Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

Book Notes: The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison is a searing account of her struggles with alcoholism.

It’s long. I read the first 400+ pages and got distracted by something else and never came back to it. But the 400 pages I read were phenomenal, and gave me great insight into the mind of a super high functioning alcoholic and the nature of addiction. I’m no expert in the genre of addiction memoir but this one, apparently, is considered among the best.

Some of my Kindle highlights below. Bolded sentences my own.

In John Barleycorn, a novel published in 1913, Jack London conjured two kinds of drunks: the ones who stumbled through the gutters hallucinating “blue mice and pink elephants,” and the ones to whom the “white light of alcohol” had granted access to bleak truths: “the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic.” The first type of drunk had his mind ravaged by booze, “bitten numbly by numb maggots,” but the second type had his mind sharpened instead.

Life with Daniel was weird and ragged and unexpected. It tingled. He was a messy eater. There were bits of cabbage in his beard, patches of ice cream melted on his sheets, crusted pots and pans in his sink, tiny beard hairs all over his bathroom counter.

drinking and writing were two different responses to that same molten pain. You could numb it, or else grant it a voice.

My ability to find drunken dysfunction appealing—to fetishize its relationship to genius—was a privilege of having never really suffered. My fascination owed a debt to what Susan Sontag calls the “nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting.’” In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag describes the nineteenth-century idea that if you were ill, you were also “more conscious, more complex psychologically.” Illness became an “interior décor of the body,” while health was considered “banal, even vulgar.”

My own pain seemed embarrassingly trivial, self-constructed and sought.

At a certain point we were on my bed and I didn’t want to fuck him—but I was too drunk and too tired to figure out how not to fuck him, so I just lay there, still and quiet, while he finished. The situation would sharpen into awareness, in fleeting moments, and I’d think, This isn’t what I want, and then it would dissolve into soft focus again.

In early drafts, there were no explicit traumas in the narrative that produced their self-destructive impulses. The mystery of these impulses was what I wanted to explore, the possibility that you might damage yourself to figure out why you wanted to damage yourself—the way exhaling into cold air makes your breath visible.

Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept.

A few scientists eventually wondered: What if they were given some company? What if they were given something else to do? In the early eighties, these scientists designed Rat Park, a spacious plywood habitat painted with pine trees and filled with climbing platforms, running wheels, tin cans for hiding, wood chips for playing, and—most important—lots of other rats. The rats in that cage didn’t press the coke lever until they died. They had better things to do. The point wasn’t that drugs couldn’t be addictive, but that addiction was fueled by so much besides the drugs themselves. It was fueled by the isolation of the white cage, and by the lever as substitute for everything else.

Their aliveness, their daily-ness, their back-and-forth energy, came like a sudden slap, a confirmation of my fears: He would always crave the sharp tingling sensation of falling for someone, rather than having her.

Pool told me that he started shooting heroin after dropping out of college, operating under the notion, as she put it, that “writers needed conflict and adversity. So he deliberately went out to find some.”

Describing Dave to a friend, I invoked that scene from Out of Africa where another character explains what’s charming and infuriating about Robert Redford as a big-game-hunting, impossibly restless lover: “He likes giving gifts, but not at Christmas.”

When Dr. Chisolm told me that she sometimes attaches a warning when she encourages certain patients to seek out AA, it didn’t surprise me. “You’re really smart,” she tells them. “That might work against you.” The idea of being “too smart for AA” immediately resonated with the part of me that sometimes found its truisms too reductive or its narratives too simple.

At meetings, I hated when other people abandoned narrative particularity in their stories—I accidentally crushed my daughter’s pet turtle after too much absinthe—for the bland pudding of abstraction—I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I wanted crushed turtles and absinthe. Clichés were like blights, refusals of clarity and nuance, an insistence on soft-focus greeting-card wisdom: This too shall pass, which I once saw on a cross-stitch in the bathroom of a Wyoming meeting, followed by It just did. Long ago, I had learned that to become a writer I had to resist clichés at all costs. It was such accepted dogma that I’d never wondered why it was true.

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Sauna Culture in Europe Over the Holidays

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I’ve become quite taken with saunas recently — primarily dry, wood paneled saunas, but I’m not unhappy with steam rooms. I find myself more relaxed after a deep sweat; I also think it helps me sleep better. Taking a cold plunges after a hot sauna is especially effective at lifting my energy level in the hours following. Cold showers can serve a similar purpose. A friend once advised to “breathe” in the cold plunge if you feel like the cold is overwhelming. When the cold starts to feel too much, just keep breathing.

(For my interest in sauna, I must credit, in part, Bob Wright, for his encouragement here and for spreading the good gospel of sauna as spiritual practice over at BloggingHeads.TV.)

Over Christmas and New Year’s this year, I traveled through Munich, Zurich, Istanbul, and Ankara with friends and family. By some good luck, we ended up sampling a range of saunas that were just the thing for cold winter days in Europe.

In Germany, we went to the Therme Erding sauna complex just outside Munich, the second largest sauna complex in all of Europe. 4,000 visitors per day. 35 different saunas and steam baths. And dozens of different pools. It’s truly massive. You pull your car into a multi-level above ground parking garage that’s situated next to what appears to be an enormous mall and dome structure.

The adults-only sauna facility is in its own area within the compound. Unlike the kids waterslide area, teeming with children sprawling and splashing about, the sauna area is more quiet, more refined, and… completely nude. And co-ed. People wear towels and robes while walking around; inside each sauna or steam room, they sit on their towels. No bathing suits allowed. I saw more naked humans in a couple hours than at probably any other time in my life. Within a few minutes, the weirdness wears off, and truth be told it was kind of relaxing to be free of constraint or squeeze. The downstairs area, with its low ceilings and narrow, cave-like walls meant people were slinking past each other in the nude to get to their preferred destination. Through it all though, a remarkably wholesome atmosphere. No funny business in sight.

There was excellent variety across the 35+ different offerings. The traditional dry saunas varied in temperature, humidity, scent, and setup: some were in dungeon like underground caves, others were in huge glass paneled amphitheaters. The steam rooms offered the opportunity to scrub yourself in salts before entering. The outdoor thermal pools allowed you to float along with your head exposed in outdoor frigid winter air. An assortment of different jacuzzi-style jets were placed along the pool walls along with some built in “chairs” that you could lounge in with special jets propulsion. Nearby to all this was an outdoor cold plunge. Going from hot water to cold always revs the engines; especially so when the temperature in the air upon getting out of the cold plunge is also freezing.

In Zurich, we went to the Thermalbad. This is a chain of spa facilities throughout Switzerland; supposedly the Zurich location is the finest. It’s a beautiful, modern facility designed like Roman cisterns built inside of an old Zurich brewery building. As opposed to choose-your-own-adventure, this places encourages a sequential process whereby you start in Station 1 and end in Station 12, with signs suggesting the amount of time to spend in each station. It starts with a lightly warm steam, followed by a sequence of differently heated pools, then some hotter steam rooms and scrubs. My favorite pool was the “classic Roman pool” where the depth and temperature made it feel like I could almost float effortlessly, as in a sensory deprivation pod. Very relaxing. One station had me lie on my back on slightly warm stone floor, which I’ve never done before.

A TripAdvisor review of Thermalbad notes, “It’s a lot of money to spend to watch couples basically all but have sex.” That seems off. I didn’t witness anything X-rated, and this place, unlike the one in Germany, was all clothed. Even the locker room had curtained “changing areas” for changing into bathing suits. The Swiss: as buttoned up as ever.

Elsewhere in Zurich, we went to a neighborhood gym/community center that offered a large indoor pool for swimming, plus a medium size thermal pool that offered a range of jets and suggested a rhythm to the water massage. Every minute or so a light would flash (like one of those rotating lights on the top of a cop car but adhered to the side wall) to indicate it was time to move to the next set of jets. With each move in jet, the pressure moved up the body, from hitting your legs at first and ending with your upper shoulders. The propulsion of the jets — the forcefulness with which the water hit you — was intense. I’ve never felt jets pulse water so hard. Nor have I seen such precise instructions offered about when it’s time to switch to the next jacuzzi jet. The Swiss: as punctual as ever.

In Istanbul, we went to the Cagaloglu hamam — a 300 year old facility. Not quite as tourist-famous as the hamam next to the Blue Mosque where we went 5 years ago but just as ornate on the inside. The male and female experiences differ here. As I reported five years ago during my first trip to Istanbul, men receive quite a beating. Your therapist slaps you around, pulls your arms in every which way, attempts light weight chiropractiory, and with no warning, dumps buckets of hot water over your head. It’s fun and worth it but anyone with tender shoulders or backs should beware. I told my therapist at one point to be more careful of my back, and he replied, “Relax.” It turned out that that was the only word in English he spoke. Women, reportedly, experience a much gentler set of scrubs. Unlike the hamam in Morocco, the Cagaloglu hamam in Istanbul does less loofa scrubbing. There’s not the stunning pile of dead skin at the end of it. But you’re still relaxed and alert.

All in all, there’s great sauna culture in Europe. Lots of relaxing fun. And I haven’t even to Finland yet… that’s going to be its own trip!

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Thinking About People Who Have Less Than You Before Writing/Bragging About It

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If you’re writing about your life on social media and want to be considerate of the feelings of people who are not lucky enough to have what you have, be cautious about how you write about your highly desired, hard to obtain things and experiences like a second home in the country, a shiny new Tesla, beautiful well-adjusted kids, and a loving spouse.

Self-aware people tend to exercise this restraint when it’s about material wealth. I don’t see a lot of compassionate, aware people writing Facebook posts like, “It’s so glorious to have a second mansion in Napa. It just feels great to jet over there and relax in wine country.” The people I know who maintain multiple fancy residences either don’t write about it publicly at all, to self-express with subtlety: “Beautiful day in the Hamptons” might be the caption of a single photo of a beach; they choose not to include a 6 photo slideshow of their fancy kitchen and $5 million re-model.

Yet with respect to one’s personal life, people tend to be less restrained when writing — and bragging — about their triumphs.

“So blessed to be married to the most amazing man in the universe, who loves me every day, pushes me to be stronger, and makes me a better human. He’s my rock.” How do singletons feel when reading this? How do people in shitty marriages feel?

It’s especially noticeable when it’s about kids. Parents frequently post odes to their perfect offspring without regard to all the people who may be reading it who are unable to or cannot have children for whatever reason.

There’s nothing wrong with celebrating how amazing your spouse or child is, or for that matter, how much you love that second home in Napa, or your thousand dollar bottle of wine, or brand new Tesla. But there’s a time and a place for those celebratory words and photos. Private journal? Private email to friends? Private iCloud photo stream group?

Our social media presences by default broadcast public to the world, indiscriminately. If it’s low cost to self-express without making those who are less fortunate feel badly, it’s worth doing, in my view. Many people already do this with their material trophies. If my Facebook feed is any indicator, people could do better when tooting their horn about their personal life wins.

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What I’ve Been Reading

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Books, books, books. Many of which I didn’t fully finish but I take pride in that (not finishing most/all books I start).

1. The Problem With Everything by Meghan Daum. I read everything Daum writes. I even took a writing workshop with her earlier this year. She’s one of the premier essayists around, in my view. This book is not a collection of essays, though, it’s a continuous narrative documenting her “lived experience” (the phrase of the moment) navigating the culture wars. I found myself sympathetic to many of her arguments about the extremes of modern left wing cultural norms.

2. String Theory by David Foster Wallace. Collection of old DFW essays about tennis. Always great and worth perusing if you’re learning to play tennis, as I am.

3. One and Only by Lauren Sandler. Excellent summary of the research on being an only child and excellent personal reflections on what it’s like to be and parent an only child. Refutes many inaccurate stereotypes about being an only. She points out that singletons are immune from modern political correctness culture — it’s still fair game to make fun of the self-centeredness of only children, even though that stereotype (among others) is unfounded.

Some quotes:

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self,” May Sarton wrote—a musing that makes me want to pull on a coat, leave behind my cell phone, and take an indulgently long walk on a crisp day.

“Only children are well self-connected in their primary relationship in their life.” By primary relationship, what he means is that whether we like it or not, married or single, identical twin or only child, every relationship we have is secondary to the one we have with ourselves—nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide.

In their much-discussed analysis of a survey of 35,000 Danish twins, women with one child said they were more satisfied with their lives than women with none or more than one. As Kohler tells me, “At face value, you should stop at one child to maximize your subjective well-being.”

The University of Chicago’s Linda Waite, whose research focuses on how to make marriages last, tells me, “You’re better off to ignore your kids and focus on your relationship than to focus on your kids and ignore your relationship”

4. Recursion by Blake Crouch

Fairly compelling sci fi. I read it on a beach — a good book to get absorbed by on the road. That being said, I preferred Crouch’s other novel Dark Matter.

“His mind races. It is the lonely hour of the night, one with which he is all too familiar—when the city sleeps but you don’t, and all the regrets of your life rage in your mind with an unbearable intensity.”

5. Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

Some big ideas that didn’t captivate me.

6. The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes by Frank Bures

Some fun stories about how culturally determined many diseases are. Eating disorders are uniquely American, for example. Penis snatching (the feeling that someone has stolen your penis) is unique to certain countries in Africa. Makes you wonder what other beliefs in life are so culturally influenced. I read the first half but didn’t finish. Here’s Nick Gray’s summary.

7. A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen. I love Keith’s writing. I eagerly dove into this novel. The writing is spare and expert…so spare, in fact, that at halfway I began to bore of the slow-moving “and today I woke up and helped my grandmother down the stairs” plot developments. I’m okay with micro observations but prefer more elaborate Knaussagardian flourishes.

There are, though, some touching scenes of the protagonist taking care of his aging grandmother, whose mind is going, memory flickering in and out.  Or of the grandmother trying to not go mad of boredom, as she never figured out a way of “doing leisure” in the late afternoon witching hour.

8. Open by Andre Agassi. A super well written memoir from the tennis legend — likely credit the same ghostwriter who penned Phil Knight’s renowned Shoedog, J. R. Moehringer.

The most stunning fact from Agassi’s memoir: he hates the game of tennis. Always has. His abusive father turned him into a tennis maniac as a child against his wishes, basically, and there was no turning back — from playing the game he became amazing at, or from hating every second of it.

I like playing tennis but I’m not that into the history of tennis tournaments to desire so much detailed blow-by-blows of matches and tournaments. I’d still recommend the memoir for any casual tennis player or fan to get inside the head of a world class sports champion and better appreciate the sacrifice and mental fortitude that made him so.

9. This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund

I dipped into a few chapters of this one. Spiritual freedom is defined as being able to ask what you should do with your time — you possess a meaningful degree of autonomy with which to challenge norms and shape a life. And secular faith is defined as acknowledging the fundamental finitude of life, and consoling oneself over the unchangeable fact that no one gets out alive. Religious faith assumes the ability to live forever in the afterlife.

The loss of loved ones is the experience that is hardest to bear in a secular age. – Charles Taylor

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Venture Capital Scout Programs: FAQs

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The Sequoia scouts program recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The founding of that program kickstarted a trend in the venture capital industry. As Jason Lemkin once asked: “Anyone not a scout these days?”

Over the past two years, my Village Global partners and I have spent a ton of time studying this trend and indeed building our own effort around it. Here are some frequently asked questions and answers about VC scouts based on our experiences.

What are “scouts”?

People who are empowered to invest money in startups (usually in ~$50k increments at the seed stage) on behalf of a venture capital fund, sometimes with full decision making autonomy.

What are the differences between the scout programs?

There are two broad types of scout programs.

Some scout programs are run by venture funds that for the most part focus on Series A or later investing. For example, Sequoia Capital is commonly credited with inventing the scout program. Sequoia invests the vast majority of its capital via its full-time GPs at Series A stage through IPO. Some of their investments at seed stage happen through independent scouts who write $25k-$50k checks. It’s an active program but in the grand scheme it’s minor part of Sequoia’s reported $8 billion global fund.

Then there are independent, newer firms like AngelList Spearhead or my firm Village Global. At Village, a network strategy is a central part of our firm strategy. We thrive based on our ability to execute our scouts strategy. At the independent venture firms, you’ll generally find more innovation, resources, and community around scouts.

Why the blossoming of scout programs inside legacy firms?

Over the past 10 years, some venture funds have ballooned in size. Lightspeed, A16Z, Sequoia, Accel, Greylock, Founders Fund, Thrive, Spark, and others are all now deploying billion dollar+ funds, a substantial step up from their historic fund sizes of $200–400 million. Suppose one of these firms employs 6–10 GPs to invest that billion dollars. To get leverage on their time, GPs need to be writing minimum $10M+ checks — ideally bigger.

The problem is, at the seed stage, founders don’t want or need a $10M investment. The round sizes are smaller. Small check sizes don’t move the needle for the VC when they’re trying to allocate over a billion dollars. So should these mega funds just get out of the seed stage business altogether and focus on Series A, B, and later? Some firms have done that, but many have decided they can’t. They need to be seeing seed deals because that’s today’s seed deal is tomorrow’s great Series A — it’s the pipeline.

Hence their scout programs. Big firms perceive them as an efficient way of scanning seed stage flow to feed their main Series A or Series B business.

Why are there independent, network-driven firms?

The existence of firms like Village Global represents a different macro phenomenon. At Village, we aren’t trying to lead Series A’s, B’s, and growth rounds. Our scouts aren’t lead gen for later stage investing. We’re taking a network approach to executing on our core seed mission.

Why a network approach? It used to be that a few full time men on Sand Hill Road could wait for the best founders in the Valley to parade into their office and pitch their businesses. Today, that passive approach doesn’t cut it. There’s an explosion of software-driven, diverse entrepreneurship around the world and across almost every industry. We believe this explosion of opportunity requires a fundamentally different approach to sourcing, selecting, and supporting. We believe a wide sensor network (i.e., a network of dozens of scouts) is more likely to discover a talented founder on day zero.

What’s more, the way founders socialize and develop their business ideas has changed. Thanks to online communities and social networks, founders are increasingly able to connect with fellow founders, professors, authors, or other people they know or respect. These days, when you’re brainstorming a business idea, your first stop may not be the VC’s office — and all the intimidation and nervousness that might entail. You might instead call a founder friend to ask for advice.

We want to ally with the people who are that first call, whose expertise makes them valued resources to founders who are just getting going. We empower those people — our Network Leaders — with our Village Global capital to back their smartest friends. And then we bring to bear the full resources of our network to make those companies more successful post-investment.

Can non-professional, non-full time people make good investment decisions?

At the earliest stages of company formation, you’re mainly evaluating whether the founders are unbelievably resourceful and persistent, and whether they’re attacking a massive problem that, if solved, could produce a large business. There aren’t metrics to analyze. There aren’t customers to interview. So at this stage, we think it’s very possible for someone who’s not full time, or even not terribly experienced at investing, to back her smartest friends, and for those friends to end up creating huge businesses.

Chris Sacca, one of the most successful angels ever, backed Ev Williams and Travis Kalanick, before he had any investing track record or sophisticated framework for investing. It worked out pretty well for him — and eventually for the LPs who backed his angel-stage funds. Who’s the next Chris Sacca?

Do the scouts make money themselves?

The sharing of economics differs from program to program. Almost every firm — including Village Global — shares economic upside with their scouts.

For us, we also focus on non-economic benefits. We cultivate a community between and among our Network Leaders. We expose them to and connect them with our luminary LPs. For example, several of our Network Leaders have had intimate interaction with people like Bill Gates, Bob Iger, Abby Johnson, Eric Schmidt, Ben Silbermann, and others.

Most great scouts — most great angels in general, I’d argue — are not doing it for the money. They’re doing it for the love of the game. Making money is a happy coincidence if you find yourself in luck’s way.

Do scouts invest their own personal money alongside the venture fund?

At Village Global, we ask most of our Network Leaders invest money alongside us commensurate with their net worth or whatever would constitute skin in the game. We think it makes for better decision making.

Are scouts exclusive to one firm?

Some venture firms try to insist on an exclusive relationship with their scouts.

At Village Global, we eschew a zero sum, exclusivity mindset. We’re fine with our Network Leaders working with multiple venture firms so long as there’s good communication and transparency around the deals they’re doing.

As it turns out, most of our Network Leaders prefer to just work with us because of our focus on them and the network strategy that’s in our DNA.

Should founder/CEOs really be angel investing on the side? What about focusing on their business?

Different sorts of people can be scouts. At Village Global, we have professors, full-time angels, big company execs, retired GPs, and active founder/CEOs in our network.

The most famous archetype — popularized by Sequoia — is for founder/CEOs themselves to be the ones investing the scout capital.

Some people worry that founders who invest on the side are too unfocused:

Here’s my question: Is any hobby outside of work a dangerous distraction? Should founders who work 80 hours a week and spend 20 hours a week on an intellectual, artistic, or athletic hobby, cut out the hobby time and increase to 100 hours a week of pure focus on their startup? Some people believe that. If that’s you, then it’s true that being a scout (i.e., investing on the side) as a founder is just one more distraction from your day job…along with playing tennis, or writing short stories, or occasional travel, or volunteering, and any other hobby one might pursue.

Myself, I don’t think working 100 hours a week is healthy or sustainable, and I don’t think it increases the odds of success. I also don’t think your team will respect you more if you work those extra 20 hours a week like a heartless robot.

If we’re open to the idea that even founders ought to be able to spend some precious hours each week not directly working on their startup, then I’d argue that of all the hobbies one could have (and who are we to judge?), angel investing is comparatively high value.

When you invest in or advise startups as a CEO, you learn. You learn how other CEOs make decisions, especially around fundraising. You grow your network of fellow CEOs and of VCs. You intertwine yourself with a community of people who will likely be more loyal to you, or at least have no choice but to stay in touch with you as you’re on their cap table for life! Among other reasons, this is why Sequoia Capital encourages many of its founders to be scouts.

And sometimes angel investing can actually benefit the CEO’s main focus: her startup. Adam Nash recently tweeted about how Reid Hoffman’s angel investing in Facebook and Zynga (while he was CEO of LinkedIn) helped LinkedIn:

Here’s Falon Fatemi, who’s a scout and a founder/CEO of Node.io (which has raised ~$40 million):

Should you start angel investing as part of a scout program?

The great Elad Gil, in his post on scouts, frames the pros and cons this way:

The positives of investing include giving back to others, broadening your network, information access (for example, what new distribution approaches are working for others), and the potential for financial return (although you should plan to lose any personal money you invest — so do not invest if you can not afford to lose the money).

The cons include investing can become a big distraction, can irritate your cofounders or employees if a lot of your time goes to it (and your startup is not working), and the potential to lose money.

Well summarized.

Is being a scout a good way to become an investor?

Maybe!

Per Bryce, it’s true that in today’s venture industry that best path to a job is to be a really successful founder with a big exit. VC firms tend to favor successful former founders. So if you’re deciding between focusing on your startup or focusing on investing, focus on your startup.

But a lot of VC firms, and all venture capital LPs (they matter if you want to found your own VC firm), care about your angel investing track record. They’d prefer to see some experience at finding deals and investing in the good ones. If you’re cash illiquid, investing scout money — in a time-boxed, hobby kind of way — is a good way to begin to build that track record.

How do you become a scout at a venture firm?

Lots of ways. If you’re interested in working with us at Village Global, feel free to reach out and say hello.

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