Tag: Finance

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 430 and History Rhymes

If you aren’t following along I am in spending the month working from an Airbnb in Frankfurt. I picked Frankfurt on a whim when I decided to go to Europe. I wanted to work from “somewhere” else after two years of being home. It seemed like a nice central city and I’m a finance nerd (it drives my investments in crypto) so the home of the European Central Bank felt like a great pick.

When I booked the trip the war in Ukraine wasn’t even on the horizon. I was simply trying to get a change of scenery after two years of Covid lockdowns. But now I feel as if it might have been accidentally prescient to be here. Like I’m in some world historical nexus as Europe reorients itself to the next era of geopolitical reality. I couldn’t have picked a better place to absorb the zeitgeist that is going to drive the financial future.

I am going to spend my time here absorbing everything I can about about the currents of past intellectual movements like the Frankfurt School. I am going back to Weimar history and the interwar years. I will go further back to Goethe.

I have this gut sense that there is something I am supposed to learn about history so I can navigate the next decade. While I founded chaotic.capital on the thesis that the world was going to become more complex and thus inherently more unstable I didn’t expect those trends to unfold quite as fast as they did. I thought I had a decade. It turns out the future was already here. History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. And if I’m going to predict the next stanza I better start with the past.

Categories
Internet Culture Medical Startups

Day 415 and Accessibility

I don’t think of myself as disabled or requiring special accommodations, though I have a well controlled medical condition that swells my spinal cord called ankylosing spondylitis. But for the first time since my diagnosis I really felt like I was handicapped. And I am feeling so much sadness over the idea that I might genuinely be disabled.

I’m attending ETHDenver and it’s wildly over capacity. No consideration has been given to any kind of basic accessibility. I didn’t think it would effect me though till I got here. I can walk without a mobility aid and if you met me you’d never know I have an issue. But I can’t stand in line on cold concrete for two hours. It turns out I would need a wheelchair for that kind of activity. And even if I had a wheelchair the first two days were in the cold and snow so I couldn’t have wheeled over or around the slush and water.

So I have only attended private parties and small events and group outings. This is great for me as I’m a well networked established member of the startup ecosystem. I’ve got a popular Twitter handle and can easily reach out to people. But I’m noticing just how much a bit of inaccessibility will gatekeep the crypto and web3 community. If you don’t have my heaps of privilege there is no way you could navigate this conference.

And we really need web3 to be welcoming and accessible. To build a better future with infrastructure and economies we all collectively own and benefit from we need an order of magnitude more people participating. But if no one can get in and experience things first hand than web3 will just be a repeat of the oligarchy of web2. It’s honestly my worst fear for crypto. We will accidentally exclude the people who will benefit the most from our innovations.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 394 and Antiwork

There is a Reddit sub that is imploding at the moment called Antiwork. I didn’t really follow it before the extremely online moment where one of their mods demonstrated that internet people don’t generally have media training. But one of the amusing bits of antiwork culture got into my feed because someone had an awkwardly worded tweet about young people demanding at least two days off of work in a week.

Before I became a member of the capital class I wasn’t really much of a weekend person. Or even a time off person. I was in a constant battle to get over the line of survivable earnings in America.

But then the magic of Silicon Valley shined on me a few times and I’m suddenly no longer desperate about medical bills or having enough savings for an emergency. This has had the dramatic effect of completely reordering my priorities. Now I take restorative rest time seriously. Knowledge work and good judgement rely pretty heavily on be clear headed. There is no premium afforded for being exhausted. If anything it will lose you money.

So the antiwork folks might have a point. If so much of your life is spent in survival you never have a chance to really be human. And being human is oddly more lucrative. I stand a better chance of doing even better because I can orient my life around bigger outcomes. That attracts more people and more money and improved my chances. And yeah success compounds if you are lucky. If you can get out from under survival. Which is I suppose the hard part.

Categories
Startups

Day 392 and Deal Flow

I wrote about my general philosophy about the futility of the typical hour long deck based venture pitch two days ago. I explained that I’d rather have a conversation with founders.

So if you want to pitch me just hop on over to a Telegram chat or my Twitter DMs. Let’s talk and learn and share and then I can really see your passion and vision and we can both avoid canned performative shit.

Well since then my Twitter DMs have been filled with amazing chats with founders of companies as diverse as consumer products, marketplaces and web3 games. The stuff people are cooking up in crypto is wild. Thought not enough SaaS tool pitches though so clearly I’ve got to get more mindshare there. Note to self to impress Jason Lemkin or something.

I’ve taken a dozen pitches now through direct messages and chats. It’s worked amazingly well. Maybe I owe a drink to Sam Lessin as he came out strongly against Calendly right after I wrote this post.

So pitch me however you like to communicate. Plus, don’t we all die inside a little every time someone sends a Calendly link?

So I’ve got to say I hope I became known as the slide into her DMs VC as this has been a lot more fun than trying to play calendar sync with dozens of people. That game sucks.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 391 and Breath

Daily overstimulation is starting to rub the pressure sores of America’s downer induced depression into a full blown mental health crisis. Like, even more than usual. War with Russia in the imagination, inflation and market volatility coaxing a recession, culture war skirmishes over every basic fact in the pandemic, along with generalized anxiety are fucking us up focus wise. And every propaganda outlet and publicist on the planet is having a field day.

I’m listing to The Prodigy’s Breath and mumbling lyrics like pyschosomatic insane. So I guess, come play my game?

I try not to listen too much music as it overstimulates my nervous system to be honest so its kind of rare for me to have Spotify playing. I’ve got a finely tuned propaganda radar that benefits from sensing subtle shifts in tone and extremely online discourse. I can’t do that if I’m too worked up from the rough stimulus that comes from pop music. I mostly use it to run my portfolio and investing but sometimes I think I should really be used in the service of some autocrat or multi-national. I’m the doubt factory

I guess it is nice I can make a buck during the end of the empire. I’m one of those post structuralism, post-capitalism babies. A regular Bane “born to the darkness” of hyper objects like markets and climate change. So I guess I’d better be molded to being the kind of villain that survives a world of agitprop and meme warfare. Thanks Adbusters!

Frankly I’m having a fucking blast. Sure I’m scared I don’t have my homestead property all shored up for civilization hiccups, but I’m of the mind that the crumbles is going to take a while so might as well enjoy the gains that come from a massive upheaval. I guess its true venture capitalists are ghouls. I mean at least we aren’t private equity carrion birds but it is wild that the system rewards a class of people that invest in creative destruction.

But even as I want to paint myself as bad, I do stereotypically think what venture capital does is often good. We can’t predict second order effects. Chaos theory doesn’t let us see all the future paths. But stochastic as shit power laws are just math so we’ve got a shot at accidentally making things better. So while the agitprop tries to sway your opinions might I recommend you just Breath? That is my professional advice.

Categories
Finance

Day 389 and Bear Down for Midterms

I used to be something of a perma-bear. I was always somewhat convinced that bad shit was just around the corner. I guess you can see that in my persistent interest in doomer culture. But as the world continues to experience “the crumbles” I’ve softened my general stance on everything is awful.

Crypto is arguably responsible for much of my stance. For all the bitching about Web3’s lack of decentralization and heady “takes” on how this has all been done before, I actaully do this think is the next wave. Do I think we are due for a lot of crashing and failures and unrealized promise? Also yes.

So when the market decided to do a January bubble bursting I was surprised at how sanguine I was. I kind of didn’t believe it was going to turn into a full blown recession rout. Now this is not to say I don’t think stuff is frothy, as I clearly do. But I think the weirding has so confused markets that who knows when contagion bubble popping is going to hit for real. I don’t think we are there yet.

And indeed I started this post in the morning and by market close stuff kinda bounced. Maybe a dead cat bounce. But who even knows is my point. I don’t think we will see a genuine correction till a real market leader like Facebook or Microsoft pulls a Worldcom or an Enron. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Tesla but I ain’t playing that short. I think it’s more likely that “Meta” fucks itself in the transition to the metaverse or whatever and then we get a real systemic crash. Right now no one gives a single fuck if all of crypto goes to zero. We need much bigger game to drive a recession. Systemic Lehman brother shit.

Which is long way of me making an elaborate Community joke. That TV show with the Talk Soup guy. They had a plot where someone misspoke or made a bad joke and the theme at their community college dance was “Bear Down for Midterms” and no it isn’t a real phrase. My basic feeling on a recession is that the Fed will toss us a couple rate hikes to deal with inflation. But half of America is convinced the pandemic isn’t over. Congress could be talked into more stimulus since the midterms are bearing down on us and well the Democrats are going to lose. The exponential age, the end of American empire and global weirding means no one knows what is going on. The next real marker on our calendar is the midterms. So bear down for midterms. I’ll be wash trading to get some actual cost basis losses till then.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 367 and Flat Out Grossings

December was a pretty gnarly month for me. I tore a ligament. I got Covid. A fire burned down two entire towns. I’m emotionally burnt out right now and letting myself feel it because tomorrow I go back to work. So apologies if this is even more stream of consciousness than usual.

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a reporter. So I talked my way into an internship at our local television station Channel 8. I loved it. I got to be the assistant for such glamorous events as city council land use meetings. Which is how I happen to have the misfortune of knowing how Boulder became surrounded by suburban sprawl. I don’t have a grand unified theory. I just witness a lot of little decisions that compounded into unspeakable disaster no one could have predicted. Except we did.

There used to be a crappy mall in Boulder. It had a Macy’s and a Foley’s but it couldn’t sustain its anchor tenant department stores even in the late 90s and early aughts. Now big developers and chain stores knew that Boulder was fast becoming a wealthy town and wanted in. Maybe we could upgrade from middle market to premium retail. But Boulder is run by a bunch of hippies and wanted no part of upgrading big box stores. City council meeting turned into an endless parade of “no” to various folks coming in attempting to take over the mall on 28th street. It languished for years.

Eventually the developers gave up. Decided to construct a mall outside of the open space belt outside of the city. You see Boulder is the prototype for NIMBYS. We literally bought up a bunch of land that the town owns and can never ever be developed so no one could sprawl the town. It’s gorgeous and amazing and expensive to maintain and makes Boulder a haven for its natives and an impossibly expensive place if you didn’t buy real estate in the 60s. But I digress. This is about the mall.

The developers called the new mall out on the prairie beyond the town’s open space Flatiron Crossing. It’s an homage to Boulder’s signature feature the flatiron mountains. And the views from up town highway 36 into town driving back from the mall are amazing.

And Boulder honestly felt like it won. The ugly box stores went up around it. Our town was saved from Costco and Chuckee Cheese and Ann Taylor. We all snobbishly called it Flat Out Grossings. We thought it was a nasty money grab. It was wise we let them develop outside the open space band and protected the town.

Except that mall and all the box stores turned into the anchor for all the surrounding towns. We called them the L towns. Well that and Superior. And that’s where the growth happened. That’s what enabled Colorado to thrive. And that’s exactly how an urban fire that was started on Boulder open space ended up destroying so many homes. We pushed out the development thinking we’d done a good thing.

I actually have to stop writing this as I can’t make the point I want to which is that Boulder brought much of this misery on itself. We wouldn’t let the land be developed in town. So someone else did outside of town. And now that land got wiped out from a fire in our open space. And everyone is going to be snide and awful but our policies have consequences and by pushing out our development to Flat Out Grossing the law of unintended consequences has taken over. And I’m sick to my stomach knowing the well intentioned hippies ended up doing so much more damage.

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 365 and Normalcy Bias

Today officially marks a full year of writing every single day. What should be a sense of accomplishment is mostly a sense of comfort at my own discipline. It’s an edge. I like to be improving and that takes good habits. Writing daily been an enormously positive influence in my daily life. I don’t have any plans to stop but as with hang habit you take it one day at a time.

I’m writing from Boulder Colorado after one of the worst natural disasters our state has ever seen. Though the experience was entirely unnatural. Gusting winds over 100mph combined with bone dry grasslands to start a raging wildfire in the middle of the suburbs. The front range hasn’t seen snow yet this season so Chinook winds must have rolled over a downed power line. The wildfire destroyed two towns in my county in the space of a few hours. Last I heard over 500 homes were lost.

I’m devastated. I feel genuinely traumatized even as I’m safe. But of course I feel the trauma of the hour. This is my home. My neighbors lost their homes. All the roads that are closed are my daily routes. My fucking grocery store was burning. Another climate driven disaster makes the national news. But it’s not somewhere else. It’s my home. Better active shooter I guess. A comparison we can make in Boulder. Gallows humor.

I was working through most of the fire. Just letting the apocalypse unfold around me as I went about my business. 8 miles away the world was on fire but I had no evacuation order. No reason to stop working. I closed the blinds as I found the hurricane force gusts unsettling. They shook the house. I would check social media on my phone in between pitches and worked on financial modeling. I took an Ativan to calm myself down so I could focus.

I had explicitly known something like this was coming. Maybe not this crisis. But more weird shit was inbound bWe named our fund chaotic.capital. Precisely because we believe stochastic shit will dominate the next decade. We are betting the future will be chaotic so we must bake flexibility into everything. There is good money to be made betting on chaos. Normally bias will lose you money. Chaos is good for business.

So what does that have to do with writing every day? I want to say something wise about bearing witness. But I don’t think I’m capable of living so large with this much fear around me. I didn’t expect the exercise of daily writing would mean writing through crisis. But I should have. Normalcy bias effects me too.

This year showed me stochastic chaos regularly. After only six days of writing the insurrection in Washing’s D.C. happened. And so I wrote because I made the commitment. And then a few months later a man shot dead 10 people in a grocery store down the road. And so I wrote. Because it’s my habit. I didn’t expect to be covering so much chaotic shit in a public journal.

And yet I must have in some sense predicted that life would take this path even if I wasn’t directly in it. Or I wouldn’t have named the fund chaotic. I wouldn’t proudly discuss prepping. This is the world I live in. Chaos is a given and I’m going to work towards a better future. I’m documenting it as it comes with these essays. And I guess we will see how far it goes. Thanks for joining me for the first year.

Categories
Background

Day 363 and Best Of 21

One of the unexpected benefits of writing every single day has been the accumulation of reference material. I can send folks a synopsis rather than retyping a topic that I get asked about a lot. So if you want to know how I get healthy, or how I invest, or even how I think about aesthetics this page will serve as a reference for year 1.

Health & Wellness

Biohacking 101 Guide

Supplements for Beginners

Self Care & Pacing and Recovery Protocols

How To Communicate with Me

Why I Prefer Asynchronous Communication

Why I Dislike Phone Calls (Or DM Me First)

Getting To Know Me for Founders Seeking Investment

Investment Thesis Thoughts

Empathy Investing

Chaotic Labor Markets

Chaotic Families

Request for Founders

Psychological Safety

Mental Flexibility

Bias Towards Fuckaround

What Don’t I Know?

Why I Don’t Like to Invest In Retail Anymore

Aesthetics

Fashion Week Back in The Aughts

The Thursday Styles Problem

Swag (Or My Facebook Hoodie)

A General Theory of Shitposting

Cultural Hegemony and Internet Citizenship

A Short Guide to Becoming an Edgelord

Advice for Startups

Above All Else Fun

Inertia

Rooting For You

Stress, Luck & Startup Families

The Emotion of A Big Exit (or Stack Overflow Sold)

Show Me Anything

Just Make Stuff

Optimizing For The Right Outcome

How To Work With A Startup

Emotional Growth

3 People Inside You

Punishment

Forgiveness and Failure

Easy for You (Not For Everyone)

Superpowers

My Addiction to Work

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 359 and SOS

A few days ago I wondered what project or cultural artifact was going to grab our mutual cultural attention during the Christmas vacation week? Something always does. One year it was fucking Quora if you can believe it. This year I’m ready to call it for $SOS at least if you are into Web3 and crypto economics.

On fucking Christmas Day these degenerates drop a contract to let anyone claim tokens who has ever purchased an NFT on the OpenSea marketplace. And people went ape shit. Suddenly someone had taken all the visible contributions from OpenSea and manifested them in a token and said this is ours. Fuck corporate dominance of profit your users hold the real value. I’ve never seen anything so ballsy. Last year when Wall Street Bets decided to taken on hedge funds I felt like we had entered a new era of community behavior.

An emergent community has swum up from the sea and eaten the lunch of a supposedly greedy centralized platform. Web3 just attacked what we didn’t even realize was Web2. A crypto darling turned parable for centralization in the space of a few years. $SOS seemed to say community owned this value all along. The airdrop showed us the balance of power in a web3 community if we all work together. I’m so impressed by the sheer cultural force of the statement. It could all go horribly awry but god damn if it isn’t utopian.

I’ve got not fucking clue if this is a legitimate contract or not. I’m not going to FUD. But from a first principles, we are building a new internet where the incentives of the users align with the technology statement, then this is quite a shot across the bow. Also I’m pretty sure this makes it harder for OpenSea to IPO if their user base is in open rebellion against who gets rewarded.

The thing is I believe Devin to be a well meaning and genuinely forward thinking guy. He’s a terrific communicator that set out with the utopian intentions that we all do. But we are moving so fast with breaking cultural norms and acceptable societal level rewards for contributions to an economy that I think we might have just spiraled up to some kind of cultural singularity. Crypto might just be moving that fast. Whatever happens this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen from a startup. Score one for the anonymous degens.