Tag: Safety

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Finance Startups

Day 146 and Gossip

Gossip drive the world. The stories we tell about other people reflect a lot. Even if we claim we don’t care what others think what others think moves the world around us. And I would posit that this actually isn’t a bad thing. It can drive closer bonds and increased connection.

There is a concept in evolutionary psychology called indirect reciprocity. Natural selection favors strategies that base the decision to help on the reputation of the recipient. Social interactions in which one actor helps another and is then benefited by a third party are key to cooperative reputations.

This isn’t just a systemic population level issue either. People who are more helpful are more likely to receive help. It’s uneven obviously and people can obscure their reputation. Depending on if you are up or downstream of helping or being helped, you make different calculations. Some people help more but they feel it’s worth the cost. They are downstream. Others accept more help because they are upstream. We are all making trades based on our position and arguably they are fair market trades.

How we decide to cooperate and with whom is driven considerably by reputations and shared value beliefs. Relaying reputation signals to bolster your capacity to connect to others is actually a key part of empathy. We need to establish psychological safety to partner with each other. Gossip helps us find suitable relationships. This is especially true in disciplines which require creativity. Quoting myself on the topic of psychological safety in venture capital.

If entrepreneurs are solving entirely new problems with high chances of failure feeling like they can trust their financial partners should be a top priority. Yet the atmosphere of distrust is pervasive. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur are constantly managing the information flow between each other.

Managing the information flow is a key component of gossip. 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.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 81 and Good Patients

I don’t know why I feel compelled to act on a doctor’s opinion (literally every doctor) when I can think critically about any other form of authority. I’ve got some kind of deep seated fear of disobeying a physician’s suggestions in a way I just don’t with others traditional authority figures and I wish I could break it. American doctors love to prescribe drugs for every random symptom or blood result. And I’m fearful to say no. Even though I know I can’t be on about half of what I’m given

Absolutely had a anxiety moment this morning as I’m due for a metabolic blood work up and I am not sure I have the energy for the shaming if I “fail” that my endocrinologist will throw at me. I’m a healthy weight but I was overweight earlier this year and I leave in fear of that fat shaming coming back. At this point I just let her prescribe the drugs and don’t take it all. I’m sure I’m in for a lecture about some thing.

Categories
Chronicle Preparedness

Day 70 and The Joy of Preparing

I’ve found a lot of satisfaction in the feeling of being prepared. And I don’t just mean for the apocalypse. Simple preparation for storms are enjoyable for me. I keep an eye on weather so I don’t find myself at the grocery store among panicked last minute shoppers. I love the run up last minute puttering of battening down the hatches before a snowstorm. I use it as an excuse to do errands or chores I would otherwise find a way to put off.

My usual storm routine is to do all the laundry (including sheets and towels), vacuum, run the dishwasher and take a long shower. This routine comes in quite handy if you lose power as having clean underwear and plenty of dishes is something you will appreciate if you are left without electricity or water.

Storms are a terrific way to force the issue of lingering “to do” lists like go to the hardware for more batteries or run by the pharmacy for more Advil. I personally hate running errands until a hurricane or snowstorm is bearing down on me and then I gleefully tick off chores that have been languish for weeks if not months.

Much of these routines are really about self soothing. The illusion of control calms the mind. I know I have little control about much in life (the pandemic really brought home that point) but by engaging our will we can exert a little pressure on the on the parameters of our world. If we put the intention into our work to prepare, then a few days without power sounds manageable our mind should it come to pass. We’ve already told ourselves this uncomfortable or even dangerous situation is one that we are capable of enduring.

It’s not that I think mind over matter is a plan (it’s not you need a plan for emergencies) it’s that building our capacity for experiencing stress makes actual stress much more manageable. Busting out the generator and the camp stove is fun! I’ve said this so many times to myself I genuinely believe it. A snowstorm is predicted to drop up to two feet in Colorado over the weekend. Lots of breathless coverage is in the local papers and on the weather channels that it could be historic. I’m secretly hoping we lose power for just a little bit. Long enough for me to play with some of my gear.

Categories
Chronicle Startups

Day 53 & The Process

Startup land can feel exclusionary and clique driven. Looking in from the outside it can seem as if all the power and money is concentrated into a few groups that only fund and hire their friends. Less charitably it looks like a circle jerk.

While this isn’t an incorrect perception, I believe why we think it is exclusionary is very different from the reality of why it is exclusionary.

Startups are tight knit because successful companies have high psychological safety. We all tend to work together again and again and back each other’s plays because we have built up a high trust environment in order to survive. Even if we don’t exactly see the vision someone else has we trust that they will find a way to make it into a reality.

We don’t trust that this is true for everyone. Ideas are like assholes in that everyone has got one. It’s the ability to turn a formless expanse of ideas and hopes into a company that makes a product it’s customers like. It’s extremely hard to make something new. Harder than you can ever imagine if you haven’t tried it. So people who make a living out of making something from nothing have developed a set of heuristics that let us determine if someone outside our circle is capable of making “a thing” to prove their ideas can become reality.

We tend to overweight people that build tangible things. Even though many of the most crucial skills in business are the less quantifiable ones. We tend to overweight people that have demonstrated any kind of success in zero-to-one work even if what they want to build isn’t remotely related to what was done in the past. This is how despite most of my experience being in advertising tech and e-commerce I was backed to make cosmetics. People had faith that I could flip the bit from off to on.

While this may make it seem hopeless if you are currently not inside the system that’s not what I hope you take away. Startup people love watching newbies make the leap. I cannot overstate the fondness we have for someone gathering up the courage to spring into the unknown. I used to hate the phrase “I’m rooting for you” till I realized everyone actually did want me to succeed. They just rightly realized I needed to learn the hard lessons in my own time. They could give me all the advice in the world (and believe me they did) and sometimes I just needed to make the mistake in order to learn the lesson. The mistakes allowed me to succeed.

Of course, we always hope people will learn from our advice and not require the pain of a fucked up cap table or a growth plan that missed target because we burned our cash position down to three months runway. But most people that are genuinely good at startup work appreciate that only the person actually “doing it” can make the choices that lead to success.

So startup folks will always be excited to give back and encourage those that want to try “doing it” too. If I have a clear ask I find I get an answer from even the most successful and prestigious. Literally CEOs and world famous developers of entire languages will just email you back. It’s honestly miraculous. I have invested in cold emails. Championed them to my nearest and dearest. Because we believe that the process of making something from thing doesn’t exclude anyone. You just have to show someone that you will try to make your vision a reality.

Categories
Chronicle Finance

Day 33 and Psychological Safety

Creativity is scary. Any time you build something new fear lurks around the corner. Because even if it’s not rational, your perception of risk rises when your potential for failure is at its highest. Perhaps this is why when you take a conscious risk you unconsciously try to mitigate any unnecessary additional risks. This has a number of significant consequences for businesses. You want to feel safer when you take risks so you seek out psychological safety from your associates. The principle is simple. You will only take risks if you believe you don’t be punished for it. Psychological safety has been shown to be crucial for teamwork.

I’d wager this is a factor in why startup teams tend to be homogeneous as human nature makes it harder to trust what we don’t know well. Which is fascinating when you consider that diversity is also an important factor in financial performance. And as much as this principle of psychological safety been discussed for team performance, there is one area in startup land where feeling safe is rarely cultivated: venture capital.

Venture’s entire culture is steeped in cliches of competition and combativeness. Which seems odd for a group that theoretically prizes high performance. Wouldn’t they benefit from cultivating psychological safety the most? If entrepreneurs are solving entirely new problems with high chances of failure feeling like they can trust their financial partners should be a top priority. And surely plenty of ink has been spilled on picking good partners in the literature of startup advice. And yet the atmosphere of distrust is pervasive. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur are constantly managing the information flow between each other. Which is exactly the opposite of what creates the necessary safety to take creative risk. So why isn’t this discussed more?

Imagine a fund who instead of poking holes in your data or lobbing grenades in your plans instead showed it was sensitive to the parade of fear and doubt that pervades most decisions. You’d get more done by a mile. Ideas could be refined instead of defended. Plans could be buttressed and shored up rather than rationalized. Having safety will lower the kind of inhibiting social pressures to show “that you are always crushing it” perhaps enough to produce startups that actually do go on to crush it.

This strategy could shift the dynamics of a firm’s competitiveness too. In group dynamics of status and posturing prioritize deal flow among only in group group members which disadvantages everyone by increasing competitive deals and rising prices. Funds who who have psychological safe founder relations will then disproportionately control what deals get done as the creative risk takers will seek them out. That kind of deal flow would be a major leverage point. Rather than getting stuck fighting for the same deals everyone agrees on (which isn’t a sign of quality no matter how much we want it to be so) venture fund that sticks to prioritizing psychological safety will spend more time with productive risk taking that builds the future.

Developing emotional capacity isn’t a platitude. It’s grueling work that takes place over years, sometimes to little effect given our innate resistance to change. But it is truly transformative.