Hi, I'm Monica

I love markets, math, history, and sci-fi.I worked for many years as a commodity trader, handling both the physical and financial products. It was a great place to start a career. Since then, I have spent time in VC and advising startups directly. I have had a lot of fun and also seen a lot of things go wrong.If you want to reach me:
I like talking to people whom I can learn from. If you are someone who can show me the magic in what exists, or what could, please reach out via email or on LinkedIn.Learn more:
If you are interested in hearing a little bit about my experiences and what I am interested in, keep reading.

Media Recommendations

Below, I’ve put together a short list of some of my favorite media, that I probably talk too much about.Money Stuff
Newsletter. Matt Levine writes in the intersection of finance/law/tech. There is no one better to read to get a broad overview of the financial world, and he is extremely funny too. Understanding what makes Levine's style so charming may require reading his work regularly, because he spends time highlighting emerging trends, as well as traditional aspects of finance, in a style that is approachable and pedagogical, but with wisecrack lists and joke rules that become funnier every time they reoccur. Levine is talented enough to make people who do not care about finance enjoy his newsletter. At least, that's what I tell myself when I forward him over to a friend.Exhalation: Stories
Short story collection. Ted Chiang might be the most talented science fiction writer currently alive. I want to read more of him, because I cannot stop thinking about Exhalation. He is terrific at taking a premise for a world that is different from ours and exploring how a particular character might operate within that world. I think his work will continue to feel more and more prescient as AI accelerates the boundaries of science in the next decade or two.

The Prestige
Movie. Chris Nolan has a fascination with people who are committed to their goals to the point of obsession. The larger-than-life portrayal of single-minded dedication to the performance of a teleportation magic trick makes this my favorite movie.I often enjoy casual sci-fi, shoehorned into other genres, because sometimes everyday realities are bizarre, and yet we accept them as normal. The unreal, and the fantastical, especially when embedded in a conventional context, can sometimes shock our minds into contextualizing reality. The Prestige asks the question of how far would you go to pursue greatness?Econtalk
Podcast. Honorable mention because I think Russ Roberts has unfortunately gotten more experimental with his choice of guest recently. He has been lucky enough to interview Ronald Coase and Milton Friedman before their deaths, and my favorite type of guest he brings on is an academic I have never heard of, who has recently written a book, because then the person has enough expertise to talk at length about their ideas, and I get to hear about something I have never thought about. He has started bringing on people who have just written an article, or are interested in a topic but aren't experts, which I find less compelling.Despite this wider scope, Roberts is a talented interviewer, and EconTalk is one of the few podcasts that brings on a guest to explore and challenge their ideas, versus just functioning as a long advertisement.Proof
Play. Also an honorable mention, since the play is set in the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, so I think I am biased in loving it so much. Just four characters appear: the dad, who is a math professor, his two daughters, and his former student. I see this play as an exploration of authenticity of intelligence; when do we feel able to credit someone as the source of an original idea? What goes into that assessment, fairly and unfairly?More recs (with fewer details) below.The Twilight Zone is a well-known TV anthology that explores science fiction premises and their interaction with human nature. I fell in love during the NYE all night specials as a child.Q.E. is a board game where players place bids with an uncapped pocketbook. The title stands for quantitative easing, and it’s quick, strategic, and funny (not dry) to play.Diplomacy is a board game focused on zero-sum negotiation and absence of chance. It takes all day and you won’t finish, but it’s fun if you play with people who are into it.Merchants of Grain is a book on the history of commodity trading from the 1970s. This one is dry, but it’s a classic.Dreamland is a book that parallels marketing for pain management opioids with the illicit drug trade. It reminds me how context can shape how we view really similar products.

Startups and VC

Most of the startups I invested in or worked with have been capital-intensive. Traditional VC focuses on capital-light startups. A capital-intensive portfolio is not the traditional bread and butter of VC financing, though I do think there is more durable opportunity there.I have learned lots from this space, and a lot more from failures and struggles than from successes. There are a lot of potential pitfalls when it comes to running a manufacturing facility in-house, but there is a lot of potential opportunity.Interests / Opportunities
I am pretty interested to see how some of the lessons from conventional manufacturing and commodity processing will apply to the AI buildout we are seeing now. I am so curious how well the market will size and time that buildout. I feel similarly about other deep-tech verticals that are getting funded with similar vigor, like quantum computing.I also remain interested in some of the climate-tech industries that have yet to achieve their full potential, like direct air capture, cultivated meat, and industrial renewable energy solutions. All of these face scalability challenges. I hope we will discover the right technological developments that can unlock profitable scale for each of these.I really enjoy thinking about the world and the macro flows of goods and capital. Given my commodity trading background, I am also interested in fintech innovation in principle. However, I have been frustrated in practice. So many fintech startups do not center consumer financial wellbeing as an ethical core. I see whitespace where the trend of democratizing access to financial instruments is accompanied with substantial education on the risk profiles of these products. I also see some potential for better B2B risk management products. Ultimately, I think ethics are so core to anything within finance, because the field can be opaque.

Common pitfalls for high-capex startups

I have put some pitfalls I have seen for startups operating manufacturing facilities below:1. Ill-sized capex.
If you build a large manufacturing plant, you must plan how to keep it online in the early days, and running at full speed as quickly as possible. Shutting down a plant is one of the most expensive things you can do and can bleed a company quickly (think: Peloton). Of course, under-building when the market is hot can be even more expensive. A larger plant will have more economies of scale and will be more able to withstand the inevitable downturn. Sizing a plant is not easy; my rule of thumb is you should build the largest plant possible that you trust you will be able to run full throttle.2. The wrong people.
I saw this most frequently with sales heads hired from Fortune 500 companies (head of sales is an easy hire to get really wrong). Sales executives at large companies are often used to “build it and they will come.” That attitude isn’t going to work at most startups, and missing sales targets for physical products can become disastrous much more quickly than in a lightweight software business. Plant management is equally critical, but I think there is a deep bench of talented plant managers and workers, and I think it is easier to hire for.3. Inefficient logistics
Both on the physical and on the financial side. I cannot tell you how frustrating it can be to see a working capital squeeze from a lengthy receivables cycle. Short upstream delays compound into disaster without proper cash management, and you can waste a lot of money by having your inputs or outputs have to travel long distances and over long lengths of time via truck. (This is not a function just of the miles between your inputs, your plant, and your customer. Transit via truck is much more expensive than by ship or rail.)4. Bad timing.
Wine and VC funds are often known by their vintage; we ought to talk about manufacturing plants similarly. Boom/bust cycles are inevitable in many industries. Being able to sell during the boom and stay afloat during the bust can make or break a business. That means that timing of when your plant comes online matters a lot. Plants that come online too late in a boom may not be able to withstand the bust.5. Poor location.
Perhaps a subset of poor logistics, but I separated it out because it is not something that you can change after you break ground. The most efficient commodity processing facilities are located on a rail spur, ideally with access to multiple rail lines, quick access to a port, and of course within a drawing arc for producers to bring in supply via truck. Siting may be less critical for lower volume, higher margin products, but a very poorly located facility will still struggle because location feeds into logistics, supply chain costs, and hiring.So (1) sizing, (2) staffing, (3) logistics and financing, (4) timing, and (5) siting all matter, so much more so than for a capital-light business.I believe that with the right execution, a capital-intensive business has more durability than a lighter-weight business. But the details are so much easier to screw up.

Essays

Links to a short collection of personal essays are below.• Everyone imports rice and phones
• Disposable software
• Common pitfalls for high capex startups

Everyone imports rice and phones

My two main takeaways from my years in commodities have been:(1) an appreciation for the grandeur of the macro flows of our everyday products, and(2) a compulsion to breakdown any decision, transaction, or product into its risk and opportunity components over a set of future scenarios.For thousands of years, people ate the grains they or their neighbors grew, burned local fuel for heat, and clothed themselves with local fibers. The products that did travel across continents were luxury goods (like silk or spices), not those daily necessities.The fact that our basic food, fuel, and clothes now travel all over the world before getting to us is a fantastical product of the absurd efficiencies of modernity's global market.

Macro Flows
Modern commodity trading is intertwined with technology.Commodity trading only exists at scale due to the existence of instantaneous communication technology, as it has developed over the past 150 years, from telegraph wires to the internet.Fun fact: junior traders at my first job as a trader were tasked to write daily summary emails titled with the date and the word "wire"... it took me years of writing "July 1 Daily Wire" to realize the throwback.Also, commodities and technology are two categories of items where everyone, including the world's poorest, will spend a substantial portion of their income to import / engage in the global market: sub-Saharan Africans import rice and phones just like Americans do.Both commodity and technology flows are highly strategic geopolitical flows, which means they are inherently intertwined, and sometimes used against each other. Thus, if you understand both, you can understand a lot about the flow of capital and labor as well. Some of this knowledge can be highly specific, of course. Knowing that Ukraine's rail gauges differ from the rest of Europe's, resulting in a bottleneck, or that oil stocks were at a peak in the fall of 2025 and have drawn down through summer 2026 can feed an understanding of the implications of a global supply and demand balance sheet and its interaction with other macro and geopolitical trends.Technology has enabled and driven the existence of these flows for these everyday basics. Thus, our forecast for how tech will change, will drive changes in our material life.

Scenarios
Personally, I enjoyed working with both the physical products as well as financial products (think: commodity futures and options). Working with these financial products reshaped the way my brain looks at risk.So many common transactions should be thought of as a call option (classic example, rent-to-own), or as a hedge. Hedging an underlying asset against a financial instrument generally creates a basis risk, and I have started to reframe decisions in terms of mitigating risks and creating opportunities.I think about scenario analysis personally a lot too. By summer 2020, I realized that tautologically, COVID restrictions would either be over within 12 months, or they wouldn't be. In the first scenario, the housing market might go back to normal within a year or two, but the second scenario would be so impactful on demand, that it was clear to me that anyone who could buy a house should. The downside scenario was capped, but the upside was not. (We did buy the house.)For more:
• Disposable software
• Common pitfalls for high capex startups

Disposable Software

If there is one conventional, yet controversial, lesson from economics, it is that technological progress and a globalized economy are net creators of material opportunity. I think many people would agree abstractly, but when their specialized skillset is threatened, they panic.To that end, I do not think the intelligence worker threatened by AI is any different than the spinners or weavers of centuries past. I believe that the existence of devices that help workers save on physical labor created more of a demand for production in that industry.

There is a lot to glean about modern life from Bret Devereaux's series on the life of a peasant; one fact I like is that the creation of spinning machines caused a discontinuity in the average person's consumption of fiber. Their invention meant people wore more clothes, by orders of magnitude, and the clothes they wore became less fabric-efficient.I forecast a similar discontinuity for the products that AI produces, like software.Could a peasant in the 1700s imagine the fast fashion industry? I think they saw spinning machines, and thought about hours saved, or jobs lost, and could not fathom clothing becoming essentially disposable. Can people in the 2020s really envision what it may mean for software to go from a hugely expensive product to single-use and disposable? What would a world with fast fashion or disposable software look like? How much more software could we use, if it became disposable? 10x is certainly too low. 100x? 1000x? Companies building out footprints for intelligence factories ought to keep that picture of demand in mind in order to plan.(Of course, whether any particular skillset becomes obsolete is a separate question, and "what jobs will be left" deserves a longer answer.)I think this coming decade is going to see immense opportunity for new economic activity. It is so easy to see what will be lost or destroyed. It can be harder to see what magic will be brought to life. I’m looking forward to that journey.For more:
• Everyone imports rice and phones
• Common pitfalls for high capex startups