"Don't be an a$$hole"

If you were at the last Ascend Happy Hour, during circle time you might of heard Tiffany Bisconer, CPA, MS, MAFM say during her give/ask - "don't be an asshole."

Here's an exclusive interview, keeping it real:

D: Tiffany, thanks so much for joining. We had our first Ascend happy hour last week and we did a little circle time to get to know each other. When it came to your turn, you said something that people are still talking about. You said, "Don't be an asshole". What did you mean by that?

T: I think part of that comes from this idea of, you know, our actions and the way that we interact with others creates such powerful ripples. We have the choice on a daily basis to choose at least how do we guide our own behaviors, and how we guide our own presence when it comes to connecting with other humans. At the end of the day, every single thing that we do in life, in my opinion, needs to be human first.

If we bring it back to the startup community it's learning about the person first and how we can connect and moving away from leading with a transactional mindset overall, because we in a community we are all responsible for supporting one another, and we are all connected.

D:  I hear you. I value social capital and as a founder it's really your most important asset. The reciprocation that's really involved in nurturing those relationships is so critical and having it not just be to your point transactional, but organically just getting to know each other. If you're doing business with each other, you know, that's your livelihood. So taking the time to get to know each other and just having a healthy relationship, I think is really important for managing social capital.

CTA: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE :)

Then we proceeded to talk about the Greylock podcast about a Personal AI assistant called Pi.

D: Here's where we are in our society today of really figuring out the balance between human and tech, and we all know that, we're the loneliest society we've ever been. But how did we get here? The rise of everything being digitized was necessary as part of the information age, but we lost so much in the process.

And now we're having to tap in to technology again, in Pi's case to guide us back to reminders of self compassion and kindness.

What is your take on this Tiffany?

T: I think that intersection point for me has always been to dial back to the beginning of what it means to be kind of a self a self actualized but also how to realize the potential of being a human. And going back to the question of being versus doing and I think a lot of times when people get threatened about the advancement of tech or tech replacing the human component. I think that still goes back to the same idea of intentional design. And going back to the core going back to the center and going back to well, what can I do, and what can I do for others?

I do think that that just brings us back to the beginning, which is who are we as humans, what can we do for one another? How do we not hold Death Grips on to stuff that's basically evolving and will be able to do something better than we can do and revert our energy back to what can we do together to create a more powerful design process? And what it means to be human and what it means to do things within the community?

D: There's this need for social innovation as it relates to, let's acknowledge the fact that we have become so distant from the things that we once knew, because we were consuming so much information and working on digitizing our life. But here's a reminder that we do have to go back have this level of curiosity that many of us have in leaning into emerging tech to see this next phase of AI for good and how it can impact and get us back to that connectivity of where we deserve to be. Back to basics love it. Thanks Tiffany!

Thank you for reading, see you on Friday!