Author: Zach Ware

Earlier this year Zack Kanter introduced me to Andrew Youderian who is, among other things, the founder of Ecommerce Fuel. Later in the summer, at the tail end of my summer working from rural NW Montana, I drove to Bozeman to hang out with Andrew and do a podcast interview with him.

We drove to a wilderness area a few hours outside of Bozeman in his VW camper van, camped, fly fished and talked how I see retail, the misuse of venture capital in retail and many other things. Andrew is a wicked fly fisherman. I am a terrible fly fisherman.

My views on the future of retail and the use venture capital are very different than those of the larger venture market. Second perhaps only to conversations with my partners, this interview is the place I’ve been most authentically clear about how I see the industry and why.

This is likely thanks to a combination of factors namely, the outdoors is my element and I’d spent over a month before this interview mostly in the outdoors. Also Andrew is just a great guy to talk to.

Here’s the interview which is also presented as a transcript.

If you are an ecommerce or retail entreprenuer building a company to last, you should check out Ecommerce Fuel. The members I know say it’s very powerful. And Andrew is a really great guy.

I took the photo while we were fly fishing in a protected wilderness before the interview. I’m pretty sure the cows were owned by a land squatter. They did not like me. You can see the beginnings of the smoke from the fires that ravaged Montana starting in August. 

According to Facebook a lot has happened since I last logged into Facebook. Strangely, I feel fine.

On a random Sunday a few months ago I decided to break a habit loop checking Twitter and Facebook obsessively. I had some deep thinking to do that day so I wanted to stay away from distractions.

The next day for the next two months I kept not checking it. I haven’t been to either site since some time in April.

I’ve done this before. I intentionally took a month off of social networks in January 2016 after reading Fooled By Randomness and realizing my entire life was about consuming bits of undistilled information. I did this by obsessively reading tech blogs, perpetuating a comparison bias that made me feel terrible about myself.

From there I developed an information habit that I explained in a post called We are addicted to now. I’ve kept that habit for well over a year.

But things changed in November 2016 around the time of the Presidential Election. Like most people, I started following the flashing lights related to Trump.

The periods of my life when I’ve been disconnected from Twitter and Facebook have some of my happiest periods. So when I accidentally started doing it again in April, I was quickly reminded of the decision’s impact.

I am happier today because I keep those things out of my life.

The most comical aspect of this experience has been Facebook’s reaction to it. It started behaving like a petulant child forced to sit in a corner. At a certain point, it realized it wasn’t getting its way and started screaming wildly to get my attention.

Facebook started sending me emails in an attempt to trigger FOMO. What I found most interesting is just how bad it was as selecting things I actually cared about.

I’ve received about 70 of these emails.

All but about three of these notifications are about people I have never or rarely interacted with. A few I can’t specifically remember becoming Facebook friends with. Not once did it notify me of things shared by, for example, my best friend.

The one above is a photo notification from a friend’s wife who I have never met.

Then there are the summary FOMO emails. which come intermittently.

A mild vote of confidence in Facebook’s interest algorithm can be seen in the the FOMO emails about things I’ve at least sent a reasonably recent signal (last four months) that I enjoy:

I would show you how Twitter has reacted but poor little Twitter hasn’t sent me a single email.

It’s worth noting that my blog automatically publishes new post notifications to Twitter and sometimes Facebook. The fact that I broadcast to these platforms and don’t interact, even to see the responses, makes me a bit of a hypocrite. But worse things have happened.

Overall, I’m a happier person today than I was a few months ago.

And what’s most interesting is that I don’t feel disconnected from friends in the slightest. I didn’t expect to feel this way.

So what now? Well, like most things, specifically drinking which I stopped doing accidentally in 2015 and never started again, not even once, I may one day go back to it in some way. Who knows? But for now, I’m content with the way things are. My brain is more focused.

And I get to watch Facebook have a hissy fit.

After a great week in London working with our investment partners I decided to take a week to putz around Europe. After all, what are airline miles for?

When I travel I like to explore random places and off the beaten path restaurants.

Atlas Obscura once led me to a donkey refuge in Palo Alto that was only a few blocks from my hotel. 

I keep long Evernotes about every city I visit to recall or share with others friends who live there and interesting places I want to remember to go to again. I also star a ton of places in Google maps.  

One of my favorite new apps for discovering cool places is V for Wikipedia. I came across it thanks to Kevin Kelly’s weekly Recommendo email newsletter. 

It shows you Wikipedia entries for things close to you. Or close to a location. And the UI is beautiful. 

It’s led me to a few interesting places around the ancient city of Pompeii. And it provides a ton of history wherever you are. 

It’s a paid app and even if you don’t travel frequently I highly recommend it. 

Note: this is a part of an email and real life conversation I am having with a friend about people living with terminal diagnoses. After sharing my thoughts on When Breath Becomes Air he suggested I watch a video about Claire Wineland and asked me what I thought. This was my response. 

I took some time to reflect on this. I mentioned that earlier this week, I read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. He was a 35-year-old neurosurgeon and aspiring neuroscientist. He entered that field because he found it to be the most efficient way to explore man’s interpretation of existence…he wanted to learn what gives life meaning and to do that he studied both literature (man’s written interpretation) and the science of the brain (what makes it be).

What I find most interesting about both stories is the respective characters’ conscious exploration of the tension between what is supposed to be and what is.

We all know we’re not guaranteed a tomorrow. But humans are not good at projecting events over long time arcs. So it is no surprise that we are miserable at truly understanding how soon our death may come. This all changes for those who facing terminal diagnoses. Most interestingly, though, in neither case (nor generally in medicine) do they have clarity on when. So while they know they will die “soon” there is no exact time.

What I’ve found most fascinating about both stories is how the close proximity of the end reorients them to the present moment. I’m not so much interested in the fact that they live in the present as I am in observing a) what that actually looks like and b) the very present tension they fight between what a life is “expected to be” and what they want theirs to be. But each of them has a different struggle. I learned from the contrast.

In Claire’s case, thanks to her youth, she is less programmed in the heuristics of life. She has less to unlearn. Conversely Paul (the writer of the book) is 35 when diagnosed and is in the middle of the very programmed path of doctor/scientist. His basic struggle is the same as Claire’s but with the added complexity of exploring what it means to live a life you are proud of versus what he’s been programmed to do.

He struggles with figuring out what he wants. And his greatest tension is with not specifically knowing when he will die. If he will die in ten years he should do X because X takes 7-10 years to complete. If two years he should do Y because it’s more short-term.

I don’t think I would gain as much from either story if I hadn’t encountered them in sequence.

This is all very similar to how as kids we play and as we grow we play less. We play less not because we hate laughing but because we are programmed to see play as childish…bad. To return to our child-like state we must unlearn so much.

I recall my own experience of exploring what I call internal orientation which is otherwise thought of as marching to your own beat, keeping your own score, etc.. For years I read all of the self-help gurus’ explanation of doing your own thing. And then I lived it. And the experience was completely different than both what is written and what I imagined it would be. It was much harder to break away from the heuristics.

Similarly in the case of death I’ve read extensively about living in the present moment because “tomorrow may not come.” And in these two cases I observed it on opposite ends of a spectrum.

I would have been inspired by Claire if I encountered her story alone. But seeing it contrasted against someone whose life experiences made it harder to follow the present path was the most powerful. It made the value of unlearning much clearer.

Claire summed it up best when she said “live a life you can be proud of.” That has a hint of Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework.

Bezos’ states that we should think about what we would regret when we are 80. His view is an inversion of looking at the future from the present state. Both are useful. But when your life is surely going to be short but you don’t know how short, you can’t look at it from the position of 80 year old you.

So in a sense that forces you to be more present-state focused. You don’t have the luxury of waiting. So you must be proud of every moment. Right now.

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Zach Ware