Time is everything

The view from the start of Nimitz Way in Berkeley this past weekend.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

My most enduring interest is in time. How do people spend their time? And how does that change over time? I’ve long been interested in the everyday: what it’s really been like to be alive at each point in history. This drove me as a history student and it drives me today as an investor. I want to invest in tools that change lives. This means investing in tools that change the way we spend the time we have.

We all have the same number of hours in the day. We spend roughly a third of our hours on work, a third on our personal lives, and a third on sleep. I’m most interested in ideas with the potential to change the way lots of people spend lots of time. This leads to a natural focus on highly engaging enterprise and consumer products. But what goes on behind the scenes matters, too. Products that save time reshape our days just as surely as the ones that draw us in. And tools that help us plan and organize our time do, too.

There’s a saying: timing is everything. This is true. But also, time is everything. It’s what we all have in common, and it’s the lattice that undergirds every part of the human experience, at every level of scale. It’s grand, but it’s also modest. I like that about time.