Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 18th, 2021
"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”--John Maxwell
"Banks are massively larger and more important in terms of their institutional power and centrality to our way of life than printers ever were. When this insanely consolidated, over-levered, politically invincible loses its grip on the basic plumbing of finance, it will be a way bigger deal than the advent of the Web. More along the lines of the Catholic Church losing its grip on government and culture with the rise of the printing press.
All this is already in progress and will happen at the speed of software."
https://www.jonstokes.com/p/cryptocurrency-and-the-great-unbundling
2. Net net: Be like Thiel and learn the tax rules.
https://contrarianthinking.co/peter-thiel-accumulated-5b-with-this-trick/
3. "Technology - from AngelList syndicates to new insurgents to no-code solutions - has made it easier than ever to accommodate new types of investor relationships. Now the legal docs just need to catch up.
I don’t quite know what the solution is yet, but I feel pretty confident that we shouldn’t keep working off the same document that’s been used since the birth of venture capital. Emerging startups and the adoption of automation by the legal industry should make it easier to generate new agreements that accommodate the nuance of modern investor relationships."
https://automatter.substack.com/p/the-future-of-vc-is-decentralized
4. Interesting new VC firm focusing on the psychedelics space. Vine Ventures.
5. "the timing of the CCP’s latest wave of regulatory scrutiny could not have been better. The ensuing miner exodus currently taking place is one of the most positive fundamental developments for Bitcoin in 2021. Even if we see short term drops in monthly implied hash rate figures as miners emigrate, it would be for an important cause."
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-miners-moving-out-
6. Monster write up I posted before. It’s such a good one on the Future of Work.
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35
7. “Bottom up” go-to-market strategies and product-led growth are changing the game, forcing companies to rethink traditional funnel-focused processes when it comes to sales and more. Compared to the old world, where software tools were imposed upon workers who had little say in the matter, this world is one where purchasing power has become decentralized; where users expect as much from their work products as they do from their personal apps; and where paywalls and “call us” pricing have been replaced with trials, free tiers, and self-serve.
So where does community come in then? A strong “go-to-community” competency not only helps companies proactively compete in this new environment, but it also provides the framework and tools to shift from top-down to bottom-up. Go-to-community helps build positive-sum relationships beyond just sales. And perhaps most importantly, it uplevels the very notion of community from something that’s purely company-centric and transactional (e.g., “good for deflecting support tickets”) into something that impacts every part of the organization.
Community, in other words, can become a force multiplier for the entire business."
https://future.a16z.com/community-≠-marketing-why-we-need-go-to-community-not-just-go-to-market/
8. Worth learning about. DAOs: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
"On a fundamental level, you can think of DAOs as internet-native constitutions. Like regular constitutions, DAOs embed a fundamental set of rules and principles that establish an organization and determine its governance structure. But unlike regular constitutions, DAOs can execute some activities fully autonomously. For example, a DAO with its own internal capital can automatically buy and sell cryptocurrencies based on specific programmatic conditions."
9. Beyond Meat!
"For me, getting the innovation that’s in our labs to market is the most difficult part, and it’s the most difficult part for any business. I spoke at Tesla a couple years ago, and I enjoyed the fact that I was with people who knew how hard it is to commercialize. There was a sense of shared recognition that scaling something that is new for the market that is really special and new, not not just another knockoff … It’s difficult and there’s going to be a lot of failure and it’s gonna be a lot of frustration. A lot of our products are very good, but we have stuff in our labs—it’s a lot better."
https://time.com/6078353/beyond-meat-ceo-ethan-brown/
10. I like the idea of Libertarianism but they are wildly ineffective in real life (kind of like Communism and Socialism).
"In conclusion: Libertarians play in their own little sandbox, but there's an entire playground they’re missing out on. They pretend that the larger playground doesn't exist, or that playing in it would be a waste of time, so they’d rather be king of the sandbox than an average Joe on the playground. As a result, they’re playing status games in their own little echo chamber in their own little ecosystem while having no impact whatsoever on the outside world."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-lose
11. Basics of DEFI.
"The current problem with DeFi is that no one trusts it. You have too many scammers running off with funds and too many software bugs. This is no different than the internet. When the internet came out people said only scammers and crooks used it. Back in the day people said that Craigslist/eBay and all of these online portals for peer to peer sales would be zeros. That didn’t work. In fact, the brick and mortar business suffered dramatically once e-commerce was up and running.
Your job? Find projects that are mispriced. We’re more than happy to give a basic risk framework around this: 1) BTC/ETH, 2) LINK/Stables, 3) Defi, 4) NFTs and 5) random new meme coins/hottest trend on Crypto Twitter.
From the above if you spend all day looking at yields you’ll find that the biggest spreads occur on level 3 and level 4."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/farming-risks-fees-and-crypto-information
12. "The short answer is that you need to create an evolving lifestyle investment strategy. And as you invest and create new types of digital assets to meet your lifestyle needs, you will need to also learn and adopt treasury management practices. ie: Your money management practices should mimic what corporations do. Learning to plan and manage cash flows, volatility, and risk across a wide variety of new assets.
Why?
Because digital assets can be very different from traditional assets. And there are no unified services offered by brokerages, banks, financial advisers, or other 3rd party services to manage your entire digital asset portfolio in an optimized way. For example: your cryptocurrencies are in separate accounts from your websites and newsletter, which are separated from your business income, and your social media accounts. All of which are separated from your traditional assets.
Adopting treasury management practices promotes a unified and collective picture of your financial circumstances. All of which helps you maximize the value of your assets to ensure you maintain the lifestyle you want to live no matter what situation you encounter."
https://dougantin.com/how-to-manage-money-like-a-sovereign-individual/
13. Good to know. Notice how there are no US cities here. (just a comment, USA is not about lifestyle, it’s about biz for better or worse)
https://www.positive.news/society/the-worlds-best-cities-for-mental-wellbeing/
14. This is so deeply insightful. Must watch if you want to see where the world is going. DeFi= Defection....in a good way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQpG5vDp5M
15. "This is the big picture. Why do we have to wait for specific time periods to send a wire transfer? Why are the fees so high? Why does someone pay 1% of total assets (a huge amount) unless there is real differentiation in the advice? Why do firms pay up to 7% to raise funds in a world where transaction costs are lower and people can connect via the internet rapidly? Why should governments cover the costs of bad loans?
Lots of questions here. In the end we know the long-term answer.
Banks and Wall Street are going away. The talent is leaving to new industries and the firms will struggle to hire anyone with an understanding of technology. And. They didn’t move fast enough to adapt to the new world."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-banking-model-and-wall-street
16. "Asia is rising peacefully. Its economic heft, widespread prosperity, and cultural clout are all still on a steeply upward trajectory. That is what China’s aggression jeopardizes. To disrupt the Asian status quo and embark on bloody military adventures, when the status quo has been good for almost everyone in the region, would be not just a terrible crime but also a tragedy.
But in addition to preserving this status quo, there are other reasons the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t back down in the face of Chinese aggression. To allow a revisionist power to press revanchist territorial claims would invite more such adventures
In other words, when the Left asserts that any resistance to China means that the U.S. is responsible for starting Cold War 2, it’s actually a call for appeasement. If Cold War 2 is upon us, we have little choice but to fight it — and, hopefully, to do it while avoiding the mistakes we made in Cold War 1."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-didnt-start-cold-war-2
17. Tiger and Softbank shaking up VC. This is a very good thing IMHO.
"What they have in common — and what makes them both symbols of this golden age of venture investing — is being open-checkbook investors who aren't afraid of pouring hundreds of millions into a startup with a desire to hold that position into the public markets. As such, they've both shaken up the venture capital market in 2021 and are the new forces driving deal speed and price in late-stage investing.
Tiger Global may be setting the pace and the deal terms lately, but founders may be the real winners from its growing competitiveness with SoftBank. Instead of one ominous capital cannon, there are now two — both willing to move quickly to snag deals. And if VCs can't rethink their dealmaking traditions, they may find themselves caught in the crossfire."
https://www.protocol.com/tiger-global-softbank-vision-fund
18. Balaji Srinavasan remarked, "In the future, everyone is an investor."
Or newsletter writer as an investor.
Packy M has a big audience and writes incredibly well. This definitely helps him with deal flow (and LPs). Impressive LP list and some super interesting companies. We can all learn from him.
https://www.notboring.co/p/introducing-not-boring-capital
19. People forget how important the French & Indian Wars were to setting up the conditions for the American Revolution.
https://douthat.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-revolution-in
20. Bitcoin as a religion. Which is what makes it so potent and scary.
"Many people I speak to are disillusioned by the state of the world generally and the state of America specifically. Society, if you haven’t noticed, is in dismal disarray. The Federal Reserve — or “the Fed,” as it is often spat out derisively — is printing money willy-nilly. Inflation is on the rise. The dollar is backed by little more than the whims of shadowy plutocrats who’ve been sucking the value out of your bank account faster than a greedy toddler with a milkshake. Or have you not been paying attention?
Ask Bitcoiners (and I mean real, hardcore Bitcoin acolytes, not cryptotourists dabbling in dogecoin) what Bitcoin means to them and you’ll find that they grow passionate and misty-eyed. Often, becoming a Bitcoiner is not all that dissimilar from the transformative awakening of someone who’s undergone a radical spiritual conversion."
21. "Now we live in the age of neuroscience, positive psychology, biohacking, and supplement stacking. We have research in every direction telling us how we can be successful, get rid of bad habits, rewire our brains, supercharge our willpower, and be the superhuman we dreamed of becoming as children.
But psychological trauma is a very real thing, and it makes us sick—physically and mentally.
Clearly money, fame, success, popularity, or talent alone does not help us to reliably escape the grasp of psychological trauma. Self-enhancement and self-healing are two different things.
self-enhancement without the inclusion of self-healing will likely create traumatized supermen—dazzling but unstable stars that eventually collapse in on themselves."
https://highexistence.com/self-healing-vs-self-enhancement/
22. "Despite the various challenges we face currently, the reality is that Americans have never really known hard times within living memory—real hard times, not invented ones based on Twitter dramas and ‘misinformation’.
All that Americans have known since World War II is yet higher plateaus of freedom and material wealth, with all the horrors of the world—killing fields, political prisons, autocratic demagogues, a real resistance—held so far out of their mind’s eye they don’t even know what they look like anymore. There is no law of physics that dictates that must continue however.
America wasn’t built on ‘cancelation’ and ‘content moderation’ guidelines and ‘problematic’ this and that; it was built on the inalienable right of every citizen to tell their government, as well as any fellow citizen, to go fuck themselves and read and write and do whatever they like. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, and the hellbent drive toward some supposed utopia often ruins an imperfect society that would be better served by a more fervent embrace of its founding principles."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-invisible-boot
23. "Over the last decade in Silicon Valley, “growth hacking” has become a popular term. It refers to analytical, innovative, often unconventional ways to rapidly grow a startup. Lil Nas X took growth hacking and applied it to fame. When one thing meets another, Gen Zs often use the 🤝 emoji. Lil Nas X said: growth hacking 🤝 music. He took a playbook of scrappy, savvy, brilliant marketing tactics and applied them to a slow-moving legacy industry.
Lil Nas X didn’t get lucky. He didn’t get hand-picked by a record label executive in a suit. He manifested his own success with ambition, creativity, and an internet connection."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/lil-nas-x-is-gen-zs-defining-icon
24. "Cool, once narrowly delineated and foisted upon us by marketing cherry-picked from hip kids, has been blown apart for the new generation. In a world where everyone, not just the most interesting youths, is under a kind of constant surveillance — where our individual information is more valuable than any short-lived idea of collective cool — demographics give way to data. Gen Z might willfully defy categorization, but each disparate bit of their bizarre taste stew can still be marketed to.
Cool — and by extension, taste — just isn’t all that useful anymore."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22570006/cool-consumer-identity-gen-z-cheugy
25. "And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered.
“I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it."
https://www.gq.com/story/jason-sudeikis-august-cover-profile
26. I am such a big fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. I still remember him speaking at our big annual sales conference. So funny and sharp. This should be a worthwhile documentary to watch.
https://www.gq.com/story/anthony-bourdain-morgan-neville-roadrunner-documentary
27. This is a little bit grim. Pretty natural, everyone gripes about their boss. Don't think this is smart move on Netflix's part.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/fired-for-venting-on-slack-about-boss-5489370/
28. This does sound about right on present geopolitical scene. Sadly so I might add.
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/afghanistan-and-the-great-powers
29. "Still, Tribe’s successful fund raise is a high-profile validation of the venture firm’s thesis, one that could ultimately disrupt the way the VC industry operates, from identifying promising start-ups to determining whether to back mid- and late-stage companies. While Silicon Valley venture capital has bankrolled tech companies that have upended whole sectors of the economy, venture firms themselves still use little more than Excel spreadsheets to identify companies and conduct due diligence."
30. "Emerging managers also seem adept at capitalizing on the venture industry’s blind spots. One is the excessive wealth of more veteran VCs. An investor’s experience counts for a lot, but there’s a lot to be said for up-and-comers who are still establishing their reputation, who aren’t sitting on more than a dozen boards and whose future will be closely aligned with their founders."
....the industry is changing shape, and some form of consolidation, if not imminent, seems inevitable once the checks inevitably stop flying. Some firms will break out, while others team up. Some newer investors will find themselves at top firms, while others close up shop."
31. "Imagine the first digitally inhabitable country. It’s implemented in a virtual reality city with 100,000 inhabitants. Someone set up the rules and put the city up online, and people can join and see what it’s like.
Without some level of commitment to the city, this would obviously be chaos. so maybe you’d need some minimum requirement from members. That could be done by requiring people to stake some amount of ETH, or to log a minimum number of hours per day in the city.
But testing a government in VR is faster and safer than testing it in the geographic world, not to mention that it isn’t constrained by physical resources. Hundreds of governments could be tested online simultaneously.
Testing entire governments with VR is the most broad-based application. You could even test more granular aspects of a government. Start with some common base for a city, with a standard set of rules, and let people run tests on it. What if we reduced the size of the police force? What if we changed our road system?"
https://1729.com/voluntary-governments/
32. Good way to think about your career. You, your company and your industry.
https://medium.com/@jillcarlson/trends-and-timescales-a9b738be3e97
33. "Shein’s ubiquity, most notably on TikTok, has catapulted the retailer to cult status among young women across the globe. And while Shein is based out of China, it ships to 220 countries, with the US serving as its largest consumer market. In June, Shein overtook Amazon for the first time on the iOS App Store to become the leading US shopping app, a title it holds in over 50 countries. This comes after a pandemic year of record-breaking sales: Shein raked in close to $10 billion in 2020, which was reportedly its eighth consecutive year of revenue growth over 100 percent.
The retailer is also one of the most talked-about brands on TikTok and YouTube, and the most visited fashion and apparel site in the world, according to the web analytics platform Similarweb. Shein had enough in its coffers to place a bid to buy Topshop in January, which it ultimately lost to Asos.
So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22573682/shein-future-of-fast-fashion-explained
34. No surprise either. Banks are zeros. #fintech
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/junior-bankers-have-had-enough-5087524/
35. "The social “panic” that disturbed mayors, presidents, columnists, and Communists never materialized. It never does. Time and resources that could have been devoted to combatting a very real pandemic were wasted combatting an imaginary social phenomenon. In 2020, we all learned the perils of the myth of panic."
https://palladiummag.com/2021/07/15/the-myth-of-panic/
36. "Professionally speaking, where you live physically may no longer be more important than where you live digitally. The people who you engage with on Twitter, or on group chats, or in online communities might influence your career more than your longitude & latitude. Which means you can finally live & work anywhere — an absolute game-changer. We didn’t even have to build The Silicon Valley of Idaho or India: we built it in the cloud."
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains: No Such thing as Overnight Success
We see this all the time: people who seem to come out of nowhere to become big name successes, whether this in Hollywood, Wall Street or Silicon Valley. But dig into their stories and look back a bit longer like 5-10 years earlier and you can see they were hustling and grinding in obscurity. The only difference is they just had the grit to keep pushing.
I think the other secret besides having some personal mission to focus on is that they make a lot of small smart decisions that build on each other. This gives them massive velocity and growth.
It reminds me of a Fireside chat I did with Charles Hudson of Precursor Capital, easily one of the best and most active pre-seed Venture funds around in Silicon Valley. Charles talked about how some of the best founders just make a long series of good decisions. And how the average founder makes good decisions but ones that are just 10% off each time. The problem is that this slight deficiency compounded over time causes them to lose trajectory versus the top best founders. The top founder’s trajectory is just much steeper in the long run. In the highly competitive environment Silicon Valley, this steep trajectory makes all the difference.
We all know people who just seem to go from strength to strength. People who make a lot of good decisions and usually just don’t make many bad decisions. This is especially where it matters like where you live, who you do business with, who you date/marry etc. etc. I think we all know many people who just can’t seem to get their act together. No matter what they do. People who tragically go from one mess up to another in life and career, year after year after year.
This is the same with companies whether big established companies or startups, it’s very rarely one decision that causes them to fail. It’s usually a long series of bad decisions. I saw this far too many times in my career to count.
The power of compounding goes both ways. It’s like you are pulled into a vortex and you cannot escape. Or if you do escape, it’s only through massive effort and energy. This is why mental frameworks and decisiveness are critical.
Even if you make the wrong decision, as long as you recognize it, immediately deal with it and fix it right away. This is how you get your upward trajectory. This positive momentum is how you win in the long run and carries you much further than you think.
The Power of the Conscious and Subconscious Mind: Language, Programming and Mindset Matters
I’ve always been interested in learning about the power of the human mind. I have read Psycho-Cybernetics and Neuro Linguistic Programming since I was a young teen. The idea is that your brain is like software and you can program your brain to do things & to act in a certain way. As Henry Ford was reported to have said: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.” If you study the most accomplished individuals in whatever field, Mindset and attitude really does matter. Vision boards and mantras really do work.
But one of the problems of growing up in Canada and in an academic household, was a very high level of skepticism & cynicism. I always half believed these and that was the problem. It doesn’t work when you half believe something. Or more dangerously, you are programming yourself but without much deliberate thought.
This is kind of what happened to me. When I think about the things I’ve always wanted, I actually end up getting them in the end. 3 very simple things.
1) Being able to buy whatever book I want, whenever I want, regardless of price. This is also how i ended up as a crazy Tsundoku: ie. Japanese word for person who has more books than they can read.
2) Traveling around the world for my life and career
3) Being able to afford and eat anything I want without looking at the price on the menu.
3 very simple and frankly somewhat petty things that bring me incredible joy. Yet I got this point subconsciously & really only figured this out through my sessions with a therapist. I certainly do wonder if I had been a bit more thoughtful & deliberate when I was younger I might have had bigger, more ambitious and impactful goals.
Don’t get me wrong. I am immensely grateful to be where I am but there is a lesson for all of us. The mind is going to be programmed one way or the other. Might as well aim high & be thoughtful about it. This programming is from the content you consume (aka your media diet), the people you end up spending most of your time with and the self talk you have.
For the record, you can’t just imagine and picture yourself to success or whatever it is that you want. You have to put a lot of mental and physical work behind it as well.
But the hard work without some bigger vision is like going hiking in the woods without a GPS or Map. You end up getting lost or end up somewhere else far away from where you planned. I personally think this is why so many people end up having midlife crises in our society. They come to the realization that the life they lived was not the one they truly wanted.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 11th, 2021
"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."--John F. Kennedy
This is a good summary of the Robinhood S-1.
"Robinhood is the brokerage for fun gambling on meme stocks and meme cryptocurrencies. The main theme of financial markets for the last year or so has been “fun gambling on meme stocks and meme cryptocurrencies.”
2. "I face recurring challenges adapting my skills to support a growing portfolio of assets. I’m learning to write copy, create lead funnels, and use social media to build a brand. Simultaneously, I’m learning to treat myself like a business. This requires budgeting, planning, and treasury management as I look to build and leverage unique assets to support this lifestyle.
Through this new perspective, I hope to increase globalized income streams focused on information based products targeting global audiences. Simultaneously using time based consulting, ghostwriting, and other freelance initiatives to accumulate money in the short term to buy income streams for the long term.
The logic: you can build an income source or you can buy income. I want to do both."
https://dougantin.com/building-a-sovereign-individual-in-public/
3. Hope it never comes to this. But glad to see Japan is backing Taiwan in possible CCP invasion.
4. 110% here. I still think we can turn America around even with the mess we have here.
"If we want to make it through this era of crisis, we’re going to need a greater sense of urgency.
But I also think we’re going to need something else: Optimism. When FDR and the New Deal dragged America out of its last existential crisis, his attitude wasn’t dire or dark, but confident and unafraid. This is what they call “optimism of the will” — not a blithe reassurance that it’s “morning in America”, but a faith that if we keep digging our way out, we’ll come out on the other side stronger than we were before.
And in addition to a belief that America can persevere and win, we need a conviction that it should."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/fourth-of-july-thoughts
5. Interesting list. I'm partial to Tokyo, Montreal, Sydney & Melbourne personally.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/05/these-are-the-best-cities-globally-for-remote-working.html
6. Not a fan of PE firms in general but this is a great story of one of the early legends.
https://neckar.substack.com/p/reginald-lewis-bootstrapping-buyouts
7. Are Social media influencers aka Creators "Uncancellable?". It seems the answer is a resounding YES.
"That’s the power of YouTube. That’s the power of influencers and that’s the power of parasocial bonds."
https://brendangahan.com/are-creators-uncancellable/
8. “When a company first launches, honestly what you’re looking for is whether it seems like there’s a real product need. Are customers adopting it at some reasonable rate, and then is that growing?”
Elad believes that the “reasonable rate” will depend on your product, pricing, and customer. In some cases it could be a handful of net new customers; for other products, it could be thousands. Just as important is to look at retention: “Does it look like those customers will stick around and do they see some expansion over time or from a revenue or usage perspective?”
For a later stage company (“or I should say for both mid- to late-stage”) it’s time to start looking at your overall growth rate. “How fast is the thing actually growing off of a revenue basis, what’s the churn both from a dollar and customer perspective, and what does expansion look like?”
For Elad, a company that turns a $1 customer into $1.40 the next year is best-in-class SaaS, bringing together churn reduction, expansion tactics, and customer satisfaction."
9. "Bitcoin expands free speech, property rights, individual sovereignty, open capital markets, and checks on government power. America was founded on these values, and can thrive with them. The Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s dictatorship in Russia, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?”
“Not so much,” he says."
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-and-the-american-idea
10. Lots of truths here.
https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1412012537986568193
11. "The world is changing quickly. No one is going to come and save you.
You should operate under the following mantra: 1) be a top performer, 2) don’t be number one, 3) learn *any* specific skill, 4) learn how to make even $100 a month from it and 5) begin to scale that skill.
The one big change we’ve made here over the last decade is that you *CAN* go ahead and trade time for money. Why? You can shift the business model later."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/going-from-not-gonna-make-it-ngmi
12. Yikes. Throw the Quad into the mix and this will be WW3.
"And the experience of that war shows that even a limited conflict between two great powers can be terrible – millions dead, years wasted, a country devastated for decades. Taiwan probably won’t spark a US-China war in the next five years, but it might, and if it does it would be a disaster."
https://unherd.com/2021/07/will-china-invade-taiwan/
13. This Moore guy seems like the ultimate grifter. What a crazy story, especially for a self proclaimed prepper like me.
https://theintercept.com/2021/07/05/barrett-moore-brad-thor-doomsday-prepper-the-haven/
14. "There is a level of insanity at the moment that is hard to comprehend. Grocery stores are acting like hedge funds through their speculation on future food prices. Think about that for a second. The current economy is so out of whack that the grocery stores are speculating."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-world-is-so-crazy-that-grocery
15. This is pretty terrifying to say the least.
https://blog.keys.casa/casa-client-case-study-the-tinder-trap/
16. This is not a good trend......
"This worrying increase in mortality due to hot weather is already evident as summer temperature records are broken each year by severe and extended heat waves. The Pacific Northwest heatwave at the end of June killed hundreds of people, and these intensely hot periods are projected to continue as summer reaches its peak temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the next two months."
17. This is absolutely fascinating. Ethiopia being a great power during the Middle Ages.
"The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness."
18. "In sum, fintech is likely as underhyped as space is overhyped. Why? The ROI on your professional efforts and investing are inversely proportional to how sexy the industry/investment is, and fintech is … boring. Except for the immense opportunity and value creation — for multiple stakeholders. “Half the world is unbanked, but we need to colonize Mars,” said no rational investor ever."
https://www.profgalloway.com/bank/
19. "Any veteran of the video games industry will tell you that good games are products of miracle. Think about it: A symphony of idiosyncratic, often underpaid artists, coders, designers, sound engineers, marketers, writers, and producers must all unite in their vision for a commercial art product. Anything and everything could go wrong—and it has, explosively, even at the Activision-Blizzards, the Biowares, and the Rockstars. No amount of money and personnel can ensure success. Blockbusters can flop, and indie titles, some even made by a single developer, can sell millions.
Yet Amazon’s total inability to excel in gaming is remarkable. Breakaway wasn’t its first fiasco, or its last. After more than a decade of concerted effort, the tech company that brute-forced its way to dominance in books, retail, and cloud computing has failed to produce a single successful big-name title."
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-wants-to-win-at-games-so-why-hasnt-it/
20. Colombian ex-soldiers are the backbone of alot of private military companies around the world.
"The presence of such a large number of foreigners among the Haitian leader’s alleged murderers has shocked many, particularly in Haiti itself. But Colombian guns-for-hire have been turning up in war zones around the world, including Yemen, Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan, for years now.
Many were once trained by American soldiers and, having spent years battling insurgent groups or drug traffickers within Colombia, go on to find work with US-based private military contractors.
“After so many years of warfare, Colombia just has a surplus of people who are trained in lethal tactics,”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/09/colombia-haiti-guns-for-hire-assassination
21. This is a really good book list.
22. I love this.
"During his tenure as head chef of Noma, the restaurant was ranked either in first, second, or third place in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. No easy feat. Giusti is clearly a hard-working man with skill and ambition. But that same skill and ambition is what led Giusti to see past the accolades and want to make an impact beyond 45 covers a night. He wanted to feed the masses, and he wanted to do it his way.
What sets Giusti apart from other ambitious chefs in the food world is his approach: Rather than peel off of Noma to start his own restaurant empire or string of fast-casual concepts, he decided to start on an institutional level, and more importantly, start at a place and community that needed the change the most. Transforming what America’s youths eat and the way they think about food—that’s a meaningful change."
https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a23027389/dan-giusti-noma-brigaid-school-food/
23. Very cool company.
“Oil was the new gold, data the new oil; now, nature is now the most precious and valuable resource of all. A company having a hectare of forest saved as a key metric to scale is a company we are thrilled to back. Disrupting the economy and financial markets with a new tradable and liquid asset class that has a positive impact on the environment is an irresistible investment.”
24. "The stock market is a reflection of memes, notably magnified through SPACs, NFTs and GME. The memefication has displaced reality from valuation, as fundamentals grow less and less useful as each new flying helicopter company hits the market.
It’s not a bad thing – it just reshapes how we think about investing and the decisions that we make around portfolios. This is a hype cycle in a bull market. It’s to be expected. The core drivers are some of the financial tools (SPACs), but it’s also the broader market environment – memes are no longer a metaphor, but a living structure, called the stonk market."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-meme-market
25. So much wisdom here. Worth a read.
"Much of life is about the return on investment — your relationships, life, and career are reflective of what you consistently invest into them. You ultimately get what you put in. Of course, it's much easier said than done."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-investor-turned-criminal-f99
26. Some really great books to understand where the world is going. Good summaries here.
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/understand-our-changing-world
27. "Our value as employees is often boiled down to the quantifiable, whether it’s our output of nails, the number of products we sell, or the number of pageviews we get on our articles.
But there’s a problem with that: When a metric becomes a target — that is, when it becomes the primary focus of a job — it ceases to be effective."
https://thehustle.co/Goodharts-Law
28. Creators paying to advertise themselves. Totally makes sense.
https://creatorscape.substack.com/p/issue-13-creator-advertising
29. "The current higher education “bundle” is comprised of three value drivers:
📕 Content
🍻 Community
📜 Certification"
https://foundercollective.medium.com/the-three-cs-of-edtech-cb987835e701
30. "Despite our exuberant optimism, we keep getting the potential market size wrong. Market sizes have proven to be much, much larger than any of us had ever dreamed. The reason? Today, everyone aspires to be an early adopter. Peter Drucker’s mantra, innovate or die, has finally come to pass.
Looping back to our market size definitions, “software eating the world” has dramatically expanded the TAM while also catalyzing a compressed technology adoption lifecycle, which has dramatically expanded the SAM."
31. "Software is fashionable, but we need more than software to reshape our physical world. Software alone will not construct manned bases on Mars. Software alone will not decarbonize the atmosphere. And software alone will not make our cities gleaming wonders. America needs to be a place that builds. Manufacturing capacity isn’t merely a nice-to-have to respond to emergencies, but is the key to realizing a technologically-accelerating civilization.
The Bay Area once led in manufacturing — it was where transistors were first produced at scale, spawning the computing industry — and can do so again. Let’s once more prioritize the “silicon” in Silicon Valley. To do so we have to prize manufacturing as more meaningful work."
https://future.a16z.com/the-silicon-in-silicon-valley-again/
32. This is really really interesting for some odd reason.
The Rise of Edtech: One BIG result of the 2020 Pandemic
One of the biggest emerging trends to come out in 2020 was the rise of Edtech (Educational Technology). I don’t need to go into too much detail about how disillusioned and concerned parents and students were feeling about institutional education as a whole prior to the pandemic. The crazy rising costs of education with a range of 144% to 200% in tuition increases since 2000 according to US News & World Report. (Source:https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities)
There was also a non-surprising consequent rise in student debt (almost $29k usd for bachelor degree) and frankly declining quality and student satisfaction of schools at almost all levels.
MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy were a precursor to the Edtech boom in the 2010s. It fizzled out despite the promise of making education more accessible. But it did show that education is at heart a big bundle: not just content itself but arguably, it’s the network, community, identity & the credential.
The pandemic lockdowns showed the Education emperor had no clothes. The pandemic completely unbundled this & forced every parent and student to re-evaluate what it is they were getting with their hard earned money. Basically NOT very much. Especially in California where my kid goes to school.
But thankfully Education is changing. Lots more options coming up: Homeschooling for example really grew, doubling to 11.1% in households with school age children. Outschool generated $100M in bookings and raised over $120M in two rounds in 2020 and 2021.
We’ve also seen the rise of ISA’s (Income Sharing Agreements) prior to 2020 as exemplified by Holberton School, Lambda School, Kenzie Academy,Strive School in Germany, even Mate Academy out of Ukraine. These companies have only continued to grow and expand more in the post 2020 world.
But more importantly: the INTERNET really came to the fore. One of the best classes I ever took was an online writing class by David Perell called “Write of Passage'' in 2020. Amazing group of people, great content and I personally learned a ton. They took the best of what traditional offline schools do, but combined it with the best of the internet (international distribution, flexibility, remote and diverse).
Venture Capitalists have definitely noticed these new trends, changes and opportunities.
Reforge raised $20M, Ondeck raised $20M, Maven a cohort driven education platform raised $20M from A16Z. Professor Galloways Section 4 for business school students. One of the most exciting companies is Synthesis (https://www.synthesis.is), a spin out from SpaceX.
There is so much activity happening here and I truly believe all these new education options are great for society in the long run. This will be the space to watch in the next few years and if done well, this might be the leverage that pushes our civilization to the next level.
Business does not need to be Busy-ness: the rise of Calm businesses
Frenzy. Mistaking activity for progress. Focussing on time spent. This is all Industrial Age thinking. This is why so many incompetent people rise through the ranks in Big organizations like Fortune 500 companies & government bureaucracies. I also think this is the reason people keep their schedule so packed.
One of my favorite quotes is from French philosopher Blaise Pascal "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
The hardest part for most people is sitting alone with lots of time to think. The first and most critical part is finding the time to do so. That is also why beyond the personal and financial reasons, I spend as much time away from the SF Bay Area as I can. I tend to have more control of my schedule with the weird times zones & it makes me more considerate about where I open up slots or set up calls. Or even if I choose to have calls that day at all.
Whenever I am back in San Francisco which is arguably where a large part of my network is, I end up with a frenzy of back to back calls and meetings. I end up feeling harried. End up being mentally tired with very little time to read, write, process things and most importantly think.
You need silence to think more clearly. Multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett is known to have a completely empty calendar. Not because he is not doing anything. But as his friend Bill Gates was quoted to say.
“I remember Warren showing me his calendar. I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way you could do things....
The fact that he is so careful about his time, he has days that there's nothing on [his schedule]... [I learned] that you control your time, and that sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority than a normal CEO, [where] there's all this demand, and you feel like you need to go and see all these people...
It's not a proxy of your seriousness that you've filled every minute in your schedule.”
This thinking piece will be the edge for the creative class as the world gets faster and more complex. Calmness as paraphrased from rising investor Tyler Tringas. (Read more on the cool stuff he is working on: https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding)
It’s about being effective versus efficient. Are you even working on the right and most important things? But even more importantly for me, do you have the freedom to choose what to put in your calendar? This is a reflection of what you choose as your life’s work and time.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 4th, 2021
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good to know.
"Current trends Hernandez is forecasting revolve around the drink space: ranch water, chagaccinos, apéritifs, THC-infused drinks, and hibiscus. What she does from there is try to weed out the gimmicks from the legitimate products and recommend the latter to her readers."
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/snaxshot-profile-andrea-hernandez-food-trends
2. This is pretty funny.
https://thehustle.co/how-tomatoes-took-over-twitter/
3. "While there may still be space for cryptocurrency in China, it seems the CCP authorities have finally concluded they have little to gain from nurturing anti-authoritarian technology. On the whole, their loss could be the world’s gain but there are still likely turbulent waters ahead."
https://www.coindesk.com/watch-traders-not-miners-china-crackdown
4. Dollar stores are crushing it in America for all the wrong reasons. ie. decline of middle class and stagnant wages.
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-dollar-stores/
5. Peloton crushing it. Also shows how backward and awful the music industry is.
"The company, which went public in 2019, has a market cap of around $30 billion. It has signed deals with Peloton member Beyoncé (on classes that celebrate her music) and member Shonda Rhimes (on a campaign called Year of Yes, designed to build self-confidence and encourage regular exercise).
And Peloton, whose bikes start at $1,895, has done it all by carefully controlling its production values, smartly promoting its instructors, and making music integral to its ethos, as 17 interviews (with company execs, instructors, industry sources and former employees) attest."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywoodization-of-peloton-1234964386/
6. "If one were to dissect the self-made industry titan’s path to success, Braun has clearly been a calculating figure in his years-out development of artists’ careers, but he’s also demonstrated a Forrest Gump-ian quality of being in the right place at the right time and, more recently, an understanding and appreciation that the universe lets the chips fall where they may."
7. Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift was the best one in my opinion. Loved the Han character. A very cool cat I want to be more like.
"Kang played Han with a studied, laconic charm, and it put his unpretentious but undeniable good looks on display: all high cheekbones and sweeping curtains of hair. But Han is also a deeply melancholic character, someone who’s cool and collected and has a story you’ll never hear all of. It’s an odd choice for the second lead in a franchise reboot, and a more delicate touch than the Fast movies had seen before, or since.
“He's the guy that is in control of his, you know, his room, his world, but yet it's easygoing,” Kang says. “So where do you get that? Where do you get that confidence, that purpose? And so, you know, I hung out with a lot of dudes from L.A. that have that swagger. And I was like, where did they come from? It comes from community, man.” It’s clear that Kang was pulling from the Newman and McQueen playbooks — with an added Pitt-esque obsession with constantly snacking. What’s most surprising is how well his performance worked."
https://www.gq.com/story/sung-kang-han-fast-and-furious-f9-profile
8. This is why I do what I do.
"That’s why leaving your home country for a few days or weeks can act as a reset, allowing you to get a more wide view of the world beyond the rigid mental walls you’ve built over the years."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/traveling-mental-frameworks
9. I love this story. Goes to show the Silicon Valley way is not always the best way.
"By the time Tangney started his next venture, Doximity, in 2010, he’d learned a few things: Don’t raise too much money. Don’t burn too much cash. Fix a real problem for doctors.
On Thursday, Doximity debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, closing the week with a market cap of almost $10 billion after raising around $500 million in its IPO. Tangney’s stake is worth $2.9 billion."
10. Very good to know! Get multiple passports if you can! #Citizenshipinsurance
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2019/10/23/how-to-travel-with-two-passports/
11. Yikes.....
"It’s hard to criticize the venture capitalists when they seem to so effectively be doing what they’re supposed to, earning money, just realize that having VCs invested is no indicator of quality. Often they have done no more due diligence than the average anon Twitter account in your mentions screaming #XRPTOTHEMOON."
https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/
12. A talented actor here.
13. "Bitcoin is energy stored as value —> 10,000 miles away or 10,000 days into the future.
Bitcoin defined as a battery -->
Bitcoin converts electrical energy to economic energy. The energy can then be transferred or stored with virtually no loss in energy (value)."
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/btc-is-a-battery
14. DEFI!
"To reiterate, the reason why the opportunity is so large is two fold: 1) you have fiat money being printed at all times and 2) you have *much* lower cost of business as people are being replaced by lines of code - same thing that happened to the music industry when it went digital.
You are in the Wild West. If anyone says it will be an easy road, they are lying. If anyone says they never miss, they are also lying. Mark Cuban got rugged with TITAN. Every single wealthy DeFi investor has gotten rugged. There is just no way to learn something without making mistakes. The best you can do is learn as much as possible and stay on top of all the changes"
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/opportunity-risks-and-going-down
15. This is a great interview. Always learn stuff from Chamath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKHCCZnGzzE
16. "The idea that you have to follow a particular set of rules that other people set for you to qualify as a “real man” is a form of psychological slavery.
People want you to do things in their best interests – they don’t care about you.
Think for yourself, ask yourself “why”. Is doing the thing they want you to do, being how they want you to be, and taking on the responsibility they want you to take – is it in your best interests or not? Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s not.
You are not a donkey, so stop letting people manipulate you into becoming a beast of burden."
https://lifemathmoney.com/what-is-a-real-man-the-real-definition/
17. “I think it is a stunning fact that China, just as it becomes successful and more wealthy and more powerful, has managed to alienate one country after another,” said Schell."
18. Singapore ahead of the curve again. This "living with Covid" plan does seem to make sense. Admire the pragmatic approach which I doubt will be adopted any time soon by others.
19. "I suspect an interesting byproduct of an abundant society is increased mental illness. As we have more time and ability to focus on our new fundamental purpose, we may struggle to make sense of this changing world. The fundamental question of how to find our place and sense of belonging in society will eat at our sense of self worth.
But what is clear is that in a world with UBI, the value systems of society will change. Wealth and status this reshaped society will come from an ability to create, entertain, and become culturally productive. The ability to service the populations higher order needs."
https://dougantin.com/the-consequences-of-universal-basic-income/
20. "It’s the rare person who has an independent mind capable of looking at everything on its own merits and who can think outside of these simplistic tribal group think patterns. If you’re one of them, then your mistake is thinking other people fall into the same category because they don’t. You might as well be arguing with a non-player character in a video game.
The truth is, all money is the same at its core, whether that’s gold, Bitcoin, or the US dollar:
--It’s only valuable because we believe it is and it’s backed by nothing but our faith (and violence, in the case of fiat currencies)
--It’s a massive energy suck that serves the purpose of keeping the wheels of commerce turning"
21. This looks so damn good. The Foundation series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcjxbQ8ItvM
22. "By embracing and mandating a state-controlled and distributed monetary system in the form of a digital yuan, the CCP will be able to further control every aspect of the lives of China’s 1.2 billion citizens. With the digital yuan, the CCP can monitor and manipulate the spending, earning, savings, and behavior of Chinese citizens. The CBDC furthers the goals of China’s infamous social credit score system — the national blacklist launched by the CCP about a decade ago — and its mandated adoption comes with the additional bonus of giving the government even more surveillance tools over citizens’ movements.
Now, Bitcoin serves as the antithesis to both China’s digital yuan and social credit score system. When properly secured, your Bitcoin cannot be confiscated, stolen, or hacked. Moreover, the Bitcoin network functions as an entirely market-based decentralized network."
https://dossier.substack.com/p/why-china-fears-bitcoin
23. “In chaotic situations, creativity takes over. We understood that unless we work hard to develop our country, we won’t move forward.”
In the span of just a few days in February 2021, two earthquakes shook the capital. Warm weather timidly appears only for an hour or two, until biting cold, rain and heavy snow rush back — a warning that the gentle awakening of spring won’t come easily this year. Yet on sunny days, at golden hour, Yerevan lives up to its “pink city” epithet. A warm hue surrounds the city, making it look like it’s rising from the ground up to the sky — proof that beauty can still be found even in the hardest of times. “Pain, whether at the level of a person or a country, always has a chance to affect positively because it gives you a space to open up and try new things,” says Sukiasyan. “Against all odds, the cultural scene in Yerevan has the opportunity to gather momentum, to be in its best moment.”
24. "We do not believe it will be easy for someone to compete under their own names anymore. In the “creator economy”, you have to be different and interesting. The only way to be different and interesting is to say controversial “in the grey/black area” stuff. That means it’s easier to do these things as an anon. Good luck posting jokes about escorts or “dank memes” under a corporate drone face. You’ll be fired instantly."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-jungle-and-creating-your-own
25. I am not sure how I feel here. This is a hopeful & interesting solution, yet horrified at the underlying causes of this growing homelessness in what is supposed to be the world’s wealthiest country.
“If the Great Recession was a crack in the system, Covid and climate change will be the chasm,” says Bob Wells, 65, the nomad who plays himself in the film Nomadland, an early Oscar contender starring Frances McDormand. Bob helped April to adopt the nomad way of life and change her life in the process.
Today, he lives exclusively on public lands in his GMC Savana fitted with 400 watts of solar power and a 12-volt refrigerator. His life mission is to promote nomadic tribalism in a car, van or RV as a way to prevent homelessness and live more sustainably."
26. For the record, many countries do the same. This is not new.
"There are a number of PMCs in Russia, but the Wagner Group typifies the way global business and geopolitics operate in Putin’s Russia. Mercenaries who work for companies like the Wagner Group provide security to sites (such as mines and oil fields) that are of strategic interest to the Kremlin and its kleptocrats.
PMCs also perform such functions on behalf of foreign governments, and in this way, they have become an important tool for the Kremlin to promote its foreign policy objectives. For each of the key parties involved — the Kremlin, foreign governments, state industries, and private business interests — PMCs not only offer lucrative opportunities but, due to their quasi-legal structure, also provide plausible deniability for their clandestine activities."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-soviet-origins-of-putins-mercenaries/
27. "There are threye ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [1]
Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are."
http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html
28. This is a really good idea. Arming the creators. ie. Be the arms dealer. :)
29. Been a fan for a very long time.
"There’s a softness to Brosnan — in both voice and temperament. He’s clearly content, happy to follow his own path and be his true self — but he’d never let this freedom of spirit bring detriment or discomfort to others. Speaking to the actor, one thing is clear: we should all be moreBrosnan. Because this is a happy man happily growing old. He’s happy for his hair to go grey — “I just let it go…”. And he’s happy living by his short, time-tested list of considered mottos and mantras.
“Be kind,” he says, checking them off. “Show up on time. And be patient. You might have to step back and take a breath. You might have to think about what you’re doing, think about the situation. I don’t get angry. I could get angry — but where would that anger go? There would be no point.”
30. "Wall Street is not a nice place. People are not exactly known to sing together around the camp fire. They operate in a cut throat, ruthless world. In fact, there was a class action lawsuit recently filed against many of the top banks for an alleged collusion on federal antitrust grounds related to CDS pricing and trade execution. You really want some of these organizations to run your exchange or be the counterparty to your transaction? Probably not.
I say all this because we have to remember the pros and cons of the entrance of Wall Street. It will likely be a net positive, but it won’t be without some ridiculously nasty stuff. Keep your head on a swivel out there. Stay alert. And most importantly, remember the importance of decentralization and sovereignty."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/wall-street-brings-pros-and-cons
31. "To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people.
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
32. There is a lot of macro economic stuff here. Not just crypto. Very much worth a read.
"As stablecoins grow and silo high quality liquid assets, which are the same assets central banks like to use to suppress volatility, US will either fight against stablecoins or adopt them into the system.
Politicians love using a weapon against their enemies when it is disguised as an olive branch.
Bringing dollar stablecoins into the traditional system would not be striking at China or intended to destroy weak currencies and cement dollar supremacy, it would be for the good of countries and people currently cut off from dollar swap lines."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/a-tale-of-two-eurodollars
33. Interesting way to play the economic growth in Africa. The African Lions Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH7xuYj8Ls0
34. This is a great thread for European history fans like me.
https://twitter.com/NewJersey_Rob/status/1407357975463972865
35. Great discussion on Asian economic development which has relevance for most of emerging markets.
"And the upshot of that grand theory is that countries have to basically wait in line to get rich. There’s just no way for them to all hop on the rapid industrialization train all at once. Better policy can let you cut to the front of the line, but then the countries you cut in front of are out of luck.
To be sure, this is a highly stylized, pretty speculative theory, which is even harder to prove than Studwell’s. But it kinda-sorta fits the observed pattern in Asia — first Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore grew quickly, then Taiwan and South Korea, then China, now Vietnam and Indonesia. Malaysia and Thailand got a head start on China but then slowed down after the financial crisis of ‘97, while China accelerated — perhaps because China “cut in line” in front of the Southeast Asian tigers. But now, with China slowing down, perhaps Malaysia is back at the front of the line."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-studwell-got-wrong
36. Africa is one of the most exciting tech business opportunities of the future. This excellent write up shows why.
"Many may have become convinced of the “African opportunity” by observing the demographic zephyrs powering the continent into the coming decades. No other region on earth is poised to undergo such explosive growth across so many dimensions.
With massive demographic tailwinds, a growing capital base, a cohort of companies building necessary infrastructure, the next century may very well belong to the continent. We can hope that as its position on the global stage grows, more granular detail, more profound analysis, and greater attention is given to the industries and companies it hosts.” https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/africa
37. This is really creative. Ikea Hacking or Ikea as a platform! :)
"This type of upcycling, called Ikea hacking, has been on the rise during the pandemic.
And for companies that sell custom Ikea-friendly fixtures — legs, couch covers, knobs, and cabinet doors — business is booming.
Broadly, Ikea hacking is any form of upgrading, customizing, repurposing, or personalizing a piece of stock Ikea furniture.
The movement gained steam in the mid-2000s, when popular DIY blogs like Ikea Hackers and Instructables began offering up easy, affordable tweaks to popular items like Billy bookcases and Kallax shelf units.
At first, Ikea wasn’t a fan of people customizing its furniture and even sent Ikea Hackers a cease and desist. But since then, the company has embraced its hackers.
And over the past decade, this once small and wacky community has burgeoned into a full-fledged industry."
You Earn the Right to Grow: Commitment, Focus and Prioritization
A common issue I see for young people these days (or people in general) in the first few years of their career: complete lack of focus, taking short cuts, not willing to put in the time. Or something I’m still conflicted on: Seed stage founders who also want to do venture scouting or run a rolling fund/angel invest. I think it’s a different story if you are a founder of a Series B company which is somewhat established and has a leadership team in place. But at the seed stage you are still searching for product market fit. And intense focus is how you get there.
This is a hard concept for generalists like me who are interested in everything. But one thing I did well after some missteps early in my career was that I stuck with things until I got half decent (or hopefully good). That usually took 2 years. First year, you are grinding and learning. Second year, you begin to see the results of the previous year’s work, good and bad. That is why I have an issue with people who jump around from company to company or role to role after less than a year. They don’t stick around long enough to learn and see the outcomes of the things they worked on.
This is the same with startups. They find a channel or tactic that works but they get shiny object syndrome and they want to try something new. SO they divert their attention and resources to this new thing and the old tactic that was working so well stops working because of lack of focus. This is almost chronic in startup land.
The lack of attention, shows lack of discipline. But maybe even more important, a lack of commitment. Fortunes are made with concentration, not diversification and hedging.
It reminds me of a time in the latter part of my professional investing career, when I was exploring doing my own Venture fund. I met a HNW (High Net Worth) Australian who had sold his company for half a billion dollars. He liked my presentation, we had dinner and a lot of drinks together. Initially he said he was very interested in putting some major bucks in. But as we discussed next steps, when he found out I was not going to jump in until 9 months later, he told me directly that he would not invest anymore based on this. He said I wasn’t going to make it because I was not ALL IN.
It totally stunned me at the moment and I had all these excuses. But he was 110% right. I really did not have the courage or conviction for this. I was just playing and doing what I thought I was supposed to do by Silicon Valley standards. It was a great wake up call that I actually ended up emailing and thanking him later for. (Separate Lesson is don’t be so thin skinned as its usually outsiders who tell you the truth versus those closest to you who fear offending you).
The point I try to make here is that you have to be “All in” and get Step ONE done and executed well. Then you can move on to work on something else. This is the same regarding projects, startups and even big companies. This was one of the key issues I saw at almost every company I worked at: Alibris, Yahoo! & 500 Startups. All were organizations infamous for trying to do too many things at the same time with limited resources. We never got good or known for one thing.
Some examples: Alibris did B2C, B2C, B2G all at the same time, definitely. Yahoo!’s infamous lack of focus issue was well stated in the Peanut Butter manifesto here: https://www.cnet.com/news/brad-garlinghouse-updates-yahoo-peanut-butter-manifesto/
For 500 Startups, the challenge and question: is it a Venture Capital fund, an Accelerator, a Corporate Innovation Agency? Focus & prioritization sounds so simple but it’s never easy. Very smart people run these organizations but it’s so very easy to get pulled into a new market or opportunity. And it’s also very hard to say NO to customers or when there is a lot of money on the table.
Yet as Napoleon famously said: “He who defends everything, defends nothing.”
This requires immense discipline and something I think most people and companies will continue to struggle with in our ever competitive world.
Mixing & Remixing: On Personal Identity and Reinvention
The hardest part of leaving a job/role/company: What do you tell people you do when you meet someone at a party? Work is a very big part of your identity.
In the Netflix Sci Fi series “Tribes of Europa”, one of the main antagonists was the vicious Crow warrior tribe. In the making of a Crow warrior, the candidates. fight to death. The winner has a ceremony where a new name is chosen. Your old name can never be spoken aloud again or you will be executed. I don’t think you need to go this far but sometimes this is the only way you can jumpstart into your new life. It’s like the girlfriend you broke up with. Usually not a good idea to see her all the time afterwards. Makes it hard to move on.
After you leave your company and role, it’s important to step away and take some time off if you can. Go far away from the work friends, clients, partners and business network & community you normally spend your time with. “New country and city” far away. As my friend the writer Polina Pompliano wrote: “That’s why leaving your home country for a few days or weeks can act as a reset, allowing you to get a more wide view of the world beyond the rigid mental walls you’ve built over the years.”
Go hang out with new people. Read some new books. Take some classes. New Inputs are everything. And the data that will help you form new ideas and opinions. This break will help you gain a new perspective. Take the time if you can.
Also it’s key from the get go that you don’t identify too closely with your occupation, your city, your state, your politics or religion. Or at minimum be more conscious of it. Paraphrasing Naval, you need to ”Keep your identity small”.This way you don’t build up the biases that keep your brain in a mental straight jacket. It allows you to be more mentally flexible.
It’s scary and goes against our own instincts that have been deeply instilled in us for millenia. We are wired to identify with a tribe and to distrust change. But with the right mental framework, steps and a little imagination and luck, it can be manageable and prevent us from being stuck in the past whether that is an identity or relationship. Our occupations, especially so in America are a strong identity and a deep (usually abusive & dysfunctional) relationship.
I think it would be a personal failure on my part if I only just jumped back into doing Venture capital after a long break. I love the industry and the business. It will definitely be some part of my personal skill portfolio & practice. But as a creative individual, I would hope I would be evolving further.
I should be mixing in new skills or knowledge during this sabbatical. Maybe I should just go do something that builds on top of my old startup, tech executive and Venture investor skill sets by taking this into a completely new region or market. Or maybe I will even go to a completely new industry or role. I guess we will see. This journey of discovery has definitely been fun so far.
“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”― Cornelia Funke
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 27th, 2021
“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”--Jordan Peterson
I don't agree with his conclusion. This dude is an overly pessimistic grim dark guy who I don't usually post anymore. But he has a point of view that I do think may come true if we don't get our act together.
"The decades of catastrophe we face now — climate change in the 30s, mass extinction in the 40s, and the final collapse of our ecologies in the 50s — are going to cause inequality to grow even wider.
Covid’s a dry run for the future of catastrophe. The good news is this: there are things we should learn, about how fast and hard collapse happens, how fragile our societies are, economically, socially, politically, culturally. A few months of a pandemic — and they snapped like twigs. And if you think things are “normal” now, go ahead, again, and tell me why you’re paying 30% more for the same stuff..."
https://eand.co/the-future-of-the-economy-is-even-more-dystopian-than-you-think-14342f2f7fe4
2. This is a solid view on what's happening in the VC world now.
https://mobile.twitter.com/semil/status/1406132999708577792
3. I am a fan of Ryan Reynolds. Great actor but really sharp businessman.
"From distribution and budget control to marketing and brand collaborations, Reynolds has poured himself a whole new résumé of skills as owner and creative director of the liquor brand. So if, like us, you’re wondering just what it takes for a high-flying A-lister to reinvent themselves as a boardroom big shot, wet your whistle with Ryan Reynolds’ five indispensable, unpredictable — and regularly rambling rules of business."
4. "Calm promises to give the anxious, the depressed, and the isolated—as well as those looking to be a bit more present with their family, or a bit less distracted at work, or a bit more consistent in their personal habits—access to a huge variety of zen content for $15 a month, $70 a year, or $400 for a lifetime. For that, its investors have valued the company at $2 billion—roughly as much as23andMe, Allbirds, and Oatly—making it one of just 700 private start-ups to hit the 10-digit mark.
Now flush with venture capital, Calm is in the midst of becoming a full-fledged wellness empire: It is producing books, films, and streaming series, as well as $10 puzzles, $80 meditation cushions, and $272 weighted blankets. It is expanding its corporate partnerships, offering meditations on American Airlines flights and in UK Uber rides, in Novotel hotel rooms and at XpresSpas, and for employees of GE, 3M, and a number of other companies. It even has ambitions to move into hospitality, offering real-world oases to match its smartphone ones."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/do-meditation-apps-work/619046/
5. "Bitcoin, like the Protestant Reformation before it, disintermediates a powerful, central institution: Government monopoly of money
Your property rights are your rights to the extent you can defend them.
Government exists as a monopoly of violence in a given territory. A lack of a monopoly on violence exists in parts of Mexico and Iraq to name recent examples.
Bitcoin is individual sovereignty not because a government, court, or power enforces your “rights”.
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/monetary-reformation-bitcoin
6. This is quite the thread on the Sovereign Individual and the decentralized future we are entering.
https://twitter.com/BowTiedBarbary/status/1406480720818757662
7. "If you’re only hearing positive things within a company, something is obviously wrong because something is always wrong, no matter the company. And as nice as it is to celebrate wins, it’s also just easier than talking about hard truths and times. But the latter are so much more valuable in the long run, especially as ways to accelerate learning across a team."
https://mgs.blog/making-bad-news-travel-fast-a35ee7764e8f
8. "Emerging markets are better if you value convenience. Buying stocks in China or a condo in Malaysia is much easier than figuring out places like Myanmar.
Meanwhile, frontier markets are best if you want low correlation with other investments, potential for outsized returns, and don’t mind some additional work.
A big reason why frontier markets boast immense opportunities is because few people put forth the effort needed to discover them.
But that’s only a positive thing if you’re among the willing.
Large money managers spend billions on trading algorithms and well-paid staff. They’ll find any truly undervalued asset before you’re even aware it exists. As such, there aren’t many deals left on major stock exchanges.
Goldman Sachs isn’t looking at stocks in Vietnam or land in Manila though. It leaves a chance for the rest of us."
https://www.investasian.com/2018/09/29/emerging-frontier-markets/
9. "So decades of unequally shared progress, rampant NIMBYism, elites telling Americans that some of them don’t have what it takes to use computers, and fears of automation taking jobs. No wonder Americans aren’t as excited about The Future as they used to be!
But as reasonable as that caginess toward The Future might be, I still think America could benefit from a lot more artists crafting positive, optimistic visions."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/losing-sight-of-the-future
10. This is why you do not negotiate with terrorists. In this case "Woke" ones.
"Hopefully, Basecamp will learn from this incident that woke employees cannot be satisfied, and they will do everything to find a molehill they can make into a mountain. If it wasn’t a dumb list of funny customer names, it would have been something else. This is the true lesson every CEO should learn — that you cannot please these employees, no matter how much you try. The answer must be “no, do not bring politics to work, whether I agree with you or not.”
Anything less than that will invite chaos to your company, will destroy team psychological safety, kill team collaboration, and have a direct impact on your bottom line.
We should all be striving to create happy, fulfilling workplaces where all employees have access to opportunities to advance their careers and do good work. But sometimes, you have to serve your team by giving them what they need, rather than what they might want."
https://karlyn.medium.com/the-real-story-behind-basecamps-woke-revolt-bd9b56b3d11d
11. "While China is losing market share in bitcoin mining, the United States is gaining market share. It won’t necessarily be one-for-one because some Chinese miners will not come to the US, but it is hard to argue any country is going to benefit more from this than the United States."
"As we have discussed over and over again, open systems beat closed systems. The Chinese approach of banning an open monetary network in pursuit of a tightly controlled monetary system is unlikely to be seen as an advantageous strategic move for their citizens. But just like North Korea, this decision will be helpful in continuing to consolidate power and ensure the longevity of the dictatorship."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/china-just-made-a-significant-geopolitical
12. For young folks starting off their careers!
"Steps to gaming the system: 1) focus on relevant experience and make sure your grades are good enough 3.5 GPA, 2) to make sure it is roughly there, 3) get the position and play politics to get ahead, 4) at your mid-year review if you’re in the top group, you’ve done enough, 4) being #1 just means you’re doing too much and are being abused, 5) start ramping up your side income, 6) if you do make it to a revenue generating role where you’re heavily incentivized the game gets trickier… Ideally that doesn’t happen to you."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/getting-your-first-career-we-all
13. So basic but hard to execute and get right. Sometime the best startups focus on seemingly simple & obvious problems.
14. This will be fun to watch. E-commerce roll up plays around the world.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/22/berlin-brands-group-enter-china-roll-up-amazon-ecommerce/
15. "Well, the essential point, it seems to me, is that Washington still lacks a strategy. I am not talking about the erratic policy of the Trump years. The problem has persisted and it was there before Trump.
Would you be able to say what the US wants from its China policy? To be tough, it seems. But tough with what purpose?
The truth is that no one knows, not even the people crafting the policy. They look to the past, disagree with the previous approach and have embarked on a different course. But the future remains a dark abyss."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/what-exactly-is-the-american-strategy
16. This is a crazy diffuse and insight dense interview. Must listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHQi1HnCZGY
17. Big congrats to Victor Folmann, Rasmus Holmgaard & the Gamerzclass team!
18. This is a valuable framework for figuring out financial independence. You can make your money go further & get a better quality of life with geo-arbitrage. (versus spending your time in expensive countries like USA & most of western Europe)
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-much-do-you-need-to-be-financially-independent/
19. "In the workplace, the biggest change has been the move of technology from a supporting role to a central role. It isn’t just that messaging became more important or that video meetings began to work, but that people quickly realized these can actually be superior. The next step is to take these tactical lessons and apply them more broadly to how a company is structured and operates.
In the coming months, many will claim to offer the best solution to managing the tension between returning to the old normal and adopting some new approaches to appease those wanting more. Some corporations will work hard to snap back to the pre-pandemic world as quickly as they can. Some will stridently try to find a compromise approach, the hybrid work environment or dual headquarters and so on.
In great numbers, startups and newer companies have all been adopting far more aggressive approaches to the future, with fully distributed teams. These are not solutions but tactics. One does not recover from a significant trauma by making one change or one compromise."
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35
20. This is a very interesting take on EU's strategy for China. We can learn something here.
"With the notion of systemic rivalry, the European Union hoped to separate political differences and economic links. In strategic rivalry, conflict leads. In systemic rivalry, conflict is limited to the political sphere. It is part of the EU’s political tradition to believe that politics and the economy can be insulated from each other. Even inside the bloc, political differences with Poland and Hungary are not allowed to interfere with the single market.
Performing the same trick with China is far more difficult, but the Commission has been busy putting the plan in practice. Over the past two years, it approved a barrage of new regulations limiting the Chinese state’s ability to interfere with the framework of economic links between the two blocs. These include investment screening, trade defense instruments, a package against state subsidies and a public procurement tool."
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-china-strategy-geopolitics/
21. Net net: own assets.
"Coca Cola has clearly become a LESS valuable company over the past decade. And yet its stock price has soared to record highs.
Coca Cola’s record stock price has nothing to do with the company’s success; it has everything to do with the tidal wave of cash that the Federal Reserve has printed. Much of that money has made its way into the stock market, pushing up share prices– even when the companies are in decline.
This is asset price inflation."
22. "Why in the world do we need a centralized exchange to trade stock certificates? We do not. If you put all of these certificates onto the internet it is actually a lot easier. You can see buy and sell orders from every single person with an internet connection. The only reason this doesn’t work right now is due to regulations.
If you think about crypto, there is absolutely no need for a Centralized Exchange (such as Coinbase) over the long-term. Decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, 0x, Sushiswap, etc. already do more volume than Coinbase! So. The future is a decentralized exchange environment.
As a note to keep ourselves honest here, centralized exchanges will still exist. Large funds with tons of regulation involved will be around for a long time. The big picture is that the decentralized side will gain more mass adoption over the long-term."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/decentralized-finance-the-high-level
23. Kaboom! Batch 14 represent. Go Olivier Pailhes, Jonathan Anguelov & the Aircall team!
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/23/aircall-raises-120-million-for-its-cloud-based-phone-system/
24. "Now for the fun big picture: governments need to compete for citizens. There was a book on this topic called “The Sovereign Individual”. We’d go as far as to say that this is required reading for anyone at this point. This era relates to the novel 1984, the millennial and zoomer generation will relate more to the Sovereign individual.
This means that *you* (everyone reading this) will become your own bank. This means you will be allowed to lend out your assets. You can borrow from anyone in the world and on top of this you can transact 24/7/365. If you’ve made a wire transfer before you know that there are windows to send money even if it is a small sum. The future is 24/7/365 with no intermediary.
Crypto currency is the biggest invention we’ve seen since the Internet. Sadly, we’re getting old here and many people don’t remember life before the internet. We used to put quarters into payphone machines to make domestic and international calls. Back then people argued that the internet would be less impactful than the fax machine… These arguments all proved to be incorrect."
25. "Investors invest in deals. They don’t invest in dreams. Sure they’ll lie to TechCrunch and say they love investing in untested ideas by made geniuses, but that’s a lie. They want to make money, and if your deck doesn’t have dollar signs pinging off of it in with cartoonish AWOOOGA noises you’re probably not going to get a check.
So what should you do instead? Approach investors for advice. Tell them about your product, ask them what they think, and just listen. They’ll tell you important stuff and maybe be able to help you with devs, management, and logistics. Maybe they’ll even like you enough to put in money."
https://startupstrats.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-jerk
26. This is really damn funny. This is a parody BTW.......I think......
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/23/an-interview-with-a-leading-venture-capitalist/
27. This is a fun podcast to learn about what's happening at the edge of the internet.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdv7VmpESKo
28. "This unholy trinity—the quasi-religion of wokeness, corporate ingestion of the corrosive social-media machinery and a deluded view of working life—is what bedevils the newest generation of American companies.
Once you let the mob accrue influence internally, short of taking a hard stand managerially as Coinbase did, you have no option but concede to their demands and offer the mob the object of their desire (or rage) on a plate. Every company who goes down this path will be limping from crisis to crisis forever (as Google is)."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/bad-apple
29. "While there may still be space for cryptocurrency in China, it seems the CCP authorities have finally concluded they have little to gain from nurturing anti-authoritarian technology. On the whole, their loss could be the world’s gain but there are still likely turbulent waters ahead."
https://www.coindesk.com/watch-traders-not-miners-china-crackdown
30. I've been wanting to take the Trans-Siberian railway for a long time. One day in the post covid world.
31. "In other words, Pakistan is eating its proverbial seed corn instead of planting it in the ground. Bangladesh and India, in contrast, are planting their seed corn — foregoing current consumption in order to build productive capital and be richer tomorrow.
Why would Pakistan consume today instead of investing for the future? I’m not sure, but my guess is that it has to do with the country’s political system. The country alternates back and forth between civilian and military rule:"
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-would-pakistan-grow
32. Propublica just seems shrill. Maybe more of us regular folks can learn from this & use Roths better.
"Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments."
33. Lots of good inside notes on what's going on in Venture capital.
https://www.newcomer.co/p/looking-back-on-the-week
34. So many nuggets of wisdom from the Wall Street Playboys.
"★ Fame is harassment from regular people. Regular people have nothing better to do with their lives than live vicariously through someone else. This is why celebrities go nuts. They are harassed every single day as people charge after their cars just to touch their shirt or skin. Lunatics.
★ If you are never able to sell and never able to scale… you can become “well off” but you will NEVER be rich. You need to make money in your sleep to generate real wealth.
★ A successful man does everything in life with a purpose.
35. Worth pondering. Building a great digital Virtual reality or Building a Great Reality.
"Should we be confident that the further internet-ization of Western life can go hand in hand with other technological leaps forward? Or alternatively, is our progress into realms of virtuality and simulation actually intimately connected to the dearth of building in the real world?"
https://douthat.substack.com/p/decadence-and-andreessens-dilemma
36. Finally! Good news for Taiwan. Suck it CCP.
Gaming is the Extreme Frontier of Business: Time Machine Investing and Operating
I listened to the excellent Josh Buckley interview on the Invest Like the Best podcast. Josh is a 15 year gaming operator turned investor and consumer startup founder extraordinaire. He states that Gaming is one of the most competitive markets bar none. Not just in the fight for consumer mindshare. But literally super competition in pure numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of products fighting fiercely to fill the very few top slots in the store ie. Apple Appstore and Google Play. In 2020, according to Statista, there were 957,390 gaming apps in the App Store as compared to 3.42 million non-game apps available. This came out in my research and analysis when I was a VC. (I even wrote about this unique industry here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/why-gaming-industry-is-so-interesting)
Now as a board member of a Gaming holding company I definitely see that in 2021, this space has even become more popular. This competition has gotten even more crazy with consumer interest rising during the pandemic.
Because it’s so competitive there is an extreme amount of experimentation and the only edge that a games company has is operational excellence in analytics, monetization, gameplay & design + Distribution and customer acquisition.
It’s almost like a time machine: I talk alot about geo-arbitrage, learning advantage technology or business models and bringing them to a newer geographic market. Well in gaming, the most advanced markets are from North Asia: namely China, Japan and South Korea. There is almost a 2 to 3 year lag time from Eastern gaming market to Western gaming market. Within the west, we see another 2 year lag time of best practices and learnings being applied to consumer products and then another lag to B2B software. I should note this lag time is shrinking very quickly at each step as business and competition speeds up.
Gaming is where the cutting edge of analytics & online marketing. I’ve learned a lot of my online marketing tactics from gaming folks when I was retooling back in 2012.
Games are also where most advanced behavioral psychology is applied. Variable rewards are a very big part of most games. Loot boxes. Status games & leaderboards. Super engaged communities and belonging. Gaming companies have been integrating and executing on these for the last 2 decades. All things that have migrated to become basic parts of consumer and now B2B businesses over the last 5 years particularly.
The biggest lesson from Gaming to other businesses according to Josh Buckley & something I wholeheartedly agree with. (and I should note if you ask many of my old portfolio companies I do spend a lot of time talking about customer segmentation with them)
“It would be the full understanding of power laws. It would be understanding your base of users or customers in their segments, and then understanding how much of your business is driven by your biggest segments and realizing you probably don't understand them as well as you think. Both you're probably underpricing that segment because you don't value the product nearly like they do. And you probably don't understand how to build effectively for them, because either you don't love the product as much as they do or you don't derive as much value from it as they do.
So you can't really build a one-size-fits-all product. There's so many different jobs to be done for a product. Your product may be a Swiss army knife because you have 10 different segments or 5 different segments. And each of those segments may both have different things they want from the product and they may have different importance to your own business.”
I think the point of this incredible discussion is that there is so much to be learned of the art and execution of business from the gaming industry. It is the literal bleeding edge of business. Operators and investors dismiss this industry at their own risk.
Have Fun Getting Kidnapped: Why Stealth, Privacy & Pseudonymity is the Future
People who have followed me know I’ve been a big fan of Wall Street Playboys (recently rebranded as BowtiedBull) for a long time. They preach keeping your ego in check and to not show off via status signaling. Ie. driving around flashy lambo while your neighbours fall behind economically. Falling behind: an awfully easy thing to happen in 2020 while we are all buffeted by hugely significant economic, geopolitical and technology change. Going into 2021, that has only accelerated. Some smart and lucky folks will pull far ahead but a good majority of people will continue to fall behind in desperation.
It’s what is called the “Red Queen” effect: You have to run twice as hard to stay in the same place.
This is why I stress two things for those who are fortunate to have gotten ahead in the last few years. I define this as having a well paying job or running a business on the right side of the trends, possessing assets and being healthy (mentally and physically). This is a shockingly low percentage of the world population.
Number 1: Make sure you are helping your friends, family, neighbors & community at large. What kind of human drops those they came up in the world with?? Donate to charities you believe in and at minimum use a tithing system (10% of $$ made donated, it’s simple, easy and the right thing). Also tip your restaurant waiter and waitresses very well, like 30–50%. Literal hat tip to BowtiedBull for this recommendation. I’ve been doing this for the last 6 months. It is a great feeling seeing how surprised and happy you can make your server.
Number 2: is the biggest part. Be modest, Go stealth and have different layers of identity in public. That’s why you see the rise of cartoons or pseudonyms on mass social media like on Twitter. As a young up and comer (and now old and still trying to be an up and comer), I always wanted to be in Forbes (Midas List or whatever), or be famous or have a huge Twitter or social media following.
Now I think it’s a horrible curse and just opens you up to attacks. Post the wrong thing, or say something that is taken out of context and you can be cancelled by the idiotic “Woke mob” that seems to be actively looking for things to be outraged about.
Or even worse a target of physical violence or threats from the insane or the professional criminal class.
Seriously anyone who thinks being famous is the thing: read this by Tim Ferriss and it will cure you of any inclination or interest for fame:
11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”).
I have admired the guy forever but would not want to have his life ever.
The point is that there are going to be a lot of disenfranchised, desperate and rightfully angry people in the world looking to take this anger out on those seen to be doing well or seen as different (in my case, being Asian/American-Canadian). We have already seen a 150% rise of Anti-Asian attacks in America in 2020 and do not see this sad trend ending anytime soon. It seems inevitable with the Covid coming from China & the increasing animosity growing between America and China. No different than what happened to many Arabic looking folks after 9-11. Lots of ignorant idiots in America sadly. But this is just something any student of history, psychology and sociology has seen time and time again.
That is why we will see a growing movement of pseudonymous players. Privacy for the smart folks will be en vogue again. The ultimate flex is going stealth and living a life doing whatever you want to do, hanging out with whoever you want to hang out with & being left alone when you want ie. True freedom. You can’t do that if you are being chased by paparazzi or surrounded by security or at the beck and call of others.
I am not a begrudger. Many of these people worked hard and earned their good fortunes. In the world prior to 2020, when most people were doing well, you can show off all you want. But in the post 2020 Covid world, for pure decency and self preservation, I hope those who are doing well check their egos and stop their status signalling. Otherwise keep on showing off on Instagram, showing your luxury travel porn, doing bottle service at clubs, going to ostentatious restaurants & driving around your flashy lambo. If you keep doing this, as the guys at BowtiedBull say: “Have Fun Getting Kidnapped!”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 20th, 2021
“The more self-discipline you have, the more you do the things you should do, the happier your future self will be.”--Maxime Lagacé
"There is now a global movement to make just-in-time supply chains more robust and better able to absorb shocks. This means holding larger inventories and buffer stocks. It will add to costs. This is inflationary.
It remains to be seen if this truly becomes the new norm. Maybe it is just talk. Time will tell. But one thing is sure. The improvement of logistics supply chains over the past several decades was a huge efficiency driver and a deflationary force. If this has reversed, we can all expect to pay higher prices for goods and services in future."
https://globalvaluehunter.com/what-i-learned-trip-to-dar-es-salaam-port/
2. Lots of wisdom here. The ever burgeoning socialist class in the western world will hate this but F--k them!
"Your 20s are not the best years of your life. If you live life correctly the general path should be: 20s pain and suffering, 30s tons of excitement change and income, 40s repeat 30s but your body slows down a bit and then 50s = do whatever you like."
"You owe it to society to become a producer. In fact, if you have the skills to become a producer you’re doing society a *favor* by being selfish in the *beginning*. You are going to create jobs and opportunities for other people. You owe it to yourself and to the country you live in to become a successful individual. That will generate the most value for society over the long-term."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/five-lies-that-can-ruin-your-life
3. This is a horrifying & sad story. Feel bad for Venezuelans and what happens when you have incompetent corrupt socialists in power. This country used to be RICH.
"In 2014, after oil prices peaked, my country’s economy started shrinking, and it hasn’t really stopped. The basics of modern urban life have collapsed there, one after the other. There are power or data blackouts constantly, often multiple times a day, making my online freelancing gigs almost impossible to keep. Even when the internet works, it’s excruciatingly slow. There’s no public transport, sometimes there’s no cooking gas, and even the most basic of foods, like bananas, keep getting more and more expensive."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/fleeing-venezuela-b71
4. "Worldbuilding is when an idea or theory is taken from a concept and created through action. Most people think of fiction writing when they hear the term worldbuilding. An author has a vision of a world in their mind and communicates that vision through written word.
But worldbuilding is more than creating works of fiction.
People become worldbuilders when they use their time, energy, and resources to build belief systems, processes, and companies to shape the world to make their vision a reality.
Worldbuilders are entrepreneurs. They create products, services, and/or concepts to shape the world with solutions to build the world a certain way."
https://dougantin.com/prototyping-the-network-state/
5. "A Nomad Capitalist is someone who is pioneering a different kind of life.
Spending time in vastly different parts of the world both expands and transforms your ability to relate to the world. It is a lifestyle full of both adventure and work, freedom and discipline, passionate connection and sometimes deep loneliness—but always LEARNING."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2017/02/06/22-things-nomad-capitalist-taught-me/
6. "This is the beauty of a programmatic, transparent, fixed monetary policy. Bitcoin is literally the wealth protection that billions of people around the world need. While the market manipulators are pretending to save the world, they are actually running trillion dollar marketing campaigns for the true wealth inequality solution.
I wish the market interventionists would knock it off. I wish they would let the free markets do what they do best. I wish they would stop inflating asset prices artificially and punishing the bottom 45% of Americans who hold cash. But they won’t. So this is why we bitcoin."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-market-manipulators-are-laughing
7. "I think Americans’ terror of automation is another example of the scarcity mindsetinto which we’ve fallen in recent decades. Like timid mice guarding our last crumb of cheese, we look to any change as a source of dread rather than a source of opportunity.
But we don’t have to be like that. Believing in technological progress is about believing in the potential of humankind. Do we really think that QR code ordering in restaurants will be the innovation that finally renders humans obsolete? Do we really think that wandering around a restaurant saying “Are you still working on that?” was the last thing that the average human being was good for, and after this we’ll never be able to find something new for people to do?
I don’t believe that. I believe we’re only at the beginning of our quest to unlock average people’s true economic potential."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-virtuous-cycle-of-worker-power
8. This is such a great podcast. SO good. The All in Podcast!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSB93bkB4NQ
9. All founders should read this. How to manage your lawyers while closing your fundraise.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RomeenSheth/status/1403825413663637504
10. This is the macro behind all the money flooding into PE & VC.
"Here’s the bottom line: as interest rates increase, we should expect venture capital investment to regress. When the cost of capital is low and yields on cash are small, investors seek greater risk to attain a return. As the risk-free rate on Treasuries increases, market forces should engender enough friction to pull venture investment from the stratosphere into the troposphere or below."
https://tomtunguz.com/10-year-yield-and-venture-capital/
11. This is so eye-opening. Why Lumber is so damn expensive right now.
https://thehustle.co/why-is-lumber-so-expensive-right-now/
12. This is a pretty big deal. Great signal for EU tech ecosystem. The Nordic startups are the secret that is not really a secret.
https://sifted.eu/articles/thiel-sno-ventures/
13. "Paul Tudor Jones is a legend of Wall Street. He has spent the last few decades navigating financial markets better than almost anyone else on the planet. His comments yesterday really drove home the point that a transparent, programmatic monetary policy would not only be attractive to the average citizen looking to protect their wealth, but it would also be attractive to macroeconomic traders looking to grow their wealth aggressively as well."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/paul-tudor-jones-explains-bitcoins
14. "It feels as though all the rules of early-stage investing are getting rewritten in real time and that kind of unbounded change is something I’m incredibly excited to be a part of. But, as I explore those possible futures, I keep coming back to the above Bezos quote as a reminder that the uncertainty that comes with unbounded possibilities for change have a counterbalance in the things that don’t."
https://bryce.medium.com/whats-not-going-to-change-9a5951c8fc57
15. Good stuff.
“A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable,” writes Savodnik. “In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.”
Are you wondering how to manage the in-house team of cultural authoritarians you inadvertently hired? Well, allow me to be so bold as to make a few humble suggestions.
One possible approach is refusing to tolerate psychotic behavior in the workplace initiated on your time, with your money. Speaking of money, if you have the resources, literally paying activists to leave is a now proven, effective strategy (thank you, Brian).
But the easiest thing to do remains the simple act of never hiring employees primarily focused on niche political activism in the first place."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-talking
16. Super proud of Bogdan Litescu & the team. Plant an App is doing awesome, for me the great thing is the revenue & customer growth, not the fundraising.
17. Not sure how I feel about this.
"Compared to some other brands, Big Oil has made relatively small forays into the world of Instagram marketing—but if history is any indication, they’re just getting started. Almonte’s post—with the accompanying whiplash of seeing a company partly responsible for the climate crisis sponsoring a trip to a place greatly endangered by climate change–could become the norm.
History has shown that fossil fuel companies have mastered the art of quiet persuasion, and they’ll almost certainly join in the battle for our time and attention on social media.
Earther has found at least two oil and gas companies—Shell and Phillips 66—have launched campaigns with different types of Instagram influencers."
https://gizmodo.com/the-big-oil-instagram-influencers-are-here-1847091004
18. I'm excited for this new emerging and frankly better future.
"Independent work aligns with the way that younger workers approach work—as entrepreneurs and investors. They’re tired of renting their time to corporations: they watched their parents and grandparents do that, only to be burned in the 2008 recession and again in the 2020 pandemic.
Corporations aren’t reliable; corporations don’t have your interests at heart. Younger workers would rather dictate their own fortunes through hustle and grit. They want to own equity that appreciates, and they understand that equity is the path to true wealth creation.
The disaggregation of work is about that control—that ability to control your destiny. You reclaim your agency from “the system” and you control your own career arc. You aren’t a businessman, donning your suit and tie and commuting on the Metro North and dreaming of the day you get to stick it to the man. Those days are over. You’re a business, man."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/im-a-business-man
19. Good life advice for men.
https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/alexander-krafts-9-rules-for-living-elegantly/
20. The best & ultimate combo of Media meets VC Solo Capitalist. Congrats Harry Stebbings!
“A lot of times a Series B or C [stage startup] approaches us — or their investors do — and say, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about distribution, the content machine, the founder brand…’ and then I write a $3-5m cheque in a $30-50m round,” he explains. “It’s a small part, but it’s super collaborative, and I bring something very different.”
https://sifted.eu/articles/harry-stebbings-140m-funds/
21. "The common misconception about Russia is that Putin controls all, sees all, knows all. He doesn’t. His has been a regime reliant on the buy-in of interest groups, oligarchs, and powerful clans within law-enforcement agencies. Behind the scenes, decision makers from among the siloviki and the technocrats have battled it out as analysts have sought to guess who has been on top and how deeply tensions have run. Putin is no liberal, but he himself has described his government as divided between “Westernizers” and “people of the soil.
Not any longer. The people of the soil have won. They monopolize nearly every aspect of Putin’s government and are enforcing their will—his will—on Russian society in a way that was previously unimaginable.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/06/joe-biden-vladimir-putin/619209/
22. “There’s a tendency for people to suffer with ‘delayed life syndrome’,” says Serov, meaning that they are only preparing for “real life” to start. Often, this comes from a desire to move away. But, for many this doesn’t happen. “They’re not living for the moment.”
23. I'd agree with this assessment. Not a value judgement but it really could have been much worse in 2020. (not that I think majority of city and state governments have done a good job at all during the pandemic, most have been pretty awful & incompetent).
"That bold decisive action on the part of the U.S. government, which set aside our usual stinginess and skepticism of welfare spending, was instrumental in staving off economic devastation for millions of vulnerable people. American ingenuity and determination was very important, of course, but we couldn’t have come through the pandemic nearly this strong without a helping hand from our government."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/covid-doom-predictions-that-never
24. Hmmm.....this seems like a good opportunity. I love Japan and am planning on spending more time there as well so this could be interesting.
https://japaninsider.com/transform-japans-abandoned-property-into-your-dream-home/
25. "Set goals. Set deadlines. Stick with it. Be disciplined. Be free.
Do this for 6 months and you’ll be amazed at the results.
Discipline is the path to freedom. This sounds paradoxical which is why freedom is so elusive."
https://benjamingjw.com/2019/03/25/what-is-the-path-to-freedom/
26. Canada is sadly not immune to the brain damaged Woke movement. #DownwithWOKEmovement
27. HAVAH Nagila! Congrats Itai Damti & the Unit team.
28. No surprise. Singapore is the top entrepôt of Asia by far.
"As the coronavirus pandemic hammers Southeast Asia and political turmoil threatens Hong Kong, the city has become a safe harbor for some of the region's wealthiest tycoons and their families."
29. "The biggest divide, though we don’t often talk about it, might be between knowledge workers and other workers; between those who benefit from the spillovers of ideas and capital that arise in superstar cities, and those who will do just as well living in the exurbs. Knowledge clusters have reshaped the entire geography of the nation; this has led to a divergence of class interests between the residents of the exurb and the denizens of the megalopolis.
Class in America is thus so complex, so multidimensional and fragmented, that it requires an enormous amount of cultural capital just to navigate."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/social-class-in-america-719
30. I do like Hungary!
https://mailchi.mp/cf9fdb2aa515/escape-plan-in-hungary
31. This is the scary case for why covid pandemic may be with us for a very long time as it mutates and evolves and spreads from one region to another because we can't vaccinate or eradicate it quickly enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha6yUxze1vk
32. "Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it’s almost as good as seeing the future."
https://jasoncrawford.org/precognition
33. "I believe pessimists make better operators. I, no joke, sit awake at night and imagine everything that can go wrong in my firm(s). Then I start emailing people to ensure it won’t. On a livestream last night with two other entrepreneurs, someone asked about our management styles. The other two panelists gave Hallmark Channel answers about helping people find their purpose and encouraging failure and some other bullshit. Then it was my turn.
“I’m fucking all over everybody all the fucking time.”
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-reluctant-optimist/
34. This is immensely stupid and goes against the science. BUT What do we expect from gutless government bureaucrats?
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/us-canada-travel-limits-extended-5079060/
35. I love this idea of a "Digital Bugout Bag." A must in the emerging new world.
"Most people don’t need to worry about bugging out. But a Sovereign Individual knows that an ability to exercise the tech enabled exit can require leaving a country. And because of this, it makes sense to think through and explore your options for moving abroad. How might your life be impacted? What can you do to create insurance policies that ensure the continuity of your lifestyle? Most importantly, how can you ensure that as many of your families wants and needs are seen to?
Reorganizing your life to a remote oriented society requires a fundamentally different approach. If nothing else, it’s a healthy activity to think through."
https://dougantin.com/how-to-think-about-a-digital-bug-out-bag/
36. "Meme Investing , like SPAC’s are here to stay in the new world of retail investing/trading. It is a weird by product of the internet as power shifts ..you can hate it, ignore it or figure out how to harness it. I choose to harness it."
https://howardlindzon.com/meme-investing-the-fundamentals-are-coming/
37. The concept of the North Star metric is crucial for every founder to understand.
https://davidcummings.org/2021/06/19/define-the-north-star-metric/
38. VERY Interesting.
"Chinese consumer tech giants are pursuing owning the funnel through a combination of buy, build or partnerships (investments). Each of them starts from their domain of expertise (Tencent's WeChat is traffic, Alibaba's Taobao is conversion, and Bytedance is also traffic), before moving either up or down the funnel. Once you consider the pieces they need to acquire, their next move is no longer a surprise.
Generally, it is easier to move down the funnel than up since traffic players already control the users’ attention. Users move from low intent browsing to high intent buying rather than the other way round. This is also why Alibaba's acquisitions tend to struggle. Aside from the difficulties of integration, Alibaba is more often than not trying to obtain traffic from its acquisitions, whereas Tencent is giving traffic to their partners. The differing dynamic is stark."
https://lillianli.substack.com/p/owning-the-funnel
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
“Cause My Life is Dope and I Do Dope Sh--t!”
Kanye West was reported to have said this. I think this is such an amazing quote and something I’ve taken to heart. I do NOT like Kanye as a person but boy is he an interesting, creative and accomplished individual in both music, fashion, design and business. There is so much to learn from him.
I think the point of the quote is that if you want to be interesting, go do interesting things. Even if something does not personally seem attractive to you, it still might be worth trying at least once. I’ve been pleasantly surprised far too many times in my life on this front. I’ve also been unpleasantly surprised, but now I know. In fact, trying and doing is the only way to find out.
Have interesting hobbies, play sports, go travel to interesting places (once the pandemic is over), eat different kinds of foods, read interesting books. DO SOMETHING. Get real life experience and develop a point of view, which is your hopefully very different take on the world. As my friend Justin Mares tweeted “Money can’t buy being interesting.”
My biggest gripe with most people is that they do not have a well thought through opinions or ideas. They just follow what everyone else is doing. Nothing wrong with this in the beginning as you start off doing whatever it is that you are doing: writing, Instagram, Startups, Art. But you will need to develop your own point of view and take on things.
There is this quote from this movie: “We are your Friends” where an older successful EDM DJ takes a budding young kid DJ under his wing and mentors him. He tells him:
“Any successful artist has this moment where they stop being an admirer and they find their signature. Sounds have soul. Build them from scratch. Find new ones. Get your head out of that laptop and start listening to what the world's trying to tell you.”
This is how you differentiate yourself from the pack and why Jerry Garcia’s famous quote has so much resonance.
“Don’t Be the Best, Be the Only”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Eat the Frog As Early as Possible in Your Career
Mark Twain once said:
“If the first thing you do in the morning is to eat the frog, then you can continue your day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that will happen to you all day”
Productivity expert David Allen used this quote to talk about how you should do the hardest thing first thing when you get up in the morning. There is a career version of this too. When you are starting off your career, you should volunteer and try to do the most complex and most challenging thing. In a Big company, take the toughest projects that no one wants. Or join the startup over taking that prestigious big company.
Why would you do that? Well, for one thing you will learn A LOT. You will exercise mental muscles that you never knew you had. It helps you build personal momentum. And whatever happens you will be better off than where you started even if things don’t work out.
I experienced this at Yahoo!. I took on everything they asked me to do and asked for more. I was lucky enough to be in a fast growing company. But I was doubly lucky to end up in what was at that time an ignored but fast growing part of the business. International growth. Then I also volunteered to take on the online marketing side of FIFAWorld Cup 2002. That made my career there and I was off to the races. It was a brutal, gruelling 100+ hours a week for a period of 10 months. But boy was it worth it. This set the foundation for my rise through the organization over the next 10 years.
The project gave me exposure to key people at all levels throughout the organization. The relationships I built throughout the organization served me well in all the executive roles I held later on. It allowed me to push through projects others could not. You also never know who will notice you either. My work got me in front of most of the C-level leadership team at Yahoo!
Many of the most successful people I know in technology, on Wall Street or any other industry shared a common road. They took the hard, unsexy route (at that time) and grinded it out. Eating the frog early allowed them to get their reps in, measure themselves against the best and acquire the skills & experience faster than their peers. This allowed them to take advantage of the big opportunities that came their way later on.
To paraphrase Indiana Jones: “It’s not about the years, it’s about the mileage”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 13th, 2021
“Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.”-- Abraham Lincoln
"In software development, there is a concept called “technical debt.” It describes the costs companies pay when they choose to build software the easy (or fast) way instead of the right way, cobbling together temporary solutions to satisfy a short-term need. Over time, as teams struggle to maintain a patchwork of poorly architectured applications, tech debt accrues in the form of lost productivity or poor customer experience.
Our nation’s cybersecurity defenses are laboring under the burden of a similar debt. Only the scale is far greater, the stakes are higher and the interest is compounding. The true cost of this “cybersecurity debt” is difficult to quantify."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/04/the-rise-of-cybersecurity-debt/
2. There is very much to take in here. But these trends are the future. Worth a reading the whole thing.
"The methods of government and societal organization of the late industrial and early information age are failing in the digital age. And the fallouts from this narrative erosion are leading to conflict and a sense of future shock. The people and jobs that rely on past societal structures create a populist push for nationalism. While digital age workers push for neomedieval and globalist institutions. The needs of these two divergent classes of people coming into increasing conflict with one another.
As this conflict grows – we can expect to see more us versus them narratives."
https://dougantin.com/8-technology-trends-that-define-the-digital-age/
3. It is noisy in Micro-VC land these days. But ultimately this is good for founders & the larger ecosystem in long run.
"So while micro VC funds may not be as prolific as they seem, if anything, many in the venture industry would welcome more. In a way startups themselves, they take advantage of many of the same tactics as the companies they’re backing to make a splash. While being the noisiest fund in the market isn’t the best investment strategy on its own, no one seems eager to turn the volume down."
4. This is quite insightful of why the USA has become such a scary place in last few years. I've definitely felt it change since 2016 for sure.
"So America has created artificial scarcities of tangible goods like housing, education, and access to the country, and intangibles like a sense of belonging. Not all of our scarcities are artificial, of course — high-paying jobs at top companies like Google are limited due to the superstar firm phenomenon. But for the most part, the things Americans are scrabbling to take from each other are things whose supply we have chosen to limit.
I’m not saying that this artificial scarcity is the only reason America has shifted toward survival values like personal violence, ethnocentrism, and distrust. But I think it’s a contributing factor. We’re taking a country that should be a land of plenty, the ultimate positive-sum game, and we’re turning it into a zero-sum
game."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-scarcity-mindset
5. I love Mexico too just like Rock: it holds a special place in my heart. Can't wait to go back soon.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/the-rock-dwayne-johnson-tequila-mexico/index.html
6. There is so much good advice here for young people. Wish I had this when I was in my twenties. Whole thing is a Must read.
"nothing prevents you from starting a basic online business that makes even $30-50K US Token per year. You could do something low risk like reselling products or becoming a copy writer. You could even attempt to scale out something on Fiverr.
In the end, you should become more optimistic. In your 20s and even 30s, you have a ton of energy. There is no need to take your foot off the gas as you can use it to build a bigger base/foundation. The future is brighter than it has ever been before and you can de-risk your future while simultaneously increasing your income. It is a no brainer!"
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/personal-finance-and-collegeeducation
7. Not sure why people are surprised. This is the way the US tax system is supposed to work. It favors business owners & investors, NOT employees. Not saying this is good or bad, its just way it was designed. This should be a wake up call to everyone in America, that being "YOU, INC" is critical.
"America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell."
8. The private space race is on!
9. Net net: don't have a hot wallet.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/07/politics/colonial-pipeline-ransomware-recovered/index.html
10. "Our media’s reliance on its in-group web of trust is entirely human, and almost all of us rely on something similar. I would never have been early to the danger of Covid-19, for example, had I not trusted people like Balaji Srinivasan, my opinion of whom was and is enough to make me take a closer look. I think this kind of trust is useful, and in any case probably impossible to entirely adapt away from. We’re wired to love each other, and belief is a bond between men as much as it is between men and ideas.
But in this new and rapid media environment we live inside, our disembodied schools of talking heads on Twitter are bigger than we’re built to manage, and we have wildly exposed ourselves to any bad faith actor smart enough to hack the dynamic."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/zone-of-repulsion
11. “In our role as a wizened witness tree, we have been asked repeatedly over the past year, ‘Is this worse than the dot-com bubble?’” he wrote. “We have tried to be cautious when answering, and there are many ways to compare the two eras, but now our answer is yes, it is worse. The main difference: the anger.”
12. This is a great perspective. Play your own game.
"When startups face these big decisions, they're often framed in the most high-stakes way possible. One path could lead to success and riches. The other to failure and ruin.
The reality is a bit more nuanced.
In most cases, both paths are viable. The key is heading the direction that makes the most sense for your mission and business model.
And remembering, too, that your competitors face their own forks in the road. Depending on the choices they make, they may cease to be competitors at all.
The internet contains multitudes. Even for digital sports publications, there are many paths to success.
So don't worry about the paths not taken. Focus on the one you're on."
https://davenemetz.com/sliding-doors/
13. "We have had proof of just how good networks are at solving modern problems. I don't think we can go back."
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/malcolm-gladwell-post-pandemic-covid-optimism-adobe-summit.html
14. I think YC was right in these situations & within their rights to kick them off community board. These founders broke privacy policy of community.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/09/does-what-happens-at-yc-stay-at-yc/
15. These are very good lessons from the pandemic.
https://thenextweb.com/news/5-lessons-post-pandemic-startup-ceo
16. Spot on. Hedonic Adoption is a killer of financial freedom.
"As I started to design my life around working less, I also had a calmness and contentedness re-emerge in my life. I stopped drinking alcohol, craving expensive meals and opting for the nicer arrangements while traveling. I no longer “deserved” them after a long work-week. Nor did I need them.
I’ve come to believe that “financial security” as most people frame it is a myth. The problem with this idea is that there is never a number that is defined as “enough.” While some in the financial independent, retire early (FIRE) crowd are are literally defining how much is “enough”, it doesn’t seem to resonate with most people. Yet this community is often spot in with diagnosing the problem.
We are owned by our jobs and our stuff, not the other way around."
https://think-boundless.com/lifestyle-creep-frugal-cut-expenses-by-75/
17. "With startups staying private longer and growing larger, Seed and Series A venture investors have come across an interesting dilemma: with limited reserves to follow on across multiple financing rounds, what should they do with their pro ratas in their breakout portfolio companies?
Enter the opportunity fund: a new fund structure soaring in popularity among early-stage GPs that offers an elegant solution to this problem. Done properly, an opportunity fund — sometimes known as a “select fund”, “follow-on fund” or “growth fund” — offers fund limited partners (LPs) the prospect of doubling down on emerging winners in a fund’s portfolio."
https://fjlabs.medium.com/opportunity-funds-3f500b9017da
18. I can't lie. I'm excited to see this. Back to my childhood!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81wyj65SJIo
19. "My bromide: Be warriors, not wokesters.
Be mentally and physically … warriors. Lift heavy weights and run long distances, in the gym and in your mind. Many tasks you’ll be asked to perform early in your career will be tedious. Don’t do what you are asked to do, but what you are capable of doing. Think of it as boot camp before being sent to battle, as there are millions of other warriors fighting to win the same regions of prosperity.
Get strong, really strong. You should be able to walk into a room and believe you could overpower, outrun, or outlast every person in the room.
The most rewarding things in life — relationships, work, kids — are all really fucking stressful."
https://www.profgalloway.com/advice-to-grads-be-warriors-not-wokesters/
20. The lockdowns have been a travesty & debacle across the so called free world.
"Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working classwere the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history."
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/
21. Farmland makes sense as an investment. Works for Bill Gates.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22528659/bill-gates-largest-farmland-owner-cascade-investments
22. Scary scenario here. We need to be prepared for China unmanned platforms in war.
23. Incredibly wise article. We should all pay attention.
"Today’s economy is good at creating two things: wealth, and the ability to show off wealth. Part of that is great, because saying “I want that too” is such a powerful motivator of progress. Yet the point stands: We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes – but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.
That, in many ways, has been the defining characteristic of the last 40 years of economic growth. And Covid-19 pushed the trend into hyperdrive.
Whether it’s savings or investing, getting the goalpost to stop moving – or at least move slower than your income grows – is the only way to both be happy with what you have and ensure you don’t push beyond the limits of what you can handle."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/goalpost/
24. Lots of painful nuggets of truth in here.
"To change you’ve got to understand that your beliefs aren’t just good because you have them. Your head, my head, and everyone else’s head are stuffed with inherently broken and self-destructive beliefs that have no business being there. Until you understand that, you can’t begin to let them go because you mistake your beliefs for actual reality. There’s objective reality and how you perceive it and they aren’t the same thing.
If we mistake our beliefs for actual reality, those beliefs run us like rats through an invisible maze. They limit our actions and our range of responses."
But surviving tigers and surviving the modern world of social media and tremendous abundance are two very different things. And the resilience of our beliefs can really hurt us because they tell us not to look to closely. At the deepest level we don’t want to change our beliefs because it feels like we might die.
That helps us when we believe looking both ways before crossing the street is a good idea but it’s not so good when we think we’re worthless or that we’ll never find someone who loves us how we want to be loved."
25. Wholeheartedly agree here. The power of Sabbaticals.
"Taking a break is scary but from what I’ve seen it’s probably one of the simplest ways to grapple with one of people’s biggest fears: that they didn’t live a life that they were capable of. Taking a break is a way to take a different perspective of your life, remember the things that mattered to you, and sometimes simply rest and be with the ones that matter to you."
"We are moving from what Seth Godin has argued is a competition of “being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper” to “being faster, more remarkable, and more human.”
https://boundless.substack.com/p/the-case-for-sabbaticals-144
26. Good stuff takes time (and consistency).
"Working for yourself requires a tectonic mindset shift. A shift that flies in the face of society’s deeply programmed views of progress and achievement.
When you work for yourself your growth will be very, very, very slow."
https://radreads.co/passion-economy-secret/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Pitfalls of Operators as Investors
It’s become a widely lauded trope in Silicon Valley that Venture Capital is changing and that the best investors used to be founders or operators. I have written about this many times and generally think it’s a good thing for any tech ecosystem. It is a very helpful thing having someone who has built and run a company sitting on your cap-table.
But one observation from personal experience is that the best operators aren’t always the best investors. When I ran the core 500 Startups Accelerator in SF, I had a fairly large team who helped me. Many of them were accomplished and experienced founders who were incredibly helpful to my startup founders. But I would say in many cases, there was a direct inverse correlation to their picking abilities.
I think this happens due to several things:
1) They look at everything from an operator perspective. They literally think “this is such a great opportunity, if something goes wrong I can just come in and help fix stuff.” The problem is that as an investor, you are only an advisor & help at the edges.
2) They don’t always have a bigger picture or large enough sample set to understand or evaluate the business model or team properly
3) They are too empathetic to the founder that they overlook big flaws in business model or market size
I made all the above mistakes as an operator turned angel investor and then Venture Capitalist. Picking is one of the toughest pieces of the investing game to do well.
My angel investments and many of my early VC investments were pretty much write offs. It took me probably about 2 years or so, with lots of guidance from VC friends on the outside and at least 100 investments to really calibrate and learn the trade. At some of the better venture firms, new investors are not allowed to invest for the first year while they apprentice beside some of the more experienced hands.
In fact, historically, if you look at some of the top VCs, they weren’t founders or operators. John Doerr was a manager at Intel, Mike Moritz was a journalist. On my team, the best pickers were actually not ever founders or operators. But they had good instincts and worked on them. It also helped that we just had a lot of investments to the tune of 60-80 investments in a year, so we were able to get a good sample set fast.
Of course, just because you are a good investor, it does not mean you know how to run a startup. This is pretty self explanatory.
It’s a very rare person who is both an excellent operator and investor. Some folks who come top of mind who fit this bill are Kevin Hartz, David Sacks & my friends Mike Maples of Floodgate, Sheel Mohnot/Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures and Zach Coelius of Coelius Capital. You are very lucky to get these folks to invest and work with you. So do treasure it.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Caesar’s Palace Coup
I recently read a very entertaining and somewhat dense book by Journalists Frumes and Indap. It told the story of a massive battle among the titans of Wall Street. It was a billionaire battle between storied Private Equity firms Texas Pacific Group (TPG) & Apollo versus equally tough Hedge Funds like Elliot, Oaktree & Appaloosa with over billions of dollars at risk. A bruising & complex battle that spanned executive board rooms, court rooms & the halls of DC aided and abetted by a multitude of white shoe law firms and investment banks.
Basically TPG & Apollo ended up doing a Leveraged Buyout (LBO) of Harrah’s gambling empire and ended up overweighing them with debt to goose their returns. With the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a declining business burdened by overwhelming debt and many employee layoffs later, things get tricky when some hedge funds start to take the other side of the bet.
No one comes out looking good. To me it shows the economic battles happening around us and at levels far above us. And an African saying comes to mind “When Elephants Fight, the Grass gets trampled.”
That is literally what happened, the employees being the grass. With many of them losing their jobs and their retirement plans as a result of these machinations. Yet so many of us are ignorant of what is going on around us with technology trends on one side and globalization on the other. But ignorance is no excuse. Not in this day and age.
Growing up in Asian immigrant academic family was great for me in many ways. I gained a drive/hunger, a good work ethic & willingness to do the grunt work which has served me incredibly well. At the same time, on the negative side, I also inherited an unhealthy distrust of business, investing & sales along with the middle class scarcity mindset. The last few things I have had to unlearn over the last 2 decades, and something I am still working on.
You have to take personal responsibility for rectifying this ignorance or else you will be bracketed and regularly caught off guard by all these changes in the world. Basically, learning the bigger picture of where the world is going and how business and government actually works.
David Bailey said “The Best advice I ever got was Knowledge is Power and to keep reading.”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 6th, 2021
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”-Jim Rohn
This man is an investing legend. I read and listen to everything he says. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the Global macro greats.
https://thehustle.co/stanley-druckenmiller-q-and-a-trung-phanin/amp/
2. Really excellent fundraising advice and lessons. Big fan of this longevity company too.
https://www.celinehh.com/seed-raise-how-to
3. "A new generation of early-stage investment firms offers an alternative. "Calm funds" (CFs) seek to work with company builders that choose to play a different way. Rather than shooting the moon by pursuing growth at all costs, calm founders look to build sustainable businesses that are "default alive," meaning they don't require regular capital injections to stay alive.
While some may operate in niche markets that cap their ultimate size, many of these businesses seek to reach the same scale as VC's biggest winners. Indeed, though they're not always viewed this way, companies like Github, Atlassian, and Zapier all ran this playbook, taking in limited outside funding, or delaying it. Instead, of trying to gobble up market share unsustainably, these founders chose to secure the existence of their company early in its lifecycle.
Other less recognizable calm businesses like Wildbit, Tuple, Papertrail, and VueScan, might approach or surpass unicorn status in a venture paradigm."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding
4. Holy crap. Lesson: do NOT be a Chinese Billionaire!
5. "Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.
Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.
Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is going direct, Stripe has Stripe Press, and many more tech companies are quickly ascending the stack from mere “content marketing” to full-on media arms, complete with editors-in-chief and original content. As Balaji Srinivasan points out, this is the mirror image of legacy media corporations hiring engineers and declaring their aspiration to become world-class tech companies. There is no distinction anymore between app, distribution, and content — everyone is going full stack."
6. A really great episode as always. All-in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZG89pDzzY
7. "If you want to ensure failure, just follow your passions with no regard to scale or income. This is a trap that the masses believe in. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. The only thing you should love is winning/being the best."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/general-life-framework-and-defi-sr
8. I've said it before. I'm a fan.
"For the many people in tech circles who once proudly considered themselves outsiders and now control some of the most powerful firms in the world, Palihapitiya embodies the kind of interloper currently in ascendance: the bitcoin millionaire, the Reddit oversharer, the arriviste who moves markets by tweeting memes.
Palihapitiya has gained notoriety by telling seductive stories of quick riches and upended hierarchies. These narratives have become such mainstays of how the technology industry sees itself that executives refer to enrapturing a roomful of people as “Chamathing the audience.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/the-pied-piper-of-spacs
9. I like the idea of the "Freedom Class" versus say Middle Class.
"A Rich Life is about FREEDOM and FLEXIBILITY. You can be rich on $50K/year if you’ve created a life where you can do the things you love — whether it’s traveling, eating sushi every week, or teaching drawing. You can also live that Rich Life on $500,000 or $5 million. And of course, more money makes it easier.
You can also have a lot of money and be drowning."
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/class-in-america/
10. Like to see things like this in other ecosystems.
"People in tech circles sometimes jokingly refer to the Shopify-affiliated angel investors collectively as the “Shopify mafia.” The term “mafia” is often used to describe the networks of current and former employees of tech companies who go on to invest in or start other companies (the PayPal mafia was one early example).
Shopify has encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit among its more than 7,000 employees, many of whom have developed deep expertise in e-commerce and a track record of working for scrappy online merchants trying to compete in a world of online shopping dominated by Amazon.
Lütke and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein “have often spoken about Shopify being the best entrepreneur school in the world,” according to Ananta."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/shopify-mafia-aims-to-become-bigger-force-in-angel-investing
11. This is the future.
"With an army of supporters, collaborators, and followers accessible with the click of the 'Tweet' button, a successful founder-creator doesn't need to chase deals.
The deals come to them."
https://davenemetz.com/founder-creator-investor/
12. Word.
"Just as by the time WW2 rolled around, the country no longer thought of German Americans as the enemy (as they had in WW1), this sort of vigorous proactive inclusion of Asian Americans in the national story can help sever the link between U.S.-China conflict and anti-Asian racism. It can help Americans understand that conflict between nations is not a race war — a clash not of civilizations or peoples, but of governments, institutions, and values.
And one of America’s core values must be that we accept and include everybody. Otherwise, what the hell are we even fighting for in the first place?"
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-to-criticize-china-without-abetting
13. "So why exactly is Russia deciding to drop the dollar in the National Wellbeing Fund? There is an element of politics at play (Putin and Biden are scheduled to meet on June 16th), but the consensus belief is that Russia is trying to mitigate the risk of sanctions and other economic pressures from the United States. While this makes sense from a risk mitigation standpoint, it may not make complete sense from an economic standpoint.
Russia is exchanging the US dollar for two other currencies that are less trusted around the world by populations. They are trading one monetary policy and political regime for two others. Some will argue that the euro and yuan are managed by economies and central bankers that are more sympathetic to Russia than the United States, but others will argue that all non-Russian ruble currencies carry similar risks."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/russia-drops-the-dollar
14. Not a fan of this guys bizarro land political views but I agree with the data points he presents on challenges China is facing. But these challenges & the CCP's frenzied reactions are what makes China so dangerous to the free world.
"The reality is that China will grow old, weak, and poor long before it can achieve its dreams of global dominance. It will be strong and powerful, to be sure, for at least the next twenty years. But it will not be long before SERIOUS cracks in their system begin to show up and threaten to topple the whole thing."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/06/the-dragons-downfall.html
15. This documentary looks amazing. Such a fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. Miss that man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEEjwRlghQ
16. "In risk disciplines, whether they are in finance, defense or technology, we are often confronted with the challenge of sensemaking. Understanding our world can only be done in retrospect with causal stories, but managing risk in real time is an exercise in acting with incomplete information. The lesson of Akira is not to fight the positive feedback loops or try to contain entropy, but to embrace it, ultimately benefiting from these societal phase changes."
https://refractor.substack.com/p/systems-thinking
17. "China’s long game is to show nations in play that applying the brand at home is forever beyond their reach, that the U.S. can’t or won’t protect them, and that Beijing’s armies of engineers can do a better job of delivering prosperity to them now than the capitalists will ever deliver in some far off future.
That’s where the real fight is, not in the South China Sea. Aircraft carriers are just targets now. The hardcore struggle for military domination is in cyberspace."
https://www.spytalk.co/p/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before
18. Is this a joke? No wonder the world is losing respect for America. WTF?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7ebqa/darth-vader-and-stormtroopers-attend-us-military-ceremony
19. Very exciting news for travelers everywhere.
“Supersonics could connect major cities as never before, vastly extend global business networks, boost American competitiveness, and enliven an industry that has been stagnating for decades,” Bloomberg’s editorial board wrote in March. “Down the road, ultrafast travel for the masses isn’t implausible.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22508975/united-supersonic-plane-concorde-boom-hermeus-virgin-nasa
20. Good daily routine here.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/rob-dyrdeks-playbook-for-optimizing-your-life
21. Go Bangladesh!
"All those skeptics should take a look at Bangladesh. The compact but populous South Asian country has quietly been powering ahead using a very traditional-looking growth model. A Bloomberg article recently reported that Bangladesh has now surpassed both India and Pakistan in terms of GDP per capita. That’s an astonishing milestone. In purchasing power parity terms, India is still ahead, but the gap is closing."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-tiger
22. Cousin Greg!
"His groundedness, as I read it at least, can be chalked up to a piece of advice given to him by Daniel Petrie, the director of his first movie, a made-for-TV melodrama called Walter And Henry, when he was just 12 years old. It was extremely simple, a comment that most children his age would have shrugged off as the allure of fame and money drew them deeper and deeper into the mechanism of Hollywood. To paraphrase, it was: don’t let acting and fame become the crux of your wellbeing. But Braun took it seriously, even as he watched his teenage costars, including Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, become superstars.
He has learned to find his self-worth in things apart from the approval of others, an impressive achievement in an increasingly gamified entertainment industry. “I do love when people love the show,” he says, “but if it makes me feel so much better about myself that someone said this to me, I think I need to work on my self-esteem more.”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/nicholas-braun-interview
23. What’s happening with mining in China. This is a good thing in the long run as miners move out of China.
24. "Unlike traditional bank accounts, which are registered under a legal name and subject to oversight, digital assets like Bitcoin and NFTs don’t have a central regulatory authority.
Crypto investors maintain their own assets using digital wallets that are only accessible via a password or a private key — a 256-bit long string of alphanumeric characters that is only known to the account holder.
Without these private keys, there is little hope of heirs ever accessing a dead loved one’s crypto holdings.
By one estimate, ~20% of all bitcoins are “lost,” meaning the wallets containing them haven’t been accessed in 5+ years. This works out to ~3.7m bitcoin, or ~$140B in capital (as of publication) — and that doesn’t include the 10k+ other cryptocurrencies on the market."
https://thehustle.co/what-happens-to-your-bitcoin-when-you-die/
25. What an amazing time to be young.
"Yu is part of a growing cohort of Gen Z investors who are beginning to make their mark on the startup ecosystem. Some of them are now old enough to work in VC firms or pursue careers as investors.
Others, like Yu, are newcomers to angel investing, as new platforms and recent regulatory changes widen the aperture of who’s eligible to participate. Like-minded young people congregate on TikTok and Twitter, where talk of startups can lead to valuable connections and deal flow. A Slack group called Gen Z VC has more than 7,000 members, many of them still in their teens.
For many of these Gen Z investors, angel investing is less about getting rich and more about participating in the startup economy for the first time."
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-your-next-angel-investor-theyre-19/
26. This is a really good sci-fi book list.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/science-fiction-novels-for-economists-7d8
27. "How else could we discover what we’re up against? After all, if SARS2 came from nature, then the biologists who were furiously studying its close relatives were, if anything, too slow and too cautious to protect us. The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab. Indeed, we would be forced to redouble our efforts before SARS3 catches us off-guard.
If, on the other hand, SARS2 emerged from a lab, then the lesson is the opposite. Covid-19 would be, at the bare minimum, the direct result of our failure to heed prior warnings about the possibility of such an accident. Lab leaks are not uncommon, so making already dangerous viruses even more dangerous is a recipe for disaster. If, therefore, we want to avoid a pandemic from happening again, obviously we would need to curtail this research."
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-we-should-welcome-the-lab-leak-theory/
28. This is a pretty big deal. And why Biotech is where the action is at.
29. "We need a generation to emerge from this crisis with a commitment to being better fathers and mothers, spouses, and citizens. The fastest path to a better life is regularly assessing what we leave behind. The fastest blue-line path to a better world is more engaged parents, not a better fucking phone."
https://www.profgalloway.com/what-we-leave-behind-2/
30. "Max Benator co-created Orca (orcashop.co) as a platform-agnostic retail opportunity that allows any influencer to monetize his or her social-media following. Currently on such sites and platforms as Amazon Live, Instagram and YouTube, Orca showcases live and taped selling segments of influencers extolling the benefits and appeal of everything from K-beauty brands to kitchen essentials, fashion accessories, tech items and children’s toys."
31. Go Ham and team. Chipper Cash is crushing it. Batch 24!
"To send money across Africa used to involve going to an agent, at a kiosk, negotiating a rate and then sending money, before collecting it offline or by getting an mobile top up via the MTN network. Chipper makes it all fade away and eliminates the cost, which founder Ham Serunjohi was motivated to solve “The cost of sending money in Africa is the highest in the world”.
https://mediciglobal.substack.com/p/chippercash-is-a-diaspora-payments
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Bubble or Revolution: Why Not Both?
Bubbles in Short term, Revolution in Long term
Sahil wrote: “When millions are buying to sell: bubble.
When millions are buying to own: revolution.”
https://twitter.com/shl/status/1370798254930104323
Dotcom Boom in 1999 is a great example. Definitely a Bubble and completely imploded in 2001 as I lived through the painful aftermath. But fast forward 20 years later, the internet has been a revolution that has affected almost every business and person on the planet.
Having participated, operated and invested in numerous categories and technology markets, trends can be both. A Bubble in the short term but a game changing Revolution in the long term. Using the Gartner Hype cycle as a tool, you can pretty much chart every single major technology trend that has happened over the last 2 decades. 3D Printing, Food Delivery Startups, Bitcoin/Crypto, SaaS, Insurancetech, Autonomous Driving, SPACs & the long list goes on.
Phase 1 Innovation Trigger which has initial heat from the hardcore and fanatics
Phase 2 Peak of Inflated Excitement and Hype where everyone seems to be making a crazy amount of money. Tonnes of new startups join this category. VCs mindlessly invest, followed by Big Corporates and Wall Street.
Phase 3 Bubble Pops and we get the “Trough of Disillusionment”: All the “Get rich quick” type guys leave the market. The Media writes off the space. But the hardcore stay and continue building.
Phase 4 Slope of Enlightenment: Where the technology gets legs and starts being used by the mainstream. Clear winners emerge, a category becomes recognized by the media. People start making money again.
Phase 5 Plateau of Productivity: Everyone is using this that it just becomes standard and normalized.
Very simple, right? Simple but not always easy to execute against. These cycles happen over a very long cycle that usually ranges from 8 to 15 years.
All these steps seem really basic. But with our regular human short term-ism, goldfish-like attention spans and lack of discipline, it’s really hard to pay attention to these. We get so burned or scared by the popping of the bubble, that we choose to ignore it. Or more likely we lack the courage to act. As well, shiny new objects continue to show up and distract us with what appears to be easier or exciting things.
This is why it’s the long term players who seem to do well when it comes to the technology industry. As Naval says:
“Play Long term Games with Long term Players, All Returns in Life Come from Compound Interest in Long-Term Game”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/