Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 6th, 2023
“To lose patience is to lose the battle.” —Mahatma Gandhi
“The venture business, if you want to be at the top, requires insane, remarkable hustle… You have to live in fear that the next Google is going to get funded by a firm that's not yours,” he says. “Either you're in there rowing as hard as you can, because we're all a team, or you're not.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/home-austin-legendary-vc-bill-224443607.html
2. Such a great interview with Codie Sanchez. Good one Ali.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHiRzcXftPw
3. "A glance at the map of Europe shows this little 40-mile gap that separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, right on the border between Poland and Lithuania. 40 miles is not very far. Here’s what Russia would get if they tried to grab this little stretch of land. Russia would be able to access the sea directly through Kaliningrad. They’d create a wedge that separates the Baltic states from the West, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom have been seen as a thorn in the side of Russia ever since their independence.
Russia will also face a direct fight with NATO if one centimeter of Poland is touched. Poland and Lithuania used to form a single Kingdom. Both nations are reinforcing that ancient alliance now, so even if Russia kept the fight on the Lithuanian side of the border, we can be sure that Poland would get involved immediately and forcefully.
Remember that Poland is about to have the largest military in Europe, and they have the toughest attitude of all to Russian adventuring. It is easy to imagine a moment where NATO says let’s not respond to a Russian provocation, and Poland says let’s respond without NATO."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/suwalki
4. This is an incisive discussion on different types of creator driven businesses.
Learned a crap ton.
Also love Sahil Bloom's newsletter as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3nMk4PAViY&t=167s
5. "In fact, the entire shape of the war is very different from what experts imagined. Rather than the fast-moving conflict led by phalanxes of armored vehicles, supported by Russia’s advanced piloted aircraft, that the analytical community imagined, the invasion was chaotic and slow.
There has never been a quick armored breakthrough by the Russians and only one by the Ukrainians—last September’s surprise advance in the province of Kharkiv.
Instead, almost all of the war’s gains have come gradually and at great expense. The conflict has been defined not by fighter jets and tanks but by artillery, drones, and even World War I–style trenches.
Military analysts also neglected to account for the broader industrial, technological, and economic strength of the warring parties. They didn’t, for instance, take note of the fact that Ukraine has traditionally been one of Europe’s biggest weapons producers, or that—despite its size—Russia’s economic and technological base is not one of a major power. (Russia’s economy is smaller than Canada’s.) Conventional interstate wars have never just been tests of militaries; they also always involve entire economies."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/war-defied-expectations
6. "I like that term: category of one.
Everyone is obsessed with being the best, but you can only have one “best,” regardless of the number of competitors.
In the newsletter game, The Milk Road was a category of one. The AI market, however, is a category of one too many, and all of these newsletters are producing the same content for the same general group of readers. They can’t all win, the numbers just don’t work.
Of course, this “category of one” idea isn’t just a content thing, it’s a life thing.
The key to winning your game, whatever it is, is to either be the first or be the only, and it’s far easier to be the only."
https://www.youngmoney.co/p/categories-1
7. "The long and short of all this is that the intelligence communities of all the superpowers are under greater pressure than ever to figure out who will win and what the consequences will be for policy, geopolitics, and for the intelligence communities themselves.
Could all this change be signaling the rising likelihood that the next American President will be seen in a photo alongside the leaders of the other superpowers, signing a peace deal? More and more, I am betting yes. Will the intelligence communities of the superpowers then stand down, be demoted, be deconstructed, or just become less visible?"
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/i-spy-a-deal
8. "The company structure is so powerful and useful that it is found across nearly every facet of society. It doesn’t matter if a state is capitalist, fascist or communist – they all still have companies. The US and China, for example, have vastly different ideologies and forms of government, but both embrace the concept of the company. The only difference is that in China the state owns companies; in America companies own the state.
Given the importance of companies to the productivity of the state, the state employs a wide range of state-sanctioned entities that help ensure companies’ compliance. These entities make up the “cartel of trust”. Auditors, accountants, lawyers, and bankers provide services for companies and help the state ensure everyone follows the rules and fosters trust between citizens and companies. In effect, these cartel members act as a tax on companies’ profits, as companies are required to employ them just to exist.
But what type of organisational structure would / will an AI use? Would an AI that is just a thinking machine, who “thinks” in lines of computer code and has no physical body, organise itself economically using today’s standard company structure?"
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/moai
9. "How we interface with and define technology will transition from the current incumbent-use-case-with-AI-sprinkles to new modalities of software and hardware altogether. The former is a world where incumbent tech wins big, and it will exist for some amount of time.
The latter is harder to comprehend today.
It’s a future that likely consists of autonomous systems, asynchronous decision-making, and a big leap forward in robotics. Filling in and extrapolating the gaps from there is harder to do, and underscores why newcomers are so well positioned: Envisioning, building, and ringing in a new era of technology will fall in the hands of visionary, ambitious entrepreneurs — not a public company R&D departments."
https://www.thursday-threads.com/p/incumbent-consensus
10. I am a fan of Packy's newsletter. He has built an interesting VC fund portfolio as well. Lots of great thoughts on newsletter based businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAqBoK6I0Js&t=435s
11. Shows how messed up the economy is in Argentina when Cuevas exist.
"Once you’ve known your cuevero for a while, and there’s trust, cuevas are really the Tinder app of black-market finance. For example, if you want to get money into the country, they match the order with someone who needs cash outside, you send it from your offshore account to that third party US account, and the cueva gives you cash, and vice versa."
https://bowtiedmara.substack.com/p/cuevas-the-knights-of-the-free-market
12. "The services industries should be home to massive marketplaces. They are enormous markets: annual freelance labor spend is 1.3T and home improvement spend is 600B in the US alone [1,2]. They have highly fragmented buyers and sellers that would benefit greatly from a better way to find and transact with each other.
So after thousands of attempts by some of the smartest teams in the world, where are they? You might argue that Uber is a service marketplace. But other than that, none of the ~10 US public marketplaces with market caps over $10B are in services. None of the top 10 private marketplaces are either [3,4].
This essay explores what is holding services marketplaces back, how they might get unstuck, and why this would produce some of the largest businesses in the world."
https://www.danhock.co/p/service-marketplaces
13. The US Economy seems to be looking up.
https://kyla.substack.com/p/is-the-vibecession-over
14. Russia is a terrorist state. The impact of this will be famine and it will hit the Global South very badly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yAfgdyZlCw
15. Lots of things to take in here. Agree with much of this but the automation & technology part is a blindspot for Zeihan.
Still some good nuggets to understand what’s happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISk9ZpKM9so&t=583s
16. Active investing will be important for the future. A good global macro view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfnPmXjp9cY&t=306s
17. Old one but fascinating.
"By going into uncharted territory where most investors don’t dare to tread, the Chandler brothers have, in the space of 20 years, grown a family fortune of $10 million into a cool $5 billion -- and they’re still in their mid-40s. Along the way they have made waves by being among the first and biggest investors in such emerging markets as Brazil, the Czech Republic and Russia and playing an instrumental -- and controversial -- role in advocating economic reform and better corporate governance.
They have waged, directly and by proxy, several bruising governance battles, most notably in Russia, where their militancy helped get the first independent director appointed at state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, and in South Korea, where their two-year campaign at refiner SK Corp. to oust chairman and CEO Chey Tae Won, who had been convicted of fraud, ended in failure last year. (The pair still pocketed some $728 million in profits on their SK investment.)"
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6f5zmyo/home/secrets-of-sovereign
18. "There are two keys to this.
One is that you can’t force it and you have to really really know your stuff or else you’re assuming blind risk and opening yourself up to financial ruin. The Chandler brothers understand businesses inside and out. They could cut through the fluff in laser like fashion and get to the meat of the issue when evaluating companies.
Second is time. Fat pitches like these don’t come around often. The Chandler brothers would go years in between big investments without risking any substantial amount of money. Michelangelo once said that, “Genius is infinite patience” well the corollary to that in investing is that infinite patience is success.
Next, there is contrarianism. The Chandler brothers made it a point to set up shop in Dubai and Singapore, far away from the financial centers of the world in New York and London. They did this because they didn’t want to fall victim to the powerful pull of groupthink and herd mentality.”
https://macro-ops.com/the-chandler-brothers-the-greatest-investors-youve-never-heard-of/
19. This is a solid discussion on the importance of defensetech & the wake up call in America to the threat of China.
Anduril Industries was a pathfinder in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmSkihdGUp0
20. "Q: How do you generate new investment ideas?
A: We mostly look around and check on what government has done this week that is really stupid. Politicians always pursue short-term actions because they have to win elections. This creates a lot of opportunity for investing as they don't care about effects that happen beyond the election – they only care about winning the election."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/11-highlights-from-our-dinner-with-kuppy/
21. "The studios’ real enemy isn’t a pair of naive, shortsighted unions, or one another, or streaming. Their antagonist isn’t even TikTok, though the short-video company will be happy to absorb the additional viewing hours once people have to adjust their habits. (Pro tip: Late-night TV will soon be a shadow of itself as consumers find substitutes.)
The enemy is the same enemy the rest of media, and retail face, Big Tech. Specifically, in this case, Big Tech AI offerings that will digest content (at zero cost if they have their way) and wedge themselves between the consumer and repurposed content.
Filmed entertainment is ruinously expensive. It takes a special kind of edible to pile Benjamins and light them on fire greenlighting Pete Davidson in Marmaduke ($50 million budget, $800,000 in box office, 0% on the Tomatometer). One signal capital allocation is the primary function for Hollywood studios is how easily Big Tech muscled its way in. Nobody brings a taller pile of Benjamins, or a stronger stomach to risk it, than Big Tech. Apple, Netflix, and Amazon now dominate Hollywood. And what did they bring? Cheaper capital."
https://www.profgalloway.com/frenemies/
22. "This chart makes perfect sense to me right now because the really wealthy are not crushed by inflation and high interest rates. Sure they buy fewer homes and yachts, but in a modern world, they travel and buy silly things that make them happy. They wait out the inevitable next boom earning high interest on their cash, entertaining themselves with the growing degenerate economy (speculation as entertainment and gambling).
Meanwhile, the suffering intensifies at the bottom and the angry man economy grows."
https://www.howardlindzon.com/p/explaining-rich-man-angry-man-degenerate-man-economy-charts
23. This is the reason so many venture firms implode or disappear. Succession to the next generation.
https://chudson.substack.com/p/succession-in-venture-capital-is
24. "Of course, we could simply wait until the balloon goes up and Chinese missiles start raining down on our bases in the Pacific. At that point, support for increased defense spending, military transformation, munitions production, and all the rest will shoot through the roof, as support for war production skyrocketed after Pearl Harbor. But by then there’s a good chance it’ll be too late — in the years that it’ll take us to overhaul our sclerotic system, we’ll have run out of munitions and we’ll be up against a smoothly functioning Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.
In the post-Cold War years and the Iraq War years, it made sense to cut defense spending, because that spending either wasn’t needed or was being wasted. But America’s writers and politicians and fashionable intellectual hipsters need to realize that those eras are both over, replaced by a terrifying new age of great-power competition. Right now, trapped in our nostalgia for easier times, we are refusing to meet that new era head-on. But refusing to compete doesn’t make the competition go away. It just means we lose by default."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/uh-guys-we-really-should-think-about
25. So many good insights and tips for improving your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUO2DqCwdiE
26. These are really good predictions. I actually think these may come to pass.
"The world is going to change, but not in a brand new way.
The center of the world was once in the East.
India was once a great economy.
We once lacked workers in Europe (after the Black Death, which spurred the end of serfdom)
We’ve had many civil wars before
The UK was once decadent and rose up
The Church has decayed then came back many times before."
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/10-worldwide-predictions-for-the-next-20-years-e45f186a4cc
27. Such a valuable discussion on life and career design as a creator. Also how opportunities show up when you have built an audience via the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5uH-FwCWo
28. This is pretty cool.
29. This is a masterclass in value investing from one of the best. Seth Klarman of Baupost. I learned so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHsEt6MchhE
30. "Having serially outperformed expectations, Ukraine finds itself in the unenviable position of having gone from scrappy underdog to victim of its own mythologized success. Six and a half weeks into a much-anticipated counteroffensive and there are no dramatic battlefield developments. A handful of settlements have been reclaimed in the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, and that’s it. An absence of climax has begun to lead to impending anti-climax and the sort of doomcasting that characterized the preliminaries of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The counteroffensive into which Kyiv and its NATO partners have invested so much kit, manpower and money is already a busted flush, we are told. “Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing, with no easy fixes,” ran one comment piece in The Daily Telegraph. This was preceded four days earlier by an even less sunny prognosis in the same newspaper, “Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat.”
Ironically, such assessments stand in marked contrast to what Russians in the field are saying about the capability of their adversary.
We find ourselves at a bizarre turning point in a crisis which has seen no shortage of them where the only ones who think Ukraine’s counter-offensive isn’t quite the let-down or failure it’s been widely portrayed as are the Russians desperate to prove otherwise."
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/russians-see-ukrainian-progress-where-others-dont/
31. This American hedge fund has a contrarian investment thesis to say the least.
Even if he makes money, he will not be able to get it out of China.
Note: Cyrus Janssen is clearly a paid CCP shill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pxm_Wn2MXE
32. I've always liked Jason Momoa. This is pretty cool.
https://www.goalcast.com/jason-momoa-promotes-mananalu-on-hawaiian-airlines/
33. "We hear only little of new Ukrainian advances (which Im sure means that pessimistic stories will start up again soon). I do think we need to be very cautious in thinking that this development represents anything like the main effort of the Ukrainians. It could just as easily represent a small ramp up of the efforts of the Ukrainians over the last few weeks—and again it has not yet been confirmed how many of the brigades Ukraine has in reserve (which is considerable) have been committed to battle.
I have heard from some pretty reliable people that a very large force of reserves still remains to be committed. I will go back to what I said last week—Ukraine is actually not under any immediate time pressure to step up ground attacks, and they will only do so if they really feel there is a weak spot in the line.
Actually, Ukraine continues to making major efforts doing what it has been doing for weeks—trying to damage Russian artillery resources, from the systems to the logistics. They are clearly still trying to weaken Russian defensive capabilities before going forward in masse. The data seems to show that clearly."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-39
34. Watching this will make your life better. So many good tips, tools and frameworks for improving your life. I will watch this many times I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBNw3u4lOr8
35. Some good advice for someone starting off in their career.
The weird scripts that run through your head that prevent you from progressing in life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BKf-FGq21g
36. "The start-up, based in New York City, is in one way easily understood and, in another, exceedingly strange. In the realm of clarity: Praxis’s central and stated ambition is the creation of that city in the Mediterranean. Where exactly on the Mediterranean coast and why they wish to build there have not been publicly addressed."
https://airmail.news/issues/2023-7-29/company-town
37. I'm actually still pretty bullish on the creator economy.
This is a good presentation on why we should still be paying attention despite the hype cycle that happened in last few years.
Everyone needs to be a creator if you want to be relevant in your career.