Categories
Finance Media

Day 1157 and Maybe Things Are Good

I remember learning about economic malaise, inflation and oil wars in the seventies at school.

The grand narrative I was raised on was that deregulation led to the go-go eighties as Reagan leaned into free markets as the mood of America changed.

I’ve read a lot of takes in the financial news and on Twitter that suggest we are in a similar period. I tend to land more towards Kyla Scanlan’s position that the Vibecession may be over. And yet we cannot agree on if things are getting any better. We are confused.

So we have this number that no one knows where it’s coming from, yet we are using it to make informed decisions on headline text which informs what is happening in the economy – but also informs how people should feel about what is happening in the economy. No wonder the sentiment is off! No wonder people are confused! It’s hard to understand what’s happening, and that makes all of this so much harder

Kyla Scanlon “Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore” on Epsilon Theory.

I’ve got lots of reason to be optimistic. I see the shock and confusion and culture wars and I still see people who are optimistic.

I’ve taken to joking around about decisions by saying “fuck it, e/acc!” I am extremely online and it’s a contagious cultural meme to root for the future. And so maybe things are getting better.

There is a same shit different day quality to the long now. But I see more and more people committing to build things. Gold rushes are a patten humanity seems to follow at every changing of the generations. Maybe we’ve got reason to think we can come out of this moment better. Or at least work to make it so.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1147 and Balkan Crypto

I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionally colorful participation in cryptocurrencies.

The region has experienced currency volatility, struggles with central banking and even in Albania a civil war stemming from a financial crisis over government Ponzi schemes.

These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.

The ecosystem is host to serious projects has a talented base of engineers. Ripple is experimenting with a national stable coin in Montenegro. Zuzalu, the two-month invite-only gathering that Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin led in Montenegro has been a regional hub. And it has inspired a new grants program Zu- villages that strikes me as a cross between network state and a DAO with Gitcoin.

In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”

As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.

Plumski founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in the System

While parked in gridlock caused by the American state department delegation snarling traffic in Tirana, I shared a classic British comedic sketch from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail with a friend who resides part time in the Balkans.

King Arthur is riding through his lands and is asked to contemplate anarcho-syndicalism and the constitutional arrangement most equitable to an offended peasant named Dennis.

Help! Help! I’m being repressed

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Feeling moderately repressed ourselves by the various bureaucrats, politicians, and general institutional disarrays that was in our way, the joke hit home. No matter your station in life, we are all a repressed in someone else’s system.

We can make jokes about staying above the API layer all we like, but the nudging organizational state is finding ways to reduce us to variables. Many of us have become spreadsheet brained. Will it be a gradient descent into the madness of a jackbooted local minima?

Perhaps it better to become the disassociating trader acted by Paul Bettany in Margin Call who simply can’t stomach that level of hypocrisy. He knows we want to play innocent about the violence hidden underneath the abstractions.

“Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal peopl

Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) Margin Call

We are all experiencing some level of abstraction from the base layers of reality. Some of us are more academic about it. Some of us are simply more or less unwilling to accept the hypocrisy of it. None of us can opt out completely. Plenty of professions let you get closer to the visceral base reality and then you too can see the violent inherent in the system.

And so we argued over resources and raw power. How abstract can we get? The paleoconomists say “go back to the gold standard” but we can’t. Can we go forward though?

Most of us see that entirely detaching the exchange value of goods from material items and their underlying value is a huge struggle for most people. We wouldn’t have endless discussions about the cost of groceries if it was clear to folks how the market priced physical goods.

Financial markets are fictions where we negotiate material needs like food, shelter, clean water, bodily integrity, and property ownership claims. All need to be priced in. It isn’t fun when the exchange value mechanism completely detaches from that reality. It makes us uneasy. Shrinkflation makes humans feel gaslit.

Humans are physical beings who abstracted our physical needs into an elaborate market system of exchange values. And like that Monty Python sketch, sure it’s a fun joke, a meme if you prefer, but that meme is a reminder to see the violence inherent in the system.

Anyways, I hope Antony Blinken enjoyed his time in Albania and that everyone has a productive weekend in Munich for the neutral ground security conference. Our diplomats have never needed a neutral ground weekend more amirite? The financial engineers will concede that reality. Maybe.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1095 and 2023 Round Up

I’ve been sick for the last week and a half or so, so this round-up is coming on the last day of 2023.

As you may have gathered from my title schema, I have been writing every single day for 1095 straight days.

That means I’ve been doing this for three years which is a satisfying achievement. If you’d like see my favorite posts of 2021 here is a link to my first year round up. My round up for the second year of writing in 2022 was quite comprehensive as well.

Below is a list of categories that held my attention in 2023 and the posts I wrote as I tried to make sense of my rapidly changing world.

It probably tells you a lot that the largest sections are artificial intelligence, startups and community. I think this includes almost 50 posts so it’s a testament to how busy the year was that I couldn’t narrow it further. I spent time in Prague, Puerto Vallarta, New York City, Austin, Seattle, Frankfurt, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Amsterdam which is way more travel than I expected. Much of my focus was on investing work for chaotic.capital and is reflected across almost all categories.

Artificial Intelligence

Day 1078 Why We Keep Centering Ourselves

Day 1072 and Math is Leverage.

1055 and Freedom to Compute

Day 989 and Autopoeitic Ergodicity

Day 980 and Beff Jezos

Day 897 and Cruft and Email Bankruptcy

Day 826 and Alignment

Day 780 and Copernican Crisis of Meaning

Community

Day 1070 and Allocating Social Capital

Day 1055 and Shipping, Smoothing Narratives and Making Reality or Effective Acceleration Is About Choice

Day 1053 and Neo Revivalism

1033 and Agency Explosion & The Network State

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

Day 978 and The Great Twitter Unfollowing

Day 932 and Schisms

Day 847 and Erasure in Crypto

Aesthetics

Day 1040 and Being First

Day 1023 and Automatic Doors

Day 1007 and Half A Decade After Premium Mediocrity

Day 961 and Repeating 2003 Aesthetics.

Day 748 and Molly Millions (William Gibson Casting Choices)

Travel

Day 1038 and Travel, Middle Markets & American Exceptionalism

Day 1030 and Helsinki

Day 1029 and Nordic Ferries

Day 1019 and Old Town Tallinn

Day 876 and Americana in Germany

Day 863 and Abstract The Pain Away

Day 749 and Beef in Prague

Economics and Politics

Day 1019 and Tallinn’s Free Enterprise & Alcohol

Day 1010 and Exogenous Shocks

Day 907 and Unaccountable Bureaucracy

Day 904 and Wardogging on Mobile Phones

Day 817 and Mourning A Bank

Day 811 and Hierarchies

Day 807 and Hyperinflation

Day 803 and Killing Strangers

Day 799 and Black Friday in Silicon Valley

Day 740 and Immigration Failures

Emotional Work

Day 1014 and A Fragile Birthday

Day 1000 and Milestones

Day 987 and Eggs

Day 902 and The Singer Lasts A Season

Day 895 and How to Stop Being An NPC

Day 845 and Fucked Fertility

Day 791 and Bathing Suits I’ve Never Worn

Day 784 and Endocrine

Day 731 and Auld Lang Syne Motherfuckas

Startups

Day 1001 and Circumstances Change

Day 970 and I’ll Be Your Publicist

Day 962 and Milestone Based Seed Rounds

Day 939 and Culture Wins Not Culture Wars

Day 906 and Resilience Tech

Day 840 and Chaos Magic

Day 783 and The Alliance (Vanity Fair Magazine coverage of chaotic.capital which is covered in two pieces on the blog)

Homestead & Montana

Day 976 and Chores

Day 969 and Hot Chicks

Day 958 and Civic Engagement

Day 940 and Buying Dishes

Day 856 and Springing Into Action

Day 766 and Weather Station

Categories
Community Finance Startups

Day 1070 and Allocating Personal Capital

As part the part of Twitter called TPOT comes into its own power the topic of resource allocation and how to route projects to sources of capital game up with Brooke Bowman of VibeCamp. It is a key question for Network State like entities that will need to navigate social ties.

I want to share how I do it as I’ve rooted some amount of capital across very different communities. I do it with some sets of intuitions I’ve gained from existing in a very powerful network of interests that are “The Silicon Diaspora” which is a syncretic coalition.

Much of it comes down to very specific context of what others are looking for in terms of outcomes. Investors with a specific thesis are much easier to work with for this reason. I try to express mine clearly at chaotic.capital and express myself actively through revealed preferences. I assume nothing is personal & everyone is working with some amount of emotional reactivity as it’s a human business.

A lot of it comes down to knowing who is a node in your network that can redirect it to someone who believes their resources can see a good return on their goals that are varying levels of abstract and personal. Skills and passions vary and this is good. It’s a mix of social capital, actual capital, and attention and it’s a giant game of inference

Some folks very good nodes and quite open to a range of different types of projects. Sometimes it’s just as simple as asking if they know someone who knows someone. I see a lot that isn’t in my own thesis but it’s in my own interest to pass it to others for whom it might be. The ecosystem approach has maximum strength when it’s played as a multi-agent pro-social game.

Also you almost never know someone’s full history so taking any reaction super personally is something I find to be too much for my own emotions. And I know a lot of history so if I can’t do it I try to make the presumption others can’t either. Be kind but clear.

That helps avoid a lot of accidental feuds that otherwise can ignite if you try to be delicate. I find transparent assessments of my own incentives goes a long way if I express it as part of my own reason for aligning. This is how I’ve worked with communities as diverse as back to the land doomers and crypto futurists to effective acceleration.

This is a fancy way of saying I don’t think “gossip” aka information sharing is actually bad but part of the empathy process of understanding what people want to work on and pay attention to in how they marshal their capital. You intake the values of your coalition and find shared ground. You keep their confidences by expressing collective goals. I try not to overweight my goals in that process. You have to do what’s right knowing outcomes are uncertain.

Showing you understand their context, their fears and their reputations concerns helps you. An act we denigrate in popular culture actually helps you to deepen the relationships as each signifier breaks down space between two people and builds trust. So don’t knock gossip. It has evolutionary, societal and individual benefit. Just remember the ultimate outcome is about bringing people closer.

Day 146 Gossip

I believe we are in an era where individuals can exercise significantly more agency because of the high leverage nature of the tools available to us. We owe much of this to information access and that is a wide coalition of people who are exercising basic freedoms to self determine because of this march of technology.

It’s my belief that freedom to compute is freedom of speech and these digital communities represent what I hope is more effective self governance through decentralization. We must build up the social trust amongst each other by showing we value each other’s interests. I believe this to be the right thing to do for each other. It’s the human thing too.

Categories
Startups

Day 1047 and Risking Resets

Apparently the last year has been an “annus horribilus” for startups. Kate Clarke writes in The Information.

If 2022 was a year of shock and denial for tech founders and investors as stocks collapsed, 2023 was a year of acceptance of their harsh new reality.

Kate Clarke “Startups’ Annus Horribilis—and What Comes Next”

Maybe I never got over my skis, but I don’t feel like I went through shock or denial as capital markets tightened. I remember a world before interest rates were low. I remember bad times. I have memories of bankruptcies and struggles to raise capital.

I was a teenager watching my father when tech crashed the first time. I was living in San Francisco working for a venture backed company that had acquired my startup when Sequoia said RIP good times and the global financial crisis unfolded.

Maybe the elder millennial timing of my life wasn’t as shitty as we thought. The constant crises were the norm. Unlike Gen Xers I never had a fear of selling out. I was much more interested in finding a way to survive. And I was disappointed to learn that the institutions didn’t really offer that anymore.

When I had good luck I didn’t think my accomplishments were my own. I mostly thought of them as accidents of survival. Praying for exits was less of a joke and more of a bitter reality. And when they did come it was a surprise.

I have made my peace with the risk of resetting the chess board. My optimism has always been tempered by expectations of crisis and chaos. I might even believe it’s for the best.

Categories
Aesthetics Finance

Day 1040 and Easier To Be First

I was telling a friend of mine, only somewhat hyperbolically, that I’d watched “Margin Call” forty times just this year. The actual number is probably half a dozen (my blog’s search function tells me I’ve mentioned it fifteen times) but it’s still a lot for what was a niche drama about the financial crisis.

There is a speech given by Jeremy Irons that sums up perfectly why finance and fashion are fundamentally in the same business.

What have I told you since the first day you stepped into my office? There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first; be smarter; or cheat. Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.

Being first is my game. I’ve taken it from a career in luxury fashion to a career to a career in venture capital. It’s the same fucking job.

It means I often look stupid as I see emerging trends long before the rest of the market gets there. There is a basic math to this which involves status signaling. If you are the type who must do the math to understand how status works as it’s not intuitive to you I recommend this piece.

Just remember that being first is the key to both. And your ability to be first is almost entirely a function of cool. And being cool means not giving a fuck. And if you don’t give a fuck its generally for one of two reasons. Its either because you have the status to do and can get away with it or or you genuinely don’t care.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Janis Joplin

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1036 and The Right Direction

I’ve been in Europe for the last month. My itinerary included Tallinn, Helsinki and Amsterdam. It was a personal trip with work overlayed on top as the digital nomad as become a regular part of my life.

I have said it before but I don’t take as much pleasure as you might imagine from these trips. Much of the reason I spend so much time outside of America is simply that the State department won’t let in the kind of rare weirdo digital grey tribe talent from the portions of the world the United States has labeled as “bad passports.”

I’ve written about it extensively if you are interested. We’ve reached a crisis point in the dysfunction of our immigration and travel visa system in America and it weighed heavily on me and mine. It’s the most concrete evidence I have that America simply isn’t serious about being competitive in the global economy.

As I head back home to the states, I want to be sure I’m heading in the right direction with my priorities. I’ve been committed to crypto for close to a decade now. I’ve added in more focus as it’s become clearer we can’t rely on fiat and the dollar system. I’ve become part of the artificial intelligence explosion over the last two years. Now that the Network State concept is more formalized and we have rallying movements like e/acc, I feel as if some optimism is cautiously warranted. All it will take is twenty or thirty years of work and surviving the geopolitical tumult. No big deal right?

Categories
Travel

Day 1004 and the Muses

I’m such a homebody that I sometimes thinks the joys of travel are lost on me. But then I go shopping and I remember that markets are muses. What sells tells you something about a place.

Now you may think crass commercialism is more of a vice than a virtue. But I think it’s wise to hear what works. A market can tell you about what’s popular. Being an American is a niche experience but we’ve got a bigger footprint than our mere population would suggest.

But also the spoils of capitalism have priorities that are about the efficiency of the market. And you see it in every large city of any density or wealth. The layers for consumption of good and services have a logic to them that defies too much local concern. The algorithms have trust and safety teams but scale takes you pretty far. And every city at a certain size needs market logics.

It’s just important to remember each market has a local gem. There are great performers that outclass by wide orders of magnitude. It’s usually some combination of what appeals locally but is also legible to the larger global cosmopolitan skill sets.

Many of the food wars are just city tastes fighting country tastes. Some situations are more market based and transactional. Sometimes that is even good. I’m personally delighted that I can show up to a city and get food delivered. There is always orange soda brand in every market. And you can always get French fries.

Categories
Chronicle Media

Day 994 and Good Conversation

There are few pleasures in life as gratifying as having a good conversation with someone. I recorded a podcast with one of my absolute favorite Twitter mutuals and LP in chaotic.capital this morning. I don’t want to ruin the surprise (click here if you do) but it was a very good time and a very good conversation. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.

I’ve had the good fortune to be in a few deep dive podcasts recently if you want a preview of the kind that of thinking and conversations that bring me joy.

I was recently a guest of Frazer Rice’s podcast Wealth Actually to discuss how the venture asset class has changed over the course of the last fifteen years. I was also a guest of Stewart Alsop III on his podcast Crazy Wisdom where we discussed the complexity spectrum of bringing our present into our future.

One of the most challenging aspects of doing the earliest stage investing in technology, and startups in general, is that we simply have no idea what the future will bring us. We have our best guesses.

That doesn’t mean we are flying blind. Like Captain Kirk, I trust some people’s best guesses a lot more than other people’s facts. But the harsh truth is that we are all doing our best with heuristics and humility.

And it’s through conversations with others do we get to improve our best guesses. Sharing insights and history helps us refine our process and worldview such that our knowledge broadens and deepens.

In conversation we share what’s worked for us and what we’ve seen across our own experiences. A good conversation is a pleasure unto itself but it’s also a window into the world of someone else. And I cannot imagine a more joyful way of improving yourself.