Tag: Work

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Community Startups Travel

Day 849 and “Oh I Follow You!”

I’ve been in Austin for Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference. I’m flying home to Montana today after five intense days of work. But if the on the ground reception is any indication, I nailed this year with my talks and vibes. I might actually be good at my job.

Conferences can be tricky if you are a speaker. You’re obligated to hold attention & entertain while also getting across complicated topics like governance contracts. It takes energy and preparation to do it well.

This year I was a bit less academic than last year as Marc Hochstein and I hosted an interactive town hall which was spicy as hell and my loud carnival barker voice carried. A bit bigger than just a talk and I think it was a hit.

By the end the room was packed with folks passing by and stopped to see what we were discussing. A bunch of smiling energetic faces and a loud lady in a full length dress is a bit eye catching out on a convention floor stage. I got so much positive feedback.

Heck, I was in a bathroom where I overhead an attendee discussing the panel the next day with a gentleman who was also panelist. The attendee raved to the panelist and said “that chick” really held everyone’s attention on topic. A good performance all around.

I called Consensus a “summer camp for adults” as it all your crypto friends get together for it. An expensive paid conference with a lot of talent and speakers makes for excellent serendipity. I felt like I made new connections and even a new friend or two.

It felt easy as in a small community someone like me gets to enjoy the benefits of niche fringe micro-celebrity. I kept hearing over and over “I follow you on Twitter” along with “she’s so funny on Twitter she says the shit you are thinking.” I’ve got to admit it feels good.

And I think it was fun for Alex who spent part of the week hearing folks tell him that while he’s great (and everyone loves his homesteading adventures) but they are really more excited to meet his wife. Dare I say I’m a trophy wife?

It’s super fun when your internet frens and parasocial relationships come together in actual reality. We were all happily saying “oh I follow you” to each other all week. I miss everyone already. But I’m happy to be home in Montana.

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Community Startups

Day 847 and Erasure

I hosted an interactive town hall for Consensus this afternoon. The topic was the path forward for building communities online, offline and IRL with cryptocurrency, decentralized autonomous organizations and maybe even network states.

I’ve been working on this town hall for several months. I worked with Marc Hochstein to refine the thesis question, build the flow and topics, bring together speakers from unique ecosystems and projects, and horse trade the various bit of social capital required to get interesting content out the door. I worked hard on it. I felt I was one of the owners of the panel.

Builders of new types of communities – online, IRL, and hybrids – roll up their sleeves and discuss how they’ve addressed challenges from 60,000-foot strategy to immediate on-the-ground tactics in a zero-trust world with high trust expectations. Topics include: governance and accountability; organic scaling through consensus (who and what decides on whether it is achieved); the architecture of sustaining and driving loyalty; navigating regulatory hurdles; uncertainty around novel governance structures; and managing information and workflows around who and what is trusted.

I was proud of my first question as I felt qualified to ask having once been the founder and leader of an organization. Conway’s Law is a familiar adage in software design. Simply put, what we build is a reflection of who we are and how we communicate with each other. So I opened the town hall with this as the thirty thousand foot view.

If what we build is a reflection of the organizations that build it, then crypto is a reflection of this room. Assuming you believe our goal is economic and monetary solutions for everyone willing to align with our reformation, are we living up to this ambition?

We had a lot of ground to cover. Issues of institutional distrust, transparency, governance, and decentralization’s promises for inclusion. But reactivity means we go to base emotions. An older woman asked the panel (not me though) why there weren’t more women on the panel. Needlessly to say I took that personally. Ain’t I a panelist?

I just brought the hammer down on this poor woman who wanted to call my panel a “manel” because lady it’s fucking erasure I worked for months to bring this group together, I’m on the stage as an expert, and you think don’t I count?

She said I was the moderator. Which like yeah it’s my fucking show because I have the expertise to bring the leaders together as I’m a peer. I shut it down as we had deeper questions on what inclusion means than Boomer feminism or Girlbossing woke-ism can manage.

The beauty of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the ecosystem of L2s like Stacks is any of us can validate what’s going on. There is no “man” or patriarchy or systemic oppression keeping you out of learning and using the tools. Maybe they reflect their builders who haven’t always been inclusive but now all of us together can earn and build like anyone else. We can make our tools reflect us by insisting on being seen.

I regularly have my background and expertise and existence questioned by everyone. And I just keep showing up. So I’d like to say sticking a girl on a panel does nothing for inclusion. But being a woman who organized a serious (ly) weird town hall on community should also mean my experience counts as much as anyone else’s.

I want everyone to count. You count. I count. Your gender or sexual orientation doesn’t discount you unless you discount yourself first. I regularly make sure I’m seen and I want you seen too.

The way to count is by speaking up and making sure that men aren’t the only ones who contribute. Don’t want to make your gender or sex a thing?

Go ignore gender & sex and & identity entirely and be an anon with a Milady pfp. I came to crypto to be a sovereign of my own body and choices. It’s your choice. None of us are victims.

I was amused as dozens of women came up to me after with enthusiasm about how we do inclusion in crypto because we don’t need to be restricted by Girlbossing or Boomer feminism. We include ourselves as the system is inclusive by design.

Decentralized systems include us all. And that’s a future they can’t exclude us from. Do you want to categorize every identity into perfect little corporate identities and slogans? I don’t. We can build a future where we are free to be you and me. Ok Boomer?

Categories
Startups

Day 846 and Serendipity

Last night I arrived in Austin for my favorite annual cryptocurrency event called Consensus. If you are participating please consider coming to my interactive town hall on Thursday at 1:30pm where we have an hour of panel & audience discourse on the future of trust & community.

I am excited for this panel as I feel like I’m ready to own my experience as a professional community builder. It’s been a job in the social media era for a bit. But it’s only recently that we’ve realized the ecosystem of builders is tightly knit together by a tapestry of overlapping passions and competencies. It’s lots of different kinds of nerds.

We arrived earlier than expected which enabled us to go to an event with Jon Stokes (I was slightly more excited to see his wife Christina but Jon knows I adore him too). While we had lots of folks discussing heady issues like the network state, it is most joyful for me to discuss the more human aspects of life in a community. Who was looking after the kids and which one of our neighbors is housesitting. Practical daily living things felt like the natural connection of humans beings working together.

From there we went to a dinner with one of our most cherished real ones Ben Huh. The man knows food so I was thrilled to be feeling healthy enough to stay out and enjoy a meal with a table of deeply weird unabashedly themselves people. When we did introductions the question was “what is something you are obsessed with right now?”

The answers were wide ranging. High temperature cooking, textile pattern making, reality dating shows on Netflix (not for the record me but I am also obsessed), showing up as you are, sewing the perfect custom dress shirt, raising goats, riding tractors, reading science fiction mind bender The Three Body Problem, and mastering nervous system regulation (this one is me).

I felt like everyone I saw that night was one of my fellow travelers. The serendipity of overlapping passions and curiosity showed me so many ways I connect with diverse humans. I encountered politics as disparate as reactionary fascist and shitlib standard as everyone comes to grip with a future that feels as yet unwritten. There is a lot of serendipity on the frontier. It’s nice to be reminded that the future is built together.

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Emotional Work

Day 842 and Sucks to Suck

A lot of folks are suffering right now. And I’ve got all the empathy in the world for just how rough it is to live in this modern moment. So I want you to really hear what I’m saying knowing that I do it out of love.

It’s sucks to suck

I’m currently sucking at a bunch of stuff in my life. Because I’m learning new skills and expanding my horizons. I am just sucking big hairy balls as I go about the process of embarrassing myself becoming competent through failure.

Thankfully I am surrounded by a family who loves me and wants me to improve. They don’t mind if I suck because sucking is the first step in success. If I don’t suck at something I’m probably not pushing myself to learn. And just because I’m afraid of sucking is no excuse. Everyone sucks sometimes.

And I get it. It sucks to suck. I hate how uncomfortable it makes me feel to fuck up. I am regularly failing at lots of shit on what feels like a daily basis.

And I do often want to crawl into a hole and stop doing new things so I can enjoy the feelings of power and competence at things I am already successful in.

And yet I don’t want to stay in my comfort zone. Even though I am intimately familiar with how much it sucks to suck. I hate the feeling of having not tried even more. I’d rather shoulder the risk of the fuck ups than live with the crushing anxiety of not shooting my shot.

Because more than it sucks to suck, it really fucking sucks to not even try. It eats away at your soul. You wonder if your life could be better. And I am here to tell you yes it can be. My life is fucking awesome right now. And it’s awesome because I tried. I spent a lot of time being embarrassed.

I didn’t get everything I wanted. But like those damned boomers said, you might find that you get what you need. So go ahead and suck. The path to happiness is on the other side of it. Don’t give up just because it sucks to suck.

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Medical Travel

Day 833 and Industrial Romaine

I packed my day a little too full so I found myself ordering a salad from popular New York industrial salad chain Chopt at 8pm right as they closed.

The order was placed on an app so it was a crapshoot and I knew it. And sure enough I got something that wasn’t what I ordered but I’d been running around for 12 straight hours so I just said fuck it I’ll eat this weird burrito of industrial romaine and mayonnaise because I’d really rather be passed out.

Incredibly poor decision making on my part. I was up early and I was up often performing ablutions and praying to the gods of intestinal fortitude that this please pass swiftly.

I appear to have stopped with the worst of it and had about an hour or so before a meeting I really didn’t want to cancel. It’s not as if food poisoning is catching. So I groomed and put on something that would withstand the 88 degree heat of…checks notes… early April in Manhattan? And then I got on the subway.

Shockingly heat and the subway aren’t a great combination, but I was determined to gut it out. I’d left early so I could find my way to a drug store. Naturally nothing was available to purchase without someone unlocking a cabinet. Nothing more humiliating than asking if one could have a key to acquire GasEx, Tums and Imodium. A really stellar look all around.

I’m now comfortably in a lovely office of a venture capitalist hoping it all kicks in before I need to attempt socializing. Naturally I’m taking the time to write about it as I wait as it’s keeping my mind off the discomfort and misery of it all.

This isn’t the first run in I’ve had with agribusiness greens that’s gone awry for me. Many moons ago I got food poisoning from spinach I bought at a Trader Joe’s. A few blocks from where I am now. I had Gucci insurance (literally Gucci the luxury house I do not mean that it was particularly fancy) and spent the night in the emergency room. So maybe this is just a full circle experience. Ashes to ashes romaine lettuce to romaine lettuce to romaine lettuce.

I can feel the drugs kicking in and maybe I’m at the end of it. And hopefully this will just be an amusing anecdote that I recount on why we need to be more careful with food safety and industrial run off. But also I am loathe to cancel a commitment during a business trip. Showing up matters too.

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Travel

Day 832 and Julie in Motion

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Newton’s laws of motion work for people in motion. I swung into my day and once a Julie is in motion she tends to stay that way.

I want sure how I would feel being in New York City. I’ve technically been back to the city since we left but this felt like my first real trip back to the city. And I remembered what it felt like to have my days packed. Full of things to do and people to see.

I felt energized. Maybe even just a little bit optimistic. Like being in motion was a worthwhile state to maintain. I enjoyed it. I expected things to feel maybe busier or louder or overwhelming and instead it felt normal. Like I’d always lived life bouncing from one thing to the next.

And to be fair a lot is happening. Balances of power are shifting. Plans are being hatched. People are planting seeds. There is a palpable sense of springtime hope but it’s a bigger than that. People are excited to see what happens next. And a city is a place of serendipity when the weather is good. And I could see some joy in being at old haunts.

We’ve got change on the horizon and some of us are excited to be players in the great game. Which is always a nice feeling. A lot is shifting and changing and we bandy about words like apocalypse and disaster. But maybe we have a hell of a good time finding our way out of this mess. I felt like maybe I could see a sliver of how it might play out while strolling in Manhattan.

Categories
Startups

Day 826 and Alignment

I think there is this persistent fantasy in startup life that people will always agree with your bets. We forget the discord of every hype cycle but it’s not always clear who is winning and what outcome is certain. Only hindsight is 20/20.

You do get occasional moments of vindication but it’s rare that they ever clearly overlap with a trend or a moment that everyone is paying attention. Media hype cycles and innovation hype cycles are not the same thing. Trust me I’m a pretty good publicist for a hobby.

Your deals aren’t always going to get attention though and a lot of founders want to keep things quiet so you can’t always talk your commitments.

This is a problem that investing has in common with fashion. I earned my stripes making shit cool for money. It’s actually hard. I call it the The Thursday Styles. The problem with tend forecasting is knowing what’s going to be trendy is a temporal bet as well as a cultural adoption one.

It’s a thing happening over time that is unevenly distributed. I learned that from William Gibson. Some of us live in the future but you can’t be too far out because then it’s just you speculating. You got to be right on the thing and on the timing to make any money.

It’s honestly way harder than it looks and anyone who is any good at taking a bet on what the future looks like has to take some variant of this bet. It’s probably why Dune is such a canonical text for nerds. He predicts the future dimly and is also a messiah time lord? Sign me up that sounds like venture capital to me. The sheer hubris of this comparison is honestly nauseating.

Like fuck all the way off you ain’t Maud’Dib. You’ve got to be very skeptical about the charismatic pull of a messiah my friends. That said I bet you’d believe me if I told you I was a Bene Geserit right? Anyways. My point is you don’t always get it right and you don’t usually get to take credit till the end. And mercenaries can co-opt anything. Your shit might hit the skids.

But sometimes one of your deals looks hot and everyone is paying attention and you get to feel like you were cool. You spotted the band. You saw the runway show. The media is hyped about it at the same time and your friends noticed on Twitter. It’s a nice feeling. And yes I invested in the Chroma seed round. I think Jeff and Anton are cool.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 825 and Papered

A bunch of stuff that has been in the works for me for a while all got papered in the last couple of days. If you read any of my zen poasting (misspelled for internet reasons) you’ve probably gleaned that I’ve had a lot going on. Stuff got resolved on time horizons as long as lifetimes and as short as a narrative cycle.

I’d like to celebrate some of the papering (two deals I worked particularly hard for over a long time horizon) and I’m sure I will do so at some point but everything is going by fast and I’m just so drained from the dance. I suppose it’s how you really know if you are living. It’s a lot to live through everyone’s ego death drives and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take a huge toll on me. I don’t yet know how to pay these costs in anyway but energy yet but I’m learning. If I put hard costs on it motherfuckers wouldn’t like the bill.

I’m modestly less sympathetic to everyone else’s bullshit as someone in my extended family passed away (not getting into it as it’s not my loss) and that invariably makes every other problem look inconsequential. Who care about your feelings and your ego and your petty obsessions in the face of death. But also maybe you should care about them even more? Not my call to be honest.

I’m not really able to mourn with them directly but I feel the energy of the loss reverberating for my loved one. And I wish I didn’t want to discuss it at all but I do. Somehow death is the lowest drama aspect of my week. Actual death.

So if everyone else can tone the energy down a little I’d appreciate it. I will absolutely make sure shit is inked, wired, soothed, smoothed and otherwise handled. It will all get papered. Whether it gets celebrated or mourned is a matter of personal discretion and I’m all out of fucks as to what you chose. Just gimme a beat or two to breath. This isn’t what you’d call a nine to five job.

Categories
Emotional Work Finance

Day 824 and Ego Loss Aversion

One of my favorite cognitive biases is loss aversion.

The pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. The loss felt from money, or any other valuable object, can feel worse than gaining that same thing.

The Decision Lab

Isn’t it wild how much we hate loss? The pain of losing $100 is worse than the joy of finding $100. In behavioral economics “loss aversion refers to a phenomenon where a real or potential loss is perceived by individuals as psychologically or emotionally more severe than an equivalent gain.” I guess we don’t like to win as much as we hate to lose.

But we have to train ourselves to tolerate losses. Otherwise you’d never play a sport of any kind. And you’d be an absolutely terrible investor of money. So it’s clearly possible for some of us in some situations to get over loss aversion as we have professional athletes and money making fund managers.

But what if we have to address loss aversion in our own ego? How much do we hate to lose a part of ourselves? What if we stand to gain something significant by letting go a part of ourselves. I don’t think we can always predict where in our own sense of identity our ego will fight against loss.

They say the therapeutic process is just mirrors. You have no real sense of what anyone sees except as a reflection. Everything else is just our faulty sensory equipment. And imagine what a colossal fuck up you could make by ignoring what the mirror says and only relying on the faulty sensory data from your ego.

Stew on that a little bit and decide how much you really want to win and get back to me. Could be you need to see how much you hate to lose before you can see what you stand to gain.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 822 and Increased Load

Maybe I should lay off the space opera as this is the second blog post this week in which I’m tempted to use a metaphor about gravity. I’ve been recalculating fuel costs and orbital mechanics for all the journeys in my life as of late. Just to see if I can go the distance.

I’m feeling good about the increased load of an accelerating life. I like that so much is happening. But I do feel very like it’s a bit by the seat of my pants. Various things aren’t tightened, shit is flying everywhere, I’m finding out who gets sick to their stomach.

I am finding that my adjustment to the increased load is a bit uneven as well. For a couple days I’m flying and then I realized I need to recalculate my fuel inputs and it gets a little bumpy.