Tag: Venture Capital

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Finance Startups

Day 1858 and Parked Outside the Flow

The crazier the informational world gets, the more inclined I am to tune it all out. The flows of information are fun sure but it’s only useful to financiers, degenerates and the global management class. I really only rate into very bottom of one. No, not the degenerate class.

As 2026 has become the year of repositioning for “whatever is coming,” I am unsure of much I wish to return from the hinterlands into the flow. Being inside the flow looks enticing but it’s Thor the only way to do business.

The thing is that I began my own career by participating (in a small way) in what Will Manidis calls The Flow. Being inside has its perks and I saw a lot which enabled me to make some very good investments.

What is the flow? It’s a metaphor for a 24/7 club of information, a formal and informal circuit of social and business obligations, and series of social & professional inputs that sometimes generate spectacular output.

It’s no wonder people think investing looks like gambling when you put it that way. It takes a lot of shrewd social manners and access to resources to be inside the flow and those are distinct barriers for anyone outside the global ten percent.

So where to go if you are an American? Well, stay put somewhere you can be stable and secure. Sure the middle powers will tell you that they can save the liberal order but in reality it’s all state capitalism by strong man and technocrats. And I’m not either and I’d wager most truly new things that will matter won’t be easily secured by old mechanism of power.

What Manidis rightly points out in his Flow essay, is that you can build businesses and make good money for investors and limited partners outside of the flow. You can focus on your unique insights and build something great.

I hope I offer some proof of that myself. I flash the codes for my odd little node and traffic occasionally routes through me. I found crypto winners and the future of atomics outside the flow. And I think I’d rather like to spend my Sundays seeing what’s happening outside the nightclub of financial flows.

If you want to be outside you can be. I just might be already. You can find me in the proverbial parking lot of the Flow (the open internet) yapping, chilling, lighting and fighting with the cool kids. You will always know where to find me. I’ll be one DM away.

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Community Politics Travel

Day 1840 and Firm Planning Over An Abstract Constantinople

A friend of mine James Pogue published an opinion piece long in the making about a new kind of Democratic. He deeply investigates the subtly misunderstood Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

I was really moved by his sincere engagement with a new kind of Democrat who is really an old kind of Democrat who spoke to America s who lived closer to the land and took pride in a type of communal and conservative stewardship of our country.

I felt it very deeply as someone between two worlds. I sense the grief and loss I carry everyday. If the nation had chose a different path, I wouldn’t have been shunted up and out in The Sort.

Maybe I’d have married to my high school sweetheart. He’s an EMT, didnt go so far from home and is a passionate outdoorsman. We were on different paths as is clear from where I landed but my respect for the life he leads endures.

I live an amazing life with a loving dedicated husband with whom I pursue a deeply aligned set of life goals. The blessings that have been showered on me by the Sort have been substantial. We we have almost maximum freedom to pursue our lives while.

I thank God that despite the changes that have ravaged much of the America, I grew up in most of what I know is incredible agency and comfort.

But there are other Americas who are not so lucky. I hold that William Gibson saw Cyperpunk as science fiction rooted in Appalachia. I see how he writes the near future and it’s one where the past still exists but some of us have been sent forward to the future.

In his almost present maybe I’d have in-laws I grew up with and maybe I’d have my parents nearby because we’d never have lost the house in Boulder and staying close would have made economic sense. Hippies really did want that world.

Maybe a world where “right to repair” has been enshrined would have allowed me to build and own the work I could do on the farms that surrounded our defense industrial focused land grant university. It’s hard to imagine what I would do in that other America.

I’d manage the organic school farm I worked to gain permits for that my mother built from the first year. It mostly existed to produced fruits and vegetables for those who worked it. Itd a fantastical idea that has little basis in economic reality but it’s a life that would make sense to almost anyone.

But instead I was off to acquire an enormous debt that was hard for me and my family to fathom to take huge gambles that I’d be a winner. And I was.

But I’ll never have my family, childhood house, or my town back. That America is gone. And when I wanted the pickup truck of the past I had to import it from the fucking Balkans. It’s expensive to be able to repair what you’ve got.

I’m writing this from a hotel in a trade capital where Alex and I are working while doing our yearly “firm” planning for the family because it was the best place to meet up based on his travel and mine as we run the ancient trade lines that have always ruled the world. That we can plan is a dream.

We aren’t aristocracy but agents of them. And if they ever tried to take our trucks or our guns what else would we have left but being “in service” and tut tutting over a lie of moral superiority for having achieved high rank by serving our betters.

I’ve never felt more America than in this moment, even though I’ll never ever get back the American whose logic forced me into achieving a bigger life than I’d ever imagined.

I just happen to know that it was achieved at the expense of my home and my family and a future that would have also been a life of beauty and meaning close to the land and a town that has benefited from an American government that worked a little bit more for the people around me.

Just because I have thrived doesn’t mean the cost wasn’t great. That would be a dismissal of the material reality that I know to be true. But isn’t it nice that I will be treated as a respected trader representing capital interests in some great capital. It’s freedom most certainly, but not the freedom that America promised. That one might be a little less grand. It’s a little bit firmer. And I am in the realm of the abstract.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Reading

Day 1831 and A Stenographer For Everyone

I hate to use a dictation software to write a piece that I typically write with my own two hands and ten fingers but I’m not entirely sure that I see the difference between typing out a hundred words a minute on a mobile phone versus saying something a little more slowly to a stenographer application. I use Wispr Flow

I’m sure if you are a Paul Kingsnorth type, you would be happy to remind us that we’ve lost the “steno-pools” filled with women whose job was knowing just how to speed their notes to keep the dictation flowing. Those jobs are gone as the personal computer made its debut.

I don’t mind writing as I can write just a little bit faster than I can talk. And I often find that my dictation is less pulled together than my writing. But isn’t it funny that we should have reached this point so many centuries later? Yeah.

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Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1809 and Hating Content Management Systems

I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. Like rounding the corner to twenty years (in actuality going on 17) of time in the open source content management system.

Blogging was the new hot thing when I was in college. Blogging platforms emerged out of the strange tendency millennials and Gen Xers had for publicly sharing their own self reflection. I presume we got this from the Me Generation who raised us.

“I learned it from you Mom and Dad!”

Those early generations of social media all had flavors of being oriented towards writing with some multimedia mixed into mediums that were immersive and hyperlinked m but also narratives shared in reverse chronological order because the norm.

We went from Geocities to Livejournal to blogger, Typepad (RIP), and WordPress over the course of a few booms and busts. If you were blogging before 2005, you probably could have made a career out of it.

I don’t just mean writing, though lots of bloggers because professional writers, but whole online communities turned into careers from fashion and beauty to legal and financial.

Alas, the type of person who might once have made a wonderful career out of being a writer was caught out by the gutting of print media. America lost especially the kinds of middle class aspirant jobs that local news and independent publishers once provided for all kinds of creatives.

I’ve watched many platforms attempt to replace media jobs. Tumblr once hired a stable of writers. So did Medium. Neither ended well for anyone. Watching the comings and go of platforms and networks instilled a kind of paranoia in me about owning your own space.

I prefer posting under my own name on my own domain on an open source maintained piece of software as a back. I don’t pretend like I own my distribution on any social media channels. I’m sure Twitter will always be around wink wink.

So I am inclined to distrust Substack though I am reading more and more on the platform and I’ve enjoyed writing my own beauty blog there in the last few months. Thus far they managed to thread the needle on making money and making a social network and I don’t feel fearful that it will suddenly disappear like I once did.

Which is really a shame as it’s designed almost completely for the Gen C and Millenial set who really wished they had media jobs. The most successful did have media jobs and realized they could make more as an independent niche like the venture beat or by pandering to a very specific demographic or market that the giant media platforms don’t like.

These professionals class writers have a preference set for how they do content management and writing that just doesn’t remotely overlap with how I like to write. They want easy peasy hit publish. I want mobile. I want cross platform writing. It’s funny to finally have a content management system solve for monetizing and it’s just not made for me. But distribution and payment matters so I’m not booting up anything on my own without handling that first.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

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Community Startups

Day 1792 and Grateful for The Exceptions

This Thanksgiving I am feeling particularly grateful for the exceptions in my life. My world is filled with the exceptionally rare. Rare people, insights, businesses, and outcomes are part of building something genuinely new.

I suspect I’ll have to justify my faith in investing in and introducing new technologies to the world. We are doing a lot of looking back as the path forward looks so uncertain. And I continue to advocate for looking forward with optimism.

We have a lot to integrate and metabolize into human cultural life. We will be forced to address these changes as they change our institutions and expectations over the next few decades.

There is a lot to dislike about the technology industry at the moment. We’ve evolved far beyond “startups” being scrappy zero to one experiments in the proverbial garage. Startups turned into “Big Tech” and that concentration of influence and money has not always lived up to the high expectations we have for power.

We have had multiple cohorts of businesses as a mature industry. And indeed we’ve had multiple generations of people who spent their entire lives building a global ecosystem of technologies, along with the talent and capital to scale it. We may relentlessly start afresh but we cannot avoid acknowledging that we are a power base in our own right now.

Just in my lifetime, we’ve publicly codified our cultural mores, shared decades of knowledge on best practices on the open web and built institutions dedicated to helping people work across the multiple fields and disciplines that encompass “technology” as an industry. Or maybe I should simply call it an economy. It may even be the economy at this point.

Which is a problem. Our capital sorting mechanisms have seen our efficiencies and returns and pushed more resources, human and financial, towards us.

That has frustrated and starved the industrial base that provides us with the infrastructure to build. Let’s not even get started on what it has meant for food, education, entertainment and family.

I began more seriously investing in startups at the beginning of the pandemic. We maintain a small fund with low key LPs and our own family capital.

That is enabled by what we jokingly call the circle of life that is a liquidity event. When a startup sells many people become not just a little bit better off but sometimes twenty or even hundred times better off.

Those outlier events pay for all of the other things which don’t work as well. It’s a hits driven business. Hollywood would say “Thats show biz baby!” Oddly we don’t have a simple way of explaining the randomness of who or what becomes a winner.

Being excellent just isn’t enough. Startups that succeed are often exceptional in all areas and even then it still might not work. That bothers losers more than it does winners because the winners can comfort themselves with the money. But deep down even the winners know it could have easily gone another way.

So this Thanksgiving I am grateful for all the exceptional cases that have come into my life. To even see one is a rare thing. To be exposed to dozens of them is extremely unusual. To be invested in even positive outcome from the very start is beyond rare.

We’ve done so much to make startups more accessible to those with the mindset and discipline to succeed and still so many barriers remain. I see my work as the first check a founder takes as being a small part of the cycle of exceptionalism that builds success.

Just in the past two weeks we’ve had three companies raise large scaling rounds at markups that now place them soundly in the exceptional category. In two cases, I was their very first check, and in the third I was in their first pre-seed round. I qualify it only because I was not the first person to commit which I strive to be.

That is where I strive to be exceptional. I want to be the very first person that sees you for what you will be.

And I am deeply grateful to the founders that allowed me to be their first believer. It’s hard to be a founder. I’ve done it. To be an investor is much easier. You just have to have the balls, the brain and the bravery to say “yes” to something nearly impossible. That I can say yes is something for which I am most thankful.

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Politics Startups

Day 1784 and Strange Trade Offs

It’s been a pretty fantastic few weeks for my investments. Decisions made years ago are now looking pretty smart. A bet I made two years ago announced a round and then proceeded to announce splitting the atom the next week.

Not to only focus on current belle of the ball in Valar especially as everyone in the portfolio seems to be finding their way. We are lucky that we focused on compute, energy, and decentralization as that is the trifecta of the artificial intelligence wave.

I honestly didn’t expect that we’d see such progress in our nuclear pick. With the regulatory climate it seemed more likely compute marketplaces and inference products would outpace the most regulated technology in the world.

Somehow during a Trump administration you get unexpected outcomes. I’ve been fighting for compute figuring the energy bottleneck wouldn’t get addressed till we had the full supply side of new AI products. It turns out everyone wanted to rush into capital expenditures and infrastructure as the demand was already there.

I guess I’ve proved my own thesis again. You can get a read on the direction and maybe even first order effects but in a chaotic world the second and third order effects are much harder to predict.

And on balance for all the bad I think on balance the atomic age finally arriving might be a worth while trade for our future. Hard to say if I’ll keep that opinion but I am grateful America is getting back on track with nuclear power.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1783 and Good Days In Bad Times

I have spent a lot of time in various states of concern, sadness and frustration this year. Which is too bad, as so many incredible things have happened to me. We passed a right to compute law. Valar Atomics took “accelerate” way more seriously than most.

It’s hard to balance knowing the future won’t be anything like the past, but still having to make decisions made on that being the only data you’ve got. Engaging in governance and investing in energy seem like sensible ways of approach a strange future. Organizing energy is civilization 101 stuff.

I can predict a world with increasing chaos but how it will affect demand for things like energy, compute and decentralization are directional bets. You know it’s coming but how and when? And the downsides are hard to consider. Nobody ever thinks the entropy will apply to them but it’s already begun.

Every time future shock gets me I’m surprised I’m managing an imitation of Cayce Pollard at all. I’m practically a poster child for “sensible takes about various concerning challenges” as I get asked about various eccentric revealed preferences.

The Fourth Turning is coming about and we aren’t ready. I use short hand like the Churn, elite overproduction, The Sort and other minor terminologies and schools of thought to signal to others. I understand this to be my best way available way signal. But who knows as the humans retreat from shared networks it won’t stay that way.