halfway into 2020 + startup lore today
'happy' six months, you hell of a year
BAY AREA FRIENDS, DO THIS HIKE —
hi friends! before we get into this week’s post, i’d love for you to do a tiny survey about too wordy. it was this blog’s first birthday a few weeks ago and i thought to celebrate with asking for some unfiltered feedback. i appreciate you all immensely, even and maybe especially the readers who will unsubscribe today and keep me humble. here’s the survey.
i joke that 2020 will be the year that our memories are the extent of the tv shows we binged. the recipes we mastered. maybe in the new talents we picked up.
upon further reflection, i respectfully disagree with myself. we are (nearly) half way into 2020, and unprecedented feels like an understatement.
you see when 2019 ended, i wrote about how the year was filled with big hallmark moments (graduation, a move to san francisco, my first job), but the things that stuck out about the year were much more subtle. like, making maggi out of an instant pot in yosemite or creating a diy christmas bar at home with my roommate-turned-perfect-partner. (here’s the post if you want to reminisce of a world not yet defined by the c-word)
i started the decade with a simple piece of advice: don’t discount the small moments because they will be bigger than you realize, looking back.
six months later, my advice is the same with a footnote: the small things matter by virtue of simplicity, but the big things matter too — once we do the hard work of finding our own place to sit within them, and change our definition of what definitive needs to be in the first place.
more later, but first my words + reads:
my words: when the coronavirus hit the united states, darius sankey and first-time fund manager melinda moore watched their main investor put all investments on hold and consequently pause the close of their first fund. here’s what happened next.
etc: i couldn’t have put it better myself
learning lesson: scrappy growth isn’t startup folklore, it still happens. in my profile of squire, a barbershop tech startup, the founders opened up about a tactic that got them their first customers. it’s hairier than you think.
unorganized tab time:
hamilton is timeless, and that is both sad and beautiful
how will the visa ban affect tech?
i’ll never be able to cook the bad news away, but i try anyway
anyways,
you see the moments i thought of as hallmark in 2019 — graduating and moving — were some of the first things to be threatened for millions of people during this pandemic.
six months into 2020, life is paused in a way most of us didn’t think it could.
we’ve learned about tragedy in a way that undermines the things we thoughts were the hallmark moments of life.
for those of us who feel like things have been put in perspective about the racism in our country after the death of george floyd and breonna taylor, acknowledge that it is a privilege to have spent this much time in ignorance. then, and more importantly, don’t let senseless deaths be an intellectual exercise for you to flex — let these deaths be a catalyst for change.
the big moments of this year should not be exhausted out of our radar because they are too hard to digest. we should do the work of finding our personal role and line to draw in each and every single one of these issues.
so when i think of 2020 so far, i see that it is a disservice to boil it down to a time of exhaustion, headlines, and quarantine memes. the big things this year should not be exhausted out of our radar because they are too hard to digest. we should do the work of finding our personal role and line to draw in each one of these issues.
to this year being so loud that i had to do a midpoint ode for sanity,
n
p.s. one more survey plug