Tag: Trust

Categories
Aesthetics Finance Startups

Day 390 and Pitches

So I think pitching is bullshit. My husband has a great analogy. He thinks an hour long pitch to an investor is like a white board coding interview. Have any of you ever done developer work that didn’t have access to StackOverflow and Google? Yeah didn’t think so. It’s a completely artificial environment. Real work is collaborative and input driven and not at all tied to your capacity to memorize and perform on the spot.

I think this is pretty revealing. We force intuitive input driven thinkers, our founders, into a situation where they have little to no feedback. They can’t get anything from us as investors for like twenty minutes. They lead an investor by the nose through a narrative but what if it’s a narrative the VC doesn’t care about. Then what you lose the deal? Fuck no.

You should anchor a conversation based on expressing interest and seeing together where the biggest vision might lay. I’ve legitimately talked to founders who can see their way into imploding corporate legal apparatus or building clean energy through on chain gaming. That is some science fiction level shit. But could they tell me that in a 12 page deck? Fuck no they would look insane. But I want to see you for who you are.

So if you want to pitch me just hop on over to a Telegram chat or my Twitter DMs. Let’s talk and learn and share and then I can really see your passion and vision and we can both avoid canned performative shit.

You want an investor that sees you for you. I want a founder that is building with such a keen passion it’s all I can do to stop from wiring the money that day. Our incentives can align from first contact. So pitch me however you like to communicate. Plus, don’t we all die inside a little every time someone sends a Calendly link?

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 383 and Good at What I Am

Startups are a privilege. You meet people who are exceptional at what they do. Brilliant qualified people who are so capable you could spend your whole life working and only achieve 10% of their innate capacity by natural talent. But the real differentiator is never the talent. It’s the acceptance of who you are. You can’t just be good at what you do. You have to be good at being yourself.

Be good at what you do. Then be good at what you are. Startups require both.

I struggle with this and watch many others who struggle as well. I am brilliant at connecting and amplification but terrible at details and logistics. I used to hate this about myself. I’d beat myself up when I’d get performance reviews that said I wasn’t detail oriented. I thought it was a moral failing. But guess what? It’s just a regular failing. I doubt I’d be great at my actual natural talents if I also had to be good at my failures. Accepting your light means accepting what cast shadows equally.

It’s hard to do. Our coping mechanisms praise us for our good traits and claim full responsibility for achieving them on our own merits. Equally we disown and assume divine intervention or forces outside our control drive our vices. We cannot be responsible for our failures. We only like to take responsibility for our wins.

And I get it. Accepting your shadows is hard. Our parents and our social circles show us who we are supposed to be. Show us what to strive for in the good life. If we are loud we are told to shush. If we are shy we are urged to socialize. Acceptance oh who we are isn’t encouraged. And for good reason. We must push to grow. To become an adult requires effort and work. But we must always remember the ultimate goal in becoming an adult is to become who you are. If you never accept yourself you will never be truly great. And the road is long so start getting good at being who you are.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 368 and Eating Disorder Season

Warning! Before you go any further this post will discuss food, emotional relationships with food, disordered eating, diets and diet culture.

Today is the first Monday of the New Year. That means it is weight loss season online. Despite me having many positive healthy habits including walking, weight lifting, meditation, supplements, sleep hygiene and a moderately nutritious eating routine I found myself upgrading my wellness applications and panicking at stepping on a scale. January is the month where the “wellness” industrial complex gets you. Even though I spend a small fortune on my health even I am vulnerable to the season’s exhortations.

December was a little rough for me so I put on some fat and lost muscle mass. I had an injury that kept me off my feet and then I had Covid. So my routines got a little fucked. Also two towns next door completely burned down in a terrifying urban firestorm. So like it was ok that I lost some progress.

But rather than reintroduce slowly and moderately my good habits, I’m finding myself desperately tempted to go over board on January changes. I spent $199 upgrading Gyroscope to get their nutrition tracking and a health coach. Despite knowing full well what I need to do in order eat better. The trouble is that I fucking hate doing it. So I thought let’s try a health coach why not!

I’ve had a mixed relationship to food my entire life. One of the defining traumas of my childhood was my pediatrician telling my mother I needed to eat more dairy. I hated the stuff and refused milk & yogurt as small child. My doctor’s solution (and I am not making this up sadly) was to not allow me any food till I ate dairy.

My mother attempted to follow his instructions but was stymied by the fact that I wouldn’t budge. I was a stubborn child. I didn’t care that I would be allowed to eat if I just had a spoonful of yogurt or a sip of milk apparently. I went on a full hunger strike. Fearing the worst as her daughter went days without eating, my mother eventually caved but the damage was done. Baby’s first eating disorder!

I continue to have all or nothing attitudes on food. I love to fast because it’s a total solution. I feel in control. My inner child continues to see it as an act of setting emotional and physical boundaries when the adults around me overwhelmed mine. Is also happen to hate running kind of caloric deficit. I’ve got health challenges that do better if I’m at maintenance calories.

Now I’ve successfully managed to heal an out of control immune system and I’ve overcome a significant rheumatoid condition so you’d think “being fat” wouldn’t be a worry of mine. I am proudly an avid biohacker. I actually enjoy taking care of my body these days. But it’s so very easy to slip up in a culture where we treat our bodies as moral failures. Just take a look at Covid discourse and you will see America’s obsession with categorizing each other’s health decisions as “good” and “bad”!

So I urge you to be gentle with yourself in this environment. I’ve written extensively about how to slowly introduce healthier habits in ways that are measurable and kind to yourself. Because I know how hard it is to do so. There is a joke in fitness communities that you should only ever trust a former fatty because the naturally slim just don’t get it. It’s insulting and moralizing in its own way, but it’s also a bit true. Trust your health to the chronically ill as they know how to survive the system.

January can feel like eating disorder season (or at least the first two weeks or so) and it’s alright to participate in your own wellness experiments just as it’s alright to do nothing at all. Be gentle with yourself. I know it’s a tall order. I just spent $200 in a panic about being fat so I know of which I speak. Good habits and a healthy body aren’t made in the first week of the year. That actually takes a lifetime.

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 365 and Normalcy Bias

Today officially marks a full year of writing every single day. What should be a sense of accomplishment is mostly a sense of comfort at my own discipline. It’s an edge. I like to be improving and that takes good habits. Writing daily been an enormously positive influence in my daily life. I don’t have any plans to stop but as with hang habit you take it one day at a time.

I’m writing from Boulder Colorado after one of the worst natural disasters our state has ever seen. Though the experience was entirely unnatural. Gusting winds over 100mph combined with bone dry grasslands to start a raging wildfire in the middle of the suburbs. The front range hasn’t seen snow yet this season so Chinook winds must have rolled over a downed power line. The wildfire destroyed two towns in my county in the space of a few hours. Last I heard over 500 homes were lost.

I’m devastated. I feel genuinely traumatized even as I’m safe. But of course I feel the trauma of the hour. This is my home. My neighbors lost their homes. All the roads that are closed are my daily routes. My fucking grocery store was burning. Another climate driven disaster makes the national news. But it’s not somewhere else. It’s my home. Better active shooter I guess. A comparison we can make in Boulder. Gallows humor.

I was working through most of the fire. Just letting the apocalypse unfold around me as I went about my business. 8 miles away the world was on fire but I had no evacuation order. No reason to stop working. I closed the blinds as I found the hurricane force gusts unsettling. They shook the house. I would check social media on my phone in between pitches and worked on financial modeling. I took an Ativan to calm myself down so I could focus.

I had explicitly known something like this was coming. Maybe not this crisis. But more weird shit was inbound bWe named our fund chaotic.capital. Precisely because we believe stochastic shit will dominate the next decade. We are betting the future will be chaotic so we must bake flexibility into everything. There is good money to be made betting on chaos. Normally bias will lose you money. Chaos is good for business.

So what does that have to do with writing every day? I want to say something wise about bearing witness. But I don’t think I’m capable of living so large with this much fear around me. I didn’t expect the exercise of daily writing would mean writing through crisis. But I should have. Normalcy bias effects me too.

This year showed me stochastic chaos regularly. After only six days of writing the insurrection in Washing’s D.C. happened. And so I wrote because I made the commitment. And then a few months later a man shot dead 10 people in a grocery store down the road. And so I wrote. Because it’s my habit. I didn’t expect to be covering so much chaotic shit in a public journal.

And yet I must have in some sense predicted that life would take this path even if I wasn’t directly in it. Or I wouldn’t have named the fund chaotic. I wouldn’t proudly discuss prepping. This is the world I live in. Chaos is a given and I’m going to work towards a better future. I’m documenting it as it comes with these essays. And I guess we will see how far it goes. Thanks for joining me for the first year.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 359 and SOS

A few days ago I wondered what project or cultural artifact was going to grab our mutual cultural attention during the Christmas vacation week? Something always does. One year it was fucking Quora if you can believe it. This year I’m ready to call it for $SOS at least if you are into Web3 and crypto economics.

On fucking Christmas Day these degenerates drop a contract to let anyone claim tokens who has ever purchased an NFT on the OpenSea marketplace. And people went ape shit. Suddenly someone had taken all the visible contributions from OpenSea and manifested them in a token and said this is ours. Fuck corporate dominance of profit your users hold the real value. I’ve never seen anything so ballsy. Last year when Wall Street Bets decided to taken on hedge funds I felt like we had entered a new era of community behavior.

An emergent community has swum up from the sea and eaten the lunch of a supposedly greedy centralized platform. Web3 just attacked what we didn’t even realize was Web2. A crypto darling turned parable for centralization in the space of a few years. $SOS seemed to say community owned this value all along. The airdrop showed us the balance of power in a web3 community if we all work together. I’m so impressed by the sheer cultural force of the statement. It could all go horribly awry but god damn if it isn’t utopian.

I’ve got not fucking clue if this is a legitimate contract or not. I’m not going to FUD. But from a first principles, we are building a new internet where the incentives of the users align with the technology statement, then this is quite a shot across the bow. Also I’m pretty sure this makes it harder for OpenSea to IPO if their user base is in open rebellion against who gets rewarded.

The thing is I believe Devin to be a well meaning and genuinely forward thinking guy. He’s a terrific communicator that set out with the utopian intentions that we all do. But we are moving so fast with breaking cultural norms and acceptable societal level rewards for contributions to an economy that I think we might have just spiraled up to some kind of cultural singularity. Crypto might just be moving that fast. Whatever happens this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen from a startup. Score one for the anonymous degens.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 345 and Trust

I’ve not always been accepting of my own weaknesses. Instead of focusing on how well I can hone my super powers, I’ve occasionally fixated on where I lack innate talent. I’m not particularly adapt at operations or logistics but I feel bad about it. I am however genuinely top tier when it comes to narrative & attention. Somehow I don’t feel equally good about this.

I’ve tried to work in teams where my talents & weaknesses are balanced out by others. I like teamwork now in a way I didn’t fully appreciate when I was younger. I’ve learned to trust my own value. And I am able to emotionally trust the people around me.

The psychological safety that comes from trusting yourself and others is a lifelong process. Even a few years ago I’d struggle to not compulsively overwork to overcome my weaknesses. When I should have been honing my unique talents.

I’ve got an opportunity over the next few days to really trust one of my teams. We’ve got a deliverable that isn’t in my area but I’d crucial to success. I could spend my extra energy worrying over it and making an attempt to contribute just so I felt useful. Or I can emotionally let go and appreciate the trust I have in others.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 331 and No Going Back

We were never getting rid of the downstream effects of the pandemic. All the joking about the “before times” was just our collective psyche exhibiting normalcy bias. There is no going back. Inequality is rising and people are struggling and attitudes have ossified. Not because of some bizarre conspiracy but because you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Every restriction and panic is just another day where the world gets more unfair and the prepared and the wealthy have more moves than those at the bottom. And so more people suffer and the gyre widens.

The thing about being privileged is that it compounds over time. Every instance of success and every lucky break build on each other. The math is an inexorable process that leads to one conclusion. The rich get richer.

The reverse is true too. Every barrier, every bill, every setback, every issue compounds too. An object in motion stays in motion.

If this all seems very unfair, I regret to say there is absolutely nothing any individual can do about the physics of success. The best you can do is try to bring others up with you. Educate them on the logic of success and arm them so they can begin to compound their own.

You can’t do it at mass scale. Individual outliers will distort every set of rules and every game within a handful of moves and the accretion of influence begins anew. There is no such thing as revolution. There is only hoping you can enable enough people to change the direction for good. That enough people chose collectively to make better choices for each other.

Anyone who preaches anything other than individuals aiding each other in freedom will have to acknowledge that all systems are prone to corruption and self serving. There is no level playing field.

Some of us just have enough ego to think if it is our people and our tribe or our political party in charge we’d do it better. That’s a lovely lie and history is riddled with the graves of societies that fell to egos of Caesars and strong men. Humans wouldn’t be interesting without our sins. We have to chose to overcome them and accept responsibility for their consequences rather than put our problems at the feet of elites.

And this unfortunate logic can lead one of two ways for America. We can either accept the personal freedom and self responsibility of each other. Or we can get smaller as a nation. What’s more likely to happen is the inequality widens. The rich and productive will write their own destiny. They will take advantage of the sifting sands. New fortunes will be built on pandemic logic and technology.

And the insecurity of the chaos will erode the positions of most fragile members of society and they will fall further as we climb higher. We will force rules on them we don’t abide by. Masks, testing, vaccines, restrictions of movement become for thee but not for me. We will restrict their capacity because it doesn’t affect our lives. It’s corrosive and unequal and cruel. It’s entirely without empathy. And we are accepting that because our stars are rising. The money is being made off this societal transition. It’s already in motion.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 330 and Vitamin Not Pill

I was reading a fellow investor’s thesis page and noticed one lens they use for investing is whether a product is a “vitamin or a pill” with the insinuation that pills are inherently better investments than vitamins, as one is a nice to have for a business and the other is a must have. Now I can’t speak to this as an investment thesis, though I largely agree, but I do disagree on a wellness basis.

Preventative medicine is just as necessary as interventional medicine. In some cases more so, as getting ahead of a disease’s inflection point should be the humane way we handle our medical needs. We are just often too focused on short term impacts to see the value of solutions that build over time. Think of it as the quarterly reports of healthcare. Why build for the future when the market judges by each 10K?

The nature of panic may make us inclined to spend heavily on something that has become acute. But that does not make it inherently more effective or worthwhile. It’s just the immediately necessary. It just means we need higher minimum effective doses to see a result.

What we often ignore is compounding effects of wellness interventions are far superior to the mitigation of a pharmaceutical over time. Most of us would prefer to not require the costly (both biologically and financially) medicines that keep us together. This is not to say that I am not deeply grateful for all the drugs I take. But rather that I have seen incredible value in what we deem “lifestyle interventions” and other “nice to have” vitamin style supplements and protocols.

And while it takes much longer to see their effects, the compounding positive effects often wildly outperform anything that might be dubbed a pill. The trouble probably boils down to switching costs and time to pay off. Which is why an investor would prefer a pill to a vitamin. But just because something has a longer lifecycle doesn’t make it inherently less sticky. Or less effective. Or crucially any less profitable. The only way we ever see the deeply positive effects of habitual practice and dedication is to do the work. That work is boring, repetitive and low payoff. Until, most times years in the making, you see how putting your future self over your present self is what is giving you the future you always dreamed would be yours.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 329 and Thanksgiving

I have so much to be thankful for this year. I don’t have a lot of poetic thoughts on it, though I have written extensively about my feelings on some of the bigger moments of the year. So click those if you want essays as this is going to be mostly a list.

I’m grateful to have recovered my health in 2021. I’m equally grateful I had the money, support and willpower to achieve it.

I’m grateful I have a husband who understands me and gives me the love, support and freedom to be me.

I’m grateful for having a space to share my thoughts daily, and rather than be punished for speaking my mind, I am rewarded for it. That includes WordPress, Twitter and all the people who made the internet possible.

I’m grateful I can live in Colorado and still do the same work I previously thought I would only do in New York or San Francisco.

I’m grateful my mother sent me to Waldorf school. I’m grateful I have a father who supported my development as a full human being.

I’m grateful I can afford to buy whatever dumb shit I like for my hobbies which range from expensive skincare to preparedness.

I’m grateful I can consider buying a home that will have the capacity to provide safety even as the world around me has risks.

I’m grateful to have business partners who share my vision for investing and founders and entrepreneurs who allow me to help them.

I’m grateful I never have to worry if there is enough money in the bank to buy a book.

I’m grateful that the supply chains have held so that I have an apple pie that I ordered online the day before the biggest holiday of the year which I picked up in my car that I was able to buy even as global trade was strained and our currency was inflated.

I’m grateful for the time to pursue emotional capacity and the money to pay for it.

I’m grateful for chemistry and the wide variety of pharmaceuticals and supplements that I take every day.

I’m grateful for my iPhone, it’s applications and games I use daily on it that have connected me to a world of people virtually that I love as truly as the people I interact with physically.

I’m grateful for shitposting.

I’m grateful William Gibson still writes. And I’m grateful that Twitter has let me interact with my favorite writers.

I’m grateful for West End BBQ and Spruce Confections.

I’m grateful for my raw milk dairy cooperative and it’s farmer Daphne.

I’m grateful for sunscreen and for apple cider vinegar.

I’m grateful for Costco.

I’m grateful for my parents making good decisions when I was younger that have compounded into incredible luck and prosperity for me.

I’m grateful to be American and I’d like that to remain a thing for which I am grateful.

I’m grateful for democracy, the enlightenment, free elections, a free press and liberalism.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 324 and Seneca

I was once asked by someone how I can act so quickly on major life decisions when they needed to mull a change over for months. I found the question confusing as I don’t think of myself as being particularly fast or even impulsive.

Well, that’s a lie, I’m impulsive about lots of shit but never anything of consequences. When it’s a major life decision I gather information for years so if the opportunity presents itself I’m prepared to act immediately. I take the bias towards action seriously.

But I only make a move when I believe I’ve crossed a threshold of information where the benefits of action clearly outweigh the benefits of inaction. I’ll make a move when I think I’ve got a better chance of winning than losing. Or when it’s clear that if I don’t act at all I’ll have a losing hand. But I generally only needs the odds to be tilted to a plurality of probability. Especially if it’s an action I can undo later. It’s not always easy to know if you can win. Sometimes the best you can do is recognize that inaction is weakening your position.

Part of my comfort in my process for taking action is I am a researcher by nature. If I’m interested in a topic I’ll begin with exposure right away. I’ll do the light skimming research the internet has enabled through articles and videos. I’ll dive deeper and purchase books. I’ll find experts in the field and begin following them. If I have questions I’ve got a habit of emailing the source. And then I’ll start doing what I can to implement my research with small scale experiments.

Chances are if you see me making a major move it’s because I’ve been considering the possibility of action for years. I like to be prepared to act immediately if an opportunity presents itself. If a situation presents itself I want to be ready. That way I’m positioned for luck. Seneca had it right. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. But you can only have luck if you are willing to do the work of preparing and be ready to take action if opportunities present themselves.