Good morning. Hello. How are you? #778
Christine McVie, a mercifully brief Elon/Apple update, Piecakens, stopping the Wegovy, RIP Haus and a long trip down memory lane regarding my Angel Investing career.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? Week going okay? I do hope so.
RIP Christine McVie, eh? Man. That is sad. Emma and I took Janet to the 2014 Fleetwood Mac Rumors-era reunion tour that Christine played at, so I got to see her once in my life. I should have gone to the Buckingham-McVie shows, that was stupid not to do that. Distracted with being a new parent and all. I had no idea she was 79 years old, that is crazy. That means when I saw her on that tour she was 71. That seems inconceivable. What’s crazier is that back when I got a giant crush on her when the “Hold Me” video came out, she was 39 and I was ten. Well that is pretty crazy. She is older than my mom! Man, Chrsitine McVie was ageless.
Reminder to fill out this form if you would like a holiday card. But Emma tells me she emailed the form to everyone we sent a card to before, so I will probably stop bugging you to fill out this form tomorrow. No need to keep doing this until Christmas.
Yesterday Elon visited the Apple Campus and Tim Cook and Tweeted out that: “we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” This would ostensibly be a complete contradiction to everything he said the day before. Would look like Elon Musk was lying! That can’t be! And it would look like it contradicts my long single-issue GMHHAY from just two days ago. I don’t think that’s the case though. I suspect this is a classic corporate case of very slight word changes here and there, both by Tim to Elon and Elon to us. I also don’t think it really contradicts my post, because like I said, Apple treats Twitter with kid gloves, and Twitter has been in blatant violation of Apple’s policies forever, and they’re going to have to do something much much worse than they’re currently doing, not just more jizz and Nazis, which they already had. So of course Tim could say something like “well, so long as things don’t get much worse you should be fine,” which is true, because what can Apple do? They can’t kick Twitter off for violating the rules they’ve always been violating, which is what I said.
I read through Apple’s App Store guidelines yesterday and Twitter is in violation of like three of them, but they’ve always been in violation of those three, and there doesn’t seem to be too many other ones they’re in imminent danger of also violating, save for the inevitable massive data leak due to newly lax security policies. Like I said. Something big, and new. Did Tim make that explicitly clear or not? Who knows.
But I will say, if Tim hasn’t “considered” that he might have to pull Twitter from the app store soon, he’s derelict at his job. And I’m pretty sure that dude is not derelict at his job.
Some people think Tim and Apple will never pull Twitter from the app store cuz of the blowback hassle from Republicans, congress, etc. I don’t buy this. Apple by all accounts was imminently about to pull Facebook and Instagram over human trafficking ones (another category Musk could easily fall into accidentally). They will do it if at some point if the violations mount. The when in Twitter’s case, like I said, is trickier, because of their previous hypocrisy.
I am now four days off of Wegovy. Was gonna wait till the new year, but there are shortages everywhere, save for the very high strengths that make me nauseus. I think I’m through the worst of any sort of “withdrawl?” Hopefully? I find myself a bit more hungry but nothing crazy. No other real side effects. I mean, I have had a headache all week, but that’s just me and my stupid neck, I think. Doesn’t feel any different than my usual shitty headaches. I was vaguely worried there would be some sort of miserable withdrawl, but it seems fine. I made about 12 quarts of turkey broth from our thanksgiving turkey and I am back to working broth in to skip meals. I dilute it to half strength cuz turkey broth is so thick. I add a little soy sauce and fish sauce. Not going the whole distance to make turkey tom yum right now like last time. And it’s hard to figure out which meal to skip because it’s no practical to skip breakfast anymore since I have it with Jane and have to make it and it’s very unpleasant cooking a bunch of delicious food and then not eating it when you’ve not eaten for 14 hours at that point. So I think I’m gonna skip lunch, and my daily amazing stir fry, which is very sad, cuz I love that stir fry, but I think it is the correct move. For a few months. We will meet again, delicious stiry fry.
I’d hoped to deal with all of this after Christmas, but whatever, doesn’t hurt to do some experimenting now. Probably just as well, given all the yummy sweets in the house: Janet’s thanksgiving bluebery pie, Emma’s chocolate banana bread, and the amazing Piecaken. Today is the last day of my Piecakeen. My friend Helayne sent this to me as a thank-you gift for jumping in at the last minute and teaching a session of a class she leads. It came via Goldbelly in dry ice (fun) and we thawed it and ate it on Friday. It is so weird. Apple pie and pecan pie and pumpkin pie and cake all in one. It’s too much. But also fantastic.
In the thanksgiving hubub I didn’t get to say RIP to Haus. Haus’s co-founder, and my good friend, Helena posted over the holidays that the low-ABV, direct-to-consumer alcohol brand is no more. They had been in a sale process ever since their last investment round fell apart at the last minute, and that sale process did not yield any buyers.
This makes me sad for three reasons.
First, because Helena is great and going through a failure like this fucking sucks, and she put her all into it and I am so sad this is how it all ended up and it must be terribly hard for her. We’ve spoken since then, I know she’s doing okay, but still. What a massive disappointment for this to be how all that work turned out. My heart goes out to her.
Secondly, because I love the product and I am running low on Cherry Spiced Haus, which is what I’ve been drinking as my “tiny wines,” the last couple of years and I am very sad that I am going to run out soon I think I only have 3-4 bottles left. I bought a case during the flash sale that kicked off Haus’ sale process, but it never crossed my mind no one would buy the company, so I was only focused on buying enough to get me through that process. Alas. I will miss it. I do have a complete collection of the Haus Restaurant Collection, which was a fantastic project Haus did during the height of the pandemic. They made thirteen different unique flavors in partnershipw ith thirteen different restaurants like Momofuku and Marlow collective. It was so cool. I bought two sets, drank the first set. I really don’t want to drink the second set. It’ll be, like, really the end then.
And third, because I was an investor in Haus. I mean, I did not put like a life-changing amount into Haus. I did it in partnership with two great friends of mine, Ari and Danielle. We’re not going to lose our shirts. But it is still sad.
Relatedly, last week a friend of mine posted a (private) Tweet about his time as an angel investor and did not have 100% positive things to say. It got me thinking. I really don’t talk about my angel investing “career” much, because I really don’t do much of it anymore, I get bored with things professionally and move on, but it struck me that it might be worth saying a few words about it.
When I got cash from selling the Barbarian Group, I decided that I was young, that I didn’t ‘need’ the cash, that I was generally irresponsible with money anyway and that if I kept it in my checking account I would spend it. I also figured that New York real estate was an insider’s game as much as angel investing, so I should just stick to the one where at least I knew the ground rules and had an edge.
(n.b. I did not understand how mortgages work. In hindsight, I should have bought a nice apartment in NYC instead.)
Thus I made my first angel investment in early 2010. Since then, I have done maybe 50 or so. I meticulously kept track of them in a spreadsheet. At first, it was super fun. I got to meet a million interesting people. Everyone always wanted to take a meeting with me. The companies were small and hustling, and my experience of running a bootstrapped company for more than decade was super relevant to them, as was my experience with digital marketing.
As the years went by, though, the whole thing became significantly less fun on several levels:
Several went out of business, of course, that wasn’t particularly fun to see your money disappear. Especialy when it was suspiciously quickly, or the people involved gave you almost no informastion or explanation. People really do want to run from bad news. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
But the worst were the successes, actually. Friends ghosting you through the years. You becoming a liability on their balance sheet, them growing to resent the shares you own, the deal you got. The information blackouts they would apply to you. There are companies out there in which I own stock that are owned by former “friends” from whom I’ve not heard in a decade. it really is something.
Or sometimes they will get “bought” early on by some other company, in stock, so now you own stock in a company where you know no one and they won’t tell you anything and you can’t even get any information out of them. It’s always fun when you havent heard from one of them in, like, eight years, and then they sign up for Carta — a software company that helps startups manage their shareholders — and low and behold you can actually see your shares finally. Not that anyone got in touch with you except an impersonal admin, once, to make sure your email address is valid.
I also didn’t plan for the time horizons. We are now twelve years in. Do this again and I’d be in my mid-60’s!
This January — twelve years after I started angel investing — I finally returned to the black. I am up a good amount now, but I just checked an S&P calculator and in the same time frame just letting that money sit in an index fund would have yielded me 229%. I have beaten that, but not by much, not even 10%. Nothing worth the additional level of stress and risk.
Of course, I still have holdings in some companies, and those companies have now gone a good distance, there’s a good chance that some of them will result in good returns. I may well trounce the S&P. But I still don’t think it was worth it. Decade-plus investing horizons are not for me. Friends ghosting you is not for me.
I radically pulled back in angel investing when we moved to NC, I stopped working for a couple years, and we bought the house. Because I had put almost all my cash into angel investing, and the rest into the gloriously-fun-but-money-losing coworking space Secret Clubhouse in Williamsburg (god, that was so much more fun than angel investing), and then bought the house. Couple years after moving here and my finances balanced out, I did a few more: Meow Wolf, Haus, my friend’s brewery, an art collective in NY, a social-justice weed company in LA. I think that’s it? So far, those have been more fun. Two have already returned: I sold my shares in Meow Wolf on the secondary for about 300% up, and my investment in the brewery was the form of a note that my friend, genius that he is, actually just paid back instead of letting me convert into equity no matter how much I begged him. That was smart of him, I admire him for it.
Haus is done now, so the new batch is down to one. The old batch still incudes a few companies you’ve heard of. I honestly don’t know how or why none of them have exited but I don’t really care anymore. Not a single person from any of those companies talks to me anymore and while that used to bum me out, these days it suits me just fine.
Oh, and there’s Timehop, of course. I was one of their first investors. The people who run that tend to keep me pretty informed, boy, they are really great. BUT, on the other hand, I would say we are just as bad to our investors. I am a hypocrite. God. I think perhaps it is time to write an investor update. It has been two years.
And there’s one other guy. Will. Great guy. The friendliest of the batch, the hustler who kept me informed of things for a decade. He was great. He’s mostly pulled back from day-to-day operations at that (still running) company, though, and I’ve not heard from his replacements once in two years.
When people ask if they should get into angel investing, I generally discourage them unless they have, Imagonna say $2 million or more that they would not miss if it disappeared forever. And they are they kind of person who is okay with never hearing from a bunch of people again. And they’re into the idea of randomly getting a few checks in a decade or so. It’s a small cohort where all these criteria click.
I could also go on and on about VCs, and follow-on rounds, and the utter misery I routinely felt in the early years watching VCs abandon good founders and good companies because they needed a little bit more cash or they couldn’t envision the future for the product. It really soured me on the entire industry, I’m not gonna lie. But that is a topic for another day.
Justa mix for today I don’t know what is up with this thing. One time I was standing at Hemmy’s in SF with some friends and one of them said “we gotta go across the street to that bar there” and I knew the bar and it was kinda dumb so I asked why and the friend said “I don’t know Brian wants to go its part of his zeitgeist at the moment,” and the phrase stuck with me, so I guess I’ll use it here. This mix is part of my zeigeist at the moment. Christine Perfect is Christine McVie’s maiden name and first album I just learned that yesterday. Been listening to a lot of Music Complete by New Order because it’s a shockingly good album for a band as old as they are. I profoundly miss Tilly and the Wall they were really one of the great live bands I wish I could see them again. But I guess you can only rock tap dance for so many years. And one of these songs is from a band I used to be in and it’s not, alas, Sonic Youth or the Stone Roses.
Talk to you guys tomorrow! It’ll be friday! We’re going to Walmart! Much more exciting.