Hey Wall St., You Can't Eat Money and Ivy Leauge Degrees

Entrepreneurship has been one heck of a journey for me.

My early life is ~85% the same as Steve Job's wikipedia. From being the son of a teen mom with multiple marriages, getting off the elementary school bus at her hole-in-the-wall clothing alteration's shop, watching her grow that business into a busy tanning salon before selling it to return to alterations and eventually becoming the COO of an investor-backed children's clothing company, to running a lemonade stand outside of the tanning salon and delivering the mail to the other businesses in the strip mall for a few quarters, I've only ever wanted to be in business for myself.

Fortunately, the rough and tumble nature of my upbringing as an only child gave me the grit and preparation for the lonely, arduous journey of the path less chosen.

When I moved to Chicago in 2016 after a 3 year gap post-high school to pursue architecture at the Ivy-league equivalent of fine art & design schools, I was guided by a handful of first principles:

• make things that are beautiful and useful
• do good by and for other people
• do good by and for the environment & future generations
• live a life I could be proud of on my death bed

My ambitions have tended to outpace my access to resources, and after 2 years I had to drop out of school - sometimes we are redirected for high blessings. I learned a lot while I was there, some of which informed how to apply my first principles thinking into the direction of actionable plans. There was still a good deal of learning and refining to do, but at least I had a direction to move in: the food system is broken, and so is the municipal waste system.

Being serially unemployable and not always having good mentors around me, I've had more jobs than years I've been alive, refusing to settle into a "career path" in favor of actualizing my dreams. Many of them were learning opportunities, ie it's a good idea to work in sales if you are going to be selling things, many of them were a means to an end, simply keeping the bills paid. All of them I either quit once I felt I had learned as much as I could learn without diminishing returns or had found a better opportunity, and have been fired from a handful too. I also tried my hand at a number of businesses as a means to get the capital to do the things I wanted to do.

6 months after dropping out, I had two job options: join a multi-billion dollar architectural conglomerate's structural glass facade division as a Quality Control Manager making high 5-figures, (shoutout to the guy I met at a Halloween party who got me the opportunity,) or work with an urban farming non-profit for a year that operates school and community gardens as an Americorp member, making $1,250 per month. I chose the latter, and spent a year living in the cheapest apartment I could find, occasionally waking up to gun shots coming down the alley behind my house, learning as much as I could about Chicago's urban farming industry.

Spending 6-7 days per week for a year working in Chicago's urban farming scene gave me a solid understanding of what was going on in the city. Some for-profit efforts had been attempted, though they mostly failed due to using expensive operational models inside of warehouses. Gotham Greens stood out as an example of what was possible if the natural resource of the sun was leveraged.

Nonprofits pursued varying models, some using simple community gardens with raised beds, some had greenhouses with hydroponic systems but more often than not lacked the education/ training to use them, so they sat dormant. The Farm on Ogden was the shining star, yet it took millions of federal dollars and grants to build something that didn't seem likely to be a scalable model. Certainly the shoestring budgets and lack of a revenue model most nonprofits had wasn't workable.

As my time as an Americorp member was wrapping up, I knew there was an avenue for something different, and my job was to dive deep into figuring out what that was. Shortly after, the pandemic hit.

Being constantly in the house gave me lots of time to research the farming market and technologies, bringing into my awareness some of the technologies and processes we're now deploying. Crypto introduced me not only to people trying to get rich quick, also to a world of people seeking to shift market incentives and dynamics for more positive sum outcomes. The more I shared my vision of decentralizing agriculture through controlled environment technologies, the more I found the world wanted this, that it made perfect sense to people.

Then I started talking to investors.

"Where'd you get your degree from?" "Oh that will make a nice lifestyle business for yourself, it's not scalable." "Yeah, we prefer to invest SaaS, the margins are significantly higher." et cetera, et cetera. The founder of Starbucks, Howard Shultz, has said he was told NO 276 times before securing his seed check. I can relate.

Don't get me wrong, they're fair points. Yet the more time I spend around polite society, the more I'm glad to not be part of it. If pure capital ROI is your desire, technology is probably the better investment; tech companies have 40-80% gross margins as compared to grocery store's 20-40% on fresh produce. You can't eat money though, and while it provides a degree of security, chances are it won't fulfill you.

Heartbreaking for me, are the conversations I've had with career traders and software developers. "Man, I love what you're doing so much. It's so real and tangible, I just move numbers around on a screen. My wife and I have been renovating our house and I can't wait for the weekends to be out in my garage. I think I might have been born to be an electrician." If only we had not relegated the trades to drunkards, criminals, immigrants, and people "too stupid" to go to college.

Some of the most successful, prolific founders - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs - are dropouts who had a contrarian dream. Jeff Bezos dropped out of polite society against all advice to build Amazon. “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

Managerial capitalism is perfect for the highly interventionist system we live under that subsidizes large corporations at the expense fo the middle class and poor, never allowing the true dynamics of capitalism to play out and wiping out companies that should be based upon their mismanagement (see 2008.) Entrepreneurial capitalism is where true change, society shifting disruptions come from.

MBA Tim Cook was great for reducing costs and executing Job's vision efficiently, though Apple has lost any hint of its innovative spirit under his leadership in favor of resting on Job's laurels and optimizing for quarterly results. They're paying the price as it's competitors are eating up their once dominant market share and accelerating new technological innovations faster than Apple.

I don't write this to complain. Your network is your net worth and I'm fortunate to have gathered people around me who not only believe in what's possible, they also have the expertise and connections to fill the gaps where I lack. We're creating a revolution in agriculture using radical technologies, empowering communities and bringing an end to a system driven by contemporary slavery. We're aligning ourselves with capital partners who have deep expertise in the field and an interest in using their capital to make a positive change in the world while seeing returns to disrupt multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations.

I'm truly too blessed to be stressed. My hope is that the person reading this is too. My message to Wall Street, to MBAs, to the people doing the smart thing and following the smart path, is to consider that if you end your work week feeling hollow, with the nagging sense that there must be something more, its because there is. The market mostly goes up because the Federal Reserve is pouring liquidity into it and a debasing currency + mass immigration suppresses wages, not because your trading strategy is a particular genius.

On the other side of all your fears about looking good, about getting invited to the right dinner parties, about driving a better car than your neighbor, is the opportunity to live a fulfilled life making a true positive difference in the world. Truth be told, guys like me need more of you willing to take that risk and shift capital incentives away from pure ponzinomics to use all of that capital trapped in markets to elevate the quality of human life across the globe.

I hope you'll join me, and the people like me, in dropping out of polite society.