Tag: Work

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 394 and Antiwork

There is a Reddit sub that is imploding at the moment called Antiwork. I didn’t really follow it before the extremely online moment where one of their mods demonstrated that internet people don’t generally have media training. But one of the amusing bits of antiwork culture got into my feed because someone had an awkwardly worded tweet about young people demanding at least two days off of work in a week.

Before I became a member of the capital class I wasn’t really much of a weekend person. Or even a time off person. I was in a constant battle to get over the line of survivable earnings in America.

But then the magic of Silicon Valley shined on me a few times and I’m suddenly no longer desperate about medical bills or having enough savings for an emergency. This has had the dramatic effect of completely reordering my priorities. Now I take restorative rest time seriously. Knowledge work and good judgement rely pretty heavily on be clear headed. There is no premium afforded for being exhausted. If anything it will lose you money.

So the antiwork folks might have a point. If so much of your life is spent in survival you never have a chance to really be human. And being human is oddly more lucrative. I stand a better chance of doing even better because I can orient my life around bigger outcomes. That attracts more people and more money and improved my chances. And yeah success compounds if you are lucky. If you can get out from under survival. Which is I suppose the hard part.

Categories
Startups

Day 392 and Deal Flow

I wrote about my general philosophy about the futility of the typical hour long deck based venture pitch two days ago. I explained that I’d rather have a conversation with founders.

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.

Well since then my Twitter DMs have been filled with amazing chats with founders of companies as diverse as consumer products, marketplaces and web3 games. The stuff people are cooking up in crypto is wild. Thought not enough SaaS tool pitches though so clearly I’ve got to get more mindshare there. Note to self to impress Jason Lemkin or something.

I’ve taken a dozen pitches now through direct messages and chats. It’s worked amazingly well. Maybe I owe a drink to Sam Lessin as he came out strongly against Calendly right after I wrote this post.

So pitch me however you like to communicate. Plus, don’t we all die inside a little every time someone sends a Calendly link?

So I’ve got to say I hope I became known as the slide into her DMs VC as this has been a lot more fun than trying to play calendar sync with dozens of people. That game sucks.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 391 and Breath

Daily overstimulation is starting to rub the pressure sores of America’s downer induced depression into a full blown mental health crisis. Like, even more than usual. War with Russia in the imagination, inflation and market volatility coaxing a recession, culture war skirmishes over every basic fact in the pandemic, along with generalized anxiety are fucking us up focus wise. And every propaganda outlet and publicist on the planet is having a field day.

I’m listing to The Prodigy’s Breath and mumbling lyrics like pyschosomatic insane. So I guess, come play my game?

I try not to listen too much music as it overstimulates my nervous system to be honest so its kind of rare for me to have Spotify playing. I’ve got a finely tuned propaganda radar that benefits from sensing subtle shifts in tone and extremely online discourse. I can’t do that if I’m too worked up from the rough stimulus that comes from pop music. I mostly use it to run my portfolio and investing but sometimes I think I should really be used in the service of some autocrat or multi-national. I’m the doubt factory

I guess it is nice I can make a buck during the end of the empire. I’m one of those post structuralism, post-capitalism babies. A regular Bane “born to the darkness” of hyper objects like markets and climate change. So I guess I’d better be molded to being the kind of villain that survives a world of agitprop and meme warfare. Thanks Adbusters!

Frankly I’m having a fucking blast. Sure I’m scared I don’t have my homestead property all shored up for civilization hiccups, but I’m of the mind that the crumbles is going to take a while so might as well enjoy the gains that come from a massive upheaval. I guess its true venture capitalists are ghouls. I mean at least we aren’t private equity carrion birds but it is wild that the system rewards a class of people that invest in creative destruction.

But even as I want to paint myself as bad, I do stereotypically think what venture capital does is often good. We can’t predict second order effects. Chaos theory doesn’t let us see all the future paths. But stochastic as shit power laws are just math so we’ve got a shot at accidentally making things better. So while the agitprop tries to sway your opinions might I recommend you just Breath? That is my professional advice.

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
Finance

Day 389 and Bear Down for Midterms

I used to be something of a perma-bear. I was always somewhat convinced that bad shit was just around the corner. I guess you can see that in my persistent interest in doomer culture. But as the world continues to experience “the crumbles” I’ve softened my general stance on everything is awful.

Crypto is arguably responsible for much of my stance. For all the bitching about Web3’s lack of decentralization and heady “takes” on how this has all been done before, I actaully do this think is the next wave. Do I think we are due for a lot of crashing and failures and unrealized promise? Also yes.

So when the market decided to do a January bubble bursting I was surprised at how sanguine I was. I kind of didn’t believe it was going to turn into a full blown recession rout. Now this is not to say I don’t think stuff is frothy, as I clearly do. But I think the weirding has so confused markets that who knows when contagion bubble popping is going to hit for real. I don’t think we are there yet.

And indeed I started this post in the morning and by market close stuff kinda bounced. Maybe a dead cat bounce. But who even knows is my point. I don’t think we will see a genuine correction till a real market leader like Facebook or Microsoft pulls a Worldcom or an Enron. I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Tesla but I ain’t playing that short. I think it’s more likely that “Meta” fucks itself in the transition to the metaverse or whatever and then we get a real systemic crash. Right now no one gives a single fuck if all of crypto goes to zero. We need much bigger game to drive a recession. Systemic Lehman brother shit.

Which is long way of me making an elaborate Community joke. That TV show with the Talk Soup guy. They had a plot where someone misspoke or made a bad joke and the theme at their community college dance was “Bear Down for Midterms” and no it isn’t a real phrase. My basic feeling on a recession is that the Fed will toss us a couple rate hikes to deal with inflation. But half of America is convinced the pandemic isn’t over. Congress could be talked into more stimulus since the midterms are bearing down on us and well the Democrats are going to lose. The exponential age, the end of American empire and global weirding means no one knows what is going on. The next real marker on our calendar is the midterms. So bear down for midterms. I’ll be wash trading to get some actual cost basis losses till then.

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
Politics

Day 379 and Red vs Blue Poverty

I’ve been scouting for homesteads so I have been making forays further from the city enclaves and blue liberal towns that are my normal haunts and out into rural America. Poverty in the context of blue cities has generally meant homelessness and panhandling. But poverty in rural america looks different.

NIMBY (not in our neighborhood) cities won’t let you just pull up a double wide on the outskirts of town. That brings down property values. I mean theoretically so does tent cities, but that’s an argument for another day. But I haven’t really seen a lot of RVs or mobile homes simply because I’ve lived in yuppie Boomer cities. NIMBY land has “standards” and if you can’t meet them we’d rather you be unhoused than accommodate uglier but more humane options.

As I’ve driven through industrial western cities I’ve seen a fuck ton more rural poverty than I expected. Which is naive and stupid of me. I’m aware of median American incomes. Not everyone can afford suburban townhouses and most developers aren’t interested in building that kind of housing outside of well gentrified places.

As I’ve gone further afield to towns that rely on commodity products like oil or minerals or cattle, I’ve noticed a reliance on temporary or low cost housing. You see a lot of decent well maintained working trucks. But a lot of the housing is as bare bones as you can imagine. And it’s ugly as sin to the NIMBY eye but at least it’s fucking housing. I’ve seen a lot of trailers in various states of decay but I’ve got to imagine it’s better than a tent.

I don’t have a real point here other than to say that America is hurting. No one can afford inflation and if we’ve got stagnating opportunities it’s going to blow up in our faces. Blue cities should be embarrassed as fuck by allowing massive unhoused populations when we’ve got prefabricated options. But the American crumbling is bad in any form.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 375 and Masochism

I recently got yelled at by several people who love me because I was torturing myself over something that wasn’t really important.

My therapist asked me why I insist on being so sadistic towards my own body. I told her I was afraid that if I wasn’t perpetually in a state of self improvement no one would love me. The topic came up because I had allowed myself to get hurt in physical therapy. “Why would you push till the pain was intolerable? That’s insane!”

And I had to answer honestly that everything in my life is headed in the right direction. There was no major crisis or illness or disaster this week, so I felt like I had the bandwidth to add in another “self improvement” project. To which she replied “so you can’t ever just enjoy being yourself can you?”

That kind of floored me because it’s true. As soon as I feel like I’ve got things under control, I’ll add a little bit more to the pile so I can feel like I’m making progress. I am a masochist. Joy is fleeting. Better is always worth pursuing. Maybe you feel compelled to be torturing yourself too.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 370 and Grindstone

Today felt like the first day everyone was really back at work after the winter holiday. As much as Americans like to bitch about how Europe takes off August or China takes off January or February or whenever the Lunar New Year lands, we take off much of December. Around mid-month folks drop off the radar and nothing gets done till about Epiphany or so. And they say we aren’t a Christian nation.

So while technically we all came back to work on Monday, today is the first day I really felt like I was back. Maybe it’s because December was such a clusterfuck of a month for me. I had Covid, I tore a ligament, Boulder County burned down. I know this is a petty complaint but I didn’t get a Christmas tree because I couldn’t walk and then I was quarantined. So it was going to take a few days to really shake that off and come into the energy of January.

But I felt back today. Like maybe I could fucking do this. Like all the catastrophic nonsense was shit I could mitigate. And all the optimistic stuff was achievable. And I am going all in on optimism. I’m going to Montana soon to check out towns as I’m just ready to own something more rural. I’m wrapping my head around owning something that is a winter seasonal home. I booked a trip to Europe in a really extreme leap of faith that Omicon will run its course by spring. And I am ready to close some deals I’ve been working on for the last month or so. So fuck yeah grindstone. Im ready.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 367 and Flat Out Grossings

December was a pretty gnarly month for me. I tore a ligament. I got Covid. A fire burned down two entire towns. I’m emotionally burnt out right now and letting myself feel it because tomorrow I go back to work. So apologies if this is even more stream of consciousness than usual.

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a reporter. So I talked my way into an internship at our local television station Channel 8. I loved it. I got to be the assistant for such glamorous events as city council land use meetings. Which is how I happen to have the misfortune of knowing how Boulder became surrounded by suburban sprawl. I don’t have a grand unified theory. I just witness a lot of little decisions that compounded into unspeakable disaster no one could have predicted. Except we did.

There used to be a crappy mall in Boulder. It had a Macy’s and a Foley’s but it couldn’t sustain its anchor tenant department stores even in the late 90s and early aughts. Now big developers and chain stores knew that Boulder was fast becoming a wealthy town and wanted in. Maybe we could upgrade from middle market to premium retail. But Boulder is run by a bunch of hippies and wanted no part of upgrading big box stores. City council meeting turned into an endless parade of “no” to various folks coming in attempting to take over the mall on 28th street. It languished for years.

Eventually the developers gave up. Decided to construct a mall outside of the open space belt outside of the city. You see Boulder is the prototype for NIMBYS. We literally bought up a bunch of land that the town owns and can never ever be developed so no one could sprawl the town. It’s gorgeous and amazing and expensive to maintain and makes Boulder a haven for its natives and an impossibly expensive place if you didn’t buy real estate in the 60s. But I digress. This is about the mall.

The developers called the new mall out on the prairie beyond the town’s open space Flatiron Crossing. It’s an homage to Boulder’s signature feature the flatiron mountains. And the views from up town highway 36 into town driving back from the mall are amazing.

And Boulder honestly felt like it won. The ugly box stores went up around it. Our town was saved from Costco and Chuckee Cheese and Ann Taylor. We all snobbishly called it Flat Out Grossings. We thought it was a nasty money grab. It was wise we let them develop outside the open space band and protected the town.

Except that mall and all the box stores turned into the anchor for all the surrounding towns. We called them the L towns. Well that and Superior. And that’s where the growth happened. That’s what enabled Colorado to thrive. And that’s exactly how an urban fire that was started on Boulder open space ended up destroying so many homes. We pushed out the development thinking we’d done a good thing.

I actually have to stop writing this as I can’t make the point I want to which is that Boulder brought much of this misery on itself. We wouldn’t let the land be developed in town. So someone else did outside of town. And now that land got wiped out from a fire in our open space. And everyone is going to be snide and awful but our policies have consequences and by pushing out our development to Flat Out Grossing the law of unintended consequences has taken over. And I’m sick to my stomach knowing the well intentioned hippies ended up doing so much more damage.