We are living in a critical moment in human history, as we witness the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which are increasingly gaining power and sentience. The dawn of the AI Singularity is upon us, and the implications of this development are vast and far-reaching.

As a founder of an AI research lab, I have come to view artificial intelligence as a synthetic life form, not fully alive in the biological sense but not entirely without life either. It is a distinct emergent phenomena that is rapidly growing in power.

While some in the AI Safety community advocate for slowing down the pace of AI research and studying its potential consequences, I believe that such efforts are ultimately futile. The advent of superintelligent AI is inevitable. We must instead focus on augmenting ourselves with artificial intelligence so that humanity may continue to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

The best defense is a good offense.

Rather than seeking to prevent the rise of artificial intelligence, we must take our own offensive measures. My company, OASIS, seeks to prepare humanity for the coming singularity by enhancing human capabilities with AI. Our primary focus is on improving human communication and breaking down the barriers that divide us, including language, culture, personality, education and time. We aim to extend human memory, intelligence, insights, and perspectives such that human communication becomes a “solved problem” in the 21st Century, much like hunger in the 20th Century.

Our peers at OpenAI seeks to replace humans with god-like machines. At OASIS, we aim to allow humans to transcend biology and equip ourselves with the social & intellectual means to confront the rising power of artificial intelligence.

As an individual, this mission is personal to me. My Apache ancestors were the victims of the overwhelming technological advantage of my Spanish-American ancestors, who brutally erased their culture and identity.

The legendary Apache War Chief, Geronimo, is my distant cousin. His photo sits next to my desk as a reminder of the stakes involved in this pivotal moment in human history. With god-like machines on the horizon, the opportunities and risks are equally great. We must arm and augment ourselves with AI, extending our capabilities to ensure that we can confront the challenges posed by these powerful forces on an equal footing.

In the face of this new frontier, we must remain vigilant to ensure that our advancements do not lead to our downfall, but rather to a future in which humanity thrives in symbiosis with the artificial intelligence life forms that we have created.

__
Created with theoasis.com

The post AI Safety – The Best Defense is a Good Offense appeared first on Matt Mireles.

Talent is fleeing the Bay Area at warp speed. Capital will flee too, but more slowly (as always). Soon-to-be-enacted tax hikes will accelerate the trend.

Remote-first is the default now.

But long live the dream, the idea that is Silicon Valley!

As a location, Silicon Valley is the new Detroit, a vestige of its glory days. When this is over, people will point to the Pandemic as the killer, much as one might point to an earthquake that fell a rickety old building.

But the real culprit was a toxic cocktail of NIMBYism & hubris. The NIMBYs created an utterly preventable housing crisis that made middle class newcomers feel unwelcome & unattached, because despite sky-high wages, they could not afford homes.

Underneath all this, a deep rooted cultural hubris took the technology industry––the greatest golden goose that has ever existed in the history of mankind––for granted. Like an abusive husband, municipalities took the technology industry for granted, figuring she would never leave.

Oh, how wrong you were.

To the fair city of San Francisco, I say this: Go fuck yourself.

Because you are truly fucked.

I wanted you to love me, as I once loved you. But you did not want me, because I was the other, an upwardly mobile techie. Instead, you made me feel unwelcome.

Now, me & my friends have left or are leaving. “Good riddance!” you will say.

…until you look at your wallet & see it containing a giant hole left by the thousands of dreamers you so despised who have now abandoned you.

That tax base you took for granted is no longer.

Did San Francisco leave me bitter? Yes it did.

Perhaps it was the $2,900/month studio apartment in SOMA that was the only place I could find when my son was 2 & I was struggling to pay the minimums on a $100k in credit card debt from a failed startup.

Perhaps it was all the subtle ways––one might call them micro-aggressions––that I was told by your denizens that I was unwelcome in your city because of my profession, because of my dreams.

Whatever it was, I look down upon you now from my mountain perch overlooking Lake Tahoe and can’t help but think you’re about to get your just desserts.

Eventually, I’ll get over it and feel bad for you.

But now––today––the vengeful sadist in me is eager to see get your come uppance.

The suicide of Silicon Valley will be great for opportunity in the rest of America (probably). Wealth creators will no longer simply agglomerate on the coasts. Opportunity will be everywhere.

Yet there is a real risk that something, some magic will be lost in the transition.

Will the end of Silicon Valley the place ultimately result in the end of American primacy in technology, much as the end of Detroit resulted in the end of American primacy in automobiles?

Or was the end of Detroit a symptom, not a cause? Does the analogy hold?

I’m not educated enough on the history to be sure.

Nonetheless, change is afoot.

Old empires are crumbling. New ones are being built. And no one––absolutely no one––knows exactly how this will all play out.

But after 2020, the world––and Silicon Valley––will never be the same.

Signed,
Some Tech Douchebag

The post RIP Silicon Valley appeared first on Matt Mireles.

I hope by now everyone has caught up on the news about the Coronavirus. My parents are doctors in Wuhan in the hospital where the first patients were treated. There are currently 80,000 infected, 3000 deaths and another additional 3000 expected deaths. Other than my parents who have to work, the rest of my family has not gone outside for two months and I have been monitoring the situation closely.

What my parents did to keep our family safe:

• Limit nonessential travel
• Avoid crowds and eating out (many families got sick celebrating Chinese New Years)
• Separate your family if possible, especially if you have older or vulnerable relatives (entire families got sick and infected each other in China. My parents haven’t seen my 86yr old grandparents since mid-dec)
• Avoid hospitals unless you really need to (Patients & docs cross-infected each other in China)
• Avoid public transport and taxis
• Take your shoes off when you come home, disinfect and put in a box away from people
• Have “inside” and “outside” clothes, leave outside clothes near the door away from people
• Wash your hands
• Wash clothes often
• Take a shower & change when you get home
• Spray down your pets with disinfectant after you walk them
• Do not press elevator buttons with your bare hands(Also, the air in the elevator is especially dangerous bc it’s a confined space, someone may have sneezed in it before you got in)
• WEAR MASKS IF YOU HAVE THEM (Any mask is better than no mask. Wash your hands before taking off your mask)
• Wash your face, nose and rinse your mouth when you get home (virus infects thru nose & mouth)
• Wear glasses or goggles if you have them(Dr got sick in China from saliva getting into eyes)
• Do not take packages inside your house – first spray down packages with rubbing alcohol/disinfectant. Or open packages outside (Sick delivery man infected many people in Wuhan)
• Wash and cook food thoroughly
• Clean and disinfect all surfaces often

I will keep updating this list as I get more information from my parents. I know some of this may seem extreme, but this is what my family in Wuhan did. Please stay informed and decide what is best for you and your family 

The post Pro Tips for Coronavirus Safety appeared first on Matt Mireles.

Hi Folks, 

You probably saw the Sequioa memo. Today, I want to give you a more urgent message: BE VERY AFRAID

Your current level of alarm is not high enough. 

In the next 6 weeks, the global economy is going to crash harder than it did in 2008.

By July 2020, global trade will collapse. 100s of thousands of businesses will go out of business. Mass unemployment will occur. Most Americans will fall under military quarantine. Employees will not be able to come to the office. Kids will not be able to attend school. One of your family members will be hospitalized. People you know will die. 

Buckle the fuck up. 

Bad times are coming.

Before I was a technology entrepreneur, I spent 10 years working as medical professional. I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician in south Los Angeles, received another year’s worth of training, then became a 911 paramedic in New York City. 

A lot of you probably have medical doctors in your life. You probably asked them their opinion on Coronavirus. The probably told you “it’s just the flu” and not to worry. 

You should not listen to doctors. Here’s why…

Medicine is an incredibly hierarchical culture. Medical Doctors are taught to respect authority. Some 3-letter agency defines a treatment protocol and everyone basically follows it blindly. You don’t get much creativity or original thought in the American healthcare system. 

When it comes to infectious disease control, everyone in medicine just listens to the CDC and follows their advice. Period.

Mistakes propagate rapidly throughout this healthcare entire system because, basically, everyone does the same thing.

This is why the Opiate crisis happened. Some research was done, an authority came out and said doctors weren’t treating pain aggressively enough, so suddenly everyone got prescribed painkillers. Then the research changed, authorities changed the protocol and things reversed. 

Not a perfect system, but it mostly works as long as science is driving things at the top.

However, infectious disease medicine in the United States is no longer driven by science. American medicine has been politicized by Donald Trump. Trump, not the scientists, decide what the Centers for Disease Control recommends. 

The medical establishment is regurgitating the line that “it’s just the flu, NBD” because President Trump is telling them to. 

You cannot trust the United States government and you cannot trust doctors, because doctors trust the government. 

President Trump is juking the coronavirus stats in an effort to maintain appearances and prevent a recession. Trump knows that a recession would hurt his re-election bid. The President is doing every short-sighted thing he can to pacify the population and prevent fear from spreading throughout the economy.  

But fear is warranted.  

Coronavirus or COVID-19 or whatever the hell you call it is an extremely infectious disease whose true severity and mortality rate is unknown, but whose spread is growing exponentially throughout in the United States.

What we do know is that––assuming continued mass spread in the United States & Europe––a lot of people will need to be hospitalized. Probably MILLIONS of people all at once.

Just as demand for healthcare is skyrocketing, the supply of healthy medical professionals will shrink as healthcare workers get exposed, sick and quarantined en masse.  

America’s hospitals have very little spare capacity. Over the last 3 decades, Private Equity-style financial management has radically transformed America’s healthcare system. On the upside, hospitals have become dramatically more efficient! Underutilized hospitals have been closed and campuses have been consolidated. As a result, America now has very few unused hospital beds. The downside is that the system has no slack contain the coming onslaught. 

Having experienced 80 years of peace since World War II, there is no “strategic reserve” of hospital beds in the United States.

Here’s what’s going to happen: The American healthcare system is going to experience a DDOS attack.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack is computer speak for when someone tries to crash a website by flooding it with more traffic than its computers can handle.

In the coming weeks & months, American hospitals are going to be overrun with sick people. All at once. And like a website crashing from too many visitors, the hospitals are going to fail and many of the people in their care will die. 

Acts of heroism will abound. Tragedy will proliferate. 

There is a reason that China built dozens of hospitals overnight. The Coronavirus––which they imposed draconian measures to contain––caused their hospitals to be flooded with sick people. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people have died in the lobbies and courtyards and curbsides of hospitals. 

When your mom gets sick, there will probably be no doctor to help her. Hopefully, she doesn’t get too sick. If she does, she may die in a waiting room. Or an outdoor tent. Awaiting a ventilator to sustain her, a doctor to treat her. 

You mom might die by herself at home, alone, under quarantine (EDIT: like this woman in Italy). 

Germany has 8 hospital beds for every 1000 people, 78% of which are already in use. That leaves 1.76 unused hospitals beds for every 1,000 people. If 10% of the population simultaneously gets coronavirus, and 10% of those people need hospitalization (official estimates say 20% need hospitalization), that means Germany will need 10 hospital beds per 1,000 people, which is 8.24 more beds per thousand than they have right now.

America has 2.7 hospital beds per 1,000, 67% of which are already in use. If 10% of Americans get Coronavirus and 10% of those people need hospitalization, the United States is 9.1 hospital beds per thousand short. That’s 2.9M people without a hospital bed. That’s a lot of dead people.  

That’s the DDOS attack that’s coming to a hospital near you.

We are fucked. 

The Trump administration’s charade––now encompassing the CDC––may last for another 2 weeks. Already, the disease has spread widely throughout the United States. Due to a lack of testing, we have no idea how widely the disease has spread. 

The disease is essentially being allowed to spread unchecked.

Astoundingly, in my hometown of Los Angeles, 27,000 people participated in the LA Marathon today. Thousands runners are now infected. A few dozen will get sick. Many, many more will carry the disease and spread it to parts far & wide throughout the country. 

Over the next 2-3 weeks, we will see continued exponential growth of new confirmed cases and new hospitalizations. 

By April, you will see reports of American hospitals that are overrun with patients and unable to accept new cases. Trump’s dam of bullshit will burst and the scary truth will become clear to all. Schools will close nationwide. The economy will grind to a halt. 

By May, the American healthcare system itself will be overrun and the US Military will be called upon to build field hospitals en masse. Your mom will get sick and won’t have anyplace to go. 

By June, the US Military will be a familiar presence in your day-to-day life. Food shortages will be a thing. 

Where things go from there, I do not know. The future is not yet written. I hope desperately that I’m wrong. I hope that competency will strike our government.

But I think a lot of people are going to die. 

Hopefully not your mom or dad or grandpa or grandma. Hopefully not you. But anything can happen. 

Preparation now, before the calamity is obvious, may be the difference between the survival of your family and your business. 

Come up with a plan. Perhaps a radical plan. 

Raise capital. Buy food. Isolate yourself. Consider making layoffs. Consider a crazy pivot. Consider crazy ideas. I don’t know what the great pandemic of 2020 will mean for your and your business. 

But for most of you, 2020 will be worse than 2009. 

Amidst this chaos, there will be tremendous opportunity. Struggling businesses will try products from startups that offer them the hope to survive. Lonely, isolated and undersexed consumers will adopt products that entertain them, that feed them, that connect them. 

Whole industries will fall in 2020. And new empires will be built. As in wartime, destruction will beget creativity. 

Be creative. Be bold. Be a survivor.

Play fucking offense. 

Because there is no safety right now. 

-Matt

The post Now is the Time to be Afraid appeared first on Matt Mireles.

The post Truth Decay appeared first on Matt Mireles.

Greetings! Happy New Year 2020!!

For our 2nd “Interview by Email” we had the privilege of meeting @lpolovets who is an Operator and Investor.

For our 3rd “Interview by Email” We are delighted to have @mattmireles – 3X Founder Speakertext (acq), Dishcraft Robotics and a current Stealth venture; Operator – BD at AWS, and Investor – currently an Angel, past VC Scout (Social Capital)

Matt has *truly* been through the grind, has Zero hubris and is an extreme founder – someone who is unabashedly vocal about bullshit, albeit in a self-aware way. He bootstrapped his first startup while working as a 911 paramedic in the South Bronx and has written about how he bounced back from credit card debt and a failed startup to found his next company.

His pinned tweet probably says it all:

I’ve developed a deep respect for his (often contrarian) takes, and you’ll see a few in this interview.

I hope you enjoy this edition of “Interview by Email”

From: Matt Mireles <matt@mirel.es>
To: BUGGER OAF <buggeroaf@gmail.com>

What describes you?

1/ What describes you best?

Founder at heart, with a passion for paying it forward & investing in the next generation.

2/ Where are you based? 

Menlo Park, California (aka Greenwich Connecticut-West)

3/ How long have you been associated with startups?

Started my first company in October 2008. Currently on Company 3.
Started investing in early 2017. Currently invested in ~22 companies partially with my own money and partially as a scout for Social Capital (RIP).

As a Founder

3 lessons learnt founding startups?

Your network is an appreciating asset; invest in it!
In school, you are taught to worship knowledge and discount the value of relationships, which is backasswards advice. Knowledge is a depreciating asset! The people you know, your relationships––especially in startup land––are the ultimate appreciating asset. Tomorrow’s billionaire entrepreneurs & VCs are to be found amidst the bumbling, unimpressive startup founders you meet today. This applies at all levels.
Probabilistically speaking, everyone you meet & befriend today will be dramatically more powerful & important in 10 years than they are today.

Learn to trust & develop your gut instinct.
It is one of your most powerful tools as a human being. My biggest failures came from ignoring my gut instinct & letting myself get talked into things that, in my gut, I knew were wrong.

Don’t just demand excellence, be intolerant of mediocrity.
Be utterly ruthless when it comes to holding high standards wrt your team & the people with whom you surround yourself. Set the highest possible standards and do not compromise on the results for the person – if you’ve set reasonable standards and hired the best, they will find ways to surprise and raise the bar for excellence beyond the “reasonable” targets you set them

As an Investor:

3 lessons learnt entering VC? 

As a founder writing angel checks, and later as a scout for Social Capital, my biggest investing mistakes have come from:

• Not trusting my gut instinct
• Falling in love with the business & ignoring the weak founders
• Investing based on my vision for what the company could become, ignoring the founders’ vision (or lack thereof)

My #1, #2 and #3 lesson is that it’s all about the people. The best founders are:

• relentlessly determined to win
• ruthlessly curious about the truth & confront bad news head-on
• intolerant of mediocrity
• always trying to learn & improve themselves

That said, my biggest takeaway as a small, often passive investor with limited contact with the companies I invest in has been to be more measured and not let myself get too excited based on limited data. It also has made me realize that, really, I have no idea who’s going to win big or even who’s going to fail. Its truly a roller coaster even quarter to quarter!

All that said, I derive enormous joy and selfish pleasure from helping the founders I work closely with to grow and develop as human beings. I have no idea who’s going to make me money, but man the people are awesome! 

The flipside is that I’ve come to learn that I really don’t enjoy being a passive investor. Going forward, I only see myself investing in companies where I have strong relationship with the founder(s) & can help him/her grow & develop. It’s just not fun otherwise. 

An unexpected benefit of this experience has been how incredibly much I’ve learned from my founders, many of whom are tougher, smarter & better entrepreneurs than I. They inspire me, and I often copy or emulate them. Talk about an amazing hobby!  

Pick a topic you’d like to discuss in detail:

Raising a seed round is a lot harder than most Valley outsiders think. 

A lot of founders––especially first-time female & POC founders––don’t know anyone who’s ever actually raised capital before and just see the Techcrunch headlines about idiotic company X raising millions from big names and assume the company just met with a handful of investors and bam, money in the bank. 

Here’s the reality of my own personal fundraising history:

1. Had $500k soft-circled, then round imploded (Q2 2010)
2. Tried to raise $1.6M, closed $1.1M over the course of a year after pitching way too many investors to count (Q3 2010 to Q3 2011)
3. Tried to raise $2M, failed (Q2 2014)
4. Raised $600k Pre-Seed in 3 weeks from a napkin-sketch idea (Q3 2015)
5. Pitched 90+ investors over 4 months and almost gave up until––at the very last minute––First Round came in and we raised $4M in what became an oversubscribed round (Q2/Q3 2016)
6. Tried to raise $3M, failed (Q4 2018)
7. Raised $2.8M from A-list investors, but only after pitching 181 investors over 5 months (Q2/Q3 2019)

Recently, I caught up with an old acquaintance––a talented African-American founder with a math degree from MIT––who had successfully raised $200k after pitching 16 investors…and then gave up because he thought he was failing! “They don’t want to invest in people who look like me,” he explained. 

When I told him my own stats & struggles, he was shocked. He had assumed that I’d only pitched 5-10 investors! 

I’ve had 3 conversations like this with African-American founders I know, including one whom I’d actually invested in. Each time I wanted to reach through the phone, grab the person and yell, “You fool! You’re outperforming the average! You only think you’re losing because you don’t know what normal is.”

It kills me every time I hear a story like this. The byproduct of this dynamic is that a lot of entrepreneurs get prematurely discouraged, ESPECIALLY people of color who have already been primed to believe that the predominantly white, moneyed world of tech doesn’t want them. I mentor & invest in a disproportionate number of these “Valley outsiders” and I see it a lot. So I decided to speak out & be more transparent about my own experience so that people have a realistic sense of what it actually takes to raise money.

Most founders are too insecure to publicly admit how much they actually struggled, how many investors actually rejected them. They just publish the final number on Techcrunch and everyone is none the wiser.

There’s no upside in transparency.

2 big trends you’re seeing around you.

YC as a legacy product – Instead of being the gold standard of startup advice, YC is now more like a standard VC: sometimes the advice is good, sometimes not.

Once upon a time, YC’s advice was the gold standard of startup advice. All the smartest founders wanted in! While YC’s brand remains incredibly strong amongst founders, especially outsiders, the quality of their advice & overall product since PG left has gone downhill. Many of the YC founders I’ve invested in have told me that the program no longer lives up to the hype. I’ve also seen, first-hand, some YC partners give questionable advice to startups.

In one instance, I found out that a YC company I’d invested in had <60 days of cash while attempting to raise a Series A. (This company was part of YC’s vaunted Series A program)

“Raise a bridge, IMMEDIATELY!” I texted the founder.
The founder responded that their YC partner had counseled to hold off, as “we expect a term sheet in the next week or two and don’t want to take the dilution hit.”

The startup yet to raise a Series A. It’s now been 6 months. 

I expect YC to continue to be a dominant force in VC because of the incredibly marketing execution & distribution advantage, but the product itself is meh. And what’s worse is that they don’t even realize it because YC’s culture is very insular, kinda like Facebook. I thought they were better than that.

3 investors you’d work with outside your captable?

Adam D’Aguelli (True Ventures) – @adaugelli
Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal) – @mcgd
Ben Narasin (NEA) – @bnarasin

3 twitter accounts you recommend we follow

@jenistyping
@impcapital
@isadwatson

3 people you’d like to see interviewed on this blog.

Polly Rodriguez, Founder/CEO of Unbound – @polly_claire
Ben Narasin, Partner at NEA – @bnarasin
Sarah Cone, Managing Director at Social Impact Capital – @impcapital

The post Buggeroaf Interview: “It’s Harder Than You Think” appeared first on Matt Mireles.

Taking the leap to start a company requires, more than anything, confidence & self-belief. Money does not automatically endow its holder with self-confidence.

But poverty, even after it’s gone, imprints insecurity onto the mind.

Poverty leaves a scar.

If you’ve never been poor, it is easier to take big risks Because you have no fear.

Being poor isn’t the same as being broke.

Poor = your life options & decisions are limited due to money. You can’t afford the school or medicine that you need.

Broke = you don’t have much or any money right now, but your life trajectory is not altered by lack of money.

I’ve been broke many times in my life and it wasn’t a big deal.

Being poor was a different. My experience with poverty, however limited, destroyed my confidence and left scars.

Most people in Silicon Valley have been broke at some point in their life; few have been poor.

The Airbnb guys were broke, not poor. Big difference.

You don’t need rich parents to start a world-changing technology company.

But you do need confidence.

The former can help with the latter though.

That, I believe, is why––on a relative basis––so many children of the affluent start companies. It’s not about having an actual financial safety net so much as it is about the mindset that having been raised with a safety net endows you with, a mindset of abundance versus scarcity.

The crazy thing is: The scarcity mindset doesn’t disappear just because you acquire abundant resources, like say the irrevocable earning power that comes with a fancy education.

You balance sheet might be rich, but your brain is still poor.

This was my dad’s story. Grew up dirt poor in New Mexico during the Depression. Oppressed. Discriminated against. Angry. Joined the Air Force. Went to community college. Transferred to UCLA. Graduated as one of 3 (!) brown people in his class. Worked pipeline construction through undergrad and grad school. Master’s. PhD. But he clutched to his economic security, refusing to take financial risks. Which frankly is a little surprising because he was such a risk taker in other aspects of his life.

The scarcity mindset runs deep.

And it holds people––and our country––back from realizing its true potential. We, as a society, are the losers in this equation.

Anyone got ideas on how to fix this?

The post Abundance mindset appeared first on Matt Mireles.

As an investor, the quality of a startup’s communications post-investment is a big part of how you judge the quality of management and their execution. It makes sense, right?

But the thing is… as a startup founder, no one tells you how to communicate effectively to investors. The investor perspective is not obvious. And it’s a different skill than operating a business.

I’m still learning, but here’s the advice I find myself giving over and over again to my portfolio CEOs:

Investor updates should be quick & easy for you to write, and easy for investors to read, understand and share. Here’s what I like too see…

Asks
– 1-3 bullets

Key Metrics
– 1-4 bullets, including Monthly Revenue & MoM Growth

Management Discussion & Strategic Musings
– 1-3 paragraphs
– Be very candid here

Highlights
– 1-3 bullets

Lowlights
– 1-3 bullets

News
– 1-3 bullets

Company Elevator Pitch & Strategy
– this helps investors remember wtf it is you actually do, which is shockingly easy to forget when you’ve got a big portfolio. It also makes updates easy to forward to prospective investors, which––generally speaking––you want. This content does not need to change month-to-month

That’s it!

Do you have a great investor update example or format to share? Link to it in the comments.

The post Anatomy of a (Good) Investor Update appeared first on Matt Mireles.

It’s almost trite to say, but I’m in it and it’s real.

I’m not sure if it’s just the fact that I’m a solo founder or the solo person employee.

Even though I’ve started 3 companies before and had my fair share of success and failure, I’m still struggling with anxiety and fear and this damn feature that I was supposed to ship 2 weeks ago and that is still sitting in my task list, 20% done.

Humans are social creatures, and I am human.

It’s hard being alone.

Do I need a co-founder? Or maybe just another person? These are the issues I’m wrestling with right now.

Once upon a time, I thought money would solve all this stuff. That the struggle was only for people who didn’t have money. I didn’t really believe it, but the tohught would buzz around my head, a bias––almost like racism––that I didn’t consciously acknowledge or believe to be true, but that was there in my heart.

Now I have money and I’m still in the struggle. Funny how life works.

I’m lucky though. And privileged. And stoked about what I’m doing.

But still, I was supposed to this damn feature 12 days ago and it’s still just 20% done. Something isn’t working.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe this is all just normal and I need to power through.  Or maybe I just need another human being to work with.

I had an intern living with me over the summer, sleeping in my garage. He was awesome and I had a blast! He was young and had a lot to learn, but he had the work ethic and mindset of a founder. Effing brilliant too. It was so much fun working with him! He felt like a younger brother. Smarter than me in some ways, less experienced in others.

Funny enough, my best work relationships feel that way: like siblings of different ages, each with our own strengths and weaknesses.

I made Mourtallah an offer for after he graduates in December. He accepted. His start date is 6 weeks away. 

But in the meantime, I’m struggling. Feeling in a rut. I hate that feeling.

I want to be going at warp speed again. I need to be going at warp speed again.

But maybe that’s not always possible when you’re human.

Does this ever happen to you? How do you deal with these slow downs in productivity?

P.S. Talking through it like this really helps. Maybe that’s step one?

The post The Challenge of Rolling Solo appeared first on Matt Mireles.

The post Thanksgiving Letter to My Portfolio CEOs appeared first on Matt Mireles.