“37% of Gen Z reported no sex in the last month — less than half the rate of Millennials and Gen X, and on par with those in their 60s.”
-The Kinsey Institute

Let that sink in.

Perhaps they just take the creed of the millennial workplace literally:
“We must all agree that none of us watch porn, women aren’t wearing makeup to look more attractive, and you’ve certainly never had a daydream about sleeping with your co-worker. That would be unprofessional.”

If asked:
“have you ever been sexually attracted to a co-worker?”
The required response,
”Of course not!”
The more enthusiastically you tell this lie, the safer you are.

Around 1% of the population is actually asexual, however, in the workplace, letting it slip that you are part of the 99% that is attracted to the opposite (or same) sex is the fastest, most certain form of career suicide.

That’s right — new graduates, with their sex drives at an all-time high, are expected to switch their sex drive to airplane mode as soon as they enter the office in order to create a “safe and welcoming” work environment, or suffer the consequences.

This gets even more ridiculous in fields like advertising, where much of the content is barely wearing a fig leaf — sex sells, after all. The sex drive is more directly acknowledged in the subject matter of the work than it is allowed to be in the workplace where it is being created and discussed.

The irony of the chaste professional is that in the pre-remote world, 20% of couples met at work (still 10% today), so somehow many people have managed to navigate past the HR policies to arrive at mutual acknowledgement of each other’s genitals.

This dynamic is most apparent in the workplace, but it even carries over to a nightclub, where direct acknowledgement of sexual attraction is considered “creepy” or “desperate”. It’s much easier to get socially punished for acknowledging your sexual attraction than it is to be rewarded.

So perhaps Gen Z is just unable to decode the ever-more-advanced cryptography required to avoid punishment for acknowledging one’s sex drive.

They’re watching more porn than ever though, might we hope the real thing will stage a comeback?

They share the same economic moral playbook — one that:

1. shames wanting money

2. praises hard work

3. reveres generosity

Without ever admitting those three beliefs directly contradict.

This creates a culture where blatant lies to conceal self-interest are the norm.

“Our firm is only as strong as the communities we serve, and we are dedicated to creating opportunities for financial growth worldwide.”
-J.P. Morgan’s “About Us” page

Do you honestly believe making money isn’t J.P. Morgan’s first priority? Please tell me “no”, don’t get knocked out in level one.

Corporate PR like this is just one example of the make-believe we’re surrounded by — and that we tacitly agree to play along with. The contradictions start with how we think about money.

On Wanting Money

The desire for more money than you have — especially to be rich — is branded as unspiritual and immoral. This is denial in its purest form.

From the destitute to the ultra-wealthy, from scrappy startups to international conglomerates to elite universities to the Catholic Church, no one turns down a windfall.

If a meaningful sum appeared in anyone’s bank account — even if they planned to give it all away — they’d feel better off.

This is most glaring in the “limousine liberal” — the product of private schools, preaching the virtue of selflessness while holding tight to their wealth enough to keep their kids on top of any system they propose.

On Hard Work

Hard work is revered, but work always has an exchange rate with money.

Even if you’re building houses in impoverished communities, you could instead earn money elsewhere and pay someone else to do it — it would feel less personal, but the economic exchange holds.

However, if you acknowledge this exchange rate with the statement:

“I’m working hard to become rich”

you’ve now acknowledged a desire for money — which, per the above, makes you unspiritual.

On Generosity

Generosity is hailed as the highest moral act.

Here’s an obvious truth: to give, you must first have. There’s no such thing as a destitute philanthropist.

Yet the desire to become rich is viewed as unspiritual and immoral. So what’s the moral ideal?

Trust Fund Morality

If getting is shameful but having is required for generosity, the self-made entrepreneur is not the pinnacle of virtue — unless they actually manage to convince us that their wealth was accidental.

No, the moral ideal is someone who has without getting and chooses to give.

So not the entrepreneur (too much getting), but their morally untainted philanthropic trust fund kid.

The Trap

For those not born into it, this is a role you can’t audition for (unless you marry in, more on that later).

The rest of us have two options:

1. Work hard and deny wealth as the desired outcome — see J.P. Morgan’s “About Us” page for inspiration.

2. Accept our lower station and properly worship the generous trust fund kid.

To those of us in the free world who value individualism and self-determination, the notion that our highest calling is to worship the subset of inheritees who choose to be philanthropists is violating.

Yet this seems like the obvious intellectual conclusion of the value system I grew up with and instinctually have.

How Do We Escape?

I don’t think the trap was laid as a nefarious plot — it’s more that the full chain of reasoning is never pieced together and spoken out loud.

Instead, we see it in fragments: a payday lender trapping the poor in debt is bad, mowing your elderly neighbor’s lawn is good, and it’s kind that Bezos’s ex-wife is choosing to give away a large portion of the money she got in the divorce.

The problem is we have turned these values into absolutes — instead of recognizing them as three poles we must continually balance our lives between.

When this balance is lost, hypocrisy becomes the dominant religion.

It goes like this:

1. We are the party of the working class.

2. Expansion of women in the workforce, immigration, and global trade is an unqualified moral victory — questioning that makes you respectively a sexist, racist, or xenophobe.

The first is an economic promise.
The second is an economic landmine — and the right has pulled the pin.

Let’s refer to this contradiction as the Third Rail of the Left (TRL):
The belief that these three labor force expansions are unqualified goods — and that anyone who suggests they had economic trade-offs is branded a bigot.

Untouchable Common Sense

Common sense — and basic economics — tell us that, absent other changes, increasing the supply of labor drives down wages.

Harvard economist George J. Borjas supported this reasoning with data in 2013:

“The best empirical research that tries to examine what has actually happened in the U.S. labor market aligns well with economic theory: An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages.”

Elizabeth Warren addresses perhaps the most charged element of the TRL — the expansion of women in the workforce — in her 2004 book The Two-Income Trap.
On the back cover, she writes:

“…sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before.”

Warren does not argue against empowering women — she’s proof of that empowerment. Her point is that the shift from one income to two didn’t double household prosperity. Instead, costs in housing, childcare, and education rose to match the new baseline.

Warren’s lesson: nuance exists. Moral goods can still have economic downsides.

In today’s Democratic party, however, touching the TRL — even to propose solutions — risks social and professional exile.

And that’s the opening the right exploits.

How the Right is Winning

The right uses this dynamic brilliantly.

The revealed preference of Trump’s tax cuts shows the right is still the party of the rich. But their willingness to touch the TRL has earned of the lower-middle class — even as they cut food stamps.

By pointing out the obvious — that more labor supply can hurt wages — they can posture as truth-tellers while the left scrambles to defend the moral high ground.

They don’t need to solve the problem; they just need to show that the left won’t even acknowledge it exists.

Worse, when the left responds with “sexist,” “racist,” or “xenophobe” to this legitimate economic point, it allows the right to dismiss the left’s valid accusations of bigotry on other points.

This one truth, spoken without fear, lets them parade around leftists trapped in a rhetorical cage of their own making.

So where do we go from here?

The fix isn’t to abandon progressive values — it’s to drop the taboos.

Publicly punishing those who touch the TRL is the cheap power grab that Obama spoke out against in late 2019 as the trend of woke outrage culture emerged.

It is not activism to cordon off reason from public discourse.

The Democratic Party’s floundering will only stop once the TRL is dismantled and the following can be said openly:

• It’s not sexist to analyze the expansion of women in the workforce on wages.

• It’s not racist to suggest the impact of immigration on wages.

• It’s not xenophobic to critique the impact of global trade on wages.

Once we can speak those truths openly, we can address the downsides with real solutions — childcare, housing reform, education funding — instead of ceding the narrative to the other side.

By making these truths untouchable, we hand our opponents a free weapon.

The alt-right has mastered this weapon. It’s time the left actually woke up.

I learned these lessons the learned the hard way and hopefully you don’t have to.

I used to think I understood how startup fundraising worked from watching Shark Tank and reading the news; I had no idea.

Often those of us outside of this process just see the press announcement many months after the actual fundraise took place. Here is an inside look at startup fundraising.

Note: many do an initial “friends and family” round before going out to raise money from angel investors and venture capitalists, but this requires having some wealthy friends and/or family members, so I’m going to ignore this step because you either have it or you don’t and if you do then that fundraising step is not hard.

—

Startup Fundraising,
why do it? If you’re not independently wealthy, you can’t go very long without a paycheck, so the initial funding is the upfront cost of you paying yourself so you can afford to start the business.

That basic fact however, can lead us to make a poor decision if we don’t look at the economic picture of the exchange happening.

Taking on startup investment typically involves a founder giving up future upside so they have money to pay upfront costs. From a purely financial standpoint, one could think of being an entrepreneur as running an expensive experiment with lucrative potential. Some businesses, like ad agencies, have low upfront costs, for others the upfront costs are gigantic (e.g. SpaceX).

For a business with low upfront costs where you’re able to self-fund off profits, you probably should not raise money, because there’s a huge cost to having non-operating ownership in your business (only 14% of founders have not been pushed out by investors at exit).

For a business with large upfront costs, fundraising from investors early on is likely the only option.

what does it look like? Startup investing happens through an informal pitch process known as “fundraising” that consists of a bunch of (today) Zoom calls, emails, and in-person meetings.

Often the process is 2-3 months from the start to the final check being wired.

It is very unlike Shark Tank in that there is no formal structure around how it happens. It is more like a sales process where you have to go out and build a pipeline of potential investors from scratch, hopefully get an offer out of it, and nurture the deal over the finish line, it is all its own art.

Unlike the public markets, stock in a startup is very rarely sold. It almost exclusively takes place in a transaction that is the culmination of the above pitch process, known as a round.

Round: A transaction where the founder sells a portion of their company to investors. How much money the founder receives and how much of their company they retain afterwards is determined respectively by the round size and valuation. These have sequential titles, pre-seed, seed, Series A, B, C, D, E, F, each with semi-independent markets which fluctuate quite a bit.

Round size and Valuation: The “round size” is the total amount of money invested in a round. The percentage of the company that gets sold for the money invested is determined by the agreed-upon price of the company, the “valuation” as set in the termsheet.

Term sheet: An offer to invest in a startup which states the “valuation” and “round size”, this offer is given by a potential lead investor for the “round”.

Lead Investor: Investors that can write termsheets are typically partners at larger venture capital funds as the lead invests the most money and does the most due diligence. The prestige of the lead is a signal to other investors. Most other investors, “follows”, won’t invest until you have a “lead”. So the challenge in any round is securing your first “term sheet” from a “lead”.

Sometimes rounds will be co-led by two funds. In this case the founder trades for a broader network in exchange for less motivation for these investors to use their social capital to help with introductions.

Follow and Angel Investors: Other types of investors include “follow” funds, i.e. funds that don’t lead rounds, and “angel investors”, individual investors (rarely individual investors may lead rounds too, but this is an exception). Typically at least two thirds of a round will be raised from the lead and the remainder is for angels, follows, and previous investors in the company.

I wrote this back in 2015, not realizing at the time how rapidly this would all begin to play out in the middle of the following decade, who knows, maybe those of us alive today will see if I was right.

At the time (and I’m sure still) these statements occupied an odd space: socially controversial yet, to me, intellectually clear.

(image generated by providing this article as a prompt to Dall-E 😉)