2022 was a larger version of 2021. Which is to say: 2021, but more so. Louder. Faster. More expensive.
The number of startups increased. It went to a level where if I found some talent, the next day I’d start actions to turn them into an entrepreneur. Within 30 days, we’d have a London-registered Ltd with a mastercrafted brand identity, a shining website, and a newly converted founder -wide-eyed, freshly baptised into the church of impact entrepreneurship, not entirely sure how they got there.
Within 2 months it would become difficult for them to meet me, because I’d already be busy with the next brilliant founder. The previous brilliant founder would have to manage the brilliant company on their own, which is, in retrospect, where the problem lay.
Spending spree. Mainly on startup building. The ancestral estate ; that reliable old engine of feudal capital , was being liquidated in tranches to fund what I was now thinking of as a portfolio.
A carefully curated, strategically diverse, deeply impactful portfolio. Of startups. None of which would survive the year.
But was it just startup building? Capitalistic exploitation? Of course not. The socialist in me was extracting and combining the pros of both systems and giving birth to Neo Capitalism.
I’m writing that sarcastically ; but I want to be clear that I do genuinely believe in the merger in real life, too. The sarcasm is directed at myself, not at the idea. The idea is sound. The execution, in a hypermania phase, was less so.
To top up the funds, I remotely sold more from my share of the ancestral estate. Thanks, grandgrand-grandpapa. Feudalism: morally indefensible, financially indispensable.
And how can I close this without naming a few of the future Impact Unicorns? DisBorder Inc – Delaware registered, naturally. A London Ltd would have been a humiliation for this masterpiece. It was going to dismantle borders. All of them.
And then there was TellUntold Ltd, set to take over Murdoch. Murdoch, specifically. Not just media in general -Murdoch. The hypermania had excellent taste in enemies, at least.
On the bipolar front, I was in a continual hypermania phase for the first half of the year. Hypermania for me is not as erratic as it generally presents. I somewhat tilt towards positive grandeur ; in my own mind, highly creative, highly productive, operating at a frequency the rest of the world simply hadn’t caught up with yet.
This is, of course, exactly what every person in a hypermania phase believes. The condition is generous with self-confidence.
There was a sudden mood shift sometime around June. Generally with me, one phase turns into the other very slowly – a gradual dimming rather than a power cut. This time it was a power cut.
What followed was not gradual at all.
