Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 22nd, 2024
“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vincent “Vince” Lombardi
Good guide for founders talking to VCs.
https://startupistanbul.substack.com/p/what-investors-say-vs-what-they-mean
2. "The rationale behind these higher prices rest in the idea that AI companies have signficant future growth & likely faster growth than their non-AI peers both public & private.
Most of the time, the private tends to lead the public market with trends & valuations. Not this time. The markets are moving in parallel. This is likely because the major AI publics like NVIDIA & Microsoft have spurred the market forward first."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-premium-2024-08-16/
3. "The power of music and books and movies and TV shows lies in the fact that they don’t just take up our eyeballs and time. They impact how we live our lives, the decisions that we make, and how we see the world around us. And, while dystopian fiction can act as a wake up call, it can also be a dangerous drug in a world increasingly in the grips of hopelessness and depression. The collective imagination is increasingly becoming a collective nightmare."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/science-fictions-dueling-fates
4. Educational discussion on what’s happening in VC land. Some smart & very experienced folks here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6CxMTy6Peg&t=1017s
5. This is a pretty solid discussion on the future of Crypto as the title states. Worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdaQr3EW8g&t=1142s
6. "If your primary source of cash flow is a job, it’s of paramount importance that you become an unfireable employee.
Like the name suggests, an unfireable employee is one the company wouldn’t even dream of firing.
There are a few ways of making this happen."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-make-yourself-unfireable-from-your-job/
7. I love Montreal (except for during the winter).
"French Culture Without the Insanity: A good filter for you is if you would enjoy a cleaner version of Paris. If that’s the case you’ll probably like it a lot. If you don’t like the French look and don’t like french food, it’ll probably be whack.
While France is a heavy tourist destination, it just doesn’t make sense when Montreal is closer, cheaper, cleaner and a potential second home for the right person.
Essentially, Montreal is a better version of a major city in France...... As stated “cleaner and cheaper” version of France.
Upgraded across the board."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/city-guide-montreal
8. "For the foreseeable future therefore, both Ukraine and Russia must commit to conducting two major ground campaigns concurrently. While Russia is probably better placed to resource two such campaigns, neither Ukraine nor Russia is likely to be able to do so into 2025. The issues explored in this article will hopefully inform readers about how complex and challenging the decision making will be about Kursk and the Donbas campaigns for Ukraine and Russia in coming weeks and months.
Unfortunately, as stunning and clever as the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has been, it may not change Putin’s overall war goals. Previous setbacks, including the Russian Army’s defeat in its 2022 Kyiv offensive, its defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson as well as the international sanctions regime, have not modified Putin’s overall goal of subjugating Ukraine and destroying its capacity to exist as a sovereign, prosperous democracy. Kursk, unfortunately might only make him more determined to achieve this – assuming he remains president.
But, if we are lucky, Ukraine’s audacity, demonstration of offensive capacity and most importantly – will – might convince the U.S. and its NATO partners to reconsider their strategy for supporting Ukraine and the level of resourcing it provides."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-kursk-offensive-dilemma
9. Really educational discussion on what's happening with AI Foundational models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUGosOgiTeI
10. "Hope for the Best Plan for the Worst
One downside of all this stuff after you make it? You’ll become insanely paranoid. Rational optimism is probably the best you can do. No matter what you’ll get the paranoia.
Write down the absolute worst case scenario for everything (finance, health etc.). Then try to line it all up to prevent disaster. Once you get to this point and feel safe *never* make a decision that gives you any sort of pause/anxiety.
As the saying goes “if you have to think about it the answer is no”. This only applies after you’ve hit your exit number though."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/regret-minimization-framework
11. "This tendency is bad because these tools are fragments of a future that is taking shape around us—and by ignoring them, I’m setting myself up to fall behind. But there is a bright side: I’m staring down the problem and understanding why it exists, which is the beginning of solving it. I need to be more comfortable with the uncertainty that AI brings with it.
Take it slow.
Learning a new language as an adult is similar to weaving AI into familiar workflows. While learning a new language, you’re basically learning new ways to do familiar things. You’ve been to a grocery store many times, but suddenly, you have to find new words to ask when that fruit you like will be in season again. Similarly, when it comes to AI, you’re attempting to use new tools to do things that you’ve done many times before."
https://every.to/learning-curve/why-i-avoided-ai-and-how-i-finally-embraced-it
12. One of the best shows to know what’s happening on the edge of the internet and creative businesses. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYSXF-15Upw
13. Good discussion on how the American's think and American culture of rejuvenation. Compared with AUS, Canada, NZ etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNJKuV53sU0
14. This was a fascinating interview with Pieter Levels. He is King, nay, God Emperor of Indie Hackers and Patron Saint of non-douchey Digital Nomads.
I first saw him present at Brain Bar in Budapest back in 2015 and it was incredibly eye-opening to me re: the growth of the digital nomad world and geo-arbitrage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2780s
15. Great update on Ukraine's Kursk incursion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AVSki6dIgg
16. A good overview of the new Axis strategy in Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOKvX0ezMTg
17. A must listen to discussion on the state of venture capital. More on the end of the industrial VC model.
It's the time of Tinkerer/Builder VCs, not Finance VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-jARU9rjrY
18. Important discussion on the challenges of mass immigration in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDATt_4dVk
19. "Johnson’s practice of Not Dying—and talking about it to anyone who will listen—has made it so we all know far too much about him. Yet, beyond this, it’s as though we really know nothing about the man at all. In recent months, though, Johnson seems to have at least become a bit more likable. Maybe something has shifted in our public perception of him, possibly due to the mild sense of levity he has started to use in his posts online. In the talk, too, he came across as thoughtful, charismatic. I found myself thinking: I genuinely sort of like the guy! But still I wonder, what exactly is he buttering us up for?
Johnson's mantra is “Don’t Die,” which he thinks of as a game, one we’re all playing whether or not we chose to, “like capitalism.” And certainly, the way Johnson is doing it, it does seem as though it’s all for sport."
https://www.gq.com/story/bryan-johnson-immortality-party
20. A surprisingly interesting and wise interview with Dan Bilzerian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lleTnSIiAFE
21. I'm a fanboy here. Josh Wolfe is one of the best deep tech investors around for over 2 decades. I always learn from his interviews. One of the few folks who think for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGdZzGzy0xU
22. "Six years before that conversation, Morgan had completed his purchase of Andrew Carnegie’s entire steel operation for the unheard-of sum of $480 million, hundreds of billions in today’s dollars. You don’t do that deal and amass that kind of wealth with a persistently negative outlook. Count the perma bears on the Forbes 400 list or the number of pessimists who run companies in the Fortune 500. You will find none.
Winners and other men and women of foresight and ambition do monumental things; pessimists watch them from the sidelines, making a list of all the reasons things won’t work out. The losers do get to win sometimes, too. But their victories tend to be Pyrrhic, as every calamity ultimately leads to opportunity when the dust clears.
But the optimists are eventually proven right. Not every day, but always and eventually. Indisputably. It just takes a while to be able to see it play out. Even if you don’t believe me, make your investment in the future anyway, just in case I end up being right again. Plant your seed regardless. If you end up being right in your pessimism many years from now, we will all have bigger problems than what our investments are worth. Being optimistic all the time is difficult. But having any other disposition as a default setting makes little sense when you’re investing for a future far out in front of us."
https://www.profgalloway.com/optimism-as-a-default-setting/
23. Interesting inside view of Anduril, the leading Defense-tech company in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NGTEMEvVI
24. "Theseus’s story reveals a lot about the Pentagon’s changing relationship with non-traditional companies and innovators. For example: breakthroughs in the defense space are no longer the sole domain of a handful of established defense contractors. Advances in AI—coupled with decades-long trends in information technology—are lowering the bar to bringing important new capabilities online. Now, a group of smart young people with no experience in the military can create new battlefield-relevant capabilities from cheap, easily available components, and do so at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional defense contractor.
It also shows that the culture of young Silicon Valley programmers and aspiring company founders is changing. The taboo of collaborating with the Defense Department is not what it was in 2018, when Google programers objected so strongly to the company’s work with the Pentagon that the company dropped the contract.
That change is fueled in part by the success of a new breed of defense-focused startups like Palantir and Anduril, who are winning contracts and showing that digital-first processes in design and manufacturing can deliver new capabilities much more quickly than in the past."
25. "Moctezuma II’s authoritarian control of true speech may have happened over five centuries ago. But the three examples I just touched on from the Soviet Union, Germany, and China all took place in living memory. People like my Oma (who just turned 101) lived through these historical events and under some of the tyrants who created them.
We are teetering on the brink of experiencing the very same fate.
If we allow laws like these to propagate, we’re allowing our governments to build a prison for us that encompasses all of society. A prison where one day, without intent, something—anything—you say could be used as a means to persecute or imprison you.
You’ll say it’s truth.
They’ll say it’s hate.
However, only one side gets to win the argument without intent, evidence, or fair due process.
It won’t be the side of the people."
https://anticitizen.com/p/a-prison-for-us
26. An inspiring story of Stronghold Refugee Rescue and Relief.
Our military vets are amazing. Incredible interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAUqYoxv_ZU
27. This is going to end in tears. It's like we learned nothing from 2019-2021.
28. Wes is the kick in the butt every person needs, at least those who wants to be the best version of themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKWLtTFv7I
29. "There is no single optimal pricing model for AI. Each AI application creates and delivers value differently and to different personas (e.g., individual vs. team vs. institution), and they will have individual value metrics optimal for achieving a company’s monetization objective.
However, from a pricing strategy perspective, as more sophisticated AI applications shift the value scaling away from the user, these developments pressure user-based pricing in two ways: 1) Cannibalization — as these systems become more productive, they potentially reduce the # of users required, and 2) Increase sales friction — continue pricing these applications on a per-user basis will make the sales conversation increasingly tenuous as its user growth no longer correlates with increased value delivery.
These developments will require companies to change monetization away from pure user-based subscription pricing to a pricing model that incorporates elements of “pay-as-you-go,” or sometimes called “usage-based pricing” (UBP) metrics.
There are many types of Usage-based metrics, operating across a spectrum between cost alignment and value alignment in four distinct patterns: price to Resource, price to Activities, price to Output, and price to Outcome. Price to Resource is generally not recommended for SaaS Applications as it ignores the application’s value proposition.
Activities-based metrics are a good choice for AI Applications operating in the “human augmentation” and even most content generation paradigms as they align well with the user’s engagement model with the application. They are also a good proxy for resource consumption and can be used as a cost governance metric in a hybrid model (e.g., Kittl.) However, they may become more challenging to operate with AI systems designed for complex workflow automation due to the potential complexity of defining and attributing values to activities.
Output-based metrics are a poor fit for AI applications operating as “human assistants” because they are difficult to attribute value to. However, more sophisticated AI systems operating in the Generative or Agentic paradigm will generate more discrete and intrinsically valuable output, making this model a potentially good fit for these types of AI applications.
Finally, outcome-based metrics have the potential to be the best usage metric for the most sophisticated AI systems automating complex workflows, as they fully align monetization with customer success. However, value attribution remains a concern, and whether highly autonomous AI systems can make value attribution self-evident remains to be seen."
30. "The key difference now being that the US military has lost a decade of valuable time to rebuild military capacity and bolster conventional and nuclear deterrents. The US Army active duty force is the smallest it has been since the end of World War II; the Navy has stagnated short of 300 battle force ships, half the size of the Cold War fleet; and the Air Force combat aircraft inventory continues to shrink as retirements outpace new purchases every single year.
Reality gets a vote. The military balance keeping peace across three theaters—two of which are engaged in wars of mass and attrition—is no longer possible with the smaller, older, less ready force on hand. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Indo-Pacific."
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/americas-one-war-military-is-no-match-for-reality/
31. I kind of get this. But like every place people take this to stupid extremes on the right (or left as on the coasts).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5kb3gX6UM
32. "The way I sum it up for myself is that I’m just a normal bloke doing very unusual things that most people don’t have the guts to do. The ones who do can be serious oddballs with whom I generally have very little in common at the end of the day.
Has Australia and the West Lost Its Way?
I think so. But you can think this and still be a semi-normal, rational-thinking human without aligning yourself with the whole package of some particular political category or mindset."
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/finding-my-place-between-reality
33. Lifestyles of the rich and famous in Japan. Bit flashy but you can do this in Japan and Dubai and most of Northern Asia without getting robbed or kidnapped. (Definitely do NOT do this in America or Latin America or Africa)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKmo5MOy5g
34. Good discussion on the IPO and M&A market from an experienced Tech I-banker. Lots of old but useful tech history too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjfcK-lF0o
35. "English is the new programming language. Coding this way, I explored the data much more deeply, more rigorously, & more quickly than I would have otherwise.
The user still needs to be aware of the underlying syntax to fix errors & some statistical tests to verify the computer is doing the right thing, but gone are the days of memorizing the functional arcana of individual programming libraries."
https://tomtunguz.com/higher-level-of-abstraction/
36. I'm on a Wes Watson kick. Motivation for doing the work & Getting S--t Done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61CyhWhS-lU
37. Who are you when you are facing hard times? The coach I needed in 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9kBKsStr2w
38. "If data = the future of personalized healthcare, then it’s tragic that these visionaries in the field of healthcare data were all wiped out just days after having been exonerated from the criminal charges associated with the legal case HP brought against them (an extremely rare outcome in the US justice system). HP complained that Autonomy’s data-gathering software and/or the Autonomy team were not performing as expected, accused them of fraud, and had them extradited to the US (which is also rare).
One wonders how it's possible that these rare minds who truly understood the marriage of data and healthcare, who were loaded with a ton of money in the bank, hard-won venture capital expertise, and who had an interest in advancing the cutting edge of medical solutions, were all lost at once. Healthcare is at the heart of everything, everywhere you look. Trump and Kennedy now own and have knitted together these popular issues – healthcare and inexplicable suspicious deaths.
To be clear, I fully support medical innovation. I’m hoping they can 3D print a new me and give me personalized life-saving drugs in my lifetime! Longevity isn’t about a new vitamin protocol. It’s about 3D-printed spare parts and medicines that are genetically specific. That helps explain why so many in Silicon Valley are backing Trump and Kennedy now. I am just saying that what is happening in American politics is bigger than this particular Presidential race.
These questions about life and death don’t just refer to who wins or who loses this race, but to who gets to decide who gets to live and who gets killed, and how we all get to live or die. Kennedy has long been investigating all the different kinds of shots, from assassins’ merciless bullets to medical syringes to media potshots. Now, he has a Presidential sponsor and is potentially armed with a platform to find the smoking guns, to get under the skin of healthcare, and to hit his “money shot” - even if he does not win this particular Presidential race."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/assassinations-autonomy-anatomy-anomalous