Welcome to The Aviation Club

You can think yourself out of anything. These thoughts are probably also very reasonable. So you’d list the reasons why not to do it, for example why not to start a blog / newsletter. One reason is that you could be completely unqualified to share any expertise on the matter (any and all matters). Another reason could be that you’re prone to rambling. Yet another reason could be that you could potentially create something so horrendously bad or factually incorrect that it destroys your reputation and brand. These are good reason for not starting. 

Yet here I am. Starting. I’m starting because what I’ve decided to commit myself to is simply just telling the truth. I will inform you right now up front, that I don’t have the answers. Any of them. And my jokes are subpar at best. But what I can do is document this... extraordinarily wild experience of my humanity. Of building a company in a developing economy and figuring shit out the hard way. Of my discoveries and insights into philosophy, mindfulness, wellbeing, happiness, free thinking, libertarianism, free market capitalism, compassion, literature, aviation, venture capital, bitcoin, exploring, Cape Town, and as of very recently, dare I say it, love.

So welcome to The Aviation Club, and here we live by this creed: “Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi.” If you don’t know Latin, your first requirement is to brush up immediately. It’s needed for a pretentious club such as ours. In the meantime I’ll tell you that it means: “surely the sky lies open, let us go that way”, written by Ovid, sometime during the reign of Augustus. It sums up everything this journey will be about.

A fundamental belief of mine is that humans are born to be explorers. We are destined to have our eyes on the horizon and push the frontier. It’s what our earliest ancestors did, standing on shores and looking out, building crazy rickety canoes and paddling into the unknown, pulled by the deepest desire to know what lies beyond. We pulled our species up, kicking and screaming, from somewhere at the bottom of the food chain to the undisputed rulers of our planet, for better or worse, and now we look further to conquer our solar system with a (hopeful) Mars landing this decade (all fingers crossed). This is in our nature. This is our destiny. 

We push the frontier and we build. We build tools, cities, systems, economies, rockets, stories, art, ideas, empires, wars, horrors, holocausts. Our bodies reorganise inanimate matter into consciousness and we expand out. It is the most sacred experience, just existing and feeling the great life force of it all moving through you in each moment. And in this snap of the fingers of our entire species’s existence perhaps an opportunity to do something wonderful. To hop the planetary boundaries. To perhaps hop the biological species boundary with artificial intelligence. To do good for other people and animals and propagate joy and gratitude. 

We writhe and strive and scream and pray and somehow figure it out. Distilled down into a tiny instance of this, here I am, sitting crossed legged in my bed, tousled white linen all around me and a cup of tea growing steadily colder. I’ve somehow woken up into this beautiful life where I have the extraordinary privilege of being the CEO of DigsConnect, and for the time being have committed my life to building this company and making it all that it can be, occasionally fucking up royally along the way. This is probably not the best time to start documenting the experience - I probably should have started before we did our seed investment round, or probably should start this once / if we sell, when I’ll have more authority on the matter.

But there’s no such thing as the right time. Just like there’s no such thing as authority, as right or wrong, as meaning, as intrinsic value.

The beauty and chaos of it all is that we get to make it up, we get to choose.

And so it begins.