Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 6th, 2021
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”-Jim Rohn
This man is an investing legend. I read and listen to everything he says. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the Global macro greats.
https://thehustle.co/stanley-druckenmiller-q-and-a-trung-phanin/amp/
2. Really excellent fundraising advice and lessons. Big fan of this longevity company too.
https://www.celinehh.com/seed-raise-how-to
3. "A new generation of early-stage investment firms offers an alternative. "Calm funds" (CFs) seek to work with company builders that choose to play a different way. Rather than shooting the moon by pursuing growth at all costs, calm founders look to build sustainable businesses that are "default alive," meaning they don't require regular capital injections to stay alive.
While some may operate in niche markets that cap their ultimate size, many of these businesses seek to reach the same scale as VC's biggest winners. Indeed, though they're not always viewed this way, companies like Github, Atlassian, and Zapier all ran this playbook, taking in limited outside funding, or delaying it. Instead, of trying to gobble up market share unsustainably, these founders chose to secure the existence of their company early in its lifecycle.
Other less recognizable calm businesses like Wildbit, Tuple, Papertrail, and VueScan, might approach or surpass unicorn status in a venture paradigm."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding
4. Holy crap. Lesson: do NOT be a Chinese Billionaire!
5. "Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.
Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.
Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is going direct, Stripe has Stripe Press, and many more tech companies are quickly ascending the stack from mere “content marketing” to full-on media arms, complete with editors-in-chief and original content. As Balaji Srinivasan points out, this is the mirror image of legacy media corporations hiring engineers and declaring their aspiration to become world-class tech companies. There is no distinction anymore between app, distribution, and content — everyone is going full stack."
6. A really great episode as always. All-in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZG89pDzzY
7. "If you want to ensure failure, just follow your passions with no regard to scale or income. This is a trap that the masses believe in. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. The only thing you should love is winning/being the best."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/general-life-framework-and-defi-sr
8. I've said it before. I'm a fan.
"For the many people in tech circles who once proudly considered themselves outsiders and now control some of the most powerful firms in the world, Palihapitiya embodies the kind of interloper currently in ascendance: the bitcoin millionaire, the Reddit oversharer, the arriviste who moves markets by tweeting memes.
Palihapitiya has gained notoriety by telling seductive stories of quick riches and upended hierarchies. These narratives have become such mainstays of how the technology industry sees itself that executives refer to enrapturing a roomful of people as “Chamathing the audience.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/the-pied-piper-of-spacs
9. I like the idea of the "Freedom Class" versus say Middle Class.
"A Rich Life is about FREEDOM and FLEXIBILITY. You can be rich on $50K/year if you’ve created a life where you can do the things you love — whether it’s traveling, eating sushi every week, or teaching drawing. You can also live that Rich Life on $500,000 or $5 million. And of course, more money makes it easier.
You can also have a lot of money and be drowning."
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/class-in-america/
10. Like to see things like this in other ecosystems.
"People in tech circles sometimes jokingly refer to the Shopify-affiliated angel investors collectively as the “Shopify mafia.” The term “mafia” is often used to describe the networks of current and former employees of tech companies who go on to invest in or start other companies (the PayPal mafia was one early example).
Shopify has encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit among its more than 7,000 employees, many of whom have developed deep expertise in e-commerce and a track record of working for scrappy online merchants trying to compete in a world of online shopping dominated by Amazon.
Lütke and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein “have often spoken about Shopify being the best entrepreneur school in the world,” according to Ananta."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/shopify-mafia-aims-to-become-bigger-force-in-angel-investing
11. This is the future.
"With an army of supporters, collaborators, and followers accessible with the click of the 'Tweet' button, a successful founder-creator doesn't need to chase deals.
The deals come to them."
https://davenemetz.com/founder-creator-investor/
12. Word.
"Just as by the time WW2 rolled around, the country no longer thought of German Americans as the enemy (as they had in WW1), this sort of vigorous proactive inclusion of Asian Americans in the national story can help sever the link between U.S.-China conflict and anti-Asian racism. It can help Americans understand that conflict between nations is not a race war — a clash not of civilizations or peoples, but of governments, institutions, and values.
And one of America’s core values must be that we accept and include everybody. Otherwise, what the hell are we even fighting for in the first place?"
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-to-criticize-china-without-abetting
13. "So why exactly is Russia deciding to drop the dollar in the National Wellbeing Fund? There is an element of politics at play (Putin and Biden are scheduled to meet on June 16th), but the consensus belief is that Russia is trying to mitigate the risk of sanctions and other economic pressures from the United States. While this makes sense from a risk mitigation standpoint, it may not make complete sense from an economic standpoint.
Russia is exchanging the US dollar for two other currencies that are less trusted around the world by populations. They are trading one monetary policy and political regime for two others. Some will argue that the euro and yuan are managed by economies and central bankers that are more sympathetic to Russia than the United States, but others will argue that all non-Russian ruble currencies carry similar risks."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/russia-drops-the-dollar
14. Not a fan of this guys bizarro land political views but I agree with the data points he presents on challenges China is facing. But these challenges & the CCP's frenzied reactions are what makes China so dangerous to the free world.
"The reality is that China will grow old, weak, and poor long before it can achieve its dreams of global dominance. It will be strong and powerful, to be sure, for at least the next twenty years. But it will not be long before SERIOUS cracks in their system begin to show up and threaten to topple the whole thing."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/06/the-dragons-downfall.html
15. This documentary looks amazing. Such a fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. Miss that man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEEjwRlghQ
16. "In risk disciplines, whether they are in finance, defense or technology, we are often confronted with the challenge of sensemaking. Understanding our world can only be done in retrospect with causal stories, but managing risk in real time is an exercise in acting with incomplete information. The lesson of Akira is not to fight the positive feedback loops or try to contain entropy, but to embrace it, ultimately benefiting from these societal phase changes."
https://refractor.substack.com/p/systems-thinking
17. "China’s long game is to show nations in play that applying the brand at home is forever beyond their reach, that the U.S. can’t or won’t protect them, and that Beijing’s armies of engineers can do a better job of delivering prosperity to them now than the capitalists will ever deliver in some far off future.
That’s where the real fight is, not in the South China Sea. Aircraft carriers are just targets now. The hardcore struggle for military domination is in cyberspace."
https://www.spytalk.co/p/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before
18. Is this a joke? No wonder the world is losing respect for America. WTF?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7ebqa/darth-vader-and-stormtroopers-attend-us-military-ceremony
19. Very exciting news for travelers everywhere.
“Supersonics could connect major cities as never before, vastly extend global business networks, boost American competitiveness, and enliven an industry that has been stagnating for decades,” Bloomberg’s editorial board wrote in March. “Down the road, ultrafast travel for the masses isn’t implausible.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22508975/united-supersonic-plane-concorde-boom-hermeus-virgin-nasa
20. Good daily routine here.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/rob-dyrdeks-playbook-for-optimizing-your-life
21. Go Bangladesh!
"All those skeptics should take a look at Bangladesh. The compact but populous South Asian country has quietly been powering ahead using a very traditional-looking growth model. A Bloomberg article recently reported that Bangladesh has now surpassed both India and Pakistan in terms of GDP per capita. That’s an astonishing milestone. In purchasing power parity terms, India is still ahead, but the gap is closing."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-tiger
22. Cousin Greg!
"His groundedness, as I read it at least, can be chalked up to a piece of advice given to him by Daniel Petrie, the director of his first movie, a made-for-TV melodrama called Walter And Henry, when he was just 12 years old. It was extremely simple, a comment that most children his age would have shrugged off as the allure of fame and money drew them deeper and deeper into the mechanism of Hollywood. To paraphrase, it was: don’t let acting and fame become the crux of your wellbeing. But Braun took it seriously, even as he watched his teenage costars, including Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, become superstars.
He has learned to find his self-worth in things apart from the approval of others, an impressive achievement in an increasingly gamified entertainment industry. “I do love when people love the show,” he says, “but if it makes me feel so much better about myself that someone said this to me, I think I need to work on my self-esteem more.”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/nicholas-braun-interview
23. What’s happening with mining in China. This is a good thing in the long run as miners move out of China.
24. "Unlike traditional bank accounts, which are registered under a legal name and subject to oversight, digital assets like Bitcoin and NFTs don’t have a central regulatory authority.
Crypto investors maintain their own assets using digital wallets that are only accessible via a password or a private key — a 256-bit long string of alphanumeric characters that is only known to the account holder.
Without these private keys, there is little hope of heirs ever accessing a dead loved one’s crypto holdings.
By one estimate, ~20% of all bitcoins are “lost,” meaning the wallets containing them haven’t been accessed in 5+ years. This works out to ~3.7m bitcoin, or ~$140B in capital (as of publication) — and that doesn’t include the 10k+ other cryptocurrencies on the market."
https://thehustle.co/what-happens-to-your-bitcoin-when-you-die/
25. What an amazing time to be young.
"Yu is part of a growing cohort of Gen Z investors who are beginning to make their mark on the startup ecosystem. Some of them are now old enough to work in VC firms or pursue careers as investors.
Others, like Yu, are newcomers to angel investing, as new platforms and recent regulatory changes widen the aperture of who’s eligible to participate. Like-minded young people congregate on TikTok and Twitter, where talk of startups can lead to valuable connections and deal flow. A Slack group called Gen Z VC has more than 7,000 members, many of them still in their teens.
For many of these Gen Z investors, angel investing is less about getting rich and more about participating in the startup economy for the first time."
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-your-next-angel-investor-theyre-19/
26. This is a really good sci-fi book list.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/science-fiction-novels-for-economists-7d8
27. "How else could we discover what we’re up against? After all, if SARS2 came from nature, then the biologists who were furiously studying its close relatives were, if anything, too slow and too cautious to protect us. The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab. Indeed, we would be forced to redouble our efforts before SARS3 catches us off-guard.
If, on the other hand, SARS2 emerged from a lab, then the lesson is the opposite. Covid-19 would be, at the bare minimum, the direct result of our failure to heed prior warnings about the possibility of such an accident. Lab leaks are not uncommon, so making already dangerous viruses even more dangerous is a recipe for disaster. If, therefore, we want to avoid a pandemic from happening again, obviously we would need to curtail this research."
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-we-should-welcome-the-lab-leak-theory/
28. This is a pretty big deal. And why Biotech is where the action is at.
29. "We need a generation to emerge from this crisis with a commitment to being better fathers and mothers, spouses, and citizens. The fastest path to a better life is regularly assessing what we leave behind. The fastest blue-line path to a better world is more engaged parents, not a better fucking phone."
https://www.profgalloway.com/what-we-leave-behind-2/
30. "Max Benator co-created Orca (orcashop.co) as a platform-agnostic retail opportunity that allows any influencer to monetize his or her social-media following. Currently on such sites and platforms as Amazon Live, Instagram and YouTube, Orca showcases live and taped selling segments of influencers extolling the benefits and appeal of everything from K-beauty brands to kitchen essentials, fashion accessories, tech items and children’s toys."
31. Go Ham and team. Chipper Cash is crushing it. Batch 24!
"To send money across Africa used to involve going to an agent, at a kiosk, negotiating a rate and then sending money, before collecting it offline or by getting an mobile top up via the MTN network. Chipper makes it all fade away and eliminates the cost, which founder Ham Serunjohi was motivated to solve “The cost of sending money in Africa is the highest in the world”.
https://mediciglobal.substack.com/p/chippercash-is-a-diaspora-payments
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/