I remember when I first started this substack - 100days. I told myself I’d write for 100 days in a row. That turned into writing for 100 days....in no particular order.
Before launching 100days I was writing everyday. I was exchanging writing with a friend of mine on a daily basis. We had a sort of pen pal situation about what we were seeing in the world. Writing was my opportunity to reflect, unpack fleeting ideas, recall memories - and connect the dots.
But since I started 100days, I've taken a bit of a hiatus from public writing.
Mainly because I started a new job in venture. A job that I worked really hard to get, and I'll share a more in depth version of the story soon. Long story short: I stopped prioritizing writing and began focusing nearly all my time on meeting founders and thinking out loud.
One thing about young people in venture is that everyone is incredibly hungry to prove themselves. Investing in startups is a game where your ability and skill is measured over decades. You have no idea if you are “good” for a long time, and that has the power of shaping the industry’s culture. As a result, I find that young investors like myself feel the need to demonstrate that they know everything going on in the now.
Knowing everyone and everything is a flex and maybe even a super power: having a pulse on the hottest companies, the newest testflights, latest rhetoric or twitter gossip. Information is currency - not only to demonstrate you have a rich network, but also to reflect that you’re “smart”. The fact of the matter is that in the grand scheme of things, all that can be a waste of time. In the very long term, knowing “everything” might not make you a better investor, because at the end of the day we are hunting for outliers - the few amidst the many.
I should add that attempting to know everything in the early days is useful, and might even be a necessary evil. However, you have to be intentional about your gluttony, digesting all that there is, for the purpose of being able to identify your own selective taste.
As I settled in to the industry of startups and venture capital, I saw this as a tendency towards consumption vs creation - where one spends time sifting through many good ideas, with little depth, leaving no time for thinking and writing. I’ve noticed however, the best investors strike a balance between breadth and depth.
note: I wrote this a few weeks ago - and came across a few other pieces of content on the need be more in touch with the world as an investor: Cyan’s podcast on Invest like the Best & Kanyi on Mercury’s podcast Series Tea.
More recently I’ve found my footing and gone back to these writing roots. It was important for me to remember that writing and sharing your ideas isn't necessarily about having something unique to say or even having a novel idea. It is about having the courage to say something at all, to put it out there. The act of writing/building in public and on the internet is real time experimentation: it is a call for the cacophony of reactions and feedback, all to recalibrate your sense of the universe with the people around you.
In 2019 I discovered and fell in love with the ideology behind startups through writing. Not only my own writing - of cold messages. But other peoples too. Internet writing from Alex Danco, Fred Wilson, Paul Graham, Rest of World, The Long Now and so many more. In fact of the first companies I invested in was Matter a social reading app that gave airtime (and still does) to some of the best startup writing.
I had always loved fiction - especially the idea that books contained whole other dimensions - and authors are spinning up a whole new world, all from their imagination. Fiction holds bits and pieces of the true stories from our very own world, giving attention to causes or experience we might not give a second thought to.
I found that startups are a lot like writing. Except with startups, founders are writing their ideas into reality - for similar reasons.
In the spirit of how it all started, the hiatus is over and I hope to be writing more.
The good, bad, and the ugly. Just not a 100days in a row.
Thanks for reading. Also, here is a random selection of content I’ve been consuming:
Read
you-should-write-blogs (2005)
Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI? (June 2023)
On Fasting in the Paris Review (2019)
Listen/Watch
Patrick Collison and Dwarkesh Patel - Craft, Beauty,
Note: Dwarkesh is 23 years old and sharp as ever, he essentially emerged on the podcast scene with some of the most interesting guests - all through sharing his ideas on the internet and cold messages. As always, Patrick is thoughtful and finds a way to weave subjects together seamlessly.
Semil Shah talking about the long and winding journey that can make a career.
Note: I have an oddly similar pathway to Semil. This is a casual chat about putting in the work and doing the job with out the job, somehow opportunities always emerge.
Steve Jang w/ Tim Ferris in Korea
Note: I took mutliple film classes back in the day and one of my favorite films was Joint Security Area - which is referenced here. Their conversation about soft power reminded me of a book I read not too long ago New Kings of The World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture, and touches on how capital and culture intersect both historically and today.
Shuzo Matsuoka Are you just living day to day?
Note: Japanese tennis pro motivation. As a kid I wanted to be “the person who picks music that goes with movie scenes” - this video reminds me of that.