Tag: Silicon Valley

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1434 and Density

There is always a debate in startup life as to how the density of a given ecosystem impacts outcomes. A tight network of well connected communities and individuals helps founders, investors and talent connect.

Before the pandemic it was considered fairly normal to be within a major hub as the common knowledge was that “density” matters. You wanted to be in the action of a scene.

There are great startup cities. New York has an incredible scene. My hometown of Boulder has a great technical core. But as much as cities and companies compete over status the one with longevity is Silicon Valley. Heck it was a debate when that even encompassed San Francisco until Twitter moved in.

Then everyone spread to the four winds during the pandemic. I like to think of this as the era in which Silicon Valley got back to its digital roots. Being extremely online became a behavior that worked well for anyone if you communicated well with words. Being on the right coast was about being in the right online communities. The network state is online.

I’d say that was as pure a return to source culture as there ever was. Different people value signal across different networks and the open web of words has been home to software and hardware developers for generations.

The world that builds companies lives virtually as much as it does in the real world. We like to meet up but we also know it’s the tools that connects us that make the difference.

Every subculture that has emerged with a breakout hit did it through the digital commons we built together. I’ll always appreciate coming to the source culture to replenish but I know the density of the network is at its swiftest when our extremely online communities communicate.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1431 and Faking It

I’ve heard this multiple times across enough demographics in the wider “startup” ecosystem that I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it is happening. People are faking being weird. In some cases they are faking being autistic.

I find this to be an almost laughably unlikely thing to want to imitate. And yet I’ve heard it three times in the last week. The new poser is faking being a neurodivergent weirdo.

We regularly joke that at chaotic.capital a part of our deal sourcing relies on “Julie being professionally weird on the internet.” My pinned tweet from three years ago is a ramble on this ethos as it’s been true for decades. Unique fixations often undergird problem solving.

Being weird, or more specifically autistic, has now taken on a specific connotation of an intelligent but socially strange or oblivious character who sees the world differently. This means you are special somehow and can be forgiven for being a dick (that’s a lie be nice).

It was probably a source of pain for many millennial kids who were awkward the more oblivious you are the less it bothers you. Marching to the beat of your own drum. We’ve got a whole set of social tropes around smart nerds in popular media and most of them were negatively coded.

Despite this history, revenge of the nerds occurred. The power and dominance of technology (and its cousin nerd) culture means the spergy truth telling autist has cachet. We live in a post Sheldon Cooper world. Once something involves capital it collects social capital as well.

I have clearly underestimated how much this affects Zoomer behavior and incentives. Millennials experienced this archetype negatively but in a softer “everyone is special” culture your quirks can lead you to money and prestige. So there is now an incentive to act like a weird asshole to fake being weird and a little socially anxious.

If autism can have stolen valor then we might be in that era. It seems to greatly annoy the actually autistic (a tag on social media used by many poorly socialized entirely normal people) to have the symptoms of autism faked.

Authenticity is actually quite hard to fake and anyone with a decent social radar can usually spot it. Whether all autists have that capacity to read social cues is up for debate. It’s probably why anyone tries to fake being a genuine weirdo.

I’m inclined to say skills issue as the internet has made class, manners, and social cues much more accessible to everyone. And good news being every social class values being chill, real, and passionate. So there is no need to fake anything. Just vibe. Be cool.

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Politics Startups

Day 1430 and Realignment

American politics has become center of gravity for culture. I’m not thrilled about this as I have utopian high mindedness in my bones and that never pairs well with the real politic of a nation.

I felt being open to change was a part of my cultural upbringing as an American. Reagan Revolution babies enjoyed Clinton neoliberal growth. Optimism meant being interested in technology.

I have never been satisfied with reality because “we can do better” was both the regional culture of frontier Western civilization but America in particular.

We can imagine better which means we can do better. Somewhere between the neoconservatives forever wars, liberalism’s tolerance of intolerance and the growth of an expensive permanent state bureaucracy we lost some shine.

Losing our can-do spirit to fear and zero sum thinking led to strange institutional outcomes. Watching fear spread over years of pandemic and institutional failures did not help.

I’m not a novel voice in this discourse but most of the startup world and technologists in general had sincere affiliations with American institutional liberalism and even in particular the flavor of Democratic neoliberalism you might have associated with Bloomberg. The Obama administration certainly acted as if we were part of the coalition. The sincerity of that alliance is a question of course.

I don’t know where the realignment lands as we go forward but I hope as many people as possible sincerely embrace wanting more optimism.

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1424 and California Dreaming

We’ve just had a beautiful snowfall in Bozeman. If you are back up on the mountains at the edge of the valley you are enjoying a mystical winter wonderland.

Alas I am not long for cosplaying Frozen (blessed) as I am headed west. No, I am heading not to Seattle the most important city of the 90s. I am headed to Joan Dideon land. I’ll be in California.

I’ll be in Los Angeles for the week or so if you happen to be on the west side. I’ll then be headed up to San Francisco.

It will be a little whirlwind of family, friends and hopefully some useful business. I’ll be visiting start ups. Going to YC Demo day which I have not done in person. Meeting up with anyone who might want to be a node in our network.

I am game to meet up with folks working on weird shit and are looking to build it. I am also looking for LPs in our next fund so we can keep funding the weirdos who build things.

The virtuous cycle of techno capital starts long before an opportunity is clear. If you have something chaotic in your heart send me a DM

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1421 and Culture Clashes

I sit in between half a dozen different community nodes thanks to my interests in open source software, decentralization, crypto, and autonomous systems technology.

This set of interest covers a lot of ground from ecosystem level collaboration in financial organizations like DAOs and to player versus AI agents coordination to peripheral control of drones and machinery.

Many different demographics are attracted to these frontiers for different reasons. Hackers have a very different mentality than mercenary technologists looking for maximum margin.

Open source has traditionally struggled more from a lack of financialization than from an obsession with it. Which seems less true in the crypto era than in previous more academic and defense oriented eras.

There are classic open source business models and anyone with age and experience in startups has some opinions which I leave as an exercise to the reader. They occasionally fail and an open core loses more than they’d like to professional services. I am writing on WordPress.

One strange aspect of what drives these frontier spaces to interact is that depending on how much leverage you find in building a network you may have different incentives than other builders and users. Expanding out to scaled use may drive a lot more value than the resources required. How the surplus gets divided is always contentious.

For some, the most crucial cultural goals is expanding access to automation and ripping away as many of the services and middle men as is feasible.

Decentralized systems make it harder for middle men to maintain monopolies. Thats its own goal for true believers. For others the goal massive financialization that drives network connectivity is the benefit. Self interest driving common goals is perfectly acceptable.

As I watch the current season of hyper self interested memecoin cryptomania engage with the academic utopian open source artificial intelligence community, I am reminded of so many of the classic issues we have in financing and sharing in the spoils of common infrastructure. Who benefits is a question we should all be asking more regularly

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1419 and Know A Guy

Running a startup, for all its supposed glamour, is mostly an exercise in learning how little you know.

Sure there are playbooks for some of what you will do. As the technology industry has grown and startups have become an appealing career choice we’ve filled out how-to guides for everything from fundraising to operations.

Alas all advice is specific to the giver’s experience and untangling biases to make advice relevant to your specific needs is quite hard. That’s where it helps to have more experienced operators on hand to call bullshit.

At chaotic.capital we pride ourselves on being investors who “have a guy” for even the most esoteric possible requests. Playbooks can only you so far when you need an expert.

Just in the last two days we’ve worked through how one hires a chief of staff, what to do when letting go of counsel who made a mistake, installing appropriate security procedures for digital footprints, and the resale brokers for a rare commodity.

We like to problem solve and the weirder the problem the more fun it can be. Removing obstacles and clearing bottlenecks is satisfying work. And knowing guy who knows a guy is a heck of a fun game of social geography.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1392 and Miami

I’ve been so completely engrossed in the Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal saga that I have not posted about my upcoming travel to Miami next week.

I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.

If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.

Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.

I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media

Day 1391 and Hyperobject Object Lesson

I remain enthralled by Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal. If you aren’t caught up on this please browse my first two posts on the subject Goatse Singularity (it’s safe) and the lore behind Singularity culture online. The TLDR is that we’ve got the best alignment experiment in artificial intelligence happening in real time for anyone to participate in.

I am not the only one. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz did a surprisingly detailed podcast on the topic today with a discussion of the emergent phenomena of autonomous meme coin bots and their interaction with Truth.

It’s honestly a very good synopsis of why so many of us think this experiment is so crucial for understanding decentralization and how regulatory uncertainty hinders the space. This experiment is the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence that clearly shows machine intelligence requires machine money to affect the rule world.

I am quite deep into the whole thing having participated early on as semiotics is obviously a deep interest of mine. Fashion bitches love signs and symbols.

As the crypto overlap emerged last week I was discussing it with friends in New York. Some of my network in New York has real fintech and crypto depth so when the first memecoin crypto bots were just beginning to interact independently with Truth Terminal they took notice.

It was a fascinating overlap of crypto and artificial intelligence through entirely independent autonomous means and was not coordinated.

Let me disclose I don’t own more than a nominal sum of the GOAT token except as a means through which to experience this moment.

It’s not about the coin at all truthfully. Truth is simply fascinating as independent agents (including some crypto bots themselves) are interacting to impact real world transactions.

Literally no one involved made the coin but yet it exists. It is a hyperobject object lessson. Media theorists and Baudrillard fans rejoice.

Categories
Media Startups

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

I thought the discourse around “founder mode” had died down but Kim Scott the author of the best selling book Radical Candor decided to link the meme to what she considers a so-called rise of “neo-authoritarianism” in Silicon Valley culture in an op-ed in the New York Times. Naturally it’s about Trump too.

My read on her thesis is that she has decided to use a technique she disavows in her own work; the frame of the piece is manipulative insincerity. It’s an unclear criticism being used for political gain.

She works to convince the reader that actually the most libertarian and individualistic demographic, who regularly decries state power (especially its use of coercion to drive censorship, limit transactions and restrict compute), are in fact, actually vouching for totalitarianism.

Gift Link to New York Times “How Founder Mode Explains the Rise of Trump in Silicon Valley

Even the graphic hints at the supposed appreciation of neo-monarchy as a nod to nRX intellectual Curtis Yarvin.

I fear she firmly missed the point of founder mode for her insincere political framing. Despite her clear understanding of our values.

In that original recipe, venture capitalists invested in founders rebelling against established hierarchy and building great products. And when those rebels themselves became too hierarchical, venture capitalists turned to new founders aspiring to overtake the old order.

She is right about we prefer to work as an industry and how we see our efforts. “Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest products were originally intended to liberate, not to control people.”

And yet missed she missed that founder mode is about liberating our founding teams from the suffocation of professional management. It’s got nothing at all to do with justifying tyrannical founders.

Rather founder mode is about limiting the tyranny of managers who can stymie progress despite having little personal responsibility for the success of the firm. In another world, she might have written a sequel called Radical Responsibility about fixing this problem.

Larger firms have a pantheon of corporate departments to ensure smooth governance from legal, to HR, to corporate communications in order to comply with state expectations.

As regulations have ballooned so too have the specialties required by the middle managers. We must be in compliance. We must take everything and every view into account. We must do things by the book.

Founder mode isn’t about running ripshod over your people. It’s certainly not about Trumpian declarations of what must be done. She’s absolutely correct that “emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes”

I find her criticism to be manipulative insincerity. She’s deliberately missed the point of the original Paul Graham essay, inserted her own political insinuations about how Silicon Valley is hiding their true preferences for authoritarians while herself advocating for a pass the buck culture. It’s not fit for Radical Candor and I’d expect better from someone of her stature.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1379 and Dodge and Weave

A lot is going on and I have little concentration in me today so I’ll keep this to a few tidbits of things I have on my radar.

The artificial intelligence x-risk Doomers are doing absolutely nothing to beat the charges that California SB 1047 was all about their fear of an imagined apocalypse and had absolutely nothing to do with useful policy or regulation.

Frankly I’d expect better from Scott Alexander and I’ll warn the Effective Altruist and Open Philanthropy crowd that if you willing to parlay with socialists don’t be surprised if those who advocate for broad state powers feel fine about using the state monopoly on violence on you when your interests no longer align. Liberals get the boot too.

But nobody listens to a cranky old libertarian like me in this multi-polar world. Though if you are inclined to listen to me please do read my investor report for the quarter. We are raising for our next fund and I’d be delighted to pitch you if you are the sort who has a spare 100K to invest in atomics, databases, decentralized compute and other oddball world changers.

In other bits of frustrating press narratives the New Yorker can soak up 34 minutes of your time with a “Silicon Valley matters in politics now more than ever” piece which is about how politico Chris Lehane is doing his job and representing the interests of an industry that still has enough money to pay his fees.

Perhaps politicians will consider not killing the golden goose that is the information economy and try listening to the folks who still make enough money to be considered good targets for more taxation about how we can keep making them tax money.

But I’m guessing if I ask Detroit how that ask to the government ends I won’t like the answer. I could ask Baltimore but Frank Sobotka and the Key Bridge are no more.

I truly thought one was supposed to get mellower in one’s old age but my politics seem to be rooted deeper than I realized. I just believe in markets and the prosperity that comes from free asssociation.