Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 19th, 2021
“You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.”--Morgan Wooten
"It’s stories like this that may help ease any lingering worries that Nanjiani has absconded from the dingy basements and Games Workshop backrooms of comic book culture to mix in the gym lockers and frat houses with the beefy, square-jawed jocks. Even when he’s shredding himself into the best shape of his life to play an ancient, genetically altered guardian of the galaxy who can blast laser beams from the tips of his fingers, he still manages to mount a rococo, Bollywood-inspired dance sequence. More than a turncoat in the pop culture wars, he may well manage to ease tensions between the betas and the alphas — an ancient enmity that, like the battles between Marvel’s various races of superhumans, is seemingly eternal.
For all the hype around his new movie (and his new body), Kumail Nanjiani is still the same guy. He remains — proudly, and even a bit defiantly — an indoor kid."
https://sharpmagazine.com/2021/11/16/kumail-nanjiani-profile
2. This is the dream but surprisingly few VCs use tech and data themselves. Probably changing fast with all the competition out there (and new tech too)
“Especially as venture firms grow, and especially as having access to data and speed and efficiency become competitive advantages, I do think that there will be more demand and budget for buying additional products,” Lerner said. “There are real firms out there, like Tribe, that have built proprietary datasets and data models and that is their edge, but I don’t think that’s how the majority of firms differentiate.”
It may not be a core differentiation, but venture firms are turning to data sources and building their own analysis layer on top of it to help them gain a competitive edge."
https://www.protocol.com/tech-software-venture-capitalists-use
3. "I think that the key to believing in a very bright future is to have trust in oneself, in others, and in the future itself. Things will only get better if we work on making them better. It’s just as self-fulfilling as being Debbie Downer. Plus, according to the late Hans Rosling, most things do get better over time.
I think that the only threat towards this bright future are distractions. We are daily bombarded with attempts to distract us from what I believe really matters: self-fulfillment. Its news, phone calls, social media, traffic, emails, spam, commuting, drama, unproductive meetings, boring Zoom calls, mindless thoughts et cetera."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/unlocking-the-bright-future
4. "By the 20th century, the term pulling yourself up by your bootstraps had morphed, changing to something not only possible, but desirable.
Zimmer said it’s not exactly clear just when the turn happened, but it became a compliment about self-sufficiency.
.......bootstrapping most often isn’t the way to become one of the biggest companies on the planet, despite a few tales of outliers.
Still, Godin defended bootstrapping as a choice most founders should consider to stay focused on the unique product or service they’re hatching."
https://thehustle.co/who-gets-left-out-of-bootstrapping
5. Very thought provoking and well worth a read. Strong recommend.
"Put all these pieces together, and rather than a unipolar Pax Americana or a bipolar “New Cold War,” the future will be a decentralized race to the top as countries, cities, companies, and communities—physical and virtual—compete to attract talent and capital. We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it. Such is the nature of great protocol politics.
What does that mean for the United States? Today, the United States is experiencing a relative decline in strength across economic and military axes. Its global role is more a function of its victories in 1945 and 1991 than its capabilities in 2021.
Places as varied as Estonia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and Chile are all vying for newly mobile talent through “nomad visas” and other similar programs. After all, many aspects of life are already in the cloud (like email, education, and e-commerce) and many others are partially digitized (like finance and foreign incorporation). Government is what economist Mancur Olson famously termed a “stationary bandit,” extracting rents in exchange for providing benefits."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great-protocol-politics
6. Good framework for thematic vc investing. Tech, Society, Timing and Team.
https://worldpositive.com/how-to-build-a-time-machine-f207b2cae3fb
7. This is a worthwhile interview with Doomberg on the decentralization of media. Also the future seems to be anonymous and content driven. People taking control of their lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deD3QRt3DZw
8. "In a world where US oil production tapers off, spare OPEC+ pumping capacity fails to materialize, financing for new exploration and development continues to shrink, and demand for oil in the West continues to grow while exploding higher in the emerging economies, what happens to price?"
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/theres-not-enough-oil
9. "We are interested in people like Wallis because he is a successful content creator, and we are continuously researching and learning all we can about the rapid decentralization of entertainment and education into such niches. The gig economy for brains is exploding and has only accelerated under the world’s response to Covid-19.
Brand is one of five pillars of any business, the others being production, technology, demand creation, and channel. An effective way to improve business performance is to do a deep dive on each of these five pillars, identify strengths and weaknesses, and then look for ways to get better."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/the-riches-are-in-the-niches
10. "nations are not very old, and there is no species law that we must organize beneath their banner. Across human history, we have cobbled ourselves into tribes and fiefs and city-states of varying prosperity and endurance. We have favored other configurations and flourished.
We will do so again. Just as mechanical advancements gave rise to national systems, the technological revolution enables new structures. While the internet was the dominant force in the current shift, cryptocurrency represents the missing piece. Though much discussed, we remain in the early innings of understanding how profoundly the blockchain "vernacularizes" economics and empowers digital, censorship-free homesteading.
The result will be a new kind of civilizational structure: decentralized countries. "DeCos" will operate above national borders in the digital realm. In that respect, they resemble the "cloud nations" theorized by one of decentralization's poet laureates, Balaji Srinivasan. This piece owes a debt to his thinking and the writings of Benedict Anderson and Marshall McLuhan.
While Srinivasan's "cloud nations" seek to proceed "cloud first, land last," DeCos may never attempt to settle terrestrial territory. Rather, these entities recognize that our digital lives are more real and valuable than our corporeal ones."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/the-decentralized-country
11. Whatever you think of this man, he is the real life Iron Man & a bloody, interesting guy who deserves to be Time's Man of the Year. Elon Musk.
"This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.
His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper.
He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.
He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere."
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk
12. "The conclusion goes back to the same: computer coins. Individuals and institutional investors need to figure out a way to move up the risk spectrum given double digit inflation (minimum) and an asset class that is secure from confiscation. Crypto offers both. As we go through a rocky Q4/Q1 (more mandates, Covid-19 new variants), keep your eyes on the prize: holding onto all assets.
Smaller countries will continue to adopt BTC, larger countries will be better off in Fiat terms (US Token, Euros, Yuan etc.). However. The cat is out of the bag. As inflation ramps up, third world countries are generally hit harder. This results in a need for a new financial system to combat $30+ fees on remittance (just ask the Middle East, South America or Africa). Crypto solves it."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/improving-the-free-value-and-some
13. Woohoo! Congrats to my friend Apostolos, go Venturefriends!
14. "From travel restrictions to the efficacy of vaccines, every single major Covid position has diametrically switched across party lines, and almost every person responsible for Covid decisions, which have nearly all been disastrous, is still in power. Unless we’re all completely insane, none of this would be possible were we able to effectively remember.
Intuitively, most people seem to understand we’re missing something important. Even while nuclear power plants around the western world fade to dust, the concept of nuclear power is gaining popularity across all political ideologies.
In terms of space, Elon was just named TIME’s person of the year. Sure, the bluecheck anti-moon crew was furious about it, but the intuition of the average person seems to draw us back to these concepts, to American greatness, really, and to the people who embody the concept.
With a clear vision of a greater future now somehow difficult to grasp, and to really see, intuition — our feelings — are perhaps our last guide through the dark. Trust your gut. Things used to work. Things can still work. On some level, you know this is true.
That something has gone wrong with the world is not exactly controversial. But what, exactly? Perhaps that nagging feeling of something “off” is less a looming danger than it is a thing we’ve lost. An erosion of the soul, maybe, almost too gradual to name."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/variant-xi
15. "We’ve argued on several occasions that replacing coal with natural gas and scaling nuclear power alongside renewables like wind and solar is the most sensible energy strategy available to humanity today. Substituting baseload power with exclusively intermittent sources consistently fails those who adopt such a strategy, leading to higher costs, less reliability, economic damage, and rolling blackouts.
We find it odd that this empirical evidence is not only routinely ignored, but those who dare point to the data are labeled primitive defenders of the status quo. We prefer to think of ourselves as pro-human realists.
If one wanted to destroy an economy from within, it would be hard to do a better job than what Germany is doing to itself. By systematically shutting down baseload-critical nuclear power facilities and replacing them with intermittent renewable energy, Germany has left itself – and by extension, the entire European Union – vulnerable to shortages of reliable sources of electricity.
Not satisfied with that error, Germany has further impaled itself by attacking its suppliers of natural gas – the remaining option for producing reliable baseload power, having ruled out nuclear and coal – turning a mistake into a predictable catastrophe.
Unfortunately for some Americans, especially those living on and near the Pacific Coast, Germany holds no monopoly on dummkopfs. For evidence, consider that the formerly great state of California will soon begin the process of shutting down its last remaining nuclear power facility."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/california-ditzkrieg
16. Very exciting. I’m definitely binge watching this December 31st.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3uX4uwrAaY
17. I'm super bullish on Eastern Europe. Great place to invest, live and hire.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/lifestyle/why-we-hire-in-eastern-europe
18. "This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving.
But knowledge is a thing that we can always create more of."
19. "Brotman said he estimates small, early investing venture firms allow about 95 percent of pro rata rights to expire due to a lack of capital, funds needing to be closed, and the simple fact many of the firms are not growth round experts.
It often makes sense for investors. A small seed investor who may have invested $1 million for a 5 percent stake in a startup from a $20 million fund likely cannot now budget $5 million in a follow-up round to maintain that stake."
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/pro-rata-rights-vc-explained-changing
20. "To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others. There’s always a case for optimism, optimism of human ambition and capability of great technological and scientific discoveries.
But if your main argument for owning an asset is that other people will own it, not because it has intrinsic value, but because there’s a greater fool—i.e. let's just hype it up and pump it and promote it until more and more fools get in—eventually, the smarter people that induced the fools are leaving them as the bag holders. That to me is the great inequity. To The Moon is a constant encouragement of people. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbx9b/the-to-the-moon-crash-is-coming
21. "When we look back on 2021, however, no story will be more consequential than the people’s revolt against institutions. In recent memory, there hasn’t been a single year where so many people told society’s pillars to buzz off. Instead of holding jobs, they chose to resign. Instead of making safe investments, they chose meme stocks. Instead of political orthodoxy, they chose to vote independent."
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/the-revolt-against-institutions-is
22. "When we eventually emerge from the energy crisis, the story of how China came to dominate the magnesium market should inform a strategic reconsideration of the West’s entire approach to the economy. Certain critical raw materials are difficult to make and doing so with all appropriate environmental controls is a price worth paying. Allowing China to abuse its environment so it can flood the world with cheap goods and put our manufacturers at a terminal disadvantage is dumb policy.
We need to get smarter, and soon."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/magnesium-pi
23. I wouldn't invest in this space personally but I'm a happy customer!
"The final step in delivery, handing a product to the consumer, is known as the last mile. Historically, the mile has been rhetorical. The nearest UPS hub or DHL warehouse might be 10 or 20 miles. These businesses, however, have dispersed their distribution networks to within an actual mile. The last last mile.
VCs recognize the opportunity. Gorillas has raised more than $300 million since its founding last year and is valued at over $1 billion. Jokr, which started delivering groceries eight months ago, has raised $350 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. They’re two of the fastest zero-to-unicorn firms in history.
It’s a global phenomenon. Spain’s Glovo raised $528 million in April ($2 billion valuation). Turkey’s Getir raised $550 million in June ($7.5 billion valuation). America’s Gopuff raised $1 billion in July ($15 billion valuation). Prague has Rohlik, London has Zapp, Moscow has Samokat … the list goes on. In the first quarter of this year alone, instant-delivery startups raised nearly $8 billion — more than in all of 2020.
This is part of a larger trend that’s bigger than just physical delivery. Everything is getting delivered. Streaming brought the box office into the home; roughly half of pre-pandemic moviegoers aren’t buying tickets. Telehealth brought doctors and therapists into the home; telehealth claims are up 37 times from before the pandemic. Yet more evidence of the Great Dispersion.
Over the past two decades, the dispersion of retail from shelves to porch fronts has created and reallocated trillions in value. A similar tectonic shift is likely to occur in grocery and restaurants at the hands of ghost kitchens, ride-hailing companies, and well-capitalized last-last-mile firms. The question is, will new giants be birthed or will the existing behemoths grow new heads?"