Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 14th, 2021
“Whether You Think You Can Or Think You Can’t, You’re Right.” –Henry Ford
1. "NFTs have caught the attention of tech investors (Mark Cuban), the high-brow art world (Christie’s auction house), and major corporations (Nike) alike. And everyone from Lindsey Lohan to the rock band Kings of Leon is flooding the market with high-priced virtual creations of their own.
But what exactly is an NFT? What makes them so valuable? And what might the future hold for these digital assets?"
https://thehustle.co/why-nfts-are-suddenly-selling-for-millions-of-dollars/
2. "I think [I’m] in a fortunate enough position — I’m probably the youngest public company CEO — to be able to have a time horizon and a vision more on the order of 50 years than five years. As we see this through, I don’t plan on, frankly, doing anything different. Now the scope of what Luminar will do, we will expand over time, but we have the time.
And I mean, certainly if there’s any industry that’s ripe for disruption, has the ability to enable this as a trillion-dollar space, and is evolving, it is autonomy, and that’s where absolutely we’re going to be continuing to drive towards."
https://www.theverge.com/22298001/luminar-austin-russel-ceo-interview-self-driving-cars
3. Taiwanese pineapples are actually amazingly delicious so this is great news! Also, F--k the genocidal CCP!
4. "If you want to become a Sovereign Individual, your goal should be to build multiple streams of location-independent income and accumulate distributed assets. In doing so, you cultivate freedom, security, and independence. All of which are essential components of the Sovereign Individual’s lifestyle.
Secondary income also provides an element of security. Whether an unexpected expense arises, a pay cut, or loss of the primary job. Accumulating multiple streams of income provides a safety net for the unexpected life events that are probable.
As everyone can attest to, life frequently throws us curveballs. By building a portfolio of incomes, you are better positioned to handle the unexpected challenges of life."
https://dougantin.com/sovereign-individuals-need-a-multiple-income-portfolio/
5. "And as remote workers realize they can reprioritize their personal needs, they will leverage this ability to conduct a tech-enabled exit. Through this “vote with your feet” practice of “tech enabled exit”, governments will begin to adapt their policy offerings to attract this class of people or be forced to adapt to their absence. In the end, the Sovereign Individual class will gain previously unavailable qualities of life.
This change will not be a smooth transition. It will be full of conflict, populism, and will change what people value. There will be bitterness, resentment, and attempts to publicly shame and extract value from this new group of people. Most importantly, in this transition, freedom of movement will become a luxury good."
https://dougantin.com/remote-work-the-tech-enabled-exit/
6. "Retail’s recent performance and the risks required to achieve as much also suggests smaller investors are trying to do one thing in the market — get rich quick.
We could go on and on about Top Shot and crypto and SPACs, but the actual evidence for why individuals are motivated to speculate is right there in the polling on stimulus checks. The kinds of behavior we’re seeing in the market enabled by services fighting for every ounce of consumer attention is being argued as preying on ignorance when the data suggests the fuel is actually desperation."
https://mylesudland.substack.com/p/financial-literacy
7. A very wide ranging interview here with the brilliant Patrick Collison. Hard not to be optimistic about the future. Biotech, Batteries & the Internet & so much more.
"In terms of what the world needs, improvements in medical technology are probably still #1. Climate change mitigation technology (cleaner energy generation and CO2 sequestration and so on) is also quite high up. More broadly, we need to make all of the things that you and I enjoy every day cheap and efficient enough for billions more people to afford (with safety/security high on that list). But "need" is a tough framing.
There's obviously so much stuff that would be fabulously valuable and it's hard to predict the magnitude of the impact upfront. Besides the obvious diseases, better cures for depression and mental illness and other psychiatric conditions would be hugely beneficial. $100 robotic surgeries. A machine for cheaply manufacturing arbitrary food -- a 3D printer for nourishment into which you just insert elemental "ink cartridges".
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison-co-founder
8. "Printing more money will not solve this problem. It will actually exacerbate it. The mainstream media won’t call it out because they have become mouthpieces for the state. The Wall Street hedge fund managers won’t call it out because they get rich off this nonsense. Instead, the responsibility falls on the independent thinkers.
There are no contrarians left on Wall Street. There are no contrarians left in finance. They’re all sheep. They take the information that is force-fed to them by the propaganda machine and repeat it religiously. Showering money. Cutting poverty. No inflation. Government good. Bitcoin bad.
Each of you has the power to educate yourself and do what you think is best. Don’t wait around for anyone to save you. They’re not coming. You must do your own research. Think for yourself. And ensure that you aren’t exclusively exposed to any one way of thinking. Diversify your inputs to diversify your conclusions."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-stimulus-package-wont-cut-poverty
9. I really like these. We should all be striving to become Sovereign Individuals.
https://dougantin.com/10-elements-of-a-sovereign-individual/
10. Zapier is crushing it and doing it their own way, not the overhyped Silicon Valley way. Love it.
"But just because Zapier hasn’t played the game — raising just $1.3 million in funding, going fully remote long before the pandemic made it commonplace, and targeting a customer set left overlooked by many software companies — doesn’t mean it hasn’t built a big business. Last summer, Zapier reached $100 million in annualized recurring revenue; it’s passed $140 million by now. And in January, investors found a way into the business, just not through Foster. Sequoia and Steadfast Financial bought shares at a $5 billion valuation from some of Zapier’s original investors."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/03/08/zapier-bootstraps-to-5-billion-valuation/
11. Preply crushing it. Congrats to Kirill Bigai & the Preply team. I regret missing this deal. Ukraine represent!
12. Wow but this makes sense. Love what Pipe is doing. NASDAQ for Revenue!
13. I'm a sucker for a good samurai movie. Rurouni Kenshin is classic anime turned live action film.
RUROUNI KENSHIN: THE FINAL/THE BEGINNING (2021) Full Trailer - eng sub | Takeru Satoh
14. This is right on.
"At the end of the day, it comes down to:
Is it worth it to live like the average person?
Is it worth it to pursue vanity, enjoyment, and immediate pleasure and gratification, at the cost of your wider goals, dreams, aspirations, and potential?"
https://lifemathmoney.com/are-all-the-sacrifices-worth-it/
15. This is a pretty neat & timely startup.
"Capsule‘s plan to launch a super simple decentralized social media platform which is safe from censorship by Big Tech has advanced another stage: The nascent startup has closed a seed round of funding ($1.5M) led by Beacon Fund, a dedicated crypto fund by Polychain Capital — which is itself focused on startups building on Dfinity’s decentralized network for next-gen ‘open’ apps (aka, the Internet Computer)."
16. This is incredibly catty and clever writing. Bravo. I am not a fan of either the Monarchy or Hollywood but....this is really good.
"Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.
Harry and Meghan are ultimately going to win. Despite the tabloid frenzy, this was never the story of an ungrateful pauper being elevated by the monarchy. This was about the potential union of two great houses, the Windsors and Californian Celebrity. Only one of those things has a future, and it’s the one with the Netflix deal."
17. Yes, the culture wars in the USA are getting pretty stupid even by 2020 standards. This is a good recap.
As Naval famously said, "The Left has won the culture wars, now they are just driving around shooting the survivors"
https://www.piratewires.com/p/green-eggs-and-stfu
18. Big fan of Sahil Bloom, he is a must follow on Twitter.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/sahil-bloom-on-leverage-and-living-online
19. Twitter is starting to innovate again. Glad to see as its such an influential platform.
"One of the things that [Twitter CEO] Jack [Dorsey] really emphasized when he came back to the company, was morphing our product development process to respect the “jobs to be done” framework a lot more. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about “jobs to be done,” but fundamentally, it just comes down to imbuing customer understanding into the product development process.
And so for us, all of the work we do starts from the standpoint of: what are our customers trying to hire us for? What are they firing us for? And how do we build product solutions that have those dimensions in mind?"
https://www.theverge.com/22319527/twitter-kayvon-beykpour-interview-consumer-product-decoder
20. This seems promising.
"If MobileCoin becomes a de facto way to transact over Signal — Goldbard and Marlinspike told Wired they envisioned it first as an integration in chat apps like Signal or WhatsApp — its reach could potentially be massive."
21. Bullish on Roblox.
"In short, Roblox isn’t a game at all: it is world in which one of the things you can do is play games, with a persistent identity, persistent set of friends, persistent money, all disconnected from the device that you use to access the world. That is the transformational change.
Roblox, though, isn’t simply the same game everywhere, it’s the same persistent world everywhere, from PC to console (Xbox, not PlayStation) to smartphone, in which games happen to exist. It’s a metaverse…kind of."
https://stratechery.com/2021/the-roblox-microverse/
22. 3Lau is one of the most forward thinking & business savvy musicians around. I'd say most EDM DJs are pretty omnivorous and business savvy though.
"Young artists will realize that if they have traction, they'll be able to raise money from their early fans. This applies to visual artists too: Beeple only started issuing NFTs three months ago. The first pieces that sold for dollars are going for tens of thousands now.
The future is fans investing in artists and being able to share in their success. It’s a technological renaissance where artists have the power. It’s the first time it’s happened in centuries. It will enable artists to recapture all of the emotional value that has been stolen by social media platforms and advertised upon."
https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/stories/2021/03/01/conversation-3lau
23. It is definitely a brand new exciting world for artists. Now I know who Beeple is.
"Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.
And yet in December the first extensive auction of his art grossed $3.5 million in a single weekend."
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a35500985/who-is-beeple-mike-winkelmann-nft-interview/
24. This is a funny story. Something lighthearted for once in the media it feels like. Last of the lost tourists.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/lost-tourist-who-thought-Bangor-was-San-Francisco-15940512.php
25. It really pays to have friends who start companies in Silicon Valley.
"More than three decades later that idea has made Baszucki extremely rich — his Roblox stake is worth $4.6 billion after the company’s stock market debut on Wednesday. Rimer’s investment firm, Index Ventures, is benefiting handsomely too. Its shares are valued at $3.7 billion.
Baszucki and Rimer are two of the biggest winners in Roblox’s direct listing, the latest tech company to go public at a massive valuation and generate hefty paper returns for its founders and venture backers."
26. This is really awesome, especially considering how corrupt and broken the healthcare system is in USA. Many friends who use this & rave about them. Will have to sign up too. Forward Health!
27. The only positive thing to come out of pandemic. Here comes the "Great Acceleration!"
"Many psychological obstacles to technological development are crumbling at the same time. I group them in two areas, both related to our state of emergency. First, we have realised that time is actually scarce. Moving fast is the responsible choice, now that we understand deadly threats can arrive suddenly and catch us unprepared. Second, societies have a collective responsibility to address common problems, and consent cannot become a veto power by each individual on our ability to act.
Peter Thiel, a card-carrying member of the Great Stagnation society, sees an epochal change, telling Forbes magazine: ‘I keep thinking the other side of it is that one should think of Covid and the crisis of this year as this giant watershed moment, where this is the first year of the 21st century. This is the year in which the new economy is actually replacing the old economy."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/the-great-acceleration
28. This is a pretty useful framework for life.
https://sahilbloom.substack.com/p/the-bezos-regret-minimization-framework
29. This is a funny show. I need to check it out again.
".....the world of Kim’s Convenience was Canada’s dream of its better self. Which is a different dream than America’s. And sometimes when your own dream has been shattered, at least temporarily, it’s nice to be able to live in someone else’s, and to believe that it might still be alive and intact."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/kims-convenience-the-end-of-the-dream
30. Learn something new all the time. "Regenerative Agriculture" is very interesting.
31. This is so awesome for EU tech scene. Taavet and Sten are great founders and investors (and good guys to boot). Operator-Investor movement coming to Europe.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/fund-with-no-name/
32. This sounds about right.....rough time in most of the locked down world. But there is light at end of the tunnel.
"Why might rudeness, meanness, and pettiness be guiding our actions right now? According to therapist Ashley McHan, the answer is simple: we’re tired, and as Kosoff wrote, we’re tired because of forces outside our control. “Over time we get fatigued,” McHan told VICE. “If there hasn't been change happening around us or there hasn't been improvement of situations, our ability to tolerate them is going to decrease… Our ability to cope might eventually piddle out.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b7nj/heres-why-everyone-is-acting-like-an-asshole-lately
33. This is a promising edtech startup focusing on massive corporate executive education market. Prof Galloway is not so good investor but solid entrepreneur with a large audience. So this totally makes sense to me.
34. Finally some Decency in the White House after an awful 2016-2020.
"The president’s speech echoes the message of an executive action he took in January, when he denounced anti-Asian racism, called for better data collection of these incidents, and urged federal agencies to remove any racist language still being used in government documents.
His remarks send a powerful message, directly counter to the one sent by former President Donald Trump, who disregarded World Health Organization guidelines and used racist terms for the coronavirus. By strongly opposing anti-Asian actions in his remarks, Biden made it clear that such racism is unacceptable and won’t be amplified by this White House."
https://www.vox.com/2021/3/11/22326462/joe-biden-anti-asian-racism
35. Not sure I agree with China or Hong Kong being on this list anymore
(at least for foreigners). The rest of list I think is right. Go Taiwan, Georgia, Macedonia, Lithuania & Armenia!
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2016/08/24/strongest-free-market-economies/
36. "Which wouldn’t be the first time someone in a boring business has spent a lot of money to sidle up to an entertainment business. In fact, that dynamic is a core feature for Hollywood.
And while $300 million is a lot to you, a normal person, it is not much for Square: The company has $3 billion in cash on hand and likely paid for most of the deal with its stock, which, like many tech stocks, has been on a crazy tear and currently values the company at more than $100 billion.
So the real Square argument will be: Why not? If associating ourselves with Jay-Z, who we’ve also put on our board of directors, helps us convince people to buy and sell stuff on Square and talk about creating new paradigms for art and ownership, then great. And if not, it still sounds pretty cool."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22313268/tidal-square-jay-z-jack-dorsey-nft-explainer
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