Belief Comes Before Ability: Have Faith
This quote by David Senra has stuck with me since I heard it. “Belief Comes Before Ability”. I wish I had heard this when I was younger.
The counter to this point is what most of us grow up hearing. It’s why so many of us are discouraged before we try anything. They tell us “Get training, get credentials, get a degree before you can do anything.” While this absolutely makes sense if you are in a career like medicine, engineering or architecture or other industries that don’t change that much.
It’s completely different in most businesses, particularly on the media and technology side of things. In fact this is where the innovation happens and why many times these innovations and startups come from younger people or outsiders.
Sometimes youth, inexperience and naivety is a benefit. It allows them to look at problems with a whole new angle. It makes them question how things work. And inexperience and lack of understanding how challenging something is can be a major boon. It’s like that funny meme that went around that said “We did this not because it was easy but because we thought it would be easy!”
So mindset is critical. As Henry Ford said:“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” We end up becoming our own worst enemy. This negative mindset is something people really struggle with, especially from commonwealth countries like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Have a big goal, scrap the negative self talk, screen out the naysayers around you and get to work. Everyone who has done anything interesting started from scratch. Through making the inevitable mistakes, learning from them, doing the work consistently over a long period of time, you will eventually get good. Too many people quit too early. It all comes down to how badly you want it.
If you are chasing your interests and curiosity, you are more likely to find something you want to work on. Couple this with real problems that you want to tackle, that the world needs solved and you will eventually stumble onto the work of your life.
Remember the world rewards you according to the difficulty of the problems you solve. So have some belief in yourself and get to work.
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Fix Your Media Diet
It seems like everyone these days is pessimistic about the future. The future of their country and themselves. And no wonder if all you are reading and watching is the news on tv and online. Nothing but bad news, wars, crime, climate change, natural disasters. Hard not to feel despair.
Same thing has happened on the technology side. I remember when Science fiction used to be optimistic. The Jetsons, Isaac Asimov or Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. Portraying ideal and golden future worlds where technology enabled societies and living that were better than what we have now. Now almost everything written in books or shown on tv is dystopian, dark and depressing.
The side effect of these ideas permeating society and influencing young people is that these same young people inevitably feel gloomy and unenthusiastic about science and technology. They see it as a force for bad not good now.
Our brains are programmed every day. You watch stupid sitcoms or Netflix shows, you become stupid. You watch brainless action movies, you become brainless. You read angry tweets, you get angry.
Your brain is your LLM aka Language Learning Model. But like AI, it’s highly reliant on all the data inputs you get.
At the micro-level, this is why you need to carefully curate everything you read and watch as it deeply influences your thinking. This is why I carefully filter my Twitter feeds & newsletters.
I still watch garbage brainless action movies for fun and short breaks. I admit I do enjoy various Star Wars series shows and good, intelligent & stirring series like the Peaky Blinders, Billions, Taylor Sheridan’s Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Yellowstone & 1923. I counter this with plenty of documentaries and optimistic Star Trek series like Next Generation, Enterprise & Strange New Worlds.
I read educational books in history, geopolitics, business and historical biographies of great men. Also worth reading the classics like Dickens, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Plutarch and the Stoics. I listen to many podcasts like Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best, David Senra’s Founders, Turpentine Media Empires, The Acquired, the Tim Ferriss Show, Chris Williamson, Creator Labs, 20 Minute VC & Not Investment Advice are highly motivational and educational.
What you don’t consume is just as important.
I rarely watch the news as it’s just junk for the brain. Netflix & Disney+ is an occasional indulgence but I purposely limit my time here.
The sooner you can adjust and fix your Media diet, the better off you will be. Your brain like your body, needs good quality nutrients. So work on avoiding the sugary crap and try having more of the veggie equivalents of media & content every day. For good health, you need to fill both your mind and body with good nourishment.
Land of the Wolves: Surviving in the New World Disorder
I’ve watched the movie “Sicario” countless times and it’s always impactful. It’s not just an action drama movie about the drug wars going on at the Mexican & America border. It’s about how people cope with the violence and try to survive it.
Near the end of the movie, the anti-hero Alejandro tells the FBI agent:
“You should move to a small town where the rule of law exists. You will not survive here. This is the land of the wolves now.”
So many among us are blind the breakdown of law and order around us. I write this in San Francisco, in a place where basic law is not enforced due to stupid progressive left policies driven by zealotry and stupidity. And usually by wealthy trust funders who don’t even live in the city. This is happening not just in SF but also LA as well as other cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago among others. The result is increasing crime and lawlessness that is open on the streets.
Unfortunately the crime, violence and disorder in Mexico shown by the Sicario movie is spreading across the USA. Add in a recession and the rising wealth inequality + racial tensions & insane lack of border control, this will be further exacerbated. America will become more like Latin America and South Africa: rising crime coupled with a big massively growing private security industry. It will get worse before it gets better.
So if you live in a city, you need to have good environmental awareness wherever you are in the USA. Never walk around with earphones, blasting music or losing yourself in your phone. Keep your eyes open and trust your gut if you feel something is off around you. Especially if you see or sense strange unusual people around you. And of course, don’t carry around too much cash.
It’s become even more important to learn self defense and even carry a weapon. I recommend having a tactical metal pen or monkey paw with you. It’s just pure self defense that you can use to hit an attacker. Mace tear gas spray and a whistle would probably be useful too.
Get to know your neighbors and look out for each other. Join a neighborhood watch.
I’d also stress having and building financial independence. Have resources. In this day and age it’s become even more critical to have money. Money for private security, and if you are extreme, even a private military company (PMC). Money for electronic alarms. Money for weapons. And money to make sure you aren’t ever put in dangerous situations or environments.
The USA is still going to be the best place for business and to make your fortune in. But as I said many times, it’s going to be a bumpy ride the rest of this decade.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 28th, 2024
"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability." –Sam Keen
Insightful conversation, a warning but also an ultimately optimistic take on the future driven by technological innovations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccOQ_lxOz_4
2. "The role of Cambodia in China’s power-play within the Indo-Pacific cannot be understated. The autocratic Manet regime is a critical ally for China. The Chinese Foreign Minister was the first foreign official to congratulate, and then meet with, him following his inauguration as Prime Minister in 2023.
And there is an increasing crossover in the tactics—and adoption of certain technologies, such as mass surveillance tools including CCTV, facial recognition software, and internet “firewall” technologies—that are being used to monitor and suppress regime critics, trade unionists, and activists. Independent news outlets have been shuttered, and female journalists, in particular, have become targets of harassment and many forced into exile.
For those in Washington, who are increasingly concerned by the rise of China and the looming threats to Western democracy not just in Southeast Asia but around the world, a reset is required with countries like Cambodia. The current all carrot, no stick approach risks further democratic decline in Cambodia and the growth of Chinese influence."
https://time.com/6990154/china-cambodia-ream-naval-base-2/
3. If you love talking about the art and science of business and achievement, this is one of the best conversations around. Net net: "Believe you can win in whatever you choose to do"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P39dOoLeoSg&t=65s
4. "I think and feel we’re near the bottom which will come in early 2025 once we get through some political issues and there is some clarify on how this country and the world will be run. So based on that I’m starting to see more investors advise their early pre/seed founders who are raising bridges to prep for a Q1 2025 push. Meaning build and strategize now, give it everything you’ve got in Q4 2024 and raise in a hopefully more favorable environment then (can't really get much worse). Get ready to play offense again!"
https://startupstechvc.beehiiv.com/p/a16z-accounted-for-80-of-all-lp-funding-in-q1
5. One of the best shows talking about cultural and creative businesses on the edge of the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6rGAFC4O7k
6. "In short, megalomania has gone mainstream in the Valley. As a result technology is evolving rapidly into a turbocharged form of Foucaultian dominance—a 24/7 Panopticon with a trillion dollar budget."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-silicon-valley-turn-into
7. "So this Fourth of July, I thought I’d go through the various threats to the Republic, and assess how dangerous each one is. Broadly speaking, my view is that the greatest danger from internal turmoil, civil war, and authoritarianism has passed, despite the probable election of Trump this fall. The economy is likely to be OK, but the national debt is a huge and looming problem that could hurt us a lot if it’s mismanaged. Various chronic issues will continue to hurt the country going forward, despite modest progress.
If this were the entire list of threats, I would conclude that America will muddle through, and that would be the end of that. But unfortunately it’s not. While most of the threats from within are less dire than commonly believed, external threats to the United States are grave and getting graver by the day. The U.S. faces an axis of enemies that is larger, more productive, and more technologically advanced than any we have ever faced before, and which is ideologically bent on the degradation of U.S. wealth, stability, and autonomy. Failure to respond vigorously to this New Axis could easily result in catastrophe — either from a U.S. loss in Cold War 2, or from a World War 3 that we fail to deter.
And this danger makes America’s domestic troubles much more severe than they would otherwise be, because our internal squabbling could weaken us and prevent us from dealing with the real threats out there.
As I argue, there’s a good chance that America would lose this war. The U.S.’ manufacturing sector, and especially its defense-industrial base, has atrophied while China’s now dominates the world. Any war that went longer than a couple of weeks — which most wars do — would heavily favor the country that can produce more ships, missiles, drones, and ammunition. That country is China.
Some people — especially folks I hang out with in the tech industry — try to comfort themselves by believing that the U.S. would never go to war over Taiwan. They are sticking their heads in the sand."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/assessing-the-threats-to-the-republic
8. This is a must watch: if you want to know what’s happening in SaaS sector re: Fundraising & what VCs are looking for.
Incredible insight and tracks with what I am seeing in my portfolio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daakrQavsU4&t=1024s
9. This is a scary but important discussion on geopolitics. What a mess and all due to our own weakness & complacency. America is the new Soviet Union.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YifbCUG3gvI
10. "In the meantime, the parallels are a little worrying. Tokyo may not meme a governor into office this time around, but the kids aren’t all right. As I said, that old saying hyakki yagyo is written with characters meaning “night parade of a hundred yokai.”
We’re only seeing a few dozen tricksters and trolls in this election. But if young people continue to believe they have no place in the political system, I suspect we’ll see a lot more in the years to come. Eventually, one might actually even win. And we’ve all seen how that turned out for America."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/trolling-tokyo
11. "A huge amount of economic value is going to be created by AI. Company builders focused on delivering value to end users will be rewarded handsomely. We are living through what has the potential to be a generation-defining technology wave. Companies like Nvidia deserve enormous credit for the role they’ve played in enabling this transition, and are likely to play a critical role in the ecosystem for a long time to come.
Speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the chance to build extremely important companies. But we need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world. That delusion says that we’re all going to get rich quick, because AGI is coming tomorrow, and we all need to stockpile the only valuable resource, which is GPUs.
In reality, the road ahead is going to be a long one. It will have ups and downs. But almost certainly it will be worthwhile."
https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/
12. Perfect message for the 4th of July for all Americans.
"Therefore, it falls to us (you and me) to fight back, not with violence or harsh language, but with our actions.
Work hard.
Love.
Be compassionate and understanding.
Listen in earnest.
Give with the expectation of reciprocation.
Be present.
Get involved in your community."
https://ryanhanley.com/how-to-keep-america-is-the-greatest-country-on-earth/
13. Insightful conversation. Lessons from past waves of technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqNaOuRdkA
14. This is a great listen. A good analysis of investing in private and public markets. & AI commoditization.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/84488038/proposal-ai-commoditization-and-capital-dynamics
15. I always learn stuff from Tim Ferriss, this was an incredible discussion on how to make your life better.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/11271167/ferriss-curating-curiosities
16. "The Manchurian model of forced industrialisation under single-party rule found post-war expression in China, North Korea, and South Korea during the Park Chung-hee years, directly influenced by people who had participated in the colony’s institutions. The Japanese technocratic planners who worked in Manchukuo likewise returned to serve in the highest levels of government and economic and planning bodies in Japan after the war.
They led Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which governed uninterrupted from 1955 to the 1990s. The most prominent among these was Kishi Nobusuke, who was once Manchukuo’s economic tsar and among the most ruthlessly anti-Chinese and imperialist of its political leaders. His postwar position as America’s man in Tokyo allowed him to become prime minister from 1957-60 and retain prominence as an elder statesman until the 1980s.
Kenkoku University—the highest academic institution in Manchukuo from 1938 until 1945—was the educational center of the pan-Asianist experiment. Its students came from all over Asia under Japanese rule to learn how to modernize Asia. After the war, they maintained contact with each other while they assumed important roles in East Asia’s postwar order—some of their careers lasting until the 1990s.
The legacy of Kenkoku lived on in their political achievements. Across East Asia, alumni implemented their goals of national liberation and state-led industrialization in the region’s postwar states, and on all sides of the Cold War divide. By inculcating the region’s rising elites, Manchukuo’s rulers secured an unlikely legacy. While the Japanese empire met its end, its tradition of technocratic state-building endured as East Asia’s new leaders drew on their Japanese training to build its successor regimes."
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/the-school-that-built-asia
17. "Investors are desperate to find the ChatGPT for robotics.
The thinking goes that if all-in-one foundation models are going to be dominated by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, venture capitalists need to find niche foundation model companies that can really differentiate themselves.
And there’s no area more than robotics artificial intelligence that’s got investors excited, particularly when it means investors can bet on robotics companies without taking on any of the actual risky hardware development. Investors get the innovation of robots without all the capital intensive work of building actual machines.
Of course some of these companies are building robotic arms, and even humanoid robots themselves."
https://www.newcomer.co/p/why-investors-cant-get-enough-of
18. “If you want to choose one investor, you want to choose Trae, if you want to be a defense tech company," said Gecko Robotics founder Jake Loosararian, who told me Stephens played a big role in helping his company compete for department of defense contracts.
Stephens has climbed to what is effectively the number two spot at Founders Fund, one of Silicon Valley’s most elite venture capital firms, by doing exactly what Founders Fund partners dream of doing — bucking the conventional wisdom and defying political pieties. Stephens co-founded the iconic defense tech company — Anduril — with Palmer Luckey, a pariah co-founder back when rank-and-file Google employees terrified their bosses by resisting working on America’s own defense.
Stephens really did see the rise of defense tech before most everyone else in Silicon Valley — of course he had the benefit of learning from his now boss Thiel, who co-founded Palantir, the progenitor of modern day Silicon Valley defense tech.
Andreessen Horowitz is the marketing juggernaut that can make their name synonymous with American Dynamism, but Founders Fund laid the groundwork for the defense tech back before it was cool."
https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-investor-who-called-defense-techs
19. "If unchallenged, these information warfare campaigns present a fundamental threat to the United States. These three regimes want to sideline American power as they target three of our most vital and vulnerable partners: Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel.
Of course, the problems and divisions in the United States cannot be blamed on America’s adversaries. Unfortunately, Americans are quite adept at creating their own problems. But it would be dangerous to not recognize that Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran seek to exacerbate and magnify existing social-political fault lines to help pave the way for their wider ambitions.
The final group targeted for information warfare is populations and governments in countries that are not necessarily allied with the United States, where the three regimes seek to obtain valuable strategic resources or concessions. Their focus is on parts of Asia as well as Africa and Latin America.
If the United States and its allies cede ground in these strategic countries due to a failure to counter adversary information warfare, the results will be serious. U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military interests will suffer, while Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran cultivate corrupt leaders who prey on the local population, destroy the environment, and slowly but surely undermine the U.S.-led world order."
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/06/28/cognitive-combat/
20. "From this analytical standpoint, the structure of power is no longer a pyramid but a web with multiple spiders forging networks of varying strength. Today we live in a truly multipolar, multicivilizational and multiregional system in which no power can dominate over others — while all can freely associate with others according to their own interests.
This structural entropy is embodied in what I call the geopolitical marketplace, a distributed landscape far more complex than the conventional wisdom of a bipolar U.S.-China “new Cold War.” Many countries in the world are post-colonial nations innately suspicious of overtures that would render them subservient pawns of either the U.S. or China. This is why the notion of alliances is a hollow one for much of the world. Alliances are more like multi-alignments in which swing states, regional anchors and almost every other country actively play all sides in pursuit of their own best deal. This is not about deference to hierarchy but active positionalism: each country, large or small, places itself at the center of its own calculations.
This is a far cry from the rigid Westphalian order of sovereign states — which, due to centuries of colonialism, was always more fiction than reality. Instead, the emerging world order can best be describedas a global version of the pre-Westphalian Middle Ages. Europe at the time was a multi-layered milieu of competing authorities from the Holy Roman Empire and its papal states to autonomous city-states such as Venice and the Northern European Hanseatic League.
But Europe was also a sideshow. This was an age when China and India’s dynasties were ascendent, the Arab Caliphates pulsed with energy and the Silk Roads tied together what historians call the “Afro-Eurasian” system centered on the Indian Ocean rim. Then as now, Afro-Eurasian geography represents the central mass of the global system and the dynamics among its participants — Chinese state-owned enterprises; Indian merchants; Gulf Arab holding companies; Singaporean commodities traders; African pirates; sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms from the East and West; and navies from America, Europe and Asian powers — provide a bottom-up lens into how authority is contested and constructed."
https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-entropy-of-our-world-order
21. This is a worthwhile interview for all those hustling out there.
It helps you think about what you are hustling for & how to create the life you want (ie. how to use money to build your perfect life & figuring out your number).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPJYBnmxNMI
22. "As a young geologist who refused to go down the Australian dream of taking on heavy debt to buy a house and Toyota Land Cruiser, I got hooked on the uranium fundamental story at the time:
--Powerhouse China is choking their cities with fossil fuels and will require a clean baseload energy source.
--Simple supply-demand fundamentals are easily mapped out per reactor - either the uranium price goes up or the lights go out on 10% of the world's power (20% in the US) - Rick Rule and Mike Alkin.
--ESG backflipping and adopting uranium as a green source of energy.
--ASX-listed stocks with assets priced so low that it was as if they were drilling aircore drill holes for gold next to guerrillas in West Africa, all while having no debt.
All this was pre-SPUT launch, Japan restarts, and the world just waking the f-ck up*"
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/argentina-for-uranium
23. "My view on inflections aligns with Andy Grove’s but from another angle. Grove saw strategic inflections as significant threats that could overturn a company’s core business. Companies blind to these shifts or too slow to change risked their existence.
I see inflections through the lens of opportunity for the attacker — the startup.
Inflections are a startup’s secret weapon. Startups have nothing to defend. They want to upend the status quo. Inflections are the underlying force that pattern-breaking startups can exploit to change the future.
For the same reasons incumbents should be paranoid about inflections, pattern-breaking startups should vigilantly exploit inflections to change the future."
https://medium.com/@m2jr/how-inflections-let-startups-change-the-rules-a8cca5f9b948
24. Bullish case for America. We are really positioned for the future despite the political mess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ktBjYtjs1E
25. Best convo in Silicon Valley. This weeks "More or Less"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOruH-5ebV4
26. "The most extraordinary techno-capital acceleration has been set in motion. As AI revenue grows rapidly, many trillions of dollars will go into GPU, datacenter, and power buildout before the end of the decade. The industrial mobilization, including growing US electricity production by 10s of percent, will be intense."
https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-dollar-cluster/
27. "Ukraine and Russia will already be planning their 2024 winter operations and contemplating their offensive operations for 2025. There are a range of known variables that will impact on this strategic thinking and planning. Additionally, in a rapidly evolving technological and geopolitical environment, strategic surprises may influence the trajectory of the war.
Russia will continue to implement its strategy of subjecting Ukraine and its people to a death by a thousand cuts. And Ukraine, as it has throughout this war, will continue to adapt and seek new ways to not only destroy as much of the Russian military as possible but to also develop new strategic methods to convince Putin that his Ukrainian gamble will never pay off."
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/four-key-influences-evolution-ukraine-war-2025
28. "I look at my total net worth and investments every quarter to see if anything has changed drastically.
While I would like to say or endorse a software that aggregates or combines all of my investments together, I actually built my own Google Sheet that lays everything out.
Reviewing and updating my numbers is a cathartic quarterly exercise and helps me focus ways I could optimize, diversify, consider, and act on other opportunities.
I’m always trying to think bigger picture – on money, opportunities, my network, and businesses.
When it comes to working for yourself or working for companies, I avoid small-minded people and mentalities.
I generally try to help people ask themselves whether what they’re doing is the best or most valuable way to spend their time."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/rituals-how-to-manage-money
29. "The vertical SaaS ecosystem in Europe started a long time ago with companies such as Relex (2005) and Fenergo (2009). Two decades later, we believe we are still at the inception of value capture. On the one hand, some verticals lag behind when it comes to digital penetration relative to their GDP contribution.
New technologies like sensors, AI, or robotics should accelerate that digitization. On the other hand, vertical SaaS are becoming increasingly multi-faceted. By integrating financial services, building a marketplace, and/or adding AI, we believe that some of them will be able to capture even more value moving forward."
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-state-of-vertical-saas-in-europe-21900b8aefc5
30. “There’s definitely worry about that,” he admits, speaking about what the release may do to his public profile. More eyeballs. More attention. More whispers at the grocery store. “I’m trying to view the fame aspect as a challenge and navigate through it in a way that I’ll find happiness,” he says. “I really don’t think my line of profession is a recipe for happiness or contentment. Not a lot of us are happy. And the more the fame is increased, the more turbulent and scary life becomes.”
Skarsgård tries to keep those worries out of his mind when he’s picking jobs. He’s adamant that he is building his career not with some grand vision but rather role by role. Yet when you look at his filmography, it is undeniable that the stories he is drawn to are often twisted—occasionally, as he says, even “pure evil.”
“He doesn’t want to be a Hollywood heartthrob,” says Sanders. “And that’s the legacy of a long career to me—if you’re not involved in the Hollywood machine and you’re creating roles that you are emotionally connected to. It’s like buying art. You just buy what you want to see on your walls and not what you think is going to make you money. And he’s just got a weird taste in art.”
David Leitch, who directed Skarsgård in Atomic Blonde, feels he still has much more to show. “He’s an actor that I believe can do anything,” the filmmaker says. “It’ll just be a matter of time before he does something that reflects his comedic chops.”
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a60878863/bill-skarsgard-interview-2024/
31. I certainly appreciate this as a frequent flyer.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/united-oversharing-on-delays-6823650/
32. "Looking outward too, the stubborn strength of the US economy and the US dollar have sent other world economies scrambling. Some are already throwing the towel by cutting interest rates, while others like Japan or China have seen their currencies declining in value.
Investors would be unwise to venture outside the “quality” trade when strong currents are pushing it upstream, both across equities and fixed income. However, the accumulation of wins for this isolated portion of the market is drying out liquidity, and create desperation elsewhere. At some point it would backfire.
Pyrrus comes from Greek Pyrrhos, derived from Pyr (fire) and -ros (pertaining to). Here it looks like the victory of some is burning the ground for the rest of us."
https://benjaminrobinot.substack.com/p/pyrrhic-victories
33. Good discussion on portfolio management and how to think about downstream capital as a VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnLRzX1L1AE
34. "Throughout the 2010s, many people — including myself — treated it as a truism that manufacturing industries have faster productivity growth than service industries. Historically that was true, and the reason wasn’t hard to grasp — machines improve faster than human beings do, so industries that depended on better machines naturally tended to advance faster than labor-intensive service industries.
But this particular piece of conventional wisdom stopped being true over a decade ago. In 2011, manufacturing productivity in the U.S. hit a ceiling, and has actually declined in the years since
Anyway, the question of why American manufacturing productivity has stagnated is a very important open question. More than just a few percentage points of economic growth hang in the balance here — defense and defense-related manufacturing will be one of the keys to victory in Cold War 2, and the U.S. has a lot of catching-up to do in that regard. So we had better get started chasing down some of these hypotheses — and any other plausible ones we can think of."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-has-us-manufacturing-productivity
35. This is one of the most important trends that we need to be focusing on in America & the West. Re-industrialization.
https://x.com/MikeSlagh/status/1809362222382035017
36. Taipei is an amazing city and well worth visiting. Highly recommend it.
https://www.hemispheresmag.com/asia/taiwan/taipei/three-perfect-days-taipei/
37. One of my absolute favorite places in the whole wide world: Tokyo.
https://www.hemispheresmag.com/asia/japan/tokyo/three-perfect-days-tokyo/
Your Dreams and Nightmares Point The Way
I had one of the most vivid dreams, a nightmare actually. I dreamed I was back working at Yahoo! surrounded by cubicles and droll salarymen & women. Weirdly working for one of the most awful human beings I’d met in my working life in the last decade (ironically not at Yahoo!). I was getting hassled by her and also by HR for not getting approval for travel. Being threatened with getting fired. It was one of those WTF experiences and I woke up in chills.
My interpretation of this signifies my biggest fear these days. Of being trapped. Of being dependent on someone. Having to work for someone else. Having an a-hole boss that I have to ask for permission to do anything, go on vacation, travel or whatever. Comply or get fired. It goes counter to what I value most these days. Freedom. The ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want, with who I want.
Your subconscious brain is a powerful tool. It helps you process your thoughts, emotions and experiences in the background. It really comes alive when you are sleeping. Your deepest desires show up. But more frequently your deepest fears.
We’ve all had the school dreams about not having your assignment done or showing up at a test unprepared. Growing up I had nightmares of being ostracized or not being accepted. In my first decade and half of work these tended to be about money or failing at work. This was usually symbolized by falling down off a skyscraper or being chased by zombies.
Interpretation of your most vivid dreams and nightmares give you an understanding of the deepest emotions driving you. Once you understand them, you can manage, deal with and conquer them.
1923: Tough Times Need Tough People
I started Taylor Sheridan’s new epic series 1923 that follows the Dutton family of Yellowstone fame through their adventures in Montana and Africa (yes, Africa). In the middle of miserable drought, locusts, a range war with sheep farmers and legal war with some ruthless businessmen; the Duttons really start to expand their cattle empire that we know so well from Yellowstone.
To survive the horrors of the 20th Century you gotta be a pretty tough cookie.
There is a telling comment during a conversation with all the cattle bosses. One of them says “If it weren’t for the easy years, I wouldn’t waste my time in the rough ones.”
The main character played by Harrison Ford, Jacob Dutton responds: “I’ve been here since 1894, I do not remember an easy year. Do you?”
I remember being a young kid and thinking that life would be easier when I got older as an adult. Boy, was I wrong. You just start to get new problems and challenges.
It’s a crazy competitive world out there. Always has been. Jacob Dutton says:
“Man will choose to take what you built, rather than try to build it for himself. Every civilization in this world, built on top of one they conquer. You go to Rome, or Jerusalem, or Paris, France, you have cities stacked on top of towns, stacked on top of villages, on top of one man’s house, on top of one man’s cave. You wish it wasn’t so but it is. Your enemies gotta be so terrified, that their fear is greater than their greed.”
Life is a massive sized competition. Life is always hard. It’s supposed to be. Life is a struggle and that’s what makes you who you are. It’s a big test to see how you rise to challenge and grow. Or for many, how they do NOT.
This is why I am such a big believer in self development. You have no idea what tomorrow or life will throw at you. But you can work on yourself all the time. The more you can prepare yourself, work out, read, evolve, learn, get smarter, the more fit you are to handle things that inevitably come up. Tough times require tough people. You don’t ever surrender.
It don’t mean a Thing: Career and Life Lessons from “Hamburger Hill”
“Hamburger Hill” was a Movie based on the true story of an American airborne unit that fought the North Vietnamese Army to take a hill in 1969 during the Vietnam War. They went up and down and up and down, losing friends to finally occupying the hill. Only to withdraw and leave it to the Vietnamese army after.
All the sacrifice and pain ultimately for nothing. No wonder so many soldiers become cynical and jaded after. And this also seems to be the situation many of our vets from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan find themselves in. Let down by incompetent officers and betrayed by venal and cowardly politicians who sent them there to begin with. I can’t imagine the hell of this.
It’s symbolic of many of our careers albeit not anywhere close to the danger and pain these soldiers suffered. Immense sacrifice with no commensurate reward or achievement. It’s a hell of a painful realization. Maybe that our work just doesn’t matter very much.
I felt this way near the end of my years at Yahoo! or 500 Startups as the company fell into a death spiral. That ultimately, that extra revenue or investments a year I brought in for the company, just really didn’t matter. All the missed time with my family, the damage to my health and the stress of hitting and beating your business groups P&L. As the soldiers say, in the end: “It don’t mean a Thing.”
This is why you absolutely need to re-evaluate your work every year. At the minimum:
Are you learning new things?
Do you still like your colleagues?
Are you getting paid enough? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Does the work support your larger mission and goal in life?
It helps you to understand whether the hill you picked is the right one. If not, stop climbing it and find a new hill worthy of your talents, energy & precious time.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 21st, 2024
"When all else fails, take a vacation." –Betty Williams
Excellent dissection of a niche media business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBv7ebE6ZrA&t=5s
2. "Given the progress of AI in the last years and the speed with which AI is transforming the way software is developed and used, any prediction comes with a high risk of not aging well, but my best guess is that the fundamental need for software persists — and AI will enhance the value and importance of software rather than diminish it."
3. "In the developed societies almost all of us manage to stay a few steps out of reach of that monster for our entire lives, and this fact is the wonder of the world. The artifice we have built to keep it at bay — vast farms blanketing whole continents and tended by fantastic machines, sprawling landscapes of ersatz caves to keep us sheltered from the elements, endless roads and rails, an empire of warehouses and supermarkets and pharmacies and just-in-time logistics — is the only meaningful thing that has ever been built within the orbit of our sun in billions of years.
It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.
When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”, they are denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence. Safe within its sheltering bastions, they are free to indulge in the extravagance of pretending that the foe isn’t lurking right outside.
They revel in the luxury of their material security by staging mock revolutions over differences in social status and relative wealth among the elite. With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements. Sometimes they imagine they could move to one of those fantasy worlds.
As shallow as all that sounds, it’s precisely to allow the luxury of shallowness that humanity struggled so long and hard. Yet we can never afford for luxury to become complacency, because the foe has not been defeated."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elemental-foe
4. "If we take too many detours chasing this kind of distracting knowledge, we risk consuming our lives with content that ultimately doesn’t nourish us and is instead an obstacle to the development of our personalities and to our becoming fully alive.
Contrary to our bodily appetite for food and drink, our intellectual appetite toknow is never fully satiated. There is always more to learn. Our desire to know is always active. So, in a way, getting our curiositas under control is even more important than our physical fitness. We are desiring to know at every moment of the day. We are not necessarily desiring to eat.
The age of social media and the 24 hour news cycle is completely dominated by curiositas, by distracting knowledge, and that’s why the virtue of studiositas is more important than ever to try to cultivate."
https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/there-are-no-more-hedgehogs
5. Masterclass in building an SDR team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USC4q0fcApQ&t=1881s
6. “Are you sure the Chinese Communist Party isn’t behind the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan?” That’s the question I get over and over again as I explain Taiwan’s seemingly inexplicable decision to close its last nuclear power reactors in the face of a possible energy blockade.
Unfortunately, the aversion to nuclear power is entirely home-grown with no help from the Chinese. It goes against not just our stated efforts to reach Net Zero by 2050 but threatens our very survival as a nation."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/is-taiwan-sleepwalking-into-an-energy
7. "Between the lines: Geopolitical and national security concerns are also motivators as China's prominence grows.
--Globalization didn't work, these leaders say, because the U.S. wound up giving away working class jobs — and its industrial advantage.
--"The fact that we can't make anything here has screwed our ability to stay leaders in the battery industry," for example, says Austin Bishop, co-founder of Atomic Industries and now a general partner at Tamarack Global, an early-stage investment firm.
--"Once we lost the ability to make basic batteries, then we missed the entire revolution with cellphones, and leading the lithium ion generation, and then that means we've now missed the opportunity to be the leader in [electric] cars."
What they're saying: The alliance's goal is to modernize manufacturing, not re-create the past."
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/01/us-industry-leadership-summit-detroit
8. Such a great conversation here on AI & Defense. Also great discussion on where entrepreneurial talent sits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QJR1LOxXz0
9. Always learn from Peter Thiel, one of the most controversial but orthogonal thinkers in Silicon Valley (altho he is based in LA).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ZXrTzskw0
10. An interview with one of the men (and women) who literally runs the world (for better or worse). Larry Fink of Blackrock + Central banker & CEO of Honeywell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XYwJAH19Eo
11. "By borrowing against your assets instead of selling them, you don’t have to pay capital gains taxes. Borrowing money against your assets is not a taxable event. If you borrow $50,000 from your house, that is not a taxable event. Same concept.
Even on a thirty year span of borrowing $1,000,000 per year, you can end up saving money for your legacy (kids/family/charity whatever you like)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/buy-borrow-die-the-basics
12. "There have historically been two types of periods: Local and Global. In a Local period, the authorities financially repressed savers to fund past and present wars. In a Global period, finance is deregulated, and global trade is promoted. A Local period is inflationary, while a Global period is deflationary. Any macro theorist you follow will have a similar taxonomy to describe the major cycles of the 20th century and beyond historical periods.
The purpose of this history lesson is to invest wisely throughout the cycles. Over a typical 80-year life expectancy, I better get more time due to the stem cells I’m injecting; you can expect to experience two major cycles on average. I boil down our investment choices into three categories:
If you believe in the system but not those governing it, you invest in stonks.
If you believe in the system and those governing it, you invest in government bonds.
If you believe in neither the system nor those governing it, you invest in gold or another asset that doesn’t require any vestiges of the state to exist, like Bitcoin. Stocks are a legal fantasy upheld by courts that can dispatch men with guns to force compliance. Therefore, stocks require a strong state to exist and hold value over time.
In a Local inflationary period, I should own gold and eschew stocks and bonds.
In a Global deflationary period, I should own stocks and eschew gold and bonds.
Government bonds generally do not preserve value over time unless I’m allowed to infinitely leverage them at low to no cost or am forced to own them by my regulator. Primarily, that is because it is too tempting for politicians to pervert the government bond market by printing money to fund their political objectives without resorting to unpopular direct taxation."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/zoom-out
13. Title says it all. US & China: Edging toward War. Panel of 2 Chinese and 2 Americans (who actually speak Chinese fluently and spent time there).
Chinese folks seem really ultra reasonable but it's hard to believe them looking at the facts and what China has been doing since Xi took power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il_XQhIBR7M
14. I so want to watch this movie. Tokyo Cowboy.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2024/06/13/film/tokyo-cowboys/
15. "Unless a Trump victory in November results in a drastic reduction in U.S. support for Ukraine, Russia is unlikely to be gifted another chance like the one it has had in the past six months to make progress in the war. European defence industrial capacity is increasing, and its political resolution to resist Russia is strengthening. Ukrainian defence production is increasing. But then, Russian defence production has also exceeded the expectations of most western analysts. Whether this can be continued indefinitely is another question.
Ultimately, the past six months offer another case study of a military institution that has failed to effectively change its doctrine, training, structure and equipment during wartime in a way that increases its chances of tactical, operational and strategic success. The Russian gains hardly justify the burning through men and materiel that has taken place since January 2024.
The sources of their failure to capitalise on their strategic opportunity in 2024 are many. Russia has yet to develop a new offensive doctrine for land operations in modern conditions. It has not been able to balance quantity and quality across the force, generally leaning on mass for its attacks. Its military leadership is clearly not capable enough to build and implement the right military strategy for such an intellectually demanding war.
And Russia’s style of fighting in 2024, and how poorly it treats Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, has meant that Ukrainian resolve is sustained. In due course, the Russian 2024 offensives will be added to the failed campaign for Kyiv in 2022, and the failed 2023 Ukrainian counter offensive, as examples for military analysts and scholars to study well into the future.
Russia may still have a couple of months where they can conduct more offensive activities against Ukraine before they culminate. But, given Russian losses so far, the lack of any new, wide-ranging offensive doctrine, and that Ukraine’s strategic prospects are improving with respect to manpower, air defence and munitions, Russia appears to have blown what might have been its last chance to strike a decisive blow against Ukraine in this war.
The question now is whether Ukraine, which wants to liberate more of its territory occupied by Russia, can build all the different physical, moral and intellectual elements of offensive combat power to do better than Russia has either later this year or in 2025?"
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/has-russia-blown-its-2024-opportunity
16. "The nuance in selling between GPTs compared to search & chatbots is a great example of how the market is evolving differently in different segments : lumping all AI solutions into the same category is a mistake.
Leveraging the executive sponsorship to bypass procurement processes is consistent with the AI imperative boards & executives have championed.
The AI market isn’t a single market : it’s reflective of the software market both older segments & newer segments."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-first-of-your-newsletters
17. "As you age though other costs begin to come up that can wrinkle your cash flow — this month I got a delayed bill from my accountant, an unexpected medical bill for my son, and a car tax payment for my town on the same day after apeing BTC/ETH with my free cash flow from my business. My goal is to always be comfortably saving or investing money each month — these random expenses can add a bit of pressure to that regimen and I am a bit OCD about having that cushion.
We’ve all heard BowTied Bull recount the classic conundrum of the NYC Managing Director who saves basically no money due to lifestyle inflation and absurd spending each month.Today I want to talk through areas that I have personally identified waste in — that is — areas where I am potentially vulnerable to lifestyle inflation or overspending for no good reason."
https://arbitrageandy.substack.com/p/stop-wasting-your-money-on-these
18. "This flipping of risk-free return in US Treasuries to return-free risk will be a defining development for the next decade in finance. Trillions of dollars are sitting in a global 60/40 portfolio with US Treasuries as a major component of their asset allocation. At some point, common sense must win out over doctrine. This brings me to another development that seems to be happening simultaneously — bitcoin is becoming the risk-free return for digital natives.
In the same way that US Treasuries were the “safe” asset that was backed by the US government, bitcoin is becoming the “safe” asset that is backed by the strongest computer network in the world. That may sound insane to traditional investors, but I hear and see it from digital natives every day."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/risk-free-return-vs-return-free-risk
19. Get equity in a business. This is the lesson.
"Federer becoming part of On made him much more than Nike was ever going to pay him. Per a 2022 report by Quartz, when On went public in 2021, Federer’s 3 percent ownership was worth $180 million. It’s this opportunity that’s given him a new perspective on how athletes should or shouldn’t approach deals, although he admits that not all athletes are in a space where they can accept long-term money over short-term financial success.
“Not thinking as an athlete is not easy,” the tennis icon says."
https://www.complex.com/sneakers/a/matt-welty/roger-federers-big-bet-with-on-is-paying-off
20. "But even if you don’t decrease your spending over time, there’s nothing stopping you from adjusting your spending when necessary. As I’ve shown previously, you can spend more money in retirement if you are flexible. The trick is to not withdraw as much from your portfolio when it’s in a large decline. In other words, don’t kick your investments while they’re down.
If you can embrace this idea, then you don’t need to worry as much about running out of money in retirement. This is especially true if you experience a period of high inflation. After all, the best way to fight back against higher prices is not to pay them! While this is easier said than done, a little flexibility in your spending can go a long way in retirement."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-does-inflation-impact-retirement/
21. Lots of great life lessons here.
"It’s almost impossible to imagine how much your psychology around money will change once you start seeing those kinds of numbers. And no matter how much of a minimalist, smart saver and investor you think you are, you might be surprised by how quickly your attitude can change.
I imagined five, ten, twenty years in the future, and asked myself how I would feel if I never became an extremely successful crypto investor or programmer.
And the truth was, I wouldn’t care. That skillset was near meaningless to me, it was just a means to an end.
But when I imagined not being a successful author that far in the future, I realized I would be filled with regret.
This is how success can become a curse. If you get really good at the wrong thing and you’re making a bunch of money from it, people are telling you how smart and capable and accomplished you are, you might start to think that it is the thing. And then you wake up one day and realize you were duped.
Obviously you probably need to get good at something you’re less thrilled about to put food on the table and get your career started. But don’t forget that it’s merely a tool for the work you really want to do later. Deprioritize it as soon as you can."
https://blog.nateliason.com/p/losing-10-million
22. "A South Korean weapons manufacturer that traditionally specialized in older, less advanced armaments is seizing on demand for 155mm howitzers by producing them faster than the West.
Hanwha Aerospace can build its K9 self-propelled howitzer in about six months at $3.5 million apiece, Bloomberg reported, estimating the company to be two to three times as fast as its competitors.
By comparison, French supplier Nexter was estimated to take about 30 months to deliver its Caesar self-propelled howitzer. However, it was reported in early January to have reduced the wait time by half.
South Korea's defense contractors have emerged as significant industry players, making the country the world's 10th biggest arms exporter, per theStockholm International Peace Research Institute."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-korean-weapons-company-once-072157477.html
23. "The political divisions imposed on society by the elite have degraded the sense of community. Many videos on YouTube feature people traveling the country, speaking to those in struggling neighborhoods, and one common theme I noticed was this idea of a strange social closing up, a guardedness or even avoidance of neighbors.
Multiple slightly older to middle aged people expressed how, when they were growing up in the 80s or 90s, their communities felt more connected. Neighbors and your “block” or street was an open, hospitable space where people interacted and knew each other’s names and families, sometimes helped each other or solved problems together. Now, they say in the same neighborhoods, no one says hello or talks to each other, the sense of commonality replaced with a growing sense of enclosure, mistrust, standoffishness, a kind of paranoia and cynicism growing like weeds from the neglected sidewalks and untended yards.
Most readers can likely relate. There’s a mountingly pervasive feeling—a defense mechanism of sorts—that keeps us a little more bottled up, wary of oversharing, reluctant to ‘step out of our comfort zones’ into spaces we know may be culturally or politically hostile to our guarded alignments.
When before we may have waved at a neighbor, engaging in chitchat over weather or the ballgame, now we may simply pull our hat tighter over our eyes, give a curt nod while avoiding eye contact for fear they may be “one of them”—a hostile from the other side of the spectrum, the politico-cultural divide: maybe a pro- or anti-vaxxer, a Democrat or conservative, a pro-Choicer abortionist or transphobe, ad nauseam."
https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/the-hoi-polloi-are-sick
24. The spirit of entrepreneurship alive & well in Cuba.
https://restofworld.org/2024/cuba-dancers-social-media-restrictions/
25. "Indeed the Russian micro-advance strategy is probably making the Russian army less efficient. It’s basically working overtime simply to pace losses. It can only do that with very quick training time (if that) leading to deteriorating unit cohesion and little military learning. There are stories of whole units basically becoming combat inefficient in a few days of fighting around Vovchansk.
What the Ukrainians have to do is accelerate Russian losses by encouraging them to keep these micro-advances up. It will lead to a horrible summer of fighting, but if the Russians are willing to keep slaughtering their own forces for tiny gains, the Ukrainians have to let them—while keeping Ukrainian losses as low as possible.
And when the Ukrainians return to trying to liberate their own lands, they need to do something else entirely."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-87-the-russian-micro
26. "Every team of more than a few people will have at least one employee struggling. Sometimes it’s because they were an mis-hire, and sometimes it’s that their job is changing faster than they can adapt. Sometimes it’s their fault, and sometimes it’s not.
The first step is to identify struggling employees, and here are some signs an employee is struggling:
--They take longer than their peers to complete the same tasks, or cannot complete them at all.
--They push back on simple tasks that should be easy to complete.
--They start to work fewer hours, or be less available online.
--They start complaining a lot about everything wrong with the company.
When you find a struggling employee you need to act. Maybe you need to change their role, or provide deeper training. Or maybe you need to part ways. Whatever the solution, you can’t let the situation continue and simply hope they will figure it out."
https://www.breakingpoint.tech/p/struggling-employees
27. "If you are a Limited Partner at the very beginning of the Emerging Manager journey, here is my unsolicited advice: do not take shortcuts in honing the craft of identifying the best Managers.
Accessing Emerging Managers won’t be your problem, but how to underwrite them is a challenge. The only way to master this challenge is by developing taste. The only way to develop this taste is by genuine curiosity to explore the entire landscape that is unfolding in front of you.
And every now and then, on a rare occasion, you come across a very, very, very special Emerging Manager, and the feeling of sensing the quality within seconds is priceless. It’s like tasting some french soil in your wine - it’s special."
https://embracingemergence.beehiiv.com/p/1-advice-limited-partners
28. "America is the only major “empire” in history whose entrepreneurial magnitude exceeds its government magnitude. America is the first Capitalist Empire.
That is an unbelievably important distinction. It means that America’s success or failure isn’t exclusively determined by the strength of its institutions or the people running them. As long as the Constitution remains in place and rule of law reigns supreme, individuals have more opportunity to define the trajectory of the American Empire than they’ve had in any Empire to date.
While China’s manufacturing capacity is awesome, and while its growth has been eye-popping, China does not have the same dynamic: recall just a few years ago when Xi Jinping Thanos-snapped Alibaba CEO Jack Ma to show the country that he, and not tech companies, were in control.
China, strong as it is today, is fragile to the whims of its leaders.
America, chaotic as it is, is decentralized and antifragile.
To the extent that it is an empire, America is an empire defined not by its ability to expand geographically to capture existing resources, but by its ability to expand technologically to create new ones. America, therefore, is a boundless empire.
We will see more legacy institutions fall and weaken, and it may feel chaotic. Good! That chaos, underpinned by a stable Constitution and legal code, is the lifeblood of America’s success. The greater the challenges, the bigger the opportunities, the better the solutions.
We can even build new and better institutions to replace old and sclerotic ones."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-american-millennium
29. "There is much that should be learned, or relearned, from these modern military failures. They provide the most recent, and perhaps more relatable, examples for the current generation of military and national security professionals.
Military failure should be an essential aspect of study for aspiring military leaders and effective military institutions. It may not be the ultimate guarantor of battlefield success or victory in war, but it is certainly a better strategy than ignoring lessons from the past in order to personally learn the agony of defeat."
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-misfortunes-of-war/
30. "The quick summary of all this if you’re planning on building something long-term that doesn’t go down in flames after a short burst of sales (see thousands of businesses in 2021) is as follows:
--Sell to Women, selling to men is a fools game
--Try to find something that causes instant results and is hard to return. You can’t return botox but you can easily return a sky blue shirt that wasn’t light enough
--Majority of people will not have any savings, this means debt based purchases have to be encouraged
--You can charge more for speed since people are impatient. Could be shipping could be digital entertainment
--Anything lottery/quick high “could change your life or go to zero” is going to sell extremely well
--If you’re looking for more stable income focus on targeting the wealthy, if you’re looking for more cash flow based items, look at bare necessities for the low-end. Don’t buy middle class suburban homes!
All of this leads to the same general direction. Staying at home, glued to screens and lower population growth due to high vice/addiction and belief that the only way to make it is via overnight success."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/understanding-the-future-of-the-consumer
31. "Any wifi money business you start is going to be a 100% remote company.
It’s just the way things are done, unless you get HUGE (then it might make sense to open up an office).
But for the businesses I talk about in this newsletter, it’s all going to be remote. By the time you get so big that you have to start looking for office space you’re probably going to want to cash out and start over anyway, because that’s how builders are wired.
So if you’re serious about building online, you’re going to have to confront a few realities about managing a team of atomized people who are scattered all over the world who you only see on Slack and the occasional Zoom call.
Hint: It’s not always awesome."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/pros-and-cons-of-managing-a-remote
32. One of the best tear downs of media businesses in recent American history. Great for media biz junkies like me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJBdd9D3nEg
33. "Christopher Morley said, “There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
A lot of financial mistakes come from trying to copy people who are different from you.
So be careful who you seek advice from, be careful who you admire, and even be careful who you socialize with. When you do things quietly you’re less susceptible to people with different goals and personalities than you telling you you’re doing it wrong."
https://collabfund.com/blog/quiet-compounding/
34. "Everyone eventually has to sit down and produce their work, and are held to goals and quotas. But as the economy shifts to knowledge work, we should respect that what actually produces good work can at first look lazy, and (even more so) vice versa.
In investing, where there’s the potential to win by pure luck, it’s wise to judge someone by their process, rather than their outcome. Work may be the opposite. Judge people by their outcomes, not by the visibility of their process, which is often hidden inside their head."
https://collabfund.com/blog/lazy-work-good-work/
35. This was how I felt in the early days of Alibris, Yahoo! & 500 Startups. Good times & magical times career wise.
"In your career and life, you will hopefully have moments where you feel championship level success.
You might even be part of a dynasty for many winning years. When that happens, remind yourself that it won’t last forever. And celebrate with champagne.
A dynasty ended yesterday — and now a new journey begins."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/the-end-of-a-warriors-era
36. "Seibel likens defence tech to similar recent hype cycles: “They're like, 'Oh shit, we need to do AI; oh shit, we need to invest in WeWork or whatever.’
“I have a little bit of the feeling now that a lot of dual use VCs say, 'We have to defend Europe, blah, blah, blah,' and they just jump on the train, which means they also make bad decisions on who they invest in,” he says.
Although he expects there will still be a lot of investment in the drone space in the next few years, there will likely be a lot of consolidation: he predicts there will be three or four European winners 10 years from now."
https://sifted.eu/articles/vc-defence-tech-hype-drones-quantum-systems
God, Gold and Steel: Conquest is in the Blood of Man
As a history major, I love reading about great men who start empires. Going into the great unknown and despite experiencing major trials and tribulations and ending up on the other side victorious. A true hero's journey.
There were none more exemplary than the conquistadors of Spain, grizzled ex soldiers like Cortes and Pizzaro, who arrived in Latin America and extinguished the massive Aztec and Incan empires that spanned the continent, and established Spanish dominion for several hundred years. A massive landmass that ran from modern day Mexico all the way down to Argentina & Chile.
Before the modern, industrialized & somewhat civilized world, this is what ambitious men did to gain wealth and power. Traveling, Fighting, killing and conquering. This did not change for hundreds, if not thousands of years in human history.
This was the driving factor of all the great men in history, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror from Normandy, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Babur of the Mughal Empire in India, Robert Clive of the East Indian Company among others. True adventurers and conquerors.
This was the norm at least until the 20th century, where our men’s drive was channeled toward building business empires. This is true progress. Thank God that riding around and cutting off heads and taking other people's land and goods is not the norm anymore.
Now you can take your urge to conquer and use the global market forces to build a product and provide a service to solve a problem for many people at the same time. You can build big businesses and accumulate massive wealth while serving others.
But these feelings, the urge for conquest, still exist in all of us men to this day. I remember a quote from the excellent show Yellowstone.
“Man is migratory by instinct. What you are feeling is a hunger for new land. Smoldering in your DNA. It’s the reason our species survived when countless others failed. That tingling is a sensation of your destiny.”
Modern day life and comforts dull these senses but they are always there. You can’t remove it. And I believe this explains the growing number of listless and lost young men in society now. Their impulses to conquer dampened. Angry, impotent and unhappy. They know their lives should be better but they have no clear mission or direction. No clear place to channel these urges.
I think if we want to turn things around again in America or the world in general, we have to acknowledge man’s need to conquer something and then to unleash these urges and channel them into productive avenues. Whether it’s personal fitness, self improvement or learning. Become an entrepreneur, go build something.
Young men need a mission so they can become controlled monsters! So conquer your mind, your emotions, and your environment to build your own empire.
1/99 Rule, Not the 20/80 Rule: Entering The Winner Take All Economy
I talk to many of my single guy friends about their dating experience. It’s really ugly out there, even if you are attractive and fit and well off. The dating market has changed dramatically in the time of globalization and Instagram and other social media. It literally is “the best of times and worst of times”. If you are what is considered a top tier man, which means, attractive, tall, fit and wealthy it’s an amazing time.
It’s even better for the most beautiful and attractive girls. Before the globalized world, they were limited to males in their town or city. Now, they get pinged by wealthy men from everywhere in the world on IG DMs. Or put this in economic terms, there is a massive supply and demand imbalance. The demand has become global and in excess of the actual limited supply of both top tier men and women, thus they have become more valuable.
However, there is a dangerous counter-effect. If you are an average guy, ie. not in very good shape and not financially secure, it’s looking pretty bad. And as the world becomes more competitive, it’s harder and harder for those men to keep up. So they just give up. Thus we see a rise in incels. We see a rise of drug use, video gaming, gambling, drinking, pornography, obesity and lack of fitness in men.
So the point of all this is not a lamentation on the state of men as tragic as it is. But as a point about the future of work and talent. The nature of the world and society, it’s become a winner take all market in almost every realm. This explains the astronomical pay packages and demand for top talent in sports, in technology or even in the music world. For example, it’s reported that Taylor Swift will surpass $1 billion dollars on her Eras tour alone. Estimated to be almost $13M a night. By the way, this does not include merchandise sales either.
That means you are either the best or nothing. The days of having an average life are over.
I don’t think you can aim for a mediocre life or do your minimum. It’s the Red Queen Effect where you have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place you are now. If you thought it was competitive before, it’s only going to get worse.
This is great for type A, somewhat broken, unbalanced and ultra competitive individuals like me. It’s not so great if you have no drive, value comfort or don’t want to do the necessary work. You have to be intensely focused on personal development all the time for a long time. As Roy Bennett wrote: “You make the world a better place by making daily improvements to become the best version of yourself.” This might be the only way you will ever stay relevant in the work world.
America Is the Frontier: The Future Is Here
Brilliant private investor Jeremy Giffon had a great tweet on America:
“Europeans live better than Americans because the spirit of the American lays in the infinite frontier. Europe is enclosed and complete, the frontiers are known. So the European must turn inward. The good life for him can be found in simply asking "what is for lunch?".
But the American exists solely in the future, in the unconquered frontier. There is no time to pause and reflect on what has been mapped as the future lays beyond him, always out on the horizon.
Toqueville observed that the American spirit relies entirely on the existence of a limitless unsettled West that he can employ his industriousness upon. Even if he himself never sets out to conquer he takes great assurance in knowing that it is there, infinite possibility awaiting him.
Without a frontier, the American has nothing. He is not equipped to stop and look around. To cultivate an appreciation for the finer things and settle in, comfortable knowing that the soil on which he rests is soaked in his ancestors blood and will so to be one day in his childrens'. He is not equipped for that self-reflection, that contentment. His ambition lays outward. He must journey. Robbed of this, he is nothing. He has nowhere to cast his gaze. He will self-destruct.”
Source: https://twitter.com/jeremygiffon/status/1655412696773189634
American society is fractious and raucous in times of peace and prosperity. But when it’s guided or directed toward a common goal or enemy it’s a fearsome place. We saw this in 1941, we saw this in 9/11. Don’t count out this country yet as we head into the new frontiers of technology and space.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 14th, 2024
“Life’s short. Eat dessert first, work less and vacation more” – Lea Mishell
"Since the decision makers are all old, none care or have interest in helping generations from their grave. This means the lean is going to be towards? Wealth Inequality.
Expect the decision making to benefit asset holders. Create equity. Don’t focus on your career/W-2. Just hit the performance metrics and be likable while pretending the paychecks don’t exist. If you find yourself at a sweatshop W-2 (bad luck), switch ASAP until you can get into a bloated environment where it is easy to skate by.
Set Up to Scale: You don’t really need a large team to build anything anymore. Look at something like Tether and its massive profits with practically no employees. The Industrial Age is over. Having a high head count does not mean you are growing or succeeding anymore. It just signals that you’re a bad human resource manager and you don’t have any idea how to scale with technology.
Comically, having a fast growing headcount (outside of ultra small start up) just says you’re falling behind at this point. The smart big tech companies are already cutting heads for the middle layer (rapidly!). The skill difference is shrinking between younger and older employers due to tooling improvements.
Earn Online: Beating a dead horse. Considering that governments are certainly not up to speed on tech you should assume no geographic location is safe. No need to anticipate that a particular country goes to zero tomorrow. However, you should have a plan B in a worst case scenario. If your money is tied to the internet, you can change states, countries, etc. No geographic risk. In a world of EMP attacks another 10 IQ conspiracies, the world is already a zero anyway so don’t worry about that scenario."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/president-is-a-fake-job-just-a-talking
2. "Venture distribution cycles have elongated to the point that LPs now risk a decade of negative cash-flow on many of their VC relationships.
That's not sustainable for institutions with large spend requirements, such as a university endowment. At least not if it's overallocated to venture."
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/28/venture-capital-endowment-foundation-yale-model
3. "China has long sought to harvest U.S. defense companies’ expertise. In 2019, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper accused China of “perpetrating the greatest intellectual property theft in human histor,” while other experts have long suggested that the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s premier J-20 fighter jet incorporates numerous stolen design secrets.
Today, however, “adversaries are operating with greater scope, scale and sophistication,” Haugh said, and the threat is not limited to intellectual property theft, but now encompasses efforts to disrupt supply chains and critical infrastructure."
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/cybercom-china-targeting-defense-industrial-base/
4. Learning from a true long term thinking VC. Original Operator & VC from 2000s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6cZK4ehQjg&t=1s
5. Good state of VC market in Q2, 2024 from Redpoint Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5DetbQdBJc
6. So many great data points on what's up in SaaS.
Net net: it's ugly and will continue to be ugly for a while. There is still stress in the system.
Good founders should be aware but you keep going, keep building and keep selling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00_mp6k7zQI
7. Coatue founder. 50M to 50 billion in AUM. Also 6 kids too. Impressive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nuSOMooReY
8. National Security and Silicon Valley's role. World is changing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vroFlxZykIE
9. This movie looks so good. Tokyo Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_l11juia6E
10. "Entrepreneurs learn a number of lessons and tips along their journey. Go big from day one, 10x products win, markets are more important than ideas, small, fast-growing markets are best, and culture wins are my favorite general tips for founders. There’s no one way to do it, but these have been instrumental to me."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/06/29/5-favorite-general-tips-for-founders/
11. TLDR is an emerging media empire. Pretty good breakdown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhPCX5GAFhM
12. "An "investment loop" in user onboarding occurs when users start using the product with a low-friction entry point (no signup form).
As they progress through the onboarding, they become more likely to continue using the product. Only once they're sufficiently invested do you ask them to sign up with email (and perhaps their credit card)."
https://justinjackson.ca/investment-loops
13. "VCs are nothing if not pattern recognizers, right? So, whether consciously or subconsciously, they start to correlate deference as indicative of lower quality. The nicer you are to a VC, the more likely you are to be a bad company.
Now, the opposite is also true. The more a company is crushing it, the less deference they need to pay VCs. The more a founder ignores you, the more likely it is that the company knows its good.
That's the reality of storytelling. The stronger a group of people believe something, and the bigger that group of people is, the more likely that thing is going to start getting reflected in reality. Just one necessarily reality of an inefficient market that is largely dictated by human emotions, whether founder or VC."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-groucho-marx-mandate
14. "However, despite its substantial contributions to the global AI ecosystem, Taiwan often struggles to accurately represent itself in global assessments by international organizations such as the United Nations.
The irony is stark: Despite a lack of global data on Taiwan’s AI performance, the island’s semiconductor industry, led by national champion TSMC, is the backbone of global AI infrastructure. The Economist recently reported that the island produces over 90 percent of the most advanced semiconductors for the world’s most cutting-edge AI applications and research."
https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/decoding-taiwans-true-ai-potential/
15. "There are basically two things Trump could do with regards to the threat from China. The first is to retreat, offering up Taiwan and the Philippines’ islands as a sacrifice in the hope that China will be appeased. The second is to strengthen America’s hand in the Pacific, increasing defense spending, diverting resources from Europe, and building up forces to deter a Chinese attack.
It’s not at all clear to me which of these Trump will do.
There’s also the question of how China will react to a Trump presidency. The general consensus seems to be that China hates both Biden and Trump, the former for his effective economic policies, the latter for his general attitude of antagonism. Some argue that China fears Trump more because it views him as an unpredictable loose cannon, much like the Soviet Union Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, and that this uncertainty would deter them from launching an attack (though that might be wishful thinking).
So on the biggest and scariest question of them all, Trump remains an unknown quantity. America looks fairly likely to roll the dice on this riskiest of gambles. My general conclusion is that the era of instability and chaos of the late 2010s hasn’t ended — it’s just shifting from domestic turmoil to international chaos. Buckle up, because it isn’t over yet."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/time-to-think-about-a-second-trump
16. "It’s to remind you that the best way to latch onto the future is to think through affirmative possibilities, to remember that the world is in flux, and to keep turning over old stones.
This mindset is particularly important with AI. Some of the tasks it struggles with today are going to be child’s play by next year. Like Claude, which has improved leaps and bounds since its last model, and will likely continue in this direction.
Previous eras of creativity have mostly looked a bit like sculpting. A sculptor takes a block of material and carves it, slowly but surely, into shape. Nothing happens without her hand. Even when an assistant is involved, the sculptor pores over the project, because their human input is important at every point of the process. So too with writing, or programming, or painting.
This era of creativity is going to look more like gardening. A gardener doesn’t grow plants directly. Instead, she sets up the conditions for the garden to grow. She takes care of the soil, the water, and the sunlight—and lets the plants do their thing.
So too with AI. As more of our time is spent being model managers, we won’t be directly making as much creative work. That’s like pulling up a plant to help it grow. Instead, we’ll be creating optimal conditions and letting the models do their work."
https://every.to/chain-of-thought/when-ai-gets-more-capable-what-will-humans-do
17. "As a society, we have never had more tools at our disposal to track “activity.” 40% of workers claim that their time spent active on their computers is monitored, and 31% are subject to real-time monitoring. But activity is not synonymous with productivity, and too much activity can actually hinder productivity. We think that the solution to every problem is to simply spend more time on it, or work harder, but exhaustive effort has diminishing returns. Often, the most effective choice is simply stepping away for a bit.
Thinking is a critical part of the writing process, and if you’re just writing, and writing, and writing, with no time to think, the writing will fall flat. If you’re trying to solve a difficult client problem, the solution will likely hit you while you’re walking around town, not while you are staring at your monitor. 90 minutes of free-thinking and 30 minutes of focused work is often more potent than two hours of grinding away. Don’t underestimate the value of stepping away from time to time."
https://www.youngmoney.co/p/benefits-slowing
18. "Costner is now 69. In the past decade, he has experienced a revival of sorts, doing nuanced and charismatic character work in film after film while starring on Yellowstone, the most popular show on television. Other actors might be content with their late-career good fortune. But other actors are not Kevin Costner, who is prone to obsession, regardless of what that obsession may cost. “I’m so grateful that I’ve never seen a UFO,” Costner said. “I’m a pretty sane person, although some people would think maybe something else. But what happens once you see one? You can’t let it go.”
One of those obsessions is a Western called Horizon, which Costner—as cowriter, director, and star—has been trying to make since 1988. Over the past 36 years, the story has evolved, from a two-hander about a couple of guys to a vast, panoramic portrait of the founding of a town—called Horizon—during a particularly bloody chapter of America’s western expansion, but Costner has never fully left it alone.
But if no one in Hollywood wanted to make one, they certainly didn’t want to make four. And so Costner, a few years ago, decided to fund the film himself, with the help of two outside investors whose names he will not disclose. (More recently, Warner Bros. has also come aboard for the first two films, handling theatrical distribution.) Press reports have been wide-eyed about just how much Costner has put on the line to make the film. “I know they say I’ve got $20 million of my own money in this movie,” Costner told me. “It’s not true. I’ve got now about $38 million in the film. That’s the truth. That’s the real number.”"
https://www.gq.com/story/kevin-costner-gq-cover-story
19. "But West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences."
https://www.gq.com/story/why-men-are-rawdogging-flights
20. "It all started with a TikTok video by 27-year-old Megan Boni, known as Girl On Couch. Her April post, amassing about 49 million views, features a singsong message: “I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. 6’5.” Blue eyes.”
DJs remixed Boni’s audio. Thousands of social-media users created videos with the sound or riffed on the phrase—making it a front-runner for TikTok’s song of the summer.
Boni, meanwhile, struck a deal with Universal Music Group. Versions of her “Man in Finance” song are now on Spotify, including a release with David Guetta, a top name in dance music.
Finance bros, the world seemed to declare, are back.
Boni said she made the original video as a satire of women with impossible dating standards, not because she’s particularly interested in dating a man in finance.
“I wanted to make fun of single people, including myself,” she said."
https://archive.ph/eZmVI#selection-5747.0-5763.52
21. "This is what actually scares me the most… thanks to Ai big tech is getting back in shape to run a marathon at breakneck speeds. It’s been a long time since all of them competed so intensely against each other to win, in a very public way, with events and media coverage almost daily.
Startups face significant challenges in competing with these giants. The financial muscle of Big Tech allows them to outspend startups in R&D and acquisitions. The data advantage held by these companies means that their AI models can be trained on more comprehensive and varied datasets, leading to superior performance. So most startups will need access to it via partnerships, APIs etc - hopefully go beyond being just a wrapper."
22. "One of the contradictions I’ve felt about Japan is that large-cap growth in Japan gets priced at ridiculously high multiples. It’s not uncommon to see these things trade at 40 times P/E or higher. This is presumably because the cost of capital in Japan is low and in a deflationary economy where the population is declining, growth is rare. However, when you look at these small companies in great competitive positions that are growing double digits with lots of room to grow, you can find them trading for single-digit earnings multiples!
The delta is so big that I call this the ‘chasm’. If you look at some of the large-cap growth companies, these also traded at very low multiples early on but as they continued to grow earnings per share at some point brokers start to cover it, institutions start to pile in and the stock re-rates quite significantly and that contradiction gets resolved. Some of these large caps are expensive and can de-rate as interest rates rise, but the gap is large enough that I still think it’s more likely that these small companies will re-rate than the large caps de-rating down to where these small caps are valued.
There are some good reasons for this gap, the first is that Japanese stocks are ridiculously underfollowed. I think it was something like close to 50% of the 4000 listed companies aren’t covered by any broker. Compare this to the Russel 2000 where most companies have some kind of coverage on the stock. Coverage is ultimately a function of investor demand, so if there’s no demand no broker will cover it making it illiquid.
This leads to the second reason which is that as a result, the small companies are owned by passive funds and Japanese retail investors. But here's the problem: most of the Japanese populace lost interest in allocating to stocks decades ago and with it, our ‘financial literacy’ of understanding equity capital markets has dwindled. Those same people are setting the prices of some of these assets today."
https://www.readideabrunch.com/p/idea-brunch-with-made-in-japan
23. "What is getting ignored in this current startup world is that we have so much !@#@% jammed into our limited attention spans because of a million notifications a day and a follow-up NPS survey for every single restaurant/software/service/product/travel experience and a million other things occupying our attention, there is no room left even for good stuff.
So the problem for startup founders is, you can have product-market fit, you can execute flawlessly, you can take the risk out of the buying process, you can offer a deal, and you still may fail because we live in a world where you are just… crowded out. You did everything right. You did everything your VCs said, but I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to pay attention to you.
And that’s just for low friction products. A lot of AI products are higher friction, so the situation is even worse.
Which brings me back to my original point - attention is all you need. The companies that win now are the ones that can find ways to get attention. I’d even go so far as to say attention-market fit may soon become more important than product-market fit."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/attention-is-all-you-need-but-not
24. "Over the past 40 years, Arnault has assembled the world’s largest luxury conglomerate and globalized a sector once constrained by the limited ambitions of family-owned European companies encrusted in tradition. He didn’t invent conspicuous consumption, of course. But thanks almost exclusively to him, luxury is now the universal obsession of shoppers on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, Milan’s Via Monte Napoleone and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and of the tourists who flock to LVMH stores on the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Fifth Avenue in New York City.
Arnault has dressed royals and presidents, supermodels and celebrities. Perhaps more than anyone else, he’s made the clothes and accessories that signify status among the global elite—and project a bit of their insecurity, too.
For that, he’s the wealthiest person in the world. Or very close to it, depending on the day. (And on French politics, which lately has been turbulent and deleterious to LVMH share price.) As of mid-June he has a net worth of around $200 billion, as estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune, built on the most analog of industries, is only comparable to the digital riches of a few titans who built their affluence on expanding access to things like software, cloud computing and electric vehicles.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, often criticized for their social and sartorial tastes, have invented our future. Arnault, the embodiment of taste, yoked together the nouveau-riche brands that symbolized Europe’s postwar influence and exported them all around the world."
https://archive.ph/ZPCuU#selection-1851.0-1873.240
25. "All the old papers were already online, and they quickly followed the young guys into the chaos of clicks. As mobile grew more popular, Facebook grew more dominant, and once the world’s attention was concentrated in one place every media company in the country started going viral just enough to make them feel like they were the future. It was a mad gold rush, so obviously venture capitalists got involved, and once that happened valuations became dumber than you can possibly imagine. A few years later, Zuckerberg flipped the free traffic switch to “pay me,” and everything began to die. Unless of course you’d built up email-based subscriptions before 2017 or so.
Do you know who charted the “new” course in subscriptions?
The New York Times launched a paywall in 2011, six years before Vice’s famously deranged $5.7 billion valuation (for comparison, the Times was trading around $2.3 billion at the top of that year), and by 2014 they were featuring a wide array of newsletters. The Gray Lady wasn’t interested in farming clicks, she was laser focused on your inbox. Sharing stories across the new medium was cute, and certainly the writers were all distracted by the rush of Twitter. But leadership was focused on rebuilding their company online, which could only begin with distribution. This is not to say the old thing was the new thing all along. This is to say there was never actually a “new” thing. There were just a bunch of stupid rich kids screwing around on the internet, and a lot of dumb money (some things never change). Separate from its actual content, a news company is, and has always been, distribution + paid + ads. Just as in the physical world, you either had all three online or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you were doomed.
By the mid-2010s, the instability of social media was obvious to everyone, but for most huge players it was way too late to adapt. Once Substack democratized the bootstrapped newsletter, which guaranteed the most popular writers and publishers ownership of their readership by way of the email, a fresh media Renaissance was inevitable, and random online shitposters quickly became more influence than Vox or Vice or any of the other huge encumbants."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/we-are-the-media-now
26. "Frederic Court of Felix Capital discussed the necessity for VCs to think about their funds, not just as investment strategies, but unique products for LPs that stand out in a crowded market. Generic fund strategies are predicted to be much harder to raise given the competition in the market. Jason Gray amplified this sentiment: “SuperReturns underscored the importance of VCs distinguishing their funds in a crowded market. To remain competitive, unique value propositions have become essential.
In conclusion, the Super Venture conference highlighted a cautious yet optimistic outlook for the venture capital and fintech ecosystems. The industry is adapting to new realities with a focus on specialization, capital efficiency, and strategic differentiation."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-money-behind-the-money-lp-trends
27. "By day, Yass, who has a personal fortune of $47 billion, oversees Susquehanna International Group LLP, a trading firm burrowed deep in the machinery of modern finance. It’s a giant force in options, stocks, energy, bonds and foreign exchange—and also in more esoteric stuff. It runs a Bermudan subsidiary that sells niche insurance for lottery payouts and natural disasters, a Bahamian cryptocurrency operation and an Irish sports-betting group. It backs startups around the world, including in China and Israel. And it arrived relatively early to Bitcoin—Yass purchased some from a US marshals auction following their seizure from the illegal marketplace Silk Road, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A registered Libertarian since 1996, Yass has in the past decade spent tens of millions of dollars funding politicians focused on limiting government intervention in every area that matters to him, notably taxes, trading, education and gaming. He personally champions a controversial overhaul of public schools favored by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former secretary of education. But more recently he’s found himself at the center of attention for another reason: his roughly $15 billion stake in ByteDance Ltd., the corporate parent of TikTok."
https://archive.ph/BKZuw#selection-1853.0-1857.228
28. "I’ve been that guy. Even now, I am that guy sometimes. I’ve done regrettable things, and I’ve hurt people with my behaviour. But getting treated for bipolar disorder, diving into psychedelic therapy, and experiencing internal family systems therapy have made me a better human.
I still wander into douchebag territory at times, but I don’t get lost there anymore.
We’ve all done things we’d undo if we could. We’ve all been horrible at some point in our lives. But there’s a solution.
Forgive yourself.
Be a little less horrible."
https://www.sanjaysays.co/p/10-regrets-from-a-58-year-old-douchebag
29. "Hilger, a medical device salesman, ran a company in Minnesota called JBJ Industries and, in 1986, had cooked up an idea with a few of his friends.
There wasn’t anywhere good to change a diaper. What if they put change stations in public washrooms? They created a fold-out station that could be mounted to a wall, and patented the invention.
The problem was, Hilger needed to get the dads — who weren’t changing diapers from their perches in the boardroom — on his side.
Once he did, the money started rolling in. So did the market share: Koala Kare’s share of the US market is now an estimated 85%.
But no monopoly is created equal. Some, like Koala Kare, grow organically, riding a cultural tide to decades of success. Others, like Google and Apple, face lawsuits from the FTC for monopolistic practices.So why are some monopolies able to flourish while others are scrutinized?"
https://thehustle.co/originals/the-worlds-cutest-monopoly
30. "Make money, there’s nothing wrong with that, but remember that real wealth comes from being a person rich in imagination and character.
Nobody can take that away from you."
https://www.sanjaysays.co/p/4-great-reasons-to-be-rich
31. "For venture capitalists, this part of the investing process – the time between discovering a desirable, competitive deal and making the investment is the arena. It’s the province of sharp elbows, late-night phone calls, speed reading data rooms, and dueling term sheets.
If handled well, this can be the making of the firm. With a small number of intelligent, farseeing decisions, you may find yourself the equity holder of a legendary business and the partner to a historic entrepreneur. But if managed poorly, you may find yourself sitting on an overheated pile of buzzy logos, not real businesses.
Based on the strategies of the exceptional investors we’ve interviewed, and our own research, we’ve devised a five step playbook to help you run a tight process, make shrewd decisions, and win allocation."
https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/how-to-win-a-competitive-deal
Austin: The Silicon Valley for Creative & Literary Entrepreneurs
Austin Texas is a very cool place. SXSW and an amazing live music scene. The HQ of Whole Foods and a major center of post secondary schools like UT Austin. It gets talked about as a rising tech center which it sort of is. But what is not talked about is that it’s really the center for Conversion Rate Optimization in Digital marketing and in the last decade, Content Creation Entrepreneurs.
In Austin, it started off as a center for E-commerce and CRO. My friends & Conversion Rate Optimization experts like Peep Laja & Ryan Deiss but also giants like Brian Massey and the Eisenberg brothers.
But starting in the 2010s onwards, we saw some impressive literary and content creation entrepreneurs show up there. Best selling book authors like Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday and Tucker Max being most prominent. Others of note: Taylor Pearson, Srinivas Rao, The arrival of podcaster superstars Chase Jarvis, John Lee Dumas, Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan really put Austin on the map here. This concentration of creative and literary entrepreneurial talent was also what has drawn the up and coming podcasting superstars like Chris Williamson.
So just like how the San Francisco Bay Area is the place to be if you are in the Software, SaaS or Developer Tools space. Or New York for fintech, media or finance or even fashion.
If you want to get good you have to go to the center of the network. Great people want to be around other great people. Specifically in their industry and craft.
You literally are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. The collisions, the random meetings and serendipity that happens when these people are in the same place over a good period of time. This is the cluster effect that Anna Lee Saxenian ascribed to the rise of Silicon Valley as a technological center of technology.
So if you want to figure out the future and see what the next emerging ecosystems will be, just track where the best and brightest of that sector are moving to. And go there. As I’ve said many times, place matters.
Generalists Win: Building Your Polymath Stack
Dan Koe is one of the best rising and risen educators about the digital economy and how entrepreneurs can thrive in this new world. He tweeted an interesting thought:
“Become a nobody.
Become everything.
Become a designer, writer, marketer, socializer, runner, bodybuilder, philosopher, scientist, psychologist, and polymath who knows how to sustain your obsessive curiosity.
The universe rewards those who don't impose their own limits.”
Source: https://twitter.com/thedankoe/status/1694728525344104955
I’ve railed about the common but awful career advice about specializing. I think in an unpredictable future, your best strategy is learning as many different skills. Chase your curiosity. You never know where they will lead you. And because it’s innate, you’re more willing to do it over a longer period of time.
As Steve Jobs said: “you connect the dots looking backwards”.
I think about my career path and what I do now. I’m living my ideal work life but this was built on the foundations of skills, experience and network I built up over the previous 20+ years of work.
I learned about startups and online marketing at Alibris. I learned to managing people, building sales teams, public speaking, scaling and international expansion during my time at Yahoo!. I learned fundraising and venture investing at 500 Startups.
This has all come together in my new work life. I travel the world investing and doing public speaking at conferences. I spend time reading and thinking about the future. I invest in dozens of early stage startups as well as some LP checks into other VC funds a year from my venture fund & Holding Company.
I also sit on several Investment Committees of different international VC funds and help them fine tune their investment processes. I do some free as well as paid mentoring (via government programs) with various accelerator programs
And all of this stacks on each other. My previous experience helps inform my investing, advising and mentoring. But doing the mentoring sessions as well as spending time with my portfolio companies helps keep me up to date on the latest tools, tactics and techniques of the startup world. Speaking at conferences and writing helps me clarify, hone and codify much of these learnings. This all turns into a virtuous cycle.
All of these activities provide me with a great and unique data sample set that helps me understand what’s happening in the tech world. This is my work stack and I believe this is what gives me my edge. This is also my path to staying relevant in the tech and business world if I continue to build on this.
Failure is a Message from the Universe
I’m actually a graduate from University of British Columbia in Vancouver and it was a major bit of pride for my family as it is ranked one of the top schools in Canada (although looking back it was pretty useless to my life and career overall). But I didn’t get in the first time. I was a lackluster student in high school and only did well in classes that interested me or where I liked the teachers.
Plus I skipped a lot of school because I didn’t enjoy it. Period. I read my own books and educated myself. I learned hacks and shortcuts. I ended up with like a 3.1 GPA which was below the curve, so I didn’t get in for the first year of University. It was highly disappointing and my parents were far from happy. It was a huge shock to me personally, when I had gotten away with so much previously. I ended up doing classes at local Kwantlen college with my other slacker friends.
But this was a crucible moment. As Tony Robbins said: “When people succeed, they party. When people fail, they ponder.”
It was a wake up call and forced me to get my act together. I learned what I did before was not good enough. I took school more seriously and led to a ferocious work ethic. Frightening, almost. No surprise it was easy to get into UBC in the next round. This moment set me on my path and approach to life. The use of overwhelming force.
I’d always try to learn and over prepare. Whenever I met an obstacle I’d grind through it and overcome it with intense effort and work. Doing this sets you ahead of most people who just quit when it gets hard.
I never quit. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to find smart ways to sort an issue. I might rest and prepare. But in the long run, I’ll never quit for important and strategic things in my life and business. It’s served me well so far. I’ve seen this trait also in all the most successful people I know.
So the lesson here is when something doesn’t go your way. When you fail and you will fail, what lesson do you take out of it? Do you adjust your approach? And do you get back up? Do you keep going? That is all that matters if you want to succeed in the end.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 7th, 2024
One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter--Henry David Thoreau
"For Mubadala’s next act, Ajami is seeking to milk his tech connections to put more money directly into startups. At the same time, Mubadala is increasingly using its clout to encourage Western companies and investors to deepen their ties to the UAE’s tech ecosystem, part of the country’s broader push to diversify its economy away from oil.
For Ajami, 49, the goal is for Mubadala—a term that means “exchange” in Arabic—to one day be mentioned in the same breath as Sand Hill Road’s most vaunted investment firms. “The way founders speak about Sequoia—why not, 20 years from now, won’t they speak that way about Mubadala?” asked Ajami.
Ajami has a ways to go before he gets Mubadala there. Mubadala has stumbled badly in Europe as it has tried to employ a strategy similar to the one it used to break into the U.S. The companies it has backed in Europe have performed so poorly that Mubadala has put Jonno Elliott—who joined the firm in 2022 after leading VC investments at Virgin Management Ltd.—in charge of salvaging its portfolio of companies from the region, according to a person who spoke to Elliott. Among some European investors and founders, it has developed a reputation for aggressive tactics that could impact its ability to invest in top European companies in the future.
And while plenty of tech investors speak highly of Mubadala, many of them are eager to curry favor with the deep-pocketed firm so it continues to invest in their funds, especially in the current dismal fundraising environment for VC firms. Privately, after singing the praises of Mubadala as a limited partner, many venture capitalists have also said its direct investments in startups don’t carry the weight of other investors’ bets. Sovereign wealth funds just don’t have the track record of picking winners that VC firms do, those critics say.
Still, Mubadala has had some notable successes. Ajami and his lieutenants have helped it buy shares in buzzy companies like SpaceX, Waymo, Klarna, Brex, Chime, pharmaceuticals company Recursion and AI infrastructure company Crusoe Energy Systems, among others. Mubadala Capital, the VC and private equity arm of the sovereign wealth fund, oversees a $24 billion pool of capital with 180 employees spread across several offices, including in London, New York and San Francisco, which hosts a tech team they first established in 2017.
Mubadala is also continuing to plow money into other VC funds. Its portfolio includes Altimeter Capital Management, Greenoaks Capital, Iconiq Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, 8VC, Marcelo Claure’s Bicycle Capital, DCVC, Haun Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Clocktower Group, Radical Ventures and a handful of emerging managers, like a new $30 million seed fund called Nebular, according to several people familiar with these funds."
2. This is a story of the 2nd gen of Huy Fong, getting greedy and trying to screw their supplier of peppers Underwood Ranches (who actually won in lawsuit).
Huy Fong are getting what's coming to them.
BTW: buy Underwood Ranches Hot sauce instead.
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/huy-fong-sriracha-shortage-2024
3. "We begin with the rather obvious observation that the wanton destruction of facilities integral to the daily lives of non-combatant civilians is almost certainly a war crime.
Supporters of the Russian side will point to the refinery attacks as justification, but the response thus far has been wildly disproportionate to the provocation. They might also call attention to how the US carried out similar raids against mostly civilian targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Kosovo. While these accusations certainly carry some merit, such whataboutisms are only likely to harden the position of both sides, diminishing the prospects of a diplomatic settlement to the war.
The months ahead look set to deliver incredible hardships to millions of innocent civilians. With the warring sides farther apart than ever, those in the West will eventually be forced to choose between two highly unpalatable options: sit idly by while much of the population of Ukraine is devastated, or become a direct participant in a kinetic war with a nuclear superpower.
One way or the other, the calendar will soon demand clarity of intent."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/doom-loop
4. "Going from an angel to a fund manager is a huge jump—as is going from a junior person at a fund to the main person at your own fund. It could take a long time to convince people you can make that leap, but you want to stay in motion as much as possible during that time—remaining in market, keeping your network warm."
5. One of the best conversations in Silicon Valley these days on AI. With guest Elad Gil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBIQdSAKjE
6. No surprise here. This is a super impressive new VC fund. Kevin is an OG of Silicon Valley.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/21/kevin-hartzs-a-raises-its-second-oversubscribed-fund-in-two-years/
7. "Regardless, Series As haven’t grown to nearly the extent of Seeds. During the last 14 years, the ratio of Seeds to Series As has grown from about 1.1 to 1, to 5 to 1. Meanwhile, the ratio of Bs to As is relatively constant : between 3 & 4 to 1.
With excess seed supply & in an era where forward public software multiples have reverted to the mean from their stratospheric levels, Series A rounds are harder to raise. AI startups, the darlings of the current era, are a notable exception. In this category, the heady multiples of 2021 & 2022 still apply.
But for classic SaaS companies, the Series A Crunch is real. In 18 months, the Series B will again become the hardest round to raise."
https://tomtunguz.com/seedpocalypse-2024/
8. Always learn something from Tim Ferriss. Look for patterns of anomalies. This was an old interview but super insightful tips on how to improve your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nos3AXfdFnY
9. "The line between AI opportunity and AI washing is neither clear nor fixed. Sure, it’s obvious for the outliers — Nvidia will continue to register upside powering AI, and shady brokers who claim to use AI to pick stocks will not. But for most firms, clarity will only come with hindsight. Ironically, a year ago the big story was how to detect if someone was using AI (news stories, student papers, lawyers). Today, we’re attempting to discern if a firm is not using AI."
https://www.profgalloway.com/ai-laundromat/
10. This is a "must listen to" discussion from one of the best early stage B2B VCs. It's an insight rich conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0pab-qwSoo&t=3428s
11. "For entrepreneurs, my recommendation is to say “we” when referring to the work being done by your startup and avoid using “I.” “We” recognizes that it’s a team effort and shares credit where credit is due. Entrepreneurs would do well to remember this in their communication."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/06/22/i-vs-we-when-speaking-as-a-founder/
12. The best new show on tech and investing. BG2 at the Coatue Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuurlc-V2Jg
13. An alarming view of the geopolitical future. China is making some smart moves in the Global South. US is in decline mainly due to incompetence and arrogance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJ8NPi_xTA
14. Not sure I agree with this take on the Trump trials. I agree with what this looks like from the outside.
"The remedial mechanism of Society has been desecrated for political gain. There is no recourse or compromise to be had. “The System is rigged, why bother?”
In time people will begin to disregard the law. Laws from on high will be disregarded at the lower levels. They will take the law into their own hands. Hoping to tip the scales of Fate to their favour…
People no longer trust each other. Hell, they don’t even know their neighbours. America and Western Society is collapsing. A jury of your peers? What peers, if there’s no community; they probably don’t even speak your language.
America and the West have become more tribal and factionalized. Fractured by their differences and multiplicities. Cascading down till it reaches the local level. The end of our age of Atomization."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/out-of-the-shadows
15. "Nations go to war for fear, honor, or interest. The PRC pushes the world to the brink of war on at least three different fronts from the Himalayas to Pacific because it has an interest in aggression, it may miscalculate when war will happen or it may misjudge another’s will to go to war, but its aggression drives conflict.
Seizing territory, building islands and fortifications, ramming Filipino ships and cutting off people’s appendages, or shoving an Indian commander off a cliff is not an “accident.” This behavior is not something that can be managed as if it were a civil marriage dispute. When one party is the abuser in a relationship, you don’t treat them as equally at fault (at least you shouldn’t, in the 21st century).
Because that’s all the Chinese Communist Party is: the abusive husband who has a lot of guns and ammo, is deeply paranoid, thinks the world owes him everything, and takes a swing at every neighbor he thinks he can bully.
Any war that breaks out over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or elsewhere isn’t happening as if we tripped and fell into war in the dark. The PRC is to blame, and we should be doing everything we can to ensure they know what happens if they keep pushing."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/there-is-no-accidental-war
16. "I’m really worried AI is going to make all of this worse. I hear all the same things about AI that I heard at the beginning of other waves of tech about how it will make things better. Yet, I don’t hear any acknowledgement that we made mistakes that time around and now have ideas how to improve with the next wave of innovation."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/lessons-from-filterworld-and-a-warning
17. "The idea of America as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II—innovative, productive, and hard-working—is now firmly a part of the story we tell about ourselves. It is a source of pride, patriotism, and inspiration. And it’s a true story.
But that was then, and this is now.
Today, Americans are waking up to the reality that we can’t make things in sufficient quantities to keep us safe, while our principal adversary is flooding the world with its manufactures. Many of our allies are in even worse shape.
Rebuilding and rearming before it’s too late are the urgent tasks before us. Thankfully, industrial decline is a solvable problem—anda choice. We can make better choices, create better incentives, and use the strengths we still have to our advantage.
Not only is mass production a solvable problem. It’s already being solved. Half of our business at Palantir Technologies, where I work as chief technology officer, is with commercial clients. We work every day to create software that helps the free world’s most important industrial concerns supercharge production, see into their supply chains, and empower their workers, from the C-suite to the assembly line.
I’ve seen the results, and I believe this model—what’s sometimes called software-defined production—is key to rebuilding the American industrial base."
18. "So it is not that hard to see a link between missiles devastating Israel’s north, Biden’s plans, global tensions and how the most odious forces are escalating this conflict into America’s main street. It will require rare political talent and guts to turn events around on both the frontlines in Lebanon and the streets of LA. So far we have seen little of it but events may now force Biden’s hand to act decisively."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/silence-before-the-storm
19. "While there are still many companies sub-$200m in revenue who go public, the late-stage private markets enable those who would wait to achieve much higher scale."
https://tomtunguz.com/ipo-size-2024/
20. "When hegemony is broken, conflict returns. At worst, the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. At best, innovation returns. When there is no dominant power to ensure peace, there is also no bureaucracy to ensure stagnation. No global hall monitor. The same environment that produced Sparta and Athens––one of iteration and competition––is allowed to flourish.
Hegemony brings peace, competition brings innovation.
If America slips from total hegemon to standard first power, we’ll see a much more dynamic global environment. Ideally, the US will rise to the challenge and become more competitive as well. Decentralized currency means small network states can operate with a globally valid currency––no confederate dollars. Startup founders are now using LLMs to run companies with 2 people instead of 20. The same may be true of countries.
Athens held total hegemony for 67 years. The United States has enjoyed the same for 79 years. Now a challenge to American hegemony paired with advances in tech set the stage for the rise of smaller, agile nation states and organizations to compete."
https://americanreformer.org/2024/06/rise-of-the-dutch-republics/
21. "To Run the World helps explain why Russia’s grasping for great-power status often looks so irrational. The Kremlin repeatedly punches above its weight, and strikes militarily before it is ready economically or strategically. Its outsize ambitions, inherited from the Russian empire and often challenged by the West – which learned in the 20th century to treat Russia as both culturally and ideologically alien – are often responsible for such behaviour.
With no sign that Russia’s ambitions are waning, the book offers a silver lining of sorts. Russia’s policies can change. After failing to gain legitimacy as an adversary, it tends to pursue the same goal as a partner. Its war on Ukraine has failed to give it legitimacy in the West and has positioned Russia as a weak junior partner of China in the east. Russia will have to change its strategy in future. For that to happen the West needs to show resolve, as Truman did in the 1950s, Kennedy in the 1960s, and Reagan in the 1980s."
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/06/russias-great-power-complex
22. "The first thing to understand about this war is that it would have been entirely avoidable if the US had utilized historical American pragmatism and first principles when building its post-Cold War national security strategy. It did not. Instead, it allowed its decision-making to fall victim to greed, trendy theories, and tribalism. These flaws led to a policy that:
--Treated Russia as an enemy, even though they were democratizing
--Embraced China as a partner, even though its totalitarian government was still in control
--Allowed a networked swarm that demonized Putin for Trump’s election in 2016 to drive its policy response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Now, the US is rapidly moving to contain China by bolstering its regional alliances and building a strategic “thorn” that perpetually threatens them (in Russia’s case, Ukraine, in China’s, Taiwan). Unfortunately, as it is prone to do, the US has decided to embark on this strategy without seriously considering its consequences or minimizing its vulnerability to an escalation in hostilities."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/permawar
23. "So in other words, by reaching the future a little ahead of the West, Japan, and its content creators, began creating things that met the needs of its children and adults – increasingly indoors, isolated, and in need of stimulation and comfort and escape – just as the children and adults of other nations were approaching these same sorts of societal milestones. This wasn’t canny – it was lucky. Effectively Japan is surfing waves of societal trends that radiate outward from itself to post-industrial nations around the world.
But a bigger part is because successive generations of American tastemakers have grown up on Japanese fantasies themselves – which, bringing things full circle, is how an all-American sports celebrity like Noah Lyles can make Japanese tastes a big part of his public persona, and nobody bats an eye."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/the-united-states-of-japan
24. "But if Canadians are so ambitious, why do we buy into the narrative of a “bronze medal mentality”?
Because to do otherwise would require us to accept an inconvenient truth: that the problem isn’t the founders, it’s the ecosystem.
It would require us to accept a fact that many Canadian founders have come to terms with over the years: in many cases, the best path to fulfill their ambitions involves leaving Canada."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/canadas-problem-isnt-ambition
25. Happen to be in Detroit and wish I had more time to check out this city. But it's really undergoing a renaissance. 2025!
https://www.michigan.org/article/trip-idea/perfect-detroit-travel-guide-first-time-visitor
26. This is a sign of one of the most important trends: Hardware as a Service.
Will be a key piece of VCs coming into manufacturing. #Reindustrialize
https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/state-of-haas-report/
27. "Lübeck’s and Hamburg’s access to salt supplies had given them unique advantages in the herring fishing industries of the North Sea and Baltic. Dutch salt-upon-salt, however, was just about as good as any other refined white salt for preserving fish, while also being much cheaper and more easily scaled. France, Spain and Portugal, with plenty of coast and infinite sunshine, could easily expand the production of bay salt to serve as the basic feedstock, while Dutch peat to fuel its refining was, as we’ve seen, for all intents and purposes inexhaustible. By contrast the traditional sources of the Baltic’s white salt, like the Lüneburg salt springs, were constrained by the supply of wood fuel for boiling the brine.
To expand in the same way would have required the creation and maintenance of many more forests up-river into Germany, on land that was already spoken for, and thus expensive to convert. There was simply no contest: thanks to their uniquely expandable supply of white salt, the northern Dutch could catch and preserve far more herring to a high quality.
Yet despite this game of New World whack-a-mole, the Dutch still just about managed to keep their commerce afloat. It was widely acknowledged that whereas the Spanish empire drew vast quantities of gold and silver from the New World, the Dutch seemed to have as great a “gold mine” of their own in the humble salted herrings of the North Sea."
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-dutch-salten
28. This is a great convo on the state of VC and AI in Silicon Valley. It's very educational.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhBAgSQnhVs
29. "But as I’ve been arguing for a while now, there’s one region of the world that’s well-positioned to grow and industrialize in the new era of geopolitical fragmentation. This is the region I call SASEA — an acronym for South Asia and Southeast Asia. South Asia includes India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and some smaller countries nearby. Southeast Asia includes the big island countries of Indonesia and the Philippines, the medium-sized mainland countries of Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar, the small rich countries of Singapore and Malaysia, and a few others.
I coined this term — I pronounce it like “SAZ-ee-uh” — because no one else seemed like they were going to do it. The Economist briefly talked about “Altasia”, but the term never caught on, and it also included developed countries like Japan and Korea. SASEA is a much more cohesive bloc because it’s geographically contiguous, and most of it is still in the early stages of industrialization.
I don’t think people realize just how important SASEA is. It may not look big on a Mercator projection, but its population size is absolutely enormous; India alone is bigger than China now, and the region as a whole contains a full third of humanity. SASEA has far more people than Africa, East Asia (excluding Southeast Asia), or the entire Western hemisphere.
SASEA really is globalization’s next frontier. The age of export-led industrialization is not finished — geopolitical tensions will not return us to a world of local supply chains, nor will China become the world’s single factory floor. Yes, it’s a time of tensions, competition, and fragmentation. But so was the first Cold War. And just as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan reaped the benefits of Cold War 1 when access to Western markets drove their industrialization, the billions of people living in South Asia and Southeast Asia are well-positioned to benefit from the new age of geopolitical rivalries."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-age-of-sasea
30. "A weak manufacturing base also means fewer opportunities for knowledge spillovers—the transfer of knowledge between different industries or problems—and clustering effects—the benefits that accrue when an industry is concentrated in a specific region. America’s most globally competitive industries are all undergirded by these characteristics: there is a reason Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood are all physical locations. By bringing people together, you get benefits greater than the sum of their parts.
Finally, rebuilding domestic manufacturing is just plain cool, and that is an underrated fact. It seems to me that America needs a renewed sense of national pride and more positive visions for the future. The right offers nationalism, but it is a kind of wounded nationalism—scared more than proud. The left offers a poststructuralist attack on the concept of America itself. Neither offers voters much to be excited about, and as a result, we are a cynical country.
Fortunately, there is good news. The tools required to push the frontiers of manufacturing forward play to many traditional American strengths: software, artificial intelligence, automation.
I believe that we can use our strengths in software, cloud computing, and AI to fundamentally change the capabilities and cost structures of manufacturers. International competitors, predicated on higher manufacturing employment than the US, could even struggle to compete. There is a path—perhaps a narrow one, but a path nonetheless."
https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/america-the-serious
31. Wisdom from everyone's favorite new Tiger Dad. Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
"To wrap up, I think Jensen summed up his life and work principles well in a recent commencement speech at Caltech. In his words:
--Believe in something unconventional and unexplored but let it be informed and let it be reasoned. Dedicate yourself to making it happen.
--See setbacks as new opportunities. Your pain and suffering are your ultimate superpowers. Of all the things that I value, intelligence is not at the top of that list. My ability to endure pain and suffering, to work on something for a very, very long period of time, to handle setbacks, and to see the opportunity just around the corner I consider to be my superpowers, and I hope they're yours.
--Find a craft. It's not important to decide on day one, and it's not even important to decide any time soon, but I hope you do find a craft that you want to dedicate your lifetime to perfecting and be your life's work.
--Prioritize your life. There are so many things going on and so many things to do, but prioritize your life, and you will have plenty of time to do the important things."
https://creatoreconomy.so/p/15-life-and-work-principles-from-jensen
32. What an enlightening and excellent conversation. So many good frameworks for thriving in modern day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDzpFk7u8I
33. Manufacturing on my mind. Vietnam, Indonesia, America & Argentina well positioned for the future assuming the investments are made now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlr-SmmBC_A
34. One of my favorite weekly conversations in Silicon Valley. Good to watch if you want to know what's up here in tech land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrodU2nqLCQ
35. "AI adoption is slower than expected in many spaces. Some of the reasons are straightforward, but others are more subtle.
Most leaders wants to inject AI into their business to develop a competitive advantage. There are four challenges."
https://tomtunguz.com/why-ai-adoption-slower/
36. "His climb underscores how interwoven those ties can become: OpenAI, for example, is an important customer of Scale, which supplies AI companies with contract workers to fine-tune their data. Last fall, Altman and Wang actually discussed the prospect of OpenAI buying Scale, according to a person informed about the talks, though the deal never reached a formal stage.
Instead, Wang kept Scale independent and raised $1 billion over the course of several months, with Scale at a $13.8 billion valuation. Thanks partly to Scale’s deals with OpenAI, revenue is booming, and Scale has forecast more than $1 billion in sales this year, catapulting it to the top ranks of generative AI companies by sales.
For the most part, those sales come from what amounts to AI grunt work: Scale employs a vast but relatively low-paid workforce to label and train the data that underpin the AI systems developed by Scale’s customers, including OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Alphabet. They rely on Scale contractors to push their AI products toward creating more human-like responses; the contractors teach the AI by writing their own responses to questions submitted to chatbots.
Over the past eight years, Wang has successfully steered Scale in whatever direction AI was leaning. In the process, he has proven himself a crafty opportunist, shifting Scale toward fresh pools of revenue when old ones dried up. His nimbleness comes from considerable careful study.
“I don’t think he figured out where the world is going by sitting in his bedroom and thinking about it. He spends time with the right people. He gathers a lot of data on where the world is going and can reorient the business around it,” one Scale investor told me.
Part of his polarizing reputation also comes from the fact that Wang holds grudges. Unhappy with high staff turnover amid intense industrywide competition for AI workers, he has prevented ex-employees from selling shares in an upcoming secondary offering—forcing them to continue waiting to sell their illiquid stock.
When I discussed Wang and his relentless scramble to the top of Silicon Valley with a fellow founder who knows him well, the founder described Wang as someone who “needed success like he needed oxygen.”
37. "The reason Zuck and the other Axis powers haven’t built age verification into their platforms is it will reduce their profits (because they will serve fewer ads to kids), which will suppress their stock prices, and the job of a public company CEO is to increase the stock price. Period, full stop, end of strategic plan. So long as the negative impact to the stock price caused by the bad PR of teen suicide and depression is less than the positive impact of the incremental ad revenue obtained through unrestricted algorithmic manipulation of those teens, the rational, shareholder-driven thing to do is fight age-verification requirements.
If we want the platforms to make their products safe for children, we need to change the incentives — force them to bear the cost of their damage. Internalize the externalities, in economist-speak. There are three forces powerful enough to do this: the market, plaintiff lawyers, and the government.
The market solution would be to let consumers decide if they want to be exploited and manipulated. And by consumers, I mean “teenagers.” One big shortcoming of this approach is that teenagers are idiots. I have proof here, as I’m raising two and used to be one. My job as their dad is to be their prefrontal cortex until it shows up."
Mass Versus Class: Customer Segments Matter
Outside of reading, I spend most of my time meeting and talking with founders either in my now very large portfolio or with new founders. One of the biggest challenges facing founders is understanding the market and actual customers. A common mistake is that they target too large & wide of a customer base initially.
In early days, the more specific a niche is, the easier it is to learn about them and target them. This is where positioning comes in.
Positioning is defined in Wikipedia as “the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors and different from the concept of brand awareness.”
I highly recommend the excellent business book Position by Trout & Ries. It’s a must read. Basically, what they posit is that your customer is busy, distracted and has very little brain space for new products.
If you are not in the top 3 of the category or in a specialized niche then you will be nowhere in their minds. This is one of the reasons for the failure of many new products despite the astounding amounts of advertising put behind their launches. Being stuck in the middle and thus usually not standing for anything or too general.
Assuming you’ve done a good job identifying your initial customer segment, your go to market is just much more straightforward. And this is where the idea of “mass versus class” comes in.
Ultimately you either go premium/luxury or you go mass market. It’s the difference between Erewon versus Safeway, Neiman Marcus versus Kmart, Roam or Bare Burger (my fave burger places) versus Mcdonalds, Bentley versus Ford/GM. I think you get the picture.
There is money to be made going in either direction which makes sense. In almost every category of product and business you have 3 big players who have 80 percent of the market share and usually are mass market focussed.
But on the other side you have very small but focused super niches that can charge very high premiums because they are specialists in their sector. This usually makes up the rest of the market share.
Unfortunately every player in the middle gets crushed in between them because they don’t have the scale of the big 3 and thus pricing power over suppliers. Nor are they specialized enough to charge the premiums that lead to big margins.
Focus on where the money is. As the excellent BowtiedBull writes about on the consumer side:
“You know the baby boomers have the money and the assets. You know their kids will have the money and the assets when they move onto the after life.
At this point we know which trends matter: boomers and their children. This made it pretty easy to predict the growth of pets and plants. Now? The boomer generation is getting older and the millennial generation is starting to barely taste that sweet sweet inheritance (top end of range of millennials).”
For B2B startups, this would be fortune 500 companies for B2B focussed founders versus targeting SMB customers. All things being equal, I think too many founders overlook the premium side of customers. In other words, go after class, not mass. Or start with class, then migrate down to mass. It usually doesn’t work the other way brand wise. It’s a different story when it comes to software products but this is a whole different discussion and write up.
Net net: go mass or go class.
Throwing Stones: We’re All Flawed
For people in Silicon Valley, Chamath Palihapitiya has long been a controversial personality. A rags to riches story, & fellow Canuck come to Silicon Valley. Having made his first fortune at Facebook as the guy who led growth there, he parlayed that billion into several billion via ownership of Golden State Warriors and investing in many public and private investments via his Social Capital vehicle. Known for being outspoken, you either loved him or hated him. I admired him for his intelligence and for calling out the many hypocrisy and unspoken truths in Silicon Valley.
But perhaps what has tarnished his reputation is his flogging of SPACs during 2020 and 2021 which many saw as a pump and dump scheme.
Eric Newcomer wrote about this:
“He lent his reputation to a slew of companies going public via his special purpose acquisition companies. He was the ruinous SPAC king.
Now, almost a year after calling two SPACs quits, he’s still in denial that he was the pied piper who enticed retailed investors into betting on speculative, money-losing companies. He has said he made roughly $750 million by throwing his reputation behind the stocks, taking them public via SPACs that he helmed, and then selling shares on the public markets. He hyped the stocks, he sold his shares, and he made a profit while the retail investors who trusted him lost money.”
He has gotten much criticism of this online and offline. Some of it was very much justified.
I’ve drawn several lessons from this. One: the higher, richer and more prominent you are, the more of a higher standard you have to live and act by. Or at least pretend to follow. Either that or go “Anon” or “stealth wealth.” If you choose being well known, you better watch value your reputation over the short term money or else you will get taken down. Or at minimum attacked.
The second lesson is that most of us should look in the mirror before you cast stones. It’s so easy to attack someone online behind a keyboard. It's one of the worst things to come out of the internet.
If we are honest, everyone has made mistakes and bad calls. There are many things I regret doing myself due to bad judgment, desperation or stupidity and ignorance coming up. The point is not to make the bad calls on the big important decisions like where you live, who you marry and who you do business with and how you do it.
Why? There really is karma in the world. If you treat people badly, word gets around fast. What you put out in the world comes back to you. This is both as an individual or organization. There is direct correlation on how a company is rated on Glassdoor and how they do in the long run. There is always a reckoning.
I don’t know about you but I want to sleep well at night. I do not want to be looking over my shoulders all the time just for ill gotten gains. Most people eventually get what they deserve in the end.
Be Grateful: Simple Things in Life that Make You Happy
I’ve spent the last few years doing gratitude practice. Thinking about the things I am happy for. I didn’t really think it worked or impacted me until recently. It took a trip back home to my hometown Vancouver to appreciate all the simple things that we all take for granted.
My mother recently got hip surgery and due to complications had a longer than expected recovery time. The impact was that she had a hard time moving around. She couldn’t go down the stairs without help, let alone leave the house. Even taking a shower, she would need help from my dad. Thankfully she is recovering quickly.
It also reminded me of a good friend who had a freak bike accident. He broke both his arms. So you think so what? Well, you can’t put food in your own mouth as you can’t use your hands. You can’t type anything in a computer or phone so you can’t do anything with work. You can’t clean yourself in the bath or go to the toilet by yourself.
Think about that. How helpless you are in either of these situations. No mobility or no capacity for handling anything. No freedom and total dependence on others, which is especially painful and glaring for an adult.
So next time you think your life sucks, remember to appreciate what you have now. Having no injuries. Being able to take care of yourself. You have your health, your independence and mobility. Don’t take these for granted. Simple basic things make a difference. Be grateful and be happy.
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."