Adventure Capitalism 02.0
Reflections on what really matters; the future belongs to the Truants; Eternal Adolescence; Recommendations
In this issue:
Welcome Letter: Just Passing Through this Life — Reflections on a conversation apropos to Thanksgiving.
Essay: The Future Belongs to the Truant: Messy Realities of Building the Future — There’s a ton of opportunity trapped by the fact that tracked careers and tracked schools keep people from seeing the messiness of reality
Essay: Eternal Adolescence, Part I: America’s Coastal Cities and the Tyranny of Professionalism — The hubs of elite professionalism incentivize living like a college kid, even for those who want to grow up. How do you escape this pull?
Recommended Product
Recommended Viewing
What I’m Reading
Post-production note: While writing this issue, I inadvertently discovered that Substack has an “email length limit,” so I had to cut this issue short.
Expect a short Adventure Capitalism 02.1 out soon with the extra content I wanted to include in this issue, like:
Follow Up: Eternal Adolescence, Part II: The Fix
Essay: The Looming Boomer Baby Business Bust
How To: Work Remotely — Convince your boss or negotiate it in a job offer.
“Just Passing Through This Life”
A conversation at Denver Union Station.
I had to go for a walk after this conversation.
I was speechless. The conversation I had had for the last hour or so left an impression on me that I couldn’t quite grasp. I had a simultaneous desire to tell my friends and colleagues about it but also to just let it stew in the crevices of my mind for a while.
There wasn’t anything groundbreaking about this conversation. I didn’t learn anything new that shifted my view of the world. It wasn’t even the first conversation I had had with this person. But the way it was delivered, the calm with which it progressed, and the comfort with which the man I was speaking spoke was so unusual and so comfortable that I was taken aback.
I had flown to Denver to meet with this man, a potential investor. After 15 minutes on our initial phone call, he was interested in working together and wanted to introduce me to friends and colleagues who could join him. “But first, I want to meet in person and shake your hand.”
“I’ll come to Denver. I’ve been wanting to get out there, anyway.”
Usually these conversations center around the startup climate in 2019, the early-stage investment space, and trends that my colleagues and I have learned lead to successful teams.
We covered these points, of course, but I also like learning more about the other person. Usually, people love talking about themselves, so I factor in at least half of the conversation for them to do that.
He hadn’t said that much, though.
He opened with a quick overview of his career — 30 years on Wall Street, contributor to every major publication in the financial sector, on the boards of a few dozen successful companies over the years, now working to put together more boards for companies — he used this not to brag but as a way of conveying that he’s developed a good gut sense for people. It wasn’t an “here’s about me and my goals with doing this kind of investing” kind of thing.
“No, please, tell me about you,” I told him towards the end of our time together.
“Oh. Me? I’m just a gardener.”
I didn’t say anything, unsure if this was meant metaphorically or literally.
“I wake up every morning and thank God for the harvest he’s given me. I have standing requests from folks at the Wall Street Journal and other publications in New York. Some people want zucchini one season, tomatoes the next. I take the harvest from my garden to local restaurants and donate it. I donate it to the convent. I donate it to the shelter.
“There’s a little shop over there at the other end of the terminal. They sell necklaces and bracelets with little sayings on them like, ‘remember that you matter,’ and, ‘be happy.’ Things like that. Any time I come here I like to buy 5 or 10. If I’m walking down the street and I see somebody who’s just had a really bad day — they look like they’re just down on their luck and nobody is there for them — I like to give them one.
“They always kind of look at it confused at first, then smile, and then look at me and ask, ‘who are you? Why are you giving this to me?’ I tell them, ‘who I am doesn’t matter. What matters is that you matter.’ And I go on my way.
“But little things. Little things like that mean so much to people. And it costs me nothing to do it.
“I want to die with nothing. Nothing. I don’t even want anybody to know I died. I’m just passing through this life. I am just here for others to feel the love that God has for them. That’s it.”
There wasn’t anything I could really say to that.
After we went our separate ways, I had a difficult time filing the conversation away as “just another conversation that I have as part of my work.” It bothered me how much I enjoyed this simple conversation. He could have told me all about the high-powered deals he made. The millions he made and lost and made on Wall Street. The boards he’s been on and the billionaires he’s met. But he told me about growing vegetables and giving out necklaces and wanting to die humbly.
I talked to my colleague Danielle about it later in the evening. Some people, she said, are just really good people you want to be around. That doesn’t make the people who aren’t those people bad people, but some are just really inspiring people to meet. And a cool part of our work is we sometimes get to meet them.
“Inspiring” was the word she used that stuck with me. It made me realize just how rarely we elevate those around us, whom we can actually emulate, who are inspiring to us.
When you find those you find inspiring, who are not fringe-case superhumans that no normal person can be someday, find a way to work with them and keep them in your life.
Welcome to Adventure Capitalism, 02.0.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Zak
The Future Belongs to the Truants
Opportunity lies at the intersection of relinquished responsibility and the ability to take risks. The career and school prospects of the traditionally “successful” squash this. A few ideas on how to fix it.
I’ve spent the last few weeks on the road. It’s the busy season for my work with 1517 Fund and a good chunk of that time is spent at hackathons on college campuses. We judge these events, give out grants, and turn out to them in the same way that a sports recruiter goes to high school football games to check out who to keep their eyes on.
If you’ve never seen or been to a hackathon, I encourage you to check one out. They’re (usually) 24 hour events where teams of (usually) young people come together to hack together a product. You’ll get everybody from experienced developers who have been coding since they were 10 years old to people who had never coded until that weekend. It’s really something else. Some of the ideas that come out of them turn into serious products — it takes surprisingly little to get to minimum viable product for a lot of services.
During judging, I couldn’t help but notice a trend: the people you would think would succeed based on pedigree didn’t do as well as many of the people you discounted.
It wasn’t the students from the impressive prep schools or the Ivy League universities who put together the best projects in the weekend. It was the students with the most exposure to real-world problems and experience.
One of the teams I awarded a grant to was a group of high school students building a machine learning algorithm to help people find and sell physical advertising space, like billboards or ads on buses. Rather than ask users what kind of advertising space they wanted, they asked them what kinds of people they wanted to be exposed to. They then used publicly available advertising data and census data to figure out the best places to advertise based on that information.
Now, this may be something that ad agencies have internally (I don’t know, I haven’t worked at an ad agency) but it was an impressive project to see a group of 16 year olds build. They had clearly thought about this problem before heading into the weekend.
“So, have you actually spoken to anybody who buys billboard space?”
“Yes. This is a big problem when it comes to searching for advertising space. [Insert 10 minute explanation of how billboard brokers work.]”
Color me surprised.
This isn’t unusual in going to these events, but it runs counter to the dominant narrative of how talent is selected in American meritocratic society. The dominant narrative would tell you that it’s the students from the most prestigious backgrounds who would be more likely to come up with the impressive ideas. The prestigious background didn’t make them more likely to come up with good ideas, of course, but it was a reflection of their competence. If they’re competent enough to get into these institutions, they should be competent enough to come up with more interesting ideas.
Except that’s not how original ideas form. They’re not a function of competence at school. They’re not a function of experience within a rigid institution like a school or a corporate bureaucracy.
They’re a function of experience in the real world. They’re a function of not being in school.
“Amazon is the new CEO school.”
My roommate recently said this to me over a casual conversation one afternoon.
“Had you heard that before? Like, how GM or GE were the CEO schools of the last few decades, now you’re finding that the managers at big companies are coming from Amazon and replicating Amazon’s model inside of other big companies.”
“No. My mind usually sits in startups, not where Man-in-the-Grey-Flannel-Suit, MBA goes after leaving his job. In my world, it’s more like Tesla and Stripe that spin out lots of founders. But Amazon makes sense for your manager-MBA-types. It’s a really rigid corporate environment.”
Schools are not unlike Amazon. America’s K-12 school system, and its universities in short order after that, were largely funded as a need for an educated and rigid managerial class. The mish-mash system of grammar schools, trade schools, and various homeschooling and co-op environments that existed until the late 19th century were good for a country of craftsmen, tradesmen, clergy, artists, and entrepreneurs, but not particularly helpful for a country in the throes of full-scale industrialization.
John Taylor Gatto covers this well in his detailed (though unfortunately un-edited) Underground History of American Education. A large part of the standardization effort was funded by industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, and others whose names adorn libraries and universities across the country.
My goal here isn’t to go into a history of American education and explain its roots and conjecture about the motives of its founders. But it is to point out that schools and schooling are fantastic systems for industrialized, corporate career training. They’re very good at selecting for people who can manage and be managed.
This is neither inherently good nor bad. But when it becomes all-encompassing, when children and young adults know nothing more than the school-world and that which they see in popular media, it conflicts with the process of original ideation.
It’s no surprise that if you ask a young person what they want to be when they grow up, they give you some variation on jobs they see every day — teacher, cop, firefighter, pilot, doctor, etc. — they don’t tell you, “machine learning engineer for the adtech space,” because they’re never exposed to it.
Gatto recognized this when he was a schoolteacher and made a point to organize apprenticeships between his New York City public school and the world at large. He was fought at every turn by the System that was incentivized to maximize for test scores and efficiency. Nobody in this model is irrational, they’re all simply responding to the incentives put in front of them.
But this model selects for a very specific kind of winner. It selects for a management consultant class. It selects for the type of person who will compete to the edge of death for a job at McKinsey & Co. It doesn’t select for the person who wants to build interesting projects on the weekend just because. It doesn’t select for the person who will work 27 jobs by the time he’s 30 because he’s insatiable and always interested in solving new problems. And, of course, it doesn’t select for any kind of artist.
These hackathon projects aren’t just weekend fun. Many become products (Stripe — a company worth more than $35B — built their MVP in less than two weeks). And those products become companies. Even for those that don’t, seeing a venture capitalist come along and award $1000 to you and your 16 year-old friends because you’re working on something interesting can be enough to keep these young people focused on work that matters for the non-manager aspirant.
And they’re a product of experience and exposure to the real world. I actually like to think about this in a similar way to how Arthur Koestler wrote about comedy in The Act of Creation.
He put forward a theory of bisociation in which two seemingly unrelated planes intersect. At that intersection, you get the joke (good jokes aren’t predictable).
In the same sense, creative product development comes from the intersection of two unrelated planes. If you hole yourself entirely on one plane — school, the corporate world, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. — you’ll never discover other planes that may or may not intersect with your first plane.
In this way, opportunity awaits for the student who doesn’t fill up their resume with extracurricular activities after school and who doesn’t spend every waking moment studying for the SAT or the LSAT or the GMAT.
Opportunity awaits for the student working after school, for the student enrolling in courses because he wants to and not because he’s padding his resume for college, for the student who shadows his mom or dad at work after school. Opportunity awaits for the truant.
In Reality: 3 F’s
“You’re not telling people to actually just skip school entirely, right?”
Eh.
But assuming that’s not actually palatable to parents, program directors, and overzealous Californian attorneys genera, we’re not actually faced with a dilemma that’s “school or curious opportunity.”
There are at least 3 informal institutions that can split apart this false-dilemma:
— Freedom
— Family
— Funding
These institutions, both alone and together, can provide more planes of experience to which people can be exposed. Some of those people will select into the creative-entrepreneurial class. Others will select into the manager class.
Freedom
The most obvious fix to this problem is to give people more freedom. Let people get away from school and from work. Give them more opportunities to experience the planes that can intersect with their skillsets.
Part of this is cultural. Culture is a spontaneous order — it’s reinforced by everybody but designed by nobody. The normalization of shorter school hours, fewer (but hopefully more meaningful) extracurricular hours, and out-of-school experience is a good starting place.
For adults, the normalization of remote work would be the equivalent here. You’re more likely to put your skills as an SEO marketer or developer or salesperson to work on a creative idea outside of work if you see more things outside of the office.
If you’re a manager, allow your employees to work from home more often. Use tools like Loom to make that easier (full disclosure: my firm is an investor in Loom — but I am a huge fan of the product).
If you’re an employee, negotiate working from home regularly. Make it clear to your boss that it’s in their interest for you to work from home. You’ll be more productive and get more done for the company.
If you’re a parent, push your school to have out-of-school apprenticeships. Push them to expose the students to more in the real world and get them outside of a facility designed to maximize for test scores and US News and World Report rankings.
If you’re an aspiring parent, consider alternative paths for educating your children. This is going to be a huge market in 10-20 years as technology finally wears down the staid institutions of 19th century brick-and-mortar schooling and more funding opportunities come online for alternative paths for education. Consider setting up a 529 plan (this is essentially an IRA for education instead of retirement) for your future children — a tweak in the 2019 Tax Law now allows parents to use 529 plan funding on K-12 education, including at parochial schools, in addition to higher education expenses.
Family
“The single strongest predictor of entrepreneurship is parental entrepreneurship. Having an entrepreneur parent increases the probability that a child ends up as an entrepreneur by a factor of 1.3 to 3.0.”
— Source (H/T Geoff Graham)
I think the important thing with normalizing entrepreneurship within families is that seeing somebody start a company makes starting a company considerably less scary. I’ve noticed in the young hackers and makers I find at hackathons and in our own portfolio, that a disproportionate number have family members who have started businesses.
I want to stress that this is not a privilege point. In fact, many of these people come from families that are no better off than a normal middle class family. It’s a non-financial cost of starting point. If you see somebody identify an opportunity and pursue it, even if they fail, it becomes considerably less scary for you to identify an opportunity and pursue it.
This doesn’t necessarily expose you to more planes (to extend the Koestler analogy), but it helps you see more intersections between planes. It’s the Gatto-esque realization that you can be so much more than a teacher or a firefighter or a cop or a pilot or a doctor. There are roles you can play that don’t even exist until you bring them into reality.
That matters to people.
In lieu of a genetic family that has this, helping people be around business owners and entrepreneurs helps. You don’t do this when you sit in an office or a school all day.
Get out of your cubicle or your classroom and go meet real people.
Funding
I actually think this is the least-important of these three informal institutions, but it can be important for certain kinds of companies and (in proper doses at proper times) it can be a sign of validation.
Once you see the intersection of the planes and you want to pursue that intersection, knowing it’s a real intersection can take time.
The best validation that the point is real is money from customers. That’s the best funding for any company, period. It doesn’t come with selling off the company and it is a better indicator of value than the value-judgements of investors or grant-makers.
But a grant here or there can be validation, too. I’ve seen this first-hand.
This past summer, during a trip to Montreal, I met a group of students working on an entirely private version of the Android operating system. Impressed, I asked them what year they were.
“Freshmen.”
“That’s impressive. Where?”
“Morris County Technical School.”
“Wait. High school freshmen?”
“Yes.”
They got a small grant to keep working on the project. For them, this was a little bit of validation that allows them to justify spending more time outside of the classroom and more time working on something that may become something great. Even if it doesn’t — it’s an opportunity to gain work experience and see more planes than they would see sitting in the classroom.
An important takeaway that I want to stress: don’t let funding be a distraction. With the exception of capital-intensive high-tech projects, most things don’t require a lot of money to get started. Build something very simple first, get some people to give you money for it, and then think about growth.
In any system that rewards competent value discovery and creation, the future belongs to the truants, the weirdos, and the obsessives. Only at scale do the managers start to really matter similarly.
Eternal Adolescence, Part I
America’s professional cities look less like hubs of economic progress and more like college campuses. This is just a continuation of a century-long extension of childhood. Where does it end?
Look out for Part II of this essay in Adventure Capitalism 02.1.
Production note: As I am putting the finishing touches on this issue, the NYT reported that the US fertility rate hit a record low last year. A big part of this is continued adolescence and the (false) narrative that having more children is expensive.
Go spend a week or two in San Francisco and you’ll notice something off about the place.
I’m not talking about the syringes on the streets or smashed windows on cars.
I’m talking about the lack of children.
San Francisco has more pets than it has children.
If you talk to educated, elite young professionals in these elite coastal cities, it’s rare to come across people who are married and planning on having children (especially rare relative to the young professionals you may find in mid-market cities) any time soon.
Those who do have children tend to have them at an older age and tend to have fewer (despite the fact that these are exactly the people social planners would want to have more children and the fact that the marginal cost of every new child is actually quite low).
This isn’t (necessarily) a pro-natalist rant. But the lack of children in cities like San Francisco speak to a deeper dynamic you notice once you talk to and socialize with the young professionals who make up these hubs. The lack of children and families speaks to a lack of adulthood in America’s coastal elite hubs.
Different stages of life have defining characteristics. If you removed this characteristic or introduced it, it gets considerably harder to determine that an individual has entered that stage of life.
For childhood, play is the defining characteristic (i.e., a child who doesn’t play seems more adultlike, an adult who spends a ton of time playing seems childlike). For adolescence, preparation, usually in school or in some kind of student-status, is the defining characteristic. For adulthood, family-rearing is the defining characteristic.
(Yes, yes, not all adults start families, I get that. Those are exceptions that prove the rule. Family-rearing is the fundamental unit of any kind of society that doesn’t die. And even those who don’t start biological families tend to tie themselves into non-biological tribes. Throughout history, men and women who didn’t start families played an integral role in supporting families in the tribe, whether that’s through caring for the young and old, providing food, fighting war, or playing a religious role.)
For a lot of people in these elite coastal hubs (SF, DC, NYC and LA to lesser-extents), it isn’t that they don’t want to have families, it’s that they’re not ready and still preparing.
Talk to people in their late-20s (the age at which people in other cities start to start families) and you’ll hear things like:
“I’m waiting until I’m at a more comfortable place in my career.”
“I want to have kids, just not in [SF/DC/LA/NYC]. I’m waiting until I can move.”
“I want to have a family, but it’s just so expensive to do so here." (Curiously enough, if you ask them to chart out costs, most of those costs are in housing or private education, which means that low family rates are ultimately policy failures in these cities.)
“I’m waiting to get a better sense of myself.”
“I’m not sure if I want kids yet. I am still learning more about myself.”
(All things I’ve heard people say, either verbatim or close-to-verbatim.)
The NYT reported that this tends to be the case, too:
““The data suggest that people want to establish themselves before having children,” said Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University. “They also want to make sure they have adequate resources to raise quality children.””
(Emphasis mine.)
The term “quality children” is simultaneously shocking and not shocking. It should be shocking because the value of children shouldn’t be attached to whether or not you can afford to send them to a prep school that will send them to get a degree from a school that charges $400k.
It should also be shocking because that value of children is a function of a huge assumption about the cost of having children. That assumption comes out of the Tiger Mother philosophy of child-rearing, that says that the quality of a child is a function of the investment made in the child.
But that’s only true if nurture matters as much as or more than nature. And the research doesn’t clearly say that. In fact, Bryan Caplan argues in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that nature matters a lot more than nurture. So you should focus more on finding a quality mother or father for your children and less on saving a ton of money to send them to fantastic schools and hiring tons of tutors.
If you have a decent job and have found a decent wife/husband and you enjoy the idea of children, Caplan says, you should have as many kids as you want. The marginal cost of every additional child is lower than you think.
But then again, maybe this is less of a concern in the minds of young professionals waiting to have families and start real adulthood.
Maybe they’re just reacting to the institutions around them.
And those institutions look a lot more like adolescent institutions than adult institutions.
FAANG’d Up Campus Life
A college campus has a few very distinct characteristics. It has a social life. It has a cafeteria. It has a “campus environment” in how life is clustered together. You wake up, see people, do work, and eat in pretty much the same place.
This is conducive to studying full-time at school, of course. If you had to commute across town or leave campus to just go get food, you’d have less time to do work, to study, and to get your dollars’-worth in pursuing your credential.
Then, at the end of your 3-5 years, you should go off and start life in the Real World.
But for many (and an increasing number of) elite graduates, the line between the Campus and the Real World isn’t that clear.
Professional life looks increasingly like campus life, both physically and incentive-wise.
The major tech companies compete with each other for the top talent out of the pipeline right at graduation (and even before graduation). They compete not just in terms of outrageous compensation packages (which, in turn, drive up housing costs in the Bay Area, where the quantity supplied of housing is effectively fixed while the quantity demanded increases) but in terms of workplace perks.
Take a moment now to google “Facebook campus,” or “Google campus,” or “Apple cafeteria,” or any similar combination of words.
Please, go ahead, do it. Open another tab or your mobile browser and look it up.
Now compare those campuses to the luxury campuses of the University of Michigan, or Carnegie Mellon University, or MIT, or any number of other schools that work as pipelines for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (FAANG).
Or even look at the offices of venture-funded, privately-held late stage startups that have to compete with FAANG for talent but often can’t afford to give the same kind of salaries. Look at their campuses and you see similar perks in the all-out war for talent. People like to point and laugh at WeWork or Uber for their absurd off-sites and luxurious offices but often these companies are just responding to an insanely competitive talent landscape.
(Some companies, like Stripe, have responded to this landscape by opening more offices outside of the Bay Area and New York City and allowing their teams to work remotely. I hope this is a trend more companies will follow as coastal hubs become uninhabitable for anybody besides a 23-year old who only wants to earn options and work.)
These corporate campuses go beyond the simple corporate cafeteria of the modern era. They include luxury amenities that any 20-something could desire, just like a college. Why? Because these companies need to compete for the best people on any margin they can think of, just like a college.
Part of the process of actually becoming an adult, in the lead-up to having a family, is knowing how to survive on one’s own. It’s knowing how to go out and find entertainment on one’s own, make friends outside of work, and know how to prepare healthy meals on one’s own.
But campus life crowds out civil life.
Why would you spend the time learning how to make a delicious meal if you knew that the corporate cafeteria would provide not just lunch but also dinner if you stay to work late? (A genius perk for the company to offer, as they now can incentivize employees to stay late.) Why focus on finding entertainment outside of work if you knew that the company was bringing in speakers, authors, and even performers that you’d normally pay money and travel across country to see?
The corporate campus, once emphasized as the corporate campus in office life of the mid-20th century, has become the corporate campus in the elite coastal professional life of the 21st century.
Vest, Baby, Vest
One need not look to office design and esoteric theories of the education system and parenting to see other incentive structures in these hubs of elite professionalism that make it difficult to actually grow up.
Most of the companies that can actually headquarter themselves in these costly hubs (FAANG and late stage startups in the Bay Area; management consulting firms, investment banks, and venture-backed startups in NYC) compensate their employees in more than cash. In fact, cash can only go so far when your rent is $3700/month and every other company is paying similarly.
Instead, competitive companies offer stock options. Options, while nothing new (they’ve been around since the first tech bubble), work essentially as a bet on the future of the company. “Work more now,” they speak through incentives to the worker, “and you could own 0.001% of a billion-dollar pie.”
I actually think this is a great incentive model for the right young employee. For companies that can afford to offer retirement plans, it shouldn’t be offered as a substitute, but it’s a great complement to get employees bought-in on the future of the firm.
These options don’t come all at once, of course. That would be absurd. You’d have employees getting hired, working for a week, and leaving with options for thousands of shares in the company to which they now no longer contribute.
That’s why employees (and founders!) get vesting schedules. You get part of what you’re owed every month up to a certain point.
And just like a college degree or a high school diploma, that tends to take about 4 years to get.
So you get many elite young professionals wanting to leave the Bay or Manhattan or LA or DC, but they say, “no, in a few years I will, after my shares vest.” That, of course, assumes they don’t get drawn into another company with another vesting schedule, and that the shares they’re owed are actually worth something.
In the meantime, they live in a goofy place between adulthood and late adolescence, many wanting to escape but the incentives of their environment working against them.
Forever Preparing: the Tyranny of Professionalism
It’s hard to say if elite young office workers stay in adolescence longer because the workplace looks like school more or if the workplace looks like school more because that’s what elite young office workers demand but I suspect causality goes both ways.
Elite young office workers are the product of being the most schooled and most adolescence’d cohort of young people ever. No other cohort has had more parents, teachers, coaches, trainers, tutors, professors, provosts, nannies, and deans track every minute of their performance against their peers than young people entering the workforce today. Their parents, furiously rushing to make sure their kids can go to the best schools possible to get the best jobs possible, gave them less time than any previous group of young people to individuate and get comfortable with the messiness and disorder of the real world.
If people follow the path of least resistance and have the world at their fingertips, why wouldn’t they go for the cushy jobs that look a lot like the last 4, 8, or 12 years of their lives?
This is hardly a process that happened overnight. The water’s slowly been getting turned up on young adults over the last century-or-so.
Adolescence, that weird period between playful childhood and serious adulthood, is a relatively new phenomenon. Up until the 19th century, young people were young adults and they started their careers, their civic duties, and their families in short order after acquiring the requisite skills.
It wasn’t until Industrialization and, really, post-war education came along that young people were cordoned off into their own area of “adolescence” at the expense of growing up.†
Instead, they entered a brief and protracted age of “apprenticeship” in which they would learn their craft or trade. This may have included going off to formalized education, as in the case of the clergy or scientists (even lawyers and doctors spent competitive time in apprenticeship rather than a classroom), but the focus on that period was very much on “what are you going to do to provide for your family or community” when finished.
This was the default state of even relatively-advanced societies up until relatively recently. What separated what I call the Apprenticeship stage from modernist adolescence is that there was a definite purpose for which the apprenticeship phase was undertaken. Even in the case of the aristocracy, which went off to university as a sort of finishing-school, there was a definite end in inheriting the family’s land and taking over the business.
With the rise of non-specialized office work, school got extended into the Apprenticeship period. Instead of apprenticing, young people now spent time in school to prepare for professional studies in college. Even college became a preparation period, as students and young professionals knew that skills for work were really learned-on-the-job in many cases.
The charitable case for upending the apprenticeship period with adolescence goes something like this:
the world is getting more complex. As complexity increases, aspiring young professionals need more years of foundational education before they can go into complex professional education. As complexity increases, you should expect school to increase as a requisite need to fill complex jobs.
For the most part, I don’t buy this. Unless one is working as a highly specialized researcher or working with cutting-edge technology, the education learned in adolescence usually doesn’t lay any kind of groundwork for the real world.†† In a vacuum, abstract education might make more sense in this period, but that vacuum is a world where opportunity cost isn’t real. In reality, spending years learning about mitochondria or your college’s required classes comes at the cost of immersing yourself in real-world experience.
Despite the fact that the real-world actually looks more like the apprenticeship system that used to be common, the schools and adolescence seep into the valuable time that could be used to immerse oneself in the real world at little cost.
Here’s my theory on why the apprenticeship period was upended with adolescence via school:
Companies want to hire a candidate for a professional office position. They advertise a job posting for a position and get 1,000 applicants. The HR manager in charge of hiring doesn’t have time to sift through all 1,000 applicants, so they use a heuristic for thinning the pack and look at other office workers they’ve hired for that position in the past. Looks like most of them have degrees. So the HR manager throws out the applicants who don’t have degrees.
Simultaneously, students who are considering getting office work look at the people who have the jobs they want. They notice that they have degrees, so they go out and get degrees, extending their education even further from when absolutely necessary.
This mimetic process reinforces itself, as more credentials are required to get a job, more people pursue credentials. As more credentials enter the market, the relative signal power of those credentials peaks and then decreases. As more people have credentials, in order to filter through candidates, HR managers request additional credentials.
This leads to a second adolescence in which young professionals either spend their time in graduate school or “laying the foundation” for their careers while they build up work experience (an alternative signal to credentials).
That’s the credential inflation-driven adolescence of the modern era.
So keep the momentum of credential inflation going alongside an ultra-competitive talent market, insanely out of control costs of living in many elite urban hubs, and the difficulty of navigating new dating norms as men and women reach equilibrium in credentialing and professional experience, and you get modern Professionalism.
Under Professionalism (capital P to denote an ideology of work), elite young professionals delay growing up until after they’ve accrued the right credentials, the right work experience, and the right shares. Only then can they think of moving out to a mid-market city, buying a home, having children, and “settling down.”
A Look at Eternal Adolescence, Part II: A Fix
Professionalism and the Eternal Adolescence that underpins it is a complex cultural, social, and economic dynamic and it won’t be addressed by a single policy change or agenda. But there are a few moves that I’ve seen dozens of individuals and families take to help themselves escape the grasp of Professionalism and finally grow up.
The biggest and most accessible is remote work.
Much of what makes Professionalism so sticky and difficult to escape is its geocentrism. The SF Bay Area, Washington DC, and NYC/LA to lesser-extents incentivize spending more time than you would otherwise spend preparing to grow up and start a family. They do this through high cost of living, sprawling corporate campuses, competitive labor markets, and a horrible dating scene that is a function of professionalism.
Getting people who want to grow up and start families out of these places without forcing them to completely eschew their careers is a fix.
I want to discuss that in greater detail in Part II, in Adventure Capitalism 02.1.
† There’s a ton of good literature on this out there. For the more polemical, Gatto’s Underground History is fun and touches on this. For a look from the childhood-side of the equation, I recommend Peter Gray’s Free to Learn. I also encourage readers to pick up biographies and autobiographies from before postwar education standardization — Carnegie, Franklin, Roosevelt, and others don’t tell stories of sitting in classrooms at the expense of also growing up. That is the defining characteristic of malevolent adolescence.
†† Caplan, again, is useful here. Check out The Case Against Education for research on this.
Recommended Product
MakerPad is a website that can both teach you how to use and collects “no code” tools. No code tools help you quickly prototype and test different product ideas. They’re a great way to get something up quickly and see if other people are interested in them and they help you sidestep the need to hire a developer out the door or learn development yourself.
Recommended Watching
Balaji Srinivasan, formerly GP at Andreessen Horowitz and CTO at Coinbase, spoke to the 1517 Assembly in October 2017 on income arbitrage and living pseudonymously. This talk is more and more prescient with 2019 being the year of Cancel Culture.
You can’t be canceled if you earn your money pseudonymously.
What I’m Reading
Serotonin by Michel Houllebecq is Houllebecq’s most recent novel, just released this past week in the United States. It follows an aging, sterile French bureaucrat through an aging, sterile Europe.