Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 26th, 2026
"The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm... It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle." — Napoleon Hill
A concerning conversation. End of an era and looming civil war in America.
There is a big difference between wealth and money. Move to places where there is safety, civility and your $$ is treated well. Be prepared to move and go to where the opportunities are. Gonna be a wild next half decade as the cycle turns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eskzPuh_5w&t=1065s
2. An interview with Joe Tsai of Alibaba. Smart dude although symbolic of the old global system that is now ended. It will be interesting to see how he navigates this running Alibaba in China, yet having lots of assets in America and being of Taiwanese descent in a world of growing China-USA rivalry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbV1sMfv9TQ
3. Understanding the complicated Middle East region and how UAE punches above their weight geopolitical. By creating connectivity, dependencies & weaponizing chokepoints via air cargo, financial assets, banking & owning ports via DP World.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgUflzxejs
4. "Every platform shift compresses the distance between user & value. The web required a URL & a browser. Mobile required a download & a homescreen slot. Skills require a sentence."
https://tomtunguz.com/can-you-fly-that-thing/
5."In the final years of the Fourth Turning, according to the The Fourth Turning framework, societies enter a period of intensifying stress in which long-standing institutions lose legitimacy faster than they can be reformed. Political systems polarize, financial structures strain, and public trust in elites collapses. What begins as diffuse anxiety hardens into decisive confrontation—often triggered by a catalyzing crisis such as war, financial collapse, or systemic failure. Compromise becomes rare; history accelerates. The defining feature of this phase is not chaos for its own sake, but forced choice: societies must decide what is worth preserving, what must be dismantled, and what new rules will govern collective life.
The beneficiaries are highly asymmetric. Those tied to the existing order—financialized elites, bureaucratic institutions, over-leveraged systems, and cultural gatekeepers—tend to lose power, credibility, and wealth. The Fourth Turning is hostile to rent-seeking and abstraction; it punishes systems that grew detached from productive reality. In contrast, people and entities aligned with real assets, national cohesion, and practical competence often gain. This includes builders rather than financiers, producers rather than speculators, and actors capable of operating amid volatility—whether that means industrial capacity, energy, food, metals, defense, or social leadership rooted in tangible outcomes. Younger generations, especially those forced to mature quickly under crisis conditions, often rise into leadership faster than in prior eras."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-how-to-survive-the-coming
6. The crazy story of CZ of Binance. What a journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQwXgxJxwnw
7. Markets work until they don't. New mineral strategy by the US to break dependence on China, long overdue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSYPubDjK9E
8."The global innovation system is not breaking. It is reorganizing.
The conversations at the World Government Summit pointed toward a clear conclusion. The future will not be won by those who assume a return to frictionless globalization. It will belong to those who can operate fluently across borders, stages, and systems, building companies that are grounded where they operate, but informed by the world beyond them.
In an age of fracture, local context is the new advantage."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/innovation-in-an-age-of-fracture
9.One of the most differentiated new VC funds with the distribution/audience/super brand of the Paul brothers. The Anti-Fund. Longtime SV OG Geoff Woo is pretty awesome too. Lifemaxxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMzYK_kqm8M
10.I'm enjoying this series: interviewing power couples: in this case, the Lonsdales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5hTYmoQI4&t=481s
11."Thinking thru scenarios now for the on-going war in Ukraine:
First, let’s start with thinking thru the motivations of the individual players."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-scenarios-for-peace-and-war
12. "NATO is fine. The alliance is fine. Know that people and institutions are looking to exploit any opportunity to promote division. Don’t be distracted because we argue like brothers and gossip like old women. We’re long-standing friends who get on each other’s nerves, but we stick together more often than not because the rest of the neighborhood is dangerous."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/all-euro-nato-reporting-is-suspect
13."This may all sound very transactional, but getting access to the people, events and opportunities that can accelerate your business is an essential part of being a successful founder.
When it comes to startups, distribution wins. And networking is how founders distribute themselves.
If you spend time getting to know people who are well-connected and they see that you are genuine, high-value and have something to contribute (assuming that you are, in fact, all of those things), before you know it, you’ll start to find yourself nodding at the bouncer on your way in."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-bouncer-at-the-nightclub
14.Global macro with Luke Gromen. Trying to understand the rise of gold and the rise of mercantilism and the importance of critical minerals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc-swyVCDPo
15.Lots of good takes on recent news like Super Bowl ads, Saaspocalypse and BTC sell off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQUsC8_QoA
16. "Look at the four areas of your life: Work, Health, Family, Friends. Pick the one that will build your legacy and turn the other three down to Low. For the next 30 days, do not apologize for your absence. Use that reclaimed energy to force a Systemic Breakthrough.
Stop trying to be “well-rounded.” A circle has no edge. Be a spear: sharp, narrow, and designed to puncture the status quo."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-balance
17."This isn’t temporary hype. Copper prices have already hit unprecedented levels, reflecting genuine supply fears rather than froth. Retail interest is picking up—FOMO is creeping in—but institutions drove the early moves. Equities in the sector are rotating higher as leverage to the metal becomes apparent. Miners with scale, low costs, and de-risked projects stand to capture outsized gains.
The broader implications are profound. Copper isn’t just wiring; it’s foundational to modern civilization. Shortages threaten economic stability, energy security, AI ambitions, even national defense. Trump has upped the US defence budget by 50 percent. Other countries are following suit. Munitions, drones, 6G networks—all are copper-intensive. And this global rearmament competes directly with civilian needs.
Two years ago, copper was about $3.80 a pound. A year ago it was around $4.50. As I write this, it’s approaching $6. The dollar, burdened by debt and printed promises, will continue its slide against hard assets like gold, silver, and copper. Prices could easily spike in the coming years. We’ve entered an era where physical reality trumps paper illusions."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/is-copper-at-the-start-of-the-next-supercycle/
18."Your life is the canvas, and game is one of many brushstrokes. One brushstroke without the others leaves you incomplete. But when they work together, when you have built something worth seeing and you know how to invite her into it, you become the kind of man most guys do not even know exists. The kind who does not struggle because everything he has built does half the work before he even opens his mouth.
A real life James Bond and Bruce Wayne.
Today’s post is about a very significant brushstroke for your masterpiece of a canvas. Building a life so textured, so full, so undeniably magnetic that every move you make lands harder than it has any right to."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/how-to-build-a-life-so-good-she-begs
19."What I’m describing is a version of the power law. It’s impossible to ignore as a venture capitalist, where a few investments and companies drive the majority of returns. It’s hard to internalize this sort of exponential function as a human (at least, it has been for me). But it’s out there, in all sorts of places. A few stories that command the most attention. A few cities in which most of GDP is concentrated. A few people that have the most wealth. Power, in the hands of a few.
What keeps me up is that I believe AI is already exacerbating this dynamic, and will only continue to, as any exponential function is want to do. Since my post over the weekend about agentic engineering and how code generation has become much more autonomous since the start of the year, I’ve heard from a number of founders and companies, most of whom think that they are in the “bucket 2” I describe: “Those who are learning what’s possible by already generating a lot of code.” They may be, but the gap between them and the small set of companies in bucket 1 is huge."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/levels-of-greatness
20.Guest appearance from Atlassian cofounder. So many great nuggets to understand what's happening in the Age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdunfbobxaY&t=1615s
21."Becoming a venture capitalist is a very weird story for almost everybody. It’s a rare subset of finance where people stumble into it rather than taking a well trodden, planned path, for the most part. That was true for me."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/how-i-became-a-venture-capitalist
22. Always learn new stuff from Zeihan, don't always agree with his takes but this is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribrY5okACk&t=2361s
23.Lots of good insights on the drone market from this convo. Zipline has been under the radar until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF5Ocop7A_I
24.This was a helpful discussion: lots of frameworks and insights on investing at series A stage investing from A16Z. How you evaluate founders too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ
25.Understanding the new Risk board. Globalization is over, we are now in a Neo-Mercantalist world. Very important to understand what the future may look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTkt0dtxF4
26."Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don’t choose their role models at random, however. In his 2015 book The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrich, role models are “storage units” for cultural survival skills, and we’re hardwired to identify high-prestige role models.
Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money (or not) to a community project, Henrich wrote, “When the high-prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following low-prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.” But when the low-prestige player went first, they tended not to contribute, and then, neither did the high-prestige player. In effect, high-prestige people can initiate/veto collaboration, giving them power to set a group’s agenda, whereas low-prestige people have limited veto power and often follow the lead of … a role model."
https://www.profgalloway.com/role-models/
27. I like listening to Doomberg, his takes are always sober and rational. Helpful to question my own views on what is happening and where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSAN5JmgvAk
28. "Every paradigm shift in enterprise technology produces a land grab — and, inevitably, a shakeout. Cloud computing launched thousands of SaaS startups between 2005 and 2015; most were absorbed, acqui-hired, or zeroed out, while a small cohort graduated into durable, category-defining platforms. We expect the same pattern in Vertical AI, but with greater ultimate market opportunity, faster potential growth, creative new monetization models, greater early capital efficiency, and — for all those reasons — unprecedented levels of competition.
The wedge that enables much of the current generation of app-layer startups is cheap intelligence. The trap for AI Services founders is mistaking a scalable wedge for a defensible business. The companies that will endure are those that use the current window, while cost differentials are large, adoption is nascent, and incumbents are slow to embed themselves so deeply in their customers’ operations that switching becomes structurally painful, not just inconvenient. As we wrote in “Early-Stage VC in the Age of Vertical AI,” the profiles of Vertical AI company-building are forcing investors and founders alike to reimagine what success looks like. This is no exception.
This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest idea in enterprise software, rediscovered. What’s new is the surface area: SaaS companies could embed in a few workflows and capture data from the screens users interact with. AI-native platforms can embed in every workflow, capture data from every interaction — whether a human is present or not — and build compounding intelligence that makes the product better the longer it runs. The opportunity to build “load-bearing infrastructure” has never been greater. Neither has the temptation to settle for being a “cheaper vendor.”
As Benchmark Capital and Wealthfront co-founder Andy Rachleff argued, the “value hypothesis” of a startup — the what, the who, and the how of demand — is "seldom correct" on the first attempt, because founders must discover who is truly desperate for their product… not just who says they're interested. This is also why we’ve argued that when megafunds suggest that market winners are obvious within two years of founding, these are logical, if not self-serving, positions for their fund models, but not how markets behave or category-winners emerge.
Customers are always interested in cheaper services, and AI can help deliver them. What customers truly want — and what they’ll pay to retain — is a system that knows their business better than they do: one that compounds institutional knowledge, connects them to their ecosystem, and becomes more internally valuable with every interaction. Building that system is harder than reselling cheap inference. But it’s the only thing worth building."
https://insights.euclid.vc/p/who-gets-to-eat
29."Most of the time, a high valuation is a debt, not a prize. It forces you to hit massive goals just to stay alive. If your price grows faster than your business, you lose the power to make your own choices. You become a prisoner of the expectations you accepted.
For investors, the cost at the start determines the win at the end. A great business is a bad deal if you pay too much for it.
True success comes when the price of the company stays close to the truth of the work. When those stay in line, everyone wins. When they don’t, the math will eventually settle the score."
https://www.thevccorner.com/p/brex-exit-venture-capital-math
30."The adage “invest in what you know” is increasingly possible today. As a result, market participation is no longer a specialized profession. It's a mass-participation culture with its own status games, memes, heroes, villains, subcultures and language. Because of their newfound expressivity and accessibility, financial markets are increasingly intertwined with culture. And culture, from trends to events to political outcomes, is increasingly expressed through markets."
https://x.com/jessewldn/status/2022291132080644339
31.Enjoyed this discussion: what's happening in VC LP land and tech journalism land. Good takes. Charles is a smart and kind man, a rare combo in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mue5kE4UVLE
32.The father of "Geomacro", less "sell American assets" and more time to "buy rest of world assets" like Europe with extra money or move a little bit abroad. Strong case for looking at some European sectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61a6TZQyG-8
33.Always watch this show weekly to get a pulse and make sense of the culture and zeitgeist happening here in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUA7ue5vB1E
34. Sober takes on geopolitics and the movement to a multipolar world. WW3 started in 2014 and the rise of gold as reserves in many central banks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQa6mNXcM4s
35."It’s the Universe’s way of testing you to see if you’re one of the Real Ones.
You can get to the level where you’re essentially permanently successful, but you have to suffer first.
And part of the way the Universe makes you suffer is by giving you a taste of the way things could be…right before it rips it all away from you.
You advance a few levels and then drop right back to where you were.
Unlike before (during the Eternal Grind Stage of the true beginner), you now know what you’re missing out on because you’ve (briefly) lived it.
Going back to suffering and working hard for no money when you’ve felt how things could be is a total nightmare.
It’s one of the ‘dropping-off points’ where tons of people throw in the towel for good.
The re-humbling process CRUSHES people. They retreat back to the corporate world with their tail between their legs, begging for a life of stability.
But some people get a taste of how things could be and it motivates them to get back to (and even surpass) that level.
If you can push through it then you’ll know for a fact that you’re one of the Real Ones."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/the-downside-of-elevating-your-lifestyle