Blurry Transitions

Turning 60 in December marked an important moment for me. A key section from that blog post was:

“I’ve definitely shifted into a new mode over the past year. I’m still on a bunch of boards for Foundry and deeply involved in several companies. But I’m much less focused on the broader technology industry, uninterested in many of the things that are going on, and tired+bored of the arc the narrative about technology and society has taken.”

Amy and I spent the last six weeks in New Zealand and Australia for my 60th birthday trip. I went into hibernation as part of that, stopped doing anything public-facing, and flipped to default no. I also stopped blogging, engaging with social media, and reading the news.

It gave me a lot of time to think and reflect. One thing that I realized was that I’ve never had a hard break or a clean transition from one thing to another. I have multiple threads of this, but if I just choose a professional one, here’s an example.

– I started my first company while in college.
– I started making angel investments while working for the company that acquired my first company.
– I became a VC while I was still founding companies and making angel investments.
– I co-founded Techstars and Foundry while still managing the legacy Mobius funds.
– I started writing books as a VC.

I did a similar exercise on technologies that interested me and generated long investment arcs (which we used to call themes at Foundry). There was usually a trigger point that created a new theme, where I became obsessed with a new technology of some sort and went very deep into it as a user and investor. These overlapped and fed off each other multiple times.

Basically, I’ve never had a “clean break” or a hard transition from what I was doing to what I did next.

I’m enjoying another one of these blurry transitions. I’ve found the new technological thing I’m obsessed with. While I’ve played with this new thing over the past year, I spent a lot of time with it over the last two months. And my interest (and competence and understanding) is accelerating.

I also realized that I missed writing. I know that I learn by reading and writing. I don’t learn by listening and talking (or at least not very much). I have to actually write things down. And, my new obsession involves a lot of writing…

Historically, I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on ideas by writing publicly. It’s also more helpful to me, as it has generated a ton of randomness on many dimensions. And, if you’ve read Give First: The Power of Mentorship, you know that many of the successful things I’ve been involved in came from this randomness.

So, I’ll be writing publicly more. I’ve consciously decided that is not part of hibernating.

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