Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 18th, 2024
“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow
"When office buildings sell at two-thirds less than replacement costs, value should be had.
Could San Francisco become a revival story indeed, or even the posterchild for a city that was beholden to woke policies but eventually broke free? Could it yet "do a Giuliani" and enter a new era altogether?
Throw in other emerging factors, such as the investment boom in AI and how that is bringing a new start-up scene back to San Francisco. The city may yet turn around – it's not like there weren't at least some promising signs.
On the other hand, the oversupply of office space in San Francisco is so stark that no landlord will regain any real pricing power anytime soon. Working from home is not going to go away. The US now has other powerful centres for venture capital and tech, such as Texas and Florida. Elon Musk has moved X (formerly Twitter) out of San Francisco, and plenty of other companies have also moved away. Then again, given how bombed-out the market is, it wouldn't take much for a first wave of speculative money to trigger an initial recovery.
During my 30+ years in markets, there haven't been many cases where you can buy real estate in a world-famous, Western city for 70% less than replacement value."
2. "In this post, we have shown how you can troubleshoot go-to-market problems by splitting the funnel in two and focusing on two questions:
Are we giving sales the change to hit the number each quarter, as measured by pipeline coverage.
Is sales converting enough of the pipeline to hit the number, as measured by pipeline conversion."
https://kellblog.com/2024/07/23/go-to-market-troubleshooting-lets-take-it-from-the-top/
3. "Sometimes the economy really does encounter a sudden break point where all the old certainties get tossed out and a new reality takes hold. The Industrial Revolution is a good example of this. Maybe the invention of Artificial General Intelligence is right around the corner, and will replace the bulk of the work that normal humans can possibly do, leaving a world in which only the most brilliant AI engineers, savviest and boldest entrepreneurs, and most well-heeled financiers can make a living.
I encounter a surprisingly large number of people in the San Francisco tech industry who believe that this is going to happen. They might be right — Daron Acemoglu agrees with them — but I suspect they’re overgeneralizing from their own experience. Everyone likes to marvel at how billion-dollar software companies have been created with just a handful of employees. If you see that kind of thing all day, you very well might start to think that labor is obsolete! But if you look at the overall economy, you’ll see that the fraction of output that gets paid to labor has fallen by only a couple of percentage points since the dawn of the information age."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-we-still-have-to-work
4. "As I read the Third Plenum resolution, I couldn’t help but tick off the commonalities with Jake Sullivan’s speech on US industrial policy: strategic industries, supply chain resilience, innovation, long-term investments, infrastructure, clean energy. Analyzing American and Chinese economic policy these days feels like looking down a warped hall of mirrors. China and the US have both drawn policy inspiration from each other.
China wants to replicate the venture capital ecosystem of Silicon Valley. China’s efforts to loosen up research institutions and give individual researchers a greater share of their work’s rewards is clearly inspired by American success in the academia-to-commercialization pipeline.
The US for its part has become much more open to large-scale state intervention in critical sectors of the economy, like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. US efforts to leverage access to its large market to compel foreign firms to invest domestically is a classic Chinese tactic (as I’ve written about). American policymakers have a renewed interest in the “hard economy,” often drawing comparisons with Chinese manufacturing and infrastructure.
As this economic contest heats up, it’s worth appreciating the irony of how China and the US keep defying each other’s ideological beliefs and expectations. Washington is annoyed that an authoritarian single-party system like China can innovate and produce global industry leaders. Beijing is annoyed that a messy democracy like the US keeps churning out world-changing technology from the internet to AI."
https://www.high-capacity.com/p/a-warped-hall-of-mirrors-us-china
5. "In the US, every four years, the presidential election is often a hotly debated topic, with tribes on both sides often spilling quite a bit of (digital) ink in the months leading up to that November.
And you might be asking, well mouse, I don’t care about politics, why should I pay attention to their trending topics/keywords/memes?
Me either fren, but I always have a hard time walking past a table overflowing with money lit on fire when a fire extinguisher is right at hand.
The solution is not to sell to the tribe you once used to/still may identify with, but to have systems in place to sell to both tribes in the US two party system. This is easily done with a domain parked with some variation of “patriot” for one side and “hope” on the other. A simple three-page site with maybe a few mantras floating around for some light SEO, lying in wait.
Inevitably, one side will see something happen so egregious, that that faction will rush to spend money as fast as possible to perform their allegiance (whether red or blue) at school drop off the next morning"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/ecom-the-rip-and-run
6. "Using AI in these contexts to help you refine your predictions about how different decisions will make you feel is a game changer. It can bring you an entirely new perspective on yourself—one that might pull you out of longstanding patterns or can help you see the forest through the trees of your experience.
It picks up on things you know, but couldn’t say. It expands upon what you’ve written so that you can more effectively project yourself into a possible future. It allows you to try on a decision like you would a piece of clothing.
AI can help you turn a decision that was once murky into something that’s clear as crystal. The question is: Will you listen?"
https://every.to/chain-of-thought/ai-can-help-you-make-big-life-decisions
7. "Dwarkesh is the host of the Dwarkesh Podcast, where he conducts deeply researched interviews with guests like Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, and Marc Andreessen.
Before conducting each of these interviews, Dwarkesh learns as much as he can about his guest and their area of expertise—AI hardware, tense geopolitical crises, and the genetics of human origins, to name a few. He does this by researching extensively, and recently, he integrated AI into his process.
Dwarkesh is using LLMs to revolutionize how he reads, learns, and builds a coherent worldview."
https://every.to/chain-of-thought/dwarkesh-patel-s-quest-to-learn-everything
8. "The most concrete example comes from her original Substack post in which she coined the term vibecession. In her piece, she argued that the split between how consumers felt about their current situation (quite good) and how they thought the future would go (quite bad) could end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thankfully, in America, at least, they were wrong. The bad vibes didn’t get us, and the economy bounced back. However, if enough people had believed that narrative and reduced their spending habits, they could’ve made a recession happen. Scanlon’s argument is that the economy is downstream of emotions.
Which, when said out loud, feels obvious, but it hasn’t been taken seriously. Most study of emotion in the field has been confined to behavioral economics: Economists study individual patterns of irrational behavior, such as the sunk cost fallacy or anchoring bias. But few people have studied the impact of emotions on the population.
Vibes are a field of study that deserves more attention and funding."
https://every.to/napkin-math/vibes-are-a-legitimate-economic-indicator
9. "What matters is that the international foreign policy landscape is now becoming extremely complex as China moves into far regions like the Middle East and Russia moves into the Pacific. China is playing the part of a peacemaker and power broker in the Middle East, which has just led to the formation of a future combined Palestinian government. China was able to end the war between Hamas and Fateh after decades of strife. Putin met Modi in India and restored the traditional dialogue that existed between the two countries.
Washington is having to adjust to a multipolar world where the weight of America’s voice isn’t what it used to be at a time when nobody is sure which way the US is going. Governments around the world are thinking through contingency plans in case events happen, and it becomes evident that nobody is in charge in the US. This includes the possibility of a contested or a contingent election outcome or both. It also includes the possibility that the election isn’t held on time or at all."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/missing-bullet-casings-fortune-cookies
10. Great overview of the geopolitical sphere and the rise of the new axis and Cold War 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkW2oaT0zZ8
11. "Whether or not you think Jeff’s on the juice, his body transformation remains hugely impressive. Gone are the days when he was solely known for revolutionizing the world of e-commerce. Now he’s a beacon of inspiration for fitness enthusiasts worldwide, proving that success isn’t confined to the boardroom, it can be sculpted in the iron paradise too."
https://www.dmarge.com/jeff-bezos-workout-routine
12. Learning from a top tier VC. Benchmark is excellent. An insightful discussion on the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfJtIibCx78
13. Dense and wide ranging discussion from one of the smartest people around. Always well reasoned. I don't agree with everything Balaji says but he always makes me think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rWIsc34N9Y
14. This is excellent. Jason gives a good rundown on what the best sales reps look like (and the reverse as well).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN4WnZnDQLs
15. Recent interview with Roelef of Sequoia Capital. Crucible moments for Sequoia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeF7GPBM8zQ
16. Always an enjoyable conversation. I am a fan of Justin Waller: the blue collar baller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGlllvBYb04
17. Ian Bremmer is one of the top geopolitical analysts out there. Sober view on what’s up in the world. Little bit dated with political changes in recent weeks but overall interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdQDpwdNCzk
18. Tai Lopez wisdom. I have come to enjoy listening to his stories & learnings here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxzGeHrisdk
19. Peter Thiel is one of the most original thinkers and investors around. Regardless of his politics, you can always learn from him. He is always ahead of the curve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42iVcEg5SOM
20. "U.S. national interests are best served by a peaceful world where authoritarian powers don’t try to conquer their smaller, weaker neighbors, and where global trade is conducted for mutual benefit instead of as a form of mercantilist beggar-thy-neighbor competition. That goal requires that the U.S. recognize China’s movement away from peaceful economic development and toward assertive nationalism and totalitarianism under Xi Jinping.
And it requires strong steps on the economic, diplomatic, and military fronts to dissuade China from launching a reckless war that plunges Asia into violence and chaos. I hope that whoever gets elected President this year is up to that task. Right now I’d definitely pick Harris over Trump for this reason alone, but that doesn’t mean she has my full confidence either."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-trump-or-harris-might-fail-to
21. Signs of peace coming to Ukraine soon? I hope so but only if it's on Ukraine's terms.
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-is-peace-coming
22. "If you want to understand the limits of AI today, try to build an agent.
And I mean a real agent, one that does complex, open ended tasks in the real world, not one that fetches a few PDFs and summarizes them.
You can tell your human co-worker: "I need you to go off and put together a complete plan for outreach to our potential customers, craft a list of needed assets, setup an outreach sequence and come up with a novel way to make those interactions feel more natural rather than doing cold email outreach."
They'll figure how to do it and all the complex intermediate steps to take along the way, while asking questions or getting the help they need to get it done if they don't understand each step.
An agent will hallucinate five to twenty steps into such an open ended task and go completely off the rails.
We already have super machines and tomorrow's super machines will make today's models look like Atari games next to PS5 games running Unreal Engine 5.
Technological evolution happens slowly, step by step, building on the backs of millions of tiny breakthroughs through the collective intelligence of mankind. It goes slowly and then all the pieces are suddenly in place and we get a burst of brilliant new activity that takes us to the next level "overnight."
But there is always further to go."
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-llms-are-much-smarter-than-you
23. "It’s easier to distill someone’s life down to their career progression, especially if you barely know them. There it is right on LinkedIn! I guess social media would be the analogous view into their personal lives, but the Instagram version of people’s lives is hardly real either. It’s easy to imagine that if only you made X amount of money, or worked at Y company, you would be happy. Money can certainly alleviate a lot of problems, but there are plenty of people who work at Y making X (or much much more than X) dollars a year who are miserable.
On our deathbeds (I guess we are actually headed to the same place after all), most people aren’t thinking, if only I had made more money, or if only I had spent some time in an executive role. Comparing career success, or stalking your former classmates in their new roles on LinkedIn, is like watching cars speed past you on the highway. It’s the most obvious thing to compare yourself to, but for most people, it’s probably not the most important.
According to palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware, the top five regrets of the dying are:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Given these top regrets, it seems downright silly that our comparative minds hone in on career success as a key gauge of life progress and happiness."
https://jeanhsu.substack.com/p/life-is-not-a-race
24. "But that concept of maintaining a higher number of funds managing smaller fund sizes certainly makes sense to me. Speaking of Fred Wilson, he's also laid out the mathon what it takes in terms of proceeds required to generate the necessary returns on the amounts of capital being managed. TLDR: It's a LOT.
But despite the logic in smaller funds being more capable of compounding capital, you can just feel the pull towards larger and larger funds. People can make more money off of fees, build larger organizations, more definitive brands, and compete for the best deals.
Obviously everyone is going to present their own case as ideal. But the reality is that in the same way ICONIQ can lose $100M because its 1% of their fund, they can also choose not to care about you as much even if things are just going fine, but not gangbusters, because you're 1% of their fund.
So from my perspective there is still plenty of value to create as a venture fund. And there are still plenty of vectors on which to compete in venture. Firms like Sequoia and Accel had been around for 40+ years when a16z came along in 2009, but they still made the incumbents dance. And I'm sure there are firms that are just getting going today that are going to do the same."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-siren-song-of-raising-a-venture
25. I learned a bunch here on the nicotine market and also Soylent too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYkReFrm7Wg
26. How do you right size your vc fund? Learnings from Notable VC formerly known as the legendary GGV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSMqS8b3gfY
27. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Delian of Founders Fund & Varda on the art and science of venture investing. Strong opinions which are unfortunately rare in the tech industry these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAScF7kEzOw
28. "Let’s consider his point: is “going direct,” as the founders and investors on All-In have done, antithetical to their work as founders and investors?
I think it’s likely too much time online negatively impacts one’s ability to focus elsewhere, but it’s silly to pretend there aren’t considerable benefits. Seibel’s old boss Paul Graham was one of the industry’s first influencers, in a way, an early, successful essayist, and a very popular voice on social media. That work has definitely contributed to, rather than detracted from, the success of YC. It has also, obviously, drawn him into mimetic conflict with Sacks. But I digress.
What’s more clear than the benefit of going direct for one’s own company is the benefit accrued to the industry. There was no alternative tech press in 2016, when Parker was witch burned, or 2019, when the mob came for Travis Kalanick. Neither of these stories would play out the same, lopsided way today."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-battle-of-the-billionaires
29. Pretty interesting approach to VC. Super clear and well articulated fund strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK2LesWN8Jk
30. This is an excellent workshop on how to implement growth in your business.
It's a live teardown and great framework for any kind of business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKT9r9hGmkI
31. This shows why the American foreign policy clique is so incompetent & why we keep making BIG mistakes in foreign interventions. Stupid ideology and a massive lack of understanding of history.
"Despite Burnham’s noticeably ideological perspective, his analysis is worth considering. That much the same ideology dominates the liberal consensus of our time is obvious. American allies in Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines are denounced by both liberal and neoconservative pundits and officials for relatively mild measures they take to protect their borders, sovereignty, and national culture.
By contrast, largesse and deference are given to brutal dictatorships in China and the Gulf States, and to corrupt, violent, and ethnocentrist regimes in much of Africa, even though these states pursue much more aggressive versions of the same policies."
https://www.palladiummag.com/2018/10/11/the-lesson-that-america-did-not-learn-from-vietnam/
32. Interesting list for expats: Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam appeal more to me.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/best-countries-for-expats-to-live-abroad
33. This is eye opening and every ambitious person should watch this. So many great learnings.