Last Locations:
Tucson, AZ: March 27th – April
1st, 2014
Miami, FL: April 11th – April
16th, 2014
Present Location: New York, NY Y
Next Location: Undetermined
So much happens in ten weeks. I
went from listening to angsty music, to happy poppy music, to R&B—A process
that I think aptly summarizes romance’s circle of life.
I also landed my dream job
managing business development for a two-person financial technology (#fintech) company.
Our product, ClearFactr
helps entrepreneurs and financial professionals create and share
easy-to-interpret time-based financial plans.
Why is this awesome? My principal life
goal is to end factory farming.* I want to do this by creating a lobby against
farm subsidies—for which I have complementary utilitarian- and libertarian-inspired
distastes. This will cost money. Not a small amount of money. You can get an
idea by looking at how much BigAg spent last year.
There are only a few ways to get
your hands on that type of cash in the course of a single lifetime. Most of
them require growing a scalable business venture.
My original plan was highly
risk-adverse. I’d practice law for three years, enough to pay off my debt, transition
into finance and work there for ten years or until I had saved $2 million. I
would invest that money at a conservative rate and live off the interest while
I started my first company.
That plan changed quickly when I
moved to New York. I realized #1 that I don’t need $2 million in the bank to
start my own company. And #2 that law and finance are time-sucking endeavors
that pay well but offer little entrepreneurial experience.
I used a hypothesis-testing
technique to figure out that I am good at, and love, business development
(#bizdev)—an umbrella term startups use to describe the part of the business
responsible for selling the product. This includes market-research, product
iteration, community building, networking (lots of it), sales, and
partnerships. In my case, it means pretty much everything except building the
product and fixing bugs—which is the domain of our exceptionally talented tech founder.
Bizdev offers a ton of relevant
entrepreneurial experience. It is also fun and gives me an excuse to connect
with awesome, smart, likeminded people doing the types of things I want to be
doing. Which means that I am both one step closer to fulfilling my principal
life purpose with no sacrifice in terms of present happiness. A perfectly pareto
move! Hard to get more awesome than that.
Love,
Melissa
*The real goal is a utilitarian
desire to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. Ending factory farming is
the most efficient way to go about doing this. The calculus looks like: #s
harmed * gravity of suffering * probability of success, where probability of success
= the degree to which I am empowered to fix the problem. The asterisks function
as multiplication signs. If you are a utilitarian, try plugging in your
favorite causes to the equation above to see how they compare!
For factory farming, the inputs
look like:
#s harmed: 3 billion/year (land
animals in the US)
x
gravity of suffering: several months of non-stop captivity, mutilation, and torture per individual
x
probability of success: high.
minimal barriers because near universal agreement that these practices are
wrong, main need is to neutralize effect of bigag’s active deception efforts.
not a grey-area issue, no moral case exists in support of factory farming. i am
empowered to resolve the issue because it takes place in my community and is
subject to a system that allows people like me to change it.
