Back in the saddle
My honeymoon, CEO side projects, liberty vs security
I’m back. We did ≈65 miles of the Tour du Mont Blanc (not Dolomites!) which was awesome along with some time in Amsterdam. It was the most unplugged I’ve been in years and the hiking trip was really special: backpacking place to place to eat pasta and drink beer in the most beautiful locales I’ve ever seen.
CEO Side Projects
No one batted an eye that Chesky might have been announcing an RWA project with a slop post1 because every enterprising CEO needs to be founding more/new/multiple companies.
Vlad Tenev, Brian Chesky, Brian Armstrong, Daniel Ek, etc. others are all now doing fully capitalized, fully staffed companies as side projects. The extreme of course is Elon and Sama.
These aren’t merely hobbies - these guys are founding and funding companies that presumably take up significant amounts of finite and highly valuable time, attention, and energy.
Why do they do this and why are they “allowed” by boards and shareholders when it obviously takes away from what should be a full time job (running a multibillion dollar company)?
The first, most obvious answer is dual class shares. You literally can’t stop them. Boards and shareholders are largely passive advisors.
But really it’s about executive retention and status games.
Status games: this has long been a thing but some companies are just better suited to capture side projects internally (Google, FB, Amazon, etc). And now that those businesses have created the culture, everyone wants the status marker of a longevity or AI project (imagine the shame of only having an app at sun valley).
And SV doesn’t really do philanthropy and the arts in the way Wall Street does so this takes the place of say joining the board of the Met.
Retention: If you have a great CEO - every board should believe it has a great CEO - and make them choose between new and exciting and hum drum you risk losing them altogether.
Whether or not it’s bullish or bearish for a company mostly depends on how good and how critical the CEO is, but maybe not in the direction you think
The all star CEO who is 100% essential to the success of the firm is being retained to work at a higher level of abstraction. Bullish!
The mid or inessential CEO is preventing someone more locked in from taking the seat. Bearish!
After all, if the job of a ceo becomes largely vision, the best people will eventually operate at a level of abstraction such that one company (or one business in the case of 2010s web/app companies) can’t contain and obsorb all their vision
Liberty and Security
Shot spotter, traffic cams, bank SARs, etc. - there are legitimate tradeoffs between safety/security and privacy in every surveillance technology. Disliking them doesn’t necessarily make you a terrorist and supporting them doesn’t necessarily make you a totalitarian (but it can!)
Obviously these things can prevent and solve crimes (improving safety) and obviously they do so by infringing on privacy with the potential for abuse.
If you’re unwilling to accept that people might die/get hurt without it, AND/OR if you’re incapable of appreciating arguments against these technologies, you’re naive and have an inauthentic commitment to whichever side you land on.
I’m an ACLU and FIRE member... generally left libertarian and hate mass surveillance. I am willing to give up some safety in exchange.
People should be allowed to live their lives mostly free from intervention and that any tool that CAN be abused, will eventually be abused. If you put cameras everywhere people will be selectively targeted and tracked.
However, I’ve definitely come around to speed cameras and think we should be MORE aggressive on pursuing dangerous drivers. And surveillance can take the place of cops on the street, which spares more chance encounters that can go wrong.
If you believe your approach is “free” (there are no downsides to either panoptic surveillance or no surveillance) you don’t have a deep commitment to your ideals, whatever they may be.
Belief requires that you be willing to pay for it in less freedom or more harm.
Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
This was probably the most resonant, compelling thing I read this week:
On the surface it does seem as if the young are fine. Real median incomes are higher than they were for their parents at the same age, unemployment has spent most of the past decade at historic lows, and purchasing power has risen roughly 63 percent since 1973. Televisions, clothing, food, and air travel are cheaper than ever.
And yet this generation is also not marrying, not buying homes, not having children, and seem pretty miserable. I think we’re clearly in the midst of a tremendous measurement failure.
My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.
Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.
On one hand, I make much more money than my parents did at my age. I can and do consume more and better than they did.
On the other hand they owned a brownstone and sent two kids to an elite private school at my age - a lifestyle I can’t imagine for myself without fabulous wealth.
Housing Theory of Everything: if housing were more abundant, we would all feel a lot richer.
Elsewhere
We have 2 new associates joining Slow this week which reminded me of the best (early) career advice I’ve written/given: Be a Janitor or Be a Star. “You should always strive to do the work either 1) no one else can do or 2) no one else wants to do.” This is from 2021 and five years later definitely holds up IMHO.
How Ukraine Built a War Fighting State. Crazy anecdotes about using market mechanisms to allocate wartime resources within the military.
Zip makes the case that the same recursive capital flows/forces buffeting smid cap stocks are coming (here) for private markets too. Good case for companies to be reorienting their long term ambitions toward buybacks and manufactured liquidity vs binary of illiquid or public. If money just naturally flows to the biggest names (passive investing), there is no capital to support anything but.
NY Governor Kathy Hochul went on Odd Lots and I’m maybe falling for Hochulnomics? The data center moratorium (if it is a one year moratorium to give time to figure out new regs for energy and water, and not a ban) makes reasonable sense when she presented it. But more importantly the ambition around economic development, nuclear power generation, and housing are genuinely exciting. Bullish Albany?
He now says he was hacked. It’s possible that the hack was a two-parter - essay on RWA to be followed by a meme coin pump - but as it stands it looks super weird/not super believable and we’ll really never know. If there was an RWA project coming, we’ll never know.
find it interesting why Silicon Valley/Tech or modern culture at large has drifted away from funding the arts. i guess in the 18th-early 20th centuries funding arts/buildings etc was the ultimate status game, but where did that shift to now founding companies or the relentless need to always be building or owning as ultimate status. would just be an interesting thought exercise.