On Money Tree Farming

XLII

2024.04.14

I’m convinced that learning how to create a business is one of the highest leverage skillsets I can work on right now. Moreover, it’s greatly aligned with the person I want to grow into.

It goes by many names: Alchemy, Risk Taking, Entrepreneurship, Founding, Building. Another name: Money Tree Farming.

Alignment

I’ve recently mentioned the concept of being “aligned” with myself in passing. I’m starting to appreciate just how important and rare that actually is.

As a refresher, here are some things I want out of life:

• Earn the ability to systematically and sustainably create value

• Constantly be striving to be more than who I am

• Cultivate meaningful relationships 

• Own and live on a regenerative farm

• Create impactful literature that helps other people reach their full potential

• Find a lovely life and raising a beautiful family

• Maximize my health-span

• Experience a sizable chunk of the world and come to know the different people in it

• Go to space

There are others, of course, but these are some of the more important ones. I’m sure the list will change over time, but this is what it looks like now. And, if you pressed me on any of these points, I would have a fleshed out reason for it. That being said, I’m asking you to take most of them at face value for this post.

The list isn’t entirely intelligently ordered, but the first point is my focus right now, and really, a big part of the reason that I keep saying I’m aligned with myself. 

Money Trees

I want to fundamentally understand how to construct a business that helps people do something that they cannot do themselves or would have a hard time doing on their own. In other words, I want it to create value, and I want to do so sustainably. The qualifier sustainable implies three things for me:

1. The business is profitable. It receivers more compensation for the product or service than it costs the system to produce it.

2. The business creates more value than it extracts. In the long run, if you create a loaf of bread worth $5 to the recipient, and you charge $10, I firmly believe that even if you’re really good at marketing and sales, your business will not be sustainable in the long run.

3. The business truly is a system. This is where a lot of businesses fall out of the running for me—can it exist with minimum continued time investment from its creator?

If one is true, you’ll make money. If two is true, you’re having a positive impact on society and are resilient (not immune) to many more external factors, such as economic downturn. If three is true, you can leverage the profits from the system and your now free time to either scale up the system or create another system or go live in a self sufficient estate in the Mediterranean–dealer’s choice.

The ability to create this sort of system, repeatedly, without simply getting lucky, is perhaps the most important skill in the world to me. I am young and maybe naive, but I firmly believe that getting great at this skill makes all of the other things I want so much easier. 

Again, perhaps I’m naive, but I would imagine that if you can grow a grove of money trees, you shouldn’t have much problem purchasing a regenerative farm or paying Branson to take you up into space. Also, it removes existential threats and allows you to focus quite myopically on most of what you care about. 

No Bullshit

My work plays on the same team as I do. Since I don’t have a boss other than “the market,” not only can I avoid doing non value add, low impact activities, but doing low value add things actually decrease my probability of success. This is in contrast to if I had a real job or thought that the only way to make Ultima successful was to raise money, in which case there might be a greater pressure on me to signal. 

As an early stage startup, we are so resource strapped that not only do we have no bureaucracy, but we couldn’t support a bureaucracy if we wanted to.

We don’t have time for making complicated approval processes and doing legal dances; there is no compliance or HR. We just move, and every time we move, we get to make the decision–is this action, this movement, going to increase the probability of success, or is it just bullshit? 

If the action does not help us to become money tree farmers, then we shouldn’t do it. If it does help the task, then we should do it. I don’t have to ask Jack if he thinks I should post something on LinkedIn, and he doesn’t have to ask me if he can put a sales call on my calendar. 

That’s not to say we don’t think and take our time with things like code; if we push a feature that has a high cost to the user when it breaks, then of course we’re careful about that feature. That statement is utterly congruent with the above definition.

This is by no means saying that we don’t waste time; rather, it’s to point out that there’s a pressure on us to not waste time, because every time that we get caught up on some ritual or little thing that doesn’t actually matter, we could be focusing on things that will directly contribute to the business’s success, like servicing customer, selling, or building product. And, by the way, that’s pretty much it, as far as important buckets of tasks go, and you can really group the first two together.

Alignment

I want to become someone who can build a business that systematically and sustainably creates value. Ultima Insights only survives if our team learns to build that sort of system, myself included.

The other things aren’t going by the wayside; I’m still investing in understanding what healthy and strong relationships are like and in keeping myself fit and all of these other things. The priority, though, is becoming a money tree farmer.

I’ve never been more excited about how so many parts of my life are becoming aligned.

It makes just about everything else easier.

Live Deeply,