Essays

  1. November 2021: On Sequoia’s new fund and Ben Thompson’s response
  2. July 2022: Facilitating IRL Convos (an app I spend ~5% of my time working on; it’s both hard-tech and a hypothetical consumer marketplace, so hard to get going…; my goal is to combat loneliness, discrimination, and polarization)

I recognize blogging is so mid 2000s, and if my goal was to build a large audience of paying subscribers, I should instead write a regular e-mail (via Substack, of course). But I’m not. Why?

  • My goal isn’t to monetize via subscriptions. Instead I write because it’s fun, prevents me from forgetting ephemeral ideas (a turrible feeling), and helps me develop relationships with entrepreneurs and people in the investment industry.
  • Writing isn’t my full-time job, so I don’t want additional pressure of producing regular content. I recognize that deadlines force creativity, but I’d rather have more flexible internal deadlines so I’m not constantly stressed. I also want to produce content that I’m proud of.
  • Lastly, I plan to edit these essays after publishing. I’ll keep a record of prior versions in case I write something really stupid and someone wants to tell someone else that I wrote something really stupid (I hear it’s a thing…), but my goal is to write something that is really good that I later improve after gaining more perspective and incorporating feedback.

Essays I’m currently working on:

  1. Aullo: What my timid (part-time, so super timid) foray into entrepreneurship has taught me, a LP, about innovation and VC
  2. Why LPs are reluctant to allocate to emerging managers even though emerging managers are probably good for LPs and definitely good for the investment industry
  3. Why LPs probably shouldn’t allocate to crypto directly or via dedicated managers
  4. Clubhouse: A forum for having conversations with _____, despite their _____
  5. A big reason why I’m an optimist: part of my grandmother’s story and our shared connection with an innovative institution
  6. Oft-forgotten laws and regulations that affect innovation and asset prices
  7. What drives returns? Risk?