The View from the Office. 

I met up with Morgan Johnson at Ariston Flowers, a coffee shop on 5th Avenue near Union Square. We each had coffee and he shared his cookie with me.

Ariston is Instagram gorgeous. The space also seemed very familiar. I remembered I’d been there back a few years when it housed Hu Kitchen, a food hall that sold amazing chocolate.

I first met Morgan a few weeks ago when we went for drinks with a mutual friend, Kevin Krim, the CEO of EDO, Inc. We fell into a fantastic conversation and didn’t have time to finish. 

Morgan is a former hedge fund manager who is currently spending his time investing, executive coaching and writing online.

He started sharing stories on his blog and LinkedIn recently. He writes 1,500 to 2,000 word pieces about his life on the Street. He includes career lessons and mistakes he made as a VC.

We talked about writing online and how it’s opened up opportunities by connecting us with other people.

He said it’s also a way to make sense of things he’s seen and appreciate the small details that Morgan argues “make everything in life interesting.”

Morgan said he’s been experimenting with using AI to develop writing ideas, specifically loading his past posts into a repository and asking the large language model Claude to analyze his style and suggest ideas.

It reminded me I need to take more advantage of that technology. I do use generative AI to do research. I have not found ChatGPT helpful to the putting-words-on-paper part of writing.  

I do plan to get around to loading all my View from the Office columns into a model so I can glean insights. I think that kind of effort can provide an invaluable level of awareness. 

You can connect with Morgan via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.