joshjkim

At a general level, PE (and really much of capitalism generally) is built around the idea that financial efficiency should be the guiding principle re: capital allocation, so the steelman argument is that PE takes financially inefficient businesses, makes them more financially efficient, and that is good because that's the best way to allocate capital.

a financially inefficient business may be a business that employs more people than it absolutely needs, a business that treats customers/vendors more generously than it absolutely needs to, or even a business that exists as a going concern that would be more financially efficient if sold off for parts or went into bankruptcy.

i personally don't believe financial efficiency should be the guiding principle for everything or really anything, and I believe as a society we should account more for non-financial efficiencies (like treating human beings generously and kindly), and I think it's fine for an inefficient business to continue existing if that means more people have jobs for longer or customers/vendors are treated more generously. fundamentally, i think this line of thinking is dehumanizing, as it views the world (humans, nature, information, knowledge etc.) as resources/materials and not much else.

that all being said, i at least understand the principles and the materialist idea that everything can be viewed as material/resource and why people pursue them (esp because pursuing them effectively can make you fabulously wealthy).

i often say when talking about this stuff with friends: if you're willing/able to see everything (including/especially people) as resource/material, you're well positioned to obtain a lot of material resources/material. whether that's a good thing for you or the rest of the world is another question (and my view is that it's straight up bad).

8VC does some meaningful defense investing - they were founded by Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir) and they are invested in Anduril, and have some folks on the team who specifically focus on defense.

OT (and pretty random, apologies in advance!) but my company is distributed and might be a good fit for your spouse (we're an international e-commerce marketplace) if interested at all or if she'd like to chat, feel free to hit me up (email in profile!), thanks!

ya, i did the same, took a few tries - i actually ended up reading the pale king first, might be worth trying that. it's shorter (around 500 pages) and i think written in a more digestible/measured manner - still a DFW work, the plots are barely discernible until pretty late in the work but there's less gymnastics to the writing, i like to think because he was more mature at that point but maybe the editor played more of a role since it was posthumous, who knows!

i immediately fell in love with dostoevsky's work (just finished my third read of TBK), but it took me a long time to get into david foster wallace - now, i think of them as very similar. DFW is known for a lot of things (long books, footnotes on footnotes, early death) but to me at the end of the day both infinite jest and the pale king (his posthumous novel) are both incredible works that ultimately deal with existentialism. what made me think of them esp. is your comparison of C&P (cynical) and the Idiot (optimistic).

to me, infinite jest is the cynical but fun work (it's about a lot, but it's a lot about how people use drugs and entertainment and tennis(!) to (unsuccessfully) distract themselves from their larger existential problems), and pale king is the optimistic but more serious work (but with a strange reason for optimism, built in large part around the transcendence of being able to tolerate crazy boredom - it's a post-modern book about IRS employees for heaven's sake. there's a good dose of "we should probably be better citizens" - one of my fave sections describes how US taxpayers view themselves as "consumers of the government" vs. "participating citizens", digs really deep)

i actually like pale king slightly more even tho it's posthumous. it's also shorter (500 vs. 1000), i'd highly recommend starting there, though since you did TBK first, maybe you can just jump into infinite jest no problem =)

a few years back i learned that glassdoor was co-founded by Rich Barton who founded both Zillow and Expedia (another interesting fact I didn't know until then: Expedia was a MS spin-off, Rich Barton built in-house at MS and then Gates and Ballmer gave the blessing to go on their own) - he's also a partner at Benchmark.

Never loved glassdoor but find it useful on a regular basis when hiring (esp. as one data point for comp comparisons when hiring in tech) and seems to fill a need that isn't served elsewhere (essentially yelp for HR, serving both sides), but it's not-very-sexy design made a lot more sense when I thought of it in the lineage of the majorly successful but also not-very-sexily-designed expedia/zillow. in any case, impressive for Barton to have so many successful businesses/exits and still be relatively under-the-radar compared to other comparable founders (maybe because he's based in SEA), definitely someone to follow for those who like to keep track of serial entrepreneurs.

it's normal and you can expect that no matter what, as CEO you'll have phases like this on/off throughout your tenure, for better/worse it is part of the job. that being said, without knowing more details, I'd venture a guess that after 2 years, you are at a size (in terms of customers, volume, team size, etc.) where you may need to start thinking about not just getting shit done, but managing your team more actively (the thing that clued me in on this beside time/revenue is "people need things from me constantly"). there's lot of resources for how best to do this, but overall it all comes down to identifying big picture goals for the business, setting clear direction for your team, identifying metrics for performance, and then allowing your people to operate relatively autonomously but have regular check-ins / reports on performance relative to the established metrics. this can be as simple as well-defined product development milestones, support tickets closed, sales number achieved, customer acquisition targets, etc. it's important to identify the correct metrics, but often times part of that process is just starting with something simple/obvious, being consistent in evaluating, and then being willing to adapt / add / modify as you and the team learn what really matters.

hope this helps, doing similar things at my company now, not easy but once I appreciated it as a new problem set it's been interesting and satisfying to work on. hit me up if you want to chat more, happy to help.