I thought I might recap the last 12 months and use that as a jumpstart into some of the explorations I’m hoping to write about over the year ahead.
Here’s the recap:
Raising Capital for History
In the spring, I helped a good friend raise money to produce a documentary about the life of Ambassador Andrew Young.
My primary role was to help the group articulate the vision of the production and identify the potential return for investors. Over the last 10 years, a good part of my time was dedicated to raising money, but I’ve never raised money for a film before, not to mention a historical documentary.
The process was really rewarding, and afforded me the opportunity to learn about how films are produced and purchased, more deeply research the civil rights era, as well as meet Ambassador Young over a zoom call.
I’m excited to see the eventual production, sometime this year, hopefully across a major streaming platform :-).
New work & Building the Growth Function
In May, the CEO of Automox, whom I’d gotten to know through TechOperators portfolio company get togethers, invited me to join his company. What really attracted me was the opportunity to learn about company building at a stage I’d never seen before. When I joined the company in June ‘21, I was somewhere between the ~180th & ~200th employee. Today, there are close to 400 employees.
Prior to joining the company, we agreed on a tour of duty — the mission was to assemble a Growth team and define the team’s charter. I’ve explored the work of building out a Growth function in a 2-part (1 & 2) series with Jas Garcha (my co-founder at Matcha, and now thought partner at Automox).
The last 7 months have enabled a lot of fun building the team (currently at 6 people, including me), chartering the team’s mission, learning about new industries (IT & Security Operations), and working with great people across the country. As the organization has scaled, Automox’ HR & TA teams have done a great job recruiting people who are high humility & high curiosity, and this combination results in culture that is achieving the desired concoction of what I like to call rigorous fun.
A New Person
A couple of months before joining Automox, my wife Mary Howard gave birth to our first child — a boy we named Van.
We named him after Van Townsend, a legendary cross-country coach and English teacher, who lived his life with one of the rarest commitments I’ve ever seen to grit, originality, good humor, fire-in-the-belly competition, and education.
Mary Howard actively labored for 27 hours on March 26th, before giving birth in the early hours of March 27th. Long distance running has played a big role in my life, so I appreciate endurance sports and their incredible demands on the human mind and body. Watching MH weather those hours, I’ve never been more moved or impressed by what humans are capable of, physically and emotionally.
The first two days, I felt I’d arrived in some new nirvana. The secret to the universe had started unveiling itself…
Then two days later, the fatigue, the poop (which in the first couple of weeks is like black tar), and the screaming, drew me back into reality :-).
Abnormal Immune Responses & Editing the Machine
Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system responds abnormally to a functioning body part. Put differently, sometimes the immune system attacks itself.
There are at least 80 autoimmune diseases (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, coeliac) that we know of, affecting ~24M people in the US, but there are also many autoimmune disorders that are idiopathic, or undiagnosed.
For the last several years, I’ve had chronic inflammation in my chest that usually causes fever and a week of bed rest, unless countered using prednisone. I assumed that it was caused by stress, or by years of high-intensity athletics, but in 2021, the flares increased in frequency to the point that in July, I had to go to the ER.
An echocardiogram revealed a relatively large effusion in my heart, and I had to do a few weeks of testing with different teams at Emory. The diagnosis turned out to be idiopathic pericarditis, which effectively means that the lining of my heart gets inflamed chronically for unknown reasons.
Since the diagnosis, three things have changed:
Drug therapies — I’ve been working with Emory Rheumatology to test different drug therapies to reduce the frequency of the pericardial flares and limit the need for prednisone
New ways to get endorphins — I’ve largely had to stop running, cycling, or playing soccer for the last 8 months, so have turned to long walks and weight lifting for exercise
Editing the food stack — I’ve started tinkering with my diet for the first time (e.g. juice cleanses, vegetarian, vegan, etc)
On the third — diet tinkering — I believe that food is medicine (as well as poison), and so for the first time have started tinkering with diet to explore the impact of different food types. Automox’s CEO has a good term for this — he calls it “editing the machine.”
Limited by the Unnoticed in 2022
With recap written, now to the jumpstarting of Limited by the Unnoticed in 2022.
In early 2021, I wrote that I wanted to explore 13 topics. You can see those here at the bottom of the post.
Though I wrote 12 pieces in 2021, I only covered 2 of the topics I’d intended:
Infinite vs. Finite games — human communication in the context of intensity with a post called High Stakes Collaboration
The Knowledge era — synthesizing Albert Wenger’s World after Capital with a two part series (parts 1 & 2)
My other 6 pieces (not including a 2020 year in review and the growth series mentioned above) covered:
The idea that the relationship an individual has with the past may be the root of perception, and therefore the governor of experience.
A reflection on the pace of technological change, as 35 approaches
A look at the underlying causes of growth sectors and stagnant sectors with Ben Papillon
An examination of the importance of the 7 Years War on the world order we inhabit today.
In 2022, I’d like to try to make progress on some of the topics I missed this year, as well as a few new topics added to the list:
Andy Grove & Gordon McKenzie — management by objectives & orbiting hairballs responsibly
Tours of Duty — exploring Reid Hoffman’s ideas on creating a more honest & mutually beneficial compact between employers and employees
Fox holes — explorations of collective service models, lessons from the past and applications for the future
What we eat — why it still feels so inconvenient to eat healthily
Web 3 — what is it, why it matters, and what are the existential questions it needs to answer
How we learn software — for a workforce increasingly reliant on software, what are the most interesting tools teaching us how to use software
The Talerico Method & Operational excellence — how companies can build centers of excellence internally
SaaS Curriculums — ideas for accelerating Startup career paths
Vertical & Controlled Environment Agriculture — how indoor farming methods are evolving to bring production closer to demand centers
I’d also love to incorporate more guest writing, as the collaborations with Ben Papillon and Jas Garcha have been both really fun and seem to be interesting to readers. If you’re interested in writing something together, please reach out anytime.