- Locations: been back in London for a week, before that studiously keeping term in Oxford (though with two trips to the EF offices, once for watching def/acc pitches and once for a really fun meetup between the UK Socratica nodes.)
- Projects: Most of my spare time has been spent either working for a nonprofit VC fund or running coworking sessions/reading groups at OAISI. I totally dropped the ball with Oxheart after the Freshers’ Fair and didn’t get around to organising the economics hackathon either (though some progress on content was made!) – I’m 80% the hackathon will happen during Hilary, 60% we’ll do at least one Oxheart event.
- Interests: getting back into baking & cooking for friends; researching the differences in features between various CRMs (glamorous, I know); on-chip mechanisms for AI governance & verification.
What I’ve been thinking about
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Decided to stay in Oxford for the rest of the year (80% likely the whole degree) – it took a lot of back-and-forthing to get there. I think I now am starting to understand how hard it is to make big decisions well (weighing up and aggregating advice a dozen different people who you all think have reasonably good judgement is just super difficult). Saul’s post extending the rowing vs steering analogy really resonated with me here: it’s just way too emotionally & cognitively taxing to try and figure out whether a course of action is correct at the same time as properly making the most of it. Felt like the last few weeks of term were on an upward trajectory, though :)
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Apprenticeships and feedback in the VC world – Arnaud pointed out to me that it’s hard to get signal on whether you’re making smart decisions as a VC, because your returns are so heavy-tailed and even the best ones sometimes take years to pay off.
- Having lots of explicit feedback from a mentor with good judgement would be one way to get around this problem, but my guess is that it’s hard for seasoned VCs to put into words what exactly they’re looking for. You can pick up on the vibes about what startups need to succeed from, e.g., reading Paul Graham or Sam Altman or Marc Andreessen, but not much on how to apply general principles to specific cases.
- My strategy for development here has been to spend time around more experienced colleagues and pick up on how they do things (like wording emails, asking questions in calls, etc) – then making docs where I try to distill the lesson(s) I’ve learned & develop some practical wisdom.
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Organising Saddle Point, a retreat/unconference/start-of-year celebration! Incredibly, people have underestimated their likelihood of attending, but I think all will be well (we’ll see, in the next update…)
Media consumption
- Watched two seasons of Fargo, enjoyed the first more than the second but both entertaining
- Taylor Swift was (of course) my top artist in Spotify Wrapped; Arjun introduced me to some Kanye West; am liking Warriors from Lin Manuel-Miranda a lot; also discovered Linkin Park
- Have bought, but not yet got around to reading, some of the life principle-y books that Daniel recommends.