Directive 17Is there another investment firm on earth where every employee gets a text at 8 a.m. that says:
“Last one in is a rotten egg!”
I should clarify: I did not send it.
My Chief of Staff did.
Which raises an important question:
What, exactly, does a Chief of Staff do?
I’m still figuring that out.
Is she supposed to manage my calendar? Keep me focused? Translate my thoughts into complete sentences? Prevent me from sending emails that begin with “Quick question” and end three hours later?
Is she supposed to know where I am, where I’m supposed to be, where everyone else is, and why I just walked into a room?
Apparently, yes.
She sent the text at 8 a.m., which suggests that one of her responsibilities may be getting grown adults to work on time through the strategic deployment of egg-based humiliation.
I respect it.
Somewhere, the head of Goldman Sachs is sending out a memo about risk exposure.
My Chief of Staff is threatening grown adults with rotten egg status.
And it was at that exact moment that I realized:
I may have hired the wrong title.
Chief of Staff sounds very serious.
It sounds like someone who sits in a dark room with a leather binder and says things like, “We need to align on priorities.”
But what I may actually need is a Chief Fun Officer.
Someone whose job is to make sure we are building extraordinary companies, taking on enormous problems, making serious money—and actually enjoying being alive while we do it.
So I think I’m going to make her the Chief Fun Officer.
I’m not entirely sure whether that is a promotion, a demotion, or a cry for help.
But it feels right.
Apparently, this is a radical investment strategy.
We are in the investment business where the actual strategy is to make people happy!
Pretty fucking simple.
Yet explain that to certain investors and they look at you like you just suggested funding a hedge fund with Kohl’s Cash.
“Yes, Joel, but what’s the thesis?”
People would like their lives to suck less.
There’s your thesis.
Eight billion potential customers. Most of them have a few complaints.
Some are lonely. Some are sick. Some are overwhelmed. Some want a great meal, a place to belong, something extraordinary to experience, or technology that actually does what somebody promised it would do.
Some would simply like to call a business and speak to a human before their original problem becomes an estate matter.
There is no shortage of demand.
But somehow, in the investment world, saying “we want to make people happy” sounds unserious.
You know what sounds serious?
“We’re pursuing a differentiated, vertically integrated platform strategy designed to unlock asymmetric value across an underserved ecosystem.”
Nobody knows what the fuck you’re doing.
But you said “ecosystem,” so here’s $40 million.
Walk into the same room and say, “We’re building companies people will love, run by people who give a shit,” and suddenly everyone needs to consult the investment committee.
“Have you validated the giving-a-shit component?”
We’re working on a spreadsheet.
Apparently, Excel doesn’t have a formula for it. I checked.
Maybe the Chief Fun Officer can add one.
Now, can we make money doing this?
Hmmm.
My guess is yes.
My larger suspicion is that, over time, we can beat the pants off a whole lot of people who have confused being miserable with being financially sophisticated.
That’s a belief, by the way, not a guaranteed return. I can already hear an attorney somewhere putting down his sandwich.
We still have to execute. The numbers have to work. Customers have to show up. You cannot meet payroll with a group hug.
I assume. We haven’t tried it.
But why would purpose and performance be enemies?
If people love what you build, they come back.
If you treat them beautifully, they tell their friends.
If your employees believe in what they’re doing, you have a fighting chance of getting more from them than the absolute minimum necessary to preserve dental coverage.
And if your partners are proud to be involved, they might actually look forward to your calls.
Imagine that.
An investor seeing your name on their phone and thinking, “Oh, good.”
Instead of, “Jesus Christ. What happened now?”
That feels like a competitive advantage.
I have spent enough time around business to know that an expensive suit does not automatically contain a useful person.
Sometimes it contains a meeting.
A whole fucking meeting, standing there in loafers.
And the meeting wants to schedule another meeting to discuss whether there is sufficient institutional appetite for joy.
Meanwhile, we could be building something.
Something that helps a family. Gives someone a chance. Makes a person feel welcome. Lets friends spend a ridiculous evening together. Fixes a problem everybody had simply accepted as part of being alive.
Those things matter.
They also sound like businesses people might pay for.
I want our employees to do well financially. I want our partners and investors to do well financially. I want the companies we build to succeed beyond anything their founders thought possible.
I also want everyone to get something out of the experience that cannot be deposited into a brokerage account.
Pride.
Friendship.
The feeling that all these hours we spend working are producing something worth the hours.
And maybe a little fun.
Not fake fun. Not “mandatory team-building fun” where everyone is forced to throw an ax while pretending to enjoy it.
Real fun.
The kind that happens when smart people are doing meaningful work, trust one another, laugh at the absurdity of business, and occasionally send a text threatening someone with egg status.
Because there is a strange version of success where you spend forty years doing things you don’t enjoy, with people you don’t particularly like, so you can eventually afford to get away from both.
Congratulations.
You have acquired a very expensive escape plan.
I would prefer to enjoy Tuesday.
This Tuesday. While we’re building it.
That doesn’t mean every day is a party. There will be problems, bad decisions, missed targets, and days when I look at a number and briefly consider becoming a bartender.
Then I remember bartenders have to listen to people like me.
Brutal profession.
We will work hard. We will argue. We will get things wrong. We will fix them.
But we’re allowed to laugh while we do it.
We’re allowed to be ambitious without becoming insufferable. We’re allowed to care about returns and care about what produced them.
We’re allowed to admit that culture is not a poster on the wall or a paragraph in an employee handbook.
Sometimes culture is a Chief of Staff sending a text at 8 a.m. because apparently nobody wants to be a rotten egg.
And maybe that is what a Chief of Staff does.
Or maybe that is what a Chief Fun Officer does.
I’m still working through the org chart.
We’re also allowed to believe that making life better is a sufficiently large idea to build an investment firm around.
That’s Directive 17.
The future should make life better.
I happen to think helping build that future will be one hell of a business.
Anyway, I have to go. The team is coming in, there’s a lot to build, and I need to maintain the dignity expected of the founder of an investment firm.
My Chief Fun Officer is watching.
Someone is about to be a rotten egg!