Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 28th, 2021
“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Today’s kids grow up building in Roblox, mirroring the rise of low code / no code in the startup ecosystem and signaling how everyone is now able to manipulate and create software. The 12-year-old who spends her free time building games in Roblox will become the 22-year-old who builds her company’s business apps in Airtable."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/roblox-airtable-and-the-building
2. "A career moat is a professional advantage that protects your long-term employment prospects from economic forces.
While rare and valuable skills were once seen as solid career fortification, automation and artificial intelligence seem poised to render many skills obsolete.
To defend your career prospects in the decades ahead, you need an advantage that will be hard for machines to replicate.
One domain where humans seem likely to retain our edge over machines is our ability to influence other people.
Put simply, building a large audience is a good strategy for anyone who wants to build a resilient career."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/audience-as-a-career-moat
3. "With the perspective of a few weeks between the most acute phase of the crisis and the convening of this hearing, it became clear that the idea of GameStop and WallStreetBets serving as some kind of populist revolt against the moneyed elites was increasingly preposterous. And worse: the opposite of what happened. But the Fourth Law already told us this was the case."
https://mylesudland.substack.com/p/fourth-law-of-the-internet
4. "McCaskill realized that GameStop presented a rare opportunity.
After the stock buybacks, the bet was simple: You either believed GameStop would stay solvent or thought it would go out of business. If it went out of business, the shorts would make a killing. If it managed to stay afloat, the price had virtually nowhere to go but up. And now that there were even fewer shares on the market, the short interest raised to an eye-popping 110 percent.
McCaskill endlessly studied GameStop. He learned about its fundamentals. What he saw wasn’t a company trying to die. He saw a company with real fight in it to live. And he believed that there was a trade to make. A big one. “I knew that one day this would explode,” he says."
5. "The mainstream media typically portrays Bitcoin as a penny stock gone wild, or a new kind of digital tulip mania. But the reality is Bitcoin is a political project that threatens to fundamentally disrupt the Davos-led economic system, with everyone from Janet Yellen to Christine Lagarde expressing fear about its rise and demanding it be regulated.
Governments retain their power in part by issuing and controlling money. Bitcoin is a new model that mints and secures money without governments. So the big question is: Why haven’t governments or megacorps stopped it? And if they try to attack Bitcoin in the near future, what would that look like?"
https://quillette.com/2021/02/21/can-governments-stop-bitcoin/
6. This is sad & kind of observant view on the double edge that is the American Dream. Very binary outcomes in America. I'll have to check out Nomadland.
"Because, yes, she is part of an American tradition. She is proud of her self-sufficiency, her strength, the community that she is slowly building. But she is also wounded and grieving the loss of a dream, a community she once loved that disappeared because it was no longer profitable to a big company. That’s an American tradition, too.
So is working hard your whole life only to discover that there’s no more work for you, and that you can’t afford to live, either. That the American Dream isn’t for everyone."
https://www.vox.com/22289457/nomadland-review-zhao-mcdormand-streaming-hulu
7. This was written in 2004 by PG. Incredibly prescient and still relevant.
"Good ideas always tend to win eventually. The problem is, it can take a very long time. It took decades for relativity to be accepted, and the greater part of a century to establish that central planning didn't work. So even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change—big enough, probably, to justify a name like the "new economy."
http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html
8. "And to be crystal clear, I don’t disagree with all of the pro-Bitcoin arguments, just some of the more extreme ones. For example, I agree that the U.S. dollar is a terrible investment and that printing more money will make the U.S dollar worth less. However, worth less is not the same as worthless. It’s a slight nuance, but it makes a world of difference.
But without this nuance, we can end up in these extreme echo chambers that look nothing like the real world."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/have-fun-staying-poor/
9. This is a very exciting future.
"The Creator Economy and NFTs are massive human potential unlocks. Even if certain assets are in a short-term bubble, we are on an inexorable march towards individuals mattering more than institutions.
We’re on the precipice of a creative explosion, fueled by putting power, and the ability to generate wealth, in the hands of the people. Armed with powerful technical and financial tools, individuals will be able to launch and scale increasingly complex projects and businesses. Within two decades, we will have multiple trillion-plus dollar publicly traded entities with just one full-time employee, the founder."
https://www.notboring.co/p/power-to-the-person
10. "All in all, new mobile game launches aren’t guaranteed successes, and revenue growth through live operations is all about slow and steady growth. Continued organic growth is important, but M&A is still Stillfront’s key driver going forward — the prime source of opportunity and risk."
https://www.masterthemeta.com/themetas/supercell-stillfront-artie
11. "Brees, the quarterback who won the 2010 Super Bowl with the New Orleans Saints, charges $750, with proceeds going to his foundation. Cameo offers wealthy stars the chance to interact with fans without the venom that permeates many social media platforms. For lesser lights, many in need of income and purpose after retiring by their mid-30s, it is a convenient tool to remain relevant and monetise the nostalgia inspired by their on-field feats.
Former players who previously had to travel to events to earn appearance fees, perhaps spending hours signing memorabilia, can sprinkle stardust from the comfort of their own homes using just their phones."
https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/2021/feb/23/cameo-video-message-sports-stars
12. "TL;DR: The economics of smaller funds is such as they are incentivized to help you become a $1bn company.
That’s also reflected in their involvement helping you secure a top notch Series A round (and beyond). If there’s one skill seed funds master, it is the Series A roadshow prep & sprint! Because that’s at the very core of their value proposition."
https://medium.com/cherryventures/the-art-of-cherry-picking-a-seed-investor-3f21cd28b876
13. Whoa, this war movie looks intense. The Eight Hundred!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jq3nkV6XLc
14. Go Laura, Simon & team Shippo (seriously Laura, where is
my hoodie?). Batch 8 represent.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/shippo-raises-45m-more-at-495m-valuation-as-ecommerce-booms/
15. "The early buzz for Dispo 2.0 is similar to the one that surrounded Clubhouse, which has seen millions of new users flock to the audio-only social app in recent months. Capitalizing on that growth, Clubhouse raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation late last month. At the time of the deal, Clubhouse had roughly 2 million registered users and just 10 employees and no Android app. Dispo has only six employees.
Driven by the rapid success of Clubhouse, VC investors are actively seeking to invest in social media apps. The rush to back young consumer startups at high valuations follows a period when investors doubted many could gain much ground against Snapchat and Facebook’s family of apps, instead shifting their investing energies to sectors such as enterprise software. It’s a “renaissance” for social media startups, said Salamanca."
16. I'm not a Dubai fan, would never live in Dubai & believe I will always keep some foot in USA/Canada. But the main point & thesis of why he has moved there and left western world does make sense to me. Go where you are treated best.
"As I’ve talked about before, we’re entering an era where the big countries of the world (the U.S., Brazil, Russia, China, etc.) are becoming clusterfucks. They’re massively mismanaged, and they’re collapsing in many cases, but the smaller countries are far more maneuverable and better managed. The taxes are usually far lower since they don’t have the bloat and overhead of the larger countries, and it was important to me that I was moving to a smaller country (in terms of population; I don’t care about the square mileage of the place). That’s one of the reasons it works so well.
It doesn’t make any sense for me to move from a big, giant collapsing country to another big, giant collapsing country or an authoritarian country like China or Russia."
https://calebjones.com/2021/02/22/10-reasons-why-i-moved-to-dubai/
17. "In essence, that kind of ecosystem can only get better once founders manage to gain the upper hand and defuse the worst practices coming from the investing side of things."
https://thefamily.substack.com/p/train-your-investors-to-behave
18. "Fiat privilege is a concept that highlights the unfair societal advantages that people with proximity to the money printer have over people of savings."
https://allenfarrington.medium.com/fiat-privilege-3f5afae50083
19. "What sets Roblox apart: It provides tools to kids who then use them to make—and sell—their own games, turning its audience into an army of apple-cheeked capitalists. Roblox sells a virtual currency called Robux—100 for a dollar—that players can spend on games and digital trinkets, like avatars and in-game items. Creators earn a share of the Robux spent in their game worlds, at a rate of 35 cents per 100 Robux.
In aggregate, Roblox’s 1.25 million creators made $328 million in 2020. For the top creators, it’s real money: More than 1,200 earned $10,000 or more, and over 300 pocketed $100,000-plus. Roblox itself generated about $924 million in revenue those same months—nearly double the company’s $2019 revenue."
20. Longtime favorite podcast. Always learn stuff from Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose. Great episode here.
https://overcast.fm/+KebtNFiCE
21. Shaan is a very wise man.
"He doesn’t do all of this with a long list of goals, or a Notion setup that tracks his progress to achieving them, or a precisely cleaned todo list. In fact, he thinks goals are overrated and doesn’t use a todo list at all. He’s not trying to scrape productivity out of each minute of each day—he’s not calculusing his way to success. Instead, he’s focused on cultivating certain values, and characteristics. He’s trying to make himself into a certain kind of person. If he does that, he figures the score will take care of itself.
So he likes to ponder a question that he printed on a poster above his desk: “Who am I becoming?”
https://every.to/superorganizers/test-40d190c0-6e1e-44c3-aff9-12993fd16731
22. Learned this a long time ago but it is still an overwhelming pull sometimes.
What I've also learned is consensus is usually wrong, most people are wrong and or/are tools. Plus there is a big difference between a Fad versus a Trend.
"One of the best decisions we can make is to reject the cultural expectations that shift and change with the wind. And to accept the fact that we don’t need to run with the cool kids to be happy."
https://www.becomingminimalist.com/much-cooler/
23. Unintended consequence of Remote work. Growth of Bossware. Big Brother continues.
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1364613365327302659
24. Russians are so bad ass. This looks good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLq1-N5y78k
25. Another reason NOT to go to China.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxk9a/china-anal-covid-tests-us-diplomats
26. "Then the blockchain came around and [it allowed us to] make digital collectibles immutable, with a record of who owns what that you can’t really copy. You can screenshot it, but you don’t really own the digital collectible, and you won’t be able to do anything with that screenshot. You won’t be able to to sell it or trade it. The proof is in the blockchain. So I was a believer that crypto-based collectibles could be really big and actually could be the thing that takes crypto mainstream and gets the normals into participating in crypto — and that’s exactly what’s happening now."
27. "One comparison that often struck me between the way China and Western democracies dealt with the threat was this: China seemed determined to do what was necessary to obtain results in the most direct and obvious way, while Western democracies stopped to ask a previous question: what is the proper or adequate way for a society such as ours to act in order to fight the virus?"
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/how-china-beat-the-virus
28. "So why are people buying digital art and other scarce assets online? In the long term, proof of ownership will go online. You cannot simply re-create the Mona Lisa with an AI robot and command the same price (even if it an exact replica). You cannot simply recreate a Richard Millie without proof of its authenticity. In fact, digital ownership is *better* than physical ownership. If you walk into a club with your Richard Millie, most will believe it is fake (yes many haters live life like this). In the digital realm, you’ve created verifiable undeniable proof of ownership. People can take screen caps of your NFTs, they can try to recreate your NBA moment (top shots) and they can try to make the exact same item.
The problem? The hash won’t match. In a single click everyone will know that you don’t really own it. You’re a liar and a fake with zero ability to prove that it is the original. It is time stamped and engraved."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/the-future-is-bright-nfts-and-qa-announcement/
29. This is educational, grim but important to understand. The future of geopolitics.
Agriculture After Globalization - Dairy West's Feeding Your Mind Virtual Learning Series
30. "Every investor is making bets on the future. It’s only called speculation when you disagree with someone else’s bet.
Optimism is the best long-term mindset. And it requires a certain level of believing things that can’t be verified, either because you don’t have the technical skills to verify them – nobody knows everything – or because something hasn’t happened yet but you think it will happen in the future. Not enough speculation is just as dangerous as too much speculation."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/speculation/
31. Everyone is a prepper now. If the last year (and most recent Texas winter storms) did not wake you up, not sure what will.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/emergency-preparedness-kit
32. "Big markets continually create new opportunities. Even with major incumbents that seem to do it all, new areas of opportunity emerge, and the bigger the market, the more opportunity a small slice represents."
https://davidcummings.org/2021/02/26/big-markets-continually-create-opportunities/
33. I am actually less worried about the upcoming generations who tend to be more entrepreneurial + all the new opportunities and platforms showing up to enable this. The Kids will be alright.
"Like millennials, Gen Z aren’t strangers to economic disruption. Still very young at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, they saw the impact it had on their parents. Dorie Clark, author of “Entrepreneurial You,” told me this might feed into the side hustling trend. “They've grown up in a context where disruption is the norm and so the idea of hedging your bets and trying a lot of different things is not so alien,” she said. In fact, for both generations, it may seem like the smart move."
34. The original big time influencer before social media. Martha Stewart.
"She popularized beautifully photographed cookbooks and manuals for living well, of which she’s written 98, and created a lifestyle magazine centered around a single person and philosophy (Martha Stewart Living,which celebrated its 30th anniversary last year), which she then tied to an Emmy-winning TV show. She brought luxurious homewares at affordable prices to big-box stores before anyone else did, and she figured out how to sell those goods through her magazine and TV show in a synergistic (“I love that word”), self-sustaining model of content and commerce she likens to a solar system.
“Martha’s not static,” says Kevin Sharkey, executive vice president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, who’s been Stewart’s right-hand man for 26 years. “She taught me that legacy isn’t really a past-tense experience; it’s what she’s going to build tomorrow or in an hour or next week."
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a35496168/martha-stewart-legacy-interview/
35. "Chess.com has showcased how investing in a streaming community can provide immense returns over time. Building out from a core group of Chess.com-sponsored streamers, chess has taken Twitch by storm. Throughout February, for instance, Chess.com has been hosting the latest iteration of its signature PogChampstournament featuring Twitch megastars xQc, Rubius and Pokimane as well as rapper Logic and actor Rainn Wilson.
Altogether, Twitch users watched 18.3 million hours of chess in January 2021 — nearly as much as they consumed in the entirety of 2019. And for a brief period last week, chess surpassed League of Legends, Fortnite and Valorant to become the top gaming category on Twitch by viewers."
https://www.protocol.com/chess-streaming-twitch-hikaru-botez
36. "Alsin, now 63, threw away almost every investment principle he had once held. A forensic accountant by training who had formerly worked for Peat Marwick (just before it became part of KPMG), Alsin switched from being a classic Warren Buffett–style value investor who scoured balance sheets to being one who obsessively embraced the disruptive promises of Silicon Valley and the new economy.
He took big, and early, stakes in both Amazon and Tesla — in 2012 and 2016, respectively. At the same time, Alsin shorted auto companies like General Motors and railed against buybacks that had crippled companies like Sears and American Airlines, which he also shorted.
At last, in 2020, Alsin’s insights bore exceptional fruit: The small hedge fund with the quirky name, which launched in 2017, and the long-only fund, which got off the ground in 2012, turned in what appear to be the best performances in the industry for the year, according to Institutional Investor calculations."
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1qmbjmykxql3g/The-Man-Who-Abandoned-Value
37. We all need to read & heed this. 2020 was brutal and this year while slightly better, will be a test.
Mental toughness is something we all need to develop more. Amazing article here.
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/mental-toughness
38. "No one is coming to save you.
If you don’t bet on yourself, someone is going to take you and put you in play for their own schemes and dreams. When they’re done with you, they’ll discard you because you no longer serve their mission. If you doubt this, remember: nowadays, you’re actually less valuable the longer you stay with a company.
The people who hire you are betting on themselves.
Betting on yourself is the fastest way to success. Waiting for the world to give you permission to be great is the slowest way to mediocrity. Now it’s time for you to learn how and why you need to take to do this as well."
https://edlatimore.com/bet-on-yourself/
39. "Part of why Y Combinator has been so wildly successful is that they really understand the value of these Schelling Points. They’ve created three: SAFE notes, Hacker News, and Demo Day. (Not Demo Day as an investment forum, but Demo Day as the preeminent social event in the tech community, which is more important.) All three of those creations have become a default place where people meet. They are forms of organizational and social capital that meaningfully lower the cost of getting things done, and that everyone in the community gets to use."
"I think it makes more sense to think of NFTs not as a product, or as a technology, but as a gathering point; like a part of the CBGBs floor plan. This current burst of speculative interest around owning LeBron dunks or whatever is really cool, don’t get me wrong. But it’ll conclude, at some point, in its current form. But something really important got created in the meantime, which is a shared understanding and a common gathering point for creatives and developers who want to creatively represent digital scarcity, for any use case now."
https://danco.substack.com/p/nfts-and-cbgbs-hows-that-for-a-clickbait
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