Category: Notebook

Most of the amazing outcomes in my personal and professional life have come when I favor an interesting path over a sensible one and most of my regrets can be traced to times I did the opposite. Not surprisingly, the interesting things turn out to be more sensible in retrospect. This principle recently steered me towards a hard left turn and I wanted to share an update about it.

As some of you might know, last fall my VTF Capital partners and I decided not to pursue raising a new fund. Each of us has grown interested in other areas so the timing felt right to split off on our own new adventures.

Over the past two years, my interests shifted heavily towards the food system. I spent most of the last year in Montana and Los Angeles and by early 2018 was focused on a few key things, including spending more time with a group of partners at Acre Venture Partners, a venture firm focused on the future of the food system and agriculture led by people I’ve come to respect as rational, thoughtful people.

Recently Acre introduced me to one of its portfolio companies, Pilotworks, the nation’s largest provider of scalable production and distribution infrastructure to small, medium and large food, beverage and CPG companies. The easiest way to explain it is to imagine AWS but for food companies in the physical world.

Pilotworks is one of the few companies that my random collection of professional experiences spanning tech product, food production, distribution, and real estate directly aligns with. Acre’s thought was that I might be able to advise the company occasionally. After spending a week with Nick, its co-founder and CEO, and his team of nearly 60 people across six states, Nick asked me join as its COO. A few days later I was on a plane back to NY. I joined the team on Feb 1.

The decision was a hard left turn. Until meeting Pilotworks and Acre, I planned to leave the venture industry and focus on building several long-term businesses and deepening my work in real estate. My ideal approach to life is to be, in both my personal and professional life, a portfolio of interesting things.

So although it conflicted with nearly every one of my plans, I could not pass up an opportunity to work on a set of problems as compelling as those the combination of this role and this company present. If I had chosen the sensible path I would have later regretted it.

I’m writing this from NY where I’m now mostly based. As the year progresses I’ll be splitting time between NY and a home on a small ranch outside of Austin, TX. I’ll continue to travel frequently supporting Pilotworks’ growing national footprint.

If you find yourself in NY or Austin, please look me up. If you know of anyone or anything interesting in NY (e.g. tacos), please pass thoughts my way. And if you want to talk food, call me anytime.

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.