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Hi Friends,

Happy Juneteeth (technically June 19th), the new federal holiday in the US to celebrate the end of slavery.

It also happens to be the longest day of the year tomorrow.

I plan on enjoying every minute of sun and reflecting on the nature of freedom.

Today's Contents:

Weekly Song: Love You For A Long Time
Good Reads
Community Corner

Weekly Song: Love You For A Long Time

I've been listening to lot of Maggie Rogers these past couple of months. She's a special talent. I love this video of Pharrell doing a review of her song Alaska when she was a student at NYU. His feedback on her originality:

I have zero, zero, zero notes for that. Because you are doing your own thing. It’s singular. It’s like when Wu-Tang came out. You either liked it or you didn’t. You couldn’t compare it anything else. You have to be willing to seek. You have to be willing to be real frank in your music and your choices.

Despite The Knife being my favorite Maggie Rogers song, I'm choosing Love You For A Long Time for this edition, my 100th of this campaign, as MailChimp calls it.

'Weekly Update 1' went out to four people on July 21, 2019 and included the following:

'I had set a goal to send this email out on Friday. It's now Sunday at 10:37pm. I've been afraid of writing things down and sharing. I like thinking! Communicating to be understood is hard. But I've done a lot of the easy stuff so I need to act on the hard stuff now. And, friend, thank you for holding me accountable for that.'

Communicating clearly remains challenging but the fear (and associated procrastination) has faded with time. When it comes to this weekly routine, I feel the same sentiment in the song. It 'came in like a vision from the old west wind' and I'm going to 'love you for a long time'.

Which is to say, thanks for enjoying Declarative Statements and, as I blow past 100 on the counter, I'm not planning on stopping anytime soon.

Thank you.

Love You For A Long Time by Maggie Rogers

Came in like a vision from the old west wind
Like a bright new dream that I was stepping in
I saw your face and I knew it was a sign
And I still think about that moment all of the time

You know that I could never make this up
I found the reason I'm not giving up
I felt the fever and I knew he was mine
Oh I, I'm gonna love you for a long time

Good Reads

Investing in a high pressure economy. Here by Ensemble Capital. In a nutshell:

You don’t need to make any sort of forecast to simply observe that a tidal wave of money is going to be coursing through the US economy, not just in 2021 but for an as yet unknown period of time. A truly macro agnostic investor would simply ignore all of this and thus, implicitly assume that the most likely state of the economy in the years ahead would be the historically “normal” economic trends we’ve seen in the past. But to us, ignoring multi-trillion dollar tidal waves of money is not the mark of an investor who understands the difficulty of economic forecasting, but rather is a myopic point of view that ignores the unprecedented reality of the current US and global economy.

Charter Cities. Here for a deep dive on Prospera. H/T Jeremy Rudy. And Here is Balajis on The Start of Startup Cities

Investment Process: Analyzing Company Culture. Here. I can attest from my time at a corporation that this matters and is widely unappreciated in the investment process.

State of Independence. A deep dive on the freelance economy from Contra (a community for freelancers).

A16Z completely their metamorphosis to full media company with a VC arm with the launch of Future.

Invest like the Best. Podcast. One of my favorites. Have enjoyed the following episodes this week:

Kanyi Maqubela and parallels to bubbles and that the quality of the team matters most of all in venture.
Josh Buckley and using video games as a super power investor framework.
Chris Dixon and the future of blockchain.

Community Corner

I see you, friends.

Rush Sadiwala, CEO and co-Founder of Framework, raised a $3M seed round lead by True Ventures. Framework builds software that powers goal-based communities. Framework was one of my first angel investments :) Announcement here.

Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.

Best,
Katelyn

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