Compost the System

Or: a short retelling of my arrival to SXSW in the midst of Silicon Valley Bank's financial collapse

Nell and Walter picked me up at 4 AM this morning to head to the airport. The night before, I retweeted this wise analysis by

Alfonso Peccatiello (Alf)

of

The Macro Compass

— a JP Morgan deep dive from 11/22 that now seems outrageously off base today with the breathtaking collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Alf @MacroAlf

Excellent call.

It was while waiting at the gate for our flight to board that I turned to Nell and said, “This isn’t good.” I saw the many “Stay calm, just stay calm” tweets from the likes of Bryce and Marc while the economists I followed were frantically sharing SVB’s balance sheets. You may not agree with his takes, but Balalji’s analysis of how the Fed showed up here provides some perspective on why people remain so hot to trot on Bitcoin. I digress.

If you’re new here to me and my writing: I used to be an economic reporter for the likes of National Public Radio, Marketplace and Planet Money. I cut my chops in the fallout after the 2008 financial crisis, when groundbreaking journalism like “Giant Pool of Money” from This American Life managed to make sense of the housing crisis in plain English. Much of my Twitter consumption involves following the long arc misunderstood market trends. It sort of reminds me of looking at baby kittens when they first born, their eyes shut, rooting around for nourishment. I’m astonished at the absurd chasm between what I observe on the ground every day and what people speak about abstractly. For the lay person, venture capital is rarely understood conceptually, never mind how their pension fund might be exposed.

So when I became an entrepreneur, and I saw…a certain type of founder, with no business experience whatsoever, routinely get handed millions of dollars with but a glance at their financials and market assumptions, this speculative roulette was all too familiar. And a big motivation for me to co-author “Zebras Fix what Unicorns Break” and subsequently explore why it resonated with so many people, and continues to this day. We were doing our best to ring a very gentle alarm when we said, “Magical thinking drives the startup economy — but we need a strong dose of reality.” We enlisted talented artists like Arthur whose work reads as almost too on the nose today, doesn’t it?

I can’t speak for my three other Zebra co-founders, but why I felt called to Cassandra ini that moment was the gnawing certainty born of a reporter’s instinct: there would come a day when we’d fully understand what exactly would be broken by betting on unicorns, and that day certainly feels nigh. In 2016, not too soon before we wrote the manifesto, democracy itself was obvious collateral damage. Today, seven years later, I’m now able to say the quiet part out loud: the fanatical obsession in pursuit of unicorns may very well cause unfathomable harm when the markets open Monday.

Our flight landed, we stumbled out into the sun, and made our way to the the Pussy Power House and the home of artist Corinne Loperfido, an Instagram friend I’d met during the pandemic. Here’s Nell with a cat outside, unintentionally matching:

Corinne and her partner Jordan gave us a tour of their microgreens business, Flagleaf Greens. Jordan demonstrated how to use a scythe on grass in the back yard. Then they packed up for SXSW’s “Future of Food” show. Nell took their portrait. Corinne’s homemade t-shirt says, “Compost the System.”

Despite many stupefied heads bowed over their screens following the fallout, we arrived to the most optimistic scene: plant-based Filipino cuisine. I picked up Chloe Sorvino’s new book on the hidden corruption of the meat market, Raw Deal. We learned abut what’s being done to mitigate food waste with Keep Austin Fed. (And then we found ourselves at a True Ventures mixer for the psychedelics community speaking to a mycologist from Paul Staments’ lab who was wearing a red and white toadstool hat. A story for another night.)

I leave you with this message: come what may on Monday, now is our time to compost this system. It’s already being done. In the words of Mr. Roger’s mother, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” If you are reading this, you are likely one of those helpers yourself. Let’s help one another grow differently this time.