Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 30th, 2024
"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." – Joseph Campbell
"These are what I call “The Three C’s.” Communication means that you’re transparent, you telegraph change, you get on the phone quickly to walk through scenarios that might not be easy to address, you can meet conflict head-on, with depth, reason, and calm. Coachable means that you’re humble in conflict, you can take feedback, you have a backbone but you also listen deeply, and think about how to integrate new ideas. Cadence refers to your pace of problem solving. It’s not running around chasing shiny objects, to reinvoke the metaphor of the “Rocking Horse” founder who is always in motion but never progressing.
In contrast, high cadence refers to a founder who can prioritize rigorously, not waste effort or motion, and laser in on the most important pieces of the puzzle, knocking down outcomes quickly. When things don’t go as planned, they’re quick to reasses, cut losses, change direction decisively. A high cadence founder solves something in hours, not days, and not weeks. They need not always be right, but they’re directionally accurate, and iterating at a high pace.
This is perhaps a controversial opinion, but start with “Why Now.” Ask yourself where you can most authentically attack an explosive market with high communication, coachability, and cadence. What’s more important than even size of market is the rate of change in that market. Then once you’ve identified these table stakes, then begin thinking about the “What.” What you build certainly becomes hugely important, but don’t get stonewalled by early Product VCs that over analyze what you’re building. Focus on People and Velocity VCs who recognize your talents, and help you find those markets with explosive rates of change, where you need not be excellent to win."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/product-founder-and-velocity-vcs
2. "Real social consumer products (and I am not talking entertainment à la Tiktok or what Instagram has become over the years…) often start with a single feature that capture the attention of the audience, express a strong sentiment that people want to repeat. Until they get bored and move on because those applications don’t serve as a home to nurture real connections on the long term.
It’s like you renting a place and organising parties versus owning a place and welcoming friends and family. Like AMO is doing. Social consumer is very much alive and its next generation is already hidden in plain sight :-)"
https://2lr.substack.com/p/bereal-voodoo
3. Important discussion on how to build talent driven organizations and societies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfLUxVHbXSA
4. "If the regime can make the people around you partake in absurdities, you are less likely to challenge it. You will be more likely to obey it. Of course, this doesn’t mean regimes are not interested in indoctrination. They would prefer if people really did hold pro-regime attitudes and values.
But the purpose of propaganda is not limited just to instilling desired beliefs. Often, demonstrating the regime’s strength, capacity, and resources to intimidate people is a more important goal."
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-true-purpose-of-propaganda
5. Lots of nuggets for one of the most successful solopreneurs around: Justin Welsh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93xvBq-88K0
6. "Since taking office, Milei, 53, has frozen public-works projects, devalued the peso by more than 50%, and announced plans to lay off more than 70,000 government workers. So far, he sees signs that his economic “shock therapy” is working. Inflation has slowed for four months in a row. The International Monetary Fund has hailed Argentina’s “impressive” progress.
Two days before we sat down on April 25 for an hour-long interview, he had given an address to the nation celebrating the “economic miracle” of the country’s first quarterly budget surplus since 2008. Milei thinks he is pioneering an approach that will become a global blueprint. “Argentina will become a model for how to transform a country into a prosperous nation,” he tells me. “I have no doubt.”
Others do. While Milei vowed the “political caste” would bear the brunt, his austerity measures have pummeled ordinary Argentines. The annual inflation rate is still nearly 300%, among the highest in the world. Many Argentines have been forced to carry bags of cash for even small transactions; some stores have given up on price stickers entirely. Milei’s moves—cutting federal aid, transport and energy subsidies, and getting rid of price controls—have caused living costs to spike.
More than 55% of Argentines are mired in poverty, up from 45% in December. Milei may be running out of time before his popular support crumbles. “Everybody knew the cost would be huge,” says Argentina’s Foreign Minister Diana Mondino, a close adviser. “What we’re experiencing, nobody likes it. But there’s no other way.”
Argentina’s economy has been bad enough for long enough that polls show a majority of the nation’s 46 million people remain willing to give Milei a chance."
https://time.com/6980600/javier-milei-argentina-interview/
7. A very solid conversation on tech this week. Really worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP4dEDMAPR0
8. This was an instructive interview on micro-PE from one of the best in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKKf7S0oSmM
9. “Apple Intelligence” is more than a great brand move; it encapsulates the company’s strategy. Take something invented elsewhere; make it more consumer friendly, easier to use, and more reliable; mix in world-class industrial design; and print billions. Artificial intelligence is for tech bros and data scientists. Apple Intelligence is AI for the rest of us. Shrewd.
The tech press has spent the past 18 months telling us Apple is behind on AI. While in the next breath reporting on the AI gaffes produced by its rivals. And that’s the point. Apple is always behind. Apple is a distinctly inventive company — its $30 billion R&D budget generates 2,000+ patents per year. But it’s mainly improving vs. inventing: ways to more precisely cut white cardboard boxes to deliver its new devices; new glues to bond layers of glass and plastic together in its phones. For the big stuff, like the mouse, digital music, and multitouch screens, it lets someone else traverse the Sierra Nevadas first."
https://www.profgalloway.com/second-mouse-ai/
10. "Autonomy starts with Industry. And Europe’s industrial base has been declining for some time. Perhaps more important than that, Europe is amidst an energy crisis at the moment. Can the Continent be autonomous without cheap abundant energy?
In our opinion, no.
No one can be the master of their own destiny if they do not have an economic engine or reliable security that is underpinned by energy stability. Cheap reliable energy is a cornerstone of both. Europe has neither at the moment. They have sacrificed their Industrial Capacity and by extension Autonomy, for imagery.
Europe is trying to play both sides against each other, but with Trump on the horizon; and Economic volatility; Europe will once again be forced like many countries to choose sides.
It is clear that the people of Europe are unhappy with their current situation, but will their efforts to alter their destiny be in vain?
Only History knows."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/the-battle-for-the-soul-of-europe
11. "The Rule of 50 score of 50 is a solid target representing a variety of businesses like high growth with lots of losses, medium growth with modest profitability, or something with low growth and tremendous profitability. Most of the 2020 and 2021 heavily funded startups should aim for medium growth plus limited burn in the near term to achieve a level of viability. From there, the belief is that as spending on software and investment in tools increases, they will be in a good position to accelerate their growth rate.
The Rule of 50 and a score at or better than that number is a good target for entrepreneurs who want a sustainable, healthy business. However, a score of 50 is not high enough to raise venture capital. Entrepreneurs should think through their goals and aspirations and target their Rule of 50 score accordingly."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/06/15/rule-of-50-and-venture-funding/
12. Lots of good insights into how cities are run. Why they work and don't work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG8kVEDk3Yc
13. Very inspiring discussion on Tech trends from one of the best thinkers here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezv9jmrjRco
14. "As I mentioned in the piece on war and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific—war is not usually won by what you bring at the start. They are mostly won by what you can build or acquire while they are fought. This is certainly going to be the case with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Both sides have already chewed through most of the equipment that they had on February 24, 2022—and both are desperately building what they can, while they are also scouring the world to acquire all the weapons of war possible.
The Russians have been successful at this, particularly in continuing their trade with countries outside by circumventing existing sanctions. For instance, much of Western trade to Russia has simply been re-routed to Russia through other states—often in Central Asia. Here are just some examples (and I’m not doing this to dump on Germany—other Western states are doing exactly the same thing)."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-economic-war-escalates
15. "Finding ways to protect yourself from an impending crisis is not an easy task as there are so many variables to consider, and each one might require a different action. That said, it’s fair to say that the 60/40 traditional stock/bond portfolio is no longer valid.
Owning bonds is a guaranteed losing proposition in an inflationary environment. Stock picking will be a lot trickier than the passive ETF investing strategy many are accustomed to. I would rotate out of overpriced tech stocks and move into more defensive stocks. Your portfolio should be heavily skewed to hard assets, including commodities such as metals, energy and food which have traditionally done well in inflationary times.
Geography is important as well. U.S. stocks are extremely overvalued as compared to emerging markets. It’s also perfectly legal to have bank accounts in other jurisdictions denominated in other currencies. This might provide protection in the event of capital controls."
16. "This is why one belief I have is that the future of application software in a world of AI agents probably looks a whole lot more like database software…These worlds are merging (database and applications). At the end of the day, most software today is just a UI on top of a database. We need the UI for human consumption. But we don’t need it for AI agent consumption.
I’ve long STRONGLY believed that data and data infra are one of the core beneficiaries of AI. Most of my venture career has been spent investing in data businesses. One of which, Tabular, was just acquired by Databricks for >$1b. Others, like dbt Labs, Clickhouse, Airbyte, Prisma, etc are seeing really strong growth. The value of differentiated, high quality data infra has never been higher.
But let’s take this one step further. Both Databricks and Snowflake have heavily foreshadowed (or released products) that enable applications to be built on top of them. I think this is clearly the future. Applications built more for AI agent consumption, built on top of leading data platforms. The data platform companies will BECOME the application providers themselves. I’m excited for this future!"
https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-61424-is-seat-based
17. "Instead of saying, "I wish I'd put $1,000 in Amazon's IPO when I was 7," you should focus instead on "what story would I have believed if I was investing in 1997 that would have led me to put money in Amazon's IPO? And what is the comparable story I should believe today?" And sometimes you'll be wrong, and sometimes you'll be right. But most of the time, the most important things in life are determined by the decisions you get right. Not by the decisions you get wrong. You can often get 99 decisions wrong, as long as you get one right.
In general, I think the mindset of focusing on the present, and the lessons to be learned, and the stories to be believed; that is the most important takeaway. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "we should be careful to get out of a regret only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/regret-porn
18. "Taiwan faces a similar dilemma. With a population of just 24 million compared to China's 1.4 billion, and vastly less resources and manufacturing capacity, Taiwan probably can't prevail in a straight-up naval battle with Chinese naval, air and missile forces, not even with the help of allies Japan and the US.
But it doesn't have to win. It can succeed by showing China that a battle for Taiwan is simply too bloody and fraught with risk. Taiwan would need to sink or damage enough transport vessels that near the island to make a beach landing or blockade untenable. With insufficient troops, heavy weapons and supplies ashore, the beachhead would be vulnerable to being swept into the sea by a Taiwanese counterattack.
Similarly, enough kamikaze drones could force China's large fleet farther off-shore in hopes of creating openings for air drops of supplies from Taiwan's allies."
19. What a fun interview. Justin Waller is a good man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plT6XO8dN3E
20. "Anyway, I think the reports of China’s scientific dominance shouldn’t be causing policymakers in the West to panic. But it’s becoming pretty undeniable that China has now taken a commanding lead in applied physical science research, and Western leaders need to ask themselves whether they can really afford to cede leadership in those fields."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-the-west-falling-behind-in-science
21. "Lamont’s long-term approach to such relationships, which can span decades, paid off again when she backed Park’s later venture, Devoted Health. With Devoted Health now valued at $12.9 billion, her initial $20 million investment in 2017 into the Medicare Advantage insurance plan provider is now worth about $1 billion to Lamont and her backers at Oak HC/FT, the investment firm she cofounded in 2014.
Those investments, and others in the healthcare and fintech space such as early bets on primary care provider VillageMD and prepaid debit card provider NetSpend land Lamont back on the Midas List, Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s top tech investors. It’s her fifth appearance but the first since 2015, a reflection of the long game approach that Lamont takes to startup investing.
“These are friends, these are comrades,” she said. “We're in battle and we're there not just for the length of 10 years for one company, but 20 to 30 years for three or four companies.”
For Lamont, 67, the $5.3 billion-in-assets Oak HC/FT is the latest chapter in a career that spans multiple firms and four decades, with lifetime investments in at least 80 companies. She’s returned an estimated $1.5 billion to investors over the last decade, according to a source familiar with the firm’s finances. Lamont’s a prominent figure outside of venture, too: the spouse of Connecticut governor Ned Lamont, she’s served as First Lady of Connecticut since 2019.
The secret to Lamont’s sustained success, she says: an ability to spot and embrace new tech cycles, even if they force her to turn her attention away from a currently lucrative path. With the advent of the internet, she switched her focus from life sciences to digital health. And as online payments became ubiquitous in the years since PayPal’s dotcom rise, it called for a more recent, increased focus on fintech startups, too.
“It is not about being a one hit wonder in venture. It is about reinventing yourself across different cycles,” Lamont said."
https://archive.ph/IYHyr#selection-575.0-597.123
22. I am a fan of Justin Waller. Build yourself and be secure in yourself. Lots to learn here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzFpulW5m4c
23. A very sober discussion on the state of the world and geopolitics in 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4t_4S1h4Zg
24. "In the end, I’m not sure that it’s possible to avoid the ~60 hours/week we all spend on emails/meetings/etc., and the most productive people on the planet aren’t working that much more than that. Perhaps someone like Elon can breathe/sleep his work and increase it +50% more, but not 3x or 5x. It’s just not possible. To achieve more, it’s more about how you fill the time you have.
By its nature, the opportunities for 10x work are not really something you can optimize. Sometimes it’s a random work idea, or a random meeting, or a off-hand tweet (like my “growth hacker is the new vp marketing” tweet from 10 years ago) that creates a lucky break. Combine this with skills built up with years at the technology frontier, and skill and serendipity can come together. As comedian Steve Martin says, “Be so good they can't ignore you.”
Reject the core loop, the checklists, and all the email. Embrace serendipity!"
https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/10x-work-versus-1x-work
25. What a wacky story.
https://thehustle.co/originals/the-first-fugitive-caught-by-the-internet
26. "Even if there is only a 5% chance that he might do it, we must do everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen. Invasion of Taiwan would result in a disastrous war that would cause a global depression, and countless losses for the Taiwanese, for our allies, and for us if we get involved.
Even if the risk is small, we have to make sure that we drive it down to zero as much as possible. That needs to be the overarching focus of American foreign policy."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/cold-war-ii-grand-strategy
27. "Founders need to shift their thinking to an assumption of understanding—that investors who see thousands of pitches per year probably do understand what a founder is doing the vast majority of the time, and have simply decided that the risk/reward for investing in their company simply isn’t as good of a deal as others they’re currently looking at."
https://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2024/6/5/is-my-startup-fundable-venture-capital
28. This is a masterclass from VC investing from one of the best in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI301hP2gVA
29. What a freaking scary new world of war.
30. Some hopeful news coming from Ukraine soon?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwDomFk2o84
31. "The two years of full-scale war has seen Ukrainians from across the country come together in the face of the Russian threat, and the country’s Vietnamese community is no exception. At least one Ukrainian soldier of Vietnamese origin has already been killed in the war, and Nguyen said the community rallied in solidarity when he was wounded.
“Before the start of full-scale war, I didn’t know many Vietnamese people, but now they support me a lot. Lots of Vietnamese people wrote me messages of support, people brought food to the hospital,” Nguyen said."
32. "Huang’s moves reflect his paranoia as a founder who has survived multiple moments of near doom during the company’s history, including after it went public in 1999. The Christmastime meetings last year, for instance, could merely be part of the formula that has carried the company to great heights—turning its GPUs into the lifeblood of OpenAI, biotech and pharmaceutical firms, quant trading firms and scores of other AI developers.
“There’s no complacency at Nvidia,” said Jeff Herbst, a venture capitalist who spent two decades at Nvidia leading business development and acquisitions until 2021. “You wouldn’t really know whether times are good or times are bad from the tone or the tenor of the meetings.”
33. "Because the one secret to living a great life… is to be in the present moment.
The present moment is about your life as it is right now. It’s about the hill you’re already standing on. It’s about the thrill of breathing and the sound of your heart pumping.
It’s about your children, your parents, your friends, and all the people who love you and whom you love back. It’s about the grace of God and the Universe and the 14 billion years of cosmic history that have brought you to… this precise moment.
Live in it."
https://www.sanjaysays.co/p/the-one-secret-to-living-a-great-life
34. "I couldn't help myself. I have purchased in my retirement account large amounts of Sibanye Stillwater (SBSW), Impala Platinum Group (IMPUY), and Sasol, LTD. I have discussed all of these names individually and Sibanye especially has been excruciatingly difficult to own for a while (my first entry was around $6). Gut feeling, the next five years in South Africa are going to look very different than the past five."
https://calvinfroedge.com/south-africa-its-time/
35. "Hit making is the strategy of cultural influence. In the post-mono culture, media, and retail, brands are pushed to operate like a portfolio of products and categories that target different niche audiences. Mass is achieved through aggregation of niches. By targeting its different audience segments, a brand creates many doors in and increases it hold on the market.
The first step in the process of implementing hit-making is to figure out the cultural moment and mood, and those setting it. This mood is going to turbocharge a brand’s cultural influence and be a fertile ground for its cultural products, increasing their chance of becoming hits. Hit making is the strategy of cultural influence that defines which cultural products should brands produce to tell their story, who is this story likely to influence most and in which context, what is the most opportune cultural moment, and what are the expected financial returns."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/hitmakers
36. "Powell is a superhero around here nowadays. In the past three years, he’s carved himself out as one of the few leading actors who can reliably juice up the box office. Forgetting Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played the cocky antagonist Hangman, his value in the eyes of Hollywood decision-makers is higher than ever thanks to a movie that virtually no one predicted would become so big: Anyone But You, the Shakespeare-inspired romcom in which he starred alongside Sydney Sweeney, which has pulled in a staggering $218 million since its release.
Powell has just co-written and starred in Hit Man, directed by Richard Linklater, which was so warmly received on the festival circuit last year that Netflix coughed up $20 million for it in September. This summer he’s the lead in Twisters, a throwback sequel to the 1990s action film Twister, which looks set to revive another worn-out genre: the climate-panic blockbuster.
It’s a sharp reminder of how far he’s come. In his mid-20s, when Powell was working as a script reader for legendary producer Lynda Obst, he would sit outside the cafeteria on the Sony lot reading, waiting for someone to notice him – believing he was just one accidental run-in away from glory. Now, when he walks around one of these lots, there’s every chance the head of the studio will drop what they’re doing and make a beeline for him."
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/glen-powell-interview-2024
37. "Investors do not like risk. Media companies want to please investors. So there’s huge economic pressure on the executives of media companies to turn volatile hit-driven business models into stable predictable business models with recurring revenue. And the way you do that is to stick with existing properties — sequels, remakes, and adaptations of already-popular source material. Franchise continuation gives you someidea of who your audience will be and how your movie or series might perform. Thus, it partially de-risks the entertainment industry.
So the rule here should be: Evolve, don’t subvert. When you catch lightning in a bottle, don’t let it go and assume that you can catch it again just because your bottle has the same label on it.
Ultimately, both filling in lore and subverting themes are shortcuts — ways to continue a franchise without figuring out how to write a compelling new story in an existing fictional universe. But although franchise continuation makes storytelling less financially risky, it doesn’t actually make it easier. Just because an IP comes with a built-in audience doesn’t mean that audience is going to be easy to please.
An age of adaptations, sequels, and remakes might sound boring and stale, but it really doesn’t have to be."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-some-franchises-go-downhill-while
38. Investing in AI. How Benchmark thinks about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2wDuxmbXLg&t=1s
39. "Yes, other people might judge you based on your past – but so what? All of that is just part of the video game starting situation. You just work with it and deal with things and people as they come.
You start TODAY. Today is day 0. Everything before was just backstory.
God created you and the world this very moment and put your past as memories in your head.
What are you going to do with the situation and resources you have been given?
My advice? Do not ponder too much upon past negative events and faults because it gives you nothing of benefit and only weakens your confidence and spirit. Leave the past behind.
What counts is TODAY.
Spend your TODAY in a way that it brings you closer to your desired future life."
https://lifemathmoney.com/you-are-not-your-past-you-are-not-your-mistakes-you-are-not-your-failures
40. A good conversation on the state of AI & tech between two smart VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJpWKAZmGsQ
41. Excellent conversation from a very experienced VC. I agree with most of his views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgiwcus79I8
42. "Just as many began to wonder where the next jolt of dollar liquidity would come from, the Japanese banking system dropped Origami cranes composed of crisply folded dolla bills upon the laps of crypto investors. This is just another pillar of the crypto bull market. The supply of dollars must increase to maintain the current Pax Americana dollar-based filthy financial system."
Finding Your Scenius: The Power of Place and Time
I recently discovered the city of Edinburgh in Scotland last year. As I dug into the history of the place, I found out it was the scene of the Scottish Enlightenment that occurred during the 18th to 19th century. It was a place of great learning and progress in the arts and science.
According to Wikipedia: “In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterized by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief values were improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole.
Among the fields that rapidly advanced were philosophy, political economy, engineering, architecture, medicine, geology, archaeology, botany and zoology, law, agriculture, chemistry and sociology. Among the Scottish thinkers and scientists of the period were Joseph Black, Robert Burns, William Cullen, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, James Hutton, John Playfair, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart.
The Scottish Enlightenment had effects far beyond Scotland, not only because of the esteem in which Scottish achievements were held outside Scotland, but also because its ideas and attitudes were carried all over Great Britain and across the Western world as part of the Scottish diaspora, and by foreign students who studied in Scotland.”
And this has happened many times throughout the history of human civilization. Almost always centered around cities that were rich, in the middle of trade flows or the center of an empire.
Places like ancient Athens, republican and Imperial Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Umayyad Córdoba in Spain, Florence during the Italian Renaissance. Amsterdam from 1585 to 1672, London during Victorian times. Or more recently, Chicago, Paris, New York and Berlin in the 1920s. Places that were the center of action and where things were happening.
Another way to describe this is a term called Scenius. Defined by the brilliant Kevin Kelley as the following:
“Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like a genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.
The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:
• Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.
Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.”
I realized how lucky I am to be in San Francisco in the late 90s. This is where the great technology boom and renaissance was and still is happening. A place where the smartest, most ambitious and talented young people want to go, live and build. I genuinely believe that most of my relative success can be attributed to being in this place the last 2 and half decades. I’ve said many times, you have to go to the center of the network. For better or worse, it is Silicon Valley in this day and age.
And so my point here is, place and time really matters. If your life is not in a good place or where you want it, the easiest way to fix this is to move somewhere else. Preferably somewhere that is a “scenius” that will enable your success and ambitions. A place that will put a trajectory back into your life.
As Naval once wrote, that well describes the importance of Scenius: "The three big decisions - what you do, where you live, and who you’re with."
The Strong Case for Web 3 & Crypto: Declining State Capacity & Increasing State Malice
I’ve been having many conversations with old friends and business colleagues over the last year as we’ve left the pandemic behind us. We pretty much left it in 2022. But I’ve only started reconnecting with them in 2024. One commonality was anger and sadness. 2020 broke so many of us. It wasn’t just the pandemic but the lockdowns, the forced shutdowns of so many commercial businesses & schools. The amount of mental health issues and psychological damage done to us, to our kids will be studied in decades from now. The repercussions of this won’t be felt for years. All that is left is simmering anger in the populace.
We had governments, through either incompetence or malice enforcing quarantines, shutting down discussions via cancellation from big online platforms. Big media turned into propaganda mouthpieces. In Canada, they even shut down access to bank accounts of the truckers protesting vaccine mandates. And of course, 2-3 years later on, it turned out the protestors were right.
In fact, so many so-called conspiracy theories have turned out to be somewhat correct but we weren’t able to discuss them. The lock downs, Covid vaccines & vaccine mandates, infiltration of woke agenda in corporates and government. Government incompetence in Afghanistan withdrawal, Iraq War disaster, Maui Fire disaster and the lackluster support for Ukraine. Why do I say lackluster? The USA sent in weapons & ammo too late, and drip-dropped them over a long period of time, prolonging the war at the expense of Ukrainian lives. And no one in government was punished or fired for any of this.
The sense is that we are undergoing one big Psy-Op aka Psychological Operation.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was reported to have said in reference to the Soviet Union: “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
Well this pretty describes what’s happening in most of the Western world these days.
Yes, I believe that overall the USA and the Western world is a force for good. But all the data points to fast declining state capacity and ability. I would not bet against America in the long run and believe in the regenerative ability of the country. BUT this will take some time, like probably the rest of the 2020s, and I doubt things will be better until 2028 at the earliest.
And this is why despite the crypto and web 3 disaster over the last few years, decentralized technologies make even more sense. If crypto and decentralized technologies work as we hope but I do see there are still many smart people building in this space now.
Losing my access to Linkedin and Twitter for small time periods in 2023 were wake up calls to me on the reliance and dependence I have on them. It forced me to build out my newsletter email list and look at other channels. I use multiple different messenger channels as well.
But can you imagine being locked out of your bank accounts like the Canadian truckers and people who donated to their GoFundme? How devastating that would be?
If we are moving into more of a digital world, don’t we need digital currency? This is why Decentralized & digital money also makes sense. I’m talking about Bitcoin, not CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) which will turn into dangerous instruments of government control. And if we are going into an AI agent driven world, it probably also makes sense to have digital currency for our AutoGPTs & AI Agents to transact in. Thus, I’m watching this space very carefully.
Being reliant on one country, one currency, on one income stream and one main social media or communication channel is just not a good idea. In fact, it’s very dangerous. I’m not saying you need to go full on libertarian. But you do need to diversify everything to increase the odds of thriving in the new world disorder.
“Perfect Days”: A Mundane but Happy Life
This was a movie that was recommended to me by many friends. Taking place in Tokyo and directed by a German director Wim Wenders. “Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself.“ Reviewers have described it as “life affirming.” I also recommend it as I found it to be meditative.
The main character and bachelor Hirayama lives a solitary life in the analogue world. He finds pleasure and joy in small things. Waking up to a neighbor sweeping the streets. Looking at the sky. Taking old film pictures. Watering his plants. Listening to old cassette tapes of 60s & 70s music. Buying and reading classical old books. Going to his local old style Japanese baths. Eating at his favorite local restaurants. Bicycling across the city. Looking at the Skytree building as he drives by. Following his regular routine as he embarks on his job as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo.
The Guardian in a review by Wendy Ide says it even better:
“Hirayama’s ascetic existence is stripped back to basics: music, played on cassette tapes collected, we assume, in his long-ago youth; secondhand books bought from the budget section of the local bookstore; a point-and-shoot film camera with which he captures the things that please him; the interplay between the sky and the trees. Trees, it seems, have a particular significance for Hirayama, something that he pays back by carefully rescuing fragile Japanese maple seedlings in order to nurture them in his apartment.”
His life and routine is disrupted slightly when his niece shows up at his house. The bulk of the movies’ dialogue happens here. He tells his niece about how he and his sister live different lives.
“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not. My world and your mom’s are very different.”
We get glimpses of his previous life when he meets his sister. It is clear that they are from an affluent and wealthy family. And that he is estranged from his father who disapproves of his life. But he seems to be living this life because he wants his freedom. The director actually says:
“Hirayama is the master of his life. Everything he does, he does it because he wants to do it.”
The big lesson from this movie is that joy can be found in the simple things. Living in the present like the main character of this movie: “Next time is next time. Now is now.”
What i love is that he seems genuinely happy and the movie ends appropriately with an old song called “Feeling Good” by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse:
“It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. It’s a new life for me. And I’m feeling good.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 23rd, 2024
“Learn to relax. Your body is precious, as it houses your mind and spirit. Inner peace begins with a relaxed body” –Norman Vincent Peale
"My recommendation is to use the naming convention Rule of 40 when discussing the traditional growth plus profitability score, and use the naming convention Rule of 50 when discussing growth plus profitability where growth is doubled to represent its greater weighting. Startups should use the Rule of 50, representing growth rate multiplied by two plus free cash flow margins when assessing their performance. Growth is more valuable than profitability."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/06/08/rule-of-50-weighted-2x-for-growth/
2. "I can't tell you what precious metals are going to do next week. I can't tell you what they are going to do next month. But twenty years ago, gold was $200/ounce and we had a fraction of the debt we do today. I would bet my last chip that in another 20 years, there are going to be far more US dollars chasing fewer goods and services and roughly the same ounces of gold. AI is not going to save us. We are a society of humans, and the social obligations to those humans - i.e. unfunded liabilities - reach numbers beyond reckoning. Even if we can build robots to nurse all the old people, the amount of raw materials required to do so are going to strain all industrial supply chains.
In the case of silver and platinum group metals - not only does all the above apply - but the supply demand fundamentals are excellent as well, as I have written about on several occasions. We use more silver in industrial (primarily electronic) applications than we pull out of the ground every year. If it weren't for melting grandma's silverware, we wouldn't be able to make all the solar panels and batteries that mainstream politicians across the world are demanding.
My advice is this - keep accumulating any long term, durable assets on weakness. The trajectory the economic ship is on isn't changing. We're headed straight for the rocks, and our life rafts are made of printed money. The promises we have made to society - i.e. all of the social obligations our budgets go towards - cannot be met through taxation or increased productivity.
All of those teachers and veterans and policemen who were told they could rely on the system in their old age will only realize with time that they were sold a lie - and when it truly hits them, they're going to be very pissed off. The long term trend that began in the 1970s and only briefly reversed will continue for as long as our current monetary trajectory does - that is, until it collapses."
https://calvinfroedge.com/reminder/?ref=calvins-thoughts-newsletter
3. "I hit my “number” almost a decade ago. I purposefully paused and spent a great deal of time and consciousness on erecting scaffolding to update/temper my instinct to acquire more wealth. I decided I would spend a great deal of money on experiences with my family or services that gave me more time to spend with them and my friends. I likely only have a third of my (chronological) life left, but I’m intent on living 4/3 of my life in that remaining time. Meaning, I want to have a series of experiences that make me feel closer to family and friends and squeeze as much juice from this 7 continent ellipsoid as possible.
After molesting the Earth for 30 years for business, it became obvious that staying in the most beautiful places, in the most iconic cities meant nothing when I was there alone. The previous sentence could also describe my thirties. It’s as if that decade never happened, as I was mostly alone.
Another observation I’ve made roaming Terra is that the U.S. is the best place to make money and Europe the best place to spend it — one of the reasons we moved to London. In addition, I have a self-imposed tax of 100%. Each year, I add up my spending and give that same amount, or more, away. The surprise, for me, around giving is how masculine it makes me feel. I feel my strength and skills are protecting and providing."
https://www.profgalloway.com/hoarders/
4. The title says it all. "The West is Under Constant Attack, it’s time to wake up"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wwi5PYN4KJY
5. "When we zoom out, this is how much of SaaS looks like today: a Malthusian bloodbath. At the beginning of the SaaS cycle, most markets were green-field opportunities, but today almost every SaaS category is saturated, every account requires a rip & replace, leading to longer and more competitive sales cycles, lower customer loyalties, leading to lower NRR, higher churn, and high vendor fatigue. These are the tell-tale signs of the tail end of an OPEX cycle — a cycle that doesn’t speak “I win because my innovation is better than yours”, but rather “I win because my $s are bigger than yours”.
Over the last 60 years, a lot of R&D has gone to bring the cost of compute down to near zero. This led to a personal device in every hand. We also have had the cost of distributing this compute down to near zero as well. That brought the marginal cost of software down to zero, which is basically the reason the internet exists. The next 30 years is going to bring the cost of intelligence down to zero. What would the world of software look like if everything ran on “insights” instead of “compute”? If you are a founder building in SaaS, this is what you should be gearing up for."
6. "She said the same mistake was made in 1938 when tensions in Abyssinia, Japan and Germany were treated as isolated events. The proximate causes of the current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, the South China Sea and even Armenia might be different, but the bigger picture showed an interconnected battlefield in which post-cold war certainties had given way to “great-power competition” in which authoritarian leaders were testing the boundaries of their empires. The lesson – and necessity – was to resist and rearm. “The lesson from 1938 and 1939 is that if aggression pays off somewhere, it serves as an invitation to use it elsewhere,” Kallas said.
Snyder drove home his lesson from history: “If Ukrainians give up, or if we give up on Ukraine, then it’s different. It’s Russia making war in the future. It’s Russia making war with Ukrainian technology, Ukrainian soldiers from a different geographical position. At that point, we’re in 1939. We’re in 1938 now. In effect, what Ukrainians are letting us do is extend 1938.”
7. A great teardown of Boeing and the implications of its decline for America and the flying industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1pmCK6CrK4
8. Balaji is always illuminating. Bit grim but agree that America is in a bad spot and run by idiot elites. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7NBi6yLcJY&t=1s
9. "So in a world where ambition can be powerful, and we want to seek truth, and build the future, what can we say about a huge swath of the world that doesn't feel that same ambition? That same drive to accelerate? Because, whether you like it or not, you can't accelerate a society despite itself. Society crumbles or ascends based on its collective ability to believe in something.
The American Dream isn't a policy, or the result of a political party. It is a collective fever dream of people believing something hard enough to make it happen. But without that belief in a better life as the result of hard work, we can build all the rockets, robots, and AI we want. But society won't be lifted in spite of itself.
As we all seek to do work that is meaningful. To build companies that are meaningful. To hire people to build meaningful things. Whether we like it, or not, it will always come back to an individual equation. Each person is responsible for articulating how they will judge their own life. What will matter to them when all is said and done.And as long as we continue to cede that responsibility to other forces we will remain unfulfilled. But as soon as we reclaim that responsibility, even if we fail, we will know what satisfaction truly is."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-hardening-of-the-great-softening
10. People pleasing is a curse.
https://lifemathmoney.com/stop-trying-to-be-liked-by-everyone/
11. This is an instructive conversation on investing in consumer startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFWlrIb81Sw
12. "Handling a problem is hard. Avoiding it makes you feel like a coward. Accepting it feels like giving up. Fixing it feels like the world rests on your shoulders, making you resentful that everyone else is relaxing. But — you must allow yourself to park a problem and maybe revisit it later."
https://medium.com/thinking-about-startups/dont-grind-your-teeth-388fb90903eb
13. "To sum up, in the world today, we find on one side a rather liberal Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific family, whose backbone remains the alliance of English-speaking maritime powers; and on the other, a rather authoritarian Eurasian family, dominated by the Sino-Russian axis of continental powers.
It bears underlining that these distinctions remain approximate. Just like during the Cold War, a country can be strategically in the Western camp and politically in the authoritarian one. In this sense, U.S. President Joe Biden’s “autocracies versus democracies” narrative is simplistic at best, as illustrated by the fact that among the countries invited to Biden’s Summit for Democracy were states not exactly known as paragons of democratic virtues—such as Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq—even as Hungary and Turkey, both treaty allies, were snubbed.
Nevertheless, between these two families, a politico-military showdown is taking shape, a hybrid strategic conflict that will borrow from the nationalisms of the first part of the 20th century and the Cold War of the second. This war will sometimes be hot on the neo-empires’ marches, as it is today in the Western part of the Eurasian landmass; and sometimes cold, as it remains for the time being in East Asia. In short, it will be a “lukewarm war” peppered with regional crises and limited conflicts, but one that will probably remain contained, if only by the ultimate lifeline of nuclear deterrence.
This confrontation between two worlds could last several decades, punctuated by strategic shocks and realignments. In the search for analogies, the confrontation between Sparta and Athens might be as apt as the East-West conflict of the Cold War. If we are lucky, we will avoid that of the confrontation between Rome and Persia, which lasted several centuries."
14. This is as always a great discussion on what’s happening in the tech industry. So valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrDudJtKpiE&t=5s
15. "The number of micro-funds that have been established in the United States has increased fourfold over the past decade, and this is a positive thing for startups and society as a whole. They offer advantages that traditional VC don’t, and are also strategically positioned to help startups grow and scale.
They are transforming early-stage venture capital, and attracting a new breed of LPs that are ready to cater to this new sector of VC. Hopefully, as more micro VC funds are created, we will see more diversity in the ideas and founders getting funded."
16. I love Jim Rogers who has been a model for me as a global investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGsvwK9Q2sc
17. "It’s important to remember how much bigger China is than the U.S. It has four times the population and twice the manufacturing capacity by value-added. Any protracted conflict between the two countries would see the U.S. badly outmatched, despite its modest remaining advantages in some areas of technology. In other words, U.S. national security relies crucially on alliances — in order to be able to stand up to a much bigger opponent, you need a gang.
While the U.S. is pretty good at military alliances, it’s not as good at economicalliances. To be fair, no one really is — economic relationships are much more multifaceted than defense cooperation, so there’s no standard template for exactly how they’re supposed to work. But there are a few areas where the U.S. could cooperate more closely with allies in the quest to build a multinational economy capable of matching China’s.
The most obvious area is export controls. The U.S. needs countries like the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Taiwan to cooperate if it’s to have any chance of keeping cutting-edge chipmaking technology out of China’s hands. So far, the Biden administration has done a pretty good job of this.
Second, the U.S. should immediately pursue defense manufacturing collaborationamong all its allies. The U.S.’ withered defense-industrial base and lack of a commercial shipbuilding industry means will take time to fix; in the meantime, America should be relying heavily on partners like Japan and South Korea to make the military materiel needed to deter China."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/three-holes-in-the-us-economic-strategy
18. "Despite the Ministry's dominant legal status, the central bank held a huge advantage: control over a secret monetary mechanism—a wartime legacy. The US Occupation had placed central bank insiders in their positions, but these insiders misused their power to form a small elite within the bank.
This elite held significant control over companies, entire industries, and the economy, and had no qualms about wielding this power. They selected and trained their successors, known as 'Princes.' Operating behind the facade of traditional interest rate policies, these five Princes ruled post-war Japan unaccountably, with no oversight from the prime minister, the Ministry of Finance, or even their own governor."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/the-shoguns
19. Fun conversation on building a massive media business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhutjoWcywQ
20. This is such a great conversation on how to live a better life. Well worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5K4iReUnE
21. "As we face a new era of geopolitical tensions and technological advancements, the lessons from the 1930s and 1940s are more relevant than ever. The parallels between the challenges of that era and those we face today underscore the need for a robust and resilient defense industrial base. By embracing government-industry collaboration, modern mass production techniques, significant infrastructure investments, skilled workforce development, technological innovation, efficient resource management, supply chain coordination, and flexibility and adaptability, we can ensure our national security and economic prosperity.
The resurgence of isolationism, nationalism, and the formation of a modern “Axis of Autocracy” pose significant threats to liberal democracies worldwide. Just as the United States mobilized its industrial might to overcome the Axis powers in World War II, we must now leverage our technological capabilities and innovative spirit to meet these contemporary challenges."
https://andrewglenn.substack.com/p/rebuilding-americas-defense
22. The CCP is serious, we in the West are not.
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/chinas-expanding-base-in-hainan
23. "If you understand how this whole game is played at this point you know the solution is pretty simple:
1) put all of your effort into building equity in something since you cannot fight inflation with wages,
2) build your future on the internet since that is where everyone will “hang out” in the future. In fact, many of you (including us) probably spend more time online than in the real world interacting with people.
3) learn to invest in a way that is going to grow *faster* than the general economy over the next 5-10 years,
4) have a 10-20 year view where population is actually lower in the western world - outside of immigration additions and
5) be ready for a populist movement - a real one - if tech can’t lower the cost of basic items fast enough.
This is more of a guessing game. If robots/AI etc can provide entertainment while people are not working, we’d bet that 60%+ of the population honestly wouldn’t mind. (#5 is more of a wait and see)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/inflation-steal-from-you-give-to
24. "The lessons from Ukraine is driving the need for new forms of successfully executing attacks - at all levels of military endeavour"
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-quest-for-a-new-offensive-doctrine
25. Incredible interview here with the founder of one of the most unique PE firms. Lots of personal development stuff in here that was very helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h19TEWB2lNg&t=1757s
26. This is gold for SaaS founders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDlOq1iDNe4
27. Geopolitics and AI tech, this is an important discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQmwOX7rUZ8
28. Fascinating discussion if you are interested in the sovereign individual concept and how to move your money around the world. That and how to think about commodities investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd-vvrPW9YI
29. "So let’s take a closer look at the Russian threat which is still not to be underestimated, on the contrary. A win or even a stalemate with Russian dominance in Ukraine will embolden Putin and allow him to make his next move. That will mean a direct conflict with NATO which is what former CIA chief David Petraeus argued in an interview earlier this week. Quite prescient.
And support for Ukraine has not been up to the level that is required to ensure Putin is boxed in and so he effectively has the upper hand. I really enjoyed this short video from William Alberque, a former NATO security expert who explains how Putin has been winning and the West has been struggling to confront the threat. Now if you factor in how the EU election has created more divisions than unity, you will get the picture.
Both Petraeus and Alberque make the clear point that things do not look all that good if you are not committed to see the war in Ukraine through in a really decisive matter. The shifting political landscape is not helping in finding a unified voice to address the multiple threats that western democracies now face."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/europe-trembles
30. This is a very smart guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNbEr9F0wiE&t=2s
31. This is an interview everyone should watch. I needed this myself. Highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv4DlMnlQn4&t=2679s
32. This is a fun show. Worth watching to understand what’s happening globally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAWlqIWn0Lg
33. "Of course, this being a Taiwan-focused blog we have to bring in a Taiwan angle. Are there any predictions of the chance of Chinese invasion of Taiwan out there? Yes, it is a question that is being continually tracked on the crowdsourced prediction site Metaculus.
According to the wisdom of the Metaculus crowd, the chances of an invasion by 2025 is just 1%, the chances of an invasion by 2030 is 21% and increases up to 31% by 2035. If you think differently, you can add your opinion to the mix.
In a way, those numbers are comforting. Compared to the breathless prediction of invasion, a third to a fifth chance sounds manageable."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/how-to-predict-the-future
34. "Compared to Snowflake, Databricks is growing nearly twice as quickly. Without additional data, it’s difficult to comment on the relative sales efficiency or profitability.
Databricks’ growth rate is yet another example of the rapid demand for AI infrastructure & the systems needed to power it."
Tulsa King: Everybody Has Problems
I started watching Taylor Sheridan’s new television series “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone (who incidentally has aged really well, shows that fitness and working out helps a lot). It’s a show about a gangster who served 25 years in prison for killing someone for his mob family and boss. Expecting to get rewarded for his sacrifices and loyalty he ends up being exiled to Tulsa, Oklahoma to expand his mob family's business. That’s when the adventure begins.
It’s a great series but like most shows and movies I watch I tend to draw lessons from many of them.
From the outside, he is the dominant alpha male, growing the business, making cash and living the life while staying at the best hotel in town. He is chipper and happy from appearances. But inside he is in tremendous pain, having been divorced by his wife, estranged from his beloved daughter. He loved “the life” he chose only to find out “the life” did not love him back. Abandoned by his gang. Now he’s trying to live by a code in a world that has changed around him during his 25 years in prison. Living a life full of regret.
I certainly know the feeling. Like everybody, I have good days and bad days. And most of the time, I feel blessed. But there is this thing called the “Instagram Effect.” Widespread social media shows us the best, the most glamorous & filtered parts of everyone’s life. You start to think everyone is doing better than you. And this is probably why you start to feel bad about your life even though you know you are doing well. I’m aware of this effect and I still fall into his trap myself all the time.
I struggle with this all the time as it’s a two edged sword for me. This dissatisfaction is fuel for my drive and work ethic. But it also leads to occasional despair and feelings of “what’s the point” of it all. Which causes me not to enjoy everything I’ve done so far.
So I always do my gratitude exercise every night: running through the things I’m happy to have, my wealth, my family even through the rough patches, my books, my career that I only dreamed about as a kid.
I also meditate everyday. Doing 20-30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night. It helps calm me.
Exercise is great for this. Having a gym regime and personal trainer keeps you accountable. It’s probably also why I felt the need to restart fight training this year. There is no better exercise in staying present. Your mind drifts and you end up getting punched in the face.
I do my daily review of my vision board and my annual and 3 year plans which helps me direct my angst and energy towards something good.
Like Stallone’s gangster character Dwight in the show, you can only go forward. And don’t judge people’s lives from the outside, it’s like judging a book by its cover. I can tell you from experience, you may not like what you find inside.
Venture Capital is Hard: The End of an Era
I’ve been practicing venture now for almost 11 years and been in the tech industry for over 26 years now. It’s fascinating how it seems that everyone looks at venture capital as this glamorous industry. And like everything it looks more sexy from the outside than it really is in reality.
And seems so simple and fun. You meet interesting, smart and ambitious founders all the time, look at business models and give them money in return for a piece of the business. You get to be their trusted advisor and help with issues big and small. Encapsulated in a simple formula: finding, picking and helping startup founders.
But the reality is that it is really hard to be great at this. Every single step of this process of finding, picking and helping is damn hard. Few VCs are good at all three of these steps. And in light of the thousands of new VC funds and investors out there, it’s gotten ferociously competitive. There are very few differentiated venture investors these days. And we are seeing a barbell effect of many small new emerging funds on one side and the big brands like Lightspeed, Sequoia, A16Z, NEA on the other side getting bigger. The middle is getting squeezed out.
And the asset class itself is cyclical and very illiquid so unlike stocks you can’t easily sell it until the business goes public or gets acquired. In most cases they just die. Startups are hard and reliant on a confluence of team, market, timing, technology & demographic trends and business model for great success. That and a tremendous amount of luck.
Every year there are only about 25-35 companies that drive all the returns that year. It’s the ultimate outlier business. It’s not even Pareto’s law where 20% of companies drive 80% or returns. Think 1% of companies drive 80% of returns for VC funds. Crazy right?
It’s so hard because there is the pure challenge of building a high growth business, the ability of the founders and team to adapt and grow.
And on top of this it takes on average in the US seed VC fund 12-14 years before big returns show up. It takes a long frigging time for success and returns. It’s highly illiquid despite an emerging secondaries market and big exits happen usually only after 10 years due to the IPO cycle.
This is the ultimate “long term greedy” business. The majority of exits also depend on acquisitions by big companies and unfortunately unlike the last previous cycles, this has been very challenged due to the very anti-business sentiment of regulators in the USA, UK and European Union (of course the EU).
And if you have a relatively small or medium sized fund, you don't have enough management fees to have a good salary, cover all admin and legal costs or live a lavish lifestyle. VCs are poorer than you think.
This is why so many venture capitalists have been leaving the industry for the last 3 years. The ZIRP era of cheap money is over, fund performances are cratered by mark downs and fundraising from LPs across have gotten incredibly difficult due to the ugly returns so far of the asset class.
I can attest to how hard fundraising has been both as an LP investing in funds and a VC raising a small fund. I’ve gotten my face ripped off and ghosted by way more LPs and folks in this last year than ever before. This seems consistent with what I hear from VC friends who are in the market.
Consequently, the estimates are that 35-40% of VC funds were inactive in 2023 and Sapphire LP fund of Funds expects 15% of VC funds are not going to raise another fund. I believe this number will be way higher, at least 2x of that number.
This business is so hard, takes so much time, energy and effort and the market has changed so much it’s just easier to quit. So I expect a winnowing out of the venture market this year and next.
It brings to mind the term “Missionaries over Mercenaries” which for both VCs & startup founders become even more relevant these days. Only those who have the fire in the stomach and sparkle in the eyes will still be in the business 5 years from now. You gotta love the business. So for any new and old VCs out there, buckle up. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. So just focus on staying in the game, the next big cycle is just starting.
Elon Musk and F—k You Money: Separating the Messenger FROM the Message
I’m not a huge fan of Elon even though I admire what he has done and for his incredible prowess and intelligence. What I don’t like are his pro-China and Russia views as well as his long time callousness to people. He is what most folks would charitably call an a—hole. But then when you grow up in a brutal place like South Africa and raised by what can be called an abusive sociopath like his father, a lot of his ruthlessness and coldness makes sense.
But he said something in public that really seemed spot on. And illuminated what many people think but could never say out loud.
“What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. What I see all over the place is people who care about looking good, while doing evil. F—k them.”
(Source: https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1730013516034101638)
This definitely is a description of many of the elites in the West whether in media, academia, government or business.
Elon can say this publicly because he is a billionaire with FU money. And quoting “Billions” again, “What is the point of having F-U money if you never say FU!” But the observation is that it’s hard to speak truth to power if one has no power or platform or personal brand.
Everyone else is so scared of offending someone or getting canceled. It’s led us to a dearth of any critical thinking and debate in the West.
I work at listening and paying attention to everyone. Even people I really dislike like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Mike Cernovich. David Sacks had incredibly observant views on startups and operating as well as very valid critiques of the Democratic Party and stupid progressive left. I disagree with his views on UKraine of course. Cernovich is a brilliant writer and teaches great mindset stuff but I disagree with his right wing views.
Try to separate the message from the messenger. This is key to critical thinking and something missing in schools and business. An unwillingness to hear the other side leads to major blind spots and faulty thinking. So do remember a broken clock is right twice in the day.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 16th, 2024
“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop”--Ovid
Lemkin knows his stuff. All SaaS & B2B Founders should listen to this. The world has changed in GTM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFrSh3qVNwI
2. Drug Cartels will be big issue for Mexico and USA in the future. It already is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttWlOwaBOaQ&t=1015s
3. "For tech entrepreneurs who don’t have an idea but want to build software, my recommendation is to start a consulting company, build software for clients, and listen to feedback and market trends. Look for opportunities. One of the best ways to become a software entrepreneur is to start as a software consulting entrepreneur."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/06/01/software-consulting-to-software-product/
4. "The Russians have pushed forward that entire time about 1-2 kilometers. And it’s hard to argue that the town is any closer to falling than it was then. Note—people were saying a few months ago that Putin wanted to take Chasiv Yar by 9 May for his latest coronation. That seems to have been dropped.
Of course another supposedly strategic benefit of the campaign for Russia was that it would limit Ukrainian attacks into Russia. If that was an intended benefit, this was probably the most disastrous own-goal, strategic calculation so far since the failure of the original invasion.
What Russia has done with the Kharkiv offensive has opened up Russia to attack by US system in a way that would have been inconceivable before. Indeed the offensive was so flagrantly planned to take advantage of US fears, and the Russians compounded that through their terror attacks on Kharkiv, that they caused a boomerang reaction, and the Biden Administration did its volte-face this week and okayed Ukrainian attacks into Russia with US weapons.
This will make the Kharkiv offensive an even greater burden.
Also, it's worth noting that the US has also given the Ukrainians the ability to disrupt any upcoming Sumy offensive—this time before the Russians cross the border. Another Russian offensive in this area has been discussed regularly—now such an operation will be much harder for the Russians. One of the main reasons for the Russian early, modest successes at Kharkiv was because the Ukrainians could not do such disruption with US systems. Now they can—another Russian own-goal."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-83-the-kharkiv-offensive
5. "That means we now have two popular independent and centrist candidates against both Biden and Trump. Kennedy and Manchin want to return to a bipartisan world. Manchin tweeted, “Let’s work together to fix America. Don’t hate the other side. There’s only one side - the American side - and we have to work together to save our country. That’s why I changed my party registration to no party affiliation.” This is very similar to the language Kennedy uses to describe his “We The People Party”.
I question whether Kennedy and Manchin will align or fight each other for the middle ground. Could it be that both the left and the right have become so preoccupied with their troubles that they have already missed the electorate’s desire to return to a more collaborative and centrist approach to politics? Yes. Have they understood that the country’s voters want any option other than mendacity and/or senility (terms many Americans apply to both Biden and Trump, depending on which side they are on)? Yes.
Trump will appeal his 34 convictions, of course, but these convictions strongly raise the possibility that President Biden won’t be facing Trump. He’ll be facing Robert F Kennedy and Joe Manchin. On a larger scale, these events mean that the parties are playing for the ends of the playing field, the far left and the far right, while the centrists are now taking the previously ignored and unoccupied middle of the playing field. Middle America seems to want America’s focus back on the middle.
To many, it seems unimaginable that President Trump has been convicted of felony charges.
To others, it is unimaginable that he would not be convicted of felony charges.
To others, it seems unimaginable that President Biden (even if only via his son Hunter) has not been convicted of felony charges.
To others, it is unimportant if his son is convicted of felony charges.
What matters is that we are not witnessing politics anymore. We are witnessing the unraveling of the American social contract. The social contract in many nations is clear. You are either in power or in prison. Political life consists of bouncing back and forth between the two extremes. The US seems to be well on its way to this outcome now."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-four-way-race-for-the-american
6. Latest updates in Ukraine and massive implications as Western weapons now finally allowed to hit targets in Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va6Tcd7NJ14
7. The latest state of SaaS with Jason Lemkin. It’s really good. Net net: it’s gonna be rough this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM-yO1gZOE
8. A grand vision for the future. Vinod has been right more than wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti6Gft5xO1s
9. "But every attempt to create a marketplace in Private Markets has failed. Including the three times I’ve tried. And it is simply because Liquidity and Price Discovery are Bugs, Not Features, in our industry."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-private-secondary-marketplace-never-work-henry-ward-4ysoc/
10. Jason is a friend and I've always respected him. I respect him even more after listening to this. So much wisdom and honesty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7QN9RGZJ5o
11. "Some of the older software companies are slowing - a natural part of the lifecycle. But it would be a mistake to extrapolate that to the entire market. The private markets hide the fastest growing companies."
https://tomtunguz.com/weakness-in-software/
12. "At this point you should be close/near financial independence. After you are financially set you begin playing a completely different game vs. everyone else.
You’re getting in on private deals, you are able to buy assets at discounts (long vesting periods) and you can entertain various ultra high risk positions.
While we’re primarily focused on highly liquid investments since we absolutely loathe trusting people with money, there are always illiquid options out there.
Growth Industries: As of this writing (June 3, 2024), it would be the following markets: 1) tech, 2) crypto, 3) fitness/diet, 4) skin care, 5) mental health, 6) pets, 7) mental health and 8) vanity/anti-aging as older childless men/women pay millions to try and stop the hands of time. If you’re involved in those markets they will be stable to growing over the foreseeable future (if something changes you’ll hear it here first as always)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/basic-asset-protection-low-seven
13. "We take up the subject of how Silicon Valley startups seek to secure new defense contracts for an age of “great-power competition” with China. Many of these defense startups are funded by venture capitalists who promote themselves as the facilitators of global peace.
They promise that their technocratic knowledge and investments in artificial intelligence will deter Chinese aggression and reduce casualties on all sides in the event of a great-power war. If we are to save the world, they argue, the U.S. must have not just a technological advantage, but technological predominance over China and other U.S. rivals.
Indeed, the CEO of Palantir (one of the largest defense startups), Alex Karp, recently declared at the AI Expo for National Competitiveness that “[t]he peace activists are war activists. “We are the peace activists.” Karp and like-minded venture capitalists are on a mission to make money while saving the world from China and Russia; they sell themselves as the “new Oppenheimers.”
https://michaelbrenes.substack.com/p/better-defense-through-technology
14. "First of all, seeing other countries is not the same as understanding them, even though these are both valuable activities. If you go to Japan and see that they have an amazing train system, it can motivate you to think “Why don’t we have a great train system in the U.S.?”, or even “How can the U.S. get better trains?”.
But it will not tell you whyJapan has such great trains. It will not tell you how Japan’s train system was built, or why. It will not tell you how much it cost or how easy it is to maintain. It will not tell you about any political problems Japan’s government had to overcome in order to get the trains built, and so on.
It’s good to know that other countries can do things differently, but that’s only the first step in learning about those differences."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-can-you-really-learn-about
15. "This dynamic has changed now that social networking makes it possible to fight wars in the moral realm online, using events in the physical realm to advance the conflict.
Now, the center of gravity for wars in the moral realm is online. It’s where the news of events arrives first, where the narratives built upon it are fought over, and how it is distributed to most people (TV news is dying).
Unlike pre-network wars, these wars don’t focus solely on the cohesion of the combatants' domestic populations. They are waged across the entire network of people, firms, and governments connected to the combatants.
Also, unlike these earlier wars, these conflicts progress to their conclusion in months rather than years and decades."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/gazas-end-game
16. "The benefit of using alternatives is the potential for higher returns that are less correlated with traditional financial assets. While each of the asset classes listed above will have a different correlation with stocks, bonds, and cash, the hope is that these alternative asset classes will provide a diversification benefit that you cannot get anywhere else. As a result, investing in alternatives should improve your returns while also lowering your portfolio’s overall volatility.
However, these benefits don’t come without costs. One of these costs is less liquidity. Unlike publicly traded stocks and bonds, alternatives can be difficult to sell quickly or at a reasonable price. As a result, your capital can be locked into an alternative investment for much longer."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-you-need-alternatives-to-get-rich/
17. "This combination of strategic government policies, investment in infrastructure, and innovative production techniques transformed the U.S. industrial base from a state of near obsolescence in the 1930s to the most productive manufacturing capability in the world by the end of World War II."
https://andrewglenn.substack.com/p/from-obsolescence-to-overdrive-the
18. "Anytime you part ways in any kind of relationship, unless the other person is begging you to stay, it’s a bit of a failure. Even if the parting is amicable, like starting something new after working for something else, at some level, they’re ok with letting you go.
That doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a person or you didn’t create lots of value—but we’re far too dismissive about what we’re missing out on in these periods of transition. The same holds for personal relationships, too. Even if you realize you’re not a great match for someone, it’s worth taking stock of how you could have been a better partner.
A move to something better doesn’t mean you don’t still have lots to learn and improve over your last effort."
https://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2024/6/3/lessons-on-leaving
19. How to kill a franchise......over-saturation.......Hollywood is renowned for this.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-6-laws-of-dying-hollywood-franchises
20. This is an excellent and instructive interview to learn the art and science of angel investing and venture capital. Well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g22kJinehPA
21. Solid & thoughtful discussion on investing in AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fxL0jjy1tI
22. This is a masterclass in venture capital from 25+ years running a top firm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdHyk5DZJDM
23. This is always an enlightening conversation on geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt4581iZn1g
24. Everyone in sales should watch this. It's not FOMO that drives buyer decisions, it's FOMU, Fear of Messing Up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUzEgRetmC4&t=1s
25. "The TL;DR:
Burn is normal, and even healthy, in the early stages as long as you have the cash to support it.
There’s almost always a trade-off between growth and profitability.
The relative importance between the two metrics will vary over time. A balanced approach is usually best for valuations.
When growth slows below 50% year-on-year, expect to craft a path toward breakeven or profitability."
https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/growth-or-profitability
26. "It’s really that simple.
Business = Having something to sell + a source of leads
It’s nothing complex like how people seem to think."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-2-parts-of-any-business-and-what-holds-you-back/
27. "But I think consumer is actually a great place to be building and investing. Whenever something is out of favor, that’s a sign it’s probably a good place to spend time: this is an industry built on being contrarian, not built on following the herd. We’re entering a compelling few years for consumer entrepreneurship.
Big consumer wins compare favorably to big enterprise wins—relative to Snowflake’s market cap, Uber is ~3x in size, Airbnb is ~2x in size, and DoorDash is roughly equal. (Snowflake is the biggest enterprise IPO of the last decade.) The last few years produced a windfall of consumer outcomes, yet investors today almost write off the category."
https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/the-consumer-renaissance
28. "Modern western writing tends to assume a progressive linear development of societies, and that the kind of behaviour described above is just a bizarre anachronism. But older historians from different cultures were well aware that societies rose and fell. Ibn Khaldûn thought that no regime could last for more than three generations before it became decadent and declined.
If he’s right, then we are entering the third generation of unfettered Liberalism now, and neo-tribalism may be the pattern of the future, as society disintegrates into smaller and smaller groups, both elective and ascriptive, looking for security among the few they believe they can count on. Not a happy prospect."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-coming-of-neo-tribalism
29. Fun discussion on NIA today with an old Yahoo! colleague Erika Ayers Badan. She is so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPVRtbM3pfI
30. Elad Gil is one of the best operators and investors in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcvIGJ3_H_k&t=3087s
31. "In sum, there is a scenario in which Taiwan could face an economic blockade by China, but such a blockade would only make strategic sense if China had already mobilized its military for a full-scale invasion in anticipation of the need to escalate or at least have the blockade buttressed by the threat of force. In either case, Taiwan arrives at practically the same place: staring down the full military might of the People’s Republic of China.
China could, of course, miscalculate and launch a blockade without the backup of a threat of invasion — although it’s puzzling why it hasn’t done so yet if it truly believed it was likely to result in a victory without a fight — but doing so would very likely result in a strategic defeat.
Even if an economic blockade is theoretically on the table, it is not the most likely or the direst outcome that Taiwan currently faces. That ultimate risk belongs to the threat of military invasion — a threat that, unfortunately, Taiwan still has a long way to go to prepare for. If Taiwan proceeds to believe that a blockade is more likely than a military assault, or that a blockade would be the end of the matter, it is making a dangerous miscalculation."
https://warontherocks.com/2024/06/a-chinese-economic-blockade-of-taiwan-would-fail-or-launch-a-war/
32. Taiwan needs to wake up, so does the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIYVceK-e_c
33. Masterclass in building niche media businesses from one of the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QKnbKzZLLI&t=1988s
34. HUR Special forces heroes and bad asses from Ukraine.
"After our successful offensive operations, everybody started to relax and think, ‘Oh, the Russians can’t do anything.’ Every country has its propaganda, but even our government started to think that everything is fine,” Den says over a breakfast in Kyiv just before the second anniversary of the invasion.
“In 2023, we saw the consequences of our wrong decisions at the end of 2022, when everybody thought that everything is fine. But it’s stupid when you’re fighting against a country with a three-times-larger population, a real big country with everything, including nuclear weapons.”
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-the-fearless-ukraine-soldiers-front-lines/
35. This is an excellent discussion on media businesses.
Increasing Your Surface of Luck: It’s Almost Always A Numbers Game
It’s always interesting talking to people from all walks of life and learning about how they live. Their perspectives. And it’s always really clear who is successful or not.
It’s their mindset and taking action. The more sales calls you make, the more investors you reach and talk with, the more articles you write, the more likely there will be success. The more girls you approach, the more likely you will end up dating someone. Consistent and regular action. Obviously these need to be relevant and targeted to the right people. Ie. Do your homework. But the point still stands. It literally is a numbers game.
As Noah Kagan tweeted:
“When starting out, dedicate yourself to The Law of 100.
Put out 100 videos.
Write 100 newsletters.
Reach out to 100 investors.
Do 100 reps of anything and you WILL get results.”
The more relevant action you take, increases your chances of doing well. For me, doing startup investing deals brings me more deal flow. Speaking at conferences brings me more speaking opportunities. Consulting and mentoring bring me more consulting and mentoring opportunities. Meeting more people, listening to more podcasts and reading more books, you get more insights. It’s compounding at its best.
Passivity is not a formula for success in anything.
You have to hustle and have a mentality of eating what you kill. Have total ownership.
I know if I don’t do anything, nothing will happen. Yes, something could happen even if you don’t do anything. But that’s a dangerous and precarious way to live. Living in hope and praying for luck, you are NGMI. God helps those who help themselves.
Watching Your Back: Defense is Offense
The funny thing about becoming an adult. There are always problems in some sphere of your life, health, finances, business/work and family. And as much as you try to separate all these spheres of your life, it easily spills over. The highs of life are when you have alignment of all these aspects, but the other side of this alignment is when things go wrong.
In life, there is a rule of three. So when things go wrong, they go wrong in so many aspects at the same time or in quick succession that it becomes very overwhelming. It happened to me in 2001 and vividly in 2020. 2022, 2023 and 2024 so far were not exactly fun for me either.
My health and business life seemed to be going well, but my family life has been pretty disastrous the last few years. And you cannot help but be affected by it. And here is the thing: you cannot hide from it forever. You eventually have to deal with it.
Using a military analogy, you cannot attack at the front if your back is unprotected. The most terrifying thing to happen to an army is when they are attacked from behind. Very few armies come back from this. They usually end up being overwhelmed and destroyed.
This analogy is relevant for our lives. You can’t in the long run, sustainably do good work in your career or business if your family life is a mess. This is literally why the role of military NCO’s aka sergeants are so critical. Before the mission or deployment, they check with each member of the team to understand if there is anything going on at home that will affect their performance in the field. Bad performance leading to fatalities of themselves and their teammates.
Repercussions in business are not as severe. But for long term success, I either have to fix my family issues or frankly stop being in a family as hard as it is. But to figure this out, using the same analogy, you have to gather retreat to get perspective and gather your resources. Rest and refit before you jump back into the fray.
That’s why I spent a lot of time on the road in 2023 and 2024. Yes, there were lots of business reasons for sure as Q2 & Q4 usually tends to be crazy. But frankly, I had to find a “sanctuary” or “safe house” metaphorically to clear my head. As I had written before, a place that I’ve discovered sadly is that my true home and comfort is a nice hotel room overseas. A setting I know very well over the last 20+ years of working and building businesses abroad. A place you can retreat, rest and lick your wounds, think, and plan. This gives you a chance to tackle your problems and protect your back. Only then can you truly perform at your best and get back on the offensive in life.
A for Effort: Relentlessness is a Big Predictor of Success
I had an interesting discussion with my therapist recently as I discussed some stuff that was happening in my business life and family. She said she noticed I tend to be pretty judgemental of myself and also others. I tend to be very black and white. I tend to be pretty hard nosed. I definitely agree with her and think it’s true. It’s served me well, by having high standards.
You either meet them or you don’t. But for me, it’s less about how much money you have or how successful you are (that’s an a–hole move and growing up poor, i’d never treat people the way i was treated as a worker in Canada). Although results do matter. BUT to me what counts, It’s whether you try hard or not. It’s how much effort you put into things. Small things and big things.
I happened to go to a lovely dinner at Alisa steakhouse in Vancouver at the end of 2023, for a VC dinner hosted by my friends at Panache Ventures. The waiter was incredible. I mean not just professional but really top of his game. The food was delicious but it was the whole delivery and packaging that made the experience exceptional. How and when the dishes were cleared, food being sent in at the right moment. But more than that he was an artist. He cared and put in the effort. You could tell he put in the time and was experienced.
This is why I love the craftsperson culture of Japan. An intense focus and effort on excellence whatever they do. Yes, results matter but it’s almost inevitable to reach some level of success if you keep at it. This is what I see in the startup and entrepreneurial world.
The best founders never quit and just figure it out. Especially when times get tough. They do what needs to be done, whether mortgaging their house, firing 75% of their staff or whatever.
We’ve seen so many wannabe entrepreneurs drop out in 2023 & 2024 because it got tough on fundraising and customer front. It’s one thing to quit after you have been working on something for 2-3 or even 4 years. It’s another thing to drop out after a year, or 9 months or even 6 months. YES, these actually did happen in my portfolio. 2021 vintage. Peak ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) bubble.
I am judgmental. I judge people on the level of effort. I judge people on their willingness to face their fears and do hard things. I judge people on their commitment. There is no reason to half ass anything. Unless you have a medical condition, there is no excuse for not giving your all.
If you do commit and give it everything, I guarantee in America, you will eventually get what you are looking for. The bar is so low, most people give up too quickly or worse, don’t even start or do anything, let alone put in the work. So go forth and as the Japanese say: “Ganbatte” or “Do your Best.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 9th, 2024
“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.” ― John Lennon
"Putting it more simply, it may be that all the data starts to fall into patterns, perhaps fractal-like repeating patterns. Our job won’t be to guess the price of the S&P or the Yen anymore but to rely on AI and supercomputing to tell us how all financial instruments are moving in repeated patterns over the course of time. We’ll stop focusing on prices and start focusing on the movement of prices. Instead, of looking at price moves, we'll start focusing on the movement of the financial system as a whole.
Dredge says, “This brings us full circle and ties perfectly back into the teachings of Taleb and Mandelbrot, the power law distribution of things, and the non-smooth fractal nature of the real world. Likewise, the work from Per Bak on Self-Organized Criticality and the fact that relevant change in systems comes through significant phase transitions, that evolution jumps along the paths of Punctuated Equilibriums. It is the divergence that matters and ever more so the greater the scale of the variation.” In other words, volatility at the global financial systems level is very different from volatility at the level of the US bond market.
This means maybe we won’t have specialists in US Government bonds or Japanese government bonds. Maybe we won’t even have bond specialists. We’ll have people who are reading the patterns of all financial instruments in all markets all at once. This brings a whole new meaning to what we call global macro."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/salt-honey-and-half-a-poppy-seed
2. This is an important story. Ignore the clickbait title. Anduril is one of the most important companies in the West now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItLFpYha6Wc
3. Insightful take on West Africa. Geopolitical earthquake coming here if Nigeria wakes up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctbNdrSCWt4
4. "This point of view, manifest in a model funded by some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest investors, fits what I’ve observed in my own coaching practice: Many founders have a needlessly fraught relationship with wealth. As a result, they either downplay their financial ambition and lower the bar on the value they create, or lean into unscrupulous, short-sighted practices that they believe are inherent to making money.
We need to rework this perspective. One can do many amazing things with money—especially if one is creative and high agency.
Consider your tradeoffs, prioritize, and revisit your choices regularly and actively to ensure your life-building project is moving in the direction you want. Only you can know whether the tradeoffs are ultimately worth it—this is your life to build."
https://every.to/p/the-moral-case-for-making-money
5. I always have to rethink my assumptions and views geopolitically after listening to Andrew Bustamante.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0fFNX8qVLY
6. Pieter Levels has been an inspiration for many people.
https://medium.com/@rushabtated4/3m-an-year-pieter-levels-d6f6808a6a02
7. This is a deeply insightful conversation on the art of VC from one of the best in the biz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4NFkF7jCmg
8. The best convo on Silicon Valley businesses these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHYoSBixdPI
9. "If you get a paycheck, whether it’s salary or freelance, and that’s how you pay your bills, you’re an Earner. Owners, on the other hand, might collect wage income, but their real money comes through profits from investments: stock sales and dividends, rent from property, and other income streams derived from the ownership of assets.
To be an Earner is noble; you work for a living, and labor is a sacred thing. Labor is the source of food, shelter, entertainment, and every material pleasure of society. We even celebrate it with a holiday, the first Monday in September. Pro tip: If you want to celebrate Labor Day somewhere awesome, try as hard as you can to become an Owner.
Think of building wealth as launching a rocket ship into orbit. Rockets burn 95% of their fuel to escape Earth’s soupy atmosphere and incessant gravity. Once you get to orbit, you’re a master of the universe — covering thousands of miles with just a touch of propulsion. Wealth is similar. The atmosphere is your expenses; the distance traveled, your income.
Most of us never generate enough current income to make the jump to space and become an Owner — save enough to invest so our primary source(s) of income are passive. Investing is difficult, if not impossible at low income levels. Saving your first $100,000 is incredibly hard. The next $100,000 is tough, but you now have momentum and start to see the curvature of the Earth. Once your current income is substantially greater than your expenses, and you’ve deployed an army of capital that fights for you and your family in your sleep, you’ve made the jump.
What we’ve done with the tax code has rendered the atmosphere thicker and gravity stronger. Go to law or medical school, or live at the office, and you’ll see your (current) income increase, but you’ll also lose a bigger share to taxes, and the harder it gets to save and escape the gravity of being an Earner."
https://www.profgalloway.com/earners-vs-owners/
10. "The key thing to understand about this decoupling, I think, and the reason it’s for real, is that this is something the leaders of both the U.S. and China want. No matter what you heard in 2018, this is not a case of a protectionist U.S. trying to defend its manufacturing industries while China becomes the champion of globalism. The U.S. is acting not out of concern for its industries — indeed, its chip industry will take a huge hit from export controls — but because of how it perceives its own national security. And China’s leaders want to shift to indigenous industry, regulated industry, and even nationalized industry, even if that shift makes China grow more slowly.
The decoupling between China and the developed democracies, so long a topic of conversation and speculation, now appears to be a reality. A critical point has been reached. The old world-economic system of Chimerica is being swept away, and something new will take its place.
One reasonable prediction is that the era of global value chains will not come to an end. Offshoring and supply chaining are just how companies know how to produce stuff now, meaning that — barring a very catastrophic war — we will not go back to an era of largely self-contained national manufacturing economies. Instead, supply chains will shift into blocs.
China is obviously one bloc; Xi and his followers want China to make and own everything valuable in-house and rely on other countries only for raw materials and other low-value goods.
In the absence of the U.S.-led liberal world order to enforce free trade, securing those resources will require geopolitical and even military action — a return, in some form or another, to the pre-WW2 era that will doubtless draw at least scattered protests of neo-imperialism. There will be struggles over the resources of some neutral countries, including poor countries, and this could turn into some ugly Cold-War style proxy struggles.
The second bloc is less certain. I expect the Biden administration and/or its successor to get tripped up for a while by the mirage of a self-sufficient U.S., and to implement “Buy American” policies that hurt our allies and trading partners and slow the formation of a bloc that can match China.
But if Americans can finally pull their heads out of their rear ends and recognize that their country doesn’t dominate the world the way it used to, there’s a chance to create a non-China economic bloc that preserves lots of the efficiencies of the old Chimerica system while also serving U.S. national security needs.
That bloc would not only include America’s formal allies or the developed democracies; instead it would include lots of developing countries that would like to hedge against Chinese power and secure access to rich-world markets."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-end-of-the-system-of-the-world
11. "As diverse as these innovations are, there is one thing these innovations in autonomous weapons have in common: they point to a world where trade, travel, and connectivity can be actively contested. A contested world where small states and even smaller insurgent and criminal groups can use autonomous weapons to;
--reliably, inexpensively, and selectively
--disrupt, blockade, or redirect trade, travel, and connectivity
--on land, air, and sea over vast distances or focused within urban environments."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/a-contested-world
12. "It’s important to reiterate that none of these theories are mutually exclusive. It’s possible that the objectives of war production, industrial policy, forced deindustrialization of rivals, and recession-fighting simply align in the minds of China’s leaders. And it’s possible that natural forces like China’s recession and a long-term shift of manufacturing to China are lending a helping hand to the government’s effort. All of these theories could be true at once. Or perhaps only some subset of them.
But I think breaking the possibilities down in this way is a helpful prelude to thinking carefully about what tariffs and other protectionist measures might realistically hope to accomplish."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-is-china-producing-so-many-export
13. Excellent conversation this week. Silicon Valley is popping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDr1983LIuo
14. "In the US we’re used to discounting career claims. We drill down. We ask, “what precise role did you play?” We use behavioral questions. We check references, both those provided and backdoor. It’s all a normal part of the process. We do it without thinking.
But European founders are not used to all this. They come from an understated culture where people tend to discount their accomplishments. To understand a European resume, an American might need to amplify it. Think: “yes, we grew the company from $20M to $200M but I was only part of the team that did that,” when they were actually its leader who built it from nothing.
What happens when a culture of understated accomplishment meets a culture of overstated achievement?
“These people are gods.” That’s what happens."
15. "The convergence of FinTech and SilverTech presents promising opportunities to address the financial needs of an aging population and facilitate the transfer of wealth between generations. By leveraging innovation and a commitment to inclusivity, fintechs are reshaping the future of wealth management and empowering seniors and their families to build towards a brighter financial future."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/four-ways-startups-will-capitalize
16. Important discussion on geopolitics and war in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiiRbyhx7cs
17. "Classic tacos include al pastor, carnitas, barbacoa, guisados and tacos de canasta – and the search for the best of each has been the subject of countless books and TV shows.
Of the 18 Mexican restaurants given one or two Michelin stars this week, El Califa de León stands out for its earthiness. Arturo Rivera Martínez, one its chefs, has been serving customers for more than 20 years. “The secret is the simplicity of our taco,” Rivera Martínez told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “It has only a tortilla, red or green sauce, and that’s it. That, and the quality of the meat.”
18. Great discussion today on how to build a great venture fund. Brand new vc fund Saga & what they have learned from the top veteran VCs & operators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WlSOaN45Xk
19. Bullish on gold and commodities.
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/is-it-finally-fun-to-be-a-gold-investor
20. We absolutely need to bring manufacturing back to America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OThw1Y1ChU
21. Important discussion for defense-tech founders and where we sit in the world geopolitically. The world has changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN8H6JQGFXA
22. For fellow Dune fans, this is coming out soon on HBO. Dune Prophecy: a Prequel
https://manofmany.com/entertainment/movies-tv/dune-prophecy
23. Good convo on VC and tech with an east coast view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJui5p9xnbU
24. "The list goes on. Gold is breaking out to all-time highs in every currency as it appears to be reintroduced back into the global monetary order as a neutral reserve asset.
I continue to pick up breadcrumbs and I am watching the signposts. I think the next few weeks could be extremely interestingly and I intend to be all over it.
I love the Lenin quote. I’ll use it again here: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
https://thealetheanarrative.substack.com/p/economic-warfare-continues
25. Good discussion here as always on timely topics in VC and Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGu2W0yqN6g
26. Important global macro discussion from one of the best observers around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWs7H503OOk
27. "But they were ultimately a bunch of cowards who weren’t even willing to get a bloody nose for their so-called beliefs. And France’s ‘civil war’ was over in no time.
This is one of the great lessons from history: it’s easy to pretend that you stand for something when the cost for doing so is absolutely nothing. You only find out what people truly believe when their own blood and livelihood is on the line.
In our modern era, we have equally incompetent, idiotic, wimpy politicians who are devoid of backbone. They have no clue how the real world works, and they live a life of lavish status courtesy of the taxpayer.
Let’s be honest: an actual “war”, i.e. shooting, violence against violence, etc. isn’t going to happen.
Just like the French civil war in the mid-1600s, the majority of the hyper-angry progressive rebels in America today are elitist cowards. One need only take a look at the people who have taken over the universities: they’re idiot kids, not terrifying holy warriors."
https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/civil-war-really-150863/
28. "Soft skills like communication actually materially impact the terms of trade between individuals, reducing friction, coordination costs, and thus enabling greater frequency of task trading to solve increasingly complex human capital challenges.
So in a world where more rote and routine tasks are going to AI, and where complex tasks remain the bread and butter of what human workers do, it makes sense therefore that there are a premium for these soft skills that enable greater task trading, and reduce coordination costs. This was the thesis of my book, and why “the Liberal Arts will rule the digital world.”
Thin startups of tomorrow will ruthlessly prioritize accuracy, precision, and economy, meaning they will prioritize listening and humility to find product market fit, internal culture to continually refine precision and execution, and leverage new tools such as AI to trim and refine the inputs necessary to achieve more company on less."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/the-thin-startup
29. "The global elites have various policy tools to prop up the status quo, which inflict pain now or later. I take the cynical view that the only goal of elected and unelected bureaucrats is to remain in power. Therefore, the easy button is constantly pressed first. Hard choices and strong medicine are best left for the next administration.
A series of extremely long essays will be needed to fully explain why the dollar-yen exchange rate is the most important global economic variable. This is my third attempt at describing the chain of events that led us to crypto Valhalla."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-easy-button
30. Good conversation on the growing Defense-tech sector and investing/selling in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dvSkppg90o
31. "Peter W. Singer, a defense analyst and author of 2009 best-seller “Wired for War”, sees the war in Ukraine as playing a similar role to the Spanish Civil War, which served as a dress rehearsal for new techniques and technologies ahead of World War II. Modern tank warfare and aerial bombing — as captured in Pablo Picasso’s dramatic oeuvre Guernica — were arguably forged in the Spanish crucible."
32. Valid discussion on how critical timing and execution is in Silicon Valley for big technology waves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6VV3t9minM
33. "China hasn’t yet proven the superiority of its system, but its successes raise the uncomfortable question: Can this be what wins? Can universal surveillance, speech control, suppression of religion and minorities, and economic command and control really be the keys to national power and stability in the 21st century? How could that be true, when those same things failed so comprehensively in the 20th?
I don’t know. But it’s useful and to think about how and why totalitarianism might be well-adapted to the world of the 21st century. In fact, I have a theory of how this might be true. This theory is only a conjecture — it’s something I don’t believe in, but also something I can’t yet convince myself is wrong. It’s a refinement and extension of some of the things I’ve written about before, but over time I’ve begun to bring these ideas together in a more coherent form.
So here you go: a theory of how totalitarianism might naturally triumph. The basic idea is that when information is costly, liberal democracy wins because it gathers more and better information than closed societies, but when information is cheap, negative-sum information tournaments sap an increasingly large portion of a liberal society’s resources.
But we shouldn’t accept this theory as true just because I managed to write a halfway-coherent blog post about it. We should continue fighting for liberal democracy, and hope that technology and human nature allow for its continued victory. We should try to tweak our institutions to prevent our time from being cannibalized by information tournaments — restraining the excesses of high finance, limiting campaign spending in order to give legislators more time to govern, directing more capital to long-term risky high-tech projects, and so on. Liberalism may or may not still have the advantages it had in the 20th century, but whether or not it does, we shouldn’t give it up without a fight."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-liberal-democracy-might-lose
34. "There are two workloads in AI : training the models & running queries against them (inference). Today training is 60% and inference is 40%. One intuition is that inference should become the vast majority of the market over time as model performance asymptotes.
However it’s unclear if that will happen primarily because of the massive increase of training costs. Anthropic has said models could cost $100b to train in 2 years.
“In our trailing 4 quarters, we estimate that inference drove about 40% of our Data Center revenue.”
The trend shows no sign of abating. Neither do the profits!"
8th Grade: Reminders and Lessons from an Awful Time
I watched the excellent movie “8th Grade.” Boy was it hard and enlightening to watch, as we track a young girl named Kayla on her last week at 8th grade before she heads to High School. There is a quote in the movie that sums it up. “8th grade is the worst. I was, like, a complete mess when I was your age.”
I grew up in Canada but anyone I talk with here in the US or Canada pretty much felt the same way. What a strange time: your body is changing, head full of hormones that you can’t think straight and surrounded by people you are trying to impress as you try to figure yourself out. You never felt like you fit and were not one of the cool kids. You feel like garbage. Thankfully, I always had older friends who helped me through this.
And to make things even worse for this generation, they are aided and abetted by social media like snapchat and Instagram: talking about wrecking your brain and making you feel even crappier. Cool is just on a whole different level now.
I even felt for her father in the movie (and my parents), who have to suffer through temper tantrums, the stoney silence and rage of frustration from a crappy day at school. And as a parent, you have no clue what’s going on, feel powerless and not sure what to do. You just have to take it. I can tell you as the dad of a 14 year girl, I’m right there now.
Whatever you are going through now as an adult, just remember how awful that time in 8th grade was. It sucked pretty badly for me and pretty sure for you too. And you got past it. Just like all the other challenges along your life to get to now. Look at how far you have come.
So quoting Kayla: “some parts of growing up will be really hard and not good, I promise that growing up will get really good.
And I know you probably don’t want any advice from a dumb 8th grader, but if high school sucked for you. I’m really sorry about that.
Just because things are happening to you right now, doesn’t mean they are always going to happen to you. And things will change. And you know, you never know what’s going to happen next, and that’s what makes things exciting and scary. And fun.”
Finding the Efficient Frontier: A Tool for Optimizing Your Life
I’ve been on Tai Lopez kick recently and he introduced a really interesting use case of the Efficient Frontier framework from Harry Markowitz. Famously used on Wall Street by Hedge funds investors, the Efficient Frontier methodology is how you figure out the optimal price and mix for an investment. “The efficient frontier graphically represents portfolios that maximize returns for the risk assumed.”
But Tai actually adopted this for many aspects of life. So for example, he talks about money. Not having any money is bad. We can’t afford to buy anything nice or take care of our families. And if you have no money, good luck on any success on the dating side.
So we start working on a business or get a better paying job. Our life starts getting better. We’re happy. But as we men tend to be extremists, we keep going. Making more and more and more money. Where we start to focus so much on making money that we ignore our family, our health. We start attracting the wrong kind of attention, from frivolous lawsuits or gold diggers. So our life becomes bad again.
Another example he uses is health. For a guy, not having any muscles makes you look weak, and women in general will not find you attractive. So you start to work out and build muscles. You start to get compliments and attention. So go further and use steroids and build crazy muscles. But then you start to look grotesque and women find you unattractive again.
In both cases, we’ve exceeded the optimal point of success.
So the lesson at macro level:
It’s better to be known than famous.
It’s better to be on the rise and then to have arrived.
Be a prince and not an emperor. It’s because you end up with a big target on your back. Everyone wants to take down the emperor.
Basically the point is: know when the optimal point of whatever you are doing. Yes, test the limits, this is where progress and growth is. Sometimes you only know where the top is when you pass it. But don’t overdo it if you can avoid it. Don’t overshoot. Extremism is bad in all things. Find your efficient frontier. As Morgan Housel wrote: realize “the power of enough.”
Nobody Knows Anything: Leadership is Hard
No surprise I grew up watching Star Trek Next Generation as a teen and it definitely was a big influence on my life. I loved that show because it was not just action but explored a lot of philosophical, societal and life issues. There was one specific episode called “Attached” (Season 7, episode 8 if are you interested) where Captain Picard and Doctor Crusher accidentally end up in an alien prison cell with devices attached to their necks that mysteriously allow them to hear each other’s true thoughts-whether by choice or not.
During their escape there is a scene when they become lost. Captain Picard takes charge and sets the direction. Dr. Crusher, because she can read his thoughts, realizes and says “You don’t know where you are going do you?”
Paraphrasing Captain Picard: “I’ve found as captain in a leadership role, being confident and pretending to know, is important to setting direction.”
This seems to be telling of life, adulthood and leadership. I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older and having met so many people, that everyone is making it up as they go along. Joining established companies and venture funds, that from the outside looked beautiful and pristine were true disaster zones on the inside. Top business leaders, investors, media luminaries, mentors, parents and folks you look up, are mostly winging it. They are just more experienced in doing it and are able to act more confidently. Basically, everyone you think has it all figured out or looked up to is probably muddling through life like you. There are no adults in the room.
I’m not saying you should not pay attention or listen to advice/guidance from them. You should because they have seen more than you have. But you need to learn how to get advice and knowledge from a wider range of sources and learn to think for yourself.
As Romeen Sheth wrote:
“To go from nothing to something takes hard work, intent and skill.
To go from something to amazing takes the same, but it also takes luck.
If you are lucky enough to be great, take it with a dose of humility.
And if you are looking up to greatness, take it with a grain of salt.”
It’s also true that most people just want to be led. Making decisions and taking responsibility for yourself is hard. It’s just much easier to just follow your boss’ or an authority's orders. But this is also the road to inevitable mediocrity and despair. Remember if you want to take charge of your life and be more happy, “agency” and ownership is a key piece of this.
And if you are a founder or a leader, even if you are not 100% confident, it still helps to act like you are certain, set a clear direction and have a good vision. Most people will still follow along unless they hate or don’t respect you, which is a whole different issue. Everyone is thirsting for real leadership in the world today and now is the time to step up if you think it’s you.
Alexander the Great was reported to have said: “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 2nd, 2024
“Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is a good rundown of what’s happening economically in various countries in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ4fWdjWLiE
2. "Too often, entrepreneurs try to sign free “customers” in an effort to get the product used, and that usually doesn’t work. It’s much better to have the customers pay at least something so that they’re bought in and provide honest feedback. As an entrepreneur in the early days, it’s easy to get caught up in fundraising and selling a vision. But the first huge milestone is signing up 10 unaffiliated customers who love the product. It sounds simple, but it’s incredibly difficult."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/05/04/0-to-10-unaffiliated-customers-as-1st-major-milestone/
3. "Ukraine is facing increasingly tough odds in its defensive war against a better-resourced, better-equipped enemy. Thanks to delayed aid from Washington and shortages in other NATO warehouses, Ukraine has lacked artillery shells, long-range missiles, and even air defense munitions.
These drones, however, represent a bright spot for the Ukrainians. Entrepreneurship and innovation is scaling up a sizable drone industry in the country, and it’s making new technological leaps that would make the Pentagon envious.
The age of drone warfare is here, and Ukraine wants to be a superpower."
https://www.wired.com/story/ukraine-drone-startups-russia/
4. A man who give's no F--ks and willing to put money where his mouth is. Crazy good investor too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AuzAV2KVFk
5. So many great insights here for investing and growing startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04k2fFdZPmE
6. Always learn from these talks. Rabois is a top investor and operator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8zgNDIUW-w
7. Loved this conversation. Marc and Ben discussing all things startups and tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw4p85jSfQc&t=1334s
8. Good global geopolitical discussion. If you want peace, prepare for war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H8ttoQQd7c
9. Watching this makes me miss Japan even more. Adventures in Kyoto and Osaka.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sveCiXo8aak
10. "A hyped venture space only exists after the winning company in that space has already been created, discovered, funded, and become popular. The very existence of the space proves the search for a winning investment is already over. This is the reality of venture investing, and the herd behavior operating in open defiance of this reality is necessarily limiting fund returns while denying capital to promising companies simply because they aren’t on trend.
Instead of hype cycle investing VCs should bet on founders, not sectors. That necessarily means rejecting hype-driven consensus. Generating substantial venture returns requires breaking from the herd and betting on companies that launch, not follow, hype cycles.
Instead of evaluating pitches on a relative standard — “How does this particular AI start-up compare to all the other AI start-ups?” — VCs should use an absolute standard. Relative wins are effectively irrelevant to the returns of any large fund. The real question to ask is: “Could this company become a category-creating monopoly? Could it come out on top of the power law?” Because those are the only companies that matter."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/venture-capital-space-for-sheep
11. A masterclass on social media marketing and how to build a business there. Gary Vee has been on top since 2006.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2seNzdajZA4
12. "Remember, three things: 1) You won the lottery of being born in the greatest country on earth; 2) No one can take away the wealth of knowledge you acquire throughout your life; and 3) You can choose what mountain you climb.
And so, even though my parents and I had no money to our name, we were wealthy beyond belief. Because, kids, “wealth” is all about how you define it. To me, wealth is not your job title. It’s not your social status. It’s not how much cash you have in your bank account.
Wealth is the knowledge that you can bet on yourself time and time again to figure it out. You’ll fall, you’ll get up again, and you’ll keep climbing. That’s OK. That will happen no matter which mountain you choose to climb. Just make sure that you set your sights on one whose peak feels worth it, no matter how challenging the path."
https://www.thewealthletters.com/p/035-the-wealthy-immigrant
13. Invaluable discussion on the art of venture capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaFTiKQ5vS4
14. Japan getting closer to the West. This is a good thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Nv_CoR7zA
15. Lots of insights here on the venture capital industry from one of the most experienced investors in the business (29 years at NEA).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onyAulOLUU8
16. This new show looks awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-tnz-GulxY
17. Great discussion on how to build an audience and media-driven business empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVGYxhIrVAE&t=2014s
18. "For now, the three best ways to extend your life remain boring: eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and sleeping well. We aren’t going to add decades to human life any time soon; living to 150 or 200 remains in the realm of science fiction. But in decades to come, advancements in the science of aging may still lead to therapeutic breakthroughs that lengthen human healthspan — the period of life spent in good health. Perhaps a few more people will become centenarians, but the real success would be having more years when you can live well."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24121932/anti-aging-longevity-science-health-drugs
19. "The notion of an invincible Red Army is propaganda. The Red Army was formidable, but it was also beatable. Of its three most consequential foreign wars, the Red Army lost two.
It was defeated by Poland in 1920. It defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, after nearly collapsing in 1941. (Its win in that instance was part of a larger coalition and with decisive American economic assistance.) Soviet forces were in trouble in Afghanistan immediately after their 1979 invasion and had to withdraw a decade later.
And the Russian army of today is not the Red Army. Russia is not the USSR. Soviet Ukraine was a source of resources and soldiers for the Red Army. In that victory of 1945, Ukrainian soldiers in the Red Army took huge losses — greater than American, British and French losses combined. It was disproportionately Ukrainians who fought their war to Berlin in the uniform of the Red Army."
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/08/opinions/victory-day-russia-war-ukraine-snyder
20. I hope VCs pay attention to this.
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-beginner-vcs-guide-to-not-being-a-jerk
21. A little bit tin-foil hat but this was a good discussion on geopolitics that goes counter to predominant narrative. Net net: guns, gold, land and energy are good investments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBKtL1vtfd4
22. "Starbucks used to be a “Third Place” that was a community hub where people could hang out. The interiors were nice and baristas interacted with their customers. The transition to mobile orders and grab ‘n go meant that store ambience mattered less. Customers cared about “how fast can I get out?” vs. “how long can I enjoy my time here?”.
Somewhat ironically, everyone rushing to mobile orders for convenience creates long wait times. This added volume turns the work of a barista from that of a quasi-artisan into a McDonald’s-like assembly line worker. Even as the product commoditized and independent coffee shops offered the old Starbucks vibe, the current Starbucks keeps charging premium prices. Sir, I need caffeine in my dome immediately. Why am I paying $6 for a Grande Iced Coffee that I have to wait 13 minutes to get when I could grab a Red Bull from 7-11 in 2 seconds?
Further, product innovation is no longer about improving the coffee but dreaming up ridiculous new drinks that look nice on the App and appeal to younger demos on social."
https://www.readtrung.com/p/starbucks-digital-dilemna
23. "If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.
I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. We’re cooked."
https://insideevs.com/features/719015/china-is-ahead-of-west/
24. "Ukraine has the support of democracies spanning North America, Europe and the Indo-Pacific — countries committed to sustaining Kyiv’s independence and punishing Putin severely in the process. Yet that support is being matched and blunted by a cohort of Eurasian autocracies lending vital aid to Moscow and making life more difficult for the West. Two vast alliances are squaring off, albeit indirectly, on European battlegrounds. The fight in Ukraine has become the first global conflict of a new cold war."
What happens in one theater of an interconnected world cannot fail to affect others. Right now, Ukraine is where the clash between advanced democracies and Eurasian autocracies is most severe: America and its allies won’t prosper if they end up losing there.
Yet it is also worth remembering that victory in a proxy fight can occur on two levels. It is a question of who wins the shooting war. But it is also a question of which coalition better uses that conflict, by learning the relevant military lessons, strengthening the ties among its members and using this war to generate the urgency and capabilities needed to get ready for what comes next. In many ways, then, events in Ukraine will shape the future. Ukraine’s war has become the world’s war, too."
25. "That said, our best proxy is the last 30 years to make some conclusions related to your portfolio allocation and income earning strategies.
Income: We know that low-wage and mid-wage work is not going to beat money printing and asset prices. This is the message. This means you want to get the highest earning position you can get and simply do the minmum as you build equity. This has been stated on this side of the web for over a decade but now you can see it in clear numbers. Your income will erode by 50% over a 30 year frame. Even if you get those promotions etc. The high paying slots you get are not keeping up with purchasing power.
The only winner is someone using their time to build equity/assets. No one should trade their time for money unless it is a one off for fun or they are doing the minimum to pay bills.
Assets: Depending on how old you are, it is now possible to figure out what to do with all of your money. Outside of emergency funds and some 401K match stuff (guaranteed 100% returns) it is actually extremely easy to figure out
Home: This is a proxy for keeping pace with inflation/prices. Assuming you are confident the area is good for the future, it means that your house is just going to represent flat purchasing power. In 30 years the house is going to keep up with the crazy changes in the world. Both up and down. Down years it is worth less but that’s during a recession. Up years it is worth more, that is during massive *asset* price inflation. In the end it largely just tracks purchasing power (good to know!)
Tech/New Growth: Tech is largely just the top 10-20 companies + crypto and roller coaster VC projects. Any money
you put in here must be untouchable. You are going to see -80% years and +100% years. The trick is making sure you have absolutely no emotions about it. Largely not a problem for our readers who aren’t particularly emotional.
S&P 500: Essentially a worse version of being long-tech. The real benefit is you don’t have to see your net worth go up and down as much. If you have an emergency better to sell this than sell the Tech stocks because it will be down *less* than tech in a mega downturn.
Apply The 4x Rule: No one knows where taxes are going, social security adjustments, health care, oil/electricity, food etc. We’re sure some of this stuff will be up more than others in 30 years. Instead we can just use the new 4x rule.
As of 2024 assume that everything will be 4x in 2054.
Home? If you want a $1,000,000 home today assume it will be $4,000,000 in 2054.
Income? If you want to spend $10,000 a month assume you will need $40,000 a month in 2054.
Assets? If you are smart and are long stocks/crypto/tech etc. Assume that if you have $100,000 today, it’ll be worth around $500,000-$1,000,000 in 2054 (being conservative with future returns taxes etc.)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/making-inflation-a-non-event-for
26. "The United States has been the world’s dominant superpower for decades. But like Rome in the later stage of its empire, the US is clearly in decline. This should not be a controversial statement.
Let’s not be dramatic; it’s important to stay focused on facts and reality. The US economy is still vast and potent, and the country is blessed with an abundance of natural resources– incredibly fertile farmland, some of the world’s largest freshwater resources, and incalculable reserves of energy and other key commodities.
In fact, it’s amazing the people in charge have managed to screw it up so badly. And yet they have.
The national debt is out of control, rising by trillions of dollars each year. Debt growth, in fact, substantially outpaces US economic growth.
Social Security is insolvent, and the program’s own trustees (including the US Treasury Secretary) admit that its major trust fund will run out of money in just nine years.
The people in charge never seem to miss an opportunity to dismantle capitalism (i.e. the economic system that created so much prosperity to begin with) brick by brick.
Then there are ubiquitous social crises: public prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law; the weaponization of the justice system; the southern border fiasco; declining birth rates; extraordinary social divisions that are most recently evidenced by the anti-Israel protests.
And most of all the US constantly shows off its incredibly dysfunctional government that can’t manage to agree on anything, from the budget to the debt ceiling. The President has obvious cognitive disabilities and makes the most bizarre decisions to enrich America’s enemies.
Are these problems fixable? Yes. Will they be fixed? Maybe. But as we used to say in the military, “hope is not a course of action”.
Plotting this current trajectory to its natural conclusion leads me to believe that the world will enter a new “barbarian kingdom” paradigm in which there is no dominant superpower.
Certainly, there are a number of rising rivals today. But no one is powerful enough to assume the leading role in the world."
27. This was such a great discussion. Two of the best podcast interviewers in the business. Chris Williamson and Tim Ferriss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G5dXlMGMf8&t=4306s
28. Always learn new things from Zeihan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYp1Ktbz-B4&t=2245s
29. Why Taiwan matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vnd0uNUQqQ0
30. This week’s episode was excellent. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0C7tBFxZ0g&t=2996s
31. "Forbes doesn’t seem to have called him a billionaire since the SPAC frenzy in 2021. It seems highly unlikely that he is one. (To be sure, Palihapitiya is almost still certainly very wealthy by any normal standard. And his challenges may mostly amount to liquidity problems given that much of his wealth is tied up in private investments.)
Palihapitiya has openly discussed his belt-tightening on the All-In Podcast.
In January 2023, he talked about looking at his household spending. “I haven’t really looked at my household budget in 2 or 3 years — didn’t even bother. Then when I looked at it, I was like wow this is really inflated to a level I didn’t even expect. It makes a lot of sense to live in a more heads down, austere way.”
In his latest investor letter published this week, Palihapitiya wrote, “While 2023 was full of challenges, we are near the end of the hard reset from zero interest rates. After a decade of low rates and rising valuations, many of the tailwinds that benefited us as technologists are now gone. Instead, disruptive change via advancements in AI and reshoring of critical industries are reshaping how companies are built.”
https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-dictator-chamath-palihapitiyas
32. In general seems like a good list for sober rational men.
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-be-happy-at-all-times
33. "Putin doesn’t need to take Kyiv to declare victory – he just needs to seize the rest of Donbas and hold on to what he has. At stake now is not Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but its survival. Slowing Russian forces in the Donbas will be critical now to this outcome."
https://amilburn.substack.com/p/fighting-for-time
34. This is such a great interview with two emerging business leaders. Nick Huber and Sieva Kosinsky.
Understanding Owned, Paid and Borrowed Media: Tools for Your Own Media Empire
I was flying to LA last year for my buddy Eric’s Leveling Up Mastermind from Vancouver. And as I was checking my email at the airport, I saw I had gotten a notification that there was strange activity on my Linkedin profile and I needed to send my ID to verify my account. I did not think very much of it, so I just sent it in.
But then I quickly realized that my entire account was hacked and shut down when several friends pinged me to see if I was okay because my profile disappeared. Why was this an issue: I use Linkedin as one of the media that shares all my articles and readings and thoughts. I had 24,000 followers there which is one of my main channels. It took me a while to get my Linkedin account back as their customer service sucks like it does on most online services.
So why do I share this story? In this digital day and age, as people spend more and more time online whatever you do in your career, your digital presence is critical. I’ve said before that everyone has to become a media company of ONE. I firmly believe that. It’s how you build your personal brand, how you get new opportunities & work, and how you get your point of view and ideas into the world. David Perell said “It’s your serendipity engine.”
But like everything it’s a double edged sword and you quickly forget how reliant you are on them, especially when you lose access. And you also quickly learn there are different kinds of media.
Borrowed Media: These are platforms like Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter or Linkedin where you can share content to their massive audiences.
Paid Media: which is the media you buy, like paid content you place in magazines or publications online or more commonly advertising whether on Meta or Google or Amazon or other players. But it’s pretty costly to use on a regular basis.
Owned Media: This is your own website, your own blog, an email newsletter or email list. You own this platform and
I’ve learned the hard way that if you build your media empire on “Borrowed Media” platforms you are building on sand. You never know when you get hacked or canceled because someone finds what you post offensive. And even losing access for a week or two hurts your growth.
This is why you need to focus on building out your “Owned media” first: newsletters or your own blog/website. It’s arguably the most important part and where you need to focus your initial energy and efforts. You use Borrowed media and Paid media to promote your owned media.
You never want to be dependent on one platform, and if you happen to have a large audience in Instagram, it’s not a bad idea to start building out on another platform once you get to critical mass on your main borrowed media channel like Snapchat or Youtube for example. Basically it’s like personal finance, focus & have a concentrated portfolio to build wealth, but then you have to diversify to keep the wealth. You have to treat media channels the same way. My lesson from losing access to Linkedin forced me to figure out Twitter.
As my friend and new media master Kevin Espiritu of Epic Gardening wrote:
“All businesses are compounding engines, but content businesses are especially so as platforms & audiences generally reward consistency over time.
You can 'freeze' a few hours of labor in time (writing one blog post, making one video) and leverage it for hundreds of thousands to millions of views over multiple years.
When given such a gift, DO NOT disrespect it by getting distracted by other opportunities, other priorities, etc.
It takes 2-3 years to spin up a micro media empire at minimum unless you're an extreme outlier, so it's tempting to give up at any point in that process.”
So if you want to build your own media empire you will have to learn the difference between Paid, Borrowed and Owned Media. And then figure out how to best utilize them. Each of these have their own advantages and pitfalls but they will be one of the most valuable tools to make your life better and help others if you use it well.
The Big Lie of Home Ownership: Freedom is Living a Possession-Lite Life
I’ve long wanted to buy a place in Japan. I just love the place so much. But last summer when I was catching up with 2 old high school friends back in Vancouver, I was talking about getting some real estate in Japan and in Taiwan. My professional wealth management friend asked me “why, if I was only going to spend 3-4 months a year max there.”
There is the hassle and upkeep of taking care of the place. Wouldn’t it be easier and more cost effective to just AirBnB or stay in a nice hotel. I could take the money I would spend on the properties and invest it in other cash generating businesses or assets.
And the benefit of not owning, is I am not locked into one location, so I can explore new neighborhoods or cities or places. Which is the whole point of travel. Especially for fixed sign individuals like me who end up hanging out in the same places over time. I need the new environment and place to force me out of my comfort zone. See new things. It keeps me from becoming stale.
So I’ve scrapped my plans to buy new properties overseas. Maybe this will change if I end up spending more than 6 months of the year in a place. But real estate ends up adding a lot of complexity in your life.
As the previously brilliant and now literally crazy Robert Kiyosaki said “Your house is not an asset, it’s a liability.” I understand the need to have a place you think you own. The reality is the bank owns it until you pay off the full mortgage. And if it does not generate cash it’s not an asset. In fact it actually becomes an anchor especially as you add up taxes and maintenance, stuff you don’t need to worry about when you rent.
It reminded me of a friend who was very unhappy at his job and was looking to do his own thing. I gave him the advice that he needed to manage his cost structure and start on the side hustle asap. Or at least look at some new job opportunities.
That was 4 months ago. I saw him again and he told me “remember when you told me to watch my cost structure? Well, with a growing family I found a good deal so I ended up buying a house.”
I knew at that moment, he will be stuck at his crap job and his entrepreneurial dreams will be stillborn. It will be almost impossible for him to take that leap while he is stuck with a monthly mortgage payment, let alone the sunk costs of his down payment. I truly hope I am wrong but he is done.
I don’t mean to be negative as I’ve been in that situation myself in the past and it’s hard to break out of this. There is too much risk in their mind to start something new even though there is more upside in it. But there is definitely more instability especially in the first 1-2 years.
So you give up your entrepreneurial dream and end up tolerating even more crap from your employer than even before. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t. This is why most bosses want their employees in debt and living paycheck to paycheck. They will own you. It’s the closest thing to legal modern day slavery.
Owning a house that does not generate positive cash flow through rentals or AirBnB-ing it, will be a barrier to freedom.
So don’t buy into the lie that you must buy a house. There are opportunity costs to the money & time you get locked into. Especially if you want to start your entrepreneurial endeavors either as a solopreneur or new business whether online or offline. The fixed costs will wreck you.
Living Well: “Me Time” and Self Care
One of the issues of constant travel and flights are the jet lag and pure beating your body takes in uncomfortable seats in pressurized cabins in flights. When you fly as long and as much as I do it starts to catch up to you. I used to be able to handle it much better when I was younger but as I creep up past 50 it does take more time to recover.
I remember doing long and overnight intercontinental flights, arriving in the morning and then jumping right into meetings. And with energy and vigor. I try not to do that anymore if I can avoid it.
Getting in one night earlier helps me get oriented. It also allows me time to do my workout and exercise regime. And with melatonin, ZMA and L-theanine supplements, get a good night's rest. Sleep is important and key to recovery of almost everything.
But what I’ve been doing more of in recent years is the use of saunas and therapeutic massages. Not only are they enjoyable but they help get circulation and blood flow back in your body. 10 years ago I used to consider these unnecessary luxuries. Mainly because I probably did not think they were worth it. Or realistically just could not justify it due to pure cheapness and money issues. Now it’s standard procedure.
I consider it a good investment in health and well being. It's a performance enhancer. It’s something that helps me feel better and be more effective. And it’s a nice treat and reward for all my work.
Don’t overlook “me time” and self care. It’s a simple and easy way to enhance your life. It’s worth paying for. Don’t be a cheapskate like me when I was younger. Invest in your quality of life. Little doses regularly go a long way towards this.