I had lunch yesterday with someone who has been investing in the crypto / token space recently — having pooled together a small “fund” from friends and family. It’s a short-term vehicle (like, 6 months), and a large part of the goal is simply to become hands-on familiar / capable investing in token sales / ICOs, and dealing with issues like custody and security. At least for the moment, there are so many odd aspects of working in this space (handling private keys, exchanging tokens on various exchanges, downloading wallet software, etc.) that actually a large part of the value that a fund manager offers is handling all of that stuff. Over time, this will change, as infrastructure and new financial vehicles (e.g., ETFs) come to market. But for now, it’s actually really complicated and hard to do this stuff, and there’s no better way to learn it than by doing it.

More generally, I just love the idea of learning-by-doing. It’s the best way.

Right after college, when I thought I wanted to be an architect, the first thing I did was get a job with a construction company, building homes. I spent the better part of a year shoveling gravel, jack-hammering old driveways, and sealing foundations, but I also got to do some more interesting / complicated building work over time. My reasoning at the time was that I didn’t want to be that jackass, know-it-all architect (believe me, that’s often how they are perceived by builders) who didn’t know how things really worked at the ground level.

Same thing when I got into programming. There are two really beautiful things about learning to code: 1) you can learn everything you need to learn at basically zero cost online, and 2) you’re making as you’re learning. I think that’s great as a learning mechanism, and it’s also really great in terms of motivation. Nothing like wanting to finish making something as motivation for learning how to do it!

Learning-by-doing is harder to do when it comes to investing. Because, of course, in order to invest, first and foremost you need capital. But it doesn’t need to be a lot, especially in the cryptocurrency space. So it’s possible to learn to be an early stage tech investor by actually doing it. I think that’s pretty exciting.

(as always, buyer beware!)

We recently had our daughter’s birthday party, and we held it in a public park near our house, where there’s an old parks department building. The sun plan was outdoors, but of course it thunderstormed and we didn’t have a back-up plan. So we called an audible and asked if we could use the back room in the parks building and they said sure.

So we ended up with a bunch of kids running around a dank, old, concrete room (1950’s style – mostly unchanged since then), eating pizza and cake and being entertained by a (wonderful, thank god) balloon twister, in the pouring rain. It was dead simple, and cheap. And the kids had a *fabulous* time. Our daughter was thrilled; one of her friends said it was the best party ever.

It just goes to show that sometimes, simple is best (or at least, can be great).

Yesterday, I caught up with my old friend Gary Chou. Gary was the first General Manager of the USV Portfolio Network (predating Brittany and Bethany), and has since been running Orbital, a community space and “studio for building networks” (which happens to be in the original Kickstarter building on the Lower East Side). We got to talking about the different things that have been going on at Orbital and the ideas Gary is working on now.

One of the things he said that really stuck w me was the question of “what medium do you want to work in”? Like, bits & pixels (design, coding), or dollars (investing), or people (events, teaching), etc. I had never really thought of it this way, but it does make sense to think of things in terms of the medium, or put another way, the tools and objects you have at your disposal. Or yet another way, what is the craft you really want to hone.

At USV, our primary medium is dollars, or more accurately, investments, which includes dollars but also things like deal terms, corporate structure, etc. And it’s also ideas – we need to absorb ideas from the market, develop our own ideas (conviction around investing themes) and trade in ideas (influence within companies, attention in the market, etc). And my personal medium has always included a healthy dose of bits and atoms, as my background is as a builder, designer, and hacker.

I never really understood money/investing as a medium until I joined USV, but now I see that there is real artistry to be developed here. So much nuance involved in making situations “work out”, and the tools at hand are the tools of finance, corporations, leverage, and dealmaking. It has been really incredible to see those play out from the inside, and I feel like I have the privilege of observing masters at work.

As a personal strategic question (from the perspective of someone working to develop their career path or professional identity), I find the framing of “medium” to be really clarifying and helpful. What medium do you really want to be devoted to? Where do you have the most leverage? And as such, how should you be prioritizing your time, and what skills should you be focusing on developing? Where are you dedicating to perfecting your craft, and honing your art?

This is a useful frame because, at least in certain fields like startups where things are often under-determined and fluid, it can help you prioritize and focus, which is perhaps the #1 most important overall skill.

So, what’s your medium?

I’ve been doing more public speaking recently, and finally assembled videos into a single place:

https://ngis.lndo.site/speaking/

As I look at that list, I realize that I’ve been doing a ton of speaking in Europe. Of course I know this, because I was there, but didn’t quite realize the pattern that the majority of my recently speaking gigs have been over there.

I love talking about what’s going on with startups and the internet, and look forward to finding more places to give talks and meet more great people.

I’m on vacation this week, and we have some old friends and their family staying with us. Last night we got to talking about therapy (like psychotherapy) and how valuable it has been for me over the past few years.

Maybe four years ago I started seeing a therapist on a bi-weekly basis. There were a few specific things that were stressing me, and also a more generalized sense of anxiety that I wanted to work on. And then, over the next few years a few specific difficult situations came up that we worked through. My guy comes from a Zen / mindfulness background, which really works well for me.

When I think about what I’ve been working on and dealing with over the last few years, I can point to this first step of finding a therapist (I refer to him my “shrink”) as the single most important thing I’ve done. It’s really amazing how much just having someone there to help makes a difference — whether there’s something specific going on, or nothing at all — having someone there to help just unlocks a lot of stuff.

At around the same time, I got a new primary care doctor, and also a new accountant. Both of whom are amazing and have helped get things in better order, in terms of health and finances.

I remember thinking, back then, “wow, it’s OK to get help with things”. That may be so obvious to people, but for some reason it really hit me as profound. For the first time, I felt like I had a great team backing me up, helping me improve on all the things I wanted to improve on.

There is a lot of stigma around getting help, in particular around getting psychological help. Like, what’s wrong with me that I need this, or why can’t I just deal with this on my own, or with my friends, or with diet and exercise. It took me a while to take the plunge and get help for the things I needed help with, and I got stuck on all of those questions before I did.

But I can say without hesitation that getting actual dedicated help was the best thing I’ve ever done, and it has really unlocked a whole lot for me. And if you think about it, it would be ridiculous to expect anyone who wants to excel at anything to do it all alone — the Patriots don’t coach themselves, and Roger Federer doesn’t go it alone either. In those cases, it’s so obvious that help is good and necessary, and that’s true for your mind, your health, your finances, etc.

At USV, many if not most of our CEOs have an executive coach, and I can’t recommend it more. A good executive coach can play the role of therapist in a lot of ways, but a dedicated, non-work therapist is a great thing too.

If it’s available, and if you can find it, I’d encourage anyone out there dealing with anything hard to get help from someone good.