Q1 2023 Update

26 Mar 2023

For the last year I’ve sent these updates via email, but in order easily link other thoughts I’ve moved to this blog. This let’s me do nice things like write a simple for-loop to generate links. Plus markdown is great.

Motivation Recap

Here’s a quick recap of my motivations:

I want life to survive as long as possible
I don’t want people to die, death is a nasty business
any higher purpose is irrelevant without continuity or inheritors
we are default dead on spaceship earth
we are NOT on an optimal path to long term survival
humanity is grossly under utilized and under fulfilled
The genetic lottery sucks
Our biology is the bottleneck (or soon will be) of the advancement of intelligence

My beliefs on solving these problems:

The most impactful technology is human biology because it is the most meta technology that exists.
Any human bio-engineering should be opt-in else we risk in-fighting
Our “spray and pray” approach to biology is fundamentally flawed.
We need to speed up iteration by 2-4 orders of magnitude, from weeks or months to seconds or minutes to make meaningful strides. For software engineers, think a biological REPL.
There is a movement for this – synthetic biology. Building it from scratch will drive the base toolsets for rapid iteration.
My intermediate goal is funneling $1 billion into synthetic biology.
I’ve determined the best way to move in this direction and build optionality is to found a company.
The best way to maximize resources from founding is to deliberately practice founding companies and ladder up and found multiple companies.

Company #1 Update

Basics:

LeftLane Software
Vertical SaaS (Used Car Dealerships)
Team of 9
1 year, 2 months old

Updates:

We are officially multi-state (Texas and Florida)
15 k ARR live revenue, ~350 k booked ARR
Moving into office space this week
We raised a $3 million seed round at a $12 million valuation
Fired our first team member due to poor performance
We had our funds in SVB but managed to wire it out before it was closed

We have been throttling our live revenue and are turning away customers because our focus is realizing our booked revenue. We don’t need more customers right now unless they help us ladder up.

Once we have have shipped to in-house financed dealerships we will be looking at 20 - 50 k SaaS contracts. Why? Payments is a large component and is tightly coupled to SaaS contracts. We can provide massive value and take healthy margins processing payments as well as on our contracts.

Here we go again. We built an MVP for cash and retail dealers only to limit onboarding in those markets. Now we look ahead to building an MVP for the in-house financed dealerships. Normally, we’d be blowing out our customer count but for good reason. This market is where the pain and the money is.

$2 million ARR by end of 2024 is doable and $5-10 million by end of 2026.

Funny story about the SVB fiasco, we weren’t sure if we could make payroll on Monday when the FTC blocked transfers. My co-founder was trying to wire money from the Cayman’s from SVB to a new bank account but the site was locked up. We got around it by writing a paper check. Fun stuff.

On the firing I made the decision to fire our first employee. It was a decision that took six months that should have taken six weeks. I could make excuses but the reality is I dithered.

Walk cold into dealership? No problem. Plan new product and onboard first user in 3 months? Sure. Hire and negotiate a team? Sure. Negotiate with an eight figure revenue customer for order of magnitude better terms? Yeah, I read a book on that and did what it said. Cut someone from the team? Struggle bus. I looked too hard for evidence that wasn’t there.

Health

Will use GSM model. https://userpilot.com/blog/goals-signals-metrics/

Goal: perform at my biological potential day after day, year after year

Signals/Metrics

signal: maintain <15% body fat year round
- quarterly DEXA
signal: optimal sleep
- eight sleep app score
signal: daily exercise
- count of days NOT exercised
signal: habit of daily activity
- count of days WITHOUT rings closed on watch
signal: low stress
- HRV from apple watch

Strategy & Actions:

exercise and sleep on a regimented schedule
- adjusted my schedule to a 0700 wakeup and 0730 workout
stack habits at the same time every day in the mornings so it cannot be interrupted
start with token exercise (anything) and work up to 30 m

Goal: live as long as my natural biology allows

Many of the goals from performing well apply here but here are a few others.

signal: biologically appear 5+ years younger
- mydnaage horvath clock

Strategies: I have the APOE4 variant which is tragically and ironically associated with shorter lifespan. If I outlive you and you are normal – than suck it!

For that reason I follow many of the tenets laid out here https://forever-healthy.org/news/apoe4-risks-risk-management-a-practical-guide-for-those-with-the-e4-variant-of-the-apoe-gene/

Some notables:

not purchasing alcohol as a way to limit intake
not purchasing/consuming dairy, chocolote, coconut oil, and red meat to limit saturated fat intake
not eating purchased mammalian meat due to APOE

Fun

Bri and I are going to Korea in Q1/Q2 of 2024. We’ve become enchanted by Korean culture, also Hangul is easy to learn. I wanted to spend 2-3 weeks there this year but this year is too important to the company. I’ll suck it up and defer taking PTO (other than my bi-annual think week).
I built myself a zero-g reclining workstation for about $3,000. It’s pretty sweet.
Fun fact, I am a game master. I’ve been running a game of DnD for since Q2 of last year IIRC.

2023 March Books/Courses

Books I’ve reviewed this month, though many of these I first read years ago, I’ve decided they don’t count unless I’ve produced a proof which brings my count from 500+ to <30.

New books are useful for JIT learning but unless it’s immediately applicable I’d rather catalog the ground I’ve covered and double down on the best I’ve seen.

I’ll have to start a list for the titles I think are worth not merely reading, but embodying.

For March: