Building Businesses in New Frontiers: A Thirst for Adventure Abroad
I remember the great Star Trek tagline: “to go where no man has gone before”. That explains the great appeal of frontiers like space or the ocean or going to difficult unexplored places. It appeals to the young person who wants to explore new places and challenges.
That is why international business is so attractive to many of us. And why global investors have been so interesting to me personally. People like Richard & Christopher Chandler (Sovereign Global Fund), John Templeton, Jim Rogers, Mark Mobius, Bill Browder, Daniel K. Ludwig, Adolf Lundin, Marc Rich, John Kleinheinz, Swen Lorenz, and Robert Smith of “Riches among Ruins” fame.
To travel and do business in places that few people have been to. To learn about new cultures and find interesting unique business opportunities. And to invest before anyone else even knows of it.
Places like all of Eastern Europe right after the fall of the Soviet Union or China in the early 2000s to 2013. Or places in the present day like Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Rwanda, Kenya, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Uzbekistan. Or in our backyard, Mexico, Colombia and even Argentina.
Places with completely different cultures, no clear public safety (read crime), corruption, minimal rule of law and prosperity in some places and bad infrastructure but huge opportunities and economic growth.
But where else can you get to indulge your sense of adventure and also have a chance to make a lot of money. Or lose a lot of it. It’s the iron law of business, No risk, no return. High risk, high return. Something I really wish I took to heart earlier and only understood after deprogramming my middle class Asian immigrant brain.
One of my favorite new fiction books “The Siberia Job” by Josh Haven is based on the real life investing adventurers who went to Russia to buy up tenders of big Russian companies for cheap in what was the crazy & violent wild East during the 90s. Huge fortunes were made by those willing to take the risk of violence at worst or being cheated at least.
There is a great comment made once the two protagonists decide to embark on their business venture in Russia.
“Petr….let me ask you. When you were growing up , and you heard about those Old West mining towns in America, Gold Rush towns-did you think, man, I’m glad I wasn’t there, that sounds like it would have been dangerous?”
Or did you think, damn, I wish I’d been there with a six shooter and a cowboy hat and a goldmine.”
I wish I had approached opportunities with more confidence in myself and with a better sense of adventure as exemplified by the previous lines.
So for those with a sense of adventure and have a tolerance of risk, those who are looking to grow personally, professionally and financially at exponential levels, go to frontier markets. You will learn so much, meet so many interesting people and maybe even make a fortune. At worst, you will have a few new scars and lots of great stories!
Don’t Go to Davos: There is an Expiration Date for Everything
For those of us active on social media, it’s been incredible seeing the flurry of pictures and such all over social media bragging about being at Davos. Flexing. Yet it’s funny that it turns into a counter indicator. You think you are showing how connected and cool and awesome you are. All I see are a bunch of clueless “mids”. Davos used to be relevant prior to 2020 but so much has changed.
The WEF Davos event has gone the way of The Summit Series, SXSW, TED and Forbes 30 under 30 for tech people. Some would even argue Burning Man is one of these events that is past due. Super relevant and cool a long time ago. Now out of touch and soon to be buried in the past, taken over and inhabited by only the laggards and grifters. Or maybe just mainstream and thus not COOL or leading edge anymore.
Everything has a season. Everything has an expiration date. Countries. Companies. Even people. I saw a very relevant tweet from Dare Obasanjo:
“Startups tend to have 3 generations of employees
1. The 1st batch: A random mix of talented and mediocre people.
2. The pioneers: The nights and weekends crew who believe in the mission.
3. The settlers: The 9 to 5 crew who are attracted by the success the pioneers created.”
At the 3rd stage things start to go down fast. I saw this in Yahoo! The people who joined from 2009 onwards were pretty crap. You could argue Google started to go downhill 9 years ago and we are seeing the bloat really impact the business in 2020. Even formerly dominant VC funds prior to 2020 are now sucking wind badly.
What was a positive indicator before can quickly turn into a highly negative signal. The point of this is not to just bag on Davos and other Silicon Valley events and phenomena. The point I am making is that things change so quickly now, consumer behavior, cycles turn fast.
Jumping on trends is dangerous especially when it is at peak cool. The secret is doing something or joining something when it is not cool or known. Easier said than done. But the alpha is in doing something uncool which will become cool.
Tragedy Leads to Enlightenment: A Reminder That Life Is Short
I woke up last Saturday to incredibly sad news. A young startup friend of mine passed away.
He was brilliant, kind, driven and really just a good dude who leaves behind a wife and young son. I was playing our last in person conversation in my head. It was November last year, we were having coffee and carrot cake, talking for hours about his startup, family, geopolitics and life in general. Now he is gone. What a tragedy for the world.
I’m still in shock but it kind of woke me up psychologically. Sometimes it takes a big loss to make you realize important things. If I am honest, I realized I was sleepwalking through life these last 7 months. Dissociated and out of body. It was like I was watching myself go through the motions of living in a third party view, just like a video game. Putting off hard decisions. Pretending to be happy outside, when I was just feeling completely numb inside.
I think many of us walk through life this way. It’s easy to distract ourselves with social media, Netflix, bad food and alcohol. Unhappy with the state of our lives, careers and families but unwilling to do the work to fix it. It takes a painful wake up call to jar us out of this.
So for anyone out there, now is the time to fix this. Do the hard thing that is good for you. Get in shape. If you hate your job, get a new one. If you hate your city, move. If you want to be your own boss, this is a great time to start something new as a startup founder or creator. Life is short and a gift. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste your time. Take it all in.
RIP Gio, I will miss our conversations. I will pray for you and your family. Thanks for your friendship and for waking me up.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 21st, 2024
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” -Gustav Flaubert
"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."
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/in-the-land-of-triggers-merry-christmas
2. This seems pretty right on. Israel tying up with Saudi and Turkey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYoOuJIj5qM
3. Hard times require hard advice. Vinod Khosla is one of the OGs of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJZsiXQuOUA
3. "A common mistake is to think this applies only to the size of the work. That is, “Rocks” means “stuff that takes a few quarters,” “Pebbles” means “a few sprints,” and “Sand” means “less than a sprint.”
This misses the most important point of work-ordering: It’s about maximizing impact by not allowing the easy or urgent things to crowd out the strategic things that take years to unfold but are more important than everything else combined. A thousand “quick wins” do not create durable advantages or fulfill a long-term vision.
Another mistake is to think that the previous paragraph is the end of the story. “Schedule revenue-growth stuff, then maintenance updates, got it.” No. Each type of work requires different prioritization frameworks, has different goals, and hide different traps that make you unwittingly ineffective.
If you pretend these differences don’t exist, your team will be working hard and delivering lots of code-commits—the appearance of “productivity”—but they’ll feel like they’re not making progress fast enough, competition will start catching up, and they’ll (correctly) complain that they can’t see how their work is connected to the strategy.
The good news is: It does not take additional time to do it right. This is an instance of “smarter, not harder.” You just need the right frameworks."
https://longform.asmartbear.com/rocks-pebbles-sand
4. So much food for thought. Tai Lopez has some great insights on society, business and human psychology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEMHTDUXN2k&t=2123s
5. How to Build a thesis driven partnership firm. USV is one of the best VCs in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHKojtF36A
6. "No matter how distressed Argentina’s situation has been throughout the years, there are always opportunities. The bond holdout debacle of the early 2000s is an example of one “vulture fund” that dared to buy up Argentina’s distressed debt. After a 15 year waiting game, payday came. This is the story of Elliott Management’s bond play that resulted in a return of historic proportions."
https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/paul-singing-bonds-dont-cost-a-thing
7. Another reason why the Western elites are weak & stupid. (or maybe just corrupt)
Price caps don't work and all it does it forces trade to the fringes.
We should have opened up all the taps of oil, cut regulations instead of following badly thought thru ESG & degrowth environmental policies. This way we can use market forces to drive down costs of oil so we gut Russia's oil income.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azm4yKKIlqE
8. An alternative view here on geopolitics. I don't agree with his views on Ukraine and Russia but he captures the heightened levels of economic and geopolitical risk going into 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0vAjbQ4VmM
9. Really great recap of NIA this year. So much fun this show & educational as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQlzR-eCu-U&t=699s
10. Tim Ferriss is the uber influencer and OG. Lots of tips on how to be productive and how to be a consistent writer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXUuStdMeoE
11. "As I read the trial transcripts, redactions and all, I’m realizing that pharmaceutical marketing is the most bro-style shit-talking industry I’ve ever seen. This fact shouldn’t be a surprise, I mean, a standard tactic to push expensive pills was to hire former cheerleaders to flirt with dorks in white coats, such that ‘pharma girls’ actually became a gag on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. And of course this is the industry where Martin Shkreli made his fortune.
But the story of IQVIA and how it is seeking to monopolize the space, explains so much about the twisted culture of corporate America. In this trial, executives were confronted with emails in which they used middle finger emojis towards rivals and talked about “blowing minds” in the industry. At one point, an executive texted a colleague at a rival firm, “Are we preparing a bag of cash right now?” with the response being “how big? 😉.” They then joked about how much money they would both make ‘integrating’ the two firms. Bro-ing down is fine at a tailgate, but when paired with a legal regime tolerant of consolidation, it means bros come to control the industry designed to help doctors learn which medicine to prescribe.
Ok, so what’s this case actually about, and why does it matter?
IQVIA has $14 billion a year in global revenue, which is a little over 2% of all pharmaceutical spending in America. It gets this revenue largely because it has the most important storehouse of medical data in the world, including information on nearly every medication prescribed to every patient in the U.S., the doctor who prescribed it, the pharmacy at which it was dispensed, the disease history of the patient, its pricing, and hundreds of other touch points.
Nearly every major pharmaceutical firm, and most governments, depend on IQVIA to understand how to develop, finance, track, and deploy medical treatments."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-insufferable-bros-who-run-corporate
12. "Most people do not dwell on their mistakes. They prefer to think and talk mainly about their greatest triumphs.
However, the most successful few in any profession constantly examine and improve on their past performances, both winners and losers.
They know what worked, what did not, and how to improve the next time around.
Such is the case with the best PE and VC investors. The super successful, the masters of the business, succeed in large part because of their ability to learn from both their triumphs and disasters.
They remain students of their own histories and humble about what the future could bring - remarkable success or devastating failure."
https://privatequityguy.beehiiv.com/p/564m-revenue-8-people-hq
13. A good rundown of 2024 predictions from Silicon Valley.
https://nbt.substack.com/p/nextbigthing2024
14. "For Ukraine, the immediate future is one of several months of hard fighting without critical resources, while endeavouring to regenerate the combat power that was expended over 2023. But Europe can determine what the second half of 2024 and indeed 2025 will look like. This is a war that can be won.
The recent successful strike on the Russian landing ship Novocherkassk in harbour, protected by layers of Russian defences, shows how Ukraine can make effective use of the equipment that it is supplied with. But European security must not be squandered by more complacency."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/27/ukraine-russia-europe-support-kyiv
15. Samo Burma is a very wise man with a good perspective of history and the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XX1kv--lB8&t=13s
16. Learning from the best. Peter Fenton of Benchmark. Fellow GenXer but 1000X way more successful. The art and science of VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWEP6vUomi8
17. Another legend & OG in Silicon Valley. Investor and operator. I aspire to be more like Elad Gil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5uNsVOOi3M
18. "We are only in the opening chapters of this story, but I’m not sure it will get worse.
Even if we don’t change our response to these attacks, through persistence we can endure through what one would suspect is a limited Houthi inventory of useful weapons, especially if we can stop resupply from Iran. With a large dose of luck, we may get through with only an impact on economics and our own magazine depth.
There are two downsides even with this optimistic possible outcome.
--We’ve burned through an already thin inventory.
--We’ve established a precedence that anyone can take pot-shots at American warships without response.
The second worries me the most."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/barfights-winchester-indians-and
19. "Intellectual golden ages occur when new intellectual authority is achievable for those at the frontiers of knowledge. This feat of social engineering that legitimizes illegible but intellectually productive individuals is then upstream of material incentives, which is why a merely independently wealthy person cannot just throw money at any new scientific field or institution and expect it to grow in legitimacy. It ultimately rests on political authority.
The most powerful individuals in a society must lend their legitimacy to the most promising scientific minds and retract it only when they fail as scientists, rather than as political players. The society in which science can not just exist, but flourish, is one where powerful individuals can elevate people with crazy new ideas on a whim.
The dreams of automating scientific progress with vast and well-funded bureaucracies have evidently failed. This is because bureaucracies are only as dynamic as the live players who pilot them. Without a live player at the helm who is a powerful individual in control of the bureaucracy, the existing distribution of legitimacy is just frozen in place, and more funding works only to keep it more frozen rather than to drive scientific progress forward.
Powerful individuals will not always make the right bets on crazy new ideas and the crazy people who come up with them, but individuals have a chance to make the right bets, whereas bureaucracies can only pretend to make them. Outsourcing science to vast and well-funded bureaucracies then gives us the impression of intense work on the cutting edge of science, but without any of the substance.
The solution is not just to grant more funding and legitimacy to individual scientists rather than scientific bureaucracies, but to remind powerful individuals, and especially those with sovereign authority, that if they don’t grant this legitimacy, no one else will. Science lives or dies on personal endorsement by powerful patrons. Only the most powerful individuals in society can afford to endorse the right immature and speculative ideas, which is where all good ideas begin their life cycle."
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/science-needs-sovereigns-44d
20. I always learn new things when these guys talk. Two very accomplished and interesting friends catching up.
My life is always better after listening and trying some of their tips and suggestions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXa5RCGLiM
21. This article is meant as a critique. I think Silicon Valley is becoming this way because of a new level of competitiveness & toughness is required to overcome the immense change and pain coming.
“All of Silicon Valley reminds me of the first Top Gun movie: the abundance of testosterone, like 1970s, 1980s all over again,” said Manu Cornet, a cartoonist and software engineer who formerly worked at Twitter, now X. “It’s not even sarcastic or second degree.
“It’s a very jacked up movement,” said Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. “The people I know are thinking about testosterone and eating 500 grams of protein a day. They are ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked.”
But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity that’s strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat.
The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. It’s not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/12/27/24011198/bezos-zuckerberg-musk-buff-mma-masculine
22. Turkey is a dominant regional power. And will be even more powerful in post-American world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fruhvf_OWA0
23. Timely conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBeNRC_z3gw
24. "In sum, these wars over networked tribal alignment will accelerate our inability to make decisions at every level of society and governance. Facts will not be considered facts by many people unless they fit their tribal alignment, and any facts presented by people in opposing tribes will immediately be seen as attacks (like Rufo’s plagiarism charge). Attacks that will be immediately rejected or ignored. Worse, many networks will manufacture facts (for example, fake hate crimes) to advance towards the goal.
In the end, these conflicts will achieve the demoralization of the US that the Soviet KGB info warrior Yuri Bezmenov hoped to accomplish during the Cold War."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/aligning-the-ivy-league
25. An insight dense conversation for tech founders and investors. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWYN4DsVJo
26. How to be more thoughtful about your life. Die with Zero. Recommend the book as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8TTW957qDQ
27. This is a great conversation between two super smart people. Two of the world's most interesting people: Matt Mullenweig & Tim Ferriss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpaCLIUnXo
28. "But soft power is not a zero-sum game. It can't be applied coercively, as hard power in the form of diplomatic, economic, or military force can be. The difference between soft and hard power is the difference between sending rockets into a rival nation's borders versus sending BTS rocketing up their pop charts. I suppose that purchasing one band’s song or merch might come at the expense of another, in the cold, hard math of consumer spending.
But in practice, things don’t work that way: loving Bong Joon-ho’s films doesn’t preclude one from loving Hirokazu Kore-eda’s. Reading Japanese manga doesn’t preclude enjoying Korean webtoons. Our budgets may be limited, but our ability to like things is as bottomless as our hunger for stimulation and novelty. So I've always taken reports of one nation's pop-cultural rise coming at the expense of another's with a big grain of salt. You should too.
There is perhaps no better example of this than what happened to Japan over the course of 2023. All but written off at the beginning of the 2020s, it re-emerged as a pop-cultural powerhouse over the course of just one post-pandemic (he said hopefully) year.
At one point earlier this month, films from Japan occupied two of the three top spots on the American box-office charts -- Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron at number one, and Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One at number three. Putting aside my personal feelings about Miyazaki's and Yamazaki's films, this is seriously impressive stuff."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/2023-the-year-japans-sun-rose-again
29. This is quite interesting. Dallas becoming a major financial center.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/major-banks-descend-on-dallas-5855684/
30. "As an entrepreneur, it’s essential not to get too caught up in the potential exit. The focus should be on enjoying the journey and continuing to build a great business. In 2011, we had one of our first serious opportunities to consider selling, but we chose to stay the course, and were better off for it."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/12/30/the-first-serious-acquisition-conversation/
31. A conversation on money. FIWOOT over FIRE. Financially Independent & Work On Own Terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TJndZbjxP4
32. "Private-sector groups are exempt from the bureaucratic red tape that surrounds aid delivered through official government channels. Government aid can take months to approve and even longer to deliver. But private-sector channels are able to deliver assistance within days. Many of these entities already have well-established relationships with military officials, diplomats, and others on the ground in Ukraine, which allows for timely and accurate updates from the frontlines. Information detailing the most critical needs can be relayed instantly, and tailored aid can quickly be delivered where needed.
Success in Ukraine is both a victory for Ukrainians and for strategic American interests. Our economic prosperity is directly linked to the European region, and the greatest threats to our national security are Russia and China. China is watching this war unfold, and if Russia comes out victorious, there is no doubt China will follow with its own acts of aggression. The consequences of this war will have a domino effect, and I can only hope that Americans — both within the government and private citizens — will help ensure that dominos are falling in our favor.
Russia will continue to exploit its support from our adversaries with drones from Iran and long-range missiles from North Korea. As long as this continues, we must respond with support for our friends in Ukraine. Ukraine remains resolute in its efforts to win this war, and to gamble otherwise is a mistake."
33. "Weaver, the founder and managing partner of Alpine Investors, has built a private equity empire with an emphasis on personal growth, an unusual topic in the world of cutthroat investing.
He credits the self-help genre for teaching him many of the techniques he has applied to his personal and professional lives.
Graham believes in self-improvement so much that he has built a personal brand at the intersection of entrepreneurship, investing, and self-help. His TikTok account has amassed nearly 1 million followers."
https://www.readtheprofile.com/p/the-profile-interview-meet-the-private
34. "Peterffy created Interactive Brokers in 1993 as a way to sell his firm's electronic trading capabilities to the public. In 2007, he sold 10% of Interactive's shares in a public offering, pocketing about $1 billion. Over the last 15 years, as high-frequency traders took over Interactive’s market making operations, Peterffy doubled down on growing the brokerage business, which today serves over 2.4 million customer accounts, including hedge funds and trading shops.
He owns about 75% of Interactive Brokers, which has a market capitalization of over $33 billion, making Peterffy one of the 25 wealthiest Americans with an estimated $26.2 billion fortune. He also holds an estimated $3 billion in investments and cash, as well as over 560,000 acres of land, primarily in Florida where he moved in 2014.
What I'm looking out for is where socialism may be coming next, and I think America is one of those places. So then I say to myself, “I don't want to be fully invested in the United States, where else should I be where there is some hope for private enterprise surviving?” I look at New Zealand, Australia, Canada, England, South America, and places like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. I'm not saying those places are better than here now, but things could be changing. The U.S. could be becoming more of a collectivist society. So where else is there a chance that capitalism will survive?
I basically think there are no important secrets in how to invest, and there is not a lot you can learn from others. It's all logical. The better you know the facts, and the more facts you know, the better you do as an investor. What I have learned through the many years I spent in these businesses is, there is no substitute for doing your own work."
https://archive.ph/4Js57#selection-519.0-519.803
35. "Fast forward to 2023, and a similar rush is unfolding, not for gold, but for AI technologies. The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI has sparked a modern-day Gold Rush in Silicon Valley, drawing in investors, engineers, and entrepreneurs, all chasing the dream of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This AI Rush, though more structured and organized than its 1848 counterpart, shares many parallels, particularly in the way opportunities are seized and value is created and captured.
One key question emerges: In this new era of technological prospecting, who will be the James Marshall, Samuel Brannan, Levi Strauss, or George Hearst of AI? As we navigate this modern Gold Rush, the lessons from 1848 remain ever-relevant, reminding us that in times of great opportunity, the most significant rewards often lie in understanding and adapting to the needs of the era."
https://fellowsfund.substack.com/p/1848-vs-2023-gold-rush-vs-ai-rush
36. A grim view of the economic future. Jim Rogers is an investing legend.
The Unsexy but Critical: Business Operations
I remember when I first volunteered to take on international Sales operations projects when I was a few years into my career at Yahoo!, how many questions I got from my colleagues.
I was moving from doing the sexy stuff of international marketing. The glitz and glamor of ad agencies, advertising and new product rollouts to the basic grind and dirty. I remember many of my colleagues being confused and being counseled that it was a career mistake.
They were wrong. Besides being an orthogonal career move to work on an area critical to the company, it was also a great crash course on the fundamentals of business. Operations are all the hidden details that “allow the trains to run on time.”
It’s the basics of systems, processes and people that deliver our product and services. It’s the core of business. It’s the gritty details and requires amazing project management. It’s a codified way of doing stuff and how we deliver against what is being sold and promised by sales. It was for me personally a great education and step to leading sales teams later in my career. I never sold anything I couldn’t deliver on and this has served me well for the rest of my career.
I’d heard of a saying “How we do anything is how we do everything.” And this is certainly true in business operations. I always use the analogy of putting on a big event or party. Operations are in the background and if all goes well, nobody really notices. But if you screw up, people definitely see it. I think that’s why so many shy away from this part of business. It’s unsexy yet critical.
This is what differentiates the best executives, founders and operators from the rest. They are strategic but don’t shy away from getting their hands dirty in operational details to find out what’s going wrong and what can be optimized.
So my point for anyone looking for a great career, go into operations. It’s a great way to learn business at its fundamental underpinnings. It’s not sexy. But maybe because of that, it’s not as competitive. And you may end up being invaluable to your company. Couple this with sales and marketing skills and you will become an unstoppable founder and business person. Delivering on what you say you will do puts you ahead of 90% of people out there.
If You Worry, You Shouldn’t Be Worried; If You aren’t worrying, You Should Be Worried
I heard the famous hedge funder and author Ray Dalio say this. In regards to his rise and fall of great geopolitical powers like the Chinese, the Dutch, the British and now the Americans. Net net: when you worry that means you aren’t complacent and are actively trying to get better. I hope this is the case with America.
But that comment is also very relevant to individuals as well. I am naturally an anxious person. Combining that incredible greed and materialism, fear of poverty, massive insecurity and being blessed with good health and impostor syndrome, has led me to become a detail oriented workaholic. Which has also led me to become a pretty buttoned-down business operator.
As I’ve been working with a therapist for the last 3 years in pursuit of understanding myself and hopefully to aim for a more balanced life. I have come to realize I’m not sure that is even possible for someone like me. I’m so wired to work and put material things first, that short of major shock or drug therapy, I just don’t see myself changing very much here.
Nor do I really want to change this aspect too much if I am honest. It got me here to this point, and it’s what will get me to the next major milestone. My anxiety and rage keeps me young. My paranoia feeds my action. My intense curiosity feeds my learning.
This is one of the reasons that I think I won’t become like so many long time & older denizens of Silicon Valley. Wildly successful and wealthy but are largely irrelevant.
I want to be both successful and relevant. I will stay in this game as long as I can and I have every intention of doing what I do till the end of my days. Learning the craft of business all the time. Finding, investing and working with amazing startup founders all around the world. Winning the game is being in the game. To do that you have to be a bit paranoid. Paranoia will keep you on your toes and alive.
Celebrate Your Wins: The Key to Good Morale and Happiness
I think I was a pretty effective operating executive when I was at Yahoo! But I admit that I ran my team and the business hard. While we hit our aggressive numbers, despite it being satisfying, it was also in retrospect probably mechanical and joyless. We didn’t celebrate our wins. We just went onto the next quarter and the next goal.
This is pretty much how most type A individuals live their lives and run their teams. Get the win and then move onto the next thing. This becomes an endless death march, especially for teams. They get burned out.
I learned to do things better when I was at 500 Startups and my SF-based team lived the motto “Have Fun, Get Sh-t Done” and for the first 4-5 years it really worked out well. I’d like to think we accomplished a lot but also enjoyed the process along the way.
The lesson I take from this is that you need to celebrate the small wins, both personally and for your team. They are important touch-points and great moments to slowdown and reflect on what you accomplished. It’s a good rite to celebrate. Then you have proper closure to jump into the next big thing.
And hopefully enjoy the journey a lot more too. As the cliche goes, the journey is everything. This seems to be a much more sustainable way to work. Treat your life like a fun marathon and not a painful sprint.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 14th, 2024
“One part at a time, one day at a time, we can accomplish any goal we set for ourselves.” — Karen Casey
"With all these details working in its favor, it’s possible that El Segundo’s hardware scene was always inevitable. But my sense is SpaceX demonstrating what was possible, amidst all that space and talent, was like a lightning strike in the dry, California foothills. And that fire has been burning now for years.
Today there’s Anduril, an hour south, and more recently Varda, Radiant Nuclear, Impulse Space, Hadrian, Freeform Future, Senra and HGen — just a handful of the local companies Founders Fund has invested in since SpaceX. The Boring Company and Panthalassa both started off in LA.
Peeking out of corners all over town, a few minutes’ drive from point to point, robotic pizza trucks weave among electric drivetrains, automated casting foundries, small launch vehicles, rocket engines for carbon sequestration, cloud-seeding drones, and containerized nukes built in a glorified garage.
Even just in recent memory we’ve seen hype cycles fully play out, from social media and SaaS to AI and (a few times now) crypto. There was and remains exciting promise in all of these spaces, but too much hype means too many speculative investors and too much capital, which leads to more companies than can be sustained by the talent pool or customer base. In a dynamic like this, reality tends to fall short of expectations, pain follows, and important work can die. I don’t want this for Gundo, because, frankly, this is the only place this work is being done, and nowhere else for people building here to go.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining. Hardware doesn’t work like social media, where the winner takes all and colocation becomes memetic. A hardware ecosystem’s geographic network effects are positive sum. In other words, if hype inspires new companies who draw talent and enhance local capabilities — in addition to drawing capital and generating great tweets — then it can still work in our favor."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/thank-god-for-el-segundo
2. Lots of lessons from history and human civilization goes back further than we think. LONG History.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHYYo__Pkg0
3. "So what? Well, the Series A investors of 10–15 years ago operated very differently than most of the angel/seed investors of the last decade. With the rare exception, these Series A firms rarely shared deals with each other, because they wanted to maximize their ownership / dollars into the best deals (after all, they were taking board seats, so they were bandwidth constrained). They also ran more concentrated portfolios (never have I heard of a Series A firm with 40–50 companies). Alternatively, the predominant seed model of the last decade has been collaborative, high velocity and high diversification.
I didn’t make the rules, but I’m doing my best to play the game on the field and it seems pretty clear that Seed is becoming the new Series A. That isn’t to say that there aren’t new/different ways to win (I’m confident there are), but we need to be aware of these dynamics and recognize the pressure that this evolution creates on how we’ve historically invested and the skills required to be successful.
For Equal, that means operating more like the “Original Series A” investors than “Micro VCs.” We think this better fits our style as a firm and are embracing the market’s rotation toward this style of investing at Seed. There are pros and cons to all strategies, but being authentic to your team’s abilities is the strategy that will position you best for success."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/seed-is-the-new-series-a-06a6b9d00ecc
4. Another educational episode with the boys. Lessons from the edge of the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl1TO5hLUzE
5. Germany rising again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s5vIrlpAo
6. Worthwhile conversation on how to thrive in our modern world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOEsojRfo-w&t=1468s
7. The epitome of Asymmetric warfare.......
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/19/missile-drone-pentagon-houthi-attacks-iran-00132480
8. This is why the American defense industrial base is a mess. It stems from policy in 1993.
"The policy of driving companies out of business, I wouldn't even say that was a policy. The policy was to streamline the defense industry so it didn't have a lot of overhead. And I also saw many of these companies had capabilities that the government wanted to maintain.
But in the next three years, we saw our industry lose 40% of its employees to the aerospace industry, and nearly 70% of the companies were basically absorbed and other companies were combined together to be more efficient. And it saved the government a great deal of money. The problem was it reduced the size of the industrial base, should we need one in the future."
9. There is so much here. The future is bright. Mindset matters and technology will help us expand our health span. Really worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSV7cxma6_s
10. "2024 will have the highest number of national elections since the mind virus of the “nation-state” infected our collective consciousness a few hundred years ago. Any politician who wants to get re-elected needs to give goodies to the people. For the rich asset holders, give them loose financial conditions by encouraging central banks to print money.
For the poor, give them handouts to cover the rising cost of food and energy, which is a direct result of policies that favour the asset-rich. For the middle class, give them “democracy,” tell them to pay their taxes, bend over, and be glad they got a vote. With this in mind, it makes no sense for a politician seeking re-election to stop the fiat debasement party. The votes from those who benefit from fiat debasement and inflation-linked handouts will outweigh the votes from those who suffer. As a result, money printing will surge in every “democracy” globally in 2024.
Crypto represents a movement to separate money and finance from the state. Using computers, the internet, and most importantly, cryptographic proofs, we the people have created the hardest money ever known, Bitcoin; and we created an entirely new decentralised financial system (DeFi) that is powered by public blockchain networks such as Ethereum … there are others, but they are all dogshit so I won’t mention them ;).
This new crypto financial system depends on maths and grassroots support from unsatisfied humans and not the violent coercion of the state and its banking minions. As capital, which is simply energy transformed, is looking for a safe home free from debasement, it is trickling into the crypto space.
But crypto’s market cap in fiat terms is minuscule compared with the total value of all fiat financial assets. That is why a modest amount of capital fleeing the collapse of the fiat financial system can create such outsized gains in such a short time frame."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/expression
11. "As we saw in the last section, U.S. steelmakers boosted their productivity quite a lot in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the result was a steel export boom in the late 2000s and 2010s. It thus seems unlikely that the U.S. steel industry was so dysfunctional over the last three decades that it literally caused U.S. stagnation and deindustrialization.
A far more likely story is that the U.S. simply stopped using a lot of steel, so we stopped making a lot of steel.
That doesn’t mean this was a good thing — NIMBYism has been a disaster for the U.S., and I think deindustrialization has been a net negative as well. But what it does mean is that we should stop thinking about steel as something that’s desirable in and of itself, and start thinking of it primarily as an input into things like buildings, cars, and machines. Instead of throwing up steel tariffs like Trump did, or trying to protect the ghost of U.S. Steel from Japanese buyers like Fetterman is doing, we should be trying to boost the industries that use steel. And not so we can save some steelmaking jobs, but so we can have the stuff that those industries produce.
We should be trying to promote new construction of housing and solar plants. We should be making it easier to build factories, trains, and highways. We should be subsidizing consumer demand in order to speed the transition to electric vehicles and other green technologies. And we should probably be trying to rebuild our machine tool industry, in order to reduce the risk of excessive reliance on China.
And if we do those things, I predict that we’ll see a revival of the American steel industry as well."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-the-us-steel-industry-is-dying
12. This was always a good list of predictions for 2024 and love their takes on the big news in the tech industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ay_qYRzcbk&t=980s
13. Not for me but Dubai is definitely winning and well set up for the future.
https://medium.com/@loukerner/why-im-moving-to-dubai-d32a5e54a936
14. This is worth paying attention to. History as a lesson.
Also makes me not want to send my kid to university because of the stupid radical leftist ideas being taught there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtN7Z20ga6Y
15. Good overview of the state of the AI and tech world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrvsCYNB2Y
16. Huge fan of Sahil Bloom. This is a great view into how he thinks and writes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-s22uCixMw
17. A solid interview with my friend Harry. Building a media and VC investing empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9WV8uyCyhg
18. I've definitely become a Lessin acolyte. He has so many smart things to say and is a great investor and observer of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w-VYUDJRrQ
19. "In a way they are the triumvirate of macroeconomic trends that rule the world. One creates a new wave,the other runs that wave through its natural lifecycle, and the third destroys and takes us back to creation. As these 50–100 year macroeconomic cycles are playing out, there is an innovation cycle that operates underneath it, subservient to it. This cycle may be 30–40year cycle of capex & opex dominant forces.
What does this mean? Every few decades, a few decades worth of CAPEX — time, people,& money put into research, development and innovation— is able to unlock a new ‘resource’ that then eventually becomes ubiquitous and cheap for the world to use and build new things with which then turns into an OPEX cycle. If all this sounds a bit academic, just give me a few minutes and it’ll all make more sense.
When we zoom out, this is how much of SaaS looks like today: a Malthusian bloodbath. At the beginning of the SaaS cycle, most markets were green-field opportunities, but today almost every SaaS category is saturated, every account requires a rip & replace, leading to longer and more competitive sales cycles, lower customer loyalties, leading to lower NRR, higher churn, and high vendor fatigue. These are the tell-tale signs of the tail end of an OPEX cycle— a cycle that doesn’t speak “I win because my innovation is better than yours”, but rather “I win because my $s are bigger than yours”.
Over the last 60 years, a lot of R&D has gone to bring the cost of compute down to near zero. This led to a personal device in every hand. We also have had the cost of distributing this compute down to near zero as well. That brought the marginal cost of software down to zero, which is basically the reason the internet exists. The next 30 years is going to bring the cost of intelligence down to zero. What would the world of software look like if everything ran on “insights” instead of “compute”? If you are a founder building in SaaS, this is what you should be gearing up for.
Just as the earlier Schumpeterian extractive and innovation-heavy cycles unlocked net-new resources—an oil drop, or a CPU cycle—the new resource that is now being unlocked is perhaps an “AI token”. As the internet cycle winds down, and the AI cycle picks up, it’ll be important to know where we are in the cycle and which assets to play in each part of the cycle.
As a founder, it likely matters less as a successful founder will likely generate wealth no matter which cycle s/he is in but as a long-term investor, this is important because playing these cycles wrong could lead to investing in the wrong asset or the right asset but at the wrong time.
Making these mistakes is more common than we think. Let’s take a few examples. While there has been a 20yr surge in oil production & prices in the US, you’d still lose money in having invested in oil indices over the same period."
20. I really want to visit Kyrgyzstan and will probably do so in 2024!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnktDsOxDrY
21. Powerful new ship critical to American power in the Pacific.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8DzimKKXc8
22. An Arctic Silk Road? Interesting development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvy9usF7ohE
23. "My hypothesis is that deep tech companies that build valuable IP can have meaningful exits quickly. On the other hand, traditional tech companies rarely have very strong IP and are mostly acquired based on strong traction. And it often takes longer to get to meaningful traction than to accumulate valuable IP.
As a result, deep tech VCs value strong founding teams even more highly than traditional VCs. If the team is good enough to produce unique, valuable IP, then they are likely to experience a good exit."
https://every.to/p/why-you-should-build-in-deep-tech
24. Maximum bullish on Japan and will definitely be doing a lot more business there in the next decade. I so love the place and look forward to spending way more time there.
"Underlying these four Japan megatrends is demographics. Far from being a negative—fewer people must equal lower consumption—Japan’s demographics will turn out to be a catalyst for positive change.
-Industries will consolidate, thus allowing greater efficiencies and economies of scale.
-The mattress-money wealth of Japanese households will be freed and reenter economic circulation.
-Increasingly scarce labor will be empowered and gain purchasing power.
-And global talent will build careers and make their fortunes here in Japan.
Importantly, all these forces represent real structural change that will remain in place for the foreseeable future."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/japan-megatrends
25. "In practice, ambiguity aversion discourages people from doing things like participating in the stock market or trying new medical treatments when risks are less known. This may seem rational—better to play with the devil you know—but our ambiguity aversion also prevents us from seizing the upside of possibility. To be a leader is to act in the face of incalculable risk. As OKCupid founder Sam Yagan puts it, “The single biggest predictor of executive success is how you deal with ambiguity.”
One reason it’s so hard for us to sit with ambiguity is that our brain has a bias toward negative outcomes. If you are given a bag with a known mix of 50 red and 50 black balls and a bag with an unknown mix, it’s easier to assume that the unknown bag has worse odds than 50-50, even when it could just as well have better odds. While it’s easy to see the potential downside of turning toward the unknown, it’s much more difficult to see the potential upside.
In many ways, the job of an entrepreneur is to cultivate faith in the upside. Whether you are leading a company toward a new market or making a personal decision about your career, you can use what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal to counter the anxiety of not knowing. Cognitive reappraisal is a fancy way of saying “manage your mindset.”
While you might not be able to control the future, you can control your perspective on the unknown. Exercises like Tim Ferriss’s fear-setting, which asks you to take a realistic look at the upside, downside, and cost of inaction of any given decision, can help counter your tendency to catastrophize."
https://every.to/p/how-to-deal-with-uncertainty
26. "Itzler, who co-founded 29029 Everesting, is rangy and puckish, and he appears to have plucked his outfits from a college student’s laundry basket. His résumé is all hairpin turns: a former rapper, he wrote the earworm New York Knicks theme song, managed Run-DMC, and launched five successful companies, including a private-plane-rental service, before becoming a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks.
Having found his métier in motivation, seven years ago, Itzler is determined to become its leading practitioner. He believes that what we really want is to feel proud of ourselves. His chief method for instilling pride is to set physical challenges so difficult that you must discover something new within yourself to meet them.
Itzler told me, “What I’m really doing is providing people with a foundation for how to live. I could definitely make this a hundred-million-dollar business, because the category has exploded, and there’s such huge need.” Yet motivation, like intimacy, is hard to scale. It works best in high-school locker rooms, less well in arenas, and rarely, or barely, on Instagram. Itzler intends to grow with his clients—yet he worries that reaching the summit in his field might prove incompatible with becoming his best self.
“This space is filled with a lot of people regurgitating what other people have been saying for years, a lot of predatory marketing, a lot of snake oil,” he said. “Everybody says they’re not in it for the money, but everybody’s in it for the money.”
Self-help itself recently got an upgrade to “personal development.” It’s no longer the remedial training you undergo to quit smoking but a personal-brand refresh to catapult you into the C-suite. Every weekend, around the country, conferences attract aspirants eager to flip houses, or sell solar panels, or just get rich in some unspecified way. The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/jesse-itzlers-secrets-of-success
27. "In my opinion, the creator economy thesis fell apart because investors had a fundamental misunderstanding of what risks they were underwriting. They didn’t understand the media industry, they didn’t understand creators’ needs, and they totally missed that this was a vertical SaaS bet.
To understand why creator economy bets were bad, you have to understand why creators themselves are a bad business.
A small business in general is a shitty business. 65% fail in the first 10 years in the U.S.
A media company is also a shitty investment. Media stocks had their worst decline in 30 years in 2022.
A creator is a small business that is also a media company (aka shit squared).
It is important for me to note that as a creator, I am one of those terrible businesses. I think there is economic value to be found by smart operators, but the fact is that the macroeconomic conditions for the sector aren’t exactly favorable."
https://every.to/napkin-math/what-happened-to-the-creator-economy
28. Tons of good tips for a productive, successful and happy life: Tai Lopez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MVgGwWFiq8&t=3187s
29. Elad Gil is a legend in Silicon Valley: dual threat as a top tier investor and operator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4CWtfC0HIM
30. I always watch this: Zeihan has been more right than wrong.
I like the attention to demographics and supply chain stuff, even though his predictions based on these might be bit extreme. But super helpful for understanding where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FzjJIzWOgY&t=201s
31. "Japan’s unique approach to space utilization, its appreciation for specialization, and a regulatory environment that, while complex, can be more navigable for locals, all contribute to a landscape that is particularly conducive to small, independent establishments.
I love startup and small business culture, and there’s a lot of inspiration we can take from other countries to keep improving it. We should find a way to help American cities re-discover their own sense of humanity and creativity, while bolstering some of the elements that have started to erode since before the pandemic: warmth, good customer service, businesses that value regulars, fewer chains and more independent establishments.
In fact, I’d highly recommend those who can afford it take a trip to Tokyo. Better yet, venture outside of the city center and into residential neighborhoods. Taking inspiration from Japan is about more than just policies; my real call to action is to my fellow founders to think about how we can counterbalance the aloofness that accompanies our cities’ too-cool attitude with a kind, service-first approach."
https://medium.com/japonica-publication/the-magic-of-japans-micro-businesses-f7ac3bca8d49
32. This guy seems to be one of the very few super rich guys who is living their best life.
Outside of Richard Branson, Gianluca Vacchi actually seems to be really legit having fun.
https://www.dmarge.com/who-is-gianluca-vacchi
33. Sweden and Poland are the regional powers in Europe. And possible alliance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTSrGpvZ_2w
34. Some great insights about investing and running startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA00lIUES9A&t=822s
35. "With that said, in the USA, women are more likely to be childless, not married and generating income well into their 30s and 40s. Declining birth rates is already a trend and women will be spending even more money to maintain looks and status later in life.
For this reason we’ve got BowTiedTiger here to talk about various business lines primarily targeted at Women.
The Medspa.
A growing market to be sure and will continue to be for years to come as the population ages. The attraction is, of course, a non-surgical approach to youthful appearance and cosmetic improvement by several means including injectables (Botox and the like, as well as Fillers), laser therapies, fat reduction therapies, hair removal, typical aesthetician procedures such as microdermabrasion, dermaplane, and sales of white label skin care products or branded with an affiliate agreement."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/medspa-angle-long-loneliness-thesis
36. Sober predictions at geopolitical level but really positive on the business side in America.
Revenge of the Angry Nerds: A More Competitive & Even More Ruthless Time in Silicon Valley
It’s hard not to see the zeitgeist shift in Silicon Valley in 2023 as observed by the Vox magazine article by Zoe Bernard: https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/12/27/24011198/bezos-zuckerberg-musk-buff-mma-masculine. It’s worth a read but not for the reason that you think.
There is a specific section I want to call attention to:
“This renewed sense of masculine dominance hit a fever pitch in 2023. The softer, soulful leaders of Silicon Valley’s previous decades have vacated. Gone is the delicate, ascetic presence of Jack Dorsey and the laissez-faire leadership of Sheryl Sandberg. Gone are the girl bosses. In their absence, the richest, most powerful men in tech are leading Silicon Valley toward a more macho future, one in which strength can be measured in muscles, women are absent from the boardroom, and ruthlessness is a virtue.
All of Silicon Valley reminds me of the first Top Gun movie: the abundance of testosterone, like 1970s, 1980s all over again,” said Manu Cornet, a cartoonist and software engineer who formerly worked at Twitter, now X. “It’s not even sarcastic or second degree.
“It’s a very jacked up movement,” said Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. “The people I know are thinking about testosterone and eating 500 grams of protein a day. They are ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked.”
But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity that’s strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat.
The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. It’s not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley.”
But like most leftist & woke writers, the article portrays this trend as a negative. I strongly disagree. It’s a counter-reaction to the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon)-driven weakness that ripped through the ecosystem in the 2010s. And I think this turn was inevitable. The other side of the cycle.
The crazy amount of VC money is gone, most startups and big tech companies are fat and bloated and underperforming. Let’s look at the example of Twitter, Elon fired over 75% of the staff and Twitter still works. Think of the wastage at Google or Facebook or any of the big tech giants. Most tech workers are spoiled, entitled and lazy. Focused on the wrong things or working on non-core initiatives.
But the feast is over and now we are stuck with the famine. There will be very many more layoffs coming. Companies are waking up, losing their delusion and getting fit. If you thought 2023 was tough, 2024 is gonna be much harder. The easy money is gone. That is why we need a more severe mindset and attitude change in Silicon Valley. Frugality, focus and maybe most important, humility. Something we have not seen for a while.
We are back to basics. Founders, employees and investors need to fight for survival. It is war time now. Lean and mean is in vogue. Hard core work ethic of 996 (9 to 9, 6 days a week) will be required. It will be brutal and only the strong will survive like it always has been. But out of this reset, I expect to see another inevitable massive wave of growth and opportunity…..eventually.
You don’t have to be rich to Live a Rich Life: Wanting Versus Needing
Ramit Sethi had a great event back in 2017 called Forefront in NYC. Ramit Sethi is best known for his personal finance classic for young adults “I will make you Rich” and has developed a cult following due to his blunt and fresh thinking about money and how to manage it in this day and age. He has built a business empire of digital classes and even has a Netflix show.
In my pursuit of self development I always try to check out new conferences to learn new things and this event was really insightful. One of the biggest concepts he mentioned was that you don’t need to be rich to live a rich life.
But the slow learner that I am, while I understood the concepts he discussed at a conceptual level, I did not truly understand or take this to heart. Ironically, I only really figured it out when I had massive money problems like I did in 2020. Knowledge comes from pain as I’ve written many times.
Everyone has a magic number in their head: The F-ck You $$. I remember the number when I moved to SF was $10M USD. With inflation and rising costs here, FU money level is now probably $50M. But the lesson I learned is it all depends on what matters to you.
I firmly believe financial independence should be the goal of every young man. But this number really varies and all depends on what they value.
Some people want the expensive cars and expensive houses in top zip codes. The holidays in Hawaii at the Four Seasons Hotel, flying first class or private planes, wearing brand name luxury goods. That obviously will require substantially more money and a pretty high cost structure.
For me, I think it’s important to have the resources and capabilities to be able to afford these things. But you also need to understand what is a “want” versus a “need”. That’s critical for you to be independent.
I prefer a more asset light path. I love stuff as much as the other guy, I have an immense collection of books & a half decent set of weapons. I love traveling and staying at nice hotels. I’ve never cared that much about having a big house or expensive car. It’s too showy and frankly makes you a target. A very dangerous thing in a time of growing wealth inequality and lots of people falling behind and desperate. The USA is going to become more like Latin America & South Africa of rising violent crime.
It’s important to know what is valuable to you: for me it’s being generous and having time with family and friends, doing business and working with smart, awesome, honorable people; while building assets. I also love traveling around the world doing business and eating delicious cuisine. Having plenty of time to read, rest and exercise is also key. These are all needs for me. Everything else is a want and thus, not as important. I can be frugal with the things that I don’t care about. That leaves me with resources to spend on things that matter.
You don’t have to be a multimillionaire to have a great life, although it clearly does help. But if you keep your cost structure low, you will have freedom to pursue all the things that matter to you. This to me is what a rich life is about.
Staying Sane in an Insane World: Charity Starts at Home
As we set into 2024, I expect the global economy to be challenged, land war to continue in Europe and the Middle East. Things in startup land will continue to be tough as VCs are still licking their self inflicted wounds from the 2018-2021 investing vintages.
It’s so easy to be discouraged. When everything looks bad. So what do I do about this?
I stopped paying too much attention to the news or sports or video games. Spending time fanatically watching sports, whether football (American or European), basketball or hockey, is especially stupid to me as that doesn’t help pay your bills.
Instead I focus on improving myself, my business and family. That’s literally all I have control over. Anything else outside of my realm of control there is literally no point of spending any energy or time on.
Insanity is thinking and worrying about stuff that you cannot influence. So stop doing it. Get your head straight. Get yourself sorted and focused on what matters.
I go back to the airline safety videos. When the mask falls during an emergency, put the mask on yourself first before you help others. You are no good to others if you are incapacitated. Sort yourself out and then you will be in a better position to help others and the world.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 7th, 2024
"Be willing to be a beginner every single morning" –Meister Eckhart.
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.
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.”
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.”
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
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.
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. :)
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.
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!
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.
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."
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."
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."
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)."
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. :)
“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.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 24th, 2023
“It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.” —Erma Bombeck
"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.”
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.”
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