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Where I've been and where i'm going
Roll it back 30 years, and I'm sitting in an Amtrak regional, cafe car to be specific, accompanied by, count 'em' two, empty airplane bottles of Titos (relax, Linkedin, I can still legally drive a vehicle in most states south of the Mason-Dixon line), one hundred crumpled pieces of paper, remnants of ideas come, and very clearly gone. Fast forward to 2024, and I still have two airplane bottles of Titos in hand, but there is no crumpled paper, just my glorified Zoom machine that I occasionally slam out articles on in 90 minutes for my mother and my other seven substack readers, the Amtrak cafe car though, remains in its 1990's glory, smells like it too.
I know the intro here may give off the essence of a struggling print writer. I'm not a writer, a venture capitalist, or a political strategist, yet when I look at how I spend my days, my identity gets a little funky. I'm volunteering with Bradley Tusk on the campaign to allow Americans to vote from their cellphones, I'm speaking to 50 of the most promising pre-Series A startups in America in just 12 hours in New York as a leading Machine learning-focused Venture Capitalist, and I've published an article every day for the last four days. This does not include my fractional work at an influencer marketing agency, shooting a marketing campaign in New York, being a strategy advisor for an ML-infra portco, and running a book club (yeah, we are reading Chip Wars; it is a bunch of VCs; I had to pick a middle of the road book for our first read, with any luck the next one will be a Hunter S. Thompson though). When I'm not writing, strategizing, investing, or advising, I'm usually traveling solo and sitting in a hostel in a foreign country, paying under $20 a night for a bed, praying I don't get bed bugs again (fucking Chungking Mansions $2 beds), my life, as you can see is hard to put in a box.
Aside from dodging bedbugs, moving money, and, in the words of Ace Hood, "Hustling Hard" (he's the voice of a tenth of a generation, thank you very much), I'm looking for something more (I already have a podcast...). Though it's not about new, it's about mine; I've helped create and move billions of dollars of value (hey, easy, even when you're a fly on the wall, you can say you were on the wall, those ain't my billions). I'm looking to own what I do next. No more advisor this, little brother that; I'm here to rip it and rip it on my terms. I'm taking calls with the folks I respect the most and ideating with them. The moment it clicks, sparks fly, and I start having the most fun I've had in years, I will do everything in my power to make that MY/our thing. While I did not need 450 words to tell you, if you're building, having fun, and looking to rip it full speed - hit me up because I am too - fund, founder, or operator, I'm here for it all. -John
John@meridianstreet.co