Excellent Things: 05
In November, we moved back to Australia after 7 years in America.
My next thing is being an investor at Blackbird Ventures.
I am proud of the way Blackbird works with founders (Sessions was the 4th ever Blackbird investment), and proud of the companies we get to work with.
You can read about Blackbird’s Mission & Values here.
Venture at its best is a seamless web of deserved trust between totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.
Being a partner, in the fullest sense, to the founders in the arena and connecting them to that web of trust is what’s most interesting to me now.
On to the excellent things.
The Oasis movie is worth seeing, if only for the Gallagher bros. dialogue/banter.
‘Don’t Think Twice’ was genuinely warm and funny.
‘American Honey’ is perfectly scored at 7.4/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, but two things:
1/ I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks after, for the way it resolved almost every scene in an unexpected way.
2/ The soundtrack (not the songs themselves, but the way the songs change the movie) is staggering.
I saw Bon Iver tour his new record ’22, A Million’ at The Fox Theatre in Oakland on a Tuesday night and I went back on the Thursday to see the same show because it was so good.
‘Creeks’ live was one of my top-three all-time live music experiences.
It’s hard to explain, but just imagine the low-end of that vocoder being so loud it affects your breathing.
And then imagine the silences. 3,000 people in a room and every gap is dead quiet. It’s shivers.
You can relive a pale imitation of the experience by skipping forward to 23:36 here:
I kept putting Frank Ocean ‘Blonde’ on in the background while I worked.
I bought some crystal glasses at a second-hand store and didn’t have anything to drink with them, so I bought some expensive port and put the new Leonard Cohen record on and it all worked perfectly.
About 1/4 of the new Weeknd record is great (especially ‘Sidewalks’).
Some reads:
- Australia Divided
- Q&A With Jack Bogle: ‘We’re in the Middle of a Revolution’
- The Genius of Winding Paths
- LeBron Is Still Painting His Masterpiece
- Fifty Years Hence
Lucky last… Only rarely do great new tennis racquets come on to the market. Babolat, in my opinion, have just released one.
This was a surprising and unnerving quarter in many respects.
If you believe “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, this was the quarter to start wrapping your head around how to withstand the ‘long’ part of the arc.
I keep thinking, the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.
I keep thinking about the Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican — which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.
I still can’t believe this is the American President now.
So it’s bad. But we don’t know how bad, yet.
And it’s more complex than it looks.
I left America a week before Election Day. Some people said, “you must feel lucky you got out when you did” but there is no American silo and I don’t feel lucky at all.
On the bright side though…
I measure the strength of a spirit by how much truth it can take.
For past editions of this series, see:
