Unhappy in Paradise: Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side
So it’s the end of March and I found myself hanging out in beautiful Maui with my family. The sun is shining, the ocean is a spectacular blue, fringed with stark lush greenery. The weather is perfectly tropical. Food is amazing and everyone is happy here. Life should be good.
Yet it’s 2023, a few weeks after the Silicon Valley Banking crisis, I’m stressed, tired and distracted. Since then, I’ve literally been on calls with my now fairly extensive portfolio of startups. And it’s all bad news. No one calls to talk to you about good news. Founders having cofounder problems, runway or fundraising problems. Or what I experienced in just one week: 4 companies calling me to tell me they are shutting down.
But it’s the game and I accept it. When times are good, enjoy it. But when times are tough, like they are now, it’s your duty and honor to be there for your founders. Otherwise, don’t be an investor.
Fundraising has dried up, VCs and LPs are scared as we enter a risk-off environment where money is now expensive or scarce. Layoffs abound across Silicon Valley and will only accelerate through this year. Mentally you are stressed and struggling.
Yet in contrast, there seem to be so many people around you, especially in my circles that seem to be crushing it. Raising massive sized VC funds, selling their companies, building massively profitable businesses. It’s hard not to feel like a loser, especially when fundraising from LPs has gotten challenging, a bunch of your investee companies are shutting down. You feel stuck and wonder what you are doing wrong. Or even more pernicious, what is wrong with you personally?
But if you want to accomplish anything, you can’t think this way. We don’t know the travails and challenges that others have faced getting there. We still have no idea of the challenges in their life right now. You only see the good stuff. This doesn’t mean take it easy on yourself, let alone excusing yourself.
You have to step away from social media, shake off your doubts and be grateful for what you have. Then dig in deep, refocus and get back to work. You have a responsibility to yourself and your family to keep going hard. And be prepared to do this for a long time. If you do this, you will be fine. Having been in a bunch of cycles myself over the last 2.5 decades I know how these things go. This is a big test of life. Don’t get too down and definitely don’t quit.
Atlas (@DentesLeo) on Twitter says it right:
“I never see the winners complaining about the state of the world, inflation, the crisis or circumstances external to them.
Complaining is a loser's business.
Winners keep playing.”
We can all learn alot from Jeff Bezos here. This is encapsulated in a great tweetstorm by William Green:
“Jeff Bezos on the power of a long time horizon: "If everything you do needs to work on a 3-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a 7-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people…”
"Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in 5 to 7 years. We're willing to plant seeds [&] let them grow....we're stubborn on vision & flexible on details."
(Source: https://twitter.com/WilliamGreen72/status/1641185082361757697)
Taking the long term view is key. So get back to work!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 17th, 2023
“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” – Molière
"The optimal conditions for some ambitious founders may be at odds with what the venture business model requires. That’s not a judgement on the potential scale of the business or the capabilities of the founder; rather, it’s an acknowledgment that the venture model isn’t a great fit for many founders- maybe even the majority of those that raise it.
As the two examples above suggest, there’s a growing wave of founders who are choosing to defer or avoid adding venture risk to their businesses. I think we will see a lot more experienced and capable founders doing the same.
Rather than continuing to hammer on the question of whether a business is or isn’t venture scale, we might be better served asking whether a company and its team are right for venture risk. The likelihood of venture scale is negligible, but the reality of venture risk is universally present once the wire hits."
https://medium.com/@bryce/risky-business-venture-scale-vs-venture-risk-9593cf5ce66c
2. "Given Blumhoue’s focus on horror movies, it’s only fitting to think of how terrifying it would be for Big VC if the low-budget startup goes mainstream…"
https://medium.com/@bryce/the-low-budget-startup-f7d9ed7f139a
3. Vertical media is where it’s at. Everyone needs to be a media co.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1jI11ZJSto
4. I love what this man is doing for the book industry. I love Barnes & Nobles now.
"Daunt was a respected independent bookseller in London before he found himself running chains in both the U.K. and U.S. He was exactly the sort of person who could make Barnes & Noble interesting.
His plan to save the company and its bookstores is to combine the power of a big chain with the pleasure of a beloved indie. By shifting control of the process to individual store managers across the country, Daunt is giving local booksellers permission to do things they were never able to do before.
They have discretion over purchasing, placement and even pricing. He wants Barnes & Noble locations to feel welcoming but not overwhelming—a chain store should be more inviting and less intimidating than a truly independent shop—and that means he needs the people who run them to make sensible decisions for their markets. “It’s only inexcusable if it’s not interesting,” he said.
Daunt, 59, speaks quietly, as if he were in a library, but the insight at the heart of his management philosophy is worth screaming from the rooftops: find people who are passionate about books and let them sell books as they see fit. This sounds rather obvious when he says it. But entrusting a chain to someone who not long ago was running a posh store in Central London was a radical act of corporate desperation.
“I think it had to almost die before anyone was prepared to risk that,” Daunt said as we strolled around the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. “It’s no coincidence that I took over Waterstones when it died and I took over this place when it was barely breathing.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/barnes-noble-bookstores-james-daunt-c1afc06b
5. "I am willing to admit that the creation of a completely digitised currency system can bring efficiency, homogeneity, and unity to a society, just like the ban liang did for the Qin Empire. But it also comes with many downsides.
It overwhelmingly stifles the agency and diversity of how citizens choose to trade on their own terms. It inevitably funnels an increasingly larger percentage of the value an individual possesses into the banking sector, consolidating more wealth into the hands of a few. It allows our overlords to tax us via inflation even more easily than they can already. And most disturbingly, it makes money—an essential tool for survival in the modern world—a tool to further impose control on a population by our governments."
https://abundantia.substack.com/p/illegal-money
6. "The notion of a Zero-Billion Dollar Market is that it’s something that you can see as an entrepreneur, but no one else believes. As we’ve talked about before, being consensus and correct is wonderful in many parts of life, but not in entrepreneurship.
If you’re trying to create something new and valuable then it’s generally down the less traveled path, against the grain, and certainly not wildly obvious to others. Value is located when you’re both non-consensus, or contrarian, and also correct."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/zero-billion-dollar-markets
7. "Choices in foreign policy are never simple and are always sub-optimal. The choice faced now is whether to continue to support Ukraine fighting a messy, tragic war, which it may take time to win, or to let it carry on alone, with the prospect of an even more tragic conclusion from which the Western Alliance, let alone Ukraine, might never recover.
As Western countries are not actually doing the fighting and have the resources to sustain Ukraine in its struggle, in the end this is not that difficult a choice to make."
https://samf.substack.com/p/american-grand-strategy-realism-and
8. "The lesson here is pretty simple: If you’re going to commit a multi-million dollar fraud, don’t get caught… and maybe start a little smaller; a whole airport is a hell of a thing to try and blag. But, as the famous saying goes, God loves a trier."
https://www.dmarge.com/how-a-nigerian-fraudster-sold-a-fake-airport-to-japan-for-375-million
9. This guy is 89 years old but he looks several decades younger. Strong of body and mind and bank balance: Ed Thorp. So much to learn here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvz91Jyzbg
10. "When Cucinelli saw his father's "teary eyes," he decided that the objective of his life would be to give those with whom he worked a moral and economic dignity.
As a result, the fashion mogul has been preaching a new business approach called "Humanistic Capitalism," in which money is seen as a tool to improve the human condition. Services, schools, places of worship, and cultural heritage require capital, but they empower the community.
"I believe in capitalism," Cucinelli says. "I need to make a profit, but I would like to do it with ethics, dignity, morals. It's my dream."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-classic-the-philosopher
11. Part 2: Lots of good frameworks and ideas. The power of long term thinking in investing. Ed Thorp is my new hero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs39QFYIbBY
12. "Today, with its booming technology sector and thriving tourism, Japan continues to be an exciting place to be. The Japanese stock market looks buoyant now and investors are increasingly drawn to the nation, captivated by its strides in chip technology and other innovations.
There is no doubt that Japan has undergone significant transformations over the past decades. Yet, for all its changes, my love for the country remains as steadfast as ever."
https://www.markmobius.com/news-events/japan-love-at-first-sight
13. Always inspiring and educational. David Senra. Kanye self belief with Kobe Bryant work ethic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJYeSTvV5es
14. "Looking at where the offensive stands today, Ukraine’s decision to attrit Russian forces via fires and advance incrementally with small units played to its strengths. This is a grueling fight. The combat power and reserves available to both sides will play a significant role in determining the outcome. Ukraine’s offensive neither is over, nor has it failed. Ukraine’s prospects depend on how well Western countries resource the Ukrainian war effort into the fall, replace lost equipment, and provide the necessary enablers — above all, artillery ammunition.
Ultimately, in planning for their support, Western countries must also think beyond the offensive, rather than taking a wait and see approach. This includes learning lessons from this spring and summer to improve Ukraine’s chances in future offensives. Western efforts should be geared to the assumption that the war will continue well into next year, balancing long-term transition programs, such as the transfer of F-16s and scaled up unit training, with managing Ukraine’s more immediate needs.
The West ought to be introspective about missing important decision points, which had a profound impact on the course of the war, constraining everyone’s options later on. Decisions about future support should have been made well before this offensive even began, assuming that it was unlikely to end the war.
The recent anonymous criticism by officials spilling select narratives in the press, rather than fostering an open discussion about Ukraine’s challenges and successes, reveals enduring problems in this war effort: The first, is a lack of Western understanding of how Ukrainian forces fight. The second, which is closely related, is an insufficient Western presence on the ground to enable closer coordination or even the invaluable understanding that could be offered by battlefield observers.
Western capitals have sought to keep this Ukraine’s war, avoiding an in-country presence that includes contractor support or trainers. To be clear, there are Western contractors and companies operating independently in Ukraine, but this is not the same as a government sanctioned and supported effort. There is much more that could be done without becoming directly involved in fighting or deploying uniformed personnel on the ground.
The hitherto cautious approach has clear limits to its efficacy. Western support thus far has been sufficient to avert a Ukrainian defeat, and arguably has imposed a strategic defeat on Russia, but not enough to ensure a Ukrainian victory. Independent of the outcome of this offensive, Western countries need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this will be a long war. Taken together, Western industrial and military potential greatly exceeds Russia’s, but without the political will, potential alone will not translate into results."
15. "We can and should be aspire to be more like the 747 than the glass cannon. We are entirely capable of enduring, adapting, and overcoming many scenarios and situations, especially in the modern day. Most of the threats and fears that consume us are social or self-esteem related rather than truly life threatening.
But the ancient fear centers of our brain can't always make the distinction.
But when you know you are resilient, fear loses its vice-like grip. You are no longer trapped in its prison. When you know you can handle most any circumstance, whether withering criticism, a bad breakup, an unfortunate firing—you are more willing to aim high and swing big.
You are not a glass cannon. You can take the hit and keep going. So go for it."
https://www.jasonshen.com/168/
16. "The Chinese will also have observed how outrageously and brutally the Russians can behave without Western forces intervening. This will inform the Chinese decision-making about the level of military aggression towards Taiwan before and during any conflict. However, given recent statements about the re-education of the Taiwanese after any Chinese invasion, we can assume that China will not recoil from the kind of brutality demonstrated by Russia against the Ukrainian people in the past 18 months.
Nearly 600 days since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion, we must assume that the Chinese government and their military has studied this war at least as closely as they studied the 1991 Gulf War. It is prudent that we assume they will learn and adapt, even if there are gaps or shortfalls in the institutional capacity for the Chinese to make a full range of transformations based on Ukraine.
Because their learning and adaptation does not have to make them perfect. They just need to be slightly better than their adversaries."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/what-china-is-learning-from-the-ukraine
17. It's been fascinating watching the journey of the brilliant Liberman brothers. The guys are on the cutting edge of the tech business industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zP75PCZ_P0&t=4272s
18. Burning Man is not for me but we live in a free country so do whatever. Don’t understand the hate for it.
"It’s perfectly fine to ignore stuff you don’t care about, or don’t like. There are any number of reasons Burning Man is probably not for you. It’s probably not for me, honestly, at this stage of my life. But the hatred for it? That has nothing to do with the event, which most of the haters online have never attended. It also has nothing to do with people at the event, who most of the haters have never met. No, this wasn’t about techies or hippies or woke idiots. This wasn’t about socialism, or God.
For the average hater, this was war with the demonic apparitions of their own self-doubt, and all their insecurities, on a public stage before an audience of millions. The “cringe social media influencers” were not at Burning Man, in other words. They were glued to their newsfeeds, inside, on a nice day. A little bit pathetic, if we’re being honest.
Now try to be less embarrassing, or at least have the decency to shut up and let people like shit."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/rage-against-the-wooden-man
19. "Argentina’s GDP graph cratering from the heights of one of the wealthiest nations on earth is one for the history books, and it has become a famous case study at this point of what not to do if a country likes economic growth and prosperity. Today we will go over some of the causes of the century long decline, and reasons why Argentina never fully goes bust compared to countries like Venezuela or Cuba."
https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/argentinas-century-long-decline
20. "Today we dive into the fascinating story of one of the early flag planters of Argentina who even minted his own shitcoins, and the related campaign to conquer as must of the unclaimed deserted territory in the south as possible before Chile was able to lay a claim on most of Patagonia.
As you can see, planting flags and expanding territory was a bit more violent in those times."
https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/argentinas-last-frontier-and-the
21. I think we are all rooting for Kleiner Perkins to make their comeback. One of the storied firms in SV, expousing the craftsman mentality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRGp6npx0PI
22. "So you can see the changing contours of a new emerging order. With Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi leading the charge (and Brasilia and Pretoria as fellow travellers) an attempt is made to shift dependence on the West towards new power centres who can shape world events to their favour by collaborating. Again, the war in Ukraine is a case in point and Russia is a keen partner of team BRICS.
At best it is a mixed bunch with aspirations that are hard to materialize. BRICS is more of directional movement than a power block that is ready to dismantle the US-led world. But if Americans do vote to retreat there is an opportunity for this grouping to begin to start influencing that global order in a more serious way.
Much like BRICS itself that order is increasingly a fractured one where different power centres will strive to preserve their place in a decentralized and less global world."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/brics-time
23. "I would argue that the only thing that China has perhaps learned from Putin's wars on Ukraine has been that Fortress Russia economic settings have worked in that they have provided some durability to the Russian economy in the face of Western sanctions. And I think what we have seen in recent years is the adoption of Fortress China economic policy settings.
This has meant accelerating efforts at deleveraging - trying to let down bubbles in the real estate, shadow banking, et al sectors. And on the growth front, it means accepting a much lower growth target which the hope is that it ensures fewer balance sheet vulnerabilities going forward to Western sanctions when they inevitably come.
Xi is also building a nationalist economic narrative - a more socially inclusive, almost socialist agenda, "levelling down" almost to ensure the support of the mass of the population both while he has embarked on the concentration of power around himself but as the geopolitical outlook darkens. I assume herein if there is a trade off lower real GDP growth for geopolitical insulation/security that Xi assumes its more important to take the majority of the population with him rather than the elites and middle class who have done best from the globalisation trend over the past 30 years. This explains his attack on private education, corruption and the affordability of housing.
The combined impact of all the above has been a crisis of confidence in China both because of the slowdown in foreign investment but also the policy choices, and mistakes, being rolled out by Xi and his team."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/china-copies-fortress-economic-policy
24. So many ways to build an enduring VC firm. Lessons from General Catalyst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HESSmrfCgF4
25. "I must now acknowledge that I was entirely mistaken. Not only has the VC industry suffered significant setbacks in recent times, but the surviving VC firms are those that have adhered closely to the original VC playbook.
A whole era of rapid growth and innovation has receded into the past—the metaphorical door closing on startups. Yet, ample space remains for excelling and prospering at doing capitalism, similar to the scenario in the 1970s, when trailblazers introduced us to novel business strategy tools and methodologies, as well as leveraged buyouts."
https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/startups-the-door-is-closing
26. "World War 2 wasn’t just the thing that brought the United States all the way back from the Depression; it made the U.S. the center of global innovation for many decades to come.
That history is probably on China’s leaders’ minds as they contemplate starting a major great-power conflict. Of course there are other possible outcomes as well — Germany, Japan, Russia, and Britain didn’t benefit economically from the world wars, to say the least. But with their economy in the dumps and their technology under pressure from foreign restrictions, China’s leaders may see the potential upside of war mobilization as a benefit to add into their mental calculations.
Ultimately, I still think that war would be a very foolish choice for China — the risk of having its rise crushed by a global coalition, or being obliterated in a nuclear exchange, outweighs the modest gains from conquering pieces of Asia. China is already a very large country, with little need for additional territory or population; conquest and hegemony simply aren’t worth the risk.
But as leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm to Vladimir Putin have shown, national leaders are not always wise or risk-averse. And when the economic costs of war decrease and the potential upside increases, their natural overconfidence and aggression may gain the upper hand. Unfortunately, every economic factor I can think of seems to point to a major war being less risky for China on the margin compared to five or ten years ago. All I can say is that I hope cooler heads prevail and deterrence succeeds."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-slowdown-and-the-incentives
27. "A moat can be based on various factors, such as your tech, your network, your brand, oryour customer loyalty. A moat matters because it helps you generate more value for your stakeholders and reduces the risk of disruption or commoditization. And they usually grow stronger over time.
Building moats is easier said than done. In the early stages, moats are difficult or nearly impossible to demonstrate.
The strongest moats help ensure you have a business that sustains value over the long run, and honing in on these levers early on can help you focus your strategy. Moats often grow by just executing. They are compounding. So, ask yourself this: What is your compounding moat?"
https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/what-is-your-moat
28. "As one thoughtful Ukrainian colleague put it in a later discussion, they expected someone would ‘open the gates’ for them. Hence little effort was made to isolate the theater, cut ground lines of communication, or engage in other actions that I think analysts anticipated as part of the operation. Russian forces did not conduct a combined arms operation, but essentially drove in, initially trying to conduct ‘thunder runs’ along divergent axes of advance.
This takes us to why analysts rated Ukrainian chances as low. I think there were several reasons for this, but I would highlight that Ukraine did not appear to be preparing a defense against a full-scale invasion. Kyiv had taken steps in secret, but many of the preparations, from mobilization to deployments, were made last minute, and often from the bottom up."
https://samf.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-mike-kofman
29. "The reality is that the vast majority of businesses cannot possibly support the type of super-linear growth required to go from zero to $100m+ in annual revenue in 7-10 years. Marvin Liao of Diaspora Ventures noted that companies whose revenue grows linearly with the number of employees, like consulting firms, will never be able to achieve this. That doesn’t mean those aren’t incredible businesses — it just means that they’re not a fit for VC funding.
Unfortunately, many founders aren’t ready to hear this.
Between the deafening hype of VC in the media and the encouraging yet often misguided notion that all founders need to do is find “just one investor” who sees their vision, too many founders get caught up on an endless quest to find mythical investors that simply don’t exist."
https://chrisneumann.com/blog/vc-probably-isnt-right-for-you
30. "One question that I often get from founders — how did we feel after surviving Facebook? Waking up to news that Facebook is your newest competitor is a nightmare for almost every consumer founder, so I understand the curiosity.
The easy answer is we felt invincible coming to work everyday. We had survived our greatest threat.
We don’t have championships in tech, but if there is a championship to win as a consumer company, beating Facebook in your own market is the trophy you want to win."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/when-facebook-tried-to-kill-tinder
31. Learning about the craft of VC here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUTL5NNQOE
32. Pretty solid discussion on how to build a podcast show. I love "Acquired."
Good guys those two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixN-HR-aR8A&t=156s
33. Defensetech is here.
“Part of the movement is driven by an awareness of the Russian war in Ukraine, several VCs said, which has highlighted the role defense can play in protecting values of democracy.
You have an aggressor nation, taking land and causing death and destruction to civilians,” said Raj Shah, managing partner of Shield Capital, adding that tech workers “want to do something to help and they want to have meaning in their lives. And photo-sharing apps are only so important.”
As Lux co-founder Josh Wolfe said, “Do you want to build software that has people clicking on ads, or do you want to do things that have a lasting impact on the safety and security of the American people and helping to reduce human suffering around the world?”
There is No Finish Line: Playing the Long Game
I came across an excellent post by CEO coach Matt Munson, a few months ago. It really triggered a lot of thinking. The title is perfect and has been a big struggle throughout my adult life: “Rethinking Ambition: How to navigate the tension between reaching high and living a more content life.”
He goes on to say:
“One key mistake I made was not aligning my work with a purpose I cared about. Another was approaching the work with a finish line in mind.
I hold ambition quite differently now.
There is no end game to our work at my coaching firm Sanity Labs. We know the change we exist to effect, but there is no arriving. And that is how we like it.”
Source: https://www.mattmunson.me/rethinking-ambition/
I’ve always been very goal driven. I’ve always been very type A-aggressive. It’s gotten me to where I am now. This is the formula that is driven into our brains growing up.
It’s our programming: “If I get X, then I will be Y.” A common example for many young people: “If I make a billion dollars, I will be happy”. Or If I get married, I will never be lonely and my life will be fulfilled.” You think your happiness and contentment will happen when you get there or meet your goal.
Yet like many people, when you hit your big goals, what happens is, surprise, surprise, you aren’t as happy as you thought you would be. So then you go pick new goals in the hope that this will fix that. But like any treadmill it never ends. You find out that when your happiness is dependent on these goals, you never end up being fulfilled.
As I’ve gotten older, gotten past old goals and learned more about myself, I’ve realized that there is no end goal except the end of your life. So the cliche of enjoying the journey becomes even more important. You can still have a mission, you can still have big ambitions and be goal oriented. But if you aren’t enjoying the path most of the time, with a big stress on “most of the time”, you are probably doing something wrong.
It’s not to see you have to become a complete hedonist or sybarite, you still have to grind, to do hard things that hurt and challenge you. Having massive sized goals does that for you. Humans thrive on challenge and hardship and this is what brings out the best of us. It’s that careful balance between ambition and contentment. That’s what true happiness really is about in life: Understanding that there is no finish line, except for death.
This has been a big relief to me personally and has allowed me to really enjoy my life. I believe this might help you too.
Shall We Dance: Get Some Hobbies and Passions for a Better Life
Most of the time Hollywood remakes are terrible compared to the original versions. But for a change, I thought the Hollywood remake of “Shall we Dance” starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez aka JLo was much superior to the Japanese original.
It’s a story about a married man in Chicago living a conventional life as a lawyer. He has a wonderful loving family and great career but he feels an emptiness, like something is missing.
Commuting every day on the train to and from work he looks outside one day. He sees a dance studio where he notices a stunning woman. He decides to take ballroom dance lessons secretly and he is entranced. The adventure begins as he becomes really good at it. And his life is transformed as this sparks new joy for him.
It’s a wonderful story and I think it captures the lives of quiet desperation many people live. Doing what they think they are supposed to do. What their families and society tells them to do. The conventional life.
We’re taught to focus on school, to focus on our careers and our families. Yet we end up giving little to ourselves. That’s why it’s important to have passions and hobbies outside of the important spheres of work and relationships. It’s something that you can have to yourself. It’s an important part of self development.
As Naval Ravikant wrote: "The ideal life would be one where you had a hobby that as a byproduct made you money, you had a hobby that as a byproduct kept you healthy, you had a hobby that as a byproduct made you smarter and more creative."
Hobbies teach you new things. Hobbies Give you new perspectives. Having hobbies makes you a much more interesting person. We have enough bland people in our world. So try to develop as many new hobbies as you can. It will also bring a new element of joy in your life.
Paraphrasing the brilliant Luke Belmar: “It’s not ‘Jack of All Trades, Master of None’, ‘It’s Jack of All Trades, Master of All.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 10th, 2023
“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” – Henry Ford.
A very sober conversation with 2 very experienced top VCs. Newbie VCs and founders should be listening to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGvb8Pwtsbg
2. Warms my heart to see this.
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/29/yahoo-apollo-renaissance-jim-lanzone
3. "The learnings: (1) Freedom is the real goal, (2) Environment is everything, (3) Insecurity is natural, (4) Always know the game you're playing, (5) Create value with no expectation, (6) Owned distribution is a cheat code, (7) Success isn't always loud, (8) No one has it all figured out, (9) Entrepreneurial loneliness is a real problem, and (10) Solve the problem by seeing it differently.
My Rule for Life: Find the room where it happens. Get in that room. Once you're in it, help others get there."
https://www.sahilbloom.com/newsletter/10-learnings-from-a-mastermind
4. "The Ukrainian side are sending a clear message that they are in this for the long haul, they have no other place to go. Notable herein I think it is counter to the view that Ukraine only has an 18 month window, until potentially Trump takes back power in February 2025, to fight, after this Western arms and financing will stop, and Russia will again inevitably win. Perhaps that is supposed to be the tenth phase for some.
The problem with the latter, and which I think is now panning out in the ninth phase I detail above is how Trump winning, withdrawing support for Ukraine, still inevitably leads to a speedy win for Russia.
Even in that scenario, I don’t see how Russia enforces a win against a country that refuses to surrender, is willing to continue the fight, still has plenty and likely even more Western military kit by then, and likely still financing from European, and non U.S. allies. Ukraine can still drag on the war for Russia a very long time after February 2025, making this a still massive drain on Russia, it’s economy and population."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/putins-war-on-ukraine
5. "The Fed, knowingly or not, is basically in charge of the global financial system. They may shout, “We raise rates in the US to fight inflation, global consequences be damned!!” - But that’s a hell of a lot more difficult to follow when large G7 countries are in the early stages of a full blown currency crisis.
The most serious implication is that the Fed is responsible for supplying dollars to everyone. When they raise rates, they trigger a margin call on the entire world. They need to bail them out by supplying them with fresh dollars to stabilize their currencies.
In other words, the Fed has to run the loosest and most accommodative monetary policy worldwide- they must keep rates as low as possible, and print as much as possible, in order to keep the global financial system running. If they don’t do that, sovereigns begin to blow up, like Japan did last week and like England did on Wednesday.
And if the world’s financial system implodes, they must bail out not only the United States, but virtually every global central bank. This is the Sword of Damocles. The money needed for this would be well in the dozens of trillions."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/the-sword-of-damocles
6. Dan Koe on being the ultimate creative self. Learned a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3SMpmJmLEY
7. I enjoy these jaunts across the business world with NIA. I always learn something new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8ChmKwLKY&t=276s
8. The VC startup factory is dead.....this is really insightful and true.
If you want to be relevant you have to unlearn everything we learned in VC over the last 10-15 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py7IPmDKjb4&t=1684s
9. "Despite the evident dangers, venture capitalists and celebrity investors have eagerly jumped into the fray. Maximus, a Los Angeles–based telemedicine platform for men launched in 2020, raised $15 million from investors including Keith Rabois at Founders Fund and Matteo Franceschetti, founder of smart-mattress company Eight Sleep.
A competitor, Hone Health, launched a few months later and closed a $7.8 million early-stage round this July. Yet another, Lifeforce, founded by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, Dugal Bain-Kim and Peter Diamandis, launched in 2021 and closed a $12 million Series A this May.
In general, TRT companies tap into a specific brand of male insecurity, one heavily inflected with Silicon Valley notions about optimization and performance. The marketing is peak biohacker bro: Gameday Men’s Health, a national chain, markets its clinic’s “man-cave environment” (think flat-screen TVs, leather chairs and snacks); T-boosting supplement brands come with names like Swolverine, Prime Male and Hunter Test.
Sellers tell customers repeatedly they’re not in it alone—“you are a tribe” with a collective goal to “unlock living younger.” It’s the kind of men’s movement that both Andrew Huberman and Jordan Peterson could get behind. Tweeted Elon Musk last December: “Testosterone rocks, ngl.”
10. Interesting AI company.
https://tomtunguz.com/context-announcement/
11. "We can learn a lot about warfare from the war in Ukraine. Most importantly, it gives us a glimpse into the future of proxy conflicts and civil wars (the most significant types of war possible without going nuclear).
Future wars of this type will feature:
-Trench warfare. Physical realm (attrition).
-Drone warfare. Physical realm (attrition).
-Online warfare. Physical, Psychological, and Moral realm (attrition, maneuver, and guerrilla warfare)."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/replicator
12. "So the next time you’re hunched over your laptop, the coffee’s gone cold, and you’re plugging away, ask yourself: "Is my product serving its current user, or is it built to also attract the next 1000?"
This is not 1+1=2; this is 1+1=11. Symbiotic Growth changes the game. A different state of mind. It's a viral loop that doesn’t rely on network effects for scale—it creates its own network effect."
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-startup-are-you-building
13. This is amazing learning from the richest man in New Zealand.
“Your career is no more or less than a set of steps up a staircase.”
- But the cumulative output of those steps, the investment decisions you make each time you step up, the opportunity costs that you incur when you make a suboptimal decision — they all combine to give you an end result at the end of your 40 year career — so it’s about realized your full potential, no more or less than that.
Now if you’re young, it’s hard to reconcile, 40 or 50 years in front of you, that’s 2000 work weeks, 120,000 hours, that’s a long time - but I’m telling you, if you just spend some time thinking as you go forward, in 40 years, you will ensure that you realized your full potential."
https://privatequityguy.beehiiv.com/p/poor-smart-deep-desire-become-rich
14. "The company managed to 10X its value in less than three years while maintaining a positive and pleasant work environment. Last year, Glassdoor ranked Nvidia as America's best workplace based on employee feedback. In a separate survey, 97% of Nvidia employees said it was a great place to work — compared to an average of 57% at typical U.S.-based companies.
Generation-defining innovations. Incredible financial success. Happy employees. How did Nvidia do it?
Not by bringing everyone back to the office.
It embraced remote and distributed work more than any other tech giant."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/nvidia-the-distributed-rocketship/
15. This is one of the most interesting and exciting startups I've heard about in a long while. Teamshares.
16. It’s sad that this is needed but here we are. Taiwanese preparing for a CCP invasion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB7F-2JAHnk
17. I frigging love this show. So many tips for better living.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=_fklX2OonR0&t=5014s
18. Good interview with creative entrepreneur Nuseir of Nas Daily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRfi2yR3hBo&t=48s
19. "If we are genuinely interested in helping Ukraine to succeed in its basic objectives – which sometimes may seem in doubt – we need to get serious about replacing the current piecemeal system of drip-feed donations with a large-scale systematic resupply and re-equipment. And the planning needs to begin now.
The aim must be to help Ukraine create armed forces able to integrate properly with its western allies and defend itself beyond the “spring offensive”. The reward for success will be a new, invigorated and dynamic component of our polity."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/19/west-ukraine-win-war-military-support
20. "While failure is not the objective, we celebrate the courage to take risks. Failure is an inherent part of the entrepreneurial journey. By acknowledging and learning from it, we set the stage for the next round of entrepreneurs to enter the arena."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/08/26/embrace-startup-failures/
21. I'm not a fan of Vegetable Joe and the Democrats but many of the GOP seem like soulless fcuks........especially Vivek.
"That is not the kind of tech person that tech people should want as their champion, or as their representative on the national political stage. It presents an image of the tech world as a generator of pump-and-dump scams rather than engineering competence.
A techie candidate can’t be expected to know everything about everything, but he should at least be expected to know more than the average Beltway pundit. Someday there will be a candidate from a tech background who effectively embodies the meritocracy and competence that Vivek pays lip service to. But it is not Vivek."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/hey-tech-folks-vivek-ramaswamy-is
22. "For entrepreneurs who firmly believe in the value of frequent face-to-face interactions and aspire to attract talent from all over, this innovative in-office plan, allowing employees to reside anywhere, merits consideration."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/09/02/the-in-office-plan-where-you-can-live-anywhere/
23. "In terms of rules, I actually agree there are very few "rules" in real life, but there arepowerful forces. Forces that can be difficult to escape from or avoid. As powerful as gravity, but as made up as capitalism. And some of these forces shape the way that companies are made, and capital is deployed.
Choosing your investors comes with a lot of structural baggage. Your investors have expectations that you may not have. Their game has certain forces at work that require certain outcomes. And if they don't get the outcomes they hope for? It can lead to bad behavior."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/player-different-stupider-games
24. "With those caveats, though, you know what might be the biggest Big Tech side hustle?
Amazon advertising.
In Q1 2022, the e-commerce firm officially separated its ad business in company filings (for years, ads had been classified under “other revenue”). The punchline: Amazon’s ad platform is currently on an annual revenue run rate of ~$43B, which is more than the combined revenue of Bing, Snap, Twitter/X, Pinterest and TikTok."
https://www.readtrung.com/p/amazons-43b-ad-business-explained
25. "Audience building is a lifestyle.
It is the act of capturing, curating, connecting, creating, and distributing valuable information, resources, and products in a way that impacts positive behavior change.
If you don’t pursue a better life for yourself, you will fail.
A better life demands the habits of learning, building, and distributing."
https://thedankoe.com/letters/why-micro-education-businesses-are-the-future-zero-dollars-to-start/
26. "Let this be your wakeup call. Let this be a moment for you to re-evaluate your priorities and, possibly, switch gears. Because life is too short to work on things that don’t make you come alive.
After all, in the end, only the passionate survive."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/only-the-passionate-survive/
27. Helpful supplements list from Dr. Andrew Huberman.
https://medium.com/@podclips/dr-andrew-hubermans-supplement-recommendations-7491483e778b
28. "I do, however, want to share a few words about what this show says about the world of Freshmanistan, or the world of internally-mediated rivalries that every high school in America embodies. I believe any high school is the perfect “arena” to be in if you want to understand the nature of the battles playing out in our country today.
Most of the external conflict in our world is caused by internal conflict—internal conflict that prevents us from seeing, understanding, and knowing other people clearly and deeply, including ourselves."
https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-beauty-of-freshmanistan
29. "The problem is that the economic and monetary conditions in the US today are markedly different from what they were in 1980. Anyone who thinks the Fed can run the same playbook and achieve the same result is going to experience something akin to my recent kitesurfing episode. In short, what worked in past idyllic conditions will not succeed in the rough, tumble, and competitive times of today."
https://medium.com/@cryptohayes/kite-or-board-64bc45d49931
30. "For the past year, this has become a regular routine for 44-year-old David Keohan who holds a kettlebell lifting world record and has lately become a star in the world of stone lifting, an ancient practice that’s experiencing a surprising resurgence. He’s traveling around Ireland uncovering the country’s lost lifting stones, and today he’s looking for the Flag of Denn."
https://www.gq.com/story/the-quest-to-pick-up-the-lost-lifting-stones-of-ireland
31. Looking at Revenue leaders’ tech stack.
https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-evolution-of-the-modern
32. Can't wait to get this book. "Twilight Cities"
33. So many insights here. I always learn from David Senra (and Chris Williamson).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iBPbHgjHC0
34. "Klaviyo is a fast growing, incredibly efficient, profitable software company : an ideal specimen for one of the first software IPOs in the fall. Congratulations to the team on building a paragon of a SaaS business!"
https://tomtunguz.com/klaviyo-s1/
35. "You can just write that book. You can just produce your own documentary. You can start a podcast. You can write short stories. You can start a book club online or in your town. You can start a non-profit. You can organize a fundraiser for your community. There are so many things that you can just do now and most of these are practically free using the internet."
https://boundless.substack.com/p/there-are-no-gatekeepers-238
36. "This will take time. Decoupling is not an instantaneous process. China spent two decades becoming the workshop of the world; the rest of the developing world isn’t going to mirror that accomplishment in one or two years.
But there are reasons to think the process is just getting started. Although the Economist articles present decoupling as being driven by Biden’s policies, the truth is that the U.S. government has barely begun to push. Export controls are narrowly focused on the chip industry, and the Inflation Reduction Act isn’t really about decoupling at all.
Other than that, all Biden has done so far is a set of investment restrictions that was very weak and narrowly targeted at a couple of high-tech industries, some minuscule investments in onshoring of critical minerals, and some minor deals with allies to share the benefits of green energy tax credits. He kept Trump’s old tariffs on China in place, but didn’t strengthen them.
That means that so far, most of the decoupling that’s being done is being driven by the prudent decisions of private companies and investors — natural market forces, rather than the visible hand of government policy. There’s no reason to expect those forces to reverse themselves — even setting aside the threat of war, every nation has seen some manufacturing activity leave for cheaper countries once costs rise.
And meanwhile, the engine of U.S. government policy — and European government policy, etc. — is just revving up. Once policymakers figure out which policies actually speed decoupling without injuring the economy, you can expect them to double down on those.
This is only the very beginning of the decoupling story."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/decoupling-isnt-phoney
37. "Offering Kyiv enduring support may not be welcome news to many Western politicians, given the upcoming elections in the United States and some European countries. But over the past 18 months, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a will to fight, the capacity to absorb new weapons, and the ability to learn, adapt, and improve their military effectiveness.
The next way to help the Ukrainians continue their evolution in quality and endurance is making sure they know the West is prepared to support them in their fight to defeat Russia and to offer this support in 2024 and beyond."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/win-long-war-strategy-counteroffensive
The Only Certainty: Death as a Compass
I finally had a chance to check out Mark Manson’s self help book and movie “Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fu-k” and it is as powerful as I expected it to be. I do understand why it was a bestseller.
I learned about Manson’s Law of Avoidance which is “people will avoid an action or experience in proportion to how much it threatens their identity and worldview…..it’s true for both positive and negative actions.”
I also learned about how dangerous certainty is. And what a trap it becomes in life. It prevents you from changing your life for the better.
“It’s more effective to look for doubt. What could you potentially be wrong about? what beliefs can be improved upon? What could potentially change? Those are more effective questions.”
The only thing we can be certain of is death. Why be afraid of death if you aren’t trying to fully live.
Death is a wake up call. “You have to pick something and care. Cause it can be gone any moment. When it goes, it goes fast and nobody is prepared for it.”
That’s why it’s good to stand on the edge of a cliff. It raises your body’s awareness and fear, you are wide awake.
“Only in the face of death all the superficial bullshitty values that we buy into fall away.
You start to realize the dumb status games no longer mean anything or that the achievements or the accolades you struggled for so many years for, nobody cares about when you are gone.
When we avoid the question of death, that’s when we get hijacked by soulless, superficial and hateful ideas.
Thinking about death removes all that. It forces you to see that 99% of the shit going on in your day to day life doesn’t f—ing matter.”
Powerful but eternal truths in human life.
“Death is the only certainty in life. Therefore death must be the compass we orient all our values and decisions. How are we using our time? How are we using our limited f—ks? Who are we going to be with?”
As I get older this becomes even more clear. What an incredible and effective tool for living a better life.
Entering a Scary New World: Unipolar Hegemony to MultiPolar World
It’s hard not to watch the news and be dismayed. Everything seems so grim. I grew up in a world where the USA was the dominant power and espoused a hopeful future. That clearly has changed over the last 20 years as we have become an incompetent & corrupt elite-driven gerontocracy.
Our leadership and elites act like heroes when they are zeroes. They are inheritors, not builders. Literally squandering all the good will, resources and trust that has been built up over many previous decades.
We have outsourced much of our key manufacturing industries and helped grow our most dire threat in China. Run by the CCP which under Xi has clearly identified the USA & the West as their enemy. They have been operating in hybrid war methodology for over a decade, maybe even longer, while we have gotten lazy and compromised. Or maybe some of us have been driven by the naive view that they will become democratic and espouse liberal western values. That has clearly not turned out to be the case.
It’s not Right or Wrong. It’s Win or Lose. Russia & China play by very different rules and they see things as existential. Hence they will do whatever it takes. Not sure the USA & West feel or act in the same way. We have become comfortable and compromised, weakened monetarily, militarily and morale wise by horrible foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq that has left the American populace and our allies cynical and disheartened. Sadly, only a major catastrophe will shock us into waking up.
But I remain hopeful. We are still dominant in key areas of biotech, semiconductors and other areas of technology. We have a well educated populace with an immense capacity for change. Even if they are dragged into it kicking and screaming, Americans have done this before.
And we are driven by an individualistic society where it's true a small number of people can make a difference. America is Extremistan. We are entering a phase of the world and life that will be even more so. BIG challenges but also BIG opportunities. And it will require a whole new level of ruthlessness, sacrifice, of transformation and performance than we’ve ever seen before if we are to get through this.
This is why I always encourage and push for everyone to push themselves, physically and mentally. Chase the hard stuff that makes you feel pain. If you feel pain, it means you are growing. Develop a huge capacity for hard work. Be prepared to grind for a long period of time.
Go Build a business or businesses. Be financially independent. Basically as I’ve written many times before, be physically fit and financially lit. These are the basics of every adult male (or should be). It’s all about self development. Becoming a higher level of yourself.
You should also learn to fight (boxing or muay thai is pretty damn good) and shoot weapons to protect your family and neighborhood, because it will get ugly before it gets better.
Most importantly, to have a larger ambitious mission. Have a purpose and calling. One which should be to prepare ourselves for the upcoming global challenges. So at minimum, you aren’t a burden to others and so you are in a better position to help others along too. There is literally no point in doing well if you can’t bring along others.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 3rd, 2023
“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.” —Proverb
"Last week, my parents were traveling through central Argentina- they informed me that everyone was begging for dollars, even for the smallest of transactions, at a rate of 530 pesos per dollar. 48hrs later, it soared to 600. On Wednesday, August 16th- the rate went parabolic, ripping to 770.
The dollar shortage grows. And Argentina, after decades of kicking the can, finally has to pay the piper, with QE Infinity here at last."
https://peruvianbull.substack.com/p/argentina-enters-the-endgame
2. "That said, building a business as an anon means you have the tabula rasa problem—you have no personal brand. No track record to rely on. You’re all “Work” and no “With Me” because there is no “Me.” At least not someone I can google around for references, results, and reviews.
So going anon as an entrepreneur is playing business on hard mode."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/guest-post-how-to-persuade-the-anon
3. "The whole world is heading toward negative population growth. Immigration can help specific countries (especially the U.S.) maintain their populations for a while at the expense of others, but as the whole world converts to small families, even that stopgap solution will become less feasible.
This doesn’t mean that the human race will inevitably shrink to a small dying remnant of childless old people, huddling together for one last bit of companionship as nature or our AI descendants take over the planet. That scenario is science fiction, since it requires projecting very very far into the future. But the global fertility collapse will have big enough implications in the short term that it’s worth preparing for."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/humanity-is-going-to-shrink
4. This looks good. Rebel Moon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rHLOXbFZtI
5. More on Rebel Moon. I look forward to it in December.
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/rebel-moon-release-date-photos#
6. "The lesson here is not that the Ukrainians failed to achieve what the Americans might have hoped to achieve in similar circumstances but that it was unrealistic to expect them to try. Having tried the Ukrainians reverted to smaller-scale operations that they understood better and knew how to execute. The challenge now is to coordinate these more effectively so that there can be more concentration of force and fire.
This is why the decision to send F-16s to Ukraine is important. It will certainly not help with the current offensive as it is unlikely that they will be flying much before next summer. But for that very reason they signal understanding of the potential length of this war. That is also why it is essential to step up production of ammunition and other war material. If it is likely that fighting will continue well into the next year then that should be reflected in Ukrainian strategy.
Grumbles about slow progress should not lead to pressure to push harder than is feasible or prudent during the current offensive. The aim should be to get in as good a position as possible for the coming stages of the war and also to think about how best to sustain and develop capabilities for these stages. Whether Ukrainian forces do well or badly in the coming months it will still be essential to think long-term."
https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraines-offensive-is-it-failing
7. Good overview of the Ukrainian efforts to stave off barbarian Russia & recover their territory.
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/an-update-on-ukraines-campaigns
8. “Let’s be honest: experts have admitted the slowness of the West in providing new packages of equipment decreased Ukraine’s chances for success here. So it is not only about Ukraine’s deficiencies in combined arms capabilities – that point is universally emphasized. It is also about the speed of decisions made and their implementation.
Again, I do not like to play the blame game, but let’s be frank: the net result is a result of many decisions, not only those made in Ukraine. In that sense, Ukraine alone cannot be blamed. So for me, the situation remains relatively stable. Luckily, along with people ready to compromise with Russia at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and territory, there are others who recognize the problem lies in the Biden administration’s half-hearted approach guided primarily by escalation management considerations, not Ukraine’s interests.
My advice is: let’s get prepared for a long war. There have been editorials in major Western media, in Europe and North America, about the need to prepare for a long conflict, increase industrial capacity, etc. So I am not excessively pessimistic about Ukraine’s long-term chances. But again, preserving Ukrainians’ will to fight is paramount.”
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/an-update-on-ukraines-campaigns
9. "So, where does this go wrong? Where can one get tripped up? For founders, they need a strong opinion as to why whatever they produce with seed proceeds will matter for that end market. That juice needs to be worth the squeeze, and there’s an argument to be made that these types of initiatives represent true venture bets going forward.
And for investors, they will need patience. A product-first worldview to investing requires *a lot* of patience and shared context with the entrepreneur(s) because conventional signals (like revenue, customers, usage metrics) may not rear their heads for a while.
Post a ZIRP-fueled funding bonanza, the irony of writing about how companies could and should raise more capital in 2023 is not lost on me. But to that point - perhaps the answer was “too much scale capital and not enough startup capital.”
https://aashay.substack.com/p/minimum-viable-raise
10. "Venture narrative whiplash is a phenomenon I am coining that birthed from the ever-evolving discourse on Twitter, and has transformed the venture capital landscape over the past decade more than any other phenomenon that I can identify.
True contrarian investing is an active decision to avoid venture narrative whiplash on a daily basis by focusing on underlying technical progress and consumer adoption."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/venture-narrative-whiplash
11. "Long story short, the American consumer is doing well—and, contrary to the popular narrative, that well-being extends to younger Americans. So if everyone is spending healthily, what are they spending on?
One of my most reliable frameworks for startup investing is a simple one: follow the money 💰 (Cue Jerry Maguire: “Show ME the MONEY!”) What are people spending their money on? What categories comprise a large portion of household spend, and as a result offer large markets for startups to build in?
Looking at the breakdown of an average U.S. household’s expenditures, a few categories stand out: housing, transportation, food, finances, healthcare, entertainment, apparel."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/follow-the-money-categories-of-consumer
12. "The consequences of Putin’s determination to avoid loss have been heavy for Ukraine as well as Russia. A futile war has continued and will only stop when Putin, or a successor, recognizes the failure.
Because he lacks a convincing victory Putin has instead sought to coerce Ukraine into capitulation, first by attacking its critical infrastructure and now its grain exports. None of this has led to a more conciliatory attitude in Kyiv. If anything it has had the opposite effect. At most it may give Putin some malign comfort that Ukrainians are being harshly punished for refusing to join his dominion and an opportunity to remove a competitor in agricultural trade. He has spoken positively about how shortages allow Russian grain exporters to charge more."
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/20569
13. Title says it all. It's always a choice, reputation or money.
"Fresh off his wedding — a moment when you would hope someone would be imbued with a sense of wisdom and perspective — Palihapitiya is passing the buck, dismissing his role in convincing people to lose a bunch of money betting on the stocks that he was hawking.
Chamath! that was the trade that you were engaged in. You swapped your reputation for SPAC sponsor fees. You should have done some diligence on what you were getting yourself into. How were you underwriting the damage to your reputation?"
https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-scam-in-the-arena
14. "For Putin killing Prigozhin shows to Russia and the world that no one messes with him - he has a track record of taking out anyone trying who he views as traitors, including Prigozhin but also Litvinenko and Skrypal.
He would also conclude that, while the mutiny had shown his own weakness, that he is back. That said, the fact it took him nigh on two months to position himself to be able to take Prigozhin out does still show how weak his position was back in June."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/prigozhin-how-obvious-was-that
15. "You should never let a VC off easy by letting them lazily paint a whole industry as a terrible place to invest. For everyone who’s ever said that travel sucks, music sucks, or e-commerce sucks there’s an Airbnb, Spotify, or Shein that has bucked the trend—and isn’t that what VCs are looking for? Outliers?
You just have to be knowledgeable enough about the space to be able to prove to them why your company will be that outlier—and frankly, most founders don’t know enough about their industry to understand how to explain all that."
https://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2023/8/23/the-bs-list-we-dont-like-this-space-no-52
16. "Meanwhile, let’s understand that the economies in both Russia and China are imploding. The Blood and Billions that Ukraine has cost Russia are overwhelming the ability to produce GDP.
Meanwhile, back in Beijing, the economy is also imploding under the weight of massive debt.
Only a few days ago, the massive Evergrand filed for bankruptcy protection in the US courts.
What would happen to the world if Russia and or China just ceased to function? We’ve seen this before. Political upheavals are often accompanied by famines in both China and Russia.
Is now the time to consider a strategy for dealing with a failed state? Two failed states? Two very large, failed states? Yes. Maybe this is all just a rough patch, as some say. But what if we are wrong again?"
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/prigozhin-gone-xi-departed-covid
17. "Major US news outlets cite intelligence agencies opining that things are “grim” and that hopes are fading that Ukraine can reach its (supposed) objective of Melitopol, more than 50 miles away.
This is simply wrong. Intelligence analysts may look at the map of Southern Ukraine and see distances; military planners will apply the military math and see something very different. They know that to crush the Russian army and strangle the troops in frontline fortifications, they don’t need to advance 50 miles. 10 miles will do it.
Why? Because although it would be great if Ukrainian troops broke through to the shores of the Sea of Azov, they do not have to. Instead, they can achieve a significant operational outcome by bringing Russia’s ground line of communication (GLOC) under their guns."
https://cepa.org/article/ukraine-victory-is-closer-than-you-think/
18. BRICs Summit; basically a nothing burger. Not a threat to the USD dominion......for now or for a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tG7hh-Vx2A
19. "You should always be checking what your organization is optimizing for. Don’t be surprised when your organization actually get’s a challenge and immediately folds. You filled your leadership with donkeys. This goes for businesses, government, militaries anything that requires a hierarchy of people."
https://bowtiedhitman.substack.com/p/are-you-breeding-competence-prigozhin
20. "Sometimes a winner take none market can emerge when a technology breakthrough just didn’t pan out, or there’s a dramatic change in customer needs/expectations.
But other times, and through the most recent cycle, it seems like some of the most dramatic ones were just blitzscaling aimed the wrong target. Narratives and spreadsheets which somehow would take low margin, high fixed cost businesses and transform them into technology companies."
21. "Yet, the fact that an increasing number of countries want to join BRICS cannot be ignored or taken lightly. BRICS’ refusing to participate in new global trade, proxy or actual wars may make such wars less likely. And BRICS’ economic clout may help reduce some of the glaring economic imbalances between the rich, middle-income, and poor nations across the world."
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/brics-and-non-alignment-today
22. “Tokyo felt of the future, China had skipped the PC, India’s villages operated on SMS, & the Middle Eastern writing orientation - all of them opened my eyes to how the world may feel homogeneous from a PM’s Macbook Air in Mountain View, but was many users’ reality was richly nuanced - something I only understood in the field.
I’ve never forgotten the stark difference between my expectations of the way people use technology & the way they actually do. I’m grateful for that extraordinary experience with a wonderful group of people.
If you have a chance to visit your users or customers, leap for it. It will open your eyes."
https://tomtunguz.com/around-the-world-in-21-days/
23. "Kyiv launched the campaign in the hope of recapturing territory seized by Russia. But so far, any gains have been small and painfully fought for.
Now, several Russian military bloggers are painting a gloomy picture of the front line situation for Moscow’s forces in parts of the south."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/europe/ukraine-offensive-robotyne-intl/index.html
24. "The outsized role the U.S. plays in the system exists primarily because of convenience, not hegemony; to see this, witness how the BRICS’ New Development Bank does most of its borrowing in dollars. It’s not because the U.S. makes them do it; it’s just easier.
So anyway, every aspect of the threat that some in the Western press perceive from BRICS is essentially fake. More incisive commentators see that the organization is likely to become something like the SCO — an acronym looking for a purpose, coupled with a vague notion of geo-economic power that never quite coalesces into anything real."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/brics-is-fake
25. Trying to learn from the top VCs. This new series is pretty helpful. The thought process behind a firm’s strategy and org.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdpcF7LnL6g&t=7s
26. "But there is an influential tide of founders on the rise that is opting out of this path and quietly plotting a new one that leads to building generational companies.
It’s a hybrid path, combining the growth of targeted venture funding with the durability found in bootstrapping (i.e. profitability). It’s a path with less venture capital and more self-reliance.
And it’s the direct result of founders emerging from a tumultuous period of feast (with 5x more venture capital offered to startups over the past decade) and a brief flirtation with famine from the recent pullback that has left some venture-dependent companies in starvation mode.
For many founders, a steady reliance on venture capital, as it is heavily prescribed today, is often seen as unhealthy, if not risky."
https://trohan.com/2023/08/20/raise-less-build-more/
27. "The one good story to come out of this desperate need to claim credit in Washington and London is that there is now a real awareness that the Ukrainians have a chance of significant success. Believe me, people would not be trying to desperately claim credit for Ukrainian strategy if intelligence reports were not showing that things were going well for Ukraine.
In a nutshell, there are signs that the Ukrainian strategy which they have been following fore more than two months (over the early criticisms by US/UK sources and the analytical community) is starting to work.
That strategy has been to concentrate on weakening Russian forces considerably, to create the conditions for a later Ukrainian advance. The Ukrainians realized Russian lines were too well defended in June, and they (not surprisingly) had no desire to suffer extreme losses battering themselves against those lines."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-43
28. "Today the topic is Longevity. Some of you may be nearing 40 (or past 40 already), and health becomes its own investment the older you get. No point in building net-worth if you are not around to enjoy it!"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/moving-from-max-gains-to-max-life
29. There are many different ways to do VC well. This is a good case for a craftsman approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX9D9bq-6qQ
30. Good life skills for young men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTyo5ZvIgA
31. Finding the Limits of Innovation: Good overview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF4YTDsxcnc
32. Excellent NIA episode. Always a good conversation re: edge of the internet and cultural creative businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS2Zz7EDvnI
33. Felicis is one of the top VC funds. Outsiders turned insiders. Really good learnings for building a firm.
The Extreme Edge is Where the Magic Happens: Pain and Suffering is the Catalyst
I’ve learned a literal truth as I’ve gotten older and especially in light of the crazy last 3 years.
It’s been especially challenging as all my preconceived views and beliefs have been overturned. Trust has been broken by the system, by governments, companies, institutions that have been proven to be untrustworthy or incompetent.
Rules, people and friends who all have been broken. Many of us have been pushed to our mental and physical breaking points. All this pain and suffering and for what?
Yet from Warhammer 40k, a remarkably deep sci-fi series, I’ve found an explanation.
“Why do we suffer?
Suffering, pain, grief, they are all extremities of the human condition.”
Sadly, the extremities are where you learn about your true self. This is the point where you shrink or you rise to the challenge. Most people shrink, myself included. It’s like weightlifting: you build muscle by pushing it & tearing it so it gets rebuilt stronger.
Our breaking points are where we have our deep breakthroughs of insight or realization. This is the case for startups and this is the case for people. Pain is the critical catalyst. As I’ve written before from the Bible: “He who gains knowledge, gains pain.” I’d say true knowledge can only come from pain.
“We suffer because it is the sad but necessary consequence of our ability to prevail.”
Yet we run from pain and embrace comfort. And most people don’t push themselves or risk to even get close to this point. It’s like David Goggins says: we only use 40% of our true capacity.
This is why those that truly live are those that truly risk. They push themselves beyond normal levels. This could be driven by ego, driven by pride and most likely by trauma & pain. But whatever the cause, those that go all out, are the only ones who can truly say they have lived the full human experience.
Revolution: World Turned Upside Down
Revolution was one of the best series to come out in the last 2 decades, it’s a show about life in post apocalyptic America.
It is described as in Wikipedia:
“The series is set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, in the year 2027. Fifteen years earlier, in the year 2012, a worldwide event known as "The Blackout" caused all electricity on Earth, ranging from computers and electronics to car and jet engines, to be disabled permanently.
As a result, trains and cars stopped where they were, ships went dead in the water, and aircraft plummeted from the sky and crashed. In the years after the Blackout, people adapted to this new world without electricity. Because government and public order collapsed, several areas are ruled by militias and their generals.”
Not only was it a good drama, it was a survivalists and preppers dream. Looking back on it there were so many great lessons from it. Basically what do you do when the lights go out. What are you willing to do to protect your family? What are you willing to do to survive? Especially when your world is turned upside down. Do you step up?
This is the core part of the show. Two US Marine Corp friends do step up and end up creating an empire called the Monroe Republic, that runs a big part of the eastern seaboard. Another major antagonist was formerly a mild mannered compassionate insurance adjuster who turns into a ruthless driven militia officer in order to ensure his family's safety.
On the reverse side, one of the characters is a super rich Google executive who finds himself mal-adapted to the new survival of the fittest world. He is out of shape and pretty much useless. He relies on the charity and compassion of his friends. I don’t know about you but I certainly do not want to be that guy in this situation. I don’t care how rich you are, you are not a real man or truly free if you are not healthy, mentally fit and able to protect yourself and your family.
I think a lot about this in the situation that the world is in right now. Up is becoming down, down is becoming up. So many underlying trends are arising. Massive incoming geo-political, technological and financial changes so many of us accustomed to tremendous prosperity and comfort are mal-adapted for the future.
This is due to people’s laziness, blindness, ignorance, fear of change and maybe an attitude of “better the devil we know than one we don’t” that they prefer to keep their heads down like an ostrich hoping that they will be okay. Hope is not a strategy and reality doesn’t care who or what you did before.
So it’s important that you are macro aware but micro focused on getting ready. It’s going to be a rough ride where only the fittest survive like in “Revolutions”, albeit probably not as severe as it was in the show I am sure, but these next few years will be rough. However, out of great challenges come great opportunities.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 27th, 2023
“Good things come to people who wait, but better things come to those who go out and get them.” —Anonymous
This is an excellent interview re: multipreneurship. Its a great path to explore for new entrepreneurs. Jesse is really sharp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plon_u6CyZg
2. Such a baller move.
"When Swift switched over to Republic Records in the fall of 2018, she negotiated to own the master rights to all the music she creates going forward. So by rerecording her old songbook with Republic Records, she will own the copyright to all of the new recordings.
The move would give licensers the option to work directly with Swift and her team rather than go through Braun. And that, in turn, would allow Swift to reclaim some command over her music and how it’s used."
3. This was an educational discussion by some ex-US soldiers fighting in Ukraine. True heroes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNjYWS8M6c4
4. One of the most interesting space startups around. Varda Space. Educational. Sci-fi becoming Sci-fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maGE5dehsS0
5. "Now, I’m generally a major critic of election security, and I would still be shocked if Milei is actually allowed to become President (he wants to dismantle the Argentine government - literally cutting nearly every single department), but let’s see what happens.
Maybe, Argentina, which has been rocked by hyper inflation, controlled largely by Marxist radicals (Peronistas) for decades, and was one of the more totalitarian countries in Latin America during covid, is simply a reminder that it’s always darkest before dawn."
https://calvinfroedge.substack.com/p/a-big-moment-for-argentina-libertarian
6. This is a pretty good recap of the intriguing Capital Club. Lots of good tips and frameworks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfkn2ZkJ0xc
7. I wish I was this clued in on how money works when I was his age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqT4EhAbqiI
8. "The lessons from 2023, Silicon Valley's "year of failures" go beyond just business strategies or financial models. They emphasize persistence, genuine business relationships, and unwavering self-belief.
Today, as tech rebounds, learning from past mistakes can prevent future risks and transform failure into a launchpad for success."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/learning-from-failure-lessons-by
9. What a time to be alive and young.
"Hurley, the Texas high jumper, presents a crucial case study. Of the 25 college and high school athletes with NIL valuations of $1 million or more, according to On3.com, all except two—Hurley and LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne—play football or basketball, the two sports that drive athletic-department revenues.
Like Dunne, Hurley has leveraged his enormous social media following into earnings that, he says, are approaching $1 million. Among the 25 most highly valued athletes, only Bronny James, LeBron’s son, and Dunne have more impressive social media metrics than Hurley (12.9 million followers for James, 11.4 million for Dunne, 5 million for Hurley).
Hurley’s creating a novel path toward college-sports riches. Influencer first and foremost, athlete second, with each job gilding the other. His story, however, also points to the shortcomings of a model that allows athletes to make money only through outside deals and may make people take a careful look at who is benefiting from NIL, who is not, and what still needs to change."
https://time.com/6284880/sam-hurley-track-and-field-tiktok-nil-texas/
10. "That so many have been purged reflects disobedience in the ranks expressed as a reluctance to go to war. The regime handed down a death sentence this year to former Air Force General Liu Yazhou due to his continued opposition to an invasion of Taiwan, and he is not alone.
"The image that Xi Jinping is firmly in command of the Communist Party is belied by increasing evidence of instability in the ranks of China's military leadership," said Charles Burton of the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute. "The extraordinary purge of both the commander and political commissar of the Rocket Force suggests there is serious discontent within China's military with Xi Jinping."
Burton, a former Canadian diplomat posted in Beijing, points to Xi's failing domestic and foreign policies, especially the "cratering economy." "They have got some problems," said President Joe Biden about China earlier this month. "That's not good, because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things."
Bad things like starting wars."
https://www.newsweek.com/xi-jinping-preparing-china-war-opinion-1819587
11. Learned so much from this. Jack Butcher is pioneer of creative entrepreneurial life & personal holding companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDS1R6QUxWE
12. I finally found out what that "crazy plane lady" meme was all about.
Man, so many peoples brains were broken during the pandemic. I'd include myself in this.
https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/tiffany-gomas-full-airplane-meltdown-revealed-in-new-video/
13. Lots of great thoughts here. Kale vs Cocaine phone. Also great breakdown on Arnold documentary & Barstool Sports deal. One of my weekly favorite shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOZ8YvqwRE&t=620s
14. This was a solid interview on living like a man on a mission. In his case, becoming a UFC fighter and having a family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDb9E25CXSk
15. "Lifetimes of work and risk lie between a Seed round and a Series D round. And, despite increasing the value of the underlying business 7x, the dollars at exit for the founder remain roughly the same. It is also worth noting that an exit at $210M would not even qualify as a home run for even the smallest fund in Sam’s examples.
There are many paths to managing dilution- be it raising fewer rounds at higher and higher valuations, or raising one round and scaling a business on revenue and profits generated from customers."
https://medium.com/strong-words/meaningful-exits-for-founders-4c3b2baba6b4
16. "What’s baffling is that the board would give such a delicate task to a person almost universally regarded as a jerk.
“David’s not likable,” says a longtime colleague — one of the more diplomatic comments I heard in talking to more than 30 of the CEO’s current and former executives, most of them partners. “He’s a prick,” says another. “Everybody thinks and says he’s a dick,” adds a third.
“He’s a tough guy with a very short fuse”; “He dehumanizes you when he talks to you.”
Morale has sunk to the lowest level in recent memory, in tandem with a sense that the bank inspires less envy among its rivals and less esteem among its fee-paying clients and governments around the world.
Some critics have suggested that perhaps Solomon was too distracted between DJ-ing and taking private planes to the Bahamas to kitesurf to see that Marcus had veered off course. But I think that narrative misses the point. Solomon is a workaholic, a CEO who never takes longer than three hours to respond to emails. It’s not that he wasn’t paying attention; it’s more likely that no one told him."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/david-solomon-goldman-sachs-profile.html
17. "Most leaders make the same mistake I did. They jealously protect their other resources: their cash, their position in the market, and their social media presence. But they freely give away their most valuable asset: their time.
This may be just the right time to take careful account of your schedule. To what are you giving your time and attention?"
https://www.mattmunson.me/sanity-notes-017-time/
18. It’s a good time for startups with alot of cash on their balance sheet for sure.
https://tomtunguz.com/big-balance-sheet-as-an-advantage/
19. This was inevitable. De-globalization and why would you invest in your great power rival?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovvQdCmnCLo
20. "Ultimately my job as a VC is selling a few simple products: cash, trusted reputation, and access to as much downstream capital as possible. And I can do that just as well as anyone who invests in only AI.
To be clear, the venture world is evolving fast, and specialist investors play a valuable role. But I urge my generalist friends to be proud."
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/18/why-generalist-investors-will-always-win/
21. This was one of the better discussions at the All in Podcast. Some important nuances about what’s happening in the economy & American society. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzobkV_CgU
22. "My mind, body, spirit, and finances were the abilities I had to gain experience in.
I wanted to become multidimensionally jacked.
Maybe because I started questioning the default path early.
Maybe because I noticed how unhappy, overweight, and miserable people seemed.
Maybe because I observed how people limited their opportunities by taking a specific path in life.
It didn’t make sense to follow what most people do, because that would create a life that most people have, and that isn’t pretty.
The problem with the default path in life is specialization, compartmentalization, and niching down.
We are trained to focus on one dot, instead of the lines that connect the dots."
https://thedankoe.com/letters/the-cure-to-a-mediocre-life-become-multidimensionally-jacked/
23. "As an investor, there is value in recognizing the value of your life that’s been lived. You can become a better investor by seeking out the experiences that make you into a more well-rounded character. The pursuit of greatness is state of mind, not a one off accomplishment. It’s not about what you are, it’s about what you are becoming."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/back-to-the-grass
24. "Likewise, Schwarzenegger did not want to be typecast and play the same role over and over. The 1980s action star market got saturated quickly with Stallone and other ambitious actors (Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis, Wesley Snipes).
Doing a comedy like Twins was a risk but there weren’t many muscle-bound actors trying the same pivot.
“Don’t go where it’s crowded,” says Schwarzenegger. “Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.”
https://www.readtrung.com/p/arnold-and-the-art-of-re-invention
25. "Generative AI can do some amazing things. There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is excited about it and so many people have tried it out. What remains to be seen is whether it can be more than a party trick, which, given its still-prevalent flaws, is probably all it should be for now."
26. "But we’re seeing a radical shift in how founders and engineers view public service: that some of our greatest problems can be solved through building technology companies for America, whether it’s manufacturing drones to shore up the defense industrial base or building AI tutors to help elementary students learn math.
We see American Dynamism as an underrated big idea because so many young engineers are choosing to build startups that support the country, particularly after living through Covid-19 and now seeing war in Ukraine. We believe the next ten years of technological innovation will be very much focused on supporting the needs of America."
27. "We keep mediocre sales reps for way too long because we haven’t clearly defined and understood what the Mendoza Line for sales reps should be — we then potentially fire the wrong sales reps. Companies who spend more time on this will see significantly better results in the long term."
https://www.onlycfo.io/p/damage-from-mediocre-sales-reps
28. "I was struck by just how large and diverse the distressed asset opportunity of Latin America is. Whether it's high-yielding loans tied to major corporations or quirky niche assets such as Venezuelan debt, there are many sub-themes to be exploited. As stated at the outset of this series, distressed assets are not something that most private investors would be overly familiar with, and this lack of interest only further aides my point.
Latin America's economies and financial markets have matured to an extent, as seen by the much-improved balance sheets and leverage ratios mentioned above. However, the region hasn't matured to a degree where those dislocations won't occur anymore.
Many investors also continue to have misconceptions, such as that liquid bonds of major corporations are the best ways to get exposure, when actually there are even more interesting alternatives for those who have boots on the ground and highly specialised expertise."
29. "Now Cowart is in the big leagues, running a real refinery, screwing up hedging to piss away what would have been a Godsend of a quarter, failing to disclose said screw up in a timely enough manner, entering into egregious agreements with blood sucking banks and product marketers that put his company over a barrel, deciding to dilute himself (as the largest shareholder) to pay for mistakes and bad market timing, and having the whole world ask who is this idiot that doesn’t know how to run a refinery.
Gentlemen, on a scale of 0 being someone who has accomplished nothing at all in the past 20 years, and 100 being Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, or Carlos Slim, Benjamin Cowart has to be ranking in the high 80s. Cut the man some slack.
Extreme success means sometimes taking loans at high interest rates, sometimes signing agreements with counter parties you know are screwing you, sometimes diluting the crap out of yourself to make sure you don’t go bankrupt later, and needing to hear the rest of the world call you an idiot. When Ben Cowart moved to Houston, I’ll bet you he was the only person in the world who believed in what he was doing - and on some days that’s probably true even now."
https://calvinfroedge.substack.com/p/empire-building-is-hard
30. "Because of China’s struggling economy, but also because of the risk of war and because of Xi Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian policies, Western investors are pulling money out of China. They are fleeing Chinese stocks and Chinese bonds. They are doing much less direct investment too.
What are Western investors going to do with the money they get from selling down their Chinese assets? They’re going to invest it somewhere, and the most obvious place to do it would be in the U.S. and other rich countries — especially if people think interest rates are going to fall. In other words, the U.S. and other developed nations could become suddenly deluged by a flood of money that pushes up the prices of real estate and other assets — but, most importantly, real estate. Chinese capital might also find ways to flee the country, and property in developed countries is always a prime target for capital flight.
The combination of fleeing Western money, fleeing Chinese money, and interest rate cuts could put the property sector in developed countries on an upward trend. That could then spark a process of extrapolative expectations, in which a whole new generation of homebuyers and mortgage lenders become convinced that real estate is a great investment that always goes up.
If everyone has already forgotten the disaster of 2008, and throws caution to the winds, we could end up with another housing bubble in the U.S. or other rich nations.
In other words, over the next two or three years, a Chinese slowdown will likely come as a breath of fresh air for Western economies beset by inflation."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-crash-is-unlikely-to-hurt
31. "In Israel, where Wiz was founded, such quasi-celebrity is no shock. Nearly a decade ago, Rappaport, Costica and two friends sold their security startup, Adallom, for $320 million to Microsoft, where Rappaport helped the company dethrone Google as Dun & Bradstreet’s “best place to work” in Israel.
But in just three years since leaving that job to get the band back together for another startup, he has emerged as a globally relevant tech player, too: the CEO of one of software’s buzziest unicorns, invited to rub shoulders with OpenAI’s Sam Altman at Sun Valley’s exclusive confab of moguls, attending Formula 1 races as a VIP guest of Amazon and skipping famed VC firm Sequoia’s CEO summit to hang backstage with the Chainsmokers in Las Vegas.
That part is all new for Rappaport, an introvert with the eating habits of a 5-year-old (no coffee, no vegetables, no spices) and few hobbies aside from walks with his red border collie, Mika, Wiz’s “chief dog officer” (who has 2,000 LinkedIn followers), who keeps him company during late nights at the Tel Aviv office. But Rappaport’s the man of the hour because he’s catching two waves—the cloud and AI—with his security tools, and doing so faster than anyone."
32. "A road not taken. An inauspicious start that might have led to a company shutting down before it found its way. A strategic reset that proved to be the right bet. They’re the kind of stories that get explored on Acquired—and they’re also the Acquired story.
Gilbert and Rosenthal are two millennial investors who met almost a decade ago and started a podcast in 2015 as a way to cement their friendship. Gilbert, who is a managing director of the early-stage venture fund of Pioneer Square Labs, acknowledges today that if Acquired had been a startup, it would have been shuttered after two years because of its slow growth.
Now the show has gotten so big that both Gilbert and Rosenthal, who was a professional VC for a decade and currently has a fund called Kindergarten Ventures, have gone from investors with a podcast to podcasters whose popularity creates a multitude of previously unimagined investing and business opportunities. The show’s audience has doubled year-over-year for eight straight years."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90927453/acquired-number-1-tech-podcast-sensation
33. Obsession to be the best. I always get motivated after listening to David Senra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP0XvV02INw&t=2426s
34. Very interesting list of "cool" by GQ.
https://www.gq.com/story/the-gq-hype-list-2023
35. "A new era of choice will result in a "great reshuffling" of people and economic activity. This reshuffling of people who practice a variety of professions will mimic the internet's impact on content creators: It will have two seemingly opposite effects — making some destinations more popular (and more populated and expensive) than any place ever was and increasing the number and diversity of viable destinations at which people can live and work."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/the-weird-future-of-work/
36. "I’ve discussed three important communications principles that I think politicians execute well, illustrated how you can see them every day if you’re looking, and shown how to apply them to the world of Silicon Valley marketing and communications.
Those principles are:
-Demonstrate an understanding of the problem. Don’t skip over this critical step in your rush to offer technical proof.
-Framing is everything. You can win deals by changing the customer’s view on what they should be buying.
-The power of consistency. Repetition works. Pick a standard set of messages and words, train your team on them, and enforce standard usage.
Use my maxim to help: it’s better to be consistent than better."
https://kellblog.com/2023/08/20/three-marketing-lessons-from-the-political-realm/
37. "As our livelihoods shift further into this world, increasingly more parts of the machine economy will need to be built. Many investors have shifted towards AI for sheer novelty and attention momentum. My thesis is that fintech, Web3, and artificial intelligence are one economic whole, and that our ability to grow each relies on their deep synthesis."
38. "From a more practical standpoint, the real issue with high valuations, large rounds, and the overall frenzy around early-stage startups, it’s that very often, entrepreneurs lose sight of what really matters.
They quickly lose the sense of humble beginnings, of the grind that comes from early rejection, of the extreme common sense that arises when people start with absolutely nothing.
It’s great to have leverage and raise with great conditions, to have early momentum and traction, but it’s a trap as much as it’s a gift.
Stay hungry, not foolish :)"
Judgement Day is Coming: Better Get Fit
I love the tv show “Yellowstone”. It’s always full of wisdom and great observations of our present world.
There is a specific scene when he is talking with his son-in-law, Rip.
“You know The first Duttons who settled this valley, fighting was all they knew. It’s how they got here, how they kept the land once they did. But today, it seems like a liability. Cowards rule the world, Rip. With coward rules and coward customs. To succeed today, all you gotta know is how to blame and how to complain. I truly believe it’s the survival of the unfittest these days.”
Source: Episode 5, season 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC50xkOONsQ
It feels like almost everywhere in the world, we’re seeing this. Lions led by Donkeys as I wrote before. You don’t have to look much further than the USA, Canada or most of Western Europe. China and Russia don’t seem that much better. We see aging incompetent leadership, slothful & entitled youth, distracted people. Additionally, according to Harvard University’s School of Public Health, Roughly two out of three U.S. adults are overweight or obese (69 percent) and one out of three are obese (36 percent). Credit card debt and bankruptcies are rising too.
But I don’t despair too much because this is a tipping point. As Winston Churchill famously said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
This is one big wake up call, as tectonic as the Covid pandemic, the Horrendous Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing end of Globalization as the world fractures and supply chains are brought home. Technology is growing exponentially and demographics are transitioning. Remote work is turning the world into a great meritocracy, it will increase the level of competition in the world. It will be a boon for the skilled from developing countries and will wreck the unskilled (and lazy) in the developed countries.
This is a wake up call for us all to get fit ASAP. When I say fit, I mean fit in every possible way. Health-wise, physically, mentally & financially. Meditate, work out & eat clean food, learn how to fight and shoot. Manage your cost structure, learn new skills and how to invest and make money. Build a business. Become financially independent.
There will be lots of pain but consequently also lots of massive opportunities. You can only take advantage of this if you are ready. So get ready now. It’s time to get into “Beast Mode” so you can pull ahead.
Have Gun, Will Travel: Why Hustlers Win Deals
Most companies say that they are “customer centric” but in most cases it’s pure BS and just a mantra that is ignored or not followed. It’s what you are supposed to say. This is clear by how they spend their time.
Yet the best founders and CEOs spend much of their time seeing customers. This is the trait of a great early stage Founder to that of a CEO running a multibillion dollar corporation. They are on the road a lot meeting customers or helping close deals. They set an example for the rest of their organization who is always watching them & what they do.
Yes, during the pandemic and the Covid lockdowns you could close very big deals or investments via zoom. Companies closed their offices and allowed people to work from home. But Covid is over, companies are trying to get their employees back into the offices.
And from what I see and hear from my companies, people are asking to meet in person now. Especially if the customers have been spending a lot of money. Or expecting to make a decision on a large expenditure. Relationships matter even if your product is awesome & solves their problem well.
If one CEO is unwilling to travel to get the business, she will lose to the one who will travel. So get on that plane. Zoom is a great way to meet first and qualify them. But you have to meet them in person to close. This is a people business and people like meeting people.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 20th, 2023
“Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain.” —Anonymous
Justin Waller is the man. Lots of tips for living well and accomplishing your goals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmESj_9hqE4&t=4219s
2. "The more frequent the touch points, the less pressure there is on any conversation or check-in. Regular check-ins allow me to get to know the founders better and for them to get to know me better. I want to be a good advisor to the founders we back, and I learn a lot from regular touchpoints with them."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/an-investors-perspective-on-the-value
3. "Most things in your life are, at best, actively stable. Left alone they’ll follow the natural path of cyclicality. But if there’s constant intervention and management – managing your expectations, managing your reputation, managing how you advertise yourself and who you surround yourself with – you have at least a shot at keeping something good going for the longest period of time."
https://collabfund.com/blog/everything-is-cyclical/
4. Don't bet against America.
"Bear markets are for building. This is a phrase that has been repeated over and over again as the US economy teeters on the edge of a recession after the Fed increased interest rates at the fastest pace in history.
But are people actually building right now?
The short answer is “yes.” There were more than 5 million new business applications in 2021, followed by another 5 million applications in 2022. This milestone represents a significant increase in new business applications over the prior decade."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/americans-are-building-new-companies
5. "If you want to make money outside of your job, you need distribution and a product.
If you want to do it as one person without the restriction of physical location, you need code and content.
Code is the back end of the internet.
Content is the front end of the internet.
Code is how you host content.
Content is how you capture attention.
You don’t need to learn how to code, because technology has advanced to the point we are at now."
https://thedankoe.com/letters/i-had-to-learn-these-high-income-skills-if-i-wanted-to-make-money/
6. "When the next angel deal or private tech investment opportunity arises, find an expert and get them to invest alongside."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/08/05/tech-investing-alongside-an-expert/
7. One of history’s legendary warlords. Skanderberg of Albania.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TtfdLJFJdw
8. "Venture capital has been busy focused on the king making capabilities of capital, but they've lost sight of something important—there aren't enough startups to justify all that capital. But why is that?
Because (1) there aren't enough people building things that people truly want, and (2) there is only so much attention (time, energy, disposable income, corporate spend) that people have to give.
There is a finite amount of "taste" in the world. A lot of brands have thrived because there are surprisingly big niche markets, like mushroom foraging, that can sustain a certain amount of value creation and capture. But the biggest misallocation of capital is the limited understanding of taste—what do people actually want?"
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/king-making-vs-taste-making
9. "Whereas even if my optimistic predictions come true, the peak of the 2010s unrest was only 2.5 or 3 years ago. The nation is still in a shaky, nervous, bitter, exhausted mood after the coup attempt, the riots, the street battles, “cancel culture”, and the surge in crime. Even under the best of circumstances, it’ll still probably be a few years before we can really begin to move on from that.
Reagan’s sunny optimism in 1984 might therefore have included an important subtext, not captured in the economic numbers his campaign cited in that famous ad. “Morning in America” might have been about the dawn of a new era of (relative) social peace, a new political equilibrium that, if not necessarily to everyone’s liking, at least meant that Americans were no longer burning down their cities and Presidents were no longer trying to assume dictatorial powers. If that’s the case, Biden will have an uphill battle convincing Americans to feel optimistic based on economic numbers alone."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/comparing-morning-in-america-with
10. "Luke points out a kind of blindness that afflicts many of us today. Those of us who work in tech and business see the world through the lens of the metaphorical city of "Silicon Valley." Its organizing principle is usefulness, and science and engineering are its aristocrats. "Athens" represents the humanities.
The dominance of Silicon Valley has made Athens a vassal state where only the computable are recognized. Luke gives the example of the utilitarian logic in the countless white papers that lay out rationalized motivations behind movements like cryptocurrency. The third city, "Jerusalem," represents religion. Today, Jerusalem feels distant from Silicon Valley."
https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-three-city-problem-of-meaningless
11. "Why look at headcount growth? It’s a proxy for financial success. Startups with more business than they can handle should be scaling their teams to satisfy market demand."
https://tomtunguz.com/headcount_growth_and_capital_raised/
12. This dude is super smart. There is so much to learn from this guy. Luke Belmar is a young king.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlfTdYWlqXw
13. "For years, the tech media had characterized John and Patrick, 34, as boyish business prodigies who monkishly shared an apartment, rode rented e-bikes to work, and preferred reading economic histories and science fiction to ostentatious displays of their growing wealth.
John, a student of capitalism who encourages employees to read biographies about moguls like Larry Ellison and John Malone, has lately come into his own as a brass-knuckled manager who has assumed critical leadership roles as his company hurtles toward its next iteration. At the same time, he has been adding a new chapter to his own billionaire’s journey, with a much-loved phrase serving as an epigraph: “The world is a museum of passion projects.”
Two years ago, just after Stripe’s valuation had rocketed to $95 billion, Collison bought a stake in a forlorn airport outside of Dublin, a facility mostly used for pilot training that he hopes will become a hub for short-hop electric planes over the next decade. Collison, a veteran pilot, has also purchased his own twin-engine airplanes, which he has used to ferry Stripe executives around the country. Recently, he flew himself to Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay Area to interview 99-year-old investing icon Charlie Munger. Stripe’s own publishing arm plans to release a collection of Munger’s business yarns called “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” this November.
Both Collison brothers help underwrite a private summit of techno-optimists in remote Sea Ranch, Calif., called “frontier camp.” Every summer the conversations focuses on futurist topics like supersonic aviation, nuclear energy, charter cities and boosting birth rates, according to three people who have been invited. Attendees at this month's camp include “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson, former Tesla and OpenAI executive Andrej Karpathy, and Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Romer, according to one invitee.
John Collison has been able to finance some of these endeavors by cashing in small parts of his 12% ownership stake in Stripe over the years. (His older brother has a roughly similar stake.) The privately held company has allowed regular sales of shares for employees and outside investors, which the founders could also utilize, people familiar with the matter said. Collison’s stake in the company now sits at about $6 billion at the firm’s most recent $50 billion valuation. That sets him up for decades of discovering new passions.
“Everything I’ve seen him do has had a very long-term focus to it,” said Kinsella, who runs a computer science program at University of Limerick that Collison helps fund and organize. “He’s not a creature of a passing whim.”
14. "This opportunity lies with Tanzania. With more neighboring countries and a larger population than any other African nation along the Indian Ocean, Tanzania is well-positioned to extend its influence even further.
Presently, Tanzania's largest trading partners in terms of import value are already China, the UAE, India, and Saudi Arabia. Projections indicate Tanzania’s population will increase by over double to 135 million people by 2050.
While rapid population growth can pose significant challenges, Tanzania's impressive GDP per capita growth of over 40 percent in the past decade suggests it is managing to grow overall worker productivity."
https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/oped/how-tanzania-can-become-the-powerhouse-of-africa-4323136
15. "There are some compelling reasons to entertain the preemptive round on occasion. You get to learn why people you like and respect will say No. This is a gift when you decide to run a real process so you can get ahead of the curve.
Letting an inside investor (someone who is already on your cap table) that you like and already knows the status of the business is a great reason to consider it. Especially if the Partner is someone you deeply trust. This is the ideal scenario – it saves you time and you know you’re not working with a wildcard.
Same could be said for a new investor that you have a long-standing, deep, and trusting relationship with. If these things are true, then it’s worth considering. Otherwise, in this market, be wary of someone trying to preempt your round."
https://jaredhecht.com/2023/07/09/preempting-the-round/
16. Lots of implications for the Russian ports & ships being hit by drones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydv_3n5__2I
17. "Putting all this together, there is concern that the Ukrainian strikes in the Black Sea against shipping mark a new period of heightened insecurity for shipping - perhaps making the Black Sea a complete no go area. I would be careful about drawing such conclusions. Ukraine’s attack on the two vessels over the weekend appeared carefully calibrated.
The first hit was on a Russian naval vessel, the Olenegorsky Gorynak, so a fair target. The second on an oil supply vessel, the Sig, which has also been contracted to support the Russian navy and is sanctioned by the West for oil running to Syria. Kyiv has warned herein that Russian ports on the Black Sea are now fair game, and I think this is something of a quid pro quo for Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports and particularly grain infrastructure.
But I think Ukraine would be wary of launching all out attacks on Russian oil vessels in the Black Sea for fear of playing into Russian hands by driving international oil prices higher and then weakening support in both the West and the Global South for its defence against Russia.
Rather this was a proverbial shot across Russia’s bow that Ukraine has lots more options. It is a push to get Russia to back off from attacking Ukrainian Black Sea ports, and also those along the Danube and return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/black-sea-in-focus
18. Really great interview on personal development when you are young. Get your head right, get your body right and learn to fight!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYfl-6J4nh4
19. Recommend this episode of NIA: lots of good thoughts on crypto and Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPtTAbaQwPI
20. This is not a good sign for China's economic future or future period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9-wfHgjTB8&t=370s
21. Solid episode and they absolutely shine when they talk tech, startups and investing (versus say Geopolitics).
There is no one better on the planet than these folks as tech operators and investors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAAfDQx8DDQ
22. "Before I could truly understand happiness, I had to pass through grief.
There is a finality to death that contradicts everything we’ve ever been told, undermines everything we’ve relied upon. It triggers our fear, it triggers our helplessness, it triggers our insecurity. Suddenly, we can no longer trust life. We miss the person we love who left us. We are scared for them and where they are, and scared for ourselves without them. We have lots of uncertainties. It’s an overwhelming trauma.
The first step through it is to grieve, fully grieve. If you are angry, be angry. If you are unsure, be unsure. If you want to take a break, take a break."
https://www.profgalloway.com/grief-and-happiness/
23. The past and future of YC: Garry Tan. This is a great interview. Garry is a great guy and makes me bullish on YC's future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VDZRR07Eqw
24. "When our journalists and billionaires ask whether Britain or America is “declining like Rome”, they are really thinking about the grim realities of the early Middle Ages — a time of deprivation rather than plenty. And perhaps they are right to do so.
However terrible life was in the post-Roman West, it was nothing like as bad as a similar rupture would be today. Most of us lack both the land and the knowledge to grow our own food. The support structures provided by extended family networks and stable local communities — the mortar of the pre-industrial world — have been fatally weakened.
Many people rely upon regular medical intervention simply to stay alive. Our most basic goods are imported from the other side of the planet, as is the fuel required to power the machines that make contemporary life possible.
Above all, centuries of peace have left us ill-equipped for the return of a society in which war is commonplace and might makes right. A fourth-century Roman would regard modern Britons as laughably weak, ignorant and dependent."
https://unherd.com/2023/08/stop-comparing-the-west-to-rome/
25. Strength through humility. Be a warrior poet. This was a very enlightening discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCodxQiL35M
26. "This gets to the crux of the Hopin question I raised at the end of the last section.
How can investors believe a company that went from $20M to $100M ARR in 8 months could eventually get to $2.3B in revenue? They probably didn't! They just had to believe that someone ELSE could believe that something like that was possible. This is literally an academic representation of "passing the bag."
One of the most un-dealt with ramifications of a 13-year bull market is the institutionalized belief in "the greater fool." People can make money, not because a business is sound, but because there is always someone else down the line who will buy you out. And that was true for 10+ years!
But I think businesses whose operating model and valuation mechanisms were crafted between 2009 and 2021 all have a fundamental flaw of believing that the institutionalized belief in the greater fool will allow the next investor (the bag holder) to hide a multitude of sins."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/institutionalized-belief-in-the-greater
27. Jack Hopkins is one of the emerging creator entrepreneurs who exemplifies the triumvirate of getting your mind, body and money right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdqExVCZr3c&t=1631s
28. "The Indian establishment is increasing taking the view that a conflict in the Taiwan Strait will have an adverse impact on India and its economy. So, a section of the Indian leadership is of the opinion that Taiwan should be backed against China’s aggressive tactics."
The Time Value of Money: The Key lesson of Wealth
Money is a skill that can be learned and this is why in many cases wealth is propagated through families. The rich get richer as they say. And also why most people, despite all their effort and time, never break into the ranks of the rich. It’s because they don’t learn the rules of money.
I grew up in an immigrant household of academics so this was something I learned the hard way.
Money now in hand is worth more than in the future. It’s liquidity. That’s why if you invest in something long term, the pay off has to be massive to justify locking up your cash. You need to get paid for the risk of locking up your cash.
This is why you need a diverse portfolio and income streams. You need investments with different time horizons and return profiles. Nick Maggiuli writes an amazing post on what these 7 income streams look like. I highly recommend reading it yourself:
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/7-streams-of-income/
Earned Income
Capital Gains
Interest Income
Dividend Income
Rental Income
Business Income
Royalty Income
These are the only ways you can break limitations of trading time for money.
And that diversity of time and liquidity is key to making sure you don’t have the cash crunches that lead to bankruptcies. Something I almost experienced in 2020 because most of my net worth was stuck in illiquid and very long term investments.
They say cash is king, I would go so far to say “diverse cash flow is king”.
May the Arrogant Not Flourish: Pride and Ego Still Kills
This was the name of the street in the ancient capital Babylon where rulers and visitors had to ride through to the center of the grand city. A reminder to stay humble.
Just like in Ancient Roman times when their generals celebrated grand victories in war with a chariot ride in front of the populace, surrounded by pomp and circumstance. Yet beside them in their chariot was a slave that whispered to them continuously “Momento Mori: remember you are mortal.” A reminder that glory is fleeting.
I feel like I have to write a similar kind of blog post every few months here in Silicon Valley. And it’s especially bizarre when we have gone through a comeuppance that started last year in 2022.
Startup founders in denial and acting like it’s 2021 where the cash is flowing. VCs pontificating and lecturing like they saw all this coming. Or like they weren’t co-conspirators aiding and abetting the founders' spendthrift “grow at all costs” strategy.
We all got fat, lazy and dumb from greed. I admit that. Standards slipped and we made some stupid investments in teams and businesses that should not have been funded. I’m still kicking myself on a few deals I did in 2021. Ones that I never would have done in ordinary times. I am still kicking myself for this. But live and learn.
Now it’s payback time. The inevitable house cleaning and taking of the pain. Those who admit the truth, take the medicine and blame, and focus on getting their hands dirty to fix the problems, will be fine. That means taking the write downs in your portfolio ASAP!
Those who try to blissfully ignore this or hope this turns around soon without taking hard action deserve the inevitable shellacking. This is a reminder to Accept reality and Crush your ego. As the Bible states in proverb 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 13th, 2023
“Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.” —John Wooden
"The broader point here is - in the world of foundation models, market leadership that is based on technical leadership could be fragile. Be careful investing against that. It makes me wonder if OpenAI should be a short. The company that leads now may have too much stake in the status quo to see the next thing. Time will tell."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mistake-ai-investors
2. "Basically, this is the whole list. If people have jobs, inflation is low, and real incomes are rising, the economy is good. That doesn’t mean people necessarily realize it’s good — social strife, or partisan polarization, or lingering pessimism from past disasters may cause people to be pessimistic about the economy even in the face of great data, a phenomenon some refer to as a “vibecession”.
But while I acknowledge that people’s feelings are important and that there are other things that matter besides the economy, when I’m analyzing how well the macroeconomy is actually performing, I can’t go on vibes.
And when we look at the objective numbers, they are great. First of all, there’s the employment situation. Some indicators of employment, like labor-force participation, look bad because we’re in the middle of the great Baby Boom retirement. That’s why you generally shouldn’t use measures of the labor force that don’t adjust for age! When we do adjust for age, we find that the U.S. job market is now the best that it’s been in recorded history."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/if-this-is-a-bad-economy-please-tell
3. "In short, if you are financially set you never have to sell as you likely work. If you are still in wealth building mode you should risk manage by selling at least half of an asset that doubles in value.
If you recently sold a business and have no real income, we suggest working as a consultant/time for money exchange *temporarily* so you don’t go cash flow negative.
Do something. Anything."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/july-portfolio-update-some-changes
4. "Thriving in a Disruptive Environment
So, what do we do? How do we thrive during this transition, despite the dangers? The best strategy is resilience. Resilience is a strategy that safeguards individuals, families, and communities against systemic disruptions and failures — from extended blackouts to food shortages to temporary social breakdowns.
The basic philosophy of resilience is;
Connect, but connect on your own terms.
In practice, this means:
-Connect to the system (grid, retail, etc.) to maximize opportunity, wealth, and convenience.
-Be prepared for disconnection so that when it suddenly happens, you aren’t negatively impacted. This is done by making preparations (backup generator, wood stove, garden, fruit trees, stocked pantry, etc.) and skills (how to grow food, generate power, capture water, repair cars/equipment, etc.).
-Use your preparation and skills as an asset if the disruption persists. Help others and provide shelter. Sell excess to the community. Form groups to teach and provide mutual support.
Now, let’s apply resilience to disruptive AI-fueled technological change (with some examples).
-Connect. Use beneficial AI services to improve your productivity, wealth, and happiness. Learn how to use it.
-Be prepared to disconnect from abusive or disruptive AI services."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/technological-resilience
5. Interesting implications for France & their geopolitical focus. ie. much more against Russia it seems either way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Nu62pLodg
6. What a self inflicted disaster for the EU & especially Germany. Energy dependent on Russia from stupid idiotic virtue signaling energy policy. (ie. no Nuclear power). And as always the regular people pay.
"Moreover, the loss of even a small percentage of supply has the potential to raise prices across the continent, given the tightness of global gas markets. In Germany, for instance, the economy minister has hinted that the country will be forced to significantly wind down its industrial activities if the gas agreement isn’t extended at the end of the year. For a country — and indeed a continent — already struggling with creeping deindustrialisation, the consequences could be devastating.
This is especially worrying if we consider that, barring the same higher-than-average temperatures as last year, this winter Europe will have a natural gas deficit of at least 60 billion cubic meters. In other words, it’s not inconceivable that another gas crisis is around the corner — and it might be even worse than last year’s. As the Ukraine war drags on, even the few safeguards put in place are coming undone. Instead of being diluted by diplomacy, the repercussions of this conflict have merely evolved."
https://unherd.com/2023/07/the-ukraine-war-is-about-to-get-worse/
7. Love the title: Designing an Anti-Fragile career. Incredibly valuable. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAI2y1_QTTM
8. This is the challenge with being a pioneer and trying to scale like crazy. Lots to learn from the Mr Beast Burgers saga. Control and Quality matters.
9. Always recommend listening to Codie. She is a fountain of business knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyx_JvG6do
10. This is worth watching. Defense requires ammo.
This will help you understand what's happening with the weapons supply chain side in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6CusO9BntE
11. "This acquisition is a bet that the company can be run more efficiently. If we are in the nadir of multiple expansion & acquirors expect improved future results, the M&A market should re-invigorate."
https://tomtunguz.com/newr_acquisition/
12. "As with all wars, particularly ones of this scale and intensity, there remains an abundance of uncertainty. The degree to which both sides are having their combat power – intellectual, moral and physical – degraded in the Ukrainian 2023 offensives has some data (such as vehicle losses, ground taken or lost) but overall it is difficult to come to definitive conclusions at this point.
That said, the Ukrainians probably have the operational initiative at the moment and have secured the tactical initiative in some parts of the eastern and southern fronts. However, the Russian mini-offensive in northern Luhansk remains an operational risk for the Ukrainians. Even if the Russians do not gain significant territory, it offers the Russians the ability to draw in Ukrainian forces needed in the south, and for Putin to message his people about Russia being ‘successful’ on the battlefield.
But there remains a tough and long road ahead. As has been pointed out here and in multiple articles, the Ukrainians are seeking to advance against an enemy that has prepared well for a large-scale defensive campaign. Challenges in integrating larger scale combined arms operations have also been a challenge in some areas for the Ukrainians. And slow decision-making last year is now having an impact as well."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-state-of-the-ukrainian-2023-campaign
13. "The big picture concept here (at least on this side) is that you want to maximize your potential and *limit regrets*. The chances that your potential is being maximized by taking a 45 minute commute each way to stare at a computer screen with florescent lights for 50 hours a week is unlikely. That looks a lot more like prison/hospital beds than anything else.
Before moving on from that point, we’re well aware you have to start somewhere. Unless you were born into some extremely lucky genetics (pro athlete, sudden pop singer, movie star etc.), you’re going to have a gutter feeling experience in your early 20s.
You’re energetic, full of hope and of course broke.
Assuming you agree with that general premise, the key is to balance out the risk spectrum over time. In your 20s you can be a bit of a penny pincher. No one expects a 21 year old dude lifting heavy weights to be popping bottles of Louis XIII or Dom Pérignon. The trick? You have to bet on yourself at some point."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/why-fire-doesnt-work-and-who-this
14. The immense power of the big tech on geopolitics. Interview with Ian Bremmer. Interesting interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXJBccSwtB8
15. Good reasons to be bullish on Turkey. I am personally and will be a market that I will spend more time in.
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/turkey-reasons-for-optimism
16. Lots of great tips on hiring and team building. Real world meeting and discovering talent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtP-csNuCYU
17. This is a good framework for angel or VC investing. I started off Average Joe type investing at 500 but with experience, do more Babe Ruth style investing now.
https://www.eu.vc/p/angel-investment-strategies-and-how
18. Zeihan was right. Mexico tops China as USA's top trade partner. This was always inevitable under NAFTA. De-globalization happening or de-globalization as we knew it that is.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/myriad-concerns-americas-number-1-180000857.html
19. This is a great discussion on talent and career. Optionality is bad. Take more risks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1gPHgCNe5o
20. Every action has an opposite or equal reaction.
“While the U.S. rules introduced last October slowed down China’s development of advanced chipmaking capabilities, they left largely untouched the country’s ability to use techniques older than 14-nanometers. That has led Chinese firms to construct new plants faster than anywhere else in the world. They are forecast to build 26 fabs through 2026 that use 200-millimeter and 300-mm wafers, according to the trade group SEMI. That compares with 16 fabs for the Americas.
When you think about electrification of mobility, think about the energy transition, the IoT in the industrial space, the roll-out of the telecommunication infrastructure, battery technology, that’s all — that’s the sweet spot of mid-critical and mature semiconductor,” Peter Wennink, chief executive officer of Dutch chipmaking equipment supplier ASML Holding NV, told analysts in mid-July. “And that’s where China without any exception is leading.”
https://time.com/6299563/the-u-s-and-europe-are-growing-alarmed-by-chinas-rush-into-legacy-chips/
21.Strongly recommend this episode of NIA. Good discussion on investing in India and bootstrap businesses. So many good nuggets on Service versus SaaS businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZTu5ijn6yY&t=5s
22. "With this you can see that it is unlikely that the USA sees significant population growth over the next 10 years. Relative to other countries it will be fine (it’s not going to go negative). That said, you can figure out a pretty simple formula. You know the baby boomers have the money and the assets. You know their kids will have the money and the assets when they move onto the after life.
At this point we know which trends matter: boomers and their children. This made it pretty easy to predict the growth of pets and plants. Now? The boomer generation is getting older and the millennial generation is starting to barely taste that sweet sweet inheritance (top end of range of millennials)
Boomer Opportunities: Complaints = opportunities. Boomers will be suffering from boredom. This is particularly true in their retirement years and of course healthcare is of utmost importance. Since we’re wagering that medical is only a select few reading here, there is another obvious one which is boredom. Read that again. They are bored. The solution here? Easy, Pickleball clubs.
The tricky part here is that this will be a decade long trend and likely die off (more on that in part 2). It is the subject of how profitable it will be and also an explanation of why it won’t last (hint: ESPN Pickleball will be a flop long-term)
Millennials: This is by far the most insecure group out of all the age brackets. The vast majority are significantly less successful than their parents. In fact, it is so bad that you’re seeing a lot of these desperate men attempt to gold dig older women just to get money. Quite insane.
Things that will sell to this generation are vanity items. Botox, lip fillers, lambo trucks, Gucci backpacks, Rolexes etc. If it doesn’t improve vanity, it won’t work since this is the generation that grew up with Instagram drilled into their brains (social signaling).
Short Conclusion:
Since the money is with boomers and their kids, we recommend choosing one of those niches. Since there is a metric ton of complaints related to getting into Wall St. or High tech we’re going to walk through the Pickleball numbers. You’re going to have a lightbulb go off and someone will end up doing it. The vast majority will ignore it but it’ll be one of the highest cash flow machines for about a decade."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/demographics-markets-to-target-and
23. For anyone who cares about their career and aligning it with your life force & mission. Learned the term "Hearts on fire."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIWDvuJhVm8
24. David Perell's media empire is super impressive. Much to learn here.
Big fan and former student at Write of Passage. I do recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkl_WkE8F_0&t=40s
25. Lots of good ideas for when investing in frontier markets. Pitfalls and upsides discussed. Uzbekistan is super interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYMucuZN_Y
26. A trip down memory lane. History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme. Lessons from the dot.com bust. It sucked.
"There are a lot of parallels between the dot com era and the now.
Economies run in cycles. They expand and contract, and then repeat. We just lived through an exceptional tech boom and we’re in a contraction phase, with higher interest rates, lower valuations, and many “over their skis” from prior investments. The repercussions have not yet worked their way through the VC ecosystem and will continue in the coming years. But the promise of AI and the leverage technology provides will likely help avoid the prolonged downturn of the 2000s.
A downturn is a proven time for companies and teams to get stronger, and a proven time to found and build a new company."
27. "The third is the most probable path to Ukrainian success. It will be slower and more gradual than the other two—and slower than Ukraine’s Western backers desire and expect. It depends on the West providing Ukraine with a constant flow of equipment likely over many months so that Ukraine can maintain its pressure until the Russian forces offer the kinds of frontline cracks the Ukrainians can exploit. It is not primarily a matter of attrition.
The slow pace of the pressure campaign Ukraine had been using before July 26 is designed to minimize Ukrainian losses. It is not primarily oriented towards attriting Russians either, but rather towards steadily forcing the Russians out of their prepared defensive positions in ways that the Ukrainians can take advantage of to make operationally significant advances. It is still maneuver warfare rather than attritional warfare, just at a slower pace. It therefore requires patience, but it can succeed.
This situation is not a stalemate, however, and won’t become a stalemate if the current Ukrainian push falls short of expectations or bogs down again after initial successes. Stalemate occurs when neither side can materially change the situation and there is no meaningful prospect that either side will be able to do so in the future. The Ukrainians have not yet demonstrated that they can make rapid and dramatic penetrations at this time, but neither have the Russians shown that they can sustain their current defensive approach against a protracted and probably increasingly effective Ukrainian pressure campaign.
The Ukrainians still have the initiative in the theater overall and especially in the south. They choose when, where, and how they will attack. The Russians must defend everywhere and always. The theater geometry may come to play a critical role here as well—the Russians have to win every time; the Ukrainians only have to win once."
https://time.com/6300772/ukraine-counteroffensive-can-still-succeed/
28. This assessment of the Saudi & US relationship is pretty good. I think it will get better in the future in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STmadSVyWnU
29. Unheralded success story in the media world, niche B2B: Industry Dive.
You Don’t Make Money, You Take Money: A New View on Business
I always try to learn new things from everyone. This includes Andrew Tate, an internet infamous & highly controversial multimillionaire kickboxer, entrepreneur and influencer. And to be clear, I don’t agree with many of the bombastic things he says (I especially hate his admiration of Putin & Steven Segal: people who are pure awful & evil + he has some weird views on women). However, you can learn something from everyone and anyone even if you disagree with them. A broken clock is right twice in the day.
However, I do like his message about discipline, enjoying the grind & hard work, focusing on financial freedom and maybe the most important thing: focus on bettering yourself. Messages that young men these days really need.
He goes to say:
“You cannot make money, you can only take money from other people. You can only convince other people to give you money. The only way you can make money is if you are the Federal Reserve and you are not the Federal Reserve. Business is simple, it’s just other people’s money.
That’s all a business is, it’s getting other people to send you their money.”
There is so much nuance to this but it makes sense. And to be very clear, you aren’t stealing or robbing or taking the money at gunpoint or cheating them. You are “taking” the money because you offer better service or better product and are a better marketer than other people. And it is also a good way to think about money as a concept too.
Make no mistake, you will have competitors for this money. You have to out-perform and out-compete to get this money. But this is not a zero sum thing. There is just so much money to go around. And it’s abundant. You can have many winners.
In this view, money is a dynamic thing that flows. It’s your job to get in front of it. It’s your job to create, produce or add value to be in front of that flow of money. If you do that, you get to keep a small percentage of it. Do that on a large amount of money flow, do it consistently or do that for a long time and you are going to be massively rich.
This is what Investing is. Whether in startups, stocks or commodities, you are putting money into something ahead of the massive long term trend. This could be a big consumer trend, a big geopolitical change, anything that turns up the demand on the supply that you now control or have a stake in. In my working life example, it’s investing in a pre-seed stage tech startup that will grow to become a massive $100M usd a year revenue-making machine worth billions of dollars. Or its investing in Bitcoin at a dollar a bitcoin, which at this time in 2023 is worth $26,000 usd per Bitcoin. Still a pretty damn good return despite being off its high point.
That is why it’s important that you adjust your language and your thinking. Money is a live thing. You don’t make money, you take money. There are so many opportunities and so much money out there for grabs. It’s up to you to take action, add massive value and go get some!
Why Save the Good Stuff for Later?: Enjoy the Moment
I really enjoyed the new George Clooney and Julia Roberts movie”Ticket to Paradise”. A divorced couple tried to break up the impending marriage of their only beloved daughter in beautiful Bali. It was funny, touching and very clear the chemistry that still exists between the two Hollywood giants.
As a father, I definitely was captivated by this movie, especially the beautiful sights and scenery of Bali. Yet what sticks with me is the dialogue. There is this scene when he is talking with his daughter’s best friend at the bar & well captures a parents feelings for their child. You just love your kid. There is no one more important in your life than your kid.
“Happy is Great. Lily (his daughter) happy is the greatest of all. It’s just a weird thing happens when you become a parent. When Your kid is down and when they are in pain, it kills you.
But when they are up and things are going great, that’s when you get really scared. Cause you don’t want it to change and you know it will.”
Yet things always change. That’s life. We get so trapped in the future: chasing, anticipating, clenching for the pain, expecting that things will turn. Ruining the moment. The constant hard chasing of our goals like all good type A individuals. Something of which I am very guilty of all the time.
Hence the quote repeated many times in the movie. “Why wait, why save the good stuff for later. Don’t we deserve some good stuff along the way?”
The lesson for me is that we all need to step back, be present and enjoy the moment. To try not to think too far ahead. I focus on treasuring the quiet moments, treasuring the time with my family and treasure the small wins along the way. I treat myself and resist my stingy monk- like tendencies. I try to enjoy myself. It’s okay to indulge yourself sometimes.
To help slow down my brain, I try to do box breathing (4 seconds in, hold 4 seconds, breathe out 4 seconds and hold 4 seconds). Regular and plenty of meditation helps. This helps us stay present.
We have such a short time on this earth, better to enjoy it as much as we can, when we can.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 6th, 2023
“To lose patience is to lose the battle.” —Mahatma Gandhi
“The venture business, if you want to be at the top, requires insane, remarkable hustle… You have to live in fear that the next Google is going to get funded by a firm that's not yours,” he says. “Either you're in there rowing as hard as you can, because we're all a team, or you're not.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/home-austin-legendary-vc-bill-224443607.html
2. Such a great interview with Codie Sanchez. Good one Ali.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHiRzcXftPw
3. "A glance at the map of Europe shows this little 40-mile gap that separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, right on the border between Poland and Lithuania. 40 miles is not very far. Here’s what Russia would get if they tried to grab this little stretch of land. Russia would be able to access the sea directly through Kaliningrad. They’d create a wedge that separates the Baltic states from the West, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom have been seen as a thorn in the side of Russia ever since their independence.
Russia will also face a direct fight with NATO if one centimeter of Poland is touched. Poland and Lithuania used to form a single Kingdom. Both nations are reinforcing that ancient alliance now, so even if Russia kept the fight on the Lithuanian side of the border, we can be sure that Poland would get involved immediately and forcefully.
Remember that Poland is about to have the largest military in Europe, and they have the toughest attitude of all to Russian adventuring. It is easy to imagine a moment where NATO says let’s not respond to a Russian provocation, and Poland says let’s respond without NATO."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/suwalki
4. This is an incisive discussion on different types of creator driven businesses.
Learned a crap ton.
Also love Sahil Bloom's newsletter as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3nMk4PAViY&t=167s
5. "In fact, the entire shape of the war is very different from what experts imagined. Rather than the fast-moving conflict led by phalanxes of armored vehicles, supported by Russia’s advanced piloted aircraft, that the analytical community imagined, the invasion was chaotic and slow.
There has never been a quick armored breakthrough by the Russians and only one by the Ukrainians—last September’s surprise advance in the province of Kharkiv.
Instead, almost all of the war’s gains have come gradually and at great expense. The conflict has been defined not by fighter jets and tanks but by artillery, drones, and even World War I–style trenches.
Military analysts also neglected to account for the broader industrial, technological, and economic strength of the warring parties. They didn’t, for instance, take note of the fact that Ukraine has traditionally been one of Europe’s biggest weapons producers, or that—despite its size—Russia’s economic and technological base is not one of a major power. (Russia’s economy is smaller than Canada’s.) Conventional interstate wars have never just been tests of militaries; they also always involve entire economies."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/war-defied-expectations
6. "I like that term: category of one.
Everyone is obsessed with being the best, but you can only have one “best,” regardless of the number of competitors.
In the newsletter game, The Milk Road was a category of one. The AI market, however, is a category of one too many, and all of these newsletters are producing the same content for the same general group of readers. They can’t all win, the numbers just don’t work.
Of course, this “category of one” idea isn’t just a content thing, it’s a life thing.
The key to winning your game, whatever it is, is to either be the first or be the only, and it’s far easier to be the only."
https://www.youngmoney.co/p/categories-1
7. "The long and short of all this is that the intelligence communities of all the superpowers are under greater pressure than ever to figure out who will win and what the consequences will be for policy, geopolitics, and for the intelligence communities themselves.
Could all this change be signaling the rising likelihood that the next American President will be seen in a photo alongside the leaders of the other superpowers, signing a peace deal? More and more, I am betting yes. Will the intelligence communities of the superpowers then stand down, be demoted, be deconstructed, or just become less visible?"
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/i-spy-a-deal
8. "The company structure is so powerful and useful that it is found across nearly every facet of society. It doesn’t matter if a state is capitalist, fascist or communist – they all still have companies. The US and China, for example, have vastly different ideologies and forms of government, but both embrace the concept of the company. The only difference is that in China the state owns companies; in America companies own the state.
Given the importance of companies to the productivity of the state, the state employs a wide range of state-sanctioned entities that help ensure companies’ compliance. These entities make up the “cartel of trust”. Auditors, accountants, lawyers, and bankers provide services for companies and help the state ensure everyone follows the rules and fosters trust between citizens and companies. In effect, these cartel members act as a tax on companies’ profits, as companies are required to employ them just to exist.
But what type of organisational structure would / will an AI use? Would an AI that is just a thinking machine, who “thinks” in lines of computer code and has no physical body, organise itself economically using today’s standard company structure?"
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/moai
9. "How we interface with and define technology will transition from the current incumbent-use-case-with-AI-sprinkles to new modalities of software and hardware altogether. The former is a world where incumbent tech wins big, and it will exist for some amount of time.
The latter is harder to comprehend today.
It’s a future that likely consists of autonomous systems, asynchronous decision-making, and a big leap forward in robotics. Filling in and extrapolating the gaps from there is harder to do, and underscores why newcomers are so well positioned: Envisioning, building, and ringing in a new era of technology will fall in the hands of visionary, ambitious entrepreneurs — not a public company R&D departments."
https://www.thursday-threads.com/p/incumbent-consensus
10. I am a fan of Packy's newsletter. He has built an interesting VC fund portfolio as well. Lots of great thoughts on newsletter based businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAqBoK6I0Js&t=435s
11. Shows how messed up the economy is in Argentina when Cuevas exist.
"Once you’ve known your cuevero for a while, and there’s trust, cuevas are really the Tinder app of black-market finance. For example, if you want to get money into the country, they match the order with someone who needs cash outside, you send it from your offshore account to that third party US account, and the cueva gives you cash, and vice versa."
https://bowtiedmara.substack.com/p/cuevas-the-knights-of-the-free-market
12. "The services industries should be home to massive marketplaces. They are enormous markets: annual freelance labor spend is 1.3T and home improvement spend is 600B in the US alone [1,2]. They have highly fragmented buyers and sellers that would benefit greatly from a better way to find and transact with each other.
So after thousands of attempts by some of the smartest teams in the world, where are they? You might argue that Uber is a service marketplace. But other than that, none of the ~10 US public marketplaces with market caps over $10B are in services. None of the top 10 private marketplaces are either [3,4].
This essay explores what is holding services marketplaces back, how they might get unstuck, and why this would produce some of the largest businesses in the world."
https://www.danhock.co/p/service-marketplaces
13. The US Economy seems to be looking up.
https://kyla.substack.com/p/is-the-vibecession-over
14. Russia is a terrorist state. The impact of this will be famine and it will hit the Global South very badly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yAfgdyZlCw
15. Lots of things to take in here. Agree with much of this but the automation & technology part is a blindspot for Zeihan.
Still some good nuggets to understand what’s happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISk9ZpKM9so&t=583s
16. Active investing will be important for the future. A good global macro view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfnPmXjp9cY&t=306s
17. Old one but fascinating.
"By going into uncharted territory where most investors don’t dare to tread, the Chandler brothers have, in the space of 20 years, grown a family fortune of $10 million into a cool $5 billion -- and they’re still in their mid-40s. Along the way they have made waves by being among the first and biggest investors in such emerging markets as Brazil, the Czech Republic and Russia and playing an instrumental -- and controversial -- role in advocating economic reform and better corporate governance.
They have waged, directly and by proxy, several bruising governance battles, most notably in Russia, where their militancy helped get the first independent director appointed at state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, and in South Korea, where their two-year campaign at refiner SK Corp. to oust chairman and CEO Chey Tae Won, who had been convicted of fraud, ended in failure last year. (The pair still pocketed some $728 million in profits on their SK investment.)"
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6f5zmyo/home/secrets-of-sovereign
18. "There are two keys to this.
One is that you can’t force it and you have to really really know your stuff or else you’re assuming blind risk and opening yourself up to financial ruin. The Chandler brothers understand businesses inside and out. They could cut through the fluff in laser like fashion and get to the meat of the issue when evaluating companies.
Second is time. Fat pitches like these don’t come around often. The Chandler brothers would go years in between big investments without risking any substantial amount of money. Michelangelo once said that, “Genius is infinite patience” well the corollary to that in investing is that infinite patience is success.
Next, there is contrarianism. The Chandler brothers made it a point to set up shop in Dubai and Singapore, far away from the financial centers of the world in New York and London. They did this because they didn’t want to fall victim to the powerful pull of groupthink and herd mentality.”
https://macro-ops.com/the-chandler-brothers-the-greatest-investors-youve-never-heard-of/
19. This is a solid discussion on the importance of defensetech & the wake up call in America to the threat of China.
Anduril Industries was a pathfinder in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmSkihdGUp0
20. "Q: How do you generate new investment ideas?
A: We mostly look around and check on what government has done this week that is really stupid. Politicians always pursue short-term actions because they have to win elections. This creates a lot of opportunity for investing as they don't care about effects that happen beyond the election – they only care about winning the election."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/11-highlights-from-our-dinner-with-kuppy/
21. "The studios’ real enemy isn’t a pair of naive, shortsighted unions, or one another, or streaming. Their antagonist isn’t even TikTok, though the short-video company will be happy to absorb the additional viewing hours once people have to adjust their habits. (Pro tip: Late-night TV will soon be a shadow of itself as consumers find substitutes.)
The enemy is the same enemy the rest of media, and retail face, Big Tech. Specifically, in this case, Big Tech AI offerings that will digest content (at zero cost if they have their way) and wedge themselves between the consumer and repurposed content.
Filmed entertainment is ruinously expensive. It takes a special kind of edible to pile Benjamins and light them on fire greenlighting Pete Davidson in Marmaduke ($50 million budget, $800,000 in box office, 0% on the Tomatometer). One signal capital allocation is the primary function for Hollywood studios is how easily Big Tech muscled its way in. Nobody brings a taller pile of Benjamins, or a stronger stomach to risk it, than Big Tech. Apple, Netflix, and Amazon now dominate Hollywood. And what did they bring? Cheaper capital."
https://www.profgalloway.com/frenemies/
22. "This chart makes perfect sense to me right now because the really wealthy are not crushed by inflation and high interest rates. Sure they buy fewer homes and yachts, but in a modern world, they travel and buy silly things that make them happy. They wait out the inevitable next boom earning high interest on their cash, entertaining themselves with the growing degenerate economy (speculation as entertainment and gambling).
Meanwhile, the suffering intensifies at the bottom and the angry man economy grows."
https://www.howardlindzon.com/p/explaining-rich-man-angry-man-degenerate-man-economy-charts
23. This is the reason so many venture firms implode or disappear. Succession to the next generation.
https://chudson.substack.com/p/succession-in-venture-capital-is
24. "Of course, we could simply wait until the balloon goes up and Chinese missiles start raining down on our bases in the Pacific. At that point, support for increased defense spending, military transformation, munitions production, and all the rest will shoot through the roof, as support for war production skyrocketed after Pearl Harbor. But by then there’s a good chance it’ll be too late — in the years that it’ll take us to overhaul our sclerotic system, we’ll have run out of munitions and we’ll be up against a smoothly functioning Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.
In the post-Cold War years and the Iraq War years, it made sense to cut defense spending, because that spending either wasn’t needed or was being wasted. But America’s writers and politicians and fashionable intellectual hipsters need to realize that those eras are both over, replaced by a terrifying new age of great-power competition. Right now, trapped in our nostalgia for easier times, we are refusing to meet that new era head-on. But refusing to compete doesn’t make the competition go away. It just means we lose by default."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/uh-guys-we-really-should-think-about
25. So many good insights and tips for improving your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUO2DqCwdiE
26. These are really good predictions. I actually think these may come to pass.
"The world is going to change, but not in a brand new way.
The center of the world was once in the East.
India was once a great economy.
We once lacked workers in Europe (after the Black Death, which spurred the end of serfdom)
We’ve had many civil wars before
The UK was once decadent and rose up
The Church has decayed then came back many times before."
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/10-worldwide-predictions-for-the-next-20-years-e45f186a4cc
27. Such a valuable discussion on life and career design as a creator. Also how opportunities show up when you have built an audience via the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U5uH-FwCWo
28. This is pretty cool.
29. This is a masterclass in value investing from one of the best. Seth Klarman of Baupost. I learned so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHsEt6MchhE
30. "Having serially outperformed expectations, Ukraine finds itself in the unenviable position of having gone from scrappy underdog to victim of its own mythologized success. Six and a half weeks into a much-anticipated counteroffensive and there are no dramatic battlefield developments. A handful of settlements have been reclaimed in the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, and that’s it. An absence of climax has begun to lead to impending anti-climax and the sort of doomcasting that characterized the preliminaries of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The counteroffensive into which Kyiv and its NATO partners have invested so much kit, manpower and money is already a busted flush, we are told. “Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing, with no easy fixes,” ran one comment piece in The Daily Telegraph. This was preceded four days earlier by an even less sunny prognosis in the same newspaper, “Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat.”
Ironically, such assessments stand in marked contrast to what Russians in the field are saying about the capability of their adversary.
We find ourselves at a bizarre turning point in a crisis which has seen no shortage of them where the only ones who think Ukraine’s counter-offensive isn’t quite the let-down or failure it’s been widely portrayed as are the Russians desperate to prove otherwise."
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/russians-see-ukrainian-progress-where-others-dont/
31. This American hedge fund has a contrarian investment thesis to say the least.
Even if he makes money, he will not be able to get it out of China.
Note: Cyrus Janssen is clearly a paid CCP shill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pxm_Wn2MXE
32. I've always liked Jason Momoa. This is pretty cool.
https://www.goalcast.com/jason-momoa-promotes-mananalu-on-hawaiian-airlines/
33. "We hear only little of new Ukrainian advances (which Im sure means that pessimistic stories will start up again soon). I do think we need to be very cautious in thinking that this development represents anything like the main effort of the Ukrainians. It could just as easily represent a small ramp up of the efforts of the Ukrainians over the last few weeks—and again it has not yet been confirmed how many of the brigades Ukraine has in reserve (which is considerable) have been committed to battle.
I have heard from some pretty reliable people that a very large force of reserves still remains to be committed. I will go back to what I said last week—Ukraine is actually not under any immediate time pressure to step up ground attacks, and they will only do so if they really feel there is a weak spot in the line.
Actually, Ukraine continues to making major efforts doing what it has been doing for weeks—trying to damage Russian artillery resources, from the systems to the logistics. They are clearly still trying to weaken Russian defensive capabilities before going forward in masse. The data seems to show that clearly."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-39
34. Watching this will make your life better. So many good tips, tools and frameworks for improving your life. I will watch this many times I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBNw3u4lOr8
35. Some good advice for someone starting off in their career.
The weird scripts that run through your head that prevent you from progressing in life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BKf-FGq21g
36. "The start-up, based in New York City, is in one way easily understood and, in another, exceedingly strange. In the realm of clarity: Praxis’s central and stated ambition is the creation of that city in the Mediterranean. Where exactly on the Mediterranean coast and why they wish to build there have not been publicly addressed."
https://airmail.news/issues/2023-7-29/company-town
37. I'm actually still pretty bullish on the creator economy.
This is a good presentation on why we should still be paying attention despite the hype cycle that happened in last few years.
Everyone needs to be a creator if you want to be relevant in your career.