Silver Linings in an Age of Quarantine

Hello there. I write from my newly minted battle station, ahem, I mean home office.

My wife and I started working remotely on Friday and anticipate staying in relative isolation for at least the next couple of weeks.

I hope you are all holding up okay. I know staying at home is easier for some than others. I am lucky because I live with my best friend so I always have someone to hang out with who I will never get sick of. She hasn’t gotten tired of my shenanigans yet either so all is well on that front.

If you are like me, you are probably sick of all the negativity and fear that is permeating the general public. I am not going to write about COVID-19. There are plenty of articles out there written by people who have a MUCH better idea of what they are talking about than I do.

I want to offer a different angle.

I want to look for silver linings.

Obviously, silver linings are hard to find in a time where there is so much fear and uncertainty. But I think that is exactly why we need to look for them all the harder. Now, I am not trying to make light of the situation. I think it is absolutely serious and that it is important for everyone to take the common-sense steps necessary to do our part to beat this thing.

I just think that staying sane during periods of extended isolation is part of that fight.

Here is my list of silver-linings in an age of quarantine:

Time

If, like me, you are stuck at home for at least the next few weeks, chances are you will have a bit more time than you are generally used to. What are you going to do with it? I have put together a few handy-dandy lists of things that can keep you busy. That book you’ve never gotten around to? That online course you bought but never finished? That game you always wanted to learn how to play? Now is your chance.

Habits

Now could be a good time to reflect on habits. Good ones you want to acquire. Bad ones you want to get rid of. You now have the opportunity to set the tone over the next few weeks so that you can hit the ground running when the world starts spinning again. At the very least you can work on the habit of taking walks outside, which is fantastic for mental, physical, and relationship health.

Focus

I sometimes have trouble focusing. I like to multi-task and I’d rather bounce around on a bunch of different projects than focus on just one. The next few weeks could be a time to really zero in on one or two projects that will move the needle for you. Anything that just kept getting pushed to the back of your to-do list? COUGHtaxesCOUGH. Now is the time to get that box checked.

Remote Work

If you are working from home for the first extended period of time, think of it as a remote work test run. Guess what? Some people work from home all the time. Yeah. Like every day. Remote work has a lot of great perks. No commute. Increased flexibility. Increased focus. It is definitely not for everyone, but maybe it is for you and you just never had the chance to really experience it before. Don’t think of your isolation as some sort of imposed quarantine. Think of it as a remote work test-run to see if you enjoy it. Hopefully, another silver lining is that people being forced to work from home will necessitate more companies developing remote work protocols and infrastructure. Maybe this can turn into increased flexibility and access to high-quality remote jobs in the future.

Resiliency

The seeds of the next great endeavor are always planted in the ashes of the previous one. Time and time again, we see the greatest businesses and technologies born during the toughest times. Why? I think it’s because those who can weather the storm develop a resiliency that others don’t. Like a forest fire, companies and institutions built of rotting wood are cleared away which presents the opportunity for new and improved enterprises to rise up and take their place. This natural evolution is accelerated in tough times. It is going to be a painful next few months. There is no doubt about it, but during times like this is when the wheat is separated from the chaff.

Wake-up Call

Sometimes life smacks you right upside the head. Hopefully the events we are living through can be a wake up call to all of us. To businesses that need to get with the times. To governments that need to increase preparedness and responsiveness. To individuals about common-sense hygiene and personal conduct. To ALL OF US. At times like these, you realize that there is a lot more that unites us than separates us. That we are much more similar than different. Hopefully if there is one thing to come out of this ordeal it is that we look to each other with a renewed sense of humanity and brotherhood.

Things are bad. And I can’t promise you they won’t get worse before they get better.

But I can promise you that they will get better.

This too shall pass. And we will come out on the other side stronger.

Stick together.

Don’t give in to fear.

Ask for help when you need it.

And keep focused on those silver linings.

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You should be playing more board games

You really should.

Board games are one of my all-time favorite social activities. Last week some coworkers and I went to a board game bar in town to have some drinks and play some games. Last night my wife and I hosted our bible study for some good times and great games.

What is it that is so compelling about board games?

Social + Active + Chill

Board games fill a rare social niche. They are something fun you can do with a group of people that is social, fun and low-key. Think about the other social activities that occupied your last weekend.

Going to a movie? Not very social or active.

Hitting the bars? Not very active and probably not very chill.

Board games allow you to chat and hang out while you work together (or against one another) towards a goal. It is a great medium for spending quality time with the people you care about or getting to know new people better without the pressure of rapid-fire questions.

Litmus Test

Speaking of getting to know people better, board games provide an interesting social litmus test for whether you might want to spend more or less time with someone. Think of the adage like always pay attention to how someone treats the waiter at the restaurant. Or pay attention to how a man treats his mother. Board games have the same revealing characteristics.

Is someone a poor loser or an obnoxious winner?

Can they work collaboratively with people towards a common goal?

Are they focused on having low-key fun or are they obsessed with winning a meaningless game?

Spending time playing board games with someone may not reveal every facet of their character, but it is an interesting environment to observe what wells to the surface.

Learning

I believe Microeconomics 101 classes across the nation should just be replaced with board games like Power Grid and Settlers of Catan. Board games are a great medium for learning. They showcase critical thinking skills, cooperation, negotiation, strategic thinking, budgeting, tactics, and more. They great way to flex the intellectual muscle of picking up a complex system that you have no background in, analyzing it, discerning the system’s key drivers, and then coming up with a strategy about how to optimize for a preferred outcome.

Board games are great mental exercise for anybody, but they can be especially powerful learning tools for kids. They can be an onramp to second and third-order thinking disguised behind the mask of fun. They are also a great medium to teach kids how to be gracious winners and pleasant losers so they don’t fail anyone’s social litmus tests…

Fun

Ok. We both know I could go on and on about the personal, social, and societal benefits of board games, but at the end of the day, they are just fun! Plain and simple. Leave your grandma’s checkers and parents game of LIFE at home. We are currently in a golden age of board game greatness with more amazing games coming out every day. Things have evolved a lot beyond SORRY! Don’t sleep on board games as fun. If you do, you’ll be missing out.

Hopefully, I have convinced you to at least consider the possibility that board games could be a worthy use of your precious time. But where to start?

Here are a few of my favorites:

Power Grid

Power Grid is my all-time favorite board game. Each player runs a competing utility company vying to provide power to the most cities. This may not seem like the most fun in the world at first glance (unless you are a Berg who is obsessed with industry like me), but Power Grid is an incredibly well-designed game. I have never played a game with such a well-developed marketplace feature as Power Grid. Easy to learn, but with a ton of strategic depth, I think we can scrap Microeconomics and Macroeconomics from curriculums and just have kids play this game. 

Good for: Econ nerds

Azul

Azul is the latest addition to my collection and one of my all-time favorites. Azul falls into the category of “easy to learn, hard to master”. There is a lot of strategy here, but the game is pretty easy to pick up and go even if you haven’t played before. I am a sucker for beutiful games with nice, tactile pieces and azul delivers in spades with its multicolored tiles.

Good for: Everyone

Quantum

My little brother got my Quantum for Christmas last year and it has quickly become one of my favorite table top strategy games. It is easy to learn but there is a ton of complexity. It really delivers on the sci-fi fantasy of being a general commanding a fleet of ultra-high tech ships. This game has the potential for insane swing turns and ever game I have played has included drama right up until the end.

Good for: Sci-fi nerds

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is probably the most beautiful game on this list. Players play as different species of trees all trying to position themselves to get exposure to the maximum amount of sunlight possible. Come on, don’t tell me you are not intrigued after hearing that description! A super fun experience that comes alive with the gorgeous tree playing pieces.

Good for: Your environmentalist friend

Carcassone

I think Carcassone is the most accessible and widely enjoyed game I have played. It is very simple and easy to pick up for newcomers, but is always interesting and fun even on repeat plays. It is quick enough to fit in a game here or there, but it winning still feels like a big accomplishment. This is my wife and my favorite game to play together and I think it is the absolute best first step into the tabletop strategy game world!

Good for: Someone’s first board game

Codenames

Codenames is definitely one of my favorite party games. Great for all ages (even parents) and any number of people so long as you can agreeably split into two teams. Super easy, but a fun game with infinite replay value. This is the first game I go to whenever I am at a family gathering or have a big group over.

Good for: Big groups

Sentinels of the Multiverse

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a super fun and unique game. You and the other players play as superheroes who have teamed up to stop a super strong supervillain. Cooperative games are always a big hit since everyone works together. I also love the comic book style and back stories of this game. The game has a ton of expansions where you can add heroes and additional villains. My little brother loves to play this game solo simultaneously operating 3 or 4 heroes at once.

Good for: Comic book nerds

Clank!

Clank! is a super fun game that I recently received from one of my brothers. It is a deckbuilding game combined with a dungeon crawler. It employs a great "noise" mechanic where certain actions cause "noise" and if you are too loud the dragon will wake up and it is game over! A super fun game that is easy to pick up but has a decent amount of strategy. A lot of replay value and quick enough to play a couple of times in one sitting. 

Good for: Trying something new

Hive

Hive is one of my favorite 2-player games. The goal of the game is to surround the opponent’s Queen tile. Each tile has a different kind of bug on it and they can all travel around the game board in different ways. Fun and easy to pick up, but with insane levels of depth. You are going to have to think 3 or 4 turns ahead if you are going to win against an experienced player. I definitely recommend getting the pocket version so you can keep it in your backpack and take it everywhere with you like I do!

Good for: People who always take forever thinking about their turns

Splendor

Splendor is another great beginner board game. Games like Splendor are called “Economic Engine” games were you collect resources and the more resources you have the more resources you can get and so on and so forth. The downside with some of these games is that the person in the lead can get so far ahead that it can get a bit demoralizing for the other players. Splendor is short and sweet so it never feels like hopeless and I can’t remember a time everyone has been satisfied to play just once!

Good for: Your greediest friend

Star Realms

Another recent addition to my collection. Star Realms is a 2-player “Deck Builder” game. It is super simple, but a ton of fun. Probably my favorite game that uses the deck building mechanic. The game also has a few expansions to spice things up once you have played it a few times. A ton of fun for anyone that has ever day dreamed about commanding a star fleet.

Good for: More sci-fi nerds

Smallworld

Smallworld is a great game that innovates on the area-conquest game type to make a game that is quicker and with more replayability. Think "Risk" but being able to finish a game in an hour and having every game play out totally different from previous playthroughs. Each player controls a Tribe of creatures from Trolls, to humans, to skeletons. Not only does each tribe have their own special powers, but you also get to pair it up with a unique power-up. The key to winning Smallworld is to know when to send your current Tribe into decline, so you can build up a new civilization without becoming spread too thin!

Good for: If you want to play Risk but don’t have all day

There. That should keep you busy for at least a few game nights. What are your favorite board games?

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What is your special skill?

What is your special skill?

Where does that skill come from?

I was recently asked these questions as part of a thoughtfulness exercise and was surprised to realize that I hadn’t ever really thought deeply about it. I think we so often spend time thinking about our weaknesses and the areas we want to improve that we don’t always focus on how to leverage our most fundamental strengths.

When trying to come up with an answer the first place I went to was “what would my wife, friends, coworkers, etc. say is my special skill?”

The answer that immediately sprang to mind was my storytelling ability.

I have a deep love of and proclivity towards telling stories. Communicating through narrative structures is what comes most evidently (as will come as no surprise to readers of this blog).

This answer wasn’t a big surprise, but where my storytelling prowess came from was.

I ruminated on the prime driver behind my love of storytelling and the answer that jumped out was the importance of being heard.

Why is storytelling so important to me? Why do I crave opportunities to share my and others’ stories?

It all stems from the value I place on being heard. For both myself and others.

At times in my life, I have felt like I wasn’t heard. That I didn’t have a voice. Those early exposures to a lack of empowerment clearly left a long-lasting impression on me. They left me with a chip on my shoulder. They shaped who I am and the strengths that I have sought to build in myself.

It’s important to me that I and others feel heard. It’s why I love telling stories. Stories allow me to shine the light on experiences that they deserve.

This deeper analysis of where a personal strength comes from is something that never occurred to me until I took the time to really think through underlying drivers and question myself. In general, I am a pretty self-aware person (sometimes painfully so), but this kind of deeper analysis is something I intend to spend more time doing and I suggest you do the same.

It is critically important to understand our “why”.

What moves us.

What shapes us.

What spurs us forward and what holds us back.

We will never be able to grow to all that we can be if we don’t take the time to understand ourselves.

So—

What is your special skill?

Where does it come from?

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Believe in the Brick

I love LEGO!

Growing up, there was nothing I enjoyed more than building with them. I would shake every birthday or Christmas present I ever got hoping to hear the sounds of LEGO bricks shaking within.

My interest in the small plastic bricks has been rekindled recently due to my reading the book Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry. It has been a fascinating view of one of the world’s most iconic brands. Born within a small carpenter’s shop in a tiny village in Denmark, the book tells the story of LEGO’s rise to the most recognizable toy on the planet, it’s eventual decline, and its subsequent return to glory. If you loved LEGOs growing up, I recommend you give it a read. If you are interested in how businesses innovate and reinvent themselves to stay relevant, I recommend you give it a read. If you are a human being with a heart and a soul, I recommend you give it a read.

Below are some of the lessons that stuck out to me especially stronger.

Actions to Thoughts

In the early 2000s, LEGO nearly went bankrupt. The company’s low point was in 2003, and in its desperation it turned to a newly hired former consultant, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, to help right the ship. Over the course of the next few years, Knudstorp led a fundamental transformation of the company to help it compete in the 21st century. In hindsight, his actions look like those of a visionary, but Knudstorp himself would tell you that there was no master plan when he took over. It was clear that the company was in dire straights, but it took him almost a year to properly understand the issues the company was facing. Without a master plan, Knudstorp focused the company on blocking and tackling. His underlying theory was that the culture of LEGO needed to be fundamentally reorganized, but he believed this could only be done through action. Too often people start with thoughts and expect action to follow, but Knudstorp was convinced that if he was able to get the company doing the little things right again, that the positive culture change he was after would follow. I love this idea of the power of action to impact our thoughts. Too often in our personal and professional lives, we try to will ourselves to make a change. Sometimes it is easy to change you or your company’s actions and to have patience knowing that the thoughts will follow.

Creativity within Constraints

One of the big reasons why LEGO began to struggle was that it spread itself too thin in the name of trying to be innovative. It spread its attention out across a massive influx of new product lines trying to find winners. And it did! Unfortunately, for every winner, there were many more attempts that did not come to fruition. The company wasn’t doing a great job of tracking the success of different new efforts and at one point it was estimated that over 3/4 of the products the company sold were unprofitable on a per-unit basis. In an attempt to drive innovation, LEGO had removed all the parameters for its designs that ensured consistency and proper unit-economics. One of the key things LEGO did to turn itself around was put those guard rails back in place. Before the innovation explosion in the late 90s/early 2000s, LEGO had been strict about maintaining their catalog of brick designs at around 6,000 (each with varying colors). By 2003, this number had jumped to 14,000. Many of these new brick designs were custom pieces that might only be used in a handful of sets. As part of the company’s turn around, a strict review of brick designs was launched with the number of designs once again slashed to ~7,000. Designers suddenly had to do more with less. Their designs were constrained by a smaller universe of potential bricks, but something interesting happened. Design teams started churning out MORE creative designs, not less. By putting into place some constraints within which to operate, designers were forced to get more creative. Often this meant using bricks from existing sets in unique and interesting ways. This led to better, more profitable designs as the company had to produce far fewer one-off pieces. This is a great example of the positive power constraints can have on creativity. It helps to have guardrails sometimes. They can be a powerful impetus for unique thinking and help to get creative expression going.

Crowd Control

One of the favorite innovation strategies out there is to leverage the “Wisdom of the Crowds”. Get a large number of people working on something and they will often come up with better answers than even the most capable individual within their ranks would be able to generate alone. But crowdsourcing is not a silver bullet. Not all companies are right for this type of input from the masses. While LEGO did spend some time dabbling with user-generated designs, it really found its highest leverage point in “clique-sourcing” as opposed to drawing from a massive crowd. Taking designs submitted by anyone and everyone made it difficult to ensure consistency of brand and to maintain profitability on sets. Instead, LEGO turned to a small number of highly-vetted individuals that could bring a differentiated skill set to what LEGO had in-house. When LEGO was exploring how to re-launch a version 2.0 of its smash-hit Mindstorm set, the company wanted to make sure it got input from the consumer group that made the kit such a success, the adult fan segment. LEGO recruited a small set of a few super fans with differentiated skill sets to provide input as part of the design team for the new set. Each person brought something different to the table in terms of expertise, but they were all passionate LEGO enthusiasts and excited to participate simply for the sake of getting to help steer the direction of one of their favorite products. LEGO didn’t give them absolute free-reign. Internal teams already had major design decisions locked-in by the time they brought in the user experts. This ensured that the underlying fundamentals of the set would be aligned with LEGO’s vision and brand, with the details and features most important to fans still being represented in the final product. LEGO knew that there was power in tapping into the wisdom of the crowds, but it also knew that they needed to exercise some effective crowd-control if they were going to be able to deliver a truly impactful product.

Believing in the Brick

At the end of the day, LEGO’s biggest pitfall was that it strayed from what made it great. The LEGO brick was the innovation that built a toy empire, and LEGO’s attempts to appeal to fans who didn’t enjoy creative building almost shipwrecked the company. By foregoing the brick or lessening its importance in products, LEGO removed what made it special. it tried to appeal to everyone and in doing so it stopped appealing to anyone. LEGO was only able to recover by doubling down on the brick. They did so in a unique and interesting way. Yes, they cut toy-lines that had no actual LEGO bricks in it, but more than that, they focused on what the brick represented. A LEGO brick is a promise. A promise of consistency and effectiveness. A promise that no matter what set you bought it in, that brick will work with bricks from any other set. It is a canvas upon which a near-infinite world of possibilities can be built. LEGO recaptured success by focusing on what made it great in the first place, but that meant thinking beyond the physical brick and thinking about what the brick represented. One of the most successful product lines that helped turn the ship around (and one of my personal favorite toys growing up) was Bionicle. Bionicle wasn’t made from traditional LEGO bricks, but it maintained the same design principles that the original LEGO brick was built on. Sets were consistent, combinable, and infinitely buildable with each other. LEGO learned an important lesson that is every bit as applicable for people as it is for large enterprises. You won’t ever be able to be good at everything. You won’t ever be able to satisfy everyone. What you should instead focus on are the skills and strengths that are uniquely yours.

Grow.

Learn new things.

Develop new products.

But never neglect what got you to where you are in the first place.

We all have something unique inside us.

Sometimes we just need to remember to Believe in the Brick.

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Relearning Relearnings

My friend, Reagan Pugh, wrote a great post almost a year ago about the things you know to be true, but seem to constantly need to relearn over and over again. This simple concept of ‘Relearnings’ has stuck with me ever since.

It seems to me, the challenge is rarely knowing the right thing to do, the challenge is doing what you know to be right.

Why is it so hard to do the things we know we should be doing?

I believe that the answer is, as it is to so many questions, structure. We fall back to well-worn paths of least resistance even when we know the outcomes are sub-optimal.

We maintain the friendship that we know is a net-negative on our life.

We continue to eat things that make us feel horrible an hour later.

We escalate fights over inconsequential things.

We stay quiet in the meeting when we know that we really should speak up.

Knowing the right thing to do is really only half of the battle. Yes, it takes a level of self-awareness and wherewithal to realize which actions lead to long-term negative outcomes, but that knowledge won’t ever do you much good if you continue to take the same course anyway.

In an effort to try to curb this tendency to regress from the path I know to be best for me, I have started maintaining a list of my ‘relearnings’. Here are a few of the things that I know to be true, yet still sometimes struggle to implement day to day. I have found that the best way to frame these relearnings are as endings to the statement: “It’s in my best interest to…”

• It’s in my best interest to get more sleep. I feel so much better and productive when I am getting close to 8 hours of sleep every night

• It’s in my best interest to exercise daily. If I am going to be at my best mentally and emotionally, it as absolutely a prerequisite for me to do something active.

• It’s in my best interest to start working on my blog Saturday morning instead of waiting until Sunday afternoon. Leaving it for Sunday leads to anxiety and a lower quality product. (Full transparency: I started this post at 5:08pm on Sunday.)

• It’s in my best interest to be more productive. I am happier and less anxious when I avoid procrastinating and get tasks off of my to-do list.

• It’s in my best interest to do something more enriching than simply watching TV after work. Cooking, cleaning, learning. Just spending 15 minutes doing something productive makes all the difference in the world.

• It’s in my best interest to track my food intake. The benefits I get from increased awareness of what I am eating far outweigh the few minutes it takes me to input my food for the day.

• It’s in my best interest to prioritize my faith daily. The more I focus on deepening my faith, the better every other aspect of my life is. I’m happier, more fulfilled, less-anxious and there is a 1-1 relationship with the more time I invest in my faith and the more harmonious my relationships are.

Startup Relearnings

I don’t think relearnings are contained just to personal growth. It seems like the entire startup industry is currently grappling with many of the same lessons that should have been forged years and years ago. In an attempt to help us all learn from our mistakes and be better equipped next time we are starting, working at, or investing in a company, I’ve come up with a few entrepreneurship-focused relearnings as well.

• It’s in a startup’s best interest to get its unit economics right. How did we forget this one? If you don’t get your unit economics figured out early, pouring fuel on the fire is only going to exacerbate any problem that exists. Startups need to grow to succeed and if your unit economics are messed up, suddenly growth becomes the enemy. That is a bad, bad place to be.

• It’s in a startup’s best interest to go slow to go fast. Figuring out unit economics falls within this, but I think it is worth its own bullet point. The name of the game when building a company is speed of execution, but that doesn’t mean everything should be done as quickly as possible. When it comes to hiring, fundraising, developing a scalable economic flywheel, and getting to know your customers’ needs, it really does pay to measure twice and cut once.

• It’s in an entrepreneur’s best interest to raise the right kind of capital. Venture capital is not right for every company. Be honest with yourself about the kind of company you want to build and pursue the capital strategy that is aligned with that vision. Bootstrapping, grants, venture capital, traditional debt. One isn’t inherently superior to the other. They are different and they fit best with different kinds of companies.

• It’s in a startup’s best interest to be disciplined when it comes to cash burn. Cash is oxygen. Cash is at-bats. Whatever metaphor you want to use when cash hits zero the ride is over. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. The more disciplined you can be when it comes to cash burn, the more chances you have to make something happen. Building companies is about a lot of things going against you. Successful companies stick around long enough for one or two big things to fall their way. You will find startup graveyards littered with promising companies that never made it to that one or two big things falling their way because they just couldn’t keep their burn under control.

• It’s in an entrepreneur’s best interest to be picky when it comes to investors. The marriage metaphor is cliche, but it’s used so often because it is a good one. If your company is going to be successful, taking money from an investor means that you are going to be embarking on a multi-year long relationship. You don’t have to be best friends, but if you have serious question marks about your ability to work together, you are better off continuing your fundraising process. If your only option is to saddle up with someone undesirable, maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself why you are having trouble fundraising. There are great companies that struggled to fundraise, but more often than not, the best ideas are able to find capital, no matter where they are based.

• It’s in investors’ best interest to remember that capital is not a sustainable source of competitive advantage. Money is like alcohol. It’s an amplifier. If you are a jerk sober, you are going to be a huge jerk drunk. If you are funny sober, you are going to be a comedian drunk. If your company is a well-oiled cash-burning machine, throwing dollar bills at it is only going to allow you to accomplish that purpose even more effectively. If there is one lesson that the world of tech and entrepreneurship has been in the process of learning over the past year it’s that cash, in and of itself is, is not going to win you the day.

These are a few relearnings that I could come up with. What lessons do you believe the startup world is just refusing to learn? What are some relearnings you are working on making stick in your own life?

Till next week. (Hopefully Saturday morning)

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Don't Stop Imagining. The Day That You Do Is The Day That You Die

I’ve always loved books. Growing up I would speed through (or neglect) school work so that I could read whatever book I was engrossed in. When I was a kid, you could find me curled up in the corner of our couch in our living room reading for hours on end. I wasn’t anti-social. In fact, I am very much a social extravert, but I’ve struggled with social anxiety throughout my life— the irony is not lost on me— and books were always a safe haven that I could escape into. I especially loved fantasy and science fiction books.

I believe that a proper appreciation for fiction is sorely lacking in today’s modern society. Fiction is viewed as “fun” reading and not useful or practical in any way.

I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

First of all, what is wrong with doing something for enjoyment? Are we really so focused on productivity that we can’t do something for the sake of doing it? But more than that, I think fiction is absolutely valuable to the development and maintenance of a healthy person.

Fiction is an abstraction that allows us to discuss and grapple with things that are very, very real. Which is easier to understand: The heroism of a knight slaying a dragon or the heroism of a mother working two jobs to support her children? Both are heroic, but the abstraction of fiction allows us to interact with ideas in a more concrete and objective way than when we face them in real life. Joseph Campbell discusses mythology as the mirror by which our ego is able to view and judge itself. Fiction allows us to take a step outside of ourselves to see things as they are. It asks questions of us and demands answers in a way that so often be ignored in “real” life.

Famed fantasy author Ursula Le Guin has an excellent topic on the subject called Why are American’s Afraid of Dragons?. Le Guin discusses her belief that imagination and healthy escapism are fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. It is what allows us to think of a better future and to strive towards it. These thoughts can be channeled towards positive, aspirational ends or they can be suppressed. As with most core aspects of our identity, suppression of imagination deforms our thoughts into vehicles of jealousy and base cravings.

My favorite quote from the essay (and one of my favorite quotes ever):

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

I firmly believe that imagination is a muscle and just like any other, it requires exercise to be maintained. Fantasy and science fiction novels are a great way to keep your imagination in tip-top shape. Imagination is crucially important whatever you do. It’s how you see things other people don’t and set yourself apart from peers. It is also only going to become more and more important. As automation affects more jobs imagination and creativity are the qualities that will be most prized.

I hope that I have convinced you of the importance of fantasy. It’s not too late to start working out your most important mental muscle.

I have put together a list of my all-time favorite fantasy and sci-fi books for any that would like to get started.

The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson

My all-time favorite series by my all-time favorite author. Brandon is the master of world-building and Stormlight is his masterpiece. Set on the broken and war-torn world of Roshar. The world of Stormlight is by far the most unique of any fantasy book I have ever read. There are twists and turns and the most epic cinematic action scenes you will read anywhere. As with most great high-fantasy novels, the Way of Kings takes some time to get going, but it is well worth the wait for the most incredible climax I’ve ever read. The best part of Sanderson is how prolific he is. The second and third installments, Words of Radiance and Oathbringer, are equally excellent and the 4th book in the series is on its way and expected to be released in late 2020.

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

The Wheel of Time is incredible. It’s by far my favorite complete fantasy series. There is a reason the Wheel of Time sits at the head of the modern fantasy pantheon. It starts with familiar fantasy tropes but evolves into so much more. The only thing more impressive than this series’ scope is the fact that Brandon Sanderson finished it in such a compelling way after the tragic death of the original author. The character work is especially strong. Every time you pick the book up it feels like you are hanging out with your close friends. The depth of this series really cannot be overstated. The time is right to at least read the first book (The Eye of the World) with Amazon working on the production of a live television adaption.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Far into the future, the human race has populated the solar system and adopted a stratified social structure based on the precepts of Ancient Rome. The Reds are the lowest of all the different castes working as laborers and slaves until one man decides that he has had enough. This book reads like an absolute action thriller. The book’s mix of futuristic and ancient is the absolutely perfect setting for its electrifying plot. My all-time favorite sci-fi book and my trojan horse to get people into reading.

Everything else by Brandon Sanderson

Did I mention how prolific Sanderson was? The rate at which he pumps out excellent books is unreal. I have never read a book by him that I haven’t loved. They come in all shapes, sizes and settings. Some are lighter fair. Some a hefty. Westerns, sci-fi, classic fantasy, and exciting heists. Sanderson writes it all. Most of his books even take place within the same universe and are littered with easter eggs between each of them. There is one character that even makes an appearance in every book. Every book by Brandon Sanderson is worth checking out, but here are some of my favorites:

• Mistborn - The coolest magic system of all his books

• Warbreaker - His best stand-alone novel

• The Emperor’s Soul - The Hugo Award-winning novela

The Gentlemen Bastards by Scott Lynch

The Lies of Locke Lamora is one of my favorite books every. It probably has the most likable and endearing main character of any book. This book is just fun. Set in a fictional city much like historic Venice, the book follows a guild of thieves on their heists, cons, and adventures. The book is laugh-out-loud funny and the action doesn’t disappoint either. I haven’t finished the series and the second book is pretty great, but the series’ initial book is an absolute standout.

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

A fantastic Sci-Fi series for anyone who loves space westerns. The Expanse follows the exploits of the crew of the Rocinante during a time when the human race first learns that it is not alone in the universe. The Expanse is interesting for the territory it occupies. Far enough in the future that mankind has conquered the galaxy, but near enough that the world feels strikingly familiar to our own. My go-to sci-fi series and one I am excited to dive back into soon.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson

The heftiest book on this list. Malazan makes other high-fantasy books look like YA novels. It is what you get when a series is written by an anthropologist. This book series does not hold your hand at all. You get the distinct feeling that you are being provided a glimpse into a world that has existed long-before you happened upon it and will continue on long after you have gone your separate ways. Despite its uncompromising nature, I can promise you that you won’t regret picking it up. I have only read the first two books, but each was absolutely top-notch (Deadhouse Gates was especially epic).

The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Calling The Dark Tower a fantasy series is only suitable because there is no other category it could possibly fit into. Part minimalist western, part fantasy with noble knights, part metaphysical science-fiction, part classic Stephen King horror. This is a book that defies classification but is excellent nonetheless. This is a series where you need to read at least the first three books before you are going to have much of an idea of what is going on. Stick with it. It’s worth it.

The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

In fantasy, there are two archetypal subgenres. Noblebright is the optimistic stories where the heroes win out over evil and make friends along the way. Grimdark novels are the brutal worlds where every relationship ends in a backstab and where life is nasty, brutish, and short. The First Law is Grimdark. If you like Game of Thrones but figure it could use some more brutal action, you will love The First Law. I’ve never read a book with as savage and violent fight scenes. Saving Private Ryan with swords. It’s awesome.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

One of the more cerebral sci-fi books I have ever read. If you like to stretch your intellectual horsepower while reading this is the book for you. Unsolved physics problems, alien video games, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution combine to make a very good, very unique book.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

The book series that needs no introduction. Remember how good the first few seasons of Game of Thrones were? That’s because they had the books for source material. The world you know and love but better than ever on the written page. Buyer beware. I’ve talked about how prolific of a writer Brandon Sanderson is. George R. R. Martin is the opposite. A Feast for Crows came out in 2005. A Dance with Dragons came out in 2011. The Winds of Winter is supposedly forthcoming but, at this point, who knows? The books are great, but if you are going to pick them up, don’t plan on finishing them anytime soon.

The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss

Oh, the Kingkiller Chronicles. I almost didn’t put this one up here. The first time I read this series I absolutely loved it. The first book was especially fantastic. The second time through (yes I am one of those weird people who likes reading books multiple times) I realized that the only person who was more into himself than the main character was the other. Mileage may vary here. I am including it because many people absolutely adore it and I was one of them until not so long ago. This is another book whose ending seems further and further away by the day. The first two books were released within 4 years of each other but that was 9 years ago…

There. That should keep you busy for awhile. Keep reading. Hold onto that sense of wonder we all have within us. Don’t fear dragons.

And most of all—

Don’t stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.

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To Goal or not to Goal: Thoughts on Resolutions, Ruts, and Everythingisawesomitus

Ahh the new year. A time of beginnings. A time of reflection.

A time of goals.

I love setting New Year’s Resolutions. They are a time-honored tradition in my family. Every year we go to the nearest Buffalo Wild Wings on New Year’s Day to watch Bowl Games and make our resolutions for the coming years. Each person goes through how they did on last year’s list before generating and sharing their list for the upcoming year.

Now admittedly, there is a strong sense of nostalgia tied up in this annual ritual, but I still find myself regularly surprised by the flack that New Year’s Resolutions get. The jokes that by February most of these ambitions will have fallen by the wayside. People who wear their lack of resolutions like a badge of honor.

What’s so wrong with goal setting?

I think a lot of the pushback is an outgrowth of the disease of comparison that has been amplified by social media. I call it Everythingisawesomitus. If there is one phrase I have written on this blog more than any other it very well could be “Comparison is the Death of Joy” (Close runner ups would probably be “Everything is a Choice” and “Non-participating preferred equity better aligns long-term incentives between founders and investors”)

Our capitalist culture places incredible value on achievement. By in large, this is a VERY good thing. It is what has made our country the beacon of hope and progress it is for so many people around the world. It is what has made the US the best place in the world to build, create, and innovate. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got our fair share of problems (none of which I would like to get into in this post), but I think it is pretty tough to make the argument that the light of the world is anything but much darker without the US in it.

This emphasis on achievement does have its downsides. Fulfillment’s ugly step brother is anxiety and when our fulfillment is tied to external pursuits, anxiety will inevitably be waiting in the wings. When we progress, we feel great, but when we stand still we feel like the world is passing us by.

I think that is why people resist goals. Goals are scary. They can loom over us as a reminder of all that we haven’t done yet. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most driven and successful people are often also the most anxious. The drive and determination to set and achieve goals is the same thing that makes people susceptible to being anxious whenever they don’t. These feelings are only amplified when we see the high school friends on fancy vacations or ex-girlfriends score their dream job (Note that this latter point is not something I can relate to. As my best man joked to uproarious laughter during his speech at my wedding, “I’d tell a hilarious and embarrassing story about one of Erik’s ex-girlfriends if he had any!”)

If you don’t somehow achieve every single New Year’s resolution, you feel like some sort of immense failure, especially compared to the Instagram Bourgeoisie.

I don’t think it has to be this way and I have some tips on how to make goal-setting the positive experience it should be.

Go Big or Go Home

I think part of the reason that New Year’s Resolutions are a positive thing for me and my family, is that there is absolutely zero expectation of achieving all of them. I have 50 New Year’s Resolutions for 2020. FIFTY. I will list some of them out below for any curious but you can rest assured that there is absolutely no way that I achieve all of them. Some are crazy ambitious. Some are completely out of my control. Year after year, the person who achieves the highest percentage of their goals at best will achieve 50-60% (I am not counting you, Trond, and your annoyingly consistent habit of setting 4 goals every year that will be almost impossible for you not to achieve.). Our resolutions are more “want-to-dos” than they are hard and fast goals that must be achieved.

Having a lot of goals takes the pressure off. If you know you will never achieve all of them, then there isn’t any anxiety when you don’t. You are perfectly enabled to download Duolingo and try to learn French for a week before deciding “You know what? French sucks and I don’t want to learn it.” No problem. That is 1 out of 50 you didn’t get and will give you the time to try to achieve a couple of others out of the remaining 49.

Start Early and Measure Often

Ok. Time for me to answer the question that I know has been on your mind.

Erik, this is great. There hasn’t been a single Arsenal reference yet and I mean, it isn’t as good as your post on The Crown. but your self-deprecating wedding speech joke gave me a good chuckle so I am vibing with you here. But why oh why are we discussing New Year’s Resolutions in February?! A little late me thinks!

So glad you asked. The fundamental issue with New Year’s Resolutions is that we remember to start coming up with them at 2:34 pm on New Year’s Eve. Sandwiched right between “Is this dress too shoulder-y?” and “Which mixed-drink will have me in the least amount of pain tomorrow?” is “Oh crap, what am I going to tell everyone when they ask about my New Year’s Resolutions?”

Now I don’t think there is anything wrong with some spontaneous resolutioning. Have some fun with it. But if there is a change that you want to make in your life, please oh please, do not try to go 0% to 100% on January 1. This is where most resolutions fall apart. There is no prep work.

Why am I writing this post in February? Because if you want to really use the New Year for a fulcrum for change, you’ve got to start laying the groundwork ahead of time. Like way ahead of time. Maybe not in February but definitely before November when the holidays start heating up and habits partially formed are easy to let fall by the wayside.

You will see in my resolutions below that many of my goals are related to healthy eating and exercise. The reason these are heavily represented in my resolutions is that they have been a focus area for me over the past 6 months preceding the end of the year. I was not expecting to go from never working out to throwing my body weight around in the gym. I started working the gym into my routine ever since July. I started slow but by the end of the year, I was consistently making it into the gym 5 days a week. This gave me a strong platform habit to build off of. Once you have that foundational habit locked in, it is much easier to build off of it than trying to start from scratch.

Obviously, everyone has got to start somewhere, but momentum is the name of the game. You’ve got to go slow to go fast. Start easy and work your way up to the more ambitious goals. If you don’t want to watch TV during the week, start by not watching TV on Wednesdays. If you want to work out every day before work, start by simply setting your alarm early and get the habit of waking up earlier going.

Once you do get a habit going, make sure to measure it. I have made this mistake before of getting discouraged because I don’t see the results I want immediately. Incremental changes can be super motivating if you measure them, but they won’t even be noticed if you aren’t. Measurement tightens feedback loops and get’s momentum on your side. It may be cliche, but the quote “if you want to improve something, first you need to measure it” rings true, especially when it comes to resolutions.

Follow that North Star

There is another reason that I have heard cited for why people don’t like goal-setting. For smart, ambitious, driven people, if they set a goal, they will achieve it. But are they setting the right goals? Does their focus on their goals put up blinders to opportunities that present themselves serendipitously?

Outside of New Year’s Resolutions, I am actually not that big of a goal guy. The way I navigate this ocean called life is by always trying to keep myself pointed towards my North Star. By doing this, I am able to keep myself oriented directionally towards where I want to go in life, but I retain the flexibility to adapt and evolve that following a strict 20-step goal framework wouldn’t allow. It also allows for a certain amount of experimentation. My North Star is that I want to be part of building companies that make an impact by solving important problems.

Sounds somewhat specific but there is actually a ton of flexibility within it.

What kind of problems? Does ‘build’ mean as an investor or an operator? Do I want to devote my life to building one company or several?

Despite having a very clear idea about what my North Star is, the details are all quite fuzzy. And this is a good thing! It allows me to experiment. To make mistakes, learn from them, and slowly course correct. I try something new and I can say “A, B, and C, aspect of this are right for me, but D and E are not” and then I can use that information to track my way to the next opportunity.

Journey before destination. If your goals have you putting blinders on, I recommend thinking about what your North Star is and allowing a little bit more room for minor course corrections as you navigate your way towards it.

Be ok to be in a rut

We started with why people resist resolutions and we end with it. We all have a case of Everythingisawesomitus. We are absolutely allergic to ever letting anyone see us at anything less than our absolute best. What is a natural human tendency to want to put your best foot forward has been amplified by social media to cataclysmic levels. We compare our 100% to someone else’s best 10%. And how can we match up?

What if we didn’t have to?

What if we were ok with being in a rut?

Honestly, what is wrong with having a little struggle in our life? If we accept the truism that life has its ups and downs, then the syllogistic conclusion we must draw is that everyone goes through ruts. Everyone struggles. No one has it perfect.

It is ok to be in a rut. Ruts can be a time for self-reflection, learning, and growth. They can be a time to assess what really matters and they often reveal who our true friends really are.

They aren’t easy. The most important thing is to try to stay positive and be patient.

You are where you are for a reason. Accept it, don’t give in to it, and try to wait it out. The sun will come up tomorrow and it will be a brand new day.

I know all this is easier said than done. I am going through a bit of a rut right now and I wish I was half as good at following my own advice as I am at dishing it out.

But it can be done. And the first step is to be ok with where you are, whatever you are going through.

My 2020 Resolutions

For any curious, here is my mostly un-redacted list of personal goals for the coming year. I am only holding the few that could get me in trouble a little closer to my chest.

• Get down to 210 lbs by 4th of July

• End 2020 under 200 lbs

• Track food daily

• Meal prep for lunches

• Weigh myself daily

• Measure myself weekly

• Run two miles without stopping

• Deadlift, squat, and bench my body weight

• Get 8 hours of sleep each night

• Be more of a joiner

• Volunteer for two events during the year

• Try Yoga

• Go on evening walks with Caitlyn

• Be more empathetic towards others

• Be a better listener

• Be slower to anger or react defensively

• Assume best intentions in others until proven otherwise

• Spend more time reading the bible

• Read 10 non-fiction books

• Read 5 fiction books

• Complete the No Code MVP Bootcamp

• Build my first side project

• Go to church every week. Watch sermons online if we miss the service or are out of town

• Eat healthier

• Don't treat every dinner out as a special occasion

• Two trips to Colorado

• Two trips to Virginia

• Body fat % under 20%

• Grow a full beard

• Do more romantic things for Caitlyn

• Take more initiative with helping around the house

• Be less gross

• Continue to deepen my relationship with Christ

• Have the courage to stand up for my faith and my beliefs

• Communicate more clearly about my thoughts, needs, and opinions

• Be up front about what I do and do not want to do

• Do 5 pull-ups

• Continue to blog every week

• Continue to utilize my CRM to stay in touch with people

• Be more efficient with my time

• Pray more

• Happy wife

• Workout 6 days per week

• Eat out less

These are my resolutions. This is the system that works for me. Your mileage may vary. What are the resolutions that you are working on?

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The Best Ship is Ownership

We are overdue for an Arsenal related post, aren’t we? Don’t worry there will be a nugget here for you non-soccer loving people as well, I promise!

Last week, Arsenal had quite the game against our local rivals, Chelsea. We were playing away in a hostile environment and got off to a pretty miserable start. With more than 2/3 of the game left to play, we were down a man and down a goal away from home.

To say things were looking dire would’ve been quite the understatement.

Down a central defender, the vast majority of coaches would have taken off an attacking player and brought on another defender from their bench. And this is exactly what it looked like new Arsenal coach, Mikel Arteta was doing. He readied defender Rob Holding to come on, before deciding against making the switch at the last second. Instead, he asked midfielder Granit Xhaka to slot in at the unfamiliar left center-back role.

This was a strange decision but it paid dividends.

Gabriel Martinelli scored a fantastic goal to get the Gunners back in the game and Arsenal would come back once again to tie the game 2-2 through a superb finish from the captain on the night, Hector Bellerin.

Down a man away from home, a comeback draw feels a lot like a win and fans everywhere were happy with how the team responded to the adverse circumstances they faced.

Asked after the game about his curious decision not to bring on another defender, Arteta told the media that:

“I was thinking about that and said ‘I don’t want to send that message’ to the team and we decided to keep us as we were, give them a chance and I wanted to see how they could respond to that. Don’t make the response for them because I asked them to be accountable for what they do and I didn’t want to make a decision not to let them decide for themselves. It was a great response from them.”

Ever since Arteta took over the team mid-season he has preached a consistent message of accountability.

Of taking ownership of your actions and those of your teammates.

I loved what he did here. Instead of making the easy choice, he left it up to the players to step up and be accountable for their actions. I believe that if you give people an opportunity to rise to the occasion, they won’t disappoint and this Arsenal game was a perfect embodiment of that. While it is still early days, the reaction from the players to their new manager has been fantastic and I think it comes down to that same message of accountability and ownership.

I think this idea of ‘ownership’ is critically important. Ownership leads to the best decisions and the best outcomes. It is turning around Arsenal’s season and I believe it has the potential to change the course of our lives as well.

How Ownership Changes Us

Ownership changes things. Even a small amount of ownership is an extremely powerful motivator. If you own stock in a company you are more likely to buy their goods and products. Ownership gives you a stake in something’s outcome. It gives you an upside in something’s success.

It aligns incentives.

That is why companies give out equity. An actual stake in a company has a totally outsized effect on how people act. A not-so-secret-secret of the startup world is that, for everyone but the earliest employees, equity in a startup will likely not lead to life-changing amounts of money. Even with this being the case, equity still serves as a powerful motivator to do your best, because at the end of the day YOU are one of the owners. When you are an owner, even a small one, at some level you are working for yourself.

Therein lies the rub if you are early in your career.

For most junior folks at companies, they don’t have ownership. Real or imagined.

Sans ownership, the incentive structure is “work hard and you’ll get rewarded by not being fired and, depending on the company, you may have access to some sort of career progression.”

Raise your hand if incentives like that make you want to jump out of bed and run through a brick wall to do everything you can for your employer.

Didn’t think so.

So what are you to do if you don’t have ownership?

Two ideas:

Phantom Incentive Structures

If you don’t have ownership, but you want it, the best way to get ownership is to act like you already have it. A little confusing, but think about it this way:

If we accept that people who have ownership have the most incentive alignment, and therefore will generally exhibit the most desirable behavior, then the solution is to simply act AS IF you have ownership and suddenly you will have the most desirable behavior for a team, company, or project.

It doesn’t have to be actual ownership in something. Just ask Mikel Arteta.

I call this phenomenon ‘Phantom Incentive Structures’. They are incentive structures that only exist because we will them into existence. There are obviously limits with this sort of thing, but my guess is that you will find that the limit to how far you can will yourself to do something is a lot further than you’d imagine.

Build your personal brand. Build your intellectual assets. Build a flourishing network. These days those things matter a lot more than what is on your resume.

The best way to become an owner is to act is if you already are one.

Act like your incentives are properly aligned and you will stand out from the pack as the person who has the best chance of getting that actual alignment.

Taking the Jump

If all else fails, don’t be afraid to take the jump. The best way to build wealth is, and will always be, having some sort of ownership. Otherwise, you are just renting out your most precious resource, time. There is nothing wrong with doing work that you don’t have ownership in, but if your aim is wealth creation and to reach your highest potential, it is going to be a very hard and slow road without some form of ownership.

If there is no pathway to getting ownership over what you are doing why stick around? If a company doesn’t want to invest in you, why should you owe them loyalty?

I know far too many smart, hard-working, ambitious people stuck in dead-end jobs because they are simply afraid of taking that jump. They are comfortable and the idea of leaving a “just ok” job in search of a great one is scary.

Believe me I get it.

But in my experience, people far overweight career risk. Especially if you are young. We act as if every job is the end-all-be-all but the reality is that most of us will have many jobs throughout our career. I also think people don’t appreciate just how much an entrepreneurial skillset is appreciated in the corporate environment.

People think that if they leave the corporate life behind to blaze their own trail and it doesn’t work out, they will have to come slinking back to their old positions. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Big companies place incredible value on people who have gone out and tried to make something happen for themselves even if it doesn’t succeed. Most corporations are starved of innovative self-starters and the fact that you went out and tried something means you have this skill set that they perpetually seem unable to build in-house.

The reality is, if you take the jump and it doesn’t work out, the likelihood is that you actually would come back to at least where you would have been anyways if you had just stayed and tried to climb the latter the “old-fashioned way”.

For a young, driven, ambitious person entrepreneurial pursuits basically have zero downside. You learn more and you become a much, much more valuable asset to any other company down the road. Now all of this calculus can change based on an individual’s life circumstances, but I still think the idea that people overweight career risk is a truism no matter where you are in life.

Ownership is crucially important.

It is what achieves the best results for companies and it is what achieves the best results for individuals.

If you don’t have ownership, act like you do. That is the best way to get some skin in the game.

If that doesn’t work, start your own thing. No one can stand in the way of you getting ownership in something you start.

Don’t be too afraid of career risk. The real risk isn’t taking a chance and better on yourself.

The real risk is waking up in 20 years with the regret of never doing so.

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Moondust

One of my wife and my favorite shows to watch together is The Crown. She is a bit of an anglophile and I am a sucker for tense political drama so it ticks all the right boxes.

We have recently been watching season 3 which I have been absolutely loving. It was always going to be an interesting season with the show jumping forward ~20 years and swapping actors for all of the characters. The season started out a bit slow but boy did it hit its stride a few episodes in. Some of the episodes have been all-time greats not only for the show but for television in general. One, in particular, stood out to me and it has been something I haven’t really been able to get out of my head since.

Episode 7, Moondust, is centered around the moon landing and its impact on the Royal Family. In particular, the episode centers around Prince Philip and his reaction to that one giant leap for mankind. Prince Philip’s storyline throughout the entire show has been particularly fascinating to me and it comes to a head in this episode. Philip is a strong, ambitious, and adventurous alpha male in every sense of the word and his struggle to come to terms with life married to the world’s most famous monarch is an especially key plotline in the first two seasons. By Season 3, he is older and more settled into his role as a member of the royal family, even if he isn’t the one in the main spotlight. Anyways, back to the episode.

The whole world is drawn to the drama of the moon landings, but Philip finds himself especially obsessed. He is a former pilot and feels a certain kinship with the team of American astronauts sent to the moon. He also is going through something of a midlife crisis. For all his ambitions and verve in his younger years, he doesn’t feel as if he has accomplished much so far in his life. He longingly looks to the stars and the astronauts risking their lives among them as examples of “true men”. Men who are accomplishing great things through action.

In stark contrast, his own life finds him grudgingly getting to know the royal family’s new priest, Dean Woods. Woods is a young priest who is interested in using an abandoned building on the Windsor estate as a rehabilitation center for priests who have lost their confidence. Philip has a run-in with the priests who he views as weak men of inaction especially when compared to the Apollo astronauts who he expects to have reached some heightened level of wisdom through the greatness and heroism of their acts.

Once the American astronauts return to earth they go on a victory tour which takes them to Buckingham Palace to meet the royal family. Philip is so excited by the prospects of meeting his heroes that he requests 15 minutes alone with them to talk “airman to airman.” Philip finally gets the chance to meet his heroes. These titans of men who have achieved the impossible and escaped the confines of our planet, and even more miraculously, returned in one shape. Philip exchanges awkward small talk with these heroes and comes away, rather underwhelmed.

They were awkward, immature, and, in Philip’s estimation, “rather dull.” They did not gain some sort of higher plane of wisdom among the stars. They were normal men. In fact, their lack of dynamism was exactly what made them perfect for one of the riskiest missions ever.

Philip’s entire worldview was turned sideways. He had always viewed action to be the path to nobility. Here were men whose actions had been some of the greatest the world had ever known and there was nothing special about them. This shook Philip to his core and leads him back to Dean Woods and his wayward priests.

Philip suddenly saw them in a new light. These men weren’t champions of action, but they were striving in a great pursuit. Unlike the Apollo astronauts, their endeavor was purely internal in nature. These priests were working towards their own self-improvement. They were asking difficult questions of themselves and their faith and were opening themselves to the growth that only community and vulnerability can bring. Like Sisyphus, they were setting themselves against a goal that was at once unattainable and supremely noble. Whereas before Philip saw the priests as weak and ineffectual, he now saw them as courageous. He envied their ability to be honest with themselves and each other about their faults and struggles. The episode ended with Philip joining their ranks and with a statement that Philip’s support of Dean Woods and his rehabilitation center was one of the Prince’s proudest accomplishments.

Ok, now this was an excellent episode of an excellent show and I highly recommend that everyone give it a watch, but why do I feel the need to write about it at such length?

Because at times, I find myself feeling like Philip. I am highly ambitious and sometimes I feel discouraged looking at the accomplishments of others. I know that comparison is the death of joy, but it is still difficult to resist the temptation to measure yourself against others. I often find myself putting heroes on pedestals for their actions. Philip looked up to the Apollo astronauts. I look up to tech CEOs and master venture capitalists. My guess is that I would find meeting many of these heroes similarly underwhelming.

I think Philip’s growth during this episode has a lot of lessons that we can all learn from, especially in the world of tech and entrepreneurship. Almost by definition, the fact that we work in the tech world means that we want to change the world around us in some way shape or form.

While there is definitely nothing wrong with this, it is important to remember, that the greatest achievements are the internal successes, not the external ones.

Compare yourself to who you were three years ago, not to others.

Believe in something. Have faith in things that you can’t see or prove.

Focus on internal growth just as much as external growth.

It’s easy to ascribe magnificence and greatness to human achievements, but remember that for all the heroism of their pursuit, at the end of the day, all the Apollo astronauts found on that face of our most familiar celestial body was moondust.

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Micropreneurship: What it is, Why it Matters, and What resources are out there

Last week I wrote about my predictions for 2020.

One of the items I touched on was that we would see a rise in a trend I called “Micropreneurship”

I wanted to write this post to go a bit deeper into this phenomenon and to highlight some of the resources out there for aspiring micropreneurs.

What Is Micropreneurship?

I define micropreneurship as “the process of building a small-scale entrepreneurial endeavor enabled by a new generation of technology platforms and tools”. These aren’t startups. They aren’t investment portfolios.

They are blogs, Shopify stores, and online courses.

They are eCommerce plays, newsletters, and recipe guides.

Some of them are side-gigs. Some of them are full-time jobs.

What all of them have in common is that they are made possible by new technologies and services that are increasing the access people have to entrepreneurship. It used to take time and thousands of dollars to get a small business off the ground. Now it takes the few minutes necessary to sign up for Substack, Notion, or Webflow.

The future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. If you knew what you were doing, you could always build a business, but now we have the tools available to make that hurdle so, so much lower.

Why does Micropreneurship matter?

So what? People have always figured out how to start businesses. Why does this new trend matter and why does it need some flashy name like Micropreneurship?

Micropreneurship matters. A lot. The lack of it has been one of the fundamental issues that we have been grappling with as a country over the last decade.

The geopolitical story over the last quarter-century that has had more impact on the way our country looks than any other is the fact that huge swathes of our country feel like they are getting left out of the modern economy. This may be blue-collar laborers feeling left behind by technology. This may be highly-educated urban-dwellers struggling under a mountain of debt who no longer believe that the institutions around them work the way they should.

See the fundamental issue is that the economy changed and people didn’t keep up. A relatively small number of highly-educated or highly-technical workers were able to thrive in this new technology-focused economy, but for a large portion of the general populace, they saw their neighbors driving home in new cars as their own prospects dwindled. Our education system is just now starting to wake up to economic realities that were readily apparent twenty years ago.

But I do not think all is hopeless.

I believe micropreneurship can be the panacea to some of these woes.

Micropreneurship can be an enabling force function that provides access to wealth creation for those that have been left out of the modern technology economy. You no longer need to know how to code to build a website. You no longer need to get a small business loan to open up a storefront. We have the tools and resources at our fingertips to unleash a massive wave of technological democratization the likes of which haven’t been seen since the early days of the internet.

More than just the societal implications, people are yearning for this in their own lives. People want to be their own bosses. To have the flexibility of managing their own schedule. Look at how much remote work appeals to people. Doing the same work they have always done, but suddenly being able to do it from wherever has a massive impact. Just think about the impact that defining the work you are actually doing could have.

Micropreneurship Tools & RESOURCES

I am still learning the ins and outs of this new trend, but I wanted to provide some of the resources I have come across so far for those interested in learning more.

No Code MVP

No Code MVP is a course made by Bram Kranstein to help people learn to utilize no-code tools to ideate and build their first product. If you sign up, you’ll be in good company! I purchased the course recently and I am excited to dive in!

Makerpad

Makerpad is the best resource for learning how to build specific products utilizing one or more no-code tools. The site has hundreds of product tutorials and even offers no-code consulting services for businesses looking to automate workflows. Creator Ben Tossell is definitely one of the kings in the no-code space and a good person to keep tabs on.

JumpCut

Jumpcut offers courses for everything from influencers, to marketers, to passive income generators. I haven’t taken any of their courses myself, but the site was recommended to me on twitter and it looks like a great resource that could be worth checking out.

Shopify

Probably the most important company to the micropreneurship movement. Shopify enables thousands of small business owners to quickly and easily get online stores off the ground. Shopify is a big reason why I believe this trend has the legs to go mainstream.

Squarespace

The fact that you are reading this is a testament to Squarespace’s usability. If I can figure it out, anybody can. This is the third website I have built on Squarespace and it has everything I have ever needed to build and manage my blog.

Webflow

Another one I haven’t used before, but this website builder seems to be getting more and more traction based on its ease of integrations with other products. Another on my list to learn más about.

Notion

If you have spent much time reading this blog at all, you will know of my love for Notion. The swiss-army knife of no-code software. You can do just about anything with this simple and easy-to-use software. Notion sometimes suffers as a jack of all trades, master of none, but when simplicity and minimalism is the name of the day, it is hard to go wrong with Notion.

Airtable

Airtable brought promises of bringing the database into the 21st century. I haven’t done more than mess around with this tool, but I know it is extremely powerful and flexible over a variety of use cases.

Zapier

The ultimate integration tool. Zapier gets your information locked in different applications to talk to each other and can set up seamless automations. Zapier is something that I definitely want to become an expert in as I believe that it opens up a whole world of potential for anything you are building.

I am sure this is not an exhaustive list. I am definitely still figuring out the micropreneurship landscape myself so if you have any other ideas for tools or resources that could be helpful, let me know in the comments!

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The Annual View 2019 - Part II: Predictions

Happy New Year!

I hope you got everything you wanted out of New Year’s Eve and the first few days of the new decade. I know I did. Was asleep up at my family’s cabin in the mountains by 9:15 on NYE, I finished the Wheel of time series which was FANTASTIC, Arsenal showed signs of life under our new coach, and I’ve made some significant progress on a project I am working on.

Last week I recapped some of my highs and lows from 2019. I also looked ahead and set some goals for myself. This week I will look back at the predictions I made for 2019 and come up with some thoughts about how the world is going to look a year from now.

The end of a year means prediction season. For someone who writes a (usually) weekly blog, I almost feel obligated to weigh in with my thoughts and opinions. Maybe there is so much noise it’s pointless, but I like Fred Wilson’s perspective (as I do on so many things) that it is a helpful mental exercise, especially for one who is trying to make a living by investing in the future.

So how did I do?

Surprisingly well.

In fact, I would say I pretty much killed it with my three predictions last year. I’d say my three predictions were, if not completely correct, at least directionally so. Let’s dive into each.

Prediction 1: Mega Funds take a mega hit

Let’s chalk this one up to “directionally correct”. Last year, I predicted that the VC trend of “mega funds” and the investments they made would struggle. I thought it would be the lack of performance of so clearly overcapitalized companies that would put a dent in the mega funding trend, instead most of the hits this trend were from just one company, WeWork. WeWork’s tragic 2019 combined a volatile cocktail of questionable unit economics and heinous corporate governance with a healthy dose of raging against golden parachutes to become the biggest story in all of tech last year. This is one of those events that could have long-lasting events on the industry with everyone suddenly ultra-concerned with (and equally suddenly an expert on) profitability and corporate governance. Do I think this is a bad thing? No. But I do think it is a pendulum that swings to and fro and I think there is probably a healthy balance somewhere in the middle of “grow at all costs” and “profitability before all else”. Anyways, WeWork took some serious luster off of the mega funding trend and, at the very least, seemed to have taken some of the heat out of the engine with the next SoftBank Vision fund rumored to be more focused on profits and potentially much smaller.

Prediction 2: Crypto starts showing signs of life

I am going to go ahead and say I got this one right on the money. If Bitcoin’s price is a proxy for the health/attention of the crypto market in general (which I believe it is), then it recovered nicely from the pit of late 2018/early 2019. As you’d expect from the most volatile of volatile markets, there was an overzealous recovery followed by settling back down to earth a bit. The price still ends the year at almost double what it started. Outside of Bitcoin itself, I think there are generally positive signs for the crypto/DLT industry in general. I believe we are finally seeing some cooler heads prevail and signs of early maturity from the industry. No longer are blockchain’s being strapped on to refrigerators. There seems to be an understanding from both operators and investors that crypto should only be used for use cases where the technology is absolutely necessary versus other security and database options. This has been my own personal perspective for some time and I am glad to see the sentiment growing more widespread.

Prediction 3: Tech liquidity gets weird

Last year, I predicted that there would be some mixed feelings from a liquidity perspective in the tech sector. We saw a pretty unprecedented number of big-name IPOs launch (or at least attempt to… sorry I promise I will stop talking about WeWork), but the performance of these companies once public was not much to write home about. There are a variety of explanations for this (blame WeWork, blame Warren, blame someone), but I think it largely comes down to tech darlings getting a taste of public institutional investors. In light of the FANG’s dominance over the past decade, it is easy to forget that tech companies generally stumble out of the public gates. Public investors are a lot less forgiving than private investors and focus on quarterly earnings does not always jive with the long-term growth focus of so many technology companies. I still think there is a lot of room for improvement on avenues for companies to provide access to public investors. I am glad to see some momentum around the direct listing process (great podcast with Bill Gurley on this topic here). I hope 2020 is the year that projects like the Long Term Stock Exchange pick up increased momentum as well.

2020 Predictions

Alright, time for the meat and potatoes. Without further ado, my 2020 predictions:

So Long (pre) Seed

I believe 2020 will be the year that we begin to see the “pre-seed” or “Angel” round of investing slowly go the way of the dinosaurs. Why?

Bootstrapping.

With the proliferation of easy-to-use no code tools like Notion, Squarespace, Zapier, and more it is easier than ever to build product MVPs and get them into the hands of customers. You don’t need to hire a software dev shop to build something for you. If you are willing, you can learn how to do this on your own through resources like No Code MVP and Makerpad. This ability to build the first iteration of software projects without the need for a technical background makes bootstrapping tech companies infinitely more possible than it would be just a few short years ago.

Do I really think there will no longer be any pre-seed financings?

No.

There will always be a market for early capital. But the best entrepreneurs will be able to bootstrap their companies and move straight to more established Seed or Series A rounds. This will have the massive benefits of getting their product in their customers’ hands sooner, reducing their burn rate, and cleaning up a lot of early dilution from their cap table. They will also be able to show traction earlier and have a quicker path to profitability should they choose to take it. Watch out for founders who bootstrap their way past the seed-round, these teams will be serious contenders to go all the way.

I should caveat this prediction by saying that I do not believe this holds true for all companies. Hardware and life-sciences will likely always need the earliest form of capital since it is almost impossible to bootstrap these types of companies. Even some software companies may not be able to be built this way depending on the requirements of their customers, but I still expect we will see the trend across the venture landscape as a whole.

So long pre-seed, hello bootstrapping.

Bay Area state of mind

Oh the Bay Area. The much-praised. The much-maligned. Have rumours of its demise been exaggerated? Or are its best days behind it?

I believe the answer to both of those questions is a resounding:

Yes.

You do not need to be in the Bay Area to build a venture scale business anymore. You just don’t. That debate is over and I am not even going to bother citing all the examples of companies built outside of SV because it would not be a beneficial use of our time.

So Erik, you think the Bay Area has lost its top spot as a tech hub?

Not by a long-shot.

For all the challenges it faces, the Bay Area still has the world’s strongest network effects that make it primed to build technology companies. The best investors are based there. The best engineers are based there. The best tech talent pipelines are based there. The region is so far ahead of everyone else that no one even has a chance of catching up. There will be no “next Silicon Valley.” Period.

But I do not believe that it will always be the same business as usual in the Bay Area. The costs are too high. I predict we will see more and more companies maintain a presence in SV while moving mid and back offices jobs elsewhere. This prediction is cheating a bit because I would argue this is already happening, I believe we will see more and more companies maintain an office or headquarter in the Bay Area while moving significant headquarters to other parts of the country with lower costs of living and higher standards of living. This way they are able to capture the network effects of the valley, without being exposed to so many of its downsides. It’s the best of both worlds.

The rise of micropreneurship

A common theme on this blog has been my belief that it has never been easier to start a business. The tools, resources, and knowledge are all out there if you are willing to look (and do a bit of googling). This new era of accessibility to entrepreneurship is having massive impacts on the world of venture capital, but I believe that 2020 will be the year it truly begins to affect main street as well. People want to build something of their own. They want the flexibility that remote work and entrepreneurship can offer. And now they finally have the tools to build their own small businesses. Maybe these are side gigs for some extra income. Maybe these are full-time pursuits. Ecommerce. Streaming. Instagram pages. Podcasts. Blogs. Online advertising. The beauty is that this new trend of “micropreneurship” could look different to everyone.

The downside?

There are no longer any excuses. If you want to build something, go build it. If you are willing to put in the time and effort, you have all the tools you need just a few short keystrokes away.

Here's to another year of ups and downs (but hopefully more ups than downs)!

The Annual View 2019 - Part I: Lessons and Goals

What a year it has been. What a year it always is.

As with every year, there have been many ups and downs. Some excitement and some drudgery. Below is a collection of my thoughts as I look back over 2019 and look ahead to 2020.

Some highlights:

• My wife found a job she loves. She is doing something she is excellent at somewhere that appreciates and values what she brings to the table. It’s true what they say: happy wife, happy life!

• We moved much closer to downtown Columbus this summer which has been a huge standard of life improvement. Shorter commutes. Better apartment. Closer to friends. Big thumbs up.

• We have made a ton of great friends in Columbus this year and have really enjoyed being more social with them!

• We have found a church that we love and have grown a lot in our faith in 2019. Still a lot of room to grow, but this has been an extremely positive part of the last year. We even joined a small group of other young married couples which has been a great place to find fellowship.

• I feel like I am in a good exercise routine for the first time since college. Getting back on the horse isn’t easy, but now making it to the gym feels like my ‘default’ as opposed to some big effort, which feels like a really good place to be.

• I had the opportunity to attend the first Capital Camp event in Columbia, Missouri this summer. It was an incredible experience where I made some great friends. Check out this post to read about my thoughts and takeaways.

Some Lowlights:

• We’ve had to deal with some family health issues this year which has been hard.

• Despite getting into a good exercise routine, I am not very happy with where I am at weight/general fitness wise. Maintaining a healthier diet is a big focus of 2020 for me.

• Work has been somewhat of a mixed bag. I love so much of what I do, but feel like my learning curve has slowed down over the last few months. We are undergoing some organizational changes and I am hoping the shake up steepens my learning curve again.

A major positive this year has been a redoubled focus on learning. I have read (listened to) more non-fiction books this year than ever before and have had a few major lessons that have risen to the top of my educational journey.

Lessons:

• The importance of structure to organizations and people

  • Structure defines incentives => incentives define behaviors. I have written previously about how my study of structure has been a major theme over the past year. It is a topic that keeps on coming up for me and I have seen it crop up in both my personal and professional lives. Structures and the incentives they lead to is definitely something I have a newfound appreciation for and will continue to pay attention to in the future.

• Quality over quantity

  • I have gained an appreciation for the importance of quality over quantity. Time. Actions. Effort. Thought. Relationships. It’s easy to spin your wheels and not make progress. I think the idea that quality and quantity are always inversely related is perhaps a bit too simplistic, but I have found that focusing on moving the needle for one or two pursuits that I really care about has had a much more beneficial effect than amassing a high quantity of something of more middling quality.

• Clear communication

  • Something I continue to work on. I have tried to become much more direct and clear in my communication with others. What my stance or point of view on a topic or opportunity is. In the past, I have spent too much time and energy worried about how others may react to my beliefs and have tempered them. I have been worried about hurting someone’s feelings so I have pulled my punches and I have found it almost always comes back to bite me. My brother is a master at this and I have always respected him for it. If he doesn’t want to do something, he will say so in a direct and (usually) respectful way. Before I would find myself dragged into situations I didn’t want to be in because I was worried about what the effects would be of my saying no. I have learned that is much better for me and everyone else involved if I can be clear and upfront about where I stand and then we can grapple with the fallout accordingly. I now believe that introducing ambiguity into a situation in the hope of protecting others’ feelings will almost always lead to more damage in the long run than clearly communicating upfront.

• Optimize for people

  • Something I have not necessarily done a great job of being intentional about is optimizing the quality of people I have spent my time with. I have been lucky I have accomplished this organically more often than not, but in situations where I have not focused on optimizing for spending time with the best and brightest, it has really come back to bite me. Time is so valuable and who I choose to spend my time with has clearly become on of the more important decisions I make on a regular basis. While it has been an ancillary consideration in the past, for future opportunities the caliber of people I will be around will be rising to a primary concern.

• Culture is what you do, not what you say

  • One of my favorite books I read this year was Powerful by Patty McCord. It’s a book whose central premises are that A) workers want to be treated like adults while working on tough problems with smart people and B) culture is what you do, not what you say. This mindset has really resonated with me over the last year and informed much of how I now view organizations. It seems like to me for all the focus on culture building there is in the modern workplace, these two simple axioms are too often missing.

Some areas of focus for me as I look ahead to 2020:

• Purposeful learnings

  • An offshoot of my learnings on quality versus quantity, I want to be much more purposeful about my learning. To me this means investing into programs that really will make a positive impact on my growth, versus simply passively consuming content. Less free newsletters, more paid. Less free content, more classes. Less podcasts, more books. One preemptive step I have taken on this front is purchasing the No-Code MVP class from Bram Kanstein. I am really excited about this program and hope it will add some powerful tools to my toolkit. I am also working on another project in this vein, but that is double top secret at the moment. More to hopefully come soon.

• Healthy lifestyle

  • As previously mentioned, 2019 has been a bit of a mixed bag from a personal health front. I am really happy about where I am at on an exercise front, but really need to make improvements to other aspects of my lifestyle like eating healthier and getting more sleep. I believe that health is largely a momentum game and I hope my success on the exercise front can provide a powerful incentive to make improvements in other areas if I structure it correctly. This is something I am really excited to jump into headfirst in the new year.

• Focus

  • Deep focus for long periods of time does not really come naturally to me. I like to buzz about and make progress on a variety of things instead of just one. Unfortunately, I have found this constant switching can have costs in efficiency. A focus area for me this year is to be more, well, focused. I really want to try to get things done in a focused and efficient manner so I can then move onto other things instead of letting them drag out. I am still thinking through what exactly is the best way to enact this change and I would love to hear any tips you might have about achieving focused work!

This post was originally supposed to be a look back at my predictions from last year as well as a place for me to make some predictions about the year to come. Obviously, the intro got a bit away from me here. I am breaking this post into two parts so I can give each the time it’s due. Check in next week for Part II: Predictions.

The Veil of Reality: What's so special about Esports anyways?

The king of Esports analysis, Blake Robbins, had a great tweet a few days ago about how esports needs to stop trying to copy what worked in traditional sports and instead embrace what makes it unique. I chimed in with a few of my thoughts and wanted to use this post to go into a bit more detail.

The Veil of Reality

Esports is a bit of a misnomer. The best comparison we have to gaming is traditional sports, but the reality is that esports are as different from traditional sports as email is from paper stuffed into envelopes. If you look at the growth of traditional sports vs. esports it’s pretty hard to make the argument that esports will not shortly eclipse many of the powerhouse traditional sports leagues in a meaningful way. It probably has a long way to go before it eclipses ALL of traditional sports, but the writing is on the wall.

So why is this?

I believe the reason that esports are so compelling is a concept I call the Veil of Reality and just how thin it is compared to traditional sports.

What exactly is this “Veil of Reality”, Erik?

So glad you asked.

It’s a concept I have been playing around with for a while but it was lacking a really cool and mysterious sounding name until this post.

The theory is this: With any sort of spectator entertainment, the quality of the experience directly correlates to how close watching the event is to actually doing it yourself.

When I watch football sitting on my couch Sunday afternoons, I am about as far as physically possible from playing in the games. These guys are modern gladiators that are 6 foot 17 inches of pure speed and athleticism. They perform superhuman feats of strength and agility while playing as pawns in what amounts to the world’s most violent game of chess. The gap between playing and watching is massive. The Veil of Reality is extremely thick.

Esports is different. My favorite game to watch is the digital card game Hearthstone. The difference between watching a game of Hearthstone and playing a game of Hearthstone is so little it rounds down to zero. In fact, with hearthstone (and many other games), the viewing experience is actually SUPERIOR to the playing experience. You often have increased visibility vs. what the players themselves can see, you have expert commentators breaking down each play, and for any turn-based game, you can speed up the action immensely. In esports, the Veil of Reality is extremely thin.

Now, as you know, I love traditional sports. I ride or die with Arsenal (admittedly been doing more dying than riding recently) and I’m a big Broncos fan as well (Drew Lock is the greatest football player of all time don’t @ me). But even I can’t argue that anyone watches sports for the viewing experience itself. Instead, we watch because of the pageantry, the nostalgia, and the emotion that being part of a tribe bigger than yourself creates.

Esports is different. For anyone who likes to play games (which I would argue is everyone, some people just haven’t found the right game yet), the viewing experience, in and of itself, is compelling. Layer on top of this the usual drama, rivalries, and personalities of sport and it’s not hard to see why esports are growing the way they are.

Bug or Feature

As esports and gaming have started to gain mainstream momentum, the obvious first place to look for ideas on how to structure and monetize this new form of entertainment was traditional sports. It’s not something we should complain about, it just was simply the case of humans pattern matching as best they could to something that seemed, on the surface, to be similar. I agree with Blake, esports’ differences compared to traditional sports are not a bug, but a feature. If esports is going to sustain the growth I know that it is capable of, it will need to stop trying to mimic what worked for traditional sports and to instead lean on what makes it unique.

Here are a few ideas:

Unique rules for individual tournaments

The benefit of being largely tournament-focused instead of league-focused means that esports have a level of flexibility that traditional sports simply don’t. There is a lot of opportunity to use this flexibility creatively. Each tournament could include different rules, requirements, and formats. This would lead to an added level of freshness in a medium that already has the benefit of regularly adding new content such as characters or maps. Anytime a game’s meta starts to smell stale at all, tournament organizers can, and should, play around with creative rules to liven things up. Players will love it. Fans will love it.

Co-Ed Teams

Another thing that esports has going for it is a level of accessibility that traditional sports simply cannot match. Most traditional sports require athletes to have won the genetic lottery and then commit years to mastering their craft. Esports still requires incredible amounts of hard work and skill, but the physical requirements alone make it far more accessible. I hope this leads to an increased level of diversity among professional players that we don’t see in traditional sports. Someone who knows more about the space could probably give you ten structural reasons why this may or may not happen, but from the outside looking it, esports definitely has an advantage when it comes to accessibility.

Audience Impacting Live Games

Ok, I got some flak for this one on twitter. Just because something CAN be done, doesn’t necessarily mean that it SHOULD be done. No one wants sports of any kind to devolve into popularity contests. But I do think there is potential to do audience participation in live games in a compelling way. So long as the effects are symmetric in impact, this could be a great way to drive additional spectator engagement and make people feel like they are part of the action. Let spectators choose maps, ban heroes, or activate unique events that impact everyone equally. Audience members in traditional sports make an impact based on yelling or jeering the loudest. Audience members in esports have the potential to be actual participants in the games themselves.

Asynchronous Matches

Now, this is an idea that would not be a fit for most games, but I do think it has potential in niche circumstances. In esports, there really wouldn’t be a technical barrier to having two people participate in the same game at different times. I currently can’t think of a game where this would work super well, but I think that it could be an interesting design white space to explore in the future. I foresee a match could play out between two players over the course of a week and then it could be broadcast to fans in one seamless segment. Where would this work? Why would this be superior to having a game take place live? No clue. But the fact that you could do this is kinda cool is it not?

Remote Tournaments

This is already such an ingrained part of the esports and gaming experience I questioned even including it, but I do think that it merits mention. Due to the constraints of physical sports, you need to have all contestants somewhere in the same place at the same time. Even for more individual sports, weather and other factors mean contestants need to compete within a relatively tight window of time and definitely in the same place. This constraint simply does not exist in the same way for many games. There are definitely some where lag is such a serious consideration that you need to have players in the same (or at least a consistent) proximity to each other, but for other games, this may not be necessary at all. Not only can this lead to better viewing experiences and lower the bar for tournaments, but it is another contributing factor towards the increased access of esports compared to traditional sports. If you have an internet connection, you can play. This is a total game-changer compared to many sports. Does access like this matter? Ask soccer. Why is soccer the world’s game? Because it is the best sport? I’d argue yes, but that is because when it comes to soccer I am not a rational actor. It’s really because anyone with a circular object anywhere in the world can play. Access matters and the potential for remote gameplay blows access wide open.

Gaming Triathlons

Ok, this one is admittedly a little bit goofy and probably my weakest differentiator since this is very much a thing in real sports too, but come on! How cool would it be to see people go head to head in League, before watching them duke it out in Overwatch, before having them finish with a game of Rocket League?!? I don’t know how realistic this is or if it will ever happen, but I think it would be pretty cool. Similar to traditional sports, specialists would probably be better 1v1 than a more generalist gamer, but it is relatively normal for gamers to bounce from game to game throughout their career. Even between different genres of games! I think it would be awesome for esports to open up avenues where people can showcase this skillset which is different, but in my opinion no less impressive, than the ability to become a master at one single game.

Keeping the ‘Games’ in Video Games

The things that make esports unique should be celebrated not derided. Video games are fun. Even as they become serious business, we can’t forget that fact. There is so much potential to do cool things with a medium that does not have many of the same constraints that traditional sports do. We know that whatever ideas people dream up in the future, viewers will keep coming because the Veil of Reality is so thin and the viewing experience is so compelling.

So go crazy.

You can always go back to level 1.

The Pluto Paradox

You know which cartoon character I have always thought was a little weird? Pluto.

Pluto is Mickey Mouse’s pet dog first introduced in the 1930s. Mickey and all of his friends are anthropomorphic cartoon characters that walk and talk and think like humans.

But not Pluto. Pluto is a pet dog.

This relationship is especially weird in light of Goofy.

Goofy is theoretically also a dog. But he is an anthropomorphic character who wears clothes, talks, and walks upright like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Is he a dog? Is he a human? What’s the difference between Goofy and Pluto?

You start to see where I am coming from when I said it was all a bit weird.

So what does this matter?

I think the characterizations of Pluto and Goofy especially give us a great metaphor to explore.

Hear me out.

The most straightforward interpretation is that we all, at one point or another, find ourselves in the role of Goofy.

We all at some point have looked down on someone else as somehow less than. We build out our identity along cultural, political, ideological, and even sports team lines. Anyone on our side of the aisle is superior to anyone on the other side. We view ourselves as superior to someone else who is not nearly so different as we tell ourselves (except for Tottenham fans, they really do have some pretty big character red flags).

If there is one overlying theme of human history, you would struggle to find one more prevalent than the story of two peoples who seem to the outside to be almost identical fighting over nuanced ideological differences.

The solution to being a Goofy is to keep your identity small. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. He argues, and I agree, that issues are divisive, not because answers are opaque, but because people attribute parts of their personal identity to one side or the other of the debate. People hold too many things as part of their identity in this day and age, and because of that there are infinitely many ideological hills they are willing to die on. You keep your identity small, and all the sudden you don’t have a bone in many of the fights you see play across the news and social media. You can look at people like people instead of Pluto.

Now, what if we turned the metaphor around a bit?

What if we aren’t just Goofy sometimes?

What if we are Pluto?

How often do we attribute false significance and importance to someone else while belittling ourselves?

I don’t know about you but this is something that happens to me, if I had to guess, only about all the time.

We build others and their accomplishments up in our head while simultaneously minimizing our own.

This is a serious issue in the age of Instagram.

We get these tiny windows into the top 5% of someone’s life. We extrapolate that 5% and then we compare this unrealistic perspective to our own life.

Our faults, our struggles, our challenges, and our failures.

How can we measure up?

We can’t.

But that is only because we are stacking the deck against ourselves.

We perceive that others have power over us and in doing so give them power over us. We live inside prisons of our own creation.

I know I do this. Especially professionally.

I compare my achievements to what others achieve without even knowing 1% of the picture of their lives.

If you find yourself falling into this trap, it’s important to remember that comparison is the death of joy. Don’t compare yourself to someone else whose life you don’t really know anything about. Instead compare yourself to where you were three years ago. I bet viewed through this lense things look quite different indeed.

Whether you are a Pluto or a Goofy, it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, we are all just dogs.

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The Wookiee Has No Pants: On Thinking Big in a World of Small

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by Daniel Burnham, the architect responsible for rebuilding Chicago after the great Chicago fire.

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency."

Do we still think like that? Do we make big plans or are we too busy making small plans that won’t be realized?

On December 21, 1968, the Apollo 8 mission launched itself towards the moon. Only 135 days after it was decided it would go to the moon. Mission Project Constellation was initiated by NASA in 2003 to bring men back to the moon. 7 years later it had launched a total of zero crews before being canceled.

The New York subway was opened on October 27, 1904, less than 5 years after the contract was first awarded. In April 2000, the MTA decided to build the second avenue subway. The first phase, consisting of only 3 stations opened 17 years later.

These are just a couple of examples where the dichotomy is stark between what we used to be able to accomplish and the pace of accomplishment today.

Maybe our accomplishments are less tangible and therefore harder to point to.

Or maybe we simply don’t dream big enough anymore.

You want to know who did dream big? George Lucas.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away

I took a week off from blogging for Thanksgiving. I had this post half-finished and had been pondering over it all week. After watching The Mandalorian last night (Baby Yoda is my spirit animal), I was poking around Disney+ and decided to put on Empire of Dreams, a documentary about the making of the original Star Wars trilogy. I was glued to the TV for the next couple of hours watching all the drama behind the drama unfold before my eyes. All the untold stories behind the stories we all know and love and I was struck by just how unlikely the success of my all-time favorite movies really was.

Like, let me tell you, Star Wars was by no means a sure thing when filming began in 1975. Despite his recent success with American Graffiti, Lucas had been turned down from multiple studios to finance the film and the outlook was bleak until he got 20th Century Fox to take a flier on him. Even once he had the backing he needed the movies were beset with problems. The film was shot on difficult sets, the visual effects team had to create technology that had never been dreamt of before, and even the actors raised serious questions about the quality of the film.

And yet I write this almost 50 years later as Star Wars looms as the most important cultural work of the last century.

How was this accomplished?

Because the only thing bigger than Lucas’ dreams was his willingness to fight for them.

Here are a few lessons we can all take from what it took to make Star Wars the success it is today.

Start with something universal

The secret to Star Wars’ success is that at its core, it was familiar. George Lucas was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell and his study of the underlying commonalities between the myths of different people groups throughout history. In fact, Campbell once called Lucas his “greatest ever student”. (side note: if you want an excellent way to kill some time, there are a lot worse ways than watching Joseph Campbell videos on youtube)

Star Wars’ success is as much due to its play on common themes that resonate within us all as it is due to its visual effects. The young hero embarking on a journey to save the world. The wise wizard providing guidance. The damsel in distress. The witty scoundrel. The inhuman villain.

All these recognizable tropes allow us to immediately connect with the story in a way that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Star Wars isn’t a story with nations or people groups. It’s a story about all of us. And that is a big reason why it was so successful.

Give people an ideal to strive towards

They say timing is everything. It’s true in life and business and it sure as hell is true with Star Wars. Star Wars was released at the absolute perfect time to maximize its impact. The Vietnam war had ended and American cynicism was at an all-time high (a time not too different from today). The popular movies of the day reflected this with their portrayals of morally grey anti-heroes and doomsday disasters. The nation was poised for the clouds to break and Star Wars was a ray of sunshine.

Star Wars presented a portrayal of heroism and justice that people were so desperate for. I have written before about how fiction can more easily convey powerful messages than non-fiction and Star Wars is a prime example of that. It’s optimistic tone and higher ideals were universally relatable while remaining poignantly salient. Its message of good triumphing over evil against all odds inspired millions. Without that inspirational spark, Star Wars would not have had nearly the same cultural lasting power.

The lesson here is the power of being aspirational. Provide people the opportunity to rise to the occasion and they will exceed your wildest expectations. Expect the worst and you will surely find it.

Ignore the critics

An especially hilarious anecdote from the documentary was a piece of feedback Lucas received early in the production of the original movie. One of the biggest points of contention studio executives had with the movie was the Chewbacca wasn’t wearing any pants. That’s right. The greatest cultural phenomenon of the last century was almost stymied based on a debate about whether an 8 foot tall monkey bear should be wearing pants or not.

I think this anecdote does a wonderful job of portraying a phenomenon that anyone trying to create something important will have to deal with. The vast majority of people are not capable of this level of creativity. Through either a lack of talent or a lack of desire, they are unable to grasp the most important aspects of a project and therefore nit pick on inconsequential items around the edges. It is much easier to sound smart coming up with ways that something will fail. The true genius however lies in being able to see just how something could be able to succeed beyond your wildest imagination. This is a skillset that I very consciously try to foster as a venture capital investor, but it applies to all of us.

Ignore the critics. They will always try to tear you down because they can’t do what you can.

Optimize for upside

Another fascinating key to Star Wars’ success was that Lucas optimized for long-term upside. He forwent up-front compensation in order to have ownership over a greater portion of the merchandising and licensing rights than would be normal for a movie at the time. To the studio’s credit, Star Wars really was the movie that opened people’s eyes to the power of merchandise, but this was still a masterstroke on Lucas’ part. He generated such an incredible fortune on merchandise, he was able to fund the following films himself, without the need to go through the usual studio financing process. (I bet you didn’t know Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are “indy” films!) This allowed him to retain absolute creative control of the movies. Had Lucas needed to appease studio executives the way most directors do, it is hard to imagine the movies would have been anywhere near as good.

The lesson here is always optimize for the upside. Play your cards so that you take advantage of the big payout. Focus your energies on winning the war instead of winning each individual battle.

Most people don’t think this way. They are risk averse and will maximise for the short-term. If you can think differently, you will find that you have a sustainable source of edge in whatever you do.

The fact an accomplishment is important by definition means that it is not commonplace. To accomplish what is not commonplace means that you must think and act in a way that is not commonplace. George Lucas did this. He dreamt big and the payoff was massive.

Both for him and for the rest of us.

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What is your North Star?

My dad is from Norway.

The traditions and norms he grew up with are different than those of our country. He has spent more time living in the USA than in Norway, so, for the most part, it is hard to tell the difference, but there are some times where it is a bit more obvious.

One of those times was when it came to me receiving my driver’s license.

In Norway, you become an adult at 18. You can drink, smoke, drive and join the army. I appreciate the logic. If you are old enough to go and fight in a war, you should be able to drive yourself home from the airport and have a drink and a smoke when you get home.

With this policy as a framework, it’s easy to see why the USA’s policies on adulthood might seem strange. It is much more gradual and staggered than in Norway. You can drive at 16, join the army at 18, smoke at 18, and you have to wait until you are 21 to drink.

All of this was weird to my dad, but he was especially skeptical of the whole driving-at-16 thing.

Because of this skepticism, the bar for me getting my license was not just doing enough driving to pass the test proving to the government I could drive safely.

I had to prove it to my father.

We spent many, many, many hours driving together before I finally reached this bar. I must have doubled or tripled the required amount of driving time in order to finally satisfy his European skepticism.

My dad would always find excuses for us to go on long drives (even for the most pointless things). We must have driven up to our cabin in the mountains and back three or four times that summer because he left his sunglasses or a pair of socks he liked.

At the time, I thought all this additional driving was somewhat annoying. All my friends barely needed to drive at all (a fact which now scares the living daylight out of me), and here I was crisscrossing the great state of Colorado in my spare time.

I now look at these drives incredibly fondly.

My favorite part was the great conversations we would have as I drove up curving mountain passes while my dad lounged with his feed up on the dash.

Ok Erik, where are you going with this?

Getting there.

On one such trip, my dad and I were talking about work. What his career had been like. The highs and the lows. My dad came to the United States as a college student and spent some time in consulting before starting his own private equity firm where he has worked ever since.

I was at the stage where I was starting to contemplate what I wanted to do with my life and it was the first time I can really remember talking about his career in some detail.

He told me that the proudest moment of his career was when he purchased a company with 600 employees and sold it a short time later with 1,000 employees. This was a good financial outcome for him, but that’s not why it was his best moment.

He said that he got the most pride, not from the sales multiple, but from the feeling that he had built something. That he had provided 400 people with jobs that they could be proud of. Jobs in which they could find dignity and fulfillment, and most importantly, jobs that they could support their family with.

This conversation stands out as one of the most seminal moments of my entire life.

In some ways, you can divide my life into two chapters. Before this car ride, and after.

Before, I was aimless. I didn’t have a specific path or idea of what I wanted to do. I coasted through life and school without really working towards anything.

Ever since that day, I have had a North Star.

Like my father was before me, I want to be a company builder.

I believe that the highest good that you can do for someone is to give them a job where they can find pride, dignity, and fulfillment, all while being able to provide a good life for themselves and their family.

This has been my guiding North Star and has informed every decision I have made so far in my career.

It is why I wanted to become an investor. So that I could become a partner in the company growth process and provide the capital that companies need to support this growth.

It is why I joined The Carlyle Group out of college. To learn from the best in the world how companies are built and run.

It is why I transitioned from private equity into venture capital. To be able to get involved with companies from the earliest stages where I could be a true partner in the building process as opposed to working with companies once they have matured. In venture capital, I could hop into the trenches and work shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs trying to change the world. Where I could invest in tech companies that provide some of the highest quality jobs that you can find.

Venture capital is the absolute highest point of leverage I have found in the pursuit of my North Star.

I aspire to be a builder of great companies. Companies that are providing products or services that the world needs. Companies that delight their customers by building something meaningful.

Building companies is my North Star.

It’s what matters most to me.

It has defined every decision I have made in my career so far and I know that it will continue to serve as a guiding light in the future.

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The Pillars of Innovation

What is innovation?

It’s a word that gets bandied about a lot, especially in the world of venture capital, but what does it actually mean?

The dictionary defines “Innovation” as a new method, idea, product, etc. (snarky side comment: What the heck does “etc.” mean in this context. I am dying to know)

Here’s the way I see it.

There are two broad categories of innovations.

1. You can improve on something else that exists (Sustaining Innovations)

2. You can create something new (Disruptive Innovations)

That’s it.

Every new method, idea, product or etc. fits into one of those two buckets. Is one better than the other? What are the differences?

Better Mousetraps

Innovations on something that already exists are sometimes derided by tech thought leaders. They are thought of as inferior to disruptive innovations. Somehow less pure.

In the words of Peter Theil, “We wanted flying cars, instead, we got 140 characters.” (You could argue in some ways Twitter is more of a new innovation than flying cars, but the message is pretty clear here).

I definitely appreciate Theil’s perspective, but the reality is, that the vast majority of companies are building better mousetraps. There is a LOT of value to be unlocked by simply making things work better.

Less friction.

Quicker.

Slicker interface.

People pay big money for these things. And why not? At the end of the day, an increase in efficiency is really an increase in available time, the one resource we can’t get any more of.

Innovations improving on something else should not be derided. They create massive value in both venture capital and within the economy at large.

Superhuman. Zoom. Evernote. The list goes on.

There are plenty of fantastic companies that have been built by making people’s life easier. The downside is that when user experience is your selling point, you are setting the bar you need to meet extremely high.

You can’t just be a bit better than incumbents, you need to blow them out of the water.

My favorite opportunities for improvement innovations are in large, slow-moving incumbent industries that have been slow to adopt new technologies. It is absolutely unreal the amount of our economy that still runs on faxes/paper/on-site databases/etc. If you can get people to change their ways (not a trivial task), these types of markets provide the opportunity to unlock tremendous value since the status quo is so poor.

New and Shiny

Disruptive innovations are the creation of something out of nothing. These are the Zero to One type of products or services that provide you with a new experience that you have never had before. These are the products that make Mr. Theil happy as a clam (where the heck does that phrase come from? A quick Google search for those of you curious).

They are the truly great innovations that create massive step-function improvements over the ways things used to be done.

At their core, disruptive innovations provide someone with an experience they weren’t able to have before. The name of the game is access. Increasing access to a good or service that a user has never had before.

One of my favorite examples is Venmo.

Venmo isn’t a simple improvement on a cash-based society, it is an enabling force function on people’s ability to forgo cash on a daily basis. It provided access to something (P2P payments) that people hadn’t had before.

Disruptive innovations are often the platforms that sustaining innovations are built on top of.

Ok, disruptive innovations sound great right? Easier said than done, unfortunately.

Disruptive innovations by definition are harder to build. There is no frame of reference by which they can be compared. No well-worn path that they can walk. They need to be generated a priori.

And then somehow transformed from an idea into a tangible product.

This is no easy feat. Even for the biggest and most well-resourced companies in the world.

Recent innovations in the smartphone market are largely predicated on increased camera capabilities. Amazon hasn’t developed anything truly game-changing since AWS.

Disruptive innovations are, in a sense, purer. They are the creation of something from nothing. Order from chaos.

But boy, are they tough acts to follow. It is nearly impossible to successfully build and deploy one disruptive innovation, much less a string of them.

One Innovation, Two Innovation. Red Innovation, Blue Innovation.

Ok so sustaining innovations improve an existing experience and disruptive innovations provide access to something totally new.

The reason this framework is important to understand is that it defines how you look at every company or opportunity.

Sustaining innovations are, at their core, user experience plays. When evaluating a sustaining innovation business, you will want to really dig in to understand exactly how the product or service works to understand if it is a meaningful enough improvement in performance to motivate a buying decision or investment of time from a customer.

Disruptive innovations are centered around access. What access to a good or experience do they provide that people never would have been able to experience previously? I like thinking of questions of access through the Jobs to be done framework. What job does the product or service provide users? How did they achieve that job before? If the innovation isn’t an improvement on an existing good or service, what product (or products) is it replacing? Understanding the system within which the innovative product is connected will help you to determine whether it is worthwhile or not.

Ok.

I have a confession to make. This post is somewhat of a false dichotomy. I made it sound like you either had to be one innovation or the other. Sustaining or disruptive. Improving on something new or creating something from nothing.

The truth is not nearly so black or white.

The truth is that the best innovations, the most impressive, most valuable, most world-changing technologies…

They have a little bit of both pillars of innovation within them.

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So You Want to be a Venture Capitalist? Required reading for any aspiring VC

Books are one of the best ways to learn about a topic.

Art. Science. Finance. History.

A book allows you to absorb in a few hours what it may have taken an author decades to learn.

In the past, I have talked about how I always try to be reading two books at any given time, one fantasy book and one non-fiction book.

In fantasy, I exercise my imagination.

In non-fiction, I exercise just about everything else.

It will come as no surprise to most of you that a significant portion of the non-fiction part of that experience takes the form of books directly, or at least adjacently, related to the world of venture capital. I regularly get asked for resources about the industry. I thought a good place to start would be some of my favorite books on (or around) the topic. I should note that this is in no way an exhaustive list, this is simply the books that have had the biggest impact on me, my career, and the way I think about venture capital.

Without further ado, my list of must-read VC books (Amazon affiliate links included):

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

The book that started it all. During the summer after my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to intern at a venture capital firm. I knew I wanted to be an investor, but that was about as specific as I could get. On the first day of work that summer, my boss handed me a list of books to read (many of which are included below). The first book I read was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. The rest, as they say, was history. This was the book that first kindled my love of all things venture capital, tech, and entrepreneurship. It is a fascinating look into the ups and downs (and downs and more downs and somehow eventually even greater ups?!) of a dot-com era startup. Come for the lessons on leadership and entrepreneurship, stay for the rap lyrics and no holds barred commentary on the startup world. An amazing opportunity to learn from a successful technology entrepreneur who just happened to found one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms as his second act. Casual.

Creative Capital by Spencer E. Ante

If you want to learn about something, what better place to start than its beginnings? Creative capital is the story of one man, Gorges Doriot, and the monumental impact he had on the world by founding what we know of today as the venture capital industry. Doriot was an unassuming Frenchman academic who answered his adopted country’s call-to-arms by serving in World War II. After the war, he went on to found the first venture capital firm. An enjoyable and enlightening book that takes you back to the metaphorical primordial ooze of what turned into the modern venture capital industry.

Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

The definitive must-read for anyone interested in learning about the nuts and bolts of how venture capital deals are structured. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson are legendary venture capitalists in their own right, but their contribution to the industry in the form of Venture Deals is pretty tough to beat. If you are a VC, read it. If you want to be a VC, read it. If you are an entrepreneur trying to raise venture capital, read it twice. Venture Deals walks you through the ins and outs of deal terms and gives you a baseline understanding of what you can expect when hand shakes have been made and the lawyers start putting pen to paper. If you are going to be spending any time in or around this industry, you will be a step behind if you haven’t read Venture Deals.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

Zero to One is the ultimate place to start understanding the world view of one of the most successful technologists and investors in history. The book is about how to think differently and build truly innovative products the world needs, instead of simply inventing better and better mousetraps. In some circles, Peter Thiel may be derided at worst and thought cliche at best, but I for one couldn’t have a higher opinion of his technological and ideological contributions. Zero to One is one of those books you are either going to love or you are going to hate. You will either be inspired by Thiel’s unique perspective or you will find yourself diametrically opposed to it. And in some ways, that is precisely the point.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Another seminal book in the world of technology and venture capital. If you have had any exposure to modern technology development or startup building, chances are that you have come across at least some of the ideas contained in this book. Reis’ ideas have become so pervasive in the world of startups that they have become completely core to how companies are built. There are no such things as “lean startups” simply because nearly all high growth technology companies are built using the lean methodology today. The book is not without its share of critics COUGHkeith raboisCOUGH, but it is a pillar of the modern technology ecosystem. At the end of the day, The Lean Startup is about tightening feedback loops, pushing decisions as close to problems as possible, and getting customer input before you start building something they don’t want. Which business couldn’t use some of those strategies?

Powerful by Patty McCord

You want to learn how to build a world-class organization? You start by reading this book. Patty McCord was the architect behind the culture of one of the world’s most effective and impactful modern companies. Patty joined Netflix during its early days after previously working at Reed Hastings's prior startup. She was instrumental in creating a culture that favored candor, transparency, and trust over the normal HR jibber-jabber of engagement, hierarchy, and performance plans. Her key insight: People want to work on something important while being surrounded by really smart people and they want to be treated like adults. Get that wrong and all the hand-holding, all-staff retreats, and ping pong tables in the world won’t save you. An incredible book that guides you through thinking about building a company culture that is fit to excel in the dynamism of the modern world. Be warned though, if you are reading this while finding yourself stuck at a company with its head in the sand, you will find yourself in for a world of frustration.

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

The story of Pixar. Does anything else need to be said? Creativity, Inc. takes you behind the curtain of one of the most exciting and fascinating companies ever. It gives you an inside look at the trials (so. many. trials.) and tribulations of one of the most beloved companies in the world. If you read it for the heartwarming stories about how to capture the imagination, you won’t be disappointed, but this book is so, so much more. Creativity, Inc. isn’t just the history of Pixar, it is a guidebook on how to create a company where innovation always comes first. Where envelopes are pushed and conflict is handled directly out in the open instead of through anonymous feedback inboxes. The placement of Creativity, Inc. next to Powerful is no coincidence. You will see many of the same themes about transparency, treating people like adults, and holding employees to the highest possible standard echoed across both books. It’s almost like they might be on to something…

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

Hero or villain. Sympathetic or despicable. Genius or idiot. The modern titan that is Elon Musk refuses to be defined by easily traced lines. You really have a chance to know the man you need to be one of the few he lets into his inner circle. For the rest of us, we read this fantastic biography by Ashlee Vance. Halfway through the book, I wanted nothing more than to be Elon. By the end of the book, I wanted nothing less. Elon Musk’s life is one that defies all attempts at shallow categorization and in some ways this book reads more like an action novel than a biography. If you want to become an expert at building innovative companies, you absolutely must take the time to read about the life of the world’s most innovative company builder.

Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

One of my favorite books that I have read in recent years and one that, if you know me, I have probably recommended to you multiple times. Safi Bahcall excellently examines why it is that some companies are able to innovate and others aren’t. Why some are able to nurture the crazy ideas that change the world and others bury their most promising talent under paperwork and bureaucracy. So many non-fiction books follow the trope of “Here is my idea and here are 27 chapters that include slightly differing examples.” Loonshots is among the minority that truly break the mold and I found myself on the edge of my seat throughout. Throughout the book, Bahcall examines some of the very companies and people discussed on this very list and why their companies were able to succeed where competitors didn’t. I’ll give you a hint: It’s all structure.

Have you read any of these books? Are there any other must-reads for the next generation of venture capitalist? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

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Netflix Account Sharing: Sleeping at the Wheel or Genius Customer Acquisition Strategy?

During last week’s earnings call, Netflix executives discussed that in the future they could start cracking down on users sharing the password to their account with others. In completely unrelated news Google searches for the phrase “what is a budget?” among people aged 20-35 skyrocketed.*

Kidding aside, I thought this was a fascinating development. In some ways, less because of what Netflix could be doing and more because of how they haven’t addressed this for so long. I hardly know of anyone my age that isn’t using some relative or friends’ Netflix account. Apparently 35% of Millennials share passwords for streaming services, but anecdotally this figure seems understated to me. Apparently, the overall number of their users sharing accounts is relatively small, but even a small minority of their user base would translate into potentially billions of dollars a year of unearned revenue.

So why hasn’t Netflix decided to crack down on this account sharing before and why are they exploring doing so now?

Sharing is Caring

I’ve always been interested in Netflix’s decision not to crack down on sharing.

Because they could. Easily.

Anyone who has ever utilized a software subscription at work can tell you how aggressive companies can be in tracking usage to try to prevent account sharing. If Netflix wanted to, they could track IP addresses for devices and prevent usage outside of a geofenced area.

But they haven’t. For years.

My theory?

The lack of urgency with which Netflix was cracking down on account sharing was a calculated customer acquisition engine.

Netflix believes that their product is so compelling, getting it into someone’s hands will quickly render it irreplaceable. This is not a new phenomenon. Every subscription service under the sun utilizes some sort of free-trial option to help expose customers to their products.

But I can’t think of many services that so willingly turn a blind eye towards account sharing. So why does Netflix do it?

It’s all Demographics Baby

One word. Four syllables.

Dem.

O.

Graph.

Ics.

Why has Netflix been so chill with account sharing? Because the people who are doing the lion’s share of that sharing are the exact type of customers Netflix wants to cultivate.

Netflix hasn’t traditionally cared if you mooched off your parents for a few years during college because they knew that they could hook you on your favorite shows and that you would eventually pony up for your own subscription. And that because of your age, the lifetime value of you as a subscriber is MASSIVE.

Ever wonder why cell phone family plans are so much cheaper than individual plans?

Same reason.

Companies want to develop a relationship with customers while they are young because if they do so, there is a significantly higher chance that consumers will stick with them into adulthood.

The Times they are a changing

So if the most egregious account sharers are exactly the type of customer Netflix is hoping to cultivate, why change their tune now?

Now that is the interesting question.

To be completely fair, Netflix is not exactly doing a 180-degree about-face. When asked about the issue of password sharing, Netflix executive Greg Peters responded:

We continue to monitor [password sharing]. We’ll continue to look at the situation and we’ll see those consumer-friendly ways to push on the edge of that, but we’ve got no big plans at this point in time in terms of doing something different there.”

They won’t be cracking down tomorrow, but it does sound like they plan to somehow address it at some point.

Is this really a change in strategy or just a verbalization of Netflix’s long-time stance?

Honestly, I suspect it is more of the latter based on previous comments by the company’s leadership.

Be that as it may, it is still an interesting question to ponder.

What could lead Netflix, who has for so long been lethargic at best towards the issue of account sharing, to suddenly start stricter enforcement?

A few ideas:

Market Saturation

Netflix’s user growth in the US is already slowing down pretty dramatically. They have harvested all the low hanging fruit and it is going to become more expensive and less lucrative for them to acquire additional customers. They can (and are) expanding internationally, but closing the password sharing loophole could give them a meaningful lift in revenue even in saturated markets.

The Streaming wars get Serious

It is hard not to discuss any aspect of Netflix’s strategy without the context of the increasingly hot streaming wars. As Disney and others begin to double down on their own streaming platforms, Netflix may be looking for a way to stock up its war chest. Capitalizing on the low hanging fruit of password sharers could be a quick way to add some extra heft to the coffers.

The cost of marketing is too damn high

Netflix’s marketing spend is growing significantly. With escalating explicit costs, it may no longer be feasible to shoulder the opportunity costs of the missed revenue from account sharing. If some estimates are to be believed Netflix is missing out on $135 million of revenue a month from account sharing. This is more than it spends on marketing per month and if the company really does view account sharing as a customer acquisition tool, the costs might eventually simply get too high to stomach.

Now all this could just be a fun thought exercise. Despite what some headlines would lead you to believe, Netflix isn’t going to cut off access to the account of that sweaty kid from your freshman hall tomorrow. But they could at some point. The fact that they are talking about the potential is not ironclad, but it is a shot across the bow.

This is a fascinating case study in how sometimes it is just as illuminating to look at all the things that a company is actively choosing not to pursue as all the endeavors they are undertaking.

Until next week.

*This is not true.

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Gaming will Eat the World

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote one of the seminal thought pieces in the history of Venture Capital. Why Software is Eating the World basically was the rubberstamp that the age of the internet had truly arrived. Going back and reading it today, it almost reads as quaint. The idea that every company is a tech company is so widely accepted today, that it is hard to believe that under a decade ago this was a novel insight.

I am not Marc Andreessen. And I never will be.

He is one of the forefathers of the internet in addition to being the founder of one of the world’s top venture capital firms. So far, the only things I ever founded are this blog and the school of fashion consisting entirely of Polos + Gym Shorts.

I don’t expect this post to ever reach the same rarified air that his did. But I do believe one day a post on the same topic might.

And that is because, though gaming isn’t eating the world today,

I believe that it one day will.

eHype

Getting excited about gaming and esports (not eSports, I have gotten flammed for that before so watch out) is not exactly a revelation these days. Every investor and their great grandmother’s aunt Judithe is paying attention to the space. The larger gaming market is going to do about $152B in revenue this year and that figure is expected to grow to $180B by 2021. Compare that to the traditional sports market which is worth in the neighborhood of $500B (but has about a 4,000-year head start) and you can start to see why people like Judithe are putting her retirement money into a Croatian GS: GO team. More people watch videogame streams any given day than tune in to the NFL. It is a massive and quickly growing industry.

All that is great, but I’m not telling you anything new.

I don’t want to talk about how gaming is the future of entertainment.

I want to talk about how gaming is the future of EVERYTHING.

I believe that gaming and esports will become so much more than simply entertainment. As I pointed out above,it is an interesting opportunity worth investing in, in and of itself, but honestly, I think people are sleeping on just how big gaming really will be.

You had one Job

You know me. Big Future of Work guy. Gaming is a big reason for that. Gaming is going to create countless jobs in the years to come.

There will be the obvious jobs that have been part of the industry for some time now. Game development/marketing/ etc.

Then there will be the modern gaming jobs.

Esports athletes. Tournament casters. Esport reporters and news personalities. Video game streamers. These are already here and not only can you make a pretty penny from them, but they are the new aspirational careers for Gen Z.

What I am really intrigued by is the next wave of jobs. New technologies like Tokenization create the potential for creatives to buy and sell their digital wares within the economies of games themselves. Selling skins for characters and items is nothing new, that’s how many game companies make the bulk of their revenue off of free-to-play games (the most expensive CS:GO skin was sold for over $60K). A16Z had a really interesting podcast recently on the future of gaming monetization. New strategies to incent early adopters, creatives, and entrepreneurs could allow people to support themselves off of creating and selling digital goods. Imagine Etsy but for digital goods to be displayed on digital avatars. This is the way the world is going and it will be a massive opportunity for gamers and creatives alike to build income through jobs that have never existed before. And the best part is that they could do it from anywhere on earth.

Gamify me, Captain

Not only will gaming grow in new and unexpected ways, but I predict that it will start to permeate other aspects of our world. Many of the cutting edge technologies of our day like AI and high-end processors started off in the gaming world, it is not a stretch to believe that other aspects of gaming will make the jump into other industry verticals.

Today we are currently experiencing the consumerization of the enterprise stack with technologies like Slack and Zoom. Tomorrow we will see the gamification of the enterprise stack.

Generally, when people hear the term ‘gamification’ they think of stickers or leader boards. Really what gamification is is the creation of compelling incentive structures that re-frame something mundane in a compelling way. This could mean taking advantage of people’s competitive nature to try to perform better against their coworkers. Or adding a layer of abstraction to create user enjoyment where there wasn’t one before. There are already examples of teams being effectively trained through gamified modules instead of the traditional boring training seminars. I expect that this will only continue to grow and touch more aspects of people’s jobs. It is much less expensive to keep a current employee than to try to get a new one. Gamification can be powerful tools borrowed from the world of gaming to drive increased retention and employee engagement.

Of course, work is just one of many aspects where we will see a growing influence of gamification. Relationships, education, and healthcare are just a few of the aspects of our life that would stand to benefit from utilizing some of the tools and strategies developed by the world of gaming. One of the trends that I am most excited to watch is the improving UX of work. The adage that “work is supposed to feel like work” is quickly growing extinct. Today billion-dollar companies are being built by removing friction from work and simply making things like collaboration and communication not suck. I believe that tomorrow we will see billion dollar companies built to make work actually fun.

Here Today, Game Tomorrow

If you aren’t paying attention to the world of gaming and esports, you are sleeping at the wheel. Gaming is no longer for kids or the counter culture. It is a multi-billion dollar industry that is not only here to stay, but one that will continue to seep into more and more aspects of our everyday life.

My focus is not on the business as it is today, but on all that it could become in the future.

See you at the Auction House.

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