Welcome to Adventure Capitalism, 00.0
Tales of tech and careers from Silicon Valley to the Rust Belt
Welcome to the first issue of my new regular email newsletter, Adventure Capitalism: Tales of tech and careers from Silicon Valley to the Rust Belt.
I decided to put this together after I found that I loved sending email newsletters but could never stay on a strong cadence without an outside accountability measure. This will go out weekly to subscribers who want to know exactly what is going on with startups, tech, and careers at the earliest stages.
Here’s what you can expect:
A weekly essay reflecting on a trend or tale of significance from the week. Often I’ll pull on my experience traveling across the country trying to find outstanding founders and products. But sometimes I’ll pull on something more mainstream and give a take on it that I hope to be original and thought-provoking.
A real-life, no-fluff look at what the differences are like for companies in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and New York, compared to companies in the Rust Belt and cities like Pittsburgh.
This includes what kinds of companies I’m seeing where, what the investment climate is like (i.e., what you need to raise what money), what kinds of jobs people are hiring for and when, and the general heartbeat of different ecosystems. This is not another venture capital newsletter. The world doesn’t need another one of those. Instead, I want this to be more a psychological and sociological look at why different kinds of jobs and companies happen in different places.
The latest trends in early stage tech and careers. E.g., what kinds of experience you need to have in order to get hired in different jobs.
Calls for startups (i.e., “it’d be great to see a company that does X!”) based on what issues and problems I see that week.
Some of my favorite job listings I’ve found that week and how I would suggest going about getting that job based on what I know about that company and industry.
Some of my favorite products or startups I’ve found that week.
What I’m reading, and why I chose to read it (and if you should read it, too).
Recommended people to follow on Twitter.
Real questions answered by people writing in asking about tech, startups, and careers from the perspective of somebody who spends all of his time on finding outstanding talent.
Why Adventure Capitalism?
I ran through a few newsletter names when I thought about putting this together. None of them really stuck and didn’t box me in. Then I remembered an old Jim Rogers book I read years ago called Adventure Capitalist (this was before the mobile game of the same name). I loved the idea. Rogers is a financial entrepreneur who rode a motorcycle across China, wrote numerous books, and was a real contrarian in his industry.
So I knew I wanted to use some play on that.
But the world doesn’t need another venture capital newsletter, so I threw the idea of focusing solely on that out.
Instead, I like Adventure Capitalism because, fundamentally, that’s what your career and the market should be about. It should be an adventure as you build a career that supports you, your family, and your community. It should be an adventure to see what problems people have and how you can solve them.
Your job and career shouldn’t exist solely for you to get ahead in them. They serve a purpose. And that purpose is to give you the means to live a life that you think is worth living.
Join Me
I will be charging a small subscription for this newsletter. I don’t want to get rich off of this (I don’t need the money and it’s so small that it really won’t make a difference) but instead because I want to put my skin in the game. I want to make something worth a few dollars every month to read. And because, honestly, I want readers who will open the issue, read it, and engage with it. And a few dollars is enough to get that.
If you subscribe now through the end of October, you can get a 20% discount.
If you’re curious but not sure you want to spend the same amount as a cup of coffee once a month to read my writing, you can do a free signup to be notified when I send out new issues, should you change your mind.