Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 31st, 2021
“There is no “I” in Team, but there is in “Win”-- Michael Jordan
This is very crazy and I kind of really want one now! Or at least to learn more.
"An endangered species in the wild, the Asian arowana is illegal to import, sell, and, in most cases, own in the US.
Every now and again, tales like Lee’s will surface in the news, shedding light on a bizarro black market.
But elsewhere in the world, the fish is a highly coveted (and perfectly legal) luxury good. They’re prized by Yakuza gang members in Japan, business magnates in China, and superfish collectors in Europe — and a single prime specimen can cost more than a Ferrari."
https://thehustle.co/2021/01/23/asian-arowana-most-expensive-fish/
2. What a story on Stoned Pizza. The Pot infused pizza pusher. So worth a read.
https://www.grubstreet.com/article/pizza-pusha-chris-barrett-pot-legalization.html
3. Romania is definitely one of the standouts in the Central & Eastern Europe tech scene. Very big fan of the startups coming from there. Also VERY maximum bullish here and can't wait to return there in person when we can.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/23/8-investors-tell-us-the-story-behind-the-romanian-startup-boom/
4. This seems like a great description of the Silicon Valley bubble or really any cultural bubble. Lots of good insight here.
"Language is the fundamental reinforcement mechanism of why arbitrarily constructed environments eventually turn you into Michael Scott. The more you have committed to being seen as interesting within your particular area, the more you detach from reality and move into a construct of your own creation. As this evolution takes place, more of your and your peers’ language will become Posturetalk, and more of the language that gets spoken to you by outsiders will become Babytalk.
As more of the language surrounding you becomes Posturetalk and Babytalk, the more conclusively you will double down on being “serious” about whatever you’re pursuing, as both a defence mechanism and in pursuit of real praise. This drives the cycle forward again, as your values and environment become increasingly defined by doing Triathlons or whatever."
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/
5. This is an interesting SPAC. Chamath is on a roll.
6. This is very timely and a good reminder to start getting a little bit more control over your privacy.
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/five-ways-to-loosen-big-techs-grip-on-your-life-30556/
7. Great write up on the powerful pull of Superstar cities, even in the time of a pandemic.
"Superstar cities have become a one-stop shop for so many different things that people want out of society — productive work, job opportunities, friends, romance, fun. We’re definitely not going to go to a workforce of hermits living in cabins in Kamchatka.
The real question is whether distributed work will allow second-tier cities like Tulsa to take enough knowledge workers to bring them some of that superstar energy, thus relieving the pressure on places like San Francisco. Even that is a tall order, since the top cities exert many different kinds of gravitational pulls all at once. Escaping these cities isn’t like building a rocket — it’s like building five different rockets and riding them all at once."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/can-knowledge-industries-escape-superstar
8. I think this is a really smart play by Forbes. The Newsletter wars continue.
https://www.axios.com/forbes-paid-newsletter-subscriptions-ab423ae1-0b90-4863-acad-40a373adce80.html
9. This guy is becoming one of my new favorite reads & really dig his off the beaten track investment philosophy.
10. "Running a biotech company is capital intensive, and this can make it intimidating to get started. Founders sometimes face a chicken and egg problem: how do you make progress without millions of dollars in funding, and how do you raise millions of dollars in funding without having made progress?"
https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-start-a-biotech-company-on-a-budget/
11. Audience Building 101 is right. From one of the masters.
https://mobile.twitter.com/businessbarista/status/1352277955460915200
12. Great conversation here on what's happening at the earliest stages of startups. Soil stage not even Pre-seed. Two very interesting & different new platforms for developing startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuWkNQvkbcg
13. "One of the biggest risks is having all your eggs in the basket of one country. If you are trying to protect against what may be coming up, you should consider that some of these things are only going to impact certain countries. If you’re hedging against your own country, don’t dig deeper into your own country. Going to a global level gives you different systems to protect you.
Throughout the coronavirus, even for months after the peak, certain countries would not allow you to enter if you were a citizen of one of the other countries they deemed to be a problem – like the US, France, or Italy. A lot of people were being turned away. That wasn’t a global pandemic issue, it was a country-specific issue.
Have different jurisdictions where you can arbitrage risk. This means you should go where you’re treated best so that you have the assurance of knowing that even if the ATMs are shut off in the US, even if they want to bail out the banks in Cyprus, you have different homes, you have different bank accounts, you have different citizenships that welcome you in different places and access to good hospitals and medical care around the world."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/10/28/apocalypse-insurance-prepare-crisis/
14. Man has a point.
https://patwalls.com/twitter-industry-bullshit
15. "This new type of market mirrors the meritocracy of the internet. It doesn’t matter where the idea, or the capital, comes from. It just matters if they’re right."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/have-you-robbed-your-billionaire
16. Health is wealth.
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/annual-health-ideas-update-and-qa-announcement/
17. Good news here! Go Donny!
18. SO many people have posted on this. Absolutely fascinating what is happening. "Unwashed Crowds" crushing the Professionals.
19. This is why I'm still so bullish on the tech industry & Silicon Valley.
"we think the rise of no code is a sub-theme in an even larger movement: tools that give knowledge workers superpowers."
https://medium.com/@vedikajain1/the-rise-of-superpower-tech-225759dc86d0
20. This is absolutely spot on. Scale ups need a good Chief of Staff: will make all the difference.
"What’s needed is an experienced generalist who can support the CEO and leadership team, complement and deputise for them, roll up their sleeves and lead on short-term projects across the business as and when required.
The role we’re talking about is a Chief of Staff, and it’s one that I think will become both necessary and foundational, as scaleups struggle to solve the inevitable pain that occurs when ever-increasing expectations collide with finite bandwidth."
21. As a collector of frameworks, this is invaluable and insightful when looking at business or governmental organizations. (ahem, Apple=Dead player)
"We defined a dead player as a person or a group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
What can cause a player to die? A player will die if their tradition of knowledge dies and they are unable to replace their thinkers or theorists. Perhaps an individual live player simply runs out of ideas. Even if tight coordination remains, the player is dead. They will compete in old areas, but have a hard time expanding into new areas.
A player will also die if their tight coordination is replaced by formal structures, which can happen as members of an organization change. If you’re constrained by formal structures, it becomes harder to go off script, and this won’t be adaptive enough. Remember, however, that tight coordination can be achieved by just one exceptional person."
https://samoburja.com/live-versus-dead-players/
22. Poland represent!
23. Army of Davids is right!
https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1354618338429820931
24. Human competition at its worst.
"With the arrival of the vaccines, state competition took a new form, but not a milder one: an ugly global race for enough vaccine doses where the losers are denied a path out of the pandemic."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/vaccine-wars
25. Such a fan of Calendly and also glad for Atlanta scene + a new example of bootstrapping monster company.
"The company last year made about $70 million annually in subscription revenues from its SaaS-based business model and seems confident that its aggregated revenues will not long from now get to $1 billion."
26. "I still believe that Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans theory is at the core of what the Internet is about from a making-a-living perspective. Add the maker perspective to this and you have what I believe is the future of work: personal, hands-on, creative, passionate, purposeful, decentralized, and network-based work.
I believe the future belongs to the maker as we are now becoming our own managers by working from home and becoming more independent from larger hierarchies and organizations. That is not to say that the large corporations are not needed, just that they will become much more automatized through digital technologies like artificial intelligence and need fewer human employees."
https://futureswells.substack.com/p/letter-from-future-swells-no-65
27. "Millions of people learned how this game is played and it’s going to come back at some point. Maybe it dies down for a day, a month, a year… But the playbook is now out there. If a hedge fund is foolish enough to put themselves in that type of position, they will get burned again and again and again. This is great as firms should not be levering up 5-10x with customer money to short every single share of a single stock without any repercussions.
On that note this was a huge day for decentralization. Several people on our twitter commentary actually understand it. They will be rich. Filthy rich. The ones that do not, might get lucky and time the next pump. And. The real money goes to the same old people. The visionaries who understand the long-term consequences and invest in the right disruptive technologies/industries."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/amc-gamestop-and-nokia-why-it-is-a-huge-deal/
28. "The new hedge fund is the Robinhood army self organizing on Reddit. They can move a stock more easily than the largest hedge fund.
There will be calls to regulate this “madness.” But it is the same madness we have always had. It is just a different crowd in charge."
https://avc.com/2021/01/the-revenge-of-retail/
29. This is way timely.
"The brutal paradox in a marathon is that right when you can sniff the finish line, usually between mile 20 and mile 22, the race invariably feels the longest. The same is likely to be true with COVID-19. Cases are rising and fatigue from far-reaching lifestyle modifications is building. We may be done with most of the race, but there is a good chance the final stretch will feel like forever. Here are six principles to help you get through it."
https://www.outsideonline.com/2420136/covid-19-coping-skills-winter
30. A plausible explanation for the super mysterious Dyatlov Pass incident.
31. This is such a great show with two of the folks I admire: The Random Show. This episode is worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZC81QSdVIk&t=3890s
32. "Regardless of your political affinity, bans are a kind of public persecution that can be troubling because they undermine freedom of speech, the rule of law and democracy. Cancel culture is on the rise, and social media giants are its main enforcers.
In the increasingly digital world, coordinated efforts carried out by corporations, not by governments, result in what amounts to a digital execution. This corporate overreach, because it’s politicized, won’t diminish overnight. It will likely become greater and more oppressive.
Apart from bans and deplatforming, privacy is more important than ever. Reducing the amount of information that can be used against you is something everyone should consider."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-be-truly-anonymous-in-the-digital-world-11611954937
33. Social momentum goes both ways.
"The idea that people like (or hate) what other people like (or hate) is important, because it lets small ideas grow bigger than you’d guess if you assume everything is ranked by quality alone. Social momentum is hard to model on a spreadsheet, so it’s hard to predict or think about in terms that seem rational. But it’s so powerful.
Once you look for feedback loops you see them everywhere. And once you realize how powerful they can be you start to answer some of the most frequent questions in business and investing."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/crazy/
34. I am a fan and supporter of Charity Water. This is a good write up of the innovation they have brought to non-profit world. If u are looking for a charity to donate to, please consider them.
https://www.profgalloway.com/innovation-recasting-your-life
35. "People have been screwed from a system structure that is built to reward investors and punish savers. All this market manipulation and intervention inflates asset prices and devalues savings.
So you have millions of people who are psychologically scarred from the past combined with a continued feeling of being left behind. But the internet steps in and creates a lifeline — the access to information, communication tools, and financial markets has suddenly increased significantly in the last decade.
When you arm the everyday person with information, communication tools, and access to markets, you create a scenario where the crowd can face-off against these institutions that have played a rigged game for so long. Except there is one problem — the second that the tide starts to turn, the game is being shut off."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-game-has-changed-2f5
36. I am biased but this is a good perspective on the importance of Taiwan to the free world. Also Taiwan is one of the most underrated places in the world. Its just a really cool place full of smart, kind people and amazing food and culture.
"This means that there is a nonzero chance that the U.S. might find itself embroiled in a superpower conflict on Taiwan’s behalf sometime in the next decade. Which is a good reason for Americans to learn more about Taiwan.
But an even better reason is just that Taiwan is a very interesting and unique place. People can argue all day about whether it’s really a country, but what’s more important is that Taiwan is a civilization."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/taiwan-is-a-civilization
37. This actually encapsulates my worries of the podcasting space. I think it will get wrecked by all the VC $$ streaming in (just like in eSports and Adtech and many other spaces),
"When investors pour $1 billion+ into a podcast ecosystem that didn’t have $1 billion in total revenue last year, that's a problem. They're hoping their money will add fuel to the fire, and supercharge podcasting's slow and steady growth.
But what happens if the growth, and the potential financial returns, don't materialize?
Overcapitalization occurs when the real value of an asset (or in this case, an ecosystem) is far less than what's been invested. It's when investors realize there's no possibility for a decent return, and they jump ship."
https://justinjackson.ca/podcasts-and-capital
38. This is pretty horrible and frightening. A Weaponized Internet by a crazy nut.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html
39. “It’s cheaper to trade these meme stocks and easier for retail investors to get leverage via options. In short, for investors looking to have a good time or shoot the moon, meme stocks are a more fun place to be than crypto is."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/27/could-meme-stocks-like-gamestop-kill-bitcoins-rise/
40. Quite a great thread on some really good startup investment themes.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RomeenSheth/status/1345836588585123846
41. This is very helpful for the emerging VC Fund manager. Useful Techstack. What a great time to be an investor (and startup)
https://www.weekend.fund/our-stack-at-a-10m-fund
42. "Diarte was being brought in to set up a corporate venture fund for the French power management company, and he wanted to make sure it was done right. He had seen too many CVC venture funds set up the wrong way — set up to fail right from the start — and he didn’t want to fall into the same trap."
https://sifted.eu/articles/schneider-electric-heriberto-diarte/
43. There is a lot here. I like the idea of "Clockspeed." Worth a read.
"We are on the precipice of an era of extreme competition — which means that the amount and pace of competition will accelerate 4x in the next 20 years.
If you don’t prepare now, you will be more and more overworked and overwhelmed and risk being further outcompeted by the best global talents in your field."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-hour-rule-antidote-exploding-pace-modern-life-michael-simmons/
44. This thread is a great rundown on the Gamestop saga.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SahilBloom/status/1354436658129563650
45. "Zooming out: great communities, in the traditional sense, required limited options so people would remain dependent: no specialists or external trade (to ensure we all collectively worked together), and no diversity or weird ideas (to ensure a homogenous group with a focus on tradition). We had far worse medical treatment, underwent excruciating manual labor, and didn’t necessarily share the same interests with others, but because we were dependent on each other, the bonds were strong. Now the options are virtually limitless, and we’re seeing our social bonds decay as a result."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/markets-and-communities
46. This is good news for Venture capital! Of course, this is not widely distributed gains but concentrated in top few funds. But still.....good for asset class as a whole.
47. "Nineteen months into taking the job, Docter is ushering in a new, more diverse generation of filmmakers at the studio, developing a pipeline of projects to feed Disney's 13-month-old streaming service, Disney+, and grappling with taking the place of the complicated, larger-than-life figure that Lasseter represented at Pixar. More than any studio executive since Walt Disney, Lasseter was personally associated with the movies his company made, projecting a public persona of a friendly genius in a Hawaiian shirt responsible for Pixar's unbroken string of critical and commercial successes.
Lasseter's departure during the heat of the #MeToo movement punctured that myth and left Pixar employees anxious and adrift. Since taking the job, Docter has been trying to evolve the company while holding on to the principles of creative risk-taking that enabled him to direct some of the studio's most inventive movies — Inside Out; Up; Monsters, Inc. and Soul, which premiered on Disney+ over Christmas."
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Direct Line to Revenue is What Matters for your Startup (and your Career)
One of the main lessons I learned early from my startup & big tech co experience is the importance of being a producer. What do i mean by this?
I would joke back then from my experience with Alibris, when a startup is not doing well the first people to go are marketing and customer service. But who would be the last ones to be cut? engineers who build stuff, and i would argue more importantly, sales which sell stuff. At the core of any business, these are the two things that really matter.
I saw this dynamic play out while I was at Yahoo!. My initial work there was in marketing and I carried around the ignorant view that Sales was grubby (thank you Glengarry Glenross). But a few years in, I quickly realized how central sales was to everything. I saw how valued sales people were in the organization. Money is the lifeblood of every business and a great sales person literally brought in 50-100X what they cost.
Running a sales organization and then a larger P&L (Profit & Loss statement) is the best way to learn business. And it makes sense, whatever theories you have, you either hit the number or you don’t at the end of the quarter. You can’t argue against how simple and pure this is. I also saw that as long as you deliver on the numbers and don’t do anything illegal you could pretty much do whatever you want. I kind of did and that was the reason I stayed at Yahoo! for so long. Because I directly touched, affected and grew revenue, the company provided me with a great and lucrative environment to work in.
Don’t get me wrong that it was not stressful. It definitely was. But something about aiming and trying to hit an ever growing target is fun and educational. Also valuable was the clarity it provides for you and the focus for your team. It’s what i see in the best startups who use and fully focus on the “One Metric that Matters.” I should note that for some early stage startups revenue may not be the best metric to focus on, as it “always depends” in the startup world (and life). But on the other hand, the ultimate validation is that a customer is willing to pay for what you are making.
So to reiterate my main point here: the acme of business and business people is learning how to drive revenue. Ie. Sales. If you do not have a direct line to revenue, you are eventually going to be big trouble. Driving revenue is what makes you valuable to an organization both as a boss and as an employee. So it behooves you to get good at this. Have direct line of sight to revenue!
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Galapagos Island Effect in Technology: Japan, China & South Korea
The first time I went to Japan in 1989, I was completely blown away and started a long love affair with the country. Walking around Akihabara, aka “electronic town” district in Tokyo where every and any kind of consumer electronic product was available. These were the days of Sony Walkman. Going back again as young adult in 1997/1998, Japan was a leader in smartphones where the Docomo I-mode was the precursor to Apple iPhone and its rich ecosystem.
I saw similar advanced consumer technology developments in South Korea between 2003 and 2009, where Video Games, Mobile payments, Social Networking was literally 5 years ahead of where the rest of the world was due to their crazy high BB and Smartphone penetration.
I also don’t need to spend much time talking about the advanced tech ecosystem of China where ecommerce is far more dominant than in the USA or Western Europe. Advanced smartphone penetration and over 1.2 billion users on 4G is leading to a massive online population with its own separate online world and services.
Take Wechat for example as described in Wikipedia:
China's "app for everything" and a "super app" because of its wide range of functions. WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos, and location sharing.
Think Facebook + WhatsApp + Venmo + Tinder + Instagram + Skype among other services in One app. So many people use WePay and Alipay that young kids do not know what paper cash is.
Yet why have we not seen these developments or big players from these countries in the rest of the world. I think the reason is due to the Galapagos Island syndrome. For naturalist fans out there, the Galapagos Islands situated 906 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador where the most unique flora and fauna exist due to its isolation from the rest of the world. Basically it’s an ecosystem that is so different from any other that the lifeforms on the island can only exist there.
This is exactly the case in China, Japan and South Korea. Highly advanced technological countries with unique and homogenous cultural characteristics, top notch infrastructure like high speed Mobile broadband, protective regulatory regimes leading each country to develop and evolve unique services & products. The homogenous cultures in each country leads to fast diffusion and adoption of products and services. But this homogeneity also leads these same technologies and services to become stranded in their home markets. That is why products and services like Kakaotalk, Wechat have not done well outside their respective countries of South Korea and China.
Line may be an exception as it is originally from Korea but has become dominant in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. Another counterpoint is the dominance of Apple iPhone in Japan in recent years which holds a 60% market share compared to 50% in the USA & Canada. I should note, it is one of the only three markets in the world where Android is not the dominant mobile operating system. This does show that it is possible for foreign companies to crack these markets.
For technology folks whether investor or operator, there is much to learn from these countries when it comes to technology innovations and business models. But we need to understand the X-factor of what makes each place unique. And more importantly what the gap that needs to be bridged, if these products can be adopted for use in the rest of the world.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
PS: Check out my new friend Trevor McKendrick’s newsletter, “How it Actually Works”
It’s a great way to get smart fast. https://www.trevormckendrick.com/newsletter
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 24th, 2021
“Measure victories over years, not minutes.”-- Chris Cantino
1. Tencent is crushing it.
"It’s no secret that Tencent, the Chinese tech giant behind WeChat and a handful of blockbuster video games, is an aggressive investor. Even during 2020 when the pandemic slowed down economic activity in many parts of the world, Tencent was charging ahead with its investment ambitions.
During the year, the company participated in more than 170 funding rounds that amounted to a total of 249.5 million yuan ($38 million), according to the Chinese startup database ITJuzi. That made 2020 the most active year to date for Tencent’s investment team, which had been delivering superior results in the last decade.
By January 2020, more than 70 of Tencent’s 800 portfolio companies had gone public and more than 160 of them surpassed $100 million in valuation, Martin Lau, Tencent’s president, told a room of investees at the time. The achievement could well place Tencent side by side with some of the world’s top venture funds."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/07/tencent-investment-2020/
2. Not sure what to think of this one.
"Fab’s rise and fall is a case study in the perils of over-funding. But it’s also a story about a serial entrepreneur who has refused to give up in the wake of failure."
https://thehustle.co/how-one-of-the-worlds-fastest-growing-startups-burned-through-300m
3. Travel Hacking at its best.
"Schlappig owes his small slice of fame to his blog “One Mile at a Time,” a diary of a young man living the life of the world’s most implausible airline ad. Posting as often as six times a day, he metes out meticulous counsel on the art of travel hacking — known in this world as the Hobby. It’s not simply how-to tips that draw his fans, it’s the vicarious thrill of Schlappig’s nonstop-luxury life.... But his fans aren’t just travel readers — they’re gamers, and Schlappig is teaching them how to win.
Immediately he became one of the Hobby’s biggest stars and, according to his friends, a millionaire. His revenue comes from three sources: impression-based ads on the blog; the PointsPros consultancy; & “affiliate marketing,” which means collecting a commission from credit-card companies each time a card sign-up originates from his blog.
Schlappig admits that affiliate marketing gives him a vested interest in the very companies that many Hobbyists game. A garden-variety Hobbyist owns at least a dozen credit cards; many have more than 40."
4. Five flag strategy. This is an old article but still really relevant in this day and age.
World is definitely becoming less free so this is one way to diversify (and believe this is not always about lowering taxes).
https://calebjones.com/2018/11/25/overview-of-how-five-flags-works/
5. So fascinating to watch someone actually try to implement the 5 Flag strategy. It's complicated.
https://calebjones.com/2020/03/12/five-flags-update-february-2020/
6. "In other words, smart money has been looking for an alternative to China for a while. And given that business supply lines are often already optimized to have a certain flow, it makes sense to look for neighboring countries.
That way, you can build factories in several nations, like Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, etc., and pick up your shipments in the exact same spot you used to.
This is why frontier economies, and more specifically Asian frontier markets, are set to outperform just about any benchmark. At least over the long-term."
"The frontier economies of Asia are in the perfect economic and demographic position to take advantage of this global shift in commerce. Every world power has a vested interest in the development of this area of the world.
Additionally, growth in developed countries, weak as it is, will be difficult to maintain."
https://www.investasian.com/2021/01/12/frontier-economies-2020s/
7. Well this is an extreme way to save money. A for effort.
8. Long one but interesting.
"The point of including this is to put us all in the mindset of...me, or anyone working in finance & tech, probably living in a mental future that far outpaces the physical present. The pandemic partially seemed like an opportunity to corroborate the promises we’d been hearing for years (or at least, I’d been hearing for 2 years, and started attending “Future of Retail”-themed conferences hosted by investment banks).
Target added 10 million digital customers in the first half of the year and Walmart doubled their eCommerce sales. Still, despite all of this, online sales were just 16.1% of the overall total at their peak in the second quarter of the year.
I also wonder whether this understanding is influenced by the fact that a lot of people who work in tech, finance, and media also happen to live in New York and California -- where retail has arguably fared the worst."
https://virtualelena.substack.com/p/bit-structures
9. "The new economy needs to learn how to operate in an entirely virtual manner. This means the following items are needed: 1) warehouses, 2) virtual assistants, 3) delivery services, 4) smaller private schools dedicated to skills, 5) copywriting copywriting copywriting, 6) graphic design, 7) software updates – living breathing code, 8) digital training schools – think esports camps similar to a regular sports camp and 9) individualized video education and entertainment ."
"Many say that investing in drug companies or degenerative platforms like Only Fans is bad. The reality? This is likely where a lot of money will be made. A. Lot."
"In the future, call it 2040 or so, the answer will be a bit different: small internet business and technology. Those two areas are the future and there is no reason to fight the trend. While you’ll always find exceptions to the rule, the trend is clear as day at this point.
The second major item here is that taxes and individual autonomy will increase."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/avoiding-big-mistakes-in-the-new-economy/
10. This has held up well I think.
"Frontier markets are a step below emerging markets in terms of development. However, they tend to avoid recession since they’re less exposed to the international market and its whims."
https://www.investasian.com/2017/10/26/avoid-recession-markets/
11. Damn. This really hit me. I really miss seeing my parents in person. DAMN pandemic.
"look around you, all these people will be gone one day, especially the ones who spent their whole lives looking after you, yes you. Think about that once in a while. Spend your time, love, energy, and emotion accordingly. Know this: inside every 80 year old is an 18 year old wondering what the fuck just happened. We’ll all get there."
https://destraynor.com/writing/2019/02/13/she-would-be-80-today/
12. This is an old one but does it still seem even more relevant now. China's dystopian future.
https://www.youtube.com/wah?v=ydPqKhgh9Mgtc
13. This is worth a read.
"A hard thing to wrap your head around in economics is the idea that two opposite things can be true at once.
Consumers are in the best shape they’ve been in, ever.
A huge portion of consumers think that’s bogus because they’re in the worst shape they’ve been in, ever.
Both are true.
Two different worlds."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/two-worlds/
14. I've always been attracted to frontier investing. Never heard of Lundin but he is Indiana Jones of investing.
"Lundin's investment approach?
He focussed on buying the riskiest investments in the most exotic corners of the world, which allowed him to accumulate assets for the proverbial pennies on the dollar."
"If he were still alive, Adolf Lundin may have reminded investors of his favourite motto: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." The founder of the Lundin group had a lifelong knack for topping up his holdings during tough times. Provided, of course, the data backed up his belief that a turnaround was going to come. E.g., his investments in Russia got absolutely clobbered during Russia's 1998 debt default. Nine years later, Russia was back on top of things and the Lundin holdings had risen to be worth billions of dollars."
15. "As often in these cases, the company came around for another round of speculation and hope. Few such companies truly die and vanish. Instead, they usually simply go dormant for a while before the next generation of hopeful entrepreneurs and investors have another go at it. Entrepreneurial dreams tend to have seven lives."
16. Let’s hope so. I'm quite excited for this. New roaring 20s!
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/the-new-roaring-twenties-maybe-4302321/
17. “A16Z is a media company that monetizes through VC.”
That observation becomes truer by the day.
While there’s a lot of loose talk on Twitter about cutting out the media and “going direct” – publishing your own story to the world without the press as an intermediary – Andreessen Horowitz is really doing it, consciously and methodically. The firm’s strategy has dramatic implications for the future of media and the venture capital industry.
This is the story of how Andreessen Horowitz disrupted the world of venture capital by cozying up to the media and then, how they purposefully threw that relationship away."
https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-unauthorized-story-of-andreessen
18. This is pretty much the game in an extremely competitive Silicon Valley.
"At the time, it looked like Sequoia was doubling down on a losing investment. In retrospect, it was a genius move. Sequoia had the advantage of being an early investor in Chinese delivery company Meituan. The firm’s partners knew that if someone could make the food delivery model work in the United States, there was a lot of money to be made, so it invested when everyone else was getting nervous.
The round certainly established that Sequoia is not a cuddly investor. Here you have the company’s main partner investing on the cheap when a young founder wants to solidify his unicorn status.
Of course, it would have been better for Sequoia if DoorDash didn’t need the money at all. And this is an essential point: these costly fundraising rounds dilute early investors and the company’s founders."
https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-story-of-a-cap-table-doordash
19. This is why I read so much Science Fiction.
"The cyberpunks anticipated the future of technology to an almost eerie degree. Other than the prediction of industrial technologies by the likes of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, it’s hard to think of when sci-fi authors have been more on the money."
"Cyberpunk is no longer sci-fi, it’s just the world we live in. Turn on the news, and there’s cyberpunk. Not even just the technology, but the social predictions too. People in San Francisco are living in shipping containers while billionaires are trying to colonize Mars with private space fleets. You can carry a sword and be a street samurai in the state of Texas. Online media megacorporations are able to shut down the President of the United States. As William Gibson wrote, the defining characteristic of living in The Future is that it’s not evenly distributed."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/cyberpunk-came-true-so-whats-next
20. Crypto is the future so this is worth paying attention to.
"According to Sonnenshein, the six themes that investors should look for in 2021 are:
-Decreased career risk associated with digital-asset investing
-Growing interest among financial advisers
-The growth of North American and clean-energy crypto mining
-Increased stablecoin integration
-Nation-state adoption of digital assets
-New regulatory developments"
https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-ceo-outlines-6-themes-that-will-shape-crypto-market-in-2021
21. Good for him. Also appreciate the honesty here for other founders. Not everyone has to take a startup from early stage to IPO.
“I stopped enjoying my role probably about two years ago… as we grew from a scrappy startup that was iterating and building stuff people really love, into a really important U.K. bank. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, just that the things I enjoy in life is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch, and create something customers love.
And I think that’s a really valuable skill but also taking on a bank that’s three, four, five million customers and turning it into a 10 or 20 million customer bank and getting to profitability and IPOing it, I think those are huge exciting challenges, just honestly not ones that I found that I was interested in or particularly good at”.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/20/enjoying-life-again/
22. This is where the Silicon Valley hype and groupthink will be valuable.
Miami is literally becoming a new major tech center overnight due to an impressive biz friendly & Twitter saavy mayor, great weather (for now) & a critical mass of major tech players escaping from the lockdowns, high tax regimes and incompetent city governments in SF & NYC.
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/why-miami-is-the-next-hot-tech-hub/
23. "Buying Bitcoin could be considered a form of gambling. Indeed, many middle-class hobbyist traders accrued life-changing amounts of wealth over the past year, usually by experimenting with risky software. For people like Paul and Saeed, who generally avoid experimental trades and lack alternative investment options, Bitcoin’s price appreciation is helping them get through a period of abysmal job markets and intermittent lockdowns.
People don’t need to live in a dictatorship or a country suffering from high inflation to benefit from Bitcoin."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/how-bitcoin-is-helping-middle-class-users-survive-the-pandemic/
24. Lots of nuggets of wisdom here for personal development.
"Early on when I would hit a plateau in personal development I would wrongly think I was “done.” That mentality meant when the next period of evolution came it was extra painful. Today I recognize the work is never done. That allows me to enjoy the periods of relative stability while also knowing I will be called to grow and change again. It might be going too far to say I’m looking forward to it, but I no longer fear it which is real progress."
https://boz.com/articles/the-process
25. A long but really fascinating read. Taiwan as case study, German and USA as ones NOT to follow on how to manage a pandemic.
"In highly ideological or religious or culture war driven nations this is all but impossible because those forces blind leaders to parts of the population they think of as evil.
But if you can’t deal with reality as it actually is, rather than how you imagine it to be, you can’t deal with a pandemic."
"Beyond big data and contact tracing, the Taiwan government understood incentives really well. You get paid to stay in quarantine but if you break quarantine you get fined 1000x what they paid you so it pays to stay inside until you’ve proven you’re not carrying the virus.
Don’t underestimate how hard it is to get incentives right.
Incentives are tricky. Pick the wrong incentives and people game the system.
You can’t fight human nature. If you try, it only backfires. If anything characterizes the Taiwanese approach it’s realistic approach to human nature balanced with sane policies that work."
https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries/coronavirus-a-tale-of-three-nations-88fa1681810c
26. I'm pretty bullish on Poland and much of Central Eastern Europe in general.
27. Rise of the Emerging Markets.....been happening for a while now.
"Emerging markets have been growing at a rapid pace for years and it is because they are getting access to the same technology that the Western world has had for awhile. Additionally, they have a young population that is highly productive and continues to push these countries further and faster than the developed nations....
emerging markets are worth continuing to pay attention to over the coming years. Not only are they growing at a fast pace, but they dealt with the pandemic relatively well, and now we are going to see them start to benefit from decentralization, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and the larger digitization trend that is already underway."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/emerging-markets-are-catching-up
28. "I think retirement is stupid. Men are objective-seeking missiles, and there are exceptions to this, but once men retire, that’s usually when they die. I never plan on retiring. I think it’s a mistake to look forward to retirement.
Instead, as you get older, focus more on aspects of the work you enjoy doing. That way, you can work because you want to work, and you can work the hours you choose instead of the hours you have to work."
https://calebjones.com/2020/11/09/how-much-money-do-you-need-to-retire/
29. I like all these places. Taiwan, Georgia, Serbia, Ukraine, Portugal, Mexico & Hungary are tops for me.
"You can find the cheapest countries in the world. You can find the safest countries to live in. But if you want both, Eastern Europe (Georgia, Serbia, Belarus, Armenia) is a great place to start.
If you know what you’re doing in Asia, places like Taiwan and Malaysia are also very safe and reasonably affordable. There may be some purse snatching, but there isn’t a lot of violent crime.
Latin America may be a bit more dangerous but there are plenty of safe and cheap places if you buy in the right neighborhood.
The point is, you can have a lifestyle where you’re getting a lot of value from your money in a safe place."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/11/18/cheapest-safest-countries-to-live-in
30. Go Taiwan. Arguably the safest place right now outside of New Zealand. BTW: I'm actually super bullish on the USA right now, so I'd consider splitting the year between Taiwan, somewhere in Europe and the USA.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2021/01/18/taiwanese-visas-citizenship-guide/
31. Hmmm.......interesting thoughts here. Basically take ownership of your life.
https://calebjones.com/2018/07/05/every-man-should-be-worth-1-million-by-age-50/
32. This should make us all optimistic about the future.
"So the two reasons solar and batteries haven’t yet produced higher aggregate productivity growth are that they haven’t been installed in large volumes yet, and they haven’t gotten so cheap that they dramatically lower the price of energy yet. But current trends give us every reason to believe that both of these things will happen.
But in addition to measured productivity growth, green energy has another benefit: Sustainability. They help prevent catastrophic climate change, for one thing. And also, because the supply of sunlight is not limited, solar frees us from the need to constantly invent new and better extraction technologies just to hold energy costs constant.
Neither of these things adds to current productivity, but they both add to expected future productivity."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessimists-part-a3b
33. Health and wellness has always been important. Even more so going into 2021 and the ongoing pandemic.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2420164/wellness-resilience-strategies
34. For Crypto but also relevant for Stocks and most other investments.
"If you’re in it for the long run, act like it.
Constantly checking prices is how you end up falling into FOMO (fear of missing out), making stupid decisions, believing shills, not sticking to your original strategy, etc.
Seeing your investments grow (or fall) so quickly can be very exciting. For this precise reason you should avoid it.
Remember that it is always best to make investing decisions with the least emotions involved."
https://benjamingeorge.substack.com/p/timeless-crypto-advice
35. "Brown needs a different sort of fitness now, because his days are so intense. “Before, it was about being competitive athletically,” Brown explains. “Once I got into graduate school, I started to realize how important exercise was both for mental acuity and also mental endurance. I multitask all the time. I realized I have to work out to be as productive as I want to be.”
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a35142369/ethan-brown-workout-beyond-meat-ceo/
36. This makes you appreciate that your life can be very much worse. We should all be valuing the basics of living and freedom and making the best of things.....always.
https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/lessons-learned-from-inside-the-worlds-toughest-prisons/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Startups Die of Suicide, Not Murder
It’s a great saying in Silicon Valley. “Startups Die of Suicide, Not Murder.” I tell this to my startup founders who pay too much attention to what competitors are doing. Most startups i’ve seen end up dying due to their own bad decisions or actions (or inaction), not from something a competitor did.
Don’t get me wrong, you should be aware of what competitors are doing as you differentiate by counter-positioning against them. But i would argue you are better off spending your time disproportionately on what your customers are doing or saying. Then you build your business around serving them versus following what your competition is doing.
I also think that most markets end up being so much bigger than people think. This is because of how fast technology is infiltrating every single aspect of life. In a massive growing market, there will be 3-4 dominant companies in this sector. There are very few “winner take all” markets these days. I believe Zero-Sum competitions do exist but mainly in the old industrial world. Technology in theory is more about abundance. It is also just healthier to think this way in life anyways.
I will use an example from big Company land as per an interview with Simon Sinek and his experience consulting at both Microsoft during the Ballmer years vs. Apple under Steve Jobs. Microsoft focused on the competition while Apple focused on where they were going & the long game. You could even argue that this attitude is one big reason that Zune lost badly versus the Apple iPod despite being a slightly better made product. Definitely helped that Apple lined up an ecosystem of music labels around them and became a better value proposition to customers versus the limited song catalogue at MSFT Zune.
During my time at 500 Startups, I would always get pinged or pulled aside by anxious portfolio company founders freaking out over a competitor, launching a new product, or raising a lot of money from some top tier investor. I’d just tell them to relax and focus on talking with customers and focusing on the team and building the product. Actually in the majority of the cases, the competitors actions were easily neutralized or ended up going nowhere.
My main point here is that obsessing about competitors is almost always a waste of time and energy. And frankly, is a losing proposition in life generally. Focus on what you have control over: Yourself, your team, and the actions you are taking for the customers in the business you are building.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
What are the Traits of the Best Startup Founders
There is a continual debate among early stage investors on what is more important: Team/Founders or Market. In my view, both are important. But putting aside the market which i think is really hard to get right and not always that obvious. So then a big part of the equation leads to the founder. Figuring heuristics around how to select the top ones is important for all early stage investors. Also controversial because every investor looks for different things. And I might add, every investor has different experiences and skills to boot.
Michael Siebel of YCombinator says it’s:
1) Ability to Execute
2) Formidability
3) Great Communications
4) Strong Internal Motivation
Source: What Makes The Top 10% Of Founders Different? - Michael Seibel
I think those are excellent. Of course, I have a slightly different take. After 6 years of running a top tier accelerator and fund, where i was looking at thousands of startups a year. Literally thousands. From this experience and 414 investments later, I see that my top 10% of founders tend to have certain traits.
1) Learning machines:
Important to take in data and lessons from all their contacts with customers, users, team, partners and investors. A top founder is able to weigh and incorporate all of this into their plan & business.
2) Thoughtfulness & Deliberate:
About the BIG strategic decisions that literally are life and death for your biz.
A good founder understands “Risk & Reward” and where to spend their time & resources. They also learn how to think through all the data points coming at them.
3) Crazy and insane work ethic:
It takes a lot of energy and effort to get a company to critical mass. Especially true in the pre-seed and seed stage. The only way they can get there is just plain hard work, assuming you are aiming in the general and right direction. Sometimes you just have to overcome your own ignorance with hard work.
4) Decisive & Take Tough Decisions Quickly:
Startups are always short of time and money, so the ability to cut projects, features or people that are not working out is critical.
For all new investors, you have to figure out your own heuristics. As you invest in more and more startups you will be able to fine-tune your radar. Over time, this radar will become a more effective filter for you as you invest.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 17th, 2021
“It’s never too late to become who you want to be. I hope you live a life that you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
This whole thing is worth reading. Surprise 5 is good news if it plays out.
"The economy develops momentum on its own because of pent-up demand, and depressed hospitality and airline stocks become strong performers. Fiscal and monetary policy remain historically accommodative. Nominal economic growth for the full year exceeds 6% and the unemployment rate falls to 5%. We begin the longest economic cycle in history, surpassing the cycle that lasted from 2010 to 2020."
https://www.blackstone.com/insights/article/blackstone-quarterly-webcast-the-ten-surprises-of-2021/
2. I love this! Lots to learn here.
"Richards describes her and her husband’s financial situation as“Fat FIRE” – a financially independent lifestyle that doesn’t include the sort of bare-bones living that characterizes the FIRE movement."
https://grow.acorns.com/passive-income-lessons-from-early-retiree/
3. This is really useful for SaaS company investors.
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/persistence-and-predictability-of-saas-growth-bd7b90ee20d3
4. Fun interview. Was supposed to go to Iceland in 2020. Oh well, maybe 2022. Still seems like a fun place to hang out for a few months.
"Everybody is on Zoom anyway. It used to matter where you were physically. Right now, we are in this café where you bump into someone and something interesting comes out of that chance encounter. If you do it all on Zoom, your physical location doesn’t matter anymore. So I started looking at places that are remote but highly educated and entrepreneurial. Then I crossed that with how each place was handling Covid, since if the pandemic is bad they’ll be shut down too. That got me down to New Zealand, Taiwan and Iceland. And of those, two of them were solving the problem by not letting anybody in.
Only Iceland was solving the problem in a way that allowed visitors, because deCode Genetics is here, there is a good healthcare system, and everyone is tested at the border. That reduced the options from 195 countries to one, which is how I decided Iceland would be a good place to work during the pandemic."
5. This is probably more relevant to us than ever.
"Instead of listening to doom and gloom, what might happen if you were to listen to positive and constructive media? Might the infectious positivity begin to influence your mood? You will find yourself often repeating ideas and themes that you hear. Subconsciously, you absorb what you see and hear. Focusing on self-improvement podcasts or blogs could incentivize you to better yourself. They may even convince yourself that you are worthy of caring about.
And once you start caring about yourself, you begin to take care of yourself. You begin stacking little wins. Something as simple as cleaning your room or making your bed can be the nudge you need to get started. Next you might start spending less time online and more time at the gym or going for runs. This all creates a positive feedback loop. You work out. You get endorphins. You feel better about yourself. You decide to get up early. You clean up more of your living space. You keep working out and get back in shape. Then you buy nicer clothes because you’re proud."
https://pathtomanliness.medium.com/how-to-go-from-doomer-to-bloomer-path-to-manliness-d3f7653505e5
6. "Decentralization doesn’t just impact money, it impacts every single industry with a middle man. Since the middle man can control the flow of content: facebook, twitter, etc. They will now have to face competition from decentralized servers that run with censorship resistant platforms. This is admittedly several years away, but the changes we saw over the past week have accelerated the move in this direction by a minimum of five years."
"Acceleration of the Digital World: The one benefit here is that a smart individual can now scale a business into the millions and even billions of dollars without a single hire. Think we’re kidding? We’re not. In the future with software scaling at the rate it is today, you’re going to watch as all processes become automated. This leaves the following for work: creativity/becoming a producer. If you cannot produce or create, the world is going to speed past you."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/the-end-of-centralization/
7. Net net: take vitamin D. Can't hurt.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jan/10/does-vitamin-d-combat-covid
8. This seems really spot on these days whatever side of the political spectrum you are.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jackmurphylive/status/1343613092958261250
9. This is not going to win Mr Danco any popularity contests in Canada cuz most of this is true. Not sure I agree with the point on milestones but get the point of mindless milestones over growth.
"My hope is that people in Canada reading this will realize that the problem facing us isn’t a lack of anything. The problem with our startup scene isn’t a lack of money, startups, investors, hustle, great Universities, technical talent, or creativity. Our problem is actually the presence of actively bad things: all of our non-dilutive (but extremely expensive!) innovation credits, the presence of incubators & entrepreneurship programs, & the accidental costs of milestone thinking. If we want to build a real startup community in Canada, we need to let go of those crutches, & choose the Infinite Game.
That’s part of why I think that if any city in Canada has the potential to actually develop a Bay Area grade startup scene (smaller, sure, but actually the real thing), it’s clearly Montreal. Of the major cities in Canada, Montreal is the only one that naturally has an infinite game mindset. (But it really, really does. Montreal is a special place.) If Montreal weren’t in Quebec, it would be an unstoppable startup scene."
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-work/
10. "If comparing yourself to a different set of peers is going to motivate you or give you peace of mind, by all means, switch. It’s up to each of us, isn’t it?"
https://seths.blog/2021/01/choose-your-jones-wisely/
11. For all the guys out there.
"Our environments and lifestyles do affect our bodies. And many men are slowly castrating themselves through their lifestyles.
Increasing your testosterone levels, and thus your general vitality, should be of paramount focus for all men.
High testosterone levels are a representation of overall good health."
https://cortes.site/50-ways-to-naturally-increase-testosterone/
12. "We will see decentralized websites, decentralized mobile apps, decentralized social networks, and much more. The risk of a centralized organization imposing their will, regardless of the validity of that decision, has become too great to ignore now. It was previously believed that decentralization was only a fascination of those who were paranoid, but now we are seeing that it is becoming a business imperative at a breakneck speed.
This transition won’t happen overnight. It also won’t only be about decentralization. We are likely to see a significant rise in privacy technologies, along with decentralization. These renewed focuses will leverage technology to equalize power on the internet. The days of large centralized companies overseeing their dictatorships without fear of being held accountable are over. The people can’t change the status quo, but they can vote with their feet and start using new technology stacks."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/decentralization-is-a-necessity-now
13. Good case for Digital Nomad-ism.
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/amp/articles/best-reasons-to-be-a-digital-nomad
14. This is pretty crazy to say the least. I'm still processing everything that happened last week.
https://www.gq.com/story/man-predicted-capitol-coup-interview
15. Man has a point.
"Under some f*ked up version of wokeness, we have decided that stupid people are a special interest group who warrant empathy and latitude re the damage they levy. We excuse Trump’s mob, as they are the ones America left behind or who didn’t have access to higher education. No, they’re just stupid — even the ones with “Senator” before their name. The President and his mob registered a deep blow to our democracy and global standing … with no commensurate benefit.....
We need to recognize that stupid is a thing and, per Professor Cipolla, encourage our youth to discern how not to be stupid and to aspire to be “intelligent,” which also is a thing … and a noble thing, and not derived from a place of privilege that demands apology and self flogging. The right has become so weird, the left so weak, that we should see something resembling a third option (e.g., Independent) accrue momentum and elected leaders."
https://www.profgalloway.com/stupid
16. "The new coronavirus achieved in days what both progressives and nationalists had long been fighting for. Powerful economic interests were sidelined, whole industries had to temporarily close down, oil consumption plummeted, national borders were closed and export bans imposed. It was a humbling experience, as the ripples of politics paled by comparison to the giant natural wave of the pandemic, but also a conversion moment, where one could finally see the social and economic system for what it is. The great pause reveals a hidden truth and, once revealed, it cannot be forgotten.
What has come to an end is not capitalism but the idea of capitalism as a system standing above economic agents."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/covid-and-capitalism
17. Man, so interesting. Bitcoin mining in the arctic of Russia.
18. Actually I really like that Toast allowed laid off ex-employees to sell vested shares in secondaries. Good for the company that they were able to turnaround the company in the pandemic.
"At the time, the company gave ex-employees 10 years to exercise their options, though many of the people laid off had only been employed at Toast for a few months, according to a LinkedIn search."
19. I'm fascinated by the African market. Been tracking Tim Staermorse's investment work for a while.
"In a world where financial valuations have reached new heights, it is hard to find investments with sound fundamentals. Sometimes, you need to look a little farther afield. This is why investing in the stock market in Africa is an interesting option for more adventurous investors."
20. I really like this kid. One of the stars of Cobra Kai.
https://www.gq.com/story/real-life-diet-xolo-mariduena-cobra-kai
21. Fitness tips from Laird who has definitely aged well.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/laird-hamilton-fitness
22. I totally get why this is flourishing in America.
"As we head into an era that seems destined to be marked by escalating vigilantism and political violence—or, if we’re very lucky, just the fear of them—it’s time to reckon with the whole of American tactical culture. For all its power to shape this moment, that culture has roots that long precede it. The tactical world is a byproduct of years of rampant mass shootings and of our nation’s longest wars, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s a space where paramilitary ideas thrive and where ordinary gun owners learn to see themselves as potential heroes; but it's also where many Americans have simply gone looking for a way to negotiate living in a country where there are more firearms than people."
https://www.wired.com/story/america-civilian-tactical-training-industry/
23. "Rededicating Harry's to building its own family of brands has also allowed the founders to rally the team around the promise of an even bigger payoff in the future. The new vision for Harry's, in fact, might promise an even greater rush than getting acquired ever could have. If joining Edgewell was going to push the Harry's team straight into the big leagues--well, not joining it did so anyway."
24. This is a bit of a damning comment on European rich.
"Most of the European successful entrepreneurs are in their 40s or 50s, a few generations later than the digital natives, and with a lower risk appetite to challenge the establishment.
Compare this to the US where old companies like HP, IBM or Oracle, are being constantly challenged, or being replaced by the FAANG, which are also now being replaced by kids in their 20s building a new tech startup in the their parents bedroom.
Related - in Europe, the newcomers, as many as they are, are usually eating the lunch of the rich people family businesses - if they decide that it is worth keeping their startup company in Europe and not flying over to the better US environment."
https://sundaycet.substack.com/p/crazy-european-rich
25. Profile on the The Points Guy and the fascinating business of airline miles.
"Since 2010, The Points Guy has published over 30,000 blog posts: hotel, airline and cruise-ship reviews, next to wonkish analyses of rewards-program fine print. (Some typical headlines: “Why the Amex Gold Is the Perfect ‘In Between’ Credit Card”; “How to Get to Puerto Rico on Miles and Points”; “Why I Canceled Bora Bora Again.”)
Kelly is only the face of the site; the “guy” is now voiced by a 30-person team of credit-card experts, aviation reporters and expats from legacy travel media. Older travel publications sell a daydream: crisp ocean vistas, street side cafes, European hamlets with more steeples than people. The Points Guy sells that daydream as a promise, upholding a sworn oath to help you “maximize your travel.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/magazine/points-guy-travel-rewards.html
26. "If you think about this, we may see the repeat of the 1990s equivalent. In the 1990s, you made a lot of money if you took existing businesses in the analog world and brought them online. In the 2020s, you are probably going to make a lot of money if you take existing businesses and figure out how to build decentralized versions.
You obviously need to pick the right teams. You need to pick the right markets to go after. And you need great execution to ensure that it gets global scalability.
But the blueprint is right in front of us. Decentralization is going to be the future of the technology industry. I can’t wait to see what entrepreneurs build next."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-decentralization-investment-thesis
27. This is something I know many people, including myself, struggle with: Trading time for money.
We should be thinking about how to leverage our time through productization.
https://radreads.co/why-i-turned-down-20000-of-guaranteed-revenue/
28. Video games are now front and center to dominate the entertainment industry.
"The shift was corroborated last spring, when Adweek reported that the gaming industry’s revenue (at $139bn a year) had outstripped the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL combined. By this December, lockdown life further fattened the industry. The global gaming industry is set to take in $180bn for 2020 – a 20% increase in revenue, and more than sports and movies worldwide."
We’re in the midst of a cultural shift. As Trevor McFedries, the co-founder of Brud (the studio behind the world’s most famous CGI influencer, Lil Miquela), tweeted last month: “Gaming is replacing music as the lynchpin of emergent social scenes and it makes everyone 30+ I talk to really uncomfortable.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/11/video-games-music-youth-culture
29. Learned a new term: "Genericiding"
https://www.8ball.report/p/hype-house-genericide
30. A strong case for Lisbon as digital nomad center. I will be spending more time in Lisbon after this Covid mess is over. Definitely considering it to be one of my bases in future.
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/amp/articles/digital-nomads-remote-working-lisbon
31. So many parallels in America to Roman Empire. Recommend reading "The Storm before the Storm" by Duncan and "Rubicon" by Holland.
"Yet the history of the Roman Republic, even as it provided inspiration, also served as a warning. For many centuries, the great ideal of shared citizenship had encouraged the Romans to temper their competitive instincts for the common good. To place personal honour above the interests of the entire community was seen as the behaviour of a barbarian — or worse yet, a king.
Gradually, however, over the course of the centuries, this taboo began to lose its hold. The more of a superpower the Roman Republic became, and the richer the potential pickings on offer to its most powerful men, so the more it began to totter under the weight of its own greatness. The bonds of shared citizenship stretched, then frayed, then snapped. Rome imploded into civil war. The venerable edifice of her republican system of government was reduced to rubble. And in its place an autocracy emerged: the rule of the Caesars. The lesson offered was a sombre one, and weighed heavily on the minds of the Founding Fathers."
https://unherd.com/2021/01/is-this-americas-decline-and-fall/
32. Uh oh.
"China’s relentless push to build a state backed digital currency, the economic disaster the global pandemic wreaked upon the world, and the incredible rise of decentralized cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum has accelerated the timeline to kill off cash.
The only real question now is what will replace it?
Will it be decentralized, borderless, open source, privacy preserving money like Monero, or will it be nation state driven digital surveillance money?
More and more it looks like nation states have the advantage."
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Revenue Forecasts & Projections for Seed Stage Startups ????
The difference in thinking came up at a big tech conference panel that I spoke on. I was a new Venture Capitalist on stage with two prominent NYC based VCs in 2014. The question came up: what do you think of revenue/user forecasts when evaluating early stage startups? (Note: when i say early stage, i mean pre-seed and seed stage startups)
I said I did not care, my fellow panelists vehemently disagreed. This showed the difference in the tech VC scenes and attitudes of the east coast and west coast at large. But it did give me something to consider. Since then I have actually come around somewhat to their view. Not because these forecasts & projections are anything you can count on. Actually these forecasts are either lies or fantasies and any investor who invests based on projections is an idiot or amateur who needs to go back to later stage investing. No experienced or decent investor is going to hold you to these. (I stress the words “experienced” or “decent” investors).
But where the revenue projections are helpful is that it is a guide to better understanding how the founders think. Are they too aggressive or too conservative? Do they understand what the drivers of the business are? Are they detail oriented or not?
Also the financial projects help you understand the potential size of the business and key factors that could hold the business back. Like what the possible organization looks like, sales cycles, how many engineers you would need to hire to hit this growth.
So founders, make sure you spend some quality time on putting together a good basic revenue & financial forecast, usually 2-3 years out is my recommendation. If you have never done one before, go to a local top MBA program and rent a former I-Banker or Management Consultant who have extensive experience putting these together. The exercise itself is helpful for you to understand your business but it’s also a valuable tool for investors to understand you and what you are trying to build.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Importance of Differentiation: The Fight Against Monoculture
I had been going to New York City for over 25 years. I absolutely love the place. The diversity, the people, the excitement and the energy. But I had started noticing my affections and interest in the last few years wearing off. I could not put my finger on it. Figured it was just me. Don’t get me wrong I still love going to New York City but something felt off over the last few years.
It was not until I read Yancey Strickler that I figured it out. His example of real estate nails it. The local bodega, local restaurant, neighbourhood boutique or unique retail store were disappearing as commercial landlords were raising rents.
“What happens when these businesses leave? New businesses that can maximize how much money they generate move in. And these businesses are, inevitably, chains. Fast food, retail, banks, and others whose operational mantra is based on capital efficiency. Investors make money, franchises notch a new location, and the neighborhood suffers a significant death.
“Behind this dynamic is a monoculture of money optimizing for more money. An investment mentality that hollows out our culture. Real estate is just one example. It’s happening across many segments of our society.”
Source: https://ystrickler.medium.com/resist-and-thrive-1d36819853ca
Because of this endless drive for growth, Manhattan was literally becoming much less diverse, less unique and thus less interesting. Commercial homogenization in all the bad ways. This is not just New York City, I returned to Bangkok and London after a 4 year hiatus and saw the exact same thing happening there: an influx of literally almost every major global chain store. This is not just a hipster complaint (Anyone who knows me, knows I am far from a Hipster).
This Disneyfication or Starbuckization (both meant derogatorily) of global commercial culture is happening all across the globe. All across North America, across Europe and Asia.
Compare New York City to Portland, Oregon. What I jokingly call the Hipster capital of the United States. Where boutique hipsterdom has run amok. It has become a caricature with its own show “Portlandia” but mainly because it has character. Or even Tokyo, despite a large number and influx of global chain stores, it is still able to retain a uniqueness and diversity that most other top cities of so called Developed countries were not able to keep.
Perhaps this is why I am especially drawn to places off the beaten track like Central European (ex-Soviet bloc) region, Taiwan or Latin America. Or for me Japan especially which has a boutique craftsperson culture along with chains. Maybe it’s that I like looking for stuff that is unique & different. Much easier to find this in cities like Kyiv, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Taipei or Helsinki.
So what? I think this is a key lesson for all businesses. How do you differentiate when almost every product and service category is so crowded these days? How do you build something unique and that has personality?
Positioning Book is an old but still one of the best books to think about for any business and marketing strategy. If you cannot be Number 1 or Number 2 in the category, REDEFINE the category. The best way to define the category? It’s the one thing that all the most memorable and unique companies share.
“is that they are clear on their purpose and they follow a strict code in its pursuit. They don’t want to be everything to everybody. They just want to be themselves.”
It’s not about fitting in. Why would you imitate or copy them when they all literally look alike and act alike. Besides, you can’t compete with them head on as they have way more resources than you do, so that is not a winning strategy anyways. You focus on what only you can provide. You focus on being different. You focus on building something that is a reflection of your personality, character and values.
Basically “DON’T SELL OUT!” This is relevant whether you are building a business or a career.
“Don’t compete to be the best, Compete to be Unique”--Clayton Christensen
Or as the cofounder of Kickstarter Perry Chen said “F-ck the Monoculture!”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 10th, 2021
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Hard not to be optimistic about our technology driven future when I read this. But the question: is society ready to get behind this. Must read.
"Collectively, these technologies add up to a lot of possibility. If we cure a bunch of diseases, slow down aspects of aging, realize cheap and emissions-free baseload energy, and deploy new modes of transportation and better construction technologies, we will almost certainly exceed 2 percent TFP growth. But we might not do these things.
It all depends on execution. The underlying science is there. The engineers are willing. Even the funding is available in most cases. But, as a society, how much urgency do we feel? Our culture does not prioritize progress—it fights, destructively, for status. And our politics reflects our culture.
I want to go faster."
https://elidourado.com/blog/notes-on-technology-2020s/
2. This looks like a trippy new SciFi movie. Very curious now.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/watch-the-striking-trailer-for-ukrainian-sci-fi-film-at-1845978769
3. Who is MrBeast??
"Today, MrBeast has almost 34M subscribers and his videos have been watched over 5 billion times. Even if you’re not familiar with MrBeast, it is very likely that you have seen one of his videos. Most of MrBeast’s videos are best described as extreme acts of generosity and/or outrageous experiments."
"MrBeast has quickly become one of the biggest creators on YouTube and he is showing zero signs of slowing down. It might be hard to believe that a 21-year-old from a small town in North Carolina is running laps around the internet, but I think that’s the beauty and power of the internet.
I am 100% confident that within the next few years MrBeast will be the biggest individual creator on YouTube."
https://blake.substack.com/p/who-is-mrbeast
4. Long one but worth a read to get a sense of what's happening in China. Also the trade war with the USA.
"For the most part, the control hawks faction of the government has had a run of the table, shown by the fact that US agencies have been more focused on taking down Chinese firms than extending US strengths. At a time when it’s more important than ever to advance its semiconductor companies, the government is crippling their sales to their largest or fastest-growing market.
When research capabilities at US universities need to grow, the government is denying them students. And when the US should be attracting more talent to its shores, the government has made it more difficult for people to immigrate. Thus the US looks committed to a strategy to destroy the scientific and industrial establishment in order to save it."
https://danwang.co/2020-letter/
5. Well said.
"San Francisco might never return. While the Bay Area is incredible, SF is a deteriorating product. Like a bad gym, Covid expired the credit card, and customers are realizing – heck – it’s not worth renewing my membership.
In 2021 and beyond, I imagine people will diffuse to the Bay Area. Just like things were in 2008. Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sonoma, etc. The decade-long mismanagement of SF may be viewed as one of the most squandered opportunities of the modern era.
In closing, I imagine California will remain home for the Megaprojects and other cities like Miami can become generators of new networks. Both highly lucrative – Google and Uber are fine companies."
https://dcgross.com/california-future
6. Good advice.
"One big lesson reinforced to me in 2020 was to stay small, stay nimble. I know that sounds cliche, but I always think of the difference between rideshare options like Uber and Lyft vs all the money that California has burned away trying to get high speed rail up and running. Fixed costs are a bear.
Being able to tap into resources when I need them is of even greater value to me now as we hopefully approach a post-pandemic world. I’ve been trying to refactor everything I do to move away from fixed things to variable ones, and if there’s one bright spot operationally from 2020, it would be this lesson.
Of course, just a year ago today none of us knew what was in store. It could happen again, or something as improbable. So, the best I can do is plan for what I think will happen, pay close attention, and adjust accordingly when the situation changes."
https://semilshah.com/2021/01/04/looking-ahead-to-2021-planning-not-predictions/
7. "In September, the company he helped found in 2017, Compass Pathways, which has developed a synthetic version of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and is conducting the world’s first large-scale therapy clinical trial using the drug, listed in New York. His 28% stake, which cost him around $55m over multiple rounds, became worth more than $400m.
Next spring the biotech company he founded Atai Life Sciences — which is pursuing a large range of treatments for mental-health disorders using other more obscure drugs such as DMT, ar-ketamine and ibogaine — is set to go public as well at an expected $1bn-$2bn valuation, according to bankers familiar with the process.
With these high-profile exits and an increasingly large fortune — his investment company, Apeiron Investment Group, manages around $750m of his own money and $600m of others’ and invests in longevity research, biotech, fintech, spacetech, crypto and entertainment — Angermayer is becoming one of Europe’s most powerful and influential tech investors."
https://sifted.eu/articles/christian-angermayer-compass-atai/
8. Uh oh. I’m optimistic but it’s going to be a lot of work and pain next few years to get things back on track.
9. As a history major, I've been fascinated by the Hapsburg dynasty. One of longest existing multinational empires in the world.
https://unherd.com/2021/01/what-did-the-habsburgs-ever-do-for-us/
10. I'd do more than 2% but to each their own.
"Though I have changed my mind on Bitcoin, I haven’t necessarily changed my view on how one should invest in it. I believe that the only prudent way to invest in this asset class without any long-term negative repercussions is to hold no more than 2% of your portfolio in it. I wouldn’t recommend this approach for everyone, but it may work for some people. By limiting your exposure to 2% of your portfolio, you’re unlikely to get rich, but you’re unlikely to go bankrupt either."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-ive-changed-my-mind-on-bitcoin/
11. "In fact, why do we need the voluminous output of tech-oriented newsletters covering startups (by my count, there are at least several thousand newsletters covering our industry)? Why, in a media world that was supposed to be all about the long-tail, does it seem that every new media startup is targeting the same single niche over and over again?
That’s where the cauldrons of gold come in. Media is not unlike many startup markets — there may be infinite needs for diverse products, but there are only a handful of those needs that have serious dollars attached to them.
In media, these are beats like DC politics, or investment banking / M&A, or VC coverage in our quaint little world of startups, where the winners get to own massive audiences and, by extension, massive dollars from subscribers and advertisers. There are thousands of other niches, but they are impoverished with limited readership, users and recourse to revenue.
Put another way, these are tournament markets, where the winners can take all and where it is worth the gamble to have a small chance at a massive outcome rather than a good chance at a mediocre one."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/04/the-cauldrons-of-gold-theory-of-media-and-startups/
12. "Yikes! The Chapwood Index shows that the average inflation over the last 5 years is between 8.1% & 12.9% in the top 10 cities. That is a big difference between the 2% inflation assumptions that people make.
One way to think about this is if you are simply generating 8% a year in stock market returns on average, your investment returns are not keeping up with the real rate of inflation in these cities. That is a major problem for the top 50% of Americans who have investable assets, let alone a death sentence for the financial health of the bottom 50% of
Americans who hold no investable assets.
I bring up this idea of true inflation vs the CPI numbers because it is the single most important thing that is impacting the finances of tens of millions of Americans. The continued devaluation of our currency is enriching those who hold investable assets, but punishing those who simply save their wealth in cash. The system is working as designed. It is a feature, not a bug.
Savers are punished and investors are rewarded."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/inflation-is-killing-the-american
13. This is an old one but it does raise some questions/issues with the online ad world.
"Uber eventually cut $120M of its $150M programmatic budget with no impact. The effect was so surprising that they dug deeper and found evidence of fraud. Fake apps, phantom clicks, the works.
Uber’s not alone in finding that their ad spend is well-nigh useless, but the striking fact is how little organizations care. The people that uncover this often have to fight heavy internal resistance, and often lose. In reality, this is what the marketing department is selling. The idea that they have any control over marketing at all.
As Upton Sinclair “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This makes you wonder how much isn’t being uncovered because no one is incentivized to find out."
https://indica.medium.com/how-uber-discovered-that-80-of-its-ads-were-useless-bb4d96ee46c8
14. Criticism relevant to the US Government as well.
"As the Atlantic journalist Tom McTague observed back in August, the entire British state has been found wanting, as this country “has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its centre”. The problem is not just the Conservative Government, though that has failed entirely: it is the entire superstructure around it, the Civil Service, Public Health England, the media. The British state and its parasitic para-state are both entirely unfit for purpose.
"Back in the spring, distracted by the global crisis of liberalism, the pandemic was presented as a test between liberalism and authoritarianism. The success of East Asian democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea, however, shows that the crucial distinction is in fact simply that between functioning state bureaucracies and inept ones.
It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Taiwan and South Korea, as well as the also-successful Israel, are neighboured by enemies, and have experience in military mass mobilisation as a result."
https://unherd.com/2021/01/who-are-covids-guilty-men/
15. If this does not make you wary about doing business in China, Not sure what will.
https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2021/01/04/chinas-onetime-richest-man-jack-ma
16. Okay, if this is not a reason to be optimistic about 2021: Shake Shack’s Korean Fried Chicken Sandwich!
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/business/shake-shack-korean-fried-chicken/index.html
17. Lessons from history. Heed them.
"U.S. leaders must speak clearly, forthrightly, and unambiguously to the American people, declaring with both word and deed that insurrection will not be tolerated. Already, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other prominent senators have used the word “insurrection” to describe today’s events, which is good. And many leading Republicans have condemned the putsch, which is good.
But this must not be lip service. We can’t forget the events of today, or turn the page, or move on, or forgive and forget. Otherwise we risk an even worse coup attempt months or years down the line. If there’s one thing we don’t want to be, it’s 1930s Japan."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/japanese-lessons-for-the-american
18. We are in a LARP world. America on the bleeding edge in a bad way.
"Would it be better to replace fantasy with a proper sense of the real world? Ideally, yes, perhaps, but we’re now seemingly past that. The real world is almost a figment. We live surrounded by the Internet—we live inside it—and the institutionalized truth of the past has lost its hold.
The hierarchical society, religion, the old elites, the natural limits of technology: all the monuments of the past are struggling to survive in the new America. So we will have to be somewhat more sophisticated about these matters. It’s not that all the conspiracies and prophecies multiplying on both the Right and the Left should be taken seriously, but that it has become increasingly difficult to say what should—the real world? "
https://www.city-journal.org/the-role-playing-coup
19. This is incredibly prescient. Media founders is definitely a business opportunity for many people.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1347595135450710016
20. These are pretty good predictions for 2021 on the defense & strategy front.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/4-predictions-for-defense-strategy-and-technology-in-2021/
21. Go Portugal! I'm maximum bullish here.
22. This is pretty amazing. Also the future of business in my opinion.
"While Gumroad was no longer on track to become a billion-dollar company, I acquired a new asset: time. I used that time to take classes on writing and painting.
Because I was burned out and didn’t want to think about working any more than I needed to, I instituted a no-meeting, no-deadline culture.
For me, it was no longer about growth at all costs, but “freedom at all costs.”
This way, Gumroad stayed profitable, I could take a much-needed break to explore my hobbies, and the product continued to improve over time."
https://sahillavingia.com/work
23. More on the Gumroad workplace. Extreme but think it will be more common which is a good thing.
"The “anti-overtime” rate really gets me thinking as it’s a catalytic mechanism to align the internal expectations with the contractor‘s wallet. We’re here to work no more than 20 hours/week. If you need more time to do whatever, go for it, but it’s at your discretion and at a significantly reduced rate.
Thinking about contractors working no more than 20 hours week, it likely aligns with how much “real” work gets done in a normal 40 hour week. Time spent in meetings, going to lunch, socializing at the water cooler (virtual or otherwise), etc. likely isn’t “creator” time but does have social value and cultural importance. When it’s stripped away and time is only spent on the desired output, what changes?
Overall, No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees is an incredible read that feels like a new type of business where the working style fills an unmet need for some (many?) people. I believe the trend of contractors, freelancers, gig workers is only accelerating and a company like Gumroad is the logical extreme. The big question: when does something that seems extreme today become commonplace?"
https://davidcummings.org/2021/01/09/high-growth-startup-0-employees/
24. “If you now work into your 70s or 80s in a rapidly changing job market, then… [we must set] time aside to make fundamental investments in re-learning and re-skilling,” the professors argue, adding that technological disruption is making the multi-career pathway inevitable.
Similarly, researchers like David Epstein argue that the dogma of specialism is a farce. In his 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, Epstein demonstrates how star athletes, scientists, and business gurus all actually nurture several interests and skills, rather than a single niche.
Many experts argue that we can — and should — excel in multiple professions across a lifetime."
https://thehustle.co/what-its-like-to-go-through-a-dramatic-career-change/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Flash is Trash: Go Stealth in a K-shaped economy
Doom Scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & Instagram as we enter the new year of 2021, I am surprised and slightly appalled that influencer marketing is still around. I see some prominent influencers showing off about being in Tulum, Seychelles, Maldives or somewhere luxurious and exotic. Or sitting in front of their Lambo or what not.
Sure, prior to March 2020, where we were in a 10 year economic upcycle this makes sense. The economy was booming and there was a popular perception that rising tide lifts all boats. Flash was in. But in the post Covid world, we are clearly in a K-shaped economy where there are some very clear winners who have assets and good jobs but most of the populace is suffering and or falling behind.
Basically, “If you’re wealthy or have high income, the recession is essentially over for you. If you are less fortunate, you are still struggling to navigate the economic carnage.”
My friend Pomp goes on and covers this point with a lot of good graphs illustrating this big divergence. Worth a read. The K-Shaped Recovery Is Now Undeniable
Add on top of the fact of the financial suffering, we are still in the middle of a pandemic. Millions of people are still in lockdown, or have lost family members and friends. Travel is off limits to most of the populace.
I’m not a hater and count myself as an arch capitalist. I don’t begrudge these folks their success or even the right to show their lifestyle. I actually admire what the lifestyle they have built. But it just seems ill advised right now. If you were smart and/or lucky to pull ahead in 2020, better to keep quiet. Discretion is the better part of valor here. No one wants to see you cavorting around Bali at some luxury resort.
I have even heard of this term “Stealth Wealth.” I pulled this quote from Albert Goldson of the advisory firm Indo-Brazilian Associates:
“For the savvier elements of the upper-class, they've dusted off the playbook and added some more chapters specific to a global pandemic environment. For those relatively untouched financially by the market's wild gyrations, or perhaps who have profited obscenely by it, they've revived the Great Recession stealth wealth tactics of unabashed shopping. Hunkered in their urban or suburban gated-communities they usually send their personal shoppers to boutiques to pick-up and bring the designer merchandise in plain bags so as not to upset their "struggling" neighbors who have gone from billionaires to merely multi-millionaires and are actively downsizing their lifestyles.
So get ready to meet the stealthy wealthy – if you can find them. – because their low profile is so deep under the radar that it's a de facto witness protection program.”
I agree with his perspective that wealthy folks from Latin America or Asia are far ahead of the curve here and understand the risks of standing out. Think about how the Jews were targeted and attacked throughout history (they were targeted as they were wealthy money lenders and bankers, outside of the racist and religious reasons). Or in more recent times, the same thing happened to business-owning ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia & other parts of Southeast Asia.
Remember why the French Revolution or Russian Revolution happened? It happened in times of massive wealth inequality. And because the wealthy were so isolated from the real world, their acts antagonized the suffering general populace. Think Marie Antoinette’s reported infamous quote: “Let them eat cake” during a time of famine in France in 1789. We all know what happened after that. If you do not know, spoiler alert: she was executed by guillotine cheered on by an angry mob.
I don’t think (or hope) something like this will happen here in America or in most parts of the world. But why would you tempt fate. Better to keep working hard and keep a low profile. Also help your friends, family and anyone you can. Donate more to charity. Local food banks are a good choice here. We’re all interconnected here.
While I am not a fan of the inbred European nobility, I do like their concept of Noblesse Oblige: “nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities.” Not sure they actually practiced it but it’s still a good concept nonetheless and something I wish to see more of in our world.
Remember that even if you did fall behind ie. you still have a job and are solvent, you are literally still far ahead of 97% of the world’s population. Very few people have come through unscathed in the 2020 pandemic. Think about how bad things are these days, that the $600 usd stimulus check is a lifeline for many Americans. Many of them put in dire straits due to the government enforced lockdowns. People are especially sensitive these days. Flaunting your amazing life to them seems both stupid and in poor taste. If you ARE going to do this, use your audience to do things like what MrBeast has done, with the recent launch of his MrBeast burgers. A brilliant business AND PR move which helped bring more business to local independent restaurant owners in America.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, with the vaccine coming. So it should not be like this forever. You can show off all you want when the world is back to some semblance of normality. In the meantime, better to be low profile and stop posting about how awesome your life is on Instagram, Youtube or whatever social media you are on. I write to help people avoid future problems. There is only downside to oversharing in this environment. If we have learned anything from 2020, modesty and humility takes you pretty far.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Alt-VC: How the Shine is off Venture Capital and New Models of Startup Financing
As a practitioner it’s been really fun watching the evolution and revolution of the startup ecosystem and its funders. One of the weirdest things (at least to me) in Silicon Valley is the veneration of Venture Capital & love hate relationship between investors and founders.
Venture capital and its practitioners have been held up on this bizarre pedestal. And further influenced by the media (ahem Techcrunch) of celebrating fundraising, founders seem to think this is the only path for building their companies. But this thankfully is changing fast.
In many cases, founders do need a little bit of capital to get started. Yes, there are always “Friends and Family” money as well as angels. But from an institutional perspective this has been a gap for a long time. In the last few years there have been lots of new financing options arising for founders.
Investment Optionality:
Definitely seeing a new movement heralded a few years back by Bryce Roberts over at Indie.VC with a new model of funding. Their investment will convert like normal in case you as founder decide to go down the VC route. If you choose to go down bootstrap/ profitability path, you can repurchase their ownership with a fixed percentage of their gross revenue.
Earnest Capital takes this further. They invest but through their Shared Earnings Agreement.
Once the business hits a certain agreed upon threshold of founders earnings, revenue is shared with the investors until the cap is hit. Same with Indie.VC if the company decides they want to go down the Venture Capital route, the SEAL converts into equity at the next VC round.
Debt/Accounts Receivable Financing:
Basically Accounts Receivable financing where they give you money based on your subscription and revenue. I might add this is debt and non-dilutive financing. Ie. not equity. Which is an option for founders who care about ownership.
Pipe is the leader when it comes to subscription businesses, Founderpath for SaaS specifically. Pollen.vc is tops when it comes to mobile apps.
Crowdfunding:
There is Republic which is a crowdfunding platform where consumer focused startups can raise money directly from their customers. I love this as it leads to better alignment and several of my portfolio companies have gone this direction.
Private Equity-like Capital (but much less mean):
We’ve also seen Tiny Capital, Enduring Ventures, Fork Equity act like Berkshire Hathaway for small software businesses and acquire cash flowing software companies. They provide a very attractive exit option for founders who want to move on.
Bootstrapping:
Let’s not forget that Bootstrapping or self funded entrepreneurship has always been a thing. A highly underrated thing at that. Microconf, the conference and community of self-funded software entrepreneurs have been around for ages. I am a fan of how they have galvanized and educated their bootstrapping founder community. I should add that Atlanta based Mailchimp is doing over 700M usd a year in revenue and estimated to be worth at least $4B dollars. Completely bootstrapped. Also our favorite scheduling tool Calendly which is making $60M in annual revenue is also self-funded. Would love to see more high profile examples of these kinds of companies in the media.
The point I am trying to make is that there are so many paths forward for founders these days. Venture capital is not always the most suited for what you are trying to build. So I hope founders take their time to consider the right path for them. Think for yourself and do not mindlessly follow what is the “supposedly” predominant route that Silicon Valley & the media praise.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 3rd, 2021
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” —Seneca
Great interview. Love George Clooney.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6InxqMgCj48
2. "All successful startups take a tremendous amount of work. Whether it’s five years of effort (low end) or 10 years of effort (much more common), it takes an incredible amount of time and energy such that it’s best to pursue the biggest, most audacious ideas.
So, the next time you’re evaluating startup ideas, remember that it’s the same amount of work to produce a good outcome as it is to produce a great outcome, so think big."
https://davidcummings.org/2020/12/26/startup-effort-is-insane-so-think-big/
3. Seed stage investing was absolutely bonkers in 2020 despite (or maybe because of the pandemic). I was very surprised like many.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/24/us-seed-stage-investing-flourished-during-pandemic/
4. Thought this was damn funny. It happened 4 years ago but its still funny to me.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christmas-service-accidentally-prints-tupacs-hail-mary-lyrics/
5. Regardless, travel henceforth will not ever be the same.
"But while higher prices will be a reality in the short to medium term, the long-term forecast is for a return to the kind of global travel we knew before this year – probably by mid-2022 or 2023.
Whether we apply the lessons we were more or less forced to learn through lockdown – about sustainability, the fragile state of the planet and the need to curate our future experiences in a more ethical and eco-friendly manner – is still an open question."
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/articles/how-we-will-travel-beyond-2020
6. Russia may be a beneficiary of global warming.
"Around the world, climate change is becoming an epochal crisis, a nightmare of drought, desertification, flooding and unbearable heat, threatening to make vast regions less habitable and drive the greatest migration of refugees in history.
But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate. There is plenty of reason to think that those places will also receive an extraordinary influx of people displaced from the hottest parts of the world as the climate warms."
"And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation. It is positioned farther north than all of its South Asian neighbors, which collectively are home to the largest global population fending off displacement from rising seas, drought and an overheating climate. Like Canada, Russia is rich in resources and land, with room to grow."
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-big-thaw-how-russia-could-dominate-a-warming-world
7. Death Star is right. At least in cybersecurity terms.
"This week Microsoft took a series of dramatic steps against the recent SolarWinds supply chain attack. In the size, speed and scope of its actions, Microsoft has reminded the world that it can still muster firepower like no one else as a nearly-overwhelming force for good."
8. A man after my own heart.
"As much as Popovich knows about hoops, he really knows food and wine. "I don't know that he doesn't know more about wine than he does about basketball," former Spurs assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo says. Popovich scouts restaurants and wine lists as obsessively as he might any opponent. Before games, in his office, he can be found watching the Food Network. Sommeliers and restaurateurs claim to owe their careers to the man.
As absurd as it seems, one of the greatest basketball coaches in history might be more revered in the culinary world."
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/26524600/secret-team-dinners-built-spurs-dynasty
9. Great profile on MrBeast. Crushing it.
"Over the past four years, Donaldson‘s channel, MrBeast, has amassed more than 48 million subscribers. In the last 28 days, people have spent more than 34 million hours watching his videos. On Dec. 12, MrBeast was named Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, YouTube’s equivalent of the Oscars.
The consistent success of MrBeast’s videos has gotten the attention of the YouTube establishment. Last year, every video he posted eclipsed 20 million views. Such consistency is unparalleled, even among YouTube’s biggest stars. “He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world,” said Casey Neistat, a filmmaker turned YouTuber."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-22/who-is-mrbeast-meet-youtube-s-top-creator-of-2020
10. Shows that it is still early days in IoT.
"Almost four years ago, France’s Sigfox was riding high as a newly anointed unicorn and seemed to signal the potential of the internet of things (IoT). These days, SigFox is a cautionary tale about how too much hype can lead to expectations that are difficult to realize."
https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/23/how-sigfox-hopes-to-rebound-after-becoming-a-cautionary-iot-tale/
11. "Once a tech startup has reached the growth stage, VCs (and increasingly private equity firms) from Silicon Valley and around the world are unequivocally in play. As such, a lack of willingness on the part of U.S. investors to back a Canadian company should rightfully raise questions. Assuming that the company is competing in a large market, a failure to raise growth capital from any Silicon Valley VC means that no top-tier investor believes that the company will be able to generate venture-scale returns.
To believe that a hometown VC would somehow see something at the market expansion stage that the most experienced startup investors in the world all missed is, frankly, hubris."
https://ckneumann.medium.com/in-a-remote-first-world-do-we-still-need-domestic-vcs-fee1a3a65cd9
12. Some great investing lessons here.
"George observed that while most fund managers began the year thinking about which stocks they should own to make the most money, he began the year with the knowledge that roughly 50% of his positions were mistakes, tried to carefully think about which of those mistakes would cost him the most money and eliminate those positions.
Minimizing mistakes is essential given that almost all investors — even the best ones — are wrong circa 50% of the time. I really love the humility inherent to this mentality, which is aligned with my increasing belief that “I don’t know” are the three most important words in investing, not “margin of safety.” One can always be wrong, no matter how much work has been done or big the “margin of safety” appears to be."
13. Elad Gil & Kevin Hartz. Literally two of the best operator-investors in Silicon Valley. Bar None. Seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJBQUchuwJo
14. A good man here.
"The COVID crisis is what keeps the Mayor awake these days, and he is often buzzing with so many thoughts and ideas about how to help solve it that he taps them out on a phone by his bedside in the wee hours of the morning. “I’ve been through some shit in my day,” Fieri says, “but in a million years, you never could have told me a story as horrific, as decimating, as this has been.”
In late March, Fieri partnered with the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation to launch the Restaurant Employee Relief Fund, which has raised $21.5 million to distribute in $500 grants to laid-off restaurant workers, a move that landed the Mayor on this year’s “Bloomberg 50” list."
https://www.grubstreet.com/article/guy-fieri-restaurant-relief-profile.html
15. Go Taiwan. I would argue the best place to live in 2020 & probably 2021.
16. "With trillions of dollars of cash sitting on the sidelines looking for return and trillions more being pumped into the market by governments around the world, nothing is too expensive. Instead, what’s more important is finding that which is unique. That of which we can print no more. That which is finite."
https://meltdem.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-a-collectors-items
17. "With these three “attention merchants” competing for consumers’ increasingly scarce time, it’s likely that music streaming will struggle to grow even when things return to normal. We know that songs are getting shorter, and without more songs being consumed, music is already losing the battle for attention."
18. Very good benchmarks for Net Retention Rate in SaaS.
https://www.saastr.com/whats-a-good-net-retention-rate-in-saas/
19. "There are three states on the 0% State Tax list that I expect many corporations, VC firms, and HNW people will move to in the next 12 months. They are Florida, Texas, and Washington (State). The more adventurous will move to Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
Distributed work is here. And State Taxes are now a competitive disadvantage."
https://feld.com/archives/2020/12/the-great-hq-migration.html
20. This is quite a timely article. The point is "not timing the market, the point is time in the market!"
"Regardless of which risky asset classes you have in your portfolio, as this post illustrates, buying near all-time highs should not be a cause for concern. Of course, you may get unlucky with an asset class during a particular period of time, however, if you own a diversified portfolio, the impact of such an occurrence should be minimal."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/should-you-buy-an-all-time-high/
21. Sometimes the simple stuff is the best. Love watching how this could open up startups to a whole new group of people.
22. This is such a great interview. So many knowledge bombs here. I strongly recommend listening to this interview with my friend Shaan Puri (who also has an amazing podcast show as well).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaqu_YrfXuQ
23. "The hangover effect in the Bay Area became more dynamic as this year closes. Tens of thousands of households left the city of San Francisco. Many emigrated to surrounding counties, driving up real estate prices even more. The stretch of wildfires that surrounded the Bay Area in September proved to be a knockout punch for many residents — it was a really tough time. Imagine a dual-income household with small kids in school via Zoom, parents working via Zoom, and stuck inside in 100 degree weather with 8-10 days of extremely unhealthy air quality. I can’t prove it, but this tipped many people over. Once the fires subsided, major issues remained.
Seeing newer companies reach scale in a remote and distributed manner (like GitLab), having the ability to buy/sell real estate online with networks like Opendoor, the impending impact of California’s and San Francisco’s looming budget crises, the impact of SALT deductions being stripped, and with much of the industry adapting quickly to a video-first environment, for the first time a considerable number of people I know who would have never left the Bay Area began to spread out — Europe, Seattle, Austin, and so many other places around the world."
https://semilshah.com/2020/12/30/looking-back-on-tech-startups-and-vc-in-2020/
24. I so want to go to Uzbekistan to visit. The Silk Road.
25. Mario Lopez: he has definitely aged well. Saved by the Bell was one of my favorite tv shows when I was growing up.
“I never was one of those kids, like, ‘Oh, I have to be on TV,’ or ‘I want to perform and it's in my heart,’ ” Lopez says. “I wanted just to make enough money to not have to burden my parents with paying for college.” Though he got an inauspicious start—for Saved by the Bell, he was paid $3,500 an episode—he wound up being so successful that he got too busy with work to ever attend a university.
“I say no to a lot of stuff…[but] when you grow up without money, you have two attitudes when you start making some,” Lopez says. “You either think: Well, all right, I've made it and I'm just gonna get flossy and kind of rest on my laurels. Or you can think, which is what I do: You know what? This shit can go away like that”—he snaps for emphasis. “And I don't ever want to regret it. I want to keep striking while the iron is hot.”
26. "Nothing got built by cynicism. “You can’t do it!” has never created a company, except perhaps to trigger a founder to start something in revolt at the fusillade of negativity.
It takes time though to build. It takes time to take an early product and grow it. It takes time to build a startup ecosystem and expand it into something self-sustaining. Perhaps most importantly, it takes extraordinary effort and hard work, and not just from singular individuals but a whole team and community of people to succeed. The future is malleable — and bets do pay off. So we all need to stop asking what’s the problem and pointing out flaws, and perhaps ask, what future are we building toward? What’s the bet I’m willing to back?"
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/29/startup-cynicism/
27. YUP!
"Founders, investors and bankers say they are entering the new year with optimism, hopeful the vaccine will be distributed quickly and enthused about expected tech IPOs. Few said they were concerned with rising valuations and stock prices, despite parallels with the 2000 tech boom.
Puncturing the sense of jubilation is the knowledge that it’s not widely shared. Outside the tech bubble, thousands of small businesses are still working to recover from coronavirus-related losses. Millions of laid-off workers are searching for a new gig. And more than 330,000 people have died of the virus in the U.S. alone.
“I would have never guessed that one of the most devastating global pandemics would yield one of the most speculative frenzies in the public market for tech in history,” said Peter Hébert, general partner of Lux Capital, a venture firm he co-founded in 2000.
“This is the most bizarre year I’ve ever encountered.”
28. This is incredibly touching. Seems apt for the close of 2020.
29. This is quite funny. Miami is a different beast than SF Bay Area.
"Others fear that an influx of backpack-wearing venture capital disciples will do what it does everywhere: raise housing costs astronomically, increase the douchebag factor in the region and generally make life miserable for everybody else.
All we know is, the tech industry folks have no idea what they’re in for if they move to Miami. Because Miami is not Silicon Valley. We don’t have robots; we have fist-sized insects. We don’t nurture incubators; we fight toilet iguanas. We didn’t spend our youth getting in touch with our spirituality via MDMA at Burning Man. We spent it mainlining S’mores-covered bacon on a stick at Santa’s Enchanted Forest as we gazed up at the giant Christmas tree that plays Pitbull songs.”
https://www.miamiherald.com/miami-com/funny-stories/article248132210.html#storylink=cpy
30. Actually I am really eager to visit Pakistan when all this Covid mess is over. I think this is one of the most underrated countries and economies in the world right now (along with Uzbekistan).
"With all my friends and all the media outlets I knew warning me against traveling to Pakistan, the moment I stood in the queue to board my first flight to Islamabad, I admit I wasn’t sure whether I was in the right place. It’s very hard to extract yourself from all the common preconceptions about Pakistan as a person living in the Western world and consuming Western media. After all, the one single image of the country we are given is that of an unsafe, unwelcoming place – which is of course very wrong.
But as I stood in that queue, I had people approach me, asking where I was from and whether this was my first time in Pakistan. Those wrong preconceptions quickly began to wither away before I even landed on Pakistani soil. And from what I know, this seems to be a pretty standard change of sentiment among foreign visitors."
31. "The lesson of 2020 is not that we’re doomed, necessarily, only that doom feels like a legitimate possibility."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22201977/2020-doomsday-apocalypse-astrologers-memes-investigation
32. I am so going to Uzbekistan in 2022.
33. "30/50/20. On median, 30% of opex is R&D, 47% is on sales and marketing, and 22% is on G&A. The rule is therefore “30/50/20” may be more accurate."
https://blossomstreetventures.medium.com/saas-margins-where-they-should-be-ad90c44c1536
34. "I think great media businesses are massively underrated and misunderstood in technology circles.
In my experience with Hardbound, Gimlet, Substack, and now the Everything bundle, I’ve come to believe that content can create incredibly strong moats. There are properties inherent to narratives and ideas that make them naturally powerful — kind of like how social networks, marketplaces, and platforms are inherently power-prone.
But not every media business benefits from them. There are winners and losers."
https://divinations.every.to/p/why-content-is-king
35. Word to the wise, founders. Take everything you read in the tech press with a BIG grain of salt.
"As an early-stage founder, there’s no easier way to become depressed than reading the tech press.
The figures look larger than what you’re discussing with potential investors. The founders all seem to describe a process that went much quicker than yours. The rounds are always oversubscribed.
When you’re deep in the trenches of fundraising, pushing hard to get that first investor to believe in the market you’re taking on, the product you’ve built for it, and, well, you… It can be tempting to treat those stories as benchmarks.
Not only is that not helpful, often it’s straight out misleading.
Startup press releases aren’t written to tell the exact story; they’re optimised for things like hiring and fundraising."
https://thefamily.substack.com/p/everybody-kinda-lies
36. Pretty good tech predictions for 2021: especially keeping in mind how off we all were on 2020.
https://tomtunguz.com/2021-predictions/
37. What a trip!
"Since August 2018, I walked through Italy, Slovenia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In each of these countries I spoke to everyone — about everything. I interviewed historians, tourist guides, peasants, hermits, and self-proclaimed witches. I observed the mundane, simple things: the way they cook chicken, the way they make their coffee, the games their children play, what their toys look like.
I tried to pay close attention to everything, always keeping in mind the goal of my trip: to study human life."
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/12250/silk-road-by-foot-central-asia-caucasus-adventure
38. Lots of great insights in this long write up of 2020. Worth a read.
"Now as we prepare to welcome 2021, we are changed in many ways. Perhaps most significantly, the distinctions between our physical and digital worlds have largely disintegrated. We now work and we live online just as much, if not more, than we do offline. We may have always been heading this way, but this year significantly — and irreversibly — accelerated our pace. Transitioning to this new normal comes with tremendous opportunity, but we must remain aware that some will require assistance to make the adjustment.
For me — and I hope for you — the year also offered opportunities to pause and reflect on which aspects of that real, offline world we are willing to fight to preserve."
https://om.co/the-longest-year-2020/
39. Valencia, Alicante & Lisbon show up on top. Iberian peninsula rules.
"At the other end of the scale, a quartet of Spanish cities placed in the top 10. Expats gave Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, the world’s highest score based on its climate, housing affordability, and health care. Just down the list — and around 100 miles down the coast — Alicante, a city of 330,000 people, came in second place. Malaga and Madrid earned 6th and 9th place."
40. "When we look back at 2020 in the business world, we’ll remember it as the year online shopping stopped being the future of retail and catapulted firmly into the present. This was the year that local governments forced us to give up in-store shopping for weeks or months, and then when we had an opportunity to return when stores reopened, we mostly kept shopping online anyway."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22204578/2020-ecommerce-growth-retail-shopping-changed-forever
41. All makes sense to me. About time too.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/millennials-poised-to-remake-investing-4992812/
42. "This year has cemented the notion that crypto assets are not only not going away but will be integral to our financial lives going forward. As we close out a very trying and historic 2020, the future has never looked brighter for bitcoin and crypto asset ownership and use."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/governments-start-hodl-bitcoin-2021-150043234.html
43. Very interesting forecasts. I think things get back to normal in 2022. But hope he is right on the 2nd half of 2021.
"The Covid Pandemic will end in the developed world in 2021. I think we will see the end of the Covid Pandemic in the US sometime in the second quarter. I believe the US will work out the challenges we are having getting out of the gate and will be vaccinating at least 40mm people a month in the US in the first quarter."
"The twin terrors of the Covid Pandemic and the Climate Crisis will drive the great US migration of the 21st century and we are already experiencing it. We will see it accelerate in 2021. If, because of what we learned in the Covid Pandemic, a good job no longer requires someone to live in a low lying flood-prone city like Miami or NYC or a city that is burning like SF or LA, we will see many people in the US choose to leave those places and adopt new homes that are less impacted by the climate crisis.
We call this “adapting to the climate crisis” at USV, and this will be a huge investable trend for many years to come."
https://avc.com/2021/01/what-is-going-to-happen-in-2021/
44. I've always liked Miami. It seems to be the place to be these days.
"Miami is among that set of curious characters: the urban entrepôt (from the French word for ‘warehouse’). Whether Havana or Beirut in their day, Hong Kong before the Chinese decided to squash it under their bootheels, or Singapore or Dubai now, the world has always featured gateways that intermediate two worlds. Usually this city-state middle-man straddles some large hegemonic power and some (culturally foreign) ‘near abroad’. And that’s what Miami is: it’s the intersection in the Venn diagram between American business culture and rule of law, and Latin American culture and vitality (not to mention a market of 650 million consumers and a combined GDP of over $5 trillion).
To most Americans Miami might mean beaches and bling and palm trees, but in Latin America it’s something else altogether: a combined bolthole, bank and bazaar....The city hosts a slew of multinationals and their regional offices, from Proctor & Gamble to Facebook. Brickell Avenue is a sort of Latin American Wall Street, lined with the logos of every major commercial bank. If you do business in LatAm, you’ve got a Miami office."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/next-year-in-miami
45. "Traditional financial products & services are single player, which makes sense since people tend to expect a high degree of privacy around their finances, and products built for individuals are much simpler to design, market, and activate.
However, many new fintech services are built around a subscription-model, where three numbers tend to dominate: acquisition costs, average revenue per user, and churn rate. The last, of course, is a heavy determinate of lifetime value.
Multiplayer products & services have a number of advantages.
Multiplayer products are inherently viral, pulling more people into the system and lowering average acquisition costs. More importantly, multiplayer products are fundamentally stickier, leading to lower churn rates and higher lifetime values."
https://adamnash.blog/2020/11/16/fintech-2025-the-next-wave/
46. One of few good things that has come out of 2020.
An entrepreneurial renaissance is here.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/an-entrepreneurial-renaissance-is-here-4291673/
47. Miami: the place to be these days.
"Operationally it makes sense to be in the same time zone, with competitive talent and at a fraction of the cost. Another benefit: Miami talent understands both LATAM and the U.S., generally speaks both English and Spanish fluently, and is very happy to live in a place where rent isn’t prohibitive, homeownership is approachable, and the beach is a short drive away.
An estimated 300,000 people move to Florida every year. In Miami, there’s a growing trend of people looking for a better quality of life and a manageable cost of living. Even locals who once fled north due to lack of opportunities are starting to return to their home state."
https://www.wework.com/ideas/city-guides/miami-usa-gateway-to-latin-america
48. "Many things take time. How did we go from boring orchards to the Bay Area tech scene? It's very comfortable for me to think in terms of 10 to 12 years. That’s the time horizon for just one fund, for example. So I think the investment in Miami will pay dividends or is getting increasingly likely to pay dividends. And especially over the extended timeframe, I have found it incredibly easy to convince people to try it. One of the reasons why is the opportunity costs during COVID of trying a new geo are significantly smaller.
Certainly the investors are very willing to move here. If you have a thesis about how much location matters in the history of Silicon Valley, it matters a great deal. Sand Hill Road is about the most boring geographical location on the planet. And the only reason people know about it is because a bunch of venture capitalists co-located there 40 years ago. So some of the high-risk, high-reward venture capitalists are here. Some publicly announced, some not. But I have partners from many, if not most, of my real competitors here now. I don’t think the venture capital community is going to be a limiting factor here. There are entrepreneurs who are already entrepreneurs that are moving here."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/drum-major-of-the-miami-parade
49. Mexico City (and Mexico at large) is a good place to hang out for a while.
“There were weeks where I just wouldn’t leave my house, just working all day — my mental health was definitely suffering,” said Mr. George, 31, who manages business operations for a technology start-up.
So when a Mexican friend said he was traveling to Mexico City in November, Mr. George decided to tag along. Now, he’s calling the Mexican capital home — part of an increasing number of foreigners, mainly Americans, who are heading to Mexico, for a short trip or a longer stay to escape restrictions at home.
They are drawn partly by the prospect of bringing a little normalcy to their lives in a place where coronavirus restrictions have been more relaxed than at home, even as cases of Covid-19 shatter records. Some of them are staying, at least for a while, and taking advantage of the six-month tourist visa Americans are granted on arrival."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/world/americas/virus-mexico-visitors.html
50. Lots of great nuggets here. Worth a read as we enter 2021. How & where to be spend money to maximize happiness
"The key takeaways? First, treat time as the commodity. Research suggests that people who think of their time as a limited resource in its own right are more likely to derive joy from life’s simple pleasures, like eating sweets or talking to a friend.
Second, if you’re splurging on a time-saving purchase, use those extra minutes to do something that lifts your mood. Studies on time and happiness show people typically experience more positive emotions during leisure activities compared to when they’re working or doing household chores. Active and social forms of leisure, like exercising and volunteering, are also linked to greater happiness compared to more passive activities, like watching TV or napping.
“The more that people are using their time to engage in social interactions to cultivate relationships, the more happiness they’re going to get from buying time,” Kumar explains. That’s why buying experiences is another way to maximize joy from spending."
https://www.popsci.com/story/science/how-to-spend-money-happiness/
51. This is a movement I'm glad to see resurfacing. Not what you see in popular media but very important for the future. Techno-Optimism.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optimism-roundup
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Gartner Hype Cycle & Trough of Disillusionment for Investing: WHY I Hate Hype
Hopefully anyone in technology knows about the famous (or infamous) Gartner Hype Cycle.
Silicon Valley is driven by Envy, hype and bandwagon jumping. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is the name of the game. Yes, it’s a stupid game but its still a game. And a very profitable one but only those who have access and are established can effectively play this game. In Banking it is Goldman Sachs, in Venture Capital it is Sequoia, Founders Fund, Accel or one of the multitudes of top tier branded VC funds. What we call Kingmakers, who have the clout, money and brand to set trends or if they are late, to push (or attract) the best clients/founders/companies to them.
For everyone else, basically us normal investors, we have to figure out another edge. Thinking of trends, there are two major inflection points of entry where the money is made. Being super early, like at being in Crypto in 2011 at the “Technology Trigger” point. This is usually discovered by investor folks who are fanatical about the space and on the ground.
But the bigger opportunity and much easier play was shown to me by David Weekly, a prolific operator and entrepreneur and underrated angel investor. It’s actually looking at trends one or two years after its peak and when all the dilettante founders have quit. Also when almost every other investor has left the sector. This is when the real hard core fanatics are still building. And more importantly, also when the technology and market has slowly caught up to the hype from the peak. I have personally seen this through countless trends that have shown up in Silicon Valley: Cleantech, AR/VR, Chatbots, Food delivery, Crypto pop up top of mind in recent years.
This is why I tend to run far away when an investment is seen as “safe.” When investors are flocking in with dozens (or more) of directly competitive ventures being funded. With MBA type “Get rich quick” founders jumping into the gold rush and the media is gushing. I admit timing is hard to do whether in public equity investing or startups. And especially in early stage startup investing, where the additional factor of the team & founder being really critical.
But having the filter of where the trend is, is important and helpful. Technology innovation always leads consumer/customer adoption by years. The UX/UI usually sucks and people have highly ingrained habits and a very hard time changing. No surprise that tweens and young adults are usually the first ones to adopt new technologies, not older people like me. Or why startups are the first to use new technology or marketing channels, not the big enterprises in the Fortune 500.
Timing really does matter and that is why when something is so hyped up (or overhyped), as an early stage investor, you need to run the other way. The really interesting point to evaluate a trend (and you really need to do your homework here) is when almost everyone else has given up or written off the sector as a whole.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Fish Rots from the Head
If you want to understand the reason an organization is failing, look at who is running it. We don’t have to look much further than across the business world or government to see this. Yes, geopolitical trends, new competitors, changing consumer behavior, systemic breakdowns all affect these organizations. But what is most important is how the organization reacts to these challenges. The tone and reaction of the organization to the crisis is set by the leadership.
Here is a most recent and still ongoing example.
In 2019, there was a list of countries most prepared for an epidemic, ranked by the United Nations.
Number 1: United States of America
Number 2: United Kingdom
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/20629/ability-to-respond-to-an-epidemic-or-pandemic/
As I write this at the end of 2020, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The USA and UK have been unmitigated disaster zones with their hospitals full and the sickness/ death rate at some of the highest levels in the world. Add to this the lockdowns and the consequent economic declines. The universal factor here is the incompetent, buffoonish leadership at the top of these countries. Or some could argue, the complete absence of leadership. Period.
What we have learned from this? It does not matter if you have copious resources. Whether it’s money, the intelligence and education level of your people, the possession of advanced technology. The catalyst to mobilize all of these resources is leadership. It took a global pandemic to surface how this leadership was lacking in so many organizations across the world. It also showed us how valuable true leadership really is as was shown in places as wide ranging like Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand & Australia.
As we have gotten past the shock & awaken to this truth before us, we will see many people rise up to the many challenges being surfaced. These challenges range from ones related to the pandemic, and the numerous large economic, societal or climate/ environmental ones as well. That makes me hopeful for our future.
2020 was a brutal year. Most of us would agree it really sucked. But the year is almost over and we can start to put it behind us. Let’s just make sure we remember all the lessons we learned this year and move confidently into 2021!
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 27th, 2020
“Celebrate endings—for they precede new beginnings.”-Jonathan Lockwood Huie
"The good news for anyone in traditional media seeking to stake out on their own is that generations of digital creators have paved the way. Internet culture writers have chronicled these struggles, which offer valuable lessons for navigating this new environment. But in 2021, I think we’ll see a lot of independent media figures learn things the hard way."
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/journalists-will-learn-influencing-isnt-easy/
2. "Traveling has taught me there is no one right way to make, save, and invest money. Every country has its own traditional beliefs and wealth generation creators.
But I did notice a couple themes across the world.
The first is to control your lifestyle costs. Whether that’s by moving to a more affordable area or tightening your proverbial “budget belt,” financial longevity starts by saving at least 10% of your income.
Second, your money should work for you. You can buy property, start a business or learn how to earn passive income. Just do whatever you need to do to ensure you’re not dependent on just one source of income."
https://time.com/nextadvisor/in-the-news/china-uk-us-personal-finance/
3. This guy got away at the right time, leaving CD Projekt & their big 2020 gaming disaster Cyberpunk.
"Michał Kiciński comes across like a man who values his Buddhist beliefs more than his tenuous billionaire status—which he achieved twice during Cyberpunk’s recent hype cycle. (Two weeks ago, Kiciński was worth an estimated $1.2 billion. His stake in CD Projekt has now fallen to $750 million.)
“I'm not in the position to advise anybody,” he told Forbes on the phone as Cyberpunk 2077 neared its crunch period in July. “Of course [it’s] very close to me. I see CD Projekt as my child, which is now mature and goes by itself.”
4. This really is amazing. Influencer starting a national burger restaurant chain. Seriously amazing & impressive. Apparently they had download & delivery issues because it was so popular.
https://twitter.com/GavinSBaker/status/1340650100285124609
5. "In 2007, he founded Fisker Automotive, which made one of the world’s first plug-in cars, before failing spectacularly six years later.
Now he’s back–and three things are different. First and foremost, he has a vital new partner: his wife, cofounder and Fisker Inc. CFO Geeta Gupta-Fisker. Second, his Los Angeles-based company is public this time around, raising more than $1 billion in an October 2020 IPO. And finally, Fisker’s stock price, up 56% since its debut, has made both Henrik and Geeta billionaires, each worth about $1.1 billion as of Friday’s market close.
The auto industry has seen father-son and sibling leadership teams, but Fisker Inc.’s CEO-CFO combo is the fast-changing sector’s first husband and wife power couple."
6. Really surprised at how big this industry is. But I guess I should not be. Markets are so big in general these days.
"By one estimate, the global wig, weave, and hair extension market is worth ~$7B — and it’s projected to grow to $10B+ by 2024 (an 8% CAGR).
In the United States, these products have long been popular among sufferers of hair loss, African American and Orthodox Jewish communities, and entertainment professionals.
But in recent years, celebrities and social media influencers have attracted a new subset of human hair consumers."
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-the-human-hair-trade/
7. "But it’s not just the big things we’ve lost. We lost little things like going to the gym or going on vacation. I spent my whole life working so I had the freedom and flexibility to travel the world and now I’m grounded with everyone else, looking at the same four walls, day in and day out.
The only solution is to adapt and adapt now."
"But have something to hope for, something you’re working towards: a project; a destination in the future; a better body; travel; a new partner; a career change. Have a goal. Any goal. The bigger the better. But little ones work too.
But this is not about wishing for it only. It’s about doing something towards it every day."
https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries/keeping-it-together-when-things-fall-apart-8208a7f060e1
8. Love and people are strange. This is one of the most wacky stories I've read in a long time.
https://www.elle.com/life-love/a35021224/martin-shkreli-christie-smythe-pharma-bro-journalist/
9. WOW, Nathan Myhyrvold was prescient.
https://twitter.com/corry_wang/status/1340869586397372417
10. "This future, Christakis predicts, will not come until society has had time to distribute the vaccine, probably through 2021, and had time to recover from the socioeconomic devastation it has wrought, probably through 2023. But the vision he lays out for 2024 and beyond is one filled with experiences pined for in isolation: packed stadiums, crowded nightclubs and flourishing arts.
“In 2024, all of those [pandemic trends] will be reversed,” he said. “People will relentlessly seek out social interactions.” That could include “sexual licentiousness,” liberal spending, and a “reverse of religiosity.”.
11. "I think it takes the investment community a long time to understand any newly public company. At the end of the day, the IPO is just one day, right? What really matters is how companies perform over the next 10 or 20 years.
I would look at Microsoft or Amazon or more recently, Facebook, whose [share price] dropped 50% in the week or two following its offering and Facebook has gone on to be an incredible business. I have no idea what the market is going to do tomorrow [or] the day after. But over a decade, if you can really build a great sustainable business that compounds, it all comes out in the wash."
12. "Investors are trying to recalibrate where seed valuations should be. $100B is the new $10B. $10B is the new $1B. Does that mean ultimate outcome potential for all these companies is higher, so valuations can move up with it? But are those public market values realistic? Are we all using comps, but the comps themselves are totally unrealistic and being messed around with by market structure? Not value?
Does that mean a lot of seed investors can shift their mandates a bit with more flexibility? Does that mean we should start participating in these double seeds?"
https://crossstack.substack.com/p/the-double-seed-and-recalibrating
13. "interviews with two dozen people close to Alloy tell a more unsettled story that goes beyond just infighting over a few employee firings. Alloy seemed doomed to fail by this winter, people close to the company described to Recode, because of intense internal strife and sharp external mistrust. The staff coup just accelerated that conclusion, compressing what would have likely been a years-long reckoning over Democrats’ lagging data operation into a week-long combustion.
Backed with $35 million — half from Silicon Valley celebrity billionaire Reid Hoffman — Alloy was pictured as the left’s belated big money answer to the right’s supremacy in the world of political data. Hoffman and his aides wanted to build a sophisticated operation that could outmaneuver Republicans in the foxholes of the data wars. It was such a priority for Hoffman that it was his biggest public bet since he became involved in politics after Donald Trump’s win in 2016.
It didn’t quite work out as his team hoped, serving instead as a public study of how billionaires’ political experiments can fall short of expectations."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22175186/alloy-drama-reid-hoffman-democratic-data-startup
14. Fascinating space & emerging industry of Psychedelics. This is one one of the most exciting areas for humanity to develop.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/23/peter-thiel-backs-psychedelics-startup-atai.html
15. Lots to learn in the USA from how the state of Vermont is handling the pandemic.
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21541810/vermont-covid-19-coronavirus-social-distancing
16. Well said.
"Whatever the risk to ourselves, however, we don’t take vaccines to protect ourselves. We take vaccines to protect everyone, to avoid becoming a fiber in the web.
In May of 1940, the British sailors and bargemen who set course for France did not know if U-boats, bombers, or bad weather would await them. They didn’t need to know. They knew their countrymen were at risk, and that was enough.
Today, it feels as if we’ve lost sight of the connection between sacrifice on behalf of our country and the personal prosperity and liberties we are blessed with. But we’d do well to remember that they weren’t really blessed upon us — they were earned."
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-call-for-help
17. Been meaning to read "The Alchemist"
"DURING THE OFFSEASON, Diggs put himself through what he calls a "personal reevaluation." The goal, he says, was "self-healing," and the process involved several days of reflection, isolation and reading. One of the books he chose was "The Alchemist."
The novel, written by Brazilian Paulo Coelho, is a tale about a young shepherd in Andalusia who literally follows his dreams. The story focuses on the importance of destiny and belief. It spoke to Diggs. "It's probably the best book I've ever read," he says.
The idea that each of us has a personal legend we should be chasing -- chasing, as opposed to idly hoping will someday happen..."
https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/30532083/stefon-diggs-buffalo-miracle-man
18. "Reddit is one of my favorite places on the internet. It's like an early version of a metaverse, where people come together to create interconnected worlds, each with its own culture.
That interconnectedness is what makes Reddit great, but for the system to work, each community has to conform to the one-size-fits-all mold of a subreddit. One size fits all, but it doesn't fit anyone particularly well. That creates unbundling opportunities.
There are hundreds of wonderful startups waiting to be built using this simple strategy: create a product that serves the unmet needs of an individual subreddit."
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-unbundling
19. I especially like the idea of "Liquid employment" & "Living Online
"Investors would never choose to invest in just one company; the risk is too concentrated. Instead, they build portfolios. Over time, workers will invest their time in a similar way.
Currently, liquid employment is largely impractical for workers and employers alike. But the same thing could have been said about remote work at one point. Spreading risk over a few companies makes sense for employees. That means that the companies that want an edge to hire the best people for a given role will eventually adopt it."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/nine-trends-that-will-shape-our-careers-in-2021
20. Not a good thing btw.
"A big % of graduates of elite colleges take such jobs, and the other jobs they take don’t make nearly as much money. The other big employers, such as hedge funds, private equity firms, and tech firms, choose similarly. And elite colleges use similar criteria to pick their students. So this is a window into how we pick a big % of the top elites in the US today."
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/what-makes-prestige.html
21. "Brose and others have made a strong case that over the past two decades, while the US focused on overmatched battles (Libya, Iraq, non-state actors) and grew complacent with its single-superpower status, our near-peer competitors, Russia and China, focused on the US. They studied our methods and legacy systems, identified weaknesses, and developed a new type of warfare – combining speed, cyber, and new technologies – designed to exploit those vulnerabilities (the recent FireEye and SolarWind breaches are just one example).
We’re racing to catch up."
https://www.bahcall.com/letter-how-to-win-the-next-war/
22. "This year’s growth is also part of a longer-term trend for Swedish game developers, which have seen their sales more than double to 24.3 billion kronor ($2.9 billion) between 2014 and 2019, according to the trade group the Swedish Games Industry.
“There’s a notable indie scene in Sweden, with quite a lot of studios and relatively good access to venture capital,” said Tomas Otterbeck, an analyst at Redeye AB in Stockholm."
23. Great write up on MrBeast Burgers!
"With excess capacity at casual dining and a need for new demand, celebrity-driven virtual dining has emerged as a new prospect for a suffering industry. It just might work."
"Before year’s end, you’ll see Marques Brownies and Dobrik’s Dumplings. And while the creators will certainly line their pockets, Robert Earl’s foresight into this marketing strategy is due to revolutionize an industry crippled by the lack of foot traffic that leaders like Kat Cole once relied upon to fuel growth in the industry.
MrBeast wasn’t the first creator to put his mark on a fast casual product. But this partnership will be the most transformative for an industry in need."
https://2pml.com/2020/12/21/mrbeast/
24. The new face of war. Drones better integrated into war fighting tactics.
“The expanding array of relatively low-cost drones can offer countries air power at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a traditional air force. The situation in Nagorno-Karabakh also underscored how drones can suddenly shift a long-standing conflict and leave ground forces highly exposed.”
25. "Developing a diverse toolkit of mental models for investing is a proven path to success. Nicholas Sleep, Charlie Munger and James Anderson, mavericks when it comes to investment thinking, are evidence of such. The learnings these Masters have extracted from nature, biology, physics, psychology, economics, politics and complexity science have lead to investment insights and success others couldn’t see."
http://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2020/11/11/learning-from-the-santa-fe-institute
26. Cannabis is back although It never really left. Good for Snoop Dogg & Casa Verde Capital.
27. This was a great, rational & hopeful discussion between Yang & Chamath. Covered alot of good stuff about politics and tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHcsgy5gk58
28. Lots of insights for angel investors. From 2 of the top investors and operators in SV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-VDSQSHND8
29. This is the fight we should be paying attention to. Advanced Semiconductor chips are critical to any country’s digital future.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/22/tech/smic-us-sanctions-intl-hnk/
30. "The most interesting writers and "thought leaders" to me are the ones who are out doing something, and then use what they're working on to influence their writing and other media.
The problem with being a full-time creator is you have to start caring about the business of what you create. When you primarily make money from your following, you are no longer as free to say whatever you want or create whatever you want to create.
Paul Graham is an incredible writer partially because he's entirely free to say whatever he wants. He has more fuck-you-money than he could possibly know what to do with, so if he pisses off a million people on Twitter it doesn't really matter."
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/not-creator
31. Food for thought.
"But the pandemic has put a lot more people than usual in direct need of U.S. government help, and many are discovering that they don’t like the idea of workfare. It’s one thing to talk about personal responsibility during normal times (especially if you have a nice job yourself), but does the government really expect people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps in the middle of a goddamn PANDEMIC??
So it’s possible that the anger over the $600 checks indicates a growing rebellion against the whole workfare concept. It may be that in the coming years we’ll see more support for universalist programs like national health insurance and universal basic income.
And maybe that will be a good change. It certainly is something that bears thinking about. But in the meantime, don’t say that the government only gave out $600 checks."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-government-gave-out-way-more
32. The real reason SF is a mess: bad local government.
"I do think the technology industry can and should be blamed for one thing: taking this bullshit for as long as it has. While the industry has caused none of the problems it’s accused of causing, absence of tech workers from local politics has been problematic, if understandable. The technology industry is ripe with opportunity, and attracts people excited by the prospect of building technologies and companies that have never before existed, unencumbered by bureaucracy, and limited only by the bounds of their imagination.
No one moved to San Francisco because they wanted to run for the local Board of Supervisors. I get it. But if 2020 proved anything, it’s local politics is almost the only thing that matters in terms of our day-to-day existence, and if the deterioration of San Francisco can’t be stopped, I at least hope it will be remembered. We can ignore local politics, but local politics will nonetheless shape our lives, and a sufficiently unhinged City Hall can destroy almost anything."
https://solana.substack.com/p/extract-or-die
33. If it works for Tony Robbins! Biohacking tips from the best.
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/health-vitality/biohacking-for-beginners/
34. This is pretty awesome actually. One of neatest I've read in awhile.
"On this autumn Wednesday, musician and performer Har Mar Superstar, né Sean Tillmann, isn’t on the road touring or in rehearsal. He’s out delivering the mail—outfitted head to toe in official U.S. Postal Service–issued flannel blues. This is his fifth week as a city carrier assistant, or CCA, earning $17-something an hour plus overtime and clocking around 25,000 steps a day."
"He swears he’s not doing this for a movie role or because he’s writing some new USPS concept album. Nope, he was simply at the post office mailing some vinyl one day and decided, spur of the moment, to apply for a gig. He was hired almost immediately, and, poof, Har Mar Superstar became a regular working man."
“The post office is like the military for slackers,” he says. “You punch in at 0700 hours, and then you’re on tour.”
https://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/har-mar-superstar-becomes-mailman/
35. "Be grateful for what material comforts you have. If you see fit to add to them, then do so – but do not make the pursuit of comfort your sole aim in life. Otherwise, you will one day find yourself without comfort of any kind – and if you ignore my advice above, then on that day, you will have no idea what to do."
https://didacticmind.com/2020/12/comfort-makes-you-weak.html
36. I don't agree with this guy’s politics. But I agree with the message. The lockdowns don't work (or at least they way they have been implemented in California).
"Don't let yourself be trapped by stupid governments and fearful people. Make your choices and take your stand. You were free from the day of your birth - but if you surrender that freedom, then you, and you alone, are to blame. Fight back with everything you have. Do not submit to the madness of their crowd, but stand alone proudly for the truth."
https://mailchi.mp/2e4de02fee4e/lies-damned-lies-and-lockdowns?e=32cdd9e5ec
37. It's a newsletter boom. Neat company.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/letterhead-wants-to-be-the-shopify-of-email-newsletters/
38. "I also make a point that I wish the filters for venture capital were different than what they currently are. But they aren’t, and it’s because venture capital is not built for outsiders. It’s not built for outsiders because I know that there are no good filters to evaluate an outsider, even if they are the next Katrina Lake. This is losing VCs billions of dollars in value every year."
https://www.matsherman.com/p/vanity-filters
39. "Before the pandemic, Rabois believed that the only “acceptable place for a highly ambitious VC and technology executive” was to live in the Bay Area. “What the pandemic clarified is that perhaps that thinking was erroneous. Maybe never true, but certainly less true than the perceived wisdom. Second, the pandemic removed or lowered the opportunity costs to try new places.”
https://www.newcomer.co/p/taking-his-talents-to-miami-beach
40. The future of war: an interesting sci fi take.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=830Hht4t1Nw
41. These guys have been pretty good on predictions and views on trends. Worth a read.
"The big picture is that technology has been accelerated by 5 years or so and that companies have learned a good 30-50% of their headcount is unproductive. There is no need for multiple middle management layers and there is no need for low end labor when software can do the job. For example, budgets can be blocked/allowed based on certain metrics making it difficult if not impossible to cheat the system. If there is an exception then they must email the decision maker. This creates one job in total when there used to be 10-15."
"Re-prioritize your life. After spending a year in a global pandemic, you’ve likely reassessed what is important to you. You can reduce clutter in your inbox, reduce noise in your messages and increase productivity while claiming to be “at work” on a particular project. Also. During this re-prioritization process you should know with certainty that online income is the way forward and you just got another 6-9 months to figure that one out (June of next year is the earliest things will normalize based on current projections… at best)."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/making-a-plan-for-2021-and-qa-announcement/
42. "In the United States, interest rates are at historic lows, but the political will for an interest rate rise is no longer present because it would have such a devastating impact on bond markets and the real economy. The question is whether investors will continue to flow to the dollar if the currency can no longer generate yield.
Should we be surprised that in places such as Myanmar people now seems to prefer the local currency? “I feel safer now when I have kyat rather than U.S. dollars,” said Zaw Moe Ko, a business professional in Yangon. The kyat has gained as much as 11% versus the dollar this year."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-new-reserve-currency
43. Jack Ma being clipped by the CCP. End of an era in China for sure. Also why I would not do business as the rules change all the time.
"While his wealth and influence are being curbed, Ma isn’t on the verge of a personal downfall, say those familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, as did other officials and executives with whom Bloomberg News spoke for this story. Instead, his public rebuke is a warning that Beijing has lost patience with the outsize power of its technology moguls, increasingly perceived as a threat to the political and financial stability President Xi Jinping prizes most."
“The [Communist] Party is trying to make it clear that Ma is not bigger than the party,”
44. I think we all feel this way sometimes. Especially in 2020.
"Having periods without joy is completely normal. In fact, it would be a little weird for someone to be living in a perpetual state of joy. But sometimes your joy tank runs low and you feel empty and unmotivated. The key is to recognize that these moments are normal and they’re usually temporary."
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a34995097/how-to-find-joy/
45. I like Miles Teller. Especially in "Whiplash" and "War Dogs"
"As with everybody else, Teller’s next big step has been postponed due to COVID-19. Maybe you were going to take a new job. Maybe you were going to move to a new city. Maybe there was that girl you’d finally worked up the courage to ask out. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re Miles Teller and you were about to star in a film that might do a billion in global box office.
Now he waits and tries to make sense of it all. He is like a Top Gun pilot looking to land his plane after a long mission. But the guy with the sticks on the flight deck is waving him off. He refuels and keeps circling. He is on pause, just like the rest of us."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a34918983/miles-teller-top-gun-maverick-interview/
46. Wesley Snipes!
"You spent a couple of years in jail for tax problems. What did you learn most from that?
The value of time. I was gone for two years and some months, and the most amazing thing was to return back to what they call the world—interesting term—and find that there were people who were doing the exact same thing, in the exact same situation. It’s almost like time stood still for two years. Now who was in jail? Who is still in jail?"
47. YAH!
2021 starting off right! Cobra Kai Season 3!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcDQqGJG8pA
48. The Rock is the best!
"When Johnson started in Hollywood, his ambitions were extraordinary — and his incredible capacity for work has made them a reality.
Johnson is the highest-paid actor in the world, making more than $20 million per movie, thanks to a string of box office hits. His films have grossed over $10.5 billion worldwide, which makes him one of the highest-grossing movie stars of all time.
The reason? His charisma and drive for greatness. Johnson tests well in what the film industry refers to as "all four quadrants:" old men, young men, old women, and young women. In other words, the people who don't like The Rock are few and far between."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/dwayne-the-rock-johnson
49. This looks amazing. I can't wait to watch this: chasing the American dream. "Minari"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ0gFidlro8
50. "This feels different. Maybe it doesn’t feel different from the Dot Com Crash, I don’t know. But I know you’ll tell me that I don’t know. From everything I’ve gathered this is different. First and foremost because not only is the tech industry not collapsing, it’s thriving. But the city is nevertheless rotting.
Perhaps the rot is, in part, because of the tech industry. I certainly think it’s a part of it. Too many in our industry are arrogant at best and completely out of touch with reality at worst. But the more pressing issue would seem to be that despite tech being such an important part of the city, nothing has changed. Things have only gotten worse.
Our city is on fire and we elect gasoline, a San Francisco story."
https://500ish.com/wake-the-fuck-up-san-francisco-6df7629cf229
51. This is worth a review for those interested in consumer trends in 2021.
https://www.coefficientcap.com/trends/
52. Always a great discussion with lots of insights. I am definitely a Chamath fanboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu3vvrLRyZM&feature=youtu.be
53. This to me is one of the biggest tragedies of the 2020 pandemic. Death of small businesses like Mr Yao's.
Let's hope he makes it through. We need more people like this in America.
"The fates of these small business owners and employees have been in the hands of a virus that has refused to retreat. Many have seen dreams drown in debt, livelihoods gone dark.
An estimated one-third of New York City’s more than 200,000 small businesses may never reopen. Altogether they will leave a staggering void."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/nyregion/nyc-army-navy-bags-coronavirus.html
54. BTS is crushing it around the world.
"Since the start of their careers, BTS have shown a certain confidence in their aesthetic, their performances, and their music videos. It’s right there in the name: BTS stands for “Bangtan Sonyeondan,” which translates to “Bulletproof Boy Scouts,” but as their popularity grew in English-speaking markets, the acronym was retrofitted to mean “Beyond the Scene,” which Big Hit has described as “symbolizing youth who don’t settle for their current reality and instead open the door and go forward to achieve growth.”
And their affection with one another, their vulnerability and emotional openness in their lives and in their lyrics, strikes me as more grown-up and masculine than all the frantic and perpetual box-checking and tone-policing that American boys force themselves and their peers to do. It looks like the future.
The Recording Academy’s seal of approval is one thing. But BTS have already conquered the world, clowned tyrants, inspired individual fans to perform the small and achievable acts of activism that have collectively begun to save the planet, challenged toxic masculinity by leading with vulnerability, and, along the way, become bajillionaires and international idols."
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a34654383/bts-members-be-album-interview-2020/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Venture Fundable Businesses
In Venture Capital, it’s about the big winners. And almost always usually winners take all markets where the two leaders have most of the market share in the category. I’ve met thousands of founders over the 7-8 years, evaluated countless businesses and reality is most of these startups are probably not VC fundable business models. I learned this the hard way in my first 1.5 years as a VC. I found out that it’s not just a market size issue but a business model one too. Ie. Venture scale.
There are 4 business models at a broad level that could be venture fundable. I fully attribute this framework to my friend and investor James Currier over at NFX, a top tier VC firm.
1. Embed Model: This business model is almost always in the enterprise software space. You build a sales team or figure out an effective Product Led Growth motion, sell into the Fortune 500 and lock them in. Once you are locked in, it’s very hard to rip your technology out. Some examples are SAP, Salesforce, Adobe or really any major Enterprise software company
2. NetWork Effects: Usually platform driven. At a basic level, the more buyers you have, the more sellers you get. The more sellers you have, the more buyers you get. A virtually hard to break virtuous cycle once you get going. Some examples are Craigslist, EBay, Facebook, Google.
3. Economies of Scale: Growing to a stage when you can use your mass size and volume for discounts and scale to outgrow. Amazon is to me the most obvious example here.
4. Brand: Building a brand to distinguish yourself and be the main choice of your buyer. DTC brands like Warby Parker are recent examples. Older examples could be IBM.
I actually think it’s really only the Embed Model and Network Effects that truly are Venture fundable where first mover advantage supercharged by VC $$ gets you lock in of customers. Yes, Brand and Economies of Scale are very powerful but can be replicated or decay faster than Embed and Network Effects.
You can even point to some examples that exemplify most if not all of these attributes. Amazon: they have Amazon Web Services which exemplifies Embed model but they also have network effects through their 3rd party selling platform, Economies of scale from their logistics and buying power, and through all of this, their immense Brand strength.
I’ve probably oversimplified these concepts but i think they are illustrative of what a venture capitalist (should) look for. I think any investor who does not look at startups in this lens is making a big mistake. And believe this is also a good guide for founders trying to decide whether VC is the right path for them.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Risks of Endowment Style Investing for Personal Finances: Lessons from a Catastrophic 2020
The Endowment model of investing is a very interesting one. It’s been popularized by Yale and Harvard University, where they have been able to generate higher than average returns every year.
“Between 1985 and 2008, Harvard University's endowment generated 15.23% returns, while Yale pulled in 16.62%. Both endowments handily outperformed the S&P 500, which only grew 12% during that same time period.
In the decades leading up to the economic crisis, from 1985 to 2008, endowments with assets of US$1 billion and above generally invested a small portion of funds in traditional stocks and bonds and a larger portion in alternative assets such as hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and real assets like oil and natural resources. Many of these alternative investments outperform traditional stocks and bonds, but typically have longer gestation periods and impose higher minimum investments--especially in highly illiquid markets.”
Source: How To Invest Like An Endowment
Basically it’s a portfolio with both liquid assets (like equity, bonds & cash) balanced by higher return but more illiquid alternative assets (ie. hedge funds, VC, PE & even art & timber).
So using my own personal example: when you have a portfolio stuffed with mainly illiquid assets like venture capital (LP & Carried Interest), angel investments in early stage startups, Investment Rental properties. (Ie. real estate), stocks in 401K and some crypto (thankfully the last bit is liquid). I found myself in a very enviable position of being relatively “Asset Rich, Liquidity Poor.”
On paper & in the long term I should be fine, but it is the short term surprise squeezes which wreck you. I did not follow the lesson from math & the ecology: “Always Account for Variable Change”
So, for example during the pandemic in 2020, I found myself facing non-paying tenants with the addition of a local government mandated eviction ban. You just have to eat this. Add to this, some delayed accounts receivable payments for some loans and advisory work, I ended up facing a VERY painful cash crunch during the summer. Added to this, the ongoing government mandated lockdown, the BLM movement and consequent riots, Forest Fires & oh yeah, the raging Covid 19 Pandemic that started all this. And then there was chaos of the larger government mismanagement and the lead up to a zany contentious election in the USA. It was a really tough couple of months.
I barely got through it and it was only from a combo of borrowing money from family (much to my embarrassment) and selling some assets at a discount. (Yes, i know #Firstworldproblems, thankfully i had some assets to begin with)
As the famous investor Howard Marks states: Every investment move has to be defensive and offensive. This is why a thoughtful portfolio approach that accounts for all situations makes sense. Something I did not do.
I’ve thought a lot about this. In retrospect there were many things I should have done.
So learn some lessons from my own mistakes. Here are some key takeaways:
1. I should have taken a Barbell Approach to my investments. It should have been balanced with more liquid assets like stocks & crypto.
2. I was over-geared. You should always try to keep 9-12 months emergency liquid funds in your bank ie. cash. Yes, I know this is basic stuff but how many people actually do this (or can actually do this). I was a bit too aggressive with only a few months of liquid cash. Probably overly optimistic here going into 2020. Having some liquid reserves allows you to survive the cash crunch and hold on to your assets. I had to sell a rental property at a less than optimal price to get through the crunch. I still came out ahead fortunately but it was at a substantial discount to optimize for selling fast.
3.Keep personal cost structure as low as possible. Thankfully I tend to be pretty frugal. BUT your own personal budget needs to be evaluated and trimmed on a regular basis. I’d recommend doing this exercise once a quarter, and the minute a financial crisis hits, don’t hesitate and cut right away. I screwed up majorly. I did not start cutting until 3 months into the pandemic, wasting precious cash when I needed it later.
4. As a continuation of Point 3. Geo-arbitrage is a smart & enjoyable way to cut down your personal costs structure. My family is lucky enough that we can spend a good part of the year in Canada or Taiwan, where the US Dollar goes much further.
By doing this, you can reduce your living expenses in very pricey San Francisco (or wherever you live) by a very large percentage. This is also something I should have executed on earlier in the pandemic. Like many people in America, I did not expect a lockdown lasting beyond 3 months, nor the gross governmental mismanagement that occured here.
5. Do a regular and personal accounting of your P&L for all of your business lines whether it is real estate, consulting, investing etc. regularly. At minimum once a quarter, although once a month is way better. This is the only way you can keep on top of things. In fact, i did not realize how much cash money i was losing in my real estate holdings until August, 6 months after the lockdowns started.
6. Make sure you follow up on personal accounts payables collections. This turned into a major issue for me by June/July 2020.
I share all this because I don’t want you to make my mistakes. Yet, as i write this I know this is the path everyone needs to figure out for themselves. These mistakes were painful, self inflicted & caused a lot of personal stress which I would not want to wish on anyone.
But at the same time, it was really personally instructive. You learn what you are made of. Once you get through something like this, you really become far stronger, more confident and feel capable of handling almost anything. As the African proverb states: “Smooth seas do not make for skillful sailors.”
This is especially if they value having more personal freedom in their lives. 2020 made it very clear to me that you cannot have personal freedom without some form of financial freedom. But as I paraphrase ex-Navy SEAL and leadership coach, Jocko Willink, you can’t have Freedom without Discipline. This will not be lost on me going forward.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 20th, 2020
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.” --JP Morgan
Super interesting discussion on the Unicorn Decade. Precursor to the upcoming Decacorn Decade.
"The events of 2020 have settled the debate. At least for this decade’s transition — 2020 is the year that ends a strange and chaotic decade, bringing so many of its themes to a logical endpoint.
Next year, the new decade begins."
"In business and finance, the rise of the unicorn was a defining feature of the decade now wrapping up. The ubiquity of venture-backed businesses with valuations north of $1 billion created a new, lasting innovation in how investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers think about starting a company. The 2010s were the Unicorn Decade.
And this financing trend will endure just as more efficient food delivery, more available taxis, and more contingent work will change the economy in the new decade. Managing to finance operations for a company worth tens of billions of dollars while keeping that company private was and remains a novel solution for startups and their preferred investors."
https://mylesudland.substack.com/p/doordash-airbnb-ipo-unicorn-era
2. I am a big fan and can't believe I only discovered Khe Hy recently. Although in my defense I am Gen X not millennial.
"Nothing prepares you to see your bank account go down," admits Hy, who is now 37 and wears polka dot sweaters, jeans and neon blue Nike shoes. "Even if it was going down from a big number, it still f--ks with your head."
"His biggest realization is that fear -- especially the fear of failure or running out of money -- holds so many people back from doing what they really want to do in life. Even in his own life, he and his wife budgeted for a two-year break, a deadline that is approaching."
https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/30/news/economy/khemaridh-hy-rad-reads-oprah-for-millennials/
3. A very inspiring man: Noah Galloway. Amazing profile written by my friend Polina Marinova Pompliano.
"He went on to run ultra-races, marathons, and Tough Mudders. He appeared on the cover of Men's Health magazine and placed third on the TV show, "Dancing with the Stars." And still — he recognizes those accomplishments don't define him. They were just chapters in his life journey.
Galloway embodies everything The Profile stands for. It's about shedding the labels society has slapped on you and re-claiming the power to re-invent yourself — no matter your age, your current circumstance, or your past traumas."
"I see a lot of veterans — and other people do it — but I point out to veterans that you can't live in the past because you'll never be satisfied with what you're doing now. You'll never progress and challenge yourself again because you've peaked too soon. But you only peak when you decide you've peaked. So Al Bundy chose to peak in high school and never did anything else."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-man-who-builds-impossible-b65
4. Eric Yuan and Zoom definitely deserve the Time Business person of year title in 2020.
"Yuan soon found himself serving as the world’s relationship liaison, social chair, principal, convention-center host, chief security officer and pallbearer. Despite competition from corporate behemoths like Google, Apple and Microsoft, Zoom jumped out in front of the video pack, catapulting from 10 million daily meeting participants in December to a staggering 300 million in April. Zoom became a verb and a prefix, a defining syllable of a socially distant era. As his company’s valuation soared, Yuan crashed into the Forbes billionaires list."
"Yuan responded with swift course correction and transparency, at least to the security issues, gaining the trust of many critics—and the company’s stock has tripled since April. Zoom was named Apple’smost downloaded free app of the year. It won the 2020 video wars partially because, like its founder, it’s flexible, intuitive and pretense-free. It was adaptable in a year when there was hardly a more vital attribute—and it offered glimpses, promising and ominous alike, of what human connection might look like for years to come."
https://time.com/businessperson-of-the-year-2020-eric-yuan/
5. Go King James!
"After nearly two decades in the NBA, James has fully embraced that his talent on the court is a means to achieving something greater off it. And this year, more than in any before it, he showed why he is unrivaled in both.
Despite misgivings, James played on in the bubble and led the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA championship—his first with the team and fourth overall. By staying, James increased his leverage and influence, and got deep-pocketed owners, fellow athletes and fans the world over engaged directly with democracy. And through it all, he spoke personally to the anguish of Black Americans, channeling pain and outrage into a plan of action."
https://time.com/athlete-of-the-year-2020-lebron-james
6. This is one of the better overviews of the ever growing Creator economy I've seen.
"The internet is magic and creators are its purest expression. Where most people see a cultural oddity, I see an entire generation bypassing traditional gatekeepers for the first time in history."
https://hugo.pm/mapping-the-creator-economy/
7. "The hope is that private networks will increase authenticity, vulnerability, meaning, and connection — both for those in the spotlight, and the broader network of users more generally. If users are complaining about it today, it’s clearly an opportunity to build something better for the future.
Vertical networks present the largest opportunity I see in social — unbundle Facebook (or Reddit) demographic by demographic."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/opportunities-in-consumer-social
8. WORD!
"In short, the “new rich” will be able to earn their income 100% remote and they will have assets that are difficult if not impossible to seize (such as crypto currencies or NFTs)."
"If you get nothing from the post it should be “liquidity and options”. Under no circumstances do you want to decrease liquidity and decrease your flexibility. In times of wild amounts of change, you need to be able to move with the environment as well."
"the sovereign individual is coming soon. Self reliance and freedom will become the ultimate “status symbol.”
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/the-birth-of-the-sovereign-individual-short-post/
9. This totally makes sense to me. The Multi SKU Creator. ie. Portfolio Entrepreneur.
It’s my belief that very few “Substack writers” will make 100% of their income from their newsletter and this won’t be a failure of the platforms but instead related to the nature of creation itself. Enter, the Multi-SKU Creator.
The biggest impact of someone like Casey unbundling himself from The Vox is that he is now an entrepreneur with a product called Casey. His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter (it’s very good by the way) but the newsletter is just one SKU. Maybe the SKU he cares most about. Maybe even the SKU that makes him the most money. But it doesn’t have to be the only SKU. There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on. And if he does several of these over the next few years, it won’t be about the success or failure of Substack (for him) but a mix of creative, economic and lifestyle goals."
10. Pear VC is one of the best seed stage VCs around.
"Hershenson and Nozad invested $250,000 into the seed round of DoorDash, then continued to back the company in its Series A & B rounds for an overall investment of about $1.9 million. When DoorDash went public on Wednesday, their firm, Pear VC, owned 2,518,360 shares, according to two sources with knowledge of the firm’s finances. But at DoorDash’s share price of $176 as of market open on Friday, Hershenson and Nozad’s initial investment is up about 1,000 times, & the blended position up 233 times their committed capital—meaning the duo have, for now, turned $1.9 million into more than $440 million.
Pear VC is far from the only firm to have won big in DoorDash’s IPO, which made Xu and two of his cofounders billionaires.... Pear stands out: a firm launched by two immigrants that stands to return its entire $51 million first fund a few times over from one of its very first bets."
“As the size of funds are increasing, and everybody’s after the same founders, we think there’s a group of entrepreneurs that are kind of a rock, but they can be turned into diamond,” says Hershenson."
11. Talk about a modern Renaissance craftsman.
"Ellison is a carpenter—the best carpenter in New York, by some accounts, though that hardly covers it. Depending on the job, Ellison is also a welder, a sculptor, a contractor, a cabinetmaker, an inventor, and an industrial designer. He’s a carpenter the way Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of the great dome of the Florence Cathedral, was an engineer. He’s a man who gets hired to build impossible things."
“I couldn’t be employed in most cities in America,” Ellison told me. “This job doesn’t exist there. It’s too idiosyncratic.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/the-art-of-building-the-impossible
12. "In 2013, Euromonitor pegged Monopoly’s annual revenues at ~$400m. By one estimate, that accounts for ~30% of all mass-market board game sales in the world — equivalent to Google’s share of the US ad market.
The pandemic has created another boom: Gaming sales for Hasbro reached a record high in Q3 of 2020. In the UK this spring, board game and jigsaw puzzle revenues were up 240% — and Monopoly was the top seller.
Ask industry observers and fans why Monopoly has thrived, and they point to the game’s unique storyline, nostalgia, and a desire to escape screens.
But there’s another factor at play: Hasbro created a real-life monopoly that allowed Monopoly to flourish.
How did Hasbro corner the board game market? And could a new wave of collaborative board games threaten to disrupt their dominance?"
https://thehustle.co/how-a-real-life-monopoly-made-monopoly-the-worlds-biggest-board-game/
13. I will admit I did not like The Godfather 3 at first compared to its previous movies (masterpieces) but I do think its not a bad movie. Can't wait to see the new recut edition.
"But 30 years after its release, it is time to rescue Godfather III from its terrible reputation. Pacino's eloquent, fiery, knowing central performance is supported by several bravura set pieces that are mini-masterpieces in themselves. With deliberate echoes of the earlier Godfather films, there is singing and dancing at a family party, a bold murder during the San Gennaro street festival, a tragedy on the steps of an opera house in Sicily."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201201-why-the-godfather-part-iii-has-been-unfairly-demonised
14. Good for them. Love this story.
"In 2017, CNBC spoke to the Dutch family of five when they were in the process of liquidating their assets — from a profitable business and 2,500-square-foot house, to their shoes — and trading it all in for the popular cryptocurrency and a life on the road.
Nearly four years and 40 countries later, Taihuttu and his family still don’t have bank accounts, a house, or all that much by way of personal possessions. All of the family’s savings remain tied up in highly volatile cryptocurrencies.
“We stepped into bitcoin, because we wanted to change our lives,” said the 42-year-old father of three.
When the price of bitcoin collapsed in 2018, Taihuttu added more to his investment portfolio."
"This kind of mainstream adoption is hugely important, because cryptocurrencies like bitcoin aren’t backed by an asset, nor do they have the full faith and backing of the government. They’re valuable because people believe they’re valuable. So it goes a long way when bitcoin gets buy-in from some of the biggest names on Wall Street."
15. "You see your friends posting smiling selfies at exotic destinations and humblebragging about their professional and personal accomplishments, and you end up thinking your own life doesn't measure up.
Of course, intellectually we all know that our real life selves and our highly curated online selves differ hugely, but it's still easy to fall into the trap of letting other people's perfect social-media profiles convince you that you're somehow falling short."
16. Definitely one of the winning businesses coming out of 2020.
"According to Stokely, OnlyFans is adding as many as 500,000 users a day and paying out more than $200 million a month to its creators.
Along the way, OnlyFans has grown into one of the biggest media businesses hiding in plain sight. The company has 85 million users, upward of 1 million creators, and will generate more than $2 billion in sales this year, of which it keeps about 20%.
That puts the site on track for $400 million in annual net sales — dwarfing Patreon, a platform devoted to helping creative types monetize their work, which is valued at more than $1.2 billion. “OnlyFans is revolutionizing creator and fan relations,” Stokely said."
17. "As the technology industry has grown, and as end markets have been proven to be much bigger than most imagined, and with the next decade’s digital acceleration pulled forward to the present due to pandemic shutdowns, big deals are happening at a furious pace. Just this past week, we saw not one, but two, billion-dollar SaaS exits, and then a mega-acquisition of another public SsaS company."
18. The new ways of monetizing Social beyond ads from A16Z.
"The reigning ad model is becoming less viable for emerging social platforms—and less enticing for creators. Through new monetization tactics such as tiered subscriptions, social ecommerce, paid vertical communities, and more, creators and social platforms are seeking renewed agency and control over their revenue streams and take rates.
As the consumer social landscape becomes increasingly verticalized, platforms are likely to evolve beyond ads into models that better align the interests of creator, consumer, and company."
https://a16z.com/2020/12/07/social-strikes-back-after-ads/
19. Lessons from the recent war between Azerbaijan & Armenia for Taiwan.
"Azerbaijan used a mix of modern (but hardly cutting edge) and old systems in innovative ways, cleverly turning an assessed Armenian strength – fortified defenses – into a deadly weakness. More important than equipment is the thinking behind the use of the equipment.
It’s true that China is certainly no Armenia, but on the other hand, Taiwan is also significantly stronger economically than Azerbaijan: Taiwan’s GDP is some 14 times larger than that of Azerbaijan’s, and it is much more technologically sophisticated, to boot.
Taiwan has recently demonstrated an impressive ability to wield organization and technology – a veritable Arsenal of Ideas – to defeat a wide range of adversaries, from COVID-19 to Beijing’s disinformation campaigns. The key to Taiwan’s survival will be to constantly experiment, using this Arsenal of Ideas to offset an adversary with far greater firepower. Therein lies the final lesson of Armenia-Azerbaijan War, encapsulated in the old British Special Air Service motto: “Who Dares, Wins.”
https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/what-taiwans-military-can-learn-from-the-armenia-azerbaijan-war/
20. Long been a proponent of Remote work. We are never going back.
"Missing from the debate is the fact that it’s not really up to the companies to choose. Employees will ultimately make the decision. The best employees have more options now than ever before, and they’re not going to work for companies that make them shave, get dressed, hop into a car or a crowded subway, and sit at a desk in an office five days a week with their headphones on trying to avoid distractions and get work done.
Choosing to Return to the way things were is like choosing not to adopt software a decade or two ago. It’s an option, but one that will doom a company to mediocrity."
https://notboring.substack.com/p/were-never-going-back
21. "The internet makes it possible for many knowledge employees to work from anywhere. The earning potential of (many of) the most productive employees is no longer capped by geography. As a result, we will see the emergence of a new class of people earning salaries that are an order of magnitude higher than what we saw in previous decades.
Many of these people will remain directly employed, and some will become self-employed but will work on an exclusive basis with one or a few companies.
Note that I am not talking about the emergence of a handful of highly-paid superstars in the vein of Hollywood’s Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks. I am talking about micro-stars in the vein of TikTok’s Charli D’Amelio: a whole new layer of professionals than earn incomes that are a level below the biggest earners on in their field, but still much higher than what the average employee (or singer, or dancer) could earn in the pre-internet era.
I call this new layer of professionals the 10X Class. Several other trends support their emergence. As machines take up more of our repetitive and predictable tasks, the value of human creativity goes up. Concurrently, creative people can use technology to streamline routine tasks and focus only on what they do best — thus multiplying their own productivity."
https://subscribe.drorpoleg.com/p/rise-of-the-10x-class
22. "consider that Momoa would be the first to tell you that all of the tough-guy vibes you picked up from his Walk of Fame performances in Game of Thrones (as Khal Drogo) and Conan the Barbarian and Aquaman were just an act. Which makes sense, because he was acting. “I may look big and tough, but I’m not,” he explains. “I’m nothing like Khal Drogo. I’m not even the king of my own house! I’m absolutely terrified of my wife.”
"With Momoa, we’ve got ourselves an altogether different type of star from all the Chrises and Ryans who serve up their own spins on wholesome, well-groomed, on-script masculinity. Spontaneous, humble, earnest, and actually, honest-to-goodness-ly authentic, he’s more like the charismatic spawn of the Rock and wee Timothée Chalamet, bulldozing outdated and restrictive modes of manliness and showing the rest of us how to embrace our full non-incognito selves. Now, at 41, after two decades of playing buff guys without a lot of brains, Momoa is getting his first taste of working on a prestige film with an acclaimed director and a metric ton of Academy Award–winning and –nominated actors. The man is not done surprising us yet."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a34498165/jason-momoa-dune-interview/
23. "In short: We’re fine. We simply can’t travel. We haven’t gone on a trip since returning home from Australia, and we aren’t certain when we will travel again. But I know that when we do, we will do so with intentionality, with care. Travel has lost its levity. It has become gilded, or leaded, with meaning and consequence. Travel is heavy. Perhaps it always will be. And that is a good, if hard, thing—for us and for the earth."
https://www.outsideonline.com/2419621/doomed-great-barrier-reef-travel
24. "There is no question that the bay area is losing some talent to other markets but I don’t think that is anywhere near the most important thing. It is also the case that Google and Apple show no signs of leaving the bay area any time soon. Silicon Valley will remain a mecca for talent and tech for as far into the future as I can see.
What is more important is the rise of everywhere. In the most recent Pitchbook 2021 predictions, they project that Silicon Valley will make up less than 20% of all VC deals in 2021. The way that happens is not less funding in Silicon Valley. The way that happens is way more funding everywhere else."
https://avc.com/2020/12/the-rise-of-everywhere/
25. "The market conditions seem perfectly set up to reward asset owners. I realize an investment philosophy of “own assets” is far from earth shattering. And of course you need capital to own assets.
That said, if you have a longish time horizon, good luck sitting on a bunch of cash and bonds. At least for now the 60/40 portfolio is dead. I suspect it’ll be far preferable to own assets that can appreciate and/or throw off income.
One trend I see continuing is rise of alternative investments in retail investors’ portfolios.
Alts are essentially everything outside of public equities. Think real estate, venture capital, private equity, collectibles, and more. They tend to be illiquid and in some cases only accessible to accredited investors."
https://thecuriousinvestor.substack.com/p/how-im-investing-in-2021
26. "Even without knowing what exactly happened in that shed in Connecticut, Hsieh was clearly in anguish. Mental health experts caution that the ongoing Covid pandemic can increase feelings of isolation and loneliness, and offer tips and resources to seek help for yourself or loved ones.
Social isolation means having to “cope and deal with everything entirely on our own,” said Hold-Lunstad. “It has been argued that our brains in essence has have evolved to expect the proximity to others and so when we don’t, when we lack this proximity to others — and particularly trusted others — that this creates a state of alert and threat in our brain.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/12/tony-hsieh-mental-health-help-covid-pandemic-isolation.html
27. "Enough is both exciting and terrifying. For the same reason.
No one can tell you what’s enough. There’s no formula, no framework nor book to read to get you there. And that can be daunting.
But that also means that the definition of enough is not purely a function of money. It’s why there are plenty of very happy people who are time rich yet asset poor. (And also why there are Dianas who are asset rich but time poor.)"
https://radreads.co/vonnegut-enough/
28. I love a good rant.
https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/1977533/tom-cruise-covid-mission-impossible-rant/
29. "I would say that almost certainly the great stagnation is over in the biomedical sciences. It is less obvious that the great stagnation is over more generally, as we might simply retreat into our former sloth and complacency once we are mostly vaccinated.
If you are looking for a quick metric to indicate the great stagnation might be over, consider total factor productivity. It is entirely possible that tfp in 2021 will be 5 or more, its highest level ever."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/why-did-the-great-stagnation-end.html
30. "To find the right platform at a fund for your company, you should identify what your needs are (recruiting, network, event exposure), and look for a fund that maps to those specific needs."
31. Economic Inequality in America. You think? Pandemic has made this more stark.
https://www.axios.com/inequality-harder-ignore-a37be900-c8d3-474d-93fb-943b8a0da345.html
32. "Today the majority of the world’s population are using the Internet to design their lives. Historically we used to have to rely on the church for that, then universities followed by corporations. But today, 59% of all people make their life choices every month using the Internet. And we have just begun to scratch the surface of all the amazing possibilities that lie ahead."
https://futureswells.substack.com/p/letter-from-future-swells-no-60
33. This is a good explanation for exodus from formerly top cities.
"The coronavirus has reset consumer expectations back to suburban living and the mental health benefits of living in greenspace. There has been an exodus from major industry centers to their suburbs and to the alt-cities. The alt-cities of Miami, Austin, and Nashville all offer car-friendly, suburban living, relatively cheap and ubiquitous housing, and continual housing construction."
"Rather than going fully remote, key people are aggregating in cities where they will be able to network post-COVID. Austin has attracted well-known technology figures such as Elon Musk, Drew Houston, and Joe Lonsdale. Miami and South Florida have landed finance billionaires Carl Icahn and Paul Singer, as well as prominent technology investors Keith Rabois, David Blumberg, and Sherwin Pishevar.
Nashville hosts well-known artists including Jack White, Miley Cyrus, and Taylor Swift, who rejected Los Angeles and helped shift Nashville from country to other forms of music. These cities are attracting free thinkers known to lead the way, leaving the impression that those left behind in the origin cities are clock-punchers at Google."
http://www.yared.com/2020/12/the-alt-cities-why-tech-finance-and.html
34. This is a bit of an extreme individual and don't agree with his politics & most of his nutty views. But I agree with this sentiment. Corporate life is pretty soul destroying.
"When you sign on to life in a corporation, especially in any of the GloboHomoCorps that dot the landscape these days, you will be paid a lot of money to, essentially, keep your mouth shut and wallow in filth. Whenever the corporate bumpf says that “our people are our greatest asset!” and “we put our people first!”, don’t believe it. That is perhaps the greatest lie of all.
The modern GloboHomoCorps don’t give the minutest quantum of a damn about you. They view you as cogs in the machine of their operations. The moment that you step out of line, you will be destroyed. Dare to question their orthodoxy, or raise your voice in a manner that someone else deems inappropriate, and you will be fired."
https://didacticmind.com/2020/12/free-yourself-from-the-corporate-compact.html
35. This was fast series B. Neat & needed product though.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/clickup-hits-1-billion-valuation-in-100m-series-b-raise/
36. I don't like him as a person but he is an incredibly talented artist.
"The genius and talent of Kanye West is undeniable, regardless of whether or not people like him. He checks off every box and is the best artist of this century and one of the best of all time. Kanye West defines greatness in his music, and he has done more than enough to earn the title of “Greatest Artist of This Century”. Nobody else really comes close."
https://www.theechonews.com/article/2020/10/xy4mhjdlbrawm9g
37. XYZ VC is a rising but one of the quiet in the background seed stage VCs. Impressive portfolio and good rep in SV.
38. "In truth, there are plenty of managers that have thrived despite growing fund sizes significantly — DCVC, Forerunner, and Felicis are firms that have grown fund sizes, but not at the expense of the risk/return profiles they offer LP’s. In contrast, others such as IA Ventures and Founder Collective have determined that staying within a specific fund size range is optimal for their ability to produce the highest returns.
Fund sizing doesn’t have to be overly complicated and isn’t an exact science but does require thinking across several macro and micro dimensions."
39. "Whenever you can, it might pay to seek to create a game that works for you and for those you seek to serve. Because those games are the sustainable ones and the ones that you can play for a long time to come."
https://seths.blog/2020/12/whats-your-game/
40. "The Big Tech companies are extremely rich, powerful, and led by people with boundless ambition and supreme arrogance. (When someone like ME says that these people are arrogant, that's saying something.) They believe that they can get away with anything. So far, they've been right, because no government has really dared stand up to them.
That will be changing soon, though. The European Commission has already passed enormous fines on Google, Apple, and Facebook, and those fines will grow over time. The US will follow suit at some point, and so will Asia. But until the Big Tech firms get a serious kick in the teeth, in the form of tens of billions in fines and a real threat of forced breakup, they will continue to run roughshod over people like you and me."
https://mailchi.mp/33a82ad148f2/crunch-time-for-the-tech-titans?e=32cdd9e5ec
41. "Another option is to geo-diversify. Honestly, this is where I fall down. This means that your assets, in any way or form (be it money, stocks, gold, real estate or whatever) are not only in one country. The rationale is that if your property is overseas, it cannot be confiscated that easily. I’m not the authority on it, but looking it up, asking around and getting good advice will probably go a long way.
On that note, if you apply for a second citizenship (I started looking into it ~1.5 years ago), that can really help. The best advice I can give here is to consult as much as you can with multiple people and read a lot."
https://didacticmind.com/2020/12/guest-post-the-critical-battle-by-the-male-brain.html
42. "The sustainability of nations and the defensibility of platforms is better when wealth isn’t concentrated in the top 1%. In the real world, a healthy middle class is critical for promoting societal trust, providing a stable source of demand for products and services, and driving innovation. On platforms, less wealth concentration means lessening the risk that a would-be competitor could poach top creators and threaten the entire business."
https://li.substack.com/p/building-the-middle-class-of-the
43. "Indeed, underneath the punching and punchlines, Butler has articulated a vaguely political sensibility: He’s performing a sort of gun-toting patriotism, fighting political corruption, redeeming his past mistakes, and turning his insubordination into a virtue. Throughout all these movies, which range in quality, conspiracy lurks around every corner, nobody can be trusted, and family issues are the sacrificial consequences of the profession.
Though his John McClain hand-me-down doesn’t wear a red hat, he feels like a product of the Trump era—emboldened to “restore” America’s greatness at all costs. The role wouldn’t make sense for the regal stardom of peers like Keanu Reeves. Instead, Butler’s weathered face and garbled accent have produced a populist, attainable model of action hero. He’s flawed. But he owns it."
https://www.gq.com/story/gerard-butler-everyman-action-hero
44. Really good & timely interview. With two giants of investing in Silicon Valley.
45. Go Bucharest. Actually makes sense.
"The country's talent pool "is one of the most important assets. That human capital in IT is one of the best in Europe," a high-level Romanian diplomat who requested to remain anonymous.
That talent can have a dark side too. Romania has a sprawling underground scene of cybercriminals that occasionally taints its reputation — though not enough to have swung the vote."
https://www.politico.eu/article/5-reasons-why-bucharest-won-the-eu-cyber-competence-center-race/
46. Great perspective and idea here.
"One lens through which to view companies is to ask "what companies are an index of their underlying market"?
Index companies often take a cut of every transaction in their space, or are a piece of infrastructure everyone in the market needs.
For example, it is a hard to launch something into space in the West without using SpaceX. These companies may be ways to participate in the market broadly without having to worry about how wins in it."
http://blog.eladgil.com/2020/12/index-companies.html?m=1
47. This is immensely sad to me. The loss of our independent restaurant industry in 2020.
"It took decades and so much blood, sweat and tears for every single American chef, bartender, manager, waiter, busboy, dishwasher and hospitality worker to create this amazing restaurant renaissance in America.
We were the envy of the world and every independent restaurant was at the center of communities, of revenue-generating tourism and a dynamic culture that people loved and supported. We will lose so much of that and we will become a nation of corporate chain restaurants that will look and taste the same in every city. We will lose the culture of regionalism and civic pride in every city in America."
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/18/politics/what-matters-end-of-restaurants/index.html
48. Most people don’t have access to significant amounts of financial leverage until they’ve demonstrated some level of success. But we all have access to another form of leverage which can be the difference between increasing your salary by 10% per year and doubling it every year.
It’s called Personal Leverage: a measure of your ability to extend your productivity beyond yourself.
There are two ways you can increase your personal leverage:
Decrease the amount of time something takes you
Pay a machine or person for their time
The first option is how you get 10% more productive. The second option is how you get 10x more productive. And most people thinking about productivity are disproportionately focused on the first option at the expense of the second."
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/personal-leverage
49. This is going to be a prescient thread & forecast. So many business opportunities that will pop up in 2021 and beyond.
https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1340099101011156995
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Operator-Investor Nano Funds are The Future (and Present)
Founders want to take money from smart experienced founders. They want people who have gone through the journey of founding a successful company themselves. Someone who can empathise with their experience in a way a professional investor just cannot.
It started off with the Side angel funds as exemplified by Sriram Krishnan of Kearny Jackson & Ryan Hoover’s Weekend Fund. Both strong operating executives/ entrepreneurs who have gone through the scaling phase of their companies and running their funds alongside their day jobs. This was capped off by $8.3M usd 20Min VC Fund of Harry Stebbings and $7M usd “Todd and Rahul Angel Fund”. Rahul, in case you don’t know, is the Founder & CEO of Superhuman. (I love the name by the way for its simplicity!) Something I wrote about earlier and will explore a bit more here.
Angellist tested this concept of acting like an LP and giving top founders money via their Spearhead investment Fund program, giving each founder up to $1M usd to invest in tech startups in their network. Carry is split between the founders and Spearhead. A very good deal for everyone. A rare Win-Win.
“Spearhead is designed to train founders, who tend to be well-connected to the tech ecosystem and knowledgeable about startups, to be effective angel investors. Previous Spearhead leads include Shippo co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Behrens Wu, Scale AI founder and CEO Alex Wang and Rippling co-founder and chief technology officer Prasanna Sankar. To date, 35 founders have completed the program.”
This trend has been supercharged by the development of Angellist Rolling Funds. Some of the more notable being Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad, Cindy Bi, Jason Jacobs of McJPod, Shaan Puri of Monkey Inferno fame & Immad Akkhund of Mercury Bank fame. Of course, I can’t miss mentioning my friends Carlos Diaz of Diaspora Ventures and Anthony Pompliano (aka Pomp) of the Pomp Podcast.
I foresee a growing Barbell-like structure in Startup Investing. Many big branded institutional Venture Capital Funds dominating from the top. From the bottom, Niche/Industry Specialist managers, Solo Capitalists and Rolling Funds managers will dominate. Some of these may even begin building a traditional venture fund/ firm. Everyone in the middle who is undifferentiated will be squeezed out as they become totally irrelevant to startup founders.
We are seeing the beginning of a new era of operator angels who will displace many of the middling early stage Venture funds. Almost like the structure of many jungles and forests. Lots of big trees covering the top and lots of varieties of plants on the ground floor. Nothing in between, almost like a literal dead zone.
As my friend Harry Stebbings posted:
“With rise of micro funds & supportive/strategic angels; the co-lead/second lead check will be displaced.
Would you rather a 2nd firm w/ $600K (sub-optimal ownership for them) or 3-4 150K angels all bought in, providing value.
The times they are a changing…”
This means all the early stage venture funds out there better step up their game and add that value to founders they claim they do. This has been happening in Silicon Valley for the last few years. With the spread of technology, best practices, more Unicorns growing in other ecosystems and more big exits, I anticipate that this phenomenon will happen in other places across the United States and the rest of the world over the next decade.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/