Borsalino Test #16: Slides and lies
Hi friend,
It’s been more than a couple of months that I decided to take some time off work and pursue something completely different. This granted me space to surface a couple of thoughts on what I have been focusing on so far in my career.
Michele
Slides and lies
No home to come back to
There’s this great moment in the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” when the world’s most celebrated sushi chef turns to his son, who is leaving to start his own restaurant, and says: “You now have no home to come back to.” When you think about it, it isn't harsh or discouraging. It is in fact the very best thing you could say to someone blazing their own trail.
A couple of months ago I quit my job to explore an alternative path. I have never pulled the trigger on a similar initiative before. This is not the first time I am indulging the Sirens of entrepreneurship. I have admittedly dedicated abundant cognitive resources flirting with the idea of a stroll off the beaten path. Over time though, sunk cost biases and complacency had the best of me.
I’ve always been a dedicated student to the entrepreneurial craft. I read stacks of articles, essays and books on early-stage ventures. Met dozens of entrepreneurs. Even tinkered with a couple of business ideas. Like most people my age, the Internet has been the catalyst of my aspirations. But never took the leap. Between you and me, I never genuinely believed I had what it takes.
This time around, I felt sturdier. The idea of rolling the startup dice didn’t seem that outlandish anymore. It would have been a rambling journey of the mind. I would find a problem I was intensely curious about and I’d eat, breathe and sleep with it until I’d learn everything there was to know. Then I would sit in a bright room with a light breeze and a warm cup of espresso and crank out a synthesis of such depth and piquant grace that it would have been hard to pass for investors. I would have nailed it.
An uphill run
My new life began on a mid-February Monday. Crack of dawn. I am an early riser. After a twenty-minute meditation and a solid indoor workout I put on a cup of coffee and cracked open my laptop. You see, entrepreneurship, like writing, is just another “nonspecific amplifier” of mental processes. A microscope on trees, a telescope on forests. Or something like that. The point is - writing is no picnic. Writing well, a Sisyphean task.
In 1958 Ernest Hemingway was asked: ‘What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?’. He responded:
“Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself. Because he would find that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”
Writing is high fuel consumption cognitive labor. It’s hard to make calls on what’s genuinely worth saying. Or when something’s worth saying. It’s hard to arrange pieces in a way that will hold a reader’s attention. It’s hard to sound appropriate, but not pretentious. It’s even hard to know whether, when you change something, you’re making it better. It’s all so hard that it’s actually painful, the way an uphill long run is painful. It’s a pain you dread but somehow enjoy.
It turns out the less beaten track is a winding uphill road. And it’s been exhausting. I had to put my adventure on hold many times. I granted myself the benefit of several “days off”. That level of mental challenge penetrated under my skin and triggered questions, along with self-doubt. It made me feel like I have just been jogging on a treadmill right before this moment. Perhaps that’s exactly what I did and nobody ever told me.
Bringing the receipts
In college I sort of played a game. I majored in business administration and feel comfortable saying that barely anything thrown my way in college has been hard to grasp. I half-assed most if not all exams, and never failed once. I would sleep in late and spend time chasing skirts at parties. Every once in a while even skip class - mostly law. Man, life was good.
Though sometimes I saw myself as an intellectual-at-large in the style of Will Hunting, I was basically just an irresponsible moron. I would derive a pompous sense of entitlement based on a flawed belief that I deserved fun and games as recognition for a challenge that was never such. Then I read the “instruction manual” and figured out the rules of the career game. If I wanted to get anything more than a decent job, I needed to provide “proof of work”. The proof of work is in the pain.
Essentially, someone out there was willing to hire me had I “brought the receipts” of my pain. And college “receipts” are spelled as GPA. So I started playing the game differently during my master’s. I trained to withstand intense efforts of repetition and memorization. Long studying sessions and probably some exogenous miracle lifted my GPA close to perfection. I entered a notoriously bad job market in Northern Italy as one of the most employable young men in town. I cracked some sort of code. I thought I was so smart.
Memorizing concepts, proving that I had the stamina to sit still with a book in front of me for very long hours is what got me my first, relatively lucrative profession. That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. And that’s the point. Was that proof of work?
What about somebody in a coal mine — wouldn’t you say he works as hard as I did? Why should I get paid so much more than that guy?
By the skin of my teeth
Bear with me. I was a management consultant straight out of college. There were virtually very few better professions in my field at that time and place. Here’s how crazy it was. I interned for four months at a very prestigious firm. My performance wasn’t stellar, but good enough to make the cut and get me a full-time offer. At that point in time, I was already making more than both of my parents at the peak of their careers. And I had virtually no employable skill.
I never thought finding good work would have been difficult. But I sure thought that prestigious firms and high-paying careers were not my league. I had friends in college who set academic records and had miraculously bright and sensitive minds. I had none of those things. The job market was just holding a timer and checking qualifiers at the finish line. I happened to barely make it. That was it.
During my time in management consulting I saw a hell of a lot of client-side folks twice my age, with family and kids and extensive expertise making significantly less than me. More importantly, they had much less of a say at important meetings with corporate bigshots. Ultimately, that was the real currency of prestige. It wasn’t about money. It was about having a seat at the table.
At 24, I would regularly sit in C-level meetings. Most of the time I obviously didn’t say anything. Firstly because I had nothing smart to say. On rare occasions though, I had the chance to present my work, or part of it, to CEOs. The thrill of it was unmeasurable. Those were also moments in which I thought I should have been smart, or talented in some way. Ultimately, I was the one advising these corporate bigshots, at least for a few minutes of the meeting. And still I didn’t realize everything I produced (mostly in the form of slide decks and numerical analyses) was ridiculously trivial.
What gave me the right to think my work was so important? Or, was I more deserving of money and privilege just because I worked hard? What about somebody that works in a coal mine? Aren’t they as deserving as I was? Why was I getting paid so much more than that guy?
I used to think that was an awfully naive line of questioning. My transition from consulting to technology reinforced my ridiculous belief.
Carrot cakes
In 1999 a dotcom with no revenue could burn $100 million in one year. $2 million of that going to a Super Bowl ad. Its namesake website could offer a terrible user experience, and still the company could go public. Investors would chase the rising stock price, which would drive up the price further, which in turn drew more investors, feeding a textbook ‘speculative bubble’ that burst the moment everyone realized there wasn’t any there.
This kind of stuff isn’t happening any more. It’s not that the Internet has become less important, or investors less ‘irrationally exuberant’ — it’s that start-ups have gotten cheaper. A web start-up today has almost no fixed capital costs. There’s no need to invest in broadband infrastructure, since it’s already there.
There’s no need to buy TV ads to get market share, when you can grow organically via search (Google) and social networks (Facebook). ‘Cloud’ web servers, like nearly all other services a virtual company might need — such as credit card processing, automated telephone support, mass email delivery — can be paid for on-demand, at prices pegged to Moore’s Law.
It’s as if the basic structure of this sector of the global economy has been designed for the benefit of a small set of people, with a very hard to grasp set of skills. After consulting I joined a big tech company in San Francisco. Cash bonuses, raises, stock options and gifts were the norm, for me and for all my friends there - who obviously worked very similar jobs.
On Fridays we always had cake. Mostly carrot’s, sometimes chocolate. Prior to then, the only other time I had cake on Fridays it was kindergarten. There were inflatable balloons lurking around the open space, like some kind of never-ending kids’ party. Hours were flexible and time off was plentiful. Fuck-ups were quickly forgiven. My concerns were given due regard. My mind was prized. I was taken care of.
“I’m fucking sick of it”
You can imagine what it does to the ego, to be courted and called ‘indispensable’ and in general treated like you’re the hot commodity for miles. When a lot of your contemporaries don’t even have jobs. When work, for most people, has a Damoclean instability to it, a mortal urgency. To be this highly employable is to feel liquid, easy, as if you can do no wrong.
It validates you is what I mean. It inflates your sense of your own character. I tell myself a story, sometimes, that while other people partied or read for pleasure, I was sitting in a room with my head down, fighting — that I worked hard to learn these minute technical things, and now I’m getting paid for it. A pile of horseshit, obviously.
Something prima donna-ish can happen when you start believing stories like that. I used to spend a lot of time recruiting for my team and looking at a lot of inbound resumes. I would throw away everybody who didn’t have stellar academics topped with extracurriculars. I did this enough times each day that a simple pattern was forming in my mind. If you are not showing the kind of ‘proof of work’ I want to see, you’re not valuable.
To be fair, at this point I was really thinking I must have been really right. I had some form of talent. There was no doubt about that. At that stage of my career, I was making significantly more money than in consulting, and working exponentially less hours. My supposed skillset was starting to pay off in the form of leverage. It felt great. Like a warm hug of validation.
One night, I met a guy at a houseparty in San Francisco. He was trying to develop a cheaper, better, chemo-like drug for cancer patients. Or at least that is what I understood after a couple of drinks. He worked out at a startup incubator in East Bay, in an office space shared with a dozen of companies. He didn’t have a lot of patience for them. ‘I’m fucking sick of it’ - he told me. “All they care about is color palettes and office parties.” At that point I realized carrot cakes were a thing on Fridays.
Play companies
Internet startups were play companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens.
Take Doormates, a failed start-up founded in 2011 by two recent graduates from Columbia University whose mission was to allow users ‘to join or create private networks for buildings with access restricted to only building residents’. For that they, too, raised $350,000. You wonder whether anyone asked: ‘Do strangers living in the same building actually want to commune? Might this problem not be better solved by a plate of sandwiches?’ (The founders have since moved on to ‘Mommy Nearest’, an iPhone app that points out mom-friendly locations around New York.)
A lot of the stuff in the past few years just wasn't very ambitious, and it’s about fucking time to say it out loud. The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean. Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.
Facebook clones are popular, as much as apps that help you find nearby bars and restaurants. There are dozens of dating apps with a twist. “Uber for X” was a common way to define demand-supply marketplaces in the 2010s. Everything was just a permutation of something already seen. With a fake, pretentious mission to purpose-wash college kids that actually all they cared about was a six-figure salary and kombucha on tap. And carrot cakes, I must assume.
Colored boxes
I used to work in strategy and operations. My work was celebrated, captured wealth and reinforced a mechanism of talent attraction. I was a well-oiled cog of one of the fastest machines in the economy. I was part of a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But I was not curing cancer, or solving climate change. I was not sending people to Mars or rolling out Covid vaccines. Most of what I was doing was putting aligned, colored boxes on a blank page.
I would fill my days with decks of slides. Triple check numerical analyses and their collective soundness across the entire flow of the deck. I would change the colors of boxes. Taper the wording of the titles. Make sure they would all be monoliner. Create my own icons, so they would look all the same style. Create my own color palette. And there’s more.
I did most of my work between Google Slides and Google Spreadsheets. That’s it. That’s how technical I was. If you add Gmail, that would complete the entire stack.My friends who do similar jobs are kids like me. We are all playing around with these colorful toys given to us by adults. We never directly managed a fraction of the amounts of money we write about on our slide decks. We recommend strategies, and build convoluted charts to execute them. And we are the least experienced animal species on the planet to do that.
We are literally bad at setting intentions and stick to them. After all, we are the first kind of people that would change their behavior at the first permutation of incentives. I did it in college, when I realized I could get a high-paying job by switching my routine. And I would have done that again, had I not taken the time to think through what moves me, and what I truly care about.
A hell of a reality check
Unfortunately, the only rigorous way to think about value is in terms of dollars. Numbers like that are hard to dispute. Apparently people tend to gobble up those kinds of work opportunities. And the prices tend to reflect that high demand for a particular skillset. Was I paid too much to align colored boxes on the left-hand side of the slides? Was I paid too little? No. In each case, I was paid exactly what I should be.
I was probably paid more than a coal miner because the skills required to be a slide writer are probably a lot scarcer and more wanted than the skills required to be a coal miner. It’s the combination of scarcity and wantedness that drives up a salary. In that gold rush, I just had a better shovel.
And that answer seems fair, and fine, it seems to settle the question, but we’re not talking about pork belly futures, we’re talking about real people and what they do all day. The point though it that the truly naive thing, the glib and facile thing, might be equating value with a market-clearing price.
There is no venture capital emailing me. People take an average of three weeks to respond to my cold emails, when they do. There are no recruiters pursuing my phone. In entrepreneurship-town I’m an absolute nothing. I could put all my energy, time and soul in my projects, and still be worth nothing. Zero. And that’s a hell of a reality check.
Despite my esteem for entrepreneurs and for the high challenge they choose to pick up, this is not something anyone wants me to do. The way modern capitalism works has been very clear to me for a long time. ‘Be a specialized something and we’ll write you a cheque.’
Before I didn’t have the courage to say no to that. I have failed so far to escape the sweep of this cheap and parochial thing, and it’s because I was afraid. I am a tremendous slide writer because I am awfully mediocre at almost everything else. I had a secure path and a seat at the table. I used to wake up knowing that I delivered value of some sort. I knew that because of the money I was paid. That gave me self-worth.