimes you do some magic and it moves your universe. So yeah sometimes you’ve got to keep weird hours to hold space for the possibility.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 719 and Step By Step

I was discussing my goals for 2023 with a friend today. They wanted to know if I was planning on making any New Year’s resolutions. I told them that I wasn’t in the habit of using a new calendar year for making big changes.

Generally speaking if I want to do a thing I just start. I honestly feel like it’s far too intimidating to declare yourself to be some kind of fundamentally new person that will, as of a certain arbitrary day, make huge life changes. It’s too much pressure. One of my rules for biohacking is to only change one variable at a time. And I don’t make big changes to it either. 10% a week is good enough for most goals. Anyone familiar with the magic of compounding knows that small changes add up to big numbers.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t started big life changing projects on January first. If you count back from 719 you will notice I first began writing on January 1st 2021. I did indeed resolve to write every day. But I hadn’t intended it as something I’d keep up for a specific amount of time. I’d hoped I’d practice my writing for thirty days and I allowed myself a little fantasy about how amazing it would be to write for a thousand days.

A thousand days seemed like an impossibility at the time which is why I allowed the fantasizing. My pragmatic side said just get started and see if you can keep going. And I did. I put one foot in front of the proverbial other for two years. Now I’m relatively confident that if I want to do so I’ll make it to a thousand days.

I approach most goals like this. I had a fantasy that I could make it as an investor. I was a founder so I thought let’s wire some small angel checks. We were already committed as a family to being startup operators so why not combine our skin in the game with a little more capital risk with our network.

I never envisioned myself raising a fund and making some big announcement about how I had a venture fund. I just started learning by doing. I cut checks. I ran some special purpose vehicles. And this year I decided to one-step-at-a-time go about raising a rolling fund. I am just doing the thing one day at a time. And it’s going well. Amazing people are coming on board. I am confident I’ll reach my goals just by putting one step in front of the other.

If you’d like to join me my goal is to raise $500K per quarter. I’ve got folks like Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow and Michael Pryor of Trello so you will be in good company. You can read the fund overview here. Yoican sign up on Angellist through the above link or get on a call with me and we can discuss the fund, our portfolio construction and my thesis. Because I intend to work through the holidays because it remains one day at a time.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 714 and Cosmetic Organization

I used to be the CEO of a cosmetics company called Stowaway. We were a direct to consumer brand that manufactured and retailed our own line of travel sized makeup. Alas I got too sick to work and we sold the company to a private equity holding firm who shuttered it during the pandemic. I’m “shocked” that travel sized red lipstick wasn’t popular during two years of masking and lockdown.

I don’t particularly want to work in cosmetics again, even though I have arguably priceless experience that could be put to good use helping other brands. Startups are are traumatic and it’s not unusual for founders to find it challenging to work in spaces they know well. You don’t want to undermine the enthusiasm of founders. Also you’ve probably taken enough risks for a lifetime in a given space to never want to touch it again even if you made money.

But I do still enjoy being a consumer of cosmetics. I’ve got what might be the most comprehensive library of travel sized makeup in existence. I moved all of it up to Montana this year where it lives in a modestly organized vanity. For some reason I decided do a little reorganization of it today.

A very messy cosmetics vanity littered with makeup bags, travel sized packaging and a Sephora advent calendar.

Instead of finding a new schema for where I plan to keep all my products, I made it much worse. I let myself get a little bit of tunnel vision and instead of playing around for half an hour I spent an ungodly amount of time making it much worse. I’ve got drawers that are bursting with tiny mascaras, tiny lipsticks, tiny eye shadow palettes and thousands of other items.

I was surprised to find myself enjoying it. I did some comparisons of packaging and formulations and found that I was still quite pleased with what we had built. Many new brands have emerged since then but the promise of a minimalist purse friendly brand remains elusive. I see all the ways I failed but I also saw all the ways in which our team succeeded. And it was nice to feel like perhaps I’d learned something. But now I’ve got to clean it all up before my husband steps on an eyeliner.