Reflections on Angel Investing

This month marks my 10th year of angel investing so I synthesized a few learnings as a complement to the more tactical “Angel Investing Learnings” post from last year.

This post is broken up into three parts; dissecting the why behind angel investing, understanding your asymmetric advantage and how to apply this advantage in the investing process.

Why Angel Invest?

I don’t think that you should angel invest if you care most about compounding capital — there are probably better ways to achieve this goal with lower time commitment. Angel investing has been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my career, and has the following benefits many of which are not tangible or easy to measure:

Relationships: You will meet amazing people along the way; entrepreneurs, co-investors, and limited partners. Each of these connections has a chance of becoming a meaningful professional and personal relationship — collaborating with more people gives you the chance to both expand and deepen your network and relationships.
Learning: You will get an insider’s view into the positioning and evolution of a wider range of businesses that are successes and failures. You get to talk to founders making hard decisions and learn during the investing process and throughout years of partnership — this can help you become a better operator and / or investor through pattern recognition.
Paying it forward: You get the opportunity to support former colleagues, friends and folks earlier in their career or with less access to capital. It’s a wonderful way to leverage your own learnings, relationships and capital to help pay it forward.
Compounding capital: Your money will typically be tied up for a long period of time (illiquid) unless the company does well and has some sort of outcome (sale, IPO, secondary transaction). By definition this makes you a long only, value investor as you are forced to compound your capital without “messing with it” like you can with liquid investments especially as an angel.

If you’re going to make just a few investments then accept that you will likely lose it all, but if you are going to make 15+ investments then take a portfolio approach and expect at least one company to “return the fund”. Your choice here will depend on your personal situation and risk tolerance.

Asymmetric advantage

Angel investing is all about leveraging your asymmetric advantage — you need to know something that the market does not know better than the market in order to make good investments. I think of asymmetric advantage in three buckets:

People: You know the people involved in the business better than the market – for example you personally know the founders (ideally you’ve worked with them) and/or know some of the other co-investors well. If you’ve known and collaborated deeply with these folks then you have data that is hard for other investors to easily replicate. Abe Othman (AngelList) refers to these as “credible deals”.
Industry: You know the business model or the industry really well. If you’ve been an operator in the space you’ll have a good understanding of what it takes to build a successful business. I’ve made the mistake of knowing the pitfalls of an industry “too well” and not being able to see past these risks for some good investments that I’ve missed, but mostly more industry knowledge has served me well.
Market: You know the market/geography (e.g. I invest in Kenya because I grew up there) better than the other investors. If you understand cultural, economic and political nuance about investing in the market you will make better decisions. This is why many venture capital firms are “local”.

I’ll occasionally make small investments in companies where I have no asymmetric advantage but I try and make these as small as possible and with founders that I have a strong connection with and feel like I will learn from them throughout their journey.

Where can you leverage your advantage?

As an angel investor you should try to leverage any asymmetria advantage across the investing process, which I think of in the following buckets:

Seeing: If you have great deal flow and see a lot of quality companies through your personal brand, network, writings/media or your affiliations (e.g. where you work) it helps you pick from a larger sample set. Being in the “flow” of quality deals is very important to be a successful angel as you have more to pick from.
Picking: Picking is very hard and often separates the great angels from the good angels. This ultimately comes down to judgment, repetitions and a long time horizon built from successes/failures and great mentors. I still write memos (and post mortems) for every investment that I make, even if no one will ever read them but me as it helps me get better at picking.
Closing: Once you’ve picked a company to invest in, you need to “sell yourself” to get into the round which is now getting harder and harder for quality companies as more capital and angel investors flood the market. This is often a function of your connection with the founders, your personal brand or affiliations or very specific knowledge you can bring to the company.
Building: Once you’ve invested, how can you help the company? Are you an expert in a particular area, have specific biz dev or fundraising connections, or could you ultimately even join the company to help them scale? I’ve been most effective at helping build with very specific point in time asks such as specific intros or meeting a senior potential hire.

Angel investing is multifaceted craft that will likely take many lifetimes to master and involves a healthy dose of luck. I find it intellectually stimulating and personally fulfilling and I expect it will continue to be an important part of my life 🙂

A Purposeful Career

I’m starting to find more purpose in my career, and invest more time, energy and capital into activities that further this purpose (my 2021 goals here). There was a period in my life where I thought I only wanted to work on problems in emerging markets (particularly Africa) and although I still care deeply about this area, I realize that’s more narrow than where I actually enjoy spending my time and resources.

I’d like to build a career in service of entrepreneurs and creators.

Making software allows me to build tools that support entrepreneurs and creators at at the earliest stages and at scale.
Angel investing allows me to compound capital, relationships, and learning and ultimately make better software.
Investing and operating allows me to build both broad and deep relationships with people over a very long time horizon.
Investing and operating let’s me learn and writing helps me share my learnings with others which in turn refines these learnings.

Making Software

I’ve been working in software development for over 15 years. I’ve helped build products for consumers, enterprises, and small businesses. I’ve found the most fulfillment in building utility software to help entrepreneurs run their companies and help people collaborate.

I’m particularly drawn to building software that is ‘Free to Start’ as this allows users to get value even at the smallest scale. World class software can be used by people starting new projects without paywalls that prevents folks who are not well capitalized from participating.

I’m also interested in Open Source projects (e.g. WordPress) as they have all the benefits of ‘Free to Start’ but also allow users to contribute to the development and customize it for their own (possibly esoteric) requirements which is often necessary in emerging markets or emerging use cases.

Finally, I’m really excited about software that helps us collaborate better as humans especially as the way we collaborate evolves into cloud based and distributed work. I’m looking forward to spending my own time innovating in this area. I wrote more about this area in another post “A More Open World“.

My hope is these products can be helpful to entrepreneurs and creators.

Angel Investing

I’ve been angel investing for over a decade – I enjoy it and have learned a lot. Angel investing allows me to develop and cultivate new relationships with people I would not ordinarily meet, stay close to cutting edge innovation and compound capital over a very long time in a way that is very aligned with entrepreneurs.

I enjoy meeting entrepreneurs who are passionate about the problems they are solving and have a really strong ‘Why’ story. As a very small investor my role is a friend to the founder and cheerleader for the business and don’t have the same baggage that institutional investors need to consider (round dynamics, ownership targets etc).

I’ve found it helpful as an operator at scale to stay close to innovation in adjacent industries and adjacent business models. It helps me generate new ideas, recognize patterns across companies and ultimately makes me a better operator.

My hope is that these small investments can be helpful to entrepreneurs.

Building Relationships

Investing and operating has allowed me to build both broad and deep relationships with entrepreneurs and co-investors and colleagues.

I’ve found that more repetitions (over a concrete thing) with the same people or group builds lasting trust and rapport especially when I don’t have a formal relationship such working at the same company. If you are actively collaborating on a project together or evaluating an investment together over many cycles you can build deep, trusting relationships.

I’ve been spending time collaborating with a very small group of co-investors – many who I’ve known for 20+ years. In this strange time of physical distance I’ve tried to be more structured and disciplined in my approach to collaboration (more writing, more sharing) and it’s helped me build stronger relationships as an operator and investor.

I’ve found that broad relationships are very helpful for making connections / introductions which are important. The smaller set of deeper relationships are very helpful for refining synthesis and judgment (as these folks are much more direct and honest).

My hope is that these relationships can be helpful to entrepreneurs either directly or indirectly.

Learning and Sharing

I’ve been trying to compound my learning as much as possible – through operating, investing, and consuming content (mainly audio books and podcasts). The intersection of all of these activities helps me develop a perspective on the world that is unique to my set of experiences, which has the potential to have a lot of depth.

I’ve been trying to write and share more of this with others (in this public blog – now over 80 posts!) and some of the idas are ‘stubs’ and others are areas where I feel more confident in the subject matter.

Writing helps me synthesize and crystalize my point of view and also allows my thinking to be shareable at scale. I’d like to experiment with a newsletter next, even to a small private group as I think this could help me synthesize across a series of topics in a way that could be useful to a particular audience.

My hope is that this shared learning can be useful to entrepreneurs.

All this thinking may evolve, but it’s been consistently true over many years so I wanted to document it openly. I hope I can come back to this post in ten or twenty years and feel like I’ve had a career in service of entrepreneurs and creators.

White Space in Distributed Work

I’m learning more about products to support the evolution the way we work and collaborate. As I dig deeper into the problem space and talk to founders who are designing their own company ‘Operating System’ there are a few questions that persistently stand out for teams adopting distributed work:

Sync vs. Async: There is a tension between fully synchronous work with teams in the same time zone vs. fully asynchronous work with teams spread across time zones and the response is typically polarizing. I think there is a plenty of white space for new products that could work just as well for both sync or async work. Slack is a good example of a communication tool that could be used for async or sync communication in the same product. “A Slack message lets content persist for a delayed loop, but also means that the loops can become so short that loops are near realtime” (Alexander from Remotion articulated this to me). The more important part is creating a culture that supports the use case – i.e. there is no expectation you’ll respond to Slack messages immediately for async dominated cultures. There are also opportunities for better tooling in rich media communication involving images, video and audio communication that seamlessly traverse both async/sync work. I’m excited to see what companies like Remotion, Claap and Rock do in this area.
Process vs. Tools: Even over innovation in tools, defining and agreeing on a process and culture for work is important for effective collaboration, as noted above. The most successful products will be flexible tools that are able to codify process and culture within the tool and allow businesses to customize their internal ‘Operating System’. These products are inherently difficult to design as flexibility/customizability comes with complexity of learning although this is likely a solvable problem (e.g. predefined templates and workflows). I’m excited about what we are building with P2 at Automattic, and we’re just getting started.
Human vs. Product: Many teams will be working in a distributed way for the first time, and will look for help from people with experience and expertise especially at scale. I think that consulting with experts will likely be very helpful for companies adopting new products/processes/cultures as they move to distributed work. I expect a hybrid approach (human & proprietary products) will lead to the best outcomes as more teams will be effectively onboarded into a new paradigm of work.

I’m looking forward to digging deeper into each of these areas personally as well as meeting companies who are exploring these problem spaces.

The “Why” Behind Work

Aligning on “Why” for product development work is always important, but it’s especially important for distributed teams. When the “Why” is consistently missing, projects end up feeling like a list of context free tasks from ‘up above’ and teams can become demotivated and resentful – no one likes being told what to do all the time.

In synchronous, in person cultures, understanding and reenforcing the “Why” happens more organically in corridor conversations, social time (lunch/after work) that colleagues to have conversations about the reasons behind their work more naturally and transfer energy and enthusiasm to each other (also an important lever for leaders). As a leader, it’s easier to notice misalignment or lower motivation because you can ‘feel it’ and course correction can happen faster by grabbing a room talking through something and emerging with a decision.

In distributed, asynchronous cultures it’s very important that the people doing the actual work have a strong understanding and believe in the “Why” and are rowing in the same direction because detecting misalignment can be slower. This is amplified in importance if you are changing product direction and focus or are working on a new product (with lots of potential directions).

As a leader of these teams, you need to put systems in place to understand if people have a shared understanding of the business or user problem they are solving. Include your teams on the journey towards the decision (to improve shared understanding and acceptance) vs. just communicating the decision in isolation. I would try over-indexing on time spent on the user and business goals with more space reserved for discussion upfront for new projects. The contributing teams need to be able to express concern, propose alternatives and build motivation for the problem space. This can admittedly feel slow, but over the long term it’s better for both the people and the product.

I’d suggest experimenting with more rich media (audio, video, pictures) to allow people to understand your thinking as a complement, not a replacement to longform text which is still the most important as it’s easy to scan, indexable and searchable. I’ve been experimenting with quick Loom Videos to give product feedback or sharing a short video colleagues (in addition to a bullet point summary) to transfer more context of sentiment and detail across, whereas previously I would have defaulted only to text. I think this helps communicate with more personality and context but also preserves some of the benefits of async communication and culture.

As a leader, try not to be be a taskmaster. When you’re trying to align teams, try to have them write the “Why” documents and determine and justify own problem spaces (with your guidance). You can guide and get alignment by asking questions to shape the problem spaces and making decisions about priorities. Being a taskmaster creates single person failure risk (you) and ultimately leads teams being demotivated over the long term. Having to do something ‘because someone senior said so’ is deeply unmotivating over many cycles. There are periods of ‘War Time‘ where being a taskmaster is appropriate, but should is not the case for business as usual work.

We all have to execute things that we don’t fully believe in – it’s just part of the nature of work. In these situations state your position clearly but ‘disagree and commit’ if the decision has been made. When you communicate the problem space and the “Why” to your teams, emphasize on the components you actually agree/believe (versus the areas you don’t), as your team will be able to sense authenticity and energy.

In summary, as a leader of distributed teams, it’ll pay long term dividends to focus more on “The Why” upfront especially for new projects or when you’re changing directions even though it may feel slower at times. Plan for more time and space to get all folks involved to understand the rationale (user and business) and build motivation for their work whenever possible.

A good book on this topic is Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why”.

Product Development Practices

This post is a collection of some product development practices that I think are valuable. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, just a collection of thoughts.

Goals and Planning

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”
Dwight Eisenhower, 1954

Planning allows teams to get aligned and having clear goals, priorities and metrics for success creates a shared understanding of what is important across an organization. If more people understand the ‘why’ behind goals and how these goals ultimately roll up to the company’s mission then the product details reflect these goals and values. It feels subtle, but over time translates to better, more consistent product quality.

The best organizations plan but are also able to abandon plans or adjust quickly based on new internal or external data. Many large organizations become rigid and slow, although perhaps more intentional, which is often the argument against medium or long term roadmaps.

Roadmaps: Now/Next/Later

All teams should have a public roadmap (an extension of planning) and my favourite framework is Now/Next/Later because of its simplicity.

Roadmaps should be lightweight, flexible and become less precise as they look further in the future. When all teams use the same format (and this is accepted across the organization) it’s easier to roll up work across teams. It’s even easier if all teams to use the same tool (particularly for managers of multiple projects), or if there is seamless two way information transfer between roadmapping tools.

To help determine priority, which is ultimately an ordered list, I like to use an Impact vs. Effort framework (taking into account Risk as well). Impact is the potential value to users and the business, and Effort is how hard it is (T-Shirt sizes like S, M, L, XL are an easy way to visualize).

Top 3 Things

At every level of the company write down the top three projects at any point in time and share them publicly.

This is a simplification layer on top of roadmapping to make it easier for folks outside the team to understand their work, quickly. It also acts as a forcing function for teams to decide what’s most important It’s a process can scale across large organizations and roll up nicely from teams, to divisions to the top of the organization.

The top three things should be specific, have a clear outcome and refreshed at the end of every sprint or planning cycle (typically 2-4 weeks).

Shaping (“One Pagers”)

Thinking is cheaper than making, and crystal clear though upfront can save multiples of that time (and cost) down the line.

One pagers should shape problem spaces into a set of solution spaces and assess the viability of these solutions to solve a set of user or business goals. It’s a collaborative document typically assembled by product managers with engineers and designers contributing. This process helps build alignment between the team, allows multiple solution spaces to be explored, and ultimately results less discarded work and clearer requirements for design and engineering teams.

These documents are short 1-2 page descriptions of the feature that anyone across the organization can read (as little jargon as possible) and get a sense of the value and the scope of the project. They should cover the goals, metrics, problem space and options for solutions with a recommendation of an MVP.

Burndown Lists

Burndown lists are simple, ordered lists of all the tasks/bugs/polish that need to be completed before we launch a feature (can be any version of launch – internal or external).

These are typically assembled when a large feature gets close to launch and the ‘launch line’ is a moving target. Once everything above the launch line is completed, the feature can launch. It’s an excellent system to help with prioritizing what is necessary for launch in a binary way, which simplifies the decision process.

Burndown lists a simple, visual powerful and motivating tool for folks who are getting ready to launch a feature. Checking off things that get you closer to the launch line is very satisfying 🙂

Feature Reviews & Retros

After launching a feature (especially Large or XL: projects) it’s important to get together to reflect on the project. This allows teams to step back to reflect on the process, celebrate their work and their colleagues and codify learnings for the next project. I prefer doing retros once we know the outcome (metrics) of the feature to see we met the intended goals.

I could also see an argument for separating this into two pieces, the process and the outcome as there are cases where quality product development (for a risky feature) do not achieve goals. In these cases it’s important to celebrate good work, and share learnings. If taking risk is not accepted by the organization it will be avoided, which stifles long term innovation.

Dogfooding

Use your product. At every company I’ve worked at, a significant portion of the people who work on the products are not regular users of the product outside of their daily work.

Especially for consumer products, the more people at the company who use the product like ‘real users’ the better the product will become. Using products creates empathy for customers, because you’re a customer, and helps improve product sense (although increases bias) and find corner case bugs.

It’s also a powerful cultural force, and I think that leadership, in particular, should lead by example by being power users of the product (s)– the product something everyone in the organization has in common.

Role of a Product Lead

I’ve been leading product development teams for over 10 years in different industries (ads, gaming, fintech, tools) and customer segments (consumer, enterprise, SMBs). There are a few things have been consistently true across these industries particularly at scale.

I typically broken up my role into three different buckets:

Product: What are our goals? What should we build to achieve these goals? Why are these features impactful from a user or business perspective? What order (priority) should we build these features? How do we measure our success (metrics) against these goals? How do we align with other stakeholders (e.g. other product leads, marketing, finance) across the company? What are the right health metrics for the product and are we monitoring them effectively? What parts of the product should we deprecate?
People: Do we have the right people in the right places? Are wer matching the right set of complementary teams with the right problem spaces? Am I helping the people on my team achieve their personal goals, as well as driving business outcomes? Am I managing performance (both outstanding and underwhelming) effectively?
Process: What is the ‘product development system’ that ultimately allows us to build great products? What are the rituals that need to be consistent across teams, and what can be flexible within teams? How do we encourage continuous iteration and experimentation on our product development system?

When running a suite of products with multiple product lines, the very practical things I like to spend my time on include:

Identifying problem spaces that roll up into a coherent strategy to drive user and business outcomes [this is often the hardest].
Aligning each team to a problem space and a clear ‘why’ for their work.
Working with product development teams to craft their solution spaces and product roadmaps.
Giving feedback on product specifications for large features (that require large investment).
Giving feedback on products that are shipping (quality control).
Acting as the pattern matcher/glue for related work across teams.
Spending time looking at key health metrics, and talking to customers.

These practices need iteration and refinement based on the type of company (and culture), the type of product (e.g. enterprise is more customer led), and the mix of the people on your teams but being intentional about priorities and practices is always helpful (I published a version of this internally).

Operating Systems for Distributed Work

Even after we no longer have to physically distance, more software development teams will be fully distributed (people can work from anywhere) or employ a hybrid structure. Hybrid structures could include people hybrid (some people in an office and some people working remotely) or time hybrid (entire teams working some days in the office and some days remotely). This shift will continue to happen for both large, established businesses (e.g. Twitter, Stripe, Slack) and for new startups, many of whom choose to be distributed from inception.

Regardless of how companies chose to be organized a few things are clear to me:

Software development is all happening in the cloud – this is unlikely to change.
Work will be powered by a wider set of SAAS tools which are the best tools for the job to be done (v.s broal tools which may not be perfect for purpose).
APIs and systems for information transfer between these tools will, and must get much better.
Companies will want to own and control their IP across these external tools systems.

I think we will look back in a few years and realize that our systems for working in the cloud were outdated. In particular we are missing connective tissue between all the external SAAS tools that we rely on every day to power our work and collaboration.

There are many startups and established companies working on aspects of these problems, but nothing I’ve seen is flexible enough to power work for every software development company in the world. I think more of the solutions need to be open source and focus on enabling companies to own their data.

If the connective tissue or “Operating System” is open source, it allows developers to add in house custom tools or connect their unique mix of SAAS tools together without relying on a provider to ‘support’ that integration. Companies like Rippling spent over a year in stealth just building over 100 API integrations, and continues to have large teams focused on adding and maintaining these integrations. With open source, the community can power these integrations and adapts faster and more durably as new tools are built and adopted.

If the connective tissue or “Operating System” allows for better data connectivity and transparency then companies will own more of their intellectual property. This results in less, mission critical, operating data being walled in third party products (which also forces lock in) and gives companies more flexibility to organize, find and analyze their information. It would also allow for new use cases like measuring productivity of teams, which are very difficult to achieve today.

I’m personally excited about innovating, and supporting innovation in this space.

A More Open World

I’m excited to bring my children up in a world where anyone can learn anything, anyone can invest in anything, where world class software/tools are free to use and customize, and where anyone can contribute to software development regardless of their physical location.

We have made progress on all these dimensions and we’ll see even more foundational progress over the next decade. I hope it will lead to a more open and connected world and empower more diverse groups of people to create amazing things together.

Caveat: To participate, people need access to an internet connected device, and this is still only <60% of people in the world. As internet becomes more widely available and the cost of devices and data goes down substantially, more people will have access to these opportunities and be included.

Open Finance

I hope that everyone will be able invest in anything.

New projects will have (near zero cost) legal entities automatically spun up in the background, regulations will allow all of us to invest in products with any amount of money and own equity (with drastically simplified legal agreements). These micro pieces of equity will be liquid and easily to other people and there will be clear, immutable record of all these transactions (probably powered by cryptocurrencies).

People of any age/location will be able to contribute to projects with their friends with both their time or capital. They will all be able to create and capture value without the need for angel investors or venture capitalists (who currently have to meet accredited investor standards). They will not be excluded from early stage investing. People in any country will be able to buy fractions of securities in any other country, diversifying their exposure (particularly important for emerging markets).

Syndicates (groups making an investment) are still really expensive and has high friction, despite the progress we’ve made. SPVs on AngelList cost about ~$10k to set up and run over their lifetime and so only make sense for investment rounds of a few hundred thousand dollars (which is a lot of money). Rolling funds can accept much smaller amounts of capital than traditional funds, but are still expensive to run and require capital scale to make sense.

Software will power the legal and financial framework for investing (combined withj adoption of cryptocurrency and smart contracts) and will be able to reduce the overall cost and hide the underlying complexity.

Ultimately, this will provide access to more asset classes to more people at any quantum of capital. This will lead to more projects getting funded, and more people generating wealth through owning equity vs. renting their time.

Open Learning

I hope that anyone will be able to learn anything.

Access to the highest quality teaching materials will no longer be locked in walled gardens and this content will be completely open. Many leading universities are already opening up much of their teaching content (e.g. Harvard, Stanford) and this is the mission statement of the Khan Academy which has helped people learn all over the world, for free.

Students will be able to learn (at their own pace) using whatever format works best for their preferred method of learning (e.g. watching videos, reading text, listening to audio). They will easily be able to then test their mastery with interactive problems and real world applications at no marginal cost. I, personally, learn better visually and orally and that is why I found lectures in college so useful (and why I watch a lot of YouTube videos).

Schools and higher education will need to adapt (culturally and practically) to asynchronous learning, and a more diverse mix of students in each class. One of the main benefits of school and college is the ‘cohorts’ of students who go through the shared experiences (much of which happens outside of the classroom) and I still think it’s important to try and create opportunities for young people to have shared experiences and work in groups.

I hope that higher education, in particular, will preserve the cohort and community aspect but there will be specific focus (v.s. community as a byproduct) on collaborating in groups, building lasting friendships, and creating stuff together.

Open Software

I hope that anyone will be able to build anything (software) and getting started with the best tools in the world is free.

Open source is a very powerful movement and, at scale, encourages global collaboration and development so that software can easily modified to meet local expectations and standards. One of the best examples is WordPress, which powers 39% of the top 10 million websites in the world with tens of thousands of contributors working together asynchronously.

Software is now being developed in the cloud first and new projects are powered by more self serve SAAS tools than ever (Slack, Notion, Figma, Asana, GitHub). I hope that all of these tools start free to reduce the barrier to try out these tools, and also reduces the barrier for projects to start and for people to collaborate. It also puts more pressure on SAAS software developers to build quality products, have quality customer service and continue to improve their products over time.

In order to build a sustainable business SAAS companies will need to charge for features that become necessary when projects evolve into businesses that scale. This could include customer support, security, performance, connectivity with other applications, hosting and payments.

I also hope that more SAAS tools expose more of their information via API (in addition to building integrated solutions) and give project owners more ownership of their data own (so they don’t remain locked into these tools). This will also be better for the ecosystem as more tools will be able to talk to each other and less information will be lost across different tools which will improve the quality and efficiency of software development.

Open Work

I hope that anyone can work from anywhere.

The Covid-19 Pandemic has catalyzed mass adoption of distributed work especially for technology companies. If companies can hire globally it significantly increases their accessible talent pool v.s. the constraint of hiring locally (along with many of other benefits). I’m a big fan of distributed work for software development, and write about it on my blog.

With more open work, people of all ages, races, nationalities will be able to collaborate on projects together, bringing more perspectives to the table. These products will end up being better suited for global audiences, as these perspectives and empathy will naturally make it into the product development process.

Workers will be more focused on collecting skills and knowledge vs. collecting brands. When we recruit now, we use proxies to infer skills or background; where we went to school, what companies we have worked at, or how we were brought up. This should evolve into showcasing our specific skills backed up by actual contributions to specific projects that roll up into a more accurate picture of our whole self. Companies will also become better at assessing skills, knowledge and experience over relying on brands as a proxy for the requirements for jobs to be done.

I’m excited raise my children in a more equitable world where less of their fate is decided at birth and I’m inspired and hopeful at the progress we are making globally.

We will see continued improvement in social and economic mobility, better products from more diverse people and more collaboration across groups with different ages, genders and countries.

Crypto Investment Strategy

Bitcoin has increased by 300% in the last three months from $10k (Oct 3) to $33k per $BTC (Jan 3). Ethereum has also increased by 270% in the same period from $350 (Oct 3) to $950 (Jan 3) per $ETH.

I started buying Cryptocurrency in early 2013 ($BTC mainly) mainly because I thought it was an interesting concept at ~$50 a coin. I ‘lost’ most of these coins as part of the Mt Gox Bankruptcy in 2014. I’m hopeful that 10-15% of our holdings may be returned soon, after seven years of waiting.

The US government has printed more than 20% of the total USD in circulation in 2020 alone (over $USD 9 Trillion) and many people have no idea we just got a lot poorer. Given this is happening globally (across governments) I’m starting to think that I should have a more significant percentage of my savings in $BTC and cryptocurrency in general over fiat ($USD). There are also lots of other benefits/value of cryptocurrency beyond inflation protection but I won’t cover them here.

Ultimately, I’d like to allocate 10%+ in Crypto, 20% in technology companies (private), 30% in real estate and 40% in public equities (mostly in tax advantaged retirement and non liquid accounts) but this will take many years and a good amount of luck, too 🙂

Given these observations, here is how I’ll modify my strategy going forward.

Crypto Strategy

Focus on $BTC and $ETH: Most of my $BTC is locked up in Mount Gox, and this counts towards my overall allocation. I assume around 15% of coins returned at some point as $BTC (not fiat). My next largest position is ETH which I’ve had for years. I plan to hold BTC/ETH/All Altcoins in a 60/30/10 ratio in terms of USD fiat value.
Regular Purchase: I started taking 15% of my paycheck (2x per month) and purchasing $BTC and $ETC in the correct ratio (65/35), which I would ordinarily leave in fiat in a savings account. I’ve been doing this for about a month. The goal here is to remove emotion from the decision and dollar cost average over the next few years.
Crypto Savings Account: I started to move most of my $USD out of Marcus (CDs) into BlockFi (referral link). I have kept some $BTC and $USDC (a USD stablecoin) for the last 6 months or so, and I’d rather make 6-8% interest over 0.5% interest in alternatives. Note that BlockFi is not risk free (they are lending like banks do) but they do have some strong security measures in place.
DeFi: I have positions in all the stuff powering Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on the Ethereum network, which started for fun but now is more significant (which is how $BTC started for me anyway). I play around with staking, liquidity pools and lending but beware the gas fees (I got burned). My largest position is in this DeFI Pulse Index (https://defipulse.com/blog/defi-pulse-index/) which is a weighted index of all the tokens powering DeFi.

I also hold small amounts of other Altcoins like Stellar Lumens ($XLM), Polkadot ($DOT), Ripple ($XRP), Filecoin ($FIL bought in the 2017 SAFT), Arweave ($AR), UNI ($UNI), Sushi ($SUSHI), Cosmos ($ATOM), Solana ($SOL) as well as about a dozen others, but those are more out of interest than part of an actual strategy. I also added NFTX as an index for collectibles to the mix.

All of this is still very experimental, and I wrote this up to share more easily and get feedback. Despite dabbling for eight years, I still feel like a n00b most of the time in the crypto world.

My Parental Leave

I just spent two months looking after my three month old son (Kal). I really enjoyed the time we had together and it was wonderful to focus on family and interests outside of my job at Automattic.

Time with my Son

The majority of my time was spent with my son, Kal, and with immediate family. I have a lot more empathy for my wife as looking after a baby is harder work than I had expected.

Bonding: I think most of the value of the parental leave value was for me to bond with Kal. I’m still not completely sure he knows who I am 🙂
Bathtime: I give him a bath every day before bedtime, where I play him a new song each day on Spotify. It’s a fun little routine and something I’ll continue doing even when back at work.
Sleep Training: We finally did this about half way through my parental leave and it was a game changer. It was amazing to get 6+ hours of uninterrupted sleep again although I wish it was more consistent.
Walks: Every day, I’d take him on 1-2 hour walks in the baby carrier which was both good exercise for me (and when I listened to audiobooks and podcasts) and also relaxing for Kal who loves being outside.

Personal Development

I made a concerted effort to eat better, exercise more, read/write and brush up on my programming ‘skills’:

Health: After Kal was born, I was not at my healthiest. I worked on eating better (less sugar and carbs, less frequently drinking alcohol) and adding in more strength and HIIT training (Peloton classes and Kettlebells) in addition to walking, running and cycling. I am already feeling better and want to codify and adhere to new habits over the next few months.
Reading: I spent more time listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I’ve enjoyed listening to the 20 Minute VC, Acquired, and All-In. I read Powerful (Patty McCord), Greenlights (Matthew McConaughey), Range (David Epstein), Leading (Alex Ferguson) which were all great. Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline) was disappointing (even though I LOVED RP1) but I’m happy I read it regardless. I’m now slowly making my way through A Promised Land (Barak Obama) which is very interesting as I don’t know much about US politics.
Programming: I started a Full Stack JavaScript course on Treehouse (completed about 25 hours) starting right from the beginning. It was great to reconnect with engineering and I now understand many elements of JS and can scan through code and understand how it works.

Developing Theses

Africa Investing: I set up a rolling fund (focused on early stage investing in Africa) to offer my friends/family and extended network access to both this asset class (private technology companies) and emerging market (Africa). This is an extension of the part time angel investing in Africa I’ve been doing for six years.
Future of Work: I spent some time learning, thinking and writing about different ideas mainly about the future of softwar e development and investing. I made a few small investments (in support of these ideas) in entrepreneurs all over the world, mostly co-investing with folks I’ve known for a long time.

My wife and I also finally completed some life admin, such as moving out of our NYC apartment and finding childcare for when we are both back to work. We are hoping to move back to NYC once the weather improves and vaccinations are distributed widely (hopefully Q2 2021).

We are looking forward to life getting back to more ‘normal’ and being able to have closer physical interactions with friends and extended family.