So close! Aggggh!

We are so close, but we still aren't there yet! AGGHH!

In any case, Jason has been an absolute champ. He works his own full-time job, quite successfully I might add, and in his spare time has put so much energy into our project. He hasn't asked for much and he has been incredibly helpful. Of course, it would be much better if he were available full time, but beggars can't be choosers.

The biggest change is that we are basically ending our relationship with James, our designer and front-end engineer. I have never had a working experience like this in my entire life. Deadlines were crystal clear and self-determined and I can say with confidence that he missed at least 95% or more of them. If not by blatantly ignoring the deadline and not responding to communications about it, then by doing something entirely different than what had been discussed. It took several months to do the simplest things. 7 months of work has produced an extremely extremely stripped down, generic, undesigned template that we will be using and 4 or 5 iterations of half-complete templates we can't use. It has been immensely frustrating. My main primary stress point in the last 7 months has been working with him. Enormously talented, probably the worst work experience of my career in terms of a productive, working relationship. Now, obviously, being a corporate lawyer was miles and miles worse in the fact that it stole every shred of happiness and the will to survive and replaced it with desperation, unhappiness and isolation...but in terms of getting things done productively, this shit was horrendous.

In the end, I blew up at him again. He took affront and we decided just to let the December 31 kill date we put into place go into effect and end everything. Awful. Just awful. I could spend hours just talking about how terrible he is as a project manager, but I will stop. In the end, luckily I have been reading the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness and decided to end the relationship on a positive note. I will pay him the remaining payment on the contract (minus the bonus), he got a bottle of whiskey from me for Christmas, and we will grab one last drink and just say goodbye. I wish him the best -- but I will never work with him again.

Otherwise, today was pretty uneventful. I stayed home and did about 3 or 4 hours of constant bug bashing on the website. Hopefully it doesn't overwhelm Jason, but fingers crossed that we can be done soon. After that, I met the owner of an artisanal granola manufacturing concern in Brooklyn....finished a post about Mister Hotpot for the blog...and maybe now I will draft up some emails to other businesses.

Here's to closing out a good year where I learned a shit ton, but wasn't able to get much done. Next year is the year.

Kick it up a notch.

So it's clear to me I am not a "serial entrepreneur" stereotype. I am not frenetic and full of energy. I am not infused with some sort of divine inspiration to have a personality where I want to run 10 different businesses at once, sell them and move on. I don't work until 3 am all night fueled by red bull and ambition.

Instead, I am invested in my own business. I want it to work. I want to keep growing it. I want to explore opportunities of making it work well in the world and produce collateral benefits. I think about it most of the time. When it is put to me, what would you do if you had a million dollars, it turns out my answer is to dump half of it into the Company so we could hire developers. In other words, there's nothing else I want to do, despite the frustrations of being here. I work reasonable hours, maybe 8-12 a day. But I am not a frenzy of activity. Maybe I just have a different reference where working 70-80 hour weeks was a grueling horrible experience and I shouldn't expect that. Who knows.

In any case, it is time to kick it up a notch. I think our primary goal for the next few months is to hustle like fucking crazy and get as many clients as we can. Run the model, run the business, put yourself out there and get people to be involved and interested in Villager. No second guessing or pussy footing, just gotta make it work. If we can get the platform up, that is all we need to get this thing going. We can tweak and fix and tweak and fix, but our business requires that we get out there and let people know. Until now there's been too much philosophical abstract quibbling. Need to just start doing. Enough thinking. Fail a little.

Felt like a short day.

But I guess it may be because I spent a lot of it in transit. Working for yourself, you sometimes feel like you could always be working harder. Hm. Maybe I should just be working harder.

Anyway, I woke up and rolled into the office around 10:30 after dealing with some emails. From there I talked with Ben about what we should be discussing with Amy Cortese for our lunch meeting. We settled on a new Meetup concept and journalistic outreach methods. I finished a series of emails to go out to business folks. I reviewed our CMS some more for bugs and made some notes.

We met Amy Cortese and her partner Robert at Apartment 138 in Boerum Hill. Nice restaurant, but super brunchy, which was a little odd. Had a nice lunch, discussed a variety of topics including their own idea for a local investing clearinghouse for information and angel network. Great idea, definitely a need, but I think it would be great to really hone and get down to the core of what they want to do. What they want to build is extraordinarily complex and difficult. She once again reiterated her offer to help us with outreach...which is amazing! She's also got a TEDx speech to give in Hawaii, which is awesome.

I came back to the office and dashed off five emails to Brooklyn businesses. Then went off to meet Marc Schapiro, the owner of Idle Hands bar. We ended up in a bubble tea spot and talked in depth for an hour about how to run a bar and bar finances and his views on financing options and all that jazz. One of the nicest people I've ever met, super intelligent and helpful in all regards. Took oodles of useful notes. Rode my bike home over the Wmburg bridge and came home to take notes. Getting on a call with Jason re: the CMS at 8 pm.

And then I have to do shitty immigration law work all night. Sigh.

Welllll...

Maybe I didn't think this through. My first impulse was to bitch wildly about some people I've been working with. Publicly. Probably not the best idea because they still work for me.

So I guess I'm back to here for awhile.

Updates to come.

Switching Over.

In theory...I am starting on a new blog. A more public one. I want to write some stuff here, but am a little worried about directing people here and letting people read previous posts, many of which are basically private. Hence the complete inability to find this blog elsewhere. That's all.

Anotherjaylee.wordpress.com. It will probably just be Anotherjaylee.com within a week or so. Not like anyone will actually see this link.

OWS

Have the poor ever cried "class warfare!" or do they just call it Tuesday? 

Update

I am too fucking lazy to make a daily journal -- yet every day I lament the fact that I have no record of my life.  You could call it a Catch 22.  You could also call it lame-as-fucking-hell-you-lack-drive-you-stupid-indolent-son-of-a-whore.  (no offense mom, it's a term of art.)

So the gist of it is this:

• I had received semi-bad advice that I could build this platform entirely on Wordpress and then either handle the math manually or I could have someone build a plug-in in PHP that would do the math so that the website was responsive rather than static.
• I pursued this path for 3 months.  In month 4, I brought in one of my best friends M., an asp.net developer, to build this program in PHP.  He spent a month learning PHP and prepping for this weeklong hackathon.  
• He arrives.  It is great.  We spend 5 days trying to build a PHP plug-in. 
• Turns out Wordpress is a pain in the ass.  Learning how to plug-into PHP is as big of a problem as actually building an entirely new platform.  And it's gonna be buggy no matter what. 
• We pivot 5 days into his weeklong visit.  Scrap the entire Wordpress concept, move to a completely custom built web application in Ruby on Rails.  M. has never coded in Ruby on Rails before.  
• M. spends 4 days furiously learning, synthesizing and building the Ruby on Rails app.  He gets to about 70%.  The difficult 30% lies ahead.  He goes home, leaving me grateful.  
• We are left rudderless.  No developer, just a front-end developer, and a web application that requires Ruby on Rails.   Four months and nothing to show for it, and now I need a fucking developer. 
• We talk to the single developer who finds promise in our concept.  He thinks it is compelling.  He is a great developer.  We have dinner with him downtown to discuss customer acquisition with the secret hope to somehow get him involved in our project as a developer.   He is a ruby on rails guy.  He is extremely intelligent and articulate.  He understands what we are doing.  
• He tells us, in nicer terms:  What the fuck are you doing?  You guys know what you're doing.  You know the law, you know the economics, you know the market, you are more prepared than anyone I've met.  What is the hold up?  Why haven't you launched?  Is your concept validated?  Why not set up a dummy page that makes people pledge to a local business and then have it lead nowhere, just so you can validate the concept?  Just go and do it.  Do it.  Doesn't have to be pretty.  Doesn't need bells and whistles.  It just has to work.  It has to be validated.  Get your own friends to fund the loan if need be.  Just do it.
• Stunned.
• That is a very good point.
• What the fuck have I been doing for months?
• Immediately pivot again.  Launch now.  Launch now.  Get it in the world.  Learn from it.  ASAP. 
• Set up an appointment with a major venture capital firm for a product feedback session in exactly one month. 
• Attending Slow Money National Gathering for a week, the week before the meeting with the venture capital firm.   Have the prototype ready so you can talk about it.  Describe it.  Demo it on an iPad.  Get investors.  Have a product to sell when you hit the ground.  That's three weeks away.
• Holy shit, October is going to be fucked.  
• But the malaise is over.  It is balls to the wall, get this shit built time.  

Hence, slightly less time for the blogging and the updating.  I spend my days looking at html mock-ups, mark them up, build the contracts, write and re-write the copy for the website.  Think about models.  Think about businesses.  Think about how to get the money.   Figure out how to calculate debt coverage ratios.  Everything it takes. 

Yay.

New Rules

No rockstars
No gurus
No mavens
No annoying bullshit

I would consider this a pretty good day.  I have shed my lethargy, self-doubt and mild depression for a day and we have made some good progress.

I was busy all day, did some good work for my new part-time lawyering gig, and we have somehow gotten the opportunity to get some intense product feedback from brilliant minds at a major VC firm.  It is very exciting.

Today marks the beginning of a descent into UI/UX and product management.  This should be good. 

September 15

We are midweek (or a little past) in our weeklong Hackathon to get the website up and running.  The original plan was to build with a wordpress front-end and build some sort of hybrid back-end which involved manual entries and a PHP wordpress plug-in to run some of the instantaneous calculations that had to be built.  The original plan was to go fully in php and work with wordpress, but after three days of toiling and figuring out what he could do, my buddy M. (who traveled up from Charleston to help out), had a long conversation with me about next steps...and together we all decided to scrap the entire wordpress build out and have M. build a completely custom web application with Rails.  A little scary because of the huge pivot and change in how we are going to progress, but I think it makes sense.

First, we are no longer going to be fighting wordpress for beta.  Second, the manual nature of the website is unacceptable.  If users do not have instant gratification with the least possible friction, then the website is dead.  A single annoyance kill the experience.  Third, this will allow J. to focus more strongly on UX and UI components and mapping out the best ways to improve the way the site works and feels. Fourth, I think the web app, although primitive and basic, will be far more responsive than wordpress.  This was the way to go.  Ultimately, it is a difficult transition to suddenly make 4 months in, but it had to be done.

Today was also the crowdfunding hearing before the House Oversight Committee.  The panel was pretty persuasive and pretty excellent at putting together their argument.  I thought I would be annoyed to watch it, but i was actually pretty impressed.  I will certainly watch it in full, take notes and put up a full blogpost on the company blog.

I also spent a couple of hours going over Slow Money NYC documentation relating to setting up a loan fund for food-related businesses and investments.  I had been putting it off, but I took the time and finally put pen to paper.  Hopefully it's helpful.  Realistically, all I do is raise a bunch of problems no one cares about.  Some part of me is still a lawyer I guess.

I also interviewed another student intern from Columbia.  This time, the student was aiming to work in equity research for a large investment firm, as a goal.  As well as to learn about working in an American work setting.  Unfortunately, we don't really offer either of those things.  He was a nice kid though.  He just wanted something else.  This will be my first time having to reject someone outright, so that'll be interesting.

In more interesting news, I got a part-time job today.  I will be working as a flex time out of the office immigration attorney.  Now I have some income to supplement my life.  Whoo.

September 12

Today wasn't the greatest day. 

It isn't that today was an exceptionally bad day either.  I am not unhappy and I am not distraught, but it just didn't feel great from the very beginning. 

I woke up at 7 am this morning, awakened by a mistaken alarm setting by K, and I quickly began thinking about the progress I have made on my business.  I began to worry that I was not nearly as close to my goals as I had hoped.  I entered the half-delirious dream state where anxiety dominates clear thinking and you float along on the surface of emotion, not able to surface into wakefulness and rationality.  What if this is me failing?  What if this was not the right choice?  What if I'm just not really cut out for doing something meaningful in my life, and I am doomed to some sort of lazy mediocrity?  What is holding me back?  Why can't I stop being such a goddamn coward and get out there and push and fight and shout at the world  It's not in me, but it needs to be.  And it will be.  But jesus christ am I not inherently built for this. 

Anyhow, I woke up at 7 am and ran straight to the gym.  My workout was lackluster at best.  I gave up on sets one or two reps too early, I didn't push too hard, I didn't work up my lungs at all during the lift.  It was just going through the motions.  Strike two. 

I came home and roused M., who is in town for the week, in theory to help me code an application plug-in for my website, which is being built in Wordpress.  I had intended on introducing him to the immense joys of riding a bicycle over the bridge to work, but my bike, Leopold had been stolen the night before.  I walked into a football game at 8:20 pm, locking my bike on busy 3rd Street, with my helmet attached to the lock.  I walked out at 10:30, lock laying coiled around the signpost, helmet still appended, bicycle gone, lock cleanly cut through with a single chop.  FUCKING SAVAGES.    This is the second bicycle I've had stolen.   First, Marjorine.  Now, Leopold.  What do these people look like?  Who is stealing MY bikes?  What type of person walks down a street and steals a deeply personal possession from another human being?  What savage am I going to beat senselessly if I ever see them?  It is so deeply disappointing. 

The real issue today was the disaster resulting from examining the front end/back end issue in depth.   I spent 2 or 3 hours today just hashing out whether the back-end of the website could be an application appended to the Wordpress front-end or whether we had to build an independent web application with a pure html/css front-end.  We were beset by a plague of problems on all sides.  No matter which way we turned, we were completely blocked and facing painful and potentially disastrous consequences.  We went from a Wordpress Front end with php backend to a full asp.net back-end with html/css front end back to the wordpress/php compromise to a full ruby on rails backend with html/css front-end, with 3 days wasted and 3 weeks of ruby education completely squandered.  Moreover, I faced my third month of work on Villager and have realized that we are completely starting over and I am still no closer to a company, a product, a team or an alternative model.  It's scary.   Everything is in flux. 

I have not lost faith in the model - not for a second.  I'm just losing a little faith in my own courage.

September 2

Pretty good work day.  Woke up at 7, got into the office by 9.  Ate a variety of bagels with salmon and cream cheese, whitefish, and egg, cheese and bacon.  Drank too much coffee.  Got bizarrely woozy.  Began working on aggregating large numbers of businesses and reaching out.  Compiled big spreadsheet of more business contacts.  Drafted a dozen emails to various businesses in the east village.  Compiled another 10 businesses that I will walk into cold and just talk to.

Front-end developer was in the office today for the full 12+ hours:  Worked on the landing page, applying styles to the company blog, setting up basecamp accounts for the developer and just prepping the server for all of my needs.  K. also came to the office today to help build revenue projections (turns out we need to originate lots and lots of businesses to make any appreciable revenue) and do the data analysis necessary to really dig through the questionnaires we sent out to our friends.

Also drafted the operating agreement for the country and delivered signature pages to my father.  Will deliver the remaining signature pages to the partner tomorrow when he gets back from a 2 week vacation in Europe. Hopefully we can have the bank account set up and fund it entirely in the next week or so and begin making payments and setting all accounts to the business account and get them extricated from my personal finances.  In other words, obtain a veneer of legitimacy!

September 1

Well today was alright.

Got up, shot off a few emails to business owners asking me to follow-up at a later date, took a 3.5 mile run (which was depressingly not easy), cleaned the apartment, made a double kale, ginger, triple apple juice, and went off to S'mac, a local beloved Mac and Cheese restaurant in the East Village, to talk to the owner. The place was packed and crowded with happy families gorging on incredible selections of Macaroni and Cheese.  We sat on the stoop of the apartment building between her two locations, in bright sunshine, and had a 45 minute conversation covering topics ranging from financing options to leaving engineering to open a mac and cheese shop to "community" in NYC.  It was a great talk.

Then, I went to the office, rewired the internet, did some paperwork, and had some beer.

I didn't say it was a super productive day.  I just said it was alright. 

Best Laid Plans.

So K left for Seattle today and had to catch a crazy ass flight at like 7 am from Newark due to Hurricane Irene related cancellations.  As a result, she had to be up at 5 am.  As a result, I decided to get up at 5 am as well.  When you are so lucky as to be awake at a cringe-inducing time and you find yourself without a dull headache or a desperate wish to be asleep or so barely awake that you are basically blacked out with no memories...I can't help but burst with the awareness that I might be *super* productive, somehow, against all previous experiences.  It is FIVE FUCKING AM.  I can work out, have breakfast, clean the house and still be in the office an hour fucking early to work a 12 hour day, and I FEEL GREAT.

So I did it.  I got up, had a leisurely cup of coffee, gave K a kiss goodbye and hopped on by blue bike and rode straight up the West Side Highway at 6 am.  I rode and I rode and I rode.  I listened to Jason Sudeikis on the WTFPodcast.  I worried about my rear tire being slightly flat.  I wore my bright yellow helmet.  I put in a stupid tobacco snus packet I decided to try to quit smoking (again) (this time it's 8 days in).  I had a wonderful time.  An hour and 15 minutes later, I reached the George Washington Bridge, which I think is the only bike navigable bridge in NYC I haven't crossed.  Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro and now GWB.  On a crisp cool and calm morning, it was a little bit amazing.  It is so much higher than the east side bridges and the ability to see almost the entirety of New York was spellbinding. I crossed the bridge, switched up some podcasts (to Radiolab, of course) and made my way back.  26 miles today.

So I got home, got all ready for work and was determined to fix my motorcycle, because the battery had died several weeks earlier.  I put on my ratty jeans, a white v neck t-shirt, grabbed the battery, grabbed the jumpers, a screwdriver, backpack, headphones and went straight out to fix the shit out of Butterbear. Twenty feet outside the door, I realized that, for the first time in THREE years, I neglected to grab my keys.  3 hours after K left to Seattle.   Long story short, I called the Management Company who did not give a shit and then called the Super who said he would be here by 11:30 (why the fuck don't supers live in the building anymore?  What good is it if my super lives in Queens and has to take the train to let me into my apartment?).  I then wandered the East Village for 2 hours and was back by 11:30 sharp at which point I received a call that he was "on his way" and would be here in 45 minutes.   I then checked my VM which I had received 2 minutes earlier in which he said he would be here in 30 minutes.  I sat down on my front stoop and played Angry Birds for well over an hour before he arrived.

I arrived at work 5 hours behind schedule.

Ever cognizant of my laziness, I forced myself to clear out a few unpleasant tasks I just don't really feel like doing.  The first is surfing through some of the pages of "competitors" and working through design templates for the business profiles and left some notes for the developer within a few of the pages being developed.  The second is really trying to hammer out some of the credit analysis and finer points of financials and how that information is presented to the users and how to do that in a meaningful way without pushing reliance on this information.  The third was going back through some of the yet to be posted blogposts.  The fourth was figuring out whether to go to a national conference that will cost me over $1000 to go to, but may be exactly the people I need to meet.

Tomorrow will be better.  It looks like my workflow is picking up.  And when I'm actually working, it's good.  It's just sometimes easier to re-check Slate than to dig into another piece of paper I don't really want to create.
 

August 29

I have no other explanation other than laziness.  Malaise even.  I haven't been firing on all cylinders.  I need to build external accountability structures so that I will do this right.  

It appears that I am not the self-starter.  The dynamo.  The do-it-yourself-work-tirelessly-until-success guy.  I am just another guy who doesn't like working that much but reallly reallllly hates certain types of works so much that he will run away to do something else.  That being said....I will make this happen.  It just isn't hard wired into my system.  

It will be a fight. 

August 9

This was supposed to be a pretty big day since I was going to be meeting with Andre Wechsler of Wechsler's Currywurst and Jimmy Carbone of Jimmy's No. 43.  I was a bit nervous because it was a bit of a big day. Wechsler was an ex-investment banker who decided to open a small shop that served authentic german currywurst (curry smothered german sausages) and beers.  Jimmy Carbone is one of the vanguards of the good beer movement in new york as well as all things local -- local food, local suppliers, local production and putting on lots of local events.  

The meeting at Wechsler's was quite good.  I arrived at noon, before anyone was really showing up and we had a good 35 minute conversation where I picked his brain about his experiences as a small business owner and the financial issues that arose.  The place didn't have AC, so it was muggy and we were both sweating a lot, but the talk was quite productive and he indicated he would be quite interested in participating.  That's a first for us thus far, so it was wonderful to hear.  I left feeling great.  

The meeting at Jimmy's was friendly and quite helpful, but it was clear from the get-go that he didn't believe in the model and didn't find it appealing.  He poured me a small glass of IPA from California and we sat down at one of the tables in front to talk.  He offered me food several times, but I declined because I found it a bit difficult to eat and try to talk at the same time.  I did, however, eat some of his spiced fried hazelnuts, which were awesome.  In the end, I think his greatest reservations was that he was firmly against taking debt for anything if he could.  Loans add fixed costs and the amount of time you have to pay back a loan was more important than the interest rate received.  The inflexibility of loans and the fact that they have to be paid back were major detractors from his ever considering to take a loan and he was pretty convinced that if he ever needed financing at such a low level, he would be able to procure it from a variety of sources ranging from trade creditors to friends and families to any other arrangements he could find.  10K was simply not a large enough sum, because it could easily get taken out on a credit card.

Ultimately, we needed to face a strong headwind on the business model.  We have never been properly challenged and most people we encounter basically see the model the same way we do, or don't dig in deeply enough to really engage with the issues, so having someone hitting the model hard was useful.  Not that it was fun.  I mean, he was certainly a very generous and friendly guy who took an hour out of his day to talk to me, but he didn't really see the merits of the model.   

I had to shake it off, so I played Portal 2 for the rest of the day until I turned back to working on web development some more.  

August 10

Today was a heavy day for web copy writing.  I basically spent 7 or 8 hours thinking through user interfaces, the presentation of information and copywriting the FAQs, describing the business and really trying to cut to the heart of the message.  Selling the concept truthfully and making it compelling is going to be a challenge, because there exist levels and levels of nuance that I find fascinating that no one else will take the time to consider.  I need to sell the central model fast and hard and make it as clear as possible.  Being unusually wordy and precise at times, this may be quite the challenge.

Later in the evening, Ben and I met with a developer named Matt who we had met at the Dim Sum Startup Enthusiasts Meetup.  Matt developed and sold a daily deals site based in DC and they were unusually successful in an otherwise crowded field.  The discussion moved quickly from topic to topic and it was abundantly clear that we were dealing with someone who was extremely intelligent, articulate and thoughtful.  He was also quite friendly and very easy to get along with...all in all, a really great person to consider working with.  We talked through the various issues facing us technically and in terms of the model and he seemed to be quite impressed with how we were tackling the issues we saw and the preparation we put into everything.  It was a great conversation and I'm quite glad to have met him.  Hopefully we'll be able to work with him in the future as we move towards a more technical focus.  

August 11

Today, not so productive.  Just don't really feel like doing anything.  But, I wrote some web copy and will be sending out our incorporation documents for (hopefully) the very last time.  Thank god.  We need to exist.  And fast. 

August 5, 2011

Today was a productive day.  K.and I decided to devote tractor beams of intense focus today to get the most painful parts of the Villager process either firmly in motion or firmly resolved.

We got up slightly late (my fault, fuckin' snooze) and got to B&H Lunch counter by 11 am to have some of the best mornin' food in the area.  I had a challah grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup and K. had a strange veggie juice and half a whitefish sandwich.  We love those guys.  The dude behind the counter just had a baby, Hanna, who is now 5 weeks old, which he showed to us on his iPhone.  Very cute.

We then took the F train to Dumbo, where we commenced a full-blown assault on a few projects.

1)  K. decided to start with my market research on the competition.  Unsurprisingly, the success of Kickstarter has spawned a multitude of copycats and crowdfunding investment platforms.  She spent some time fixing up my primitive word document and migrating it to a powerful excel platform.  She also spent some time looking at 33needs, getting seriously annoyed with the company, and modeling out the important parts of it.

2)  I spent two hours trying to understand interest rates, yield, different ways of structuring interest rates and trying to figure out how the various laws worked.  It was painful.

3)  I then turned my attention to legal documentation.  I spent the next 6 hours reading the borrower and registration agreements for Prosper and LendingClub line by line and re-drafting them to match the needs and structure of Villager.  That was very painful.  It is slightly more fun to re-draft contracts from scratch and make them fit a particular structure...definitely more fun than working within highly constrained highly regularized environments where you are expected to understand things you can't possibly understand...but I still hate spending hours and hours in front of a contract.  It is very painful stuff.  At least I was able to get a very rough draft of the Borrower Registration Agreement, Promissory Note, Lender Registration Agreement and Terms of Use together.  I'm glad I finally turned to it, though, because it certainly raises a lot of issues and complications I am not looking forward to tackling.  But need to tackle.

4)  Didn't hear back from the folks I emailed yesterday...Rick's Picks, Brooklyn Roasters, Xi'an Famous Foods.  The day before I was 3 for 3.  Yesterday's batch came back 0 for 3.  Shame.  We'll see though.

4) Kristen then re-directed her attention to the back-end mechanics spreadsheet.  She worked her considerable magical talents on the spreadsheet and was able to build in the concept of monthly compound interest payments.  Very impressive stuff and it definitely gets us a long way.  Very happy that she's able to make such enormous contributions to the company and do things I could not even dream of doing.  It is very good stuff.

5)  I polished a blog piece on the Five C's of credit analysis.  Still far from ready for public consumption, but it was good to spend some time writing.  I enjoy writing.  (This blog doesn't count.)  When a piece of writing comes together, it always makes me so happy and satisfied . But boy, it certainly hurts like a motherfucker to get a piece to come together.

6)  Been in contact with my web developer James throughout the course of the day, so that's been helpful.  Gchat is very good for this purpose.  You can do what you need to do but not remain locked into face to face discussions for long periods of productive time.

That's all. It's 11:45, so we've gotten about 12 solid hours of work in...but I still feel good, so let's see what I get into next!

August 2 and 3, 2011

The last two days have been pretty good.  Felt like we were getting somewhere, although somewhat slowly still.

August 2, 2011

1)  Jimmy Carbone from Jimmy's No. 43 answered my email almost immediately about meeting up to discuss his restaurant and Villager.

2) Andre Wechsler from Wechsler's Currywurst is also happy to meet up to discuss the same.

3) I set up a lunch with two bankers from Citi to discuss retail banking with small businesses.

4) Set up a meeting with Alie Shaper and Craig Kayaian from Brooklyn Oenology, a wine producer and tasting room, in Williamsburg.

August 3, 2011

The morning was spent preparing for the meetings today.  The first meeting was a little underwhelming.  Dave S. introduced me to some of his colleagues who work with the smallest of small businesses as relationship managers at Citi.  They weren't really able to tell me anything Dave hasn't told me and didn't seem especially interested in answering any of my questions with anything more than terse, very straightforward answers that offered little insight.  Luckily, I had some excellent Provencale Moules Frites.   And then I had a beer with Dave at a German Restaurant Beer Bar at 3:30.

After that, I hopped on the swelteringly muggy subway with a single transfer to make my way over to Brooklyn Oenology, where I met with Alie Shaper and Craig Kayaian (her boyfriend and informal business strategist) about their financing options, as well as a quick discussion of Villager.  The discussion was really quite lively and interesting.  Alie started out as an aerospace engineer who decided she wanted to be in the wine business.  Pursuing that goal, she went into the wine business and hopped around a few places until she decided to mix the artisinal, local and high quality concepts of Brooklyn and produce local wines in the borough.  In 2006, she began producing her own wines from Long Island grapes and began selling them through local retailers.  After her production ramped up and expanded considerably, they decided to open a tasting room in Williamsburg, where they showcase their own wines and other wines and spirits from New York.  All of their wine labels come from local artists and they use the tasting room as an arthouse as well.

The discussion ultimately was wide ranging.  They need a capital infusion that is beyond the capabilities of Villager and are planning to expand and grow.  They want to push out and be bigger.  We talked through the various forms of financing, from a convertible debt deal to a straight equity deal to a structured note to bank loans to interest free Villager-like loans, to bonds to offering structure and the difficulty of the securities laws.  Without going into too much detail, Craig and Alie were razor sharp, ambitious and very charismatic.  I think they will be fine with whatever path they choose.  I find that despite my nervousness, I love meeting all of these business owners.  It's just so much more interesting.  I just need to get my product FINISHED so I can figure out how to sell rather than to just serve as a sounding board for all of the ways small businesses can raise money.

It becomes more apparent to me every day that the charlatans and assholes who perpetrated securities fraud and made excessive money pushing other people's money around have made it incredibly difficult for smaller players to access funds.  Sure, the public markets are extraordinarily liquid and get a pricing premium because of the enforcement regime, but what about everyone else?  

August 1, 2011

Getting up on time is a bitch.  Another day where I set my alarm for 7:30 am and I wake up at 10:30 am.  Non-lawyer life is very different.  My body is going to get used to sleep and it is going to be bad news.

Today was a bit of a mixed bag.  I ended up working from home today because I was up at 10:30 and had a 6:30 meeting.  Yes, this is ridiculous, but considering that my commute would take about an hour total and I had to get ready and everything, that would only leave me about 5 hours of solid work time with an hour of travel, a half hour getting ready and not getting a workout in.  The workout is important because I got a 3 day pass to a local gym and figure I should get the most out of it.

First thing I did today was sign up for Rackspace.  We officially have a web server!

Second thing I did was re-draft our entire LLC Agreement for the company.  After a nice conversation with Niya last night about the tax implications of structuring the LLC to give me 80% of the company while only contribution 33% of the capital, she explained that my concept of an LLC membership interest operating like a normal corporation equity share was the wrong way to go.  Instead, LLC's have capital accounts for each of their members, so as long as all future profits and losses are allocated 80% to me, I don't incur tax income upon incorporation and capital contribution.  This is all very boring, but it was critical to getting the company structured correctly.  I spent the morning stripping out all of the portions of the agreement referring to "Units" and replacing it with the capital account and profit allocation construct instead.  I think this works much better.  I didn't proofread because I am sick as balls of proofreading legal documents, but I can clean it up later.

I also spent an hour or two talking to my good buddy Mark who is a coder that has offered to construct our web back-end.  The original plan was for him to come up for a 4 day weekend and we would commence a crazy hack-a-thon.  About halfway through the day he mentioned that if there was ever a time for me to make him an offer, I should do it because he was getting fed up with his job.  He was considering going to another company, so I offered him a month in NYC, paid with accommodations, to come work for Villager for a month to code and fix the entire back-end up so it would be flawless and fully operational.  It's very exciting.

I also spent another hour or two re-editing and constructing the web copy for the website.  There's a lot to be populated, so I had to take some time to re-polish.  I have been writing quite a few blogposts for the company, so some of my language and key words have changed.  Just wanted to get it consistent because messaging will be very important here.

Finally, I met with Jill Ackerman, who is the head of the 12th Street Block Association.  I heard of Jill when I was talking to the owner of Continuum Cycles, when a young school teacher came by and mentioned that she was just a spectacular leader and amazing at organizing folks in the area.  He gave me her email address and I put in a message to her.  We didn't quite get off on the right foot.  She pushed me away during the first email exchange and during the second email exchange immediately attacked what I was doing as potentially detrimental to the neighborhood.  We swapped 4 or 5 emails where I patiently but flatly explained that she misunderstood the business model, after which she slowly began to come around and agreed to meet.   It was a little hostile for a bit, but once I explained what we were doing and conceded that she probably didn't want to meet, her curiosity was finally piqued.  Go Figure.

We met at Cafe Pick Me Up on the corner of Avenue A and 9th.  She was probably in her mid-40's, a pleasant looking woman.  We exchanged pleasantries for a lot of the conversation -- she narrated many of the events that swallowed up Alphabet City in the 90's and past ten years, talked about changes in the neighborhood and then we got to the meat of her activism and concerns with the neighborhood:  bars bars bars.

In her particular block of the East Village, there are about 19 bars within a 500 foot radius.  Although this seems sorta like a fun thing and good for the community (maybe), it turns out that there are other effects.  The main concern for her is that her community was now a destination for night life but that there were no sustainable daytime businesses.  The groceries disappeared, normal services were no longer available and the daytime businesses that were open could not sustain themselves because no one comes into the area during the day.  She further went onto explain the crazy liquor license situation in NY.  Liquor licenses cost like 200-300K to acquire.  When a bar or restaurant is sold, one of the most important assets to be sold is the liquor license for the business, which can be provisionally transferred to the next owner for 6 months, after which it can be renewed.  What this means is that any business that has a liquor license stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars if they can't get paid for the license -- much like a security deposit.  Thus the landlords and the business owners stand to lose a lot of money if they close down their bar and like, a hair salon moves in, because they aren't able to sell the liquor license and get their money back.  As a result, it seems almost like whenever a new location obtains a liquor license, it will be nearly impossible for any other business to take over the space except a restaurant or bar that wants the license.

Pretty fascinating stuff.

Okay, off tonight to go to dollar oyster night at Desnuda.  Hopefully I can con the bartender / owner into talking to me about their financials. 

July 27, 2011

A shortish day in the office because I needed to get a haircut and because Kemi was coming in from out of town in the early afternoon, so I didn't really get to the office until 3.  Sigh.

The day was consumed primarily by two tasks:

1)  Finishing the blogpost about Soaking up the Annoying, which went up last night.
2)  Trying to write up some of the back-end requirements for the website, which I sent to Mark.

Nothing great.  Yesterday, Tuesday, was far more productive when I drafted up the entire fee structure issue and took care of that.  

July 25, 2011

Today started out a little weak.  I woke up at 10 am, rather than at 8 am when I planned to be up and I just didn't feel great.  I think I need to stop eating spicy foods -- even though I have no issues with the actual eating or the spiciness, it throws my digestion into disarray for a couple days at a time and I have learned that when my digestion is a little bit off, my entire sense of well-being goes off-kilter.  Plus, we are coming off of like 5 days of wretched heat-wave heat, where we are subjected to a barrage of sweating, followed by sluggish lounging to avoid any sort of re-heating effect.

We spent the entire day yesterday lying on the couch and watching The Office on Netflix for like 4 hours, and a couple of documentaries (Beer Wars, eh, not bad not good), Modern Family and Jackass.  It was a good day, but it was extremely sluggish.  We also left the house exactly one time to go to Ben's place to watch Breaking Bad (the episode felt like filler) and came back home drained.

Anyway, today was not such a bad day.

First, I wrote a nice email to Alie Shaper at Brooklyn Oenology in hopes of having a meeting with her to learn about her business finances and seeing if they would be interested in the Villager platform.  After, I went over to Continuum Cycles, where I had a 30 minute talk with Jeff, the owner, about his finances and the Villager platform.  I love the store and I love what they do and I would love if they would raise through Villager.  They are good people and it seems like their business model is perfect for Villager.  I also met a young teacher named Frank who works with the CB3 to try and change the business makeup of the east village.  He pointed out that the neighborhood has like 24 bars in a 500 foot radius and that it means no one visits the area during the daytime so more sustainable daytime businesses can't stay alive.  Their goal (12th Street Block Association) is to bring more daytime non-entertainment businesses to the area.  Very interesting stuff. I reached out to the head of the association, Jill Ackerman, to see if she'd be willing to meet.

P.S.  Alie Shaper just emailed me back.  Awesome.  

July 18

Been struggling quite seriously over the past couple of days to finish up an entirely too academic issue of identifying the correct scale for social investments.  The concept hit me like a bolt of lightning during a discussion with Slow Money NYC, but getting it into digestible and interesting text is a bit of a challenge.

Today has been so-so.  I feel terrible today.  Sore kidneys or something and dullness in my stomach.  I have a feeling this relates to the massive amounts of alcohol consumed over the weekend.  I take responsibility, but ugh.  Plus, it doesn't help that it's upwards of 95 degrees and muggy as fucking hell in New York right now.

As far Villager goes, today was first contact with a business!  I met with the owner/head chef of Egg Williamsburg and his number 2, who runs operations at the business.  Egg is a gorgeous little restaurant that serves straightforward, super high quality southern influenced foods.  Very charming, loved the space and the atmosphere.  The main issue is that they are seeking funding in the 500K range which is outside of Villager's ability to manage and probably isn't a good start case.  We did discuss financing alternatives for the restaurant and I tried to walk them through some of the alternatives, but it's abundantly clear to everyone in the small business world that the securities laws are unholy minefield entirely focused on stifling capital formation and only aiding those who can access high powered lawyers.  They offered to feed me and I reluctantly declined, having just consumed a large green juice down the street and we had a productive and quite pleasant conversation.  I hope to re-visit them in a later phase.  I liked them a lot.

I spent the rest of the day reviewing financial statements and business plans of various presenters at the Slow Money entrepreneur's showcase.  The amount of cash flowing in and out of these companies is interesting to see on paper.  I'm not sure how much money I expected a small business to make or how much profit they would see, but in many ways it is lower than I expected.  Margins are also quite tight.

I also spent the rest of the day feeling lethargic and generally crappy.  My bike sprung a flat after my meeting with the Brooklyn Torch (local currency) ladies and someone stole Kristen's front tire in the course of the evening.  Bunch of fucking savages in this town.

July 12 and July 13, 2011

I don't think I really remember much of July 12.  Not for any particular reason, but just cuz.

So....the big event of July 12 was the "Find a Co-Founder" event that took place on a private terrace, a 4,000 square foot private terrace to be precise, where 400+ entrepreneurial types gathered for free drinks and ostensibly a chance to meet a co-founder.  As could be expected, almost everyone that showed up was some person with a business idea seeking help in executing that idea.  This is pretty much the prevailing theme in NYC startup culture.  I certainly was not looking for a Co-Founder, I was just forcing myself to go to a networking event of this nature (which I totally hate) and just getting used to the friction of having to cold-introduce myself to dozens of people.  Among the people I met included the founder of Rent-Hackr, who wants to bring transparency to rents but has no clear strategy on how to get thousands of people to sign up when you need thousands to have a starting point, a video conference consultant and a reporter who started writing down everything I said, even though I spent most of that time talking about Villager and how frothy and ridiculous the tech scene is.  I drank beer.  It was just fine.  I am a natural relationship builder -- I am not a natural networker.  I also found a woman who wants to build a "social gifting" sight, but refused to reveal her "twist" her "secret" her "special little design" which really wasn't that secret.  (As you can tell, I got the secret out of her.  I kept a straight face.)   Afterwards, I made my over to Williamsburg for the Gastronauts event and add tongue tacos, congealed blood, gorgeous Van Leeuwen ice creams, pork chop over rice and paired it all with...Rolling Rock.  Mmmm.  (New york is fucking hot these days and sitting outside in my suit was a no no).

Other than that, I spent quite a bit of time refreshing myself on securities laws in preparation for a Slow Money NYC small working group meeting the next day and also studied up on the models they were considering.  It should be interesting.   I also chose some more samples I received from my web designer.  That guy is the tits.

Today, July 13 has been better.  I just had lunch with Amy Cortese, author of Locavesting, at Rucola, a beautiful little restaurant in Boerum Hill that serves all local, organic foods.  Delicious food, great conversation and really got along well.  Hopefully this relationship continues on and that we have a long fruitful partnership in working on local projects.  At 4 pm today, I will be attending the Slow Money Investors meeting to explore options of how to invest in farms and organic food in NYC.  I hope that my years of organic farming, Pollan-fever and securities law background are a good fit for what they need.

ALSO, I received an email back from Egg in Williamsburg who are trying to raise money for a farm in upstate New York.  They are excited to talk about Villager and I really hope they are a good first target for our pilot. First business contact!  Whoo hoo!!

Update:

The meeting with Slow Money NYC (Investors Inspired by Slow Money) at Faber Daeufer & Rosenberg was quite productive, not least because I was gathered in a room with many people with similar food and investment philosophies as well as a mix of accredited investors and, of course, Amy.  From my memory, I met a dude named Michael, who worked at an investment fund, Derek Denckla (the chairman and serial social entrepreneur), Amy Cortese, Steve Godeke (an investment manager and business prof at NYU), Holly Howard (on steering committee and works at Egg Williamsburg, who we are going to be speaking to next week), Nicole Reed (steering committee, need to follow up), Brian Kaminer (Steering committee, need to follow up), Sam Kressler (a finance guy who didn't survive the cataclysm who went into food systems and is now trying hard to get back into a big bank...) and Evan Wagner, who is in Green construction.  

The thrust of the discussion was finding ways to foster an actual investment platform for agriculture and slow food.  The discussion was slightly discursive at times and the chairman of Slow Money NYC was quite good at explaining a lot of the possibilities. We had a hard time finding focus, but I think it was a relatively productive session, not least because people began to develop a baseline familiarity with each other (at least us new ones) and I was able to make some of my views heard.  

In particular, it was entirely unclear whether the point was to democratize slow money financing for the public or whether it was merely to channel capital to preserving the foodshed.  I think the issues faced are entirely different on both sides.  If you are trying to channel capital, then you are targeting accredited investors.  Among accredited investors, you are probably shit out of luck targeting institutional investors or funds, who do not invest in "high risk, low return."  That leaves you with rich folks.  Ultimately, as I said during the meeting, what we are pricing into these investments is a positive externality.  You are never going to be able to get a single individual to "invest" in high risk, low reward investments if you expect to provide a return, social or economic.  They, investing 1 million dollars, will never reap enough social reward to give up that giant chunk of money unless it is a form of philanthropy.  I argued that on a small scale, of 100 dollars or 200 dollars, people are able to reap the social return on investment and externality because their contribution was small.  Thus our focus should be on expanding opportunities to the retail level.  Otherwise, it was charity.  

I think I need a more fulsome post about this on the Villager blog.  To the top of the list!

July 7, 2011

Day 3 of the raw food / only plants day was in some ways better and in some ways worse.  I certainly feel a little less ill than I normally do, when I eat myself into a stomachache and coma three times a day, but I find it difficult to cope with the gnawing hunger.  It is amazing how much food I don't have to eat, but nevertheless cram myself full of.  After waking up to a crazy green juice Kristen made out of lettuce, chard, kale, apple and some other fruit or other, I went to the office by bike, sweating the whole way over the bridge and sweating another 30 minutes in the office.  I LOVE new york in the summer, but sometimes it can be a little bit brutal.

Today I did a full re-write of the Villager Questionnaire for individuals to get a sense of lender demand.  I decided to eschew the corporate voice and just write in my own voice.  It is still slightly sanitized, but hopefully it's not all that different from how I used to write on this blog.  I'm sick of corporate voices and corporate language and the jargon that glazes over communication with a slick veneer of vagueness.  Maybe it will land with a pitiful thud, but might as well give it a go.  I don't want to become what annoys me.

I also spent a significant amount of time researching methods of credit analysis and re-examined the Five C's of credit analysis: Capacity, Conditions, Collateral, Character and Capital.  After going through each prong, I realized that Villager fulfilled each of these issues in innovative new ways and was excited to go through and write it up.  As usual, my first run was extremely subpar and my final was only slightly better.  I need to spend a little more time with this, but I think it is important and useful.

There was also a torrential downpour that appeared from nowhere and disappeared as quickly.  Not before the Manhattan Bridge spawned dozens of beautiful little waterfalls and the sewage line in the office parking lot began spewing sewage, flooding the cars up to their bumpers.  Gross, but still kinda interesting.

July 6, 2011

Sent out an email to Jessica  at Greenlight Bookstore, who had capitalized their business with community funding.  She's out of town until the 10th, but hopefully I will hear back from her soon after.  Got her information from Amy Cortese, the author of Locavesting.  Hoping I can learn a lot here. 

Scheduled a lunch with Amy Cortese at Rucola for next Wednesday.  Also very excited to see what she can tell me about the brooklyn local finance scene. 

Spent some time reviewing securities offering exemptions and options for small businesses.  Made a small business securities grid to prepare for meeting with BedStuy organic. Met with Darell Brown and Evelyn Oliver of Organic BedStuy to discuss their financing options.  They are a startup, but are trying to create an organic grocery in BedStuy, which is a virtual food desert, so hopefully that works out.  Fortunately and unfortunately, they are seeking a relatively small slug of capital ($85,000), so they may have some difficulty getting any investment.  Very interesting to meet them and hope they do well. 

Discussion with Mark O. today about the possibility of coding the back-end of the platform, which he says shouldn't be too complicated.  Am interested to see what type of product he can put together and see if it can form the foundation of the site.

Swapped some emails with James G. about setting up the servers and the PayPal sandbox.  Hope to pull the trigger on those arrangements as soon as I get the incorporation documents back from the NYSOS.   Hurry up!

The biggest issue is to just get out there and start talking to businesses.  I need to figure out a game plan for this, I am stalling and I don't have any good reason for it other than just being nervous about the process.  I'm hoping to spark that process by creating a few more organic relationships that get my foot in the door rather than blindly soliciting, so we shall see how that goes for a couple more weeks, otherwise I will need to just suck it up and get going.

***

This is also the third day after we watched "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead", which is a documentary about an aussie who decided he was too fat and too sick and went on a 60 day juice fast across the United States.  Pretty remarkable stuff.  I was entirely skeptical and definitely had the "oh here we go again" thought once I saw him making juice in the back of his SUV...but after the first 30 minutes I was hooked.  It was fascinating to see the changes he underwent.  Even more fascinating is his encounter with a morbidly obese truck driver who he happened to encounter at a truck stop and the unbelievable transformation the truck driver underwent after attempting his own juice fast.  Pathos galore.  I didn't pull this hard for Rudy.  (well maybe)

In any case, Kristen and I were so enthralled we decided to go on a 3-day mini fast:


Cooked food once a day.
No alcohol.
No meat.
No eggs.
No dairy.
No fish.
No flour.
No refined sugar.
No simple carbohydrates.
Lots of green smoothies and fresh juices.

I have to admit -- this shit is difficult.  I find myself hungry ALL of the time.  Even after eating a barrel of vegetables, my stomach feels oddly hollow.  I am grumpy.  I am just sorta uncomfortable and not really in the mood to eat another raw piece of vegetable. 

That being said, I do feel strangely better that I am just filling my body entirely with plants, lots and lots of greens, lots of water, nutrients and nothing refined. Also, even though the first day was kinda shitty, the second day feels normal.  Lets see how the third day goes. 

(Why only three days?  Visiting Kristen's family down at the shore this weekend and it's unlikely that we are going to be eating only vegetables and not drinking anything.  And we don't want to have a conversation about it.  I, myself, find myself very easily annoyed by dietary zealots and raw foodists and juice people and fasters, etc.  I just am curious and already fully subscribe to "Eat Food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  Why not see how it goes?)

July 1, 2011

So the Digital Dumbo event (sponsored by Big Fuel) basically exemplified all of the things I don't really like about networking:  Lots and lots of fashionable young people crowded into a giant sweaty room, the twitter stream for the event writ large on a screen, "Like" stickers that you are supposed to stick on each other's customized T-shirts to demonstrate how much people like you for some sort of contest and just a pervasive sense of "awesome awesome awesome!" in a way that's not awesome.  I will continue to go to these events and hopefully meet some interesting people, but it's just not all that fun.

Today was not a very productive day, I suppose.  We woke up at 11, went to lunch with Jeff M. at B&H (good dude, good food) and then we arrived at the office around 3:30 pm with all sorts of gear in tow: a new television, some cables, a twelve pack of old school Rolling Rock.

I had a long productive talk with James G. about his web development contract and we talked through the ins and outs of print and digital design so that he could get to work in earnest on the development.  And then drank beer.

Now Kristen is going to help me develop my forecasts so I can determine how many accounts I need in order to make my first dollar and then my first billion and a half.  Oh yeah.

Thursday, June 30

Quote of the Day from Rework:  "It's entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true."

Arrived in the office a bit late, ended up sleeping until 9:30 or so due to meeting with James R. and Wei D. over drinks at Old Town Bar to discuss refugee life from the BigLaw maelstrom.  Good talk, mostly ended up gossiping and talking about every thing for a few hours rather than dig into the details on our respective companies.

James raised the point that Villager should just intermediate between the businesses and the lenders without actually issuing any of the notes.  That is, the business should be the note issuer.  I spent some time today thinking about that, but I think in the end we have to avoid that path because 1) simplicity is critical to the customer experience on both ends and 2) the securities laws implications of a direct issue are a bit too complex to have a  small business owner grasp.

Today was another day of struggling to figure out what to do:

1)  Finished Zaragosa post on the blog.
2)  Reviewed the contract from James G. at GoToBed for web development services.  Revised the contract and sent it back.
3)  Modeled out the direct issue concept and decided against it.
4) Emails with Brooklyn Torch.

Still haven't heard back from the developer who was ostensibly the dream partner, but I think my decision to go with GTB rather than them is probably proved right by the fact that it took 1 week to get a proposal (after a promise of "this week") and a day has passed without a response.  In the end, I need someone who will work enthusiastically and throw themselves full-time to the project and be fully available and responsive to my guidance.  James seems to be that guy and he is very good.  Hopefully his chattiness will not cause any productivity issues.

Also came across someone else's post on Profounder who rolled up the concept fairly neatly, which I have re-summarized here:  Villager will have the advantage of rolling marketing, customer acquisition, identifying loyal customers and strengthening existing relationships into the process of funding.

Off we go tonight to the Dumbo Digital "What's Your Status" event sponsored by Big Fuel.  The last Big Fuel event I went to was annoying and I did not enjoy it.  We shall see how it goes.

Migration.

So, I may or may not blog here from time to time.  But since Villager is the new focus of all of my time, I suggest you also re-direct to villagernyc.wordpress.com.  It's beta and will be migrating to the actual site once it's ready...but it's a start. 

Villager: The First Week

Unsurprising -- there is a lot to do.

The initial moments of panic I suffered in the first three days came from thinking of Villager as a tech start-up, which would put us in fierce competition with the bustling  masses of crowdfunding platforms, peer-to-peer lending giants and social media driven start-ups.  Ten minutes on Techcrunch or a quick review of the dozens of start-up articles that are published daily by mainstream media sources immediately convey the fact that New York and San Francisco are in the throes of start-up mania.  The (must-be-dreaming) valuation of Groupon at $25 billion, Facebook at $50 billion, Twitter at $7 billion and Zynga at $10 billion has angel investors and venture capitalists in frenzy mode, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at start-ups in hopes of riding the next wave.  Software developers are being lured with bigger perks and better compensation and there appears to be unlimited appetite for developers and a very limited supply, as the earlier fears of software engineering being dominated by outsourcing were clearly wrong.  All of this led little ol' me to start freaking out because so far this is just me and all of the tech folks I know are so happy at their jobs that there is no way I could convince them to jump ship.  This is a fiercely competitive world and culture I was not entirely ready for and that I am frankly a bit terrified of.

But, I think all of this is wrong.  Besides the fact that I think we are witnessing the frothy crest of a social media bubble (I don't see how it could be otherwise -- all you need to do is look at this article to fully grasp the froth), I think it is fundamentally wrong to think of Villager as a tech start-up, despite the fact that the internet is a critical tool.  I am not trying to reach a national or global market, I am doing the opposite -- I am trying to reach deeply into local communities and strengthen the ties within.  I need to push hard to cultivate connections with small businesses in New York and Brooklyn and push harder to reach citizens (heh, villagers? (no.)) in these markets.  I want to use technology to re-orient to the local, not to the global.  Now that it's the simplest thing to take a dollar and stuff it into the balance sheet in a Chinese or Indian company instantaneously, it should be just as simple to take that dollar and invest it in the donut shop next door. (Disclosure: I love donuts.) (Not much of a disclosure, of course I love donuts.)

In these terms, I am more comfortable and confident of steering my own course and finding my own way.  The entire mission of Villager is to preserve the character of our neighborhoods, of allowing local entrepreneurs and their dreams to thrive, to strengthen the bonds of community, to re-consider the meaning of investment, to reduce the footprint of the chains that slowly undefine the character of a hometown and use of the power of infinite possibility and optionality to choose what we would like our neighborhoods to look like.  I hope to build my business accordingly.   

Starting Over

The idea of starting an ambitious and complex company was a lot less scary at 3 a.m. while handcuffed to my office desk.

I've been on "vacation" for exactly three days working from my brand new "office" space in DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) Brooklyn just trying to get a sense of what I will need to do to get Villager from just another idea to a company that actually works. 

Three harrowing days.  Just sitting at my desk.

I have discovered that I am going to be trying to elbow my way into a crowded room full of very connected and powerful people.  Since embarking on my "internet surfing IS learning" tour of social lending and crowdfunding, I have since discovered profounder, rockethub, indiegogo, crowdrise, microplace, loan guarantee fund, myc4, on deck capital, funding circle, community lend, fynanz (awful name), big carrots, crowd cube, start some good and of course have learned more about Kiva, Lending Club, Prosper, Kickstarter and Inventure, which I already knew about. 

Three. Harrowing. Days. 

It's easy to tell yourself that it's going to be hard and there's going to be doubt and it's going to be challenging and that you have to fight for everything that is worth it and that you just have to believe and struggle and keep moving forward...but sometimes you forget what that actually means.  

Overcoming self-doubt is the challenge.  Here I go. 

Villager.

I have decided to learn to fly on the way down.  Wish me luck.  

Terry Jones is a fucking idiot. 

$1.44 two hard boiled eggs, testicular in my styrofoam bowl, flat spots notwithstanding.
$17.99 giant bottle of yellow tail cabernet sauvignon (year irrelevant, if the label even attempts it)

Tired.

But Hunger Games was awesome. 

7.25 whole + sum lunch (don't ask)
3.83 oikos and gum.


My birthday party was lovely with activities from 5 pm through 4 am, although it is my understanding that I fell asleep sometime around 3 am, after which people messed with me, and after which I woke up at 7 am to release the red wine that was still inside of me, causing my head to spin.  I was informed there are as many neurons in the gut as there are in the brain - I believe this.  I was also informed that I played and sang on the ukulele extensively, but I have no memory of that either.


Work has gotten bad -- the feeling of despair and dread that comes with working in such an office is difficult to deal with.  Yes, all of you stupid assholes, I should be happy to have such a well-paying job, but boy do I hate it.  This is simply not my highest and best use and is deeply bad for my will to live.  I am by no means depressed and I am by no means suicidal or anything like that, but sometimes I just feel so trapped and feel so dissatisfied with where I ended up in a career that I am not all that fazed by the prospect of simply being wiped out by some freak accident. Even though I clearly deeply deeply don't want to die or suffer or anything like that, some part of me always thinks "at least I won't have be a lawyer anymore" and I find comfort in that.  


Call my symptomatic of chronically dissatisfied yuppies or youth.  Or just call me someone who isn't where they belong in life.  

I've been a little bit lax in posting because my job has decided to fuck me again.  Granted, I did basically have 4 months of doing very little and enjoying my life, which I savored, but now it looks like I'm back to the shit of things.  So I lost track.

But before i go back into penny pinching and counting, I think I have discovered the rule that will save Villager -- the key that will prevent me from being dragged headfirst into the morass of SEC regulation and pain and suffering associated with trying to get a start-up company registered and completely nailed down with the securities law before even getting my shit together.  And that is Section 3(a)(11) of the Securities Act of 1933, the Intrastate Offering Exemption.  I can totally help small local companies offer securities to small local investors as long as they are all in the same state.  This is exactly the law I needed.  Elegance.  Exciting.

Okay back to it:

Yesterday:


$40.00 Gramercy Park Dental co-pay for fluoride treatment. (sucker)

$3.95 Fast and Fresh Burger exactly 30 minutes after my fluoride treatment at the dentist - looked like an In n Out rip off.  Had to try it.

$1.75 Bag of Almonds (Chili Lime) because I get so fucking hungry after work I can hardly stand it.

$101.50 Whole Foods preparing for my birthday party on Saturday.  Microgreen salad with parmesan, olive oil and lemon with a dash of salt and pepper, 7 pound Bo Ssam to be shredded and glazed wrapped in bibb lettuce, rice, with an oyster, kimchee puree and ginger scallion,  ginger scallion with cold spaghetti noodles, bread, baguette, beer.  I think I am approaching my birthday correctly -- not with exaltation and celebration of my existence with a roomful of strangers -- but keeping it small, with those who matter to me and breaking bread and drinking wine.  An offer, not a receipt.  A thanks for the life they allow me, not for the life I give them.




Today: 


$1.75 bottle of V8 from the cafeteria which i promptly spiked with black pepper, cholula hot sauce, a dash of worcestershire and some sort of pathetically damning cold mixture from the salad bar which, despite all mental models to the contrary, was not healthful and good for me just because it came from the salad bar.


And that's a wrap.

No breakfast.  First full week of work.

$3.45 the most depressing salad of my entire career -- ignored the wilted mesclun mix (the inclusion of red lettuce in any salad bag or any salad mix is a 100% certain sign that you are going to be eating gritty, rotten vegetable matter, I hate mesclun after learning this fact, the hard way) and went straight to the sad, watery, slightly too cold iceberg lettuce and random red leaf veggie (cab) mix, topped with soybeans, chunks of broccoli that are entirely too large to be pleasant for a salad, dried out chicken breast cubes, red and yellow bell peppers tossed in blue cheese (which is really watery blue cheese since the cafeteria folks don't really dry the salad that well) from a styrofoam bowl.  I am going to start bringing my own salads to work because eating is a chore from the cafeteria.   The upside is that I recently got an insane micro greens salad mix from the farmer's market and it was the most incredible, tender, fresh, broom of the system wonderful mouthful of greens that I've ever had.  I feel like a happy cow.

$0.72 red bartlett pear.  Despite eating this as my mid-afternoon snack, I felt super hungry.

$3.99 chicken gyro from a 14th street halal cart on the way for a 45 minute subway ride to Bedford-Stuyvesant to pick up our bicycles which we would promptly grab and ride back for 45 minutes to Manhattan.  I remain convinced that the ride over the Brooklyn bridge at night, into the heart of wall street and the skyline, over the wooden planks and over the river and through the wind (to grandmother's house we go?) is one of the greatest experiences New York has to offer.  It is a free moment.

$4.20 for a red velvet donut and marble glazed donut and decaf small coffee from Donut Pub at 10 pm on the way to the subway station.  Just cuz.  Donut Pub is the best.

Today, although a good day, was a sad day because work has picked up in such a manner that I think I have legitimately lost the rest of the month and most of April.  My new plan is to quit my job in May and line up a job for July or August, giving myself 2-3 months to pursue Villager full time.  This seems eminently reasonable. 

$1.44 for two hard-boiled eggs with disconcerting flat spots, corners, edges and thus a surprising lack of resilience -- these must have come from a giant bag -- which rang up on the cafeteria as "boiled chk egg" which, all together, was highly alienating as I imagined a giant plastic bag full of soapy looking liquid and a ghastly number of hard boiled eggs laid by dozens of different chickens kept in pens in a giant factory farm, all somehow sterile and biologically toxic at the same time.  (Isn't anyone else freaked out by the fact that a carton of milk probably has a bodily fluid produced inside the bodies of dozens if not hundreds of cows?)  (Come to think of it, I think "single cow milk" cartons of milk would be a real money maker.  Or single cow cheese, raised on a diet of dandelion and dew rather than bone meal and prions.)  (I wonder if a pack of bacon is all one pig.  It's gotta be, right, if only because it's cheaper to slice a slab and package it then re-organize multiple pieces of bacon?)

$7.55 spinach pita with falafel, tzatziki, hummus, tomato, romaine lettuce and feta with a side of half sour pickles and terra blue potato chips.

$3.20 heirloom tomato salad (the red and dark green bad boys) from the cafeteria, which clearly is not in season, but I figured was completely and entirely irrelevant because there is no way that anything in our cafeteria is local, organic or anything short of agrindustry, and I was so excited to see a tomato salad that I got a heaping bowl and promptly dropped an oily tomato on my dress pants after getting back to my desk

(all of the above underwritten by styrofoam plates/bowls and delivered using a fork that I literally have not washed -- but have wiped -- for at least two months)

$13.00 six pack of miller lite tallboys

$7.50 post open bar New Amici pizza slices (for me and K)

$7.04 Barbecue tofu wrap (actually fucking awesome and my favorite thing in the cafeteria when it's there) and bag of baked lays with half-sour pickles (so much better than full sours)

$3.17 Hummus, cucumbers and bell peppers

I am beginning to mull the possibility of throwing caution to the wind and taking a risk with Villager.  A serious possibility.  

Yesterday:

$25.60 Fuji Sushi (lunch for two)
$72.14 Whole Foods (shopping for the week?)
$50.59 CVS (shopping for the month?)

Today:
$2.00 bottle of water.
$3.00 snacks in the day
$12.00 Xi'an famous foods (dinner for two)

I am deeply depressed today.  The prospect of continuing to be a biglaw lawyer is starting to wear on me.  Deeply unhappy about this.  The dream job is over.  In, what I believe, is bullshit HR nonsense.  I don't know how I am going to be able to cope with this.  Even if objectively, my job is not something that sounds that unbearable, I am just so deeply disappointed in my job, so deeply disappointed in ending up as a corporate lawyer serving the bad guys, that I don't know what to do with myself?   This disappointment is beginning to consume me.

How do you fix it when you are too demoralized to do anything?  I need to find my will.  I have no discipline and I have no will and it is starting to ruin my life.  

Vacation

$33.00 Sripraphai - excellent as always.  Shrimp Tom Yum Soup, Green Papaya Salad,  Chinese Water Cress, Whole Red Snapper in crispy chili-garlic, drunken noodles, Taro/Sticky Rice.

I decided to take a vacation from my expenses during my vacation -  the reasons were obvious:  1) lazy. ass.  2) terror.

I am going to spend 5 minutes summing up the vacation now, though I may come back and re-visit the trip if I get some free time during the week.

1. It rained the entire fucking trip.  We sat down for breakfast outside of the Redwood forests watching the Weather Channel and saw exactly two tiny blips of clouds for every state east of California.  Clear skies.  Unseasonably warm.  Beautiful.  The entire western seaboard, however, was dealing with torrential rains and floods.  And hail.  And snow.  And wind.  The entire week.  (When we arrived in NY, it was raining AND snowing.)
2. Redwood trees are beautiful.  Redwood forests are humbling.  The immensity of these living things thrusting powerfully up from foggy hillsides with such power and solidity was moving in a way I didn't expect (frankly, I expected to be disappointed.)   It's not just the height or breadth or age of the trees, but just their sheer power and immensity.  They transcended my minute understanding of Life. Go see them.  
3. Big Sur is gorgeous. 
4. We managed to see, in the wild, Sea Lions (dozens), a herd of Roosevelt Elk (about a dozen within 5-15 feet, several dozen from a distance), elephant seal bulls, cows and pups (hundreds and hundreds in a colony in Big Sur) and banana slugs (I died inside, so who cares about the fucking number).   No bears (I always wonder about my ability to make myself big and make lots of noise to scare off a charging bear, but for some reason have less doubt in my ability to "fight back aggressively" if attacked), no sea otters (bashing oysters on their bellies) or whales (I already crossed that off my bucket list).
5. I drove 1600 miles.  Route 101 and Route 1 in California must be unparalleled in the world.  I hope I'm proven wrong but am not unsatisified if I am not. 
6. My phone interview for my dream job was extremely demoralizing and disappointing.   C'est la vie. 
7. Maybe I will ruminate more later.

Seattle Day 2

$9.85 blood oranges, cherry tomatoes, basil in Pike's Place public market (farmer's market)
$12.55 K's hair product, Mountain Dew throwback (rad), bottle of water at Walgreen's
$8.75 dill pickles from farmer's market
$2.95 6 mini best ever fucking donuts ever from farmer's market
$37.95 oysters, bowl of fish chowder, bowl of clam chowder and two beers at Fisherman Restaurant and Bar on the pier
$9.00 cab ride to Anchovies and Olives
$76.35 dinner at Anchovies and Olives -- 4 Kumamoto Oysters with scallion mignonette, 4 Shigoku Oysters with lime ice, Escolar with avocado, coppa and lime, bigoli with anchovies, chilis and garlic and spanish mackerel with eggplant, spicy tomato sauce, guanciale and mint
$11.00 cab ride back to the Alexis hotel

TL; DR

$2.25 spinach knish from old world eastern European bakery that manages to survive on 9th street.  (I think it’s actually called 9^th Street Bakery)  It was not good.  But the Fifth Element was inexplicably playing on an equally inexplicably large flat screen over the display case.  So I ate half the knish sadly off a Styrofoam white plate while watching the movie then threw it away and left as an old man came in to buy a loaf of rye bread, sliced.

$25.70 for laundry.  Two bags.  Damn.

$54.50 Cab to JFK from the East Village.

Edit:  $23.20  Dexter Season 1

$6.06 for Dentyne Ice, Poland Springs and Mello Yello (holy shit!).  Or…Gum, Water, Soda – fucking marketers.

$43.00 cab ride from an Ethiopian driver from Seattle Tacoma hospital to downtown Seattle

Today is an experiment.

I’m trying something different today. Rather than the usual entertainment fest I throw for flights -- serial movie marathons, podcast oversaturation, music plus reading, reading the New Yorker or a novel beyond all patience or watching an entire season of television shows in a single sitting, I have decided to see if I can just sit here with a blank page and write.  I actually downloaded the entire first season of Dexter  (ah shit, I better add that to my expenditures) for this flight, but I’m just gonna let it sit there for as long as I can. 

JFK to Seattle/Tacoma.  JetBlue.  6 hours.  Personal TV is turned off.  Sammi Sweetheart was next to me in the security line.

Why?  I was talking to B during another drinkfest and I reiterated that I spend no time in reflection.  B recently attained his Holiest Grail – an iPhone on Verizon the day it came out.  During every break in our conversation (including pauses within and between sentences), he would pick up his phone, type in his 6 digit work-mandated password, and start dicking around on his phone, face blank and bathed in blue light. It could not have been pressing, though I can’t say for sure what he was doing.  Maybe he was checking his email, maybe he was sending text messages, maybe he was playing Angry Birds, at one point he definitely started downloading NPR apps after a voiceover mentioned said apps during a broadcast of a live Explosions in the Sky concert on All Songs Considered. To be fair, I myself was in my computer nook intermittently Gchatting with K and shuffling through my iTunes playlist (shuffle is embarassingly bad at reading my mind), at times clicking mindlessly on bookmarked news sites and scanning the headlines for catastrophe, having just turned off the WTFpodcast I was listening to when B arrived all while sipping wine and ostensibly socializing with B.  This was essentially what happened for 3 hours.  So, without much of a sense of revelation or epiphany, the familiar thought crept into my mind again: I don’t think about things anymore.  I don’t reflect.  In fact, I actively avoid reflection.  In the moments where reflection is common – in the shower, in bed, while cleaning, making breakfast, getting dressed, brushing teeth, while walking (!) – I have actively erected (hehe) measures to allow someone else’s thoughts to replace my own.  These days it’s Marc Maron (WTFpodcast), Ira Glass (This American Life), Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (Radiolab – and curses for them not hiring me), Bill Simmons (BS Report), Ross Tucker/Matt Williamson (Football Today Podcast), the Slate Gabfest teams and all of the writers of the New Yorker or whatever book I am reading in bed or on the john.  I let people decide the path of my consciousness at all times, leaving me with little or nothing to say.  I have become a vessel for receiving ideas, which is not a substitute for creating or providing ideas.  So, long story short, I decided to take a strange baby step in the direction of re-setting, especially on vacation. I first considered going full David Putty and simply sitting on the airplane, staring at the seat in front of me, and riding out the airplane ride with nothing but my thoughts.  But Jesus fucking Christ, that sounds miserable. So I decided to write for 6 hours.  Let whatever entertained me come from within me (edit at the 4 hour and 20 minute mark: the things that come from within me are remarkably boring) while providing some sort of activity. Did that seem too long and detailed for a brief introduction to this post?  Sure.  But I’m only 15 minutes closer to Seattle. 

I am the blood fluke feasting in the tick feeding on humanity.

I have checked out on the idea of being an attorney, which, despite all of my constant bitching over the past 5 years (sigh), is not as much the sweet release of freedom as I had expected.  It’s a little scary, actually. Once you have established a baseline of income and a standard of living, you have developed behaviors and a groove you settle into for how you spend and what you can do.  (Yes, this is a little relevant to my diary of daily expenditures, though now it just seems interesting to me.  I have never examined my consumption patterns before.)  When I really want a new song on iTunes, I can buy it.  When my bicycle gets messed up and I have to take it in for repairs, I can opt for the better Sturmey Archer wheel rather than the used POS, while also replacing the serviceable but damaged bottom bracket, just because I should.  I can go out for drinks and be generous and buy the round, even though it’s likely I will not get a round in return.  I can split the bill in a restaurant, even though I ate less, and not have to behave like a dick.  That being said, the deeper concern isn’t really money.  The fear is turning my back on an entire path of possibilities that would virtually guarantee that I live comfortably and with security for the rest of my life and that could still conceivably lead to success and good things.  I am essentially throwing my very hard-earned law degree and honors away.  Lawyers, being what they are, and the legal profession, being as hierarchical, prestige-oriented and lame as it is, may never really let me back in if I realize I’ve made a mistake.   Is this me being ungrateful for my opportunities?  Am I just another whiney rich asshole with problems everyone would love to have?

But the bottom line is that I have already wasted five years of my life, and I fully believe that “wasted” is the right word choice.  I did not want a law degree, yet now I spend my life in a job I hate, serving the bad guys who often serve bad guys, doing things I am simply not good at (read: legal practice) in order to pay off debt for a degree that feels like it is only going to get me work that I never wanted in the first place.  I could be a legal aid lawyer or a human rights lawyer, maybe, but those fields feel remarkably hard to get into and simply don’t appeal to me because I would still have to do this thing called “law” surrounded by these people called “lawyers” and still have to introduce myself to people as “a lawyer”.  All of which, to my mind, hurts.  Maybe my mind is wrong, but it does.  When people ask me what I do, I don’t know how to say “Corporate Lawyer”: without feeling ashamed of myself.

More specifically, the financial services industry is a fucking parasite on our society.  Yes, blah blah blah, we need some sort of financial system, I’m not a moron, but what exists is not it.  The golden age of financial innovation from 2000 to 2008?  Here’s a graph.  

Zero growth in investment.  Nada.  Bullshit.  Wait, no, that’s not correct.  Income inequality has continued to grow at a rapid clip.     

Beyond being fee-sucking middlemen taking a bite out of our asses and the asses of those companies and people that **make** things, they rob us of our talent by generating vast amounts of wealth doing nothing. (well, I guess gambling with other people’s money counts for something).  So many of the best and the brightest have now been lured to Wall Street to design brilliant methods of generating fees and creating financial arrangements that do nothing except transfer and rearrange piles of money and value (with fees) while rendering the true risks opaque to everyone, including themselves.  Or make enormous bets that pay off for the financiers if they win them and lose the money of their investors (and taxpayers) if they lose them.  I will, for the sake of fairness, leave out the culpability of individuals working financial services, not only because I work in financial services, but also because people need to work, need to have dreams and shouldn’t be held to such standards for working to live.  But as an institution, as an industry?  They are fucking parasites.  They are leeches.  When industrialists create a better air conditioner, a better car, a better headache pill or a better software for organizing information,e we are better for it.  When an investment bank creates an equity-linked note offering bets on how Chinese currency appreciates against the dollar, allowing limited upside gain based on a complex formula but unlimited downside, we are fucked   It’s all bullshit. We do not need this financial system for growth or innovation.  Whatever, I will try to articulate this better later, this was a mess.  An angry mess that is easier to say in conversation than to write down. 

Why was I bank ranting again?  Oh right, being a corporate lawyer. 

It’s unavoidable that I confront my current career path:  I serve the bankers who serve the companies.   A parasite within another parasite.   Taking a step back from that, you will notice that the money I earn from this is funneled directly back to the banks who provided my student loans, who have very profitable interest rates on my loans, ranging from 5% to 7.9% (while getting interest free loans from the Fed after they blew everything up), who in turn have managed to get the government to guarantee my student loans AND prevent my ability to discharge these loans in bankruptcy.   What a bunch of dicks.   (Luckily, I can still go to the bank, borrow as much money as I can, blow it on a week of hookers, blow and gambling in Vegas and discharge that.  Nah, there’s no lobbyists influencing policy.) 

The actual point of all of this, however, is to explore the question of whether this sense of malaise and discontentment and sheer disappointment with my (…oh look, I got a Mr. and Mrs. T’s bloody mary mix instead of V8 from the flight attendant…a very small can though – lame) life decisions is a product of going to law school and becoming a lawyer, or just the universally felt pangs of growing up   I don’t think it’s actually easy to tell because it does seem like most people I know (oh wow, this is delicious bloody mary mix, I am going to ask for another one later) who are lawyers are very unhappy with their jobs – at least the ones who practice in New York, where I want to live.  But then again, most people are disappointed with their lives in some meaningful way.  I think this becomes more acute as you get older, though I imagine it begins to dull as well.  I just feel like I’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long and need to change course before it’s too late.   You aren’t entitled to second chances and you certainly can’t expect a third. 

I think it’s time to find a new topic.  I spend way too much of my life thinking about this.   1 hour down.  Wow.

Aside:  JetBlue

So JetBlue is actually not too shabby.  There is definitely more legroom which is a giant plus for someone of my size, although the seats and the plane are definitely older models refurbished into re-use (I always get a little nervous when I fly in India and notice that the armrests have ashtrays).  The snack basket is definitely a winner though, I just housed a bag of Terra Sweet Potato Sea Salt Chips (with a dubious “full serving of vegetables in every ounce”), a bag of butter crunch cookies (what the hell is butter crunch?) and Bloody Mary mix “perfected with Sea Salt”, which is apparently the newest bullshit subtlety used to make garbage food seem less unnatural.  (mmhmm, not “more natural”, but “less unnatural.”)

The Great Outdoors  (and somehow this ends up with a section on smoking)

Yes, I would like to eat the Old 96er and even the last little piece of gristle on this vacation.

I’m on vacation now.  The last vacation I took was in July 2010 (Wwoofing in Quebec followed by a marvelous/disastrous high school reunion trip home.)  That feels like a long fucking time ago. 

Since I haven’t had much to do at work in the past week and K has been working hard in Seattle, I had the time and internet resources to come up with a fairly comprehensive vacation plan, which has sadly become slightly rigorous in the ground covered and amount of places visited. 

Starting today, we stay in Seattle and do Seattley things for two days.  From what I understand, this means getting wet in the rain, buying raincoats and umbrella shopping.  K is already in town because she was a business trip for Amazon and she knows the place well, so I am leaving this leg of the trip entirely up to her.  My only real entry while planning this trip was eating a Salumi sandwich.  (I also demanded that it be waiting for me.  When I arrive.)  Otherwise, Olympic Park and the rainforest (Pacific Northwest Rainforest?) was super highly recommended by S.O., who I generally trust for all things outdoors and such. 

Then we essentially road trip for 6 hours each day to each successive destination.  After my phone interview takes place on Monday morning (ahh!!!), we will drive somewhere in Oregon.  Yep.  That’s the plan.  Somewhere in Oregon.  Folks have suggested Portland, but if our plan is to drive the Pacific Coast Highway, then that’s two hours out of our way, adding 4 hours to the drive.  I will Meh that, but we shall see.

Then, off to Redwood National Forest, which is probably the highlight of the trip for me, since it is on my bucket list and because I have a distinct feeling that I will like tall-ass trees (not to be confused with my disdain for tall ass-trees).  (Incidentally, I actually did write down a short bucket list with embarrassing little entries such as “see whale”, “see redwood forests” and other lame little 5-year old desires, but I lost it.  Actually, I didn’t lose it.  When I moved offices last summer, I took the thumbtack out of it and it promptly fell behind my 700 pound desk at work and was trapped behind the desk, which was, of course moveable.  It wouldn’t be embarrassing except that I wrote it on firm stationary which, of course, has my name on it.  Someday it will be found when the office is rearranged.)  The plan is to camp in Redwood (actually Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park since the national parks don’t have campgrounds), cook over a fire, wake up miserably cold in a sleeping bag, not bathe, avoid banana slugs (these are yellow and over a foot long, which I have actually googled several times in the past just to marvel at the fear that overtakes me at the sight of them…more proof that god is not nice), and look at very large trees.  And not die by bear.  I would really like to avoid that. 

From Redwood, we continue to follow the Pacific Coast Highway 6 hours south to Napa/Sonoma/Yountville, where we will stay at Bordeaux House Bed & Breakfast on the same block as the French Laundry and only 1 block from Bouchon Bakery, where we will have pastries for breakfast.  The French Laundry seemed like it was worth splurging for, but that is 540 dollars worth of fucking splurging even without wine.  And I’d have to wear a fucking suit.  No, Thomas Keller.  But I will eat your pastries for breakfast.  And maybe load up on extras for the road trip.  Somehow, in a plan TBD, we will wine taste.  Either shelling out a couple hundred bucks for a driver to take us around to the various wineries where we will get blotto and have a wonderfully intoxicated time (followed by a long drive...) (…) (…) or I will chaffeur the various tastings myself and just try to keep my appetites under control, as I will need to drive from winery to winery as well as the long drive afterwards… (…) (…)

(For some reason, the default channel on JetBlue plays 1) many music videos with two or three James Blunt videos constantly in the rotation within the hour, or 2) is playing only James Blunt videos on repeat.  I will report back.  Oh look, he just jumped off a white plastic cliff.)

The original plan after Redwood was Yosemite, which really and legitimately excited me.  The imposing grey cliffs and domes, Yosemite falls, the gorgeous plains, mountains and forests.  For some reason, not even known to me, Yosemite has always had this unnatural allure that I have no basis for.  (Yosemite Sam?)  I have always just assumed and believed it would be beautiful and refreshing and rehabilitating.  I have been to San Francisco 3 times and not once have I been able to make the trip out to Yosemite.  This is the only place we budgeted two days in for camping, hiking and general exploration.

But, we’re not going. 

I was informed by S.O. and various websites that Yosemite is basically in full-on wintery blizzard mode right now.  The weather is in the single digits or lower in the nights, snow falls and accumulates, untouched by anyone, snow shoeing and cross country skiing is the preferred mode of transportation, the roads are not plowed, cars can’t get to the main sights and we aren’t even allowed into the park unless we actually show our snow chains to the park ranger.  So, we would have to buy snow chains for the little compact car we are renting, violate rental agency policies by installing snow chains (and risk the damage and pay for any damage), and then see if we can survive in arctic conditions in a 3 season tent (guess which season is the fourth).  So we’re going to Monterrey and Big Sur instead, where we will try to camp and hike in what I already know is one of the most gorgeous places I’ve seen. 

Thinking about driving down Route 1 towards Big Sur makes me want to put the windows down, the music on and drive, cigarette dangling out the driver side window.  Here a cigarette is a very specific joy, but a very real one as well.   I just have this strangely pavlovian response to put cigarettes into that scenic drive.  I think this is the true difficulty of quitting smoking.  Sure, it is addictive and the nicotine certainly has a role, but I haven’t smoked in two months so the nicotine is no longer a factor. Instead, it seems to be the strange completion and satisfaction that smoking lends to certain experiences.  Road trips make me want to smoke.  Being in another country * really * makes me want to smoke (I can’t even imagine returning to India without buying a pack of 70 rupee Wills Menthol Lights).  Strangely, but happily, my old triggers of smoking after a meal or smoking with or after coffee have completely subsided.  I also don’t have any particular urge to smoke when I drink (which I think is a stupid classification because the dirty secret of adulthood, at least in New York, is that you are likely to be drinking more nights than not, if only in moderation, so basically you are a smoker and you should shut up).  Rental cars definitely trigger the urge to smoke, as does camping.  And fishing, big time. 

Now that I am thinking about it, most of these activities are passive and reflective activities.  Maybe what it provides is an additional pleasant stimuli for a potentially boring moment, even better, a stimuli that can be added to any activity other than eating.  Sure, driving can be boring, so you add music to make it more stimulating.  Add a cigarette and it’s that much better.  Previously, I also felt like smoking provided me with a break.  Not just stepping outside from any given situation for 5 minutes, but something more fundamental.  Smoking a cigarette provided me with a break from life, and importantly, the relentless part of life.  Not necessarily difficulty or stress or events that were hard to escape, but just the low-level hum of existing that can never be turned off – the weariness.  Not sleepiness or exhaustion or being spent, but just the friction your soul is constantly buzzing against – smoking gives that part of you a break.  And I guess adding that break, that part of the day or hour you can look forward to, into more and more activities makes life a little easier.  And you get to structure these breaks into your life and you come to rely on them. 

Except, apparently, they are bad for you.   And when you start to smoke a lot, you also start to realize you don’t always want the next cigarette but you have to smoke it anyway.  The clearest example of this for me is the long road trip.  On the drive from home to college (or vice versa), which was 3.5 hours or so, I had to pace my smoking.  As soon as I hit the road, the music came on, the window came down and my cigarette was lit and in hand the moment I pulled onto the freeway. And after flicking the spent cigarette into pursuing traffic, the counting started. After you finish that first cigarette, always glorious, the next cigarette is clearly going to rock. But you have to pace yourself, so you find a system.  For me, it was counting the mileage.  I was permitted to have a cigarette every 30 miles.  And so I would watch the mileage, which moved interminably.  Until ding! 30!  Smoke.  And 60!  Smoke.  And 90!   You get the picture.  But smoking every 30 minutes or so is a little bit accelerated. The joy decreases markedly.  And by the time you smoke 5 cigarettes in 2.5 hours, it starts to hurt a little bit.  The first drag is okay, the second drag hurts a little, the third drag is just work.  But I would want that damned cigarette every 30 minutes.  I would still watch the mileage and I will still even get excited for it, forgetting that it actually hurt at that point.  I couldn’t not smoke it.  (You can imagine the shit show when we took a spring break trip from North Carolina all the way down to the Everglades then back up to New Orleans and back.)  But once you know when you are used to smoking, you just smoke through the pain – which upon reflection might be one of the stupidest things I can imagine. 

I need to get addicted to exercise or something.  2 hours down.

(cue the crying baby…)

I hope that when people refer to my having bought the farm, they clarify.

Buying a large plot of land and starting a farm seems like it would be amazing.  I think about this all the time. Of course it is easy to idealize a pastoral existence when you’ve only lived on 3 farms for precisely 4 weeks in two foreign countries in the most idyllic of circumstances and run by other people, but I can’t really shake it.  Owning 50 acres of land would just be so amazing on a mountain side or in rolling forested hills (which have been the case for all three farms).  On your **own** property you would have creeks and ponds and forests, and spaces you’ve never seen before and may never see.  Untamed wilderness that belongs to you.  A blank canvas of sorts.  On a given day you could decide to just grab your rod and go fishing on your own property with a cooler of beer and fresh grown tomato sandwiches.  You would have animals and ecosystems surrounding you.  You could down trees and build large bonfires in open fields. You would grow and raise your own food.  Cultivating even half an acre would provide more vegetables than you could possibly eat in a year.  The shocking amount of produced by a single acre of vegetables in Quebec was astounding.  Your food scraps would go into compost or into the chicken coop or into the pig slop.  Your overage of vegetables could go to the animals as well, producing clean healthy fats and meat.  Eggs from the chickens, milk from the cows.  You would be able to be outside.

The downsides are social and financial, clearly.  So in a perfect world, you would almost need three or more families or friends to join on the farm.  The labor load lessens, the social isolation disappears, the ability to diversify and produce a broader and more complex range of food increases (cheeses, yogurts, cured meats, pickling, canning).  (plus, of course, a bonfire requires more people).  Convincing anyone I know to join such a scheme is basically nil, so I would have to recruit people who will most likely end up being young, middle class raised idealistic dumpster divers with extreme ideologies of some sort or another, who pretty much take the fun out of anything, if not everything.  So there goes that.  Maybe the secret is to have a farm that is nearby a city where you live full time and use the farm seasonally.

 

On the financial side, there’s just no way to do this without a massive accumulation of wealth or someone working a full time job, since actually making money to live off the form seems unlikely and unreliable.  Sure, food costs should drop substantially, but the cost of electricity, water, beer, healthcare, repairs, equipment, beer, grain-based foods, internet, gas…I will just stop here and say “costs of living) have to be covered somehow, not to mention the cost of raising any children.  So you would have go into this with a war chest of money that can be spent down over the years and still have enough for retirement.  So basically, that means you need to have such a large pot of money that you are essentially living off of the interest from the money until you retire, after which you can start spending down the principal.  Assuming you need $50,000 a year and an interest rate of, say 5% which seems quite generous, then you would need 1 million dollars saved.  (Actually, that’s not that bad…though, maybe it’s super bad because I only have $6,000 in savings after two years of high income)  So maybe, just to be realistic and safe and factor in the costs of actually getting a farm and making it liveable, you would just need to have savings of $2 million dollars.  Hm, maybe I should scrap this development and public health dream I’ve been harboring for 6 years and just join a fucking bank and get this money and go buy a farm in West Virginia. 

Alright alright, Apollo.  OKCupid?

Online dating is a fascinating thing.  Just to set the table, I have never online dated in my entire life but I absolutely don’t think there’s any stigma in it, so I’m really just commenting on my first experience with an online dating website ever.  My friend B is currently in the online dating market, so he is constantly talking about the girls he goes on dates with, which has to be like 15 by now.  The process is scroll through a series of profiles, gauge how much you would like to sleep with them, then look at their profiles to see if anything disqualifies them.  I imagine there’s really no other vetting process.  B was over a couple of days ago and he wanted to ask for my opinion on a certain girl, but all he had was his iPhone (sigh).  Instead of signing on as him on my computer (because apparently people can tell when you click on their profile and I also did not want to put him through the embarrassment of letting me see his profile), he told me that it would only take 10 seconds to create an OKCupid account, which I did in shockingly record time (as TaiwaneseDude, since my first 6 attempts to choose funny names were already taken and of course, TaiwaneseDude was not taken because, honestly, that is not going to get you a date), and was soon behind the secret but super flimsy city wall. 

I had zero information in my profile, so I don’t think any algorithms were going to produce any results for me, so I just hit whatever button it is that effectively works like chatroulette and began the process of skipping blithely through hundreds of profiles in the span of 10 minutes, offering colorful and (most likely) appalling commentary on every profile that came up. 

Like I said, that shit is fascinating.  You rarely get to see how people peacock, how they present themselves, how they perceive themselves as potential mates and the characteristics they project to the world.  In real life there’s a constant negotiation of moments.  You have to read their faces, their hands, their posture, the management of timing and beats between communications and gauge your own interest and the chemistry and then try to wade your way through the minefield of involuntary ticks, awkward expressions and insecurities.  Sure, you have to deal with these things eventually when you meet online, but everything is so stripped away in an online profile.  There are maybe 5 pictures, which have been carefully chosen.  The first picture is clearly their favorite picture of themselves and is as good as it’s going to get – “this is why I’m hot.”  Then there are a series of other pictures, which are there to alleviate suspicious about the profile picture – provide context and evidence that the main picture is credible.  Sometimes you notice that all of the pictures are meant to capture the person’s “good side”, since they all focus on the same cheek.  Sometimes some flaw or another is hidden in 4 out of 5 pictures, and it just slips out on the 5th (B and I audibly gasped/groaned on several occasions when an incongruity suddenly made an appearance).  But every one of those pictures was chosen carefully with the opposite sex in mind, which simultaneously reflects what they think other people find attractive and what they feel represents themselves in the best light possible.  Oddly, even though I saw dozens if not hundreds during my flip through each felt strangely vulnerable – an admission that each person wanted someone, which in all of its voluminous archives means that even when we are alone and admit we are alone, we are not.

And then we get to the blurbs which present answers to a series of questions that I assume you choose out of some drop down menu when you fill out a profile, like what is important to you, six things you can’t live without (a shocking number of people wasted two of the six with “Food” and “Water”, which although correct, reveals an idiocy that is an immediate DQ), who should write to you, and other various generic questions.   These things must be brutal to write.  You also get to see what personality people think that other people want.  Everyone seems to be…a lover of laughter, a bit of a bad-ass, sassy and independent, feisty and sensitive, driven, sarcastic and just a little bit prickly and above posting on an online dating site. But almost everyone is self-aware and tries to affect a sense of irony because earnestness would only enhance the vulnerability.  This makes total sense, of course, but it is no less illuminating or surprising to witness each person’s way of dealing with it. 

And of course, I found a co-worker on there, who is M’s officemate.   (The James Blunt on a beach video is on again.  I assume You’re Beautiful will follow shortly thereafter).  I told B to message her.  That wouldn’t be awkward.

Fuck, stream of consciousness writing is tiring man.  And although not boring to do, I’m sure that I will never read (James Blunt – You’re Beautiful just came on) my way through this again...it’s just not that interesting.

Local Finance

Maybe I will try this now when I am trapped on a plane.  This is a topic I have been putting off for quite a long time, in part because it is an extremely difficult topic for me to write eloquently about, but equally because I feel like it could be critical to my life to be able to understand, develop and communicate this idea.  (That baby is fucking crying again.)  This is my first and only true idea for a business or for a major idea with legitimate impact and possible success.

(I know there are at least two people other than K who have somehow become aware that I have re-started “writing” here, neither of which I believe will appropriate any ideas I have, but if there is a third or a fourth, I would ask that if anything I say here sounds appealing, please don’t steal it or tell anyone, just talk to me.  It’s extremely unlikely that any of you would actually still be here, or have an interest in stealing or telling other people about thts idea, but I just wanted to say it.)

Setting the Table

As I’ve expressed above and a thousand times before, I believe that the existing financial system is parasitic and broken.  It relies on creating complexities beyond the understanding of normal people, so that the public is bewildered by investment choices and has no option but to entrust their money to the very people that rigged the system in the first place.  Out of this fear and confusion, money from all across the country flows towards our financial centers, where a handful of very large institutions staffed by intelligent twenty-somethings decide where that money goes and purely on the basis of returns.  So that’s the first piece, our financial system is, for the most part, highly concentrated and centralized in Wall Street’s hands. 

Putting aside for the moment, the financial cataclysm and economic crisis aside (which is quite a favorable starting point), the returns on investment from financial professionals really isn’t that good (unless you are super wealthy and able to invest in hedge funds or privately negotiated deals where you get sweetheart inside deals or become the client of the bank trading on the other side of normal investors – guess who gets fucked).  We believe that they know what they are doing, monitor the total returns on all of our investments without investigating the underlying strategies and comparisons and just assume that the fees they are charging are worth the growth they are getting us.  In actuality, they are often being beaten by the indexes and still taking a fee.  That’s the second piece, they actually aren’t very fucking good at what they do.  In fact, going back to the first sentence of this paragraph, they blew up their own fucking system and had to be rescued.  

So all of the money goes there and they suck at getting money back to you.  But what are they doing with the money?  They seek out the bottom line.  This is not their money.  This is not their morality.  This is their job.  Their job is to maximize returns, consequences be damned.  So they funnel money to whatever companies produce the best returns.  Some of these companies are Halliburtons and others are Blackwaters and others are the Altrias (Phillip Morris changed their name to make it sound more anodyne and unrecognizable.)  Other companies are not so inherently insidious, but surely include Blue Chips like McDonald’s, Pepsico, Walmart, Coca Cola, Exxon Mobil, Home Depot, Goldman Sachs, TimeWarner, BestBuy, Citigroup, Bed Bath and Beyond, BP, Barnes and Noble and other pervasive, large companies with expanding presence. Some of these companies are better than others, but I believe many people don’t want them to wipe out their local bookstores, restaurants, music stores or hardware stores, while others don’t want them engaging in ultra deepwater offshore drilling or monopolizing cable and media networks, or creating unsustainable financial derivatives that required taxpayer bailouts resulting in continuing excessive compensation practices.  Okay, this is becoming a rant.  Back to the point.

In short, all of our money into the hands of a small concentrated group of intermediaries who take a fee and then turn around and make decisions with our money for companies who could be all the way across the world or for companies that we would never choose to invest in ourselves and still don’t even do good by us.  This can’t be the only option for our money.

The Alternative

I would like to build a system of local finance. Allow people to invest where they live, in the businesses they frequent, in their own communities with their own decisions.   Let them decide whether a company is credible, not a 26 year old running spreadsheets with complex models they do not understand.

Neighborhood businesses are a beautiful and vanishing institution, in many ways the last remnants of a community rather than an atomized collection of people. The East Village, where I live, can be a brutal place to small businesses.  Businesses rise and fall constantly, which is a good thing as the good ones are spectacular and the lame simply flame out.  (I will not miss you, Cookout Grill).  I am not against creative destruction of small business.  Recently, though I have noticed that many failed storefronts are increasingly being filled by large corporate chains.  A small Cuban sandwich place has been replaced by a Papa Johns just across the street from two pizza joints.  A Papa Fucking Johns.  In New York.  There is a Subway next to that, right near the Dunkin Donuts.  And these chain stores tend not to close.  And the character of the neighborhood begins to change so that it begins to look a little bit like everywhere else.  And I do not believe this is dictated by consumers choosing these brands and supporting these businesses because they like them.  I believe these chains have lower start-up costs, less supply volatility, less marketing costs and financial support from the mothership allowing them to borrow at better rates. 

Local finance would allow communities to support these companies when the traditional avenues of finance may not be available.  Investors would be investing in their own neighborhoods, building an economic stake in their community.  Obviously, the rate of return might not be as high as an investment in a mutual fund or in stock investment, but I believe that by specifically targeting disposable income (i.e., more speculative money) and aggregating small loans of as low as $10 dollars, people would be more than willing to eat a little bit of additional risk or a lower rate of return to participate in this investment.  

The model is relatively simple.  You log onto the website, choose your neighborhood (I would like to pilot this in the East Village between Avenue D and Broadway between Houston and 14^th Street), and you would have the option of choosing to loan into a “neighborhood fund” which would aggregate loans to a pool of borrowers, or you could loan directly to a single enterprise.  The website would continue to aggregate small donations, probably between $10-200 dollars (to prevent large loans and thus a need for self-enforcement), and then when the total amount has been reached, the loan would be released.  Ideally, the loan structure would behave like equity, so that investors can reap a higher upside if the business becomes more profitable in a given time period, but this is certainly far more complicated and a future idea. 

The businesses receiving the loans may simply need to make payroll or need capital to make an investment in a new pizza oven or kick-start an advertising campaign, or it may just be for a start-up -- a chef wants the start-up capital to open a new restaurant in an abandoned storefront and cannot get the moneybags to give him a shot.  (This is a critical issue that I need to research further – that is, discuss with local business owners and entrepreneurs what exactly their capital needs are.)   

There are, of course, many kinks that need to be worked out. Such a business model is generally limited to places like New York, San Francisco and other large cities that haven’t been entirely invaded by chains, but it also might be quite successful in college towns.  What happens in the event of a default.  Who actually has the lending relationship with the business.   Collection and payment arrangements.  How to avoid securities and regulatory issues.  How to avoid self-enforcement or intimidation, if necessary.  How to vet businesses and their creditworthiness.  How much disclosure to require from each business.   Recourse debt v. non-recourse debt v. secured debt v. securing the debt with account receivables.  There are technical minefields all over the place, but I believe the idea itself is elegant, simple and appealing and technology and social mores are now in place for such an idea to come into being.

An obvious objection is that peer to peer lending already exists and that it is slow to start and hasn’t really taken off.   I think “Lending Club” and “”Prosper” are the two biggest examples, both of which were just covered in the NYTimes.  I actually view this as an advantage because it means that the lending model and securities issues are already established.  But I also think they are missing the heart and soul of a successful business, which I believe can be provided by the local aspect, the community aspect, the sense of true investment.  Prosper and Lending Club are also struggling with creditworthiness issues for their borrowers, which is vitiated for local finance because people can get a better sense by visiting the store and getting a sense for how it’s run.  Sure, it’s not the same as having a financial professional (vom) review the balance sheet and cash flows, but for such small investment, people may go for it.

There are also many competing models in this family of social enterprises.  Kiva provides microloans to small business owners in the developing world. Vittana does the same except it provides student loans to people in South America.  RootCapital focuses their financial efforts on the “Missing middle”, which is middle sized enterprises that aren’t big enough for commercial loan arrangements, but are too big for micro loans.  RootCapital actually does large scale offerings to raise capital and then disburses that money itself to businesses of its choice, much like a mutual fund.  Prosper and Lending Club run peer-to-peer lending programs.   Kickstarter just aggregates donations for artistic endeavors and disburses money when a goal is reached.  All of the plumbing exists and is fully operational and there is much to learn from. 

I really do think this could work, but it is going to take a lot of work and an ability to find the right people to work through the financial and accounting issues. 

So here is the official unveiling of my idea and brand!

Villager:  Invest where you liveä

Tada!  This will hopefully not be the last time I discuss this topic.

* * * * *

(Four Hours Down -  I have begun to go back to the top and revise.) (James Blunt is on again.)

(Five and a Half Hours down – back hurts, neck hurts, eyes slightly strained, and the Mac Battery has a miraculous 40% left.  Wow!  Still have not read anything, listened to any music or watched a single program.  This might be a record.)

Six hours down.  I made it.  And now I have to shut down my computer.  I’m a little amazed frankly.

(James Blunt)