Degeneration & Despair: The Coming Great Cope in America
I was hanging out in Italy with several friends for a wedding in 2023. In one of the numerous conversations, a buddy was talking about some young Italians he met. He described them as “nice but no prospects in life.”
When I asked what he meant, he said: “these guys literally have no future and they know it.”
I guess that's why they are just living purely in the now. Sadly, it seems they have zero ambitions or thoughts to change this or their circumstances. They are setting their own limits. It’s so sad.
But this is representative of a very wide swath of America these days.
We have an upcoming generation that has gotten spoiled, entitled and aimless. They think they deserve that glamorous and rich lifestyle they see on Instagram and other social media. But they are themselves unwilling to do the hard work, move cities/countries or take any risks.
We will see a large portion of society move down one economic strata. Dating will be brutal for both males and females.
For most Americans, we will see rising crime, rage on streets and the middle class disappear. This is accompanied by a clueless, unaccountable & grifting political class and fast declining state capacity.
That is why I agree with what the smart folks at BowTiedBull have been saying for years now: we are going to see a tremendous amount of complete degeneracy. What do I mean by degeneracy? I mean excess food, alcohol, drink and sleeping around/ whoring. Partying like mad. Las Vegas & Miami will do very well in this new world I think. It will be completely rampant hedonism to an unhealthy degree. Why? This is the ultimate COPE when they realize their lives are going nowhere. Just like the young Italian men my friend met, absolutely zero prospects in life.
And this degeneracy will be promoted in the mainstream media. It already is. Why? Because what other way can you keep a restive populace distracted and contained.
So watch this space and don’t get caught up in it. I’ve said this many times: this crisis actually does provide massive opportunities to pull ahead. If you are ready for it.
If you are one of these people feeling stuck in life. Troy Francis tweeted some good advice:
“If you're really stuck in dating, or any area of life
Sometimes you need to go nuclear
- Ditch your loser friends
- Move to a different city/county
- Take on radically different habits
- Completely overhaul your personality
What you've been doing until now hasn't worked”
Just move somewhere. Anywhere. Make new & better friends. Get a new job. Motion creates emotion.
Start a new business, maybe even one catering to this degeneration. I wouldn’t personally but if this is the only way you can pull ahead, do it, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Stack cash as money equals freedom. Freedom to escape if you need. Otherwise have good home/ private security and shooting skills to protect yourself from the desperate crooks and druggies out there.
Just stay focused on your health, your family, keep learning and building skills and your business/craft. And make sure you carefully curate and build your tribe of fellow driven, healthy and ambitious individuals. This may be the only way to keep sane and moving forward in life.
Lessons in Living a Dolce Life: My Italian Trip
I came to Italy for a VC friend's wedding in September 2023 in Apulia. Ended up staying at this very nice 1400 year old B&B hotel, in the hills, surrounded by extensive groves of Olive trees that run as far as the eye can see. There is also a great view of the Mediterranean Sea from here. Absolutely stunning and a very relaxing place.
The owner was walking us around and I asked him about his life here. He said he only spent 5 months here during the summer. He spent most of the year in Milan where his business was. Now this is good living.
I admit I am a city boy. I love big cities but there is much to be said about splitting your time between your city home and a rural country place. This is actually how many of the wealthy and the not so wealthy Europeans live. You get a dose of the opportunity, excitement, buzz and diversity of the big city; balanced by the quiet, peace and nature of the countryside.
Being here in nature brought a strange feeling of solace to me. Especially in light of all the troubles I’ve been facing at home.
After more than 2 decades of gallivanting across the globe building businesses, peace and quiet is probably something I could do with a lot more of. In fact after the last few years, this peace and quiet is something most of us could do more with too.
Spending time in Italy I realize just how unbalanced my own lifestyle is. And have realized I have much to learn from Italian living. Being more present. Having more exposure to nature. And of course, eating good, healthy delicious food which dovetails perfectly into my preferred lifestyle.
So my goal for the next few years. Be more Italian! :)
Be a Pioneer: Immigrants Are the Best Entrepreneurs
Louis L’amour was one of the best Western writers in America. There was a beautiful passage he wrote in the intro to the Sackett series that perfectly describes pioneers and immigrants to America and any other country.
“Physically and psychologically, the pioneers' need for change had began in the old countries with their decision to migrate. In most cases their decisions were personal, ordered by no one. Even when migration was ordered or forced, the people who survived were characterized by physical strength, the capacity to endure, and not uncommonly, a rebellious nature.”
Sounds like a perfect description and fodder to be a good entrepreneur doesn’t it?
This is why some of the best performing founders are immigrants or children of immigrants. It’s a much quoted statistic that 50% of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley are immigrants or children of immigrants.
Some of the top performing Venture capitalist funds like One Way or Unshackled Ventures purely focus on immigrant founders. No surprise their performance is unbelievably good.
America is born from immigration and our strength has been from attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. Long may this continue. Louis L’amour wrote: “In a new land, all things are possible.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 6th, 2024
“A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.” – Michael Larsen
State of venture investing & fundraising in Europe. Lessons post boom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLguB-j8E9E
2. I enjoyed this interview with a Deeptech VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8so2ijONKA
3. Interesting discussion on longevity & biotech. I've long been fascinated by the sector. But I always found it hard to understand, thus hard for me to invest in.
But biotech is really the future in my view. The first trillionaire will come from this sector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWLb4EvUwoQ
4. "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
5. It's always enlightening and motivating at the same time when I listen to Wes Watson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RttYlGP1fG8
6. "Billionaires like Musk and Durov shouldn’t be above the law. But it’s clear the law isn’t being applied fairly or equally across all billionaires. Only those who refuse to censor or allow complete government control of our data seem to be targets.
Musk and Durov are our Templar Knights. The governments of the EU, France, and Brazil are modern-day equivalents of Prince Philip IV having a temper tantrum.
Our leaders won’t stop painting targets on people like Durov and Musk. Because it’s never been about crime. If it was, every other messaging app and social platform would have been shut down already.
Governments despise independent power."
https://anticitizen.com/p/kill-the-messenger
7. "We live in an age of grifters, hucksters, scammers, and narrative weavers. Everyone is looking for the opportunity to take advantage of others at the expense of any long-term value. And, what's worse, they've managed to craft such a strong sense of self that they can't acknowledge the way in which they've taken advantage of people.
I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life NOT like a status quo novel where they're guaranteed not only to be the hero, but to survive, succeed, and thrive.
I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel that it really is. Choices and consequences. Consider the possibility that you are the bad guy. Consider the possibility that you're wrong. And then explore accordingly."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/against-your-own-self-interest
8. "Status limbo is a state of ambiguity and future uncertainty about your status, both in your estimation and as perceived by others.
When in limbo, your status is challenging to pinpoint, both for yourself and those around you. And your future status is uncertain, with no visible path in front of you charting your next steps.
To get status, you have to give up status. You have to sacrifice some existing status to make it back and more. This is especially true in creative fields and high-upside opportunities. Writers, musicians, actors, directors, entrepreneurs must all do their time in status limbo. And you don’t know how long that time will be. How well you tolerate this state can be the “winning” difference between you and someone just as talented and hard-working as you.
The more status you have, the more you may feel yourself giving it up. That’s the price that comes with the privilege of your starting position. Are you willing to pay it?"
https://www.workingtheorys.com/p/status-limbo
9. Amen.
"Many of the assumptions underlying the startup boom of the 2010s were fundamentally misguided. In my opinion, we are now exiting the age of glut and entering the era of the gritty startup—companies that take the best of what we learned and reject the harmful habits of yesteryear. This is not just about being “lean” or cash-flow positive. I genuinely believe that we are on the cusp of a spiritual and operational revolution in how we build organizations.
Gritty startups will still provide generous equity packages, but they won’t hire the same volume of people. They’ll be smaller, faster, weirder, different. Employees will use AI to do 10 times more work than what previous generations of employees did. It’ll be a hard transition for most—it is tough to accept that expectations are 10 times what they were before—but it is also deeply empowering. At Every, we like to say that AI will make you the most creative you’ve ever been.
In many ways, gritty startups will look the same as what came before. They’ll still be scrappy and hard. They will still pursue big visions—and if anything, their visions will be even bigger. But crucially, they will know what they are—and that starts with the recognition that AI means you can build a fundamentally more effective company. You don’t build the next Google by acting in the same way it did. You do it by building something new."
https://every.to/napkin-math/welcome-to-the-era-of-the-gritty-startup
10. Another example of the rot happening in Academia in America. Incredible.
Bureaucracy at work. BITFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWMpB0fK1Sk
11. So much to learn from Bill Gurley, one of the most storied vc investors in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Glbvtw9Z4
12. This is a solid punch in the face for understanding how to scale sales teams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBxwWXlA4Po
13. "So, all allies are being roped into place. America is pulling Japan, Australia, and others like Singapore closer together. Russia is pulling in China and the BRICs.
The US is actively demonstrating this shift by moving its battle command operations into both Japan and Australia while making it clearer to China and Russia that the US will not tolerate any encroachment on these two allies. The US is requiring Japan and Australia to become more deeply integrated into the US commercial economy and the American strategic security space. While preparing to decelerate from Taiwan and Ukraine, the US is increasing its presence in Asia, especially in Japan and Australia. This clearly signals to China and Russia that these two countries are sacrosanct.
Similarly, The Washington Post writes, “Australia offers U.S. a vast new military launchpad in China conflict: Australia is expanding its northern military bases, with U.S. support, to counter China's growing threat. Critics quip it’s become the “51st state.” However, this is controversial in Australia because it remains caught between the US and China. China remains a critical trading partner, and the US remains a critical defense ally. Australia’s job at the moment is to try to avoid being asked to choose sides. It watches carefully as both China and the US jockey for footholds and influence across the many island nations of the Pacific that lie between America’s forward presence in Guam and Hawaii. I’ve called this the Cold War in Hot Places. The Lowy Institute calls it the “Great Game” in the Pacific Islands. Taiwan is no longer the only island that matters between the US and China. Seemingly unimportant, remote and small Pacific island nations are now central to global geopolitics, which further enhances Australia's strategic importance to the US.
Some call Australia an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” but the reality is that Australia would rather not test that proposition. Japan, Australia, and the world would be relieved if the stress between the superpowers had de-escalated."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-asia-pac-australia
14. "This is where Australia’s position becomes critical. Its commercial well-being is linked to China, and its strategic well-being is linked to the US. As such, Australia is beautifully placed to help diplomatically encourage these two superpowers to keep talking and find a way forward. Australia is talking to the Pacific Island nations.
The South China Morning Post recently wrote, “Beijing has been restrained in response to Pacific island leaders backing Canberra’s regional policing plan – a move seen as a “diplomatic coup” and a “masterstroke” for Australia as it tries to counter China’s security presence in the region.”
To the world, this may seem inconsequential. For those in the know, this is a central part of managing geopolitical tensions and moving the superpowers away from conflict and toward cooperation."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-asia-pac-australia-54f
15. "As I look at the broader venture ecosystem, it rests on the laurels of best practices and pattern recognition. The long duration and volatility of return cycles permits allocators (both on the LP and GP side) to simply stay the course on what has been done (and is perceived as safe), rather than what is new. This has been gamified to feed the AUM of large scale asset managers - they have adapted and evolved in the Darwinian nature they were supposed to and I place no fault on them for doing so (it’s an evolutionary function of the free market).
However, my fear is that we will see an extinction level event to the venture industry if left unaddressed. This is akin to when you see an foreign predator come into an ecosystem that they are suited to dominate and effectively kill off all other life, eroding their own feed supply and ultimately collapsing the ecosystem.
Unlike in RE, PE or public investing (where small timers can win by accessing obscure opportunities and the returns are normally distributed), consolidation in venture (given power law and the needs for downstream funding) may yield a landscape where ONLY the megas survive unless thoughtful action is taken to embrace greater diversification - in terms of both capital and cognitive thought."
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/the-extinction-of-venture-capital
16. "Like Pavlovian dogs, we all believe the correct response to rate cuts is to BTFD. This behavioural response is rooted in the recent memories of Pax Americana’s subdued inflation. Whenever there was a threat of deflation, which is terrible for financial asset holders, aka rich cunts, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) responded forcefully by pressing the Brrr button on its money printer. The dollar is the global reserve currency, creating easy monetary conditions for the world.
The effects of global fiscal policies to fight the COVID hoax or pandemic, depending on your view, ended an era of deflation and ushered in an era of inflation. Central banks belatedly acknowledged the inflationary effects of COVID-19, justified monetary and fiscal policies, and hiked rates. Global bond markets, and most importantly, the US bond market, believed our monetary masters’ seriousness about vanquishing inflation and did not send yields 2 da moon.
However, the assumption is that the witches and warlocks at the helm of various central banks will continue raising the price of money and reducing its supply to appease the bond market. This is a very dubious assumption, given the current political climate."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/boom-times-delayed
17. Great discussion today on NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyMXHVeR9rQ
18. SO much here re: the Data ecosystem and implications for startups and enterprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLzsLgacR6c
19. This is a grim forecast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPECLBd22Eo
20. This is an eye-opening discussion. Heretical to this day's stupid woke sentiments and I love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef09eK5zHSk&t=2703s
21. This is always insightful and interesting. Global Macro and geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KBZw9fIO7Q
22. The most interesting and original VC fund in the world. Founders Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xHxZqGIyIg
23. All seems surprising but I guess we will see. Net net: More manufacturing jobs in America and lots of inflation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-VQzjxHaWc
24. Always love this show. Fun yet also education. Get a good zeitgeist of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhK0rlfpsvs
25. "Over the past two decades America expended vast resources to fight scheduled wars that, at a strategic level, resulted in failure. The grand “nation-building” and “state-building” projects pursued by successive administrations, Democrat and Republican, depleted our national resources, shrank the nation’s military to the point where we are able to fight only in one major theater, reduced and consolidated our defense industrial base such that we no longer have the capacity to produce weapons and munitions at speed and scale, and most of all, sapped public confidence that our leaders are able to provide effectively for our security and defense, and to do so at an acceptable cost.
During the two decades of the Global War on Terror and “overseas contingency operations” we seem to have forgotten the basic verities of great power politics, i.e., that there is no substitute for hard power, and that in a state-on-state near-peer conflict a country’s military capabilities ultimately rest on its manufacturing capacity, its manpower reserves, and its human capital, for without them no nation will have the requisite resilience to deter and, if need be, defeat its enemies.
The United States needs a generational investment in defense, an effort that will require the next administration to articulate a clear vision of victory – not in normative terms and values, but one that speaks directly to geopolitics, our economic welfare, and the security of our homeland.
We need a strategy that returns national security priorities to our economic policy-making, speaks directly to the imperative of re-shoring our critical manufacturing and supply chains, and most all is grounded in the clear articulation of the hierarchy of our national interests. Those critical of increased defense spending argue that the American public will not support more military spending, but the truth is that as of today nobody has made a clear case to the public about how dangerous the international system has become, and what is at stake."
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/06/phase_zero_of_the_coming_war_1056517.html
26. For anyone who cares about the art and craft of super early stage venture capital, this was a great conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYWNMd6LkUU
27. "My bias is probably obvious: I lean towards the abundance side of the spectrum. I know you have to take leaps of faith to build a successful company, even if that means having a smaller role and less control. I want to have the biggest possible impact on the market, build wealth, and bring a fantastic team along for the ride. It’s also more fun.
I’ve met founders who put their energy into “not getting screwed.” They obsess about dilution, giving the smallest equity grants possible when they hire people. They don’t trust investors, even ones with stellar reputations. They hire junior people who won’t challenge them, or they even try to outsource critical functions. I’ve never seen one of these founders do well.
But abundance doesn’t mean abandoning caution and being indiscriminate about who to trust and what risks to take. Abundance decisions, which usually involve who you want to invite into your startup, need to be made carefully. You need to do plenty of due diligence and take risks only when you have a good chance of getting more in return."
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/choose-abundance-fb8b7df8de17
28. The rise of Vertical SaaS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-lKAsrllE
29. "Emerging manager backers such as Cendana Capital and Screendoor remain supporters; joining them in Wischoff’s third fund is the foundation for Children’s Health, the Dallas-based pediatric healthcare system. There, Wischoff impressed the investment team by flying in to present in person with her young son in July, just four weeks after giving birth. “She has a really tenacious personality that she has parlayed into investing,” said Yangge Seaman, head of private investments at Children’s Health, who added she was impressed by Wischoff’s pristine founder reference calls and focus areas tied closely to her past startup experience. “There’s a lot of strategic coherence. It’s not random that she picked those areas,” Seaman added.
Wischoff’s online presence also helped. A consistent poster on X and TikTok, she’s also gone unexpectedly viral in recent years — including when she posted about closing an investment with a founder while on her honeymoon (she was bored on a cathedral tour). Last year, when Midas List investor Keith Rabois dismissed her critique of the Miami startup ecosystem as that of a “third tier VC,” the immediate blowback turned the would-be insult into an internet meme."
https://archive.ph/22TY9#selection-599.0-599.464
30. Can't wait to read his book. A discussion on where America's youth is going wrong: lazy, entitled and intolerant to disagreement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDiVZ7RFtU&t=1446s
31. "Much like the myth — that I first learned about in business school — that captains should grab the yoke and fly the plane alone in an emergency. It turns out that cockpit crews get far better performance by maximizing teamwork and communication in emergency situations. Coincidentally, this practice is called CRM (crew resource management).
I understand the attraction of founder mode. It sounds cool. But while it’s more romantic to imagine the founder grabbing the yoke to drive the company, it’s more effective to have a strong team working together to face challenges."
https://kellblog.com/2024/09/07/we-are-not-the-same-the-obligatory-post-on-founder-mode/
32. "So what happened between Chinese explorer Zheng He and British Captain Elliot that led to this stark reversal in supremacy? This is a fascinating point of contention among economists and historians, mainly because it begs a question that precedes the question of “Will the West continue to rule the world?” with a new question:
Does the West rule the world?
Or, in the bigger span of history, has the West stumbled into a 200-year hiccup amidst an otherwise 4000-year history of Eastern dominance?
Fun, to debate."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/who-is-really-in-charge
33. "If you are finding yourself squeezed for money as prices rise, realize the important fact: Prices will NOT stop rising.
You can either live extremely frugally (which in my opinion is not a great life) or you can find a way to increase your income.
Personally I much prefer the latter (even though you should manage lifestyle inflation) because there’s a limit to how much you can cut costs but no limit to how much you can make.
Pick any online business and work on it for a few years and it will set you free.
Even if you fail the first few times, the things you learn will help you in the next one (also known as falling forward).
If you think you can just focus on your wage slave job and “wait for prices to come down”, you are like the base public – delusional, ignorant, and stupid.
You have been warned."
https://lifemathmoney.com/inflation-will-come-down-does-not-mean-what-you-think/
34. "Our leaders know these taxes are unpopular and controversial. So, what better way to get the population to say yes to them than by saying, “It’ll only be for the rich?”
In fact, this is exactly how US Federal income taxes were initially proposed in 1913. The government received the American people’s acceptance of them under the guise that only citizens earning over $500,000 (more than $15.8 million USD in today’s terms) would be taxed 7% on that income.
Fast-forward to today, and all residents of the United States are taxed between 10% and 37% on everything they earn.
This is always how new taxes are pushed through. First, only for a few. Then inevitably, for all. Our governments must think we’re stupid if they believe we’ll fall for it this time.
Just as the wealthiest citizens in the time of Peter the Great could pay to avoid the beard tax, so will the ultra-rich in our societies be able to pay to escape taxes on unrealised gains when they inevitably become commonplace.
For normal people who can’t, their wealth will be slowly shaved away by the authoritarian tax enforcers of today who want to claim their profits before they even materialise."
https://anticitizen.com/p/flee-the-beard-tax
35. A very fair and solid discussion on the growing multipolar world and China's role here. And America's decline, which is for most part self inflicted.
Everyone Has Problems: Why You Should be Kind to Everyone
I have a staple of movies that I can always go to that bring me great joy. Movies that I never get tired of watching when I am on long flights: Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, Crazy Stupid Love or The Great Gatsby, The Godfather 1 & 2. All classics.
Another one of these movies is “Notting Hill” starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. A romantic comedy about an unlikely pair, a bumbling everyday guy, English book seller Will Thacker meets America’s favorite leading lady Anna Scott. It’s such a great & entertaining movie.
There is this excellent scene when the actress is brought over to meet the bookseller's friends at his sister's birthday dinner. After dinner, in a conversation, each of them detail why they have the worst life in a typical British ironic way of communicating. The person with the worst problems would win the last brownie. (You have to watch it to really get it).
One friend is a failure at work, the sister is unlucky in love, the bookseller is barely getting by, followed by another friend who is now a paraplegic and cannot have a baby due to the accident.
They are surprised when Anna, the actress, wants to join in and make an attempt. Especially as she is beautiful, successful, rich and famous and living a glamorous life. She talks about her painful surgery, how she has been on diet for 10 years, how her last few relationships have been terrible and when she is heartbroken, it’s spread all over the media like it’s entertainment.
She finishes with a telling comment. “One day not long from now, my looks will go, they will discover I can’t act, and I will become some sad middle aged woman who looks like someone famous for a while.” It’s a powerful scene, at least to me.
The table goes silent because it’s so surprising. They, like the audience, realize that even those who seem like they have everything and are secretly envious of, actually also have vexing problems in their lives.
I think this is the reality. As I’ve climbed through my career, and gotten to know people across all walks of life: corporate execs, social media influencers, high flying investors, business people, super successful people in general. They are humans, they have problems that absolutely consume them. I can tell you so many stories of people who seem to have it all but whose health or family problems you would not wish on your worst enemies.
I find it funny when I talk to many young smart people who ask for advice. They tell me, “I want to be you when I am older.” I am always honored. But I am also always shocked & surprised everytime I hear this. I feel like a fraud and imposter.
Do I tell them the price I paid for some mild & perceived financial/ career success?
To quote Al Pacino’s character in another classic movie ‘Heat’: “My life, No, my life is a disaster zone.”
Away from my aging parents. I also missed key moments in my kid’s life that I can never get back. I am estranged from my family and daughter, especially my daughter who has good reason to be angry with me. I’ve worked with some pretty awful human beings. I’ve become isolated most times from my friends and community because of a business life that requires much international travel. All stemming from choices I made and have to live with. There is no one to blame for this except for myself.
The great irony is that at a time when my business, career and finances were at something of a high point, my personal life was an awful mess. The exact reverse of my life prior to 2020. Life can feel cruel.
Yet, I love most aspects of my life. I feel blessed most of the time to have the career I have. But I am haunted. Haunted with regret & guilt sometimes. And this pain and sadness can be crippling sometimes when I have time to sit down and think.
So I try to keep active, meditate, go to Church, workout/train. I remain focussed on my mission and do what I can to repair the things I can.
And most importantly, I try to be patient, generous and helpful as possible to everyone I meet.
The big lesson is that you never know what personal hell someone is going through in their life. So try to be kind.
A Good Year
I saw this movie back when it came out in 2006 in my Yahoo! jet set days. It stars Russell Crowe as a hard driving, world class a—hole, playboy and money hungry investment banker named Max Skinner. “Max Skinner doesn’t do weekends. Max Skinner doesn’t do holidays. Max Skinner makes money.” Living in London he learns he inherits his recently passed and estranged uncle’s winery and estate in Southern France.
Away from his high pressure job he starts to reminisce about his happy childhood with his uncle. “Every single one of my memories takes place within 100 steps of this very spot. Good memories? Grand.”
“This was my room when I was a little boy. Sleeping here was the safest place in the world. No bedtimes, no chores, no squabbling adults. Those summers saved my life.”
“I can’t for the life me think of why I stopped coming down here. I love this place. It’s intoxicating.”
He also meets a group of eccentric French winery workers, an American cousin from Napa and a new local love interests. It opens his eyes, ignites his joy and makes him realize there is more to life than work and money. It reawakens his humanity and his deep regret for not telling his uncle he loved him. More importantly he does the right thing in the end and protects his uncles legacy.
There is a specific scene that stands out near the end of the movie. After the chaos he causes, he gets an offer from his big boss, Sir Nigel. Either leave with a big severance or become Partner of the firm for life.
When talking with his PA who tells him: “partner, you are made for life. Sir Nigel didn’t become partner until he was 53. Now look at him.”
Max replies. “Yes, look at him.” What he means if you have not watched the movie, Sir Nigel was an old, out of shape man with more money than he can spend, buying expensive art and paintings that he doesn’t even look at. Existing but not living. Which is a good career lesson: if you want to figure out what your future looks like, look at the life your big boss lives. Is it one that you want? I’d say in most cases, probably not.
I actually needed this movie as one of my wake up calls when I was making the decision to leave my cushy, comfortable executive job at Yahoo!
I was so money hungry, goal obsessed and scared at the same time, that I spent the first two years of my daughter’s life away working and expanding the Yahoo! empire. And for what. Foolishly, I did the exact same thing at 500 Startups to my ever lasting regret.
“This place just doesn’t suit my life.” No, Max, it is your life that doesn’t suit this place.”
I’m glad I caught this movie again. Money, career, work and success are important. But it’s a reminder that it’s good to stop and smell the flowers. To be more present. To enjoy the simple pleasures of life. That is my big take away rewatching this movie.
I’ll end with a quote from the uncle. “Once you find something good Max, you have to take care of it. You have to let it grow.”
The Kids Are Not Alright: The Repercussions of ZIRP Era 2018-2022
I invest in people and early stage startups. At least that is what I did for the last 10.5 years.
I’ve been doing this for a long time and gotten lucky along the way. I love the business of finding and investing in the brightest and most ambitious people and ideas.
But somewhere and sometime in 2024, I just wanted to take a break. After the craziness and stupidity of 2020-2022, I thought we would see a return to sanity and basics. But the Gen AI boom only seems to be an exact repeat of the Crypto/Web 3 or the Metaverse or most of growth stage silliness. It’s like investors have learned nothing from those days.
I thought there would be more humility in founders and investors. And definitely less entitlement especially as fundraising and tech employment at large has gotten so much harder.
Unfortunately this is not what I see. This only happens after massive pain in the market and we aren’t there yet. Nowhere close. We haven’t seen the write downs and write offs of the many so called Unicorns. We haven’t seen enough VC funds shut down yet.
But this is coming still. Mark my words. Many of these Unicorns are not run by their original founders anymore. Many founders were able to take out 10s of millions of dollars of secondaries in the 2020 & 2021 mania. Unlike in prior downturns, these folks have FU money and are now doing the chairman of the board thing.
Why stick around in crap times, when you have to fire half your staff, you have no business model and probably have to take a down round (or more). Easier to chill out cuz you have the cash, join the board, promote your COO to CEO and chillax. I mean, my god, if Frank Slootman of Snowflake, wisely known as one of toughest CEOs in SV quit, most founders will definitely not stick around.
I also feel for the founders of 2019-2021 era who learned all the wrong things in startup land, aided and abetted by even more clueless VC investors. They all learned bad habits or basically all the wrong things on what makes a startup or business. Add the incredible arrogance and entitlement which has bled into most tech workers at large. Remote work. Paid lunches. Gym memberships and answering emails only during work hours. Summer Fridays off.
They got used to easy fundraising, milestones and valuations that were frothy and that have been resetting hard in the last 2 years. It’s like you grew up rich but then your parents lost their fortune and now your whole family has to move out of your 50 room mansion and into a small studio apartment in the not so good part of town.
It’s reminds me of folks who win a massive amount of money from a lottery ticket or betting on an NFT or Crypto Sh-tcoin. The easy money breaks your brain and you cannot adjust to reality, especially as they inevitably lose that money. However, this loss allows them to quickly see the reality of the real world. One where good things take time, immense hard work and unrelenting commitment. That extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.
I admit I was one of these clueless, deluded idiots back in 1999-2000 & it took the dotcom bust and near destitution to reset my brain. As Jensen Huang of Nvidia said in a speech: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”Maybe only then will you be able to wake up and get to the real work of building.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 29th, 2024
“It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” – Benjamin Franklin
"This observation backed me into what I now use as my four-question framework for evaluating angel opportunities:
Why this idea? Do people need this? Will they pay for it? How big can it be? Is this really a company or just a feature?
Why now? Is this idea too far ahead of its time? Or, is this company too late?
Why this company? Do they have a technological head start? Do they have uncommon expertise that is difficult or impossible to replicate?
Why this leadership team? Why is this particular group of smart people (hint: they’re all smart) going to win? What is special about the founders that makes me believe they will beat everyone else in this race?"
https://kellblog.com/2024/08/26/the-4-key-questions-on-every-angel-investment-opportunity/
2. "The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians. There are many reasons for this, including Russia not assembling all the available pieces of intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian attack, the Ukrainian deception plan, and a failure of humility on the part of Putin’s regime and military.
The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.
Ukraine has shown that, fortunately, strategic audacity is not entirely dead in democratic nations."
https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ukraine-kursk/
3. "So where to invest in an AI world? Invest in the things that AI can’t change. Invest in uniquely efficient customer acquisition models, because all the people playing the standard customer acquisition game will have perpetually worsening business models."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-indirect-implications-of-ai-when
4. "Quick Summary of Good Options
Boat Rentals
Smaller tiny homes if at/near major city
Car detailing for luxury vehicles
Pets - but more niche has to be something high-end to keep margins up
AI GF/BF experiences
Handbags/status good product resells
Upscale Mid 30s-40s bar experiences
Niche collectables that are expensive
Rehab/mental health type establishments (would pass honestly but needs to be mentioned)
This is our general view of what will become more common. Of these probably like car detailing, niche upscale bar and AI girlfriend/boyfriend.
As usual, we’ll have to wait and see for something like this. We’ll check back in 5-years to see how we did!"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/monetizing-extended-youth-the-next
5. "With AI, we believe there’s a new opportunity to win on quality. We anticipate a shift in this three-point framework, moving from an emphasis on convenience & price (Access) to convenience & quality (Edit). So for example, rather than providing greater access to healthcare, companies in this new paradigm will provide better healthcare. Price will always be a factor, but parity will suffice — similarly to how quality parity was serviceable for the last wave of access-focused companies.
With AI, quality largely hinges on a product or service's ability to properly capture nuance, intent and context to either 1) effectively serve up the most relevant and useful insights, or 2) effectively perform tasks on our behalf.
We see a world of opportunity for products and services that help people get to the best possible output, providing fundamentally more useful value than the previous alternatives rather than cheaper or more accessible extensions of existing standards."
6. "Though it has no large warships in its navy, Ukraine has used these drones to outmaneuver one of the greatest naval powers in the world. Produced at a cost of around $200,000 apiece, the weapons have damaged or destroyed about two dozen Russian warships—as much as a third of the Black Sea fleet, including large landing ships and missile carriers worth billions of dollars. These strikes have forced the rest of the Russian navy to pull back from Ukrainian shores, all but conceding defeat in the greatest sea battle Europe has seen since World War II.
Standing on that beach, nose to nose with the Magura, it was hard to believe this motorized dinghy could score such an epic victory. Russia’s status as a naval power dates back more than three centuries to the age of Peter the Great, the Russian czar who was so obsessed with battleships that he once traveled in disguise to the Netherlands to learn how to make them. Now, thanks to a drone conceived in a Kyiv garage, the Russian navy has begun to look useless along a critical front in the war. Vladimir Putin knows it. In February, he fired the commander of the Black Sea fleet; a month later, he sacked the head of the entire Russian navy as the Ukrainian drone strikes intensified."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMxE_hXUKQI
7. Very timely discussion on the AI Hype cycle. The YC guys have an amazing data set.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-5xJQ4U8g0
8. Sad that it's needed in modern society but here we are. The growing divorce coach industry
https://thehustle.co/originals/getting-a-divorce-theres-a-coach-for-that
9. "The important thing to note here is that these two profit drivers are driven off of two fundamentally different things. Fees are driven off AUM. The bigger the AUM? The bigger the fees. Carry is driven off returns. The better your returns? The bigger your carry.
And maximizing fees vs. maximizing returns are not only fundamentally different games, but are in many ways diametrically opposed. The bigger your AUM, the worse your returns. Understanding that dichotomy is fundamental in understanding the strategy of many (though not all) venture firms.
You might come to the conclusion that bigger just means better. The bigger you get, the more swings you can take, you can take bigger losses, and have lower expectations.
But there is a fundamental bottleneck. Not every company can be a really big success. And building a model around massive pools of capital that require massive outcomes to move the needle will increasingly give investors "nail goggles" and they'll take their hammers, and just start swinging. But in the process, they'll shatter a lot of good businesses trying to form them into $10B+ outcomes.
Some firms, while being large, have still made attempts at being responsible stewards of capital, like in early 2023 when Founders Fund chose to reduce its eighth venture fund from $1.8B to $900M. It wasn't that they couldn't raise the size of fund they wanted; they told LPs they wanted the fund to be smaller, and pushed capital out of that fund.
And don't get me wrong, I'm hopeful that more and more of these massive firms can be responsible stewards of capital. I want there to continue to be great successes and outcomes that will continue to alleviate LP's concerns and continue to build the pool of capital going towards big, ambitious ideas.
But I've worked with a lot of these firms and I gotta say, I'm not super optimistic. And the existential danger to all of us, from the funds that want to be big or small, to the founders that want to build productivity tools or humanoid robots, is that the more irresponsible the biggest firms continue to be, the more capital gets destroyed, the more we run the risk of chasing a large volume of capital out of the asset class."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/mo-money-mo-problems
10. "Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion we can draw from all this is that billionaires represent a kind of moral singularity—a point beyond which our usual ethical frameworks break down. They operate at a scale where intentions, actions, and consequences become so intertwined and far-reaching that clear moral judgments become nearly impossible.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to evaluate, and also regulate, the impacts of billionaires. But it does suggest that we need new frameworks for thinking about them. Maybe the question isn't, "Are billionaires good or bad?" but instead, "How can we structure society so that no individual wields outsized influence over everybody else?"
In the end, the Bill Gates paradox—philanthropist or predator? Savior or sinner?—may be less about Gates himself than about the limitations of our moral intuitions in the face of vast wealth and power. As we grapple with the rise of the billionaire class, we may need to develop new ethical tools, alongside all the new economic and technological ones."
https://every.to/napkin-math/billionaire-or-despot-or-both
11. "Yet, despite this returns compression, venture capital remains an incredible asset class. Here is some fascinating data from JP Morgan. Despite the downturn, it still seems to be the best long-term asset class (this is not investment advice). Between 2014-2023 annualized VC returns were 16.2% IRR, compared to 14.6% for private equity, 4.4% for hedge funds, and 8.8% for direct lending."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/vc-hot-or-not
12. Great conversation here on zigging when others are zagging. All three of them are original thinkers. Made me question my own investment thesis a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIMRXp1qkg
13. "First and foremost, it’s a reminder to stay vigilant. The strategies and decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, Brussels, and elsewhere will ripple across the globe, affecting everything from trade policies to military alliances.
Next, it’s likely that the United States will remain the most powerful of the great powers at least over the next decade. Beyond that, there are too many variables to account for (kind of like how weather forecasts remain only good for ~8 days, as explained by Chaos Theory).
We can maintain our strength through intelligent investment in defense capabilities (both high-end exquisite systems as well as low-cost attritable ones), continuing economic policies that strengthen the American base (reshoring / friendshoring manufacturing, restoring infrastructure, leveraging competitive edges in software, etc), regaining control over information systems messaging our vision of progress (the one that glamorizes hardwork and industry more than influencer status domestically and that sees a rising tide lifting all boats internationally), and smart diplomacy that doesn’t just talk-the-talk, but walks-the-walk.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. This period of competition also brings opportunities—opportunities for innovation, for forging new alliances, and for rethinking old strategies. The key will be to stay adaptable, to keep our eyes on the long-term game, and to understand that in this new world, nothing is set in stone."
https://andrewglenn.substack.com/p/buckle-up-the-era-of-great-power
14. "Just like how I eat candy bars and sugar goo when I’m not hungry to avoid a drop in blood glucose levels, the Fed is committed to never letting financial markets stop their upward ascent. The US is a hyper-financialised economy that requires up-only fiat asset prices so that the population feels rich. In real terms, stocks are flat to down, but most people don’t look at their real returns.
Nominally rising stocks in fiat terms also drive capital gains tax receipts. In short, a falling market is bad for the financial health of Pax Americana. Therefore, Bad Gurl Yellen began subverting the Fed’s interest rate-raising cycle in September 2022. Powell, I believe, under instructions of Yellen and the Democrat party leaders, is falling on his sword and cutting rates when he knows he should not be."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/sugar-high
15. "As postulated by Carlota, this new world enables a wider surface area for founders and one where the core skillset may very well be industry knowledge and connections, not just technology acumen. Founders and investors alike need to be able to tap into the knowledge and networks of their industry segment if they’re hoping to unlock opportunity. As Kanyi Maqubela puts it “The Services as Software era is about industry.”
Ultimately, our mission is to find, fund and help founders capable of transforming their industries. Sometimes this will be through SaaS and other times it will be competing with incumbents directly. The freedom to pursue investments outside of traditional SaaS presents an incredible opportunity along with the equally incredible burden of (as one of our LPs lovingly put it) “knowing your shit”.
Learning these industries is rewarding, but time consuming given their nuance. It’s not for the faint of heart and even some of the most brilliant investment minds have been burned by approaching these markets without a fully informed appreciation for their difficulties. That said, those who do invest the time to unravel those complexities of these markets may have the opportunity to unveil some of the largest investment outcomes ever achieved.
Buckle up as we leap forward into the age of “Technology Deployment”.
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/the-technology-deployment-phase
16. This is a must listen to. Incredible discussion on the future of AI, Semiconductors and Robotics. The future of tech. I'll have to re-listen to this one as it’s insight dense.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/67636422/baker-ai-semiconductors-and-the-robotic-frontier
17. One can never listen to Luke Belmar enough. The youngest wise man around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09HJKepCY8E
18. As always: a great informative and fun discussion on whats happening in business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMbaAZtCJR8
19. "Generally speaking, we buy the idea that *income* taxes will go up. That makes logical sense to us. It doesn’t impact anyone with real money. Income taxes entrench mega companies because their employees can no longer save enough money to leave and create a competitor.
The truly rich do not have large salaries. The truly rich are CEOs and private company owners. They pay themselves a fake salary ($1 is common amongst major tech executives) and then get the rest in stock. When they sell the stock they incur a 15-20% capital gains tax (USA)
Summary: The faster you can get your income tied into businesses? The safer you are. You can move them, shut them down, sell them to someone else to put in a trust… so on and so forth. The chances of anyone tracking this down is limited. It is even less likely they bother with you if you just retain the paper work. You get a letter asking for proof of the transaction and that is it.
They can’t do much if you gift your grandmother a house. You have $13,610,000 to give away in your lifetime and they can just put that into a trust that goes to someone else. For small money you can gift $18,000 to anyone you want tax free (current limit for 2024). As long as you have some trustworthy relationships, none of the tax rules will ever impact you."
Similarly, if you run a private company, you can avoid paying yourself a salary and simply get paid out in dividends."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/taxing-unrealized-gains-wont-be-passed
20. Luke Belmar is the man. Most of this is on crypto & trading side but it's really good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAdahc6xEmY
21. A wide ranging conversation with Luke Belmar. Small parts of this veers into tinfoil hat land but overall it's an exercise in thinking for yourself and first principles thinking. Understand the world around you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQs8ZHfZNq8
22. Great conversation here. Is coding even relevant in an AI world? Can u build billion dollar cos with less people.
I don't agree that more Unicorns are being created every year, as they are just valuations from ZIRP-era stupidity. Question is are they sustainable businesses.
But I do believe it's easier than ever to start up a startup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKvo_kQbakU
23. "Talent and funding are great, but they won’t get you anywhere if customers don’t want to buy what you’re selling. And that’s where recent economic and political tailwinds come in. Tensions with China and Russia have created pressure on our government to fund defense innovation.
Strained relations with China are also causing companies to rethink their material sourcing and manufacturing for the first time in years or decades. Additionally, rising minimum wage laws and intensely seasonal hiring needs in sectors like agriculture are pushing many industries toward increasing automation in order to survive.
These global trends are an immense tailwind for startups focused on robotics, manufacturing, defense, energy, and many other areas."
https://www.codingvc.com/p/the-golden-age-of-deep-tech
24. "This post barely scratches the surface of these dynamics (trust me, I’ve got plenty of adjacent topics for future blog posts). For now, if you take anything away from this analysis, it’s the following:
Silicon Valley is a global outlier when it comes to fundraising dynamics.
In the rest of the world, early-stage funding rounds are overwhelmingly led by local investors.
U.S. participation in early-stage Canadian funding rounds is higher than anywhere else in the world — including in most U.S. states (which is either a blessing or a curse, depending on whether you’re a hungry startup looking for funding or a Canadian investor wary of competition)."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-mythical-us-lead-investor
25. There is so much gold here for founders. How to buy back your time and become a more effective leader and parent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZF_7_tjepU&t=2247s
26. This provides good details for the simmering hybrid war & spy war happening on European soil between Russia and the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2DkseOnL2M
27. Japan ramping up their military force to meet the increasing CCP threat in Asia. Good rundown on Japanese military capabilities and plans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqqAtDqq6Mw
28. Great edition this week on what's up in tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVoyROHOPt0
29. There can never be too much Luke Belmar. Mental reframing for success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19aKbciNKdA&t=2199s
30. "You cannot produce a top decile fund with just reserves and recycling. You need to be working with great founders and teams who are building breakout companies. Just like a poker player needs to get dealt some great hands. But how you play those hands when you are dealt them is also critically important.
I have seen early stage VCs make way too little on their best companies because they ran out of money and could not keep on participating or they had to sell too soon or some other reason that was effectively poor portfolio and fund management.
Reserves, recycling, and returns go hand in hand. So build them into your firm's culture and processes. They make a difference over the long run."
https://avc.xyz/reserves,-recycling,-and-returns
31. "While much, if not most, of the furor surrounding fake news is due to a power struggle over control of the new medium, fakes exist. Let’s toss around some ideas on this:
We’ll get used to them. Like marketing fakes in the past, we’ll learn to live with them. Most AI fakes, even political fakes (see above), are far more humourous than harmful.
The power of network dissent. In open media networks, free of authoritarian censorship, dissent will flourish. This means that every published fact and their narrative interpretation will be challenged. It also means that facts won’t be overlooked or ignored (on the main).
Opt-in narratives. Without control over the narrative, governments will be forced to adopt narratives that deliver beneficial results. If they do, people will opt in voluntarily, and alternative narratives will wither. If not, dissent will flourish and hound their every move. Forcing people to adopt a narrative without delivering beneficial results is tyranny."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/fakes
32. "Open source is a powerful idea that's shaped the modern world but it's largely invisible because it just works and most people don't have to think about it. It's just there, running everything, with quiet calm and stability. That's made it hard to defend and that's a tragedy because open source gives everyone a level playing field.
With that kind of reach and usefulness I never saw it as even remotely possible that someone would see open source as a bad thing or something that must be stopped ever again.
But I was wrong. Here we are again. The battle is not over. It's starting anew."
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-open-source-is-so-hard-to-defend
33. "This idea of a negative roadmap is complementary to the normal roadmap. It’s a way to document things that are not going to happen in the product or things that are going to be removed from the product. Roadmaps are critically important, and as organizations grow, getting everyone on the same page becomes harder. Adding a negative roadmap to the mix is another exercise in aligning the team around what is not going to happen. Entrepreneurs should consider adding a negative roadmap to their collection of documents and best practices that they use to run their startup."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/08/31/negative-roadmaps-for-startups/
34. "We all crave access to experts. It’s why people show up to hear Scott speak. It’s why someone once paid $19 million for a private lunch with Warren Buffet. It’s why, despite all the bad press re: their ethics and ineffectiveness, consulting firms continue to raise their fees and grow.
But most of us can’t afford that level of human expertise. And the crazy thing is, we’re overvaluing it anyway. McKinsey consultants are smart, credentialed people. But they can only present you with one worldview that has a series of biases including how to create problems only they can solve with additional engagements, and what will please the person who has a budget for follow-on engagements. AI is a nearly free expert with 24/7 availability, a staggering range of expertise, and — most importantly — inhumanity. It doesn’t care whether you like it, hire it, or find it attractive, it just wants to address the task/query at hand. And it’s getting better.
The hardest part of working with AI isn’t learning to prompt. It’s managing your own ego and admitting you could use some help and that the world will pass you by if you don’t learn how to use a computer, PowerPoint … AI. So get over your immediate defense mechanism — “AI can never do what I do” — and use it to do what you do, just better. There is an invading army in business: technology. Its weapons are modern-day tanks, drones, and supersonic aircraft. Do you really want to ride into battle on horseback?"
https://www.profgalloway.com/what-does-ai-think/
35. "Fear of missing out, today’s parlance for "keeping up with the Joneses,” can drain on your wallet.
Use this mantra next time you feel compelled to do something or be somewhere:
“There will always be another ___.” For example [party/event/rave/Burning Man/conference/vacation].
Knowing and repeating this mantra will help you get over not feeling compelled to attend for whatever reason."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/how-to-be-good-at-money
36. "One of the major questions for web3 exists in the US where the regulatory regime isn’t clear.
Overall, web3 continues to see activity but most of the interest exists in the public markets as the market awaits next-generation of infrastructure & applications & regulatory clarity."
https://tomtunguz.com/web3-disclocation-public-private/
37. "The scale and nature of the task is determined by the capabilities of the opposition. In World War 2, the Axis powers had advanced manufacturing prowess, but small populations and a lack of access to fuel. In the Cold War, the Soviet bloc had a lot of fuel and a population similar to ours, but had a small and dysfunctional economy and struggled with advanced manufacturing.
In contrast, a potential “New Axis” of Russia and China would control enormous population, vast fuel resources, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and a combined economy of enormous size. Except for the fuel part, this is all just China.
So today’s post is about how the U.S. and its likely allies stack up against the New Axis in economic terms."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/sizing-up-the-new-axis-3ce
38. "As a result, that soil is a precious resource the Ukrainians ought to safeguard, but which foreign firms, funds, and banks have long eyed like wolves. Now, with the Russo-Ukraine war presenting an opportunity, it is a resource up for grabs that those same firms and funds are now are coming for.
However, the exigencies of war since the Donestk conflict began in 2014 have meant that corrupt entities, including foreign companies and even the Saudi Arabian pension fund, have managed to gain not just a foothold in Ukrainian agricultural land but also acquire control of a major percentage of it."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/when-ukraine-finally-falls-american
39. "Instead, learn the names of who is on your city council, school board and other people making multi-million dollar decisions with your property taxes, and make sure they know YOUR name. This can be done on a middle-class income and the energy you expend on this endeavor will have a far-higher likelihood of improving the quality of your life."
https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-favor-bank-local-politics
40. "Whether the ancient Aztecs, Rome, China, or the US, civilizations traditionally flourish as long as they invest in the fertility of their soil bank. Once they begin extracting the soil’s future fertility by consuming its stock of carbon at unsustainable rates, the clock is ticking, and they need to expand outwards with imperialistic might if they are to sustain themselves (with the US being the starkest example of this in history).
At a certain point, they are no longer able to continue expanding outwards and managing already-conquered territory, and at this point, collapse is a single generation away. The high time-preference thinking that invariably captures empires on the decline can arise from many sources, but all the patterns of consumption and waste that an empire employs to feed itself by robbing from the future lead to the same outcome."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/soil-and-money
41. "The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.
Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
Most folks in the tech and venture orbits are probably aware of the most salient example of the vibe shift in startups: the happenings in The Gundo. The tl;dr on the Gundo is a bunch of bright, young, ultra-ambitious dudes in El Segundo, CA have forsaken the “don’t rock the boat by saying what you believe and focus on hitting the SaaS jackpot” ethos of 2010-2020s Silicon Valley and are instead unapologetically pro-America, pro-family values, openly religious, all of which they channel into challenging and important missions like manufacturing hydrocarbons out of thin air, making it rain where it doesn't, and more generally “rebuilding America.”
But part of what is causing the Vibe Shift is that it goes well beyond the Gundo: indeed, no matter what circles you run in, almost everyone—from AI accelerationists to techbros to gun owners to Bitcoiners to Christians to normal families to children who like math to American citizens—is undergoing a variation of the same kind of pressure to conform, stagnate, decelerate."
The Silent Pandemic After the Pandemic: The Global Mental Health Crisis
I emerged out of the Covid pandemic lockdown bubble in 2021 but only really started reconnecting with many old friends and acquaintances in 2022.
Fast forward to 2024, what has struck me are the lasting scars the pandemic and the now widely condemned lockdowns have caused people. I now know countless couples divorced or separated. And many of our kids are irreparably harmed psychologically or developmentally. This is not some random observation but a trend I’ve noticed in a sample set of dozens if not a hundred or so folks in relatively deeper conversations.
I’ve widely written about how badly the lockdown affected my family for the worst. It caused me massive financial pain and due to my own weakness, led to the unintentional damage for the rest of my family. It also stripped bare any illusions I had regarding my ability to provide, how strong a husband and capable of a dad I was. O for 3 in 2020. Some of these, I’m still working very hard to sort out.
When I feel helplessness or fear, it quickly turns to rage. And in a situation where dojos, parks, gyms and churches were closed, there were literally no outlets for this.
Multiply this situation to almost every family in the world to different degrees of severity and you see the endemic rash of violence, suicide and loneliness of many young and old people now. The amount of broken families whether here in California, Canada, India, Australia, China or anywhere in the world. I know very few people unaffected.
The only good thing to come out of all of this is an openness now to therapy and the importance of mental health, things that were taboo to speak about prior in society.
The other big thing I’ve learned is that I will never blindly follow what the media or our so-called experts in government and corporations say. These people are either corrupt or incompetent. It reminds of the old Hollywood saw “Nobody Knows Nothing.” And it’s funny that many of the things labeled conspiracies turned out to be true like the virus coming from a lab, the lockdowns & masks being useless and the health effects/issues with the Covid vaccines.
The price of not being prepared or not thinking for yourself is high. This is why having financial independence is so important, you need the resources to leave and or/ protect ourselves from overarching malicious or incompetent bureaucrats.
The big lesson is: if you panic, panic early and take action. Use your extensive resources and leave.
My big mistake was that I made assumptions that the lockdowns would be short. I should have taken my family directly to Taiwan or Vancouver that first week of March 2020. Now I am literally paying for it in the thousands of dollars of therapy every month to repair the extensive damage from those hellish 6 months locked in. Well, live and learn. I can tell you this, nobody and nothing will stop me in the future.
So remember folks, take care of your mental health. Therapy is a good thing. And when the next major global crisis happens, panic early and don’t trust our elites. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
The Magic of Modern Air Travel: Refuge in the Sky
I wrote this post after a trip to Australia. It should be magic that I’m leaving Perth on a Saturday morning and arriving Saturday morning in San Francisco. And this is a 22 hour trip btw, so not short. It never ceases to amaze me about the miracle of international air travel.
It should come to no surprise that I really enjoy flying. It’s tiring and not good for your health with the radiation exposure but I’ve been sucked into the romance of air travel since I was a kid. Walking into the airport and knowing that everyone there was going someplace else. The airport for me symbolizes adventure and an escape from the mundane and everyday.
It’s almost become an addiction to me. But it’s also become a refuge. A refuge from the ubiquitous phone and Internet. A refuge from the disturbances and chores of everyday life. A refuge from business challenges or family problems. A place I cannot be reached by others for a period of time. Pure introvert-time.
Flying is more than a distraction from my normal life, it’s a place for my personal growth & self development, where I can read and write without guilt. It’s a place I can catch up on movies and television shows I normally do not have any time for in my regular life. It’s a place for me to discover new shows and movies typically from Japan, Korea, China, India or some non-Hollywood. An opportunity to expand my perspective.
So while flying might be a chore for others, it holds a special place in my heart. A place and time of discovery and reflection. If you reframe the experience, maybe you will end up enjoying it as much as I do.
Only the Paranoid Survive
Tech legend, Andy Grove’s autobiography is one of the best books written regarding thriving in the fast paced business world of Silicon Valley. I’m surprised more people have not read it. It traces the rise of Intel to the one of the most dominant semiconductor companies in the world. Well, at least until the last decade decline. But the lessons he shares are invaluable: the most important being the title.
All the best founders and investors are a little bit paranoid. You have to assume that competition can pop out of nowhere to eat your lunch. If you let your internal operations get a little bit out of whack, that usually ends up causing big problems down the road. Comfort kills.
This is relevant for our life too. Every time I’ve met serious issues in my life was due to my own complacency. The minute I was flying high and took my eye off the ball, things would inevitably start to slip.
This happened in the end of 2000 when I was at the startup Alibris. I ended up getting absolutely REKT in 2001.
It happened in 2013 when I overspent my bounty from Yahoo! and got myself in financial straits. This also happened again in 2020 albeit it was during a pandemic with the criminal & idiotic government lockdowns and anti-eviction programs for crooked tenants.
Of course you should be present and enjoy the wins that happen. I certainly don’t do this enough.
But also don’t take anything for granted. Your health, your personal finances, your business and especially with your family. The minute you start to get too comfortable or complacent, let alone arrogant, life will come and smack you on the head. Rightfully too. I am paying for this on the family side.
This is a lesson we all seem to learn on a regular basis. In our insane state of competition and intense change, a little bit of paranoia goes a long way. As I heard from Ray Dalio before, “if you are afraid, you probably don’t need to be afraid. If you are not afraid, you should probably be afraid.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 22nd, 2024
“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vincent “Vince” Lombardi
Good guide for founders talking to VCs.
https://startupistanbul.substack.com/p/what-investors-say-vs-what-they-mean
2. "The rationale behind these higher prices rest in the idea that AI companies have signficant future growth & likely faster growth than their non-AI peers both public & private.
Most of the time, the private tends to lead the public market with trends & valuations. Not this time. The markets are moving in parallel. This is likely because the major AI publics like NVIDIA & Microsoft have spurred the market forward first."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-premium-2024-08-16/
3. "The power of music and books and movies and TV shows lies in the fact that they don’t just take up our eyeballs and time. They impact how we live our lives, the decisions that we make, and how we see the world around us. And, while dystopian fiction can act as a wake up call, it can also be a dangerous drug in a world increasingly in the grips of hopelessness and depression. The collective imagination is increasingly becoming a collective nightmare."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/science-fictions-dueling-fates
4. Educational discussion on what’s happening in VC land. Some smart & very experienced folks here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6CxMTy6Peg&t=1017s
5. This is a pretty solid discussion on the future of Crypto as the title states. Worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdaQr3EW8g&t=1142s
6. "If your primary source of cash flow is a job, it’s of paramount importance that you become an unfireable employee.
Like the name suggests, an unfireable employee is one the company wouldn’t even dream of firing.
There are a few ways of making this happen."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-make-yourself-unfireable-from-your-job/
7. I love Montreal (except for during the winter).
"French Culture Without the Insanity: A good filter for you is if you would enjoy a cleaner version of Paris. If that’s the case you’ll probably like it a lot. If you don’t like the French look and don’t like french food, it’ll probably be whack.
While France is a heavy tourist destination, it just doesn’t make sense when Montreal is closer, cheaper, cleaner and a potential second home for the right person.
Essentially, Montreal is a better version of a major city in France...... As stated “cleaner and cheaper” version of France.
Upgraded across the board."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/city-guide-montreal
8. "For the foreseeable future therefore, both Ukraine and Russia must commit to conducting two major ground campaigns concurrently. While Russia is probably better placed to resource two such campaigns, neither Ukraine nor Russia is likely to be able to do so into 2025. The issues explored in this article will hopefully inform readers about how complex and challenging the decision making will be about Kursk and the Donbas campaigns for Ukraine and Russia in coming weeks and months.
Unfortunately, as stunning and clever as the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has been, it may not change Putin’s overall war goals. Previous setbacks, including the Russian Army’s defeat in its 2022 Kyiv offensive, its defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson as well as the international sanctions regime, have not modified Putin’s overall goal of subjugating Ukraine and destroying its capacity to exist as a sovereign, prosperous democracy. Kursk, unfortunately might only make him more determined to achieve this – assuming he remains president.
But, if we are lucky, Ukraine’s audacity, demonstration of offensive capacity and most importantly – will – might convince the U.S. and its NATO partners to reconsider their strategy for supporting Ukraine and the level of resourcing it provides."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-kursk-offensive-dilemma
9. Really educational discussion on what's happening with AI Foundational models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUGosOgiTeI
10. "Hope for the Best Plan for the Worst
One downside of all this stuff after you make it? You’ll become insanely paranoid. Rational optimism is probably the best you can do. No matter what you’ll get the paranoia.
Write down the absolute worst case scenario for everything (finance, health etc.). Then try to line it all up to prevent disaster. Once you get to this point and feel safe *never* make a decision that gives you any sort of pause/anxiety.
As the saying goes “if you have to think about it the answer is no”. This only applies after you’ve hit your exit number though."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/regret-minimization-framework
11. "This tendency is bad because these tools are fragments of a future that is taking shape around us—and by ignoring them, I’m setting myself up to fall behind. But there is a bright side: I’m staring down the problem and understanding why it exists, which is the beginning of solving it. I need to be more comfortable with the uncertainty that AI brings with it.
Take it slow.
Learning a new language as an adult is similar to weaving AI into familiar workflows. While learning a new language, you’re basically learning new ways to do familiar things. You’ve been to a grocery store many times, but suddenly, you have to find new words to ask when that fruit you like will be in season again. Similarly, when it comes to AI, you’re attempting to use new tools to do things that you’ve done many times before."
https://every.to/learning-curve/why-i-avoided-ai-and-how-i-finally-embraced-it
12. One of the best shows to know what’s happening on the edge of the internet and creative businesses. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYSXF-15Upw
13. Good discussion on how the American's think and American culture of rejuvenation. Compared with AUS, Canada, NZ etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNJKuV53sU0
14. This was a fascinating interview with Pieter Levels. He is King, nay, God Emperor of Indie Hackers and Patron Saint of non-douchey Digital Nomads.
I first saw him present at Brain Bar in Budapest back in 2015 and it was incredibly eye-opening to me re: the growth of the digital nomad world and geo-arbitrage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2780s
15. Great update on Ukraine's Kursk incursion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AVSki6dIgg
16. A good overview of the new Axis strategy in Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOKvX0ezMTg
17. A must listen to discussion on the state of venture capital. More on the end of the industrial VC model.
It's the time of Tinkerer/Builder VCs, not Finance VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-jARU9rjrY
18. Important discussion on the challenges of mass immigration in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDATt_4dVk
19. "Johnson’s practice of Not Dying—and talking about it to anyone who will listen—has made it so we all know far too much about him. Yet, beyond this, it’s as though we really know nothing about the man at all. In recent months, though, Johnson seems to have at least become a bit more likable. Maybe something has shifted in our public perception of him, possibly due to the mild sense of levity he has started to use in his posts online. In the talk, too, he came across as thoughtful, charismatic. I found myself thinking: I genuinely sort of like the guy! But still I wonder, what exactly is he buttering us up for?
Johnson's mantra is “Don’t Die,” which he thinks of as a game, one we’re all playing whether or not we chose to, “like capitalism.” And certainly, the way Johnson is doing it, it does seem as though it’s all for sport."
https://www.gq.com/story/bryan-johnson-immortality-party
20. A surprisingly interesting and wise interview with Dan Bilzerian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lleTnSIiAFE
21. I'm a fanboy here. Josh Wolfe is one of the best deep tech investors around for over 2 decades. I always learn from his interviews. One of the few folks who think for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGdZzGzy0xU
22. "Six years before that conversation, Morgan had completed his purchase of Andrew Carnegie’s entire steel operation for the unheard-of sum of $480 million, hundreds of billions in today’s dollars. You don’t do that deal and amass that kind of wealth with a persistently negative outlook. Count the perma bears on the Forbes 400 list or the number of pessimists who run companies in the Fortune 500. You will find none.
Winners and other men and women of foresight and ambition do monumental things; pessimists watch them from the sidelines, making a list of all the reasons things won’t work out. The losers do get to win sometimes, too. But their victories tend to be Pyrrhic, as every calamity ultimately leads to opportunity when the dust clears.
But the optimists are eventually proven right. Not every day, but always and eventually. Indisputably. It just takes a while to be able to see it play out. Even if you don’t believe me, make your investment in the future anyway, just in case I end up being right again. Plant your seed regardless. If you end up being right in your pessimism many years from now, we will all have bigger problems than what our investments are worth. Being optimistic all the time is difficult. But having any other disposition as a default setting makes little sense when you’re investing for a future far out in front of us."
https://www.profgalloway.com/optimism-as-a-default-setting/
23. Interesting inside view of Anduril, the leading Defense-tech company in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NGTEMEvVI
24. "Theseus’s story reveals a lot about the Pentagon’s changing relationship with non-traditional companies and innovators. For example: breakthroughs in the defense space are no longer the sole domain of a handful of established defense contractors. Advances in AI—coupled with decades-long trends in information technology—are lowering the bar to bringing important new capabilities online. Now, a group of smart young people with no experience in the military can create new battlefield-relevant capabilities from cheap, easily available components, and do so at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional defense contractor.
It also shows that the culture of young Silicon Valley programmers and aspiring company founders is changing. The taboo of collaborating with the Defense Department is not what it was in 2018, when Google programers objected so strongly to the company’s work with the Pentagon that the company dropped the contract.
That change is fueled in part by the success of a new breed of defense-focused startups like Palantir and Anduril, who are winning contracts and showing that digital-first processes in design and manufacturing can deliver new capabilities much more quickly than in the past."
25. "Moctezuma II’s authoritarian control of true speech may have happened over five centuries ago. But the three examples I just touched on from the Soviet Union, Germany, and China all took place in living memory. People like my Oma (who just turned 101) lived through these historical events and under some of the tyrants who created them.
We are teetering on the brink of experiencing the very same fate.
If we allow laws like these to propagate, we’re allowing our governments to build a prison for us that encompasses all of society. A prison where one day, without intent, something—anything—you say could be used as a means to persecute or imprison you.
You’ll say it’s truth.
They’ll say it’s hate.
However, only one side gets to win the argument without intent, evidence, or fair due process.
It won’t be the side of the people."
https://anticitizen.com/p/a-prison-for-us
26. An inspiring story of Stronghold Refugee Rescue and Relief.
Our military vets are amazing. Incredible interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAUqYoxv_ZU
27. This is going to end in tears. It's like we learned nothing from 2019-2021.
28. Wes is the kick in the butt every person needs, at least those who wants to be the best version of themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKWLtTFv7I
29. "There is no single optimal pricing model for AI. Each AI application creates and delivers value differently and to different personas (e.g., individual vs. team vs. institution), and they will have individual value metrics optimal for achieving a company’s monetization objective.
However, from a pricing strategy perspective, as more sophisticated AI applications shift the value scaling away from the user, these developments pressure user-based pricing in two ways: 1) Cannibalization — as these systems become more productive, they potentially reduce the # of users required, and 2) Increase sales friction — continue pricing these applications on a per-user basis will make the sales conversation increasingly tenuous as its user growth no longer correlates with increased value delivery.
These developments will require companies to change monetization away from pure user-based subscription pricing to a pricing model that incorporates elements of “pay-as-you-go,” or sometimes called “usage-based pricing” (UBP) metrics.
There are many types of Usage-based metrics, operating across a spectrum between cost alignment and value alignment in four distinct patterns: price to Resource, price to Activities, price to Output, and price to Outcome. Price to Resource is generally not recommended for SaaS Applications as it ignores the application’s value proposition.
Activities-based metrics are a good choice for AI Applications operating in the “human augmentation” and even most content generation paradigms as they align well with the user’s engagement model with the application. They are also a good proxy for resource consumption and can be used as a cost governance metric in a hybrid model (e.g., Kittl.) However, they may become more challenging to operate with AI systems designed for complex workflow automation due to the potential complexity of defining and attributing values to activities.
Output-based metrics are a poor fit for AI applications operating as “human assistants” because they are difficult to attribute value to. However, more sophisticated AI systems operating in the Generative or Agentic paradigm will generate more discrete and intrinsically valuable output, making this model a potentially good fit for these types of AI applications.
Finally, outcome-based metrics have the potential to be the best usage metric for the most sophisticated AI systems automating complex workflows, as they fully align monetization with customer success. However, value attribution remains a concern, and whether highly autonomous AI systems can make value attribution self-evident remains to be seen."
30. "The key difference now being that the US military has lost a decade of valuable time to rebuild military capacity and bolster conventional and nuclear deterrents. The US Army active duty force is the smallest it has been since the end of World War II; the Navy has stagnated short of 300 battle force ships, half the size of the Cold War fleet; and the Air Force combat aircraft inventory continues to shrink as retirements outpace new purchases every single year.
Reality gets a vote. The military balance keeping peace across three theaters—two of which are engaged in wars of mass and attrition—is no longer possible with the smaller, older, less ready force on hand. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Indo-Pacific."
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/americas-one-war-military-is-no-match-for-reality/
31. I kind of get this. But like every place people take this to stupid extremes on the right (or left as on the coasts).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5kb3gX6UM
32. "The way I sum it up for myself is that I’m just a normal bloke doing very unusual things that most people don’t have the guts to do. The ones who do can be serious oddballs with whom I generally have very little in common at the end of the day.
Has Australia and the West Lost Its Way?
I think so. But you can think this and still be a semi-normal, rational-thinking human without aligning yourself with the whole package of some particular political category or mindset."
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/finding-my-place-between-reality
33. Lifestyles of the rich and famous in Japan. Bit flashy but you can do this in Japan and Dubai and most of Northern Asia without getting robbed or kidnapped. (Definitely do NOT do this in America or Latin America or Africa)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKmo5MOy5g
34. Good discussion on the IPO and M&A market from an experienced Tech I-banker. Lots of old but useful tech history too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjfcK-lF0o
35. "English is the new programming language. Coding this way, I explored the data much more deeply, more rigorously, & more quickly than I would have otherwise.
The user still needs to be aware of the underlying syntax to fix errors & some statistical tests to verify the computer is doing the right thing, but gone are the days of memorizing the functional arcana of individual programming libraries."
https://tomtunguz.com/higher-level-of-abstraction/
36. I'm on a Wes Watson kick. Motivation for doing the work & Getting S--t Done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61CyhWhS-lU
37. Who are you when you are facing hard times? The coach I needed in 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9kBKsStr2w
38. "If data = the future of personalized healthcare, then it’s tragic that these visionaries in the field of healthcare data were all wiped out just days after having been exonerated from the criminal charges associated with the legal case HP brought against them (an extremely rare outcome in the US justice system). HP complained that Autonomy’s data-gathering software and/or the Autonomy team were not performing as expected, accused them of fraud, and had them extradited to the US (which is also rare).
One wonders how it's possible that these rare minds who truly understood the marriage of data and healthcare, who were loaded with a ton of money in the bank, hard-won venture capital expertise, and who had an interest in advancing the cutting edge of medical solutions, were all lost at once. Healthcare is at the heart of everything, everywhere you look. Trump and Kennedy now own and have knitted together these popular issues – healthcare and inexplicable suspicious deaths.
To be clear, I fully support medical innovation. I’m hoping they can 3D print a new me and give me personalized life-saving drugs in my lifetime! Longevity isn’t about a new vitamin protocol. It’s about 3D-printed spare parts and medicines that are genetically specific. That helps explain why so many in Silicon Valley are backing Trump and Kennedy now. I am just saying that what is happening in American politics is bigger than this particular Presidential race.
These questions about life and death don’t just refer to who wins or who loses this race, but to who gets to decide who gets to live and who gets killed, and how we all get to live or die. Kennedy has long been investigating all the different kinds of shots, from assassins’ merciless bullets to medical syringes to media potshots. Now, he has a Presidential sponsor and is potentially armed with a platform to find the smoking guns, to get under the skin of healthcare, and to hit his “money shot” - even if he does not win this particular Presidential race."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/assassinations-autonomy-anatomy-anomalous
War of Traps: Power Corrupts Absolutely
I started watching a Japanese political drama called “War of Traps.” It’s a very good tv series which I recommend to get an insight into Japanese politics.
Washizu is a loyal lieutenant and secretary to a Senior minister in the Japanese government. He does everything he can to support him. Until his son is hurt and he is betrayed by his minister. He starts to see how corrupt and broken things are.
“Do the powerful get anything they want? Must the weak accept everything? I’m not having any of it. They’ll get what is coming to them. I will teach them how much it hurts to get stomped on. I will teach them.”
He gathers his team and slowly uses his position to rise through the political ranks. He even joins the Japanese Diet and becomes special advisor to the Prime Minister, punishing his enemies along the way. It is a literal war of political traps he sets and escapes from. He becomes the power behind the throne.
“I used to suck it up when I was mistreated. But when I got power, people started to bow down. People listened to me. Truly a good feeling. I wanted to help people. I had to be coercive at times to do so. I thought power made me virtuous but I was just being possessed. Possessed by power and authority.”
But he destroys his relationship with his beloved family along the way. His son becomes alienated to him and his wife divorces him. All a result of him getting lost in the pursuit of power. He eventually wakes up and sacrifices his career to take down a corrupt Prime Minister.
“I looked it up. The fate of a bamboo grove when it dies after blossoming flowers. The grove dying allows more sunlight to reach the soil and then new bamboo plants sprout and grow.
Soon an even stronger grove sprout.”
The point is sometimes you need massive change to improve things. “When the old perish, the new will sprout. Something new, and something beyond imagination. Cover up injustice to uphold the status quo? Politics like that should disintegrate.”
I guess this is a lesson we need to learn here in the Global West. We need a rejuvenation of our system. New blood, new energy and it’s coming.
“The weak have their own way of fighting.” Remember that.
Freedom, Impact and Generosity: The Only Point of Wealth
“Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre'' at first glance seems like a silly, action comedy movie from Hollywood. I was hesitant to start it but frankly I was bored and way too tired to read. Boy, am I glad I picked it up. Guy Ritchie is a damn good director.
The movie starring Jason Stratham and Hugh Grant is about a team of private spy’s trying to track down a stolen & secret AI weapon in the hands of a billionaire arms broker. They recruit a Hollywood star to help save the world. It’s really entertaining.
There is a great scene where the billionaire arms dealer Greg is showing the movie star Danny around his estate and he comes to this beautiful classic rare Ford Mustang in his garage. It’s a car in one of his movies.
The billionaire asks him: “How much did you want this car Damny?”
Danny answers: “Of all the cars I’ve driven on screen, this is the only car I’ve ever wanted to possess.”
Greg: “Is that right: did you crave it? Did you yearn for it? Did you dream about it?”
Danny responds: “I longed for it.”
Greg then answers: “Do you know what? It’s yours. Come on, let’s have lunch!”
The actor is flabbergasted but overjoyed.
Now this is what we describe in Mandarin Chinese as “Da Chi”, big heart, or big energy. Immense generosity. This is the opposite of “Xiao Chi” or small energy, cheapness.
I’ve long talked about the importance of wealth in enabling your freedom. Going wherever, whenever and doing it with whoever you want. This part is pretty clear. It’s also to enable initiatives and causes you care the most about whether it’s certain charities or movements or political parties. It’s all dependent on the person.
There is this scene when the actor asks the billionaire: “So tell me how did the leap from millionaire to billionaire change you?”
The billionaire says: “Right. Interesting question. And I imagine my cue to tell you money doesn’t make you any happier. But I tell you what, it f—ing does. But it does. And I’m really happy now.”
Yes, having money does make you happier!!
The other and arguably biggest reason why wealth equates to happiness is making sure your loved ones are taken care of. I’d take it a step further: doing really nice things for your friends and loved ones. I want to treat my friends & family. I want to be generous. I refuse to split the bill for meals, I will pay for it. I want to give nice gifts to people I care about. I want to take them on trips or pay for nice material things that make them happy. I want to make magic happen for them.
This is the whole point of having money. It enables “Da Chi.” I never want to be a rich person living by himself like Scrooge in the Christmas Carol for most of that tale. I want to be the generous Scrooge at the end of the tale when he spreads his wealth and takes care of the Cratchit family. Sadly, this early Scrooge is like many wealthy people I know in real life. Cheap, ungenerous individuals counting their pennies.
Which leads me to a quote in the movie that sums up my view. “We are anti-capitalist. We’re just anti-other capitalists.”
All this wealth creation is enabled by a capitalist system, but capitalism is like technology, a neutral tool. A blade. You can use it for good or for evil. I hope everyone who ends up doing well, uses their gains for good. Good for your family, your friends and society. This is a reminder for myself too. Be “Da Chi.”
Dark Nights, Dark Thoughts: Never Make Big Decisions in the Dark Hours
I remember a comment a colleague made to his team right before Yahoo!'s infamous annual Sales Conference as a warning against the drunken debauchery the event was known for. (It is a media sales organization after all). He said “Nothing good can happen to your career after midnight.” Incredible advice. But it’s more than just about your career and work life. It’s relevant to most life decisions.
I am a night owl so I naturally stay up later. I tend to get a lot of work and reading done late at night. You are alone with your thoughts which in normal times is a good thing.
But the time when this is not good is when you are facing trouble or some big setback in life. Work trouble, family trouble, health or whatever crisis. You are tired and really stressed. I find my thoughts veers to pure crazy. And usually to some extreme form of despair or anger. You have some really dangerous and dark thoughts.
This is the absolutely worst time to be making decisions. So I force myself to meditate for at least 20 minutes and try to go back to sleep. And surprisingly you just feel better in the morning. You have a clearer head as the crazy late night fugue state is gone.
Why do I write about this? It’s been a really rough time for many of us since 2020 and it’s only getting worse not better. Don’t make big decisions in the wee hours after midnight. Try to get some sleep and I guarantee the situation will look much better in the morning.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 15th, 2024
“Problems are guidelines, not stop signs!”--Robert H. Schuller
This is always an educational conversation. Global macro from the Rebel Capitalist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh6IuI8oMnk
2. "Ukrainian production and employment of air and maritime drones has, indeed, been revolutionary – truly path-breaking, in fact. Indeed, the US and other countries need to learn a great deal from what Ukraine has done – and likely will do – even as unmanned ground systems are introduced in larger numbers, as well!
The ability of Ukraine to throw thousands of aerial drones at Russian soldiers on the battlefield every day – and also to strike strategic targets inside Russia nightly, as well – is truly game-changing. And Ukraine’s ability to employ vast number of electronic warfare [EW] “bubbles” of various sizes all over the battlefield and around headquarters and bases and important infrastructure is also hugely impressive.
So have been the ever evolving software components and enablers of all of these technological advances, as their constant refinement and improvement, increasingly involving AI [artificial intelligence], have been the critical element that has enabled the drones to evade Russian EW and air defense systems and engage targets heavily protected by Russian assets. (All of this should suggest, by the way, that Ukraine will be a major exporter of unmanned systems when its domestic requirements are ultimately reduced…)"
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37119
3. This is the punch in the face and wake up call that every modern guy needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiYmRC0Mmuk
4. "This Ukrainian operation represents a very significant effort on the part of the Ukrainians to reset the status quo in the war, and change narratives about Ukraine prospects in this war.
It is the kind of strategic risk-taking that I don’t think is well understood in many Western capitals anymore. For nearly two generations now, Western nations have been able to cut military spending. None of them have faced existential threats, even though the War on Terror did require a significant response for more than a decade after 9/11.
The slow decision-making cycles in Western military and political circles, an in military procurement, is indicative of institutions that no longer understand the imperative to act quickly and decisively while taking major risks.
This is not the case for the Ukrainians. They have faced an existential threat since February 2022 (and more broadly, for the entirety of their existence as a people) and have a very different political and military decision-making calculus than those of their supporters. A nation and a people who face an existential risk from their neighbour tend to think differently from those who do not."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/kursks-next-operational-phase
5. "Quality water is essential for brewing delicious coffee. Shifting gears to investing, water, or liquidity, is important to stacking sats. This is a recurring theme throughout my essays. But we often forget how important it is and focus on the little things we believe will impact our ability to make money.
It is very hard to lose money investing if you can recognise how, where, why, and when fiat liquidity is being created. Unless you are Su Zhu or Kyle Davies. If financial assets are priced in USD and off US Treasuries (UST), then it stands to reason that the quantity of currency and dollar debt globally are the most critical variables.
Instead of focusing on the US Federal Reserve (Fed), we must focus on the US Treasury Department. This is how we will determine the specifics of Pax Americana's addition and subtraction of fiat liquidity.
Once the US debt ceiling charade is over, liquidity will gush from the Treasury and possibly the Fed to get markets back on track. Then, the bull market will begin for realz. $1 million Bitcoin is still my base case."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/water-water-every-where
6. Incredibly valuable discussion on vertical SaaS businesses. And good differences between USA market and other international markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfZEotCiK8g
7. This is a master conversation with a dual threat top tier operator and investor. Elad Gil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX19cmIIkkM&t=3s
8. "The funny thing about deterrence is that if you don’t do it properly, or worse balk at it, you create exactly the opposite conditions from what you wanted. You wind up encouraging bad actors, not only the one you targeted, but also bad actors worldwide who are deciding if the risk/reward ratio favors the bold, or signals caution."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/doing-just-less-then-the-minimum
9. "I’ve increasingly come to feel that the destruction of our attention – thanks, in large part, to the combination of smartphones and social media – is one of the biggest threats we face as a civilization, as it compromises our ability to make sustained progress on anything worthwhile. Most people are so immersed in it that they can’t see how bad it is; you can’t ask someone to think clearly when their core operating system is compromised."
https://nayafia.substack.com/p/protecting-our-attention
10. "Coast FIRE, which stands for “Coast Financial Independence, Retire Early,” is an innovative approach to retirement that is somewhere between traditional retirement strategies and more extreme FIRE methods. The idea is to front-load your retirement savings early in your career and then allow those investments to grow without needing additional contributions.
This concept is very similar to a post I wrote back in 2021 called Go Big, Then Stop. That post emphasized the importance of saving and investing early, but it more or less describes the core tenet of Coast FIRE.
The purpose of Coast FIRE is to save aggressively in your early working years until your portfolio reaches a point where its expected growth would meet your future retirement needs. This is called hitting your Coast FIRE number. Once you hit this number, you can then reduce or even eliminate how much you save each month. At this point, the only thing you need to worry about is covering your current expenses.
With Coast FIRE, you don’t get to leave the workforce, but you do get the freedom to:
Shift to part-time work
Pursue a lower-paying, but more fulfilling, career
Take extended breaks from work
Coast FIRE is not about completely stopping work at a young age, but, rather, achieving a level of financial security that allows for more flexibility and less stress before traditional retirement. This approach appeals to those who want more financial freedom and work-life balance without the sometimes extreme measures associated with other FIRE strategies."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/coast-fire/
11. 50 Years is one of the best Deeptech VCs around. Love Seth & Ela are the best. "Tech is having its Bio moment!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsIxOXsX30A
12. Frightening new wave of cartels, the ultra violent CJNG seems to be first of new scary groups emerging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F10DOXk5MOU
13. "This is very concerning, but not for the reason the BCI purports. It is incorrect to blindly equate higher margins with higher taxpayer costs. To spell it out: Companies could be selling products at high margins but lower overall cost. In fact, this is what you would expect from innovative commercial companies amortizing self-funded research and development across a large number of customers.
The best-known example is, of course, SpaceX. The company lowered launch costs and humiliated the United Launch Alliance’s technology and business model in the process. Who cares if SpaceX’s margins are higher? Perhaps the US government, but certainly not China or Russia. Those countries just see that the United States is home to the firm that launched 87 percent of all tonnage to orbit in Q1 2024.
The US government chooses to obsess about profit margins—rather than value delivered—at its own peril. This mindset is the best way to ensure repeated FASA violations, but more importantly, it will doom the United States to failure in the next war it fights."
https://behindthefront.substack.com/p/the-law-the-department-of-defense
14. This is a masterclass in building and running a Holding company. Must listen. There are so many great insights on how to build and operate one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IDoyuMIhFI
15. "But if he is perhaps the wildest misfit tech diva of his generation, with a torrid ambition and engineering prowess rivaled only by Elon Musk, Luckey is also, in a way Musk is not and cannot be, the product of something more familiar—the heir to a 100-year revolution in American society that made Southern California the techno-theological citadel of the Cold War, and a one-man bridge between the smoldering American past and an unknown future that may be arriving soon.
Which is why the magnetic poetry version of the life of Luckey that does the story justice goes more like this:
Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron—which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.
In Luckey’s phrase, the mission of Anduril is to serve as the Western world’s gun store, turning America and its allies into “prickly porcupines so that no one wants to step on them.” Just imagine the political dividend of such an outcome, he told me. “What if instead of a $60 billion aid package [for Ukraine], it was a $1 billion aid package, and it was 10 times as effective? Just imagine that that were possible. If you’re building the right mass-produced, AI robot-produced, very, very cheap loitering munitions that are always able to do the job at a hundredth or a thousandth of the price of an existing system, at some point the justification [for withholding aid] goes away.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril
16. Japan waking up to the growing threat of China and North Korea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxlodxeWZ58
17. "At the application layer, economies of scale aren’t a viable mechanism for defensibility either — because computational costs are an order of magnitude lower compared to the model layer. Your ability to pay for an OpenAI’s API or compute for your app isn’t a sustainable advantage over a future competitor. Some applications like Character.ai have attempted to avoid this problem by vertically integrating, i.e. building their own customized models. Here again, the efficacy of economies of scale is questionable for the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
This leaves network effects and switching costs as the only realistic modes of defensibility for most applications.
So how do you create real, meaningful network effects with an AI application? Based on what we’ve talked about so far, the app needs to have an AI-enabled multiplayer interaction which involves a lot more than AI-generated output created by another user. These applications use AI to enable a (higher friction) multiplayer interaction that was previously impossible."
https://medium.com/breadcrumb/ai-2-0-introducing-network-effects-to-the-ai-era-bef6c5fec3c4
18. Quite a good state of Crypto in 2024. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhAyuAeQ2Vg
19. A fascinating jaunt about what's happening in Eastern Europe and their future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOcQGAYMdbs
20. Excellent discussion this week. Not Investment Advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kERv6UNgF6g
21. "Innovation also leads to the last trend, autonomy. Today, FPV drone use is limited by the supply of skilled pilots and by the effects of jamming, which can sever the connection between a drone and its operator. To overcome these problems, Russia and Ukraine are experimenting with autonomous navigation and target recognition. Artificial intelligence has been available in consumer drones for years and is improving rapidly.
A degree of autonomy has existed on high-end munitions for years and on cruise missiles for decades. The novelty is that cheap microchips and software will turn the low-end munitions that are saturating the battlefield, into smart weapons. The side that can push autonomy to the edge – that is enabling each of these weapons to close the kill chain independently – will consistently out-tempo the other. Ukraine is the laboratory for this deadly competition."
https://amilburn.substack.com/p/drone-warfare-article-and-podcast
22. "I’m mostly concerned that we’ll face a similar fate that is plaguing the Japanese population as it continues to decline. We need to prime the top of funnel with more startups, which you’ll see below is still going down, and as of now unless we do something, wont increase significantly without intervention. We already have a Series A crunch which I believe will last another year or so but then after that the funnel will dry up if nothing changes and later stage growth etc will have less to choose from. Eventually in 7-10yrs we’ll see a major lull in IPOs and M&A because of the lack of investments now.
Emerging managers are the cornerstone of early stage innovation, taking huge risk on relatively unproven ideas and founders. Despite their potential for higher returns, these managers are currently struggling to secure sufficient capital due to LPs’ preference for larger, more established and “safer” funds. As I wrote in a previous newsletter, no one ever got fired for investing in a well established and brand named firm."
23. "So the more you think about it, it was the First, not the Second, World War that is at the origin of most of the world’s problems today. By destroying high-level supranational and multi-ethnic structures overnight, it created massive problems. By selecting “self-determination” as the solution, without really thinking through what it meant, it ensured that those problems would be insoluble without brute force, and perhaps not even then.
In fact, if you consider where crises and political instability have arisen in the last thirty years, from the Balkans through the Levant to Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, these are all territories of Arab/Ottoman conquest: even Yemen was added to the Empire in 1517.
This is not because the Empire of the Ottomans was especially bad—though there is a tendency to romanticise it— but because of its organisation of the population into religious groups, and the speed and nature of its collapse and the vacuum left behind. In a very real sense, we are still dealing with the consequences of the fall of three Empires in 1918."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/people-states-and-borders
24. "Tension tells us that we need to change. I had to stop in my tracks and acknowledge that certain forces in my life had corralled me into a career which was not ‘me.’
Facing tension, and avoiding a quick fix, what can we move towards? The remedy will be particular to the root of the problem. Recurrent desires or thoughts, of work that energises you, are signs of your true interests and passions. Whenever I took holidays from work, the same old ideas and curiosities tended to arise, and I would begin to think about them, enjoying an energetic shift which would dissipate as soon as I returned to the work environment which was stultifying me.
In my work and personal life, the pattern was similar. There was no point in running away from something unless I had something to replace it. In some cases, the right thing to do was not to leave, but to work through the issues, which can require confronting deep tension."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/living-in-tension-guest-post
25. "As the world shifts to more digital competition, one of the most powerful long-term advantages is addiction. For businesses, this means that services that can grab and hold consumers’ attention for longer will be rewarded. For consumers, it means that we will have to be ruthless in our relationship with technology. Business best practices are not equivalent to consumer best interests. Whether professionally or personally, each of us will need to understand and reconcile ourselves to this phenomenon. In the years to come, whoever responds best will be rewarded."
https://every.to/napkin-math/the-addiction-economy-7590d4c0-19c6-4eab-9653-e7a961b6aeb9
26. Building a business around C-Suite communities. I know Greg from back in the day, awesome to see him building something so needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyadaohMXDw
27. "If you’re still unconvinced, let me remind you that everything online is fake.
Social feeds are a window to that impossibly desirable living style, exempt from worldly affairs and oblivious to the daily news: wanderlust nomads that live by not living anywhere; chefs cooking succulent meals in the middle of nowhere; and beautiful couples sharing landscapes as enchanting as from God’s dreams.
The trick is that those people spent just as much time, if not more, setting up the camera, preparing the lighting, the angles, the spot, the calculated movements, and taking a gazillion of footage to show us. They need to document everything. They need to be terminally online. They need to design and manufacture their lives for social media likes and engagement.
Ideas flourish in the unplugged places but spread through the wired currents of the internet.
It gotta be both."
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/no-place-left-unplugged
28. Good state of pre-seed. It's still active but with fewer rounds & ones taking longer from what I see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpOHeTWCDMM
29. “Things are turning into positional war there,” he said, meaning static lines of contact on a battlefield defined by artillery fire, similar to what obtains in Donbas. “I believe Ukraine can hold the line there for quite a long time unless Russia dedicates very serious resources to kicking us out.” One person who agrees is Russian parliamentarian Andrey Gurulev, a retired lieutenant general, who said on state-run Russian television: “We must look at this situation with sobriety. We won’t be able to push them out quickly.”
Ed Bogan, a former senior CIA operations officer who follows Ukraine closely, told New Lines that the campaign has already delivered a “heavy psychological blow to the enemy, as it clearly exposes several of Russia’s many military and political deficiencies and challenges our policy assumptions. Now would be a good time to lift the remaining restrictions and let Ukraine move towards finishing this thing on their terms.”
https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/how-ukraine-caught-putins-forces-off-guard-in-kursk-and-why/
30. An Incredible vision of the future. And a call to action for all of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xi8Krhy8FQ
31. "That said, we often discuss that the brush stroke of “venture capital” is far too limited. Our mandate isn’t exclusively to invest in SaaS startups (though that’s certainly part of what we do); it’s to invest in companies that we feel can provide an incredibly compelling return for our LPs. At Equal, not a single one of our last 3 investments sells software. In each case, we diagnosed the value chain of that particular industry and determined that the most transformative impact (and highest value-creating potential) was in developing a service that utilizes technology to disrupt and/or augment the existing stakeholders in the industry.
When we look at an investment opportunity, we don’t just look at top-line revenue and ascribe revenue multiples. Rather, we diagnose the economic benchmarks of that industry segment to determine 1) is there an opportunity for an economic moat, 2) how that company may be valued at scale, and 3) whether the corresponding return to our fund would be sufficient to justify the investment."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/acrisure-2-0-insurance-agency-gbo-4935ae632d7d
32. This was a fun interview with two smart VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKsfsWo0qF8
33. Incredible episode if you want to know what’s up in the tech world. IRL versus remote work, body futurism and what the young kids are into.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8w1iB-pmYk&t=3064s
34. "The question to ask is why Zelensky did not order his troops into this direction earlier as it serves multiple and useful goals for him. First, opening a new arena of hostilities will likely force Russian troops to vacate positions it has in occupied Ukraine and move to the homefront and thereby opening up offensive opportunities for the Ukrainians. Secondly, captured territory can provide a bargaining chip for Ukraine if peace negotiations are to take place.
But the overarching rationale is that this is an incredibly humiliating swipe at Putin and therein also lies a significant risk: it may provoke Russia to ramp up the war and engage in similar and more lethal moves deeper into Ukraine which will escalate the war further. It is not a stretch to argue that Ukraine’s war cabinet’s bold move is therefore a huge gamble."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/potential-game-changer
35. This is an ambitious initiative. A brand new school. Very interesting.
https://balajis.com/p/network-school
36. "For Ukraine itself, preserving its own personnel is vital, so the more it can degrade Russian forces with indirect fire, the better. The priorities for support include artillery ammunition, strike drones, and systems for knocking down Russian reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles that allow its forces to attack Ukrainian units while they are being resupplied.
Ukraine’s wider military position remains precarious, and the autumn looks to be politically challenging. Kyiv must strike a balance, preparing for the loss of critical supplies without burning its ability to fight on. For Europe, it is vital that Kyiv, if forced to negotiate, is given as strong a hand as possible, and that there is a concrete plan to ensure that any settlement produces a lasting peace."
37. "The significance of this moment may lie less with events in Kursk than with the change in strategy they reveal. Ukraine may be adopting some elements of guerrilla warfare, looking for weak points anywhere within the Russian forces and taking greater advantage of the element of surprise. The goal would be less to bring about a spectacular victory of the kind Ukraine still dreamed about a year ago than to weaken Russia to the point where it has no alternative but to withdraw.
Ukraine and its partners now hope to keep Russia under increasing pressure – I expect a succession of attacks – and wait for the Kremlin to conclude that the war cannot be won. The terms for a peace negotiation remain uncertain, but Ukraine is convinced that reaching a deal depends on blocking any path to a Russian victory. Kursk is the opening salvo of a psychological war on Russia."
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2024/08/zelenskys-gambit-invasion-russia
Oil and Water: Painful Lessons of “BlackBerry the Movie”
It was September 2023 when I finally watched the “Blackberry” movie on a long flight home. I’m an old tech business guy who actually used Blackberry. I recall how I felt when I was first given a Blackberry phone as an executive at Yahoo!
It’s stupid looking back but at the time I felt I had made it both within the organization but in the industry. It was that much of a status symbol during the mid-2000s. It was ubiquitous in executive suites throughout the Fortune 500. It was so addictive to use that we called it the “Crackberry.” This addictiveness is something I can personally attest to. It had 30% market share in North America and 50% market share globally in 2007.
Then the IPhone from Apple came out in 2007. Boy, did Research in Motion (RIM) the master company of Blackberry really mess it up despite their overwhelming lead in the market. Another long story of incumbents getting their butts kicked because of arrogance, complacency and cutting corners.
Anyways, back to the movie, it’s the story about two techies who bring on board a hard-nosed business guy Jim Balsillie to help take RIM to the next level. It’s a dramatized version of their rise from the crappy small town of Waterloo in Canada to global domination but it’s good fun.
I should say Jim Balsillie is a completely vicious a-shole with major anger management issues albeit he is damn effective. And Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin are naive, frigging doofuses but brilliant technical geniuses. Such a good business drama movie, watching a freewheeling tech driven startup turn into a soulless big corporation. A “pride before the fall” story.
Jim the business man, when asking them for some random phone prototype, says: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” But Mike the techie responds: “Good enough is the enemy of humanity.”
This exchange encapsulates the eternal story of culture clash in business. Suits versus creatives. Geeks (tech) versus jocks (business). Founders versus professional managers aka “Adult supervision.”
This is just so very common in startup land. Sometimes it works out. But this culture clash is the main reason so many growth stage companies spin out of control. They bring in the wrong stage of executive and leadership. It’s like when a B2B startup hires a bunch of executives from Oracle or Salesforce. It never works out most of the time.
They are just too bureaucratic, too used to having a ton of resources and unwilling to get their hands dirty. They are also extremely skilled politicians, who are great at managing up but don’t do any real work. Or great at taking credit for others' work or removing rival executives altogether. They draw the wrong lessons from their previous experiences and act without understanding the new context.
This happened at Yahoo! when I was there with a wave of horrific executives from IBM for example. Or at Zynga with a wave of Electronic Arts managers. These people calcified the culture and I can point to these companies' decline at the point of time when these specific executives joined.
Most recently & prominently in 2023, it was the clean sweep of ex-Amazon executives from Flexport when the founder returned after seeing the bloat that happened with his replacement CEO. You want to hire someone who can help you grow through the next few stages but not too far ahead.
There is a big difference between inheritors and founders and builders. Too many times founders get entranced or deceived by the credentials, or the prestige of the brand or the impressive presenting and interviewing skills of these executives. But they soon find out these people have no clue. They inherited a working system and have no idea how to build it.
If you use my quick framework of the 3 stages of companies it’s very clear. These stages are the Commando, Infantryman and Policeman phases. Don’t hire a policeman when you need an infantryman. Make sure these folks have done the job of scaling that specific stage or at least have the humility & mindset of learning.
Plus a willingness to get their hands dirty in doing basic things needed in running the day to day business. If they refuse to help out on customer service calls, booking their own travel on occasion or even stacking chairs or cleaning up after an all hands meeting, they may not be a good fit for your startup. Especially if they see these things as beneath them.
Get rid of them fast as they will ruin your culture with arrogance and entitlement. Something we’ve seen that was endemic in startup land these last 6-7 years that thankfully is disappearing fast since mid-2022. But take the lesson here that others are now learning the hard way.
You Are the Company You Keep: Academy Companies, Alumni and Your Career Velocity
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last 24 years in Silicon Valley is the importance of the people and place. But to put it together even more crisply, “you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” It’s something I’ve written about or stated often because it’s that important.
This could be your school, this could be your city or even a mastermind group. But the more frequent occurrence is what company you work or worked at. This is where you spend a disproportionate amount of your day and time.
This is why starting your career at an amazing company is critical to your success and trajectory. A place full of brilliant, ambitious, entrepreneurial and talented individuals. Places known for all the spin outs and even greater success after.
In the past and traditional industries it used to be Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. In Silicon Valley, the most famous was Fairchild Semiconductors and the notorious PayPal Mafia. For a period of time in ecommerce during the early 2000s it was EBay. In Media, from 2002-2007, Yahoo! was the hothouse. I was so damn lucky to be there. It elevated my knowledge and gave me an understanding of what smart truly was. Some big pools of talent these days I’ve noticed, would be Coinbase in crypto and Stripe in general.
As a VC, I was also lucky to end up at 500 Startups and work there for the time I did. It was something of a clown show and looked down upon in Silicon Valley, despite Dave being ex-PayPal.
But it was pointed out to me, that unlike many other VC funds, there have been a tremendous amount of new and successful VC fund managers that have come out of it over the last 4-5 years.
The list is surprisingly long:
Sheel & Jake @Better Tomorrow Ventures (Fintech); Edith @Race Capital; Elizabeth & Eric @Hustle Fund; James & Yohei @Coral Capital in Japan; Pat, Mike, Chris @ Panache Ventures in Canada, Binh & Eddie @ Ascend Capital in Vietnam, Monique Woodward @ Cake Ventures ,Asher @ Sukna Ventures in MENA, Pankaj Jain of Saka Ventures in India, Sherif who runs the Dubai Futures Fund, or Neha @ 2048 VC, Tanya @ Southpaw Ventures & Andrea @ Mahway Ventures among others.
And I’d include myself in this illustrious group with Diaspora Ventures and my Personal Holding Company, Sukna Holdings.
This list of spin out VC managers, using a key metric of the industry, has a combined AUM (Assets Under Management) far larger than 500 Startups now 500 Global. (Although I should note that the most important metric for most VC funds is cash on cash returns, so still early days here).
This is a testament to the critical mass of talent that existed at 500 Startups before. Something we haven’t really seen at other places like YC, Techstars or other of the big VC Funds. And the point I am making again is that when it comes to picking a place and job to work at, focus on learning over earning.
And the way to do this is? Go to where the smartest but most overlooked people are. If you surround yourself with super smart people, it inevitably raises your IQ and acumen. The reverse effect will happen if you go to the wrong company. So do your homework and be super thoughtful and picky on where you work early in your career. You have no idea how much it matters and how much momentum this will give you in life.
Les Miserable: Do You Hear the People Sing? Singing The Song of Angry Men (and Women)
Les Miserable is a classic broadway show (not the Hollywood movie which sucked in my opinion). Loved the show when I saw it in London almost a decade and half ago. Although it was kind of depressing yet inspiring at the same time. The music and characters are amazing. But the song that stuck in my head was “Do You Hear The People Sing?” sung by the young Idealists & Revolutionaries during their ill fated uprising. The 1832 Paris Uprising for History buffs.
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q82twrdr0U
But don’t just watch it, do read the actual lyrics below.
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes
It’s so powerful. So majestic and highlights what all of us want. Opportunity, a better and more prosperous future. Freedom.
I sang this song with my kid all the time during my 2 year sabbatical after I left Yahoo! because it epitomized my search for a new beginning and freedom from working for “the Man.”
It led to me joining 500 Startups and becoming a venture capitalist which opened up an exciting new world to me. But I still wasn’t free then. It took getting booted out (nicely I might add) and the financial and mental hell of the 2020 pandemic to wake me up to that fact.
I have so many friends and ex-colleagues stuck in the matrix. Working at companies or jobs they hate. There is a reason people call a JOB=Just Over Broke. Dealing with financial challenges or bad relationships or living in bad situations. Desperate. You feel helpless and it’s soul destroying. I know, I’ve been there.
Freedom is not free as Ukrainians have shown. Financial independence & wealth has to be earned. Anything worthwhile needs to be fought for. So whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish: be prepared for a lot of pain and a lot of work.
So for those who want to fix this and are embarking on your personal journey of discovery and business but are scared: get angry! Get angry at your situation, get angry at your own fear, weakness and laziness. It might just be enough to get you moving & doing something.
So keep the below words from the song in mind:
“Is there a world you long to see? Then join in the fight. That will give you the right to be free!
And most importantly take action! This way you might realize your own new bright future.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 8th, 2024
“Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.”--Kyle Chandler
"The first study in self-improvement, therefore, is understanding our own psychology: how we think, learn, form habits and break bad ones; our unique strengths and weaknesses that enable us to succeed in some situations and not others.
Only if we can close that gap do we have any hope of closing the others."
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2024/08/06/the-three-gaps/
2. Older article but important space in this scary new world. Asia's defense industry.
https://www.asiancenturystocks.com/p/mapping-asias-defense-industry
3. Some pretty glaring issues on what the CCP has been doing to us. The China threat, they are masters of the hybrid war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7_7wmAyy4g&t=22s
4. "I fear that Taiwan has a bad case of “main character syndrome” — see in the world as a narrative of good vs evil where good will ultimately triumph in the end. Instead it should give at least equal weight to the world as a chessboard and learn to count the pieces on either side.
When you are vulnerable and live in a bad neighborhood, stupidity is a sin. Taiwan is sinning even as it bathes itself in imaginary glory. Getting together with you buddies to talk about how awful your opponent is isn’t diplomacy, it’s brunch. Diplomacy I define as sitting down with entities you don’t necessarily like to maximize the benefits to your interests."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/on-the-real-vs-imaginary-defense
5. "But if China could climb up the value chain, then so can Vietnam, Indonesia, Morocco, and Egypt. Over time, the companies in these countries that do assembly for China will learn enough of the tricks of the trade that they’re able to make more and more of the harder, more valuable stuff.
The U.S. and other tariff countries can help accelerate that process. By putting tariffs on Chinese components, but not on Chinese brands, they can incentivize Chinese companies to move more of their high-value work to poorer countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Companies like BYD will then be able to circumvent tariffs, but only if they transfer their technology to developing countries.
In other words, tariffs by the U.S., Europe, and others might help usher in the next phase of globalization. They’re a costly inefficient policy that sometimes backfires, but that might be an acceptable price to pay for smashing the unsustainable, toxic pattern of China-centric globalization that prevailed in the 2000s and 2010s."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-tariffs-on-china-could-help-the
6. This was a spectacular interview. Zuck has really come into his own on the image front.
He was always brilliant but now just on the front edge of cool (and lot less robotic).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02fBBoZa9l4
7. "Humans are built to seek connection, but we often forget that our body language and tone convey more than the things we say. The next time you interact with someone, reflect on what you’re communicating without words. Are your shoulders slouched? Are you turned toward them? Are you making eye contact? Do you nod along to what they’re saying? Are your arms crossed? Do you keep checking your phone? We perform so many of these small gestures every day, without even thinking, and each one sends a message.
What message are you sending?"
https://debliu.substack.com/p/the-hidden-message-youre-communicating
8. "Stripped to core components, an investor is a machine in which information goes in one end and capital allocation decisions come out the other. Venture capitalists who do not take care of their inputs place themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to their outputs.
The best investors focus on feeding themselves a regular diet of differentiated, high-quality information. Books and other sources of thoughtfully crafted writing are essential. Podcasts, YouTube, and social media posts can all hold valuable information. But there is a reason, beyond age alone, that so many of the world’s best thinkers are bibliophiles.
Listen to Reid Hoffman, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla, Josh Wolfe, Michael Moritz, or Marc Andreessen speak, and you will hear someone extraordinarily well-read, with wide-ranging tastes spanning fiction, philosophy, economics, history, anthropology, media theory, linguistics, mathematics, zoology, and beyond."
https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/how-to-spot-a-supertrend
9. Mike is the best. There are so many deep insights on the art of venture investing and building world changing startups. This is worth watching twice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV313WfYNdg
10. "Defense tech upstart Anduril Industries raised $1.5 billion in new venture capital funding at a $14 billion valuation, with some proceeds to be used for building autonomous weapon manufacturing facilities."
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/08/anduril-14-billion-autonomous-weapons
11. One of the best shows on the tech business and Silicon Valley. Latest episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LYZCoDysLs
12. “If the U.S. Army found itself at war, American manufacturers would struggle to produce the large number of high-quality small drones that the service would likely need—unless the Pentagon increases its support for drone producers, and soon.
When you look at Ukraine, now, they are building insane capacities to build drones,” he said. After the Russian-Ukraine war ends, “there will be a production capacity that will in return address the European and maybe even North American market,” he said."
13. "The trend is still the same from 3 years ago. The Upper Middle class is being pushed into the middle class. This means the true “Upper Middle Class”, is going to become small business owners. The only difference between upper middle and upper class will be the successes at scaling, inheritance and some odd ball incredible investors.
Considering that the vast majority of Wealth Management clients are all small business owners, the answer is in front of you (statistically).
Fade at Your Own Risk: You have all the numbers in front of you. We don’t sell dreams of “guaranteed riches”. We only provide the highest *probability* way to make it big. That’s the best you can do: play the odds.
Besides, even if you mess up, Thailand and Poland are always there."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/upper-middle-class-collapse-optimizing
14. "In a global economy, every point of connection is an axis of attack. Hybrid warfare is a conflict cocktail that blends conventional military operations, cyber, disinformation, guerilla tactics, lawfare, diplomacy, regime change, and economic warfare. Vladimir Putin is a seventh-level hybrid warfare wizard. He has covertly poured state resources into high- and low-tech means to pit Americans and Europeans against each other. Just as Big Tech realized the greatest ROI was misinformation from likable executives — “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made” — propaganda continues to be how nations punch above their kinetic weight class.
Investments affecting national security, energy, and infrastructure also face scrutiny. It’s a dumb idea to give your adversaries the ability to control your weapons systems, turn off the power grid, or close your ports. And it’s plain stupid to let them implant a neural jack into the wet matter of our youth. (See above: TikTok.)
American universities, however, are undefended — they are open for business.
In 2019 fewer than 3% of 3,700 higher education institutions complied with a law requiring them to report foreign gifts or contracts exceeding $250,000. The following year an Education Department report concluded, “U.S. institutions are technological treasure troves where leading and internationally competitive fields, such as nanoscience, are booming.
For too long, these institutions have provided an unprecedented level of access to foreign governments and their instrumentalities in an environment lacking transparency and oversight.” A subsequent crackdown has called into question foreign money at Harvard, Yale, MIT, and other schools."
https://www.profgalloway.com/weapons-of-war-higher-ed/
15. "The drone operates on an electronic battlefield. To defend against a reconnaissance drone, the adversary must jam the radio frequency connecting the aircraft to its ground station controller, so it can no longer receive manual commands, or jam the frequency connecting the drone to GPS satellites, so it can no longer navigate. Introducing AI to the drone allows it to use computer vision to navigate like a human would by looking at a map, without the need for any satellites, and make decisions about where to fly without constant input from a human operator. “You cannot jam such a drone, because there is nothing to jam,” one Ukrainian drone pilot from the 92nd Brigade told Reuters in March.
Electronic warfare and counter-drone systems are rapidly growing more sophisticated. To achieve decisive superiority on the battlefield of the future, drones will need to be capable of operating, processing data, and making decisions independently of a human operator. Against a technologically capable adversary such as the U.S. might face in China, new capabilities such as recognizing objects and obstacles and autonomous action will very quickly become necessary. The next generation of unmanned aerial systems will not be achieved with attritable systems alone. The winner of the next great power conflict will be the one that invests in intelligence at the edge.
History can take the same lesson from the successes of Ryan Aeronautical in Vietnam, of Abraham Karem in his garage, and of the grassroots drone industry in Ukraine. Key breakthroughs in unmanned systems are made when startups are able to receive tight feedback from performance on the battlefield, rapidly iterating in conjunction with the warfighter. As the Department of Defense seeks to reshore America’s drone fleet, it should prioritize the startup companies that create war-winning innovations."
https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/09/the-past-and-future-of-military-drones/
16. Adopters and non-adopters. The Future of Work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps2asYuD5js
17. "There's a whole nerdy ocean of debate about Marvel vs. DC, and how they each built their respective cinematic universes. I've contributed plenty to that conversation in my life. But I'm willing to concede that even Marvel, despite a glorious run of a golden age from 2008 to 2019, fell victim to the same fallacy as DC after Endgame. The pursuit of big came at the sacrifice of good.
In the venture world I often see the same danger. People willing to sacrifice good in pursuit of the big.
Bigger funds, bigger brands, bigger teams, bigger swings, bigger outcomes, bigger capital requirements.
Does a bigger fund mean not as good of returns? Yes.
Does a bigger brand usually mean you're not as good for a specific industry or subset of founders? Probably.
Does a bigger team mean not all of them are as good of investors? Usually.
Often my sense is the people pursuing the big believe that it is mutually exclusive with the good. They're satisfied with the "good enough." But I think that's wrong. I think thats as wrong in moviemaking as it is in company building.
You can build outcomes that are just as big while also focusing on what is good. Whether thats a good movie, in terms of quality, or a good business in terms of profitability, externalities, and overall outcomes."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-hits-business
18. Good discussion on the present geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x7bXllrB-s
19. Lyn Alden is one of the best global macro observers in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8JzsnZVylY
20. This is an enlightening conversation on tax laws for self employed entrepreneurs. America is set up specifically for entrepreneurs and businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjx70-vqZmQ
21. "Basically, I think the end of the pandemic and the rise in interest rates were triggers for investors to wake up and realize something they should have realized a while back: the internet is a mature industry now.
But because internet companies aren’t very capital-intensive, they don’t require huge fixed costs to set up — all you need to do these days is to hire a few software engineers and pay some cloud computing bills. Even back in the day when startups had to own their own computing hardware, it wasn’t that expensive. Together with network effects, low startup costs meant that software investors could take a huge number of bets, many of which offered the chance of gigantic returns.
The new industries that the tech sector is interested in mostly don’t offer both of these features at once.
Deeptech is obviously incredibly useful — the world needs newfangled semiconductors, spiffy drones, better batteries, new cancer drugs, and so on. In many ways this is a return to form for the VC industry — before software took over, in the 1970s and early 1980s, VC was mostly about funding hardware companies. The high fixed costs of hardware are a source of increasing returns, and therefore a source of market power, which means hardware startups offer the possibility of big rewards.
The problem is that hardware, unlike software, has incredibly big startup costs. To scale up a manufacturing company, you have to build big factories, like Anduril is doing now with its “Arsenal” factory. Biotech companies have to pay the huge fixed costs of drug research, testing, and approval. This makes hardware a tougher investment in three ways.
First, it means fewer investors can participate in the market past the seed round — you just need to have a lot of cash to pay a meaningful percentage of those fixed costs. Second, it tends to put a cap on the rate of return — there are some extremely valuable hardware companies out there, like Tesla, but they generally require more investment capital than a Facebook or an Amazon. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it stops investors from diversifying, which increases risk. If you have enough money to invest in 100 software startups, but only 10 hardware startups, it means you have a better chance of catching the next Facebook than the next Tesla.
Deeptech is still great, and it’s what VCs used to do more of, but it’s going to be tougher going than internet software. One thing investors will try to do to mitigate these problems is to put their money in deeptech companies that only do design, not actual manufacturing — think of Apple and Nvidia here. But given U.S.-China decoupling and the inherent difficulty of retaining an edge in design without controlling the factories as well, there might not be so many design-only deeptech companies out there."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/some-thoughts-on-the-future-of-the
22. "The rotor-toting robots of the hand-held, camera-sporting, persuasion that play such a big role on the battlefields of Ukraine owe much to consumer electronics. Indeed, if I am not too badly mistaken, the companies that make drones get most of their components from the same companies that supply the manufacturers of computers, smart phones, and video game consoles. Likewise, I suspect that the people who make remotely piloted planes of the smaller sort, whether design engineers or assembly-line workers, learned their respective trades making iPads, iPhones, and other items of that ilk.
To put things another way, the relationship between drones and consumer electronics echoes the connection that once tied field artillery matériel to civilian steel industries."
https://tacticalnotebook.substack.com/p/who-will-make-the-drones
23. Great list of off the beaten track places in Europe.
https://sharpmagazine.com/2024/07/08/meaningful-travel-guide-klm-cyprus-estonia-austria/
24. "Therapy is not linear. Each stage is fluid and overlaps, like tides sloshing in a rock pool. But what finally broke me free of this push and pull between denial and intellectualization was simply time—time and repetition. The boring truth about therapy is that rather than a stream of profound epiphanies, it is mostly a case of revisiting the same analysis—rising from the same undesirable thoughts and patterns of behavior—over and over again. But each time, the truth of it penetrates a fraction deeper and starts to catalyze changes in how you react to things and feel about them.
For Balick, this is the power and beauty of being in it for the long haul. “Though you keep coming back to a lot of those same repetitions, you get to them quicker, you move through them faster and you take greater risks,” he says. “Your therapist knows you and what your limits are. If it's good, trust continues to grow, deeper things continue to be said. And it's a real exploration—for the therapist, too.”
People often dismiss therapy as self-indulgent, and this is somewhat true in the beginning. You go because there’s something you have to change, something making you miserable or anxious. Many people feel the immediate relief of catharsis—I’ve said it out loud! Finally!—and stop. Sticking with it over the long term, I’ve come to understand I’m not just there to invest in myself but other people, how I interact with the world. It's a space to practise saying things that used to terrify me in real life—“I am angry with you”, “I feel insecure about this”—and learn the world does not fall in as a result. The long grind of therapy has enabled me to have conversations—with my parents, with strangers, with all sorts of people in between—that would have been unthinkable before.
“Long-term therapy has the capacity to deepen and improve all your relationships in life,” says Balick. “You can hold space. You can listen better. You can understand your own defensive reactions and be less reactive to them. That’s a very different thing from feeling less anxious about giving a presentation at work, which is a totally valid reason to seek a short-term therapy. It's just a different offer.”
https://www.gq.com/story/in-defense-of-the-long-painful-grind-of-therapy
25. "If you need any evidence of where this kind of control goes, you only need to examine human history. Whenever a government has carried out mass censorship or had complete control of narratives, it’s never ended well for the people.
Or, to simplify, the simple truth is this:
At any time in human history, whenever a government tried to censor or suppress the free speech of its people, they were not the good guys.
Whenever a government in the past has alleged they have a monopoly on the truth, they were not the good guys.
If your government is doing the same thing now—exactly like what’s happening in Australia, the UK, Europe, and beyond—I can promise you they are not the good guys."
https://anticitizen.com/p/not-good-guys
26. "Companies outsource manufacturing to China, but then realize that the Chinese copy their designs (and even improve upon them) and release their own competing products. Sooner or later, they will beat the OGs in innovation as well.
When you outsource, you give up some amount of control to a third party. If the function you outsource is unimportant, you’ll be fine.
If what you are outsourcing is THE thing that makes you great and powerful, or allows the third party to learn or outclass you at the thing that makes you great and powerful – you are making a huge mistake.
The day will come when they will learn how to do it better than you, and they will already know your business and your abilities and often even your customers. You will fall due to your own folly and mistake.
This is the lesson from the Athenian allies who became a subject people because they outsourced the fighting to Athens."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-athens-conquered-its-allies/
27. Kevin is an OG of Silicon Valley. One of the top investors and operators here.
Solid interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvvHojJrr-A
28. Good state of the startup funding world. Things are turning around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wNAJMF4NYQ&t=24s
29. "I’ve honestly been grappling with where the key vectors of competition and competitive advantage are in an AI world. I’m not there yet but, I’m leaning towards the idea that AI will level the playing field for areas like operations and innovation. I keep coming back to the things AI can’t change, and I think, counterintuitively, those may be some of the best places to invest to make money off of AI.
The fixed capacity in the modern world is attention. It seems like commanding someone’s attention is the most valuable thing to have or be. That generally cements incumbent positions, except in cases of extreme novelty. Maybe the AI people are right, and attention is all you need."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/would-you-use-an-outside-ai-program
30. "Two of our major themes this year are “The CPG Commerce Ecosystem” and “The Transactability of Wholesale” (see 2024 Equal POV on Investing in Retail) because the pain points that CPGs, especially emerging brands, encounter are distinctly unique from other retail categories, given how heavily reliant they are on traditional offline channels.
Getting into, and succeeding, in retail is a whole other ballgame, particularly given how offline and antiquated wholesale processes remain. CPGs also have to manage a more challenging supply chain that’s regulated and / or perishable, all the while managing cash flow constraints when working with procurement and payment cycles of large retailers.
We view CPG as one of the most exciting and underserved segments in the retail segment today and will be sharing more of our thoughts on the category over the next few months."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/the-cpg-dilemma-and-opportunity-77a942976f89
31. "The source cautions against comparing the Kursk incursion to Ukraine’s successful swift recapture of much of Kharkiv province in late 2022. The Russian army is taking the war more seriously now, he says: “The danger is we’ll fall into a trap, and Russia will grind our teeth down.” On Sunday Russia’s defence ministry claimed, albeit not for the first time, that it had “thwarted” attempts by Ukrainian forces to break deeper into Russia.
The mathematics of war have never favoured Ukraine, which must husband its limited resources, and an assault deep inside undefended Russian territory risks making the situation worse. But the operation has already improved the one crucial intangible—morale—that has allowed Ukraine to cheat the odds for nearly three years now. Whether in government offices in Kyiv, or in front-line hospitals treating the wounded, the nation believes it has uncovered a vulnerability in Vladimir Putin’s armour.
Tired, dirty and exhausted, the soldiers say they regret no part of the risky operation that has already killed scores of their comrades: They would rejoin it in a heartbeat. “For the first time in a long time we have movement,” says Angol. “I felt like a tiger.”
32. This interview with Sahil Bloom is such a great roadmap on how to build a business as a creator.
Lots of great insights and learnings here for building a personal brand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0yIT4GENRk
33. "Conventional wisdom would say that any window for Zuckerberg to come off as cool has closed now that he’s a 40-year-old father of three. So he’s decided that if people are going to laugh at him, he’s going to laugh right along with them. “I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just, like—all right, whatever. It doesn’t matter,” Zuckerberg says. “Just kind of try to be myself as much as I feel comfortable being.”
It’s the latest shift in Zuckerberg’s public persona, which he periodically reboots. He’s grown out his hair, started wearing a gold chain and oversize T-shirts, been spotted wearing a barbecue-themed hat with the motto “Smoke meat every day” and, earlier this year, participated in a “jacket swap” with Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang. On the Fourth of July, Zuckerberg posted a video of himself wakesurfing in a tuxedo while holding an American flag as Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. played in the background.
If Zuckerberg just did sales at a tech company instead of run one, this might seem like a standard midlife crisis. But his personal makeover corresponds with an attempt to do the same for a $1.3 trillion social media giant attempting to adapt to what he and other tech power brokers see as a fundamental shift in the industry. Advertising revenue from Meta’s social networks drives his business today, but Zuckerberg expects artificial intelligence to overhaul that formula soon."
https://archive.ph/lK89x#selection-1673.0-1693.479
34. "I have an idea for a new type of software company. It is radically different from anything that exists today, and if you read this article closely, you might be able to make millions of dollars.
The pitch goes like this:
Software is the greatest business man has ever invented. It is God’s gift to capitalists. The margins? High. The technical difficulty? Surprisingly low. If you follow the strategy proven by hundreds of startups, you can scale a software business to tens of millions of dollars of revenue in less than five years. It’s simple, cash-efficient, and has been the bedrock of tech’s might for decades.
The entire foundation of this mountain of moolah rests on three simple things:
A back end that has a table of data,
Logic that performs a set of actions based on that data, and
A front end that lets a user interact with the results of those actions.
The three together create a virtuous cycle: The user inputs new data or takes some action with the data on the front end, which gets sent to the back end, starting it all over again.
Annnnd that’s kinda it.
The multi-trillion-dollar world of software applications is all based on those three things. The technology is so simple that the majority of value over the last two decades has come not from sci-fi innovations in technology, but from innovations in how we distribute it. But I think that is about to change with a new model of design I call ambient software.
Ambient software, whoever controls the backend controls the AI. It works best when the startup has all of the data centralized in one location. This is challenging because most software incumbents have already realized the problems that AI represents and have started doing all they can to lock up data. Getting ambient software live with a customer would require a large migration process—and a number of cultural changes. Convincing employees to allow every phone call, keystroke, and conversation to be recorded will be challenging to say the least.
Most glaringly, models aren’t yet good enough to do this at scale. The big bet of ambient software is that you are hoping the models will improve. That is far from a sure thing! LLM progress has felt relatively slow compared to the gains that came in the year between the GPT-3 and GPT-4 release.
I actually find the model problem encouraging. The differentiation doesn’t come from model strength—something most startups can’t compete on because it’s expensive—but from implementation and understanding customer problems which is where startups excel. This means that there is an actual startup to be built!"
https://every.to/napkin-math/a-million-dollar-software-idea
35. "Packy McCormick’s job is to find, articulate, and invest in the next big idea. I spent an hour with him to understand how he’s baked AI into his process.
Packy writes Not Boring, a newsletter that analyzes technology and startups for 200,000 subscribers every week. He also invests through his fund, Not Boring Capital, which backs early-stage companies that combine sci-fi ideas with viable business models. And he’s an advisor at a16z crypto."
https://every.to/chain-of-thought/how-packy-mccormick-finds-his-next-big-idea
36. "Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister who now leads the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukraine-based think tank, described five potential motivations for the new offensive: diverting Russian forces from other fronts, particularly near Kharkiv; discouraging further Russian cross-border attacks into Ukraine by showing that Russia’s own borders are unprotected; showing the rest of the world that, despite its size, the Russian army is weaker than it appears; testing out new military tactics; and taking the initiative away from the Russian side. The larger question is how far the Ukrainians want to expand their current offensive."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/08/ukraine-russia-kursk-invasion/679420/
37. "The CIA’s veil of secrecy often submerges individuals’ stories, over time, into a compartmented void. But within some agency circles, this operative’s feats were the stuff of hushed renown. He was a “freaking legend,” says a former colleague. A “hero,” says another. “Exceptionally ballsy and committed,” says a third.
But some within the agency questioned the tangible intelligence value of this operative’s work, and the broader efficacy of the CIA’s post-9/11 push to seed more deep-cover officers abroad, including into terrorist circles. For two powerful kingdoms within the CIA, locked in the eternal governmental battle over resources and prestige, his case became emblematic of deep disagreements about the agency’s role in the War on Terror.
His story serves as a requiem for the CIA’s War on Terror, mirroring its successes as well as institutional and moral disfigurements. And his case speaks to fundamental questions about the viability of the CIA’s human-focused spying mission in the 21st century — quandaries that, if anything, have only become more acute in the years after his death.
“What he did — at the time, we thought it was amazing,” says a former CIA official. But “time and distance” have revised this person’s assessment. “Did he just give his life for nothing? All the risk and danger, so what? What really was accomplished? What was really done?” asks the former agency official."