Environmental Awareness, Breakpoints, Pride & Red Lines: Lessons for Life and Investing
I’ve long been an admirer of the military and more so the elite special forces. At Capital Camp I had a chance to take a short workshop with the awesome folks of Asymmetric Solutions on tactical awareness and shooting. All the instructors were ex-SOF (Special Operations Forces) like Navy SEALs & US Special Forces. A tough, impressive crew and it was pretty eye-opening. The biggest thing I learned was their amazing mindset and frameworks for life.
The Mission Matters: At the end of the day, whether in business or life, there has to be a driving force for whatever you do. For them, it’s about taking care of their team and their family and getting home safely.
Pride is Dangerous: This was stressed more than a few times. It’s always better to walk away from a fight, even if you know you can win. There is way too much risk in being hurt or being sued. And going back to the first point, if the mission is to get home to your family, who cares about pride. Easier said than done though for a macho guy.
Situational Awareness: How often do we walk around caught up in our own thoughts unaware of everything around us. I can’t tell you how many times I see people walking down the street with their face in a phone. It’s also why I don’t walk around with headphones blaring music.
This causes terrible situational awareness. You can’t see possible threats around you. This is a huge issue in San Francisco which is full of insane drugged-out crazies in the downtown area. Or an issue really in any major city you go to. It’s not just about crime, it’s also about avoiding possible traffic accidents.
Risk Management and Breakpoints: Basically before you go anywhere like a restaurant or movie. Play scenarios in your mind and understand what could possibly go wrong. Evaluate possible exit points and the safest and fastest way to get out with your family.
A Breakpoint is where you can’t see anyone and an area of possible danger. Make sure you know where these are. So for example, I never sit with my back to the door. Always with my back facing the wall. I think many of us naturally do this because you don’t want anyone walking or moving behind you. Basically, Have a plan anywhere and everywhere you go.
Have a Redline: Break distances from possible threats into different zones. Keep them as far away as possible, but as they get closer entering each zone, you can act or evaluate accordingly. Basically use the OODA loop. Orient, Observe, Decide and Act.
For many of us who have families, a Redline could be a high potential threat to our families.
If they cross the Redline, you have to act with incredible speed and violence. Hold nothing back. As they say, Shoot to kill.
So for those reading this, I know the question is how is this relevant to business, investing or life outside of self defense. Well there is a lot here.
For every business, every investment, you should always have a plan or thesis. You should always be aware of your environment (read trends around you) and play out possible scenarios in your head even when nothing is happening. Always have a plan. When bad things happen, at least you have some clear steps on what to do. This will help prevent you from being frozen in indecision and surprise. As I heard from the guys, in times of shock and tiredness, you regress to the level of your training. And most importantly, don’t let pride get in the way in admitting you screwed up. Own it, fix it and move on. Pride has REKT more than a few investors and businessmen.
Basically, as Marine General James Mattis once said: ‘Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’
This is a pretty good rule in life I think, especially in America these days and in the chaos around us during the pandemic age.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 17th, 2021
“Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.”― Virgil
1. This is incredibly smart.
"Jon Oringer, the billionaire founder and former leader of ShutterstockInc., a global photography provider, is taking aim at a new gig.
Over the past year, he and a partner have invested in more than 100 high-tech startups, 10 of which Mr. Oringer himself co-founded. He prefers to bankroll executives who have started and run businesses that flopped.
“Trying again after failing shows perseverance,” the 47-year-old entrepreneur explains. “We look for people with that track record because it’s the same as my track record.”
2. There is much we can learn here. Being a Portfolio entrepreneur. The future of work. This is a worthwhile read.
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/stepping-off-a-rocketship-strapping
3. "Nearly a decade later, Veritas Capital’s assets have grown from $2 billion in 2012 to $36 billion today, and its funds have generated staggering net internal rates of return of 31%. The funds have lost money on only a single investment ($87 million on a solar panel company in New Mexico), and since Musallam took over, Veritas has distributed $12 billion to its investors. At 53, Musallam finds himself worth an estimated $4 billion, good enough for a debut appearance on this year’s Forbes 400.
Musallam produced this track record by focusing on technology companies that operate in sectors dominated by the United States’ federal government, particularly defense, health care and education. America’s $6.8 trillion worth of annual spending and sweeping regulatory power give it unparalleled sway in these markets. While many buyout firms try to avoid investing in areas affected by government interference, Musallam’s strategy hinges on understanding what the most influential player in the global economy will do next." https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2021/09/29/wall-streets-top-secret-billionaire-investor/
4. Business travelers subsidize 5-6 economy class travelers on flights.
https://thehustle.co/why-airlines-need-business-travel-to-return/
5. The World’s most important Semiconductor chip company: TSMC. A counterpoint to those who do not believe Taiwan is strategic to the USA.
"The $550 billion firm today controls more than half the global market for made-to-order chips and has an even tighter stranglehold on the most advanced processors, with more than 90% of market share by some estimates.
“TSMC is just absolutely critical,” says Peter Hanbury, a semiconductor specialist at the Bain & Co. consulting firm. “They basically control the most complicated part of the semiconductor ecosystem, and they’re a near monopoly at the bleeding edge.”
https://time.com/6102879/semiconductor-chip-shortage-tsmc/
6. #futureofwork
"Mr Bloom is part of a growing brigade of digital nomads in Europe, who work remotely while satisfying their wanderlust. This kind of itinerant lifestyle is as old as laptops and free internet. But covid-19 has given it a boost. A game of lockdown arbitrage began earlier this year as border controls eased and people fled congested cities like Berlin and London. Some headed for other cities, such as Lisbon and Madrid, which offered sunshine and looser lockdown rules. Others chose remote spots on the Mediterranean and in the Alps.
Now covid-19 restrictions are easing but the trend continues as many Europeans reject a traditional office routine after a year and a half of remote work. As Yoon-Joo Jee, an entrepreneur who has spent the pandemic between Seoul, Geneva and Lisbon, puts it: “there's an addiction in moving and exploring new places.”
https://archive.is/J75OP#selection-699.0-699.850
7. This is going to have major implications for the world wide supply chain.
"It’s the worst electricity crisis China has faced in a decade. The immediate cause is that China is still highly dependent on coal, which provides 70 percent of the country’s power generation. The electricity prices paid to generators are regulated by the central government, while coal prices are set on the market. When coal prices rise, unless regulators increase electricity prices, it doesn’t make economic sense for coal power plants to keep supplying electricity. Plants can then avoid generating at a loss by claiming they have a technical malfunction or by failing to purchase the coal they need to run, both of which happened in the run-up to the current crisis."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/07/china-energy-crisis-electricity-coal-pricing-renewables/
8. "There is an opportunity for early adopters to write the conventional wisdom of tomorrow. There is an opportunity for the people that identify trends to take action today. And there is an opportunity to reposition yourself from a dystopian mindset, designed by conventional wisdom of times gone by, to a hopeful and positive mindset empowered by conventional wisdom of tomorrow.
There is an opportunity to attack fatalistic mindsets and empower people to play the long game. To educate them on what they intuitively know. That we are living through the digital transformation. And that the digital age requires a new conventional wisdom.
Those that learn to adapt to this new age quickly and that decisively deploy their money towards it can break free of the established order
of the late industrial age."
https://dougantin.com/opportunities-form-as-we-circle-the-drain/
9. Lots of lessons from history here. Well worth a read.
"Politicians wanting to stay in office will always bow to public pressure at the ballot box to inflate the money supply and lower interest rates because that requires less pain than deflation which causes businesses to shutter and lays people off even if it does preserve people’s ability to save money and earn a high rate of return on savings.
There are no bad guys in this story, just everyone with their own problems doing what is best for themselves. I am trying to protect my family and capital, bankers are trying to not get fired, and politicians are trying to be reelected.
It is completely understandable when looking back at the decisions previous generations made."
People can evaluate for themselves if they want to have a portion of their net worth in an asset which is not dependent on politicians and bankers.
For me after studying history, whether inflationary or deflationary, bitcoin is a way to save value outside the system."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/world-war-i-to-bitcoin
10. 110% agree here. Hungary, Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia are tops on my list.
"We support the idea of finding a place where you can retire and “live like a king.” In today’s world of competition and opportunity, it only makes sense to go where you’re treated best.
Everything considered – real estate, second residency, currency, investments, lifestyle, all of it – Eastern Europe is the place to go for retirement."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/early-retirement-best-places-to-retire/
11. "Inflation Only Benefits Asset Holders: As mentioned many many times here, the only people who like inflation are the ultra rich and the people who do not understand asset valuation. The only people with assets are the wealthy. Instead of addressing wealth disparity they will attempt to address “income disparity”. Which of course, doesn’t impact a CEO making $1/year in annual salary (heroic!).
Since inflation benefits asset holders, you can wager that mainstream outlets will begin to push this narrative. That inflation isn’t “a bad thing”. They will then move to various spins to help the masses agree with this statement. It will be difficult but it’s one of their only hopes in keeping everyone calm."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/inflation-jp-morganbofa-a-10000-investment
12. "The suburbs will not vanish as a result of America’s new need for density; they will simply change. But what will they change into? What will the new suburbs look like, and what will the lives of people in them be like? Obviously there will be a wide variety, but I think that current trends are starting to sketch us a rough outline of that future."
"The densification of the suburbs that I envision here will not solve all of the problems of American urbanism. There will still be some segregation by class and race. Good local train networks like those enjoyed in Europe and Asia will still be far too few, and cars too common. The suburbs will still be too distant to form a truly efficient urban network. America will not become the Netherlands, and it will not become Japan.
But things will be moderately better. Housing will be a bit more affordable, living near to a knowledge industry center will be a bit easier, cars will kill somewhat fewer people. More people will know their neighbors, and life in the American suburbs will be less socially isolating and stultifying."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/life-in-the-new-american-suburbs
13. I like Matt Damon.
"I ask Bono whether he’s saying that, in the nicest possible way, Damon is not that good at being a celebrity.
“Yeah, that might be the truth,” Bono replies, and contrasts a particular glazed look he has learned to recognize in the eyes of some politicians he meets with the affect of someone like Damon. “He’s not professional,” Bono suggests. “He’s way beyond that. He’s an amateur, in the way that he should always be, regarding celebrity. You know, quite good at it on the weekends, probably falls down in the week. But the respect for people and for human life, and the squandering of it, that’s absolutely core to who he is. And he’s just trying to be useful. Trying to be helpful.”
https://www.gq.com/story/matt-damon-october-cover-profile
14. I'm definitely a supporter. It’s early days but the promise is there.
"Although ketamine is legal if prescribed by a doctor, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) lists psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substance Act, which says they have no medical value and a high potential for abuse. But there’s also growing evidence that psychedelics could lead to game-changing medications and, when combined with conventional therapy, may help people who aren’t seeing results through currently available treatments. Several US cities have already decriminalized psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is overseeing clinical trials into using psychedelics to treat PTSD and depression.
This potentially revolutionary approach to mental health also represents a tremendous commercial opportunity for health care and pharmaceutical companies."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22716491/psychedelics-ketamine-mental-health-research-fda
15. This is worth watching. Don't agree with all the assessments but overall this is sobering & his points are well argued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1IJ9kqBilE&t=1814s
16. This is immensely sad. I really dislike hedge funds. Well, Alden don't pretend they are saints like others.
"What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.
The men who devised this model are Randall Smith and Heath Freeman, the co-founders of Alden Global Capital. Since they bought their first newspapers a decade ago, no one has been more mercenary or less interested in pretending to care about their publications’ long-term health.
With aggressive cost-cutting, Alden can operate its newspapers at a profit for years while turning out a steadily worse product, indifferent to the subscribers it’s alienating."
17. This is awesome and long overdue. Standardized Legal templates for VC fund set up, an otherwise very painful and expensive process.
18. For those interested in Asian geopolitics, this is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IO1ROPIjd8
19. This is quite illuminating....worth watching. Kind of explains everything going on in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8Ndnpfw69w&t=2s
20. "Despite being a latecomer to Hollywood, Bautista found success quickly, starting with his breakout role as Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy when he was in his mid-40s. Now he’s scored the role, as the villainous unit Glossu “Beast” Rabban in the elegant sci-fi epic Dune (out October 22), with the guy, director Denis Villeneuve, and he should play an even larger role in the film’s forecasted second installment. Dune is big—Dune is “Dave Bautista’s arm” big.
For Bautista, who tells me, “It wasn’t until my 40s when I really started to be okay with myself,” his progress from bouncer to wrestler to action star to serious fuckin’ actor is hugely validating. And for those of us who may sometimes feel underactualized and appalled by the rate at which we are careening toward senescence, Bautista’s self-reinvention in his 50s is thrilling."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a37712403/dave-bautista-dune-movie-interview/
21. What a story. Intense too. The point. Learn how to fight and defend yourself.
"I saw in that moment, how everything was, and how everything would be. You’re on your own. There wasn’t anyone coming to save you, cops included. You had to watch what you’re doing at all times, and, when the time comes, you handle your business."
https://www.bobbydino.com/blog/riot
22. What could possibly go wrong here.....at the same time I kind of want one or two myself.
23. "Before web3, users and builders had to choose between the limited functionality of web1 or the corporate, centralized model of web2.
Web3 offers a new way that combines the best aspects of the previous eras. It’s very early in this movement and a great time to get involved."
https://future.a16z.com/why-web3-matters/
24. Geography really does matter. The Balkans as a case study (a region I love btw).
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/why-were-the-balkans-underdeveloped
25. Hard to argue with this. The extremely high level of dishonesty and fake it till you make it in tech these days. Not good.
"The more I think about all this wackiness and assholery across the economy, it becomes clearer that there have simply been no parents around. The institutions or financial constraints that are supposed to teach a well-formed, but still developing mind, the difference between right and wrong haven’t been around. The entire economy feels like it’s acting like a teenager. Every CEO tweet, every odd price action, Adam Aron not wearing pants, just all of it. The more I remember my own mindset during those awkward, formative years, the more everything starts to make sense."
Your Inside Game is More Important than the Outside Game
We’ve all seen these situations in real life, and in some cases, actually been in these situations. The Supremely fit Olympic Athlete who cracks under pressure in a competition. The ball player who trains madly for years but freezes in his/her first game. A student who flunks the final test they spent a semester or two preparing for.
What is the universal cause? They did not crack from the external competition & the audience and attention. They cracked from not being able to handle the pressure: basically they psyched themselves out.
What I learned in investing is that the mental game is the critical factor of success. Most of the time you know what you need to do but you don’t due to insecurity, fear or indecisiveness. I learned that psychology accounts for most of investors' mistakes. How many folks sold their stocks back in March 2020 due to fear? I did and boy did it cost me. Loss aversion cognitive bias at work, which ironically caused me even more losses in missing the incredible run up on stock prices.
The best investors are able to manage their psychology incredibly well on a consistent basis. Almost Stoically. To do that, first you must dig in deeply to understand yourself & what drives you . Sometimes it's negative things like fear & shame. The shadow as some folks call it. It goes without saying, I strongly recommend that seeing a therapist or coach will help.
The Process is important. Visualization. Meditation. Journaling. Exercise. All these contribute to improving your mental inner game.
The biggest competition is not with others but with yourself. Once you understand this you will look at life in a very different way.
This all seems simple and obvious but yet how many people actually do these? As Laozi states: “The Easy way seems Hard”
The Extremes of America: Why It’s both the Best & Worst Country on the Planet
If you get past the clickbaity title, you will find that it’s absolutely true. I am incredibly fortunate to have lived in San Francisco now for the last 22 years of my life and have a Love-Hate relationship with America. Trying not to sound ungrateful, I admit I been such a huge beneficiary of America. Yet I can definitely say that I’ve seen the country as a whole degrade substantially over the last decade. I speak as both an American and Canadian who has lived abroad and is fairly well travelled.
I don’t think I got how broken the USA was as a place until my young daughter told me how they had “Active Shooter” drills at her elementary school. A food system that is awful: cheap but unhealthy and captured by the corporate food industry. The widespread issue of mental health, homeless and guns. A rapidly declining education system at the pre-University level. How most bankruptcies are caused by healthcare costs and medical emergencies, despite having one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world. Almost 17.7% of the GDP is spent on healthcare, almost $4 trillion dollars a year! The quality of life is really crap and America is literally like the book “No Country for Old Men” but with a badly run government by old white men. Life can be harrowing and honestly, I never really feel secure there. The quality of life is just not that great compared to Canada, Australia or New Zealand or most of Western Europe.
Yet despite all of this, I still can’t imagine doing business anywhere else. The United States will always be one of my bases. It’s one of the best places in the world for business and is the place to learn the craft of business. As President Coolridge once said “The business of America is Business!”
It is a massive market of 330M people that still attracts the best and brightest from around the world. America is one of the most commercial cultures that is highly competitive. And for the most part, still governed by law that is still business friendly unlike in many parts of the world. It is still the country of opportunity.
Yes, I do argue that the future opportunities of Africa and Latin America will be massive but for many the trade off in quality of life (ie. even higher crime rates there than in America) may be too much (as in my previous blog post on this topic. Here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/high-opportunity-places-vs-high-quality). I worry about going soft and losing my edge when I spend too much time in Canada or Taiwan. The USA is the place to hone your skills and keeps you market ready and competitive.
But in this remote work world you can have both a high quality of life for a good price without missing out on business and investing opportunities. This is where the Digital nomad lifestyle comes into play. I still spend time in San Francisco but it’s limited with the bulk of my time in Canada & Taiwan with my family. I’ve also thrown in Ukraine and Portugal, Mexico and Japan (when it opens up). Basically it’s a “Follow the Sun” strategy where I spend time where the weather is nice. So for example, Europe & Canada is where I spend the bulk of spring and summer, while winter is when I am mainly in Taiwan (assuming they open their doors soon that is). This is very important as weather is a big driver of my mood and happiness.
The point is the problems and issues in America are also some of the biggest opportunities. There are so many things to be fixed. This is why we will continue seeing entrepreneurship grow and grow here. And as we’ve seen all it takes is a small percentage of amazing individuals to start a movement and change the world. Despite all the problems, as multi-billionaire Warren Buffet once said “Never Bet Against America.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 10th, 2021
“Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.”― Gautama Buddha
"For the aspiring Sovereign Individual, a person of humble and growing means, you have to take a pragmatic approach to creating your passport portfolio.
Design your jurisdictional arbitrage strategy so that the countries you select address a couple of lifestyle needs and benefits.
That could include favorable policies for freedom of speech, business rule of law, crime, safety, graft, and quality of life. And of course it should also include countries with Covid policies that align with your beliefs.
You should consider border restrictions and other geopolitical considerations. Are you placing all your eggs in one basket with western nations? Should you be seeking citizenship in Western rival nations?
Are you designing your passport to consider both ascending and descending nations? 1st world, 2nd world, and 3rd world exposure?"
https://dougantin.com/lifes-tradeoffs-impact-where-you-live-why/
2. Shows how much Hollywood has sold out to China and the CCP.
"Hollywood’s China troubles are well known. Only a few U.S. movies get released each year in the world’s largest film market. Negative portrayals of China risk bans, not just for individual films but entire studios. Plot lines involving China’s government, let alone Chinese spymasters, are thus off limits.
2001’s Spy Game did feature a rare plot linked to China. But in general, no major Hollywood release has portrayed China’s government in a negative light since 1997’s Seven Years in Tibet, as analyst Matt Schrader has shown."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/05/bond-no-time-to-die-daniel-craig-hollywood-china
3. Good observation.
"To me, the Great Fragmentation is the result of an alignment of interests, in every country, between the government and users. As proven by many industries, starting with Hollywood, user demand for customized products was long not enough to make the industry change its approach to serving national markets: the attraction of economies of scale was just too difficult to resist, and every corporation that could afford it tended to impose the same product on everyone on the global market.
Likewise, the fact that governments enforced a set of (stupid) local rules was never enough to make tech companies comply if users were perfectly happy with the product. In the end, the Shift/Fragmentation/Decolonization could happen if users andthe government agreed: together, we want a customized approach to serve our market, and we’ll force those big (US) tech companies to comply."
https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/digital-sovereignty-thumbs-updown
4. "In a decentralized world, good geography will be one of the scarcest and most valuable assets on the planet again and it is currently undervalued since for most, they grew up in a world where geography hasn’t mattered.
I started thinking about geography in a decentralized world, and remembering my time in Asia, thought what is more scarce, durable, and independent than the Strait of Malacca?
This helps me think how to diversify investments geopolitically, while also understanding which areas to avoid in a region, like I think the CCP has serious problems for the reasons outlined above, but am bullish on Asia. Just specific places in Asia, like Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The more I thought about how US naval doctrine will dictate responses to anything China does in earnest, it made a lot of sense from a variety of angles that Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia will do well."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/mahan-strait-of-malacca-and-dollars
5. Interesting......
"Unlike a few years ago, SoftBank is no longer the only gigantic fish in the VC pond. Rivals including Tiger Global Management, Coatue Management, Insight Partners and Andreessen Horowitz have raised bigger and bigger funds in the past couple of years. That’s helped these firms win some of the deals Son has wanted, said two people with direct knowledge of such deals.
The growing competitors also don’t have SoftBank’s baggage. High-profile implosions of WeWork and other portfolio companies in SoftBank’s first Vision Fund, such as construction tech company Katerra and lender Greensill Capital—both of which are now defunct—have tainted the Vision Fund’s name with some founders, even though the fund’s performance has rebounded overall."
"All told, 13 of the 23 investment partners listed on the Vision Fund’s website as of mid-2019 have since departed or recently announced they would leave. Only a handful of the departed partners were replaced. The moves resemble an exodus of partners from the Vision Fund nearly two years ago amid internal strife that tore apart the firm’s operations as its bets soured."
6. Don't agree with his assessment or conclusions as he definitely has a very Anti-US bent but....still worth a read.
"China, for all of its power and strength, actually has a VASTLY overrated military. The PLA’s record in actual combat is PISS-POOR. Despite the best attempts of Chinese propagandists to rewrite the history of China’s intervention in the Korean War, they lost 200,000 men in that war – that’s the LOWER END of the estimates of their actual casualties. Some estimates run as high as ONE MILLION DEAD on the Chinese side. Compared with some 40,000 (roughly) American and Western allied soldiers killed, and about a million South Korean soldiers and civilians killed, that loss ratio on China’s part is genuinely appalling – and even more so was the PLA leadership’s willingness to use attrition tactics without any thought for the lives of the men.
Some thirty years later, they couldn’t manage to defeat the Vietnamese – indeed, the Vietnamese were so unconcerned about China’s attempts to rebuke them for their invasion of Cambodia that they didn’t even bother diverting mainline army units to fight the Chinese."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/10/lessons-of-war-pt-1-red-storm-rising.html
7. YAH! My two favorite countries in Asia: Taiwan and Japan are getting closer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWgObGTYZrY
8. “If I'm playing the first South Asian superhero, I want to look like someone who can take on Thor or Captain America, or any of those people,” he says. But also because the character shrouds himself in the guise of a Bollywood star. Nanjiani grew up watching Bollywood movies—“From the '60s to the '90s I know basically every big [one],” says Nanjiani—so he knows those guys are jacked. “I was like, I want this to be believable. I want to feel that kind of powerful in this role.”
But his upbringing and career have primed Nanjiani to see the unexpected contours of things. So now he worries that, despite looking and feeling better than he ever has, he's nonetheless perpetuating the toxic image of masculinity that he grew up idolizing.
The way he looks is tied to a certain way of being a man. “It is aggression,” he says. “It is anger. A lot of times we are taught to be useful by using physical strength or our brain in an aggressive, competitive way."
https://www.gq.com/story/kumail-nanjiani-profile
9. "Four years ago, Bankman-Fried had yet to buy a single bitcoin. Now, five months shy of his 30th birthday, he debuts on this year’s Forbes 400 at No. 32, with a net worth of $22.5 billion. Save for Mark Zuckerberg, no one in history has ever gotten so rich so young. The irony? Bankman-Fried is no crypto evangelist. He’s barely even a believer. He’s a mercenary, dedicated to making as much money as possible (he doesn’t really care how) solely so he can give it away (he doesn’t really know to whom, or when).
Steve Jobs obsessed over his sleek and simple products. Elon Musk claims he’s in business to save humanity. Not Bankman-Fried, whose philosophy of “earning to give” drove him into the crypto gold rush, first as a trader, then as the creator of an exchange, simply because he knew he could get rich. Asked if he would abandon crypto if he thought he could pile up more money doing something else—say, trading orange juice futures—he doesn’t even pause: “I would, yeah.”
10. "Taiwan is the focus of more security cooperation in the United States. Whether or not allies could defend Taiwan successfully is one thing, but I think politically, you are seeing a coalition come together. And for Taiwan, that gives it a bit more space to maneuver, and I think it tends to offset some of the fear generated by this incursion."
https://www.vox.com/22713517/china-taiwan-tensions-united-states-xi-biden
11. Great advice.
"Here’s what I want you to know. It’s ok to walk away. It’s ok to change your mind. It’s ok to deeply listen to yourself. It’s ok to take a different path. It’s ok to press pause. It’s ok to question what matters most to you. It’s ok to leave a “great situation” behind. It’s ok to choose a calling over potential financial upside.
Just because you’re capable of doing something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you. Follow your energy and your passion. When that happens you’ll eventually become the person you are destined to become. I can’t think of anything more fulfilling and powerful than that."
12. For all founders raising money in the seed stage. Worth a read.
https://twitter.com/jwdanner/status/1446822778494078976
13. "Surely it makes sense to try to pack as many activities as possible into each day, to be sure we meet our goals before we shuffle off this mortal coil?
In reality, this may be the very worst thing we can do to live a happy and fulfilling life. In his new book, Four Thousand Weeks, psychology writer Oliver Burkeman argues that this only leads to disappointment and unhappiness – thanks to a phenomenon known as the “productivity trap”. In his view, we would do far better to slow down, rather than speed up, if we are to make the most of our short lifespans."
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210805-how-to-escape-the-productivity-trap
14. "Looking at 2022, any significant level of ongoing power disruptions will begin to cause fractures in China’s economy, particularly in the finance and heavy manufacturing sectors as well as within the population. Such fissures have in the past led to increased belligerence by China against neighboring and regional countries, which could have unexpected disruptive effects on maritime and air traffic in the Far East.
With regard to which sectors of the economic base will receive favored treatment for any surplus power, heavy manufacturing (auto, shipbuilding, infrastructure), high technology, energy (renewable and traditional), petrochemicals, medical, and metal processing will likely be protected first."
https://fortisanalysis.substack.com/p/coal-for-christmas
15. I'm a big fan of Georgia (the country) and this shows a strong case for adoption of Bitcoin here.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/.amp/culture/bitcoin-adoption-for-the-country-georgia
16. Worth watching this to understand what's happening in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVWAxZU89Ys
17. "To say the least, Dastmalchian is no longer broke or, as he puts it of his past, looking for his “next fix.” What he is doing is bringing an enormous amount of humanity to outcasts, even sometimes downright terrible people, who he feels nevertheless deserve a voice. He’s ready to bring it. And based on his standout roles in both The Suicide Squad as the fan favorite Polka-Dot Man (tormented with illuminated spots and not nearly as silly as he sounds) and the hotly anticipated Dune, which reunites him with Villeneuve, he’s delivered."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a37897920/david-dastmalchian-suicide-squad-dune-interview/
18. "Kevin Ryan has become very wealthy by being at the right place at the right time — including at online ad network DoubleClick, which he joined as its twelfth employee and eventually ran as CEO (it was later acquired, twice) — as well as co-founding numerous companies, including the software company MongoDB, which is currently valued at roughly $30 billion as a publicly traded company. (Ryan still owns “at least half my shares” in the company, he says.)
The other day, we talked with Ryan about his biggest, newest bet, which is on healthcare tech."
19. Interesting observation: shows maturation of VC as asset class. Passive investing.
The Cycle of Life: Career, Crisis and Family
I’ve recently gotten into this recent modern Taiwanese tv series called “The Making of an Ordinary Woman”, which traces the story of a young career oriented lady who is making her life in the big city of Taipei far away from her family down in Tainan (southern Taiwan).
She spends so much of her youth trying to get away from family to carve out her own life. But after decades away, achieving a high level of career success, she finds herself very dissatisfied and gravitating back to her family in Tainan.
I find myself understanding this and relating to this a bit too much. I literally left Canada the moment I graduated from University in 1996. I could not wait to get out from the small and stifling environment of Vancouver. I remember the joke was that Vancouver had the best educated waiters and waitresses in the world due to the lack of good employment. I was determined to make something of myself elsewhere. What a grand adventure it has been.
But if the pandemic taught me anything, it's the importance of family. We all say this but do we really understand this point? Life is a cycle: It’s so weird. During the ongoing pandemic, I spent almost 20 months away from my parents in Canada and close to 9 months away from my daughter in Taiwan, due to the cursed travel bans and such. Family is something so easy to take for granted. Yet I’ve learned how precarious and precious they are. How safe and comfortable you feel even as an adult when you are with your parents.
“Life is long so you can go back and fix your mistakes, but it is short enough that you should not dwell on unhappiness.” (Quote from the show)
I don’t regret anything or the path my life and career has taken me. But things have changed so much in the world that you can now have it all with the rise of remote work and entrepreneurship globally. You can start a world class company or work at a high paying job from anywhere.
How amazing it is for young ambitious people these days. No more trade offs. Remote work opens up the possibility of not giving up family for career advancement. This is something I am fully taking advantage of now. And you should too.
Rip the Bandage OFF NOW: There is No Better Time for Personal Change
The reality right now is many people are feeling stuck & unhappy. A recent survey by Gartner states that only 13% are highly satisfied with their work. A whopping 46% are HIGHLY dissatisfied with their work experience. In 2020 and 2021, Americans have been shown to be the unhappiest they have ever been in 50 years, with just 14% of Americans stating they are very happy, a massive drop from 31% in 2018.
No surprise considering that we’ve gone through a pretty tumultuous time in the last one and half years: with the continuing pandemic, disastrously incompetent government reactions (or lack of reaction), riots in the street, massive fires, destruction of main street commerce, job destruction, an ongoing disaster in Afghanistan as i write. Morale is definitely down in America and people are feeling fatigued, worn out and listless.
Yet many people refuse or won’t take action to change their personal situation. Could be due to laziness or fear both being big drivers of inactivity. Or hope that things will get better by themselves. But relying on outside factors to change a recipe for failure. People should remember that the status quo is psychological death. Hope is NOT a strategy. If you don’t take any action or control of your own life, it’s a 100% percent guarantee that you will fail. Better to try something, heck try anything (outside of drugs and alcohol of course), at least the odds will be better for you.
But in my opinion, a big reason most people won’t take action is because they care about how any changes will be perceived by others. These are mainly family members, friends or their peers. Social acceptance of our actions is wired into our being and we worry about what other people think about us or what we do.
Yet the reality is no one really cares. In fact, they probably did not care before 2020 as they were busy with their own life. In 2021, with the continuing pandemic, many of us are stuck at home and isolated away from other people. People are now either in survival mode or engrossed more than usual in their own mainly virtual lives. They literally aren’t able to pay attention.
The result? It is now the BEST time to be making these big life changes because nobody is paying attention. So quit that soul destroying job. Join some workout program like Peloton or Tonal. Take some classes like an Ondeck Fellowship or David Perells “Write of Passage”, both which I highly recommend. Go start that side business or side hustle. If you are unhappy in your city; move to another one. Or move out of the country like many people I know. The world and society is transforming around us. You should do the same.
The best way to change your life is through action and movement. Much easier to do so in stealth conditions. If it works out, which it usually does, awesome. If it does not, who cares? No one is watching anyways. So go forth, you literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 3rd, 2021
“Heroism is Endurance for one minute more”--George F. Kennan
"The point is that policies will shift as the nature of productive society changes.
The people and institutions that advocate for policies to stay the same and “go back to normal” are the immune system response of the elite players of the old game. The winners of the previous age protecting their status and influence.
We’re increasingly exposed to hostile messaging of the established system from the previous age. Intended to influence the world in order to reflect the old game at the cost of the new. Simultaneously, influencers of the new age attempt to wrestle control of public policies to reflect digital age needs.
This is a flash point, a tectonic fault line that causes friction along key areas of innovation.
In areas where the old system is overly defensive, the flash points are more severe. Making it likely that we see an acceleration of cognitive dissonance. Confusion for individuals struggling to decide what game to play. The old? Or the new?"
https://dougantin.com/how-tech-trends-change-the-rules-of-the-game/
2. "On a final positive note, 2021 is still the greatest time to be alive. Crypto currency is solving a large chunk of these issues in real time. Intermediaries simply sit in the “flow of money” and that rent extraction is moving to digital currencies. Therefore, we don’t even care about the prior three steps! They were just there to tell you the real issue (wealth disparity *not* income disparity).
Instead of fighting all of these loopholes, remember that no one is coming to save you. Not your boss, your family or your country. Save yourself by playing the game correctly (“Don’t hate the player, hate the game")
The game is won by creating digital income (online income) and investing into high quality technology firms and crypto currencies in our opinion. This way your income can be moved to a more tax friendly state/country. This is what the wealthy are doing so you should do it too."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/for-dummies-wealth-inequality-is
3. "And that is what you don’t understand in your complacency, you now have a generation who is now saying what you have been telling them back to you,
“Life isn’t fair, we will keep bringing it, and we don’t want your form of capitalism”
You should be very worried. I have seen this play out overseas. You are a Baby Boomer who is soft, past his prime, doesn’t bench press his bodyweight, and works with a keyboard and not a rifle with much to lose.
Being complacent is survivable in a stable society. It is not a winning strategy when volatility finds you in life.
But life is nothing but volatility and when you continually try to suppress it, instead of addressing the cause of it, you only compound the problem.
What starts as economic and market volatility becomes political volatility which finally transforms to societal volatility."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/the-wall-street-insurgency
4. "The wolves are circling within and without, defining our new reality through dialectic and drafting all souls into the conflict whether they choose to care or not. China or a US-led Anglosphere?
Corporatocratic authoritarianism or fascistic traditionalism? And thus we each find ourselves locating our place in this age of the Long Defeat. It will not end easy, and likely not bloodlessly.
May God curse the weak men and women who have succumbed in this moment to the easy siren songs of nihilism, collectivism, or authoritarianism. They who have betrayed liberty, the most precious of gifts granted to man."
https://fortisanalysis.substack.com/p/the-long-defeat
5. This is a good interview with an interesting entrepreneur & investor. All about learning opportunities.
https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/yaro-starak/
6. "While P2E gaming is still in its infancy, games like Axie Infinity have proven that hundreds of thousands of people can earn money and create monetizable value through play. Assuming this model holds up, we will likely see gaming transform from an activity that distracts players from being productive into one that allows people to earn a livelihood in the economy of the future."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/playing-earning-working-learning
7. Tech legends here.
8. Worth a read to understand what's up in VC these days.
https://twitter.com/magdalenakala/status/1443382644809547783
9. "The seemingly unique techniques of freediving, then, translate beyond the bounds of freediving. To other sports, to work, to relationships with colleagues and friends and family. There are, it turns out, benefits to better breathing, to masterful body control, and to pursuing the state of mindfulness that is required to plunge to unfathomable depths without freaking the fuck out and accidentally killing yourself. “There is a part of freediving,” the world's best freediver, Alexey Molchanov, says, “that can be very useful for everyone.”
"There is, though, also the allure of records. The raw number. How deep can we go as a species?Today, there is one diver who goes the deepest, who blends the physical and metaphysical like no one else in the sport. Watching the 34-year-old Russian Alexey Molchanov dive can be dangerously disorienting. Seemingly anyone else attempting what he does would die. It is like watching the world's best rock climber scale a sheer face with ease, only the inverse. That's one way to think of what he's doing: Free Solo but for drowning. Free Solo but down. And no one alive goes down like Alexey Molchanov."
https://www.gq.com/story/freediver-alexey-molchanov-profile
10. For Dune fans, this is good to know. Love this book series.
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a37771990/best-dune-books-in-order/
11. "The best way to handle the risks and uncertainty of scalable occupations is to share them. Doctors or fitness instructors or writers or investment advisors worried about the future can issue tokens and let their fans and customers participate in their careers' ups and downs.
And just like with celebrities, sharing risk is only part of the story. By letting other people invest in you, you are incentivizing them to promote your own story and do their best to increase your tokens' value.
In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme. If you can attract enough people to buy your tokens, and they can attract enough people to buy even more tokens, the whole enterprise will continue to increase in value. This increase will happen regardless of how much revenue you can generate from doing your actual job. And it will continue until you run out of stories to tell, or until you run out of people to tell stories to.
There are a lot of people on the internet."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/the-ponzi-career/
12. "The flood of new Miamians who have arrived, full or part time, during the pandemic includes tech investors (Peter Thiel, David Sacks), cryptocurrency bulls (Anthony Pompliano, Ari Paul), new-media tycoons (Bryan Goldberg, Dave Portnoy), start-up founders (Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Steven Galanis), and many more who aren’t yet billionaires but think the Magic City will give them their best shot.
They’re breaking sales records for dock-accessed mansions by day and packing the new branches of Carbone and Red Rooster by night. The boom is visible in the city’s crane-spiked skyline, too, with deals for Spotify, Microsoft, Apple, and TikTok either signed or in the offing. In greater South Florida, a related incursion by the finance industry — Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Elliott — is in full swing.
Wall Street may not be quaking over Miami’s ascendancy, but in the zero-sum game among cities, San Francisco is indisputably feeling some pain. In July, according to Redfin, Miami was the top migration destination for home buyers in the U.S., while San Francisco had the largest homeowner exodus."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/how-miami-seduced-silicon-valley.html
13. "Over the last decade, Peak and other Turkish gaming studios have transformed Istanbul into the world capital of the “casual game” (otherwise known as free-to-play games) industry. Unlike AAA games, like Halo, Assassin’s Creed, or Final Fantasy, casual games are mobile-native, easy to learn, shorter to play and target the broadest audience possible. According to 2020 statistics, around 58.86% of all mobile game players are casual gamers. It’s estimatedthat the global market for casual gaming is worth more than $8 billion.
In March 2021, six of the Apple App Store’s top ten mobile games in the U.S. came from Turkish studios......And Istanbul has become a magnet for up-and-coming game developers."
https://restofworld.org/2021/turkey-gaming-peak/
14. "NFT collections, and especially the latest wave of ‘avatar communities’ aka PFP collections, have the potential to mirror this healthy dynamic. When we own a SupDuck or Cryptoad, we have a motivation to engage in behavior that makes everyone’s ownership more significant.
As ‘residents’ of that virtual neighborhood, we all have an interest in broadening the list of ‘stuff you get’ as part of your NFT. And yet, the vast majority of these projects pay only lip service to that potential. The vast majority of projects offer only hand-waving assurances of future amenities. Rather than investing in genuinely valuable services for its community, the focus tends rather to be on shilling and stunts to generate FOMO.
Most of today’s Web3 virtual neighborhoods are following the history of the physical world’s McMansions; building 10,000 ‘homes’ in the middle of nowhere hoping people move in. The awareness that needs to take place in order to avoid a mass flippening is the approach Web3 takes to constructing neighborhoods. Instead of just finding land, developing homes and hoping community fosters through a shared space, developers need to invest in making sure individual buyers get value out of their experience. This means making sure that every single day, there is something happening in the community. NFTs communities can be awesome, we just need to start building shit inside of them."
https://darkstar.mirror.xyz/VTLvmo0xzs6I9YFIN2f7EZna-Zj4tNIEbF7RVpJOS7s
15. This is a must read for founders. It’s a weird market right now.
"With the current market, Series A+ investors are using a couple of strategies which work to their favor but are not that great for founders. One strategy is to seed fund companies you like to give yourself an advantage if they do achieve PMF. The main problem with this for founders is that venture investors know nothing about finding PMF unless the specific partners was a serial founder or has an immense amount of seed experience.
They also have no time to spend with their optionality bets. However, founders love the brands of these firms and will often allow them to crowd out seed investors who would be more helpful. This is seen regularly in YC demo days where venture investors will write checks to capture the optionality of promising companies. Only later do founders realize that there is nothing but cash and some brand value in these deals, the partners don’t have time or expertise for the dirty work and experimentation to find PMF."
16. The man is a Libertarian kook but he has some good ideas. (and pretty good contrarian investor and writer).
"First of all, education is something that you provide for yourself. It’s not something that somebody—certainly not the State—gives you.
....even if you don’t want to internationalize, the next best thing is to quit your job and become self-employed.
But beyond that, in order to have control of your life, you need capital, which gives you flexibility and room to run.
So how do you get that capital?
If you’re not in a position to quit your job and become self-employed, then take a second job— part-time. The advantage of that is your income will go up and your expenses, in the way of consuming, will go down. Put that money aside.
The key is to cut your spending to the bone and save. That means don’t buy that new car or trade up to a larger house. Don’t go out and get a new wardrobe.
Build capital while the economy and the currency are still held together. Capital will allow you to take advantage of opportunities in the future, as opposed to getting deeper in debt like a serf."
17. This is a very exciting future here enabled by software.
"The solo stacks of the future will offer a mix of these three things (depending on what makes sense for any industry), giving workers the tools — and thus, the confidence — to leave their jobs. The software will be vertical-specific, as well, as lawyers, personal trainers, money managers, and graphic designers all need different tools, have different customers to market to, and require access to different networks to do their jobs."
https://future.a16z.com/solo-workers-software-stack/
18. "Look, I’m all for using “green energy.” However, I’m a realist—you need to first build the “green economy” before you shut off the “carbon economy.” Going through the steps in reverse, is bound to create an energy crisis—which may incidentally be the goal here. If carbon is unaffordable, everyone will be forced to pivot into “green energy”—costs be damned. I’m a hedgie; this will be a minor inconvenience for me—it will cause chaos for most of society."
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/09/29/will-esg-create-the-next-lehman-moment/
19. Insightful read.
"Reading this list, it felt like a kind of post-mortem that could apply not just to the Vietnam War, but with a few minor revisions, the War on Terror, personal and work relationships, failed product launches, the tumble of once-great corporations."
Iron Versus Gold: Learning to Love Good Times and Bad Times
War time and Peace Time. Depressions and Boom Times.
I’ve thought alot about why militaries that are developed during times of peace tend to get wrecked in the beginning of the war. The generals who rise and run it during peace tend to be bureaucrats and politicians versus true warriors or strategists who only emerge when the S--t hits the fan. And you literally will not know until you go to war. This is why wargaming and stress testing is so important.
This is why I’m worried about investors who have only been through a bull market. Everything they learn only works when the market goes up. Risk tolerance goes up.They over-leverage themselves. Then the market turns and they get REKT. Badly.
This is the same with employees, especially software engineers who have only been in high demand coming out of school. They get their inevitable raises, keep making more money. Or if they have some small issue with the company they can literally move to another company in the same building and get a 20% raise. Entitlement grows, they fall into the Hedonistic Adoption treadmill where their cost structure goes up. The economy inevitably turns or more likely the programming language they use becomes outdated. If you don’t think this can happen, try asking any COBOL or BASIC programmer. I’m clearly not a programmer. But as an investor watching the rise of the No Code/Low Code movement, I do see a day when many programming jobs go the way of coal miners.
The skill sets useful for rising markets become major encumbrances in a falling one. And vice versa. I was listening to an interesting podcast talking about Iron versus Gold. During good times, gold is valuable as a signal of success and to flex. But during wartime Iron is far more useful as it can be turned into weapons, while Gold is pretty useless for forging weapons. There is a place and time for everything. The secret and key is knowing when to hold and use either one.
This is the iron law of cycles. What goes up, must come down. When times are good, you should still be testing and preparing yourself for the inevitable bad time. I don’t mean to be paranoid. Enjoy the good times and don't assume it will last forever. Always try to stay in the present and enjoy the moment.
Same with the bad times, know that it will not be forever. Squeeze whatever joy you can out of it. Be present and don’t overthink things. All you have to do is to make it through. If you do, you will have much to look forward to. No different than what I have been seeing in San Francisco these last few weeks. This last year was plain awful for the restaurant business with many shutting down. But for the best ones who have survived, business has come back very strong. Try going to brunch at Sweet Maple or Plow. The line is literally around the block.
We humans are built to be highly adaptable & resilient compared to most other species even though we hate and fight change. Embracing this and learning skill sets and mindsets to prepare for both up and downcycles will be critical for everyone. As US Army General Eric Shinseki said:“If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.”
Consistency is King & Queen in Startups, Business & Life
Lessons from archery class. Instructor recommends focusing on groupings and consistency. Then focus on “Gap Shooting” which is the process of shooting one arrow to see where it lands and how far from the target. Use that as a measure to focus where you shoot the rest of arrows to hit the target. It’s the same principle when you fire artillery like mortars and heavy cannons.
Consistency is important to figure out what you are doing well and what you are not. Everything takes time and you can’t count on beginners' luck in the long run.
Works in Startups too. Make regular groupings and have a regular sample set.
Your first investments will suck. Your first shots will be off. But you keep fine tuning ie. Gap Shooting along the way.
This is why you have to practice and do something A LOT. I know the 10,000 hour rule Malcom Gladwell popularized to get really good at something has now been obsoleted. But the principle still sort of stands. If you want to get good at something you need to be prepared to spend a lot of time on it. Too many people quit too early.
How many podcasters or bloggers or Youtubers start off super excited but then drop off. These wannabe Creators or Influencers usually end up releasing 2-5 things but due to the lack of feedback they just quit. Seriously, most people drop off after a few tries and this is why most people fail at getting what they want. They lack the discipline and commitment to do something for a long time without the recognition and fanfare. (I should also add that you need to work on figuring out proper online marketing and distribution too. The “Build it and They Will Come” strategy in this busy and crowded media world DOES NOT Work).
The best goals are intrinsic ones: doing something that is naturally satisfying or gives you personal reward. When I started writing online, I committed to writing and publishing for a full 2 years even if no one reads it. I genuinely hope that people will read it and it will help them. But at the same, I also really don’t care if no one reads it. Why? This writing helps me personally by fine-tuning my thinking, processing all the things I see around me and acting as therapy.
So the point: keep on creating and making even if there is no audience. Harvey Mackay is right when he says: "Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time."
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 26th, 2021
“A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.”--Bernard De Fontenelle
Woke is a joke.
"This also holds true at country level. Countries that implement ever-stricter woke regulation will likely fall behind economically. This will trickle through to individual companies, and to their owners and employees. "Go woke, go broke" does carry a lot of truth in it, and it will affect people in the US and Europe."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/woke-ceos-bad-for-your-investment-performance/
2. Africa is one of the biggest and most exciting opportunity in the next decades.
3. Big fan of Josh Brolin. Can't wait to watch him in Dune.
“I’m just a junkie at heart. You know what I mean? I don’t want to get too far into this, but the idea of safety sounds like death to me.”
4. "In a way, it's easy to see why the nickname Little Prince has trailed Wizkid, born Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun, since he started making music in the mid-2000s. It's a career arc that runs parallel with the emergence of Afrobeats as a distinct genre, or at least as a distinct wave within Afropop.
The genre fuses the song structures of R&B with the distinctive melodic energy of West African palm wine music, pushing the hard, offbeat pulse of Jamaican dancehall into a more polyrhythmic clave. The sin Afrobeats nicely captures a plurality inherent to the sound itself, which is less a set formula than a constellation of Afromusics, made in West Africa but for an audience that encompasses the whole Black Atlantic diaspora."
https://www.gq.com/story/wizkid-king-of-afropop
5. Jason Momoa is the MAN!
"This sort of full-throttle enthusiasm is Momoa’s true superpower, demonstrating that he’s got more than physical DNA to sustain his rapidly multiplying pursuits. Beyond his most visible presence as an actor, now he’s producing documentary passion projects and even parlaying his ongoing relationship with Harley-Davidson into directing a six-part series spotlighting real riders around the country."
6. "In this kind of a conflict, public image will be the key. True, Cold War 2 looks likely to be less ideological than Cold War 1, because the Soviet Union was more interested than China in trying to export universalist principles. But the basic idea will be the same. If people in China think the U.S. offers a better model, they’ll be dissatisfied with the kind of system Xi Jinping is trying to force them into. If people in other countries are turned off by the kind of system they see developing in China, they’ll be more wary of being China’s ally, and so on.
But that process could easily run in the other direction. If people see America as a chaotic, ineffectual, terminally divided, deeply unequal, unfair society, they’re not going to see the U.S. as a model or trust it as an ally. And currently, the U.S. isn’t doing amazingly well in this regard."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/us-vs-china-a-battle-of-ideas-not
7. Gatorade! Fascinating.
"An undisclosed share of Gatorade’s profits flow to a Gatorade Trust. The trust then sends 20% to the university, which employed the professor who invented the drink nearly 60 years ago.
In 2015, Florida announced it had accumulated ~$250m from the royalties. Its annual take over the last few years has been ~$20m, according to the university.
These days, many universities cash in through IP policies that ensure they get the bulk of proceeds from anything invented by their staff. But that didn’t happen at Florida in 1965. Gatorade led to an expensive dispute between the inventors, the university, and the federal government.
Depending on how much credit you believe belongs to inventors or institutions, Florida’s cut from the sports drink is either way too much, or not nearly enough."
https://thehustle.co/why-the-university-of-florida-gets-a-20m-cut-of-gatorade-profits-every-year
8. "She’s the first Black woman in the Open era to be ranked the number one female tennis player in the world; she’s won a combined 21 Grand Slam championships and 4 Olympic gold medals. She also, somehow, found the time to get two degrees (in fashion design and business administration) and launch three companies (more on those later). It’s the kind of résumé that would be impressive for any athlete....."
9. Worth listening to. Jim Rogers is one of the best global macro investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYY9bal71OM&list=PL7vUOWh5dtHN0HL-ckjHLeXfW8vZgo0H8
10. Part 2 of a fascinating interview with one of the best Global macro investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DYLy6RWjv4&t=0s
11. Lots to learn from Bezos and crew at Amazon.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/jeff-bezos-tips-for-success
12. If you want to understand what's happening in the economy today, this is worth watching. Hard choices for Central Bankers: a credit collapse or riots in the street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-gr3bfXnNs
13. Hope he is right.
"On the domestic scene, Xi Jinping has amassed virtually unlimited power for himself and his allies, meaning risking war would be an unnecessary gamble. Xi can already boast of cracking down on Hong Kong, subduing Xinjiang, and reclaiming most of the contested South China Sea. But if invading Taiwan went badly, none of that would matter: his legacy in P.R.C. history would forever be tarnished.
And this brings us to the most important reason why China will not invade Taiwan: the costs of doing so, even given China’s enormous military build-up, would be too high. It would be political suicide.
If China invades, the American people will rally around the besieged democracy."
https://supchina.com/2021/06/07/no-china-will-not-invade-taiwan/
14. Always interesting profiles here.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/clarity-content-and-imposter-syndrome-with-nikhil-basu-trivedi
15. This is pretty awful.
“The lead partner took meetings barefoot, and would pick his feet incessantly. During one meeting, he lit a cigarette and smoked it in his office, windows closed. He finally put it down in his lunch plate, and poured his coffee over the cigarette to extinguish it. I didn’t know if it was some weird power play, or if he just lacked any kind of manners.”
SoftBank did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. But the Vision Fund has over the years won a reputation for eccentricity, and executives have even become known for their barefoot meetings — notably Rajeev Misra, the London-based head of the Vision Fund."
https://sifted.eu/articles/softbank-monzo-blomfield-feet/
16. This is pretty damn cool. Trento is beautiful.
17. Also appreciate the shout out here.
"This post is intended to show a specific way anyone can create personalized evergreen content. Why would you do that? Because in the digital age, you want to exist online. And you want to bypass the urge to enter into the attention economy’s arms race."
https://dougantin.com/evergreen-content-ideas-youd-hate-to-forget/
18. The Asian American Indiana Jones.
https://asamnews.com/2019/11/10/meet-a-real-life-indiana-jones-in-lost-cities/
19. Can't wait to read this new book on Peter Thiel whose influence on this generation of Silicon Valley founders & investors is hard to argue against.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-contrarian-max-chafkin.html
20. "We’ve already seen this story play out in 2008-2009. When there is massive default (Lehman) governments decide to print money. The emergency bailout for 2008/2009 crash was ~$700B. Evergrande has ~$300B in liabilities. We have printed over $5T with another $3.5T bill being pushed through shortly.
Therefore? Our current bet is on a lot of monetary policy measures/bailouts to prevent a massive collapse (once again). In short, money printer go Brr and a continued push for Modern Monetary Theory.
While we’re getting some panic messages about the price action (of crypto) in September we’re not surprised. In the end, none of this matters.
Both solutions end the same: 1) print tons of money? people will then question the value of the currency as they see *asset* inflation pick up - remember the stock market recovery in 2010-2019 and 2) if you allow for widespread default, there is a lot of near-term pain/suffering and people begin to question the merits of the system they are in (painful unemployment numbers).
There is no way we’re changing our macro view of the world since it leads to the same conclusion: the need for a new financial system designed for a deflationary environment as technology continues to eat jobs."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-evergrande-fisaco-avoiding-irrational
21. For those folks trying to understand NFTs.
"And now consider NFTs, which bring scarcity along with provenance of ownership to digital goods.
NFTs are essentially digital Veblen goods. For those who want to signal status especially in the digital world, “flexing” ownership of valuable JPEGs i.e. NFTs is one of the easiest ways.
One of the most popular forms of this “flex” is NFTs as profile pictures on Twitter and other forms of social media. You’ve probably seen people with these apes or punks or penguins as their profile photos."
https://tanay.substack.com/p/nfts-as-financial-assets-status-identity
22. "Altman’s feat reflects a new trend in startup investing. Some founders are taking on the additional role of venture capitalists, investing money from financial institutions and wealthy individuals at the same time they are guiding their own companies through critical growth periods. These include Zach Perret, CEO and co-founder of banking technology startup Plaid, and Josh Browder, founder of startup DoNotPay, as well as Altman.
Armed with fresh capital, some founders are even beginning to lead investment rounds for young startups through their venture funds, a role that reflects the larger size of their investments. They are adding to the ranks of nontraditional investors, including hedge funds and solo venture capitalists, who are increasingly competing with established VC firms for stakes in the next generation of technology startups."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/more-startup-ceos-are-moonlighting-as-vc-investors
23. "This is the Hunter Economy: a series of products that will enable people to gain status as hunters and curators, gaining social and financial capital in their favorite people, businesses, and ideas in the process. Product Hunt, Reddit, and Kickstarter may be to the next generation of Hunter Economy startups what Web 2.0 will be to Web 3 more broadly—the inspiration for what was next to come."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/the-hunter-economy
24. Can't argue with this.
"Yet with COVID, as with the Afghanistan boondoggle, the stated goals have been ever-shifting and often nebulous. "Two weeks to flatten the curve" evolved into "defeating the virus"—whatever that means—and of course "building back better," which is to say, exploiting the pandemic to forcibly impose a full-spectrum progressive agenda.
Routing al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harbored it evolved into making Zurich out of Kandahar. And if "zero-COVID" is the implicit goal, it is equally as farcical. The totalitarian means that would be employed in a bid to achieve that would only compound the disaster. In both cases, mission creep was baked in from the beginning by dint of the mission itself.
The measures by which to achieve these vague goals have proven similarly haphazard. With COVID, our authorities conjured social distancing rules almost out of thin air; urged us to wear no masks and then up to three at a time, despite their questionable efficacy; and imposed on-again, off-again lockdowns—all selectively enforced based on political ideology."
25. "Where, when and how does the burgeoning Forever Pandemic end? No one has said, but it is not hyperbole to see the makings of a biomedical security state apparatus."
https://www.newsweek.com/covid-becoming-afghanistan-pandemics-opinion-1631721
26. 110% agree and putting my money and time where my mouth is.
"Despite some of the success stories, I believe many Eastern European startups are still overlooked and undervalued. For investors, this represents a massive untapped opportunity."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/are-eastern-european-startups-overlooked-and-undervalued/
26. Food for thought. George Gammon has a very good Youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oda0FEI6M8M
27. This is the best podcast & with special guest Balaji Srininavasan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2iNXMiGEms
28. "Once people are free to live and work from where they want, governments will have to compete for the “cream” citizens – entrepreneurs and skilled people.
Think about it – let’s say you’re a high-income person who can work from anywhere in the world.
Would you rather live in a place with high taxes, or would you like to live in a place with low taxes?
Would you rather live in a place with good law and order, or a place where it’s unsafe to go out?
Would you live in a place where it costs 80% of your income to live, or a place where you can live a great life in only 20% of your income?
All of these are questions that people will have to answer for themselves.
If a government wants the best of the planet to live in its territory, it will have to offer compelling reasons for doing so. The time where people just didn’t have a choice is now gone."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-cryptowfh-age-a-look-into-the-future/
29. "There's a question whether these funds are playing offense or defense. Offense: Snap up larger stakes in the best startups earlier. Defense: Don't let the Tigers of the world eat their lunch in later stages. The answer: Both, as VCs get sandwiched.
--Tiger Global, Coatue and SoftBank have moved their way down the stack from being purely growth money to leading series A and B rounds with some frequency. They're even being spotted in some seed deals.
--Bubbling up from the bottom are investor-operators and solo capitalists like Lachy Groom and Josh Buckley. They're now leading early rounds and besting some name-brand firms in the process.
--Serial entrepreneur Hiten Shah told me that he thinks the new megafunds for seed rounds are more of a reaction to the investor-operator dynamic than the Tiger cram-down. "The founders are going to investor-operators and everyone knows that," said Shah.
--He sees these announcements more as marketing to attract founders. From his perspective, brand name alone isn't doing it. "I think those firms are dealing with a deal-flow problem," Shah said."
https://mailchi.mp/protocol/the-arms-race-in-seed-funding?e=ba0e3a5060
Self Sovereignty versus Growing Government: Why You Need Citizenship Insurance
Libertarianism is stupid. No government is anarchy. Just look at Somalia.
But the ongoing growth of government reach into almost every sector of life is not a good thing. Having bigger organizations and throwing bodies at something does not usually equate to better results.
In fact, the bigger an organization is, the dumber and slower it is. And even less responsive to “customer” needs. This is the case in both business and government. They start to focus on internal issues versus external needs as critical mass and attention is spent inside.
I think this accounts for the gross incompetence we see in governments everywhere around the world in 2020 and 2021 as they have tried facing the ongoing pandemic. No surprise it was the smaller countries that were able to weather and adapt to things faster and better. Ie. Singapore, Estonia, Finland & Israel. It’s been pretty ugly in India, USA, Brazil, Russia, Mexico all over the European Union.
Yet even previous outperformers like New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and Canada are now overreacting due to their unrealistic goal of zero-ism ie. zero cases. This is leading to the massive overreach of the government. Full Lockdowns even on the basis of one case, large fines for protesting and leaving their neighbourhood, while destroying the main street small business owners by forced shutdowns. All driven by possibly well meaning but “so called experts” and faceless unaccountable bureaucrats who continue to lie to us.
First masks don’t work, now they do work, now you have to wear them as a mandate etc. etc. (For the record, I’m pro mask and pro vaccine but also think idiots should have a right to do what they want. There is no law against stupidity & ignorance). They also shut down any conversations and discussions that question their dogma. It’s very easy for these government experts and officials to push for enforced closures through lockdowns and anti-eviction mandates. Especially when they are still getting paychecks and aren’t really taking any hit themselves.
No surprise, I’ve become pretty disillusioned and angry about most of the respective governments and political parties I live under (both the Republicans and Democrats are self serving scum). It’s one thing if they were competent & for the greater good of society ie. well meaning. These people are clearly NOT. Edward R. Murrow said: “A Nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
I’m never going to be under lock down anymore. If you value your freedom you should be prepared to do the same. This is why we need to be watching them closely and be prepared to question everything they do. And it’s also why I’ve come around strongly to the idea of being very well-armed & well trained. I am focusing on financial independence, so I can take care of my family, my friends and neighbours. I am also building up multiple country passports and residence visas. I’m ready to fight but am also ready to exit to more welcoming places if I need to.
As Andrew Henderson, the Nomad Capitalist says: “Go where you are treated best.”
Lessons, Not Regrets: Missing Life Changing Wealth Multiple times
I was talking about the Crypto token Solana (SOL) with a friend a few weeks back. Solana’s value has literally exploded, pumping a full 24% in one day. I made a remark about the fact that I knew the Solana team back in 2017 and had the chance to buy some tokens. They actually went through the Accelerator program I ran and the 500 Mobile fund (now Race Capital) we worked with made an investment here. My friend did the math and said that if I had made a $100k investment at that time, this would have turned into $75M usd today. Yikes. I was just too ignorant, lazy or busy at that time to jump on the opportunity.
Being in Silicon Valley, you get exposed to many opportunities. Maybe even too many opportunities.
I had the chance to join an adtech startup Klipmart to run the Asia region when I was Yahoo! But I rejected it. They were acquired by Doubleclick. I was then recruited by the same friend to Doubleclick. Nope. I had chances to join Google & Facebook very early many times. Missed all these opportunities. Every single one would have translated into a financial net worth 10 times if not 100 times more than what I have now. I by no means have anything to complain about but I would be in a very different realm of impact with these additional resources.
You don’t realize this until after. Even if you mentally understand at some level, it’s whether you had the courage or true understanding to take action. But philosophically I have to come to appreciate the Chinese saying “The master appears when the student is ready.” This is exactly the same as investing in anything. The opportunity shows up when the investor is ready.
I don’t regret missing those opportunities (most of the time if I am honest :). Regret is not helpful. But you definitely are more thoughtful and prepared for future opportunities. As Louis Pasteur famously said: “Chance favors the Prepared Mind.” I missed at least 5 massive life changing wealth opportunities. Yet I still believe in a world of abundance. Because of this, I am very confident there will be many more opportunities appearing, just as they will appear for most people out there in the future.
This is also why I don’t begrudge any investor or founder who has done well financially (obviously without breaking the law, through shady acts or being total A--holes while doing it).
I have many dozens of founders whom I have invested in who have done far better financially than I have. And they ABSOLUTELY deserved it. They took the high risk, they put in the work, they took the hit to their lifestyle and health for years. Why shouldn’t they get the benefit? It was fully earned. This is the game.
So the lesson is to keep on swinging. As long as you continue to play the game, be long term greedy, and do right by people, you will come out ahead. And hopefully enjoy the ride along the way like I have. Your time will come!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 19th, 2021
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.--Bertrand Russell
"Why in the world would you want to be involved with ponzis, rug-pulls, ultra high yields and competition with traditional finance? Easy! You want to be ahead of the curve and have a bright future.
Think about it like this. If for some reason lending rates go up 5-6%… all this means is that Traditional finance sees a *slight* increase in Net Income margins. While the profit margins may go up a bit, the distance between the two doesn’t change much.
In a second scenario where rates go negative… this means individuals would begin pulling capital out. As capital comes out it has to go somewhere and you only need a fraction of the pie to move into DeFi."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/yields-can-remain-high-and-quick
2. Kaboom! Batch 18 represent. Congrats to the team at Printify.
3. This looks good. Matrix 4. I'll watch this reboot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB59tJPthZg
4. Fascinating character Marc Rich. Amoral but fascinating.
"Fortunes are made when markets open up and old power structures crumble. This could be political (Russian oligarchs), technological (the internet and software eating the world), or geopolitical — such as when Western dominance of the oil trade ended and a free market emerged.
One of the biggest winners of the oil market’s sea change was an enterprising trader named Marc Rich. He and his family had fled Nazi persecution to America. He started as a trader at commodity trading firm Philipp Brothers before building his own trading house (today’s Glencore). Rich’s web of relationships allowed him to spot the breakdown of the oil market’s oligopoly early and he bet aggressively on higher prices.
He entered long-term supply contracts, organized logistics through tankers and pipelines, and in some cases had exclusive buyers. As Byrne Hobart correctly pointed out, he was able to replicate the value creation of an integrated oil company in a synthetic and more flexible way. This way he was able to take advantage of the more volatile market and poorly positioned players."
https://neckar.substack.com/p/marc-rich-part-i-riches-in-regime
5. No surprise: California's been treating their resident companies like the golden geese for too long. Also forest fires and increasing costs of living + declining quality of life does not help.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/texas-wins-in-california-exodus-5132372/
6. Interesting case for Tezos. I'm intrigued actually.
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-bullish-case-for-tezos-written
7. Great profile & interview on Simu Liu! #Shangchi
https://enroute.aircanada.com/en/interviews/simu-liu-marvel/
8. "The world is awash with capital, and even the most conservative institutional and retail investors are developing an appetite for riskier bets. This is driven by (1) historically low-interest rates and (2) the winner-take-all nature of many technology-powered businesses. In other words: you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power if you keep your money in so-called safe assets, and a handful of extremely successful investments capture most of the available returns. Investors who try to stay safe or even take risks but miss out on the biggest winners end up far behind.
How do you compete in such a world? You think strategically. In the case of venture capital, that means doing things your competitors aren't doing. And that's exactly what Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) is doing. The firm is on a hiring spree, recruiting new partners and former government officials, writers, editors, and more. A16Z is no longer building a venture capital firm; it is building a new type of company with a thick management layer that helps support its multiple portfolio companies with marketing, legal, lobbying, and technical resources. It's no longer venture capital; it's a venture corporation.
By doing more things, A16Z becomes dramatically more attractive and valuable to entrepreneurs, increasing the likelihood it won't miss out on the biggest winners."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/pulling-a-bezos/
9. Great overview on what's happening in the Venture Capital industry these days. Worth a read.
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/the-changing-venture-landscape-6b655c68e631
10. Awesome Lux reads this week.
11. "An arbitrage takes advantage of a pricing dislocation in markets. When two places value an asset differently it creates an opportunity for someone to buy low in one market and sell higher in the other. But as more market participants catch on to the opportunity, the price discrepancy closes to reflect the true market value of the asset.
This process creates a market equilibrium. An equaling out of the true value of the asset in question. So in a sense, an arbitrage is like a gold rush and a land grab. Its a race to take advantage of the price discrepancy before it gets equalized across the market.
Society’s transition to the digital age is itself, an arbitrage, a land grab, and a gold rush.
As global society adapts to the Digital Age, it reveals a massive arbitrage opportunity. There is a dislocation of the true market value of people, geographies, and new assets unique to the digital age society. And this opportunity is created from stable internet access.
The biggest opportunities, the ones that represent the greatest arbitrage, are formed from the merging of key digital fault lines: remote work, internet access, cryptoassets, and the ease of creating & distributing information capital assets.
They permit anyone, anywhere, to earn a digital age salary in a low cost of living location."
https://dougantin.com/sovereign-individuals-go-where-the-opportunity-is-greatest/
12. "The trajectory is clear: Coatue is coming for the venture asset class as ferociously as Tiger Global has over the last few years.
Coatue invests all the way as early as seed and as late as pre-IPO, and can of course hold on to positions post-IPO, which is another appeal of raising from Coatue. A common misconception is that Coatue is selling the same product to founders as Tiger Global, but this is far from the case. Coatue take board seats and are significantly more involved with portfolio companies than Tiger Global.
They’ve hired some exceptional investors in Matt Mazzeo (formerly of Lowercase Capital with Chris Sacca, and Creative Artists Agency, which is beginning to feel like a bit of a pattern), Dan Rose (formerly of Facebook and Amazon), Michael Gilroy (formerly of Canaan), and many others."
https://akashbajwa.substack.com/p/coatue-the-cub-on-the-prowl
13. More on Coatue!
https://mobile.twitter.com/nsheth12/status/1412806439664500745
14. "Adding all of this up, we see that China has an astoundingly large quantity of protein to produce and import for its population. Taken together with the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s fears of social upheaval due to food insecurity (and the stain upon the party from the Great Leap Forward), the impetus for much of China’s belligerence in global fishing and crackdowns on commodities trading become clear.
Broadly speaking, the confluence of supply side and logistics disruptions has formed into a perfect storm, where China cannot as readily meet its current food demand through production, trade, acquiring foreign food manufacturers, and even illegal activities such as illicit fishing."
https://fortisanalysis.substack.com/p/protein-and-transpacific-power
15. "Time > Money and also Health > Money
This is why rich people spend so much money on comfort items (lay flat business class, private jets, massage, hormone replacement, diet, high quality gym etc.) Therefore, we can take a look at how much damage a few "bad decisions” can make on your life."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/getting-ahead-by-using-time-calculations
16. "My view, and the view of many in this space, is that web3 will inspire us to return back to the original values of what the Internet should be: decentralized, community-governed, efficient, innovative, accessible, and wildly dynamic. Crypto networks provide us with a cooperative economic model that ensures incentive alignment between platforms and users over time. When users are truly aligned with platforms, the platforms become larger and more resilient, and the users become more incentivized to innovate and create new technology.
It is difficult to overstate the impact digital ownership will have online. Of course, too, it is difficult to comprehend in its early stage. But we are moving towards an entirely new economy built on the foundation of what consumers need. The next era of the Internet, web3, will be defined by software that is not just architected, operated, moderated, and funded by users — but collectively owned by them, too."
https://gaby.mirror.xyz/sXs9qaL44Cf5x3cAJ2ZXWOqoKJ8BRvHoH37-W6rwlDU
17. This is why you cannot trust the old institutions. #BeASovereignIndividual
"There is no difference between money and a rifle. Both are weapons of force, used for good or evil depending on the person wielding it, so if you are responsible for wielding one, entrusted to use it for the public good, you damn well better make sure everything you do is beyond reproach and avoid even the appearance of corruption, because there is no coming back once the public loses trust in you.
When the public loses trust, that leaves room for an insurgency to gain the moral high ground because the public now perceives you don’t value integrity as a leader and they are not playing on an equal playing field to those entrusted with their protection.
We are already seeing signs of this already.
People feel they are not playing on an equal playing field after all the market interventions by the government. From bailing out banks in 2008 while people lost homes and hedge funds bought them, to in 2020 bailing out companies who paid out billions for share buy backs in years prior.
People are rightfully saying this is not free market capitalism anymore, but a state run economy with billionaires protected by the US government from failure that doesn’t serve the best interests of their families anymore.
Without integrity there is no trust, and without trust there is no rightful leadership.
I’ve seen all this before overseas."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/65n7cdtdr2ybtfrxu96753g4bleyn2
18. There is so much here. A MUST read.
"Internet and software companies are far less risky than they used to be, even at the early stages: there hasn’t been a venture vintage since 2002 with negative median returns. Big tech is now huge tech. Risk-averse people and money have flooded in. When people have something to lose, they protect their downside – think of wealth managers, encouraging a “safe” mix of stocks and bonds. The tech industry has too much to lose.
Indexing may be the correct default for public investors, but can be dangerous when replicated in other domains. The public markets show us the second-order effects of indexing, so we can learn how it affects the private markets, startups, and culture."
https://luttig.substack.com/p/indexmindset
19. "At the time 1047 Games was founded, about five years ago, free to play (F2P) PC games were a niche genre. While games like World of Tanks and Warframe were seeing success, and of course many mobile games relying on in-app purchases, Fortnite had yet to show the industry that F2P could be so ludicrously profitable.
“Five years ago it was very hit-driven: You spend years developing a product, put all this money into hyping the launch and then hope it’s a success,” Proulx explained. “Our process was, there’s no way we can take that risk — if we spent our entire budget and got it wrong, we’re out of business. So we thought, let’s do a soft launch, put it out there and see what happens, learn, listen, look at the data. Why would I spend money marketing a product that I have no idea about whether it will be a success? If we wanted to spend money, and we didn’t have a lot, I’d rather spend it on a product that has great metrics and KPIs.”
20. Impressive.
"In the last three years alone, Insight has raised more than $15 billion in new capital, ranking it second on The Information’s recent list of the fastest-growing private investment firms. It’s now raising its 12th and largest fund, which is expected to close at nearly $16 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Backed by this bounty, the firm some employees call the “sleeping giant” of venture capital is taking more aggressive leaps into new sectors, such as fintech and cryptocurrency, taking cues from two of the most active deal makers, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global Management.
In the past, Insight had the reputation of being “more like the PE guys who wanted to buy up underpriced assets and whip them into shape,” said James Cham, a partner at venture fund Bloomberg Beta. “The strategy now is ‘oh, actually we can invest for minority ownership and we can be quite aggressive about it.’”
“That aggressiveness has been impressive,” Cham added.
So far this year, Insight has participated in more than 150 VC investments, double last year’s total. In the second quarter, it was the third most-active U.S. VC investor in older, more mature businesses—behind only Tiger and Andreessen Horowitz, according to financial data firm PitchBook."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/insight-partners-venture-capitals-sleeping-giant-wakes-up
21. "If you were overly focused on track records the past 10 years you would’ve missed numerous promising emerging managers and an entirely new generation of solo capitalists. Put differently, I wouldn’t want to be backward-looking in a forward-looking asset class.
Track records are about assessing process, decision quality, business quality, repeatability, etc. For VCs, both new and emerging, it is important to communicate that to your LPs. In Gil Dibner’s words, “provide evidence of something systematic.”
The Dangers of Hedonic Adoption to Your Personal Finances
I’ve been part of the initial Ondeck Investor Fellowship and it’s been really educational. One of the big pieces of managing investments is dealing with your own psychology or instincts wired into your lizard brain from thousands of years ago on the plains. One of these is Hedonic Adoption & Novelty effect. And boy do I suffer from these.
Looking back, I was very fortunate to land at Yahoo! during its rise. I got to travel the world, learned a ton, and met amazing people. I was also paid very well, got to expense almost everything and got stock options that were worth quite a lot. You would think I was able to put away much of this. But I got caught up with lifestyle creep. The more I made, the more I spent. Holidays became more frequent and expensive. I pretty much bought whatever I wanted.
So I use the example of chocolate. You start off enjoying Hersheys, but then you discover Ghirardellis. It’s a bit more expensive but you love it the first time. After you have it a few more times, you get used to it and you hanker for something new. You upgrade to the more expensive See’s or Godivas but that soon gets old. So then on to Dandelion Chocolate or La Maison Du Chocolat which btw both are absolutely divine. Also crazy expensive. I think you get the point. You keep raising the bar and spending more. It’s a never ending cycle.
This is why they call it “Hedonic Adoption”, the “Hedonic Treadmill.” There is an initial rush of joy or pleasure but you quickly return to your previous sense of happiness.
It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in this trap. Especially in an advertising-driven materialistic & capitalist driven society like America. I even remember an Idiotic American President from the early 2000s encouraging people that spending was patriotic. The American economy is literally the world’s consumption engine where we are taught that you are what you buy. As Will Rogers once said “Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.” We are in a society where flexing is driving around an expensive sports car to show people how successful you are
And this is broadcast all across the world in media and social media so this is becoming more widespread.
So how do you beat this? It’s taken me almost 2 decades and a lot of personal re-programming.
I follow the very basic rule of “Paying myself first”, having money automatically deducted before I even see it.
I automate and Dollar Cost Average (DCA) most of my investments
I’ve re-wired myself to enjoy investing, when i feel like getting something, i will first look at investing a small amount of money which usually gives me dopamine rush i normally get from buying something
I write down every expenditure I make and I review it every week to make sure I am not overspending. Not writing down and tracking expenses for over a decade nearly wrecked my finances. I literally had no idea what my spending levels were (it was very high btw) and what I was spending money on.
To think of all the money I wasted. But you can’t have any regrets and it’s part of the learning process. And it’s never too late to fix.
The biggest driver of managing and controlling your impulses is having a bigger goal or mission. For me, it’s financial freedom. I’m never going to be beholden or dependent on any one person, any company or any country ever again. That was the big lesson from 2020.
The Future of Work & the inevitable Rise of Entrepreneurship
This is a topic I’ve been speaking publicly on and is based on my Future of Work Presentation that I have been giving since 2016. And it’s quite startling how 2020 really accelerated much of these trends.
One major trend: The decline of corporate longevity. The average longevity of a Standard & Poors 500 company went from 50 years to 15 years. This is due to the rising Tempo of Change. Incumbents being attacked by challengers in every sector. And because the bigger a company is, the dumber and slower they are. They have a harder time reaching market changes.
These companies need to cut costs to survive. Guess what is the biggest cost on the balance sheet? Employee salaries. Hence you see the Rise of Software/Automation and outsourcing to developing regions like India, Latam and Central Eastern Europe. All of which basically eats people & middle class jobs in the developed world.
You see the rise of major layoffs every year. This happens regularly, most companies cut the bottom 10% of staff every year. Thank you Jack Welch and GE for pushing this as a best practice in corporate America. For anyone who thinks full time employment is safe needs to have their head checked.
I can understand someone growing up in America up until the mid- 80s, where there was some social contract between companies and employees. That was pretty much torn up as middle level managers were laid off in masses when companies hit hard times or just needed to be cut as costs as they have shareholders to please.
I recall IBM being called “I’ve Been Mugged” as they laid off 60,000 people in 1993. Yes, Sixty Thousand! I tell everyone to set a google alert tagging the term “mass lay off” or “corporate restructuring” and you literally will get a wake up call every morning. If this does not wake you up to reality, not sure what will. Your company will remove you the minute they don’t need you.
So that’s the bad news and hard reality. The good news is there are some rules for thriving in this new world.
Be Like Jay Z: He says “I’m not a BusinessMan, I’m a Business, Man”. Basically treat and Think of yourself like a business.
Focus on a Niche market: Niches are riches now with the internet you can aggregate large numbers of customers or clients interested in the most random things. Read Kevin Kelly’s a “1000 True fans”https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/.
Be a lifelong Learner, there are so many tools and classes you can take to upgrade yourself on a regular basis. Learn copywriting, take classes on online advertising. Learn Bubble or some other No Code tool. Join an Ondeck Fellowship.
Learn to Build an Audience: Everyone is a Media Company of One. Gary Vee & my friends Eric Siu and Pomp has done to perfection
Be a Digital Nomad & learn the benefits of GeoArbitrage. Earn developed market wages and currency while living in a lower cost country.
Learn to Invest the difference. Inflation is a real thing and everyone needs to understand how to make your money work for you. It’s the ultimate leverage in life.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 12th, 2021
The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage--Carrie Jones
"Individuals and organizations seeking power, money, and prestige can stoke and leverage fear. All in the name of fighting the external threat. Using fear and targeting scapegoats to consolidate power. In this system, incentives align in a way that promotes fear of the enemy as a means for deploying money throughout the economy.
Today, the global population is transitioning from a military industrial complex to a COVID industrial complex.
This is an opportunity to position yourself and your capital to take advantage of a likely future outcome. Investing in the business areas that we know will benefit from the COVID industrial complex. And by profiting from this societal restructuring, you and others like you will be in a better position to influence future policy.
But even if you don’t have grand aspirations of making money and influencing policy, there is another reason for taking action now. In spite of the policy choices that are coming, there are and always will be great places to live and work. And the digital age makes it easier to find these opportunities."
https://dougantin.com/fear-the-covid-industrial-complex/
2. "2020 was a rough year, and 2021 is shaping up to be similar as we now see that the elites don’t mind fully revealing that the only people allowed to win in the stock market are hedge funds.
This is something to be happy about!
You are now joining a special club most people only get to join through war.
The world you thought you knew was peeled back and you now see the wizards are just scared old men who have no control over you unless you let them."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/stress-and-the-changes-to-expect
3. This is an incredibly exciting company on an important topic. Human longevity.
"an ambitious new anti-aging company called Altos Labs, according to people familiar with the plans. Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life."
4. "Zapier has also become one of the standard bearers of the low-code/no-code movement, one of a teeming new industry of companies offering tools to build apps and workflows without needing so much as a <body> tag. "I think there was a huge amount of power in tools like Zapier," CEO Wade Foster said, "taking things only a single-digit percentage of people could do, and giving that leverage to regular business users."
https://www.protocol.com/amp/zapier-tips-interview-2654856281
5. Tyler Cowen is an amazing talent curator.
"Everyone in the business of building and managing organizations should study Tyler’s performance and process. For entrepreneurs in today’s environment, talent, not capital, is the limiting factor in company building. Finding and recruiting talent is also the core task of venture capital investing, building a research lab, or managing a university."
"Maybe the most important piece of the puzzle is selection. Tyler has compounded his skills in selecting talent over decades of deliberate practice in “cracking cultural codes.”
Tyler’s nose for talent, even in technical fields like biotech, comes from his study of the humanities: art, music, complex novels, religion, anthropology, et cetera. After all, the humanities are about humans. This is at first counterintuitive, but we also observe that Silicon Valley’s legendary talent pickers like Peter Thiel (a philosophy major and JD) or Mike Moritz (a history major and former journalist) stand out for their humanities backgrounds as well. Indeed, in Tyler’s view, Peter Thiel possesses the “deepest understanding of the humanities that is out there now,” and “is the best selector of talent… maybe ever”
https://kulesa.substack.com/p/tyler-cowen-is-the-best-curator-of
6. Tragedy in Lebanon but crypto seems to be taking off because of the horribly managed economy and government (similar like in Argentina & Venezuela).
"The financial crisis has led to a spike in cryptocurrency usage in Lebanon, both as a means of recovering savings through speculative trading and as a way to circumvent a broken banking system. Due to domestic bank restrictions and international sanctions, Lebanese bank accounts and credit cards have been rendered effectively useless for making purchases outside of the country, including buying cryptocurrency on international exchanges.
That’s where Awad comes in. Over-the-counter (OTC) suppliers like him are part of a complex and legally murky ecosystem through which cryptocurrency is purchased abroad, sent to Lebanon, and then distributed through a network of dealers to be sold to clients in exchange for hard cash.
Dirany sees the cryptocurrency market in Lebanon as having two distinct functions. Some people are using it to preserve or recover the value of their capital, while others are simply moving money from one place to another. “Using USDT is not like actually using crypto. It’s more like a money transfer. A payment method, not a store of value”
https://restofworld.org/2021/the-cryptocurrency-dons-of-beirut/
7. "Byers and Susa eventually carved out $250,000 to help fill out Robinhood’s seed round. It was the first check the firm ever wrote. (“That was terrifying for me,” Byers says. “I remember being extremely nervous.”)
Today, Byers says Susa’s stake in the stock-trading company—including a couple follow-on investments in later funding rounds—is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million."
8. Tony Leung is an icon. HUGE fan and he was great in "Shang Chi."
"The preeminent Hong Kong actor of his generation and one of international cinema’s greatest stars, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, now 59, moves with the smoldering, understated charm of an old-world matinee idol. His performances often make his films feel like their own genre, whether they’re kung fu sagas, police dramas, or film noir love stories.
And over the past four decades, he’s been a muse to some of Asia’s greatest directors, among them Ang Lee, John Woo, Andrew Lau, and his friend and frequent collaborator Wong Kar Wai. Wong’s films, in particular, set the tone for Leung’s career; the pencil mustache and debonair personality he cultivated for a role in the filmmaker’s surreal epic 2046earned him a nickname that tried to translate his charm for Western audiences: Asia’s Clark Gable."
https://www.gq.com/story/tony-leung-tries-his-hand-at-hollywood
9. This guy is a badass. Lots to learn from Special forces folks.
"You’re not looking at the final day, you’re looking at what’s in front of you today. What do I need to do today to get to tomorrow? And that’s how I did it. I broke down the countries into days, and I broke the days into stages. I was laser focused on what the objective was and kind of blocked everything else out.
I also ensured I hit my targets for the day, because when you go to bed at night, you’re in the right mindset for the next day. And that’s a good takeaway point, whether it’s in business or sport or whatever—stay on that bike or do those extra phone calls, make sure you get done what you said you were going to do."
9. Another example of "fake it till you make it" turning into lying. Grifters everywhere these days.
What a nutty story. Unfortunately so many of the like in most emerging industries & hi-growth ones like tech and crypto.
https://www.indianapolismonthly.com/longform/half-baked
10. "But now the world is a closed system. Every country is industrialized to some extent and the entire world is more connected than ever before.
During this transition to a decentralized future, volatility will ripple around the world with no new shores to dissipate on, instead ricocheting off the continents of this now hyper-connected, centralized, and industrialized world in ways none of us can predict.
Most don’t understand why decentralization is our normal state historically and why the last seventy years under US hegemony has been the anomaly, and if people do not understand, they cannot manage for the risk of it happening again."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/back-to-the-decentralized-future
11. Success on a platter mindset. This is why most people will be losers in life.
"Many people reading this will have the success on a platter mindset too. The easiest indicator of this is to want results but being unwilling to learn the skills and prototype a product.
You need to get rid of this mindset if you want to get anywhere, otherwise you’ll spend your life looking for magic chickens that lay golden eggs i.e. things that don’t exist."
https://lifemathmoney.com/stop-looking-for-success-on-a-platter/
12. Love this story. A truly American rags to riches story.
“Living the UN American Dream,” reads the bio of Lopez’s Instagram account, @twojskicks, with 423,000 followers. The one-line description bears a double meaning – an acronymic callout to the brand he’s built, and a nod to just how unconventional his path to success has been."
13. "On Capitol Hill, political support for Taiwan remains strong to this day, especially given the deterioration in relations with China in recent years. Many Americans also see the costs of deserting Taiwan to be incalculably worse than those incurred in the retreat from Kabul, claiming that it could fundamentally reshape global security.
Such a view is articulated by Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund founder and frequent commentator on geopolitics. Writing in a blog post last September, he argued that any American failure to defend Taiwan would be analogous to Britain’s inability to regain control of the Suez Canal in 1956—a humiliation that portended the disintegration of the British Empire and switch from the pound to the dollar as global reserve currency.
“Even though the United States fighting to defend Taiwan would seem to be illogical (e.g., if there is a 70% chance of the U.S. losing), not fighting a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a big loss of stature and power over other countries who won’t support the U.S. if it doesn’t fight and win for its allies,” he wrote."
https://time.com/6094500/us-taiwan-defense/
14. This is a must listen to interview with Radigan Carter. If you want to understand what's happening today & where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueqGkI5LOKc
15. Lots here.
"City-based tokens are programmable, decentralized, and applicable to a wide range of use cases. One use case we’re particularly excited about is using city-based tokens to unlock novel ways that a community can organize to better itself.
While this might strike some as a far-off idea, some cities are already laying the foundation for how city-based currencies could accelerate their local economies.
Let’s look again at Miami. A city mid-renaissance, driven by a freshly untethered workforce and a leader who’s rewriting the playbook for leading government in the Internet age."
"Pause and Look at the Big Picture: Life is a big Video Game. If you take it too seriously you stress out and underperform. If you continue to practice and “level up” you’re going to get better over time (by definition). Do your best to compare yourself to your prior self every ~3-5 years (1 year is too short and 10-years is too long)."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/patrick-stanley-ex-head-of-growth
16. "Investors enjoy a wider range of options in Asia as well. You simply cannot find a region with such an economically diverse range of countries, all spanning different stages of development.
Specifically, Asia is the only continent where developed, emerging, and frontier markets all sit next to each other.
Africa and Latin America have lots of frontier markets, a few emerging markets, but lack fully developed markets. Developed economies are very important since they help feed investment, infrastructure, and employment opportunities into their neighbors.
Similarly, you’ll find almost no frontier economies in Europe or North America. Nor will you profit from the vast potential that such undiscovered markets have.
Asia is the only continent where you can find all types of markets. Their strengths complement each other as developed financial hubs sit alongside populous, high-growth economies. Take a look at Singapore and Malaysia’s relationship. Or Hong Kong and mainland China’s."
https://www.investasian.com/2017/05/28/invest-asia/
17. This is why Semiconductor production will remain in Asia. (for better or worse) & will be a critical piece of future geopolitics.
"So first they have to build the building, and then you have to move all the equipment in, you have to get it clean and qualified and up and running. In Asia, they’ll build these things in a year. They’ll move in equipment in the second year, get it qualified, running, by the end of the year. In the US, or in the West, it takes a lot longer, because we don’t have the same mentality they have in Asia. We’re going to do all the permitting, all the hearings, and all that stuff. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it took 50 percent longer to twice as long.
Now, let me tell you why that’s a problem. Because to your second question, a modern fab these days, one of the closer-to-leading-edge ones will cost you $10 billion-plus for the smallest efficient scale, and a really efficient scale will probably cost you closer to $20 billion. Think about how much depreciation that can generate. In Asia, the mentality is every day, every hour this thing isn’t running costs me tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars. I’ve been in Asia on Christmas Day, and there are people out there with jackhammers and pouring concrete because it was like, “Man, every minute this thing gets done sooner, we can start generating cash.” We do not have that mentality in the West."
18. This is room clearing ART!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxolFYFCi24
19. This is pretty cool.
"The cleanliness of Tokyo, the diversity of New York and the social services of Stockholm: Billionaire Marc Lore has outlined his vision for a 5-million-person "new city in America" and appointed a world-famous architect to design it.
Now, he just needs somewhere to build it -- and $400 billion in funding.
The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert."
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/telosa-marc-lore-blake-ingels-new-city/index.html
20. "A leading indicator of where the world is headed is where the smartest people are spending their time. A decade ago, it was mobile. I had just finished college, and I already felt like the fact that I didn’t have a background in mobile engineering or product put me a step behind those who did.
Today, climate and crypto are consistently the top two areas that come up anecdotally in my conversations with talented young people, with the intersection of biology and healthcare probably third."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/climate-crypto
21. "Cognitive reappraisal — sometimes called cognitive reframing — is most commonly encountered in therapy, where it’s used to regulate emotions. It’s a component of cognitive behavioral therapy, a whole suite of strategies that can encourage positive patterns of thinking and behavior.
Recently, hundreds of researchers in 87 countries published the results of the largest cognitive reappraisal study to date in Nature Human Behavior. They were asking a simple question: Could they make people feel better about the pandemic, if only for one moment in time, by teaching reappraisals? The study, which amassed data on more than 20,000 participants, came back with a resounding answer: yes."
22. I like Vilnius, Lithuania. Actually I think the entire Baltics (Estonia & Latvia) are awesome for startups.
23. "Anyone who has observed the track record of nation-states in fighting guerrilla wars over the past 300 years, cannot help but come away feeling rather depressed. Nation after nation, empire after empire, has FAILED to handle the rather specialised requirements of guerrilla warfare.
Why is that? Because guerrilla warfare is, by its very nature, completely non-Trinitarian. The old checks and balances no longer exist. The people, the military, and the government become effectively one and the same."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/09/can-guerrilla-forces-be-defeated.html
24. Read media but don't always believe media. Learn to think for yourself. Manage your media diet.
"Fear is one of the most powerful and primal emotions, and government has always used fear to unite the people behind it. Government—which produces nothing—only exists because of fear. Fear of foreigners is allayed by its army. Fear of domestic chaos is allayed by its police.
The media is an ideal way to transmit fear. The media has transformed itself into the government’s lapdog. It has the same talking points and communicates “the narrative” in the same way. Government and media have always worked hand in glove, of course, but today more than ever. There are no longer thousands of independent newspapers scattered across the country, just a few conglomerates that control all significant print and electronic media."
25. This is the next big frontier for entrepreneurs. Already has been for over decade, but more so now than ever.
"What makes the scope of biotech so staggering is not just its size, but its youth. Manufacturing first exploded in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. But biotech is only about 40 years old. It burst into existence thanks largely to a discovery made in the late 1960s by Hamilton Smith, a microbiologist then at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues, that a protein called a restriction enzyme can slice DNA. Once Smith showed the world how restriction enzymes work, other scientists began using them as tools to alter genes.
“And once you have the ability to start to manipulate the world with those tools,” said Carlson, “the world opens up.”
http://alliance.nautil.us/article/155/the-man-who-kicked-off-the-biotech-revolution
26. "When the results of being wrong are permanent and the enemy hopes you don’t learn any lessons so they can keep killing you the same way, you quickly learn arrogance on our part makes their job much easier with less risk and work required to win and try at all costs to avoid that.
Betting it all is the only environment that leads to fast self-reflection, no matter how painful or wrong you are, because to not confront mistakes and learn lessons is to continue losing.
This is why the best investors are ones with substantial amount of their own money at risk and treat their capital as irreplaceable because if you lose that money, you cannot get the years back it took to earn it.
That is Anthony Deden’s approach, and resonates with me because I recognize it from overseas."
"In addition, I am now starting to measure my net worth against the S&P500 instead of in dollars.
The reason is simple. Governments will continue creating money that flows into assets, so using the S&P500 as the benchmark for if I am getting wealthier in real terms against my peers makes more sense than CPI which is nothing more than a narrative and does not match my reality.
I no longer trust what institutions tell me, so I am finding my own way of measuring real returns."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/the-financialization-of-everything
Make your Life an Adventure: Lessons from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
I must have seen this movie a hundred times and I never get tired of it. Beautiful cinematography and landscapes put to a great story and music soundtrack. Ben Stiller plays Walter Mitty who lives this humdrum life supporting his family working in the photo team of Life Magazine but has these crazy daydreams of wild & spectacular adventures. All of this is happening when he loses the snapshot of the last cover while the magazine he works at is shut down.
He then begins a real world adventure trying to track it down, traveling to Greenland, taking a helicopter ride in a storm, diving into the ocean & working on a trawler, off to Iceland skateboarding during a volcano eruption and then hiking uncharted Afghanistan.
So why does this resonate so much with me and many others? It’s an amazing story of personal growth. I remember growing up as a kid in suburban Canada. Not having done very much, with limited experience in general and very bored at school, I would have these crazy ridiculous daydreams and was never really present in life. Looking back these daydreams seem so silly but it probably was a way for one's brain to exercise itself. With so little life experience this probably is natural.
But like Walter Mitty as you travel and experience more real world adventure you tend to daydream less. Your reality can become more interesting and much better than your imagination. This should actually be the goal of all of us. As seen in the movie, the motto of Life Magazine is “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other and to feel.”
Yet so many people are stuck in work and life situations that while not awful are still boring and soul crushing. Maybe because these people are not reaching their potential but have ended up settling in life.
With the internet, cheap flights, job & business opportunities galore all over the world there are less and less excuses to not try something different. Or at least change your environment and perspective.
Watching “Walter Mitty” is a reminder of this and how jumping into adventure can completely change your life for the better. No time like now to do so.
Or as the TV Billionaire Bobby Axelrod said “You have one life, so do it All”
Scale Kills Quality: Big is the Enemy of Great
In the mid-2000s when I started going to Russia, I discovered this amazing coffee place in Moscow called Coffeemania. At the time, it was a well designed atmosphere, with friendly staff, great crowd & delicious food and coffee. But over time they expanded and grew from 2 locations to 50+ locations across the city and even at the airport. Literally everything declined. I obviously stopped going. I saw this with multiple stores across the globe. I think we have all experienced this in our lives.
Why does this happen? Scale is where you make the really big money. It’s very easy, as you expand and scale, you have to add in processes & policies, you dumb down everything for the average or lower than average intelligence person to run and work at. You can open up access to more people. But this is at the expense of diluting the wonderful experience & service you used to provide. This is always why pretty much all the major chain stores and buffets suck. And perhaps this is the reason I much prefer boutiques and craft restaurants and food and clothes. Also why I much prefer the craft culture of Japan & Taiwan, a place full of unique stores & restaurants versus the retail monoculture of the United States.
This makes me think about companies as they scale. Literally described by Guy Kawasaki: “It’s depressing to watch a mean, lean, fighting machine of a company deteriorate into mediocracy. In Silicon Valley we call this process the “bozo explosion.”
Source: https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_prevent_/
I remember how amazing almost everyone was when I joined Yahoo! When it was below 3000 people. At 5,000 people, the quality of people was still amazing. But wow did it change when it hit 10,000 people, and I do not mean in a good way. When we hit 15,000+ people it was an admittedly mediocre place. The quality level of people just goes down as the filters get expanded. I do ascribe some of this to my Jungle/Dirt Road/Freeway process that happens in growing companies.
(Source: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-jungle-the-dirt-road-and-the).
But one of the end results of this growth is you just end up with so many not so awesome people looking for a cushy place to work. Frankly, look at the deterioration of the once great HP, Intel and depending on who you ask in Silicon Valley even Google & Facebook.
This happens on the money management side too. I’ve been tracking Venture capital and startup investing for a long time. It’s so much easier returning a smaller fund than a big fund. I’ve seen previously amazing startup investors and VC funds deliver outstanding returns. But this changes quickly as they scale up to much larger fund sizes. More companies, bigger investments, different stages. Everything changes including their returns as their strategy changes. What worked before will not work anymore. Also frankly focus & incentives change. It becomes less of a returns game and more of an AUM (Assets Under Management) game where the management fees are the priority (whether consciously or unconsciously). Pretty common in Private equity Funds, Hedge funds and mutual funds too.
Startups are almost always able to outmaneuver big and well resourced competitors. Angel investors and emerging venture fund managers usually outperform established VC funds. This is why elite special forces operate in small teams and groups. This is why Amazon keeps “Two pizza teams”.
Small is beautiful! And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 5th, 2021
“Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom”--Benjamin Franklin
"In Sacca’s new investor letter for his latest climate funds, he describes his return this way: “In the timeless words of LL Cool J, don’t call it a comeback, we’ve been here for years. We just finally admitted to ourselves that 60 hours a week has been the opposite of retirement. This time around, we’ve staffed up by bringing on full-time science and sector experts while building a community of advisors and collaborators that keep us learning every day.”
Sacca — along with his wife, Crystal Sacca, and general partner Clay Dumas — have invested in about 50 companies with the Saccas’ own money. Lowercarbon retroactively gives outside investors exposure to a slice of those companies and is continuing to make a bunch of investments in climate-oriented companies.
Sacca, who is now 46 years old, is actually creating four funds — two oriented around past investments and two for future investments. The two early-stage funds 411.2 LP and 419.1 LP are named after the “the highest monthly average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere” in the years that the team started investing out of the funds."
https://www.newcomer.co/p/bloodthirsty-capitalists
2. "In other words, the war in Afghanistan is like seeing management consultants come to your badly managed software company where everyone knows the problem is the boss’s indecisiveness and cowardice, except it’s violent and people die.
Today, this short-termism has taken over everything, including the military, which is now dominated by McKinsey-ified glory hounds without wisdom and defense contractors with market power. And this leadership class hasn’t just eroded our strategic capacity, but the very ability to conduct operations.
More fundamentally, the people who are in charge of the governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying logistics of what makes them work. Everything, from the Boeing 737 Max to the opioid epidemic to the waste inside most big corporations to war, has been McKinsey-ified. And it’s all covered up with moral outrage, partisanship and culture warring, public relations, and management wisdom bullshit."
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-war-in-afghanistan-is-what-happens
3. "In the 21st Century, the basic financial entity is the individual. Individuals are exposed to the whims of the market directly, incentivizing them to suppress their own personality and emotions in order to "be themselves" in a way that is likely to generate the highest financial return.
This means creators and entrepreneurs are freer than ever. But it also means they are trapped in an invisible financial machine that encourages them to completely forget who they are, to become the person that the market needs them to be. The most obvious examples of this are platforms like OnlyFans and Instagram, where people make money being "authentic" — but where being authentic means constantly responding to feedback from thousands of customers and market signals."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/selling-your-soul-to-yourself/
4. "Yet the metaverse, a technologist’s dream, is Facebook’s nightmare. It would essentially render the social network irrelevant. Facebook’s most valuable asset is its social graph, its dataset of users, links between users, and their shared content. In a metaverse future, we’ll all have identities on the metaverse, and anyone can open a virtual space for sharing photos of your 10-year-old’s birthday party or arguing over vaccines.
There will be trillions of dollars in value created by the creators of these spaces, and the infrastructure to support them, but an open world of interoperable identities and information is antithetical to Facebook’s project, which is to keep you on Facebook."
https://www.profgalloway.com/metaverse/
5. "We admire those who made a change and came out on top, and we feel compassion for those who got stuck.
However, sooner or later the feeling of compassion and understanding disappears.
After a period of mourning for our past lives, we expect even those who are staying behind to start adapting and “getting over it”.The longer they stay stuck, the less compassion and understanding we have for them.
The same expectations we are starting to hold organizations and companies to. Those who refuse to adapt, who stagnate and who don’t figure out will be left behind."
https://benjamingeorge.substack.com/p/notes-on-the-future-of-business-and
6. "Markets Eating The World 2.0 will begin when, instead of revolutionizing existing industries, markets create entirely new ones.
Good examples of this include Prediction Markets (markets for ideas), ISAs (markets for people), Charter Cities (markets for governance), and NFTs (markets for internet culture).
Crypto, in theory, should usher in a new era for markets for the following three reasons:
It removes rent-seeking middle men from taking profits.
It allows markets to operate without being monitored or controlled by those same rent-seeking middle men.
It allows for the creation of totally autonomous systems. A machine can now participate in a market without needing a human to intervene."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/markets-are-eating-the-world
7. The title says it all. Very good. "How Not to Die in the Wild"
https://jasonshen.substack.com/p/067-how-not-to-die-in-the-wild
8. Very interesting.
"In the 60 years since that handshake, James Bond has become one of the most enduring franchises in Hollywood. The films have grossed ~$7B at the global box office (~$18B accounting for inflation).
Through all 25 movies, the Broccoli family has maintained creative control of the franchise, weathering lawsuits, a rotating cast of studio executives, and the threat of bankruptcy."
https://thehustle.co/the-family-business-that-owns-a-share-of-the-7b-james-bond-franchise/
9. This is why Federer is THE Billion dollar tycoon-sportsman.
Federer had the means at this stage in his career to reduce a great deal of friction. He was on his way to becoming one of the few athletes in history to earn $1 billion during his playing career....
Federer’s two decades of on-court achievements only begin to account for that stunning total: About $130 million of Federer’s earnings has come from official prize money, a figure that puts him second on the all-time list in tennis to Djokovic’s $152 million. The rest has come through sponsorships, endorsements, appearance fees at tournaments and lucrative exhibition events around the world. Federer’s performance in this domain has been every bit as impressive as his performance on court — perhaps even more so when you consider the disadvantage he started with.
The French have a fine expression that applies to Federer: “joindre l’utile à l’agréable,” which translates loosely as “combining business with pleasure” but is actually broader in scope, encompassing the tasks of daily life. If you wonder how Federer managed to remain in the top 10 until age 40, part of the answer lies in his ability to embrace what some other prominent athletes might consider drudgery. That applies to long-haul travel, news conferences in three languages and mundane one-on-one interactions with various corporate partners."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/magazine/roger-federer-brand-legacy.html
10. "Although Koch isn’t big on consuming it himself, he’s going public now with a long-held belief: Cannabis should be legal nationwide. So he’s putting his name, and nearly $25 million of his $45 billion fortune, to influence criminal-justice reform and legalization by the end of 2021. Brian Hooks, Koch’s right-hand man, says that a good barometer to gauge what Koch and his network are eventually willing to spend is what they’ve already put toward these issues—some $70 million in total over the last two years.
“It should be the individual’s choice,” says Koch from his office in Koch Industries’ sprawling granite compound in Wichita, Kansas. “[Prohibition] is counterproductive. It ruins people’s lives, creates conflict in society and is anti-progress. The whole thing never made sense to me.”
11. Quiet giant.
"Dell Technologies, at $75 billion, is worth more than four times what it was before it went private. Because of all that leverage, Dell, Durban’s Silver Lake and co-investors have done far better, with total gains of more than $40 billion, according to Forbes’ calculations. Dell’s personal net worth has risen to $50 billion. In many ways, he was the architect of the biggest buyout coup of all time.
“It didn’t feel that risky to me,” he says. Skeptics had missed the big picture. Dell gushed cash and sat on plenty of valuable software assets to sell. And cheap money provided the ideal conditions to finance a corporate gut renovation.
“Michael is financially sophisticated. He’s not a technology geek by any stretch of the imagination,” says George Roberts, the billionaire cofounder of private equity giant KKR and a pioneer of the leveraged buyout, who marvels at the deal. “He bought the company back at the right time. With hindsight, his timing looks pretty perfect to me.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-the-century-how-michael-dell-turned-his-declining-pc-business-into-40-billion-windfall/
12. "Like I said, people want to be a part of something. And people want to make money—people want the satisfaction of money in their pocket (or rather, ETH in their wallet) as well as the satisfaction in knowing that they bet on the right horse. That their taste and intuition and vision were vindicated by time and by the market. ‘I told you so’ is a powerful driver, as is FOMO, as is mimetic desire.
Audiences have never been able to tap into this like they can now. This is a Web 3.0 development. This is the engine of the Soaring Twenties.
Rather than feeling hipster disappointment when an artist who you follows since their first underground release blows up, you will feel joy. Because you are a stakeholder in the productions of that creator’s artistry. The value—both culturally and financially—has been captured and distributed between the artist themselves and their friends, fans and co-conspirators. Everyone grows together."
https://hyperionmagazine.com/featured/non-fungible-talent/
13. This!
"We now live in a world in which, by typing things into your phone or your keyboard, or saying things into a microphone, or snapping pictures or videos, you can marshall resources, support, and opportunities. Crypto has the potential to take it up a notch by baking game mechanics -- points, rewards, skins, teams, and more -- right into the whole internet.
The Great Online Game is free to play, and it starts simply: by realizing that you’re playing a game. Every tweet is a free lottery ticket. That’s a big unlock.
Anyone can play. You can choose how to play given your resources and skills at the current moment. You can level up fast. Financial and social capital are no longer tied so tightly to where you went, who you know, or what your boss thinks of you. This game has different physics and wormholes through which to jump. It’s exponential instead of linear."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-great-online-game
14. Wow, Owen Wilson is 51. This is a good profile.
“Sometimes it seems like life is being played by Gene Hackman in Hoosiers. Tough but fair. He’s going to demand a lot, but if you play as a team and do your job, things work out. That’s a good feeling. Things make sense.
But of course sometimes life seems to be played by Tom Hardy in The Revenant, some nightmarish guy trying to kill you, where even if you get the upper hand, he’s still going to be there at the end whispering, ‘This ain’t gonna bring your boy back’ or your dad back or any good times from your past back. Or whatever. And when life’s being played by that guy, you just gotta hang on and wait for it to pass.”
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a37227718/owen-wilson-interview-2021/
15. "The game has changed. We are watching a different type of asset get created and adopted right before our eyes. Whether you are talking about bitcoin or any of the other assets, legacy investors are going to be forced to update the mental models that they have used in the past. The timeless investing principles of “buy low, sell high,” “dollar cost average into great assets and hold them for a long time,” or “buy an asset with a margin of safety” still apply, but the methods to determining value are going to evolve.
Just as legacy investors misunderstood Amazon and Facebook for nearly a decade each, we are watching the legacy investors struggle to understand these new assets. That is nothing new actually. This is a story as old as time. It is important to identify the trend underway and realize that the investors who have an open mind will be the capital allocators who likely succeed in this environment."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-game-has-changed-and-you-need
16. Impressive volunteer acts by heroic people. But also shows the breakdown of government capability. Covid and Afghanistan shows the declining competence of the US government and most governments around the world sadly.
17. Stuff like this makes me think people are nuts. Folks are angry for whatever reason and looking for excuses to act out.
18. This is timely and worth a read.
"In short, start pricing your net worth in asset terms. Even if you don’t believe in our world view of the sovereign individual, at least peg your net worth to an asset. It could be as simple as the S&P 500 where you decide if you “earned more money” relative to S&P 500 return or if you “gains more S&P net worth” (ie. you outperformed the S&P 500).
This type of thinking will prevent maximum regret. You will focus more on “what am i going to do with this money if i sell”… Then you will realize there is nothing else to buy."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/afghanistan-shrink-flation-and-a
19. I really appreciate these thoughts.
"I don’t think we can avoid volatility in the future and this has happened before. The 15th century was not pleasant for a lot of people as trade was decentralized, just payments are catching up in a modern centralized world now.
The Decentralized Future colliding with the Age of the Disinterested Hegemon doesn’t sound very tranquil.
So for me, the importance of building an investment practice grounded on ample liquidity and productive assets is the key for me to navigate whatever the world decides to give me, whether tranquil or volatile.
Dollars, gold, and bitcoin, it is all just liquidity which I can use to invest in productive assets run by other prudent men who are honorable and I can trust, because working in decentralized societies taught me personal honor becomes more important, not less, so that is where my focus will be going forward."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/money-and-durability
20. Augur of the future of VC. Elad Gil, Oren Zeev, Lachey Groom and Josh Buckley are pioneering the path of the Solo Capitalist.
“Solo VCs investing at the growth stage, and in particular leading rounds, is what makes this a unique wave,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder of early-stage investing firm Footwork. The challenge for these individuals, he said, is continuing to spend time with portfolio companies as they do more deals. Gil, he said, “seems to be able to do it all.”
The larger funds raised by Gil may augur a more frenzied investing pace for solo venture capitalists, who could seek to follow him by leading late-stage funding rounds. Other solo investors, such as former Stripe product leader Lachy Groom and Product Hunt CEO Josh Buckley, typically lead seed and early-stage rounds—small investments that require less capital. Although they have also raised larger funds in the last year—Groom raised $250 million for his third venture fund—none is close in size to Gil’s."
21. I understand the sentiment. (ironically as I am preparing to jump back into the fray after a long break)
"Valuations have become out of control. VCs began investing in every single sector. It makes sense because technology, health, how we eat, next-generation consumers, etc., have changed everything. Yet to value a company that sells mattresses like a software company makes zero sense to me. The amount of money just tossed around and lost without care is mind-boggling. There are products that I purchased knowing full well that some VC paid for them. Actually, some LP paid for it. I didn’t get it.
At the end of the day, nobody has to look any farther than the publicly traded companies to understand correct valuations. Correct valuations allow everyone to grow and hopefully prosper. It stopped happening. Companies being valued at $30M getting out of YCombinator are not for angel investors. The expectation with these valuations also creates an environment of crash and burn that is not pretty. No wonder mental health issues are on the rise."
https://gothamgal.com/2021/08/my-investing-days-might-be-over/
22. "Put differently: Abundant things become economically worthless, even if they’re foundational for life. Scarce things make people rich, even if they’re meaningless. These ideas incentivize people to artificially manufacture scarcity and avoid abundance everywhere, and this perverse incentive model results in what we call “multipolar traps” — scenarios where the things that work well for individuals locally are directly against global well-being."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-software-eats-the
23. Good discussion on why 2nd (or even 3rd Passports) really make sense in our new world. Diversify your citizenship!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY_asT_139M