Notes towards becoming a better investor

Learning to lean into my weirdness has taken many shapes. Mostly it’s looked like embracing what comes to me naturally: I’ve always been much more interested in understanding people than ideas, get immense gratification from building lasting relationships, and consider it a lifelong goal to improve my discernment and refine my taste. This often shows up in how I spend my time: I rarely take pitch meetings (if a founder is fundraising already I probably didn’t get there early enough), always have a creative project I’m actively working on, and spend a significant amount of time striving to understand and translate myself to the page. Cultivating a view of the world that no one else has is an edge I consider critically important to Moth’s success, as well as something that requires continual cultivation and critical refinement.

what is so interesting about baking bread?

“I’m always thinking about... It reminds me of the first person I was. Kids going crazy about beetle catching, playing in the water, etc. There's no reason for that one. They're just absorbed in it. But as we grow up, we tend to look for reasons and logic for such behaviour.

No, it's not that. [It’s] that kind of obsessed, sensory, original self. When I'm kneading dough by myself in a place like this, that's what it reminds me of.

So my mental age is getting more and more childish. I'm becoming a social misfit. I'm getting further and further away from organizational people."

I want to end this with a quote by Ivan Illich, who I'm sure many of you have heard of.

He wrote a wonderful book called "Tools for Conviviality" where he talked about the importance of people being able to make tools for themselves.

He says, "People need not only to obtain things; they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others."

Software is no exception to this.