Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 29th, 2023
"If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way." —Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Every time I talk about psychology when it comes to investing, it comes back to incentives. That's not a coincidence. The same is true of most psychology. We often believe what we want to believe because of what we want to come to pass.
Human empathy matters more than human associations. In everything I want to be involved in, my hope is that it leads to less suffering than more. Net positive outcomes. We should want to eliminate suffering, from the slightest tweak in someone's expense management software interface to the alleviation of poverty, starvation, and violence."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-inescapable-debate-of-human-nature
2. "many PLG companies combine bottoms-up & top-down selling motion. Those motions target different buyers. It’s possible to achieve this with the same product.
But, it’s easier to achieve with two different products. Atlassian sells Jira to engineers to help them manage their features & bugs. Confluence, the internal communication tool, targets managers & leaders. To achieve this type of sale requires a long-term view or a willingness to acquire products to bolster a suite."
https://tomtunguz.com/plg-trap/
3. "In any case, the larger message here is that neither the U.S. private sector nor the public as a whole, nor even the government, is properly prepared for the risk of a war with China. That war may never come, and I strongly hope it never comes. But being caught unprepared would be a disaster, not just for the U.S. and its allies and global security and freedom and all that, but for the American people themselves, who would suddenly find themselves without consumer goods, shut out of key global markets, etc.
It’s simply better to prepare, both mentally and with policy. If the wars in Ukraine and Israel have taught us anything, it’s that we live in a much more volatile and dangerous world than we did five or ten years ago."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/were-not-ready-for-the-big-one
4. "The son of an engineer and a government administrator, Cerezo was encouraged to get an economics degree in college. But between his studies, he’d fly to Asia and pay a few bucks to hop on a fishing vessel bound for a remote island.
Islands became his obsession.
He began to develop an extensive knowledge of archipelagos in Indonesia, the Philippines, Polynesia, and Micronesia. After he graduated, he began to wonder if he could make a living out of his hobby.
“I wanted to do this every day of my life,” he said. “I had no idea if there were others out there who wanted to travel to these remote islands, but I decided to see.”
In 2010, Cerezo launched Docastaway (a combination of “do” and “castaway”) and billed his service as an escape from the clutter and digital chaos of the modern world. Travelers would pay Cerezo to dump them alone on an island, where they could spend time in complete and utter isolation.
The timing for this service was fortuitous.
Interest in extreme wilderness tourism had taken off, thanks to TV shows like Man vs. Wild and Survivorman, and a growing number of YouTube channels dedicated to “bushcraft” — wilderness survival skills like foraging, building natural shelters, and starting fires.
People wanted to test themselves — and there was no better test than being marooned on an island without food, water, or shelter."
https://thehustle.co/the-wild-business-of-desert-island-tourism/
5. "My life, until now, has been the era of globalization. Trust existed, fragile as it may have been, for the world to function as one global marketplace. If you had the money (or credit), you could buy whatever commodities your country needed.
But on the back of currency wars, trade wars and now hot wars, that era is over.
I don’t think the transition to whatever comes next will be simple, quick or predictable. But I do think that our supply of commodities will become more vulnerable than it has been in my lifetime.
Understanding the world of commodities gives you a unique lens through which you can view global events - because the distribution of these raw materials is what leads to the distribution of power.
If you understand which commodities are most important - who has them and who needs them, then you understand a lot about the world.
Predicting geopolitics is harder than we think. I usually find truth by following the money - but in the case of global power, the money follows commodities."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/if-the-king-looks-weak-every-pawn
6. "The past few years were fun, people were raising and spending without even thinking how efficiently they would invest that money. The party is over, and regardless if you are in the hype of artificial intelligence, building the next boring SaaS an industry needs, or trying to crack the next social consumer cool thing, your job is to build intentionally with financial independence in sight, whether it’s going to take 1 million or 1 billion.
Higher Goals x Positive Yields on Actions, the rest doesn’t matter if you’re not intentional about that equation."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/new-normal
7. Part 1 of the interview series with Sahil Bloom. It is so good. How to make your life better and happier. Worth listening to as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqIL0VgFqOc
8. Love this important conversation. Learned a lot on how to live better and more productively and happier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdxFctWShtc&t=1s
9. "The sudden emergence of fictive kinship didn’t just increase sympathy and support for Israel; it turned millions of unrelated people outside of the Jewish community (both in Israel and the diaspora) into active partisans engaged in moral warfare with an existential enemy.
Weak nation-states and non-state actors will find ways to manipulate this tribal dynamic to amplify their ability to wage war. Ukraine is an excellent early example of success in this area, and Israel is catching up fast.
Israel is also pioneering ways to blunt fictive kinship formation. They cut off Gaza’s power and telecommunications capacity when they began bombing to prevent the upload of empathy triggers. So far, this has been successful in slowing the global spread of fictive kinship production. However, it’s unlikely to last if the campaign stretches on for long."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/fictive-kinship
10. "As the nation-state becomes weaker, alternatives arise to exploit the opportunity. These corporations, wealthy individuals, criminal groups, NGOs, rogue institutions, and tribal political networks find ways to exacerbate crisis events and loot and coerce the system as it becomes vulnerable.
The capitalist Western nation-state, the victor of a five-hundred-year battle for supremacy between alternative systems, has become a victim of its success. The globalization and networking it used to cement its victory at the end of the 20th Century is hollowing with each successive crisis.
The migrant crisis, like earlier similar events, will eventually fade, but the damage it did to the nation-state and its decision-making capacity will not. It will accumulate (from financial losses/budget overruns to increasing network tribalization to unaddressed criminality/corporate looting), setting the stage for the next event in the permacrisis."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/onward-to-the-hollow-state
11. "To make 10X possible, you must focus on expanding what Dan defines as your four most important freedoms — time, money, relationship, and purpose. As your time becomes 10X more valuable, you increasingly multiply the money you earn both in terms of amount and profitable satisfaction. As money becomes a tool you can increasingly access with greater ease, you will engage with a growing number of other freedom-motivated individuals."
12. "Because the traditional vehicle of the last few decades — the startup company — assumes a stable political environment that is no longer in evidence. For example, our literature on competition assumes founders are facing corporate rivals, not captured regulators.
Our models of investment assume that some companies may die over time from bankruptcy, not that many companies might die at once from a failed banking system. And our theory around international expansion assumes that countries actually want economic growth, not that they’ll fight it with trade barriers, product bans, and regulations.
Even more fundamentally, if you’re in the West, you can no longer assume the power will be on, the roads will be open, the fires will be put out, or the crime will be put down. You can no longer assume your bank account will be there tomorrow, your passport will remain valid tomorrow, or that your speech will remain free tomorrow. You can’t just start a space company, or even a taxi company, without worrying about the politics of it all.
At a fundamental level, the political environment we grew up with is transforming from constant to variable. So the model of ignoring politics to focus on technology is no longer applicable. That model worked in its day, but today innovating in tech requires somehow gaining the ability to innovate in politics, without getting entangled with DC. We can’t assume Western institutions are going to keep basic infrastructure — like banking, law enforcement, or even electricity — working anymore. So what do we do next?"
https://balajis.com/p/network-state-conference
13. "In the pursuit of greater intelligence and understanding, Jevon’s Paradox reminds us that complexity is an ever-present companion to most things in the world. You for sure have opportunities to simplify ornate processes and rules in your own organizations. We get more software and tech tools that are supposed to make things faster, but they can easily add more busywork that makes us less efficient and simply creates more red tape or boxes to check, applied incorrectly.
We create onboarding processes for new team members that are overwhelming during a time they are already emotionally overwhelmed. We make it impossibly difficult for customers to get the service they need or even figure out how to contact you. You can think of more examples here, I’m sure.
To overcome these challenges, we must harness the power of simplicity and think through issues from first principles, as well as be unafraid of tearing something up because it’s become unwieldy or makes no sense. Respecting your users and teams also involves not frustrating them with unnecessary complexity for complexity’s sake."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/jevons-paradox-and-a-world-of-spiraling
14. Another masterpiece by Andressen. A long one but worth a read and good call to action. Be a Techno Optimist.
"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
Our enemy is stagnation."
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-techno-optimist-manifesto
15. This is always good. Jason Lemkin is a sharp dude and glad he is my friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_xu9NK53E0
16. Part 2 of this. So much wisdom. Saastr AMA: so awesome. Net net: You will never fail if you don't quit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMxDzn-1Wdw&t=425s
17. Always enjoy Zeihan's takes on the world. He has been more right than wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klzJyO2cXas
18. "But, these two sparse data points do suggest that the acquisition market is moving in synchrony with the public valuation environment. Benjamin Graham said over the long term, the market is a weighing machine, even if in the short term it’s a voting machine."
https://tomtunguz.com/initial-exits-2023/
19. Learning from the greats: Elad Gil. You have to have a great product and also a commercial mindset. And be capital efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT9Q1KY-D5Y
20. "In other words, we should recognize that these two hot wars (the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war) are not just between the parties directly involved in them—these wars are part of the bigger great power conflicts to shape the new world order—and they will have big effects on the countries who are allies and enemies of the four sides in these two seemingly irreconcilable wars.
These two wars will cost the allies of these countries a lot. For example, the US is now fighting proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East while preparing for war in East Asia. As these wars spread, they will cost more.
Fortunately, the progression toward a world war between the biggest powers (the US and China) has not yet crossed the irreversible line from being containable (which it is now) to becoming a brutal war between the biggest powers and their allies."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/another-step-toward-international-war-ray-dalio
21. "Liscovich is a strange, liminal figure produced by a novel sort of conflict. He is a civilian neck-deep in military work, a Silicon Valley emissary to battlefields beset by electronic warfare, a Thomas Friedman character cast into a Joseph Heller world. Having grown up in Zaporizhzhia, in eastern Ukraine, Liscovich went on to a PhD at Harvard and then a career in the San Francisco Bay Area.
For a while, he was the CEO of Uber Works, an Uber offshoot that helped companies find on-demand staffing. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he moved back to Zaporizhzhia and, through circumstance more than intent, became a personal shopper for the Ukrainian army. He deals only in nonlethal equipment—merchandise that’s available off the shelf to everyone, or at most classified as “dual use,” suitable for both military and civilian applications.
Generals and brigade commanders tell him what they need, and he roves the global tech souk, meeting manufacturers and inspecting their products. Then he cajoles wealthy friends or friendly nations to foot the bill and arranges for the matériel to be fetched to the front. In the year and a half since Russia invaded, he has wrangled everything from socks to sensors to Starlink terminals. The two downed Vectors were among his earliest acquisitions, paid for by a Ukrainian benefactor at more than $200,000 a pop.
Loosely speaking, Liscovich is an adviser to the general staff of the army, although the most he gets out of that is a military email ID. The army doesn’t compensate him for his service. Instead, Liscovich said, he cuts himself a paycheck out of donations from an American billionaire. (He wouldn’t say which one, but he assured me it was a household name.) He is one of at least 100 civilians who act as buying agents for Ukraine, an official in the general staff of the army told me.
His is the kind of role that aristocrats played back in the 1800s, when their unelected influence extended to statecraft. Over the past century, as war became a nationalized state function, that species died out. Liscovich is a throwback: a Victorian with an iPhone.”
https://www.wired.com/story/ukraine-russia-war-military-retail/
22. I think this is many of us this last week and half especially. It's been a rough year & many of us feel like crap.
"Make yourself sweat.
Your body is meant to be in motion. It didn’t evolve to sit all day under artificial light.
Exercise, sweating, and sunlight release endorphins in the brain which will make you feel “good”.
You will feel happier, more energized, and it will also reduce the feelings of stress/anxiety if you were going through them."
https://lifemathmoney.com/what-to-do-when-you-feel-like-shit/
23. More of the implications of India assassinating Sikh on Canadian soil. Multipolar world and great power politics now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwpn7EwNmcs&t=360s
24. "War is unpredictable and devastating, making wealth preservation during such times a secondary concern at best. However, if you’re looking for ways to safeguard your financial future in the face of conflict, remember—asset portability and geographic diversity are key. You want to move a portion of your assets before conflict erupts or be able to move them if it ever does.
For those not directly facing conflict, you should focus your investments on those assets that do well during periods of higher inflation since inflation tends to be higher during wartime. Historically this meant investing in global equities, real estate, and short-term bonds, however, the future may not necessarily be like the past.
While no one can guarantee the safety of your wealth during wartime, the principles above can help guide you in making hard choices during extremely difficult circumstances. Let us just hope that you never have to use them."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-to-invest-during-times-of-war/
25. "Quick Summary: 1) the *highest probability* way to make it into the $10M+ camp is by starting a small business, 2) the *highest probability* suggests that if someone is obsessed with their 401K or personal home that they are in the $1M or lower net worth range. They are emotionally attached to those two items due to the weight in their net worth, 3) the *probability* of bonds being this low in the future in terms of asset allocation is low given the rate change from 0% to over 5%+ and 4) stocks or real estate should be your preferred *next* step after your first business.
Read that again if you have to! Until you have a small business (even $20K a year is a fine start), you should not bother with investing. You should be investing in yourself to learn the skills needed to grow your biz.
The USA remains as the greatest country on earth to get ahead by practically every metric. **IF** you’re willing to self inflict massive amounts of pain and suffering while everyone else lazily goes through life doing the minimum since the quality of life is so high."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/talking-about-true-wealth-and-entrenchment
26. "But the livestream e-commerce bubble has begun to deflate this year, with the saturated industry facing an economic downturn. Sick of dwindling salaries, longer working hours, and increasing competition to win over frugal Chinese consumers, livestream sellers are beginning to question their job prospects in the industry."
https://restofworld.org/2023/chinas-livestream-shopping-bubble-is-popping/
27. "That's what the Society of the Spectacle is kind of about, when everything becomes entirely predicated on the appearance of appearances. And we're seeing the response to that now, just based on how often we have to interact with social media, how often we have to interact with each other online, which the pandemic exacerbated.
Media headlines driven by monetizing and Twitter driven by monetizing false information, everything driven by making people feel insecure on social media, all selling you some image of what it is based on what it isn’t.
When we talk about the Society of the Spectacle and talk about the information that we're consuming, especially in a time of intense geopolitical conflict like we're in now, it's really important to check who we are getting information from."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/how-mrbeast-broke-the-economy
28. Learning from Founders Fund. The most iconoclastic & interesting VC fund on the planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L4CrAb73G0&t=82s
29. "It is time for a Marshall Plan-scale effort to rehabilitate the Palestinians, ensure their and their neighbors’ safety, and set a clear roadmap toward a Palestinian state. It should also dismantle Iran’s proxy militias — including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — on the Israeli and Saudi borders. Such an effort should be secured and funded by all interested parties, in particular the US, EU, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.
For Israel, the price would likely be a commitment to relinquish control over Gaza and over most of the West Bank. For the Palestinians, it would mean relinquishing the dream of eliminating Israel and settling for a smaller but stable and, ultimately, prosperous country of their own. This effort should encompass Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan and help stabilize these troubled countries.
Is it too ambitious a plan? It certainly isn't modest. But this is the type of effort the world is now required to make. It would take years, and it would cost billions. But it would be a better investment than never-ending wars and instability."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/its-time-for-a-palestinian-marshall-plan/
30. Every fund manager should listen so they can learn how LPs think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwq16XuyVtg
31. "Have you ever looked at the U.S. and thought, ‘man, this looks a lot like the late stage Roman Empire’?
Powerful but divided. Rich but corrupt. Glamorous but dysfunctional.
A source of marvelous technological achievements but unable to build things as it used to.
Ruled by incompetent politicians, owned by a small elite, its masses trapped by unsustainable debt and distracting themselves with endless mind-numbing entertainment.
A nation struggling to meet the many challenges it faces. A people in deep spiritual crisis. In other words a vast empire about to tumble?
Of course you have. You, me, and everybody else.
To assess an empire’s age, Glubb focused on the changes in the minds and hearts of its citizens. He pointed out a shift in attitude “from service to selfishness” due to the “spiritual disease” of decadence. Empires ended with a mood of “cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.”
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/the-roman-empire-fallacy
32. This is the next geopolitical flashpoint sadly.......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hoyeJvge3A
33. "Most nontraditional LPs a.k.a. family offices have not been inclined to invest in venture funds, on the basis that they could do no wrong directly investing into companies themselves. Now that this has changed, we have a new challenge in the form of the current market environment. However, it is common knowledge that great companies are founded during challenging economic times. What this means is that well-managed venture funds of the 22'/23' vintage (incl. 24') are said to perform well — as valuations continue to fall.
“But remember, anybody can get it. The hard part is keepin’ it” — Dr Dre
The difficulty for family offices is not only PTSD from the performance of their direct investments, but more so the lack of access to high-potential venture funds.
According to data from a recent FO conference I attended, if they were to go it alone they would need at least $250M to properly source, evaluate and make direct venture investments - with due diligence requiring not just expertise but an expansive network and perspective.
All things considered, investing in a venture fund would make more sense, right? However, it is no longer a game of ‘the most established player wins’ which adds a new paradigm as emerging GPs come to the fore. This brings additional complexity through the challenges of fund diligence, relationship building and post-investment relationship management."