Maniac on a Mission: the David Senra Story
I met David once very quickly at the awesome Capital Camp conference and thoroughly enjoyed his talk on stage. And admittedly he is not everyone’s cup of tea. People find him too intense, obsessive and dark. But I love him and his message.
For those who do not know David Senra, if you are in the business world you will eventually. He runs the “Founders” podcast where he reads some of the best business biographies both popular and obscure and dissects and pulls out the lessons for us to learn. That’s all he does, reads and puts together and releases his podcast show every week. And he has been doing it for years, having read hundreds of books. I’m embarrassed I did not find his work earlier.
He has some of the best observations that will serve as great advice and guidance for business people.
Focus and obsession is everything.
That capitalism is the ultimate tool and game for the type-A individual. Remember that before capitalism, the ambitious, driven male would have been riding around on horseback fighting & chopping off heads while conquering land. Capitalism is the best alternative tool to channel this drive.
Podcasting is one of the best businesses to build. It can be platform for building relationships and new business opportunities
This is the best time to be alive as there are infinite opportunities for the ambitious, smart and hard working
I think the reason many people find him off putting is his intensity, his crazy work ethic and determination to be the best business podcast on the planet. This goes against all the garbage being taught and told to young people these days: that you can be great or do great things without hard work and sacrifice.
Of course, this is untrue and something anyone who has done anything outstanding knows is patently wrong.
Your hard work and learning accrues over time. Do the boring but important things and improve your craft every single day and time. When you direct this over a long period of time toward your mission, you cannot help but succeed. Be more like David Senra, be a maniac on a mission. I know I am.
Dominate The Year: Your Net Worth Will Never Exceed Your Level of Personal Development
Jack Hopkins is this young hard charger I found on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@JackhopkinsCEO. An English businessman on the make, with several online businesses and a growing media empire. He is also a pretty damn good Muay Thai kickboxer to boot. He represents the new generation of entrepreneurs. Jack is really hardcore as a young twenty something, so he can be crass at times and his content is not for everyone.
But some of the themes of his content that I like: Personal excellence. Self discipline. Financial success. Physical fitness. Fighting spirit, literal fighting spirit. Crazy work ethic and showing receipts. An example for young men. Heck, he is an example for me, a relatively older guy too.
He said something that stuck with me. “Your net worth will never exceed your level of personal development.” I really did not start making real money until 2020. I had done well in my prior career as tech exec and venture capitalist, I had a pretty good life. But I did not understand money or how the world works.
More fatally, I did not really understand myself or trust myself. I lacked courage. And I got rekt in 2013 after making good money at Yahoo! And once again in 2020 due to the covid disaster which I wrote about earlier and don’t need to recount. I thought I had spent time and money in personal development but it was clear most of it did not really take. Or I guess I did not really understand at that time. 2020 was the wake up call that jarred me out of my self-inflicted blindness and weakness. So I implore many of you to learn from this and learn from Jack Hopkins.
Hopkins talks about routines and its importance to doing well in life. Embracing challenges and doing the hard stuff. Waking up early, doing cardio exercises to get oxygen to the brain and making sure he is reading regular self development books whether business, investing, psychology, marketing and self help. Pushing yourself mentally and physically. That and have daily non-negotiables you need to do everyday: whether it’s creating content, prospecting for new clients or whatever.
You have to have a clear vision of your future. Of all aspects of your life: Your health & physique, Your money/business & belongings, Your personality and relationships. To be the best version of yourself.
To do so: you have to have personal ownership of everything. Have consistent habits in exercise, in posting media, in marketing and in investing. Do it when you are comfortable. And more importantly do it when you are uncomfortable.
It’s about becoming a character of who you want to be and you can’t break character. And it also means you fully commit and never break promises to yourself. Be the guy who turns up every single day. If you do this, your life will absolutely be better on all fronts.
The Bystander Effect: More is Less & Why Big is Dumb
We all think that bigger is better. That we are safer in crowds. The wisdom of crowds. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this just isn’t true.
It’s a myth put to rest by the Kitty Genovese murder back in 1964. She was attacked for over an hour without anyone in the apartment complex doing anything to intercede. Even though many people reported that they heard it all happen afterwards. Reports though were unclear as some people did say they tried to call the police. This is before 911 was implemented. The general public was appalled of course.
It’s called the Bystander Effect. Defined as: “the inhibiting influence of the presence of others on the willingness to help someone in need.”
It’s due to not wanting to make a mistake or be seen as foolish in case it’s just a misunderstanding. Or more likely it’s not their issue, that someone else will take charge or intercede as there are so many others around.
In fact it’s better if there is only one person or two people around. They feel direct responsibility. Or “ownership”.
But there is a way around this. If you find yourself in trouble but conscious, point directly to someone “you in the blue jacket call 911 and you in the red coat come help me or whatever.” People need to be directed and this may jar them out of their daze.
So besides the safety and security aspects. We see something of this effect in very large impersonal organizations. This is also why most big companies in the Fortune 500 and organizations like the United Nations and most NGOs are so useless and ineffective. There is usually very little accountability from their employees because it’s so easy to hide in such a big morass of people.
Also in big companies, it’s so much easier to think someone else or some other department will take care of an issue. Or worse you kick it over the wall to them. Ownership and accountability is never clear and the attitude of “It’s not my problem” is rife.
You just can’t do this in a small startup. Well you can but you probably won’t be there for much longer if it happens too often. Additionally, in small organizations, it’s pretty easy to find out who is doing work, who is doing good work and who basically sucks. It’s transparent. Yes most startups are dysfunctional but it’s transparent.
Which leads us to the ultimate secret to career, entrepreneurial and life success. You have to take ownership for everything whatever the situation. Good and bad. Find problems and fix them. Take action, and preferably thoughtful, decisive action. Don’t be a bystander.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 25th, 2024
“The secret to happiness is freedom…and the secret to freedom is courage.” – Thucydides
"If there were a “golden” rule of subscription businesses, it would be that your customer won’t use your product longer than their problem exists.
The longer they experience the problem, the longer they use your product.
In the world of consumer products, there are only a handful of things people will do for more than a year.
Things like eating healthy, staying in shape, learning German, meditating, etc., are all things that 90% of people will either accomplish or give up on within 3–9 months.
Things that will happen for more than a year: rent a home, pay for electricity, watch something entertaining at night, etc. These are all things that people need to do for a long time.
The same logic applies to B2B companies; they need cloud hosting for their product a lot longer than they need a place to hold drinks for the team."
https://medium.com/entrepreneur-s-handbook/fighting-churn-101-the-tactics-that-work-72f8b1198f40
2. “Dark Forest” behavior isn’t typical in the real world
In fact, we actually do occasionally see human societies behaving like the aliens in Liu’s books. In actual dark forests, hunter-gatherers would often attack strangers they encountered. And in old Oceania, island groups would sometimes invade and massacre other island groups. This was often done out of fear of attack and/or desire for resources, as Liu postulates. And of course there are plenty of historical examples from the colonization of the Americas and Oceania, as well as steppe nomad imperialism.
But overall, relations between terrestrial nations and peoples are usually very non-genocidal.
Trade and cultural exchange are the norm in the modern day.
This is not because strong nations lack the power to wipe out weak ones — it would be easy for Russia or China or the U.S. to annihilate Kyrgyzstan or Mongolia or Honduras, especially if we made an agreement that we’d all be better off destroying those smaller countries before they can grow big or advanced enough to threaten us.
One very important reason we don’t do this is partly because it would rightly be seen both within and outside of the attacking nation(s) as a terrible crime, increasing unrest and international hostility. But it’s also partly because we have more to gain by trading with smaller countries than by annihilating them."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-dark-forest-hypothesis-is-absurd
3. "Enemies are swarming around the world… including passionate ignoramuses within the US who seem hellbent on making the country weaker.
Wealthy activists like George Soros, for example, fund the political campaigns of ‘progressive prosecutors’ who release criminals onto the streets and refuse to prosecute crimes.
Combined with the geniuses in many city councils across the country who have de-funded their police departments and decriminalized shoplifting, the unsurprising result has been an alarming rise in crime.
Meanwhile, the people running the federal government roll out the red carpet for illegal migrants at the southern border, creating total chaos in most major cities.
They constantly issue idiotic regulations and legislation which make life more cumbersome and expensive for average Americans and small businesses– like the Labor Department’s recent 800-page proposal to make sure that interns can use a toilet which conforms to their gender identity.
Enemies are at the gate. And in some instances, including through repeated cyberattacks and other incursions, enemies have already breached the gate.
Yet the people in charge have weakened the military between their vaccine mandates, the humiliation of Afghanistan, and endless diversity & inclusion efforts. Recruiting and mission readiness are now both at historic lows.
They weaponize the justice system against their opponents and soften it for their friends and family. Rule of law has become a total joke, especially now that even high-ranking judges have become social activists whose rulings reflect their woke fanaticism rather than Constitutional law.
They suppress intellectual dissent and denounce those who disagree with them as “cave men”, “white supremacists”, “threats to democracy”, or “science deniers”. And their propaganda machine masquerading as mainstream journalism constantly feeds us these lies with a straight face.
They refuse to even acknowledge the looming fiscal crises they’ve engineered through decades of deficit spending and expensive entitlement programs. The country is only a few years from a financial cliff, yet they’re not even talking about it.
And to top it all off, the guy in charge appears to have lost his mind… just like King George III.
These are the circumstances of America today. And in many respects, they are similar to Britain in the early 1800s.
Could there be a similar, miraculous turnaround for the US? Is it possible that, ten years from now, America is firmly the world’s superpower with a booming economy and negligible debt burden?
Yes, absolutely. There is still a very narrow path forward."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/so-youre-telling-me-theres-a-chance-2-148665/
4. Learning from Silicon Valley legend: Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH70GfL2UwM
5. He is a wise man. I do like listening to Justin Waller: the blue collar baller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBakneN4yxA
6. "Endless cubicle farms were never the end state of anything, and all this can be repurposed for better use: shopping, socialization, recreation, residential and exciting/novel concepts we’ve not even considered yet. The future here is something to look forward to: going to city centers purely to do something alone you can do anywhere makes no logical sense. This was all inevitable and good, unless you wanted humans to remain enslaved and great real estate locations to be stuck in 1950s-era industrial economy use.
So basically, TL;DR: you will make your employees hate their lives, make less money and be less efficient by electing to assert authoritarian control over their movements and do the same work in a different arbitrary building every day. And I am not being hyperbolic here, I have heard stories from friends in legacy sectors whose teams have started location-tracking employees during the day. It’s straight out of a dystopian panopticon science fiction novel. I can’t imagine anyone competent staying at such firms very long.
Absolute top companies like like NVIDIA worth well >$1 trillion are running remote operations for their teams, so there’s really no excuse that “this is just for smaller shops.”
https://www.hottakes.space/p/remote-work-won-dont-let-anyone-gaslight
7. "Whatever happens now this war remains a terrible blunder which can never deliver Putin a satisfactory outcome. It is not only that Ukraine will not stop fighting even if US support tails off, or that a Trump victory might not deliver the country to Russia, but that whatever happens now Russia’s relationship with the Ukrainian people is going to be deeply antagonistic and no amount of brute force will change that.
At some point Ukraine needs to persuade the Kremlin that the only hope of restoring equanimity to the relationship is for Russian troops to be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory. Meanwhile it is deeply unsatisfactory to be in a position where Ukraine can only mark time, and take the pain, waiting for more favourable turn in US politics – and to have devise new strategies in case it never does."
https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraine-through-the-gloom
8. MANG (MSFT, AMZ, NVC, GOOG) is here: big implications for the startup ecosystem.
9. How the heck did we allow this to happen.
"The United States has relied almost entirely on China — and to a lesser extent Russia — in recent years to procure a critical mineral that is vital to producing ammunition.
The mineral antimony is critical to the defense-industrial supply chain and is needed to produce everything from armor-piercing bullets and explosives to nuclear weapons as well as sundry other military equipment, such as night vision goggles.
After Japan cut off the U.S. supply of antimony from China during World War II, the United States began procuring the mineral from ore in an Idaho goldmine. However, that mine ceased production in 1997.
“There is no domestic mine for antimony,” according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency. “China is the largest producer of mined and refined antimony and a major source of imports for the United States.”
10. Interesting discussion on building a new VC firm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47THC7LwgVM
11. This is the most important thing VCs should be investing in right now. I'm really proud that Firestorm Labs, Buntar & Hefring Marine fall into this camp.
"But I also believe that there will be a crop of new companies that challenge incumbents head-on and win, capturing large markets at high margins in the process. I’ve started calling them Techno-Industrials.
Techno-Industrials use technology to build atoms-based products with structurally superior unit economics with the ultimate goal of winning on cost in large existing markets, or expanding or creating new markets where there is pent-up demand.
They can leverage their structurally superior unit economics in the form of lower prices to win market share, higher gross margins, or both.
Less fancily, they’ll use new technology, processes, or approaches to make physical things that customers want more cheaply than existing companies can, in a way that existing companies can’t match. Because they can manufacture more cheaply, they can either lower their prices to steal market share from incumbents or capture more gross margin. In some cases, they’ll have enough room to do both.
The category alternately called hard tech / deep tech / frontier tech / atoms-based / American Dynamism is on fire. The things that these companies are able to do and build boggle the mind.
It takes a new, old way of thinking about tech companies to understand which might break through to become very large standable businesses, and this is my first entry in what I suspect will be an ongoing attempt to put a framework around it.
While software has been all about swamping upfront fixed costs with high gross margins as revenue grows, I think the defining characteristic of successful Techno-Industrials will be whether they have a structural cost advantage.
That might come from an in-house invention or the integration of a number of new capabilities in novel and defensible ways. In either case, if Techno-Industrials are to succeed, it will be because they leverage technology to do what technology is supposed to do: give people more and better for less.
We covered three examples – Anduril, Solugen, and Monumental Labs – taking three different approaches towards that end. Beautifully, there is no playbook written yet, and I suspect each Techno-Industrial will forge a different path."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-techno-industrial-revolution
12. "The Chinese who rùn to the American border are still a tiny set of the people who leave. Most emigrés are departing through legal means. People who can find a way to go to Europe or an Anglophone country would do so, but most are going, as best as I can tell, to three Asian countries. Those who have ambition and entrepreneurial energy are going to Singapore. Those who have money and means are going to Japan. And those who have none of these things — the slackers, the free spirits, kids who want to chill — are hanging out in Thailand.
Most of the young Chinese I chatted with are in their early 20s. Visitors to Thailand are trying to catch up on the fun they lost under three years of zero-Covid. Those who have made Chiang Mai their new home have complex reasons for staying. They told me that they’ve felt a quiet shattering of their worldview over the past few years.
These are youths who grew up in bigger cities and attended good universities, endowing them with certain expectations: that they could pursue meaningful careers, that society would gain greater political freedoms, and that China would become more integrated with the rest of the world. These hopes have curdled. Their jobs are either too stressful or too menial, political restrictions on free expression have ramped up over the last decade, and China’s popularity has plunged in developed countries.
So they’ve rùn. One trigger for departure were the white-paper protests, the multi-city demonstrations at the end of 2022 in which young people not only demanded an end to zero-Covid, but also political reform. Several of the Chiang Mai residents participated in the protests in Shanghai or Beijing or they have friends who had been arrested. Nearly everyone feels alienated by the pressures of modern China. A few lost their jobs in Beijing’s crackdown on online tutoring. Several have worked in domestic Chinese media, seriously disgruntled that the censors make it difficult to publish ambitious stories.
People complain of being treated like chess pieces by top leader Xi Jinping, who is exhorting the men to work for national greatness and for the women to bear their children.
This middle class, however, is feeling less sure these days, as the economy keeps getting whacked. The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen thing. Are housing developers taking on too much debt? Yes, but driving many of them to default and triggering a collapse in the confidence of homebuyers hasn’t improved matters. Does big tech have too much power? Fine, but taking the scalps of entrepreneurs and stomping out their businesses isn’t boosting confidence. Does the government need to rein in official corruption? Definitely, but terrorizing the bureaucracy has also made the policymaking apparatus more paralyzed and risk averse. It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions."
https://danwang.co/2023-letter/
13. "People are looking for explanations and certainty in these troubled economic times. So they’re turning to anything and everything that will give them meaning. People will continue “finding God” and become more Spiritual.
These won’t just be the run of the mill religions and cults either. They’re going to become stranger. Social media has created self perpetuating loops of content and reinforcement that will radicalize more and more individuals to more radical and ridiculous ideas. Flat Earthers, Wiccans and the Hippies of yesteryear will be tame compared to what is coming."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/world-business-outlook-2024
14. "Meanwhile, Brex is cutting 282 jobs, or about one-fifth of its workforce.
In the email to staff, seen by The Information, co-CEO Pedro Franceschi acknowledged that “we grew our org too quickly, making it harder to move at the speed we once did.” He said Brex management “decided to take a hard look at our current structure, and reduce the number of layers between leaders and the actual work that affects customers.”
Brex, which issues credit cards and manages cash for businesses, was burning an average of about $17 million a month in cash in the fourth quarter, The Information reported earlier Tuesday, based on data given to employees at an all-hands meeting earlier this month."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/brex-cuts-20-of-staff-and-shakes-up-senior-management
15. Lots of great nuggets on what’s happening in venture capital. Good optimistic signs for the industry over the next 2-3 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qsm24HFHq8
16. A crash course on building effective sales organizations for SaaS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZt0U4xQx6c
17. "I predict that we will witness just how difficult it is for the mighty Red, White, and Blue fist to swat a drone swarm of flies. For shipping companies to feel confident sailing through the Red Sea again, the US Navy must be perfect in every engagement. Every single drone must be neutralised. Because even one direct hit with a drone’s payload could incapacitate a commercial vessel. Additionally, because the US is now at war with the Yemen Houthis, shipping insurance premiums will skyrocket, making it even more uneconomical to sail through the Red Sea.
Due to weather and geopolitics, higher shipping costs could cause a surge in inflation in the third and fourth quarter of this year. As Powell is undoubtedly aware of these issues, he will do everything he can to talk a big game about rate cuts without having to actually cut them. What might be a mild increase in the rate of inflation due to increased shipping costs could be supercharged by rate cuts and the resumption of QE. The market doesn’t appreciate this fact yet, but Bitcoin does.
The only thing that trumps fighting inflation is a financial crisis. That is why, to get the cuts, QT taper, and the possible resumption of QE the market believes is already in the bag come March, we first need a few banks to fail when the BTFP is not renewed.
Tactical Trading
A 30% correction from the ETF approval high of $48,000 is $33,600. Therefore, I believe Bitcoin forms support between $30,0000 to $35,000."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/yellen-or-talkin
18. An excellent episode on what’s happening at the edge of cultural and tech biz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sjzS4KGJwk&t=1372s
19. America is a country of laws and lawyers, China is a country of engineers and technocrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h0frLCJO5U
20. Excellent discussion on Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLn_N3wSs5w
21. Two of the smartest guys in Silicon Valley. This is a must listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu_LF-VoB94
22. "As an entrepreneur, it’s crucial to find that balance for your organization—setting ambitious goals without making them so lofty that they become unrealistic and harm morale. It’s a delicate balance with no straightforward solution. Entrepreneurs would do well to find their own approach to this and be intentional about how they lead their organizations in respect to goal setting."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/01/27/unrealistic-goals-can-hurt-startup-morale/
23. "Israel’s moral losses, while significant, will be overshadowed by the damage done to Pax Americana and those who benefit from it over the longer term.
--If the US diminishes the ICJ and international rule of law, as it is currently doing to protect Israel, it will damage the system and its moral standing globally. It will also, due to the networked-enabled shift underway in younger demographics (55% of Americans between 18-29 believe that Israel is committing genocide), deeply damage its legitimacy (this loss in legitimacy is similar to what happened on the networked right with WMDs, the financial crisis, and the COVID response). Losses in legitimacy create distrust in politics, government institutions, and loyalty to the nation (which impacts everything from military service to siding with it in disputes with tribal identities).
--This loss will come on the heels of other significant moral losses suffered over the last few years. For example, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which became an evacuation, generated distrust in its military competence. In turn, the war in Ukraine demonstrated a selfish desire to sacrifice Ukraine to damage Russia and its unreliability as an ally when it slowed support for the war.
--Combined, the rapid diminishment of the “international rule of law” and US moral standing, both cornerstones of Pax Americana, has set the stage for global chaos as the myriad tensions, hatreds, and ambitions that were dampened by this system are unleashed — from opportunistic Houthi style drone blockades (in part enabled by those opposed to the US system) to major nation-states taking advantage of the chaos to realize long term ambitions (Taiwan)"
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/losing-the-moral-war
24. Inside view on Dan Koe's brain. Love his content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whzy4p7Mes8
25. This looks amazing. Monkey Man!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Kpfmr1W20
26. "there is “clearly something different going on than what has been [happening] during the post-Cold War era,” but cautioned that it’s too soon to say whether it’s a “long-term or a short-term reversal.”
Goldstein pointed out that even as new conflicts have emerged in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere, a number of long-running wars have also come to an end. The US withdrew from Afghanistan, ending a two-decade war, in 2021. The conflict in Syria has gone from a raging inferno to a low boil, as the Bashar al-Assad regime has consolidated control over much of the country and has normalized relations with many of the regional powers that were backing armed efforts to overthrow him just a few years ago.
An uneasy ceasefire has been held in Yemen for the last two years, a welcome respite in a conflict that has directly killed more than 150,000 as well as far more through disease and malnutrition, although it remains to be seen how long that can last given the Houthis’ recent activities and the international coalition assembled to stop them.
None of the outcomes of these wars are particularly welcome for the United States — or for most of the people in those countries, given which groups and authoritarians ended up in power — but they do show that seemingly intractable conflicts can end even as new ones emerge."
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/25/24049551/war-increasing-ukraine-gaza-sudan-ethiopia
27. “The threat is not just coming from guns, artillery, rockets, missiles, warships,” General Sun said. “They’re trying to influence our minds as well.”
What Taiwan needs is more practical help — anti-ship missiles, military training, coordination with allies, better cyberdefenses. Meanwhile, the United States needs to boost the capacity of industry to produce munitions rapidly in a crisis.
The Biden administration has worked very effectively with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines to prepare for joint action to constrain China. That enhances deterrence. Washington could also do more to help Taiwan cultivate cyberwarfare: If the grid goes out in Taipei, Shanghai should lose power, too. If Taipei’s internet cables are cut, then China’s great firewall should cave so ordinary Chinese are able to read about their leaders’ corruption.
Maybe the best recommendation I heard came from Mark Liu, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. He offered this useful advice for Americans aiming to help Taiwan’s security: “Do more. Talk less.”
That advice might have helped the major powers in August 1914 avoid a cataclysmic and unnecessary war. It remains sound counsel today."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/opinion/china-taiwan-war.html
28. A great history of the internet and why crypto still makes sense. Chris Dixon is one of the smartest people in tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nIQztk5KWY
29. "Paradoxically, death can even make wealth terrifying. That delightful dream of being on top of the world will end all too soon. I can think of a few games the wealthy play to avoid this terror:
The game of hope: outwit death by betting on science. Let the protocols of longevity and Dr. Andrew Huberman become the saviors of your wilting avatar. The sci-fi series Altered Carbon plays with this idea: people switch between bodies like suits and those who can afford it can practically live forever. Not only can they compound their wealth forever, but their children plot to murder them because immortality ruins the natural rhythm of succession.
The game of distraction: go all in on hedonism, consumption, and status games. Buy another boat, throw a bigger party in an even bigger house. Escape the haunting inevitable until you slip away in your sleep — hopefully before waking up to the hangover of a meaningless nightmare.
A special case of distraction is the game of more, also known as ‘number go up’. Almost by definition, the self-made wealthy are very good at this (leaving aside the merely lucky). And even though the marginal value of earning another dollar declines to zero, the game remains an interesting distraction. It doesn’t fill the void and occasionally might feel like an addiction. But it’s still better than contemplating death. Might as well keep playing.
Finally, there are secular games of legacy like children, charity, and teaching."
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/in-search-of-ozymandias
30. This is worth watching. It starts off a bit gloomy but there is much to learn. What we can learn from the rise and fall of empires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQlLZK8se4
31. Found myself nodding my head a lot here. Don't always agree with their views but they are patriots in their own way.
Definitely agree with their perspective as startup investors and being bullish on India and Internet values.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny93ZjlR93g
32. "In a sense, consumer products now resemble entertainment, with users regularly wanting to try out the latest thing and then quickly moving on. I’ve been investing in consumer startups since 2016, and in that time I’ve amassed screens filled with social apps on my iPhone—BeReal, Poparazzi, Fam, and Dispo, to name a few. All were once popular but now are mostly forgotten.
As apps predicated on smaller use cases gain traction and start to scale, they can actually erode their core value proposition of intimacy, creating an opportunity for still-newer newcomers to take their place. Furthermore, the novelty of a new, narrow social experience quickly wears off before the app can iterate and expand, making it difficult to compete against incumbents that offer many more options and formats for social interaction.
In light of this, I sense that an alternative path to success in the realm of consumer apps lies beyond the well-worn model of building a “kitchen sink” social giant. An alternative, less obvious, and likely more fun route is to create a series of smaller, transient hits. Rather than building something that can one day scale to a billion users, the goal is to launch a series of quick-hit apps that capture attention fleetingly.
For founders, the benefit of following the venture studio strategy means more optionality than betting on one idea from the get-go. Creating a succession of apps still leaves open the option of building a big consumer app: if one of the bets takes off, the founder has the freedom to run with it. Beyond that, it’s a structure that can also offer more autonomy and creativity. Since the goal isn’t to build a monolithic giant that has mass appeal, each of the ideas can be more offbeat, interesting, and niche.
In a landscape now dominated by scaled incumbents, a viable alternate route for consumer builders is to embrace the dynamics of fleeting attention, build for transience and niche use cases, and—uniquely enabled by crypto—deploy tokens for cross-promotion and growth."
https://www.lisnewsletter.com/p/multi-hit-wonders
33. Mike Thurston breaks down his path to building a successful solopreneur life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxTjNaQYzFA
34. "Meanwhile, gaming companies In North America and Europe continue to undergo layoffs, an unfortunate trend that seems set to continue in 2024 and will inevitably result in the delay or outright cancellation of many projects. While Western markets may not face the same regulatory challenges as their Chinese counterparts, they do still face uncertainty, as evidenced by the Microsoft-Activision antitrust saga from last year, the courtroom battles over Apple’s mobile stranglehold, and the evolving debates over distribution of web3- and AI-enabled games.
These are broad generalizations, but I mention them only in contrast to Japanese publishers, which appear to have a more favorable path to growth in 2024. Japan features a number of companies well-positioned for a strong year ahead, and has been more welcoming to web3 and AI. Should we see an unexpected breakout driven by these technologies, Japanese publishers may be best positioned to take advantage of them."
Don’t be Sad, Get Mad: Your Catalyst to Action
I was catching up with an old friend and heard his story about some traumatic family issues he was facing. He ended up literally spending all his time at work, taking any project that came up and drowning himself in work.
We all face problems at home, with our families and personal lives. It’s normal. Family is both a source of joy but also one of immense pain sometimes. But it’s how you deal with it. I find for the driven, they transmute that pain into action. Frenetic action.
There is this scene in the excellent Brazilian movie “Elite Squad 2” about the BOPE elite military police force, where the lead character Colonel Nascimento facing massive problems at home, estranged from his son and hated by his ex-wife, takes this into his work crushing & killing drug gangs.
“I became a workaholic. Nothing mattered more to me than my job. To people like me, war is medicine. War keeps the mind busy. Pressure builds at home? I release it in the streets.”
Many type-A men do some form of this. But I don’t think this is particularly healthy in the long run. Yet it certainly is a very effective way to drive your career and life forward in a big way. Transfiguring that sadness and pain into something productive. To do something in a world where most people quit, mope or do nothing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger had a familiar philosophy: “As my father used to say “As long as you concentrate on being useful, rather than “How do i feel today?; It doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna help anything anyway. “So you can feel sh-tty, you can feel happy,” the world is not going to change so let’s get going.”
“Stay busy. Stay useful.”
“Saving Paradise”: You Can’t Run From Your Past
I always try to watch a random movie on flights. Sure I go back and watch the regulars like Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift, Gatsby & Top Gun Maverick. But every once in a while I will watch some Indian, Korean, Japanese or even obscure American movies.
I decided on “Saving Paradise” which is based on a true story. It centers around the estranged son of the owner of the last remaining pencil manufacturing company who returns to his small town to save his family’s business. He ran away to New York 10 years earlier to pursue a very successful and high flying career as a ruthless corporate raider aka private equity a—hole but is forced to return after his father dies. (Note: I hate most private equity guys as they are just paid a lot of money to slash and burn businesses. Anyways.)
It’s an interesting story about how the skills he learns wrecking companies to make money end up being used by him to turnaround the family business. It takes him a while to get used to things and shows the clash of cultures between cold blooded finance around numbers versus the mid-western blue collar values with a focus on hands on work & operations. Where work is all about dignity. He slowly earns their trust and they are able to turn things around.
But returning to his old town also forces him to face the tragedies and baggage in his past. Something he has dreaded. Yet confronting it allows him to move on and frees him. It’s a good reminder that you can’t hide from your trauma and pain of the past forever. Unresolved pain festers. You can’t bury it forever. It always reappears in some negative form or other in your life.
A very big and correct insight from this movie at the macro level was how this was emblematic of how the Private equity and American corporate elites strip-mined & hollowed out our manufacturing base, wrecked the middle class and shopped jobs to China. Ironically, by doing so we empowered our biggest geopolitical rival. This awful legacy is one that America is dealing with right now.
The big micro insight for me was that as far away as you move and as much as you try to recreate yourself, you can never hide from who you are and where you grew up. And that you can never escape your past so you should try to integrate it into who you are. Good and bad.
I have a love & hate relationship with Vancouver. It is a beautiful place where I grew up and where my family is. But it’s also where I felt constrained and could not be myself. It’s where I felt I was mocked or looked down on whether that was reality or not.
That’s why I left as soon as I could. So I could figure out who I really was and to fulfill my ambitions. To recreate myself and spread my wings without the limited expectations of those around me. Thank god for America which showed me what was possible and gave me opportunities I never would have gotten anywhere else.
But the longer I am away from Vancouver, the more I appreciate it and appreciate what my parents and my upbringing gave me. It made me who I am today and for that I will always be grateful.
Watching this movie made me realize I need to learn how to better integrate my past with my present and future. This might be one of the reasons I’m still so uncomfortable in my own skin. But knowing and realizing you have a problem is the first step to fixing it.
The Constant Lesson: You Only Ever Learn the Hard Way
You would think that when you are close to 50 years of age you have everything figured out. That you make less mistakes. But here I am older and not feeling much wiser than I was 20 or even 30 years ago.
This is in regards to relationships, family, friendships, business, as well as personal finance and investing. I’ve made some progress but the way life seems to work is that the minute you figure something out, everything changes. So what used to work does not work anymore.
Or nothing has changed except you. You get cocky, arrogant and sloppy. You start thinking you can do no wrong.
This was me in February & March 2020 as I came off 2 very good exits in my portfolio at 500 Startups. High on that and a few keynote talks I did at some big tech conferences. Of course, that was right before the pandemic lockdowns and my own personal financial difficulties. But I recovered financially by the end of that year and jumped hard back into investing in 2021.
It was a nutty time and I got caught up in it. I made some good investments but I also did some really stupid ones. Investments in businesses and teams I never would have done in prior years. Like many investors during that bubble, we lost discipline and, well, our portfolios show it. I have never seen such a fast and steep J-curve that happened the year after in my time as an investor.
That is why there is a much used aphorism in investing, “there are two kinds of investors, those who are humble and those who will be humbled.”
The point is to own up to it, take the lesson and keep going. As the saying goes, pain leads to knowledge. Or said even better by old Roman Titus Maccius Plautus: “not from age, by capacity, is wisdom gained.”
This is probably a good thing. I’ve learned to just keep pushing forward. Besides, life would be pretty boring if it was predictable and static. Like water when it’s still, it only leads to staleness, stagnation and decay.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 18th, 2024
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — E.E. Cummings
Trillionaire within a decade. I think so and probably from Biotech is my guess.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/trillionaire-within-decade-oxfam-6559802/
2. "The strategy Russia and China are pursuing is simple and clever. America is a formidable superpower. You can’t take on America’s military might directly and expect to win. Instead, the idea is to make trouble for the US and NATO on multiple fronts at once, usually by relying on proxies or places that the US does not take seriously or cannot easily respond to. In practical terms, Russia and China have aligned with small militias that are problematic for the West but which usually can’t do that much damage.
However, with China and Russia quietly supplying superpower level intelligence, capabilities, and capital, these entities can wreak havoc. This way China and Russia can create expensive and difficult problems everywhere and all at once for the US. This is a different kind of swarm strategy. It’s flies irritating a lion.
All this raises a fundamental issue that now requires close attention. Could it be that Ecuador is not at risk of being overthrown by superpower-backed crime gangs? Rather, it has already been overthrown by superpower-backed organized crime gangs.
You may think that Ecuador is far away and not particularly relevant to your portfolio or political life in the West. You’d be wrong. Events in Ecuador are symptomatic of the new conflict. I’ve long argued we are already in WWIII. It’s just occurring in places we don’t pay much attention to. Ecuador is yet another example of that.
The strategy is ever clearer. China and Russia are aligning with small militant groups around the world that will make life hard for America. They are also picking strategic choke points like The Gate of Grief, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is a global choke point for shipping. That’s where the Houthis are causing trouble. The US can send in a 3rd Aircraft Carrier Group, but the lion is swatting at flies."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/swarm-geopolitics-everything-everywhere
3. This is a super useful convo on doing software sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRx3qFEGses
4. Very solid discussion on how venture capital works and the unbundled model. The GP has a very interesting approach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkvIW6eXddM
5. For anyone interested in building a creator business, this is a must watch. Justin Welsh is the king of helping solopreneurs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbvyBxcl6T8
6. I'm on a Justin Welsh kick. You can learn so much from him. It's the age of the Solopreneur whether we like it or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfJ4vwMPP0o
7. A different perspective on family dynasties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcwmKwEleaw
8. This is super instructive on building a creator business. They go into a lot of nitty gritty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYzpslk76hQ
9. I actually agree with this view. I don't like it but it's happening. In a multipolar world, gold will actually be more important. Especially with growing weakness and debt in the Global West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LitoOjLScS0
10. I think this will become more of a thing. Be a "War Lord": don't go to war but be prepared for it. Become capable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmYN4p599Is
11. "The 2024 US slowdown and/or recession is poised to create opportunities to buy US companies and assets at significant discounts, which will turbo-charge Japan’s global merger and acquisition activity. Already Japanese industrial companies - Nippon Steel buying US Steel - started leading the way in late 2023.
The 2024 surprise will be a broadening of the new “Japan buys America” trend to the services and asset sectors. Yes, I expect major Japanese financial institutions to buy US banks, insurers, or payments companies."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/japan-surprises-2024
12. "Unicorns ballooned 14x in the past decade, from 39 to 532! They now serve a wider array of sectors (we’re tracking 19) from climate and crypto to vertical SaaS.
The pendulum swung hard to enterprise (78%), the inverse of 2013.
It’s a bloated herd that will thin in coming years (likely to about 350) because…
• A whopping 93% are ‘Papercorns’ - privately valued companies.
• 60% are ‘ZIRPicorns’ - their last valuation is from ‘20-22, when interest rates were near zero.
• Many are running out of runway. Many are on the cusp: 21% are valued just at $1B (sorry?!)
• ~40% are trading below $1B in secondary markets.4
• BUT. There is lots of substance in this herd.
• And we see evidence of a Software Unicorn Power Law - the US will be home to more than 1,000 unicorns by 2033."
https://www.cowboy.vc/news/welcome-back-to-the-unicorn-club-10-years-later
13. This is such a fun and relevant convo on what's happening in tech land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyekCXZINYo
14. This is a grim discussion on the geopolitical mess we find ourselves in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KHr-dF5CW8
15. One of the wisest men alive today. Luke Belmar. This is a worthwhile conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK0Z2Xkit2Y&t=1s
16. "Successfully rattling the cage of a public company board and CEO requires a specific set of skills and attributes. Most activist investors possess three key traits.
1) Intelligence: Good activists see strengths/weaknesses the market is missing. After amassing a short position, Hindenburg revealed that Nikola was a fraud. Elliott is building a position in the underperforming Match Group, as it has a monopoly in online dating, minus the monopoly-like valuation.
2) Leadership: Every activist bid is a battle that requires significant financial and psychological commitment from the activist and their investors.
And 3) Narcissism: Like influencers, activist investors crave attention. They know their actions make headlines, because takeover bids are corporate violence.
Billionaires are humans, and thus, not to be trusted. Humans need guardrails, because we are temperamental, short-sighted creatures. We are irrationally suspicious of those different from us, and far too trusting of those like us."
https://www.profgalloway.com/acktivism/
17. This is super instructive on how to differentiate a new VC fund. Also how to think about riding the changes happening in the venture industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orw-KZkkBcY
18. This hit a bit too close to home. Midlife transitions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HjHxrwOWI
19. "Private military contractors have been increasingly used in the past several decades, but this was a step beyond their traditional role in combat zones, which has mostly been in support—training local forces, technical support, security, logistics, and occasional SOF roles. What distinguishes the UAE in Yemen is that a power deployed third-country mercenaries alongside its own regular troops—a rarity in the 21st century.
The demand for manpower may see more mercenaries in frontline roles, augmenting national forces during major deployments or even forming the whole of an expeditionary corps for politically sensitive operations. Russia’s Wagner Group is something of a template for this: although more of an organ of the state than a true PMC, used to deploy Russian ex-servicemen without official involvement, it has been active throughout Africa and the Middle East.
As things stand, small hydrocarbon-rich countries such as the UAE and Qatar stand to play an important role in any future mercenary marketplace, similar to what Genoa, Amsterdam, and the small states of the Holy Roman Empire once did. Their wealth gives them the capital to make the initial investments and a certain degree of political independence, while the Emiratis in particular already have a network of contacts that would allow them to raise large numbers of fighters."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/mercenaries-and-manpower
20. "Put together, the above seems to paint a dire picture for Ukraine and its prospects going forward. But one of the key lessons from watching this war, and the way that it’s covered in the media, is that perceptions can be fickle.
Throughout 22 months of conflict, the ironclad conventional wisdom regarding the war’s present state and near future has repeatedly been shattered. By my count, there have been no less than seven major narrative periods of this war, each of which has ended with the script flipping almost entirely.
Both Ukraine and Russia have regularly been seen as the conflict’s inevitable victor — only to fall back down to earth when the expectations created failed to live up to reality.
The length of each cycle seems to have expanded as the war itself has gone on and dramatic swings of battlefield fortune have become less common. But the characteristics of each new paradigm have fundamentally remained much the same, and there is every reason to expect more to come."
https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/ukraines-war-of-narratives/
21. This week's episode was pretty damn funny and overall great biz discussion. They shine when it comes to tech business discussions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG0dfz0r3eo
22. "When thinking about different businesses and exploring entrepreneurial opportunities, my go-to is a simple distillation of the financial model in a way that can be described quickly and easily out loud. Start simple before adding complexity."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/01/20/simple-financial-distillation-as-a-mental-model/
23. Living the creator business life. This is an insight dense interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDJ2VOHgThk
24. This was an illuminating conversation. On life, on loyalty and living with success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgj5a28_jag
25. "The whole remote or in-office debate is a fake debate. It is fake because anyone who’s worked in knowledge work for the last ten years already has been working remotely. Even if you happen to be in the same building or office as someone, your work is mediated by a screen, most of the time.
And this is why I think all this conversation around remote work is really exposing something much deeper: that most companies don’t have a worker location problem, they have a mission problem.
People want a place where they can thrive and some people might find that in a 100% in-office environment and others might find it in a 100% remote environment. Others might find it in a hybrid workplace. But the success of those companies will not be because of a top-down attendance policy. It will come from a bottom-up re-imagination of how people can do great work together in this new technological era."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/the-coffee-badging-resistance-254
26. "That’s why if the California Forever project succeeds, the ramifications will go way beyond having one nice new city of 50,000 — or even 400,000. It would serve as an example to other cities all over the country, showing them a vision of what they might become if they had more density, walkability, transit, and mixed-use development.
The creation of a new city could also revitalize the discipline of urban planning in the U.S. The era of stasis that has engulfed America since the 1970s has made planners focus more on small-bore projects, or — even worse — on finding reasons to forbid things from being built. The creation of a planned new city that’s livable, pleasant, and environmentally responsible would undoubtedly get at least some planners to think big again.
This is what excites me about the California Forever project, even more than the prospect of more housing for Californians, or of a cool new city to visit. America needs to be shaken out of half a century of stasis, and we need to reimagine urban infill as a new frontier. Irvine, the corporate-planned city of the 1970s, became the ultimate sprawling modern city-as-suburb — a living symbol of what post-70s California would look like. California Forever has the potential to be the anti-Irvine —a city planned for density rather than sprawl, pointing the way to the next 50 or 70 years."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-california-forever-project-is
27. "Writing is the skill that breathes life into any other skill you learn.
It is the meta-skill that people avoid learning until they are forced to (because they need to survive).
They don’t see it’s importance because it’s “just plain old writing, who needs to learn that?”
There was a reason I failed at almost every business model I tried.
Digital art, SEO, Facebook ads, dropshipping, e-commerce stores, and more.
I was so focused on learning the skill and building a website that I forgot I actually had to get customers at some point.
How do you get customers?
Writing.
Content (or media) is the front end of the internet. It’s how you capture, hold, and convert attention in a sea of self-deprecating memes and valueless content.
The foundation of content is writing.
Tweets? Writing.
Threads? Writing.
Newsletters? Writing.
Blog posts? Writing.
Cold emails? Writing.
Social media captions? Writing.
Landing pages? Writing.
Product descriptions? Writing.
Course modules? Writing.
Client communications? Writing.
Customer resources? Writing.
Ads of any form? Starts with writing.
YouTube videos? Done best with written scripts.
Instagram reels and TikToks? Like reading well-written tweets.
Images on Instagram? Usually designed from a well-written quote or saying.
Any other form of online marketing, advertising, or entertainment? Starts with writing.
Everything that your audience, customers, and network see starts with writing."
https://thedankoe.com/letters/learn-this-skill-if-you-want-to-survive-the-next-10-years/
28. "The rich want to keep the system as it is - it is working in their favour. But the poor demand change and redistribution of wealth. Both sides are logically fighting for their best interest.
But because monetary policy is complex by design, most people don’t understand why the wealth disparity exists.
And an upset population with no obvious enemy, begins to look for one.
The nation finds itself in a scenario where the people are angry - about everything. Blame is passed back and forth. The poor are called unproductive, the rich are called greedy, and civil discourse becomes impossible.
With emotions running hot, every issue becomes a boiling point of tension, and the population can seemingly no longer agree on anything.
Civil unrest sparks protests; protests lead to riots and eventually activity that begins to border on civil war.
However, a nation can continue in this state of dysfunction for a long time - until, the third red flag emerges - an external competitor.
For an empire to enter its sunset years, there must be another country that has risen in power enough to challenge the existing world order - a country whose economy is strong enough to offer alternate trade and military assurances.
Now, rarely in history does this external competitor emerge as one solo country. More frequently, a syndicate of smaller nations emerges - who are able to park their ideological differences to align against the global superpower."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/my-morning-keynote
29. "We live in a knowledge economy. What you know—and your ability to bring it to bear in any given circumstance—is what creates economic value for you. This was primarily driven by the advent of personal computers and the internet, starting in the 1970s and accelerating through today.
But what happens when that very skill—knowing and utilizing the right knowledge at the right time—becomes something that computers can do faster and sometimes just as well as we can?
We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not.
It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done."
https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy
30. "The SaaS ecosystem has fully matured. Each of those buckets of fixed costs can be selectively ignored, automated, delegated, or consumed as a service. Today, companies can forgo hiring sales and marketing people, and produce millions in free cash flow by selling their products through re-sellers (like AWS) with large client bases.
While a custom research and development project used to be the domain of million-dollar contracts, you can now buy a basic Django web app from a Replit bounty for $650 or monetize a scalable business intelligence tool built by AWS or Microsoft. Scaling operations used to require headcount; now all you need are virtual assistants. SaaS products like Zapier or Intercom that power countless vertical market software companies are increasingly charging for their service as consumption: software paid by the task, not, as customarily, by user by the year.
This future was emerging before our current generative AI moment; it will only accelerate if companies can use large language models to automate junior-level work. Generative AI is quickly ushering in a new frontier for software, where organizational structures, cost structures, and growth strategies can and should be re-imagined.
As hyperscalers and vertical software battle it out on the enterprise side, the lower and middle market will need services to take advantage of the opportunities to come. Enormous fortunes await those who can accelerate the deployment period of generative AI, to speed-run the Carlota Perez arc of technological revolutions. For the countless public and private sector organizations frustrated with their software, eager to adopt better practices, or just looking for a friendlier face to partner with, their business is yours for the taking."
https://every.to/p/asset-light-software-businesses-the-new-paradigm-for-startups
31. This is so very good. Conversation on how to live a full and interesting life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApCGeST90RA
32. One of the top experts on Russia and their (negative) effects on geopolitics. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttIxO9oWQY
33. Hybrid war happening. China using cartels to send drugs into the US.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwU8KcUm5o
34. "The hidden costs of private equity activism seem to have been higher than advertised in the Toshiba case. We should at least examine the evidence with care before uncritically accepting a leading consulting firm’s recent contention that private equity is a "force for good" in Japan.
It is certainly good for private equity firms and their activist helpers. The rest of us may prefer the slow and steady approach of the GPIF and TSE, whose prudent but creative activism has delivered enormous value with little fuss and lower fees."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/guest-contribution-toshiba-and-the
35. This seems like a good reason to want to be a multibillionaire.
https://www.dmarge.com/superyacht-submarine
36. Good overview of Scandinavia, a close alliance with UK & USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoHUXxjlgfs
37. The art of VC investing from a veteran in the business.
A Soldiers Funeral in Lviv: Reminder of Life and Freedom
On my last day in Lviv in October, I was walking in the old town and saw a funeral procession of a young Ukrainian soldier to a church. One who paid the ultimate sacrifice. He was escorted by his unit with a full panoply of flags and his picture. Many of us just stood at the side, as it was a solemn and sad scene. Repeated far too often this last year and half.
What would that young soldier be doing in his life otherwise. The impact he would have had on the world either in art, in business or in science. The family he would have started. Now all gone. What a complete waste of potential. This horrific senseless war started by a sociopathic dictator in Russia in a revanchist quest to turn back the clock to an Imperialist age.
I also see a parallel in the corrupt unserious politicians of the West who send other people’s young kids off to war for badly thought out wars like in Iraq. Or worse, enable this kind of barbarism through either their corruption or their weakness and appeasement.
I want to honor the sacrifice of the Ukrainians. They are defending their families, their neighbors, their people and their country.
They are fighting a just war against an enemy who invaded them in a quest to end their way of life and westward leaning tendencies. Ukrainians deserve to have the choice of joining the EU and the Global West. A world order that is still the best system and places to live despite the flaws and degradation we see in the news everyday.
But this young soldier's funeral is also a reminder that freedom and our way of life is not free. That many people are paying the price for our good and bad choices. We have an obligation to find our life mission and fulfill the potential in ourselves.
It would be a waste of our lives to not make the best of our short time on this earth. To live good lives, raise strong families, build great businesses and organizations that provide leverage to provide value and good to everyone around us. And to benefit society at large. Let’s not take our time here for granted.
Apologizing is Hard: Ego and Pride is the Barrier to Growth
Being a parent is a weird thing. Having Amber and becoming a father was an immensely profound, emotional and extremely happy day for me. Yet with the many highs also come the immense lows especially when they become teens. These last few years have been incredibly tumultuous & painful both at the macro level but for me, especially at the family level.
You do your best raising your kid but you inevitably mess up in some way. Heaven knows I’ve done so plenty of times. You unintentionally inflict traumas large and small on them. Some of this is left over from your own childhood scars, cultural baggage and how you deal with your own emotional issues.
Growing up Asian-Canadian/American you have all these pressures and familial demands and it shapes you. You aren’t really allowed to question and or even express your own feelings. Love is conditional, feelings are not expressed and discipline is harsh. I was lucky to be in a Taiwanese household that was relatively liberal. And my folks did not hit me when I inevitably messed up unlike what commonly happened to many others I know.
I rebelled against this regime and when I became a parent, I swore I would not do the same to my kid. I would have high expectations but I would not make my love conditionally. I would be very open and tell my daughter how much I loved her. I would be supportive of anything she wanted to do hobby wise and show her the world through travel. I have definitely done this.
But I have lingering issues that have come to haunt me and my family. I have a horrible temper which I realized is common to my father’s side of the family. A temper which ran with my grandmother, my aunt and my second uncle, although not in my dad ironically. Something triggers me and everything goes red. I have been known to punch walls and destroy furniture in my rage. It happens when I feel disrespected or scared financially or just frustrated with life challenges.
I’ve been very open with my anger management issues which really erupted in the hell of 2020. And it has caused massive scars to my family which is unacceptable. And that is why I’ve spent so much time & therapy since then trying to fix this. It still comes out every once in a while but less so now. But when it does, boy does it mess things up with my kid.
Any very loud noise or hint of raised voice sets her close to panic attack and it’s horrifying. I feel awful knowing it’s all my fault.
But the road to redemption is clear though. When I mess up, I suck it up and apologize profusely. You apologize and don’t make any excuses. And you take all of the anger that comes back to you, the harsh hurtful words. You nod your head and accept it. You take the hit to your ego because most of what they say is true and it was your fault. This is the only way to fix it.
This works in family life and it works in business life. If you F–k up, apologize and do it as soon as you realize you messed up.Take total ownership for it. After pain comes growth. Only then will you be back on the right path upwards. And hopefully you learn from it and take steps to make sure you don’t mess up this specific way again.
The Old Path Is Broke: The Life Deferral Plan Makes NO Sense
I wrote earlier about my return to Prague after a long hiatus. Love this beautiful city. But the issue with beautiful historic places is that they tend to be overrun with tourists in the center, think Venice or Florence as an example. Lots of tour groups, especially old tourists. It’s nice to see them enjoying themselves. But I also think it’s kind of sad. Most of them are out of shape and not that mobile.
For many of them, it is probably the first time they are doing this. Sightseeing, carefree and trying to have fun. For most people they got caught up with life, jobs and family. Toiling. Living what Tim Ferriss called the “life deferral plan”, work and sacrifice and then enjoy the fruits of your labor when you are old.
Now I’m not against hard work or sacrifice at all. Most people could do with a little bit more hard work and sacrifice. But to put off your dreams till you are older seems risky. Even if you make it to old age you are less healthy and usually out of shape.
It reminds me of that old and much repeated fable of the fisherman and MBA.
“An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it.
The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.”
The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked: “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman replied,
“I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The investment banker scoffed:“I am an Ivy League MBA, and I could help you. You could spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats until eventually, you would have a whole fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to the middleman, you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You could control the product, processing and distribution.” Then he added: “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City where you would run your growing enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?” To which the American replied: “15–20 years.”“But what then?” asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said,“That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You could make millions.”
“Millions, señor? Then what?”
To which the investment banker replied:“Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.” (Source: https://medium.com/life-lemons/what-you-can-learn-from-a-mexican-fisherman-a8334882204c)
The point is that you can still make some room in your life for this now. It’s just understanding what it is that brings you joy and energy. Or trying to live some of those dreams which usually involve some travel & adventure.
I also think you are doing the world a disservice. Living a mundane life of toil and sacrifice but no impact or joy? Or no risk and adventure.
How can others be interested in you if you aren’t “interesting”? How can you inspire others if you aren’t inspired or inspiring? If you live a passionless or joyless life, how do you get energy and pass it on to others? How do you have credibility?
The answer is you can’t. Don’t die with your music inside of you. There are people out there who want to hear it. People who absolutely need to hear it.
The world needs these models and examples of inspiration. Now more than ever. So it’s never too late to start living the life you truly want.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 11th, 2024
"Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness." ― Brené Brown
"The reason things have gone so badly for Israel is that this war was a trap. A trap laid in a last-ditch move (just before the normalization of relations between Israel and much of the Arab world) by a weak adversary with few other options. A perfect trap that Israel was compelled to walk into.
The only thing that Israel can do now is reorient itself and take action accordingly. Will it? Probably not, even though even slight changes in orientation could significantly mitigate the damage it is experiencing."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-tactics-of-mistake
2. Timely conversation for any VC and founder. Worth listening to if you want to understand what’s happening right now in Silicon Valley as we go thru clean up in the startup world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-u8nwnq8g
3. This is one of the best shows to understand what's happening in popular culture and business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOoLz1O0iq0
4. Good discussion on the rise of Singapore and how city-states are well positioned for the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxF2vJxPv-c
5. I love Taiwan. It seems some people are finally waking up to the threat the CCP is to them and the West at large.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUY9Q8zpZlE
6. I'm a fan of these two gentlemen: Chris Williamson & Mike Thurston. We need more influencer types like this unlike the extremists we see these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqn1SN77cg
7. The book and trilogy overall was mind blowing. I hope Netflix does not mess this up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mogSbMD6EcY
8. This is a valuable discussion on some great startup trends. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w__bIJNafTs
9. Excellent discussion on how to think about sales in growing startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2L12I4x3BY
10. This was very educational. Describing how the Red Sea crisis is a big deal for global trade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EabamtrMOog
11. "We should beware. The Houthis have demonstrated significant resilience and military capability until this point. We should not assume they will be a pushover in this new conflict."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/its-on-against-the-houthis
12. Super insightful discussion on history, geopolitics and a very contrarian view of geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGjUOfXig9k
13. The best conversation on what’s happening in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Az75piUiY
14. Lots of great insights on being a great VC. Rabois is one of the top investors and operators around (not sure he is a nice man but he is a very smart & experienced one).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ-2_t9Fdw4
15. "Fighting piracy to protect international maritime trade is something the U.S. has been doing since its inception. The Marines’ Hymn mentions the “shores of Tripoli”; this is a reference to the First Barbary War, in which the newly formed U.S. dispatched its ships to battle Ottoman-backed North African pirates. So this may seem like business as usual.
But the truth is that the U.S. can’t really afford this conflict. Its naval resources are stretched very thin by global deployment, fiscal austerity, and industrial weakness, at a time when a Chinese naval buildup threatens to outmatch and overwhelm the U.S. in its most crucial theater of operations. The problem is that the entire world has basically gotten used to the U.S. singlehandedly protecting the entire world’s oceans over the last 75 years. So now, instead of stepping up as U.S. capabilities get stretched thin, they’re free-riding and expecting America to do what it always did.
And this is very dangerous, because if U.S. sea power is stretched to the breaking point — or smashed in a war with China — the world will suddenly find itself without a guardian of the seaborne trade that the entire global economy depends upon.
Cheap long-range missile designs and better guidance systems have changed the game in terms of naval technology — they make it easier to deny whole areas of the ocean to ships. The old adage from the age of sailing ships that “a ship’s a fool to fight a fort” might be coming true again — except this time, thanks to long missile ranges and cheap drones, it’s a lot harder for ships to simply sail around forts and avoid them.
In other words, the global economy might be facing a very difficult problem. With the global economy more dependent than ever before on seaborne trade, cheap anti-ship weapons proliferating, and American naval power fading, finding a country — or a coalition of countries — to be the Ocean Police is getting more important just as it also gets more difficult. My worry is that the Houthis are just the first chaos agents to discover how vulnerable global trade really is. I don’t think we can count on them being the last."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/world-commerce-is-dependent-on-americas
16. "The apparent strength of the Hollywood “studios” masks the international nature of their operations and the decreasing importance of the L.A. basin to moviemaking. Netflix has led the way. The company is based in California’s other industrial crèche, Silicon Valley. But it’s part of the Hollywood ecosystem nonetheless, with a quarter of its employees in L.A. and a flagship office on Sunset Blvd.
It also understands the future is not in California, but everywhere else. The company will spend $2.5 billion on Korean content over the next four years, and it’s increasing investment in Brazil, Spain, Italy, and other countries, while “pulling back” on overall spend. (Translation: It’s reducing budgets for U.S. content.) There are now five Netflix offices in the U.S. and 24 internationally. Of its subscriber base, 69% resides abroad, up from 45% in 2016.
The ecosystem is evolving to accommodate this shift. A third major film studio is opening in New York City this year, Wildflower Studios, but with a twist. The brainchild of Hollywood royalty and NYC native Robert De Niro, Wildflower plans to offer the entire production ecosystem under one roof, a “Hollywood in box” that can be replicated globally. Globalization means fewer jobs in L.A., not just for actors, but also for prop masters, makeup artists, and film editors.
The ROI on entertainment investment is increasingly the inverse of the screen size it’s produced for. Theaters are dying, streaming to televisions is maturing, and user-produced 45-second videos on phones are crowning new royalty. This week’s Golden Globes felt like a retirement dinner for Pan Am pilots in the seventies, basking in their fading relevance.
Bite-size content has inherent advantages: It’s cheap to produce and easy to consume, with platforms such as TikTok offering a frictionless lack of choice. Netflix watchers spend 78 hours per year just deciding what to watch — TikTok lets you spend that time watching. And its staggering signal liquidity makes it better than you are at deciding what you want to watch."
https://www.profgalloway.com/peak-hollywood/
17. This is really deep inside Silicon Valley and worth it for LP and GPs to understand the VC business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dcu5BfnE_c&t=1s
18. This was a fun interview & discussion.
https://startupistanbul.substack.com/p/only-paranoids-survive
19. "The human toll of such a war would be staggering. A recent wargame by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that while a US-led international force, presumably including East Asian allies like Japan, could defeat the Chinese military in a conflict over Taiwan, in just three weeks of fighting, the US could lose half as many troops as in 20 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the CSIS scenario, the US was projected to lose two aircraft carriers and 10 to 20 large surface ships — the kind of losses not seen since World War II. And this is even without taking into account China’s growing nuclear arsenal.
While the fighting would likely be contained around Taiwan, the economic impact of a war, or even just a full-scale Chinese blockade of the island, would be felt worldwide. Taiwan’s dominant company, TSMC, produces the microchips used in nearly all the world’s smartphones, about a third of its personal computers, and myriad other devices. Should these highly sophisticated factories suffer major damage or be destroyed in the course of an invasion, “we’d face an economic crisis globally akin to the disruptions that we saw during the Great Depression,” as Chris Miller, author of the book Chip War, said on The Ezra Klein Show last year.
The world’s reliance on these chips is so great that it has sometimes been called Taiwan’s “silicon shield.” The idea is that the global economy, very much including China itself, is simply too reliant on Taiwan-made semiconductors to risk any action that might take the supply offline. But as the invasion of Ukraine has shown, countries can be willing to incur severe economic costs to accomplish what they see as major geopolitical goals — and reunification is about as fundamental as it gets for China."
20. This is really interesting. Direct Primary Care trend in the USA. We all pay way too much for crappy healthcare in the US.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2020/11/09/direct-primary-care
21. "While there’s no surefire strategy, having your software adopted as a standard by a business or strategic partner can create a strong acquisition opportunity.
My advice for entrepreneurs is to look for ways to deeply embed their products or solutions in a manner that’s more than a standard customer/vendor relationship. This not only strengthens your market presence but also opens doors to a potential acquisition in the future."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/01/13/in-the-playbook-of-the-future-acquirer/
22. Good but grim macroeconomic predictions for 2024.
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/2024-predictions
23. Some solid marketing tips for SaaS startups.
https://justinjackson.ca/best-saas-marketing-strategies
24. "The real political-economic danger of Bitcoin was that it would unleash an ever-expanding wave of chaos agents upon the world, whose ranks and wealth grew and grew as their disruptive efforts succeeded, allowing them to spread even more chaos in a self-reinforcing cycle.
Thanks to the institutionalization of Bitcoin, that danger now looks increasingly remote. If you get the urge to complain about the approval of Bitcoin ETFs or other measures that direct institutional money into Bitcoiners’ wallets, you should stop to consider the political-economic benefits. I suspect that the SEC did consider those benefits when it made its decision."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/bitcoin-is-a-special-interest-group
25. "It is an “opt-in” game rather than an “opt-out” game. Meaning that the default answer is going to be “out,” and investors need to actively make a decision to opt-in to any given investment. Not hating something is not a reason to opt-in. Not loving something is a reason to remain “out.”
https://medium.com/@Alexoppenheimer/early-stage-vc-thoughts-for-2024-731c3c68be06
26. "Remember that when you’re investing in startups, you have to spread your money around. My hit rate is only 20%, but the average return is quite a bit higher than 5x on the ones that work out.
It all makes sense if you’re able to make more than 10 investments total, and if you can stomach the length of time it takes to get a return, which can be more than 10 years. Overall it’s a great way to invest."
https://www.sanjaysays.co/p/my-best-startup-investment-25k-into-750k
27. Mining magnate with a troubling and accurate view of the global macro environment.
USD hegemony is in trouble and gold is well positioned. Many Central banks are buying more gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbuhSCPwDY4
28. "When Russia invaded Ukraine, everything changed. The U.S. and NATO countries (the West) not only imposed sanctions on Russia, but they also froze its U.S. dollar reserves and blocked it from the SWIFT dollar transfer system.
Seeing an opportunity, China took notice and encouraged much of the world to follow suit. The race began to find alternatives. While the West was right to confront Russia for its unprovoked aggression, they underestimated the global response to these sanctions.
The BRICS countries and much of the global south have been reluctant to sever ties with Russia for a variety of reasons — from needing their oil, food, fertilizer, and military equipment, to taking advantage of the Wagner Group to counter domestic anti-insurgency efforts.
Additionally, many in the global south have harbored long-held resentments towards the West’s rhetorical “rules-based world order,” which they see as hypocritical and self-serving. The freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves and exclusion from the SWIFT system also put countries on notice that they might be next.
Financial systems are built on trust and, if they are weaponized, they lose the trust necessary to retain their dominance.
The critical unanswered question is how the U.S. will respond to moves to de-dollarize. Any sudden decrease in U.S. dollar demand could have disastrous consequences for Americans. It could potentially trigger a U.S. dollar crisis leading to very high inflation, or even hyperinflation, and initiate a debt and money printing cycle that could tear apart the social fabric of society."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/de-dollarization-not-a-matter-of-if-but-when/
29. Learning from war-gaming scenarios for CCP invasion of Taiwan. God it will be ugly and hope it never happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE61S9BpDek
30. The irony is that any VC investing now will be well positioned. 2024 & 2025 will be great vintages.
"The glory days of VC are over, and if history is any guide, the tech bust should last through 2024 and beyond. In other words, the venture capital bust has only just started."
https://www.wired.com/story/the-vc-funding-party-is-over/
31. "Since I first started to believe in the Roaring 20s, we’ve gotten at least two huge technological surprises: absolutely stunning progress in generative AI, and the advent of the first really effective anti-obesity drugs in history. Those breakthroughs seemed to come out of left field, kind of like mRNA vaccines did, but this is an illusion; in all three cases, years of hard work and incremental progress suddenly reached a point where the technology was ready for prime-time. Which means that there might be a few more such surprises in store for us in the years to come; the decade has six years to go!
Why are all these breakthroughs coming in the same decade? I think some of it has to do with the productivity slowdown of 2005. When the burst of productivity from computerization and the early internet petered out, some private capital and government grants focused on incremental refinements, but some went in search of long-term breakthroughs that would reignite rapid progress.
Now I suspect many of those efforts are bearing fruit. I think another factor is that the economy has running hot for most of the last decade, which gives companies both the spare cash and the incentive (high labor costs) to spend on innovation."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/techno-optimism-for-2024
32. Predictions on Sub-saharan Africa in the Post American order world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMIfXS1yZc4
33. "The outcome of the current struggle between authoritarians and democracies is far from certain. But current trends in civil discourse, political friction and small defence budgets in democracies don't augur well for a positive 2024.
In a recent article, British strategist James Sherr wrote that "as in the 1930s, feebleness abets cynicism and defeatism …The question today is not whether the West is doing what is required but whether it is capable of doing it".
34. "Second, even for those industries where you might have a technical person or team on staff — looking at the above list of publicly-traded vertical SaaS businesses, that might include chip manufacturing, banking, higher ed, and energy — the idea that companies within these industries will focus time and human capital on building internal software vs. spending that time/resources on their core competency seems unlikely.
Even if these companies could spend a lot less money on internally-developed software than purchasing third-party software, cost cannot be the only factor in the equation: you must also factor in human psychology. As the old saying goes: “you don’t get fired for hiring IBM or McKinsey.” Well, if you’re a company operating in an industry like construction or life sciences, you also don’t get fired for purchasing Procore or Veeva.
The same gold standard rationale applies within specific industries, and for an executive to make a decision to build software internally (and continually upkeep that software, including all the data privacy and other security and regulatory issues that come with maintaining software) vs. purchase software from the industry-standard vertical SaaS provider is a major career risk."
https://medium.com/reformation-partners/ai-is-not-the-death-of-vertical-saas-32b9f0ea0fa1
35. This guy is considered the best executive coach in Silicon Valley these days (outside of the Reboot team that is).
It’s Supposed to Be Hard: Life in Startup Land in 2024
It’s ugly out there. Looking at the layoffs and Carta data on startup shutdowns it does seem grim. Yet many founders remain naively optimistic, thinking “We just need to hang in there a little bit longer, and then things will get back to normal.”
Unfortunately for those tech workers and startup founders of the 2019-2021 vintage and of the Gen AI category in 2022-2023, what they went through is actually abnormal. The brutality of the market, this is what is normal and always has been in early stage startups.
We see a decline of growth stage rounds as tourist money from hedge funds disappear. We see a lower graduation rate of seed to series A from 25% of deals to 10% of deals. We now see the focus on metrics and capital efficiency. We see a regular stream of layoffs from bloated big tech and startups.
Like rich kids who develop expensive drug habits, they are now having to learn about reality the hard way now that the money is gone. Startups have always been hard. This has been lost in the ZIRP bubble environment. So many of my 2021 vintage investments have obscene burn rates.
There is no reason for a seed stage startup to have $150k usd or even $300k usd monthly cost structures. I should have caught some of these earlier and warned the portfolio back in Q1, 2022 and through most of last year as I learned from my own experiences in 1999-2000. Sadly very few paid heed to this and they are paying for it. We all lost some discipline.
And to sound even more like an angry old man, What added to this cost structure issue was the crappy work ethic that took hold in tech overall. The entitlement, bad habits, unrealistic expectations and pure laziness and unwillingness to put in the hours required. Endemic at the FAANGs but even in many startups. No surprise as we see founders waking up and gutting their staff to improve fitness.
The best companies always have an amazing work ethic. Even when I was at Yahoo! In the early 2000s we worked crazy hours, like 100+ a week because that was what was needed. I recall the parking lot being full at 730 am.
Thank goodness we are seeing companies like Traba (not a portfolio co sadly) and others demanding this high commitment. They even have 996 as a value, copied from the Chinese tech world of working 9 to 9, 6 days a week. In fact they started as 997.
Startups are damn hard and require this intensity to survive and thrive. If you are not willing to take that pay cut and work those hours then don’t work in startups. There are other companies and industries to work at. This is the reality like it or not and always has been.
We are seeing a back to the future moment in tech and I think this is a good thing. A focus on frugality, dedication and on grinding exceptionally hard to solve really hard problems using technology. Grit and endurance is everything. Hard things require intense hard work to bring them to life. Modern day alchemy.
This is why I am still bullish on Silicon Valley and tech. The tourists leave and the purists stay as the cycles turn. Thank goodness for this.
Before Living a Beautiful Life, You Need to Know What It Looks Like: Tools For Figuring it Out
I learned this term from Radigan Carter who is an ex-soldier, war vet, writer, investor and world traveler. I joined his online community called the Fortress and it’s been very rewarding and educational. He used this term “A beautiful Life” a lot and it’s been really helpful as I try to craft my own. Radigan says: “Having a mission, enjoying these hobbies with friends & family, and living overseas is my idea of a beautiful life”
One way to start figuring this out is to do the “Perfect Day” exercise which I described here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-perfect-day-exercise. This helps you know what kind of day you aspire to, what brings you joy and are necessary for you to be at your best,
Another tool is the “Hobbies Matrix”, one Radigan credits to @MikeDMedicis. The Hobbies Matrix identifies the things you enjoy solo or in group, split by Indoor Activities and Outdoor ones in Spring/ Summer vs Autumn/Winter. I’ve put one together for myself as an example.
Once you have done these two exercises your goals become clearer. How you prioritize things in your life between career and family. What you say YES to. Or maybe more importantly the ones you say NO to. These include business and work opportunities, activities or hobbies or things you do as well as who you spend time with.
And no surprise it will be different for everyone, my beautiful life will be very different from yours. Add your vision board https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-vision-board-exercise-a-tool which gives you a clear direction on where you want to go, it’s all the end goal of what you are building towards.
These are invaluable tools as you embark on your journey to your own personalized “Beautiful Life”. Just think about how amazing the world would be if everyone were able to discover this for themselves.
The sooner you start, the better life becomes. You will have to work pretty hard and overcome many challenges but having a clear direction makes things much easier.
If It’s Too Good to be True, It Probably Is: The Iron Law of Life
I would hate to be a single guy or girl during this age. I hear so many horror stories from friends. What you see is not what you get. You see this amazing picture of someone on Tinder. You look at their Instagram account and it portrays an amazing and interesting life. Yet when you meet them, from a shallow perspective, they look like nothing like the picture.
Catfished is a widely used term defined as “Catfishing is a deceptive activity in which a person creates a fictional persona or fake identity on a social networking service, usually targeting a specific victim.” Attracting someone with an attractive yet fake picture on the profile that has no semblance to reality.
Or if they do look like the profile picture, they live a life that is nowhere close to what they show. They are basically uninteresting. The likelihood of any chemistry or interest is very low.
The point of this is not to talk about how awful the dating world is, even though it really is. It reflects a hard lesson and what I call the Iron Law of Life. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Anything that looks easy is a scam. Anything that promises overnight success or wealth is a scam. Overnight success never happens because we don’t see all the decades or years of work that came before that laid the groundwork.
There are no shortcuts. I’ve said it before and I will say it again now. Have a goal, think long term, work with fellow long term thinking folks, do the hard work and be prepared to grind. Only then will you have a chance.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 4th, 2024
“Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.” — Arthur Koestler
Lots of important insights for running startups from a legend from Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKogHj2AFDI
2. This guy is a pro Russia A--hole so it's worth keeping in mind but it actually strangely also explains the weird behavior and fluctuating support coming from America to Ukraine.
"This is not to swing the pendulum too far to the other side and lay unrealistic claim to Russia being able to easily and instantly wipe out all of NATO—no, it’s simply to temper ideas about what US and NATO could realistically do to Russia. At the end of the day, a war between the two could very well be a stalemate but it would come at massive costs to the US/NATO, which is precisely the point that pro-UA supporters have made themselves blind to.
But the internal players—the CIA and policy makers—certainly understand this. Which is why they have openly made clear in the above article that a stringent set of ‘rules of the game’ have been laid out between the counterparties. Russia has obviously made it clear that it is willing to strike NATO assets that are assisting Ukraine if things are pushed too far. The US likewise now understands that Russia indisputably has the capability to do so. Thus they have shaken hands and agreed to limit the treading of each other’s red lines. Russia will allow the US certain clandestine operations within the purview of the gentleman’s agreement, and the US in turn will venture to keep its rabid dog on a short leash and within the narrow bounds of the playpen.
We’ve long known and suspected that such rules extend beyond just this, and could explain why, for instance, Russia has limited its strikes on Ukrainian rail infrastructure, bridges, etc. We’ve long known the West still receives critical supply deliveries from both Russia and China—particularly of precious metals, rare earths, etc.—by rail through Ukraine. This is simply realpolitik, and all wars in history have operated under more or less similar conventions."
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/under-the-radar-major-cia-revelations
3. "Although the specific ratio has varied somewhat across venture history, when aggregated across each decade, the percent of investments required to generate 90% of the industry profits has remained within a relatively tight band between 17% to 23%."
https://medium.com/correlation-ventures/the-80-20-rule-for-u-s-venture-not-exactly-b25cc234fee2
4. These are super tough & skilled people. UA Special Operations Forces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UH5WSKoxlw
5. I have not binge watched a series in a long time. But this was shockingly good. "The Brothers Sun." Action, comedy & twists and turns. Also an amazing soundtrack. Highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU8f8QrUCOM
6. This was so good. Worthwhile series to watch. Loved it.
7. "Bitcoin initially will decline sharply with the broader financial markets but will rebound before the Fed meeting. That is because Bitcoin is the only neutral reserve hard currency that is not a liability of the banking system and is traded globally. Bitcoin knows that the Fed ALWAYS responds with a liquidity injection when things get bad.
It might be called something new to confuse those who get their news from TikTok, but rest assured Bitcoin knows printed money in whatever guise is always printed money. Therefore Bitcoin will rise sharply before and into the Fed’s eventual capitulation to restarting money printer go brrr."
https://medium.com/@cryptohayes/signposts-693ba565cd3e
8. Sober times in Silicon Valley. 2024 will be a clean up year. Delusion is not a strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ynVF2eRwZI&t=6s
9. "My advice to entrepreneurs, when they receive repeated advice on more material topics, is to question it. Peel back the layers, understand who is saying it and why they’re saying it. Do they have an agenda? What’s their personal experience been? Work hard to see if that aligns with the goals and dreams of your own company.
While most of the time, advice will likely resonate and be applicable, there’s a chance that serious recommendations, when critically examined, may not be good advice for your own business. Always question the repeated advice from experts."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/01/06/question-the-repeated-advice-from-experts/
10. "Now, Washington is trying to get back in business after three decades of post-Cold War belt-tightening that saw companies merge and production lines slow down. LaPlante said that the Pentagon has built a facility in Texas that has the capacity to surge 155 mm artillery shells as needed. Boeing is growing its capacity to build sensors for Patriot missiles at its Huntsville, Alabama, facility by nearly a third.
In Europe, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are becoming major producers of ammunition. Germany is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artillery shells while Rheinmetall sets up shop inside Ukraine. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have begun jointly procuring 155 mm barrels for Ukraine. And the Swedish manufacturer Saab—which no longer makes cars—is producing so many diesel-electric submarine hulls that it’s even looking at Southeast Asia as potential clients.
Building industrial muscle means that the Pentagon needs to rebuild long-atrophied bureaucratic muscle, too. LaPlante has deputized a so-called “joint production cell” within the Pentagon, comprising defense officials who are visiting production floors. It’s not just a question of getting scientists and dollars, but also of getting factories full of skilled welders, assemblers, and foremen.
“It’s dusting off a lot of skills that we’ve had in this country that we haven’t used in a while,” LaPlante said."
11. "But the rise of Singapore provides compelling lessons of a different sort, ones which help us understand how the city-state was built in its unique conditions. Today, the new U.S.-China rivalry is playing out in the divergence between different development paths—a divergence which may end the mythos of a universally applicable model.
While Lee’s admirers in the art of statecraft cannot import a Singaporean model, they can learn from the ardent pragmatism which drove him to reject the easy solutions of outsiders and build a state which defied all conventions."
https://www.palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-kuan-yews-singapore/
12. Contrarian and not a bit kooky. But you should also listen to smart people even if you don't agree with their politics. Some interesting thoughts on where the economy is going and the world at large.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP1GnWJHbCA
13. "As monumental as he was, he is one of an infinite number who defined their generation and changed the world forever.
Every generation, in every region on earth, “has changed the world forever.”
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-king-of-sicily
14. Important breakdown and dispelling myths and misinformation re: aid to Ukraine & how we do it. Net net: we need to do more.
https://www.bowtiedhitman.com/p/how-much-money-did-the-us-give-to
15. "Fernandes has written a book about Australia, But one can very easily replace Australia with countries such as the UK, France, Germany and even Japan to see that they occupy positions similar to that of Australia. UK is, thanks to its still far-flung empire, a “senior” subimperial power, while France and Germany are given the “proconsular” rights in respectively Françafrique and Eastern Europe.
One can even see the current conflict between Russia and “the collective West” as a conflict explained by American unwillingness to grant Russia similar “proconsular” rights over the former Soviet republics. And one can wonder how the current hierarchical system could accommodate China that certainly shows a strong desire to be an independent pole of influence and to dominate East Asia.
Finally, the current system has trouble including the rising non-European powers (India, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia) that for historical and cultural reasons do not enjoy the level of affinity with the US equal to that of the present subimperial powers."
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/powerful-but-within-the-orbit-of
16. I like reading these work style breakdowns. We all work at different tempos and styles, good to know what works for you. Somewhat anti-US but whatever.
https://2lr.substack.com/p/how-i-work
17. "Instead of driving radical, company-wide change overnight, you can run an experiment. Say you’re thinking of eliminating customer success, passing account management back to the sellers, and hiring regional renewals reps to run the renewals process.
Will that work for your company? Test it. Run an experiment along one of these dimensions:
-Geographic. Run the new model in Europe or Asia for two to four quarters to work out the bugs, see the reaction, and track the early results.
-Vertical. If you’re organized vertically, pick one of your major verticals and run the experiment there.
-Cross-section. Pick a set of accounts and run the experiment on those accounts only. To the extent the set is a representative slice of your customer base, this might provide the most meaningful result.
I know this probably runs counter to management’s desire to be seen as decisive, having all the answers, and leading dramatic change — but, given the stakes, the prudent path may be the best one."
18. "If a founder wants to keep going for another 2 years to try to get to $15M of revenue, the result for the investors in that $25M on $150M round will likely be the same ($150M exit, they get 1x their money back - excluding any additional financing needs).
But for the founder, it makes a huge difference. Let's say they own 20% of the company, that is the difference between the founder earning $30M and $0.
But the investors may prefer to just get their money back now because the chance they make meaningfully more is low enough and will take long enough that they think it's just not worth it to risk their principal investment.
This is another reason why high valuations are more likely to put companies in a bad position than a good one. If the round was done at $75M post, those same investors would be looking at a 2x, which is a big difference inside a fund."
https://alexoppenheimer.substack.com/p/thinking-about-writing-down-your
19. Somewhat grim but also realistic forecast for the rest of the decade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfqGAvq9gpA
20. I am a believer in this thesis. American Dynamism and how VC can help drive this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPncAyHAwPo
21. We all need a lot more of Goggins in our life. He is pretty hardcore. But this is what is needed in this new world. We need to tackle the hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLb8_wgX50&t=3792s
22. This was done 3 years ago but shockingly still relevant. Describes longer term trends in play that we see now, exacerbated by covid pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine and October 7th terrorist attacks in Israel. Unipolar to multipolar world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fkHtjm-JDU
23. Creator empire. Enjoyed this interview and it was a good view on what it takes to build an independent multipreneur business here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGZg8IiDNSg
24. Good overview of the geopolitical mess right now in the Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMyTZpDwTuY
25. "2023 was one of the worst years in the history of venture capital.
Funding was down 74.7% over a two year period.
IRR’s hit -16.8% at the end of 2022.
Limited Partners investing into funds plummeted 73% year over year.
38% of funds disappeared.
38%. That’s 2,725 funds that became inactive over the past 12 months.
Insane right?
This, the early-stage game, is a game of principles, math, and patience.
If you have the fundamentals and a long-term outlook, you can completely change the world."
https://mondaymorning.substack.com/p/the-early-stage-game
26. Lessons from the past of the Defense industry. What happened after the Cold War ended and why the American defense industry is such an anti-competitive mess right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAfl64c_6mQ
27. This will have massive impacts on global shipping and thus economies everywhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k2CGHLwbBY
28. Slootman is one of the best CEOs in Silicon Valley. And toughness is back in vogue now.....finally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv5Bozsj2xM
29. This is a big change in VC land. What a start to 2024. Rabois leaves Founders Fund and returns to Khosla Ventures.
"In an interview, Rabois said he found Khosla’s culture a better fit. Khosla encourages lengthy weekly partner meetings with “unrestricted, unvarnished debate” and promotes hands-on involvement with portfolio companies, plus additional services for startups such as recruiting support, he said. Founders Fund is more “individualistic” and partners there have a “divergent set of styles,” he said.
“Founders Fund provides the capital and is happy to help when asked, which is very different from a mentorship model, which has been my forte,” Rabois said."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/founders-funds-keith-rabois-to-return-to-khosla-ventures
30. Great discussion on building a personal holding company.
You Have to Pick a Side Eventually: The Case for the West
The world is splitting up into three major blocs. Global West is defined as the USA-led order which includes Canada, Japan, most of Europe, Australia. This is versus The Global East of China/Russia/Iran etc. and the Global South, made up of India, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America.
I’m pretty critical of what’s happening in the Global West in the recent few decades. The Global West has been the dominant power since 1945. We have all seen the rank stupidity, the gross incompetence and open grifting of our political class. Don’t get me started on the covid lockdowns, insane woke/DEI BS, the cultural wars and badly executed ESG energy policies aka virtue signaling that got Europe into the energy mess they are in.
For those who don’t pay attention to the news, Europe ditched nuclear energy to focus on natural gas from Russia a decade back. Fast forward to 2022, they are burning coal and wood and paying for far more expensive gas, where the average citizen is paying anywhere between 2-5x on energy costs of what they were paying a few years ago.
I understand the criticism of hypocrisy of the American led order. Just read “Gangsters of Capitalism” or “Confessions of An Economic Hitman” or look at the catastrophe and wake of the Iraq War 2 and Afghanistan. We espouse these incredible ideals yet we don’t follow or act on them consistently.
The Global West has done some awful things and is far from perfect. But all things being equal, I’d much rather live in a USA led order than one by China. You can talk about the USA restricting freedom, abusing its reserve currency status, randomly overthrowing governments around the globe or the USA being evil.
Yet what Russia has wrought in the war is pretty horrid. It goes beyond the terrible invasion of UKraine. The Russian-inflicted horrors in Syria, Chechnya, Georgia. Or ask any Eastern European outside of Serbia on whether they would want to be under their rule.
One also needs to look at China had done: what happened in Hong Kong in 2019 over the democratic movement crackdowns, the ongoing genocide in Tibet and Xingjiang, or the severe Covid lockdowns which were substantially worse than in anywhere else in the world.
Look at the implementation of social credit scores and lack of freedom of speech in the Global East (China/Russia etc). At least you can criticize the government in the West. Try doing that in China.
If the USA, Europe and Canada/Australia are so bad, why do the elites around the world send their kids and families to go to school and buy properties there.
If China or Russia are so much better, why aren’t immigrants from around the world barging down the door of these places? Well this is what is still happening in the USA. Most migrants still see the USA as the shining city on the hill.
Love it or leave it. That’s what I say. And for those libertarians out there, if you think you can hide in a world run by China/ Russia good luck with that! Go live in Dubai or Singapore or Switzerland. But your choices for top tier and world class places outside of the West goes down severely after these places.
You will have to pick a side eventually. So think carefully and act accordingly. No decision is a decision. Those who are unaligned and neutral will end up being hated by all sides as no one trusts a coward. Or maybe better said by Robert Greene: “Everyone admires the bold, no one honors the timid.”
No Risk, No Reward Too: We Need More Risk Takers
Mike Solana of Founders Fund is probably one of the best social and cultural critics of the media and silicon valley. He takes to task and calls out the stupidity & silliness you see in the world. But he is also one of the most insightful observers and rightfully celebrates the amazing accomplishments.
He wrote back in June 23rd:
"The solo climb, the Everest trek, the remote expedition — these are deadly, unnecessary risks. Why would anyone take them? Tabling the more obviously gruesome question of why we shouldn’t celebrate their deaths, why should we celebrate their accomplishments?
Here, I think we often miss the point. When it comes to the recreational adventurer, it’s true, few of these narrow victories matter. But that doesn’t make them meaningless for all the risk that they demand. The risk, itself, is the point.
We celebrate the risk taken for glory, for wealth, for curiosity, because watching YouTube videos of the Titanic from the safety of our covers is not the thing that makes us great. The quality that drives so small a subset of the global population to extreme risk is the quality responsible for many, if not most of the most important things we have ever built or discovered. That’s what makes us great. We are nothing without risk."
I ponder this often. Humans absolutely suck at risk management and shy away from risk. It’s wired into us. But everything great that happens in our lives comes from doing “risky” things. Asking a girl on a date. Starting or investing in a startup. Moving to a new country or city. Deciding on who we marry. It’s what makes our lives awesome or awful.
So the point: take more, smart risks. The world needs us to do so if we want to move forward as a society and civilization.
The Brothers Sun: A Look into Taiwanese Family life, Gangsters and Startups
I’m really glad to see more Asian American movies and tv shows. The “Brothers Sun” on Netflix is one of them. It’s about the Sun family, one half of the family, father and eldest brother living the gangster & assassin life in Taiwan and mother and youngest son, living the quiet middle class suburban life in LA. Michelle Yeoh stars as mom and there are many upcoming Asian-American actors like Justin Chien, Sam Song Li, Highdee Kuan, Alice Hewkin & Madison Hu. It’s a good mix of martial arts action and comedy. I do recommend it and believe it's a hit among Asian American circles. Cool Asian Americans are on the rise! :) The soundtrack was excellent and overall it was so much fun.
It was also insightful. The show captures the strange dynamic of Taiwanese families, especially immigrants to North America. How important ‘face’ is. The shame culture, the open direct criticism, the lack of emotion and love, the use of food and hospitality to show the actual love that exists. The asking without asking. The passive aggressiveness. And how tough moms are on their kids, especially the eldest ones. Plus the impossibly high expectations that come along with it. As said in the show: “The oldest always gets the most respect and the least love.” They are also good at pitting siblings against each other to drive improvement in performance. It works.
Chinese/Taiwanese culture can be strange to westerners and not a little bit cold or harsh. Which maybe explains how messed up I am and how warped my relationships are at home. There is a scene when the mother says to the eldest son: “I know you have sacrificed. So much of yourself. We do it because we have to. We do it so our family can survive.”
These are environments that end up with driven, ambitious, extremely unbalanced, hard, emotionally stunted individuals pushed forward by shame and anger. Probably a good diagnosis for myself and many other Asian-American/Canadians whether they admit it or not. The elder brother said something that kind of hit me and probably describes a big part of my twenties and thirties at least until I became a dad: “....if you want to survive in this life, all you can ever feel is anger or nothing at all.” I admit it’s extreme anger for me, simmering deep inside, all the time.
But the good thing about Chinese/Taiwanese culture is there is tradition and a code. The gangster assassin brother said: “Because in my line of work, traditions and respect are important. We’re surrounded by murderers and thieves. Without a code of conduct, there’s chaos. Chaos is bad for business.” Well said.
Anyways…..like everything, I also draw lessons for startup life and life in general. There is a scene in episode 1 when the youngest son’s best friend gives him some advice: “If you want to be a man and not a little boy, you’ve gotta be willing to make bad choices now and then.”
So many people are worried about making the wrong decision that they over analyze and go into analysis paralysis or just sit on it. Unfortunately it becomes, no decision and thus no action. This may not be fatal unless you are in a life threatening situation like an accident or war. But in early stage startups you have to be willing to make hard decisions without much data or with imperfect information.
If you want to make progress ironically you have to be willing to make mistakes and go in the wrong direction. This is what Chris Dixon calls the “Idea Maze.” Exploring the different and possible ways to the exit. Sometimes it’s by stumbling around. This is what throws off many people coming into the startup world and especially if you have only worked at a big company.
Of course, you need to be somewhat thoughtful especially for the BIG and potentially existential decisions but it’s very rare these come up. This is when you need to slow down a bit to come to a better decision.
But for all the other ones, there is no perfect decision. Actually it’s a whole series of decisions and consequent actions. No surprise the best companies have a quick tempo of decision making. And if they make the wrong decision, they are not shy about fixing it fast and recalibrating because it’s about survival. The more decisions and faster you go, the closer you get to the market truth. And to get there, to say it again you have to “be willing to make a bad choice and then.”
Or it’s like Improv, if you watch the series you will understand: “It’s like anything can happen at any moment. No roadmap or fixed endings. It’s….it’s just choices. I like the idea of something totally new created by very talented people who are risking everything to make this world a happier place. I also like that there’s a potential for total and life-altering humiliation.” Seems exactly like startups!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 28th, 2024
“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt
I love everything about Personal Holding Cos. This is short but instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aanIQr34sok
2. I'd totally do the same here. Always good to be prepared.
https://time.com/6551188/mark-zuckerberg-underground-bunker-hawaii-report-reaction/
3. India is pocket power and rising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41AEoEkgDm0
4. Total legend. Peter Fenton of Benchmark VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zepF9DChY_Y
5. Such a good interview. Alex Homozi really understands how to build a big business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK-d4H7xtvQ
6. I'm fascinated by the Personal Holding co model. I like Kallaway's plan and manifesto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33RYYHqU0OQ
7. "A few takeaways:
💡 What comes up may come down: If you're in AI or defense, 2023 was your year. But every hot segment has its ups and inevitable downs. A number of investors believe the hype will come down in 2024.
📉 Valuation Variances Converge: Different sectors faced varied valuations. Climate tech had premiums, while other areas might face adjustments. These should converge over time.
🔮 Stages had different outcomes. This should normalize. As I shared, "the growth stage remained quiet in 2023, with many structured and/or internal rounds that punted valuation downgrades to the future with more structured terms (e.g. liquidation preferences). I suspect the rubber will hit the road in 2024 and some of these will get adjusted."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/2024-predictions-best-books-of-the
8. I enjoyed this more than I thought it would be. Personal finance from Vivian Tu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtDU0U7Zqw&t=17s
9. "Life is riddled with challenges, but success begins with taking responsibility. You have the power to shape your destiny. No one is coming to save you or do the tough tasks for you. They won’t get a job for you or start a business for you. It is all you in this game, make each moment count.
Acknowledge flaws, learn from mistakes, and eschew excuses. By taking responsibility, you gain the autonomy to make positive changes and pursue goals with intent."
https://medium.com/practice-in-public/how-to-be-in-the-top-1-in-2024-92266c1fe7ab
10. "So while the capital markets will likely be robust in 2024, I do not expect that venture capital investing and venture capital fund formation to grow that much year over year in 2024. I think both will grow but not nearly as fast as the sectors that surround VC.
To sum it all up, we are in a golden era of innovation with AI and Web3 leading to a new more intelligent, resilient and decentralized Internet and the emergence of a new energy stack which will power our lives new ways that will not continue to warm our planet. There are opportunities every which way I look to back founders and founding teams building these new technologies. I think 2024 is going to be a terrific year for tech."
https://avc.xyz/what-will-happen-in-2024
11. This is really too bad. Really liked what Jai and Countdown Capital were trying to do. Emerging vc fund managers are in tough spot these days.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/02/early-stage-hard-tech-firm-countdown-capital-shutting-down/
12. "Some romanticists feel the urge to knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us. But these dark romantics are rightfully recognized in fiction and public discourse as villains.
The heroes of our stories are the people like David Ho — the ones who fought to hoist humanity up from the muck so that future generations to be a little more childlike, the ones who studied politics and war, so that our grandchildren may study statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Romanticists need to accept that the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism — a way to sustain hope through the long twilight of apparent futility. And they need to accept that heroism is always inherently self-destroying — that saving the world requires that the world is worth having been saved.
And those who romanticize struggle and tragedy must at least try to understand that in the more general sense, happiness isn’t really shallow — it’s just complex in a different way. The passions of people raised in a kinder, gentler world may be alien and incomprehensible to the older generation, but they are no less intense, and the culture around them is no less complex. Adversity forces us to rise to its challenge, but abundance allows us to discover who we might become, and that is a different sort of adventure."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/toward-a-shallower-future
13. Hard core heroes in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ria_ryzIfo
14. Australia in the Post American world. Still well positioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hSYixFjZWM
15. Fascinating discussion on one of my favorite countries in the world. Japan and its future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBR9hvY3ibg
16. "Through whatever means, we end up connecting with these founders on an opportunity that is adjacent to what they are currently pursuing. We share our homework on a market opportunity with them, introduce them to our network of “bridgers” (i.e. industry experts / leaders that partner with our firm) to further vet that opportunity and craft a plan for that team to validate the opportunity and achieve product market fit within the next 12 months.
These aren’t bridge rounds, which are primarily used to extend runway to achieve the milestones necessary for the next financing. These are complete pivots in the business. These are ones where the existing business likely isn’t working, but the founders have developed amazing insight on customers and the market. These companies are willing to leverage those earned customer insights and relationships to take one last BIG swing — burning their existing business to the ground to build something different, but perhaps exponentially better.
In many cases, existing investors aren’t willing to sign up for these types of rounds. The only data points they have on the company have been negative (i.e., the company isn’t working) and VCs generally want to concentrate their dollars behind their companies that are working the best, not a perceived losing hand. But make no mistake, this has been one of our most successful entry points.
In discussing this with Ed, he brilliantly coined these rounds as “Phoenix Rounds.”
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/phoenix-rounds-11f2b35f1e30
17. "What struck me was how incredibly dumbstruck people often are once these events are discussed, even the smartest minds often roll their eyes in disbelief as they witness the increasing chaos around the globe. And it is not so much the conflicts and wars on their own, it is rather the realization that Western democracies are losing the plot and lack the leadership and resolve to direct and help structure the world in a way that we were used to.
Every discussion over Israel/Gaza, Ukraine and China ended with the painful awareness that the initiative now somehow rests with other powers and that we are diving into a deep hole of uncertainty. Reactive has taken the place of pro-active."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/a-rocky-start
18. "The United States and its European allies face a choice. They can either make an immediate plan to bolster the training they provide to the Ukrainian military, clarify to their publics and to Ukraine that the October 2024 deadline to liberate territory must be extended, and underwrite Ukraine’s materiel needs through 2025, or they can continue to falsely believe the war is in a stalemate, dithering and ceding the advantage to Russia.
This would be a terrible mistake: in addition to expanding its partnerships in Africa, Russia is strengthening its collaboration with China, Iran, and North Korea. And if a loss in Ukraine ends up demonstrating that the West cannot meet a single challenge to the world’s security architecture, its adversaries will hardly believe it can deal with multiple crises at once."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/war-ukraine-not-stalemate
19. Solid take on what’s happening in the consumer startup space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Di_BM7tNbw
20. Such a fun episode this time. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDv0MM4X0Oc
21. Timely conversation on state of SaaS & VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzt_o-eD_0Q
22. Agree that it is the era of commodities. We have always been in resource wars but this will accelerate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xry1_Pdi2yE
23. This is a grim view geopolitically out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt7H3CEIKds
24. Defense tech is critical for the geopolitical mess out there now. A very good conversation here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UVYGpY2vd8
25. "It pays to be dangerous.
If you are weak, everyone will take advantage of you.
If you are dangerous, people will not f-ck with you.
Be big. Be strong. Learn to fight. Have money in the bank. Have a good lawyer. Most of all, don’t take shit and be willing to put up a fight. (Except meaningless ones like street fights)
If you are willing and able to fight, most of the time, no one will pick a fight with you. You won’t be worth the hassle."
https://lifemathmoney.com/fight-fire-with-fire-lesson-from-kaziranga-national-park/
26. "Incentives work powerfully well, perhaps in some cases a little too well. If you don’t inspect and supervise your sales practices carefully, you could find yourself unpleasantly surprised by some of the behaviors you end up incentivizing. If you establish and maintain an effective sales compliance regime, your incentive plans will drive healthy growth in your company. Fail to do so, however, and you will find undesirable behaviors growing as well."
https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-dark-side-of-sales
27. Such a grim but realistic view of 2024. It's going to be a mess geopolitically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l46oWMu3b9M
28. These are always fun. I guess we will see. 2024 predictions.
https://www.profgalloway.com/2024-predictions/
29. I like this. Building a media empire. Erik knows what he is talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRpetYZhYmY
30. "With all that being said, the biggest thing I find I have to remind people is that the most important thing about being “non-consensus and right” is the part about being right. In the end, being right is what matters. That’s how you make money in venture capital, and that’s how you build your reputation and brand.
I tend to end most of my meetings with new managers by asking them a simple question that helps me understand how and why they think they will win over time. How are you differentiated from everyone else in the market, and how will you win the opportunities that you should win given your strategy?
I find it helps me better understand a new manager’s perspective on their own competitive advantage and strategy. The best managers I meet have a good story about why they are differentiated and good. I think that’s what helps you win today, more than being non-consensus and right."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/replacing-non-consensus-and-right
31. Lots to learn from Sahil Bloom.
32. So much wisdom here. Loved this conversation. Bill Perkins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NX9-Q-ohIY
33. This is why Benchmark is one of the best. Fascinating conversation on how the top investors think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTUtpkhBDw
34. I always learn new stuff from Zeihan. A good geopolitics overview.