Tag: Trust

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 651 and Best Guess

I’ve loved the discourse of indignation that has surrounded rich men doing deals via text messages. There was lot of hand waving about the death of genius and the meaning of it all. Isn’t it such a scandal our best and brightest are just saying shit on Twitter DM?

I suppose if you never worked in startups or finance it might come as a genuine shock that rich techie people are no better or smarter than anyone else. Why the fuck do these dorks control all the money and resources then? I’d say it is because they are willing to make their best guesses.

One of my favorite scenes in Star Trek is Spock struggling through a series of calculations and informing Captain Kirk that he may need to make a guess. Kirk’s response? That’s extraordinary! Spock is naturally confused. Dr McCoy or Bones has to do some translating.


Bones: He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.
Spock: Then you’re saying… it is a compliment?
Bones: It is.
Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (The Whale Movie)

Everyone is just muddling through and making their best guesses. Even the best and brightest among us are struggling to make it all work. I’m not suggesting the folks making the Twitter deal are as good as Spock but they are just making their best guesses too.

And for whatever reason they are willing to put a lot of money, time and reputation on the line to see where their best guess might go. That’s pretty courageous in its own right.

Categories
Startups

Day 645 and Progress

I was recounting a few pieces of work that have been ongoing to some family last night. Both items were the result of choices and trends I’d been following and cultivating for well over two years. One of the items was even set to debut next week. I had some demonstrable proof points that I was right and right long before anyone else took any notice.

I was extremely pleased to recount the long arc of work that had gone into these trend lines and how they were manifesting in successful investments and media attention now.

Usually when someone asks me what I do I have a tendency to stumble around a few more or less goofy bits. I am retired from working in propaganda. I am a house wife that manages the family budget (this works only with stay at home mom or high net work wealth managers). If I’m feeling chatty I explain the Thursday Styles Problem. If I’m not feeling chatty I’ll just say I’m an investor. Occasionally I will make an attempt to explain the founder to angel investor to venture capitalist career arc.

It’s not actually that easy explaining work that involves years of waiting. If you work for an established name brand venture capital firm it’s probably easier than being an angel investor with a small syndicate or seed fund. But even if you are Sequoia it still takes a decade on average to prove out your bets.

I’m thrilled to have concrete examples to point with any of my investment thesis points. I’m lucky that I have exposure to media so I occasionally get the chance to share what I work on online and in print. Not everyone has the skills to be as visible as I am. But it sure felt great to make some progress. And yes I promise I’ll share publicly when I can.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 644 and Status Equivalence and DAO Leadership

Capitalism has largely been a triumph of hierarchy as an organizing mechanism. As we evolved from mercantilism into corporatism, appointing and holding accountable a single point of failure in a chief executive officer has become an effective shortcut for managing complexity when deploying capital. Leadership is responsible for the outcome.

The aphorism “failure is an orphan but success has many fathers” abuts against the reality that while we love to lavish praise upon executives, monarchs and other singular nexuses of responsibility it’s often not reflected in reality. Our bias in the post-industrial revolution has been towards leadership via individual even as post Enlightenment values valorize democracy and community participation. It’s been a tension for since the Industrial Revolution. America exemplifies this as the country most committed to both participatory federalism and corporate capitalism.

I am particularly interested in this tension as I believe we may be on the crux of larger organizational needs and are seeing them begin to coalesce in crypto. As decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, make an attempt to become the new corporate governance structure in Web3, it seems worth studying the question of whether leadership is a singular or collective exercise for humans.

What does the historical and anthropological record have to say about how we organize? What are we evolved to prefer and are we capable of evolving further?

The bias we operate with now is great man theory. But what if that is not just wrong but not even the predominant form of human organization through history? Critics of cooperation might do well to explore this in particular.

I came across a Rob Henderson blog post which is an extended overview of a piece of sociology Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by the UCLA anthropologist Christopher Boehm. According to Rob’s post, the main question of this work is whether humans are by nature hierarchical or egalitarian. And it turns out our hunter gatherer forefathers were mostly egalitarian. The bulk of our history is egalitarian.

The anthropological record along with research on extant modern hunter-gatherers suggests that for most of human history we have been egalitarian, defined as “status equivalency among the decision-makers of a group.”

Rob Henderson reviews Hierarchy in the Forest

If you extrapolate this into a modern corporate context, the C-Suite or executive team, or perhaps even the founding team, are roughly the status equivalent decision makers. Maybe there is a first among equals in the CEO or founder but they can, in theory, be replaced by a board. But what if instead of a C-corporation you are managing a cooperative like a DAO? What then?

Apparently we humans are rather good at maintaining status equivalence. Richard Wrangham’s Goodness Paradox discusses how humans have self domesticated to avoid too much resource and power aggregation.

Over time, early humans eliminated those who were overtly aggressive. They killed or ostracized upstarts hungry for power; men with aggressive political ambitions. Other men would quietly organize to commit collective murder of troublesome male

Rob Henderson on Goodness Paradox

Moral communities evolve and punish those who deviate from acceptable standards. If you are too ambitious as an individual we swoop in as a species. It seems a bit miraculous in that light that we live in an era of kleptocracy and power consolidation given our tendency to murder upstarts. Great man theory isn’t all that sustainable. Or is it? Perhaps it’s that we asset influence obliquely. I’d wager any woman would agree.

Oftentimes, headmen display “self-effacing” behavior. Headmen and informal leaders usually obtained their roles through talent in hunting or warfare, storytelling ability, or congeniality. They rarely assert direct authority.

Rob Henderson on Boehm

If indirect authority is a sustainable organizational preference in the anthropological record, perhaps corporations are more amenable to reconstruction as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) through the principle of status equivalence.

The autonomous part seems the trickiest, but decentralized authority inside tribal organizations are at least recognizably human. If as a group we disliked a status or resource hungry “great man” we leaned on the leadership preferences of status equivalent equals and forced you out.

I see no reason we can’t write in similar parameters into a smart contract as an experiment. At the first hint of a rug pull let the burning begin! We are already seeing political battles for resource allocation inside bigger organizations like MakerDAO. Crypto may be a worthy space for experienced leadership to show that figureheads like CEOs or founders are not the crucial lynchpin for progress and stability we believe.

Which would be quite a balm to me personally as I’m deeply skeptical of authoritarianism as a solution for our technical and social problems. I’d much rather we explore the wisdom of past tribal knowledge to guide us than look to a mythical great man to save me.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 643 and Courage

My courage is uneven at the moment. I have a specific professional project that I am struggling to push myself on. I tell myself that it is something I want, but if the truism “having is evidence of wanting” is any indication, I am struggling to convince myself I really want it. Except I am fairly sure I do want it and I’m just scared.

I used to love it when people said no to me. I was the kind of “chip on my shoulder” young person that used a no to fuel myself. “I’ll show them” was somewhere between a mantra and a battle cry.

But now I find myself anxious to publicly go out and see just how many people will say no. I don’t know if I find it as motivating as I used to. I tell myself I don’t mind but perhaps some other unexamined element of reaction makes me afraid.

This could all be an elaborate ego protection ruse on my part. Maybe I still love the motivation that comes from no. Maybe I hate it. But I have not really done enough fucking around to find out yet to know one way or other.

My gut instinct is to simply declare in public my goals and a timeline to force myself into it. But then I’ve been working through my tendency to rely on willpower and force to motivate myself. Perhaps a big forcing function will simply send me back into my old coping mechanisms of addictive overwork.

I’ve always punished myself by doing things. If I am anxious I almost always find ways to kick a hornet’s nest to force an action rather than gentle build momentum.

Whatever I do I would prefer I do it with as much gentleness and respect for my inner child as possible. I am prone to abusing my inner child’s feelings by disregarding her fear or her desire to keep distance from the rest of the world. I deserve better than forcing misery onto my inner child.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 637 and Loyalty

I was discussing with a friend their planned to trip to London to capitalize on sterling parity. The pound and the dollar being worth the same amount is an opportunity for American travelers. The conversation turned to optimizing for travel points structures, maintaining status, and other loyalty programs. I suppose anyone who finds traveling opportunities during a currency crisis almost certainly enjoys a good deal and being rewarded for consumption during hard times.

The pandemic upset so many consumer patterns that it’s a little bit hard to remember why we bought some of the things we did in the past. We’ve got vague positive memories and we are attempting to recreate them. Travel is inarguably one of the most confused spaces in the wake of those upheavals. Status got rolled over so when travel opened back up stuff got weird. Lounges got more crowded just as business travelers were being removed from the financial base of the space. It led to a lot of chaos this summer as the economics got reliance’s.

The most loyal travelers got back on the proverbial road in the aftermath and were met with materially worse products despite paying just as much as the remembered in the past. For all of the rich yuppies who showed up to say Italy or other Mediterranean vacations, they were reminded that travel wasn’t so glamorous without the perks. And it certainly made more than a few of us consider the economics of being on the road.

There are other industries where loyalty is being rewarded with worse producers and shittier user experiences. I’ve been experiencing quite a bit of disappointment with the offerings in cosmetics recently. I’ve complained endlessly about shittier packaging and lower grade formulations even though I haven’t really cut down my spending any. Like the loyal travelers, I am putting up with less quality as I don’t really want to simply stop a hobby I enjoy.

But how long will residual loyalty and affection remain? If travel to London must be combined with currency debasement and travel rewards perhaps our loyalty is not endless. Consumers often underestimate our power with industry because it takes them some time to adapt. But if we don’t change our behaviors in response to dwindling quality or service the incentive structures don’t force improvements. The balance is cost of loyalty.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 632 and The Yips

I think I might have a case of the yips. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s most commonly referred to as type of performance anxiety associated with experienced athletes. They suddenly find themselves unable follow through on techniques they otherwise know well.

Though as it turns out it’s not actually a form of anxiety at all, but rather a failure to consistently execute on muscle memory in experienced professionals which manifests as a loss of fine motor skills or a struggle to follow through on common chains of decision making, especially ones that are subconscious.

You might also associate it with analysis paralysis, a phenomenon in which someone has access to all relevant information but gets lost in decision making rather than simply acting on their reasonable informed instinct. One’s ability to simply execute what is in front of them is diminished not through lack of knowledge of experience but rather inaction.

I am an experienced startup operator. I am also a competent angel and early stage investor in private markets with a speciality in technology driven businesses. At this point, I’m not only well into my career with a number of concrete successes (I’ve built and sold companies) but I’ve also got generational memory from being the daughter of a startup operator. And yet I’m still nervous about swimming into the deep end of my investing career. I’ve got the the yips.

I hadn’t noticed that I had the yips till I came back from a wilderness medical incident technician certification course. I was doing a hands on course meant for front line first responders in rural and back country scenarios. It was heavy on scene and scenario execution so you could build muscle memory and quick response times.

In medical emergencies, especially in a wilderness context, you have limited resources and personnel. Acting swiftly with the knowledge and materials at hand is crucial. If you don’t take action, someone will die. Startups are famously resource constrained environments. Paul Graham of Y Combinator has an entire framework that assume you are default dead unless you take action to assure survival. This is as as applicable mindset for wilderness survival as it is for startups.

I had some sort of instinctual foresight that this wilderness medicine course would be useful not only practically in day to day life as someone who lives in Montana, but also as a mindset for my investing work on the chaotic thesis that the world is getting more complex. And that complexity has consequences for all of us.

The more chaotic the world, the harder it is to act with confidence as complexity builds.

Only by getting outside of my own skill set and professional world did I finally see how much I’m holding myself back from acting. Whether it is out of fear or analysis paralysis I do not know. But I do know that if one does not act the consequences can be dire. We are all default dead unless we make decisions to remain alive. There is no safety or progress to be found by staring at your problems and becoming overwhelmed by the challenge. If there is a cure for the yips it is to simply keep playing no matter how hard the game becomes.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Preparedness

Day 628 and Intensity

If my brain is a sponge I think I’ve been sopping up more than I am designed to handle. But I am holding on and facing a lot of new information and acting on it quickly.

I’m at a wilderness medical first responder class. And I’m the odd duck out on the class. Everyone else is living with much harder realities than I do. They are the ones that fight our wars. Provide our security. Fight our fires. They keep up with where our most vulnerable live. It’s an on the margin make your best call world.

My body can feel that this reality is very different from what I live with and on different class and wealth bands. People that are more buffered from harsh realities often don’t want to face the costs of our lifestyles. But we are not in a morally neutral systems. And a lot of violence still happens on the margins.

I feel somewhat invigorated by the immediacy of decision making in these chaotic environments. If you are in a natural disaster like a wildfire your capacity to react calmly under extreme conditions is a given. So naturally we arm these people with more agency and skills as it’s a set of problems with a lot of nuance and grey areas too.

I am frankly exhausted even though I didn’t do anything that intense. I did some traumatic brain injury drills. And I worked on how to properly stint and secure broken bones if you are in the back country and need to hobble back in to society. I learned a lot about agency and context and the need for high emotional intelligence as you cope with those who are in need or duress.

I suppose with that in mind, it’s no surprise that I’d like to enjoy a good long night of sleep and a big breakfast in the morning. One has got to enjoy living when you have the chance.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 626 and Learning

I’ve been slowly making my way through a Korean show on Netflix called Extraordinary Attorney Woo. It’s about a young woman with autism who has a gift for the law. It’s warm hearted and charming and a bit of a relief to watch if you have autism or are on the spectrum. I highly recommend it.

The show really pulls on my heartstrings. The episode I am currently watching features the struggles of 10 and 11 year old kids who are at after school academic centers. I won’t ruin the plot but a young man sets out to “liberate” the kids by letting them play. I found myself tearing up the show went about discussing the need for healthy playtime.

I hated going to school even though I love learning. I found so much of the pressures of school upsetting. Being inside, being around lots of people and loud noises, and just generally being obligated to things like homework and deadlines to be exhausting and anxiety inducing. I found myself tearing up watching these Korean kids in similar situations.

I was quite lucky to have a mother who sent me to Waldorf schools and even the occasional home school year. When I could pace myself I’d would rapidly out run the curriculum. I just needed breaks and playtime and my own opportunities to self direct. I hated discipline from the outside but had plenty of my own if given the chance to be self directed.

I’m still an autodidactic type as an adult. This week I am taking a wilderness medical incident certification course. I’ve got some strong sense that this is meant to wrap around some wider learning experience about the practicalities of living in a more chaotic world. It’s a bit of learning by doing. Some perspectives have to be unraveled first hand.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 621 and Pain’s Anxiety

Before I was diagnosed with my spinal condition ankylosing spondylitis, I didn’t really understand that I was in pain. I know that sounds weird, but I just knows I felt like shit. I hadn’t yet pinpoint the origins of the crisis in my own body. I was a stranger to myself.

Back then getting a diagnosis involved a lot of questions about my mental health. Are you anxious? Would you consider taking an anxiety medication just to see if it help? Are you sure it’s not all in your head? No doctor I’m not sure of anything that’s why I’m asking you.

The thing is I did feel anxious. My central nervous system was in a perpetual state of fight or flight from the pain. I had tachycardia. I was twitchy. I wasn’t a sleeping well. I didn’t want to be touched. It hurt too much. I was exhausted all the time and felt overwhelmed that no one seemed to know what was wrong with me. I’m lucky no one asked me if I was depressed or I might have been put on Prozac.

I’m one of the lucky ones. My chronic disease has a simple blood panel and physical exam to diagnose it. It only took me a few specialists to get to a rheumatologist.

I fear I would have been given an anxiety diagnosis and told it was all in my head if I’d had something more complex. But thankfully we untangled that any anxiety or depression I felt was simply a function of being in an inflammatory condition so acute every movement was painful. You’d have a racing heart and a fear of movement or touch too if everything was painful to the touch

The thing is I am scared of my pain. I do regularly get caught in fight or flight fear responses if the pain appears and I’m not prepared for it. I am militant about certain aspects of self care and my biohacking as I fear flares. I fear the drugs that are required when it isn’t controlled. It makes me anxious to need drugs at all to control my symptoms. Especially in America where a war on drugs has made it hard to need anything stronger than Advil.

Everything about pain and it’s treatment is anxiety inducing in America. And that’s a hard comorbidity to live with in a disease. As if pain wasn’t enough, the latent fear that you might not be believed lingers.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 611 and Consumer Packaged Goods

As Ive mentioned, I’m in a heavy “bitches be shopping” mode as I’m settling into a new home that is 5x larger than anything I’ve ever lived in.

I’ve purchased furniture, home decor, sheets & towels, work boots, denim, dry goods, storage bins & racks, paint, curtains, toiletries, vitamins, over the counter medications, and cosmetics. I’ve really “enjoyed” the full spectrum of American retail in all its consumer glory. Makes me feel all patriotic.

I’m lucky that I have several decades of experience in the dark arts of consumption studies and consumer marketing to guide me through. And even with that knowledge, I feel like I keep getting ripped off.

What is wrong with shopping in America?

Most folks are keenly aware of rising costs and supply chain troubles coming out of a pandemic that was treated with stimulus and zero interest monetary policy. Stimmy checks & a society wide health scare had all kinds of unintended consequences on everything. But the end result is everything feels more expensive. And also shittier.

One argument is that shrinkflation has come for America.

Shrinkflation, also known as the grocery shrink ray, deflation, or package downsizing, is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality.

Wikipedia

It’s a maddening phenomenon as brands and retailers do their best to hide the basic fact that you are paying the same amount for less. We are a nation being gaslighted by an array of institutions that we’ve been raised to consider our pride and joy. It’s part of our national myth that supermarkets won the Cold War. American brands can be trusted. American brands are the best.

American brands are subject to market forces not central planning. And those forces are choppy at best. Which is how we ended up with our favorite popsicle letting us down.

Welch’s juice ice bars popsicles shown side by side. One is 1.5 oz and one is 2oz. Both cost the same at Costco but the 2oz is from 2020 before shrinkflation.

The otter pop’s my husband favors have gone from 2oz to 1.5oz but have stayed the same price at Costco. It’s not a huge change. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it except we had a couple older ones we bought early in the pandemic and were able to compare. It was a small betrayal but at least we knew it and could accept the increased cost.

But imagine if you weren’t aware of the macroeconomic forces at play. Or if you weren’t a careful observer of consumption and shopping. What if you were just a kid that got duped by a popsicles?

The compounding effect of lower standards of living is making us all go a bit stir crazy.

I suspect we are all experiencing a little bit of crazy-making from the subtle ways in which we can no longer trust our brands and retailers. It feels downright un-American. And I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s a contributing factor to the general sense of unease and institutional distrust. If you can’t trust American consumerism, well we don’t really have much left.