Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 164 and Building an Audience

I’ve been writing this blog with complete disregard for whether I’m building an audience. I come every single day and I put down my thoughts on this metaphorical paper and sometimes it’s worth reading and sometimes it’s shit. The rule is simple. I write every single day. And I’ve been enjoying it for six straight months. I value this habit and this space for codifying my thoughts.

Because of the personal nature of the insights and the daily routine pace of the content, I’ve been hesitant to do anything to build an audience. All the strategic things one does – have a theme, give them value, cater to their interests – will force structure into my writing. I’m not sure I want structure. If I add in rules like stick to valuable content on a broad theme I’m not sure I can do that everyday.

This means I’ve stayed away from any of the tactical audience building tactics as well. I don’t encourage signups to read this in your inbox. I don’t have any pop-ups to capture your email. I don’t promote my writing anywhere but a single link on my Twitter account once a day. I rarely out older links to past pieces even if I think it’s a terrific post with insights worth sharing. There are dozens of ways I could be increasing my reach and growing my audience that I am just not doing.

I think it feels like too much pressure. As soon as I make any promises about what content you can find here it will add friction to my one simple writing rule. And friction eats eat away at momentum. I don’t want to do anything to slow or break a successful streak. I’m proud that I’ve written something every single day for 164 days. A lot of it has been genuinely good too!

And maybe I think that my one rule isn’t good enough for anyone but me. Why should anyone else care that I write every day? Daily content that must adhere to rules is practically a guarantee for regular “meh” posts. Sometimes I just won’t be inspired. That happens. I accept that as part of the process but if I cultivate an audience will they?

Of course I could do more to promote the content with the caveats that it’s a personal site with a rule that means you will get a variety of content. If you know what you are getting into than I’m not breaking any promises. I could post to more platforms with clear indications of what I do here. That wouldn’t put any pressure on me and would be transparent with any potential readers. But I’m still hesitant. I’d love to know why.

Categories
Finance

Day 163 and Favors

Some professional arenas are driven by the favor trading of social capital.

I’ve got a gut sense that this is true on the two poles of commodity products and services. The middle ground has a lot more nuance and is thus less susceptible to favor trading, as it’s clear what drives price and value of service. With complete commodities (identical replacement value) and the non-fungible (not interchangeable or replaceable) there are not simple price or value anchors. This makes it more likely your purchase or choice will be driven by the perception of social capital. We will do favors for those with higher status or by the recommendation of those we trust.

Interchangeable commodity products trade on price, which means favors from across the ecosystem act as the grease in otherwise equivalent deals. Think suppliers of everything from lumber to textiles. If the price is the same maybe you buy from someone you like who took you out to dinner. Or you buy because that person has a good reputation in the community so you use the person your neighbor recommended. This seems intuitively true of commodity services like accounting, plumbing or roofing. Within certain bounds of quality, a 2×4 or a roofing bid should fall into the same bucket so it’s ok to pick whoever feels best. That’s why it’s susceptible to favors and social capital exchange.

On the other end, extremely differentiated non commodity products are equally prone to being tipped by favors. Think professional services like public relations that are very hard to compare. A publicist with favors to trade gets their clients the best coverage. A reporter who has a lot of sources can trade them in to get a quote for a story. Venture capital is one of the least commodified types of capital, a founder will pick one firm over another not just based on the price of a term sheet but whether others recommend them. Reputation matters a lot. Social capital is what gets a deal done, a nudge to consider someone will push you into a cap table.

Not convinced? Think about a product that exists in the middle like clothing from a brand you know but isn’t connected to you in any other way. This is the least susceptible to favor trading or the pressures of social capital.

We can intuit a dress made from quality fabrics and a recognizable brand has a set cost because the brand of the designer is not interchangeable (maybe with others in their category but Prada isn’t the same as Old Navy) and the cost of the fabric is transparent. A silk blouse can’t ever get too cheap on a one off basis. Both the brand and the fabrics set the bounds of the prices.

I didn’t really have a point in writing this other than being curious about what impacts how we pick what to purchase and what sets the bounds of our pricing. We are in a narrative cycle around inflation and work shortages which is having an impact on how willingness to to spend or hire.

So be careful if something seems too expensive but comes highly recommended. Be equally wary if something is particularly cheap even if a friend likes it. Look for the sweet spot of pricing and reputation that is based on market price beyond your in-group.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 161 and Phone Calls

A meme came across one of my group chats yeh other day that my friend said contained “strong Julie energy.” My response was oh yeah “phone calls are violence” and promptly turned it into a tweet.

Obviously I’m leaning into another extremely online joke with “thing is violence” which made for a good viral moment. But I really do hate having phone calls on my calendar. Not everyone agrees with me. I heard a lot from folks who insist that the human connection of one to one phone calls is superior to the written word.

Honestly I call bullshit on this. It is some Luddite nonsense to insist that written communication platforms are inherently inferior to voice. We thought phone calls were dangerous and weird when they were invented.

Unless I’m speaking with an entrepreneur (or my mother) I try to encourage folks to communicate with me asynchronously. Voice communication is slow and lossy. It lets you ramble and insist that tone and human emotion are more crucial than you being a crisp thinker. Which is maybe true in certain situations. Emotions and tone and context are important. But it’s not a substitute for you being a shitty communicator.

I’m not going to waste 30 minutes on something that can be communicated in a few sentences if you just think ahead and collect your thoughts. Call me an asshole but it’s not worth me slowing down my day so I can listen to someone struggle to organize their point.

And I get it, folks want to think things through together in a group. You know how much that sucks if you are the one pulling all the weight in the call? A lot! It’s exhausting. Stop expecting other people to think for you. It’s a dick move. Honestly fuck that noise.

I’m not getting on a damn phone call until I’ve exhausted all over ways of communicating and organizing a topic. Only then is all this nuance and emotional context shit a worthwhile endeavor. Do your homework before you insist on scheduling a call. It will be more productive and take less time.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 158 and The Mondays

I feel like Garfield but I don’t like Mondays. After two glorious days of reprieve, on Monday I restart the constant parade of medical appointments, biohacking activities and other habits and routines I maintain to keep my body healthy. And even with all that effort, my health is still bottom decile. The routine I lay out below can feel overwhelming with the amount of time it takes and yet if I don’t care of my body…well it won’t take care of me.

Garfield the grumpy cat falling out of his bed as he realizes it’s Monday

I woke up at 730 and made myself a breakfast of berries and homemade yogurt from raw milk. I used to be an intermittent faster but now I have to take medications with food so breakfast is back.

At 830 I read the news headlines and top articles from Bloomberg, New York Times, and the WSJ as well as listen to NPR’s morning edition. Then I need to do my physical therapy and stretching.

At 9 I go for an hour long walk. In order to keep inflammatory conditions under control, it’s recommended that I do at least an hour of low impact walking to keep limber. During my walk I will listen to more financial news and podcasts. Today I treated myself to Exit Scam by Aaron Lammer. Normally I listen to Odd Lots or something more specific to my corners of finance like Flirting with Models. I decide to go with Exit Scam as Aaron Lammer impressed me so much in Odd Lots a few weeks ago with his episode on yield farming.

At 10am I organize my supplements for the morning. I take Ray Kurzweil levels of stuff that is monitored by not one but two functional medicine doctors. This doesn’t include the slurry of powders I drink in water, just the nice easy pills.

Then I am hooked into a EEG for an experimental “brain training” protocol called dynamic neurofeedback. The best metaphor I’ve got is to defrag your mind and reorganize your pathways. It’s basically CBT with an EEG. The session lasts for 33 minutes I also sneak in a meditation during this time.

Electrodes hocked up to my head for an EEG as I do dynamic neurofeedback

11am means it’s time to lift weights. I can’t do much and I need long rest intervals but I did a full squat cycle.

1130 has me showering and doing doing cold therapy. Yes I stand under a freezing shower for 5 minutes and do Wim Hoff breathing. Somehow I also manage to wash my hair.

At noon I have a banh mi (the pork and short rib from Daikon are quite good) and finish an episode of Mythic Quest. It’s wonderful and I recommend you get Apple TV just for this and Ted Lasso. I needed the break to just hang with Alex and do nothing for a minute.

Finally at 1pm I am able to get some work done. Getting emails out, checking on deals, reading some pitch materials and checking in on portfolio companies. I should have a straight shot through to 3pm to work before therapy but my mother and I ended up on the phone.

3pm is a full hour with my therapist. Arguably the most important hour of the week, especially for getting my mind right for Tuesday’s productivity.

4pm I have a brief break to take more supplements before I go back for two hours of group therapy.

Yes you read that correctly. On Monday I have 3 hours of back to back therapy. What else can I say? I’m committed to my emotional growth. We do family systems work and group work is particularly helpful for seeing your reactive patterns and how they are or are not mirrored back. As much as I sometimes resent how much time I sink into this work I do believe it’s the best ROI on time. We repeat the patterns of our childhood unless we clear them.

Finally at 6pm l have time to do things that are not explicitly for my mental or physical health. So yeah I’ve got mixed feelings on Monday. I want to live life beyond treatments and working on myself. I wish I could live without meds, supplements, physical therapy, walking, lifting weights, meditation, and therapy. But I guess that is what Tuesday’s are for. Monday is just Monday. And yes I repeat some of those activities every single day.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 157 Brushing Your Teeth

I feel like I need a break from having daily obligations for a day or two (it was a big week) but I’m also a creator of routines and rhythm. When you’ve got a chronic disease you don’t get to skip stuff like your medication or healthy habits without some consequences.

One reason I don’t find myself burdened by writing something long form everyday is that I see it as a habit like taking vitamins, taking a daily walk or brushing my teeth. It’s just something you do.

But I can chose how much time I put into writing or how long I walk (though it seems prudent to let the electric toothbrush run it’s full 2 minute cycle). So I’m reminding myself today that it’s alright to keep today light. If you want something good to read I recommend the Thursday Style Problem.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 156 and Social Accommodations

One-on-one synchronous communication requires energy and commitment. If you have plenty of energy and few health problems maybe this isn’t intuitively obvious to you why it’s tiring for me. To understand I highly recommend the Spoonie theory of living with chronic disease. A Lupus patient Christine Miserando explains to a friend using “spoons” as a prop/metaphor.

So, she laid out a handful of spoons on the table and explained that the spoons symbolize all of a patient’s daily energy reserves. Every activity, no matter how thoughtless and automatic, depletes from the energy supply. Getting out of bed, showering, getting dressed, eating, and any number of mundane tasks threaten to deplete energy at any given time. When you run out of spoons, you can choose to borrow against the spoons of a future date, but there are consequences. When you deplete your spoons, you are bedridden. Unable to manage the simple activities of life.

I work with a limited set of “spoons” each day. If I manage my energy budget well you would never guess I’m any different than you. But I optimize my day around accommodating my firm energy budget realities. I think of it as a wheelchair or a crutch. It’s a tool that helps me extend my capacity. I can do more with less energy and thus I need fewer spoons.

One area that makes a huge difference is digital asynchronous communication. Written documents or presentations, text messages, email, Slacks, heck even voice memos are all great ways to reach me as long as you don’t expect an immediate response. Asynchronous communication means respond when I have the energy. I rarely feel overwhelmed by those as there isn’t a need to respond right that moment. I don’t have to use a spoon to get you a response. If you need FaceTime or a phone conversation then I have to work around your preferences (which might not be strictly necessary for the information it’s just what you happen to link) and then you are also asking me to prioritize your preferences over my limited energy banks. Which can feel disrespectful if you don’t suffer from strict energy budgets. You are asking me to take a double hit. Accommodating me makes me more likely to budget more energy and time on you in the future if you respect my energy now.

This means you may need to reach out more. If you expect a synchronous back and forth you may end up waiting on me. Please don’t wait on me to reach out and have energy & free time at the same time as you. You will wait a long time! Reach out and we will work it out asynchronous style.

This is why I love social media. It is easy way to connect people to what I am doing on my own tike frame I have extremely limited energy and capacity to express that one on one. If I had to I’d end up limiting my entire world to like 3 people. My energy for one to one communication is limited. As someone who is disabled and chronically ill, I feel lucky that I have access to technology that allows me to expand my capacity to connect and communicate. If I didn’t have these tools my world would be severely limited as each conversation and interaction I have takes significant resources.


Like a myriad of writers who have been sick before me (Walker Percy, Virginia Wolf to name a few) I use this tool to extend my life and influence beyond the bed in which I spend 12 hours a day. So please understand I cannot always communicate in real time or in person for everyone. It’s the highest energy usage thing I do. Let me use technology to expand my world beyond my bed. We will both get a lot more out of it and you will find that thanks to technology I can can as much done as you.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 153 and Startup Families

I’ve worked my entire career in startups. I love it. But the work barely compares to being a member of a startup family. My entire life has been lived, literally from the day I was born, in the ecosystem of families that make startups come to life.

I was “in it” from conception and all my success and traumas are in some way tied back to that luck. And I became a startup founder and eventually a startup wife. This post is about what it’s like to live in perpetual uncertainty of creation with the occasional bout of life changing money.

For everyone that has a payday that changed their lives forever, chances are they have spent decades in the shadow of that system of building, scaling, and selling companies. The paydays are sporadic, completely dependent on luck and often extremely unfair. Most of the time the early team sees nothing. I’ve personally had an exit where I got nothing. I’ve had an exit where I couldn’t afford to exercise my options so when the company that bought mine exited I didn’t see a dime. So I know how fundamentally random startup life can be. How unfair it can feel. Because today it is our turn to be the beneficiary of the unwarranted success.

My husband Alex’s long time home Stack Overflow, sold for 1.8B dollars today. And yes we are one of the 61 families that will see more than a million dollars from it. But it’s not all joyful excitement in our house. Because it’s not about not just about money. It never has been. In my family it’s always been about belief. And it’s really hard to reconcile the many competing emotions that come with a liquidity event. It’s the culmination of much work and time from everyone.

My father proudly reminds me that when I was born, he didn’t have a job as he was pitching an education startup. What a blessing to have the energy of one’s life be aligned with risk from the start. And also what a curse. My family had incredible boom years where money wasn’t a concern coupled with devastating financial and emotional ruin as companies went to zero and markets crashed. My father sacrificed so much for his dreams. He saw the value of software and took his wife and children to the promised land of Silicon Valley. And oh it was glorious. And oh how it hurt.

I have fond memories of Comdex, elaborate company cruises and board meetings during “take your daughter to work day.” I also remember my father not being there for birthdays, for dinner, for milestones because he was busy building the future. I don’t remember my parents getting divorced, because I suppressed the memories. Family trauma can be like that. The good and the bad exist at the same time. When my father went bankrupt in the Web 1 crash, I was so angry at him for not being more careful, I didn’t speak to him for years. And then I made the choice to become a founder myself. Despite my fury and sadness and hurt I too decided to live my father’s path. And then I married a man who walks it too. I guess the Bojack Horseman joke got it right.

You inherit your parents’ trauma but will never fully understand it. Haha the cop is a cat.

The day you get news you made life changing money is bittersweet because all the trauma of being a startup family member catch’s you to you. You remember the sacrifice of your whole family going back years. The long nights and missed time together. The choices to prioritize the company over your family. In our case 10 years but of course for me it’s been my entire life.

The entirety of my marriage with Alex and my entire relationship with him before was spent at Stack Overflow. I’ve seen the hard work and the pride. I’ve also seen the exhaustion and the agony when something went badly wrong. The hurt when teammates left and the fear of leaving yourself eventually. People grow up together at startups. Other more practical logistics show that not everyone wins. The hard decisions you make when it’s time to leave and you cannot afford to exercise your options are a unique pain. We just three weeks ago sold something in secondaries to afford the taxes to exercise ours. That’s timing and dumb luck. Almost absurdly so. We could easily not be in the position we are. Exits are the end goal and yet not everyone gets to make it despite equal sacrifices. It’s all random and no one deserves any of it. But it changes your life if it does happen.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 152 and Running The Play

I’m going to put $5,000 into liquidity mining and yield farming to fuck around and, hopefully, find out.

If the last year has been about laying out the primitives of decentralized finance, this summer is going to be the Layer 2 land grab and I need to learn how to stake some claims. I don’t have a clue if it is going to work but I need to start learning how to play the game by tossing the ball around. I doubt I’m going to be whatever the equivalent of a professional player but I want to learn some muscle memory. You can’t very well buy an NFL team without having ever handled a football can you? Yes I am torturing a metaphor.

On a personal psychological note, I wanted to start with a $1,000 but then I realized the difference between losing $1,000 and $5,000 isn’t material to me (which blows my mind but such is the compounded benefit of my various privileges). However, the difference between 10xing $1,000 to $10,000 and 10xing $5,000 to $50,000 is extremely material to me. $50,000 is a a material seed stage check for a company that I may want to place a long bet on.

That is roughly the cost of my medical care for an entire year (not including drugs which roughly doubles it). That is a down payment on a parcel of land to develop over the coming decades. This is a moment to learn and leverage for the benefit of my future self and family if shit goes well. And if it doesn’t no big deal. The real money is better managed than me deciding I want to toss around a ball

My Chaos thesis says it’s time to run the play on the future more generally. It’s hard to argue that I can make good puts on a chaotic future without fully experiencing some of it myself in visceral fashion. I fully expect to lose all of it trying to liquidity mine and yield farm on my own but if I don’t well then I’ve proved something to myself about the future of capital.

I need to remind myself that this isn’t representative of how I allocate capital in a diversified portfolio to preserve my future security nor is it how I’d allocate capital even in a seed stage private venture stage portfolio. But it is a worthwhile amount to put on a 100% risk basis to learn how the fuck the future of capital allocation might work.

Honestly $5,000 is a pretty cheap tuition for a fancy credentialed college class so this seems like a good deal. I will write my way through the learnings and call it an independent study.

Categories
Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 150 and Hypersigils

In the beginning there was the word……or the command line. Naming a thing used to be the literal path to power. Now we are pretty meh about the whole thing. Ritual magic is kind of a satanic panic middle brow thing in America even though we have a history of throwing in with prosperity theology. We’ve got entire evangelical communities dedicated to naming and belief with the expectation it will generate wealth and manifest prosperity. The meme magic folks who wished Trump into office were really just regurgitating Norman Vincent Peale prayers. Plenty of folks like to blame this kind of magic on like Max Weber with his Protestant Work Ethic but I’m mixed on it as I don’t think he envisioned Pentecostals when he said hard work was a moral good.

A friend of mine who knows my interest in both capitalism and its underlying energy in culture suggested I watch an old talk from illustrator and comic book author Grant Morrison.

Honestly you should pop it out and watch the whole thing if you have any interest in creation. But especially if you are interested in chaos. He discusses a term he coined called a Hyper Sigil. He is building on contemporary chaos magic which isn’t too far off from manifestation theology. He contends that bodies of art but really any form of creative work can be turned into collective signs of meaning with willpower and force. He literally means they are magic and if this interests you go read Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll. If that doesn’t no biggie the following point still stands. We have sigils in America that are pretty literally manifestations of power.

Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings… The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent… Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.

I’ve completely fallen down a Grant Morrison hole as this kind of thinking is crucial to work in attention economy trades like communications, public relations and marketing. But I’m frankly a lot more interested in the practical aspects of how he conceives of himself as a chaos magician and how he we can all affect the reality around us. I’ve purchased his Invisibles comic. When he says imagination is the fifth dimension he literally means it. Multiversity is rad.

Categories
Reading

Day 143 and Fiction

I like to read stories more than I like to read any other form of writing. I just can’t seem to get into non-fiction. History, self help, how-to just doesn’t grab me. I’ve got a particularly intense allergy to business books of which my aversion is so strong I would rather pulp a “helpful” book than crack it open.

Some of this may be because of how I perceive rest. If I have any indication that something is bettering me in any capacity it’s just not relaxing. Deliberate learning reads too much as work. It’s not that I mind edifying content, not at all, it’s that if it’s meant as some kind of life and skill improving text I’m indignant that I didn’t spend the time doing something restorative.

I happen to think that this preferences for fiction has actually made me a better thinker. Stories and hypotheticals force us to expand our mental models. If I’m being instructed in a useful topic like venture deals or better management I am learning something specific with a perspective on how things should be done. If I’m reading a story about anti-memetic weapons I’m being forced to consider entirely alien ways the world might work. There is no expectation that I find utility in the thing or that I put into practice what I’ve learned. It’s purely an expansion of my reality.

Not being pressured to accept something makes it’s eventually welcoming all the more pleasurable. You’ve simply lived your way into this new mode of being. It’s a little bit like forcing an orgasm, sure we can all do it, but is it really necessary? And yes I just compared sex to reading but that probably tells you a lot about me.

Everytime I try to integrate more utility driven books into my routine I reject the habit. I make time in the day to sit up and do the edifying books. And then I put it off for other activities. But I never put aside fiction. Every night I read for an hour before I sleep. It’s a habit so engrained it’s more necessary to my day than brushing my teeth or my morning coffee.

And so I stay with stories. I look for the most strange and different works I can find. I preference science fiction as it tends to meet that criteria but in truth I will read all genres and types. I’ve loved tight family dramas as much as a thriller. As long as something about it alters my mind even just a little I’m game. Remaking the metaphors I use is ironically the best use of both my leisure and work time. Creativity comes from the hard work of changing who you are to ever truer and more honest forms.