Happy Valentine’s Day. I went on my first real date night since we had the baby and it was magical. I live for romance…
A couple weeks ago, Alpaca VC hosted our first-ever in person AGM and it went off better than we could have dreamed. A friend said to me at breakfast this week, “it looked like the event of the season” and it truly felt like it.
See my partner David’s recap HERE.
What really stood out to me was the power of bringing people together. There is no replacement for humans interacting in person (yet); organizing an ecosystem together creates interesting collisions of participants that would not happen otherwise, and it’s highly beneficial to serve as the organizer. I was reminded of the late Tony Hsieh (my largest investor in my startup, Bow & Drape), who always talked about ROC (Return on Community) as he was building the Downtown Project, and I still ascribe to that philosophy of creating collisions and helping different people and communities interact. LINK.
As such, I am also starting a Breakfast Club (where aforementioned friend complimented me) with a few friends (Hayley from First Round and Jordan from Betaworks were the first to say “yes”). What the Breakfast Club? Though I’d like to be Molly Ringwald, this Breakfast Club version is a monthly-ish series where we are gathering intentional and intimate groups of founders and investors from the NY tech ecosystem to connect, meet, and help one another. The format is to provide a “give” and a “get” – reciprocity, the true definition of community.
Our next event is March 10th. Join the waitlist if you’d like to be included in future ones: https://lu.ma/3wdwkb51
Other things that Caught My Attention (CMA) this week:
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Nuclear’s Sensitivity to the AI market. We’ve been delving into Power Availability as an investment theme for the past eight months, and nuclear has risen to the top of our interest areas (see our Field Study here). That said, it’s been interesting to see AI’s fickle future influence the market’s expectations on power stocks. I am long on any dense, deregulated power source, though, as the US just doesn’t have enough power to meet demand. LINK.
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Eugene Healey’s take on Parenting as the new luxury. He argues having children = the aspirational aesthetic that brands are marketing as the new flex because 1) you are optimistic enough about the future to have children and 2) you have enough time to live your old stylish life alongside your children. Move over Bernar McFadden: parents are the new leisure class. LINK.
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Pickle! I hope to write more on my AI Operating System in a future post (i.e. how I use AI interfaces to power my work), but for now, I wanted to post about Pickle because man – this is nuts. It creates an AI body double to replace your live camera feed in real time, so you can join meetings without having to be on camera. Let’s see if you can tell next time we catch up… LINK.
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The Crip Walk. My final internet deep dive this week was on the Crip walk (a la Serena at the Super Bowl) and its origins. History is strange. Serena is still an icon. LINK.
Who else is excited for the return of White Lotus? See you in the chat…