Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 20th, 2026
“Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.” ~Elbert Hubbard
"My recommendation for entrepreneurs is not to get caught up in the hype around AI companies with unfathomable growth rates. Instead, focus on delivering real value to real customers in a way that is sustainable over a long period of time.
Most venture investors and venture-style investors are not looking for companies that can be worth a trillion dollars. Most are looking for companies that can deliver an incredible return within 5 – 10 years.
The AI growth rates and valuations are inspiring, but they are not the standard for the vast majority of venture investors. Focus on building a great business."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/07/04/the-real-return-standard-for-most-venture-investors/
2."It is also the foundation of our objections to the sanctioning of Russia, which—no matter how often British propagandists insist otherwise—is also a strong country. Here, the argument is even more straightforward, given that Russia’s all-important energy sector is the main target. Foolhardy attempts to restrain the volume of Russian oil and gas production were guaranteed to fail because of the higher global prices that invariably result, something we have been pointing out in vain since mid-2022. The world needs Russian energy more than Russia needs money, a conclusion the recent war in the Middle East made perfectly clear to all but the densest European Union (EU) leaders.
We close by noting ours is far from the “pro-Russian” position so many one-dimensional thinkers assume it must be. Had Brussels followed our advice—written consistently over dozens of articles over the past four years—things would have likely evolved like this: Western firms would have been encouraged to accelerate the buildout of Russian LNG assets, doing everything in their power to make it as easy as possible for such volumes to reach the market. Global LNG prices would have sunk due to an emerging glut, just as the EU badly needed the extra supply. Far from investing huge sums to become self-sufficient, Russian companies would have viewed incremental LNG development as unattractive, and a weakened Russia, still heavily reliant on advanced Western technology, would have resulted.
Instead, Moscow will soon have all the cards. Who is “pro-Russian,” again?"
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/treatment-resistant
3.Visser's global macro takes are super helpful to understand. One of the best to integrate technological trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9rfw1Iqw8&t=55s
4."America’s shipbuilding gap is not insurmountable. For privateers in particular, all that’s needed are ships fast enough to close on sanctioned tankers, large enough to carry a boarding team, and cheap enough to stand up a fleet with private capital alone.
A modernized letter of marque framework would do just that by authorizing vetted firms to identify and board vessels carrying sanctioned cargo. Congress would pass legislation specifying which categories of activity trigger the authority, declaring specific categories of activity to be within the bounds of authorized conduct, establishing verification protocols, and licensing the firms permitted to board and inspect suspect ships.
The challenge today is structurally similar to the one our founders faced. Western navies cannot police every sea lane. But American industry — with autonomous ships, AI-driven surveillance networks, and renewed shipbuilding capacity — is already assembling the toolkit to close the enforcement gap. Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress first armed private citizens to defend American interests at sea, it is time to bring back the American privateer."
https://arenamag.com/articles/a-private-matter
5."Since then, Dino Mavrookas tells me, “There have only been five major paradigm shifts in naval power since the beginning of human history. First, there’s the invention of the ship. Then, in the 1500s, you have sails and gunpowder and cannonballs. Then in the 1800s, you have steam and the pre-WWII battleship. On December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, carrier-based aviation became the center of naval power. And then, between December 7, 1941 and October 29, 2022, not too much happened.”
In those eighty-or-so years, he explained, “the ships became larger, more exquisite, more powerful, more capable, but nothing fundamentally changed. And in that process, they also became much more expensive, much harder to build.” What changed on October 29, 2022 was that Ukraine — a country without a navy and so forced to innovate — used an unmanned surface vessel (USV) to hit a Russian ship. “This was the first time an autonomous boat hit a naval ship — and you had the transition to maritime autonomy as that fifth paradigm shift in naval power.
Since human beings have had fleets at their disposal, Altekar tells me, naval supremacy has been defined by having “large ships, lots of ships, and a very skilled set of people that can operate those ships.” Navies are expensive: “they’re large, they’re complex, they’re built for humans and the supply chain.” Mavrookas agrees, telling me that “autonomous ships that don’t have to support people allow you to strip out 80 to 90 percent of the complexity of the platform.” There don’t need to be hallways, bathrooms, nor kitchens. Since much of the expense of shipbuilding comes from making them fit for human crew, autonomous ships are actually an economical option once the tech is sorted out. “Our ship,” Mavrookas says, “we can break down to seven major subcomponents,” compared to “thousands” on a naval destroyer.
Removing humans from the equation unlocks the possibility of what a boat or ship can do. Unlike autonomous cars, autonomous boats get to change the physics of the vehicle at hand. Waymos, Altekar explains, “don’t have increased fuel efficiency or energy efficiency because the car is self-driving — maybe a little bit, but the same amount that you get from cruise control.” Autonomous boats and ships, by contrast, are not floating hotels like their old-school counterparts; they don’t need gyms, bathrooms, kitchens, and so on, which allows more space for engineers and designers to reimagine what a boat or ship ought to look like. “When you design the ship for there to be no humans at all... suddenly you can take a sharp 90-degree turn, take three and a half lateral G’s, like an F1 car. And it doesn’t matter. You don’t need Lewis Hamilton in there.”
https://arenamag.com/articles/the-fifth-shift
6.Fascinating conversation with the brilliant Etched founders, building inference microchips faster than anyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BagWrgPww1o
7.Another solid episode of NIA. Learning about cultural and creative business news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXVVhaTOYI
8."For a proper war against Iran, you would probably need, at minimum, a year of preparation that includes moving tons of equipment, fortifying bases in the region, training and helping allies set up layered drone and missile defense, setting up proper deconfliction protocols and more. The US lacked so much coordination that Kuwait, a US partner, was shooting friendly US F-15s out of the sky. The planning was so bungled that during the opening move, something the US are masters at, we hit a school with children in it. The OPENING STRIKES. Were they using Claude for the targeting?
Operation Desert Storm, one of the cleanest wars and greatest displays of combined arms warfare in US military history, took about a year to plan, coordinate, and stage. What possessed the US administration to do something like this without proper preparation?
You can have the most competent military in the world, but if your politicians are not up to par, then you have nothing. As a military, if the goal you’re given to accomplish is stupid, no matter how brilliantly you go about it, the end result will always stupid."
https://www.globalhitman.com/p/the-disease-of-incompetence
9."None of this makes Starlink a bad business; it makes it a different one than the narrative sells. It is unbeatable at reach: high-ARPU rural and remote in rich countries, mobility across air, sea, rail, and RV, enterprise/government/defense, backup and resilience, and a thin long-haul latency niche where a vacuum beats glass. Tens of billions a year, a constellation worth hundreds of billions. But ~$11.4B of 2025 revenue against a telecom market in the trillions is the honest share of wallet — meaningful, premium, nowhere near a takeover. What it replaces is the bad and the absent: legacy GEO, rural DSL, the worst fixed wireless, the “no service” baseline. Not the good."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-203641377
10."The NATO summit is likely to be a huge win irrespective for Erdogan and Turkiye. Türkiye’s now considerable prowess in terms of its military and military industrial complex will be on show - seemingly everyone, but particularly Europe - wants to be friends with Turkiye.
For Europe, Turkiye offers solutions in terms of its bid to move quickly to autonomous defence capability. Turkiye has specific capabilities in drones, but can provide scale in producing tanks, planes and ships for Europe. Alongside that it has the largest army in European NATO, second now only to Ukraine and Russia in Europe. So Turkiye now appears key to any credible defence of Europe without the U.S. - arguably joined there by Ukraine, Finland and Poland."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/nato-summit-all-hail-to-trump
11."I believe two questions do most of the work here. One, if China cut this supply tomorrow, how bad is it, across how many sectors, how fast. Two, can the US actually compete, given our power costs, our labor, our patience with capital. Put those on a grid and you get four tiers. Most of the money is piling into the tier that already has money.
If you build one thing off this issue, build on-demand FATP. Most undercapitalized white space in US hardware, and whoever builds the Jabil-for-400-units owns the chokepoint every hardware startup hits on its first real run.
Rare earth processing is real too, but it’s an infrastructure play, not a startup: get the offtake or the price floor signed before you break ground, the way MP, Phoenix Tailings and Energy Fuels did.
And if you’re an operator in that roll call, or setting up to supply the Tier-1 primes, the gap map above is your addressable market.
Everything in the “leave it to China” box is a trap that burns capital to prove a point."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/closing-the-wrong-gaps
12.One of the most original thinkers in finance right now. Jeremy Giffon is brilliant and this discussion is thought provoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82q5Lw7_8E
13.Korean economy and stocks crushing it due to AI & DRAM microchips!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5YM0QJqi0
14."Venture capital has spent three years funding the gold-miners, i.e. neoprimes that assemble and sell the weapon itself - from Anduril ($61B valuation) to Castelion and Helsing, at $12B and $18B. The picks and shovels are what all of them buy to build their products, namely rocket motors, jet engines, radios and thermal cameras.
These markets have attracted far less capital, for an understandable reason. A prime owns the program, the customer relationship and the pricing power, so it earns higher revenues and higher valuations than its suppliers, and in normal conditions the supplier holds the worse position. Current conditions are different. Munitions order books now stretch years beyond capacity, customers are investing in their own suppliers to secure allocation, and governments are paying for factories.
In a market so constrained, suppliers’ position improves considerably. It is driven by players scarcity (how many of them are capable to produce a part) and the size of the demand spike (how much of that part is suddenly needed)."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/who-is-building-the-picks-and-shovels
15."Bouaziz was referring to Mark Dyne, a South Africa–born jack-of-all-trades—part investor, part deal negotiator, part legal strategist—who caters to influential tech executives and investors with thorny business and personal problems to solve. The nickname some of his clients use for him, The Wolf, speaks to Dyne’s skills in cleaning up an array of legal and personal problems on their behalf. According to two of Dyne’s clients, it’s also a joking reference to the tuxedoed character in “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel, who is called in to get rid of a dead body and clean up a blood-splattered car.
Dyne’s work is far less grisly. He gets called in to organize surveillance of rivals for his clients during high-stakes litigation and to serve as an intermediary in sensitive personal conflicts, according to people familiar with his services, including past clients. He also helps distressed companies shut down and organize rescue financing, and he reincorporates businesses offshore to protect clients from litigation, those people said. Dyne typically gets paid a retainer, sometimes with extra compensation if he successfully negotiates a deal, according to court records and a person who has heard Dyne describe his arrangement with a client.
“We are…professional fixers for complex situations,” it reads.
“The way we see the world, gone are the days when startups simply have a clear and linear path from Series A to unicorn,” Morpheus’ website continues. “Nowadays, something or someone will try to block their path—a competitor, regulator, customer, rogue employee, or attorney general. That’s where we come in.”
16.The global macro case for us being in an AI & tech supercycle. "No one stops this train". Hope he is right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n2UpyKETZw
17."Call it thick sovereignty.
The central premise of thick sovereignty is not that states should replace markets. Rather, it is that states must underwrite the critical coordination capacities upon which markets ultimately depend. Semiconductor manufacturing, electrical grids, ports, cyber defense, energy systems, defense industrial bases, strategic mineral supply chains, payment infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing capability are no longer viewed merely as sectors of the economy. They are treated as strategic coordination assets.
These investments often appear unattractive through the lens of traditional return-on-investment analysis. A semiconductor fabrication plant built for geopolitical resilience may never achieve the lowest production costs. Maintaining excess electricity generation capacity may appear inefficient. Building redundant logistics networks lowers measured productivity. Strategic reserves produce no quarterly earnings.
Yet these investments optimize a different objective function.
They are not expansionary investments.
They are option-preserving investments.
Their purpose is to buy adaptability under conditions of profound uncertainty. They resemble insurance, but only superficially. Insurance assumes known probabilities. Thick sovereignty operates under Knightian uncertainty, where the relevant risks cannot even be fully enumerated. The investment is not a wager that a particular crisis will occur. It is a wager that maintaining the capacity to respond to unforeseen futures has become more valuable than maximizing static efficiency."
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/a-tale-of-two-theories-of-coordination
18."The lesson is not complicated, just inconvenient. When a great power abandons any credible link to hard money, the currency loses purchasing power over time, and the temptation to finance geopolitical ambitions through debt and debasement grows ever stronger.
The phrase “not worth a Continental” was once popular in the U.S. It wasn’t part of a Cadillac marketing campaign. It came about after the Continental Congress decided that printing its way out of a war was preferable to the messy and difficult business of collecting taxes.
As we’ve seen, the United States has lived through several episodes of this series. The only novelty today is the scale at which the experiment is being run and the amnesia with which it’s being conducted. Those who imagine the outcome will be any different this time around might usefully recall that the Continental Congress also believed its circumstances were unique—until the notes stopped buying anything at all."
https://frankgiustra.com/from-cash-to-trash-rinse-and-repeat/
19.The insights in this podcast every week are always helpful. You have to listen to this if you want to be on top of Silicon Valley & AI news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUkbZHSQIog&t=2158s
20."We've passed peak scale. The monoculture has fragmented. The celebrities are old. Global population is in decline. Brand loyalists are now brand victims. They turn to brand as a means of self-expression, something bigger than themselves that can help them connect with others. But the references fall on deaf ears.
It’s like expecting a Harvard student to be able to read Anthony Burgess. It’s all Greek to them."
https://www.8ball.report/p/brand-dead
21."The founders have gone global. So has the adoption, and so has the cheap compute that now lets a few engineers in Lagos or São Paulo build what once took a hundred in Mountain View. Capital is the last input still behaving as if geography were destiny. For the allocators who nodded along in multiple panels, the question is what, exactly, they are still waiting for."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/tech-is-globalizing-the-money-is
22."The pendulum has swung so far towards consensus today that I’m betting there will be a mean reversion back to contrarianism.
History has shown repeatedly that the hottest theme in any given year is not the same category as the most valuable company started that year. I have no reason to believe this time is different.
I’d rather back the outsider who has a chip on their shoulder all day over the insider who’s been prematurely anointed by VCs. I believe there is a huge blind spot of great founders outside the Silicon Valley groupthink bubble who are not pedigreed, are out of distribution, and are not legible to most VCs.
I’m optimistic that meritocracy will eventually win, and those who chase momentum playing the kingmaking game will be left licking their wounds.
Follow the herd, get slaughtered."
https://showerthoughts.substack.com/p/what-you-cant-say-in-silicon-valley
23.The art and science of venture investing from a former founder now GP at USV, one of the OG top tier VC funds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjjnb8j69C0&t=2479s
24.This is the cooler and more younger version of All in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvaQuIz-VE4
25.Drone and Counter drone war and learnings from Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Zqajl74XI
26."The top 1% now control a far larger share of net worth than they did 30–40 years ago. That concentration isn’t a talking point to “eat the rich”. It’s proof that the mechanisms of ownership (equity, businesses and outsized capital gains) are what create generational wealth.
If you want a real way out, not just a better salary to “invest $10K more per year”, build something that creates recurring cashflow and a real equity stake.
Control pricing, systematize the business, and let compounding do the rest. The risk is real; the upside is structural — and the difference between owner and worker is not moral. It’s permanent.
The same politicians claiming to be for the people, are playing this same game. Year after year after year. The figure head changes, the incentives don’t."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/start-a-business-the-only-real-way
27.This is a masterclass in sales management for growth startups. Brutal and direct, which is the way it should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRPBhik_AXU&t=3s
28.Inside the mind of one of the most unique thinkers and top investors in Silicon Valley. She is truly one of the best angel investors and now VC on the planet.
Don't know her personally but just look at her track record. Plenty to learn here on how to think clearly and differently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=810VlN3lkqQ&t=260s
29.More updated geopolitical take from Zeihan on deglobalization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTciwXCkHt8
30."The old world trained you to measure business success by the size of your footprint. You were told that scaling means hiring more managers, leasing bigger offices, and adding layers of operational weight. This is a trap designed to bleed your margins. In 2026, mass is a liability. Every human you add to your payroll is a new node of misaligned incentives, emotional baggage, and communication friction.
The elite do not scale by adding people; they scale by expanding their technological leverage. If your infrastructure is built correctly, a single operator can command the distribution power of a mid-sized corporation without ever shaking a hand or signing a lease.
The ultimate status symbol in 2026 is a brand that clears millions in pure dividend distributions while maintaining a public headcount of exactly one operator. It is the ultimate flex of technical supremacy. It proves that your workflows are so perfectly automated that human labor has been completely rendered obsolete within your system. While others are hosting “quarterly performance reviews,” the Sovereign is Clearing Payouts."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-efficiency-monopoly
31."We’ve broken the social contract that binds America: Work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were. For the first time in our nation’s history, this is no longer true.
Today’s 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, yet they carry student debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations. Neither the minimum nor median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced them. The statistics on children’s and young adults’ well-being are staggering."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/war-on-the-young
32.M&A tips from one of the best Buy and Build PE firms in the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5M8xOwTvYY
33."I built my whole career that way. I was always defining strategy, figuring out systems, and building dashboards, products, and funnels to make it all work. And it did work for a long time. That skill set built everything I have in my business.
But watching Michael has forced me to think about something uncomfortable. That almost everything I got good at over the last twenty years is getting commoditized by AI.
But what Michael is doing can't be replicated. Because fun is a moat AI cannot cross."
https://justinwelsh.me/essays/fun
34.Global macro from a skeptic. Louis Gave always provides a cold, non-US & rational take on trends and investing. Good counterbalance to all the normal takes. Commodities are where the action is at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIZjKqeVdck
35.Ken Griffin is one of most wired investors in America as he runs one of the most important financial market making companies in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZweef8LX7M
36.Visser is one of my favorite new global macro investors as he has one of the best understandings of tech trends around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP9AEulCw9g
37."As one of my favorite sayings goes, nothing happens until something is sold. Understanding the market, understanding the customer, and earning the business are among the founder’s most important responsibilities.
Entrepreneurs should absolutely build a repeatable sales model. But they should not stop talking to customers. Over time, they should develop a process that keeps them involved in sales without allowing it to consume the majority of their role.
Founder-led sales is an important part of the entrepreneurial journey, and the most successful founders continue to devote meaningful time to customers and prospects, even at scale."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/07/11/why-great-founders-keep-selling/