Note to Adam Rossi

Hi Adam,

I just discovered your Twitter profile the other day when I ran across the mill Tweet. That is really, really cool.

It was only today that I noticed some of the particulars of your profile and it seems we have quite a bit in common. I use a pseudonym on Twitter. My name is Stephen Douglass. I grew up in Va. Beach, went to high school near Orange, Va., and then attended the University of Richmond. I lived in the Richmond area, including several years out in Amelia county which is populated completely, it seems, by Hokie alumni and fans. After raising two sons, I eventually moved down to the family farm in Teachey, North Carolina, which as about 50 miles up I-40 from Wilmington.

I'm a bit of a "Jack of all trades," but one of the few "trades" I'm an expert in is small farm, intensive vegetable crop production involving pretty much all aspects: field crops, high tunnel/greenhouse production, and hydroponic growing. The one thing that I'm better at than most is crop planning, rotation and successions over time, which is a lot more complicated than most people would imagine. I also do a decent amount of "content" (hate that word) writing for a couple of crypto projects and a commodity farming app.

The #cryptoenthusiast tag may be why the algorithm put us together. I used the same term on mine. I've had some interaction on Twitter with Balajis Srinivasan who, to me, is an amazing mind. Ironically, he was actually picking my brain on some farm-tech related ideas. Here's the response. My preferred cyrpto networks, outside of BTC of course, are Avalanche and Cosmos and I've worked with a couple of projects writing content. That said, one of my high school friends is the founder of VideoCoin now called Vivid Labs (VID) on the Ethereum network. That's an interesting project, but he's up against AWS. I've talked to a couple of his friends, even one who worked to raise cash for Videocoin, but I haven't seen the founder, himself, since we both walked off the high school baseball field in 1982.

I noticed the "angel investor" mention in your profile, and you seem like the kind of guy who wouldn't mind me picking his brain. I'm working on a new social site with a fraternity brother who is a phyicist and coder extraodinaire. He used to code the GPS satellite system for the DOD and, as such, is the only coder I know who has to figure out special relativity math first before writing the code. We plan on launching the site as a subscription service in the next 3 months, maybe sooner, but we are not sure we are going to make it to the finish line, financially. I wrote a blogpost on the site that gives a decent overview, HERE, And Carl, the coder with a comic wit, put up a terrific and extremely humorous post with a "compared-to-competitor" table.

I've read a lot of VC books, mostly Brad Feld's, and I do have some experience with small-scale corporate setups, but I've never had the opportunity to talk to anyone who has really participated as an "Angel." I'm interested in learning the basic expectations of an Angel down to what the actual agreements look like.

I'd love to talk to you sometime about this. I'd also love to know the story behind the mill purchase. That's amazing. And, please, I have no expectations, here. I know this is out-of-the-blue. Just to give you an idea of the project, I'm going to provide a couple of links below. One of which will be this DM as a post/mini-blog on our site.

Thanks, Adam,

Steve