Sometimes y’all get too damn serious… let’s play!

We spent the past week and a half in Bozeman, Montana supporting dear friends as they make a major life move to buy a homestead there. You can see Emo and Taco loved it!

Checking in on 2022 Goals

I added a couple new coaching clients while on the trip and have achieved my 2022 goal of billing $10K/month for that business. Rather than fast forwarding to set a 2023 goal, I’ve decided to stop striving around growing Morrill Coaching LLC for a bit and just settle into these new client relationships.

My focus now is on:

• Baby making (quite fun!)
• Product/Market fit for Firstparty (quite challenging!)
• Baseline health (10K steps, 8+ hours of sleep, eating plants)

It’s funny, now that we can conceive I’m feeling a lot less urgency about it. Anyone else have that experience?

I turned 37 a few weeks ago, and I’d be lying if I said I felt the tick of a biological clock. I don’t feel it. I just feel really peaceful in my marriage and home life, and if we add a baby to the mix I know it will be an awesome adventure. And if we don’t, that’s okay too. I will just have to get more dogs.

In terms of other people’s timelines, Kevin just turned 44, and I think he is a little more aware of what it will mean to be an “old Dad” since he had one. He’s fit and healthy as a horse now, but the fact is he will be in his mid-60s by the time our kids graduate high school. There are also my parents, who are in their mid-60s now and hopefully will live for a long long time to come. They just want more grandkids, and who can blame them? Our kids will already be the youngest among 5 other cousins ranging age 14 to 2, and unless my little sister decides to have more I am probably going to be the last one in this generation having kiddos.

Kevin and I are celebrating 15 years of marriage in August, and I feel peaceful.

Nesting Much?

I am excited to share that we bought the house next door to ours in Denver!

We’re working with the original architect and builder of our house (which was constructed in 2005) to turn the lot into a pool, patio, garden, and guest house. I find it calming having our home as our central shared project during all this chaotic market noise, and it makes it easy to be long on all our other investments. I feel fortunate that we found a diversification move that is so life enriching.

Kevin has agreed to take the lead on project management, and I’m sure you’ll see some house updates (and I’m sure some dark humor about budgets and plans and all that) in the coming months. For now, we’re in the queue with the city of Denver for permits and demolition is the next step. I’m thinking about how we can take some brick from the original house and set it aside to build the pizza oven or something else, as small nod to the past.

Market What How Now?

Emotionally, I’m barely noticing the shock waves from the financial markets. Maybe it’s because I never internalized the massive run up of the past few years as real gains? I just updated my “CFO of the household” spreadsheet, and it was pretty wild to plug in a number ~75% lower than in late December for my stock holdings account balance.

As most of you already know, I have two heavily concentrated positions in Twilio and GitLab that come from my time working for these two companies. I’ve come to realize that the way I hold startup stock in my mind is different, and perhaps something that others would benefit from knowing about. I look at it as rainy day upside, not as compensation and not as “real” money until I sell. Even though it is liquid post-IPO I still look at is as an option, and in the case of Twilio where proceeds are QSBS qualified I am even more circumspect. As those who are Super Following me on Twitter know, I’ve been buying more of both.

Here’s the latest result of my learning portfolio as of Friday’s close:

Kevin and I drove back to Denver from a visit with friends in Bozeman, Montana on Wednesday and during that 700 mile trek we had to time talk over things a bit re: the market. “I’m thinking through what’s the truly worst case scenario for us,” I told him, “To really be in trouble, we’d have to be fundamentally wrong about software and what it can do for the world.” Obviously there are some other geopolitical SHTF scenarios that are also worst case, but that’s on the downside. On the upside, my theory is that power law value creation in the future will come primarily from psychological goods rather than physical goods (bits vs. atoms).

I see no evidence this is fundamentally breaking. If anything, we are still in the early innings. For those who want to increase their own conviction, I highly recommend reading Future Shock and Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler

I also “initiated research” (sounds so official doesn’t it?) on a number of companies, which means I bought 1 share and I am planning to read a lot more about them, write up an exec summary, and decide if I want to build a bigger position in the coming months/years:

Thinking Like a Gardener

I’ve been cultivating seedlings since March, and yesterday I started planting them. Of course, I managed to dump a whole tray of marigolds onto the ground and exclaimed reflexively “No, my babies!”

Most of them were fine, and I got them in the ground. Plants are surprisingly resilient, even when they’re tiny. However, this morning I went out to survey how the peppers I put in did overnight, and its clear there are several that have shriveled up and are not going to make it. Experienced gardeners know transplanting is traumatic, and we product more seedlings than we need because we’ll be removing dead plants and subbing in new ones until everything takes.

I feel the sunk cost of the months of cultivating when tossing the tiny plant remains into the compost with a silent Marie Kondo style “thank you”.

I do worry whether there are people suffering in silence, because despite all the bravado to “fail fast” its still quite taboo to be open about losses and failures. When things go badly, the message among the startup and crypto set seems to be caveat emptor. Toughen up kid. I had to take a significant break from Twitter with the most recent crypto swirl, as there is too much grave dancing for my taste.

This weekend, I encourage you all to think about how you can spread the message of long-term thinking, cultivation, and agency. As my friend, investor, and investing partner Chip Hazard shares — thinking like a gardener is called for.

Read the full Twitter thread here.

Chip Hazard @chazard

Having chatted about this with a lot of founders this week, a final somewhat obvious point. Focus on what you can control: team, customers, products, spending, investors, etc and not on what you can’t control. In other words, less doom scrolling and more gardening!

Chip Hazard @chazard

Some thoughts while gardening this weekend and seeing this grim chart and stats. I was a venture investor across both major corrections, which were quite different. ???? https://t.co/rbzVV3kaY56:37 PM ? May 13, 20225Likes1Retweet

What I’m Reading Lately

• Virtue Hoarder: The Case Against the Professional Management Class by Catherine Liu
• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Ortberg
• The Arc by Tory Henwood Hoen
• Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop
• Independent People by Halldor Laxness
• Start Where You Are by Pema Chodron
• The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
• Work Clean by Dan Charnas
• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

I’ve been on a tear with reading, thanks to an incredible deluge of high quality recommendations from my Twitter followers. To get a taste of that they provided in response to my prompts, check out these threads…

Elle Morrill ???? ? @DanielleMorrill

What is the most transformative and/or useful book on being a good Christian? aside from the Bible of course5:22 PM ? May 14, 202221Likes2Retweets

Elle Morrill ???? ? @DanielleMorrill

What is the best book you’ve ever read concerning dignity?5:16 PM ? May 14, 202213Likes1Retweet

As always, I’d love to hear your recommendations on these prompts and anything else you think would tickle my noggin’

Have a great week everyone!

What a lovely break I’ve enjoyed from writing for the eyes of others. Thank you for the space. This morning I’m enjoying a break from the heat wave we’ve been having here in Denver, with temperatures down in the mid 50s. The dogs love it, and so do I!

Investing

My most active investment, my own startup Firstparty, celebrated the milestone of getting its first paying customer over the summer and we are still working on getting to product/market fit. It’s been nearly a decade since I was hands on with this phase of startup building, and it is a humbling journey and test of patience to be sure.

On the private company side, I’m working with a couple long-time startup founder friends on a frontier tech deal that we will be syndicating through an SPV on AngelList. To maintain confidentiality for the company I won’t be sharing details via this newsletter, but if you’d like to sign up to be notified when there is more information available you can join my LP network on AngelList.

Not much happened for me in the public markets over the summer, and I’m still long on my concentrated positions in Twilio and GitLab. I’m burned out my my “learning portfolio” approach to researching companies, and need to come up with something new that I find more engaging.

Leadership Coaching

I took about 6 weeks off, and I’m feeling refreshed. After a lot of reflection, I’ve realized that I was chronically underestimating how much emotional work I do as background processing (outside of session time) when I have active client engagements. To improve my recovery and boundaries, I’ve raised my rates and I’m coaching from mid-September to early December, and then taking another break. I don’t currently have open slots available, but you can reach out to me at danielle@morrillcoaching.com if you would like to get those email updates.

Travel

We did a lot of US travel by car this summer including our first visit to Amangiri in Utah and road-trips to Aspen, Glenwood Springs, and Gateway. We got back to California for the first time since early pandemic days, with a week in Napa around July 4th and a week in Monterey for Car Week.

We also made it up to Washington State (where we’re both from) to see family in Snohomish and Kingston, and attend a beautiful wedding in Friday Harbor.

We’ll probably have 5-6 more 90+ degree days here in Denver before we head into what is usually a fairly short but very beautiful Autumn, so I’m looking forward to several days of mountain town exploring and fall leaves peeping drives.

Health

I continue to be less of a try-hard when it comes to my goals for the year. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m on pace to miss all of them except for the health ones. I’ve gotten into intermittent fasting and I’m averaging ~2 lbs. a week of weight loss. If I could end this year back at what I weighed right before the pandemic began, that would be amazing. As to the rest, I’m just focused on making little bits of progress every day. We found out Kevin’s vasectomy reversal didn’t work, so we’re still deciding what our next moves are there and getting more curious about both surrogacy and adoption (reading list to come in a future update).

Around the House

Day-to-day life has been pretty sweet since I last wrote to you in May, with lots of growing, cooking, and eating of my garden vegetables. I’m thinking we probably have 2-3 more weeks of growing season and then it will be time to harvest and preserve whatever we haven’t already eaten. I’m planning to make a lot of salsa.

We now have preliminary designs for the pool house, and received our permit to remove the house that is currently on the land. Demo begins on Tuesday!

Life Improvement Moves

• Sold my learning portfolio so I could stop checking Robinhood
• Set up Sanebox to digest my emails for processing 3x per week
• Removed all apps from my phone’s home screen and made it grayscale
• Hired a personal assistant to help me with life chores I procrastinate on
• Bought an Eightsleep mattress cover to improve my sleep quality (if use my link you’ll get $200 off if you buy a mattress or mattress cover)
• Started intermittent fasting with the Zero app
• Signed up for a primary care provider through Forward
• Set up Jumbo Security to archive my tweets and monitor for password leaks

Ah, Fall. I can almost smell the fresh pencil shavings (do kids even use No 2 pencils anymore?) and after this final heat wave passes in Denver, I’m looking forward to cozy sweaters and mountain drives to see the changing autumn colors.

A quick note on communicate channels: I’ve stopped using Facebook and Instagram. If you are one of the people I unfriended, please know it’s not personal. After trying some half-measures, it was the only effective way to stop wasting so much time perusing and performing. You can still find me through this newsletter and on Twitter.

Last week, Kevin and I participated in our first ever car rally with Mike Ward Automotive for their annual autumn leaves driving event in the Rockies. I feel so fortunate to join this awesome community. We enjoyed some awe-inspiring drives with stops in mountain towns including Berthoud Pass, Independence Pass, Steamboat Springs, Aspen, and Vail.

There’s a lot going on in the world, and I’m closely managing my information diet these days to strike a balance between being informed vs. being overwhelmed.

In the 30 minutes I allow myself to read the news each day, I’m following events in Ukraine/Russia, Florida, climate change, and local crime in Colorado with deep concern and compassion for human suffering. It’s really painful to read the news, and I’m starting to think more tactically about what I can do to get involved. I’ve said “I’m not political” outwardly for a long time, but I think that’s changing soon.

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Investing Thoughts

On the other hand, I’m following the mid-term elections and unwinding of a decade of money creation in the US with morbid curiosity.

Inflation

I figure since we have no choice but to live through this part of the cycle, I better learn something from it, and to better understand our last dramatic inflationary period I started reading Michael Darby’s The International Transmission of Inflation (1984) last night. We’ve come a long way from hand-building models on Mark II and Mark III computers.

I’m grateful we were able to refinance our house when rates were at their lowest, and I’m looking at our other debt exposure to make sure we’re being smart. Kevin and I got married right before the 07/08 collapse, and we’ve been reflecting on what we learned from some of the top-of-market decisions we made last time. My hope is that we can make only new mistakes. The main topic of conversation is around how much more (if any) risk to take, how to collateralize it, and whether to pause development on the land we bought next door to our house since financing for construction loans has gotten very expensive and fixed rate options are basically not a thing at all right now.

Private Companies & Funds

At least in the face of all this volatility, we’ve continued to invest in startups and funds, and achieved our goal of deploying ~5% of our net worth this year.

Me: “Are you investing?”

Him: “If we had a fund I would. I’m super illiquid rn”

Me: “just deployed remainder of my fun money for the year, so I’m in the same boat”

So what investments closed out my dry powder for the year?

This week I put up my first capital call into the latest Heavybit fund (developer tools), and invested $100K in the Series A of a space tech transportation company (join my syndicate to see the deal details and participate in the SPV I’m leading). This is my first syndicate on AngelList, and wrangling investors has provided an education in LP communication that reminds me of the Mattermark party-round days. Kicking it off als led to some inbound interest about me raising a fund.

Although I’ve raised millions on AngelList for my startups, I haven’t been very actively on the platform as an investor. Now that I’m dipping my toe in, I can see there are benefits to having regular deals happening so investors get more and more familiar with what I’m into. So far, I’ve learned that running one-off SPVs is often time-consuming because it requires continuous cultivation of LP relationships an investor brand. I’m not ready to pull the trigger on this fund business quite yet, but I’ve got a few potential partners in mind and I’m definitely factoring this into my thought process as I start to rough draft my 2023 goals.

Public Companies

It’s probably time to circle back to these, but it’s been nice to have a break from tracking the market on a daily basis. I continue to hold my long concentrated positions in Twilio and GitLab, and I believe Twilio in particularly seems massively oversold (-78% in the past 12 months) while GitLab remains significantly below its IPO price. I’m looking forward to getting myself back into a position cash-flow wise where I can be a buyer in this market, but right now I am in look but don’t touch with these two and a handful of other names including Cloudflare, Palantir, Crowdstrike, Snowflake, and Porsche (why not?).

It’s a great time to read deeply and learn, but I’m not ready to transact or go back to building any kind of tracking portfolio.

Around Town in Denver

I went to my first two NFL games in Colorado, where we watched Broncos fans boo the home team… so that was interesting. It was an ugly win both games, but we got there! I’m a long way from being converted to a Broncos fan from my loyal Seahawks fandom, but it was fun to explore Mile High Stadium and I even managed to bruise my hand and lose my voice in my enthusiasm.

The real highlight was getting to hang out with former Mattermark team member Karlie (3rd from right) who recently relocated to Denver from Chicago. One of the many things I love about having lived more years is how wonderful people fro one chapter of life drift back to me again in another, through the natural course of events. I’ve got my O.G. cat loving space pants SoulCycle buddy back!

Eating Well

We’ve been enjoying the bounty of the season in our local Denver restaurants, especially fresh peaches and late season corn.

If you’re headed through Denver anytime soon, here are a few spots I recommend:

• Brunch: Bacon Social House in Sunnyside, Le Bilboquet in Cherry Creek North, Root Down in Highland, and of course Snooze (multiple locations)
• Chill Dinner: Lucina Eatery in Park Hill, The Greenwich in RiNo, Benzina in Park Hill and The Fifth String in Highland
• Fancy Dinner: The Wolf’s Tailor in Sunnyside, Restaurant Olivia in Wash(ington) Park, Bistro Barbes in Park Hill, and Beckon in RiNo

I’m pretty thrilled to see that people are reading my tweets and eating at these awesome spots!

Kevin “KMac” Damaso @project_kmac

Dinner @ Bistro Barbès in Denver Thanks to @DanielleMorrill for the recommendation, Chef John is a gem of a human

1:58 AM ? Sep 29, 20226Likes1Retweet

All these places are amazing and you should try them. But as I write this I can see I need to branch out to different neighborhoods more often, and I’m ready to up my brunch game in particular. I’m fairly adventurous, but it’s easy to get into a pattern. If you have Denver restaurant recommendations, please add them in the comments!

I also asked for recommendations for our upcoming trip to Seattle, and I want to eat everywhere mentioned in the replies.

What I’m Reading

My Goodreads is as meticulously up-to-date as ever, and I hope you’ll join more than 700 people who follow me there for interesting updates in your books feed!

Theme: Social Status & Class

• The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America by E. Digby Baltzell (1964)
• Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter? by Cecilia L. Ridgeway (2019)
• Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis (2021) who also has an excellent Substack publication
• The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It by Will Storr (2021)
• Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics and Free Speech by Geoffrey Miller (2019)

Theme: Parenting

• Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy (2022)
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (2003)
• What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill (2022)

Intermittent Fasting Update

Week 5 is done! This week I logged a new PR for hours in the fat burning “zone” (between hour 16 and 24 of a fast). It feels like I’m getting the hang of this. My biggest challenge is definitely dealing with the moodiness inspired by my physical feelings of hunger in the final hours of each fast.

My goal is to achieve ~16 hours per week in this zone and sustain that, which can happen simply by sticking to a simple 18:6 schedule (18 hours fasting, followed by a 6 hour feeding window) with a couple extra fasting hours tacked on when I feel like its going well and I can stand to wait a little longer.

I haven’t yet ventured beyond a 24 hour fast yet, but now that I have the all-clear from my doctor and some guidelines around where the limits are (refuel with healthy nutrient rich foods, don’t pass out, drink a LOT of water and pee nearly clear throughout) I’m hoping to experiment with ketosis soon to get some other health benefits besides weight loss. Fortunately, I did a blood panel in August and all my biomarkers are looking good, so I can focus on making this change while I’m otherwise healthy.

In addition to intermittent fasting, I’ve enrolled in a 12-week weight management course with Forward Health and got a referral for CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) with a specialist focused specifically on this area. I am hopeful that I can make changes that are long-lasting (so that I won’t ever need to buy a new wardrobe of clothes again!), maintain good mental health along the way, and stay of the “obese” clinical category from now on (only ~5 pounds to go!) to reduce my exposure to the health risks associated with obesity.

Go Broncos!