Custer’s Last Zine

I lived in LA for a couple of months in the beginning of 2020, taking advantage of an office opening to get out of NYC during its sad months and treat my annual funk with sunlight. It wasn’t as relaxing as I had hoped— I shuttled around in traffic between three different offices during the day, always on the look out for a borrowed room to take an HR call from, and spent a lot of late nights on calls with Berlin, trying to respond to due diligence requests delegated down the chain for a funding round that I was nervous wouldn’t come through. 

But it was a really special time too, and not just because the world went upside down a few weeks later. I would sit on the porch of my little Culver City Airbnb at sunset with a glass of wine and source vintage oriental rugs for an office I was pouring too much love and sweat into instead of hiring a professional. I went for runs on the weekend alongside a dried out riverbed behind movie studio lots and understood why people leave New York for this, calculating in my head how much money I’d have to make to live a bi-coastal life as I forced my body to stay in motion. And on the day that funding round did come through, just before it was time to open the new office, I took my team to HD Buttercup and went a little crazy. We spent the money that would have been better set aside in the beginning on long lead items like softer overhead lighting on these stunning oversized rugs instead, rugs whose cost I added up in my head as a percentage of an FTE. We loaded them into the back of my colleague’s hatchback and drove off with an invoice, feeling like we’d just pulled off a heist. 

My sister and I were on the same time zone during those months for the first time in our adult lives and she’d call me while she drove home from her office and complain about work. Decision makers layers away were about to make a change that she was determined to prevent, and over the weeks she started building a case slide by slide, while I cooked scrambled eggs for dinner and listened to her try out different storylines. I called it her “Custer’s Last Stand,” a metaphor you’ll have to forgive because I realize now more than ever how many of my work metaphors are about going to battle, and also because my understanding of American history is actually total shit. But the analogy was meant to be about realizing you have to go all out when you’re facing an existential loss, about channeling your frustration in order to fight for a different outcome— realizing you care enough to try.

I’ve seen a few people build these “Last Stands” now, usually an exasperated product manager or p&l owner drafting a moving story instead of just another dry McKinsey-style market analysis. It always circulates quietly, a designer getting added before that one critical executive gets looped in, people starting to whisper about it. Inevitably someone gets annoyed that they haven’t been asked to contribute, a counter argument comes together from somewhere on the sidelines (Finance). But there’s something magical about watching people build these plans, the slow trickling “maybe this is it” feeling that moves person by person. There’s something intoxicating about people talking about work like they care.

I only built my own version for the first time this past Friday, a frenzied four hour sprint on my couch after a long day of stewing, screenshotting slides from a board deck to copy paste them into my zine of a master plan. I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. It’s a little different here, at an organization this size and in a role where I’m proposing organizational changes instead of a new business strategy, no slow circulation across stakeholders but an abrupt “hit send” on a Saturday morning to the CEO. But I called my sister afterwards, and took a cab to her house, just on the other side of the park, to joke with my niece that Aunt Jena might get fired.

cryptoland

There’s an acronym in cryptoland, “ngmi”, that means “not gonna make it.” You can say a lot about how volatile this space is that there's a shorthand for things that will burn up in flames, but you could also argue that that’s part of its charm. 

I had no idea what I was getting myself into back in September of ‘22, coming on board after having spent six months fucking around NYC during a particularly blissful stretch of unemployment. It was impulsive, a little bit desperate, and just like every career move I’ve made so far, motivated in part by the fact that it sounded like it would make for a good story.

I watched the FTX collapse happen over slack sitting on the rooftop of our Tel Aviv office a couple of months later, chainsmoking weak Marlboro Lights I bummed off one of our co-founders. That kicked off a year-long winter of industry-wide anxiety and rolling layoffs, a year I’ve spent perfecting my playbook for involuntary terminations. Gen Z open-sourcing “what not to do in HR” without even charging me for a subscription to their TikTok is one of the silver linings of whatever this economy is. 

The flipside to ngmi is of course wagmi, “we are gonna make it,” a deliciously delusional optimism for the climb back up. It’s the feeling of sitting in a half empty sublet office in FiDi in front of a row of monitors with a group of finance-adjacent bros (my favorite kind) watching in shock as the SEC fumbles the approval of the Bitcoin ETF. It’s when something deflated starts to grow again unexpectedly, when the energy you’ve been desperately craving starts to build.

It’s those climbs that are the addictive part of working at start-ups, cryptoland or not. You have to suspend a lot of logic and ignore a lot of other people’s advice when you’re riding the 4 back to Brooklyn at the end of the day with an executive team of backpack-wearing 35 year olds. Sure this could all fall apart, but... what if it doesn’t? How cool would that be?

Talking about work.

I stopped talking to most people about work a few months ago. When they’d ask, I’d motion to my shoulders and answer that “it’s very heavy,” and then redirect, in that manipulative way that good listeners know how to do. Now, I hold my hands stretched out in front of my stomach and say “it’s a lot”, but what I mean is “I’m still digesting,” or maybe, “I’m gestating.” I'm seeing how things (how I) change with time.

In those first few weeks, I scrolled Twitter every morning before I got out of bed, checking for red alerts and missile strikes ahead of my meetings. I needed to anticipate my teammates’ tone, to understand if they’d spent their morning in a bomb shelter while I was still asleep. But I was still comically unprepared more often than not, starting a Zoom call with a joke only to find out there were funerals in Jerusalem that day. 

At some point I just stopped operating at the political level. I mostly couldn’t read the articles and I almost always swiped past the social media posts. I couldn’t enter the debate. I knew I should, that I should have opinions. I knew that the big picture would give me context. But I also knew that I needed to hold on to enough distance to show up as a human at work. 

That’s become the most important thing to me: being human at work. 

And so the level I operate at instead is mostly the “how are you” level. One of my colleagues rolls his eyes when I start this way, but then always answers the question in a long pent up monologue without stopping to breathe. It's not really my job to have these conversations, but you can't talk without talking about it. For them, there’s something cathartic about talking to an outsider-- it’s an opportunity to say the things out loud that you don’t need to say to the people who are living through it with you. And for me, it's scratching an itch too-- peeping into the non-work part of my work people's lives.  I spend a lot of time listening instead of talking, and sometimes I cringe or wince and sometimes I cry and more often than you’d expect we laugh. 

And then I log off, get on the subway, and think “what the fuck am I going to do with all this.” I miss talking about work.