I marvel every time I fly. My life rests on miracles and small issues like repair delays and malfunctioning climate systems can make the miracle feel too much like magic and not enough like good process.
I’m happy to be home in Montana after a couple weeks on the road. Financial markets are happy with certainty. So business is looking good and optimism is emerging in all sorts of corners.
And yet we are in the worst Cyperpunk moment of my life. I think about other uniquely connected moments and it’s got nothing on this.
I expect turbulence to continue. Both when I’m flying and in the wider environment. I feel as prepared as it’s possible to be with edge positions across the board and some distance from the center of the empire. I’m glad I’m back home.
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.
Yesterday I had one of those Lyft driver experiences where your life changes from what you learned. While driving to the airport, our very chill Zoomer driver explained the different financial incentives he got for ground game political canvassing in the Montana Senate race.
As our driver explained it, Sheehy (the Republican candidate) paid fewer people more ($22/hr) than Tester (The Democratic candidate) with more flexibility and a higher number of hours, but more aggressive requirements (20 doors/hr) for success.
Naturally the young man being ambitious and motivated to earn (he clarified he was an independent politically) he chose being on the Sheehy teams as it rewarded his desire to make money. Though he did pick up some hours for Tester it just wasn’t much.
That’s the difference in the ground game in a nutshell. Ambition from a young man was rewarded and he aligned with those incentives. And the candidate won.
Im certain he was a terrific door knocker. He has the easy social graces of a local. He felt PacWest Missoula than over the divisive to plains kid but still as Montana as they come. He was white boy with face tattoos & piercings in the way of Zoomers.
His whole energy seemed to be aligning to vibes. He told us he came in to run ride shares for the big football game in Bozeman. It was a busy night and he ran out of hours (Uber tops you at 12). He was media savvy. Theo Von had just played Missoula and he was sad to miss it. Kendrick Lamar played on Spotify.
His attitude was so positive. He liked Uber, Lyft and Dashing for the flexibility. He said it didn’t feel like work because you are helping with the daily life of people. Helping others be responsible appealed to him. It’s nice to get someone who shouldn’t be behind the wheel home safely.
He used to make prosthetics but this paid better & was more social. It was fascinating learning how he picked up Uber & Lyft regionally in Montana and decided to run longer shifts for events. His attunement to supply and demand was keen. He seemed determined to maximize his time as it was his preferred lifestyle. He noticed incentives and it moves him.
If he ever see this “Hi Jacob!” It was great ride. Seeing viscerally how Montana’s senate race played out across the waves of rational economic actors living their American lives.
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
We both like to tinker with new artificial intelligence features and I have got a large training set with lots of tagging.
The synopsis it kicked out of two chatting AI hosts makes it sound like I have written a New York Times bestseller on the cultural and emotional adaption in the Great Weirdening.
So naturally instead of sharing those wins with you I’ll show the emotional underbelly. He asked it to generate my blind spots and boy did the AI read me the riot act.
Beware the AI knows you better than you know yourself
I don’t know if I am blind to these as I see them as faults. I can easily go down rabbit holes and overextend myself. I worry about my physical capacity constantly. That’s why it’s such a clear theme in my writing.
I definitely recommend this as an exercise if you have enough personal content to feed into the generator. Seeing clearly into your blind spots gives you a chance see around the corners of your own life. It’s not quite the same thing as therapy but maybe just as useful.
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
I am always shocked when people say they read anything I write. This isn’t because I don’t think I’m worth listening to but because I know attention is such a scarce commodity.
It’s so valuable we have entire industries dedicated to grabbing your attention. We don’t need to keep it necessarily we just need you to get distracted.
We downplay how well we know what works by indulging people who think they are immune to such things. Of course marketing on works on fools we sagely nod.
Of course we don’t want you to know how effectively we can move your attention let alone your opinion! You thinks anyone wants you to know propaganda works? Dunk on Jaguars new futura font. Scoff at those bot accounts.
Just know that most of marketing is Cocomelon, slot machines and dopamine hits. You can’t fight that without developing discipline which isn’t an infinite commodity. Most people don’t have much of it and aren’t even encouraged to develop. Good luck out there.
It’s fun watching an entire nation realize none of our citizens functionally have opinions of their own as all of the tribalism of the American system slides off the board into the swamp of personal animus.
The great realignment is in full swing. And no one is sure where they stand. The worst thing you believe about your enemy is surely true just as only the very best things about yourself count.
Ego versus ego blunders against each other. The slow glugging of inertia and bureaucracy and nihilism begins to tug. First time?
“We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.”
The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardiansway millions of malleable minds now.”
What do we believe as RFK Jr discusses previously quite left wing coded hippie truisms about industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical company incentives.
The institutionalists are the left now and oddly they like Monsanto. But now Bari Weiss is arguing for the value of institutionalists against Peter Thiel. Are we really in for a new era of anti-institutionalism? Do we know where the board even is anymore? Don’t slip and slide into the swamp because you don’t like someone.
Many of us read significant amounts of “need to know” publications for our professional lives. I myself read Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal every day along with more specialized media like Axios Pro-Rata and various venture and startup specific media.
Culture is different. Wanting to be in touch with the ideas that shape a nation is a luxury you don’t need to be wealthy to enjoy. To engage in ideas is to have the means to enjoy a life of the mind. You must choose to spend your precious time on it. Time is the only luxury which can’t be bought.
Media is changing as news and cultural content diverge. We used to be awash in a sea of periodicals. As a child I’d bike to the Boulder library and read it all. Thats how I became a fan of the Economist. I loved culture magazines just as much. Some still retain their pride of place through institutional nostalgia like Vanity Fair and Vogue. But can the New York Times hold a grasp on culture like it used to do?
As we face down an election with clear cultural and political bifurcations, what does it mean to be a consumer of not simply news but the culture of the moment?
Someone told me they don’t always open Dirt because it’s not framed as “need to know.” Yeah, that’s why it’s luxury content, because you don’t NEED it. Take your ass back to Axios
To be au courant means deciding where our time goes when it’s not an obligation. And I’m sorry to say to Condé Nast that their grip on culture looks more tenuous than ever.
Telescope, Arena, and Palladium are all pointing to new appetites. We want the luxury of futurism. To be caught only in the moment is to reveal a perhaps embarrassingly high time preference for algorithmically forced immediacy. “I want it now!”
Doom scrolling the news may be fun. Many billionaires spend time on Twitter because of its close proximity to sentiment. We all need to know the narratives catching attention.
But want do we want? Well who rather enjoy an essay from a writer who shows you the culture beyond your feed? Giving your attention to those who respect it will always be a luxury.
The Sephora Savings event has begun for their loyalty program shoppers. And I’m so disappointed by their holiday merchandising. It’s their downmarket I’ve ever seen the brand while somehow also being incredibly expensive.
If you are not aware Sephora is a cosmetics retailer owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH with roughly 2700 stores globally across 34 countries.
I was first introduced to the retailer when I lived in France as a teenager. The father of my exchange family worked at a perfumer that supplied very high end houses.
Sephora had just began to expand to the United States. By the time I was in college they had locations in most major cities. It was the shopping destination of choice cosmetics purchasers who didn’t like the old school department store counters that didn’t allow browsing.
They became a force in cosmetics and the higher end makeup, fragrance, skincare and haircare all competed for shelf space. And because you could browse unimpeded it became a kind of destination to trial new trends and brands.
But sometime in the last four years or so their merchandising seems to have fallen off. Stores are disorganized. Prices have risen while the line up increasingly feels like it’s catering to a more downmarket demographic.
Perhaps it was the pandemic as work from home and masking made items like lipstick less appealing. Maybe it was their expansion into partnership with lower end department stores like JC Penny’s and Kohls.
Personally I think the Biden stimulus plan plays a hand in their downfall. Cosmetics spends tend to come from disposable income though some women surely do have grooming budgets.
As more people had extra cash the appeal of the Sephora splurge became a social media phenomenon. And who spends the most time on social media? Gen Alpha and Zoomers.
Sephora went from a customer base of professional women who want to look polished to girls with TikTok accounts showing off their hauls.
The most upsetting trend by far is the Sephora Kids trend. Gen Alpha loves Sephora for the same reason adults do. You can browse and try stuff. They flock to colorful brands like Glow Recipe and Drunk Elephant. Even the New Yorker is on the case.
Gen Alpha has officially entered the beauty scene, spending more on skincare and makeup than any other age group – an impressive $4.7 billion in 2023
As I browsed the new collections, I saw all their specialty sets were packaged in fluffy teddy fabric bags in muppet bright colors.
$50+ dollars for dead muppets at Sephora
Not exactly an appealing look for anyone who might wish to carry the makeup bag to the office. And they are all twice as expensive as pre-pandemic sets.
I’m not going to spend $60 for a range of trashy splashy products packaged in the skin of dead puppets. I’m an adult and alas that’s just not what appeals to me.
But if you’ve got a 14 year old daughter that you like to spoil this is probably where she is spending it. Just please don’t let her use retinol. It’s not safe. Or better yet leave the makeup stores to adults.
