Map of Oz: Making Opportunity Legible For Investors and Startups Alike
At this stage, gentle reader, you are owed an apologia for this substack.
Why should it exist? What’s its purpose? Where is Charles taking us? These are all fair questions. I hope to be a steward of the attention you’ve entrusted in me. I am not here to waste your time.
I am building an opportunity machine. It will work by exploring the relationship of opportunity zones — special land —and then human capital — special people. Special land and special people is a special combination.
What sort of technology might we make to make the world’s opportunities more legible? That term “legible” comes from the book above. It helps us see things and read them.
This is something I think about a lot but I need your help.
Like a lot of people with bad childhoods and terrible personal lives I tend to escape into my work. My work is indistinguishable from play, my play indistinguishable from work. I want to live in the world that my mind conjures and my fortune summons from the idea world. Ever since I was a child I see and hear things that aren’t quite there. These are a sort of muse that come and go and that take me along with them. I want to bring them into the world and to make lief a little less painful for me, my friends, and for you, gentle reader.
I suffer profound Weltschmerz, or “world pain.” That’s the sadness that I feel when I compare the state of the world to what it might be. So part of the reason I created this substack was equal parts therapy — I am not well — and duty. I hope that you, dear reader, may find value in the thoughts and adventures I have undertaken.
At times I may come across as insufferably arrogant and for that I am sorry for you and for myself. I am in a hurry and I will do my very best to be subtle and kind and all those things that make the mark of a modern gentleman but I am not very good at it because I am not very socially aware. I am too busy, too hurried, too always on the go.
If I could figure out a way to be more social I would do it. I tried marriage and dating — did you know women are more socially aware than men? — and neither worked so now I hope for the best and work hard. Yes, yes, I could one day meet the right woman but I strongly suspect I am more like Isaac Newton who proudly died a virgin than like Hugh Hefner.
I have lots of ideas and I can only build a select few of them. This is where the more enterprising among you come in. I invite you to become my student.
I do increasingly have access to lots of capital. How long I shall have that access and under what terms, who is to say. But I have not forgotten what it was like to be poor and weak and very hungry. I invite you to join me on building the things which matter.
We’re Off to See The Wizard of O.Z., The Wonderful Wizard of Opportunity Zones!
There is a sort of process I use to source good investments: they don’t look like good investments and they aren’t centrally planned. These investments create whole new worlds of information and that in turn, creates a whole lot of decision making.
Imagine an app where all of the local business opportunities are readily accessible on your phone and where you can bring them up and explore them.
Such an app would look and feel a lot like Zillow, at least initially.
But eventually it’d feel a lot like augmented reality. You could walk into the new developments and see them broadcast into the real world. You could interact with them. No need for glasses! You can see the dreams come to life around you—and invest in your neighbors. This is subsidiarity writ large. Love your neighbor as yourself . . . and invest in him.
Or maybe you dream of starting your own high growth start up. You entice some investors and you locate that company in an opportunity zone. The tax advantages are considerable, especially if you stay for the long haul.
For now you drive around in a neighborhood and your phone flashes when you cross in and out of an opportunity zone. You can see the opportunities dart in front of you on your phone. This entrepreneur needs capital. That entrepreneur wants to crowdfund and so on and so on.
A friend of mine and I recently built a very rudimentary prototype of what we envision. You type in your address and voilá, you can find all of the opportunity zones around you.
Try it for yourself by clicking here. And let me know what you think.
How can it be improved? Where would you take it?