Work Life Choices, Not Work Life Balance
I get asked a lot about how I balance my business and family life all the time. This happens on podcasts, in various interviews & various 1 on 1 discussions. I’m always surprised. I don’t feel successful at all and certainly don’t feel like I’ve made it. I probably never will.
Yet, I do think I’ve had a pretty interesting & fun career. But it definitely came at a high price. I’m on the road much of the year. Maybe not the 3/4 of the year when I was an executive at Yahoo! but now at least 40-50% of the time. This was the price for where I am and I paid it willingly. My answer when people ask is that I feel I am the worst person to ask about work life balance. It’s just mainly work for me. Driven by my obsessive need to win and an unending drive for social and material tangible success. Don’t get me wrong, I really LOVE what I do but it can be all consuming.
Even when I’m at home, I’m not always present mentally for my family. My head is almost always around work and business. For all intents and purposes my daughter was raised by a single parent much to my shame and regret. I’ve missed really key moments of my daughter's life. I’ve lost out on many of the important, irreplaceable intangible things.
I’ve beaten myself up a lot for this but I’ve realized all I can do is take care of the present and future. Regret does not help but it certainly does inform. This is why I am now such a proponent of lifestyle design. Which is basically all about being more thoughtful on how I spend my time daily and weekly. These details do add up. It’s about small improvements, “Kaizen” in Japanese, famously put as “aggregation of marginal gains.”
I now focus all my time on really impactful, fun projects and initiatives. I optimize for Working with really good people & friends. I also ensure that I spend real quality time with family and friends. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s how precious our health, time and relationships really are. So it’s about time all of us really pay attention to these important areas of life.
“Hard Water”: The Magic of Learning & Mixing Across Sports & Other Disciplines
Just saw this documentary on the evolution of Big wave surfing. It traces the lineage via Nathan Fletcher who grew up in the surf centers of Southern California and Hawaii.
He was influenced by Jay Adams & Chris Hosoi; skateboarders who brought a “big air” style to surfing and flying, tactics from the ground to the water. There was clearly an interplay between surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding. Each influenced and borrowed from each other. Developing new conventions and standards. This is why Big Wave surfing is so impressive and such a high-skilled sport these days.
I think a lot about the growing diversity and ecosystems of the startup world. Silicon Valley has long been the center of the tech world since the 70s. Yet there was always an interplay between the San Francisco Bay Area and the other tech centers.
We saw many ecosystems growing in the 2010s across the globe like London, Paris, Portugal, Singapore, Jakarta, Dubai, Lagos, Mexico City & Toronto among many places.
The 2020 pandemic literally blew up Silicon Valley, expanding the mindset everywhere. The main vehicle of this was through the talent that was once so concentrated in the SF Bay Area, now spreading out all across America and the world. They brought the energy, best practices and money with them. The top founders now also do not feel the need to come to Silicon Valley to build their companies as Remote work becomes more prevalent and common.
I anticipate that as many of these other ecosystems take off they will create many new & different forms of amazing startups. This will also lead to more best practices that will in turn influence new growth tactics and drive changes in various industries. We are already seeing that the most interesting Fintech companies are now coming from places like Mexico City, India and all over Africa.
I’m continually struck by how much there is to learn from the ever evolving world of big wave surfing & it continues to be a powerful metaphor for business. Like the surf world, the rising diversity and interplay of various ecosystems & industries can only be a good thing that will push the technology industry onto new highs.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 16th, 2022
“And suddenly you just know it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings”--Meister Eckhart
Zero Covid as policy seems like insanity in 2022 unless you are an island. Even then it seems anti-data & stupid.
2. Spot on analysis here. Must read if you don't want to get burned.
https://twitter.com/radigancarter/status/1478878287137021959
3. Same principle applies to Taiwan too. Arm them & Ukraine to teeth. The porcupine strategy works.
"Ukraine is a civilized European nation comprising people of talent and good will who wish to, and deserve to, become part of the free world. They are also a people that the United States has pledged its solemn word to protect."
"This can only be accomplished by arming Ukraine to the teeth. Russian forces won’t be in position to invade for several more weeks. We can and must take advantage of this time to ship the Ukrainians massive caches of weapons, especially the anti-aircraft missiles that will be so critical in neutralizing Russia’s air superiority. Unless Russia’s aerial advantage can be offset, the Ukrainians will stand no chance of holding their own on the ground. So Ukraine needs these weapons, and it needs them now, not after the Ukrainian army is destroyed by Russian air attacks. Once the invasion begins it will be too late. Ukraine is a country of 44 million people; if properly armed, it could repel an invasion by the 175,000-man expeditionary force Putin has assembled. Overcoming a well-armed Ukraine would cost far more resource-wise than Putin is currently willing to spend. By arming the Ukrainians, we can prevent a war.
Good fences make good neighbors; deterrence is much better than war."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/biden-slouches-towards-catastrophe-in-ukraine
4. This is a man I admire. He makes hard decisions and shares the learnings from his growth. Worth a read.
"Going forward, if I don’t have a “whole body yes” then it’s a “simple no” until I can decide for myself. No questions asked.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that sometimes we just need to burn everything down to the ground and start over. Fuck sunk costs. Fuck what people think. Clear it all out. Start with a blank slate. As Tom Cruise says in Risky Business, “Sometimes you gotta say, ‘What the fuck?’ Make your move.” I embraced that elegant notion."
https://www.schlaf.co/nothighoutput
5. "Ultimately, given how crypto ties belief systems, product dedication, and financial investment together, disputes about it will inevitably get more heated than in other ages of the internet. Dorsey taking on Andreessen Horowitz is just the highest-profile dust-up we’ve seen to date. The meme wars among tech’s most respected names won’t stop here."
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/why-jack-dorsey-went-to-war-with
6. "One of the most destructive mental constructs to the health of your financial portfolio is measuring yearly arithmetic returns. The goal, as always, is to maintain or increase the purchasing power of your assets relative to the cost of energy. Human civilisation essentially converts the potential energy of the Sun and Earth into kinetic energy that supports our bodily functions and modern lifestyle.
Making money is not the goal, because money is just an energy abstraction. The correct — and admittedly difficult to track — means of measuring your financial success is determining how many barrels of oil your lifestyle costs now and how many it will cost in the future. Then you must ensure the value of your financial savings increases faster than your expected energy consumption."
https://cryptohayes.medium.com/maelstrom-ee6021e9d0c2
7. "We now reside in a world in which we value things at what they could become, not what they are. A belief system centered on exponential outcomes, both good and bad, dictates the future. The alternative is an apocalypse of hyperinflation, pandemics, high rates and wars."
https://wrongalot.substack.com/p/crypto-and-the-apocalypse
8. Not sure this accusation is fair. Norway is actually pretty far ahead of the curve when it comes to ESG stuff & pushing ethical investing.
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/is-norway-the-new-east-india-company
9. Love this.
"Founders and artists should be aware of where the technology is today. If you can help it, don’t play yesterday’s game. Let your intellectual curiosity guide you toward your joy and also the new edge of the fractal. Not looking backward.
Having a network effects product and community is now even more critical. Founders need to think of their startup as a network, to think of their goal as “bonding” the nodes to their network: employees, investors, customers, and partners. This will look and feel a lot like community building, and network bonding theory brings in the math, giving you the tools to bond high-value nodes to your network.
NFTs, tokens, in-game purchases, tiered access, and many other new forms of value are now revealing themselves. These are occurring just as network formation tools are also blossoming – DAOs, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, etc."
https://www.nfx.com/post/economics-of-creativity
10. Good discussion on unlocks.
"A cornerstone of sustained prosperity is the unlock: unleashing a leap forward with a new approach. Thinking different, if you will. An external shock compels us to leverage existing resources in fresh ways. In these moments, it’s less about new or more than it is about rearranging the materials we have at hand.
Unlocks are often inspired by new technology."
https://www.profgalloway.com/unlocks
11. Good primer on Hydrogen power. The future?
"I do pay attention, though, when the Japanese are onto something. Few remember it nowadays, but the Japanese played a pivotal role in creating the Liquid Natural Gas industry in the 1970s. When Japan focusses its national attention on a task that it considers a national priority, it's worth keeping an eye on. Japan has the know-how and the capital to make things happen on a large scale.
The subsequent outcomes will probably sit somewhere in between the opposing predictions. Maybe Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess was right when he said: "Green hydrogen should not end up in cars. It is needed for steel, chemical, aero." This could still leave room for hydrogen to grow into a significant new industry, because of the sheer amount of energy required in these sectors."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/hydrogen-why-investors-should-pay-attention
12. "Dedicated crypto platforms like Coinbase or even Paypal, Venmo and Stripe, which recently added abilities to use crypto for payments, could evolve into the U.S. versions of super apps, assuming crypto issuers can work with regulators to find a middle ground between protecting the consumer and creating new financial and investment opportunities. If consumers see crypto as secure and legitimate — and easy to use — it could become the base of super apps.
Expanding these crypto and payment apps to integrate with other apps and services would make many diverse tasks more convenient. The bottom line is that people are thinking about finance not just when they go to the bank — if they even have access to a bank — but when they shop, vacation or pay for a medical visit, and such apps would help deliver the financial services they need in a personalized manner.
Integrating crypto payments into other tasks would also go a long way in democratizing the world of finance and money, giving underserved communities and those with no credit histories who struggle to open credit cards or get loans more access to financial services."
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/07/regulating-crypto-could-create-american-super-apps
13. All young founders who have not been through a down cycle need to watch this episode. The depth of solid business and investing experience really shines through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL8uXZDz_o0
14. "We shouldn’t compare the asset ownership percentages today as a snapshot in time. We should instead look at how the trend is evolving. The legacy Web2 companies are becoming more and more concentrated in ownership. Bitcoin has shown to become more decentralized in ownership over time. Web3 tokens are still up in the air. Will they become more centralized or more decentralized over time? No one knows yet, but that is going to be the most important question when it comes to answering “who owns Web3?”
https://pomp.substack.com/p/who-owns-web3
15. A super interesting and insightful perspective on Web 3. Worth a read especially in light of all the hype.
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
16. Worth listening to Zeihan re: geopolitical landscape. De-Globalization, A baby bust and populism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD-pj6i4b8A
17. What a nutty time and many people are learning the hard way about the importance of cheap energy on everything in our globalized world.
https://capitalistexploits.at/back-to-the-dark-ages-owtw
18. More evidence that much of the western developed world is run by incompetent, arrogant, complacent people. It's gonna be a rough ride.
"Europe has been doing its level best to hammer its domestic power producers and erode its industrial base for years. What stops foreign adversaries from helping them along by bidding up the price of these carbon credits to create economic advantage for themselves? How much money would it really take to double or triple the price of carbon in the EU from here? Whatever happens, this is one of the most fascinating stories we’ve come across in quite some time."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/a-banana-worth-squeezing
19. San Francisco is a disaster zone and much of this is due to the progressive idiot politicians in charge and many of us tech people's disinterest. But things are changing fast. You can only take a blind eye to malicious incompetence for so long. Thank goodness for people like Garry, David Sacks and many others.
20. "But the thing is, whatever the pros and cons, we are already on an inexorable march toward the metaverse. We are increasingly living virtual lives. What web3 enables is a richer experience in that virtual existence. One that will hopefully feel a little less hollow, a little more human.
I look forward to a future where NFTs, along with all the other promises of web3, help us create a virtual reality where human interaction is, once again, fun."
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/06/5-nft-trends-that-will-bring-social-media-audiences-into-web3
21. This thread on why building wealth is important. It's not shallow, it's a matter of both survival & freedom.
https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1479890317306470404
22. This is a good set of 2022 tech biz predictions.
https://johnbattelle.medium.com/predictions-2022-crypto-climate-twitter-and-trump-sorry-1ad7fc866cc6
23. Kazakhstan is a very important geopolitical player & the recent events show how important the country is to Russia, China and the USA.
I'm personally a fan of the wonderful people there and hope it all ends peacefully although with some reforms that make their lives better.
https://www.vox.com/2022/1/8/22872642/kazakhstan-protests-russia-troops-putin
24. The Chinese are playing a way better geopolitical and supply chain game than America. And we let them because of our arrogance and complacency. We better wake the F--k up soon.
"Through its vast network of trade deals, subsidiaries and suppliers COFCO has assembled a supply chain for every foodstuff available. They are fully responsible for China’s food supply. Yet the magnitude of this company cannot be understated. They are the modern East India Trading Company.
This is all part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
A new Silk Road. A Chinese Global order from countries belittled, forgotten, or shunned by the American Empire. One of those places was South America.
Post Cold War South America and Africa were tossed aside like the used toys they were. Pawns in a Global war against the USSR. Now broken and downtrodden, they seek aid from China the only Global Power willing to given them any; but their pawn status has only transferred players.
China is extracting them for as much raw materials as their boats can carry."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/the-secret-chinese-company-eating
25. "Today’s weapons are tools and objects that blend in today with everyday life. It is the intent of the user that matters more, for every device is now capable. The DJI drone used to make movies, is one for surveillance. The AirTags for finding your keys, are a tracking device to the amateur sleuth. The Computer is perhaps the paramount tableau of this; capable of doing only what the user inputs. Cat videos, million dollar businesses, TPS reports, or turning off the Nation’s power.
This fact is further compounded by the production of weapons. Nuclear weapons the pinnacle of 3GW weaponry can easily be monitored by the facilities that produce them. Specialized facilities with only two purposes. A semiconductor fabrication plant can producing the brains for televisions and within weeks be outfitted for missiles.
Thus the move of banning DJI hinders China, and the DJI Corporation; it also affects the Terrorist, the Rebel and the everyday consumer. For it is a tool, just as much as it is a weapon.
DJI is the latest pawn and target in an ongoing Unrestricted Warfare of today."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/dji-and-the-unseen-war
26. "With few exceptions, Covid policy was never about reason. Covid policy was a demonstration of power. It was the North Korean military parade of public health, an elaborate performance that existed chiefly to sooth the concerns of a scared nation with the illusion of competent governance. To challenge the logic of authority was to challenge the existence of authority, which is never a popular thing among authoritarians, and especially not in a time of chaos.
But with Virginia exit polls festering in the frightened minds of the Lockdown Forever Squad in Washington, and good news surrounding Omicron too impossible to ignore, it’s starting to seem, to the panicked dismay of neurotics across the country, that pandemic theater is finally close to curtains."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/neurotic
27. Totally random but for anyone who likes a good Viking movie, this short is pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_bvyqLlH8
28. Good overview thread on what's happening in Kazakhstan. This is a big deal geopolitically.
https://twitter.com/ClintEhrlich/status/1479517789450911747
29. Good list. Vietnam and Singapore totally make sense.
"You might have noticed that the countries on this list share a few similarities. Generally, all the best countries to invest in 2022 have strong demographic trends. A growing population and rising middle class helps each of their long-term economic prospects."
https://www.investasian.com/property-investment/best-countries-invest-2022
“YellowStone”: The TV series that Captures the American Paradox
The 4 season tv series centers around the Yellowstone Dutton Ranch, the biggest private cattle ranch in the United States. Held by 6th generation Dutton cattle ranching family, the patriarch John Dutton played by Kevin Costner, has to contend with scrupulous & powerful enemies trying to take their land; developers, fellow ranchers, rightwing militiamen, public corporations, bandits, government officials, and Indian tribes trying to reclaim their land. This is coupled with the complicated family drama of the next generation trying to seek the approval of the patriarch. It’s a great story about a man fighting his damndest to hold on to a fast disappearing way of life in the face of progress, moneyed interests and the outside world. A continual, intense, external pressure being brought to bear on their land and world.
As Adrian Horton points out in the Guardian:
“Yellowstone is the show of what historian Patrick Wyman has called the American Gentry – the class of land and business-owning local elites in smaller markets across the country, whose politics tend to skew conservative and whose influence tends to go under-covered in comparison to flashy oligarchs, billionaires and those whose wealth isn’t tied to a specific place.”
It signifies the way of life in America that is disappearing, one where loyalty, honor and your word matters. “Riding for the Brand” means you live “ride or die”, you will do anything for your crew or tribe. This show also signifies the eternal American battle to conquer nature; empire building and the very violent nature of America and American society. America has been at war internally and externally pretty much since its establishment in 1776. I am late to this show in 2022 but I also see it as an analogy for how an empire is held. Something that gerontocratic America is trying to do now (poorly i might add) all across the world in the face of rising powers in China, Turkey, Russia & Iran. It’s done ruthlessly, violently and with both legal means through the stock market and M&A and extra-legal means through kidnapping, blackmail and straight up killing & execution.
Coming from Canada, it’s also been my first hand experience of the intensely ruthless nature of the business & working world in America.
There is a great quote from Season 3 from the Dutton's big corporate enemy, Market Equities CEO Willa Hayes & her business partner Roarke at hedge fund Metro Capital:
Willa: “They are playing a zero sum game. They are doing it with my F–ing career.
Roarke: “Don’t feel much like a land deal in Montana, does it?”
Willa: “No, it feels like an oil deal in Yemen. And from now on that’s how we treat it.”
Things get pretty brutal pretty fast. It’s such an American approach to things. More is the solution: when you are up against someone powerful or rich, you have to become even more powerful or richer. Overwhelm them with firepower.
Yet, what is so strange to me is that this show is not more popular everywhere in America and this is reflective of the divide in our country, both in technology access and our cultural interests. There have been on average 11M viewers of each episode, numbers not seen since the 2010s GOTR & The Walking Dead. At the same time, this show is almost unknown on the liberal east and west coasts. One big reason is the technology divide, this show is mainly on cable only, which serves most of the midwest and south. Ie. red states, while most of the coasts use some streaming service like Netflix, HBO or Disney+.
I love Yellowstone as the themes it exemplifies are powerful. “Progression,evolution and pragmatism versus tradition, nostalgia & romanticism.” (Source: Looper). The forces that drive many societies but ones that seem behind the big divide in American culture right now. This show is worth watching to understand the American psyche, the American culture and mentality. The incredible level of unrelenting competition that can come from anywhere & everywhere. The ruthlessness needed to win. The highly individualistic nature of people here. The importance of family and legacy. The fact that you grow or you die.
If you want to understand the cultural zeitgeist right now in the USA, this is the show to watch. America is a strange but very interesting place to be right now, that’s for sure.
Notes from “Roadrunner”: Awesome life lessons from the legendary Anthony Bourdain
Finally saw the documentary about the late and lamented chef, author & travel show adventurer. I've been a longtime fan.
His energy, his humor, kindness, graciousness and eccentricity showed through the entire movie. He never hid his personality & he clearly loved food, the nuances of foreign cultures and the wonder of travel. He exuded Incredible humanity. I think this was why we all fell in love with him. The ultimate cool dude. He literally was the “World’s most interesting man.”
He overcame an early heroin addiction and became a chef at some of the best restaurants in New York like Les Halles. He wrote the best selling and illuminating “Kitchen Confidential” which rocketed him to fame. This opened up his television career in the early 2000s doing “A Cooks Tour” which led to all the wonderful international food and travel shows we know & love now such as “Parts Unknown”, “No Reservations” & “The Layover.”
He was a shy, introverted man who only traveled in his adulthood. His first trip was a 6 week trip to Japan and Vietnam, he came alive as the reality started to match the imagination of international travel from books and movies. His quote rings so true in my personal experience:
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
As a recovering addict, he fully embraced his new life and in almost everything he did.
He was an incredible learner, first as chef, then author and then learning the television business on the fly. It was great watching him come to life and experience such growth. And what was also wonderful to see was all the friendships he built along the way with master chefs like Eric Ripert & David Chang as well as the artist David Choe. He was also the master of change and rebirth to becoming a full on television star. As he said “the least I can do is see the world with open eyes.”
I think so many of us admired his ability to be so real and just be himself. I saw him speak live once at one of the big Yahoo! Sales conferences as a keynote speaker. He was so unabashedly Tony. Isn’t that what we all want? To be able to be our true selves, to not hide anything and have the world accept us for who we are. He was an original. Tony inspired and positively impacted so many people directly and indirectly.
That was the great tragedy of his suicide and something that took so many of us by surprise. Seeing a man we admired so much take his own life is just plain shocking. We see the glamor and outside life of people but we never know the pain, the personal battles and challenges they are fighting on the inside.
So what did I take from “Road Runner” & Tony’s life?. Be more kind to yourself and others. And really try to embrace and show more of your authentic self. F-ck what other people think. It’s your life. As the man himself said: “The essence of cool is not giving a F-ck!”
It’s deeply informed my adoption of Kanye’s motto: “I have a dope life and I do dope sh-t!” Thank you and RIP Anthony Bourdain.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 9th, 2022
“You can learn new things at any time in your life if you’re willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you”--Barbara Sher
I'm 110% down with this.
"Controlling your time and the ability to wake up and say, “I can do whatever I want today”
https://thehustle.co/12302021-morgan-housel-wealth
2. This is pretty damn fascinating for history buffs. A meeting of the military worlds in old times.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Varangian_Tagma/status/1476554924339175430
3. It's like America continually shoots itself in the foot. No wonder no one takes this country seriously anymore. America is like a blind, arrogant and mentally handicapped giant.
"If New England’s refusal to use natural gas from right next door is ironic, how it sources liquefied natural gas (LNG) is downright perverse, albeit for reasons mostly beyond its control. We’ve written before about how the US has become a substantial player in the LNG market, and how the energy crisis in Europe spread to Asia, causing a bidding war for LNG supply.
As luck would have it, New England is a now victim of that bidding war and is facing the prospect of dramatically less LNG supply this winter."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/new-england-is-an-energy-crisis-waiting
4. "If there’s one phrase that characterizes our age, it’s ‘elite failure’. Nobody is really in charge anymore; there is no secret room with all the competent people making the pivotal decisions.
From the US government to The Times, the world is now run by a Zoom screen of hollow, indecisive people—absolutely scared shitless of Twitter and Slack threads—wincing from hard realities and public stands in favor of performative posturing and backroom deals; all the while, our elites shamble feebly around the institutions that a greater generation once built … including and especially the management of Apple."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/annus-horribilis-annus-mirabilis
5. What a strange time.
"The view may be nihilistic, but in the current scenario, it isn’t entirely wrong. So much of the economy feels like a scam — the gig economy, student loans, the hope of retirement, a 9-to-5 job. Consumers are always being tricked and squeezed by corporations.
The promise of the middle class is fading fast, so for a lot of people, it just feels like you might as well lean into whatever financial chaos is available to try to hit it big. If housing prices are so high you’re never going to be able to own a home, why not try your hand at real estate in whatever the metaverse is?
If you buy into the idea that a lot of this investing is pretty divorced from reality, then the question is how long this lasts. For now, the music’s still playing, so people are dancing. How long the song keeps going depends on how long the people holding onto the assets can keep singing."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22832438/nft-gamestop-amc-crypto-bubble
6. The Nancy Martin effect. Interesting.
"You are probably familiar with the Nancy Meyers Effect. Meyers, of course, is the director who specializes in films about well-off types who seem chill and cool despite their status. Meyers is a master at writing rich characters, in both senses of the word: people who have stuff from The Row, but describe it as “this old thing”; people who own expensive cookware, but aren’t afraid to use it.
The Nancy Meyers Effect, then, is the thing that happens when you watch her movies: even if you’re a proud Jacobin subscriber, you’re glad to spend two hours in a world where owning a wine cellar is a thing to be proud of."
https://www.gq.com/story/steve-martin-fotb-30
7. Africa is crucial for the clean energy economy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59722297
8. History certainly rhymes. Hope we learn from history here. (we probably won't though).
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709
9. I like this. Short, simple and sweet. Pick an execution methodology and stick to it.
https://davidcummings.org/2022/01/01/pick-an-execution-methodology-for-the-new-year
10. Very good description of China & what's happening in the tech industry there. Well worth a read.
"There’s a little joke that the ideal company is led by a Beijinger, who would provide the vision, leadership, and government-relations savvy; its finances would be led by someone from Shanghai, and its operations managed by someone from Shenzhen (who would hire people from Sichuan and Anhui to do the actual work).
Entrepreneurial friends say that doing business is most straightforward in Shenzhen: people there get together over dinner, discuss how to allocate the workload, and then do things the next day. Dinner in Beijing features lots of drinking, bluffs about one’s connections in high places, and then little follow up."
"The Chinese leadership looks more longingly at Germany, with its high level of manufacturing backed by industry-leading Mittelstand firms. Thus Beijing prefers that the best talent in the country work in manufacturing sectors rather than consumer internet and finance. Personally, I think it has been a tragedy for the US that so many physics PhDs have gone to work in hedge funds and Silicon Valley. The problem is not that these opportunities pay so well, rather it is because manufacturing has offered dismal career prospects.
"If Beijing were only brutal or unpredictable, then people wouldn’t be so on edge. But it is both. No one is sure how far the state will prosecute its values-based agenda."
https://danwang.co/2021-letter
11. Seems like a contrarian investment. Oil!
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/petrobras-time-to-love-oil-stocks-again
12. "No matter how brilliant, none of what we do lasts. But what does matter in avoiding misery is living and working by your own standards. It’s when you operate using only an inner scorecard that you will gain independence of mind.
And it’s the independence of mind that allows you to sit on your ass when you’ve got something good while allowing you to not be swayed by stagnant or destructive herding behavior. Recognition and rewards must be the extra. And as the next section argues, there’s good reason to think that the deserved rewards will come on their own.
Many things in life follow a compounding trajectory if little improvements are present every day. Things such as relationships, knowledge, and fitness. But notice that the compounding halts as soon as you change these things around too much rather than sitting on what works for you.
When you’ve got something good, it’s working, and you’ve spent a lot of energy getting there, it’s probably best to sit on your ass and enjoy the ride."
https://junto.investments/sit-on-your-ass
13. "In his early career, Bertolini was unapologetically competitive, aggressive, and at times, ruthless. He was so well known for his bare-knuckled, iron-fist leadership that his employees had given him the moniker, "Darth Vader."
"I was tough," he says. "People used to hum the Darth Vader tune when I walked around the office. It was like, ‘Here he comes.'”
By all measures, he had made it. He was making tons of money, living in a mansion, and earning respect in his field. But it came at a cost. He was spending more and more time away from his family, and inadvertently creating a work culture that didn't necessarily reflect his values.
Then came his first wake-up call."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/mark-bertolini
14. Lessons from world class chair makers & marketers.
"We don’t write about the Eameses to compare ourselves to them, but rather to learn from them. With Doomberg, we aspire to create a great brand and to market it to the best of our abilities. Many writers recoil at the thought of having to proactively promote their content – they feel producing great writing should be enough, and that engaging in purposeful marketing somehow cheapens their work. On the contrary, we believe failing to do so merely condemns it to the crowded bin of great writing rarely read."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/these-chairs-arent-going-to-sell
15. "Consilience Ventures is creating the world’s biggest tokenized sweat equity ecosystem. We have the startups, the investors, the experts and the tech to underpin it. No one has pushed the model as far as we have from a technical or legal standpoint.
We’re creating a world where startups grow, experts get paid and investors make returns. We’re creating automated systems that allow startups to earn as they achieve preset milestones.
Entrepreneurs get access to a highly-curated network of experts who can provide the hands-on support they need to grow, but they can do it without money. Because experts have skin in the game through the value of the tokens they earn, they will give their startups their full attention and go the extra mile to help.
Tokenizing sweat equity is not a guarantee of success, but it makes success much more likely, along with a higher valuation when you get there. In addition, it helps reduce the impact of luck, so if you win, it’s because you found customers, not because you found investment."
16. "So the last thing I am suggesting for Your SaaS New Year’s Resolution is to get distracted, or take your eye off the ball. But I am suggesting, as founders and execs, you think about doing (x) one new thing that (y) builds on your core, doesn’t fundamentally change what you’re doing but (z) could inflect the curve 10% and not be terribly distracting.
Find a way to add a relatively low-stress, low-dilution layer to what you are doing now. It won’t materially change your MRR at first. But it will have a magical effect by year-end."
https://www.saastr.com/your-belated-saas-new-years-resolution-add-a-layer
17. The case against Crypto. I always read everything and anything. I read cases for and against. Still haven't fully made my mind up yet.
But my sense is that it seems inevitable as technology decentralizes. I guess we will see in 10-20 years.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/against-crypto.html
18. "In general, the studio structure is really smart in a world where there's a lot of capital coming into the market downstream,"
https://www.axios.com/venture-capital-incubating-startups-862dc1e2-2705-4554-8534-0cf2ba24a22e.html
19. Good thread on the gaming industry.
https://twitter.com/sbergel/status/1476222572199129093
20. "Cryptocurrency has become both a libertarian paradise and the most vulgar capitalist society you’ve ever seen. Every single action is a financial transaction and said transactions can be made faster by spending more money. Access within this so-called egalitarian system is entirely based on how many resources you have and how quickly you can mobilize them, which is alarmingly similar to the systems that crypto zealots claim to despise.
And the more popular a system is, the more money that’s required to spend to make things happen on it. It’s also important to remember that the only way into these systems is either through farming coins using computers that cost money, or paying money to acquire tokens to use within the system.
The consistent pro-crypto argument is that big companies control the platforms we use every day, and decentralization is the only way for us to be truly “free.” The problem is that there is no real difference between a web3 company that has transferrable ‘votes’ and a regular company - those with the money still have the power, except they have the ability to directly monetize each vote.
Democracy is quite literally for sale by the company (and regularly sold to wealthy investors before anyone else!), and those buying votes under the auspices of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are really just participating in an even more corrupt and punishing system than we have in the real world."
https://ez.substack.com/p/libertarianism-for-me-but-not-for
21. "In fact, there is a HIGH chance that the company you work for today will be disrupted by small numbers of individuals. People like Joe Rogan have crushed the media space. People like Daniel and Vitalik Buterin and SBF have individually caused significant pain to the financial services industry and NFTs which can be made from thin air are going after the entire Art industry (historically a niche/fringe market for the majority of the population).
Even if you’re not in tech you can do this by simply putting your “life online”. If you notice a common thread amongst people with large followers on social media it is that they continuously *try* to live life.
Instead of selling like your boss is reading, sell like you’re trying to get a close friend to understand what you do. After that we can all but guarantee you will grow *if* you are skilled in an industry (no you don’t need to be the best at everything, you simply need to be *good* as most people won’t even try)."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/when-individuals-eat-companies
22. "This past year shows that government can have a large role in shaping how remote work plays out. Expanding broadband access to ensure that the ability to do remote work is equitably distributed, liberalizing zoning laws, investing in amenities to attract knowledge economy workers, and ensuring that the gains from growth do not solely accumulate to the most well-off — that’s all in policymakers’ hands."
https://www.vox.com/22839563/remote-work-climate-change-house-prices-cities
23. For those who want to understand why we have a supply chain mess in the world.
"Consumers are just buying more stuff than ever and our infrastructure, frankly, isn't ready for it. It's getting held back by dilapidated port infrastructure, by congestion, non-automated ports, and bad rail connections to the ports. We're just recognizing the pain of 20 years of not investing in our infrastructure. And we're feeling all that pain in one year right now.
It’s increasingly difficult for truckers to pick up or drop off containers at ports and warehouses, leading to today’s congested ports, lots, and railyards. So boats can’t get in, we don’t have enough containers, a lot of the empty containers are stuck on the chassis, we don’t have enough chassis because we don’t have enough warehouse space, and we don’t have any space in the warehouses because we can’t move the goods out fast enough.
Until we can focus on what actually clears the ports, rail yards and warehouses, and goods can begin to move at a pace that aligns more closely with the growth in consumer demand, there’s nowhere for the containers to go, and the number of ships waiting to unload will continue to grow."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-ryan-petersen-ceo-of-flexport
24. "Journalism used to be about fanatically pursuing the truth. It didn’t matter where the truth took you, the journalists job was to find it. There was no agenda. There was no adherence to a dogmatic view of the world. Find the truth and share it.
While it may seem crazy, Joe Rogan has filled that void for the digital native generation. He would never claim to be a journalist, but rather positions himself as a regular guy who likes to workout, go hunting, eat healthy, and learn about the world. That vulnerability and transparency is attractive to people who feel like they are being lied to or manipulated by the mainstream media. Joe Rogan is the most dangerous man in the intellectual arena right now because he is the most genuine pursuer of truth."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/trust-has-fallen-and-joe-rogan-is
25. Good tweet thread on state LP land for VCs in 2022.
https://twitter.com/Beezer232/status/1478434884418871296
26. This is a very helpful guide for prepping for your Series A.
https://trueventures.com/blog/preparing-for-series-a-fundraising
27. Long overdue move. We need to bring back manufacturing to the USA & allied countries.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/a-new-push-to-bring-back-us-factories-4623657
Trauma with a small T: Therapy & How to Learn ABout What Drives you
I’ve been taking therapy for almost a year now and it’s been immensely helpful. This is one of the big reasons I’ve become much more honed and focused than ever. Talking to a professional therapist is a great way to understand what makes you do what you do and why you do this. And how you react to certain situations in life. Or in some cases, react badly or overreact to things.
I’ve been so fortunate that I was raised by incredibly kind, generous and kind parents. I certainly was not abused or treated poorly in any fashion, unlike so many others. But as young children, whether through family life or school life, we encounter experiences or situations that cut or hurt us severely. This could be being ignored by our parents, or having a series of biting criticisms from someone we care about. In most cases, this is unintentional but the reality is we’ve all suffered some small trauma in life.
And it’s this trauma that massively influences your personality, your drive and how you become the person who you are as an adult.
As many people who know me well, I am an intensely competitive individual. I have a very unhealthy drive to succeed & win, coupled with an intense fear of poverty & insecurity around money. This is a great combination for business but it is not necessarily a good combo for being a father, husband and in many cases, as a work colleague. Note: I definitely hope I have gotten better as I have gotten older.
With the help of my therapist, I’ve been able to trace much of this to a few key episodes in my childhood and young adult life. I grew up in a relatively financially challenged household in the early days, when my immigrant parents were trying to establish themselves in Canada (Another note: I have incredible admiration for what my parents did for me and my 2 siblings, I owe my parents everything). We were a single income family as my mom stayed home with us for the first 12 years of my life, focussing all her time and attention on raising us kids.
Now I will admit, I was far from a model child growing up. I ended up rebelling and got in trouble all the time at school. I fought. I goofed around and cut class all the time. I was a substandard student in topics that I hated like French, math and all the sciences. But did well in subjects I loved like English, History, & Law.
My mom was tough on us in what is now widely known as the “Tiger Mom'' method. This method is basically the traditional Chinese way of criticizing, shaming and comparing each sibling with each other. Maybe even more impactful, was comparing us with many of our peer friends in the very large local Canadian Taiwanese community. I internalized comments like “Why can’t you be as good in math as Ann”, or “Lucas gets straight A’s, what is wrong with you? “Edith’s mom said she is doing great in school and won several scholarships, it would be nice to have a kid who did the same”. Or “hey, you got 98% on the test, what happened to the remaining 2%.” Some of this was that blatant, some of it was more subtle but that pressure was there.
You felt like you were never good enough and this methodology really works. Look at how many Chinese immigrant kids do well academically in school, end up in top tier Universities and climb the ranks of the various high status professions like Investment Banking, Medicine, Law and such. This is one of the reasons I tend to have unhealthy high standards which really help in the workplace. I also tend to be pretty intolerant of people who don’t work hard to meet these standards.
Another motivator in my life was feeling disrespected or not taken seriously. Written off without the benefit of the doubt. It happened all the time at home and at school, rightfully so because I was kind of stupid punk kid. A big episode in my life was when I was in University. I ended up studying History, while most of my friends were in the elite Engineering or elite Commerce (aka business school) departments. There was one time when my Commerce friends were talking about something they learned in their classes. When I asked about it, they were incredibly dismissive. They said in a somewhat demeaning way, “You won’t understand, you are a history major.”
I was so angered by this. And in my quest to prove them wrong, I went to the library and read every single copy of “Business Week”, “Fortune”, “Forbes” magazine and at least 30 best selling books in business that year. This incidentally was what sent me down the path in the business world. I fell in love with the stories, the excitement and potential impact that a well run business has on people and society. Plus the money helped and its ability to allow you to keep score. Hard to argue with having lots of money in the bank.
I was able to channel this feeling of being disrespected into something that was overall very positive. In fact, that has fed my own personal growth for the last 30 years at least. And with some pride, arrogance and satisfaction, looking through Linkedin recently, qualitatively and quantitatively, I have completely crushed all of those folks back in University and the peer group I grew up with from a business career perspective. These traumas are incredibly powerful if they can be harnessed well.
But I should note, if these traumas are not managed or controlled, it leaves a very unhappy soul. Even when you do hit all those external and internal targets. In fact, the minute you hit these targets, you are on to the next target and a brand new, higher level peer group. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But for me, I find it impossible to stop as there is always a new higher level to hit. It’s a switch that is very hard to turn off, as it’s so deep inside you. And it can be personally destructive if you don’t recognize and work on it. What’s the point of having some success if you can’t enjoy it?
Understanding and conquering these traumas are the key to personal happiness. This is something I’m still working on. So my recommendation? Start the introspection early, get professional help if you can afford it and begin the hard work of working on yourself. It’s really important to identify those small traumas in your past and to learn to live and deal with them. The sooner you do so, the sooner you will be more effective and happy in most aspects of your life.
Why is Everyone So Angry?: Behavioral Psychology in the time of Pandemics and Lockdowns
We’re almost 2 years into an ongoing global pandemic. Have you noticed the level of anger and incivility in both the online and offline spheres? We see this on Twitter, in the media, in our day to day life walking to the grocery store. “Karen” behavior abounds everywhere (for those who don’t know what a Karen is: it is a “pejorative term for a white woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal”. In some cases, this has sparked off into violence or close to it. Think about the sudden sources of scarcity in toilet paper, or canned foods or pasta in the beginning of the pandemic Q1/Q2 of 2020. And the crazy overreaction many of us have had to otherwise small petty little things.
What is going on? I was talking with a VC friend and he had a good observation that it is certainly due to the strange circumstances we are experiencing globally. Many of us fortunate folks have been used to this world of abundance and freedom of going anywhere and anytime. With the shutting down of travel, mass lockdowns, the lack of social contact, supply chain issues leading to a reduction of products in stores and the economic uncertainties we’ve undergone, we've been put in a constant state of “Fight or Flight” mode. Fight or Flight “is an active defense response where you fight or flee. Your heart rate gets faster, which increases oxygen flow to your major muscles. Your pain perception drops, and your hearing sharpens. These changes help you act appropriately and rapidly.”(Source: Healthline, 2021)
This is an important function on how we deal with stress and danger. But the problem is we are not supposed to be in this mode for a sustained period of time. It wears on the body and mind very heavily. We have now literally been in a constant state of “Fight or Flight” for almost 2 full years now. No wonder so many of us have been strained to the limit despite comparatively comfortable material lives (especially to those who have gone through war, or famine or massive economic downturns.) Everyone is like a rubber band pulled to the limit and about to snap.
And the scary part of this is the pandemic and the consequent government reactions are not done yet. Many parts of Central Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand shut down again in the winter of 2021. So we are not out of the woods yet as they say.
Why do I write about this? I do this to help us understand what’s happening around us and how this could be affecting us personally. This is so we do not overreact to what could be a very small things in the bigger scope of life. Things like the rude jerk in the grocery check out line. Or the Driver cutting you off on the road. Or the rude post office clerk serving you. This is something I have certainly noticed that trigger me & sets off my fearsome temper. Meditation, measured breathing and exercise have been personally very helpful to me for managing myself for these situations.
We need to be more patient, civil and kind to each other and understand that we are all going through this together. For the first time in a long time, we literally are all in it together. It’s also the only way we will get out of this mess too.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 2nd, 2022
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step”--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"this is an actor who built a Hollywood career playing as gritty and heavy as you can get: a copper-coiffed and upsettingly horny Bond villain (Skyfall), a tormented priest experiencing a dark night of the soul (To the Wonder), a quadriplegic fighting for his right to assisted suicide (The Sea Inside), a terminally ill street hustler rushing to settle his affairs for his young children before he dies (Biutiful), the murderous drug lord Pablo Escobar (Loving Pablo). What happens when a celebrated actor known for exploring the bleakest corners of the human psyche and its most base passions decides to start belting out musical numbers?
Bardem’s face, one of the most distinct in cinema, is made for gritty and heavy. Hooded eyes complement a Picasso-angled nose, fortuitously broken in a bar fight when he was 19."
https://www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-javier-bardem
2. Lock downs and Zero-Covid is an intensely stupid policy 2 years into the pandemic. Fundamentally does not work.
"Though economic knock-on effects are concerning for China and the world, a bigger issue might be the isolation of China. “If the rest of the world learned to live with Covid, is China going to be the only country that locks itself out of conferences, international travel, and students going there? They are going to pay a high price for going this path,” Dollar said."
https://www.vox.com/22850441/covid-omicron-china-lockdown-olympics-travel-ban
3. "In other words, trumpeting American freedom as a way to lure scientists permanently away from China will both reinforce the U.S.’ moral image in the world, and gather needed tech talent in a way that doesn’t encourage the sending of ideas overseas. Of course, that effort would have to be paired with vigorous efforts to present the U.S. as a place where Chinese people can feel safe and free from racial discrimination. That will require cracking down further on anti-Asian hate crime, as well as stepping up rhetorical efforts to make Asian immigrants feel like America cares about them and can be their family’s permanent home.
But it’s worth it. America needs talent to innovate and grow, and China has a lot of it. We can get that talent and burnish our moral credentials as defender of the Free World at the same time."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/can-we-actually-brain-drain-china
4. "Here we clearly see that talk of China’s massive navy is rather out of proportion. It should be noted that China’s fleet relies disproportionately on smaller classes of ships, like the frigate and corvette, which are widely considered not to be major surface combatants. Even still, the bulk of its numbers advantage comes from its coastal patrol ships which, while not insignificant, have limited capacity to project power beyond China’s near seas. Further, the United States maintains a massive carrier advantage.
While the United States does remain the primary guarantor of security for states such as Japan and South Korea, they are by no means helpless. Indeed, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force maintains one of the largest surface fleetsin the world, containing 51 major surface combatants. Likewise, South Korea’s naval forces total 23 major warships, with eyes on major expansions. Nonetheless, the role of allied fleets goes largely unmentioned in U.S. national security discourse."
5. "Omicron probably is less severe than previous strains of Covid.
So although Omicron is burning through the U.S. population like a wildfire, there are plenty of reasons for optimism this Christmas season. A less severe form of the disease, combined with effective vaccines and treatments, means that we may be closer to the end of mass Covid death than it looked a month ago. Knock on wood. Fingers crossed.
As a coda, however, Covid’s economic impact will still reverberate around the world for a while. This is especially true because China is sticking doggedly to a “zero Covid” policy that almost all other countries have abandoned in the face of hyper-contagious new variants. That requires locking down whole cities whenever there’s so much as a whiff of Covid.
And because the world depends so much on China to sustain its manufacturing supply chains, that means more disruptions in the works, potentially adding to the inflation problem. According to reports, Xi Jinping’s advisors are begging him to drop the “zero Covid” policy, but the supreme leader remains unmoved."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/christmas-omicron-update
6. Still bullish on the USA but you need to diversify to other regions period.
"while the future of the USA and of the Western World is dark and will continue to get darker, the future for the world is actually very bright. While people in the West will be angrily complaining about how horrible everything is getting, most people in other countries outside of the West will be experiencing huge and dramatic increases in technology, lifestyle, standard of living, and income.
I’m not betting on the West, but I am betting on the world outside the West, and in a very strong way."
https://calebjones.com/betting-on-international
7. This is a pretty good framework to evaluate your business. Dude is weird but this framework is quite good.
https://calebjones.com/top-5-things-you-must-do-to-be-successful-in-any-business
8. "Many of these common questions stem from the belief that tech debt should be as low as possible and close to zero. But, companies and products never win by having as little as possible tech debt. Speed to delivery, being first to market, and constantly adding value to the product are things that lead to winning. And, most tech debt can make sense to accumulate as a tradeoff in order to get more of the things that lead to winning.
Just like with debt in real life, if you take on debt right now, you can get something of higher value today and pay it off over time. This means you should view tech debt as a strategic lever for your organization's success over time."
https://www.reforge.com/blog/managing-tech-debt
9. "The pattern of mainstream culture neglecting the people who started the trend or fad isn’t that surprising when you consider that gatekeepers, tastemakers, and critics have tended to skew white and male. But social media and the internet have been leveling the playing field by giving people — young people, people of color, women, LGBTQ people — a place to gather and be heard.
The internet makes the line that separates fads and mainstream culture incredibly thin. Even niche corners of the pop culture landscape feel five seconds away from becoming swept up by the masses. A fad is so quickly adopted that it’s almost futile to fight it; by the time a hater has heard of it, chances are so have many millions of fans.
Something odd is happening: People you may have thought were chic and hip are falling into fads, drinking the popular drink that’s all over Instagram, reading the novel a celebrity promoted in their book club, or wearing that overpriced shoe everyone has — and people you thought were dorky may now be trendsetters, pioneering viral recipes from their mom’s kitchens on TikTok. It’s all strange in this moment, and even I, who might scoff if one of my friends ordered an espresso martini, understand it.
It’s indicative of how the pandemic may have changed all of us. It’s made people a little more earnest about what they do like and won them a bit more slack. Given the litany of bummers over the past year and a half, we’re entitled to a little bit of that.
Over the pandemic, as I watched friends turning into plant dads, knitters, bread bakers, and cat moms, I began to realize that these fads and trends were bridges to human connection, allowing us to build communities that we might not have otherwise. Granted, some of these hobbies are much more permanent and carry more commitment than others (say, making the photogenic Dalgona coffee is a lot less investment than getting a pet), but the end result is the same. There’s a second level of enjoyment unlocked by joining and participating in a community."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22822997/fads-pandemic-dalgona-coffee-disco-peloton
10. This is such a great interview with one of the smartest and original thinkers on the planet. Balaji S. A Must listen to if you want to understand the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF1qrAzAquw
11. This is a good description of the lack of vitality and mess that America is in right now.
"Why does it matter that young people have a voice in tech and culture? Because young people are our most dependable source of new ideas in culture and science. They have the least to lose from cultural change and the most to gain from overthrowing legacies and incumbents.
The philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously pointed out that paradigm shifts in science and technology have often come from young people who revolutionized various subjects precisely because they were not so deeply indoctrinated in their established theories. One of the revolutionaries he mentioned, the physicist Max Planck, quipped that science proceeds “one funeral at a time” because new scientific truths thrive only when their opponents die and a new generation grows up with them."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-innovation-film-science-business/620858
12. This is a boss level framework for creators. Who doesn't want to become a mogul?
https://trapital.co/2021/12/20/the-overlooked-levels-of-the-creator-economy
13. "Finally, in February 2021, the NFT market roused from hibernation—and went crazy. In July, OpenSea processed $350 million in NFT trades. That same month, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, it raised $100 million in venture capital at a $1.5 billion valuation. In August, as NFT hype (and FOMO) reached a fever pitch, volume spiked tenfold to $3.4 billion—an $85 million commission windfall for OpenSea in a month when it likely burned less than $5 million on expenses.
Although transactions have since retreated to around $2 billion a month, the platform now has 1.8 million active users and a dominant share of the market. It’s up to 70 employees and is scouting for dozens more, including much-needed customer service reps."
14. "Fundamentally, the growth of DAOs has been driven by many of the same tailwinds that Web2 communities are experiencing. Amid rising loneliness, people are increasingly searching for connection within digital communities — a trend that was only accelerated by pandemic lockdowns. On top of this, people are dramatically rethinking their relationship with work and consumer adoption of crypto is accelerating — all of which is driving more people into DAOs.
DAOs are not just another use case of Ethereum — they are organizations that give users a home to explore the entire Web3 ecosystem. Packy McCormick wrote in The Dao of DAOs: “If blockchains, NFTs, smart contracts, DeFi protocols, and DApps are the what, DAOs are the how."
https://lisamxu.medium.com/daos-communities-of-the-future-ca083eb88cb2
15. This is a great thread. India on the rise.
https://twitter.com/_shuvamJ/status/1475973667783790595
16. Wow, this is an eye opening interview. He is rightfully negative on USA, bit too optimistic on the state capacity of China. But lots of food for thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-852BsgNck
17. No surprise here. 2 years in: Zero Covid policy makes no sense.
Sadly this is still being hewed to across Asia & in Australia and New Zealand.
What a stupid destructive policy. Learn from Hong Kong & China who are wrecking themselves.
"With China exercising ever-tighter control over Hong Kong, the city is hewing to the country's strict "zero covid" policy extolled by Beijing as evidence of a superior political system. Yet the approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world - a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities' refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong's viability as an international city......"
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/hong-kong-clinging-zero-covid-132702302.html
18. If you are interested in Life Longevity, this is worth listening to. All 2 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9IxomBusuw
19. "Governments are not thrilled in these scenarios to take responsibility due to previous monetary or fiscal decisions. Instead, they historically blame corporations for price gouging, implement price controls, and even institute capital controls in the most extreme examples. The higher the inflation gets, the more severe the government’s response tends to be.
The United States is experiencing nearly 7% inflation and we see our politicians calling out various industries, from beef producers to grocery stores, in regards to alleged price gouging. If history serves as a guide, it is unlikely that the corporations are actually price gouging. It is much more likely that their labor and material costs have drastically increased, so they need to raise their prices in order to still have any profit."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/price-gouging-price-controls-and
20. This is a bit dark but I definitely have come around to this view. And my awakening also happened on the same timeline as my friend Tucker.
I definitely am a Doomer Optimist myself. Worth a read here, especially if you live in the USA.
https://www.tuckermax.com/doomer-optimism-what-i-see-coming-how-im-preparing
21. Super interesting idea. Useful for all startup investors. Hope someone is working on this. MirrorTable versus the traditional Cap Table.
"As motivation, angel investing is through the roof. With the physical decentralization of technology away from Silicon Valley, the simultaneous acceleration of many tech trends, and the money released by a slew of liquidity events, there are more high net worth individuals writing more checks into more tech startups in more countries than ever before."
https://balajis.com/mirrortable
22. Very excellent tech industry predictions here for 2022. Some of the best I've read. Recommend.
https://kellblog.com/2021/12/27/kellblog-predictions-for-2022
23. Learned something new. Always found Shen Yun to be kind of creepy (although I like their anti-CCP stance, the enemy of my enemy is my not-enemy?).
"While their ultimate goals are certainly very different, both Falun Gong and VCs are betting that if they invest in customer acquisition now, there will be a long-term payoff. For VCs, that payoff is either that a) the acquired customers’ LTVs grow to the point that the businesses’ economics make sense or b) their investment exits before unsustainable economics bring down the company. For Falun Gong, that payoff is a growing number of adherents and a global understanding and appreciation of their worldviews.
Ideas are only as strong as the economic models supporting them.
Falun Gong and Shen Yun have the world’s most patient LPs - volunteers and adherents who are committed to changing the world. While Silicon Valley trumpets the same mission, VC LPs are not philanthropists, and they will only subsidize the products and services we consume for as long as they can reasonably expect a positive financial outcome."
https://www.packym.com/blog/shen-yun-startup
24. Drake is crushing it these days. Music artist, businessman and investor. We can all learn something from this guy.
https://twitter.com/TorontoStar/status/1476227545553059844
25. Word. Go where you are treated best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2STCacvs3s
26. Hopeful news on the Covid Endemic front. Hope he is right.
https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1476314067660722176
27. This is a great summary of business predictions for 2022.
Things Fall Apart: The First Step to Rebirth & Rebuilding in the New Year
This is a timely post as it’s January 1st, 2022. 2 years into the pandemic and everything has changed. We are in the midst of another Covid Omicron variant surge across the world: this pandemic has basically become endemic. All the trends that were set in motion almost 2 years ago are now mostly permanent and long lasting. Whether that is remote work, the movement of people to different states and to small towns, food delivery, growing digital life over offline life, Raging inflation and supply chain issues. A full breakdown of the geopolitical world order and the truly adult realization that no one is coming to save you. Not the media, definitely not the government. You can only count on yourself. Well, maybe also some of your family & some friends. Henrik Ibsen said: “The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.”
Boy, did I feel alone. 2020 was pretty much the worst year of my life. The stress, the fear, the financial challenges, the isolation and personal family issues. Those 8 months almost broke me. But I did get through it. I fought through it and rebuilt myself as written in a previous post: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/going-to-monk-mode. Developed some new good habits like a regular exercise regime, better investing mindset, gratitude exercises and having an actual plan for life. From the great Dick Tracy: “A Man without a plan is not a man.”
Still, I think many of us were happy to put 2020 behind us. And also very hopeful of a return to normal and to the life we had before. But we have to face the reality. Everything, including ourselves, has changed dramatically and forever. This was a major wake up call for me.
And in retrospect, this hardship was a crucible that made me stronger, smarter, healthier, better and wiser in almost every way. 2021 was a great personal turnaround. Hard lessons are only learned through massive personal pain. Everybody wants a new beginning and rebirth. But they forget about the collapse & destruction that needs to happen before.
Basically, 2020 destroyed many of my old beliefs, ideals and views of what the world was like. More importantly it destroyed my ego which is usually the biggest barrier in the way of personal change and development. It was a necessary step for my progress.
This reminds of the famous Zen Koan:
“There was a Japanese Zen master named Nan-in who lived during the Meiji era (1868-1912). During his days as a teacher, he was visited by a university professor curious about Zen.
Being polite, Nan-in served the professor a cup of tea.
As he poured, the professor’s cup became full, but Nan-in kept on pouring. As the professor watched the cup overflow, he could no longer contain himself and said, “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
Nan-in turned to the professor and said, “Like the cup, you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
(Source: https://www.gloveworx.com/blog/simple-cup-of-tea-story)
This is no different than the beliefs and ideas you have in your brain. And this is also why so many old people have a hard time changing. They have so many hard earned lessons and when the world changes around them, they just can’t adapt. Or more likely do not want to adapt. I see this all around me. This inability to let go. It’s not a physical or monetary thing. This is the mental blocker that prevents them from moving forward.
So as we enter 2022 and the new year, If you really want to make a positive change and have a personal rebirth, take some hard action. Build good habits, read good books and learn some skills. Make sure you are willing to destroy some bad habits & beliefs, let go of negative people and your previous ideas that are holding you back. It’s like taking a wrecking ball to a damaged building and leveling it. This way you can rebuild it back better and stronger. You owe it to yourself. Now is the perfect time.
As Pablo Picasso stated, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
“Our Brand is Crisis”: Valuable Lessons from a Fictional Political Campaign
Sandra Bullock stars in this movie as “Calamity” Jane Bodine, a washed up American political campaign strategist who goes to Bolivia to help turn around the campaign of an unpopular ex-President. She ends up running up against her arch nemesis and machiavellian Pat Candy who is working for the leading candidate. And to quote the movie description “it becomes a down-and-dirty, all-out battle between political consultants, where nothing is sacred and winning is all that matters.”
This is easily one of my favorite movies to come out in the last decade. Something I rewatch everytime I take a flight as it’s often in movie catalogs. It did not do very well in the box office with less than $10M taken in, which is a shame because it’s an incredibly insightful view into modern day Democratic political campaigns. So many deep and cutting views into human psychology & behavior, social psychology. Also shows the power and ability of the media and the elites to manipulate and shape public perceptions for both good and bad. Usually bad I would say considering how many crooked and rich politicians we have in office these days across the globe.
But there is so much to be learned from this as a business person. A couple of things stand out.
The use of Opposition research for other candidates and your own candidate.
Wikipedia states: “In politics, opposition research (also called oppo research) is the practice of collecting information on a political opponent or other adversary that can be used to discredit or otherwise weaken them.”
This is very smart and is basically competitive analysis to figure out competitors weaknesses. This can be done on your own candidate to see where you have issues or potential problems. In business it’s called “Red teaming.” In fact, this is valuable to do for yourself & you need to be very honest here. Blindspots kill you.
2. “You don’t change the man to fit the narrative, you change the narrative to fit the man.”
There is a scene when the other political consultants want to make their Bolivian candidate be seen as nice and cushy, by apologizing for striking a man who smashes an egg on his head at a rally. Bodine, the main character, tells them to stop. The idea is to tap into his unlikeability, his seriousness and experience. The only way for him to win is to be more authentic and be himself. She states that "A man's strengths flow from the same well as his weaknesses."
I think we spend too much time pretending to be something that we are not. Customers and clients are smart and can see through this. Better to be yourself. (Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix glaring personal issues though).
3. There is a quote by her opponent Pat Candy: “You know, when Adlai Stevenson was running for president A woman came into him at a rally one night and said, "Every thinking person will be voting for you." Stevenson said "Ma'am, that's not enough. I need a majority."
The point is people are not rational. They do not always make the best decisions for themselves. They are affected by advertising, by the media, by other people and by their emotions. In fact, most major decisions are made emotionally and then they use their rational side of the brain to justify the decision.
That’s our job as business people, understanding people better, so you can figure out what they need, and hopefully help them while making money from them.
4. In rallying cry to her team and political staff Bodine yells at them. “Wake up, this is war. There’s only one wrong in this, only one, and that is losing”
The lesson: the side that takes the competition more seriously, usually does win. If the stakes are high, treat it like war. Life or death. Thankfully most of business and life is not like this and can be quite cooperative. But the point still stands. Like it or not, whoever wants it most and is prepared to do what it takes, will usually win.
There are so many great nuggets in this movie and I learn something new every time I watch it. The acting is also quite solid and the story is entertaining as everyone loves an underdog and turnaround. And it takes place in an interesting country that is unfortunately overlooked in the world. The movie may also give you a different view into the importance and messiness of the democratic political system. This movie is worth watching for these valuable reasons alone. I do recommend it.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 26th, 2021
“I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all I Love to play.”--Boris Becker
"Everyone focuses on startup growth. What about this sales and marketing strategy? What about a freemium model? Should we invest more in this? While that deservedly gets attention, when startup growth is working, even more attention needs to be paid to personal growth.
So, how do you grow faster than the startup?
Invest in yourself.
Invest in a peer group.
Invest in learning. Find entrepreneurs you admire and read their books. Find authors that write about topics you care about and read their blogs. Find conferences and programs where you can immerse yourself.
Invest in a coach. Find a business coach that you meet with regularly. Commit to a program and process. Let someone else help you maximize your potential.
Invest in yourself in a systematic way. Carve out the time. Put in on your schedule. Make the commitment."
https://davidcummings.org/2021/12/18/personal-growth-startup-growth
2. "In SaaS 1.0 companies made all their revenue from subscriptions
In SaaS 2.0, companies embedded online payments and started monetizing the transaction volume flowing through their platform directly.
In SaaS 3.0 is an extension of that model to provide even more (typically financial) services to the customers on the platform.
The goal of the SaaS 3.0 model, especially for vertical SaaS type companies that serve a well-defined customer base (e.g., restaurants, eCommerce platforms, breweries, barbers, etc.), is to try to become the one-stop shop for their customer segment, including being the go-to for their lending, spending, protecting and operating needs."
https://tanay.substack.com/p/the-evolution-of-saas-companies
3. "To me, an "effective" homepage should be consistently producing signups.
People should be coming from google searches, word-of-mouth recommendations, review sites. When they land on your site, it should quickly let them know that they're in the right place. And then, they should be signing up for a trial.
Your visitor-to-trial conversion should be around:
0.75% - 1% (credit card upfront)
5%+ (no credit card)
I don't believe vague headlines, value-props, and sentiment-based "benefit-driven" work, but don't take my word for it; test your own assumptions!"
https://justinjackson.ca/vague
4. "We were talking about my approach to inversion when he mentioned Peter Attia’s “Centenarian Challenge” mental model of thinking about longevity. His idea is that people should start with the ambitious goal of being a healthy 100-year-old. From there, he lists a number of physical feats that this centenarian would be able to perform.
For example:
Get up off the floor with his support.
Pull himself out of a pool.
Pick up a child that’s running at him.
Walk up and down three flights of stairs with 10 lbs. of groceries in each hand.
Lift a 30 lb. suitcase and put it in the overhead bin
From there, you work backward and determine what that means you’d need to do at 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, and so on… to be on track to reach that goal."
https://boundless.substack.com/p/the-octogenarian-challenge-165
5. Agreed. Everyone needs to live abroad at least once.
"And ultimately, that’s the most important reason to live abroad — to reexamine your relationship to your own country. You’ll see both the good and the bad in your own country that previously you only thought of as neutral and normal.
Some people live overseas and decide that their home country was overrated all along, and decide never to come back. Others realize they love all kinds of things about their country that they took for granted before, and move back and feel happier at home than they would have if they had never seen the alternative."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/love-it-and-leave-it
6. "Let me save you a trip to the library and summarize them here in three simple sentences:
Your mental state controls your performance.
You can learn to control your mental state.
Ergo, you can learn to control your performance and can thus program success.
Learn the simple tricks to control your mindset and you stack the deck of life in your favor. It is a compelling and unfalsifiable logic flow that has stuck with me for decades. It was my ticket out of poverty and it cost me nothing.
We all have days where everything goes our way. We are in the flow. I call them green light days, because every traffic light seems to turn green as you approach. We tend to get a lot of useful work done on such days. All too often, we have the opposite experience in life. Nothing works, everything frustrates, and all lights are red. Not much gets done on red light days.
The key difference between those two experiences is usually an artifact of your pre-existing mental state. If you attack each day with positivity, hope, and good cheer, you usually end up with positive, hopeful and cheery experiences. If you slump out of bed annoyed, grumpy, and jaded, the world will give you a dark experience in return."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/the-work-of-my-life-july-2021-report
7. "We are on the cusp of a significant mass starvation event of our own making. Soon, tens of millions of the world’s most impoverished people will die from an inability to feed themselves, while many of those comfortably getting by now – especially in the Western World – are in for a shock.
The leaders who put us in this position are doubling down on their misguided energy policies and will continue to do so until they are overthrown. I doubt they will go peacefully. Between now and then, they will use all manner of surveillance tools to spread Orwellian propaganda, misdirect blame, and crush dissent. Leading technology companies will greedily facilitate this modern incarnation of the Great Leap Forward, imaginary utopian ends justifying all manner of grotesque means."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/starvation-diet
8. Another Africa focussed fund. Lots of activity happening there.
9. Don't know these folks but have been watching the amazing progress of South Park Commons for a while. Bullish on their and Ondeck's model. The New Guild.
"The connections lead to more than friendship and fresh ideas, seemingly. According to Agarwal, upwards of 50% of the organization’s members find their cofounders or founding employees within the community, which underscores another way that South Park Commons sees itself as distinctive.
Unlike a Y Combinator, which meets with nascent teams, or VCs who keep tabs on operational execs at big companies, SPC says it’s focused on capturing people who are plainly talented and probably much in demand but who, though they’ve left their last gig, aren’t immediately sure of their next move and mostly just want a little time to figure it out.
It’s looking to capture people whose next move is simply to freely explore ideas, squishy though it might sound. “We’re really like a learning community that helps people in the ‘negative one to zero phase’ get to the point of being able to start a company,” says Agarwal, “and if startups come out of that process, the fund invests.”
10. "I think of my house as a factory. The products of my factory are the health, well-being, and comfort of my loved ones. For most home factories, the four main inputs are goods and services, water, electricity, and natural gas. The two main waste outputs are garbage and sewage. My personal preparedness plan involves modeling my response to losing any of these inputs or outputs for various lengths of time. In the most extreme scenario, I believe I could guide my family through losing all six for at least 30 days, however uncomfortably. I figure if things get that bad, 30 days is about as long as I’d like to stick around anyway.
Under the category of goods and services falls food, medicines, hygiene supplies, and all manner of maintenance and repair work needed to keep a home functioning properly. What if Amazon stopped delivering? What if your pharmacy closed indefinitely? The plumber didn’t answer the phone?
Most people think prepping just involves storing hundreds of pounds of dried goods in mylar bags. I have nothing against that, but there are more practical approaches. The simplest is to just double the working capital of your pantry, medicine cabinet, and other consumables versus what you normally carry today. That alone will bridge you through most emergencies."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/one-flew-over-the-preppers-nest
11. Reading this is infuriating. We are run by unserious idiots in the West, losing all our geopolitical advantages.
"Energy is life. Those projects will get developed. The geopolitical power vacuum we are creating will get filled. We might not be serious, but our enemies are ruthlessly so. They raise a toast to our self-inflicted demise."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/putins-fools-rush-in
12. "As the opening quote of this piece captures so well, we live in a time where few understand how things get made. It is fine to not know where stuff comes from, but it isn’t fine to not know where stuff comes from while dictating to the rest of us how the economy should be run. In some small way, maybe this piece will educate a few influential minds to participate in a better-informed debate.
We are experiencing the early phases of runaway inflation. On what seems like a daily basis, we observe critical inputs into our economy going vertical in price. If you crimp the supply of critical inputs with no workable plan to replace them, inflation is the unavoidable outcome. Energy is stuff. Energy is life. What’s the price elasticity of demand for life, and who can afford to pay it?
Nobody could have seen this coming, they’ll say. We did."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/where-stuff-comes-from
13. Don't read this if you don't want to get angry. It’s a long one.
So many issues and so many people responsible for the mess we are in right now. It's also why there is so little trust in almost all of our institutions in the west.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/first-the-people
14. The first Metaverse in history as a way to deal with a crappy reality?
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/emperor-maximilian-i-brand-arts
15. "Every year, just after Thanksgiving, it emerges en masse at nurseries, big-box retailers, fundraisers, and holiday parties.
It’s one of the most popular plants in the world, with annual sales of ~90m unitsand a global retail impact of nearly $1B.
But behind the beautiful, blood-red bracts of the poinsettia, there’s a story rife with geopolitics, patent wars, a dethroned monopoly, and complex supply chains.
How did this Mexican shrub become America’s best-selling holiday plant?"
https://thehustle.co/how-the-poinsettia-took-over-christmas
16. Pretty excited to check this book series out.
https://www.vox.com/22840424/daevabad-trilogy-fantasy-book-chakraborty
17. A very great perspective here. Looking into the new world of work and investing in 2022.
"Most importantly, do whatever it takes to begin earning location-independent income. 2022 will be the year that people start to separate from late industrial age practices and reap the benefits of the digital age. By earning remote income, you’ll be well on your way to taking advantage of many of these benefits.
Finally, think for yourself. You are responsible for the trajectory of your life. Embrace a Sovereign Individual mindset and pursue as many digital age opportunities as you can. 2022 will reward those that are willing to adapt to frontier concepts."
https://dougantin.com/2022-predictions-what-comes-next
18. "If you’re going to live for the next 60 years (most of you are), it is wise to go ahead and give up on the old belief system. Going to school and slaving at a 9-5 is on the decline. Trusting major corporations/governments to save you is also on the decline. Save yourself first, go through the binge degenerate phase and move on to helping the people who are worth saving (Note: you will learn that 97% of people don’t even want to get ahead in life, they prefer netflix and sugar)
On that note. Toss away your new years resolution list and realize there is no such thing as a resolution, only effort to improve yourself since it’s just a single player video game."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/winning-mentality-and-what-you-actually
19. I really really hope this does not happen. It's not good for anyone. Not for Ukraine, Russia or really any country if Russia invades Ukraine.
https://www.spytalk.co/p/russian-invasion-of-ukraine-is-almost
20. This is an interesting plan for being diversified and anti-fragile.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/global-citizen/five-flags-im-planting-in-the-next-year
21. This is pretty scary stuff. The Cyberwar going around us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8bbOUxYDqc
22. We have much to learn from Russia re: Counter Insurgency & Hybrid war.
"Today, Russian expeditionary counter-irregular packages draw from professional volunteer brigades and battalions, including force multipliers such as special operations forces, drone forces, military police, and private military contractors. When integrated with air power, these force packages allow Moscow to conduct sustained operations abroad with a relatively small and scalable footprint on the ground.
This ability to tailor force composition to create expeditionary counter-irregular task forces is new in the Russian experience, and represents a watershed in expeditionary mobility and command organization. The Russian kill chain is now shorter, its forces are more specialized and capable, and it retains the ability to rapidly scale Moscow’s investment abroad in a way new to Russia’s historical experience as a continental power."
https://warontherocks.com/2021/12/the-changing-face-of-russian-counter-irregular-warfare
23. "The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.
Remote work ultimately disproves the notion that anyone can be a manager. Management is tough, managing people is tough, motivating people is tough. It is really difficult to get the best out of someone, to find what they’re good at within an organization and then give them the means and motivation to thrive.
It is also equally tough to deal with how some people within an organization have a ceiling - they will never be better than they are, and giving them a managerial title (because they’re not worth more money) is an actively abusive thing to do."
https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying
24. "Aron’s behavior is the exception that proves the rule. No serious CEO with real prospects for profit would flail about on social media, stitching himself to whatever nonsense is currently trending online. They are too busy doing the serious work of capturing profits. Instead, Aron and his team have been busy dumping stock, selling more than $80 million worth and counting so far this year. Apparently, insiders at AMC aren’t so confident that a short squeeze is imminent.
In a Greater Fool’s trade, a speculator takes a position in a questionable security in the hopes that a more foolish investor will bail them out at a higher price. This happens regularly, especially in market booms like the one we’ve experienced in the past 18 months, and the ending is never different. Eventually, the supply of new foolish money dries up, momentum behind the movement fizzles, and the price of the security reverts to fair value.
The underlying business at AMC is in terminal decline, the capital table is wrecked, the stock has been diluted so extensively it would make a penny stock promoter blush, and we believe the fair value of AMC is zero. Could it double or triple from here before reality is confronted? Absolutely, which is why we have no position and have no intention to take one."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/no-planet-for-the-apes
25. "Seriously, name me some wealthy guys who day-traded their way to billions—everyone on the billionaire list created an amazing company, invested in an amazing company, or financially engineered a mediocre company. Seriously, no one day-traded their way there. It takes a holiday, when I’m focused on hiking around calderas to realize how petty the day-to-day trading is. We all fixate on it and worry what the most recent quote signifies, but zero value is gained."
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2021/12/23/azores-part-1
26. Really interesting and some "way out there" forecasts. Alt investments become mainstream & it’s about time.
https://altgoesmainstream.substack.com/p/7a0ed369-2818-4ba3-bf42-415e557c0c57
27. I'm a fan of Radigan Carter. This is a very interesting interview and I recommend listening to this if you want to learn how to be an independent investor.
Mental Health is About Protecting Your Company’s Most Important Asset: YOU as the Founder
Life in America can be hard as many of our traditional communities have broken down. We live far away from our families. Many people don’t even know their neighbors or go to church. Work is your community now. Because of this, you need to ensure that your work life makes sense for you. It’s so easy to grind yourself to the ground. Easy to be guilty when you want to take a break. This is more so with business founders. Most founders end up taking too much responsibility.
They put their constituents like customers, employees, partners & investors first.
Many founders put themselves last. They don’t take care of themselves. And this is why so many of them burn out.
This is far more endemic than we think and no one in our macho work culture talks about this. Not when everyone is posturing and talking about “killing it”. This has to stop as it serves no one well. This is why I’ve become such a fan of Tyler Tringas and the Calm Company Fund movement & community. At their awesome Founders Summit in Mexico City, things like Mental health were front and center of the discussion and how to build a company that fits your own personality and goals. For the record, not everyone’s idea of entrepreneurship is the Silicon Valley Unicorn-chasing rocketship, even though this is the garbage being pushed on founders these days through the media.
There were so many great lessons and workshops and discussions that would take more than this post to describe. But I will leave you with a few important questions & exercises that were raised at Founder’s Summit that every founder should ask themselves.
What is your One Thing? Ie. What is it that you are working for. Is it Freedom? Is it Money? Is it Fame/Glory? It’s very important to be honest with yourself.
For me personally, it’s clearly freedom, which money is an enabler of. I will never be beholden to anyone or work with or for anyone I don’t respect.
2. If money was not a problem: what would you do? What kind of life would you live?
This is something in line with the “Perfect Day Exercise” I described before (https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-perfect-day-exercise). This really set me on the life I live now.
3. What would you do if your doctor told you, you only have 5-10 years to live?
This is crucial to help you think about how to make some small and big changes for the long term. And if what you are doing now is accretive to that long term life you want to live.
4. What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?
This question should make you think about what you are doing now. Life is fleeting. If you are not doing what you want to do now, when will you do it?
These key questions helped me to crystallize and figure out my own personal life mission and I think they will for you.
This Mission for me ultimately is about having a positive impact on 10 million people around the world through my investing, writing, public speaking and mentoring. But this of course is to be balanced with family, health and fun. My personal mottos are “I do WTF I Want” & living out “My Life is Dope and I do Dope Sh-t!”
I hope all founders really do think more about the type of business and consequently, the kind of life they are building. This way they can build happier and sustainable outcomes.
And as it is December 25th today: Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!
Scaling is F—Ng Hard: Hard lessons hard earned
I’ve been lucky here, having a fairly broad experience of scaling in Silicon Valley. Had some experience @ Alibris (scaling from 15 to 150), at Yahoo! scaling from 2800 people to 15,000+; at 500 Startups; going from 30 to 150 people. Plus I’ve invested in over 400+ startups, many which have scaled to hundreds of employees. Most companies do this very badly and like many things in life, you only learn the hard way.
I noticed 2 key breakpoints in startups. 1) Dying before PMF 2) getting to PMF but not able to scale quickly enough or Spinning out of control.
I want to talk more about the 2nd breakpoint. I noticed that this typically happens after raising their Series B.
One big problem that seems consistent: “Bad Hiring” (usually hiring big name company executives). Most founders have never managed a large team nor cultivated them. Something also common is not getting rid of commandos when you need infantry. (https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-jungle-the-dirt-road-and-the)
This is hard, these folks have been with you and helped you get to this point. But the company has evolved and they may not be effective anymore.
Tied to this and also very common for VC funded startups: “Over Hiring” and then having to fix this. You get so caught up in adding people, you end up cutting corners and hiring the wrong people. If you are honest, you know it’s not working but you want to give them more time to acclimatize. Or hope they can turn it around. Fast forward 2 quarters and you know it is not working, so you inevitably have to fire them and rebuild the team from scratch. No one talks about this but its way more common than you think.
“Messing up on Processes”: this sometimes is either underinvested in or over invested in.
Founders either tend to be allergic to bringing processes. Thus they try to keep the org flat and decentralized, which also tends to make things very messy and disorganized. And havoc when you grow the organization.
Or they over-invest and bring in processes from much later stage established companies. My view is that this was one of reasons Zynga fell behind in the early 2010s because they brought in so many execs from Electronic Arts. They became very bureaucratic and schlerotic.
Another big question and risk: “Going beyond the core customer segment. Ie. Lack of Focus.” So for example, you have grown on the back of SMB but then decide to go after Enterprise. It requires changes to product, support mechanism, and a brand new sales motion and GTM.
The big question is does it make sense right now? Have you saturated your original core market (like in my opinion, ~70-80% of the market)?
I can spend a lot more time on all the issues that come with scaling. But if companies can surmount the previous challenges, they are well positioned for tremendous hypergrowth. Like many things, it’s easier said than done. Thankfully there are an ever increasing number of people who have had great experience with scaling. And additionally, who are very open to sharing their hard earned knowledge here. I expect the art of scaling will be more common knowledge as the Unicorn startup count increases as it has in the last few years.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 19th, 2021
“You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.”--Morgan Wooten
"It’s stories like this that may help ease any lingering worries that Nanjiani has absconded from the dingy basements and Games Workshop backrooms of comic book culture to mix in the gym lockers and frat houses with the beefy, square-jawed jocks. Even when he’s shredding himself into the best shape of his life to play an ancient, genetically altered guardian of the galaxy who can blast laser beams from the tips of his fingers, he still manages to mount a rococo, Bollywood-inspired dance sequence. More than a turncoat in the pop culture wars, he may well manage to ease tensions between the betas and the alphas — an ancient enmity that, like the battles between Marvel’s various races of superhumans, is seemingly eternal.
For all the hype around his new movie (and his new body), Kumail Nanjiani is still the same guy. He remains — proudly, and even a bit defiantly — an indoor kid."
https://sharpmagazine.com/2021/11/16/kumail-nanjiani-profile
2. This is the dream but surprisingly few VCs use tech and data themselves. Probably changing fast with all the competition out there (and new tech too)
“Especially as venture firms grow, and especially as having access to data and speed and efficiency become competitive advantages, I do think that there will be more demand and budget for buying additional products,” Lerner said. “There are real firms out there, like Tribe, that have built proprietary datasets and data models and that is their edge, but I don’t think that’s how the majority of firms differentiate.”
It may not be a core differentiation, but venture firms are turning to data sources and building their own analysis layer on top of it to help them gain a competitive edge."
https://www.protocol.com/tech-software-venture-capitalists-use
3. "I think that the key to believing in a very bright future is to have trust in oneself, in others, and in the future itself. Things will only get better if we work on making them better. It’s just as self-fulfilling as being Debbie Downer. Plus, according to the late Hans Rosling, most things do get better over time.
I think that the only threat towards this bright future are distractions. We are daily bombarded with attempts to distract us from what I believe really matters: self-fulfillment. Its news, phone calls, social media, traffic, emails, spam, commuting, drama, unproductive meetings, boring Zoom calls, mindless thoughts et cetera."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/unlocking-the-bright-future
4. "By the 20th century, the term pulling yourself up by your bootstraps had morphed, changing to something not only possible, but desirable.
Zimmer said it’s not exactly clear just when the turn happened, but it became a compliment about self-sufficiency.
.......bootstrapping most often isn’t the way to become one of the biggest companies on the planet, despite a few tales of outliers.
Still, Godin defended bootstrapping as a choice most founders should consider to stay focused on the unique product or service they’re hatching."
https://thehustle.co/who-gets-left-out-of-bootstrapping
5. Very thought provoking and well worth a read. Strong recommend.
"Put all these pieces together, and rather than a unipolar Pax Americana or a bipolar “New Cold War,” the future will be a decentralized race to the top as countries, cities, companies, and communities—physical and virtual—compete to attract talent and capital. We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it. Such is the nature of great protocol politics.
What does that mean for the United States? Today, the United States is experiencing a relative decline in strength across economic and military axes. Its global role is more a function of its victories in 1945 and 1991 than its capabilities in 2021.
Places as varied as Estonia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and Chile are all vying for newly mobile talent through “nomad visas” and other similar programs. After all, many aspects of life are already in the cloud (like email, education, and e-commerce) and many others are partially digitized (like finance and foreign incorporation). Government is what economist Mancur Olson famously termed a “stationary bandit,” extracting rents in exchange for providing benefits."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great-protocol-politics
6. Good framework for thematic vc investing. Tech, Society, Timing and Team.
https://worldpositive.com/how-to-build-a-time-machine-f207b2cae3fb
7. This is a worthwhile interview with Doomberg on the decentralization of media. Also the future seems to be anonymous and content driven. People taking control of their lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deD3QRt3DZw
8. "In a world where US oil production tapers off, spare OPEC+ pumping capacity fails to materialize, financing for new exploration and development continues to shrink, and demand for oil in the West continues to grow while exploding higher in the emerging economies, what happens to price?"
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/theres-not-enough-oil
9. "We are interested in people like Wallis because he is a successful content creator, and we are continuously researching and learning all we can about the rapid decentralization of entertainment and education into such niches. The gig economy for brains is exploding and has only accelerated under the world’s response to Covid-19.
Brand is one of five pillars of any business, the others being production, technology, demand creation, and channel. An effective way to improve business performance is to do a deep dive on each of these five pillars, identify strengths and weaknesses, and then look for ways to get better."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/the-riches-are-in-the-niches
10. "nations are not very old, and there is no species law that we must organize beneath their banner. Across human history, we have cobbled ourselves into tribes and fiefs and city-states of varying prosperity and endurance. We have favored other configurations and flourished.
We will do so again. Just as mechanical advancements gave rise to national systems, the technological revolution enables new structures. While the internet was the dominant force in the current shift, cryptocurrency represents the missing piece. Though much discussed, we remain in the early innings of understanding how profoundly the blockchain "vernacularizes" economics and empowers digital, censorship-free homesteading.
The result will be a new kind of civilizational structure: decentralized countries. "DeCos" will operate above national borders in the digital realm. In that respect, they resemble the "cloud nations" theorized by one of decentralization's poet laureates, Balaji Srinivasan. This piece owes a debt to his thinking and the writings of Benedict Anderson and Marshall McLuhan.
While Srinivasan's "cloud nations" seek to proceed "cloud first, land last," DeCos may never attempt to settle terrestrial territory. Rather, these entities recognize that our digital lives are more real and valuable than our corporeal ones."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/the-decentralized-country
11. Whatever you think of this man, he is the real life Iron Man & a bloody, interesting guy who deserves to be Time's Man of the Year. Elon Musk.
"This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.
His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper.
He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.
He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere."
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk
12. "The conclusion goes back to the same: computer coins. Individuals and institutional investors need to figure out a way to move up the risk spectrum given double digit inflation (minimum) and an asset class that is secure from confiscation. Crypto offers both. As we go through a rocky Q4/Q1 (more mandates, Covid-19 new variants), keep your eyes on the prize: holding onto all assets.
Smaller countries will continue to adopt BTC, larger countries will be better off in Fiat terms (US Token, Euros, Yuan etc.). However. The cat is out of the bag. As inflation ramps up, third world countries are generally hit harder. This results in a need for a new financial system to combat $30+ fees on remittance (just ask the Middle East, South America or Africa). Crypto solves it."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/improving-the-free-value-and-some
13. Woohoo! Congrats to my friend Apostolos, go Venturefriends!
14. "From travel restrictions to the efficacy of vaccines, every single major Covid position has diametrically switched across party lines, and almost every person responsible for Covid decisions, which have nearly all been disastrous, is still in power. Unless we’re all completely insane, none of this would be possible were we able to effectively remember.
Intuitively, most people seem to understand we’re missing something important. Even while nuclear power plants around the western world fade to dust, the concept of nuclear power is gaining popularity across all political ideologies.
In terms of space, Elon was just named TIME’s person of the year. Sure, the bluecheck anti-moon crew was furious about it, but the intuition of the average person seems to draw us back to these concepts, to American greatness, really, and to the people who embody the concept.
With a clear vision of a greater future now somehow difficult to grasp, and to really see, intuition — our feelings — are perhaps our last guide through the dark. Trust your gut. Things used to work. Things can still work. On some level, you know this is true.
That something has gone wrong with the world is not exactly controversial. But what, exactly? Perhaps that nagging feeling of something “off” is less a looming danger than it is a thing we’ve lost. An erosion of the soul, maybe, almost too gradual to name."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/variant-xi
15. "We’ve argued on several occasions that replacing coal with natural gas and scaling nuclear power alongside renewables like wind and solar is the most sensible energy strategy available to humanity today. Substituting baseload power with exclusively intermittent sources consistently fails those who adopt such a strategy, leading to higher costs, less reliability, economic damage, and rolling blackouts.
We find it odd that this empirical evidence is not only routinely ignored, but those who dare point to the data are labeled primitive defenders of the status quo. We prefer to think of ourselves as pro-human realists.
If one wanted to destroy an economy from within, it would be hard to do a better job than what Germany is doing to itself. By systematically shutting down baseload-critical nuclear power facilities and replacing them with intermittent renewable energy, Germany has left itself – and by extension, the entire European Union – vulnerable to shortages of reliable sources of electricity.
Not satisfied with that error, Germany has further impaled itself by attacking its suppliers of natural gas – the remaining option for producing reliable baseload power, having ruled out nuclear and coal – turning a mistake into a predictable catastrophe.
Unfortunately for some Americans, especially those living on and near the Pacific Coast, Germany holds no monopoly on dummkopfs. For evidence, consider that the formerly great state of California will soon begin the process of shutting down its last remaining nuclear power facility."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/california-ditzkrieg
16. Very exciting. I’m definitely binge watching this December 31st.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3uX4uwrAaY
17. I'm super bullish on Eastern Europe. Great place to invest, live and hire.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/lifestyle/why-we-hire-in-eastern-europe
18. "This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving.
But knowledge is a thing that we can always create more of."
19. "Brotman said he estimates small, early investing venture firms allow about 95 percent of pro rata rights to expire due to a lack of capital, funds needing to be closed, and the simple fact many of the firms are not growth round experts.
It often makes sense for investors. A small seed investor who may have invested $1 million for a 5 percent stake in a startup from a $20 million fund likely cannot now budget $5 million in a follow-up round to maintain that stake."
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/pro-rata-rights-vc-explained-changing
20. "To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others. There’s always a case for optimism, optimism of human ambition and capability of great technological and scientific discoveries.
But if your main argument for owning an asset is that other people will own it, not because it has intrinsic value, but because there’s a greater fool—i.e. let's just hype it up and pump it and promote it until more and more fools get in—eventually, the smarter people that induced the fools are leaving them as the bag holders. That to me is the great inequity. To The Moon is a constant encouragement of people. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbx9b/the-to-the-moon-crash-is-coming
21. "When we look back on 2021, however, no story will be more consequential than the people’s revolt against institutions. In recent memory, there hasn’t been a single year where so many people told society’s pillars to buzz off. Instead of holding jobs, they chose to resign. Instead of making safe investments, they chose meme stocks. Instead of political orthodoxy, they chose to vote independent."
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/the-revolt-against-institutions-is
22. "When we eventually emerge from the energy crisis, the story of how China came to dominate the magnesium market should inform a strategic reconsideration of the West’s entire approach to the economy. Certain critical raw materials are difficult to make and doing so with all appropriate environmental controls is a price worth paying. Allowing China to abuse its environment so it can flood the world with cheap goods and put our manufacturers at a terminal disadvantage is dumb policy.
We need to get smarter, and soon."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/magnesium-pi
23. I wouldn't invest in this space personally but I'm a happy customer!
"The final step in delivery, handing a product to the consumer, is known as the last mile. Historically, the mile has been rhetorical. The nearest UPS hub or DHL warehouse might be 10 or 20 miles. These businesses, however, have dispersed their distribution networks to within an actual mile. The last last mile.
VCs recognize the opportunity. Gorillas has raised more than $300 million since its founding last year and is valued at over $1 billion. Jokr, which started delivering groceries eight months ago, has raised $350 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. They’re two of the fastest zero-to-unicorn firms in history.
It’s a global phenomenon. Spain’s Glovo raised $528 million in April ($2 billion valuation). Turkey’s Getir raised $550 million in June ($7.5 billion valuation). America’s Gopuff raised $1 billion in July ($15 billion valuation). Prague has Rohlik, London has Zapp, Moscow has Samokat … the list goes on. In the first quarter of this year alone, instant-delivery startups raised nearly $8 billion — more than in all of 2020.
This is part of a larger trend that’s bigger than just physical delivery. Everything is getting delivered. Streaming brought the box office into the home; roughly half of pre-pandemic moviegoers aren’t buying tickets. Telehealth brought doctors and therapists into the home; telehealth claims are up 37 times from before the pandemic. Yet more evidence of the Great Dispersion.
Over the past two decades, the dispersion of retail from shelves to porch fronts has created and reallocated trillions in value. A similar tectonic shift is likely to occur in grocery and restaurants at the hands of ghost kitchens, ride-hailing companies, and well-capitalized last-last-mile firms. The question is, will new giants be birthed or will the existing behemoths grow new heads?"
Building, Managing and Living by Values: The Importance of Principles
What do you do when it’s tough or your back is against the wall? Do you do the right thing or the expedient thing?
I always try to do the right thing but if I look back I don’t think I’ve always succeeded here. I’ve also tolerated or excused bad behavior from companies and firms I’ve worked at or associated with.
As they say, “There are rules, and there are laws”. Don’t break laws for sure. But the way they treat people or employees would not exactly be considered best practices or even remotely kind or human.
For the record, I don’t think these companies are run by bad people. But they are either too busy and/ or frankly cash starved and thus desperate. Desperate people do desperate things when their back is against the wall. Hence, they do some questionable things to cope and survive. Good people do bad things all the time.
I don’t justify or condone this bad behavior. And i can genuinely say, it always will come back and haunt them as their negative reputation begins to spread.
But you also need to survive so you can fix it. And hopefully you are in a position to influence or fix it.
So what can you do?
Clarify your personal values
These values should be the filter & guide of how you make hard decisions
Have a red line on what is acceptable or not
Always focus on doing better and beyond what is okay
This is something I believe I will be working on for the rest of my life.
This is why personal financial independence is so crucial. You need to be able to walk away if you have concerns or find your values diverge clearly with who you work with or for. It’s way too easy to overlook, excuse or rationalize bad behavior when you rely on their cash. Btw: this is relevant for not just employees relying on a company, but also a Venture Capitalist relying on a big Limited Partner for their Fund; or a company relying on a big customer/client. Diversification & thus less reliance on a specific revenue stream is critical.
This is another lesson I learned far too late in my career. Heed my warning here if you want to keep your conscience clear and sleep well at night.
Startup Now!: Entrepreneurship is the Ultimate Vehicle for Personal Development
James Clear stated on Twitter: “Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.”
I think if you ask any entrepreneur they would agree with me.
In the beginning, you will work. You will work hard and you will work long hours. You are putting down the foundation & there is no way around this. And you will learn a lot.
You have to learn or your company will fail. Mindset matters & you may need to change a lot to build a successful business.
Values show up in culture. Business is personal. Every business is a snowflake and unique in the world. While it is helpful to see, hear and learn how other people have built their businesses. BUT it does not mean you have to follow what they do. You can adopt it or not.
You are in charge and you own the results. Because of this, you have a Choice: You can hire the people you want, hopefully people who can do the job well. (You will also learn quickly if this is the case or not).
You can find the customers to focus on and solve the problems you want to work on. If you do this well, you can build massive value in your business. Ie. Equity value.
One of the key lessons I’ve learned in the last 22+ In Silicon Valley, building equity is the proven road to financial independence & wealth.
At minimum it could be “Launchpad Business”, one which provides you enough of an income and living that you can go work on something you really care about. I wrote about it here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-launchpad-business-concept
A successful commercial business has a social impact. You are fixing customers' problems, growing & educating employees and supporting their families.
The point is that besides starting a family, the starting and running of a business is the most impactful & high leverage thing you can do for yourself and society at large.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 12th, 2021
“When you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less.”--Paul Brown
"Free on the Internet these days is a gateway drug. Once hooked, we forget why we are wasting our time on stuff that doesn’t add value. If it has a value it’s worth paying for. Making the user the product that is being sold in shady virtual alley deals is not cool.
These days I’m very suspicious of everything free online and prefer to pay for services to avoid advertising and that my data is being sold to who knows whom.
Pay well for what matters, for brands and services that is moving humanity forward. Support initiatives that protects our planet and people, and use technology intelligently to serve humankind and create the lifestyle your heart and mind desires."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/free-versus-pay
2. This is a good discussion on the China menace to Taiwan & the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzMMGEysBk
3. This is a good tweet storm on the future of Fintech in 2022. Worth a read.
https://twitter.com/Mark_Goldberg_/status/1467858752447475715
4. "For more than 20 years now, the mountains have been the crucible in which Chin has forged his singular life. He is a professional climber, sponsored by The North Face; a mountain photographer, sponsored by Canon; a filmmaker with National Geographic. He shoots big-budget commercials for blue-chip companies like Ford. More recently, of course, he’s also become the codirector of nail-biting, award-winning documentaries—Meru (2015), Free Solo (2018), and The Rescue (2021)—that reevaluate the limits of human potential.
Through that multifaceted success, Chin has become a citizen of two worlds: He’s a Manhattanite and a Jackson local, a dirtbag climber who’s at home on the red carpet. More than anything, perhaps, he’s the consummate generalist whose constellation of skills has never aligned in quite the same way for anyone ever before. Plus, there’s the snow-melting smile.
Along the way, he’s become a survivor—of accidents, disasters, near starvation, bitter cold, trench foot, bandits, and other ordeals on expeditions in places like Patagonia and Borneo, China and Oman. “Jimmy could’ve become a Navy SEAL as easily as he became a climber,” says Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer, a friend and collaborator of Chin’s. “He’s really good at big-wall climbing, bust-ass-hard endurance stuff where you’ve gotta suffer. He really thrives and excels when you’ve gotta deliver, when failure isn’t an option, when you don’t get a second chance.”
https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-chin-uncharted-territory
5. Great to see the growth of these kind of new focused funds in tech. Climate tech is important. Very credible people here too.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/06/climactic-raj-kapoor-josh-felser
6. Lots of great life advice here.
"Making money is *never* zero sum. There is always opportunity for wealth and if you are *unhappy* when someone you know succeeds, you’re the problem and you are are parasite. If you are thrilled that they made it, they will *remember* you forever and they will look out for you if you need something in the future. In short, don’t be a hater and don’t be insecure. Support people and you will have powerful friends beyond your wildest imaginations in less than 5 years.
Incentives drive results. If you can do this well, everyone will be happy. Over time incentives do change (which causes infighting), however, the incentives matter over the long term. If you leave a starving dog in front of a steak and expect it to die vs. eating the steak, you’re simply a fool."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/change-your-psychology-and-the-cartoon
7. This makes sense, many people including myself learned that you have to take ownership of your life and career. Relying on a company or job is plain suicide.
"I believe more people are going to work for themselves and/or going into small businesses that are not part of the employer survey.
Maybe what we are witnessing is not the Great Resignation but the Great Formation."
https://avc.com/2021/12/the-great-formation
8. Getting close to the world of the sovereign individual.
"Overall this is really great. Governments need new sources of tax revenue, and we’re starting to see more of these programs where they roll out the red carpet for foreigners.
There may even come a day when governments are forced to think about all the things they are doing wrong— because people can simply take their lives and their businesses elsewhere."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/why-not-shop-around-for-the-best-government-34056
9. This was a fun interview for those in tech & investing biz. Geoff is a smart and funny dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzTqHmSQbB0
10. The new Great Game in Africa over Cobalt. Also attracting grifters from everywhere.
"Mr. Mutombo is among a wave of adventurers and opportunists who have filled a vacuum created by the departure of major American mining companies, and by the reluctance of other traditional Western firms to do business in a country with a reputation for labor abuses and bribery.
The list of fortune hunters includes Erik Prince, the security contractor and ex-Navy SEAL; Jide Zeitlin, the Nigerian-born former chief executive of the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade; and Aliaune Thiam, the Senegalese-American musician known as Akon.
All have been drawn to Congo’s high-risk, high-reward mining sector as the demand for cobalt has skyrocketed because automakers around the world are speeding up plans to convert from gasoline- to electric-powered fleets.
But for now, at least, the adventurers have taken center stage, and sometimes their ambitions converge at the Fleuve. Ambassadors, mercenaries, celebrities, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs — they all pass through."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/world/congo-cobalt-investor-hotel.html
11. Yikes: if this was any other source outside of The Information I'd be dismissive of this.
"The enmity between the former co-founders has outlasted a Series D round that today values Modern Health at $1.17 billion. In spite of its unicorn status, Modern Health has become a cautionary tale for startup founders.
Its story, much of it told here for the first time, is a minefield littered with charges of fraud, kickbacks, plagiarism, theft and racism on one side and accusations of incompetence, personal vengeance and corporate sabotage on the other. It offers a rare view inside a Silicon Valley startup that continued to raise hundreds of millions of dollars even as its founding partnership imploded."
12. Exciting & educational discussion on the rise of Crypto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pesTrC2Vg
13. A little bit simplistic but also why I am a long term buy and hold investor in general.
"Let’s not even discuss the herd mentality, the absurdity of everyone trying to jettison the stock at once. Nobody paused to take a deep breath and see if the fundamentals of this company were somehow less solid than the day before they reported earnings. Were there any red flags beyond the slowing growth, this absurd idea that if you are not continually growing at an accelerated rate, you are somehow less valuable?
If you are growing at a reasonable rate, and you are not losing money, and it looks like that will continue into the future, that sounds like a good company to me."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/07/wall-street-panic-about-saas-companies-is-completely-misguided
14. More information on the supply chain mess in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEdKaEVNg3M
15. "The People’s Liberation Army poses a formidable threat to Taiwan. Devoting more of Taiwan’s finite defense resources to distributed, mobile, affordable, and lethal anti-air and anti-ship systems could leverage Taiwan’s advantages and exploit the vulnerabilities of China’s military. This porcupine strategy makes sense independent of whether one favors clarity or ambiguity in America’s defense commitment to Taiwan or considers invasion a near-term threat or a long-term possibility."
https://tnsr.org/2021/12/a-large-number-of-small-things-a-porcupine-strategy-for-taiwan
16. What a wacky yet interesting story. Crypto meets Seasteading.
17. Wow, I ended up on Venture Capital Journal!
Great to catch up & chat Alastair Goldfisher. Excited by what we are building at Diaspora.vc with my Partners Carlos Diaz & Chris Allexandre
https://www.venturecapitaljournal.com/rolling-fund-diaspora-lures-marvin-liao-in-as-partner
18. Hard not to see this.
"Money has become something to play with for fun and profit. There are even now hundreds of play currencies, some of which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, for people who find government-issued money too constrained.
The decadence is increasingly offensive to anybody living paycheck to paycheck, or even just people brought up to respect the value of a dollar."
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-capital-4bf8a6d6-769c-4b4b-9a56-e2ef0f39f78d.html
19. "Thankfully, a researcher at Wharton took the initiative to run a new study on the relationship between household income and self-reported well-being. Sure enough, he found no evidence that well-being tops out at $75k/year.
Instead, my overall takeaway is this: when it comes to money, a healthy respect for it seems more likely to actually improve our lives than a cynical or dismissive attitude."
https://stewfortier.substack.com/p/more-money-fewer-problems
20. "I have used the Gartner Hype Cycle many times in my career to prevent myself from committing a grave mistake that almost any investor will be familiar with. In my experience, spotting an emerging new narrative to latch onto is easier than getting yourself to sell near the peak of the hype.
It is SO easy to eventually believe in the hype yourself. I have trained myself to realise that each time I believe it's really worthwhile to hold on to a successful investment in anticipation of everything turning out as expected, it's quite likely the right moment to sell.
This is counter-intuitive, but it has worked for me many more times than it hasn't. Virgin Galactic is a case in point. I, too, watched the launch of the space ship. Emotionally, I was all in. Rationally, I knew that shareholders were in for a difficult period post-launch."
21. The OG of authoritarian rulers. Whether you like him or not, Putin is a master chess player.
"What comes next for Putin’s Russia (he’s likely thinking about his legacy) and what comes after he’s gone are the questions I’m thinking about. Clearly, Russia would like to be the regional superpower dominating Europe in commerce, energy, and foreign policy."
https://sofrep.com/news/a-look-russias-vladimir-putins-secret-past-and-whats-next
22. I'm such a huge fan of the region from the lifestyle, people and startup investing. I'm very partial to Tbilisi and Belgrade myself, although I always enjoy Skopje, Yerevan and Kotor.
"It’s about time that you leave the trappings of the more popular European destinations in favor of the tranquil, modern, and culturally rich cities of Eastern Europe. There’s always something to try or see here, and it’s always ready to welcome the ones who are brave enough to come.
Not only that, but the cost of living in Eastern Europe is relatively better than most of its counterparts in the European Union. You can choose from a lot of Eastern European countries that have lower costs of living. Whether you’re earning a few thousand dollars or an eight-figure salary, you can get the best value for your money here. You can work, hire or even invest in these countries, and it’s going to be worth your while."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/lifestyle/living-in-eastern-europe
23. The new drone arms race in the world.
""Drones would be highly effective delivery systems for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons," he said. "Drones could, say, spray the agent right over a crowded area.
Drones are not tomorrow's weapons of mass destruction. They're here today, and the technology required to fashion such a device is only getting cheaper, smarter and more accessible."
https://www.newsweek.com/could-next-9-11-caused-drones-1647249
24. Scale kills quality. That's the iron law.
"The problem isn’t for the investors; they’re going to be just fine. The challenge is for the startups. Some will argue that network effects get better when the network gets bigger; and that might be true — but that is an incredibly hard problem to solve. Not least because the very best founders don’t have time to actually participate in the network; especially in the early days, they’re heads down building their startups, not rolling up their sleeves to help other founders.
As a founder, I’d question whether it’s worthwhile to be a part of a 1,000-strong cohort. Will the Y Combinator badge of honor help you get a meeting with an investor? Will it help you get bumped to the top of a journalist’s email inbox? Or will it simply cease to be valuable as a filter to the outside world, and drastically reduce the value of having been a Y Combinator alum in the first place?"
Hustle versus Calm: A Call for a New Way of Building Startups
As a young business person or founder, influenced by all the media of hustle culture, without any good mentors, all you can do is hustle & grind.
You hustle because you don’t know any better or you don’t know anything. So you brute force it. Try everything, throw spaghetti at the wall, work 24/7. And if you do this long enough, it starts to work. All at the risk of burning out and building something unsustainable.
But there seems to be a better way. This is why I’m really interested in Tyler Tringa’s philosophy of building businesses.
Calm Companies are patient and have long-term ambitions.
Calm Companies stand by their convictions, even in hectic times.
Calm Companies prioritize physical and mental health across the entire team.
Calm Companies don’t sacrifice the sustainability of the business for short-term growth.
Source: https://calmfund.com/writing/introducing-calm-company-fund
The older I get & the more I learn, this innately makes sense to me. And it is easier than ever for founders to tap into. With the new canon of bootstrap founders (namely spread by DHH, Jason Fried and the Basecamp crew), growing success stories of massive self funded entrepreneurial exits (Mailchimp, Spanx) and a growing community represented by the folks at Calm Company, Indie Hackers, MicroConf. Plus we have lots of best practices coming out (thank you MicroAcquire! https://resources.microacquire.com)
We hear about the aphorism of “enjoying the journey, not just the destination.” But the way we build these high growth startups in Silicon Valley, this seems to be ignored. We seem to celebrate the pain and brutality. I’m not saying you don’t need to work hard in startups. This is absolutely crucial.
But we also need to talk about working smart too. This way the founder can embark on a sustainable and hopefully enjoyable journey while building his business. We need to see more of this if we want to get more people into a career of entrepreneurship & to rebuild our economy for everyone.
A Walk Down Memory Lane: Using the Past to Improve your Future
I had the chance to visit my University (The University of British Columbia) after almost 25 years. Wow, has the place really changed. There were still elements I recognized but the place seemed busier and filled with lots of new buildings. And the students, everyone looked so young and excited. Doubly fun being able to do this and hang out with my Dad and my daughter.
It definitely made me very reflective. I thought about the young Marvin, a kid with a huge chip on his shoulder, with lots to prove to his family, friends and himself. A kid who never really felt like he fit in. One who kept quiet or talked about the stuff that everyone else cared about but I never really liked. (For the record, I hate hockey and only watch it for the fights. Also not that interested in football. The only real sports in my book are 3 Gun shooting, Mixed Martial Arts & Boxing) I was so angry and naive, so eager to get away from Canada for adventure in the real world.
In retrospect, not much has changed. I still feel like an outsider, still have a chip on my shoulder and still trying to prove myself. Yet I’m in an industry (Tech) and in a city (San Francisco, most of the time) that is full of outsiders and despite myself, feel I have thrived to a relatively good degree. It’s hard not to feel incredibly grateful for where things are at in my life & career right now. And most, importantly, I’m building and living a life that I could have only dreamed of as a young kid in Vancouver.
As we come to the end of the year, it’s a good time for reflection. Going back to places of your youth and childhood is an important ritual. It’s a reminder of how far you have come. And think of all you have experienced and done since then. This is doubly valuable for someone who is so goal-driven, insecure and never feeling accomplished enough. As my therapist has said, I’m far from easy on others but even harder on myself that I can’t enjoy anything I’ve earned. The shadow can be overwhelming.
This is also why you need these rituals as a good reminder of where you came from and who you really are. It’s almost like a reconciliation process. This process is an important step to help you become more comfortable with yourself. Which in theory should lead to some higher level of personal happiness. It’s working so far. Now, just like 25 years ago, I once again stand eager and ready to jump back into building the future. But this time with the hard lessons and the hindsight of my history. BRING IT ON!