Made for the Moment

The Moment: When you command clear attention as the center of the most important environment. This demands both a level of performance (either personal or corporate), known overarching narrative, and being in the right environment.

The Moment is not necessarily a positive thing. Similar to the current thing, it simple is a truth. You can be The Moment because you may be fighting for your life after a fall from grace, or you can be The Moment because you have been ascendant for a period of time — representing a virtuous cycle of both performance and event construction within the narrative.

The way you can tell where The Moment is sitting, is by determining what gets referenced during a major event.

For a simple example, we know that The Moment very clearly sits with Sam Altman and OpenAI. The level of performance of OpenAI to date has held many incredible scientific breakthroughs, revenue scaling through ChatGPT, narrative lore with Sam’s ousting and return, and insane capital accumulation through other important characters like Kushner + Thrive. Even with the release of the new Gemini model, we see it being referenced back to OpenAI.

I believe understanding what is built for The Moment is a critical framework for what we do in technology.

• There is a growing desire to hire “Heads of Narrative” across technology and venture because I believe there’s an underlying desire for Moment-ness today. Broadly speaking, I believe a lot of these hires will fail and silently become a general part of the marketing team. And it won’t be any specific fault of their own. But I’m going to attempt to talk about The Moment and hopefully by the end, you’ll know your true place.

• The Moment is language that I am borrowing from a few cultural spheres. Mainly sports, fashion, and celebrity fandom. In sports The Moment is the critical play, the make or break moment. In fashion and celebrity fandom, it is adorned on someone when they are “shining” or for creative directors / designers → when they release a collection that garners primary attention during fashion week. Virgil Abloh was The Moment. Marc Jacobs was The Moment. In many ways JW Anderson has been holding the crown as The Moment.

• There are a few environments that are consistent in their moment-ness. Politics. Technology. Entertainment. Sports. But even sports can go in-and-out of moment-ness. Baseball was severely lacking until Shohei Ohtani + some rules changes brought the MLB back to mainstream attention.

• Most people aren’t built for The Moment. They buckle under the pressure. They can’t even imagine themselves at that scale. Because of this they will tend to not gravitate towards environments that are clearly The Moment. This is not a knock on them nor the environments they choose to operate in. It is simply a different thing.

• On the other hand, there are times when people that aren’t built for The Moment — are thrusted into it as a function of the environment becoming so impactful that it can’t avoid the physics of The Moment. The best example today is AI Researchers. Previously tucked away at universities and forgotten about labs at tech giants, are now the subject of giant compensation packages and SF real estate agents’ dreams.

• Knowing when to chase The Moment vs when to wait for the next one is a critical skill. Being early is the same as being wrong when there’s money on the line.

• The Moment is sensitive to time. After the passing of the Affordable Care Act, national healthcare which was trying to be The Moment for so long finally had it’s time in the sun. But this moment was short lived. Josh Kushner talks about the incubation of Oscar at Thrive in a way that seems to understand the time sensitivity of The Moment. It was clear that the passing of the ACA was momentous, but as a result hundreds of new healthcare tech companies were formed. Bandwagon moment-teers if you will. Oscar remains standing, but it’s clear that the moment-ness didn’t have the outward effects we thought it might.

• The Moment can’t be faked. And there’s zero benefits to pretending you’re the moment when you’re not. It invites a significant amount of critique and is written off as corny.

• Moment-ness is always earned. Either through an inciting event (product launch, getting casted) or through a universally accepted victory (winning the oscar, a championship, rapid scaling revenue). MARKETING IS NOT THE MOMENT, IT IS ATTEMPTING TO LAY NARRATIVE TOWARDS A POTENTIAL MOMENT. Many do not understand this.

• The narrative leading into The Moment is very important. This is what Nepo Babies suffer from. The crowd has condensed their attempt for Moment-ness down to their parents, and thus it is killed.

• The Moment demands previous suffering and obscurity. One must have suffering before they have glory. There’s nothing better for The Moment than a classical Hero’s Journey arc. Don’t avoid this if you believe you’re built for The Moment.

• You can understand a lot of investing (particularly venture investing) and writings about markets by understanding if 1 - the market is the current environment for The Moment (hence all the eyes on Nvidia earnings) and 2 - the investor believes the market will be the environment for future Moment-ness.

• Similarly, you can understand why venture investors like to take bets on specific founders. Some people simply ooze that they’ll become The Moment or they will die trying.

• The Moment has a unique ability to teach and inspire, while creating time line references. Both from a moral reckoning — like today we are in The Epstein Moment (teach). And from a moonshot setting — “I’m on a quest for greatness” (Timothée inspiring).

• The Moment is adorned on you, like a prize. It is very hard to manufacture. Better to be related to a moment that is being adorned to a partner, then to manufacture it for yourself.

• The Moment necessitates scale and attention. It is either happening in a wide and deep way, or it is not. We know AI is the moment because 60 year old ladies at my parents’ church are asking me about it. The Moment is somewhat unavoidable. This is also why so many confuse marketing with The Moment. They can’t comprehend the difference between the sense of scaled presence, but there is a difference.

• The Moment is both a finite and an infinite game. It keeps moving to encourage performance. The Moment has it’s own agenda, it is the primary thread of active history.

• As a result, the environment of moment-ness is itself a result of play from people chasing The Moment for themselves.

• Those chasing The Moment have a deep respect for surprise. They both are looking for surprises and looking to surprise others. There’s a showman-seller quality to them.

• They are also talented at creating the cast around themselves. They know that there needs to be a stage. Or a cinematic universe as we like to say. We can spot potential future Moments based on the cinematic universes and rate of action of live players.

• To believe in The Moment is to believe in the drama of life itself. It is the ebb and flow of human energy towards our natural desire for awe.

End of part 1.

To be continued.

I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.

Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.

Much love.

Live in the light