Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 7th, 2024

"Be willing to be a beginner every single morning" –Meister Eckhart.

  1. Follow the world's energy trail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mbQDmbaZuQ

2. A solid perspective on Henry Kissinger. Realist but effective in a ruthless and cynical way. Bit too cold blooded for me but something to learn here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCCC0mOYNos

3. This is such a great episode talking about different business stories. Always learn so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNSVc0S5MvA&t=20s

4. "While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force. She did it by embracing what she does better than anyone, entertaining and writing songs that connect with people.

Now she becomes the first Person of the Year to be recognized for her success in the arts, in a year when we were reawakened to questions about who makes and who owns our cultural expressions. Swift is also a symbol of generational change: she is only the fourth solo Person of the Year born in the past half century.

In the 17 years since her debut, Swift has notched more No. 1 albums than any other woman in history. This year alone she had three. She was everywhere in 2023, filling stadiums and breaking records, which meant we were forced to find novel ways to measure the magnitude of her reach. Seismograms were deployed to show the literal impact caused by her fans.

As Swift reportedly became a billionaire, countries’ gross domestic products became the yardstick for her financial contributions. University classes to study Swift’s lessons in literature, business, and law were announced. Swift was showered with keys to cities and street signs changed to her name."

https://time.com/6342816/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift-choice/

5. I'm bullish on SBSW & VTNR.

"The Nasdaq today is overvalued on nearly every conceivable historical metric. The CAPE ratio for the Nasdaq 100 is over 50 - near an all time high. Meanwhile the market thinks Braskem is literally worth less than half of the offers made by large industrial companies.

History shows that the time to by cyclical companies is when everyone else hates them. The time to sell is when others love them. Value investing may not be a perfect strategy, but it’s the only way to make money in markets that at least to my mind, seems repeatable. I’m sticking with it."

https://calvinfroedge.substack.com/p/the-market-is-kicking-me-in-the-teeth

6. Big fan of Chris Williamson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTaDwpDTcX8

7. These are excellent ritual situations for operating tempo.

"Operating velocity helps you create an exceptional culture and phenomenal team, both of which are critical ingredients to moving even faster. There is one other ingredient that makes or breaks the velocity of a company: its operating cadence.

By the time you cross 10 employees, as CEO, you start to ritualize key team events. Events like the “Weekly All-Hands” become a standard way that communication occurs and culture is built.

As you get bigger, these events are the “operating cadence” of a company — they are the rhythm of an organization that shape how decisions get made and how information is shared as companies scale. Different companies have different operating cadences: some companies are meeting-heavy, and some underemphasize communication; some companies develop process too early, and others too late."

https://medium.com/@travismay/building-the-right-operating-cadence-6c608fd142e1

8. "As Ukraine’s anticlimactic summer counteroffensive abates (and the Western media excitedly reverts to another cycle of hyperbolically dire assessments and forecasts about the war), it is easy to lose sight of the remarkable fact that Ukraine has recaptured over 20,000 square miles of terrain and continues to deliver a succession of tactical and strategic humiliations to Moscow.

Most recently, it has forced the Black Sea Fleet to relocate its historic naval base - in occupied Crimea - 500 miles east to Novorossiysk in Russia-proper. through the use of harassing drones, missile attacks, and marine raids, – Ukraine has achieved a feat of deterrence the British, French, and Turks would have envied as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. This is to say nothing of Ukraine’s ability to strike well behind enemy lines via its hypertrophied covert action capability. The SBU, the country’s domestic security service, has reportedly blown up two cargo trains in Siberia, some 3,000 miles from Ukraine’s border, according to a Ukrainian source speaking to Reuters.

If anything resembling a normal political environment existed in the United States, Ukraine’s battlefield successes to date would be trumpeted as an enormous return on investment. But as of writing, the latest security assistance package, which included $61 billion of aid for Ukraine plus funding for Israel and Taiwan, stalled in the Senate, the victim of partisan squabbles over a supplemental border security package and curbs on immigration.

The Biden administration, then, has done three things simultaneously by arming Ukraine, all of which MAGA bangs on about in advocating the United States “defund” Ukraine. It has created and is still creating new manufacturing jobs at home while breathing new life into an obsolescent or sclerotic American defense sector. It has cajoled ambivalent or tentative NATO allies into taking more responsibility for their own security and shouldering more of the burden for a European nation at war. 

It has radically diminished the conventional threat posed against the United States by Russia – a threat previously anatomized by Donald Trump’s own Defense Department – thereby freeing up resources, attention, and bandwidth for deterring China, the other state power posing such a threat. All this without the deployment of a single American soldier to a combat zone or the loss of a single American life overseas. You might even say the vanguard of the Republican Party should by now be “tired of winning;” instead, they insist, getting everything they ever claimed to have wanted is presented as a colossal defeat."

https://theins.press/en/politics/267432

9. "The second problem is that Western war production hasn’t really ramped up nearly as much as it needs to. Russia has increased its ammunition production to 1 million shells a year, and may eventually be able to make it to 2 million; they’ve figured out ways to evade Western sanctions by routing imports through third countries like Kazakhstan, and they’re getting significant help from China. The U.S. plans to increase shell production to a similar amount, but not until 2025.

 Meanwhile, the Europeans are still floundering, unwilling to spend the required money and saddled with a defense procurement process even more dysfunctional than America’s. Thus, for the next year or two, Russia — a country with a GDP only the size of Italy’s — will be singlehandedly outproducing the entire West in terms of some of the most essential weapons of war. 

(Side note: Imagine what a war with China would look like.)

Ukraine’s third and final hurdle is manpower. Russia has more than four times as many people as Ukraine. Even though Russia’s mobilization has been chaotic and haphazard and Russians are less motivated to fight in the war, it’s a lot easier for Russia to come up with bodies to throw into the meatgrinder, simply because of the country’s sheer size. 

So Ukraine is in trouble. But that doesn’t mean Russia is about to win, or has already won, or any of the things that the pro-Russia people love to scream on Twitter. Before we believe their propaganda, we should think carefully about why this war is happening, what Russia hoped to accomplish, and what Ukraine has won so far.

In the year since Ukraine took Kherson, the war has become a static one. But Russia has continued to take massive casualties. According to recently declassified U.S. intelligence estimates, Putin’s military has taken 315,000 casualties (dead and wounded). That’s almost half again as many as the 218,000 casualties that the U.S. took in the entire Vietnam War.

But it’s still a staggering number. Only by throwing Russia’s entire economy and society into the effort has Putin managed to maintain battlefield parity with a poor country less than one-fourth Russia’s size. And even more importantly, Russia has lost massive numbers of tanks and other armored vehicles — by some estimates as many as 4000 tanks! — basically running down the huge arsenal bequeathed to them by the Soviets.

To sum up, if the war ended tomorrow, it would be a technical Russian victory over Ukraine, but a strategic defeat for Russia and a successful independence struggle and nation-defining episode for Ukraine. And the U.S. and NATO would have achieved a strategic success without even fighting. A lot of Ukrainians would be mad that 18% of their country was still occupied by the Russians, of course, and would resolve to get it back at a later date. But when you put it in perspective, it’s clear that this would be an overall Ukrainian triumph."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/some-thoughts-on-where-the-war-in

10. Guy is a MAGA Kook but he is not wrong here. The WEF is anti-human.

https://www.dossier.today/p/world-economic-forum-demands-35-trillion

11. Super helpful info for sales managers in B2B.

https://kellblog.com/2023/12/14/lessons-from-playing-with-a-simple-quota-attainment-model/

12. Hybrid war happening against us.

"The general perception is that the number of hate crimes in the US has exploded since 2016. 

-They haven’t. The perception of a surge is due to:

-Amplification from social networking and mainstream media. 

-A large and rapidly growing number of faked incidents.

Disturbingly, a growing number of incidents appear to be the work of nation-states, corporations, or funded activist groups."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/unlimited-outrage

13. Excellent conversation this week. VC is over for the year. Make number go up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0vtDOKU5Tg

14. Love this guys Newsletter: Recommend it. Byrne Hobart is great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoKjGfiK3nM

15. "While even the greatest venture investors will attribute their success to luck, the consistency of returns amongst the top investors is evident. It’s not just luck when you’re an investor that is consistently investing in amazing companies at the earliest stages. While early success certainly makes it easier to win subsequent opportunities, I’m a fervent believer that there are better “pickers” than others — those who can develop independent conviction in opportunities that are non-consensus.

Finding opportunity where others don’t see it requires more than a crystal ball — it requires work! As I witness the best investors in the VC asset class, they put in this work to consistently see greatness where others don’t. Yes, they win consensus “hot” deals as well, but even those opportunities require them to develop a premium on their conviction. Developing that type of conviction requires a way to structure thoughts despite incredibly unstructured data — that’s done through mental models.

Kenneth Craik proposed the concept that individuals use “mental models” to “anticipate events, reason, and form explanations”, but it was Charlie Munger who popularized their application in the investing world, implying that he used a latticework of different mental models — essentially an integrated system of different mental models — to inform his investment perspectives.

While value investing and venture investing are different disciplines, the best venture investors of the last decade all have their constructs for evaluating investment opportunities — some of which are based on popularized emerging concepts like the power of network effects and others of which were likely home grown."

https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/on-the-importance-of-mental-models-in-investing-fa2b3a285e5c

16. "In 2024, I expect most of these figures to revert to the mean - not the peaks of 2020-2021, but more akin to 2018.

The public valuation environment & pace of venture capital investments mirror those years better than others.

Five years ago, valuations continued to grow, competitive rounds didn’t last in market for more than a week or so, & pre-emptions did occur. But most of the market operated at a steady cadence with predictable figures for traction, valuation, & dilution."

https://tomtunguz.com/the-typical-round-in-2023/

17. OG of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla. Lots of great learnings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5c2ho3YQBg

18. Grifters everywhere. These people are the enemy. But still appreciate the hustle.

https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/china-is-cultivating-western-influencers-to-peddle-propaganda-2468165-2023-11-27

19. Rick Rule is one of the best observers of commodities and consequently geopolitics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aDfNjkH9DE&t=65s

20. Not a bad thing that the VC bubble is popping. Hopefully the arrogance too.

"For the last decade, a career in VC came with the promise of huge returns, as technology startups raised record sums and a flurry of initial public offerings minted a new generation of VC millionaires. But OpenView’s sudden collapse, precipitated by the departure of several of its senior partners, cemented a growing fear among investors that a job in VC was far less secure than many of them had once imagined. Even firms that have raised funds in the billions of dollars aren’t immune to the challenges presented by higher interest rates.

For junior investors who grew accustomed to the bountiful opportunities of recent years, the adjustment to the current reality is especially harsh. Many of them came to see quick follow-on investments, which increased the value of their deals on paper, as the natural order of things, along with speedy job promotions. Succeeding in venture during downturns requires a different skill set and patience, seasoned investors claim. The adjustment can be painful.

“This year, partners have left an array of elite Silicon Valley VC firms, including Menlo Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator and Greycroft Partners. Many departures have occurred as the firms have shifted their strategies to focus on hot investing categories like artificial intelligence. So taboo is the subject of layoffs at VC firms that almost none of them will publicly admit they have happened.

For the first time in more than 10 years, the downsides of the job are much more apparent,” said Theory’s Tunguz, who started his venture career in 2008.

Bear market conditions have caused “simmering pervasive anxiety” among VC’s next generation, Slow’s Rechtman said.

“A year ago it was, ‘Things are going to be really bad, but it’s not going to be me and it’s not going to be you,’” Rechtman said. “Now I would be surprised if there’s anyone that doesn’t have a good friend and colleague who’s been laid off in the last year. It’s sort of impossible to ignore.”

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-venture-firms-collapse-stokes-layoff-fears-among-startup-investors

21. This was such a great conversation. So insightful. I use this word alot but it really was so good. Interview with Jeff Bezos. It's a long one but it went by very fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcWqzZ3I2cY

22. "All businesses exist on a spectrum and this 2x2 just reduces the complexity of the real world into something easier to generalize. I think the answer to whether to get off the train really depends on the kind of company you have.

If you have a business that is no longer a fit for the venture model and doesn’t have near-term prospects for good unit economics, you have to get off the venture train and figure out if the business you’re working on is viable. If you have a business that has really good unit economics, can get profitable, and grow, you might want to seriously consider getting off the train. This is particularly true if you are in a category where investors do not have a lot of enthusiasm for your category. Taking your own destiny into your own hands might be the right answer for you.

My big takeaway from having had many of these conversations that the choice to stay on the train really requires evidence or a belief that you’re pursuing an opportunity that really fits the kind of outcomes that VCs want to see. If you’re not in one of the rightmost quadrants in the chart above, I would question whether it makes sense for you to stay on the VC train and rely on venture funding for your future financing needs."

https://chudson.substack.com/p/getting-off-the-vc-train

23. Lots of good tips for productivity and enjoying it at the same time. Ali is the man! Can't wait to get the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3jNYz0kxWg

24. "All of these machinations have helped forge a new category in the clubby world of venture capital, elevating the hosts of “All-In” from mere startup investors to business-celebrity influencers. However, the brands they are most avidly promoting aren’t companies or consumer goods (yet), but themselves. Meanwhile, the success of the podcast has helped paper over a less-than-dazzling run in the hosts’ day jobs, including flopped investments, increased regulatory scrutiny, dozens of shareholder lawsuits and humbling fundraising struggles.

A source familiar with the podcast's production explained that the four hosts used it as “a way to get business, as a way to get deal flow, as a way to be recognized by [limited partners], as a way to build brand notoriety.” This strategy, said the person, aligned with a philosophy commonly espoused by young VC firms—that “the ones that have really held the staying power and distinguished themselves had a very differentiated marketing strategy.

Some fans hang on every word the besties say. Others love to hate-listen. But the podcast’s reach within tech is undeniable. “Every time I survey entrepreneurs, it is the only podcast that has wide adoption,” said Founders Fund general partner Keith Rabois.”

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-besties-revenge-how-the-all-in-podcast-captured-silicon-valley

25. "My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to find a relief valve during stressful periods. For some, it’s going on a jog; others, it’s playing video games. Some love to cook or read fiction. In the end, it’s important to have something that works for you so that when the stressful times occur, and they always will, you have a relief valve ready to go."

https://davidcummings.org/2023/12/16/relief-valve-during-stressful-periods/

26. "In America, to have money is to be more interesting. People are drawn to you, give you the benefit of doubt, laugh at your jokes, and are apt to want to help you and your family. In sum, to be rich in America is to be loved. If America is a family, the household has never been more prosperous and full of love. However, like the future, it’s not distributed equally.

As we’ve written before, ground zero for America’s problems boils down to one thing: For the first time in our history, a 30-year-old is not doing as well as his/her parents were at 30. This is a fundamental break and, more disturbing, a function of deliberate decisions (i.e. social and economic policies that transfer wealth from young to old).

Nimbyism, rejectionism, seniors voting themselves more money and bailouts, financed by future generations, to preserve the wealth of incumbents are generational theft, full stop. A 70-year-old is, on average, 72% wealthier than four decades ago; a citizen under 40 is 24% less wealthy."

https://www.profgalloway.com/prof-g-person-of-the-year/

27. "This should be the first very strong clue that modern rich nations’ wealth didn’t come primarily from plunder, but from something else — something that nations started doing over the last century and a half. In fact, we know what that something is — it’s industrial production, coupled with modern science. 

We are far richer than our ancestors because we know how to make a lot more stuff than we did then — cars and trains and planes and antibiotics and vaccines and reinforced concrete and electricity and running water and TVs and computers and all the rest. And we know how to make stuff more efficiently. In 1810, 0.4 percent of Americans’ income was spent on nails. Yes, you heard that right — the little metal pointy things took $1 out of every $250 we earned. Nowadays it’s negligible. In 2006, the price of lighting in the UK was about 1/4500 the price of lighting in 1786. 

So the fabulous wealth of the modern day can’t be due to plunder alone. The world does not contain a fixed lump of wealth that gets divided up among the people of Earth. Human ingenuity and hard work increases the amount of wealth in the world.

All things considered, I think the more reasonable case to make is that wealth, generally speaking, is something that comes from a country’s technological ingenuity, hard work, sound policy, political stability, high-quality institutions, and openness to foreign ideas and technology and investment. Today, in 2023, wealth is a thing that nations create for themselves, not something they steal from other nations."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plundering

28. "What keeps Russia going (and saves it from defeat) is primarily Western hesitation, disunity, and a lack of political will in providing a decisive and powerful military and financial aid to Ukraine.

With: 1) no troops on the ground, 2) most of the contracts and military-industrial benefits going to US states and manufacturing plants (that create more jobs, and get their assembly lines in shape - in preparation for a larger conflict with China), and 3) at a mere 0.18% of its GDP and an annual amount 4x less than what is lost by the Federal government to general transaction errors, what the US gets in return is astonishing: a 315k casualty inflicted on Russia’s armed forces (with 90% of pre-invasion army accumulated at the Ukrainian border, now destroyed).

Credit where it is due: when it comes to manipulation and deception, Putin stands out as a class of his own. 

To be clear, he is not necessarily extraordinary in his skill (although he very well may be), but his willingness to be so brazen in applying his skills certainly makes him extraordinary.

He has managed to convince a not so insignificant portion of the electorate in the US and the EU that he is a bastion of traditional christian values - fighting against the woke and decadent west."

Also JD Vance, Orban and their ilk are scum.

https://thebismarckcables.substack.com/p/weekly-overview-ukraine-war-putins

29. "In our cartoon world view, every single industry follows long cycles. This could be the business cycle, the crypto cycle and even the stock market cycle that typically goes for about a decade or so. The bond market also has a cycle if you look at interest rates. 

Therefore, the main reason we were so focused on the bond market at the end of the year is simple. It’s usually a 15-20 year frame cycle. We’ve never owned bonds or even considered talking about them for anyone who has followed us for more than a decade. 

This created a chance to build a position and never look at it again. The same applies to all of the financial assets we try to buy: stocks, bonds, crypto and RE. 

Currently: Crypto cycles are historically quite short since it’s a brand new asset class. Innovation is continuing to move in that direction so just like the internet you are forced to research, invest and use the products. If you don’t you could be left in the dust bin similar to people who didn’t take computers seriously in the 2000s.

RE: This is usually a 10-12 year cycle and as you know getting out in 2021 means that we think it’s largely done. While being flattish over the last 2 years is not bad, it isn’t good if rates remain at 5%. 

Stocks: This is turning into the new bond market. Outside of a few major winners who continue to take market share (FAANNG) or some other acronym, there are very few companies that will become extremely large in the future. Even then it will be tech/healthcare since that’s what drives value. People will be glued to screens and using tech to lower the cost of every other product made on the planet (from food to clothing). Without tech, no productivity improvements are seen. 

Bonds: Only move in dramatic events. COVID was one, the financial crisis was one and the Tech boom/bust was another good example."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/re-market-update-lump-sum-investing

30. Hmmm......geopolitical view of MENA region after America retreats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PycoZ1R35Z4

31. I fall in this camp. Sam Lessin is incredibly incisive on his views of what VC will look like. A return to craftsperson style of venture. Cookie cutter VC is over, thankfully.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crj_H3JPHvg

32. Very educational conversation from a very experienced LP. All venture managers should listen to this. Emerging fund managers are where the action is at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwL6WbMt5oM

33. "It's hard to imagine a break-glass, wartime general allowing any of these issues, which amount to middle school politics, to get in the way of outcomes. But why wait until wartime to solve problems we can fix today?

If the military-industrial complex is only capable of innovating during wartime (and even that premise is questionable) and is dysfunctional during peacetime, this bodes poorly for progress writ large. The U.S. government has a unique role to play in progress by seeding capex intensive and often highly regulated technologies that will not otherwise make it to a commercial market. For some of the world’s most impactful technology, the U.S. government will be the first but not the biggest customer.

The integrated circuit is the best example of this. Minuteman and Apollo were critical early programs, but chip demand for personal computing was soon a much bigger market than defense. The Space industry today is around the same stage as the integrated circuit was in the early 1960s. 

Now, the U.S. government should not seed industries it has no use for, but for certain technologies, it is the pacesetter on progress. It is therefore unacceptable to have stagnation just because the American people no longer practice duck-and-cover drills." 

https://kinetic.reviews/p/rejecting-our-faustian-bargain

34. "But there’s another place that chipmakers can put their fabs right now — a country with cheap land, labor, and capital, with a sophisticated existing semiconductor supply chain and lots of skilled workers. A country more secure from Chinese invasion than Taiwan, yet not as hobbled by domestic political divisions and labor-management struggles as the U.S. 

That country is Japan. 

In fact, this post is a bit late, since chipmakers are already investing quite a bit in Japan.

In any case, I don’t want to make it sound like I think Japan is headed for dominance in the semiconductor industry. Instead, I think it will reintegrate itself into a supply chain that includes the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea, and Europe — a globally distributed web of high-tech companies that cooperates more than it competes, and which is dedicated to the overriding purpose of staying ahead of a hard-charging China. 

That’s a very feasible goal for Japan, rather than the single-country dominance it aimed for in the 1980s. And that’s why I predict that chipmakers are going to continue investing there."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-reasons-chipmakers-should-put

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

A Child’s Sense of Wonder: Finding Awe in Life

My teenage daughter had her big final hip hop dance event in June of 2023 where all the groups of her dance academy performed. We invited some friends who brought their young children to watch, 3 years and 6 years old respectively. It was amazing to watch how they took in the dance performances. 


You could feel their enchantment and sense of wonder as it was the first time they had seen anything like it. Jaws dropping, eyes wide open and definitely leaning forward. It was like how my daughter was when we first took her to a hip hop dance festival when she was 4. And funny how that little kernel turned into her actually ending up on stage almost a decade later. 

It makes me curious where my friend’s young children will end up doing. The possibilities from attending this random event but the doors in their minds are clearly open to them doing some dance classes. 


As parents and mentors to young people, it’s our job to be good examples of good, strong and wise human adults. But it’s also our job to expose them to new and interesting experiences whether travel, language, music or musical instruments. It will open up paths to them and show them the possibilities. 


Very similar to how my mom pushed me to travel to Japan and England, to study Violin or to read books that were not just about military history but philosophy, business, westerns and science fiction. All of which have had a dramatic impact on my life and what I’ve done since I left Canada. 

Seeing my friends' kids at that event also made me wonder when was the last time I felt this extreme sense of wonder or awe. For me, it was probably in 2004 when I went to visit the Great Wall of China or in 2007 doing White Shark Cage Diving in South Africa. Or 2009 when Amber was born. What an amazing day that was and still is for me personally. 

It’s a great reminder that I need to get out of my comfort zone and explore new places.  Or go to new countries like Colombia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam or Iceland in the upcoming years and also look or re-look at new businesses in different industries. 


I probably also really need to book that trip to Maccu Pichu soon too! :) New places and new perspectives will probably be good for me and my kid as well. That’s the least you can do for kids. It will help expand their horizons and minds and may be the best legacy you can leave them. After all isn’t that what we are all after: a great impactful legacy. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Holiday Hell: Why Holidays Are Hard for Most People

Have you noticed that many people tend to be particularly tense or in a bad mood during the major holidays. Especially during Thanksgiving or Christmas/New Years in America. As someone who has lived away from my home in Vancouver, Canada since 1996, I always religiously head home to see my folks during Christmas time. I think I missed a year because of a missed flight and then 2020 due to the BS covid lockdowns. But otherwise I would fly home, always with a mixture of joy and anxiety. 

Why? We should be so fortunate to have our parents and siblings still around. Many people don’t have that luxury. And especially as an adult with a child, it’s great to just be able to chill out while all the meals, babysitting and laundry and chores are done for you. You regress back to your childhood. And my folks even give me Canadian dollars to spend while there, which is so weird. And they never take my refusal at all.

But at the same time, you hear bizarre commentary on politics and societal events. Or the criticism from elders, and the inevitable judgment and conflict that comes up at meal time. Annoying as you are now an adult used to living and doing whatever you want. Especially for someone so independent minded like me. It’s not like I have a curfew but then you end up having all the weird arguments with them. 

The excellent financial writer Frederik Gieschen wrote something quite insightful a week or so back:

"What strange magic happens once we’re around family? We’re confronted with our past, we get a glimpse of our future, we dive into our deepest wells of conflicting emotions. Love, gratitude, and the desire to be seen, heard, and appreciated all co-exist with frustration, anger, sadness, shame. We start shifting between new and old identities, we slip back into roles and behaviors we thought we’d long abandoned. The ghosts of childhood wounds haunt the dinner table.

I think we trigger each by our very nature, not on purpose (ok, sometimes on purpose). Just like an insult only touches us if we spot a kernel of truth in it, family drama is intense because we see aspects of ourselves reflected in the other. Family ‘rubs your nose’ in the struggles of your life by showing you its iterations. If my mother struggles to let go of things, I see in this my own challenges, my own stacks of books, my own clutching and clasping.

Family is a mirror. Family throws a spotlight on what we’d rather avoid.

But here’s the kicker. If you do it right, family drama is a portal.

Fear, death, love, desire, envy, healthy and unhealthy romance, addiction, generational trauma — it’s often all there, in some shape or form. And for the holidays, it all comes together."

(Source: https://alchemy.substack.com/p/in-the-land-of-triggers-merry-christmas)

And for me it’s the long simmering anger I have toward my mother who always questioned and shamed me for not being the model kid when growing up. We’re all hurt little children no matter how old we are. And for most part, I’ve been able to use this rage to drive my career and life forward. But it’s always been there and you can only suppress it for so long. It has started to negatively impact my own family life in the last few years, despite entreaties by my therapist and other family members to finally address it over the last 2 years. Something I kept putting off the hard conversations.

So Frederik’s post came at the perfect time. He wrote:“Holidays offer an opportunity to learn about ourselves and our family and rediscover quirks and imperfections. There’s no guarantee that we leave with the gift of love, growth, and understanding. 

If we face our triggers, if we muster the courage to share, if we listen with patience, if we draw on our compassion, well, there’s a chance we can turn the drama and pain into something precious. It’s a chance worth taking.”

He was right. It was not a fun or easy conversation but things have gotten slightly better since. And I’m less angry. That’s something. So my point is that hard conversations are better to have sooner, rather than later. Your parents or loved ones will not always be there. 

Better to take the uncomfortable step to engage them and you will come out of this feeling much better. And the albeit petty sub-lesson for me: hold grudges for your enemies, not your family. :)

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Diet Matters: Geo-arbitraging Food & Eating

I had a concierge full body health check in Taiwan recently and thankfully almost all measures were good. Actually surprisingly good. Yes, I exercise, biohack and do keep myself in good shape. 

But I think a big part of it was due to the work I’ve done with my dietician. I’ve been able to fine tune much of my diet around foods that I’ve better suited to processing and learning about foods that just don’t agree with me. 

My other hypothesis of this is that I spend almost 50 percent of my time traveling outside of the USA and have been doing this for over 20 years. Hence I’m eating less of the garbage processed foods we have here in America. 

Meat has tremendous amounts of steroids, vegetables have weird chemical fertilizers and most of the food we eat in America is processed and full of sugars and chemicals. I learned the average American body takes 18 days to decompose because of all the processed chemicals in the body. 

This is also why 40% of Americans are obese. Dangerously so. This is why healthcare is a disaster. It’s not just lack of exercise but the awful food we put in our bodies. That old saying “you are what you eat” is more than true. 

Yes, you can get great high quality and natural organic fruits and vegetables, natural grass fed animal meats in America. But like everything in America, you have to pay for it. That is why I am glad I spend only part of my time here. 

Food is so much cleaner and better quality  in most of Europe, Canada, Latin America and Asia and it’s more than affordable. We have all heard the stories of friends gorging themselves during vacations there and still losing weight. Something unheard of in America. 

Good Health is wealth. Good health is key to a happy and productive life. And a big contributor to health is your diet. So watch what you eat. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

A 2023 Recap & Retrospective: Surviving A Hard Year

It’s the end of 2023. WOW, we made it. It’s a good time to review last year and prepare for 2024. It was a crazy year and I think many of us really needed this last winter break to rest and recover. So I try to break down the year and grade it in the key components as I see it.

Business and Personal Finance was good overall: It is a B. I made a bunch of investments both on the stock and startup side. I’m super excited for how well these are positioned for the future. Doubled down on energy, commodity and natural resource stocks. Cut my publicly traded tech stocks. Way too overweight there. I also started doing many more Defensetech related startups as well as unsexy B2B Enterprise Software/Saas & Developer Tools. I’ll keep doing these going into 2024 & beyond. Not jumping on the AI startup bandwagon. Seems way too overhyped right now. But still bullish on Silicon Valley startups and will do a bunch more LP checks into emerging VC fund managers this year. I will also continue to explore international opportunities. 

My cost structure went a bit out of control so I will aim to do some cost management and relooking at my budgets. But I want to up the percentage of my stock investments and charitable giving. I will also aim to cut back on my public speaking for next year. Need to focus more on writing as well as building out more income streams and my core investment business. 

Travel: No real grade. I overdid it in 2023 because of a bad home life. All of my own making. But the list of travel I did showed how nuts it was. 

Saudi Arabia: 3X 

Canada: 4X 

Georgia: 1X

North Macedonia: 3X 

Azerbaijan: 2X 

Ukraine: 1X 

Japan: 2X

Taiwan: 2X

Poland: 3X

Portugal: 1X 

Romania: 2X 

Czech Republic: 1X 

Italy: 1X 

Australia: 1X 

Scotland: 1X 

Kazakhstan: 1X 

This obviously does not include all the US domestic travel like Hawai, Vegas, Miami and Los Angeles. It was nutty this year.

Health: It’s a B+. Got a new personal trainer and am still working with my dietician to finetune my eating. Doing my regular work out every day is good but not spending enough time with heavy weights in the gym. Will have to fix this in 2024.  Signed up for some MMA & Muay Thai Fight training camps in Thailand for the new year. If this does not get my sense of urgency  to accelerate my efforts on the health side, not sure what will.

Family & Relationships: It was pretty bad, so it’s a D. Lots of relationship issues with my teenage daughter, mainly due to miscommunication and my own lack of empathy or plain stubbornness and ignorance. Family therapy has only seemed to exacerbate it. But I remain hopeful as it seems to have gotten to some semblance of normality with her during the winter break. This remains a work in progress as I try to undo the damage. 

Personal Development: I give it a B+. I was very happy with the Levelling Up mastermind Community as well as Capital Camp this year. I met so many awesome and accomplished people. I also read a lot of books and took lots of classes. Youtube and podcasts have been great as well. I learned a lot to help me with the business and investment side. 

Overall, I am healthy and my family overall is good. So I cannot complain. Retrospective recaps are helpful to figure out the gaps in your life. 

It will also help you plan for next year. I am a fanboy of Sahil Bloom and he provided a great template to use that you can find here. https://www.sahilbloom.com/annual-planning. Check it out as I think it is really good. Happy new year and wishing you all a great start to 2024!

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 31st, 2023

I want to wish all of you happy holidays in this tumultuous year. I can’t believe so many of you have signed up for my newsletter. 

I am honored that you spend some of your precious time with me every week and hope you get as much enjoyment reading this as I do writing these. 

Well, starting January 2nd, 2024, instead of 3 posts a week, I will be sending 4 posts a week. You will receive newsletters on tuesday, thursday, saturday and sunday. 

Wishing you all a very prosperous and healthy new year in 2024.

Now back to our regular programming! :)


“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” —Thomas Szasz


1. Commodities in the emerging markets. It just makes sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbp4C5sHvKc

2. This is a surprise but I sadly anticipate more stories like this as the sins of 2020 and 2021 investing catch up to all of us. Openview ventures is winding down.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vc-firm-openview-abruptly-winds-down-as-industry-pressure-rises

3. "India’s spike is particularly eye-catching. This fits with reports that Western retailers like Wal-Mart are now looking to India as a major source of cheap goods.

The decoupling-doubters seem to be completely ignoring investors’ stampede for the exits. No, the reversal of FDI into China doesn’t necessarily mean that Western economies will become less reliant on Chinese production, but it shows that multinational companies are clearly worried about the risks of staying in China.

And if they’re worried about the risks of staying in China, they’re also going to worry about the risks of sourcing products from Vietnam and Mexico and India if those products are just stuffed with Chinese-made components. And so they will seek to pressure their Vietnamese and Mexican and Indian suppliers to diversify component supply chains out of China as well.

The Vietnamese and Mexican and Indian suppliers will also want to get their component sourcing out of China, as will the Vietnamese and Mexican and Indian governments. They will want to do the component manufacturing themselves, because that will make them a lot more money.

The decoupling-doubters seem to want to jump to the conclusion that diversification has failed. Maybe this is because they had unrealistic expectations of what it would look like, from reading too many economics papers where “decoupling” means instant separation of the world into two disjoint blocs. Or perhaps they see the West’s push for decoupling as a threat to peace and stability in the world, and they want to declare it a failure so we can all go back to the world of 2015. I don’t know.

 But either way, rushing to declare decoupling dead simply because India, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. are simply doing in 2023 what China did in 2003 makes no sense. These things are hard, these things take time, but the process is underway."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/stop-saying-there-is-no-decoupling

4. Patrick Bet David provides a very sober view of the state of the world. We need more strong people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfZR0TiO9zQ

5. Important to understand what’s happening in AI & Nvidia. Worth listening to this interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkj-BLHs6dE

6. I wish I had more Tony Robbins in my life when I was younger.

Big lesson: never start with the HOW, start with the What & Why.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXkko0N3XM&t=3540s

7. This is only fair. This is war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XfEAHvM8Ow

8. The OG of venture capital. Lots of wisdom here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP0A3B0Wzmc

9. "As I think about how venture firms are structured, very few operate with competitive specialization. In private equity, however, this is much more standard procedure. Given the size of the investments and concentration of the portfolio in PE, there are multiple leads on every company, all with different complementary specialties.

On any given deal there could be someone whose job is to source the deals, another team member’s job is to analyze its finances and diligence the company, another whose job is to be on the board and others who are going to help the company with various levels of operational or industry expertise. This mirrors what we did in consulting. If we were doing a utility M&A consulting assignment, it wasn’t just the partner who found the opportunity — we brought a team together that had utility, M&A and whatever other forms of complementary expertise we needed to make sure the client was wowed by our service.

We all worked the assignment together (contributing where we were best) and share the attribution. Over the last decade, we’ve seen platform strategies evolve that have been able to replicate some of this capability, opening the door for us to think about the best practices of a venture firm in a different way."

https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/competitive-specialization-in-founder-support-3a1b66e15720

10. "Returning to Bryce, who was a founder of an incredibly successful seed-stage firm, OATV. OATV was amongst the earliest seed investment firms and had amazing success with early bets in Foursquare, Fastly and Figma (amongst others). In 2015, the firm made a decided effort to move away from its core model of seed investing and towards a new model, one they would later call Indie VC.

Indie was counter to virtually every rule that LPs put in place, wanting to defy power law and focus on companies capable of generating capital efficient returns. When I asked Bryce, “If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” He replied back, “We all need to remove the notion that what made us successful before will work today (and tomorrow).” This is a powerful thought for an industry that relies some heavily on pattern recognition.

OATV had been an innovator in its own right as one of the first firms to move upstream to write seed stage checks amidst a time period when the costs of starting a company were falling and venture fund sizes were rising (those trends have remained pervasive for the last decade). That playbook, which was highly non-consensus at the time, turned out to work quite well.

As the seed market evolved and became increasingly consensus (arguably too much so) with competition coming in from all sides, Bryce’s belief was that they needed to find new opportunities to invest, leading him to Indie. It would have been easy for OATV to continue on in the fashion that it had been operating and many managers make that choice, given the sunk cost of all the investment that they had in the structures that granted them initial success.

Most rest on their laurels, accumulating fees as their model degrades, as evidenced by the turnover of venture capital firms over the last decades. Bryce recognized this and the need to continually push the envelope to maintain edge in the market."

https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/going-your-own-way-defying-pattern-recognition-of-venture-capital-managers-0a859e5defda

11. Anduril is the 6th Prime. A leader in Defensetech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI4l-o4AcHs

12. "Further complicating matters is a rapidly shrinking vendor base to support defense needs. In 1985, the defense industry workforce was 3 million strong; today, that number is just 1.1 million. Between 2016 and 2022, the number of businesses supporting the defense sector dropped by 22%, including 43% of the small business that generally provided niche—but essential—capabilities.

Where does that leave us? Vulnerable. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a brief battle over the freedom of Taiwan or a major European war. Much of our existing stocks are depleted to levels that could be exhausted with a week of intense fighting, and we’re incapable of sustaining any fight long enough to allow for the lead time required to ramp up industrial production to support a long war.

In an era of great power competition, we cannot wait for someone else to awaken the sleeping giant. Our own complacency has allowed the arsenal of democracy to sleep long enough; it’s past time to stop hitting the snooze button."

https://news.clearancejobs.com/2023/12/07/waking-the-sleeping-giant-americas-defense-industrial-base-faces-critical-challenges/

13. An excellent episode this week. All in Podcast. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKUcpU5-Xk


14. This is excellent, love this show and it's always a good discussion re: what’s happening in Silicon Valley. It's the less obnoxious version of All in Podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUhw-bnl7s

15. "The Eastern European venture landscape is undergoing a deep transformation. It is becoming part of the European tech scene. That means that your competition is not only the next fund located in Bucharest, or in Sofia.

Your competition is every seed fund in Berlin or London, and you have to be relevant in comparison to them. And if all you have is leveraging your personal relationships on the ground, soon that may no longer be enough. However, we’ve been building infrastructure and tools internally and I think we’re on the right track."

https://www.verve.vc/blog/interview-bogdan-iordache/

16. This is a depressing but a sober view of the present geo-political situation. The West is in big trouble because we are stupid, weak and complacent. All self-inflicted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfTlPY_UQQ

17. "Every generation inherits the assets and liabilities of previous generations. However, we are maturing an immature generation less capable of dealing with some of the real challenges, and opportunities, we’re leaving them. 

Instead, we shield them from dangers that likely make them stronger — rejection, a B-, hangovers, the unknown — while letting technology exploit their fears of real or perceived dangers. My mom worried I’d get into too much trouble. Now, I worry my kids won’t get into enough.

The decline in youth drinking is not just about drinking. It’s about a generation that fears the consequences of the slightest slip of impulse control — which could be a spark in a world with a permanent gas leak (social media) ready to ignite a firestorm of shame.

The decline in alcohol consumption has many positives. But it also means a decline in the rites of passage and communal bonding that alcohol historically facilitated."

https://www.profgalloway.com/firewater/

 

18. "My recommendation for entrepreneurs looking for help and expertise in their business is not to feel like they have to raise venture capital to find people who can help. The great thing about the startup community and the size and scale of the startup industry is that we now have experts across the board. Founders would do well to build out their own team of experts."

https://davidcummings.org/2023/12/09/expertise-is-plentiful-outside-venture-firms/

19. "Rotman goes into other opportune areas. Josh Wolfe acknowledges that a lot of new firms will form. The way I continue to frame the core takeaway of the rapidly changing forces in venture capital revolve around this idea of requiring every venture fund to answer the question: "why do you deserve to exist?"

In the ZIRP era, the answer could be "because there's money to spend." But not so anymore."

https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/revisiting-the-death-of-a-venture

20. Lots of good tips here for building massive companies. Build a cult. Worth listening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpD8NQSFIYE&t=38s

21. 996. It's how I grew my career, still do this. Startups are hard so they require hard work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flf81mI5yEU

22. This is so instructive. How to set up a Personal Holding Co and some good structures and lessons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IyYN3_O80Q

23. "So much of life-long health, Emanuel says, also comes down to behaviors like eating a nutritious diet and getting enough sleep, exercise, and social support—things that are simple on their faces, but in practice far more achievable for people with leisure time and money.

As he sees it, promoting and enabling those habits for everyone, and making better use of medical treatments that are already available, is a more urgent priority than chasing the “pipe dream” of a future in which aging is optional."

https://time.com/6341027/what-is-healthspan-vs-lifespan/

24. This sounds about right (disagree on some numbers but overall YES directionally right). It's an amazing time to invest in startups and build startups despite the downturn.

https://calacanis.substack.com/p/the-greatest-moment-to-start-a-company

25. "Last year, droves of knowledge workers attended ominous all-hands meetings where executives challenged them to “do more with less.” In the past, mandates like this have rightly elicited eye rolls. However, as of 2023, this ask seems less unreasonable.

Today, every knowledge worker can access powerful AI tools that can realistically increase output without requiring additional input. With profitability goals motivating companies to cut costs and AI enabling greater leverage, conditions seem ripe for a profound productivity boom. While the full impact will take years to materialize, 2024 may showcase the first success stories."

https://junglegym.substack.com/p/6-trends-that-will-shape-our-careers

26. Super interesting perspective on geopolitics and the economic future of China and the West. Live players are needed to move the world forward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLwppfZH0R0

27. "I've consciously chosen the "leave money on the table option" over and over again and I’ve tried to do this from the beginning. My biggest reason was that I wanted to see what happened. True fuck around and find out energy. 

Most of the time? It felt silly. Like I was wasting my talent, lighting the ten years of intense consulting and business school training on fire. But also over the last 6-7 years, it's sort of worked. My days are nice. I've spent 98% of my days on my terms and I’ve felt better about the person I’ve become. 

But if I laid out my decision to people in my shoes now it would be an active choice to give up $1M of incremental income that I easily would have earned if I had stayed on my former path. While I think I still could have turned it down, I realize its damn hard for most people.

I am lucky. I found work I like doing, writing, and want to keep doing for another 10+ years. It always seems like there are things I can improve and my curiosity never seems to fade. On top of that, I've slowly built solid relationships by taking advantage of not having to ask people for help."

https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/leaving-money-on-the-table-250

28. "And then, often before the sun has even risen, someone arrives to make him do what Cook describes as “things I would prefer not to do, that I could probably convince myself not to do.” (Weight training, mostly.) And then he heads here, to the corporate headquarters of the company Cook has led since 2011.

He is not a leader who is drawn to crisis or conflict, two climates his predecessor, Steve Jobs, seemed to at times thrive in. “I try not to let the urgent take over the day,” Cook says. Regular meetings, different standing engagements with different parts of the company. He likes to ask questions.

“I’m curious, and I’m curious about how things work,” he says. He does this not to intimidate, though there is perhaps a standard, an expectation of those working for him, lurking there as well: “If something’s really shallow, you find that people can’t explain it very well.” Like Jobs once did, he sometimes takes meetings on the move, walking around the campus. Most days, he leaves the office at 6:30 or 7 p.m.

The overall sensation he attempts to impart is one of normalcy, of proportion, despite the fact that most days, Apple, which employs about 165,000 people, is the most valuable company in the world. (As of this writing, it’s worth more than $2 trillion; at one moment last year, that number was $3 trillion, a figure roughly equal to the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom.)"

https://www.gq.com/story/tim-cook-global-creativity-awards-cover-2023

29. "So thanks to subsidies, supply chain advantages, a technological shift, and macroeconomics, Europe is getting a ton of cheap Chinese-made EVs dumped on their markets. And Europe’s leaders are mad about this, calling for investigations into Chinese EV subsidies. That could end in tariffs against Chinese-made cars.

This reaction is hardly surprising, given the importance of the auto industry to the European economy. In a world where electronics manufacturing has clustered in Asia and software has clustered in the U.S., auto manufacturing was one major sector where Europe still stood relatively strong. It’s a mature industry, so Europe’s fetish for regulating new technologies was less likely to damage it.

It’s a heavy industry, so the forces of agglomeration are less powerful than for electronics, where parts can be shipped cheaply; auto production tends to be distributed throughout the world, with most cars produced close to where they’re sold, which allowed Europe to make most of its own cars even as its economy lost competitiveness and dynamism overall. And Germany, in particular, has a thriving cluster of auto engineering talent that allows them to make really good cars (or at least, really good internal combustion cars). 

Losing the car industry could thus push Europe further along the path to deindustrialization. Cheap Chinese EVs are a boon to European consumers, and they help speed the green transition and reduce carbon emissions. But the competition also threatens to put a bunch of European workers out of a job — 7% of the region’s workforce work in the automotive sector.

A domestic auto industry gives Europe much more ability to repurpose production lines and ramp up defense production when needed. If the auto industry flees to China, Europe will be that much more vulnerable to Russia. In fact, this is one reason the auto industry is so globally distributed today; during and after World War 2, lots of countries decided they needed car industries in order to maintain strong militaries."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/car-wars

30. This is incredibly insightful. The American system rewards perseverance so those with grit and who don't quit or conform actually do the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUFrzDqnRys

31. Love the intensity here. Traba the next trillion dollar company. An American startup with 996 in their culture. SO unusual but also what is needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHDAKevRrvw

32. Learning from sales at Snowflakes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9SvTjMajuo

33. "The imposition of sweeping new semiconductor export controls last October hit China’s tech sector hard. However, the blockade is arguably backfiring as the resultant Chinese investment in domestic capabilities is starting to show results.

“The problem is this was a tool designed for the Soviet Union in the 1980s,” Lewis said. “China is not the Soviet Union. The Soviets were sluggish. They didn’t have a tech base.”

Lewis suggests three modifications to the U.S. approach:

First, move faster to implement the CHIPS Act, which is meant to bring the manufacturing of advanced semiconductors to the U.S.

Also, let American companies sell advanced chips to China for civilian purposes. “We’re not going to stop the Chinese, but we can at least make money off of them,” Lewis argues.

And rather than focus on keeping advanced chips out of China, focus instead on tightening restrictions on the manufacturing equipment used to produce the most advanced chips, a more targeted goal that could still allow the U.S. and its allies to retain their edge in cutting-edge computing components."

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/12/11/chinese-chips-the-plot-thickens-00131148

34. This was such an impressive story. Talk about grit and grind, coming from nowhere. One of the best new Solo GPs around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPktwaznNAQ

35. I don't agree with this view but it's a sober perspective & prediction on the state of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. I pray he is wrong.

All I know is that the West has been shown to be unreliable, weak and lacking will to help Ukraine win. I'm ashamed and fear Ukraine will pay for this weakness. And I curse Russia for their barbarism.

I will spend much of my time after the war helping to rebuild Ukraine and their tech scene.

https://mercurial.substack.com/p/ukraine-endgame

36. "Previously we noted that the USA is a culture of Transactional Relationships with a growing rich and poor divide. We stand by that claim and it helps explain a ton of the trends: 1) sugar relationships, 2) obsession with overnight success - going viral or 10x meme coins, 3) spread of stock returns - magnificent 7 versus S&P 500 and 4) gambling/sports betting.

As a quick recap our expectation is a lot of importation of 3rd world culture into the USA this includes and is not limited to:

-Paid sex work from OnlyFans to Sugar relationships to outright transactions

-More and more drug use as younger cohorts can’t afford the alcohol binges

-Immersive digital experience - more time spent online vs. in the real world

-Decline in birth rates as both men and women have outlandish expectations

-Scams being seen as real work since “everyone is doing it” - low trust

-Increase in gambling addiction problems

-Increase in loneliness and mental health issues particularly age 40s

If it were possible to buy a stock or coin that was long all of these trends? We’d put our net worth into it. While certain segments will grow faster than others depending on the year, it’s the direction of the USA. 

We’re a culture of extremes and the more extreme you are = more attention and money. This means every year people have to do crazier and crazier things to get into the limelight.

Extreme Political Takes Third: If you think we’re here, we haven’t seen anything yet. Just look at Argentina as a good example of what is to come. You’ll see deep left and deep right policies gain the most traction. We saw a glimpse of this during the Bernie Sanders hype and we will undoubtedly see some extreme Right-Winged takes shortly (to balance out the political circus)."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/populist-movement-2024-and-beyond

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

If You Don’t Laugh, You Cry: Have a Sense of Humor

Many people probably don’t know that I did a very short stint as a management consultant at a firm called IMPAC in Taiwan, doing operational turnarounds. I only lasted about 4 months. The money was great but the travel and hours were grueling, and actually pretty boring. I think I was doing 110 hour work weeks and going on a few hours of sleep every night. 

I remember it was month 3 at a potato chip plant and I was working with a Dutch and a Malaysian consultant. It was a Thursday night. We were exhausted, having spent the whole day at the plant and it was 3 am while we were doing the analysis and spreadsheets to present to management and board in the morning. The computer was not working, the slides were awful and we were terribly stressed. 

My Dutch friend goes back to the computer to start reworking the sheet and starts to say “we’re just saving lives, we’re just saving lives doing this.” Something so ridiculous that we all started laughing. For those who don’t get this, we were up late literally working on optimizing a potato chip company to be slightly more efficient, which is far from saving lives. But it broke the tension. We were able to figure it out and bonded at the same time. 

I learned the power of having a sense of humor, even if it was a bit grim. It helps make tough situations bearable. In war and on the battlefield, they call it “Gallows Humor”: defined as “grim and ironic humor in a desperate or hopeless situation”. Laughing actually reduces and relieves stress. So learn to laugh at hard situations. 

I also believe the reason having a sense of humor is important is that it keeps you grounded. As a Silicon Valley denizen, I loved the HBO show “Silicon Valley” because it called out all the ludicrous and stupid things that happen here in the tech world. The pontificating, self righteousness and arrogance that exists in the SF Bay Area is amazing and appalling at the same time. I know many successful people here who did not appreciate the show because it burst the bubble of their delusions of greatness.

Nothing worse than someone who truly believes their own Bull-S–t. It’s important to be able to laugh at yourself in whatever situation you find yourself in. 

When times are bad, it changes your mood and helps you get going again. When times are good, it’s helpful to disarm others. Learn to laugh at yourself and don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s a good tool to control your ego and prevent you from sabotaging yourself. :)

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

“Sultan”: Bollywood Movie Life Wisdom

I love watching random Indian Bollywood movies.  The colors, the singing and dancing and the random silliness. Always entertaining. “Sultan” was one of them. About a wrestler from a small farming town who becomes a gold medal winning wrestling champ named Sultan Ali Khan. And then mixed martial arts, all in the pursuit of a woman. 


It was fun. But there are many nuggets of wisdom and truth. 

There was one particular cutting scene when the girl humiliates him publicly for being an unserious and non achieving clown at a relatively older age of 30. Well deserved I might add. 

She tells him: 

“Look at you and look at me. What have we in common? I’m state champion. I have a dream, a goal, a purpose. 

Who is worthy of love? Someone you respect.  Someone who has something special that you don’t have. 

You have no purpose in life. Any ambitions?”


This sparks a drive in him to prove her wrong and show his worth. No man is worthy of a woman if he has no ambition, no accomplishments or does not work on improving himself constantly. He will never be respected by a woman. This is a fundamental rule of humankind and pretty much every society on Earth. 

As was spoken to him by his dad: 

“There’s a woman behind  every successful man. And there’s a woman behind every failure too. But no one stands by a failure.

Sometimes it’s necessary to be humiliated to win respect.”


His dad gives him advice.

“You need to work……Work very hard, then the world will respect you.”


He trains like a madman and even challenges the grand champion twice his weight. When asked why he is doing so despite the crazy risk and odds against him, he responds: 

 “No one can defeat you unless you defeat yourself.” 

This was a fight to find his stature. He has to win if he wants to get the girl. So, of course he wins. 

But in that pursuit he becomes arrogant and insufferable, which of course, causes new issues. 

He misses the birth and death of his child in pursuit of victory at the Wrestling World Championships overseas. He becomes King of the ring but it costs him his family. 


The big lesson: whatever happens in pursuit of your goal, Don’t quit. Get up when you fall. Keep going. Remember:  “No one can defeat you unless you defeat yourself.” Victory will be inevitable. 

Sultan’s Mixed Martial Arts trainer tells him: “Everyone thinks that a hero is someone who wins….but I believe a real hero is one who loses. Because he alone knows the value of victory.”

So you must also know the price of success so you can  prioritize the truly important things in life, like family. Something I feel I learned way too late. Fight for the right thing. 

And of course, stay humble and don’t let success go to your head. Pride and ego kills.

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 24th, 2023

“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.” —Erma Bombeck

  1. "If the unicorn era taught us one thing, it’s that more isn’t always the answer. More money doesn’t solve fundamental problems. More people don’t move faster. More features don’t fix product market fit.

There are very real advantages to running lean. Talk to any founder who’s bootstrapped to venture scale and they, like Ryan above, will acknowledge their lack of resources and the constraints they enforced ended up being the superpowers behind their success.

Once you see what some can do with $500k you’ll never not be shocked at how little others can do with $5M (or $50M!)."

https://medium.com/@bryce/the-indie-era-of-startups-c92704a75ed2

2. I really like Justin Waller’s content. Every young man and old should listen to him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQp3Z8fAoiA

3. "At the theoretical level, terrorism is a method for jump-starting a guerrilla war fought in the moral realm. 

Terrorists use targeted violence to force the target state to overreact in the hope that this overreaction will do so much moral damage to the state it creates the conditions needed to ignite a guerrilla war. 

In our current situation, while the state’s overreaction might be offline, the moral damage it does will be adjudicated online, and the guerrilla war ignited by it will be fought there."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/israels-online-front-collapses

4. "The U.S. was by far the biggest producer, building twice as many large ships as all other combatants combined, and at least twice as many aircraft as any other combatant. The country’s mighty auto, aircraft, and ship industries took a while to ramp up war production, but when they did, nothing on the planet could match them.

Books like Freedom’s Forge and Destructive Creation will tell you the story of how this was achieved. And that industrial dominance carried over into the Cold War, bolstered by the addition of Germany and Japan — two other leading manufacturing nations — as U.S. allies. The Soviets could threaten the West with their nuclear arsenal, but when it came to war production, the free world could outproduce the communist world.

For the first time since before the world wars, that situation has changed. The rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse to rival the U.S. and all of Europe combined was always going to present a major challenge. But the utter withering of the U.S.’ defense-industrial base since the turn of the century has made this much less of a contest. The balance of military production potential now lies firmly on the side of the autocratic powers.

So there are actually quite a few things the U.S. can do to at least partially restore the invisible shield that protected our way of life throughout much of the 20th century. The question is whether a bitterly divided country like ours can muster the will to pay the necessary costs, make the necessary changes, and upset the necessary incumbents. In the past, national security was enough to motivate the American people to change their economic system; hopefully that will still work in the 21st century. If not, it will mean that the true Arsenal of Democracy — the American people’s willingness to defend themselves, their freedoms, and their world — has been depleted.

And China and Russia would have every motivation to weaken the U.S.’ economy as much as possible and as permanently as possible, simply because this would remove the U.S. as a potential threat. Neither one of America’s rivals would forget how the Arsenal of Democracy had kept them at bay for many decades; they would both want to make sure that a reinvigorated America could never threaten them again. They would seek to eliminate American power not because they hate us and our freedoms, but simply because this would neutralize a potential long-term threat.

The U.S. was ambivalent about whether it made sense to weaken and hobble Russia after the Cold War, ultimately deciding against it. China and Russia would not be so kind after winning a decisive victory in Cold War 2."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-arsenal

5. Super good tips for business and life success. Tai Lopez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9HQuXPaW0&t=2s

6. "Henry Kissinger essentially managed conflicts on the edges of the American empire while ensuring his adopted country would remain the leading player in global affairs. He represented a unified power centre. Today there is no longer a Kissinger to talk the parties off the ledge and even unified leadership in Washington is absent: Biden’s position on Israel and Gaza is now under attack from his own staff.

We are entering a vacuum where American power is fraying and anything is possible. The destruction of Ukraine is one, but so is taking the two-state solution to its last resting place. Henry Kissinger’s death marks the end of an era and a journey into a level of instability that was last seen when American’s famous top diplomat fled Europe in the late 1930s. His life was an arch spanning an era that is now over."

https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/the-end-of-pax-americana

7. "We are always ready, and want, to believe that this time it’s different, we will do good while making billions. The last big corporate jazz hands was the ESG movement, purporting to prioritize environmental, social, and governance concerns over shareholder returns. Succumbing to this siren call, we abdicated our responsibility to discipline corporations and curb the externalities wrought by the pursuit of profit, believing instead that one profit-seeking entity could cajole another profit-seeking entity to seek something else.

ESG and (in-)Effective Altruism are heat shields against real limits on action. They allow corporations to retain their power (and their capital) while expectorating exhaust into a headwind. Every time I write about the abuses of tech companies, I get the response, “Well, if you don’t like the companies, don’t use their products.” This is the cry of the defeated, those so broken on the wheel of corporate exploitation they’ve unilaterally disarmed, abandoning the one power we the people possess that’s equal to capital: democracy.

It’s not up to each of us to protect the commonwealth, it’s up to all of us. Put another way, the most effective ESG is not a fund charging higher fees to invest in American Airlines. It’s a perp walk."

https://www.profgalloway.com/mammon/

8. "I think Western private sector creditors should send a strong signal to our governments - debt relief for Ukraine, yes, but only after immobilised/frozen Russian assets have first been utilised.

Our governments normally are very good at spending other people’s money - taxpayers or private creditors dumped on in debt restructurings - so it seems obscene this time around that they seem to think that the country that caused all the damage, committed war crimes, and genocide, should, get away without paying a penny. Our governments are protecting the assets of the aggressor herein and remarkably writing a cheque from us to avoid making Russia pay. This should be a huge political scandal.

Lots of focus on ESG these days and I would think as asset managers we have an ESG responsibility to call out our own governments for this, and to absolutely make sure that Russia pays for its aggression against Ukraine."

https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-debt-relief-only-after-russia

9. "Advanced economies are now entering a demographic doom loop where an ever-increasing percentage of the nation’s productive capacity is siphoned into old-age care and pensions. This trend is destined to continue until either the demographic pyramid normalizes by having more children or the society itself dies. The Children of Men isn’t a movie, it’s a documentary. What’s more is the structure of modern society is oriented in such a way that it discourages the formation of families and the bearing and raising of children.

It is impossible to escape the coming demographic and economic crisis. The time to avert disaster has long since come and gone. As the security order underpinning globalization erodes, so too do the global economic, financial, and political systems which dominated human affairs for the past 30 years deteriorate. Chaos is inevitable. The question is only how devasting the coming storm will be, and that is predicated on the willingness of those in power to implement reform.

The looming danger is elites will choose their own self-interests and the interests of their particular generation over the best interests of the nation. Sadly, this is the pattern displayed for the past three decades. It is difficult to shake the idea that unless there is a changing of the guard, the greater community will suffer grave consequences for its leaders’ selfishness. Elites remain delusional that the status quo can be saved. They would rather expend the remnants of their power, wealth, and prestige in a desperate attempt to hold on to what they have rather than build something new. They are, in the truest sense, conservatives.

Reform is not merely necessary, but inevitable. Either we choose to reform American economic, educational, and cultural systems, or the coming breakdown of the Liberal International Order will force a restructuring. The people cannot tolerate declines in their security and prosperity indefinitely. It is only a matter of time before the floodgates break."

https://www.shatterpointsgeopolitics.com/p/demographic-winter-in-the-twilight

10. Very bullish on Uzbekistan.

"With population of 36.2 million Uzbekistan has the largest potential consumer market in Central Asia. It is also a young country, with more than two-thirds of the population being of working-age (15-64), contributing to a strong labour force. The country has maintained a high GDP growth, averaging 5.8 % over the last ten years. 

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks in part to reforms to liberalize prices and remove barriers to domestic and international trade, the country’s economy was one of the few in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region to avoid negative dynamics in 2020, showing GDP growth of 1.7%.

Although these quantitative figures look impressive, they are incomplete without a proper understanding of the qualitative context and breakdown of the 7.1m households and incomes within that population. Digital penetration is still nascent in the country and the majority of the population are still unaccustomed to transacting online. This blog post analyses the local market dynamics to identify the correct strategies for consumer-focused startups to succeed."

https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/the-uzbek-consumer-opportunity

11. I am surprised as many here to write this but this was a fascinating conversation with Tucker Carlson. It's really worth listening to here. 

Good perspective on what's happening in American culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pLY1X46H1E

12. Lots of good geopolitical thoughts here. India is really well positioned. US political and media elites are brain dead, leading the West nowhere. China is making stuff and accumulating a lot of real power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlXPSKPtUo

13. Be a Live Player! We need more of them in civilization to drive us forward. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0SwVCWPinw

14. “But Verdon has a social vision of his own: “If we can make it so that more people are optimistic about the future, are inclined to build, take risks and go forth and have the greatest impact it can on the world, that's a net positive. So if we have to be not so polite on the timeline, then so be it.”

At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”

So just who is the anonymous Twitter personality whose message of unfettered, technology-crazed capitalism at all costs has captivated many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful?

Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. 

He noted that Jezos doesn’t reflect his IRL personality. “The memetics and the sort-of bombastic personality, it's what gets algorithmically amplified,” he said, but in real life, “I’m just a gentle Canadian.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/12/01/who-is-basedbeffjezos-the-leader-of-effective-accelerationism-eacc/?sh=f8cbba07a13f

15. "VCs can be both frequently wrong, stupid, harmful, or bad, but still be a critical part of pushing innovation forward. Those two buckets of characteristics don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

 And one of my favorite champion’s of nuance is Bryce Roberts. For years, he’s pitched a thesis around the “indie startups.” A framework for building companies that are not desperate for endless supplies of capital, but rather with just a bit of capital can become substantial businesses. 

This past week he shared a great talk that he gave at a conference, entitled “The Indie Era of Startups.” Rather than spin my own take on this nuanced idea that a lot of companies shouldn’t raise venture capital, I instead just wanted to point you to Bryce’s presentation. Enjoy!"

https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/sharing-the-indie-era-of-startups

16. "Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, are eager to build, sell, and make progress. So when you add it all together, it creates an environment where distractions, requests, and feedback are plentiful. One of the most important things an entrepreneur can do is have a strong vision to repel distractions."

https://davidcummings.org/2023/12/02/strong-vision-to-repel-distractions/

17. This is a good discussion on the history and philosophy of doing Venture capital. Also the different styles to VC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFgqq-CMgRY

18. "Russia makes more weaponry than its enemies. If nothing is done about its military production, Russia will likely win this war

Now an interesting thing is that the US have every chance to win. That is because the supply chain for precision metalworking equipment is controlled by its allies.

And metalworking is how you make weaponry. No, it's not all about microchips. Production of complex weaponry such as an intercontinental ballistic missile is primarily constrained by the metalworking capacity. And metalworking capacity is mostly precision machining capacity."

https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/how-to-win-a-war

19. Jay Martin tracks the world through commodities and has a good perspective on global macro.

Net net: be humble, be diversified, learn from history. Personal sovereignty is important and be willing to go abroad and look for opportunity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHkVZolnBLs

20. "Four years later, with OpenAI nearing a tender deal valuing it at $86 billion, Khosla Ventures’ stake was worth billions, and the company’s success had cemented Khosla’s personal reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s most far-sighted investors. But with Altman on the outs and employees threatening to quit en masse, all of that wealth was in danger of evaporating.

As we spoke over Zoom, Khosla was lounging on a chaise at a tropical retreat his family was visiting for Thanksgiving. And though he was conceding past errors, he sounded awfully relaxed. Remorse is not his metier.

Among a significant percentage of the most powerful people in tech, Khosla carries the status of a guru or sensei—in an interview, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called him “the preeminent venture capitalist of our time.” Many peers see him as uniquely informed, experienced, opinionated and unflappable. “He has a rare combination of being a visionary who possesses deep technical acumen,” said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a longtime friend, in an email.

“He’s got very good tactical and strategic advice and ideas that other people just don’t have,” Altman told me a few days before his yo-yo ouster and reinstatement at OpenAI. “But it’s combined with a level of specific ambition. He pushes founders to take more risk, think bigger, do more.”

Patrick Collison, CEO of online payments giant Stripe, described Khosla as an almost mythical being: “There are these singular characters in Silicon Valley who would feel a bit implausible if you constructed them in a work of fiction, but who turn out to in fact exist. The world is lucky Vinod is one of them.”

A central player in the tech industry for more than 40 years, Khosla is still in the thick of its most important developments, and has mostly triumphed through its ups and downs, booms and busts. Now, at 68, he finds himself opportunely positioned as other major platform shifts get underway—into AI and climate tech.

He began betting on both sectors decades ago, and his enthusiasm and energy for them are as high as ever. By the end of the year he expects to have raised an additional $3 billion from limited partners for a trio of Khosla Ventures funds—the firm’s largest fundraising ever. KV’s aggregate returns to investors have been in the same range as other major VCs since 2009, according to a source familiar with its returns, which is a minor miracle considering how poorly the “cleantech” investment movement did financially in its first decade.

“I know what I love,” he said to me during a pair of conversations this fall stretching over several hours. “And I want to do the same job 25 years from now, health permitting.”

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/vinod-khosla-can-see-the-future-it-just-got-hazy-for-a-minute

21. "In the short run, let’s say that in two to three years, the Democrats need to win an election. If the threat of four wars on the periphery is removed, which causes energy inflation and bond yields to fall, that helps Newsom win a 2024 election. On the Chinese side, Xi just took over his third term as Party Chairman in 2022.

He needs to show his constituents that by giving him the most power since Chairman Mao, he can bring home the bacon and rejuvenate the economy immediately. Both sides need short-term wins to appease their domestic power bases. Near the end of the decade, all the real issues will resurface, and at that point, a rewrite of the global trade, security, and economic architecture will be unavoidable. This may lead to a hot or cold war between the two global hegemons.

The window to flood China with credit and not suffer negative consequences is now. If Bad Gurl Yellen was running a strong dollar policy, there would be no way for China to turn the credit taps on to the degree required to re-energise the economy. Given these facts, China will go big. Because after election day, regardless of who wins, the gloves come off again, and you can expect a change in trade and monetary policy aimed at restarting the strategic competition between the US and China.

Chinese New Year occurs in mid-February next year. I expect that Xi will provide his comrades a phat 红包 (Hong2Bao1) so they return to their families feeling rich and ready to spend once the New Year holidays finish. As such, I will continue moving money out of T-bills and into crypto because I want to get in now before it becomes apparent through the data that China’s money printer is going brrrrr!"

https://cryptohayes.medium.com/panda-power-64f2bef90327

22. Plenty to learn here re: operating startups, investing and finding undiscovered talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9by0kQ12aI&t=1897s

23. This is a self inflicted disaster like almost everything in the USA and Western Europe. It's like we want to lose. Incompetence, elite capture, greed and arrogance at work.

"As it stands now, the U.S. defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale,” according to a draft version of the report, obtained by POLITICO.

It notes that America builds the best weapons in the world, but it can’t produce them quickly enough."

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/02/draft-pentagon-strategy-china-00129764

24. "He dubbed this nesting instinct “the cockpit effect,” but I prefer thinking of these places as having what I’m going to call a certain hoarder hygge. And in fact super-cluttered, borderline out of control spaces are some of my favorite in all of Japan. 

Cramped izakaya, shops jammed with precarious towers of books or toys or even Buddhist altars, the spaces where creatives work, the rooms where collectors nest amid a lifetime of treasures. They’re hypercozy, and I love them.

Japan’s love-hate relationship with clutter arguably dates back centuries (more on that in a moment)."

https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/hoarder-hygge-is-the-anti-zen

25. "We don’t want to live in a feudal system where your life path is set when you’re born. But we also don’t want to go so far on the other extreme that we think that the reason we have any inequality is because of prejudice and we need to spend trillions of dollars to equalize outcomes. We tried that. It didn’t work.

We've spent 50 years implementing measures intended to equalize group outcomes, and they haven't equalized. Which, to the leftist activist mindset, is enormously enraging since the obvious explanation is much more pernicious ongoing discrimination than they even imagined. And yet, that’s the exact wrong conclusion to have. 

We should try to raise the floor, and we should take a holistic way of doing that, including encouraging everyone to study the habits that successful communities have adopted, instead of just blaming disparities on discrimination. We should also accept that inequality is the natural state of the world, and any program meant to equalize outcomes is dead on arrival.

By accepting that (and studying why) people are different, we can achieve a proper balance between social mobility and hierarchy, between nature and nurture, between what we can change and what we can’t — and deploy our dollars and set our expectations accordingly. By refusing to admit that individual decisions and cultural values make a difference, we’re actually hurting the communities we claim to serve, alienating them from their agency. It might feel kind, but it’s anything but."

https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/people-are-different

26. Patent battle between a billionaire and a trillionaire.

https://thehustle.co/will-this-be-the-last-christmas-you-can-get-an-apple-watch/

27. "In other words, something is convincing a lot of Americans that the national economy is a lot worse than their own lived experience would suggest — and causing them to get the facts wrong in the process. That something is what commentators, for lack of a better word, are calling “vibes”.

Where do these negative narratives come from? Brian Beutler and Matt Yglesias both blame negativity bias — the fact that scary narratives get more attention than happy ones — for filling our screens with portents of doom. But of course negativity bias has always existed; it seems to me that this explanation only works if either A) people are consuming more news than before, and/or B) the replacement of traditional media with social media has exacerbated negativity bias. And since the weird break between economic fundamentals and consumer confidence appears to exist only in America, this explanation would require media’s negativity bias to be much less powerful in Europe. 

Which leads me to suspect that although negativity bias is certainly a factor, something else is going on here. The fact that the problem is U.S.-specific suggests that either a special feature of American society and politics is at work here, or the American media and social media landscape differs from Europe’s in key ways. Since Europeans have Twitter and Facebook and TikTok too, and their newspapers and TV news shows aren’t that different from ours, I suspect U.S. social and political factors as the cause of the peculiar presence of negative narratives.

In any case, the question is how we commentators can fight the dominance of the vibes — not because we want to convince everyone that the economy is great, but because people need facts if they’re going to know whether the economy is good or bad. But I’m afraid that’s one question I don’t have a good answer to. Perhaps we should just keep relentlessly reminding everyone of the facts, while waiting for the populace to finally realize that economic fundamentals have improved."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/vibes-vs-data

28. "From his home base in Antwerp, however, Van den Brande set about building his venture firm. He did so without many conventional advantages. He did not have a proven track record, nor had he apprenticed at a storied fund. Though he had worked as a financial analyst in Boston for a spell, he had few connections to the power brokers of Sand Hill Road, let alone the endowment managers sitting beyond the green-felt lawns and pale stone of the Ivy League. And, as he would have told you himself, he was a bit odd. Van den Brande lacked the easy charm that could beguile entrepreneurs into parting with their equity or seduce limited partners into penning a check. 

What he did have was formidable intelligence, jolting directness, ferocious curiosity, and a total allergy to bullshit. These final two traits would prove the making of Van den Brande and his firm.

In the thirteen years since its founding, Van den Brande has built Hummingbird into one of the best-performing venture funds of the past decade. It has delivered three vintages with over 10x net returns. It’s done so without hitting the buzziest startups of the past cycle, instead capitalizing on a roster of relatively under-the-radar giants, including Peak Games, Gram Games, Kraken, BillionToOne, and FPL Technologies. It’s the kind of sustained excellence liable to make marquee fund managers up the dosage of their daily nootropics out of concern. 

Hummingbird has achieved this success while staying out of the limelight. Van den Brande and his team have driven such returns by ignoring much of the asset class’s conventional wisdom – and forging an extremely opinionated investing framework. Many venture capitalists emphasize the importance of the entrepreneur to their underwriting; none mean it quite as much as Hummingbird.

For Van den Brande’s firm, the founder is not merely important; they are the only thing that matters. Forget about flocking to a hot new market or playing nice with Sequoia or Benchmark. If you want to deliver consistently superior returns, Hummingbird believes you need to find the most exceptional entrepreneurs on earth – not merely the top 1%, but the top 0.1%.

Finding such outliers is not easy. It also might not look like you’d expect it to. Hummingbird isn’t searching for the slick Stanford MBA, affable Google APM, or winsome McKinsey associate. It cares little for credentials or the experienced pitchman’s smooth patter.

Instead, Van den Brande’s seven-strong roster of investors is pursuing a very specific kind of entrepreneur – someone with unreasonable ambitions, astonishing clock speed, and a frightening hunger that portends a deep, personal unease. Such people do not always make adept students or easy colleagues. But they’re liable to have a handful of bumblebees buried in the freezer. And to have a good reason for it, too, if you care enough to ask." 

https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/hummingbird

29. Absolutely fascinating discussion on human nature and social behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiUkF5hAnaM&t=926s

30. Some good new data points on what’s happening geopolitically from Zeihan (more in 2nd half, first half you should be familiar with if you track him)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcZPOuI-vcU

31. "Capital efficiency has existed in roughly every technology wave. Many of the largest, more important companies in the world started off highly capital efficient. Inded, capital efficiency tends to reflect an especially strong business model

In general, if you are not prototyping / proving something works, or scaling something that does work, you should not raise money.

One could argue that while too many SV/NY/cluster-based tech companies raise money, too few outside of major tech clusters do. In many cities and regions people bootstrap for too long, do not scale quickly enough, or do not think about time to winning in a big market. It is possible that non-cluster tech companies in the US end up scaling fast too infrequently.

Occasionally, you also see an SV/NY/cluster-based company that is growing really well and has turned profitable, and then forgoes building against and winning in their category. Sometimes this is the right thing for founders to do, and sometimes it reflects a lack of know-how, ambition, or aggressiveness.

Sometimes, it just shows the founders had a bad experience at a company that scaled for no good reason and ruined the company culture, ability to execute, and products. The wrong lessons may be learned from bad growth and bad execution. It is so rare to actually build something that people care about, that it feels like a shame to not go win when you can - but obviously it is up to each founder and team to chose their own path."

https://blog.eladgil.com/p/capital-efficient-businesses

32. This is a scary reality. We have some real frightening power grid concerns in the USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AEPzm0ptIc

33. I love this guy. The male role model all men should follow: Justin Waller

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGuQKuRRURk

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Winter Doldrums: A Season to Hibernate and Rest

It’s been a brutal 2023 in startup land. I don’t know about you but I’m feeling beaten up. Exhausted. It probably does not help that I have been traveling almost nonstop since august. And mainly to dark cold Northern Europe, Canada and Central Asia most of the time. It’s cold and dark over there and weather is a big driving factor of our moods. Plus there are just so many things to do in the business and with portfolio companies as well as all the various projects and initiatives I’m involved with. #champagneproblems for sure. 

It’s even more brutal for startup founders. As Matt Turck tweeted:

“There's a whole generation of companies for which the startup journey has gone from a marathon to an ultra-marathon. Many people are tired and the next year or two is going to take Goggins-level amounts of resolve.”

So it’s mid-December. I’m feeling lethargic but like many people in our world, making the final push of travel to get as much stuff done before the Christmas break when most of the world disappears for winter break. I’m very much looking forward to the 1-2 week interlude to rest and recover. 

The old me would have been busy during the holidays, trying to steal a march on everyone else by setting up meetings, planning, and a packed schedule during the break. I think I had to do that in the first part of my career because I felt behind and had no idea what I’m doing. 

But now as I am older and hopefully wiser, I understand that it's a marathon and not a sprint. And as I’ve told some of my founders, resting ethic is just as important as work ethic. So I’m planning on doing nothing during the Christmas break with a wide open calendar, reading and chilling. And plenty of good food with my family and friends in Vancouver. That’s it. 

Like many, I’m expecting a busy and exciting new year. There will be challenges but also inevitably big opportunities showing up. So better to be fully rested so you can jump on it in the new year. Hibernate like a bear, gather your strength and get mentally prepared.  This way you will be ready to conquer when the new year starts.

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

It Was the Best of Times and the Worst of Times: The Simultaneous Rising and Fall of Standards in America

America is Extremistan. And sadly the world is becoming more like America it seems. Rising inequality where some people have very amazing lives and most people have a pretty crap one. 

We’re seeing the rapid destruction of the middle class in America. Inflation has been ripping through the country over the last 3 years. Food & energy costs are increasing. We’re seeing household credit card debt increase as families are trying to maintain their lifestyles. 

Yet at the same time, it is easier than ever to cross socio-economic groups. Both falling out of one or rising into a new higher class albeit for most people, usually falling out of one. 

However, Crisis and change equal massive opportunities. Especially for those willing to take ownership for their life and do the hard work that it takes. 

There are literally a billion new business opportunities and new markets out there because there are so many problems for smart entrepreneurs to solve. 

We have new distribution tools like the various social media platforms, or cloud services like AWS & MSFT Azure. Add in dozens of low code and no code tools and a growing plethora of AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Scenario among others, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to build something and get started. 

We are also in a time where there are so many more sources of knowledge and information available than ever before. Things like Youtube, Twitter, excellent online classes like David Perells “Write of Passage” or the multitude of books it’s heaven for self starters and self learners. Additionally there are so many talented people you can model yourself on and learn from. 

The bar is so low to stand out. Have basic people skills (ie. EQ). Do what you say you are going to do. Work out and get fit. Dress well. Read books regularly and enjoy learning. Travel. Have a point of view. Start a business & make money. Treat your work like a craft. Be an optimist. Help others. 

If you do all of this, you will inevitably succeed in life. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 17th, 2023

“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

  1. "You have to get used to saying sorry to yourself for owning some underperforming asset class. And, trust me, there will always be some underperforming asset class. It’s unavoidable. Right now those underperforming asset classes are emerging market stocks, long duration U.S. bonds, and REITs, but, one day, the underperformers will be the S&P 500 and technology stocks. It’s happened before and it will happen again.

The good news is that most of the downsides of diversification are in your head. There’s almost no chance that you will ever go broke while being diversified. However, you will question whether to be diversified in the first place. If you can overcome that, then you’ll be just fine."

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-downsides-of-diversification/

2. "China's propaganda, cybersecurity tactics, and its political efforts to lure nations away from Taiwan will increase strains in the Indo-Pacific region and make cyber sovereignty a major priority in maintaining security in the region.

China has made it very clear that it is actively seeking to create a “Chinese Century”[15], where China will geoeconomically and geopolitically dominate world affairs. The forefront of this effort will be in the cyber domain."

https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/cause-and-cyber-effects

3. "Now 47 years old, Sanderson has already published 21 Cosmere books, and he plans on publishing at least 19 more. “But I do have to finish all this by the time I’m 70,” he says. I get the feeling he doesn’t want to wind up like a certain someone in New Mexico who’s already 74. Still, even now, Sanderson is easily one of the most successful and prolific fantasy writers of the century so far.

Sanderson has been extremely popular among fantasy readers for more than a decade, but last year, he made international headlines for raising $41 million on Kickstarter (doubling the previous fundraising record) to self-publish four secret books and deliver them directly to 185,341 fans. No publisher, no Amazon, no bookstores. 

“I think some of the things [traditional publishing companies] do in New York are wrong-headed,” he says. “Somebody has to step up and say, ‘Here’s another way.’”

“We’ll see if our philosophy holds out, but the idea is that you invest in your people and the company will be successful, rather than investing in your company first,” says Sanderson’s wife, Emily. 

Back when they first founded the company, Emily quickly became Sanderson’s business manager, “helping with fan mail and doing all the paperwork.” But as her responsibilities grew, she hired more and more people to help. Now, she acts as the COO for a one-of-a-kind business: part independent press, part merchandise manufacturer, part streaming content producer, part editorial and artistic support system for the Cosmere.

“Brandon’s the big vision person and I’m the detail person. I probably wouldn’t dare do some of this on my own,” she says. 

“And I’m a little overambitious,” Sanderson adds.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43438119/brandon-sanderson-profile/

4. “Victory is now much more than a word in Ukraine. It’s a conviction, an aim to be willed into existence. Even the bitter fighters, even the most dejected know it’s victory or death. But what it’s costing to get there transcends any quantifiable figure or metric. Numbers lose their meaning quickly, at any rate. Personal stories are the only measures that don’t fade.

And measures in wartime are whole lives.”

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a45805515/ukraine-russian-invasion/

5. "It is imperative that the Milei administration focuses on the most important thing first: the economy. 

All the rest, except perhaps for security, is secondary and will divert the attention from the main goal, which is that Argentina gets its ducks in a row from an economic perspective. 

If Milei is not able to fix it, Peronism/Kirchnerism will come back with a vengeance to “clean up Milei’s neoliberal mess”. The fact that they originally created that mess means nothing, since voter memories are short lived in Argentina. 

This could well be the playbook laid out all along by appointing Massa as the main presidential candidate for the Peronist block."

https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/the-milei-starter-pack

6. "By knowing how our current system works, we can reverse-engineer what is needed to make a new monetary system function properly. In his groundbreaking book, Layered Money, Nik Bhatia lays out this new framework in monetary science; the existence of different levels of monetary networks to service disparate users with vastly different needs. 

He explains that money as we know it does not exist, and should not exist, as a singular network upon which all transactions are completed. Various conflicting interests and user needs mean that any system built to service everyone will have to make severe compromises in all respects, and end up being sub-optimal for the vast majority of users.

In reality, the modern financial system does not operate as a single layer, upon which all transactions, no matter the size, must be executed. Instead, it operates at multiple layers- each of which has scaling solutions and key differences in security, transparency, and operability." 

https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/layered-money

7. Always good conversation and perspective on Silicon Valley. This time the gang opines on the Open AI drama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPwpiTN94iQ

8. "My recommendation is for every entrepreneur to visit the Mochary Method Curriculum, bookmark it, and revisit it on a weekly or monthly basis as new challenges and opportunities arise in their business. It truly is one of the most remarkable curriculums for entrepreneurs."

https://davidcummings.org/2023/11/25/mochary-method-curriculum-for-founders/

9. "a lot of you have had or will have a rough year. Even a Year of Hell (more on that here). We all have at least one. I sure did.

And for most of us, there’s one natural reaction: Hide. At least a bit. Put your head down, and grind it out. Try and get that one more customer in the door. Push harder. Analyze that data more. Cut everything quietly. Lay low and just “focus” until you can get growth back on track. Stare at that monitor, until you figure it out.

It’s natural, but please, don’t do that.

We’ve all been there. I hid a few times.

But I tried at least to always still Get Out There. Win that Award (even if it was kind of a stupid award). Get on that TV show (even if no one would really see it but my team). And close that Important Logo that the team loved (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter) … even if the revenue itself wasn’t that material.

Be Present. Bridge the gap between one great year and the next year at least in part by getting out there. Even if today, you have to do that somehow from inside the house."

https://www.saastr.com/rough-year-dont-hide/

10. "Every empire in written history has rolled out the same playbook during its sunset years.

Inside the Empire, runaway debt forces the governing body to rapidly expand the money supply.

The devaluation of currency inflates asset prices and widens the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots. Populism explodes, as civil unrest erupts in response to seemingly any cultural divide. 

Outside of the Empire, competitive powers start rising. Rarely is it just one rising counter-power; it is typically a syndicate of smaller nations who can pause their ideological differences to align against the lone superpower."

https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/this-may-be-the-most-dangerous-time

11. "Maybe now it’s easier to understand why Sam Altman and Open AI’s skill sets are both extremely valuable and extremely feared by both sides. It’s not just a matter of whose side he is on. The question is, will his work bust us from one temporal dimension to another? Will it burst the American mythology and allow that to be replaced by a new Chinese mythology? In a world where the average person doesn’t know anything about science and doesn’t really care about facts, mythologies can become more effective military tools than any gun, tank, or aircraft carrier.

Remember that the US did not succeed in building an Anti-Ballistic Missile system but the mythology that the US had this capability helped bankrupt the Soviet Union. The Gurkha’s and the New Zealand All Blacks are equally feared on different battlefields. Are they really more ruthless or imbued with superhuman powers? Some will say yes but they are also really brilliant at mythmaking. Geopolitics has always depended on mythmaking skill which is closely tied to propaganda skill. It still does today.

You can’t take this element lightly. It wins wars."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/q-tigris-eq-4d-the-power-of-a-haka

12. "One of those factors is geography. As the last two U.S. National Defense Strategies made clear and the latest congressional strategic posture commission confirmed, today’s U.S. military is not designed to fight wars against two major rivals simultaneously. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be hard-pressed to rebuff the attack while keeping up the flow of support to Ukraine and Israel.

This isn’t because the United States is in decline. It’s because unlike the United States, which needs to be strong in all three of these places, each of its adversaries—China, Russia, and Iran—only has to be strong in its own home region to achieve its objectives.

The worst-case scenario is an escalating war in at least three far-flung theaters, fought by a thinly stretched U.S. military alongside ill-equipped allies that are mostly unable to defend themselves against large industrial powers with the resolve, resources, and ruthlessness to sustain a long conflict. Waging this fight would require a scale of national unity, resource mobilization, and willingness to sacrifice that Americans and their allies have not seen in generations.

The immediate priority for the United States has to be to ensure that Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan have the weapons they need to defend themselves. These are the players with the most skin in the game at present. The best hope for avoiding a general conflict is that these frontier states will be so plucky and prickly that aggression is stopped or deterred before it can spread.

That won’t be possible unless the United States gets its defense-industrial base in order. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, total U.S. defense production has increased by a mere 10 percent—even as the war demonstrates the staggeringly high consumption of military ammunition in a major conflict between industrial powers compared to the limited counterinsurgency operations of the recent past."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/us-russia-china-gaza-ukraine-world-war-defense-security-strategy/

13. "You can understand why the OpenAI Board might have become uneasy when they realised that Altman was racing around the Middle East and Asia trying to raise billions for this vision. But, as Bloombergwrote, “these are not “side ventures”, they are “core ventures”. This is about redefining the cutting-edge of chip design, data collection and storage, computational power, and the interface between AI and physical robotics.

This new supply chain would not only challenge America’s IT infrastructure; it could be facilitating the diminishment of US power. It implies innovation is shifting outside of the US and acquiring data that is beyond the reach of regulators.

The truth is Altman does not believe in borders. He has one goal: to build the best AI possible. He has a vision that probably worried his board and unnerved Washington. Given that the US is trying to slow down technological innovation in other parts of the world by restricting the sale of the best chips and computers, it is hugely challenging when he says: “We’ll build our own stuff — in fact we’ll build our own supply chain and ecosystem.” So much for ITAR, the US system for banning the export of critical tech.

There was a time when an American would have been arrested for selling such protected high-tech innovations abroad. Today, can you stop a smart American from innovating outside the US? Can you tell entrepreneurs not to take foreign money and not to partner with foreign firms? Can you demand that they stop challenging existing firms like Nvidia? No. Not when others are offering so much money."

https://unherd.com/?p=492108

14. "I like the phrase "finding the right home." I like it not only in the sense of physical location, or entity ownership, but spiritual finality. Some companies are not meant to survive, and that's okay. Failure, death, defeat—the possible threat of all of those are things that make the lived experience more poignant and meaningful. Consolidation is simply one path towards "finding the right home" for people, ideas, and technology.

But one thing that the consolidation and shutdowns of 2023 reminds me is that we're not out of the woods by any stretch. Each company is bearing the burden of having to prove that it deserves to exist. Because increasingly, we're losing the veils that have hid a multitude of sins. And each of us has to stand and defend the existence of the things we are trying to build."

https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/revisiting-the-age-of-acquisition

15. "Few content creators realize that most businesses are the same nowadays.

They acquire customers online with a brand, content, product, and promotions.

Meaning:

If you learn the skills that make your creator business a success, you can use those skills to offer other businesses in the form of a freelance service or digital product.

Every single skill it takes to build a creator business is a high-value skill that everyone is talking about.

Learn graphic design as you build your profile picture, banner, website images, thumbnails, etc.

Learn copywriting and content writing as you build your landing pages, website, social media content, and newsletters.

Learn social media (yes, it’s a skill) to build your following, network, and authority.

Learn marketing and sales as you build your product or service.

Learn advertising and promotions as you promote your products or services to get buyers."

https://thedankoe.com/letters/how-smart-creators-make-money-the-build-teach-earn-method/

16. Valuable conversation on sales leadership in these tough times for startups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1EZ3kKhFWI

17. "To some observers at the Reducetarian Summit, though, it was clear that the entire model of venture capital-backed food startups has serious issues. David Meyer, CEO of meat reduction nonprofit Food System Innovations, says that VC-backed alt-protein companies faced a lot of pressure to hype their products, and to make rosy projections about how long it would take consumers to start buying them en masse. The reality of building food businesses to that scale, though, was always going to be much more difficult, a reality on full display now as the prospects of early leaders slump. 

A lot of that difficulty has to do with the costs of scaling: the so-called “valley of death” between small-scale pilot-production facilities and the truly monstrous installations businesses need to reach global scale and achieve economies of scale. Meanwhile, getting around some of the more fundamental issues holding back alternative meat—that so far, no one has created something actually indistinguishable from the real thing—may take more basic research, perhaps at university labs."

https://time.com/6339050/plant-based-meat-movement-harsh-reality/

18. This is a must for B2B founders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjiQCB8Ugao

19. Worthy pad for a media mogul.

https://manofmany.com/living/dave-portnoy-home-nantucket

20. Always lots to learn from Tai Lopez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arGpXqi0SvM

21. "It is strange that so many Westerners expect Russia to win in the long run. In the 1970s, the FNL defeated the mighty US in Vietnam. In the 1960s, Algeria defeated France in the long Algerian war. In 1967, still poor Israel defeated a broad coalition of Arab countries. In the Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, tiny Finland held off Joseph Stalin’s Soviet onslaught, etc.

Size has not turned out to be decisive in many wars. Large but poorly motivated countries usually lose wars against smaller and more motivated countries, especially if the aggressor’s objective is colonial. It would be strange if the authoritarian kleptocracy Russia were therefore to win in Ukraine. Precedence suggests that Ukraine is more likely to win this war than Russia."

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/24660

22. "Generally speaking, we’re keeping leaner inventories to be safe. For those that have been following along, Oil prices really haven’t moved and after the spike from the Gaza Event, they are down pretty significantly. When it comes to investing, never really makes a ton of sense to invest in mature industries. 

Inventory: More importantly on the E-com side… This means you don’t have to worry too much about a sudden spike in freight costs. Previously we warned every holiday season to plan ahead due to terrible supply chains. This year is the reverse. Demand has slowed a ton and on top of that? Freight costs won’t be spiking due to a broken supply chain. 

Add this all up. No significant risk to running slightly lower inventory levels than usual.

AI and Imaging Becomes More Advanced (Source): On the digital side, we’d bet extremely heavily on loneliness. More and more people are sending money to digital/fake models. It is already bad enough. Tons of only fans women/men are legitimately 4/10 on the standard 1-10 looks scale but with filters, angles and perfect lighting they look like 10s. Recently, we’ve had the (unfortunate) chance to be in meetings with a few Tier 1/A-list content creators. To say they were hideous would be an understatement.

There is good news in all of this. You can remove the need for human models to advertise your products. Anyone who has worked online for more than a week knows that having attractive women on your roster is a *must* have. Not a nice to have. A *must* have. Women prefer talking to attractive women. Men prefer talking to attractive women. Now? You don’t even need to hire them, just use digital photos of attractive chat women."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/on-the-state-of-digital-marketing

23. "This is a completely new game, and I think it’s going to challenge current leaders’ mental models of power and authority. People used to get legitimacy and authority from their title and role and some of that will remain. But increasingly, leaders will have to understand that authority will also need to come from a diverse network of support, possibly including people outside of the organization. 

Companies will inevitably develop sophisticated mechanisms to squash these swarms and/or prevent them from ever happening, which means increased monitoring, surveillance, and immediate firing of people who try to organize. 

Robb shares his own thoughts on what these trends mean for corporate governance and organizations:

“Networked swarms are a significant danger to corporate-run governance. These unthinking swarms, leveraging open-source organizational dynamics, can form quickly to coerce governments and corporations into alignment with their goals. In so doing, they actively negate the “voting” preferences people make through purchasing and employment behavior (the swarm-coerced advertising boycott of Twitter was an attempt to negate consumer choice).

Worse, the autocratic absolutism of these swarms, in combination with the inherent amorality of corporate bureaucracies (no intrinsic ability to resist moral coercion from swarms), will result in increasingly draconian action by corporations against a global population unprotected by rights that protect their freedoms.”

While this is grim there is also the positive side of things.

Returns to good leadership and coalition building should increase. While companies will increasingly screen incoming employees and be fearful of their ability to organize, happily replacing the middle ranks of the company with effective AI bots and automation, the best companies will be able to soak up great talent through their reactions to the inevitable crises they will face."

https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/organizations-and-the-network-swarms

24. "Across the board the West has been too slow, too timid in its approach to Putin’s war on Ukraine, whether that is in the supply of arms to sanctions, utilising frozen Russian assets, to creating the right institutional setting around recovery and reconstruction. 

It’s always been last minute, drip feed support for Ukraine and a failure to see the big strategic picture - what happens if Putin wins in Ukraine? Think through that and what that would mean for Western security."

https://timothyash.substack.com/p/support-for-ukraine

25. "At no point did the Icelandic authorities learn the identity of this mysterious client, the backer of the Minden expedition. They couldn’t have known that the German ship was one of dozens he’s pursued over the years. Media reports about wrecks this man has found or recovered have described him variously as an anonymous London financier, “the unknown salvor” and “the Originator.”

He’s marshaled a high-tech operation to recover the lost treasures of history, spanning centuries and entire civilizations and covering most of the blue portion of the planet. And he’s managed to keep this remarkable enterprise secret—until now.

Right now, the only ones with the resources to join in are corporate interests and wealthy individuals whose goals may or may not be aligned with the rest of humanity. The Originator is the most prolific of them all—the most successful shipwreck hunter in modern times, perhaps in all of history. His name is Anthony Clake, and he’s a 43-year-old hedge fund executive who rarely leaves dry land."

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-deep-sea-treasure-hunter-hedge-funds/

26. "As we argued when we ran the following post last year, these trends have tragic historical echoes: the price of doing business with those who traffic in hate is not measured in dollars, but in lives. What this post is ultimately about is the difference between opinions and principles. Opinions are easy to hold and cheap to change, and their value is commensurate. Principles, on the other hand, are things for which you are willing to sacrifice. Willing to draw a line."

https://www.profgalloway.com/the-line-2/

27. "For those that don’t have a financial background, it is still pretty easy to understand. Tech guys should get it immediately as well. 

If you have a return of say 6% and the risk free rate is 5.5% it means your real return was only 0.5%. Now take that and divide it by the amount of volatility you assumed.

Using the same example, if you squeaked out a 0.5% return (above risk free) but the standard deviation was 50% this would get you a whopping 0.01. For a frame of reference, a ratio of 1.0 is considered good.

Using the Bitcoin Comparison: Despite being seen as a highly volatile asset, not only has BTC gone up significantly over the past 10 years but its volatility *justifies* the risk. That is something that is still true today despite the massive decline from $69K to $16K back to $37K."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/probability-based-investing-and-cz

28. "So when she ended up getting laid off six months later, Sacks decided to channel her digital content creation prowess, previously reserved for comedy videos on Vine and Facebook, into Instagram, and Mrs. Dow Jones (a nod to one of the better-known stock market indexes) was born.

Now, Sacks has more than 820,000 Instagram followers and another 286,000 on TikTok. She tries to be as up front as possible with her followers about her own financial situation — she’s a millionaire, but she doesn’t share specific numbers. “A lot of my money is tied up in my business,” she explains, which consists of her online presence, as well as speaking engagements, advisory roles at early-stage companies, and hopefully soon, a book. She knows her situation is thanks in part to coming from financial privilege. She doesn’t have student loans, for instance, nor has she struggled with things like emotional spending. The details of her portfolio aren’t surprising, she says, but aren’t really the purpose of her work.

“The American dream has really changed,” Sacks acknowledges. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. “I’m a millionaire who rents, you know what I mean?” Instead of resenting our current financial situation, Sacks prefers her followers take advantage of it. 

We should be switching jobs frequently in order to maximize salary increases and setting up our own side hustles. “In many cities, it makes a lot more sense to invest the money in the S&P 500 versus buying property,” she says. “At the end of the day, your returns are going to be greater if you’re in the stock market.”

https://www.bustle.com/life/mrs-dow-jones-haley-sacks-profile

29. I know it’s not fashionable to be optimistic about Egypt — and my cab driver certainly wasn’t — but I believe they can do this. They’ve proven themselves to be one of the most stable and peaceful countries in the Middle East, they’ve achieved a middling level of income without significant natural resources, and they’ve shown they’re willing to spend a lot on infrastructure.

The pieces aren’t all in place yet for a successful industrialization story, but some of them are, and the government knows that growth is the only thing that will keep its people happy. Egypt has plenty of problems, sure, but it just doesn’t look like a hopeless basket case to me.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/feeling-strangely-optimistic-about

30. "The Kissinger operation was vintage Wylie: tempting an author away from a competitor and then leveraging that client’s reputation to mutually beneficial ends. “He’s playing a multiyear game in which he is constantly trying to consolidate the board,” Scott Moyers, the publisher of Penguin Press and a former director of the Wylie Agency, told me. In the 1980s and 90s, so the legend goes, Wylie used his commercial cunning to disrupt the chummy norms that reigned in the publishing industry, replacing them with what one tabloid newspaper referred to as a “greed storm”.

When he met Wylie in the late 1980s, the author Hanif Kureishi later wrote, he was reminded of “the bullying, loud-mouthed suburban wide-boys I’d grown up with, selling socks and watches from suitcases on a pub floor”. Since the mid-90s, Wylie has been known as The Jackal, and many other agents and small publishers still see him as a predator who seizes literary talents nurtured by others. His agency’s approach is “very adversarial”, Valerie Merians, the cofounder of the independent publisher Melville House, told me. The head of rights at a London literary agency put it more bluntly: “He uses Colonel Kurtz methods.”

But there is more to Wylie’s success and his character than mere rapacity. Better than anyone else, Wylie and his agency have figured out how to globalise and monetise literary prestige.

The Wylie Agency hunts for undervalued literary talent the way a private equity firm might trawl for underperforming companies that it can turn into major profit centres after firing the current management. When he started out in the early 80s, Wylie saw more clearly than anyone else that literary reputations are commercial assets, and that if you control those assets, you ought to wring as much value from them as possible. Never mind if you have to use tactics that others consider unethical or underhanded."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/09/andrew-wylie-agency-days-of-the-jackal-serious-literature-big-business

31. "Over the few days when OpenAI looked like it might collapse, I do think that there was a temporary sense of opportunity among founders and VCs. But now that Altman is back, that seems like a mirage. (In the long term, this chaos does create room for open-source alternatives to flourish as people seek the power to opt out of OpenAI’s monopoly. But, as I argued last week, I think this only starts to happen as the S curve of model performance begins to level out.)

The more interesting and concerning user base is OpenAI’s enterprise customers. Startup people don’t mind palace coups and Silicon Valley intrigue if you ship good product. If you’re a mid-level insurance executive in Connecticut with a seven-figure Microsoft/OpenAI contract, you’re likely reading the headlines and wondering whether you should invoke force majeure.

I have heard that even before this disruption, some enterprise customers were disgruntled at the rate that OpenAI models were changed or replaced with newer versions, thereby negatively impacting reliability. Adding corporate chaos on top cannot be good for trust—and a loss of trust is hard to undo.

Realistically, though, startups are chaotic and hard. They are even more so when you’re playing with high stakes at the highest levels. No CEO is blameless, but you can make up for chaos and bad decisions if you build something incredible enough. What Altman has created at OpenAI should certainly lend him the benefit of the doubt, in my view.

But, as the saying goes, you only get one coup. If something like this happens again, I’ll question whether I can trust you to actually deliver on your enterprise contracts, much less safely birth a digital god into the world. Serious companies don’t go through this more than once."

https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-king-is-back-in-the-castle

32. "Finding the next Amazon or Tesla, a small company which grows to an astonishing scale, dominates mainstream investment thinking, but throughout history, it’s been buying good companies and even better valuations that has made both men like Jim Rogers and Warren Buffet exceedingly wealthy."

https://calvinfroedge.substack.com/p/finding-value-in-an-overvalued-world

33. This is a pretty illuminating discussion. Ideas on how to Focus on Health, wealth & happiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj7S4T6o6Fc

34. Oh wow....sad news. Death of an investing legend and brilliant thinker. RIP Charlie Munger.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/28/charlie-munger-investing-sage-and-warren-buffetts-confidant-dies.html

35. I always learn stuff here. Worth watching to see how writing can help you with your life and business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZRKK-hNfA

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Traveling the World While Young: The Pathless Path and Career Limiting Move?

I’ve become a fan of Jon Raines' newsletter called Young Money. Lots of great tips and thoughts here, specifically for young people. But one that caught my eye was his recent one: “The Case for Traveling More” (Source: https://www.youngmoney.co/p/case-traveling) 

It took me back to my days after graduating from University, then attending Medieval studies at Cambridge University Summer school. I ended up spending half a year backpacking through Europe. It was an eye opening experience and extremely fun. Met so many different people and had so many adventures. It was my first experience really living by my wits and by myself. 

I ended up moving to Taiwan next year and taught English with the grand plan of saving up money and traveling the world for a few years. I ended up meeting a girl and well, joined the corporate world. Then I moved to Silicon Valley in 1999 and focused on my career. 

I remember showing up in the USA with a messed up resume and  regret for not focusing on my career earlier. Especially when I met all these hard chargers my age who had done the conventional route and not done the travel & goofing around. I felt so behind, which led me to work my ass off trying to catch up. But I did end up with an internationally focused tech career; traveling the world, selling ads, doing deals and investing in startups.  

Fast forward 24+ years, I really had no regrets. I have fine memories from those 3 years of goofing around and traveling before my career. I’ve caught up and actually surpassed pretty everyone from those early days just by grinding it out and staying in the game. Plus a touch of luck as normal. In fact, looking back, those days of traveling gave my career a boost by giving me a new perspective on business as well as cultural insights that were extremely useful down the road. The crazy adventures also make you a much more interesting person compared to the normal working stiff or corporate drone. 

So for all those young folks trying to decide what to do right after college. Career or Travel? Take a travel adventure. And if you are older, take some time out from work to see the world, bring your kids. As the excellent Jack Raines says: 

“Taking a few months to see the world won't hinder your career, but never taking time to explore will starve your soul.

In an era where travel is both cheap and convenient, a refusal to venture beyond your geographic boundaries is a declaration that you believe what you are currently doing is more valuable and enriching than engaging with the experiences and perspectives of ~8 billion other people.”

Jack goes on to say: 

“Quality ideas are generated by a breadth and depth of quality inputs, and few inputs are better than experiences. The simple acts of visiting places that you wouldn't normally visit, meeting people you wouldn't normally meet, doing things you wouldn't normally do, and seeing things that you wouldn't normally see serve as great source material.

Where you go, who you meet, what you do, and what you see are less important than simply going, meeting, doing, and seeing.”

So young people (and old), go forth into the world. Explore. Have fun. You won’t regret it. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Time is Luck: Being Present in Life

I end up rewatching many old movies from the 90s and 2000s. One of them was Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice”. What a master at the shoot out scenes. It signals the peak to American influence and confidence in the world.

But one of the phrases that stuck with me was mentioned by Isabelle, who gets romantically entangled with undercover cop Crockett. “Time is Luck” describing their situation. A magical and wonderful but ephemeral experience that does not last too long. 

Time is luck. Your time with your children. Your time with your parents and siblings. Your time with your friends. Your time on this earth. You should treasure it. 

But so many of us are either trapped by our memories in the past. Either nostalgia for a time that probably was not really that good. Or times that were so awful that we are stuck there and it traps us from moving forward. 

My problem is I tend to think too far into the future. The next trip. The next deal. The next conference. The next book. I guess this is the problem of working in tech, studying future trends, investing in early stage startups and living in the future. 

I’m so fixated on the future that I end up overlooking or missing the magical things that happen in my everyday moments and life. Moments like Waking up my kid, taking her to school, having a wonderful meal together with my family. Having a great conversation with friends and my business partners. 

I think I’ve gotten better at it. Trying to eat more slowly and savor the meal. Meditating more in the morning, afternoon and evening. But I still have a lot of work to do here. 

We all live in the moment. It’s all we have.  This is a reminder to be more mindful about this fact. Breath. Slow down and take it all in. It may also help you live a more enjoyable life. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 10th, 2023

“Courage is found in unlikely places.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

  1. "Founding a business that achieves any level of success requires ambition, talent, an irrational belief that “this” makes sense, and most important the ability to attract a flock of investors who consent to engage in your hallucination. The best founders are Zealots.

Zealots are high-talent, high-energy people — but they also tend to be narcissistic and divisive assholes. If you’re thinking “Takes one to know one,” trust your instincts. Zealots make good founders, but as companies mature, the ratio of their passion relative to the cost incurred by their difficult personalities erodes. Maturity calls for sober leaders who are better at managing risk and serving the market’s desire for predictable, if not remarkable, growth: Pragmatists.

Some (i.e., few) founders can make the transition, tempering the quicksilver aspects of their personality without losing their drive or vision. 

For most of business history, having assets was good, and having more was even better. However, one of technology’s tectonic unlocks has been elevating information (bits) over objects (atoms). In the information age, owning assets is one business, while operating them is another, and each demands distinct capital structures, management approaches, and operational skills.

Businesses offering the greatest return on invested capital don’t have much capital (assets) and can scale up faster, as they don’t bind themselves to cars, apartments, or even inventory. (Think: Amazon Marketplace.) Using other people’s assets makes firms more resilient, because they can scale down as inexpensively, during bad times, as they scaled up." 

https://www.profgalloway.com/webur/

2. Strangest news of the day in tech. Altman out at OpenAI. Very bizarre.

https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-panel-reacts-openai-fires-ceo

3. "In the years that followed the meeting between the two men, Figma ate InVision’s lunch. InVision unsuccessfully tried to sell itself, a fact that hasn’t been previously reported, and is now a husk of what it once was. Its story underscores the plight startups face in an era when borrowing costs are rising, cash piles are diminishing and venture capitalists are less likely to write checks to give companies second or third chances.

InVision, which peaked at a $2 billion valuation and raised $350 million from blue-chip investors including Goldman Sachs and Spark Capital, spiraled as Figma grew and snatched away its customers. Last year, InVision’s revenue plunged by half to $50 million, two people familiar with the company’s finances said, and it was projected to sink to between $36 million and $38 million for 2023.

As Figma cut into InVision’s main design business by building a product that was more seamless to use, InVision shifted its focus to an online whiteboard product to help remote workers collaborate. In late 2021, InVision started working with investment bankers to try to sell itself, two people familiar with the matter said, a process that was on and off. They couldn’t find a buyer willing to take on the shrinking company."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/figma-took-their-lunch-money-how-2-billion-design-startup-invision-fell-apart

4. A masterclass in making money online as a creator from some of the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZGbQvX9AXY&t=619s

5. Empires are built by blood, sweat and violence. Lots of wisdom from Tai Lopez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUJXaGnxsBQ

6. I love Stonestown Galleria (as it’s very close to my home) and it’s thriving.

"Despite having the same issues that every mall in America faces, Stonestown Galleria has cunningly persevered, mostly by focusing on shops and services that cater to the young people of the area, including — perhaps critically — the students of San Francisco State which is just next door, and the suburban kids coming over from Daly City and South San Francisco. Big draws like Regal and Target fulfill all your college needs, while classy grown-ups get their shop on at mainstay Trader Joe’s.

It’s mostly with hot new Asian eateries, like Uncle Tetsu serving Japanese cheesecakes, and Café Maiko, the first dedicated matcha café in SF, earning the mall its reputation as “the new Japantown.”

With interest in Asian pop culture at an all-time high, it’s no surprise to see young people going to popular Japanese shops Daiso and Misimo, and hanging around places serving Korean barbeque, and Taiwanese street snacks. These shops have breathed new life into the mall, following renovations made while Stonestown was closed for a year during the pandemic. The mall is now doing better business than it was in 2019."

https://medium.com/the-bold-italic/while-westfield-centre-flounders-stonestown-galleria-thrives-4bc043c50c2b

7. "These three explanations—coincidence, multipolarity, Russia’s war in Ukraine—are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they are interrelated, as wars are complex events; the decline of U.S. hegemony contributes to growing multipolarity; and great-power competition has surely fed Russia’s aggression and the West’s response.

The consequence is that others are caught in the great-power cross fire or will seek to start fires of their own. Even if none of these wars rise to the level of a third world war, they will be devastating all the same. We do not need to be in a world war to be in a world at war.

Wars were already a persistent feature of the international system. But they were not widespread. War was always happening somewhere, in other words, but war was not happening everywhere. The above dynamics could change that tendency. The prevalence of war, not just its persistence, could now be our future."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/11/conflicts-around-the-world-peak/676029/

8. "Every market is different, and every opportunity has to be evaluated on its own. One recommendation is to go to the individual job function and think through the AI Iron Man suit functionality to make that person ten times more productive or to enable the employer to fulfill the mission of that role in a way that is more scalable, more distributed, or more economical. Build software to Iron Man the power of a job function."

https://davidcummings.org/2023/11/18/software-to-iron-man-a-job-function/

9. "There are several sources that are laying out the details of the story. The TLDR? Sam and Greg were the driving force behind OpenAI’s ambitions. Raising more and more capital, establishing plans to build their own chips to compete with Nvidia, building an AI-native phone with Jony Ive. 

Ilya’s perspective was focused on the need to create AI “that truly deeply loves humanity.” The progress of OpenAI was racing far ahead of the research capabilities to pursue Ilya’s parameters for love, not just performance. What’s more, his role was increasingly getting reduced at the company. 

Increasingly, it’s clear that this is a fundamental debate between effective altruism and effective accelerationism.

What’s more, there is such a contrast today. On the one hand, we have EA exploding the most important company in technology in decades. On the other hand, we have e/acc powering a literal rocket, exploding towards the sky, space, and all the progress that entails."

https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-fall-of-the-hero-founder

10. This is such an incredible interview. Everyone should watch this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7dgxCykg-Q

11. "The “Roaring 20s” idea wasn’t just about a strong economy; it was fundamentally about a technology boom. And although it’s hard to identify the impacts of technologies on the economy, I think there are signs that some of the things we were excited about three years ago are now having an effect.

Another technology driving rapid corporate investment is AI. AI is rapidly taking overthe world of venture finance, with more than a quarter of VC money now flowing into the space. That’s partly a result of more traditional startup categories going bust, but mostly it’s about the boom in generative AI following the release of ChatGPT and various AI art apps. Goldman Sachs predicts that AI investment could be 4% of the economy in just two years. Boardroom chaos at OpenAI seems unlikely to slow the trend much, since the basic technology of LLMs is now pretty widely diffused.

And that’s just today. It’s crucial to note that all of these technologies — new wonder vaccines, solar and batteries, and AI — will almost certainly have a much bigger impact once they’re widely adopted. Generative AI will juice productivity in ways we can’t even imagine right now. Cheap solar and batteries will push down electricity and transportation costs. Using vaccines to treat cancer will reduce disease burden. And further business-model innovations will hopefully allow companies to use work-from-home to greater advantage.

In other words, the Roaring 20s are just getting started. 

Much of the country is still mired in the atmosphere of pessimism and malaise that followed the Great Recession, the chaotic Trump years, the pandemic, and the post-pandemic inflation. And of course dire events like the Israel-Gaza war continue to dominate headlines. But already I feel like I can sense the green shoots of excitement about the future, from the online “e/acc” mini-movement to nascent optimism about the economy."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-roaring-20s-are-back-on-track

12. Travel and diversify. Go visit other countries and invest outside of the USA. Be an uncommon commodity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdKA5l7HNgk

13. Good summary of an interesting conversation. Doug Casey is an accomplished international investor and author. He is a libertarian kook but he has been right more than wrong.

https://www.tailopez.com/blog/unleashing-freedom-abroad-doug-caseys-escape-plan-from-the-united-states

14. "A few weeks into a world tour to promote his latest album House on a Hill, Nam is feeling that connection more than ever—especially since he’s also an entrepreneur on top of being a pop star. He counts a podcast and media company, DIVE Studios, and a mental health app, Mindset, in his business portfolio.

Nam developed the self-care app he co-founded which features celebrities like Summer Walker, Tori Kelly, and members of Seventeen talking about mental heath, is especially dear to Nam. “It’s always weird for me to be like, ‘I’m a mental health advocate,’” he says. “it was more of a gradual, very organic thing more than it was like ‘We need to be advocates.’”

At 34, the eternally boyish Eric Nam has already lived a few lives. An Atlanta native who was supposed to become a business analyst at Deloitte, he left finance to enter a talent competition in South Korea and become a star. Nam now deftly toggles between the worlds of entertainment and business."

https://www.gq.com/story/real-life-diet-eric-nam

15. "Targeting Prosumers offers unique advantages. Unlike B2B transactions (where there can be many decision makers), it's often easier for a Prosumer to make a purchasing decision. If it's something they're passionate about doing, they'll take out their credit card.

Furthermore, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for Prosumers is growing. It encompasses creators (TikTokers, podcasters, YouTubers), career-oriented individuals (software developers, digital nomads, freelancers), and hobbyists (photographers, DJs, musicians, artists, classic car enthusiasts).

My larger point: if you see an opportunity with growing demand, and it’s a good fit for you, don’t ignore it just because “it’s not B2B.”

Your business doesn’t have to fit the dominant narrative to be successful; indie B2Prosumer products can be incredibly profitable.

There are great opportunities to build awesome $1M-$5M/year businesses with Prosumer customers."

https://justinjackson.ca/prosumers

16. "When you see the faces of the people around you unconsciously bent toward their devices, the vast majority are tumbling down a unique path, becoming surrounded by more content that affirms their convictions, biases and fears. 

People settle for being out of shape. They settle for careers they don’t love. And when they open their phones, they settle for the cultural and political beliefs that are served to them.

They have no agency. No sovereignty.

This is why it is so important to plan, strategize and execute a process. 

Most people want to be wealthier than they are. Most want to be fitter than they are. 

Far fewer people want to do the things that make you wealthy and fit. 

So focusing on the goal, although fun - and important, is not as important as focusing on the process."

https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/is-the-goal-to-get-rich-or-stay-rich

17. "For years, Ohlrogge says SPAC proponents dismissed the poor track record of SPACs, insisting it would be different with better sponsors and better target companies.   

“And it’s never been true,” Ohlrogge says. “So they just keep continuing to perform badly, and I think it’s because they have these enormous structural flaws that still very few people understand.”

https://thehustle.co/the-spectacular-failure-of-spacs/

18. "That’s the beauty and the horror of social consumer apps. The only way to know is to build fast and launch too early.

I am biased, obviously, but Antoine is one of the rare, if not the only founder in that category who is truly intentional about what he’s building with a deep product perspective and behavioral understanding. Many successful founders who have built social consumer apps have just hit a giant gold mine while digging and taking turns quite randomly and then built the narrative around and tried not to make too many mistakes along the way."

https://2lr.substack.com/p/ti-amo

19. "Aside from the obviously preposterous nature of how this process played out, the question is, why? Why would they do this now? And why so quickly?

One theory is that Sustkever believed that Altman was getting involved in too many other ventures: reportedly a NVIDIA competitor to make AI chips and a hardware company devoted to building AI phones. He might have worried that Altman’s control over other parts of the value chain would give him power beyond the strictures of OpenAI’s founding charter.

Another theory is that OpenAI made a research breakthrough that truly scared Sutskever—but that Altman wanted to proceed with commercializing it too quickly. 

It’s important to reserve judgment until more of the facts come out. But for now, whatever Sutskever’s goals, he probably did not advance them particularly well, because supporters of AI safety now look foolish. AI is, as far as I know, the only field in which startups have been built with safety research at their core from the beginning.

That’s why OpenAI is structured as a non-profit and Altman has no equity position in the company. But, barring some revelations, its focus on safety and resulting corporate structure created a ridiculously bad and chaotic situation. In the long run, it’s likely to make the cause of safety harder to justify, rather than easier."

https://every.to/everything/thinksgiving-is-upon-us

20. This will be fascinating to watch. Libertarian Milei wins in Argentina.

"Javier Milei believes that a free people should not have to deal with an overbearing central government, promising to remove massive chunks of the state’s bureaucracy, making him a friend to capitalism but an adversary to the administrative state.

He is against bad fiat money but bullish on bitcoin. He is an entrepreneur’s best friend, and a very worthy foe to the parasites who feast on the money printer."

https://www.dossier.today/p/javier-milei-who-has-all-of-the-right

21. The cause of most people's financial issues. Lifestyle Inflation.

https://lifemathmoney.com/money-advice-avoid-lifestyle-inflation/

22. "So maybe the direction of Argentina is the embracing of US dollars AND bitcoin. Not dollars exclusively and not bitcoin exclusively. You need both of them at the moment. And that is what Javier Milei ultimately represents. 

A new way of thinking about economics that appears to be built for the 21st century. The change may be bumpy along the way, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the change is needed.

This is something to keep in mind as we head into the 2024 Presidential election here in America. Multiple candidates have already come out in strong support of bitcoin, which could lead to a similar situation where US dollar dominance is continued and bitcoin is embraced as a digital gold."

https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-people-of-argentina-have-spoken

23. "As for startups, disruptions in the status quo are often advantageous. OpenAI’s dominant place in the developer ecosystem is suddenly at risk & presents an opportunity for smaller companies to fill a new void.

Sudden disturbances in rapidly moving objects like rockets tend to create catastrophic outcomes."

https://tomtunguz.com/disturbing-rockets-in-flight/

24. "I’m emerging from a two-month long set of back-to-back trips, from Texas to Nairobi to Dubai, to Riyadh, to New York and to Montreal, with the final stop today in Vegas for Money 2020.

Each has their own growing startup ecosystems budding. And they each offer unique lessons for us.

Here are five I reflect on."

https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/5-startup-lessons-from-5-ecosystems

25. Interesting theory. I guess we will see.

"What did President Xi get in exchange for all this? He got quite a lot. First, remember that Governor Newsom, Biden’s heir apparent, was recently treated as an equal by Xi. In the highly unusual and surprise meeting between a US Governor and China’s Head of State, Newsom specifically said, “divorce (between the US and China) is not an option” and “I expressed my support for the One-China policy ... as well as our desire not to see independence," Clear enough. This statement alone gave Xi what he needed to begin a negotiation with Taipei’s leaders about a slow but secure re-entry of Taiwan into China.

Suddenly, the opposition parties in Taiwan have agreed to cooperate. This will potentially bring to power a group of people who are more inclined to deal with China and ensure a peaceful resolution of the sovereignty issues. The elections are in January. Xi scored.

Xi also “gets” Russia’s Far East. Moscow has never been easily able to control the Far East due to its size and distance. The Ukraine conflict has financially bled Russia. The Wilson Center says, “By 2023, the government intends to spend $160 billion on military needs, or 40% of its budget.” “….this figure may surpass 10% of GDP in 2023.” Siberia has also been a strong recruiting ground for the Russian Army, raising opposition to Moscow everywhere in the East. The indigenous people of Siberia have even created a new “Siberian Battalion” to serve the Ukrainian side. This lack of cash and rising internal opposition have made it much easier for China to reach into this massive mecca of resources.

Instead, China now needs access to the US market. The US needs inflation to fall, and more cheap imports from China will help. China needs access to all industrialized nations because they can pay for stuff and raise China’s income. Emerging markets can’t. This means he needs a deal not only with the US but also with Europe.

This is all “kiss and makeup” on a grand scale. A peace dividend and a fall in inflation is unfolding. If war is inflationary, ending it is disinflationary. The US and China may even agree on a deal on space and the moon. It looks like we’ll see the next US President in a nice tight hug with Xi. No doubt the US and China will remain profoundly competitive. But, on the surface, the world will see Panda hugs and peace."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/deal-the-siberian-tiger-and-the-panda

26. "This trend is particularly observable in infrastructure software, where cloud marketplaces are an increasingly important purchasing vehicle and where the take rate is largely countered by the lower cost of sales for these transactions. 

Snowflake were pulled to the marketplaces by their enterprise customers and is listed on both Azure and AWS’ marketplaces.

In October, Crowdstrike announced that it was the first cybersecurity ISV to exceed $1 billion in AWS Marketplace sales since listing on the AWS Marketplace in 2017, where it also enjoys ACVs that are 140% larger than other GTM channels."

https://akashbajwa.substack.com/p/cloud-gtm-and-alliances

27. "Many deep tech industries are huge, and there’s a lot of room for new players: batteries ($100b market), pharma ($1.5T), defense R&D ($150b in the US), industrial and warehouse automation ($200b total), and so on.

To take defense as a concrete example, this site lists awarded defense contracts. The DoD awards multiple 8-9 figure contracts daily. Any startup that captures just a few contracts of this size is basically a $1b+ company.

To summarize the data above:

-There are lots of $1b+ deep tech exits.

-While the absolute number of strong exits is smaller than for traditional sectors like B2B SaaS, the rate of good exits is approximately 2x higher.

-Good exits for deep tech companies, on average, come 6-24 months sooner than good exits for traditional tech companies.

-Deep tech companies, on average, have similar capital intensity to traditional tech companies. Across all exits above $250m, the average amount of capital raised is about 11-15% of the sale price regardless of sector."

https://www.codingvc.com/p/betting-on-deep-tech

28. "You can always push yourself more than you think you can. And I think that’s true. In every environment, you can go to the gym and lift more than you think. You can push yourself more in this environment while walking, or in a start-up, you can work 100 plus hours a week for years on end. If you really have to, like if push comes to shove, you’re always able to push yourself more.

Now, not everyone is made of that same stuff. And in fact, the objective of this of the study was to find out who actually makes it who doesn’t, i.e., can you tell ahead of time based on their physiology, blood tests, etc, and their DNA and their personal mental profile?

Clearly, there’s one thing I think founders have in common is that we’re more tolerant to risk than most. I’m not saying we’re risk seeking, right, like it’s always on a risk adjusted basis. And in fact, I don’t think we take that many risks as start-up founders. But I think by taking a bit more risk than most people, we are highly rewarded.

It’s hard to imagine, with all of this, that we’re gonna have a soft landing. That said, my personal analysis of this remains – this is the very best time to invest in early stage start-ups. Right now, all the posers, the people that were getting rich, quick, are no longer building start-ups. So the bankers, the consultants, lawyers, the doctors, etc. Right now you have the true believers.

They’re building companies, yes, they’re raising money, it’s hard to raise capital, you raise a lower valuation, you probably exit at a lower valuation. But you’re careful with your cash, with burn, with unit economics, and you’re building a much more sustainable company. You’re facing way less competition. In 2021, if you had a good idea, you were facing 7-20 other people doing the exact same thing with a lot of money. Now you have one or two. When you win, you’re gonna win the entire category. And even though the extra votes will be lower, you’re going to do amazingly well.

And so if I think in the last decade, the very best time to invest was in 2008, 2009, 2010, you know, companies like Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Airbnb all came in the 2000s.

Actually, when was the best time the best actually? Oh, 2001, 2002, 2004. And so I am willing to bet that the very best time to invest in startups for the 2020s will have been 2022, 2023 and 2024. And you’re obviously gonna know at the end of the decade in the early 2030s, or at the end of the 2020s. But now, it’s an amazing time. Early stage and late stage have not repriced and you’re seeing a lot of structure. So, seed A, even B, is an amazing time to be investing."

https://fabricegrinda.com/super-fun-interview-by-robin-haak/

29. Love this: Building a mini-Berkshire Hathaway. Learned a lot in this conversation.

Big fan of Enduring Ventures! Go Sieva Kosinsky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPAnye_FZ0&list=RDCMUCPjNBjflYl0-HQtUvOx0Ibw&start_radio=1

30. Lots of myths being busted here. Interesting for biohackers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1UY8DTWpYk

31. "Part of building a startup is finding a secret that no one else knows. In crypto, I’ve seen that for founders who are new to crypto, it usually takes at least 1–2 years to “find that secret”.

Why does it take so long? Well, I suspect it’s because crypto is so counter-intuitive and so different from Web2 or TradFi, where most founders come from. Way too often, founders give up on crypto in less than 1–2 years, right before that critical juncture.

Adding insult to injury, the bear market is arguably the best time to find that secret. There’s far less froth and distraction. Founders can think more clearly. They are more likely to find users who are also here for a long time to come."

https://medium.com/alliancedao/hard-pivot-from-crypto-7c4a3988720a

32. This is thought provoking. Bitcoin as a war fighting technology in cyberspace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDS7q6uRkY

33. "D’Angelo, a high school friend of Mark Zuckerberg who parlayed an early engineering job building ad systems at Facebook into tremendous wealth, appears to be the fulcrum of finding a resolution. In recent days, D’Angelo has been “occupying the most oxygen” among board members in talks between Altman and the board, a person close to the talks said.

D’Angelo, who has been a board member at OpenAI for five years, is now the tech insider with perhaps the most to lose or gain reputationally in the stalemate over Sam Altman’s firing from the startup. Out of the three remaining board members at the company, he is the only person who many in the tech world, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, know well. He sits firmly in an inner circle of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who invest in each other’s companies, recommend software engineering talent to each other and pontificate about the future of technology.

D’Angelo has seen some parallels on a smaller scale at Quora, which he founded and has run for 14 years. He sometimes fired executives abruptly without considering the impact on employees, three former employees said. One firing a few years ago rankled staff so much that a few dozen refused to show up to work the day after the dismissal, they said. D’Angelo sometimes frustrated employees by not explaining why he had fired executives."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-quiet-silicon-valley-insider-complicating-sam-altmans-return

34. Interview was a year old but still very relevant.

Global macro discussion & geopolitics. Food supply chain is a mess & a possible food crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXQZq0fAO-M

35. Hmmmm......

"When Sam Altman lost his job running OpenAI, the startup valued at over $50 billion, there were many sins that struck me as particularly grievous. The first was that he was looking to raise billions to start his own chip company that could sell to OpenAI (e.g., profiting from the supply), and the second was that he was separately raising billions to build a hardware device that OpenAI models would be housed on (e.g., profiting off the platform).

To further muddy the waters, OpenAI’s main partner, Microsoft, buys power from a company in which Altman is a major shareholder. OpenAI’s in-house VC fund has led a Series A round in a company in which Altman is also a major shareholder. Altman owns shares in some of the buzziest tech companies in the world, including Stripe, Instacart, and Humane. Many, if not all, of those companies are using the tech that OpenAI is selling. 

This is enough conflicts of interest to make a corporate lawyer's brain smush in on itself like a dying sun. It is a ludicrous amount of mis-aligned incentives. 

I am in the camp that Altman is likely innocent, and it was a dumb board gone rogue.But there are legitimate questions to be had about Altman’s behavior. Attempting to achieve AGI is a momentous enough task that it likely requires a unique governance structure. But it also requires a CEO who is focused, honest, and committed. Altman’s investing has not left that impression with me, and perhaps the board felt the same."

https://every.to/napkin-math/the-case-against-sam-altman

 

36. "Despite Altman’s apparent sense of ease, tensions had been simmering at his company over the enigmatic CEO’s laissez-faire approach to safety, interest in commercializing OpenAI’s software, and tangled web of personal investments in other AI companies. Even as they built one of the world’s most valuable startups, OpenAI remained beholden to a nonprofit board of directors that had the power to pump the brakes if it felt the organization was straying from its mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

Unbeknownst to anyone outside OpenAI’s top ranks, members of that six-person board were growing worried that the CEO was clipping the safety guardrails as he barreled toward global dominance in AI. As far as some on the board were concerned, Altman was himself teetering on the edge of an abyss.

Just a few hours after the APEC panel, Altman received a text from Ilya Sutskever, a chief researcher, co-founder and board member at OpenAI who was responsible for limiting societal harms from its AI. Sutskever invited him to a video meeting with the board the following afternoon. The coup had begun.

What followed was a dizzying spiral of power plays and shifting alliances that seemed more appropriate for the set of “Game of Thrones'' than for the sleek, plant-filled offices of an AI startup. Altman’s surprise firing set off a chain of events—including the shock resignation of OpenAI’s president, the installation of two interim CEOs, a staffwide mutiny, backroom deals, threats of litigation, counter-offensives and counter-counter-offensives—that culminated with a late Tuesday night deal to reinstate Altman as CEO and revamp the company’s board of directors."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/from-king-to-exile-to-king-again-the-inside-story-of-sam-altmans-whiplash-week

37. "Quite simply, radicals on both sides of the political spectrum no longer view the system as something they can work within. And while this is always true to a degree, the cause for concern at the policy level is the recruitment and radicalization of those who would otherwise not be involved with political violence, driven both by circumstance and disinformation. While disinformation can come from anywhere, the intersection of foreign influence and domestic politics should be most concerning. 

This is a very fancy way of saying that what happens over there really matters over here when individuals so far from the battlefield can find cause with an enemy because their domestic politics align more with a foreign power’s propaganda or cause than with American democracy. The collective hyperpartisan rhetoric has inadvertently created sleeper cells of radicals waiting for their chosen cause’s turn to make headlines.

I’ve written extensively in the past on the threat that hyperpartisanship, disinformation, and the degradation of democratic norms can have on national security. Disinformation-driven political violence is a key plot point of my novel EX SUPRA, and something that worries me when I think about our American future just as much as the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. Jack Murphy once wrote about America’s forthcoming “Years of Lead” and I’m starting to think that time has arrived."

https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/the-new-wave

38. "Before diving into the strategies, I encourage you to read Ed’s post in full. But for those looking for the cliff notes, here is the TLDR on the incentives at play:

1) In the absence of exits (which typically take 7+ years to manifest), VCs use markups as a means of demonstrating progress

2) Hot companies in hot sectors get marked up the quickest

3) Hot companies are easier to sell internally to other partners in the fund and 4) Hot companies help a VC raise their next fund from LPs.

In contrast, non consensus companies can seem weird, are often doubted by other investors (thus limiting access to follow-on capital) until the progress speaks for itself, and can take a long time to blossom. Nevertheless, the axiom remains that being non consensus and right maximizes returns.

This got me thinking about how investors can actually make non consensus investments, without just paying lip service to the idea. I dove into the 1984 Ventures portfolio to find examples where we’ve been non consensus (and will hopefully be proven right in due course!).

I found that there are repeatable strategies to be non consensus when picking founders, markets and business models/ideas. It's also worth noting that there is a subtle, but important difference between being contrarian (”everyone is wrong and I am right”) and non consensus (investing in people or spaces that others are ignorant or naive about)"

https://samit-kalra.com/blog/non-consensus-and-right

39. “Up until a few years ago, defense was definitely not seen as Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)," he said. “My opinion is that you should actually add a D to ESG and that's defense ... If you don't have security, you can't have ESG.

The internet was created by the military but the tech firms that sprung from it have overtaken armies as "the drivers of innovation,” said Warren Low, an official of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. "It’s now flipped around where the industries are innovating.”

The war in Ukraine means “there's an appetite now” to invest in the world of defensive security, said David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for Emerging Security Challenges.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/internet-of-tanks-nato-court-tech-scene/

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Overcoming Scarcity Mindset: Dropping Cheapskate Asian Immigrant Habits

I’ve learned a lot about myself the last 3-4 years. I’ve grown a lot I think. Shaken off a lot of bad habits & harmful mindsets holding me back. But one that I just can’t shake is my frugalness and over-optimization, stemming from a scarcity mindset. 

I’ll spend an hour trying to find a hotel room $20 dollars cheaper. I’d walk to another ATM to save myself a $5 usd fee. I’d drive around an extra 30 minutes to save on parking. Doing an extra 8 hour layover to save $250 usd on airfare. 

It’s good to be frugal. It’s good to hate wastefulness. These are great habits to have. But it’s dumb when it gets in the way of bigger deals and opportunities. Or when you waste time. 

All those behaviors are left over from the time when I had NOTHING. When I was coming up in the world and only had enough money to choose lunch or dinner. Try living on a $25k usd annual salary in San Francisco. Before taxes btw and as it is W2 income, no tax breaks either. Granted this was 24 years ago but it was not easy back then either. 

But times have changed. And when I ask myself the question that my therapist asks me: “How does this serve you now?”

I’d say NOT very well. Now I don’t want to be the guy who looks at everything through the frame of money and optimizes for it. But it’s a good filter to use an ideal per hour rate to judge whether you should spend time on something. Mine is a minimum $1000 USD an hour.

My rule is I either make that rate or I outsource that to someone else. Otherwise, I’m spending time either getting paid my rate or else I am doing something I enjoy. Things like reading, watching some interesting documentaries or listening to podcast shows or family time with my kid. 

Some exceptions: I do my own laundry and wash the dishes because I actually enjoy the meditative aspects of it. I’ll do paid public presentations/workshops, government startup program mentoring for below that rate because I find these fun and educational. I also really enjoy talking to and trying to help startup founders. 

Now I’m not telling you to go big and spend like a billionaire or multimillionaire, buying the mansion, private jet and sports cars, the bespoke expensive clothing. Do it if you can afford it and really love these things. 

As I’ve written before, I just really love international travel, good food and lots of books. That and supporting some awesome charities like World Central Kitchen, Feeding America, International Rescue Committee and Room to Read among many others. If you are lucky to have done well, it’s an absolute MUST to be generous with my friends and family. I’ll always pick up the tab. 

I also love investing in startups, emerging fund managers and other interesting business international opportunities. That’s the juice for me. And of course, the goal of all this, making sure I have the financial wherewithal to work with whoever, whenever and wherever I want.

So make sure you are willing to spend the money on the awesome conferences or mastermind groups. It’s an investment. I’ve gotten tremendous value at relatively expensive events like Capital Camp or Leveling up Masterminds (LA & Miami) meetings and learning from like-minded people. It’s ultimately an investment in your personal growth as a businessperson and tax deductible as a business owner to boot. 

Because of this, I’m learning to spend the money more freely with an investor’s mindset, when it saves me time or prevents complexity and trouble. Time I can better use doing something else either profitable or more fun. Also this is with the understanding that money is recoverable but time is probably the world’s most perishable asset. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Pain Equals Future Success: Wisdom from Grim Hustle

I’ve gone through most of my life subconsciously avoiding pain and suffering. Basically trying to avoid being inconvenienced and chasing comfort. Because that was what I thought I was supposed to do. But all my biggest leaps of knowledge, understanding and wealth came when I tackled and embraced challenges directly. Or usually indirectly as my curiosity and naivety  took me in that direction. 

And when I think of the great men and women I admire, both alive or historically, they faced their challenges and took the pain. I only came to this conclusion, and dare I say, enlightenment, in the last year or two. And I finally and fully understand this now, especially after listening to Justin Waller and his much repeated aphorism: “You judge the size of man by the size of the problems they have.”

In fact, there is no better illustration than this video from Grim Hustle called
“Pain Equals Feature Success”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEkmvEuki4

“Does Your Life Suck? Are you suffering? Are you pain? Good! You are on a good path. Suffering is the only way to the top. Pain is the only way to change. Obstacles are the only way to success. 

American tv commercials made us believe everything in this life should be smooth and easy. 

Teachers and counselors taught us we should not have aggressions and conflicts in life. You have been lied to. Go your way. And let it be an honorable way. A way to make your ancestors proud. 

You will face pain on this way. Suffering, frustration, humiliation. Accept the pain, smile at the pain, embrace the pain. Pain is the gatekeeper of destiny. Pain is there to ask you one simple question: Do you really want to achieve your goals? Or are you just a talker?

Tell your pain wherever you want to go. Pain will build the stairway to the top.” 

I couldn’t say this any better myself. So in the vein of ex-Navy SEAL, influencer and extreme sports champ, David Goggins: embrace the pain & suffering. Challenge and push yourself. If you are comfortable that means you are falling behind. Or worse, rotting. Your competition is not resting, nor should you. 

Requoting Tim Ferriss: "The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life." Suffering leads to endurance and enlightenment. It’s the path to a well earned better life. 

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 3rd, 2023

“When you give joy to other people, you get more joy in return. You should give a good thought to happiness that you can give out.”— Eleanor Roosevelt


1. "To sum it all up, I believe there is a possibility threshold of intelligence beyond which you must optimize for some components of intelligence (or maybe for specific types of knowledge) because you can no longer optimize for generalized overall intelligence and push all the major dimensions of it forward.

What will this mean for investing?

It means if this begins to happen, investors, entrepreneurs, and executives, will need to understand the tradeoff boundaries. In other words, where is it best to make tradeoffs, to what end, and how? How do the fundamental limits that drive these tradeoffs map to use cases, technologies, data, and other aspects of the intelligence supply chain?

If this is true, it means building a superintelligence may not be a winner-take-all game."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/how-the-fundamental-limits-of-intelligence

2. "To its owner, a sports team is more than just a plaything. If you happen to have the billions it takes to acquire one, you presumably have a near-infinite number of ways to spend your money. By buying a team, an owner can reveal their inner winner — or make people forget how they made all that money in the first place.

If everything had gone according to plan, Steven A. Cohen might have been parading down the Canyon of Heroes this month. When he purchased the New York Mets in 2020 for a record-setting price of $2.4 billion, Cohen promised to restore his favorite team from childhood to glory, saying he would be disappointed if he did not bring it another World Series within “three to five years.” He then assembled the highest-paid roster in baseball history.

The ecstatic Mets nation treated the richest man in baseball like he was a free-spending folk hero. At 67, Cohen, a Stamford-based hedge-fund manager, has $14 billion according to Bloomberg, or maybe $19 billion if you believe Forbes, but at any rate, a whole lot of money — seemingly more than enough to procure a championship."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/steve-cohen-mets-citi-field-queens-casino-bid.html

3. "DX (Developer Experience) will emerge as a key source of competitive advantage over the next decade and more.

UX emerged as a key competitive battleground in a world of many user interfaces (UIs) competing for the scarce resource of user attention.

DX is emerging as the next big battleground in a world of many application programming interfaces (APIs) competing for the scarce resource of developer commitment."

https://platforms.substack.com/p/dx-is-the-new-ux

4. Important discussion on good management in companies from one of the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dofw-YiBfZI

5. This is a deeply insightful conversation. Importance of Defensetech & Anduril. Thank goodness for Palmer Luckey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kONhhKQi0pU

6. "So as an aside, how did Singapore get so rich? In fact, its development model is pretty similar to Ireland’s: a very small English-speaking country, a great education system, tons of high-skilled immigration, and an industrial policy that focuses relentlessly on attracting foreign direct investment. Singapore’s main investor is the U.S., for whose businesses Singapore acts as the “gateway” to Asia in much the same way Ireland is the “gateway” to Europe.

It’s not a model that can easily be copied by larger countries, of course, since the FDI has to come from somewhere. But Singapore has executed this small-country gameplan with amazing skill — even better, in many ways, than Ireland. (The fact that it has done this while also surviving in a rough geographic neighborhood, upholding racial diversity, and maintaining extremely low crime is even more impressive, but that’s a story for another day.)"

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/singapore-urbanism

7. "But the path to end this war does not only lead through the battlefield. We need to start thinking not just about helping Ukraine, but about defeating Russia—or, if you prefer different language, persuading Russia to leave by any means possible. If Russia is already fighting America and America’s allies on multiple fronts, through political funding, influence campaigns, and its links to other autocracies and terrorist organizations, then the U.S. and Europe need to fight back on multiple fronts too.

We should outcompete Russia for the scarce commodities needed to build weapons, block the software updates that they need to run their defense factories, look for ways to sabotage their production facilities. Russia used fewer weapons and less ammunition this year than it did last year. Our task should be to ensure that next year is worse.

But some of our money is needed too. Spending it now will produce savings down the line, and not just because we can prevent a catastrophe in Ukraine. By learning how to fight Russia, a sophisticated autocracy with global ambitions, we will be better prepared for later, larger conflicts, if there is ever a broader struggle with China or Iran. More important, by defeating Russia we might be able to stop those larger conflicts before they begin. The goal in Ukraine should be to end Russia’s brutish invasion—and to deter others from launching another one somewhere else."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/us-ukraine-support-putin-defeat/675953/

8. Good articulation of the counter to Zeihan's view on China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XupM5_zHDbM

9. A breakdown of Jack Butcher's business empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH_h6TaxquI

10. This is a great framework. ACP: Audience, Community, Product. Ryan Holiday using this for his media empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLzrBb66C9M

11. This is a good thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJfDKlnWYuA

12. "America’s regional posture does have weaknesses. Washington’s lack of an ambitious trade agenda is a handicap. Its relationship with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and some of its members also has underperformed.

And yet, for all its imperfections and the myriad global challenges it confronts, the United States still finds itself in a strong position. It is still where people from around the world turn when crises erupt. It is where many people from around the world still seek to emigrate. America still maintains the world’s largest economy and strongest military, and by a sizeable margin.

None of this is meant to suggest that Taiwan’s relationship with America is risk-free, especially when a US administration acts recklessly. But there is a risk for Taiwan in not aligning with a United States that is resilient and knows what it is doing externally."

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2023/11/13/2003809077

13. "The common thread in all these stories is that digital technologies that create order in autocracies are simultaneously creating chaos in democracies. Of course, it’s still far too early to tell if this pattern will persist — the effects of the printing press in 1980 were very different from its effects in 1580. But I’m very uneasy about the direction in which things are trending. A world where only totalitarian governments can lever technology to their advantage is not one I would enjoy living in."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-super-scary-theory-of-the-21st-a3a

14. "In essence, the establishment of international charter cities in Ukraine could herald a new paradigm in geopolitical dynamics, where economic interdependence fosters stability and peace. These cities, with their innovative approaches to governance, investment, and cultural integration, could become pivotal in reshaping Ukraine's role on the global stage.

As they grow and thrive, they will not only bolster Ukraine's economy but also contribute to a more interconnected and harmonious world order. This vision of Ukraine, transformed into a mosaic of thriving international hubs, offers a glimpse into a future where cooperation and progress triumph over conflict and division, setting a precedent for generations to come."

https://www.greetingsfromthefuture.org/p/game-changer-for-ukraine

15. Good teardown on a budding media empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mVnQ4wn0_c

16. "We’re well aware that there is a cohort of people online hoping to “return to the past”.This is no different than praying for a time machine. It doesn’t exist and never will. Ignore every single person who tells you to “stop selling products that promote the problem”. This is a loser mentality since you are fighting reality. If you want to make it financially, spotting trends and investing your time and energy into them is the way to do it!

Once you accept that as reality, you’ll be well positioned to re-orient your headspace for the future. You’re not going to see kids playing sports outside for 6 hours a day (like you did in the 80s). 

You’re going to see kids plugged into their computers 24/7/365.

Don’t Fight Reality!

We realize a lot of these trends are not exciting. People spending more money on pets than baby clothing is a weird trend. That said, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Remember that the trend is not what you should do, it is something that you should accept as the future and reality. You don’t need to participate in any of the trends, however, you will be in the minority. The vast majority will fall into the categories listed above. There is a reason why OnlyFans is constantly growing."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/future-of-social-life-in-the-2020s

17. “Listen, I don’t care if she’s there or not,” says Chuck. “No puffery, no hyperbole: That is one badass woman. She is smart, sharp. Dude, nothing but admiration for her. She works her ass off. Have you spent the day with her? Her schedule is ridiculous. It’s like two people. You know what’s the coolest thing, though? It’s a sneaky smart. Because what we do together is so 180 degrees from the public persona thing you see in the photographs and stuff. I wish more people could see through the glam.”

https://www.gq.com/story/kim-kardashian-men-of-the-year-cover-2023

18. "Seed has seen an influx of multi-stage and late-stage investors moving earlier. When late-stage is unattractive, Seed becomes more compelling by comparison. First, venture investors need to spend their time doing something.

And late-stage isn’t really an option right now. But Seed also offers upside with limited downside: if things work, multi-stage firms can lead future rounds and buy up more ownership. If things don’t work, firms don’t lose that much capital. 

For a smaller fund like mine, this becomes a point of differentiation with founders: a $1M check doesn’t matter much to a $3B fund, but it matters a lot to me.

This manifests in the amount of work a Seed firm will do for a founder compared to a multi-stage firm. All multi-stage firms aren’t the same, of course; many treat Seed with conviction and roll up their sleeves. But this is the broader trend, and many firms do treat Seed this way. Seed is the most “artisanal” of any investment round, yet is being treated by many like financial option value. 

While Seed valuations and round sizes haven’t corrected, the number of deals has slumped. We’re at a 12-quarter low in terms of deal activity."

https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/seed-investing-the-state-of-the-union

19. "True influence/authority are not products of speed, but of making each communication significant. They are also key elements for businesses, bloggers and marketers in a world drowning in information. 

Here’s why: each day, in every niche, there is fierce, cutthroat competition for attention. While there are increasing numbers sharing greater volumes of ideas in various channels and platforms competing for fleeting attention spans — now armed with AI — many view the landscape with the philosophy that more is better. If you think like that, you’re wrong.

The coming backlash is against the noise. Any shiny new tools are fun, and people subscribe to new streams and users in a carefree manner as they join new networks, connect with people and see excitement surrounding them. Yet attention is finite, and slowly every user realizes it is not about getting every new thing right now to scarf down information like Kirby, it is about finding and connecting with what is meaningful."

https://www.hottakes.space/p/prepare-for-the-coming-content-backlash

20. "Even in the earliest days of a startup, if you’re building something of genuine value, there are likely customers who are ready (and eager) to buy. Learning how to identify buying signals and simplifying your buying process in order to make it easy for those customers to pay you is essential to capturing as much early value as you can."

https://chrisneumann.com/blog/make-it-easy-for-customers-to-pay-you

21. "Don’t: Argue that war machines somehow make war humane or that restricting WAI keeps war “human.” Don’t romanticize this. War is hell, and history is littered with well-intentioned inventors trying to make war more humane through deadly inventions. Nor, however, does handing a robot a machine gun somehow make the apocalypse.

As a society, we’ve been reliant on AI narratives driven by hysteria and science fiction for decades with little real-world data to push back on it. That is going to change very soon, and I think you’ll see that while warbot can be a force multiplier, it’s not going to be a silver bullet for combat especially as the technology proliferates around the world.

In fact, the most destructive employment of AI on the battlefield would be if we held ourselves to an arms control treaty that our rivals did not. The PRC in particular has a long track record of signing agreements and then blowing them off as soon as they get what they want. When the missiles start flying, I don’t want to be the only guy without a warbot fighting by his side."

https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/dont-ban-the-war-bots

22. Learning from one of the top VCs: Thrive Capital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3UCFuSghdc&t=46s

23. "Hollywood has saturated the market with look-alike movies. Their pipeline of films is now exploding like the Nord Stream, but with this difference—studios are still sitting on a huge pile of future bombs.

And what does a studio do with a bomb on its hands?

They have four options—and they are four kinds of ugly

You delay the film, hoping for a better market environment in the future.

You send it back for rewriting and more filming

You cancel it entirely, and write off the investment

You release it—sinking another $50 million, more or less, into marketing—and then watch it collapse at the box office.

Walt Disney may have built his company on creativity, but his successors have replaced it with an empire based entirely on brand extensions. These are now crumbling."

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-kill-a-superhero

24. Justin Waller is the man!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i654fxtQW4U

25. Love Justin Waller, so much to learn from him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaNEHakXpUE

26. Wow, Patrick Bet David. An amazing interview. So many insights here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMPLCie1G_I

27. "I do sense that good investors that survive and thrive in venture are coming to their senses and the best part of the venture markets will continue to be reasonably priced (not Y Combinator) seed stage investing. 

For great returns, the best seed investors will not just put money to work right now, but will focus on the right founders and sectors and deploy at the prices that create optionality for exits."

https://www.howardlindzon.com/p/no-wall-worry-climb-venture-marketsand-customer-limited-partner

28. Great conversation as always. SMBs will be the beneficiary of AI tools in the long run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFyZnUT_BEc

29. "With 50-plus countries (the number is growing all the time – the Czech Republic is one of the latest) enticing digital nomads with a visa typically lasting a year or longer, the ability to work from anywhere has become a more appetising proposition – especially with the cost of living crisis hitting pockets hard in the UK. It has really taken off after the coronavirus pandemic.

As the UK heads into winter, a fair few people will be mulling over the idea of setting up shop in another part of the world for a spell."

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/nov/04/digital-nomads-work-remotely-tech-visas

30. Didn't know Dean Philipps before this but this was really enlightening. I was impressed with him as a Presidential candidate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hh8lcoJ1NA

31. Lots of learning here from Garry. He is not just a great investor but a great creator as well. He is also a good man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5qAKbFLDw8

32. Good view on what’s happening in the seed stage & Series A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uht9zOeEkFM

33. Another great summary of the Open AI saga from last weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjS-JvfWtY0&t=2070s

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Building in Public and Showing Your Receipts: Differentiation in the Age of Grifters

Social media has been a boon and curse. We get a glimpse of worlds we never would have had access to in prior decades. So many new awesome people to learn from but also lots of frauds. I’d even include the influencers selling classes online but whose only business accomplishments are taking Instagram or videos of their fake luxurious lifestyles via rented villas, jets and expensive watches. 

I can’t tell you how many tech startup founders in the last decade I know who show up on big tech conference stages, on podcast interviews or who even have their own youtube channels bragging about being multiple exit founders. I would never rat them out but “MOFO, I was on your cap table a few times and those exits were non-existent or negative.”  I’m all for “fake it till you make it” but there is a very thin line between exaggeration and lying. 

The alternative. Build in public. Whatever you think of Iman Gadzhi, he has been at this for the last 10 years, hustling & building businesses. The crazy thing is he has also documented all of this on his various social media channels as well. He started his Youtube channel in 2015. He built an advertising agency business in his teens, then expanded to edtech, crypto and other software businesses as well as investing. He is credible because it’s all been documented online.

@Kp who was known for coining the term: “Building in Public” is a great success story. His definition: “the practice of creating content & sharing stories with openness and transparency in order to attract like-minded people and nurture those relationships.”

It helps you define your niche and act as a lighthouse for your tribe.

More importantly, not only are you documenting your journey, you have to show the results. As Justin Waller says, “show your receipts”. Actual proof. Both success but just as important are your failures too. No one trusts someone too perfect. It’s okay to show your warts and all. Humans are imperfect and we are naturally attracted to this. 

This is how you build a real brand and trust. Through authenticity. That and doing the hard work and backing up your claims. This will eventually distinguish you from all the fakers and noise out there.

Read More
Marvin Liao Marvin Liao

Parallels in History: America in 2023=Late Roman Republic

I love history and I love reading history books. I recall being 9 years old and finding a history book at school in the back of the class. It was all about Greek and Roman history, I was entranced and could not put that book down. 

This led to my love affair with reading and history and what almost turned into an academic career pursuing this. I took a history degree at University and did summer school at the excellent Cambridge University. The primus inter pares (first among equals) among colleges for studying history. 

Surprisingly my history studies have been incredibly helpful and lucrative in my business career. It’s helped me understand the backgrounds and cultures of the places I visit and invest in. It helps an investor understand cycles: both up and down. As Mark Twain famously wrote: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it certainly rhymes”.

Which leads me to my observation about America and the world in 2023. I recommend reading “The Storm before the Storm” by Duncan & “Rubicon” by Holland, which are excellent narratives on the fall of the Roman Republic. The similarities to present day America are shocking. 

Picture a place that was once rich, powerful, energized, ambitious; astride a massive trading empire, backed by the most powerful army and navy in the world having vanquished any of their closest competitors. Yet due to their great dominance and riches, the people become complacent, comfortable and pursue frivolous pursuits. Wealth inequality grows.  The political elites stop thinking of the greater good and challenge each other in ever more vicious & unscrupulous methods. 

Sound familiar? This describes Rome but it can easily also describe the present day USA. The big difference is we have a peer competitor in China & their now lackey Russia actively undermining us. We are so distracted internally, with a populace’s morale & trust sapped by Forever Wars in the Middle East, culture wars raging and run by an aging, venal and or  incompetent political class. The American people are tired, distracted and apathetic. The only thing that will wake everyone up is pain or a massive military defeat. Here is hoping that this does not get to that. 

I used to rage at this and even feel some despair. But my realization was that I can’t do much about any of this. I’ve learned to be stoic and focus on what I can control. All I can do is get physically fit, financially fit, diversify assets and locations. Take care of my family. Build close ties to people around me in my network, my neighborhood and be in a position to help them. Vote with my dollars into companies and businesses that support my values and that support & protect America. And then leave the rest to God. 

Besides, I’d never bet against an American turn around even though it seems grim now, as many of the Roman Republic’s enemies found out the hard way.

Read More