by
Carrie Sun
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LATER THAT NIGHT, as I sat on the floor, blinds up, lights off, with ambition shining all around—the pale glow of tall office buildings, the faint neon of giant screens and marquees—I unwrapped the presents. A $2,500 gift certificate to SoulCycle. A large Balenciaga tote. A winter coat from Derek Lam I discovered cost over six thousand dollars when I went to the Madison Avenue store to exchange it for a smaller size. I opened his card last. The words, in his handwriting, were simple, kind, and positive. He believed in me, in my extraordinary capabilities.
damn lol
[...] This was, in her words, what was SO in vogue right now amongst the hf set: meditation speakers, FBI crisis negotiators, cool authors like the sociologist who wrote that book on privilege everyone was talking about. [...]
lol
I walked through the kitchen. On the island was an ocean of Nobu: the dark burgundy of bluefin tuna, the rosy pearl of fresh yellowtail, the fierce tangerine of king salmon, surrounded by sashimis of yellowtail jalapeño bathed in a yuzu sauce, buttery salmon topped with a twirl of microgreens, tuna tataki dressed in a soy and sesame vinaigrette, plus mounds of miso black cod—marinated, browned, dusted with kataifi and wrapped in butter lettuce—and also crispy tacos stuffed with king crab and salmon and lobster. All of these were plated by a Nobu chef who had been hiding in our secret kitchen, tweezing and sculpting each bite onto nests made of bamboo. On the side table, more desserts: Tubs of Häagen-Dazs, which people had told me was Boone’s alleged favorite, although I had never, ever seen him eat ice cream. Pints of Tipsy Scoops. Sprinkles. Fudge. Caramel. Cherries. Dominique Ansel, the progenitor of cult pastries who had invented the Cronut, had come out with his next big thing, the Cookie Shot: a chocolate chip cookie shaped like a shot glass, lined with melt-resistant chocolate so you could pour the vanilla-bean milk into the cup and chew/sip at the same time. Ah, efficiency.
jesus
The three men spoke about skating to where the puck is going and not where the puck is, which was a treasured hockey quote of business leaders. “But then,” Michael asked, “how do you know where the puck is going?”
“Practice. That’s all it is. If you practice enough, you can sense things. You know where the open ice will be.” Watching the three men interact I could not help but notice the banality of genius. It occurred to me that Carbon did not have any superpowers beyond the boring and total efficiency of the enterprise. People worked like machines, which was to say they made goals, they accomplished them—this was the genius of following through. The genius of training your brain through practice and more practice to encode as much as possible into procedural memory so there would be no deliberations of the “Do I feel like doing this now?” sort; no excuses of the “I’m tired” or “I’m having a bad day” sort. There was will, followed by action. Mean it, do it. There was no such thing as a slump. But I wondered if the genius here could also be the horror: Your brain might not have full control over exactly which parts of your experiences in daily practice to encode. You might, through no conscious fault of your own, encode a lack of moral sensitivity if every second of every day your attention was fixated on self-interest, winning, profits, money, crushing it, killing it, and destroying your competition.
Somehow Boone and I got on the topic of dating. I had blocked Josh everywhere, had not shared my work email with him, had not communicated with him since last fall. Days ago, Josh had sent an email to me at work with the subject: “Very Important, Please Read.” I read the first sentence—“I forgive you—totally”—and marched over to IT to tell them that I had a stalker and to please block this email along with Josh’s many other emails, including the burner from which he had contacted me. If he had guessed my work email, what else would he guess, or do, next? He forgave me for not being a virgin. That was his opening line. I read a bit more of the first of six long paragraphs: “Do I wish you had never slept with anyone else before I met you? Of course, most profoundly. But I hope you can understand that it was only because of my helpless love for you, so beyond any other power, that I wanted you all for myself.” To write to me at work, on work servers, at an email address I had never given him and then talk about my sexual history for all of IT and Jay and Boone to potentially see—it was too much. I told Boone about this at our very next sit, assuring him he did not need to worry because my attention was on work and only work. I kept my life organized into neat little compartments: Work. Personal. Past. Present. I did not (and to this day have not) read this email in its entirety.
actually crazy
The first goal was the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, what Collins describes as a goal that falls “well outside the comfort zone” and is “so clear and compelling it requires little or no explanation.” Carbon’s BHAG was exceptionally high returns only—for the next fifteen years. There was no talk of brand, no vision about the world, no values-driven mission statement. Nothing about passions, inspirations, or disruptions. Many funds and fund managers will try to differentiate themselves through branding of some kind, and most entrepreneurs say the brand of a VC makes a difference when deciding which fund’s capital to accept. But Carbon seemed to believe that money is money is money. It was the models, the numbers, that reigned supreme.
lol
Working on this slide removed the moral wrappers, the narrative frostings, the sweet addictive stories I had been telling myself about my job, myself, Carbon, and Boone. He did not make the world a better place. Neither did Carbon. Nor I. Whatever greatness he and Carbon had achieved had not come from noble motives. At Fidelity, I could at least comfort myself by saying I was part of an organization that served the average retail investor. At Carbon, we were serving world-class returns to a list of the most prominent billionaires whose names decorated museums, pavilions, plazas, galleries, libraries, gardens, and research centers. Sure, we had university endowments as LPs and the returns Carbon provided would in theory go toward awarding grants and funding scholarships—but that was not why anyone was here.
Carbon’s funds had long been oversubscribed. This meant that it could select its LPs and how many shares of its funds to ration out to each. It could choose to accept only the cleanest, classiest money. Carbon was allocating the highest returns on capital to the largest fortunes, but, more than that, it was investing in the change it wanted to see. It did this not only through its portfolios by selecting innovative start-ups but, perhaps more important, through its investors by selecting LPs whose endeavors would reinforce—rather than challenge—its worldview. A view shown thus on this slide: You can be as aggressive an investor as you want and do whatever it takes to achieve the highest returns (goal #1) so long as you give back and give well (goal #4). People were here because they believed in this gospel of wealth. Earn a lot first. Give a lot later. But who is to say that the process of earning won’t compromise the person doing the giving?
yeppp
So, I dug up the notes from the retreat taken during a session on Distinctive Impact in Community. I read the twenty-nine crowdsourced bullet points. There were no names attached to the bullets, but the sheer number of them, the depth of thought in them, meant that people truly cared. They felt a duty to give. For the first time since I joined the Firm, I saw an acknowledgment of social issues like education, hunger, and homelessness, with suggestions like making internet available to more people; providing online courses for kids in remote areas; meeting with people who are unemployed and helping them with their résumés; wiping out poverty—other than this word here, nowhere else on these pages was there a recognition of unequal distribution of assets or anything that might suggest how hedge funds and private equity, before they gave back, took too much. But there was a focus on less privileged people and underprivileged kids, vague terms for a firm obsessed with precision. Less privileged by race? Gender? Class? All of the above? I printed these slides and wrote down notes in thin blue ink next to this fourth Collins concept with the hope of forming, what I was calling in private, the Carbon Initiative.
I looked down. I read my notes. I saw the four Long-Term Goals packaged into neat little compartments—BHAG, Twenty-Mile March, Distinctive Impact, Distinctive Impact in Community—and it was too late. A thought trespassed into my mind. At once I understood something upon which my salary depended on my not understanding: many of the social challenges mentioned in the notes for the fourth section would be easier to solve if the first section on making billions and giving those high returns to the already wealthy and privileged, thereby perpetuating inequality—that is, if Carbon itself—did not exist.
lollll
More than one slide of the deck talked about on-demand transportation, which, according to Carbon, offered lower wait times, more customers, more money for drivers, and thus more drivers—what it called a virtuous cycle. Here, and in a few other places, I would read the text and experience a sudden stoppage of time, the flash-forward images in my mind’s eye offset by an intense déjà vu. My thoughts flew back to my first week on the job when my peers wanted to order Sweetgreen, which was so new to the city that the chain famously (at least to the Midtown lunch crowd) did not offer delivery. Not a problem! an assistant said to me. We’ll send a Postmate down to NoMad. Many months later, friends would ask me, “Have you heard of Postmates?” “Have you heard of Peloton?” As they explained these cool new companies to me, I would think not about how I had been Postmating and Pelotoning since I started at Carbon but about how the world that Carbon had envisioned—hoped for, could profit off—was here. The Fund V deck I held in my hand was the world Carbon wanted to come. It was one dominated by Amazon, Netflix; one of ubiquity; one of virtuous cycles of on-demand content and convenience and everything else. I was sure Carbon’s world would come. I was not so sure if I wanted to live in it.