Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 10th, 2023
“Courage is found in unlikely places.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
"Founding a business that achieves any level of success requires ambition, talent, an irrational belief that “this” makes sense, and most important the ability to attract a flock of investors who consent to engage in your hallucination. The best founders are Zealots.
Zealots are high-talent, high-energy people — but they also tend to be narcissistic and divisive assholes. If you’re thinking “Takes one to know one,” trust your instincts. Zealots make good founders, but as companies mature, the ratio of their passion relative to the cost incurred by their difficult personalities erodes. Maturity calls for sober leaders who are better at managing risk and serving the market’s desire for predictable, if not remarkable, growth: Pragmatists.
Some (i.e., few) founders can make the transition, tempering the quicksilver aspects of their personality without losing their drive or vision.
For most of business history, having assets was good, and having more was even better. However, one of technology’s tectonic unlocks has been elevating information (bits) over objects (atoms). In the information age, owning assets is one business, while operating them is another, and each demands distinct capital structures, management approaches, and operational skills.
Businesses offering the greatest return on invested capital don’t have much capital (assets) and can scale up faster, as they don’t bind themselves to cars, apartments, or even inventory. (Think: Amazon Marketplace.) Using other people’s assets makes firms more resilient, because they can scale down as inexpensively, during bad times, as they scaled up."
https://www.profgalloway.com/webur/
2. Strangest news of the day in tech. Altman out at OpenAI. Very bizarre.
https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-panel-reacts-openai-fires-ceo
3. "In the years that followed the meeting between the two men, Figma ate InVision’s lunch. InVision unsuccessfully tried to sell itself, a fact that hasn’t been previously reported, and is now a husk of what it once was. Its story underscores the plight startups face in an era when borrowing costs are rising, cash piles are diminishing and venture capitalists are less likely to write checks to give companies second or third chances.
InVision, which peaked at a $2 billion valuation and raised $350 million from blue-chip investors including Goldman Sachs and Spark Capital, spiraled as Figma grew and snatched away its customers. Last year, InVision’s revenue plunged by half to $50 million, two people familiar with the company’s finances said, and it was projected to sink to between $36 million and $38 million for 2023.
As Figma cut into InVision’s main design business by building a product that was more seamless to use, InVision shifted its focus to an online whiteboard product to help remote workers collaborate. In late 2021, InVision started working with investment bankers to try to sell itself, two people familiar with the matter said, a process that was on and off. They couldn’t find a buyer willing to take on the shrinking company."
4. A masterclass in making money online as a creator from some of the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZGbQvX9AXY&t=619s
5. Empires are built by blood, sweat and violence. Lots of wisdom from Tai Lopez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUJXaGnxsBQ
6. I love Stonestown Galleria (as it’s very close to my home) and it’s thriving.
"Despite having the same issues that every mall in America faces, Stonestown Galleria has cunningly persevered, mostly by focusing on shops and services that cater to the young people of the area, including — perhaps critically — the students of San Francisco State which is just next door, and the suburban kids coming over from Daly City and South San Francisco. Big draws like Regal and Target fulfill all your college needs, while classy grown-ups get their shop on at mainstay Trader Joe’s.
It’s mostly with hot new Asian eateries, like Uncle Tetsu serving Japanese cheesecakes, and Café Maiko, the first dedicated matcha café in SF, earning the mall its reputation as “the new Japantown.”
With interest in Asian pop culture at an all-time high, it’s no surprise to see young people going to popular Japanese shops Daiso and Misimo, and hanging around places serving Korean barbeque, and Taiwanese street snacks. These shops have breathed new life into the mall, following renovations made while Stonestown was closed for a year during the pandemic. The mall is now doing better business than it was in 2019."
7. "These three explanations—coincidence, multipolarity, Russia’s war in Ukraine—are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are interrelated, as wars are complex events; the decline of U.S. hegemony contributes to growing multipolarity; and great-power competition has surely fed Russia’s aggression and the West’s response.
The consequence is that others are caught in the great-power cross fire or will seek to start fires of their own. Even if none of these wars rise to the level of a third world war, they will be devastating all the same. We do not need to be in a world war to be in a world at war.
Wars were already a persistent feature of the international system. But they were not widespread. War was always happening somewhere, in other words, but war was not happening everywhere. The above dynamics could change that tendency. The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/11/conflicts-around-the-world-peak/676029/
8. "Every market is different, and every opportunity has to be evaluated on its own. One recommendation is to go to the individual job function and think through the AI Iron Man suit functionality to make that person ten times more productive or to enable the employer to fulfill the mission of that role in a way that is more scalable, more distributed, or more economical. Build software to Iron Man the power of a job function."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/11/18/software-to-iron-man-a-job-function/
9. "There are several sources that are laying out the details of the story. The TLDR? Sam and Greg were the driving force behind OpenAI’s ambitions. Raising more and more capital, establishing plans to build their own chips to compete with Nvidia, building an AI-native phone with Jony Ive.
Ilya’s perspective was focused on the need to create AI “that truly deeply loves humanity.” The progress of OpenAI was racing far ahead of the research capabilities to pursue Ilya’s parameters for love, not just performance. What’s more, his role was increasingly getting reduced at the company.
Increasingly, it’s clear that this is a fundamental debate between effective altruism and effective accelerationism.
What’s more, there is such a contrast today. On the one hand, we have EA exploding the most important company in technology in decades. On the other hand, we have e/acc powering a literal rocket, exploding towards the sky, space, and all the progress that entails."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-hero-founder
10. This is such an incredible interview. Everyone should watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7dgxCykg-Q
11. "The “Roaring 20s” idea wasn’t just about a strong economy; it was fundamentally about a technology boom. And although it’s hard to identify the impacts of technologies on the economy, I think there are signs that some of the things we were excited about three years ago are now having an effect.
Another technology driving rapid corporate investment is AI. AI is rapidly taking overthe world of venture finance, with more than a quarter of VC money now flowing into the space. That’s partly a result of more traditional startup categories going bust, but mostly it’s about the boom in generative AI following the release of ChatGPT and various AI art apps. Goldman Sachs predicts that AI investment could be 4% of the economy in just two years. Boardroom chaos at OpenAI seems unlikely to slow the trend much, since the basic technology of LLMs is now pretty widely diffused.
And that’s just today. It’s crucial to note that all of these technologies — new wonder vaccines, solar and batteries, and AI — will almost certainly have a much bigger impact once they’re widely adopted. Generative AI will juice productivity in ways we can’t even imagine right now. Cheap solar and batteries will push down electricity and transportation costs. Using vaccines to treat cancer will reduce disease burden. And further business-model innovations will hopefully allow companies to use work-from-home to greater advantage.
In other words, the Roaring 20s are just getting started.
Much of the country is still mired in the atmosphere of pessimism and malaise that followed the Great Recession, the chaotic Trump years, the pandemic, and the post-pandemic inflation. And of course dire events like the Israel-Gaza war continue to dominate headlines. But already I feel like I can sense the green shoots of excitement about the future, from the online “e/acc” mini-movement to nascent optimism about the economy."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-roaring-20s-are-back-on-track
12. Travel and diversify. Go visit other countries and invest outside of the USA. Be an uncommon commodity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdKA5l7HNgk
13. Good summary of an interesting conversation. Doug Casey is an accomplished international investor and author. He is a libertarian kook but he has been right more than wrong.
14. "A few weeks into a world tour to promote his latest album House on a Hill, Nam is feeling that connection more than ever—especially since he’s also an entrepreneur on top of being a pop star. He counts a podcast and media company, DIVE Studios, and a mental health app, Mindset, in his business portfolio.
Nam developed the self-care app he co-founded which features celebrities like Summer Walker, Tori Kelly, and members of Seventeen talking about mental heath, is especially dear to Nam. “It’s always weird for me to be like, ‘I’m a mental health advocate,’” he says. “it was more of a gradual, very organic thing more than it was like ‘We need to be advocates.’”
At 34, the eternally boyish Eric Nam has already lived a few lives. An Atlanta native who was supposed to become a business analyst at Deloitte, he left finance to enter a talent competition in South Korea and become a star. Nam now deftly toggles between the worlds of entertainment and business."
https://www.gq.com/story/real-life-diet-eric-nam
15. "Targeting Prosumers offers unique advantages. Unlike B2B transactions (where there can be many decision makers), it's often easier for a Prosumer to make a purchasing decision. If it's something they're passionate about doing, they'll take out their credit card.
Furthermore, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for Prosumers is growing. It encompasses creators (TikTokers, podcasters, YouTubers), career-oriented individuals (software developers, digital nomads, freelancers), and hobbyists (photographers, DJs, musicians, artists, classic car enthusiasts).
My larger point: if you see an opportunity with growing demand, and it’s a good fit for you, don’t ignore it just because “it’s not B2B.”
Your business doesn’t have to fit the dominant narrative to be successful; indie B2Prosumer products can be incredibly profitable.
There are great opportunities to build awesome $1M-$5M/year businesses with Prosumer customers."
https://justinjackson.ca/prosumers
16. "When you see the faces of the people around you unconsciously bent toward their devices, the vast majority are tumbling down a unique path, becoming surrounded by more content that affirms their convictions, biases and fears.
People settle for being out of shape. They settle for careers they don’t love. And when they open their phones, they settle for the cultural and political beliefs that are served to them.
They have no agency. No sovereignty.
This is why it is so important to plan, strategize and execute a process.
Most people want to be wealthier than they are. Most want to be fitter than they are.
Far fewer people want to do the things that make you wealthy and fit.
So focusing on the goal, although fun - and important, is not as important as focusing on the process."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/is-the-goal-to-get-rich-or-stay-rich
17. "For years, Ohlrogge says SPAC proponents dismissed the poor track record of SPACs, insisting it would be different with better sponsors and better target companies.
“And it’s never been true,” Ohlrogge says. “So they just keep continuing to perform badly, and I think it’s because they have these enormous structural flaws that still very few people understand.”
https://thehustle.co/the-spectacular-failure-of-spacs/
18. "That’s the beauty and the horror of social consumer apps. The only way to know is to build fast and launch too early.
I am biased, obviously, but Antoine is one of the rare, if not the only founder in that category who is truly intentional about what he’s building with a deep product perspective and behavioral understanding. Many successful founders who have built social consumer apps have just hit a giant gold mine while digging and taking turns quite randomly and then built the narrative around and tried not to make too many mistakes along the way."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/ti-amo
19. "Aside from the obviously preposterous nature of how this process played out, the question is, why? Why would they do this now? And why so quickly?
One theory is that Sustkever believed that Altman was getting involved in too many other ventures: reportedly a NVIDIA competitor to make AI chips and a hardware company devoted to building AI phones. He might have worried that Altman’s control over other parts of the value chain would give him power beyond the strictures of OpenAI’s founding charter.
Another theory is that OpenAI made a research breakthrough that truly scared Sutskever—but that Altman wanted to proceed with commercializing it too quickly.
It’s important to reserve judgment until more of the facts come out. But for now, whatever Sutskever’s goals, he probably did not advance them particularly well, because supporters of AI safety now look foolish. AI is, as far as I know, the only field in which startups have been built with safety research at their core from the beginning.
That’s why OpenAI is structured as a non-profit and Altman has no equity position in the company. But, barring some revelations, its focus on safety and resulting corporate structure created a ridiculously bad and chaotic situation. In the long run, it’s likely to make the cause of safety harder to justify, rather than easier."
https://every.to/everything/thinksgiving-is-upon-us
20. This will be fascinating to watch. Libertarian Milei wins in Argentina.
"Javier Milei believes that a free people should not have to deal with an overbearing central government, promising to remove massive chunks of the state’s bureaucracy, making him a friend to capitalism but an adversary to the administrative state.
He is against bad fiat money but bullish on bitcoin. He is an entrepreneur’s best friend, and a very worthy foe to the parasites who feast on the money printer."
https://www.dossier.today/p/javier-milei-who-has-all-of-the-right
21. The cause of most people's financial issues. Lifestyle Inflation.
https://lifemathmoney.com/money-advice-avoid-lifestyle-inflation/
22. "So maybe the direction of Argentina is the embracing of US dollars AND bitcoin. Not dollars exclusively and not bitcoin exclusively. You need both of them at the moment. And that is what Javier Milei ultimately represents.
A new way of thinking about economics that appears to be built for the 21st century. The change may be bumpy along the way, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the change is needed.
This is something to keep in mind as we head into the 2024 Presidential election here in America. Multiple candidates have already come out in strong support of bitcoin, which could lead to a similar situation where US dollar dominance is continued and bitcoin is embraced as a digital gold."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-people-of-argentina-have-spoken
23. "As for startups, disruptions in the status quo are often advantageous. OpenAI’s dominant place in the developer ecosystem is suddenly at risk & presents an opportunity for smaller companies to fill a new void.
Sudden disturbances in rapidly moving objects like rockets tend to create catastrophic outcomes."
https://tomtunguz.com/disturbing-rockets-in-flight/
24. "I’m emerging from a two-month long set of back-to-back trips, from Texas to Nairobi to Dubai, to Riyadh, to New York and to Montreal, with the final stop today in Vegas for Money 2020.
Each has their own growing startup ecosystems budding. And they each offer unique lessons for us.
Here are five I reflect on."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/5-startup-lessons-from-5-ecosystems
25. Interesting theory. I guess we will see.
"What did President Xi get in exchange for all this? He got quite a lot. First, remember that Governor Newsom, Biden’s heir apparent, was recently treated as an equal by Xi. In the highly unusual and surprise meeting between a US Governor and China’s Head of State, Newsom specifically said, “divorce (between the US and China) is not an option” and “I expressed my support for the One-China policy ... as well as our desire not to see independence," Clear enough. This statement alone gave Xi what he needed to begin a negotiation with Taipei’s leaders about a slow but secure re-entry of Taiwan into China.
Suddenly, the opposition parties in Taiwan have agreed to cooperate. This will potentially bring to power a group of people who are more inclined to deal with China and ensure a peaceful resolution of the sovereignty issues. The elections are in January. Xi scored.
Xi also “gets” Russia’s Far East. Moscow has never been easily able to control the Far East due to its size and distance. The Ukraine conflict has financially bled Russia. The Wilson Center says, “By 2023, the government intends to spend $160 billion on military needs, or 40% of its budget.” “….this figure may surpass 10% of GDP in 2023.” Siberia has also been a strong recruiting ground for the Russian Army, raising opposition to Moscow everywhere in the East. The indigenous people of Siberia have even created a new “Siberian Battalion” to serve the Ukrainian side. This lack of cash and rising internal opposition have made it much easier for China to reach into this massive mecca of resources.
Instead, China now needs access to the US market. The US needs inflation to fall, and more cheap imports from China will help. China needs access to all industrialized nations because they can pay for stuff and raise China’s income. Emerging markets can’t. This means he needs a deal not only with the US but also with Europe.
This is all “kiss and makeup” on a grand scale. A peace dividend and a fall in inflation is unfolding. If war is inflationary, ending it is disinflationary. The US and China may even agree on a deal on space and the moon. It looks like we’ll see the next US President in a nice tight hug with Xi. No doubt the US and China will remain profoundly competitive. But, on the surface, the world will see Panda hugs and peace."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/deal-the-siberian-tiger-and-the-panda
26. "This trend is particularly observable in infrastructure software, where cloud marketplaces are an increasingly important purchasing vehicle and where the take rate is largely countered by the lower cost of sales for these transactions.
Snowflake were pulled to the marketplaces by their enterprise customers and is listed on both Azure and AWS’ marketplaces.
In October, Crowdstrike announced that it was the first cybersecurity ISV to exceed $1 billion in AWS Marketplace sales since listing on the AWS Marketplace in 2017, where it also enjoys ACVs that are 140% larger than other GTM channels."
https://akashbajwa.substack.com/p/cloud-gtm-and-alliances
27. "Many deep tech industries are huge, and there’s a lot of room for new players: batteries ($100b market), pharma ($1.5T), defense R&D ($150b in the US), industrial and warehouse automation ($200b total), and so on.
To take defense as a concrete example, this site lists awarded defense contracts. The DoD awards multiple 8-9 figure contracts daily. Any startup that captures just a few contracts of this size is basically a $1b+ company.
To summarize the data above:
-There are lots of $1b+ deep tech exits.
-While the absolute number of strong exits is smaller than for traditional sectors like B2B SaaS, the rate of good exits is approximately 2x higher.
-Good exits for deep tech companies, on average, come 6-24 months sooner than good exits for traditional tech companies.
-Deep tech companies, on average, have similar capital intensity to traditional tech companies. Across all exits above $250m, the average amount of capital raised is about 11-15% of the sale price regardless of sector."
https://www.codingvc.com/p/betting-on-deep-tech
28. "You can always push yourself more than you think you can. And I think that’s true. In every environment, you can go to the gym and lift more than you think. You can push yourself more in this environment while walking, or in a start-up, you can work 100 plus hours a week for years on end. If you really have to, like if push comes to shove, you’re always able to push yourself more.
Now, not everyone is made of that same stuff. And in fact, the objective of this of the study was to find out who actually makes it who doesn’t, i.e., can you tell ahead of time based on their physiology, blood tests, etc, and their DNA and their personal mental profile?
Clearly, there’s one thing I think founders have in common is that we’re more tolerant to risk than most. I’m not saying we’re risk seeking, right, like it’s always on a risk adjusted basis. And in fact, I don’t think we take that many risks as start-up founders. But I think by taking a bit more risk than most people, we are highly rewarded.
It’s hard to imagine, with all of this, that we’re gonna have a soft landing. That said, my personal analysis of this remains – this is the very best time to invest in early stage start-ups. Right now, all the posers, the people that were getting rich, quick, are no longer building start-ups. So the bankers, the consultants, lawyers, the doctors, etc. Right now you have the true believers.
They’re building companies, yes, they’re raising money, it’s hard to raise capital, you raise a lower valuation, you probably exit at a lower valuation. But you’re careful with your cash, with burn, with unit economics, and you’re building a much more sustainable company. You’re facing way less competition. In 2021, if you had a good idea, you were facing 7-20 other people doing the exact same thing with a lot of money. Now you have one or two. When you win, you’re gonna win the entire category. And even though the extra votes will be lower, you’re going to do amazingly well.
And so if I think in the last decade, the very best time to invest was in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb all came in the 2000s.
Actually, when was the best time the best actually? Oh, 2001, 2002, 2004. And so I am willing to bet that the very best time to invest in startups for the 2020s will have been 2022, 2023 and 2024. And you’re obviously gonna know at the end of the decade in the early 2030s, or at the end of the 2020s. But now, it’s an amazing time. Early stage and late stage have not repriced and you’re seeing a lot of structure. So, seed A, even B, is an amazing time to be investing."
https://fabricegrinda.com/super-fun-interview-by-robin-haak/
29. Love this: Building a mini-Berkshire Hathaway. Learned a lot in this conversation.
Big fan of Enduring Ventures! Go Sieva Kosinsky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPAnye_FZ0&list=RDCMUCPjNBjflYl0-HQtUvOx0Ibw&start_radio=1
30. Lots of myths being busted here. Interesting for biohackers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1UY8DTWpYk
31. "Part of building a startup is finding a secret that no one else knows. In crypto, I’ve seen that for founders who are new to crypto, it usually takes at least 1–2 years to “find that secret”.
Why does it take so long? Well, I suspect it’s because crypto is so counter-intuitive and so different from Web2 or TradFi, where most founders come from. Way too often, founders give up on crypto in less than 1–2 years, right before that critical juncture.
Adding insult to injury, the bear market is arguably the best time to find that secret. There’s far less froth and distraction. Founders can think more clearly. They are more likely to find users who are also here for a long time to come."
https://medium.com/alliancedao/hard-pivot-from-crypto-7c4a3988720a
32. This is thought provoking. Bitcoin as a war fighting technology in cyberspace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDS7q6uRkY
33. "D’Angelo, a high school friend of Mark Zuckerberg who parlayed an early engineering job building ad systems at Facebook into tremendous wealth, appears to be the fulcrum of finding a resolution. In recent days, D’Angelo has been “occupying the most oxygen” among board members in talks between Altman and the board, a person close to the talks said.
D’Angelo, who has been a board member at OpenAI for five years, is now the tech insider with perhaps the most to lose or gain reputationally in the stalemate over Sam Altman’s firing from the startup. Out of the three remaining board members at the company, he is the only person who many in the tech world, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, know well. He sits firmly in an inner circle of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who invest in each other’s companies, recommend software engineering talent to each other and pontificate about the future of technology.
D’Angelo has seen some parallels on a smaller scale at Quora, which he founded and has run for 14 years. He sometimes fired executives abruptly without considering the impact on employees, three former employees said. One firing a few years ago rankled staff so much that a few dozen refused to show up to work the day after the dismissal, they said. D’Angelo sometimes frustrated employees by not explaining why he had fired executives."
34. Interview was a year old but still very relevant.
Global macro discussion & geopolitics. Food supply chain is a mess & a possible food crisis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXQZq0fAO-M
35. Hmmmm......
"When Sam Altman lost his job running OpenAI, the startup valued at over $50 billion, there were many sins that struck me as particularly grievous. The first was that he was looking to raise billions to start his own chip company that could sell to OpenAI (e.g., profiting from the supply), and the second was that he was separately raising billions to build a hardware device that OpenAI models would be housed on (e.g., profiting off the platform).
To further muddy the waters, OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft, buys power from a company in which Altman is a major shareholder. OpenAI’s in-house VC fund has led a Series A round in a company in which Altman is also a major shareholder. Altman owns shares in some of the buzziest tech companies in the world, including Stripe, Instacart, and Humane. Many, if not all, of those companies are using the tech that OpenAI is selling.
This is enough conflicts of interest to make a corporate lawyer's brain smush in on itself like a dying sun. It is a ludicrous amount of mis-aligned incentives.
I am in the camp that Altman is likely innocent, and it was a dumb board gone rogue.But there are legitimate questions to be had about Altman’s behavior. Attempting to achieve AGI is a momentous enough task that it likely requires a unique governance structure. But it also requires a CEO who is focused, honest, and committed. Altman’s investing has not left that impression with me, and perhaps the board felt the same."
https://every.to/napkin-math/the-case-against-sam-altman
36. "Despite Altman’s apparent sense of ease, tensions had been simmering at his company over the enigmatic CEO’s laissez-faire approach to safety, interest in commercializing OpenAI’s software, and tangled web of personal investments in other AI companies. Even as they built one of the world’s most valuable startups, OpenAI remained beholden to a nonprofit board of directors that had the power to pump the brakes if it felt the organization was straying from its mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Unbeknownst to anyone outside OpenAI’s top ranks, members of that six-person board were growing worried that the CEO was clipping the safety guardrails as he barreled toward global dominance in AI. As far as some on the board were concerned, Altman was himself teetering on the edge of an abyss.
Just a few hours after the APEC panel, Altman received a text from Ilya Sutskever, a chief researcher, co-founder and board member at OpenAI who was responsible for limiting societal harms from its AI. Sutskever invited him to a video meeting with the board the following afternoon. The coup had begun.
What followed was a dizzying spiral of power plays and shifting alliances that seemed more appropriate for the set of “Game of Thrones'' than for the sleek, plant-filled offices of an AI startup. Altman’s surprise firing set off a chain of events—including the shock resignation of OpenAI’s president, the installation of two interim CEOs, a staffwide mutiny, backroom deals, threats of litigation, counter-offensives and counter-counter-offensives—that culminated with a late Tuesday night deal to reinstate Altman as CEO and revamp the company’s board of directors."
37. "Quite simply, radicals on both sides of the political spectrum no longer view the system as something they can work within. And while this is always true to a degree, the cause for concern at the policy level is the recruitment and radicalization of those who would otherwise not be involved with political violence, driven both by circumstance and disinformation. While disinformation can come from anywhere, the intersection of foreign influence and domestic politics should be most concerning.
This is a very fancy way of saying that what happens over there really matters over here when individuals so far from the battlefield can find cause with an enemy because their domestic politics align more with a foreign power’s propaganda or cause than with American democracy. The collective hyperpartisan rhetoric has inadvertently created sleeper cells of radicals waiting for their chosen cause’s turn to make headlines.
I’ve written extensively in the past on the threat that hyperpartisanship, disinformation, and the degradation of democratic norms can have on national security. Disinformation-driven political violence is a key plot point of my novel EX SUPRA, and something that worries me when I think about our American future just as much as the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. Jack Murphy once wrote about America’s forthcoming “Years of Lead” and I’m starting to think that time has arrived."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/the-new-wave
38. "Before diving into the strategies, I encourage you to read Ed’s post in full. But for those looking for the cliff notes, here is the TLDR on the incentives at play:
1) In the absence of exits (which typically take 7+ years to manifest), VCs use markups as a means of demonstrating progress
2) Hot companies in hot sectors get marked up the quickest
3) Hot companies are easier to sell internally to other partners in the fund and 4) Hot companies help a VC raise their next fund from LPs.
In contrast, non consensus companies can seem weird, are often doubted by other investors (thus limiting access to follow-on capital) until the progress speaks for itself, and can take a long time to blossom. Nevertheless, the axiom remains that being non consensus and right maximizes returns.
This got me thinking about how investors can actually make non consensus investments, without just paying lip service to the idea. I dove into the 1984 Ventures portfolio to find examples where we’ve been non consensus (and will hopefully be proven right in due course!).
I found that there are repeatable strategies to be non consensus when picking founders, markets and business models/ideas. It's also worth noting that there is a subtle, but important difference between being contrarian (”everyone is wrong and I am right”) and non consensus (investing in people or spaces that others are ignorant or naive about)"
https://samit-kalra.com/blog/non-consensus-and-right
39. “Up until a few years ago, defense was definitely not seen as Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)," he said. “My opinion is that you should actually add a D to ESG and that's defense ... If you don't have security, you can't have ESG.
The internet was created by the military but the tech firms that sprung from it have overtaken armies as "the drivers of innovation,” said Warren Low, an official of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. "It’s now flipped around where the industries are innovating.”
The war in Ukraine means “there's an appetite now” to invest in the world of defensive security, said David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for Emerging Security Challenges.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/internet-of-tanks-nato-court-tech-scene/