You Were Never the Whole Forest

This past Christmas, my mother-in-law gave our family a trip to Belize. It was one of those gifts you feel honored to receive, with four days on the beach, then four more in the rainforest.

She had one request. Each of my girls had to put together a short report on the places we visited. My older daughter picked the rainforest, specifically its layers and who plays a part in maintaining each one.

I didn’t know this, but a rainforest has four levels. The emergent layer up top, then the canopy, then the understory, then the forest floor. Each one has a job. The emergent layer is the handful of tallest trees that punch above everything else and take the full force of the sun and wind. The canopy is the dense green roof where most of the light gets caught and most of the activity happens. The understory is the dim middle, where the next generation of trees waits and most of the pollinating gets done. The forest floor is the dark, damp bottom, where everything breaks down and gets fed back into the system.

Here’s what my daughter taught me: Inside every level, the animals and plants have specific jobs. Up in the canopy, the work is moving energy and seeds around the top of the forest. For example, the toucan’s “job” is to eat fruit up high and carry the seeds across the canopy so new trees can start somewhere else.

And nobody asks it to do more than that. Every level has its own lead animals, and every animal has its own task. The toucan spreads seeds across the canopy. The howler monkey works the middle. The agouti buries seeds on the ground. The ant farms and recycles below. Each animal is built for its level, and the forest holds together because none of them is trying to do everything.

ONE IDEA I’M SITTING WITH

We have levels in venture capital, too: Pre-seed, seed, Series A, and on from there. Again, each level has its job. Pre-seed is about helping a founder build a team and turn an idea into a first version of something, proving the problem is real and that somebody wants what they’re building. Seed turns those early signs into something repeatable, with real product-market fit and the first dollars in. Series A and beyond scale what’s working and connect it to bigger capital and bigger customers.

Yet, many ecosystem leaders I know are working in every level. Why?

Years ago, Brad Feld wrote Startup Communities. The book became a textbook for how you actually build an ecosystem in a city. His argument was simple: Every thriving community needs a leader willing to commit for 20 years or more, keep it open to everyone, and maintain a steady stream of activities pulling in the whole stack. Most of the time, that leader was the founder running the accelerator, the studio, the hub. Because they’d already built something, everyone looked to them to lead the rest.

So when this pressure fell on the people in GVN, they didn’t just get one job. They got two.

The first was to work every one of the venture levels. The second was to play multiple roles inside each level. Multiple levels and multiple roles, all at once.

So you get an accelerator leader running hackathons alongside hosting co-founder matching nights for the earliest founders and startup weeks for the city. Then that same leader is running a full accelerator at the seed level, with investor and founder speed dating on top. Then they’re getting their Series A companies in front of corporations and new investors.

Multiple roles, stacked across multiple levels, all carried by one person.

It makes sense why we do it. We do it out of fear. We’re afraid that if we don’t, we’ll lose ground, we’ll lose revenue, and the part that scares us most, we won’t have a business or an organization left at all. So we keep adding. More just seems better most of the time.

I think the leaders running the accelerators and studios and hubs have quietly believed the opposite of the toucan. That the whole thing only holds together if they personally hold every level of it. That saying no to a role, or sitting out a level, or passing on something they could probably pull off, means letting their community down. Or, closer to the truth, that it means they won’t be relevant, or won’t make enough to survive.

But we were never meant to be the whole forest. It’s impossible.

The toucan never apologizes for not being the eagle. The ant on the floor isn’t failing because it can’t fly. None of them carries the whole system, and that’s the exact reason the system stays alive. The forest works because each one does the single thing it was made for, at the level it was made for, and trusts the rest of the forest to do its part.

So when the next thing shows up, and it will, the one you already know you could pull off, maybe the bravest move is the smallest one.

With love and trust,

Pat

TWO THINGS I’M SEEING

The first is a strange little corner of the internet I keep reading about, where people use “dopamine sites” that let them go through the motions of ordering takeaway or filling a shopping cart without anything ever actually arriving. You browse, you customize, you watch a pretend courier bring food that does not exist, and apparently it scratches the itch. It started in South Korea, and it’s quietly spreading everywhere. I find it equal parts fascinating and a little sad, because we’ve gotten so good at chasing the hit that we’ll now simulate the wanting and skip the having entirely, as if the craving itself was the point all along.

The second thing I’ve noticed is my own quiet move in the opposite direction. While the internet is busy inventing new ways to manufacture a craving, I’ve been paying for an app called Freedom that locks my phone overnight and won’t let me back in until morning, no matter how much I plead with it. I’m not recommending it to anyone, and I’m a little embarrassed that I need it at all. But after years of telling myself I’d simply use more self-control, the thing that finally helped was admitting I don’t have enough of it, and handing the decision to the version of me who isn’t standing in the kitchen at 10pm wanting one more scroll. I mostly do it because my girls are learning what a free evening is for by watching what I do with mine.

THREE THINGS I’M READING

I almost gave up on Reclaiming Quiet early, as I was sure it was one more book about quiet as a discipline I needed to get better at. But it actually runs the other way. Sarah Clarkson writes about quiet as the place we already belong, where a deeper presence is waiting before we even arrive, and she keeps returning to the idea that its real work happens in small faithfulnesses more than grand ones. For someone running as hard as I am, that landed as relief. I love the idea that quiet isn’t one more thing to be good at. It’s the ground I get to stand on while I do everything else.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in How to Sit, has an image I haven’t been able to shake. A small boat, packed with people, caught in a storm. If everyone panics, the boat goes down, but if even one person stays calm and clear, that single person can carry everyone through. He’s writing about the Vietnamese refugees who actually lived it, which keeps it from feeling precious. I can’t read it without thinking about leadership, because my instinct in rough water is always to do more and grab every oar, when the steadier and more useful thing is usually to be the calm one other people can trust. It’s quieter work than I’d like it to be, and probably more important than anything else I do.

And then for my friends who struggle with love, I read a piece in the Daily Mail blaming bad luck in love on your DNA. Half of me wanted to dismiss it, but the science underneath is real enough. How anxious or steady you tend to be is partly inherited, and there are genes tied to how we bond and trust and chase novelty, so your wiring really does tilt the table in building relationships. The word blame is where it loses me. Genes load the dice, but we still pick them up and throw, and there’s something freeing in simply knowing your defaults. It feels the same in leadership. You don’t choose your temperament, but you do choose what you practice.