Writing

I am a talkative person and hence fall prey to embellishing my thinking with unnecessary wording.¹ I started this blog to force more structured thinking.

Efficiency in communication seems like a perfect zero-sum game. The more work it is for me to convey my thinking succinctly, the quicker the recipient can grasp what I want to say. This is not new. Bezos used this argument to ban PowerPoint and bullet points from Amazon.

We’ve almost eliminated all the support work that needs to be done to communicate: Buying stamps, and sending, and collecting letters from the post office is a thing of the past. But friction sometimes is good: This blog is a simple PHP site that is deployed from my IDE. I could have set up a WordPress or Substack site which makes it easier to craft text but I want to limit my text creation to my Apple Notes and make the publishing effort as artisanal as possible.
= Little friction in generating output; High friction uploading a lot
(The Inverse of every social network)²

——— Rough additional thoughts ———

Christina Cacioppo maintained a blog for fun and being an avid reader aside it must have helped her in her VC gig for sure. It certainly got her hired.

Personally, I am not a fan of Twitter. The platform encourages users to optimize for clout, compressing complex thoughts into the concise format of a haiku. It's akin to TikTok for thoughts, which, while arguably better for the general audience, does not provide a safe space for me.

Furthermore, I recognize the need to improve my English. Being conversational is insufficient; I have yet to achieve a level of sophistication in my language use. My approach involves structuring my thoughts, refining them, and then connecting them in a logical argument, before finally enhancing them with vivid, illustrative language. One of our partners at the fund once remarked, "Who the hell reads anymore?" This comment suggests that reading might not be the most relevant medium today. However, I am apprehensive about a future dominated by 'haiku talk' in real life, or everyone equipped with an inbuilt Grammarly and AI-powered summarizers that aim straight for the core of the matter. This scenario might seem like an ideal dream to some, particularly for efficiency-driven individuals, and I concede it's a much-needed change in certain contexts, like email communication.

The concept of an office is 200 years old, and email is about 20 years old, signaling that these forms of communication are likely not the ultimate evolution. Looking at formal emails, one might argue that the future of writing will place greater emphasis on the process of connecting thoughts and perhaps on the selective use of sophisticated vocabulary. Through my experiences in deal meetings, I've encountered and learned words such as "alleviating," "alluding," and "proliferating," and phrases like "hellbent on backing founders that" and "swinging for the fences." Yet, acquiring this vocabulary is not the pinnacle of communication mastery. This blog represents my effort to contribute to the development of the next language model, one that is trained on public data, reflecting my journey and insights.