00.1 - Prologue
A few links and thoughts in the lead-up to the first feature-length issue of Adventure Capitalism
Hey there,
I just wrapped up a few weeks’ travel to the west coast and am settled back in Pittsburgh for a while.
It feels like Autumn in the Heartland. The trees are changing colors and the cold killed my basil plant. You see entire families at pumpkin patches and in corn mazes on the weekends.
The visibility of families in the Heartland (and the east coast generally) is huge and something you take for granted until you spend an extended period of time in San Francisco — a city with more dogs than children (I kid you not).
I have a working thesis that San Francisco feels like a giant college campus — everybody goes there because they have to, many delay growing up for at least a few years, and they stick around for 4-ish years while their shares vest. Some stick around forever — instead of becoming professors, they become tech executives or investors. I’ll write a longer-form exposition of this idea in a future feature-length issue.
The first feature-length issue of Adventure Capitalism is coming this weekend. Keep your eyes peeled for it. I’ve been working on it for a while now. It includes two long-form essays, some recommended reading, a recommended product, and a sense of what the next issue looks like.
In the meantime, here are some links I found interesting:
The Time Space Continuum: Eliminating the Opportunity Cost of Travel — https://medium.com/@Cabin/part-ii-eliminating-the-opportunity-cost-of-travel-time-9821b4395dd1
My note: I spoke with the CEO of Cabin and the author of this essay, Gaetano Crupi, last week for about two hours on autonomous vehicles, real estate, urbanism, and time travel. The full conversation will be published as a podcast episode in the New Year, but he highlighted an optimism for secondary cities that I hadn’t thought much about. As travel becomes less of a drag on travelers (e.g., you don’t have to go through TSA because you can take a comfortable autonomous bus, you don’t have to drive because your car does that for you), the perceived cost of spending time traveling will plummet. This means that traveling between cities will become a lot more common. 6 hours driving from Pittsburgh to Manhattan isn’t terrible if you have an entire hotel room to stay in overnight.
You can check out Cabin here. The service only runs from LA <> SF right now, but they’re growing quickly.
Business School Sucks - https://www.ryanckulp.com/business-school-sucks/
Highlighted excerpt: most people go to business school to ascend the job ladder in their industry. presumably a business school graduate is ambitious and wants to be rich.
but you don’t get rich from salary jobs, you get rich from owning the means of production. someone who goes to business school feels elated to earn $200k+ after graduation, yet is promoted / given raises slowly over 30 years, potentially capping out at $500k – $1mm salary by the time they retire.
an entrepreneur, on the other hand, might make $3k /month freelancing while building software part-time, then make $1mm+ /year within 5 years for the rest of their career.
delaying gratification, therefore, is also not something they teach you in business school, because if they did, you’d quit.
Neither, and New - https://stratechery.com/2019/neither-and-new-lessons-from-uber-and-vision-fund/
My note: If you’ve been following the meltdown over WeWork and Uber the last few months, this essay will shed some light on the problems of running a business with relatively slim margins in those kinds of industries (note: low margins aren’t necessarily bad if you’re not running a commodity business).
Stratechery is a good newsletter if you want in-depth analyses of different tech companies.
1517 Jobs - https://airtable.com/shrYB6NuMo2q0JA0l
My note: The venture capital fund I work with has a portfolio of 50+ companies. Those companies are hiring for 100+ roles. Most of the roles are based in San Francisco or the Bay Area, but an increasing % of our investments are outside of this area.
If you find a role that looks interesting to you, I encourage you to apply.
Until the weekend,
Zak