Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 5th, 2023
“Adventure is Worthwhile.”--Aesop
"Ultimately, the clearer the message, the better people will understand it and the faster they’ll be able to know if they need it. Messaging and positioning are harder than they appear. Entrepreneurs would do well to lean on customers and better understand the value from their perspective."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/02/25/ask-the-customer-to-describe-the-value/
2. "Japan’s corporate leaders are much better than their reputation. Yes, they do lack the Davos-Jet-Set swagger, fly commercial, and still proudly print the office fax number on their meishi name-cards; and no, they have no social media presence and prefer to stay silent in investor- or press meetings.
But if you’re looking for extraordinary resilience and all-around competence to get the job done, Japan’s Salaryman CEOs - and their teams - deliver. And yes, by “job” I mean a razor-sharp focus on delivering corporate economic value and profitability.
Don’t believe me? The data speaks for itself: since 1992, top-line growth for economy-wide non-financial corporate Japan has been flat. Yet despite this three-decade-long stagnation of sales, corporate profits surged more than 5-fold."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/japan-reality-check-4-in-praise-of
3. "Root breaks a bunch of VC orthodoxies. You went all in on hard tech. You have stayed close to your seed roots. All the partners are engineers. No one’s ex-banker or consultant! Your new website is fun and weird. All of this says a lot about Root’s ethos. Root has thrived and gone against the grain in the world of VC, which is a sea of sameness."
https://sarharibhakti.substack.com/p/breaking-orthodoxies-in-venture-capital
4. Hope this is truly the case. We need to support Ukraine to the hilt.
"So the Biden trip, the follow up, and the political imperative all make it very likely indeed that, as long as this administration is in power, US support for Ukraine will remain high. The commitments wont be walked back because they matter symbolically, the represent the views of the president—and they are good politics."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-17-biden-to-kyiv-china
5. "Five decades ago, Hot Wheels were America’s hottest new plaything. Today, the children of the ‘60s are fueling a small but mighty collectors’ market that wheels and deals in obscure corners of the internet.
Pascal is one of a handful of super collectors, dealers, and middlemen who pay top dollar for the rarest cars. It’s a colorful group that includes an ex-BMX stunt rider, an auto mechanics teacher, and a man who owns a geese-removal business.
How did one-time 59-cent toy cars become 5-figure collectibles? And what drives grown men and women to spend princely sums chasing them?"
https://thehustle.co/the-collectors-who-spend-thousands-on-rare-hot-wheels
6. "An alliance may be formed between the military capitalists and the hawkish part of the semi-autonomous state. They may be wiling to accept such “costs” if they enable the US to curb China’s rise.
The pure geopolitics would dominate economic interest. Historical experience helps such an alliance too: US has won all big wars (the First, the Second, and the Cold) and every time its victory has led it to the peak of geopolitical and economic power. Why should not that happen again?
This is how we should regard the future of globalization, at least from the point of view of the western calculation: as a trade-off between unconstrained geopolitical power and higher real domestic incomes. The economic arguments as well as the usual (and at times perhaps facile) assumption that the state does what capitalists want it to do overwhelmingly point in favor of continued globalization.
Yet the “bellic alliance” may be just sufficiently strong to keep the other side in check, if not to entirely overturn globalization and shift the country towards autarky."
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/capitalists-the-state-and-globalization
7. "I can’t guarantee that stepping on the gas will get you that next round. What I will say is that if you’ve lowered growth to preserve capital, and you haven’t cut it down to the point where you’re on a path to breakeven without needing new capital, you need to think hard as to whether or not a having a little bit of growth is worth not being “default alive”.
Too many companies think they’re going to get a participation trophy for just hanging around longer than expected—and in a world where VCs will have spent more of their most recent fund propping up their own portfolio, there isn’t going to be as much capital for mediocre growth as founders are hoping.
Maybe the middle ground is not putting away your experiments.
I would figure out a way to default to breakeven while holding on to at least 2-3 real attempts at finding a growth hack that could change your story—one you could lean into hard if it worked."
https://ceonyc.substack.com/p/grow-fast-breakeven-or-die-how-moderate
8. So much wisdom here. Worth reading the whole thing.
"In Short, it isn’t enough to stop caring what people think, recognize they never even spend a second worrying about you in the first place. This should allow you to mentally take more risk. No one is going to care if you fail anyway. They will forget in 24 hours. Similar to when an employee gets let go and people forget he/she existed in 3-6 months. Everyone is replaceable.
If you’re trying to make plans 3-5 years is a good time frame. Beyond that life gets in the way.”
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/random-life-lessons-in-no-particular
9. "The simple answer is Putin’s forces have failed, and the battlefield situation is extremely tenuous for Putin: it’s not clear that this new offensive is going to work, and there is a real danger, from the Chinese point of view, that Putin might be in some way defeated on the battlefield, that he might have to withdraw — but even worse, that if he withdrew and then people within Russia were angry about this, that he could be toppled from the government.
And nobody knows what kind of Russian government would come after Putin; it’s very difficult to predict what the succession would be like.
The Chinese very much want to find a way to keep Putin in power, because Xi Jinping feels very comfortable with Putin. They are now looking at, I think, how they could get Putin the kind of help he needs."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/will-xi-arm-putin-has-a-cold-war
10. This is a very good primer for startup investing. This guy is a very good investor.
11. "Amid leaks that Marcus was hemorrhaging money, Solomon finally decided to pull back sharply on the effort that he had once championed to investors and the media. His checking account would be repurposed for wealth management clients, which would save money on marketing costs.
Now it is Ismail, who joined a Walmart-backed fintech called One in early 2021, who will be taking on the banking world with a direct-to-consumer digital startup. His former employer Goldman would largely content itself with being a behind-the-scenes player, providing its technology and balance sheet to established brands.
For a company with as much self-regard as Goldman, it would mark a sharp comedown from the vision held by Solomon only months earlier.
“David would say, ‘We’re building the business for the next 50 years, not for today,’” said one former Goldman insider. “He should’ve listened to his own sound bite.”
12. This one never gets old. Startup life!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WRGu6Zr5tQ
13. This is a valuable discussion on when to quit and when to keep grinding. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8jgetflxUA&t=1s
14. "How about just spelling it out - the rouble is weaker because of Putin’s failed invasion of Ukraine and sanctions."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/russia-the-rouble-is-weak-for-lt
15. "As a VC, I obviously want to see every company I invest in succeed, but I know that will never happen. So while it’s hard not to admire the grit of those founders determined to give it their all, it’s difficult for me as a former founder to watch some of them continue down a path that I know has little-to-no chance of success.
If you’re a founder reading this, I hope you win. But please know that it’s okay to quit. To quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing isn’t a failure, it’s a success."
https://chrisneumann.com/blog/when-to-walk-away
16. This is a great discussion: business and investing is where these guys really excel.