Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 17th, 2024
"No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That's the only way to keep the roads clear." – Greg Kincaid
"An entire generation of executives and entrepreneurs that came of age in recent years was essentially robbed of an opportunity to form actual views about the world—both descriptive, what it is, and normative, what it should be—leaving us with a managerial class whose principal purpose often seems to be little more than ensuring its own survival and re-creation.
The result is that many of those in power have become so fearful of offending anyone that one would be forgiven for assuming based on their public statements that their interior lives and most intimate thoughts had recoiled into something small and shallow. The perverse and unintended result is that corporations selling consumer goods feel the need to develop and indeed broadcast their views on issues affecting our moral or interior lives, while software companies with the capacity and, perhaps, duty to shape our geopolitics remain conspicuously silent."
“Google should not be in the business of war,” the employees wrote, insisting that the company agree never to “build warfare technology.”
The problem is not a principled commitment to pacifism or nonviolence. It is a more fundamental abandonment of belief in anything. The employees who resisted leveraging the machinery of Google in service of building software for the U.S. military know what they oppose but not what they are for. The company, at its core, builds elaborate and extraordinarily lucrative mechanisms to monetize the placement of advertising for consumer goods and services that accompany search results.
The service is vital and has remade the world. But the business, and a significant subset of its employees, stop short of engaging with more fundamental and essential questions of national purpose and identity—with an affirmative vision of what we want to and should be building as part of a national project, not simply an articulation of the lines that one will not cross.
They remain content to monetize our search histories but decline to defend our collective security. The entire company, however, along with any number of Silicon Valley’s largest technology enterprises, owe their existence in significant part to the educational culture, as well as the legal protections and capital markets, of the U.S."
https://time.com/6692111/silicon-valley-palantir-alexander-karp/
2. UK in the Post American world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjmBAhTDRXY
3. "“Made in Japan” was a joke in the immediate postwar era, and then something akin to a threat in the Eighties. Today it is a badge of authenticity, deployed anywhere status needs to be conferred to a quotidian item: Japanese denim, Japanese whiskey, Japanese cleaning magic, Japanese Breakfast (okay, so that last one’s an indie-pop band.)
Japan may not confer any cool factor in the AI sphere, but it possesses undeniable cool factor in the real world. It’s also safe, in all senses of the word. It’s seen as free from crime and societal strife. It isn’t percieved as a threat, or even involved in touchy geopolitical issues. The things many foreigners associate with Japan, from anime to Zen, spark joy. And all of this combines to make Japan one of the, if not THE, most-wanted-to-visit destination in the world. In a world full of entrenched divisiveness and conflict, Japan is the one thing everyone can agree on: humanity’s shared safe space.
So. OpenAI has a problem. They have a technology with the power to transform (there’s that word again) and the power to terrify. They need to reach as many people as possible in as reassuring a way as possible. Enter Japan, with its built-in fun-factor from fluffy cherry blossoms to high-tech Shibuya street scenes, to soften the impact.
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/ai-and-japan-as-a-safe-space
4. The best discussion on creative & cultural businesses and internet memes as a biz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxMiypNkU_o&t=557s
5. Lessons from one of the top VCs in the game. Upside maximization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Z0-d5w18M&t=7s
6. Talk about heroes.
https://time.com/6694858/ukrainian-helicopter-missions-mariupol-siege/
7. "Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”
Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes.
Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.
Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/can-ukraine-still-win
8. "That little trip down memory lane—or rather Market Street—was the happiest I’d seen him all morning. We’d spent much of our time together talking about the more recent past, and none of it was much fun to revisit. A few days earlier, he and Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras had announced that they were laying off 20% of the company and that two top executives, Chief Operating Officer Michael Tannenbaum and Chief Technology Officer Cosmin Nicolaescu, had decided to leave the company.
“It was extremely painful,” Franceschi said. “Frustrating, unpleasant, sad, disappointing—you have relationships with these folks.” As Dubugras later added: “Look, people come to work for you—you sell them a dream, and they come to work for you. And this was no one’s expectation when they joined, and it sucks. If I was in their position, I’d be pissed. I get it.”
It’s a sharp reversal in fortune for Franceschi, 27, and Dubugras, 28, whose startup became especially dependent on other startups’ growth during the unicorn era. Now the pair’s predicament presents a picture in miniature of bigger forces at play in Silicon Valley, offering a singular gauge of the rest of the tech industry’s health.
The Brex cuts were an acknowledgment that the fintech, which had bragged publicly about downing giant rivals like American Express, had simply grown too big in recent years; that it hadn’t worked hard to manage its dreams with great prudence; and that it would very much need to do so going forward or risk crumbling under the pressure and expectations attached to its most recent valuation: a $12.3 billion price tag from 2022 that had made the founders billionaires, at least on paper.
During the last several years, “it was faster to hire people than it was to increase efficiency and productivity,” Dubugras acknowledged. “And then the market turned, and efficiency matters a lot more.”
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-brex-boys-uncomfortable-reckoning
9. Every startup founder should listen to this conversation. It will help raise your game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0XO88lZEaE&t=598s
10. "All in all, the still-high rates of violence, alcoholism, and divorce, together with the low rates of church-going and child-rearing, do not paint a picture of a close-knit traditional society that compensates for material poverty with supportive community ties.
I think that an increasing number of people on the American Right subscribe to a sort of romantic Russophilia, in which they conceive of Russia as the antithesis of everything they don’t like about the modern U.S.
Ultimately, though, Russia’s continued dysfunction isn’t a reason for Americans like me to gloat or laugh or give each other high fives. Instead, I think it serves as an important warning: National greatness doesn’t make a country a good place to live.
Putin has certainly done things to improve life for regular Russians, but his most important actions have all been about the revival of Russian power on the international stage. He has engaged in a series of wars, culminating in the current invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, he has built the entire Russian media into a nonstop engine of propaganda about what a great and powerful country Russia is — sort of a 2003 Fox News on steroids. To the Americans who entertain Russophile fantasies, Russia’s most important selling point is that it’s an empire that can — at least in their minds — kick other countries’ asses.
I worry that the U.S. also fell into a trap like this, in the 20th century and the early 21st. Our country was big and powerful and had a dozen aircraft carriers, but our transit systems were decaying, our families were breaking down, we weren’t building enough new housing, our service industries were becoming severely overpriced, drug addiction became rampant, and our cities suffered levels of violence that, even after a huge decrease, would still be intolerable in the rest of the developed world. Like the Russians, we consumed a lot of national greatness, and not enough national effectiveness."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/russia-is-not-actually-a-very-nice
11. More or Less, great debate on what’s happening in tech this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVvxAIBowVs
12. Important discussion on why Pharma industry is kind of mess despite the critical factor they play in our healthcare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1u70kAohCc
13. "The global economic convulsion that would follow an interruption of Taiwanese chips could well exceed those caused by the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has estimated that losing access to Taiwanese semiconductors would shave five to ten percent off U.S. GDP. “It’s an immediate Great Depression,” he assessed in 2022.
Taiwan is in a sense the West Berlin of the new cold war unfolding between Beijing and the free world. It is an outpost of liberty, prosperity, and democracy living in the shadow of an authoritarian superpower. Just as Stalin tested the free world 76 years ago by blockading Berlin, Xi is now testing it with rising pressure on Taiwan."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/taiwan-catastrophe
14. Don't know him personally but Steve Jang has a great rep in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0SrT2tfrs
15. "Space was once something of a career killer for a military officer like Rogers, a place for nerds and science fiction fans — not folks headed to major command positions.
That’s because, over most of the past 20 years, America’s enemies have generally been earthbound. The likes of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS did not have any assets in orbit. A post-Cold War Russia could no longer challenge the US on the ground, let alone in space, while China lacked the technology and cash to do so.
But space still mattered because America’s unquestioned military superiority depended on its equally superior technology in space. More than any other country, the US relies on fleets of orbital spacecraft to communicate with its far-flung military forces, to guide precision weaponry against enemy targets, and to discover those targets through high-altitude surveillance using cameras, radar, and sensors that can intercept radio and other forms of communication. And just as the US military seemed untouchable on Earth, the same seemed true for its orbital assets.
Now, American generals have realized that rivals like China are no longer merely focused on being able to attack US space assets; they are building the tools they need in space to fight the same way the US does — to “find, fix, track targets and attack our joint terrestrial forces,” as Gen. Moore puts it. And that calls for a different set of tactics for an organization that once seemed to fly above the fray."
16. "Build the process, follow the process, and the end result is an active pipeline of great candidates with an understanding of where they are on their own timing schedule and the potential to bring them on the team.
Entrepreneurs would do well to think through the role timing in recruiting talent and always remember the old adage: The best time to start recruiting for that great person was years ago, and the second-best time to start is now."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/02/17/the-role-of-timing-in-recruiting-talent/
17. "In perusing the Global South’s exploitation of the West’s obsession with climate change, one can’t help but feel for the citizens of Germany. Having watched their leaders sacrifice so much of their country’s prosperity, they must now confront the reality of what was gained in return. “Nothing” will be a bitter, utterly predictable pill to swallow."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/dirty-secret
18. "This three day structure has given me some useful constraints. It’s forced me to prioritize what matters even more and also to be a lot quicker with how I make decisions. Also, since our daughter naps three hours a day and crashes at 7:30 there’s actually still a lot more wiggle room to tinker away at things like this newsletter if I run out of time. We don’t “go to work” and are usually at home most days so theres a lot of flexibility with our approach.
If I’m sitting at my desk and my daughter is laughing in the other room, I usually can’t help myself. But it’s been nice to have space to prioritize “me” after putting Angie and our daughter first for most of the past year. Before doing the three blocked days, I felt guilty doing anything for myself. Before she was born, I sort of just did stuff whenever and it worked. I had enough time for myself and did the work that mattered to me. But after adding a kid to the mix, go-with-the-flow was no longer viable."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/why-im-working-three-day-a-week-257
19. "Young men are especially susceptible to gambling addiction. Games of chance hold more initial appeal for them, because men are wired to be more risk-seeking than women and less averse to potential losses. (Note: There are upsides to this — men are more likely to take heroic risks in battle or start a company.)
However, once they play, young men are less able to resist the addictive cycle, because their prefrontal cortex develops more slowly. Think of the prefrontal cortex as the adult in the room, someone with common sense who can see beyond the next dopamine hit. When boys reach adolescence, they experience greater muscle growth than girls do, but behind the eyes, girls are making more important gains: Their prefrontal cortexes mature sooner, giving them greater ability to overcome the reward circuits with rational thought. Every study I’ve read on adolescent development can best be summarized as: While boys are physically stronger, girls are emotionally and mentally stronger.
Sports betting and stock trading are tailor-made to exploit these systems, and they’re particularly attractive to young men, as they don’t present as games of pure chance but tests of skill."
https://www.profgalloway.com/dopa-bowl/
20. "But in venture? You're not just in a relationship business. You're in a relationship business with targets that have constantly fluctuating value. Pass on a seed today? It might be the hottest Series A next year. Annoy a Stripe operator on Twitter? They might be the next "hot" founder. Mistreat a CTO in one company? They might leave and never want to take your money when they start their own company.
As a result? Most VCs became spineless, submissive, love-hungry puppies that will do anything for anyone's validation. This leads to several unfortunate realities about most VCs:
(1) they're skeptical of anyone who likes them,
(2) they're rarely honest about when they might be wrong, and, most importantly,
(3) they're usually incapable of providing valuable feedback"
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-trough-of-feedback
21. Africa is the future? Good case for African stocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQBp6wCOPD0
22. Masterclass on living an awesome and impactful life with Luke Belmar.
Be impatient about the inputs, not the outputs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h6_QQQ1PCE
23. You can never listen to too much Luke Belmar. One of the wisest people on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI-2y7Q-xpk
24. The OG of the internet. Tai Lopez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA1xxTI3X_k&t=457s
25. Really useful conversation on the LP mindset and how GPs should be thinking about liquidity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boNJ5mSx5u0&t=2510s
26. "Something very predictable happened in our quarter century roadtrip on the way to Tomorrowland; we realized instead we wound up on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride instead.
I would like the record to show here in 2QFY24 that this exact problem was discussed in detail back when I was a JO in the mid-1990. This is not shocking to anyone who is wearing the uniform of a GOFO. They lived the same history I did.
We knew we were living a lie that we could sustain a big fight at sea. An entire generation of Flag Officers led this lie in the open and ordered everyone else to smile through it. Ignore your professional instincts, and trust The Smartest People in the Room™."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-wages-of-taking-your-mba-to-war
27. "The expectation that if you have a startup doing well, you’ll raise more money to grow faster and capture more market share doesn’t always materialize. For entrepreneurs, the best strategy is to figure out how to control your own destiny by creating a business, funding strategy, and growth strategy that not only generates tremendous value but also allows for some control and influence over it.
Just because investors say they reserve follow-on funds for their portfolio companies doesn’t mean you’ll be able to tap into those reserves, even if your company is performing well. Ask your investors regularly where they stand for future funding."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/02/10/investor-reserves-didnt-go-to-the-expected-companies/
28. "It never ceases to amaze me when I hear people talk about the defense budget as if there were a certain number of dollars that would provide an optimal level of national defense. In this fantasy world, incredibly smart analysts crunch numbers, the Department of Defense creates a bill for the Office of Management and Budget, and this bill is then presented to the Congress—who pays it unflinchingly because of the obvious wisdom of the thinking that went into it, not to mention the unquestioned non-parochialism of the legislators involved.
This is not how things are done. The inefficiency, the pork, the parochialism, the horse trading, the compromise—these are not bugs. This is the system. And it is this system that drives defense spending. Because there are no “point solutions”, there will always be inefficiency. That inefficiency gets papered over by additional resources. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What often tends to be attributed to the military-industrial complex as undue influence is more often than not, an imperfect method of Congress allocating resources among contending claimants. After mucking around in this world for a while, I have come to conclude that the closer we come to a perfect system of resource allocation, the farther away from representative democracy we will be. It is not pretty, but it is the military-industrial (Congressional) complex, and it works."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-the-military-industrial
29. "Several critical developments are now coming together to accelerate the progress of biotechnology exponentially, shifting us to a future where reliable predictive models enable us to engineer complex biological systems quickly and easily instead of relying on today’s brute force strategy of expensive wet lab experimentation.
Three fundamental shifts are enabling this: First, advances in AI are making truly predictive models for biology possible; second, the rapidly decreasing cost of running biological experiments to generate data for those models, driven by innovations in lab automation and robotics; and third, our ability to quickly engineer animal and plant cells through technologies like CRISPR."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/were-entering-a-golden-age-of-engineering
30. Fascinating discussion on Korean culture and the Kpop wave across the globe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFLuoSqpOU&t=553s
31. SF is back!
"During the pandemic, scores of Silicon Valley investors and executives such as Rabois decamped to sunnier American cities, criticizing San Francisco’s dysfunctional governance and high cost of living. Tech-firm founders touted their success at raising money outside the Bay Area and encouraged their employees to embrace remote work.
Four years later, that bet hasn’t really worked out. San Francisco is once again experiencing a tech revival. Entrepreneurs and investors are flocking back to the city, which is undergoing a boom in artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley leaders are getting involved in local politics, flooding city ballot measures and campaigns with tech money to make the city safer for families and businesses. Investors are also pushing startups to return to the Bay Area and bring their employees back into the office.
San Francisco has largely weathered the broader crunch in startup funding. Investment in Bay Area startups dropped 12% to $63.4 billion last year. By contrast, funding volumes for Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles, two smaller tech hubs, dropped 27% and 42%, respectively. In Miami, venture investment plunged 70% to just $2 billion last year."
https://archive.ph/mT6qm#selection-5967.0-5971.159
32. A valuable and instructive conversation on venture capital & LPs from one of the best performers in VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNJn_xIm2Dk
33. This is pretty cool.
34. Great discussion on AI Investing. Worth listening to if you are a VC nerd like me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=socH3hAUx3w
35. Always nuggets of insight on the VC biz.
Blind Leading the Blind: Copycatting in Emerging Markets
I spend a lot of time traveling through emerging startup ecosystems across Asia, Latam, Europe and one of the most common things I see are copycats of business models that started in America. Things like marketplaces, food delivery, ride sharing and even micro mobility Ie. Stupid scooters like Lime or Bird.
And it makes sense, in their eyes, if it seems to work in the USA so it must work in their country or city. As a founder you copy the business model and remove business model risk. All you have to do is figure out the specific market and cultural issues and solve for it. You become the regional giant and then sell out to the big US players who come to your country later. Or become a big awesomely profitable & independent regional player. Great success!! (As per Borat :)
But there is a small wrinkle here. What if that business model doesn’t actually work in the original USA. And its issues and things like negative unit economics were papered over by massive amounts of VC money.
Obviously there are exceptions to the rule like Getir in Turkey or Glovo in Spain & parts of the emerging Europe for food and grocery delivery. Or Allegro group which is exceptionally good in marketplaces across CEE region. Or Bolt in ride sharing that is doing very well across most of Europe. Or Grab in Southeast Asia for ridesharing and payments. Digital decolonization is a real thing.
But like I said before these tend to be exceptions. So the point for founders (and Local VCs), do your homework and don’t blindly copycat.
It goes without saying: don’t equate big VC funding rounds with working business models. Especially from 2018 to 2021. Perfect example being Bird scooters. What a disaster zone, having raised at least $600M usd and now worth much less publicly than the total amount of VC $$ raised. Which goes to show you how far hype can take you. (Or how deluded venture capitalists can get, saying this as a VC myself).
You can absolutely learn from these American startups but also must understand the X-factor. Ie. What is the local situation, infrastructure and customer readiness that underlies and drives them. And does this business model even make sense locally.
You need to really dig into all the idiosyncrasies of the business model you are copying and seeing how they fit locally. Reach out and talk to VCs or even the founders or C-levels of these American companies. You’d be surprised about how open most founders will be to another founder, especially one in a completely different region.
I’d also recommend following the lean startup methodology and do lots of customer validation tests on the customer segments & testing receptiveness of your region. Don’t go into full on build mode without doing this first.
Assuming you start getting some traction here, really focus on understanding your go to market and unit economics and whether they can work as you grow. In other words, following the title of one of the most underrated startup books around “Nail it and Scale it.” (by Furr and Ahlstrom)
It’s a good practice in general for most startups whether copycatting or not.
Fear and Self Loathing: The Result of Not Betting on Yourself
I find myself in dark moods sometimes. Almost 50 and feeling like I have not really accomplished anything. I’ve done well. But can’t say I’ve done well enough to where I thought I would be if I am truly honest with myself. Especially compared to all the younger, smarter, folks around me.
I can make excuses that growing up where and in the circumstances that I did, that entrepreneurship and investing was just not an option. That I was just not exposed to the possibility although I was exposed to wealth around me.
But these are just excuses. I’ve spent 25+ years in Silicon Valley where I’ve missed so many opportunities in front of me because I was ignorant, uneducated, blind or in most cases lacked the courage to take it on. Because I did not believe in myself or have the guts to bet on myself.
I threw myself into a career making a lot of money for others and without building real equity. All the while intentionally and unintentionally sacrificing my family life that had led to it becoming an ongoing source of pain.
I did not wake up to this until much later in life. And now, overall my life in general is so much better than it ever was, all because I finally woke up and bet on myself. Doing my thing and working with other fellow entrepreneurs who share my values and drive.
It’s also a great time to do so as Dan Koe writes:
“The individual has more power than ever, they can
- Reach millions of people online
- Access any information they want
- Build a massively profitable business
- Use digital tools that have consolidated 10-100 employees' worth of work
It's foolish to let this period pass you by.”
https://twitter.com/thedankoe/status/1679883703286210561
So I implore those who are thinking of taking the entrepreneurial path, Do it now. People are bad at risk management. They overestimate the actual risks but underestimate their own ability to overcome the inevitable challenges that will come your way.
Yes, You will have really tough and bad days as an entrepreneur but give it at least 2 years. Stick with it and you will be inevitably rewarded emotionally & psychically from building something from scratch, and eventually monetarily from the value you provide to people. And if it does not work, you will have learned so much which you will eventually find some way to monetize. I’ve written before, entrepreneurship is the ultimate exercise in personal development.
In the world of globalized talent, automation and AI, being a creative entrepreneur may be the only path to surviving and thriving.
Getting into the Right Rooms: The Universal Law of The Most Successful People
I remember an amazing trip I had to Brisbane, Australia for the Myriad Conference in 2018. They chartered a plane for a bunch of us from San Francisco. It was one of the best tech conferences I’ve been to.
I met so many amazing people on this trip. One of them was Shaan Puri who was telling me about a group of friends and people he got together with regularly. What we now call a Mastermind.
Fast forward 6 years I found out this group of people were some pretty damn impressive people. At that time, up and comers, but now very successful and influential people like Shaan & Sam Parr (of the Hustle and My First Million Podcast), Nikita Bier, Josh Buckley, Xavier Helgesen and Sieva Kosinsky of Enduring Ventures & Romeen Sheth among others. All of whom have become Silicon Valley creators, entrepreneurial & investing giants.
Another impressive group of people that I found out masterminded their mutual rise on Twitter together since 2020 was Greg Isenberg, Sahil Bloom, Nick Huber and Julian Shapiro, Nikita Bier, as well as Shaan Puri and Sam Parr again. They have a combined audience of several million followers on social media. A WOW group of people here.
It’s like a flock of Canadian geese, you lift each other up when flying in motion. People are copy monkeys or as René Girard coined “mimetic”. You naturally copy others. So make sure you are copying the best people.
These groups matter for your business and for your own personal development. It’s critical to be in the right rooms with people on the same trajectory with. People you respect, people going down the same journey as you, people you can ask for advice and learn from. People who you can trade notes with and commiserate with.
It’s incredibly valuable. There is actually a paid community called Hampton for multi million dollar CEOs. Or its equivalent called Dynamite Club, designed specifically for e-commerce business owners.
I’ve joined a bunch myself. I’m part of the ex-500 Startups fund managers group who actually manage more AUM than our alumnus now.
I’m part of the Leveling Mastermind run by Eric Siu of multimillionaire business owners of various DTC, Crypto, Agency or Outsourcing businesses. Amazing group of people here.
As a global macro investor, I’m part of Radigan Carter’s The Fortress Community.
Of course, I’m part of the Diaspora VC community of our LPs, who are all mainly successfully exited HNW tech founders as well as our Diaspora portfolio founders.
I’ve also built my own informal mastermind since 2020, of some investor, founder and HNW/Family Office friends I talk with every 2-4 weeks religiously. It’s critical to keep myself accountable but probably more critically having regular opportunities to learn new things from smart people.
As I’ve repeated many times, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. So get in the right rooms to make this work for you.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 10th, 2024
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” - Ernest Hemingway
"Many people asked, or challenged, that due to modern technology and the future being so different from the past, these historic cycles may no longer apply to us.
It is easy to understand this point of view. Our world is more connected, more centralized, and more rapidly evolving than any empire in history, and as a consequence, the old rules may not apply.
But since it is easy to make that argument, today I will argue the opposite - that it is not different this time, and nothing has changed.
I will argue that the cycles of history are driven by human nature, and not by the available technology."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/it-is-not-different-this-time-and
2. "A decade ago, while doing some writing and thinking for the CJCS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), I came up with the concept of the Zero-day war. The Zero-day war concept leveraged my earlier work on Global Guerrillas (see my book “Brave New War” for more).
It combines;
--infiltration (deep penetration of an enemy’s territory, systems, and society),
--technological leverage (leveraging and modifying commercially available technology to super-empower small groups/individuals), and
--amplification from systems disruption (the ability to easily disrupt large, tightly coupled, and interconnected networks through small attacks, causing cascades of chaos)
to completely overwhelm an adversary for a short period (a couple of days or weeks) by catastrophically disrupting the complex and tightly interconnected networks (energy, transportation, communications, etc.) a modern society is completely and utterly dependent upon."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/zero-day-wars
3. Long been a fan of Nomad Capitalist's work. Go where you are treated best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-b3dEDkIQ&t=1818s
4. A far out there take but yes, Australia and Japan are big regional powers. Not sure if China will disappear as he says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eejRr-oP6hw
5. "But in any case, a global trade war is brewing. Arguments that countries should go back to embracing free trade, so that their consumers can have slightly cheaper goods, are likely to fall on deaf ears.
The best thing we can do now is to try to make sure that whatever trade barriers countries do throw up are consistent with their objectives, and have as few self-destructive side effects as possible."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tariffs-are-coming
6. "But after two years of war, the adaptation battle has changed. The quality gap between Ukraine and Russia has closed. Ukraine still has an innovative and bottom-up military culture, which allows it to quickly introduce new battlefield technologies and tactics.
But it can struggle to make sure that those lessons are systematized and spread throughout the entire armed forces. Russia, on the other hand, is slower to learn from the bottom up because of a reluctance to report failure and a more centralized command philosophy. Yet when Russia does finally learn something, it is able to systematize it across the military and through its large defense industry.
These differences are reflected in the ways the two states innovate. Ukraine is better at tactical adaptation: learning and improving on the battlefield. Russia is superior at strategic adaptation, or learning and adaptation that affects national and military policymaking, such as how states use their resources. Both forms of adaptation are important. But it is the latter type that is most crucial to winning wars.
The longer this war lasts, the better Russia will get at learning, adapting, and building a more effective, modern fighting force. Slowly but surely, Moscow will absorb new ideas from the battlefield and rearrange its tactics accordingly. Its strategic adaptation already helped it fend off Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and over the last few months it has helped Russian troops take more territory from Kyiv.
Ultimately, if Russia’s edge in strategic adaptation persists without an appropriate Western response, the worst that can happen in this war is not stalemate. It is a Ukrainian defeat."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russias-adaptation-advantage
7. Deeply insightful discussion on seed venture capital and what’s happening now. Net net: it's damn hard to be good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nzScuxuvo
8. "Summary: If you plan on being well off, a high paying W-2 could get you into the top 10% pretty comfortably. If you want to be in the top 1% you are only fooling yourself if you think the best path (probability wise) is a career - the math will prove you wrong even without normal life events - kids, layoffs and standard sudden expenses.
Getting Ahead Now
Fortunately for you there are a few things that the boomers and middle managers don’t understand. They don’t understand: 1) AI tools, 2) crypto currencies, 3) video editing, 4) AR/VR use cases and 5) network effects.
If they understood any of these things they wouldn’t have stayed in middle management, they would have built the requisite skills and asset base to leave sooner than later.
All of these skills are easy to learn today with zero need for a a $200,000 degree from some top MBA program with a 20-30% unemployment rate. Just up to you to decide if you’re going to try and get into the top 1%."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/want-to-be-the-1-get-used-to-building
9. "VC money has been burning to fuel the growth of this technology to its success. Now it’s trying to find product market fit. Will they find a sustainable business model before server costs eat their runway?
Who knows.
But when selling a strict AI company product (like OpenAI), what will people pay for a chatbot? People may be paying 20 dollars a month, but that doesn’t cover the server costs. Especially now where someone can run a full model on their laptop without safety constraints.
We haven’t seen many successful businesses yet. Because everyone has pitched and drank the Kool-aid that AI can do everything. But it can’t."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/the-future-of-ai
10. "European states must therefore start operating on the assumption that Trump will win—and in that case they will be left on their own to look after their security. It will require a very different mindset than has existed since 1945, and a willingness to be decisive in a way that does not come natural to European states."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-europe-must-do-now-in-10-steps
11. "The slowing Chinese economy may be a canary in the coal mine to other financial markets that the effects of the fastest rate hiking cycle in recent memory (with record global debt levels) have not been fully felt yet.
The speed of this downturn may be shocking to some, but I am relatively unsurprised. The Chinese stock market is littered with frauds, scams, pump and dumps, and blatant corruption.
Officials are paid to look the other way, auditors don’t care about the accuracy of reports, and due diligence is essentially a non-starter. I was awakened to the depth of the problems in China in 2018 when watching The China Hustle, a documentary on the fraudulent listing of Chinese equities on U.S. exchanges and how retail investors were exploited."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/crisis-in-shanghai
12. "The magic is not in filling out forms or watching cute videos about your product, it’s about using your product as quickly as possible. As a result, the only acceptable forms of friction are ones that ultimately enhance the users ability to have a great experience.
Thus product is much better experienced as an app, where you have a notifications channel and a richer experience, then, by all means, ask the user to download something. If a product is much better, when used with colleagues or friends, that it might make sense to take a lower conversion rate during the sign-up flow in exchange for some sharing or inviting functionality, that brings more people into the app.
Ultimately, it’s all a trade-off, where every click drops off a huge number of users, so you need to spend that user intent very very well."
https://andrewchen.com/every-time-you-ask-the-user-click-you-lose-half/
13. "Don’t get distracted by only watching the United States and western central banks. They may be still tightening at the moment, but there is trouble brewing in the eastern world. This is going to bring an estimated $2 trillion of liquidity into the market. If that happens, investment assets globally will likely benefit.
We live in a digital, hyper-connected world today. Your local geography can have an impact on you, but the global liquidity situation is the final boss. And it appears the Chinese are about to give a gift to the world."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-chinese-are-about-to-give-a-gift
14. This is a tough forecast. But better to hear an informed view that rings true and the dishonesty we hear in mainstream media. Geopolitics in USA and across the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-uaiU4f6ZM
15. I always learn from Luke Belmar. His perspective is fresh and very smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h6_QQQ1PCE&t=2076s
16. "The Silicon Valley part of me is genuinely excited about the alternative forms of governance being dreamed up today, from network states and charter cities to seasteading and space colonies. Our sclerotic institutions absolutely need more competition. But the realities of violence in the physical world mean the Pentagon part of me can't let the claim that World War III is an impossibility go unchallenged.
What I’ll be arguing in this post is that “sovereignty” is a word that will continue to be inextricably linked to controlling a powerful military. Even if the vast majority of nation-states cease to exist and are replaced by network states, those network states will be forced to either build their own powerful militaries or rely on the remaining nation-states that do have large militaries.
It is indeed possible that the scale of warfare falls in the future, but it won’t be because states are unable to finance a massive conflict or lack the incentives to initiate one; rather, some state(s) will be so capable of winning a war that adversaries will not initiate conflict. Classic deterrence through technological superiority remains our greatest hope for peace."
https://www.elysian.press/p/military-without-nation-states
17. Masterful conversation on how top VCs think and the philosophy behind excellence in startup investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2tzHNQddnI
18. Poland is well positioned for the future whatever happens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRoDjUcVOPY
19. "Most countries suffer from at least a diluted version of this problem. But the West, and within the West the United States particularly, seems these days to be incapable of long-term thinking, or of sustaining any memory of even the relatively recent past. This means that almost any unexpected event is destabilising and inexplicable, because nobody has been studying long-term trends.
Such disparate examples as the Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or the rebuilding of the Russian defence industry over the last fifteen years, were prepared and undertaken in plain sight: it’s just that nobody was paying attention to them until their irruption into the news cycle made them unmissable. Likewise, nobody in the West can really analyse their long-term consequences properly, because we no longer have the capability or the inclination to do long-term thinking.
The result is panic and confusion, and the search for simple explanations, because the myopic western system cannot accommodate the almost infinite complexity of the real world.
This combination of a brutal word-view based on crude assumptions about hegemony, an attention-span insufficient to boil an egg competently, and an inability and a disinclination to imagine futures except as variants of the present, means that any genuinely significant change produces stupefaction and panic in the capitals of the West."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-newer-world-order
20. Fascinating discussion on Africa and its future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaZzr_skxt4&t=925s
21. "Named after the mystical seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir sells the same aura of omniscience. Seeded in part by an investment from the CIA’s venture-capital arm, it built its business providing data-analytics software to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, the Department of Defense, and a host of foreign-intelligence agencies. “They are the AI arms dealer of the 21st century,” says Jacob Helberg, a national-security expert who serves as an outside-policy adviser to Karp. In Ukraine, Karp tells me, he saw the opportunity to fulfill Palantir’s mission to “defend the West” and to “scare the f-ck out of our enemies.”
Ukraine saw an opportunity too. At first it was driven by desperation, says Fedorov, 33. With the Russians threatening to topple Zelensky’s democratically elected government and occupy the country, Kyiv needed all the help it could get. But soon, government officials realized they had a chance to develop the country’s own tech sector. From European capitals to Silicon Valley, Fedorov and his deputies began marketing the battlefields of Ukraine as laboratories for the latest military technologies. “Our big mission is to make Ukraine the world’s tech R&D lab,” Fedorov says.
The progress has been striking. In the year and a half since Karp’s initial meeting with Zelensky, Palantir has embedded itself in the day-to-day work of a wartime foreign government in an unprecedented way. More than half a dozen Ukrainian agencies, including its Ministries of Defense, Economy, and Education, are using the company’s products. Palantir’s software, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present commanders with military options, is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to Karp.
Ukraine and its private-sector allies say they are playing a longer game: creating a war lab for the future. Ukraine “is the best test ground for all the newest tech,” Fedorov says, “because here you can test them in real-life conditions.” Says Karp: “There are things that we can do on the battlefield that we could not do in a domestic context.”
https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/
22. “We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.”
Altman’s idea is that AI tools will soon reach the point where they can replicate the entire output of human employees. Instead of needing to hire a designer, you can use GPT-6 to design for you. There will be far less need for software engineers (meh), sales staff (no one will miss them), and newsletter writers (a tragedy of Greek proportions, leaving our society barren and empty).
An ambitious founder could outsource the work they would use employees for to an army of artificial intelligence agents. Theoretically, this would allow entrepreneurs to focus on only tackling their most important competitive advantage.
This is a claim worth examining, not just because I would like to be the first person to build that billion-dollar company. The one-person billion-dollar company matters because it is a handy way to understand how AI will disrupt knowledge work. In a good world, Altman’s prediction would come true because AI would allow people to build something whatever they can dream up. In a bad world, it would become true because AI will make most people’s jobs irrelevant, concentrating power in the hands of the elites."
https://every.to/napkin-math/the-one-person-billion-dollar-company
23. "In fact, Bangladesh is embedded in a larger mega-region — South and Southeast Asia, together home to 2.4 billion people — that is seeing rapid, broadly distributed growth and pockets of intense industrialization. This, I believe, is the most important development story of our time. Perhaps Africa’s turn will come a bit later, but South and Southeast Asia are ready now, and 2.4 billion people is a very large number.
In my opinion, to tell these countries to give up on industrialization right now, at the cusp of their big moment, and to refocus on nontradable services instead, would be to do them a deep disservice. Instead, I think they should keep trying the traditional model of development, taking advantage of trends like friend-shoring and de-riskingto encourage FDI and build up their manufacturing sectors. If that model eventually breaks, then it breaks, and we find something else. But from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look broken yet."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/do-poor-countries-need-a-new-development
24. "Whether you are founding a Web 2 or Web 3 startup, acquiring and retaining users is the most challenging and expensive aspect of your business. In Web 2, which was most prevalent from 2010 to 2020, a VC fund looked for startups with a modicum of initial traction and subsequently provided cash money rocket fuel for the startup to go on a user acquisition spree.
Usually that entails handing out the service for free or at a discounted rate, well below its actual cost of delivery. Remember when ride-sharing apps were all fighting viciously for market share, and fares were incredibly cheap? That was all paid for with billions of dollars worth of VC money. Think of it as a subsidy in return for users.
At the end of the rainbow for a VC firm was a successful initial public offering (IPO). The IPO allowed the plebes to own a piece of a successful Web 2 company for the first time. IPOs are the way to dump on retail in TradFi. However, various regulations barred the plebes from crowdfunding early-stage Web 2 companies. The irony is that the vast number of plebe users who drove the success of the company were prohibited from owning a piece of it.
Bitcoin and the subsequent evolution of the crypto capital markets changed this. As of 2009 – the genesis Bitcoin block – it became possible to reward participants with ownership in the startup. This is what I will refer to as Web 3 startups.
Before you could purchase Bitcoin on an exchange starting in 2010, mining it was the only way to acquire it. Miners, by burning electricity, validate transitions, which creates and upkeeps the network. For this activity, they are rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin.
Participation = Ownership
The participants or users now have skin in the game."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/points-guard
25. "So viewed through that lens, the unifying pattern of Trump, Elon, and Kanye is that at their core, they're putting on a show. A massive, unlimited duration, infinitely varying, endlessly fascinating show — the greatest shows on earth. And that show attracts attention, yes, but also votes, feet in the street, shareholder investment, car sales, music sales, sneaker sales, etc.
And that’s why you can’t get the good of Trump, Elon, or Kanye without the bad. The bad is part of the appeal, the bad is what shows it’s authentic; and probably powers the engine — the torture that keeps them going.
A hero is universally loved within a society, an anti-hero is hated by double digit percentages. Until new borders are established, this is a time of anti-heroes.
When Slave Morality is embraced by the establishment, the word “hero” today often means victim: Greta and the like.
And when Master Morality is demonized, traits like strength, masculinity, power, tribalism, are seen as anti-hero traits. Batman, Punisher, Donald Trump, Kyle Rittenhouse, 2nd Amendment, Andrew Tate — the mood of the right is not hero but anti-hero. The Republican establishment doesn’t want it, but the populace does.
Strap in, because for better and for worse, I think we’re only going to get more people following the Elon, Trump, and Kanye playbooks."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-heroes
26. A must listen for anyone in the technology biz. BG2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgvoYJvbNT8
27."The result is that the US now finds itself operating in two strategic eras at the same time. In one, heavily armed industrial militaries fight a catastrophic war over a chunk of Europe (with a potentially even more catastrophic invasion scenario lurking in Asia). And in another, a Yemeni rebel group using rudimentary drone and missile technology shows itself capable of causing a disruption to global supply chains on par with Covid-19.
To comprehend this chaotic era — one in which nation-states boast historically destructive firepower but in many ways appear weaker than ever, unable to mobilize their populations around a common call or control their international environment — we need to go beyond the well-worn 20th-century analogies. We need to get medieval."
28. "Meta was able to simultaneously slim down and muscle up in part because its pandemic weight gain was so large. The empty calories of 2020-21 resulted in fatty deposits forming firm-wide. That’s been obvious, but the more interesting question is whether we are witnessing Meta go Black Mirror. Is AI the firm’s Ozempic? Preorders of Nvidia enterprise GPUs are a decent proxy for a firm’s investment in AI, and Meta has ordered more than any company in the world. (Tied with MSFT.) Does this mean the companies in the chart below are about to shed 10% to 25% of their weight/workforce while maintaining revenue growth?
The Ozemping of Meta unlocked its operating margin, which increased from a respectable 20% to a staggering 41%. Meta exemplifies an “asset-light” model. Don’t own the car, apartment, chip plant, or content (the creators’ salaries) — build a thick layer of software on top of other people’s assets. Shein, which owns no stores, factories, warehouses, or even distribution centers, is using this strategy to become the fastest retailer to $1 billion in history.
Meta speedballs this with an addictive product in an unregulated market. Now, years of investment in AI might be adding another leg to the stool — virtual workers who don’t expect pet-bereavement leave."
https://www.profgalloway.com/metastasis/
29. This is such a great discussion on tech this week. Vision Pro and its implications. The next great platform?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIWJz2d9vJw
30. "Ethnic imperialism is exactly what we’re facing in Russia right now. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine’s wheat farms. Nor is he motivated by some world-conquering ideology. He simply wants Russia to rule over all the places he views as being within its historic and linguistic sphere of influence.
The question is where that sphere stops. Putin assured Carlson that he has no designs on Latvia or Poland. This rather pointedly leaves out Estonia, where 25% of the population are Russian speakers, and which Russia continually bullies despite its NATO membership. But the elephant in the room here is really Poland.
In other words, even if Ukraine falls, the fundamental conflict between Putin and the West will not diminish, because it’s really about Poland. Poland’s Western-backed success represents the major challenge to Russia’s domination of what Putin sees as its rightful sphere of influence. And as long as Poland is wealthy and strong and independent, Putin, with the 1600s still fresh in his mind, will always feel like Russia is under direct threat.
So Americans who imagine that letting Putin have Ukraine would put an end to the conflict in East Europe should come to their senses. As long as Poland is fully independent, economically successful, and militarily powerful, Putin will feel that Russia’s position as master of East Europe is insecure. In fact, until Russian leaders learn to respect and get along with Poland, I fear that conflicts like the present one will repeat themselves."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-ukraine-war-is-ultimately-about
31. "As for those countries that are in dire need of Africa’s minerals, they should stop the demagoguery and find a way to compete with China’s approach. It won’t be easy, for the West in particular. China has the advantage that it can negotiate government to government agreements, which African governments prefer, whereas the West relies on the corporate world to do its work for them.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is one nation taking on this challenge. To achieve its ambitious Vision 2030, it will need plenty of critical minerals and has turned its focus towards the “super region” which includes West Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Much like Chinese strategic planning, KSA also takes a long-term view to its own development and is in a position to negotiate government to government deals. It also has a lot of wealth it can deploy. Like, a lot.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) has committed to investing $25 billion towards clean energy by the end of the decade and looks to invest another $15 billion to acquire stakes in mineral projects in return for offtake agreements for the physical metals. Additionally, it proposed $10 billion to finance and ensure Saudi exports through 2030 and an additional $5 billion in development financing for African nations.
Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal, citing people with knowledge of the talks, reported that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are in talks to secure metals in Africa needed to help them with their energy transitions. This approach is smart and might solve America’s dilemma in competing with China. KSA, which has working relationships with all the great powers, is uniquely positioned to somewhat copy the Chinese approach.
The Kingdom is not the only recent entrant in Africa. Qatar, along with the UAE
(Saudi’s frenemy), and to a lesser extent Turkey, are also looking to invest in Africa. We can only hope they take a similar approach.
If we hope to avoid ongoing turmoil and deadly conflict in Africa, it’s imperative that the global community secures its mineral needs while creating an environment that will benefit the fast-growing population of ordinary Africans. These objectives do not need to be mutually exclusive."
32. An excellent episode this week on what’s up in tech. Great discussion on investing and building AI businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHO4hoXc75k
33. "So here we are in 2024. All signs point to this being a pivotal year in the global contest. On one hand, China’s weakening economy is making the New Axis a less menacing opponent, but this transition is very slow and marginal. On the other hand, U.S. domestic political turmoil threatens to remove it from the equation, thus leaving China a free hand in Asia. And all the while, the war in Gaza festers on, diverting U.S. attention and resources from the far more important theater in Asia.
In other words, the U.S. election may offer the New Axis the chance to win Cold War 2 at a stroke. Without American power, Asia — and eventually, Eurasia — effectively belongs to Xi Jinping.
Even if Biden manages to rally and hold off a second Trump presidency, of course, U.S. aid for both Ukraine and Taiwan is in doubt. The so-called MAGA faction in Congress is trying to block a bill that would provide both countries with military aid, along with Israel. They don’t seem likely to give up that effort if Trump loses the election. And meanwhile, the war in Gaza and the Houthis’ attacks on shipping in the Red Sea appear likely to distract America’s attention, divert its navy, and siphon off military aid from the Asian theater.
So although the New Axis isn’t winning on every front — and may even get weaker in a decade or two — it has the chance to deal a decisive blow to the U.S.-led bloc in 2024. Only if the developed democracies can hang on and maintain internal stability and solid alliances in the short term will they be able to take advantage of Chinese economic weakness in the 2030s and 2040s."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/2024-could-be-the-pivotal-year-for
34. Still bullish in long run despite the recent drop in demand. This will be even more important with re-industrialization in West and boomers retiring.
"Non-automotive robots faired only slightly better last year, dropping 25%. According to A3, metal electronics manufacturing, food/consumer, medical and plastics/rubber saw the largest demand outside of automotive for the year.
A3 president Jeff Burnstein struck a hopeful note, stating, “While robotic sales were down over the year, 2023 ended with both an increase over the previous quarter and a nearly equal number of sales from automotive and non-automotive companies. Both are promising signs that more industries are becoming increasingly comfortable with automation overall.
While we expect to see automotive orders rise again, there’s little doubt that orders will increase from all non-automotive industries as they recognize how robots can help them overcome their unique challenges.”
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/12/north-american-robot-orders-dropped-30-last-year/
35. "Beyond the opportunity for serendipty, the biggest reason to always take corp dev meetings is to open channels of communication. Should you ever need to spin up an acquisition process (or ramp up competitive offers), you’ll already have relationships with the people you need to speak with."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/5-ways-to-improve-an-m-and-a-outcome
If Your Life Sucks, It’s Your Fault: Taking TOTAL Personal Ownership (My thousandth and ongoing reminder)
I was reading several Twitter exchanges recently and it reflects the dysfunction in the modern West these days. So many people complain about how their lives suck. Blaming their parents, their friends, their boss, the patriarchy, their government and even society. Blaming America. Everyone but themselves.
Yes, inequality exists. Yes, it’s unfair and it sucks. Yes, it does need to be recognized and called out sometimes. But ultimately this is a waste of valuable time and energy.
In fact if there is a matrix or cabal of greater controlling powers, they want you to waste time moaning, complaining and blaming others. It stops you from taking any action to better your life or situation. Yet it’s so much easier to blame others and try to tear them down, just look at the awful “midwits” on Twitter or the comments section of YouTube. It probably even feels good for a short period of time too.
But ultimately it just leads to your own downward spiral. And it’s why I have no time or patience for these whiny complaining losers. Especially if they are not actively trying to change their circumstances. And I admit I was once one of those people, complaining about a bad situation but not doing anything about it. Going nowhere fast in life. Until I woke up.
So when something bad happens to you, you must take full responsibility.
Fired from your job? That’s your fault because you did not do a good job or did not deliver results or have the EQ to get along better with your peers. Or I did not recognize fast enough about the organization and management changes and my mal-adaptation to these changes.
Have money problems? You did not understand the rules of money or save enough of an emergency fund.
Cheated by your business partners? You did not pay attention to their failings and the signs of their untrustworthiness.
Have family problems? Or does your partner want to leave you? You did not pay attention to them, you did not take care of business. You also probably did not focus on being the best version of yourself and the best option for them. Especially as a man. Your job as a man is to become strong of mind, body and finances. If you aren’t, why would your partner respect you?
I know this sounds harsh but I've experienced all of this myself. And in the last decade too. But I can tell you, the best way forward is just owning it, even though it hurts your ego.
Take the hard lesson from it. Oh and by the way, they are ALL hard lessons. Ponder and reflect on it & don’t beat yourself up too much. Easier said than done, as I am personally harsh on myself even though I know it’s not useful.
Come up with a plan, then fix the situation as well and fast as you can. Move on and don’t make the same mistake again. Life is supposed to be tough & you are supposed to suffer.
Get over it and go do the work, become capable and build a great life for yourself and your loved ones.
Or keep on complaining and blaming others, and stay stuck in where you are at, like all the other losers in life. The choice is yours.
As the brilliant Luke Belmar says: “Winners gonna win, Losers gonna lose.”
This is Why No One Will Remember Your Name: Why You Need to Do Hard, Difficult Things
There is an iconic scene in the old Hollywood blockbuster movie “Troy” starring Brad Pitt who plays the war hero Achilles.
He is woken from bed to fight the champions of the Trojans, a massive sized warrior. The young messenger says:
“The Thessalonian you are fighting, he’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t want to fight him.”
Achilles responds: “that’s why no one will ever remember your name.”
The lesson is very stark to me.
You can be a nobleman willing to risk his life in battle to save others. Or you can be a toiling peasant or messenger boy that just barely survives and ekes out a living, overlooked and unrespected.
So how are ancient war heroes like Achilles relevant to modern day life? It’s highly relevant.
Want to have a normal life without hardship. To be comfortable and not challenge yourself? To hide from pain and be unwilling to sacrifice anything. Unwilling to grow.
That is why you won’t go anywhere in life. That is why no one will remember your name because you have had little impact at all. This is why I would hate living full time in Canada or Western Europe. It’s great to visit but I can’t last more than 2 weeks there. The level of complacency and laziness drives me berserk. And people there find me a bit harsh and intense so i’m probably not welcomed there either.
This is why I prefer central and eastern Europe. Places where people generally have good work ethic and drive. Where they still want to do the work to better themselves. It’s because they have tasted bitterness as per Chinese parlance having grown up in the 90s when the Soviet Union completely collapsed. Unlike in the rest of Europe that has seen unprecedented levels of security, prosperity and socialism that has engendered a crap environment of decadence, comfort and entitlement.
Thankfully in this day and age, we usually do not have to fight anyone, although it’s probably a good idea to be trained for it just in case. So the person you are fighting is usually your own self.
Facing Your own bad habits, your own sloth and laziness and comfort and crushing them completely. Anyone who has done anything worthwhile in life is willing to face his/her own fears and challenge themselves to take action. Actions to better themselves and to better the lives of everyone around you. Otherwise you are a coward and no one respects or honors a coward.
Be Careful for What You Wish For: Life Gives You What You Want Not What You Need
It’s so ironic that as I am close to crossing the age of 50, it seems like I’ve gotten everything I’ve ever dreamed of. An interesting career, some financial success and freedom. A life jet-setting across the world investing and speaking at conferences. On the personal goals side I’m also eating well and buying, collecting & reading so many books. It’s like I manifested my childhood dreams.
But as people who know me well, I really valued and still really value family and home life. It was my refuge and source of stability as well as joy & happiness in a cold world of competition out there. As a Taurus I really value stability.
Sadly my family life has been a disaster zone because of neglect. I took it for granted. And you only realize it after you lose it. You hear the stories about other people but you never think it will happen to you. Humans only learn the hard way as always.
It’s really easy to optimize career and money. The metrics and scorecard are so much easier to track. It’s tangible in the short term.
Family and relationships on the other hand, tends to be intangible. And you usually don’t see the results for a long time. Just like building businesses and venture investing which you would think I would have clued in on this earlier. And like credit card debt, it compounds and you eventually will have to pay it.
I’m paying this price now. The price is expensive therapy costs for myself and family. The price is quiet lonely days on big holidays by myself when I should be celebrating with family. That and plenty of emotional pain that clouds all the other aspects of your life. Honestly, it sucks because there is no clear or obvious path to fixing it. And I only have myself to blame. I have alluded to this in the past few years.
So don’t make the same mistake I did. It’s a constant issue for ambitious type-A individuals; this is the trap. Work hard on your career and business, this is important. But also be equally thoughtful, dedicated & purposeful with your family and home life as well. You will pay for it eventually. And you don’t want this. Trust me on that.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 3rd, 2024
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” - Khalil Gibran
I find these breakdowns interesting. Tiger Woods on how he made his money (it's not just golf it’s mainly sponsorships).
https://manofmany.com/entertainment/sport/tiger-woods-net-worth
2. This is a must read for B2B startup founders.
https://www.vendr.com/insights/saas-trends-report-2023
3. So many great data points on what’s happening in Silicon Valley. Aileen is a 3 cycle investor. It's time to build and invest over the next 5 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psD8Wd5u-bM&t=10s
4. The Gamestop nuttiness summarized with some valuable lessons for retail investors.
"First, shorting mechanisms are badly abused in our markets. Some securities, like $GME, were able to be sold over 100% of the float. The 140% short interest on the stock was later found to be the maximum that the system could report. In reality, the stock was shorted around 220%, and even that might be conservative.
Second, financial media takes the side of the institutions, every time. The appeal to "retail investors" is a facade- it's a wonder that these news channels can even retain any of their legitimacy after this, with a notable example being Jim Cramer. Third, the clearinghouses, NSCC, and DTCC worked together to protect the brokers, short-sellers, and other firms who had been caught in this trade.
"Free and fair markets" was now clearly shown for what it was- A LIE."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/gamestopped
5. "The national willpower, human cost, and treasure that it took to mentally and emotionally break them is hard to comprehend.
This isn’t a unique situation, people are pretty much the same around the world, human nature is a constant.
Watch the Battle of Algiers movie from 1966 to see the level of will required to win a counterinsurgency against a civilian population. But even then, it only worked for a time before the national French will required to exert their will on Algeria was no longer there.
This is what Israel is currently doing against Gaza and they know they are on the clock. They have limited time to break the will of the Palestinians before the will of their own people and the international will to support the level of violence required fades.
This is also why I think the US strikes in Yemen and the blood thirsty calls by ancient politicians to strike Iran who are risking nothing and should be in an old folks homes instead of clinging to power like Skeletor at Castle Grayskull is such a joke.
The US national will to exert the level of violence required against either of them to win is not there.
There is zero point to having aircraft carriers when the public is not committed to the level of violence necessary to make them the Houthis stop.
It is a fact the Houthis can take more pain than we can deliver since that is all they’ve known for last decade.
Americans can’t even take living without air conditioning, Houthis are having missiles and bombs dropped on their heads while wearing flip flops in 120 degree heat and chanting bring the pain while they keep launching missiles.
No amount of ordnance dropped on them is going to break dudes who have had tens of thousands of bombs dropped on them by Saudi Arabia already."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/warlord-economics
6. Getting inside an LPs mind. This is very instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihT5BHm4z2E
7. "Robust answers will require data and evidence that are not yet publicly available. But the best answer for now lies in the way the two sides, and especially the Russian defenders, used their available forces. By late spring, the Russians had adopted the kind of deep, prepared defenses that have been very difficult for attackers to break through for more than the last century of combat experience. Breakthrough has been—and still is—possible in land warfare.
But this has long required permissive conditions that are now absent in Ukraine: a defender, in this case Russia, whose dispositions are shallow, forward, ill prepared, or logistically unsupported or whose troops are unmotivated and unwilling to defend their positions. That was true of Russian forces in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson in 2022. It is no longer the case.
If quality can ensure quick, decisive victories, the traditional U.S. approach is sound. But if the lesson of Ukraine’s 2023 offensive, in light of past experience, is that deep and well-prepared defenses remain robust, as they have been for the last century, then quality alone may not be enough to ensure the kind of short wars of quick decisive breakthroughs that U.S. defense planning has long tended to presuppose.
Quality is necessary for opportunity but may be insufficient in itself for success. And if so, the United States may need to rethink its balance of quality and quantity in a world where permissive conditions happen sometimes but cannot be guaranteed."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-russia-stopped-ukraines-momentum
8. "Therefore we’ll outline the ideal use case:
Caffeine is ideal for pushing through. If you have an exam, a deadline or something you need an extra hour or two of focused work? Take the drink. Do not use it daily
Caffeine on the physical side is likely maxed at a 20 minute interval or so, maybe 30 minutes max. If you are a competitive athlete you wouldn’t use it for a 90 minute soccer game. You might use it if you have 15 minutes left in a major game, or you are a role player who plays 15-20 mins in basketball. Essentially line up the caffeine with 20-30 mins of max output. Do not use this to try and win the Tour de France as you’ll burn out
Absurd consumption. When you’re in full workaholic mode you might be forced to drink a full gram per day of caffeine. This is absurd to many but if you’ve lived the “gauntlet” you know why it happens. If you do this, you better have a detox plan lined up right after
Consistency kills the positive of caffeine. It is meant to be cycled.
As you can see, no where in here is *daily* consumption. Daily consumption is probably the worst of all worlds. You get a slight boost that declines in effectiveness every week. You’re building tolerance. If you were to take it once or twice a week, at 200mg or so, you are unlikely building tolerance and could zero it out with a couple weeks off."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/caffeine-as-a-drugperformance-enhancer
9. "Anything that offers substantial rewards comes with risk, a high likelihood of failure. Which means you’ll need to make several appearances at the plate before you connect with the ball. The top scorers in the Premier League miss half their shots.
Great players, like great entrepreneurs and leaders, see the ball go wide, shake their head, and move on. If you want to be successful, you will likely need to quit the majority of your jobs, homes, friends, and investments. Your jobs, locale, investments, and relationships are commitments, not suicide pacts.
What get labeled ”overnight successes” rarely are, and the best way to become an overnight success is to work your ass off for 30 years. Most hugely successful entrepreneurs don’t hit it on their first venture.
Nobody is paying as much attention to your failures as you are, so fear them but don’t let them paralyze you. When you do fail, don’t feel you need to excuse them or blame others. Being gracious in victory is admirable. What’s harder, but can pay greater dividends, is being gracious in failure. Express gratitude to everyone who believed in you, and demonstrate grace to those who didn’t.
Shame and fear of embarrassment often hold people back from leaving … and leading a better life."
https://www.profgalloway.com/quitting-time/
10. "Which is why, even if an invasion is unlikely, or even decades away, the question — What might Japan do if China invades Taiwan, unprovoked? — has become more urgent. Japan’s answer could shape how the US prepares for any armed confrontation over Taiwan, its outcome, and whatever world emerges after.
Whether it wanted to or not, Japan itself cannot intervene to defend Taiwan. Japan’s post-World War II constitution renounces war, and so its Self-Defense Forces (SDF) are just that, a military that exists to defend its territory. (Japan has, especially in recent years, pushed against those constitutional parameters.)
What Japan does have is a security alliance with the United States. This treaty commits the US to defend Japan in the event of an attack on its soil, in exchange for America’s use of Japanese territory for “the purpose of contributing to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the Far East.” That is, military bases. About 55,000 US forces are based in Japan, and US military facilities span 77,000 acres, the majority in Okinawa prefecture. In any war with Taiwan, the US would need to deploy naval vessels and fighter jets from these locations.
But the use of these military bases requires prior consultation: Japan must grant the US permission to use these facilities in combat beyond the defense of Japan. If Taiwan invades, and the US wants to intervene, Japan has its own dilemma: to say yes potentially signs Japan up for war, leaving itself vulnerable to attack from China. To say no could unravel the US-Japan alliance, leaving itself vulnerable by cutting off its only security guarantor.
If Japan does say no, seeing the risks to itself and its population as too great, in any fight with China, the US is probably toast. The American military would likely be crushed if it intervened without being able to deploy its assets from Japan, but potentially strategically defeated if it did not intervene at all."
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24047940/china-us-war-taiwan-japan-key-role-explained
11. "I asked Hastings if the tumult preceding his departure had left him shaken, a question he shrugged off: “We’ve been through a lot of ups and downs. When I screwed things up with Qwikster in 2011, well, that was a scary moment,” he said.
Hastings remains Netflix’s executive chair, a vague title that has meant a hands-on role for other people in his position, inviting meddling. But Sarandos, who’s stayed on as co-CEO along with former Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, said Hastings was so intentional in building the company’s cultural foundations that his influence will endure without any need for micromanagement. “Reed had been working on succession, I think, from day one,” Sarandos told me. “He always said, ‘I’m building this company to be around centuries after me.’”
“I’m not in the office a lot, trying to hold on to my powers,” Hastings admitted during our conversation in Utah, as the snow outside glinted under bright sunshine. “They are in charge, and it’s theirs, hopefully, to run for 20 years and make it even more successful.
Then he made an admission: After leaving Netflix, he assumed he would dedicate himself full time to philanthropy. When he found himself spending so many hours on the Powder Mountain project, “I felt guilty. It was an indulgence,” he said. “And then it became ‘I should do both.’ I’ll do more and better philanthropy thanks to the nourishing part,” as only life at this altitude can deliver.”
12. This is a great discussion and school on how venture capital works and the different strategies that firms pursue. So very good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4RfDtAAcgY
13. This looks so very awesome. "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnFo21ZlYc
14. The wisest man on the internet these days. Luke Belmar. Entrepreneurship is about freedom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHJeylXFsw8
15. "SaaS 1.0 represented the initial leap from physical software installations to cloud-based solutions, changing the way businesses accessed and scaled technology (think Salesforce). SaaS 2.0 built on the concept, embracing mobile integration, enhanced user interfaces, and collaboration tools to meet the evolving demands of enterprises (think Slack).
For decades, machine learning and iterations of AI have been embedded into these B2B applications. Everything from semantic search, automated content generation, recommendation engines, and big data have found their way into product suites. This made managing backend operations much easier for enterprises.
Now, with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), AI isn’t just an add-on but at the core of the application.
Enter SaaS 3.0: In this new phase, AI and machine learning are enhancing B2B applications to more effectively handle business-critical tasks. Through LLMs and deep learning, B2B vendors can automate entire processes, including payments, HR, CRM, content creation, and so much more.
To be fair, OpenAI’s API and enterprise-grade chatbot, along with other LLM vendors, have enabled some tech-savvy startups and hyperscalers to build their own tools to automate tasks.
But the reality is that most companies suddenly aren’t engineering powerhouses, capable of pumping out their own vertical software just by downloading an API. Engineers lack the time and expertise to build proprietary tech. And executives don’t want to invest in developing tools that already exist — ones that benefit from the experiences of thousands of customers and come with the assurance of being third-party provided.
The SaaS business model is alive and well."
16. Two nerds geeking out. Transhumanist and technology thinking. I'm open minded and it was actually interesting.
But I also see why traditional thinkers would hate this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvSX0rLyERs&t=1s
17. Everyone and anyone who is interested in getting into the Silicon Valley networks needs to read this.
"But how can you make it easy for someone to say yes to spending time with you, when they don’t have any to offer?
The solution involves 3 simple steps:
-Grab their attention quickly
-Signal that you understand how limited their time is
-Earn the rest"
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-paradox-of-time-silicon-valleys-ultimate-riddle
18. Good tear down on how government can be improved on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD73X_bO8Ss
19. Loved this episode, always thought provoking. NIA is my weekly bite of biz cultural insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLFVoxIeqGU
20. There is a great reckoning coming to Europe if their people & politicians do not wake up to the armed threats against them. That and their lack of preparation on the military front and resource front, as well as their over reliance on the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0ZvGwzo3GQ
21. This is going to be bad. Global maritime shipping is in trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtrFTV3ZKDw
22. "Even harder is the work required in Ukraine. Once an engine of the Soviet war machine, Ukraine’s military industry has hundreds of factories and tens of thousands of workers at the ready. But they have been pummeled by Russian missile strikes and have atrophied through decades of mismanagement. According to industry insiders, their output during the first year of the invasion was paltry. Among Zelensky’s advisers, some now see the industry as Ukraine’s best hope for defeating the Russians in what has become a war of attrition.
The task in front of Kamyshin is huge. Not only will he need to breathe life into Ukraine’s moribund factories—in some cases, he will also need to reconfigure them for entirely new purposes. “No matter how much we produce in conventional weapons, we can’t catch up with Russia,” says Kamyshin. “We need to use advanced technology to find a new approach.” He compared the challenge to the story of David and Goliath playing on repeat, with each new phase of the war obliging Ukraine to find a new slingshot."
https://time.com/6588222/zelensky-kamyshin-inside-ukraines-plan-to-arm-itself/
23. Some industry giants talking about what's happening in the tech industry and the global macro situation for public and private cos. It's a timely convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWE5LsO62wA
24. Another wake up call for the West, will we hear it & take action?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H57_Rev14cE
25. Bull case for technology over the next 20 years. It's an amazing time to be alive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lnbfw9QdAE
26. This is solid advice. Don't self isolate. Especially when you are feeling down. And especially if you are introverted. Go talk to people if things are bad.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IzZkPx9uYmo
27. "What Makes a Business a "Banana Stand:"
I've identified four key traits.
1. Customers love the product
2. The company is growing quickly (often in hypergrowth)
3. It is losing money (which, nowadays, is virtually all startups)
4. Critically, #1 and #2 are truly primarily because #3 is true.
I call these businesses banana stands because they are functionally equivalent to a banana stand that sells bananas at a discount- or sells banana smoothies for the same price as the underlying bananas. Customers will love it, it will grow, it will burn money- and as soon as it tries to make money, it will find that the reasons for its adoration and growth no longer apply.
This phenomenon is hardly limited to beach-side businesses- or even to consumer product companies, for that matter- there are practically infinite ways to be a banana stand."
28. Another great episode of More or Less to know what’s happening in tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dyEEbQqOAE&t=2700s
29. "The stasis comes at a massive cost. College is more expensive than ever and, relative to the number of qualified students, less accessible. The tsunami of capital generated by increasing tuition has not gone toward the mission. Instead, it’s funded an army of high-paid administrators, and academic programs and centers with no measurable outcomes.
These arrogant attempts at social engineering are immune from scrutiny — you are clearly a racist or don’t “get it” if you question the return on DEI, ethics, leadership, ESG, or campus Rolexification (such as lazy rivers and climbing walls). The top tier of higher education is steadily regressing (again) to become the domain of the ultra-wealthy, salted with some freakishly remarkable kids to wallpaper over its transition from a lubricant to a coronation.
A reckoning is inevitable. Demographics are destiny. And destiny is coming for higher ed. The declining birth rates in the aughts mean there will be fewer undergrads starting in 2025. And the appeal of college to this dwindling cohort is fading. The most bloated industry in America is about to face a perfect storm: There are fewer customers, and the ones remaining are losing interest in the product."
https://www.profgalloway.com/rot/
30. This is highly disturbing but also rings true. So much bloat in US defense and ineffective military aided and abetted by horrific bureaucracy in the USA.
Also explains why we lost in Afghanistan. Infuriating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_bgyUdQAXY
31. "It feels great to win. But that’s not what this story is about.
It doesn’t matter the size of the pond or how large you are in it. It only matters who else is in there swimming with you."
https://www.sanjaysays.co/p/what-tom-brady-and-my-son-can-teach-you-about-success
32. "This sentiment was echoed last week when I met a gentleman and inquired why he chose to live in a warmer climate. He replied, “All the problems are the same. It’s just a little easier living down here.” This reinforces the notion that challenges are frequent, and there will always be aspects of life that are less than ideal.
However, one of the significant advantages of entrepreneurial success is the ability to be more intentional with our choices and, ultimately, to have the problems we prefer to deal with."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/02/03/i-have-all-the-problems-i-want-to-
33. "It’s almost as if some Americans are dealing with the psychic impact of our country’s institutional dysfunction, and our decline relative to China, by punching down on whoever is available to be punched down on — namely, our allies who are struggling even more than we are.
China’s manufacturing prowess is so vast that only by combining their industrial might can the developed democracies hope to match it. This will not happen if we continue to view allies’ companies and allies’ exports with suspicion and antagonism. We need to stop thinking of Germany, the UK, Japan, etc. as our old rivals, and start thinking of them as our indispensable partners. Their strength is our strength, and their weakness is our weakness.
This is something we realized in the aftermath of World War 2 and the early days of the first Cold War, when we did the Marshall Plan and opened our markets to European and Japanese goods. We need to remember that spirit right now."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/economic-losses-for-our-allies-are
34. "Now is a good time to remember what René Girard said about war. It’s mimetic. We humans do whatever the other side does. It’s like a game of copycat, except it’s not a game. Bernard Perret, an expert on Girard, says, “Violence is the most mimetic of passions, and the attraction that it has always exerted is further amplified today by social media." "Violence puts everyone in moral jeopardy, even those who are initially mere spectators." None of us are “mere spectators”.
Every choice to ignore this, or to comment on this on social media, or vote or not vote as a result of all this is an action that will determine the outcome. In the end, nobody wants war. Peter Drucker faced the same problem I see now. War is already underway, just as in the late 1930s when nobody could see it coming. He warned of the imminent risk of war in his first book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939. It was not “politically correct,” but it was correct.
Today’s drivers, forces, and stories are not exactly the same, but history “often rhymes.” Lest we forget, in 2014 President Putin said, “I would like to make it clear to all: This country will continue to actively defend the rights of Russians, our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means — from political and economic to operations under international humanitarian law and the right of self-defense.”
I wonder how long it will take for the public to wake up to today’s events and take the risk of conflict seriously enough to try and stop it. NATO Military commanders seem to think a wake-up call is needed."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/wwiii-an-update-for-taylor-swifties
35. "The Super Bowl’s primary purpose may be to crown the top team in professional football (and prop up the American chicken wing industry). But artists who perform at halftime are the biggest winners. In a fragmented cultural landscape, they’re granted the single-largest advertising stage in the world — for free."
https://thehustle.co/why-the-super-bowl-halftime-show-is-the-most-important-commercial-on-tv/
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.