Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 24th, 2023
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” – Michael Jordan
The Bull case for America.
"By nearly every measure, America is doing just fine. Better than fine. Our annual GDP is $26 trillion — 40% greater than China’s, whose population is four times larger. And, despite our enormous output, our economy is still growing, with 2.4% GDP growth last quarter. China’s is higher, but slowing faster than expected.
Meanwhile the yuan continues to slide and this week hit a 16-year low. We have many unique advantages, including unrivaled innovation, the best universities, the best military, strong rule of law, a willingness to embrace risk, and a culture of doing the right thing (I believe this). Last year, U.S. startups received $245 billion in venture funding — roughly equal to the rest of the world combined."
https://www.profgalloway.com/least-bad/
2. "Entrepreneurs would do well to identify the type of independent board member they’re looking for and consider one that’s either a coach, an industry expert, or a functional area expert. Identifying that type of person at the outset will make the process of recruiting the independent board member that much more efficient and productive."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/09/09/types-of-independent-board-members-for-startups/
3. Wide ranging conversation: understanding the world through the lens of tribes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIJLW_Rc6Rg&t=899s
4. A beautifully written love letter to New York City. It is an amazing place still.
"Don’t get me wrong — New York City has its problems. It’s not perfectly manicured and its blemishes are evident on any city block. But there’s only way I can possibly describe it: It’s extraordinary."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-ceo-fighting-for
5. "The 40-year-old music manager is best known for discovering Justin Bieber and fighting with Taylor Swift. But over the years he has transformed himself from a well-compensated babysitter to the stars into one of pop culture's most influential power brokers.
Last year, he made a billion-dollar deal to sell his company Ithaca Holdings to the South Korean entertainment behemoth Hybe. Along the way, he's gone to great lengths to distinguish himself as a good guy: a family-oriented philanthropist with a strong moral code, known for steering artists out of rough patches.
But many say that far from being an exception in a particularly ugly industry, Braun is one of its most ruthless players — a relentless egotist whose main focus is burnishing his image and growing his empire. The majority asked that their names not be used out of fear of retaliation, citing Braun's reputation for litigiousness. "I've never seen anyone burn so many bridges with so many people," a person familiar with Braun's business dealings said."
6. "There are moments when we’ve truly, irrevocably, fatally failed, and we should say so. If a company has to shut down, especially before it achieved some meaningful success, then okay, we failed.
Otherwise, find a better way to describe what’s happening, so we understand the situation better, and are pointed in the direction of what we should do next."
https://longform.asmartbear.com/fail
7. "Since then, the internet has increasingly devolved into tribalism. Balaji makes the point that the founder, creators, and influencers who are thriving in the current internet age are "tribal leaders." Call them taste makers, aggregators, curators, whatever you want.
But to bring it back to my core reflection on the rising generation. I want my kids to be aware of the frontiers. And I want to help them to be capable of overcoming the barriers to entry, and engaging with these challenging and compelling frontiers that exist, to solve hard problems."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-rising-generation
8. "This is the company Musk dubbed xAI. He personally recruited Igor Babuschkin, formerly of DeepMind, but he told me he would run it himself. I calculated that would mean he would be running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter, the Boring Co., Neuralink, and xAI. That was three times as many as Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) at his peak."
https://time.com/6310076/elon-musk-ai-walter-isaacson-biography/
9. "The inflection point is coming — sure as it has already with podcasts — for Substack, OnlyFans and any platform where creators are reliant on the largesse of their audiences. When creators realise the dream of financial success and celebrity is sputtering, so too will the impression that this is a radical new future for content creation fade."
https://medium.com/@nickfthilton/the-end-of-the-subscription-era-is-coming-ed197f252c6a
10. "As an economist, I keep saying, follow the artists. They spot the future before the rest of us. I also believe that life sends you invitations. When one came to go to this culturally iconic gathering, I said yes. So, I started making the long trek to feel The Burn. I learned many useful lessons about start-ups, fundraising, visioning, art, and madness that are relevant for people in business.
There is a particular etiquette at Burning Man. No one says, “So, what do you do?” Instead, they offer. They say, “This gives me joy. Maybe it will give you joy too”. People here give the gift of their most interesting ideas, music, songs, and secrets. The implicit question is not “what do you do but what gives you joy?” This gives everyone blanket permission to not be in a silo and to express a wide range of unrelated interests.
The workplace rewards the specialist and considers outside interests a drag on your time. Burning Man rewards those with the most eclectic and obscure interests and considers work a drag on your time. The wise are smart enough to ensure avocation and vocation are aligned. There are lessons here for business conversations. We’ve got to do better than “So what do you do?”
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-gift-of-burning-man-lessons-for
11. It's a long one: but worth listening to. Tribes of blue versus red versus gray. Pretty interesting framework to view the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqJoXaNFFjY
12. "Like the animal kingdom, when you know you’ve been gifted a large win, you’re supposed to prepare for the upcoming winter.
Winter is here thanks to 1) unemployment, 2) credit tightening, 3) student loan payments and 4) major companies now struggling to show y/y growth (excluding the standard 3-5% increase in pricing)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/what-us-citizens-should-want-and
13. "Pleasure is what you are after. Why would you be with someone if you don’t find any pleasure in being or working with them. To me, that was the fundamental matter, it sounded so obvious, and yet I hadn’t realized it.
I really loved how he addressed it: Did you ever find pleasure in being with that person or working with them? If the answer is negative, it’s interesting to dig into why you joined them because there might be a wrong pattern going on there. If the answer is positive, get back to those enjoyable moments again and try to understand how and why those encounters felt great.
Then, dig into the things that raised friction and address them together. Very often, the trust that will arise from sharing your vulnerabilities will allow you to solve the dysfunctions of your relationship."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/pleasure
14. "When Peyton Manning left the NFL in 2016, he had plenty of options in retirement.
The Hall of Fame quarterback could have taken a coaching job on any team he wanted. He could have signed a nine-figure broadcasting deal, like Tom Brady’s $375 million agreement with Fox. Or he could have sat back and relaxed, enjoying his $250 million in career earnings without adding any additional stress to his life.
But Manning didn’t do any of those things. Instead, the 2-time Super Bowl Champion has taken on another challenge: Building a billion-dollar sports media company.
Omaha Productions, named after Manning’s infamous audible call, has become one of the hottest companies in sports. The production company works with ESPN, Netflix, the NFL, and many others in the audio and video space. And if you are even a casual sports fan, you have unknowingly seen much of their content over the last few years."
https://huddleup.substack.com/p/peyton-manning-is-building-a-billion
15. Lots of good views here. Patrick Bet-David is a sharp dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7shJgAA-na4
16. "In other words, it’s wrong to see this next wave of globalization as a shift of economic activity away from China. Yes, FDI in China will drop, but China will help drive the next wave in totally new and different ways from what it did in the 2000s. It’s a developed country now, and it will start behaving like one.
So I think the future of globalization is bright. Even if the spread of industrial activity to South and Southeast Asia gets interrupted by a major war or hobbled by climate change, the spread of economic activity from region to region is a deep and inexorable economic force that is very hard to deny. This party isn’t over yet."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-next-phase-of-globalization-is
17. "Contrary to how some understand the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, the lesson extremists are taking from the Taliban’s success is not simply that jihad works but that diplomacy and engagement are a necessary part of the process, which includes reassuring the West about external threats emerging from their areas. What can be gained from parlays in Doha is more significant and lasting than any terror attack.
In the past month, analysts noted with interest how the Taliban assisted U.S. forces at the Kabul Airport during the evacuation of American citizens and their Afghan allies. The Taliban practically held the door while the U.S. troops departed the country. What appeared bizarre and paradoxical was in fact entirely predictable to anyone who has studied how jihadism, shaped by the past 20 years, has reevaluated its priorities.
The other lesson is to not mess with the U.S. if you can help it; in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, jihadists fought the U.S. as an occupier not as the “far enemy” as such. The Taliban limited their fight to Afghanistan, while al Qaeda and the Islamic State took the fight to the West. The first succeeded and the other two failed."
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/what-the-global-war-on-terror-really-accomplished/
18. "Despite the grim assessments of some over the past few months, Ukraine is making progress in its ground offensives, holding off a Russian offensive in the north and accelerating its strategic strike campaign. Ukraine now holds the strategic initiative.
Ukrainian diplomatic activity will focus on international support for Ukraine, maintaining the flow of military and economic assistance — and forestalling peace initiatives designed to hand the strategic initiative to Russia.
Finally, Ukraine will want to ensure its people are able to endure the winter conditions."
19. A lot of stuff is gonna be re-shored soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHOWMnUU02s
20. This is super cool. Digital remake of old Aztec Capital Tenochtitlan.
https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/
21. "Recently we’ve seen two pretty significant shifts in technology — first with crypto (I’m still a believer) and now with generative AI — that are recreating what is possible.
Moreover, we’ve seen a demographic shift as boomers age out, millennials enter their mid-life crisis / disposable income years, and Gen Z (a cohort that makes millennials look like luddites) takes the mantle of the young and cool.
So there are tons of ‘good’ ideas that didn’t work before but can work today. Midjourney looks a lot like the 100 digital design startups that failed over the last 10 years. New tech (Gen AI) + new distribution (discord) = new opportunities."
https://darcy.substack.com/p/ive-seen-this-before-it-didnt-work
22. "One of the ways we might view contemporary operations in the Ukraine War is through a lens of North versus South. In the south, Ukraine is conducting a campaign which is designed to contribute to it winning the war. In the north, Russia is conducting a campaign that is designed to prolong the war.
This framing can be useful because it provides insights into the overall strategies of Ukraine and Russia."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/north-and-south
23. "The focus of this program is to, as opposed to most DoD programs, create unmanned systems that are low-cost, autonomous, fast to produce, and attritable. Given what we’ve seen in Ukraine and what we can expect in a war with the PRC in terms of ammunition expenditure and casualties, focusing on attritable systems that don’t break the bank is a very smart idea.
The challenge is nailing down how we are defining terms like low-cost, attritable, and autonomous, and how we are going to turn them into reality."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/how-to-build-a-robot-army
24. "The message of this whole thing is to start now. Anyone who thinks they are “underpaid” in a non-revenue generating role will get the biggest wake up call of their lives. They will suddenly realize that if there is no existing client base they are worth $0 in the open market. That is right. Their positions, their skills and their tasks have absolutely nothing to offer if starting from ground zero.
This isn’t a bad thing. In fact it is a good thing. You will learn how to sell a lot earlier which makes it 100x easier to secure promotions at your W-2 in the first place! Funny how that works. By trying to start something yourself you will learn 1) the value of an existing customer base and 2) what really matters to the firm.
This is excruciatingly important. By knowing what truly matters to a firm you can work 50-75% less hours than your peers… yet secure that promotion every 3-years. The firm will recognize that you’re always going all out on what matters and it is hard to even notice the stuff you’re ignoring (since no one cares anyway)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/corporations-are-designed-to-bleed
25. Sahil Bloom has built an amazing life and we can all learn from him on his habits and learnings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeJiC_lEUi4
26. "Whatever the work is that you are doing, love it, and commit to it. If it’s activism do that. But don’t do photo-op activism. Circulating another petition and getting people to sign a letter that will be forgotten in a month is most likely not “the work,” but we can’t rule it out without further information.
Only you can know if you are loving the work or acting the superior. But it’s a good meditation exercise: Does this action support “the work” or is it merely putting on airs or sycophancy?"
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/love-the-work
27. "It’s the idea of being a contributor. Life is not a zero-sum game, and neither is work. That if all of us contribute just a little bit of what we know and some of our hard work and combine it into a shared potluck, the result is magical and much bigger than any one of us could possibly have imagined."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-art-of-possibility/
28. "Oil is very volatile. It's not like real estate. You can't just sit back and not monitor your portfolio closely, and you need to be ready to dump your positions. It's a very different way of investing."
https://mailchi.mp/f96b1741e9b0/why-i-own-oil-stocks?e=123a1c25c4
29. "Obviously, governments would love to fund themselves at a lower rate than the economic value their debt generates. Using financial repression to ensure that nominal GDP growth is higher than bond yields has been the policy of all the most successful export-led Asian economies since the end of WW2. China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. have all used this playbook to export their way out of the destruction their countries experienced during and in the wake of WW2.
To implement this type of financial repression, countries must use their banking systems. Banks are instructed to offer depositors low rates. Depositors then have no choice but to earn a negative real yield on their savings, as the government puts restrictions in place that prevent them from moving money out of the system. The banks are then told to lend to state-backed or large, politically connected heavy industrial firms at low rates.
Deposit Rate < Corporate Loan Rate < Nominal GDP Growth Rate
The result is that these industrial companies – which require a large amount of CAPEX – get cheap funding to quickly build out a modern manufacturing base. Governments then use these manufacturing bases to accrue sovereign wealth, which is recycled into US Treasuries and other dollar-based financial assets.
Supposedly, these funds can be tapped into when the economy falters. The plebes all get good-paying, blue-collar manufacturing jobs for life. When compared to their prior lives as agricultural peasants, during which they endured a standard of living only slightly better than that of slaves, working nine to five with full benefits for a large corporation is a major improvement.
As it becomes clear that, even with short-term nominal rates at 5.5%, sitting in bonds is a mug's game, capital at the margin will begin seeking hard financial assets. Certain assets such as Bitcoin, big tech / AI stocks, productive farmland, etc. will continue rising and confound the majority of financial analyst muppets."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/are-we-there-yet
30. I'm cheering for Yahoo! to turn around. Very surprised this is happening under Private equity.
"Yahoo is on pace to generate about $7 billion in gross revenue this year, compared to a reported $8 billion in gross revenue last year, though the makeup of the business has changed significantly over that period. Despite the weakness in the ad market, earnings, measured before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, have grown in recent quarters because of operational improvements, the person said.
A turnaround at Yahoo would represent a huge tech win for Apollo, but Lanzone and others say Yahoo is at least a couple of years away from being able to make another run at the public markets.
“Yahoo clearly has had its ups and downs. Right now it’s very much on the up,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital at Omnicom Group, which owns ad agencies that do business with Yahoo. “It’s kind of miraculous to see this company from the mid-’90s come roaring out almost 30 years later.”
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-yahoo-be-saved-how-apollo-is-rebuilding-an-internet-icon
31. More on Sahil Bloom. Such a great story and so many learnings on how to build a creator business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSpnnwbZrxo
32. Seems like an interesting book. Dark but interesting.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23840033/vaster-wilds-review-lauren-groff
33. "As it currently stands, no nation alone could challenge U.S. hegemony. Russia is an oil-based exporter with not much diversification in economic terms, China is declining demographically and has an authoritarian government with capital controls (which can’t be held onto if you want to become a WRC). Brazil, India and South Africa are all export based economies.
These countries cannot sustain constant current account deficits and thus would need to switch their economies overnight if they wanted to gain WRC status. That isn't feasible.
And the combination of these countries is no better. Imagine all these nations, with different cultures, histories, traditions, governments, and monetary policies all trying to band together and manage ONE currency with a single monetary policy."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/brics-a-ghost-power
34. Not a fan of his politics but this is pretty spot on about the disaster zone that is California. Lots of telling data here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=balGGAd6ZrI
35. Back to basics. Susa leading the way to specific concentrated, focused funds. Also why multistage funds are a challenging model to execute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWIhC0c2L50
36. Sahil Bloom is an impressive guy. The Personal Holding Company business model exemplified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm2l9eXAIew
37. Excellent conversation on global macro situation and IPO market. Worth listening to if u want to understand why the IPO market and VC is broken right now.