How to Make “Remote Work” Work for you
For those fortunate to be doing paid knowledge work, 2020 was a blessing as formerly anti-remote workplaces were forced to allow it from the government mandated lockdowns.
I’ve been a proponent for Remote work since the mid 2000s, having experienced it as an executive based out of San Francisco/Sunnyvale while my team and business group were split between London, Geneva, Dubai, Mumbai, Barcelona and serving customers and partners across the entire EMEA region (Europe/Middle East & Africa in case you were wondering).
And this was before the days of Zoom video calls, Slack, Google Docs in case you were wondering. We did it via painful conference call lines, Yahoo! Messenger & expensive mobile phone calls. I would get a text from finance admonishing me for having one of top 10 most expensive phone bills every month for the last 4 years of my tenure at Yahoo!
Well, this has now become the more mainstream new reality in the post 2020 covid world.
The big questions:
How do you manage time zones when working with people all over the world?
How to optimize your life around this?
You will end up having weird hours and it’s something you have to accept. My days at Yahoo! were crazy. I was on the road most of the time. But when I was home in San Francisco, I would start my week on sunday evening. Kicking off the week on team calls if they were in Asia or Europe. I’d do calls for a few hours, then sleep for 5-6 hours and get up to do more calls until Europe's evening, my late morning.
I’d save the afternoon for email, coordinating with key folks in HQ in California & do any deep work. And sometimes take a nap or do the gym. Early evening was for family time and then the calls would begin. Needless to say this was not sustainable. Also something I did because I was younger and didn't know any better.
But I did learn some key lessons since then and have adapted a schedule that worked better for me (and was much healthier).
1) I’ve gotten better at utilizing the weird hours by batching video calls/meetings into specific mornings or evenings. Preferably 3-4 days a week at most for me.
2) Saving specific blocks of time where my time zone did not overlap with my teams, clients or colleagues. This time was when I could relax, do the reading, writing and thinking, all components of valuable “Deep Work” as coined by Cal Newport.
3) The Batching of tasks. Something I’m still trying to get better at. Ie. not checking email & slack so frequently
4) The weird working hours can be tough but it does open up much time with family and friends.
5) Also the lack of office face time gives you better control of your schedule and forces you to focus on real work that drives visible results. I will not be surprised that many companies will end up firing a large portion of their staff because they realized many of them don’t really do any real work.
There are aspects of the in-office workplace I miss. The camaraderie and serendipity that happens when you run into . But to really make remote work work, you have to force yourself to schedule and plan better. And basically be much more deliberative in what you do, how you do it and when. Not a bad thing.
And considering that most big companies have publicly stated they will not be opening their offices until this september, a good part of 2021 will be similar to how we spent 2020. Remote work is something we need to get used to. It’s here to stay for a while so we might as well get good at it.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 2nd, 2021
“For the master, surrender means there are no experts. There are only learners.” ― George Leonard
"Making hard decisions can cause analysis paralysis aka FOBO (Fear of better options). It can lead to indecisiveness or what I call, half in half out decisions. And as we face more hard decisions on a daily basis, our minds can become fatigued from the constant weighing of options.
We also experience analysis paralysis and doomsday scenario building. When we drag our feet with making hard decisions even when we know the decision we ought to make. We do this when our minds come up with crazy disaster outcomes from the choices we contemplate."
https://dougantin.com/a-guide-to-making-hard-decisions/
2. "In particular, as you get a little bit older, the greatest secret that has been the most liberating thing to me was as soon as I stopped trying to be right all the time, everything clicked. Everything. When I stopped trying to be right and instead to be loving, or instead to learn something, everything else, all that insecurity, fell away. That artifice and bravado vanished. I really found projects and life fulfilling in ways that I hadn’t before, which is part of what our Wrexham journey is about. I don’t want to be right; I want to learn."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a35928206/rob-mcelhenney-ryan-reynolds-interview/
3. Cool story.
"The product she would eventually create — Liquid Paper, a white correction fluid used to conceal handwritten or printed typos — would become one of the world’s most popular and enduring office supplies.
Graham wasn’t a chemist or an engineer. She was a single mom from Texas who had a brilliant idea while working a 9-to-5 job as a secretary.
But she was also a budding product marketing genius: Over several decades, she identified a need in the market, organically grew her business, staved off competition, and bootstrapped her way to a $47.5m exit — $173m in today’s money.
And she did it all during a time when women were discouraged from pursuing business ventures."
https://thehustle.co/the-secretary-who-turned-liquid-paper-into-a-multimillion-dollar-business/
4. I have this problem myself.
https://radreads.co/trevor-lawrence/
5. Form Capital: One of the top new micro VC Funds coming out. They have a very differentiated offering and I have heard good things.
"I do think there are a number of funds that raised more than they should have; I think there’s a danger zone somewhere around $80 million where you’re forced to be a lead investor and you can’t be a collaborative investor and so it becomes this slug-it-out, duke-it-out [situation] with other other funds as to who’s going to be the lead writer on a given deal . . .
part of the joy of being a small fund manager is more flexibility in terms of constructing a portfolio. In the cases where we may get squeezed down a little bit, or we want to invest at a slightly higher valuation than is typical, we can paint outside the lines a tiny bit more."
6. Jeff Yass & SIG, the Hedge Fund Powerhouse very few have heard of.
"Yass bootstrapped Susquehanna in part with startup capital plucked from racetrack pots and poker tables in the 1970s and early 1980s. He then applied his gambling instincts to options markets during the 1980s bull market, and his skill for handicapping odds and finding an edge set him apart. Yass’s number one trading rule is also the mantra of every poker pro: there is no surer way to win, than to bet against someone who is dumber or less experienced than you, otherwise known as the “mark” at any poker table. On Wall Street, Robinhood is in the business of cultivating and serving up millions of marks daily.
“All of sports betting, all of playing poker, and all of options trading is making sure you’re betting against someone you’re smarter than,” Yass told the Bet The Processpodcast a year ago. “If you’re not asking yourself, am I the sucker, or am I the [bait], you get arrogant and you get crushed.”
7. Great write up on Prospera in Honduras. One of the latest and most promising Charter cities. ht/ Garrett.
"The idea behind charter cities is: Shenzhen, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the rest of the rich world aren’t rich because their citizens are morally superior to those of their poorer neighbors. They’re rich because they have better legal systems, less corruption, stronger rule of law, and more competent administrators.
Próspera’s not a place, it’s a platform. It’s a government with a charter, laws, legislators, officials, contracts, partnerships, etc. Anywhere can become part of Próspera - if someone has land in a totally different part of Honduras and wants to be part of Próspera they can."
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera
8. "the way that you earn reputations in both cultures is by facing challenges and overcoming them successfully. In commerce, the way you earn trust and status is by finding opportunities to do a hard kind of commerce, that people really want, and then successfully following through. Same with software development: the way you earn trust and status is by finding opportunities to take on hard, complex problems, that people really want solved, and then successfully following through.
Without those challenges, these worlds stop working. The participants’ purpose requires challenge, and requires unforeseen stressors. Without them, commerce becomes frictionless, low-trust Amazon purchases. Without them, software development becomes just a 9-to-5 chore with no joy or craft."
https://alexdanco.com/2021/04/24/worldbuilding-and-antifragility/
9. "One of the best analogies I've heard: When a musician starts out, they're playing at a dive bar for like 10 people. And then at some scale, they end up headlining Coachella and there's hundreds of thousands of people in the stands. But when they're in the little dive bar, after they're done playing, they go have a beer with everyone and meet them. And the bigger you get, you kind of lose that connection with people. So that's what we're trying to solve."
https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2021/04/25/icebreakers-cameo-ceo-steven-galanis
10. What a great write up on Miami. I kind of want to visit now after over a decade.
https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami
11. "You should not think of investing as a method of preparing for retirement. Instead, you should think of it as a tool for empowering the lifestyle you want at various life stages. Lifestyle investment strategies are different from much of the common investment advice out there. It’s a method that promotes adaptation, short and medium term planning, and a willingness to take on risk."
https://dougantin.com/why-lifestyle-investment-strategies-should-constantly-evolve/
12. Not quite the same as feudalism......but.....
"A thousand years ago, noblemen, from time to time, became overly confident in their ability to keep the serfs on the farmland and demanded taxes beyond the customary “one day’s labour in ten”. When they did, the serfs of old often voted with their feet and simply moved. Today, this is still possible.
If the reader presently contributes more than one day’s labour in ten to his government, he may wish to consider voting with his feet."
https://internationalman.com/articles/escaping-serfdom/
13. Their company, they can do what they want. I think its a good idea.
"It's precisely that. We're compressing X to allow for expansion in Y. A return to whole minds that can focus fully on the work we choose to do. A return to a low-ceremony steady state where we can make decisions and move on. A return to personal responsibility and good faith trust in one another to do our own individual jobs well. A return to why we started the company. A return to what we do best."
https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
14. "But although the fact hasn’t received much media attention, China’s government has stumbled badly on a couple of things in the past few years. These state failures aren’t big enough to threaten the country’s development, but they’re small narrative violations that may indicate that the omnipotence of China’s rulers has been oversold.
It’s not clear yet whether China is suffering some kind of long-term institutional issues — ossification of vested interests, complacency, internal struggles, etc. — or whether it’s simply the case that no government can win them all. But observers outside China should quietly take note of the government’s modest stumbles, and question any tacit assumptions of Chinese state omnipotence they may hold."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/chinas-government-is-starting-to
15. This will end well. NOT. But no surprise as it is a bull market.
"Many employers are experiencing an exodus in the workforce of young people who are looking to make their fortune trading amidst the current crypto bull run."
https://www.coindesk.com/young-koreans-crypto-wealth-alernative
16. "From getting us through the most extreme lockdown to emerging as a cryptocurrency stock almost overnight, it’s been a big year for memes. But while the burgeoning impact of memes can be felt across various industries (including those NOT owned by Elon Musk), it's the entertainment industry that appears to have massively capitalised on these humorous short snippets of content."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kv99e/music-producers-memes-viral-remixes-tiktok-reels
17. No surprise. The Oscars suck. And pretty much have for the last decade.
https://mgs.medium.com/2021-oscars-ratings-ouch-9d995a39bafb
18. I like this.
"I always thought I was actively carving myself a path towards freedom. Or at least I thought I was. After reading his tweet over and over again, I realized I wasn’t.
I’m living in my dream apartment, dating an amazing partner, making good money, living in my favorite neighborhood in the world, and have a tight circle of friends.
But none of that means I’m free.
Sure, I can buy a fancy car and book a cabin in the mountains for the weekend. But where would my mind be on that drive?
It would be running through what work I’m behind on, which clients I need to check in with, and endless plans to grow quicker and go faster.
It wouldn’t be on the road. And that’s my point. That’s why I’m not free, because I know if I bought that car and booked that cabin, I still wouldn’t be present."
https://www.theproofwellness.com/freedom-is-an-open-road
19. Lots of good quotes here from one of the most underrated & hated short sellers around. Muddy Waters. I understand his rage.
"Block runs a small firm — its assets are now around $260 million — but punches above his weight in influence.
Block, says Anderson, isn’t just “messing” with people for fun. “He enjoys holding truth to power. He’s going after people who are running scams and crooked management teams and their supporters, whether it be investment banks or auditors who are earning handsome fees to look the other way.” "
"Block, who’d studied Mandarin and once believed that China was the future, was disillusioned. “What I saw there was a society where rules didn’t matter and everybody was breaking rules, and it was a fucked-up place as a result,” he says."
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1rgry7qgc7t9f/The-Rage-of-Carson-Block
20. Awesome news. Go Ouriel & the ZenGo team!
21. "In accessing global opportunities as an investor, we are operating in a similar manner as large scale enterprises that also look globally for corporate development: the very companies that venture is funding and building will need to be truly global in order to be successful and get to the size to deliver the returns that most investors want and need to see.
Furthermore, if you invest in a certain sector it is almost illogical to not look at a sector globally. Do you invest in agri-tech, drones, health tech ? What is happening in each area in Europe and Asia? And if you start researching that and you come across great opportunities you would love to invest in but your mandate restricts you from doing so, would that be palatable? Of course not."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/going-global
22. "It’s not just the countries you know and are familiar with that are developing, it’s all of them. And among them, there are some that will do extraordinarily well in the foreseeable future.
That is where you will find your best investments – where the world is growing and developing. Higher interest rates, better yields, wide-open opportunities… they are all out there. You just have to shift your mindset and think globally."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/04/21/best-investments-think-globally/
23. "Now (finally!) the technical and business tailwinds are coming together to make it possible. The cost and ease of getting to space are about to improve by many orders of magnitude. This will drive the space industry to be one of the biggest sources of growth over the next 10-20 years.[1] It will make existing technologies cheaper and more ubiquitous, like allowing worldwide high-speed internet in even the most remote, rural areas. It will also open up a host of new possibilities previously only imagined in science fiction."
https://futureblind.com/2021/03/03/the-future-of-space-1/
24. I'm with Mr Solana. Media bashing of tech is getting tiresome. Maybe we do need more hard-driving leadership. (I should note, I am not a Jobs- style of abusive management either).
"Travis became the media bogeyman he did by performing things the media loathes: unapologetic “baller” business ambition, masculinity (as defined, at least, by nega-masculine writers living in Brooklyn and San Francisco), and an apparent contempt for local government.
But none of these things are necessarily bad, and it’s actually quite bizarre our cultural gatekeepers have internalized a sense that phrasing so uncontroversial as the “champion’s heart,” for example, should be termed a “radioactive value.” I’m not sure where everyone else has been living for the last year, but it seems to me the United States is presently embroiled in an existential fight with rot. Champions are in short supply. The champion’s heart? I don’t hate it."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/temple-of-bros
25. Probably one of the most proficient "Meme" VCs right now. New breed of small fund VCs.
“It just kind of happens where [my investments] are people who understand the culture of the internet, to understand memes and understand wit and humor and appreciate that a little bit more,” he said. “Those are probably the people that are more naturally intuitive investments, so it definitely does skew that direction.”
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/27/banana-capitals-fund-1-turner-novak/
26. It's all trade offs. I definitely jumped at these roles in my 20s.
“You know what you're getting into, and like most jobs, if you want to reap rewards you’re probably going to have to jump through hoops and do some stuff that’s painful along the way.”
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210426-is-extreme-working-culture-worth-the-big-rewards
27. I'm a customer and fan of this company. Congrats Chris Herd & team.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/29/firstbase-raises-13m-to-make-remote-work-suck-less/
28. 110% agree with this. Mixing is the key. This leads to a much more interesting life.
"So many interesting artists, designers, ideas and entrepreneurs are successful because they find a unique combination of passions at a synergistic intersection.
Pursuing several concurrent paths of personal development opens you up to so much. By embracing several passions that feed off each other, you open up a world of possibility you otherwise would miss."
https://adamsinger.substack.com/p/interesting-results-always-happen
29. Still the best podcast around. Smart folks talking rationally and thinking for themselves about political, business, geopolitical and cultural issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLS3osXJY54
30. So many great places listed here. The point is about having a great quality of life at a good price. ie. Value which is not something you will get in most US/Western European cities.
Then you invest any remaining money into assets. On the list: I favor Taiwan, Georgia (the country), Argentina & Vietnam & Mexico. Ukraine, Portugal & Serbia goes without saying.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2021/04/28/places-to-live/
31. "many Bitcoin critics see it as just a Visa-like payment platform, and analyze its performance and costs by “transactions per second.” But Bitcoin is not a fintech company competing with Visa. It is a decentralized asset competing to be the new global reserve currency, aiming to inherit the role gold once had and the role the dollar holds today.
The world relies on the U.S. dollar and U.S. treasuries, giving America unparalleled and outsized economic dominance. Nearly 90% of international currency transactions are in dollars, 60% of foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars and almost 40% of the world’s debt is issued in dollars, even though the U.S. only accounts for around 20% of global GDP. This special status that the dollar enjoys was born in the 1970s through a military pact between America and Saudi Arabia, leading the world to price oil in dollars and stockpile U.S. debt.
As we emerge from the 2020 pandemic and financial crisis, American elites continue to enjoy the exorbitant privilege of issuing the ultimate monetary good and numéraire for energy and finance."
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-petrodollar
32. I like this story. Leaning into what makes u different. Good for her.
"In modelling, looking different is a blessing not a curse and it gives me a platform to raise awareness of albinism."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56464881
33. This is one of the best tweet storms on predictions for future of work that will appear before 2025.
https://mobile.twitter.com/chris_herd/status/1388099111774265351
34. I normally bag on these things but this could work. Another influencer trying the VC thing. But glad he is thinking big & understanding the importance of ownership and equity.
"A lot of social media creators get pigeonholed or told they have to grow their account really large, go for brand deals, try to become a musician or become an actor," Richards said. "They're kind of held to that stigma. We want to break that. That's what we're all about, proving people wrong."
35. This politicization of everything is the reason the USA, Canada & Western Europe are going down the tubes. This is why freedom of speech, rational discussion and questioning media narrative is even more critical these days.
"In other words, knowledge is useful in large part because it leads to more knowledge. Suppressing a piece of knowledge also suppresses everything else you might subsequently learn as a result."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-politically-guided-science-is
36. This sums up Digital Decolonization. Great write up here.
"Most societies around the world are nearly two-thirds under the age of thirty-five. They were not raised with the mindset of people of my generation with a certain view of America’s role of leadership in the world. They have assumed access to technology with easy, convenient, available information, products, and services. They are global day one, because bottom up experiences are one click away. And dissatisfied by top-town institutions’ inability to act, they are taking the reins of impact themselves.
In my world, the old American playbook as access to technology increased was to show up where a market was big enough, or outsource where labor markets were cheap enough. And for years overall, that worked. The Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, or Intel of almost anywhere has been, well, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google, and Intel.
This is no longer the case. For the first time, billions of people have local and regional choice. They no longer have to accept only one-stop-shop products from the United States but have access to services more attuned to their realities and cultural differences."
https://christophermschroeder.substack.com/p/america-is-back-but-to-what
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Why Most Venture Capital Content Marketing is So Bad: Actually why MOST Content Marketing is BAD in general
I was chatting recently with a new Venture Capital friend about content marketing. As a new Fund, how do you standout? VCs now have a well worn playbook of becoming media companies, particularly in Silicon Valley. But this has led to a massive deluge of content ranging from medium posts, newsletters, Podcasts, Youtube Channels. As a regular reader and admittedly very amateur investor, I try to read or follow all of them, especially from the top tier firms. And let us be very honest, most of it is AWFUL, Useless or even worse...plain BORING. Rene Girard-esque Mimicry. They all seem the same. Bland.
Yet there are some standouts. The firms I would rank highest are NFX, First Round Capital, Village Global, SaaStr Fund & the grandmaster A16Z. I think most founders and even their investor competitors would admit that these listed firms are able to provide amazing content. I always learn new things. No one firms come anywhere close.
I think the universal thing they all do well is: Voice, Format & Consistency.
1. Voice:
Having a very clear editorial positioning, reflecting other media players ie. taking a clear opinion or point of view. So for example Financial Times is conservative, New York Times is leftish. So in our specific case for Venture Capital content, First Round Review is about sharing the lessons and practical learnings from operators and investors across Silicon Valley. A16Z is almost always talking about future trends and implications, which started from Marc Andreessen’s “Software is Eating the World” 2011 Op ed. Basically building the content strategy around this key voice and theme.
2. Format:
The choice of medium is really important. Whether it is podcasts from Village Global VC, written long form and write ups like First Round Review, useful frameworks from NFX. A16Z has done a great job for their video interviews and thought leadership pieces in Enterprise software, Consumer, Crypto and Biotech: all the key categories they invest in. Many new investors have done a great job building up content and followings on Twitter (Sheel Mohnot or Leo Polovets) or Clubhouse (Zach Coelius and Sheel Mohnot again). Jason Lemkin of the SaaStr Fund pretty much kills it on Twitter, Linkedin and written content. Garry Tan is crushing it on Youtube.
3. Consistency:
You want to have a regular publishing schedule. It’s better to do fewer pieces of content say once a month versus putting out 10 pieces of content irregularly, so 10 one month, zero the next month. Readers or watchers want to know when to expect the next piece of content. If the content is good, they even expect it. Ask any top newsletter writer. Once again, I’m incredibly impressed with what SaaStr Fund has done. They are so regularly prolific I am tempted to ping Jason to see if he is alive when I don’t see any new posts or tweets for a few hours in a day. :)
If you look at most of the other content strategies of other VC funds, they only follow some of these. To do content marketing well, these are the basics that you have to follow and do well.
I should also note in my humble opinion, that these are highly relevant for any content marketing initiative outside of venture capital.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Time Management in the Age of Leverage: Filters for Prioritization
This has been well stated many times, we all have 24 hours a day and nothing we can do can change that. Yet there are those around us who seemingly are able to get 10X the amount accomplished compared to us mere mortals. I’ve spent a lot of time reading, analyzing and asking around to figure out some tips and tricks to optimize my own schedule.
I use and recommend a very simple framework.
The first is Valuing your time per hour. So for example if you are a founder, each hour should be worth $10,000 usd or if you are Jeff Bezos it could be $1 Billion dollars per hour.
This can be helpful to judge how you spend your time. If the expected outcome or ROI (Return on Investment) is less than the valued amount, then say NO, give it to someone else, or outsource it for less than that amount. This also works well for startup founders in prioritizing how they use their precious engineers or designers.
2. But I would add one overlay on this: Do you enjoy the activity you are spending time on or not?
I think this is the most important piece that people miss. So for example, if you enjoy cooking or folding laundry, then keep doing it. ROI does not have to be purely financial. Hobbies are fun and are meant to bring color to their lives. We aren’t robots. Also what a sad & pathetic way to live if everything is done through the filter of ROI.
This is why it’s important to keep a “Mood Journal” and do a diary. I also do a weekly calendar review on the weekend to go through my previous week’s schedule. I review my calendar in the context of my mood journal. And modify my schedule accordingly by blocking out times for enjoyable work or activities. Also by cutting out some activities and conversations with people that bring me down, something I know worker bees at big companies don’t always have the luxury to do.
Our time on this planet is short and I truly believe you can have it all if you put enough effort into managing your day properly. YES, you can be insanely productive and get alot done and at the same time also squeezing great joy and pleasure out of your life. This is what freedom is: how you spend your hours.
As they say, “The Days are Long but the Years are Short.” It’s so easy to let time get away from you. This framework has helped me personally and I hope it can help you get the most out of your time and day too.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 25th, 2021
“Fall seven times, stand up eight.” ― Japanese Proverb
I always learn something new from the Balaji conversations.
#11 Balaji Srinivasan - Crypto is the Future of Our Society
2. "Once a small port on the edge of a desert, Dubai has become a global hub of influencer culture, a magnet for social media stars desperate to tweak their image in what has become the ideal Instagram city. The emirate is home to a vast industry of aspiration: agents and producers trained to boost follower counts; hotels and luxury brands eager to use social media as cheap advertising."
"Already built on the illusion of unlimited indulgence, Dubai has at times appeared a parallel universe as other countries wrestled with Covid lockdowns. Tourist arrivals peak annually in the Gulf’s temperate winter months, and since July last year, the emirate has allowed travellers from almost anywhere in the world to enter, so long as they have proof of a negative PCR test."
3. I remember the Beardstown Ladies!
"Aged 41 to 87, the women hailed from a small agricultural town 200 miles south of Chicago. They were retirees, teachers, homemakers, and hog farmers. Before their rise to fame, many of them had never picked up a copy of The Wall Street Journal.
Yet, during the bull market of the 1980s, they reportedly turned a few hundred dollars into six figures, outperforming even veteran bankers.
Dubbed the “Beardstown Ladies,” they pumped out best-selling investment books, embarked on multi-state speaking tours, and made the rounds on primetime TV.
It was the perfect story about a group of underdogs who used common sense, intuition, and Midwestern grit to beat the market.
That is, until it all came tumbling down."
https://thehustle.co/the-midwestern-grandmas-who-became-stock-market-celebrities/
4. Invaluable reminder.
"Suffering is universal, Eger says, "but victimhood is optional." We're all likely to be victimized in some way through the course of our lives. At some point, we will suffer some kind of affliction or abuse, caused by circumstances or people over which we have little to no control. "This is victimization," she says. "It comes from the outside. It's the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital."
On the flip side, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/why-ultimate-freedom-lies-in-the
5. Good description of Tiger Global's approach. High Velocity Venture Capital.
https://davidcummings.org/2021/04/17/high-velocity-venture-capital/
6. "The basic idea behind BitClout is to create a token-based marketplace for shares in someone’s (or something’s) reputation and influence. Go viral on Instagram for something delightful? Bull run. Say something stupid on Twitter? Could be the start of a bear market. In theory, every public action and utterance from anyone becomes tradable by anyone else."
7. Social media influencer marketing coming to real estate. Seems to be working in DC.
"This is all unusual, to say the least. Sure, there are other local agents on TikTok, but with smaller audiences (and no Lamborghinis). Washington is a city where the luxury clientele often includes politically adjacent names who would die if their home were all over the internet, let alone filmed by a drone and set against a Megan Thee Stallion song. But Heider—to the consternation of some critics—sees the norm-breaking as a plus (even if TikTok has generated only a couple of clients so far). For his team’s Blue Steel–like headshots, Heider purposely wore a turtleneck because he didn’t want to look like every other DC agent “in a navy suit with a tie and a white shirt and, like, a mahogany background.”
“This is about attention,” Heider says, sipping a cappuccino made by one of his colleagues. “I like things that are big and extravagant and fun and over the top. It’s just me. I love it.”
8. Not a Bieber fan but glad he has turned around his life. It's just not healthy to be a child star in Hollywood.
"And we as a society are all too familiar with what happens next to kids like Justin Bieber. We are particularly familiar with what happened to Bieber himself—the litany of distasteful and sometimes dangerous stuff he did that he won’t defend, the equally unkind things people said about him as he did that stuff, etc. But I will share a personal view: Being famous breaks something in your brain.
Especially when your fame comes as a result of your talent, from the thing you’ve loved and nurtured and worked at since you were young. Bieber earned his success while he was still a child; then his gift turned into a snake and bit him. How do you become a good or well-adjusted or normal person when you don’t have access to a single normal thing in your entire life? You can’t. You don’t."
https://www.gq.com/story/justin-bieber-cover-profile-may-2021
9. Very critical that the USA & Quad get closer to Vietnam. Very important rising country.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/ally-with-vietnam
10. "So fab equipment goes from the west into Taiwan, where TSMC puts all the parts together into fabs that can turn raw materials into advanced chips, and the chips then go back out to the west and rest of the world.
Thus the semiconductor market in 2021 is a fully baked cake. You can’t just swap some ingredients out in response to a one-off military invasion, and then keep trucking along. No, we’ll have to bake a whole new cake if TSMC goes bye-bye. And that will be painful for everyone, everywhere."
https://doxa.substack.com/p/why-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan
11. The richest man in the world.
"So here we are a generation later. Putin is still in power and there are no signs he has any intentions of leaving. A few things have changed about him: he gets nenaturalny doses of Botox, he’s gotten divorced, he doesn’t take his shirt off as often for calendar beefcake, and he seems to have forgotten all the German they taught him in the KGB. He lives in palaces that would make a Bond villain whimper in impotent envy. Because after twenty years of skimming double-digit percentages off of one of the world’s largest commodity exporters, nobody on this planet has more personal money than Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Even Crown Princes have to share with the rest of the House, but Putin is a Dynasty of One."
https://gregolear.substack.com/p/plunder-tsar-putin-the-plutocrat
12. There is going to be a day when we see these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and slaughterhouses as major crimes. Awful awful. (yes, I know I am a hypocrite as I eat meat but US food system is messed up).
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22344953/iowa-select-jeff-hansen-pork-farming
13. Gaming space is on fire! These are good predictions.
https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/01/the-deanbeat-predictions-for-gaming-in-2021/
14. This is quite good. Learning investing from the best.
"He analyzed every investment and trade made by these 45 managers and found that on average they only made money on 49% of their investments with some of the best ones only making money on 30% of their investments. Despite this, almost all of them made money overall — and yes, slugging % vs. batting average is well understood by anyone reading this. Shor’s most powerful point is that investment performance is largely dictated by what an investor does after they buy a stock, specifically by how they deal with both losing and winning positions over time (obviously an investor needs to be correct in their initial purchase decision at least some of the time)."
15. “South Korea was able to flatten the epidemic curve quickly,” researchers from Harvard and Seoul National University wrote in a review of the country’s response. Among the top reasons for its success: “conducting comprehensive testing and contact tracing and supporting people in quarantine to make compliance easier.”
https://www.vox.com/22380161/south-korea-covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-contact-tracing-testing
16. This attitude in the long run is a good thing for most emerging tech ecosystems.
“There is a sociological shift here,” said Mohammad Alshahrani, an advisor for a Saudi fintech firm with a startup of his own. “Tech has changed the way that young people are thinking about money,” he told Rest of World. “It’s not just about making money anymore — it’s about making money in a way that people perceive as impactful and smart.”
Alshahrani said Saudi’s cafés are brimming with young and often wealthy founders. “You can see it from their cars; they’re driving to the cafés in [a] Porsche,” he said. For young Saudis with money, the appeal is less about the fabled and lucrative exit: there is a new respectability to “tech.” “It’s hip, it’s young, it’s the cool thing to do,” said Alshahrani."
https://restofworld.org/2021/saudi-arabia-tech-not-oil-the-hot-new-thing/
17. Impressive rags to riches story, driven by alot of grit and hard work. Very inspiring.
"His success was built the hard way: from independence, self-discovery and the pursuit of knowledge. He believes that no one is limited or defined by the circumstances of their past – only by the choices made in the present. From sleeping on the floor of Walmart to becoming the founder of an eight-figure international business conglomerate, this is Song’s story."
18. Kyiv is pretty awesome. Big fan in general & one of my Heptagon cities. (7 places I'm spending most of my time in)
"But to sum it up, I like the freedom and personality responsibility of the Ukrainian culture. There's no such thing as playing the victim card, or expecting everyone to conform to your extreme beliefs regardless if you're left, right, vegan, carnivore, feminist, men's rights, socialist, or capitalist or anti-capitalist. People here are realists and have real problems, but even more than that, they respect and allow everyone to have their own beliefs and don't try to force others to believe in what they think is the only way. Personally I like the traditional family values that Ukrainians have, which in the west is quickly disappearing.
Plus it's just an awesome city to live in with tons to do, unique architecture, tech, great wifi, amazing food, people, and relatively low costs of living or a big capital city. As for the weather, I think it's the best place in the world from Mid April when Spring starts to around October when it starts to get cold."
https://www.johnnyfd.com/2021/04/why-i-bought-property-in-ukraine.html
19. Very interesting discussion on what being "rich" means. Good stuff.
https://www.johnnyfd.com/2016/02/soam-i-rich-yet.html
20. "The first phase of the internet empowered the business models of the old world: It made it cheaper for big middlemen to distribute mass-produced content to a mass audience, and it intensified the competition between these middlemen. But ultimately, new business models emerged to make the old middlemen redundant and address what only the internet can deliver: a relationship between individuals and their fans, at scale. The internet is not a cheaper television; it's a matching engine for personal connections.
The new European Super League is an example of the first phase. It allows one group of powerful middlemen to wrestle power away from another group of powerful middlemen. It also helps some soccer stars make more money, but it does not liberate them.
This is a temporary phase. What comes next?
The stars will realize that even the new middlemen are far less necessary than they seem."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/lovers-and-leavers/
21. "In the fall of 2020, when no single person could protect themselves, there was at least some utilitarian argument in favor of the Forever Lockdown (which is not to say it was a good argument, or a moral argument, or that the tradeoff ultimately made sense — just that there was some argument). But in a world of abundant, accessible, free vaccines it’s much more difficult to link the assumption of individual risk to the assumption of risk on behalf of the greater public. We all have the choice, now, to vaccinate or not.
If you want the Bill Gates microchip flex, that’s on you. If you’d rather risk permanent lung damage, that’s also on you! For my part, I went with the Borg implant. But I’m also not here to do a Pfizer commercial. This is America, baby, choose your own adventure."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/science-and-safety-porn-1fb
22. "Most people think product innovation and growth are what drive $Trillion+ outcomes. In practice, operational excellence is the key driver to executing consistently for the long term. This is how you harness creativity that compounds value over time."
https://www.nfx.com/post/the-ceo-that-jeff-bezos-called-his-teacher/
23. Neat picture book here. Soviet Monotowns.
24. Sabbaticals are an important tool to recharge, retool and think about your future. Have done 3 of them now and have completely changed my life and also what has taken my career into completely new and exciting arenas.
"A sabbatical is not something you do, which can be optimized to do more efficiently. Instead, think of it as a space where you can be. It takes a while—a lot longer than you’d think—to disentangle yourself from your work identity. Just think about how long it can take some evenings after work to transition from executive to mom, from boss to creative hobbyist, or from product manager to loving partner.
Most people in our study described needing at least six weeks(!) just to lose the anxiety around tasks piling up, phantom phone alerts, and old responsibilities that were no longer theirs."
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/sabbatical-time-off
25. This makes me sad that this is even happening. Big fan of both Russia and Ukraine. Both being cursed with evil self serving politicians making a mess for their respective peoples.
“Seven years on, the war continues. And seven years on, I see the truth of what Sasha told me that winter in 2014: Russia may keep on attacking, but Ukraine will not surrender."
https://unherd.com/2021/04/ukraine-will-never-surrender-to-putin/
26. "They’ll tell us that the inflation is ‘temporary’ and ‘transitory’, and not to worry because they’re still in control of the situation.
But anyone who visits a grocery store, fills up a gas tank, or pays tuition, will know the truth.
I’m not suggesting the sky will fall and we’ll see some Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation. But a return to the painful inflation levels in the 1970s? That’s absolutely a possibility."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/its-time-to-start-thinking-about-inflation-31989/
27. "This is a battle just beginning over who will control the communication satellites so central to our economy as well as the vast resources of other planets. But ultimately, the new space battle represents a war over opportunities for colonization, for an increasingly resource-stretched and crowded earth.
This may sound like apocalyptic sci-fi. But space is already becoming big business, and it's certain to get much bigger. Boosted by a huge surge of investment, space-industry global revenues are up more than twofold since the early 2000s, from $175 billion in 2005 to almost $424 billion in 2019. By 2040, Morgan Stanley projects annual global space-industry revenues to reach $1.2 trillion."
https://www.newsweek.com/who-will-control-21st-century-whoever-controls-space-opinion-1584024
28. These are great Biohacker tips from one of the best in the biz. He literally wrote the book on it.
https://mailchi.mp/biohackercenter/teemus-routines?e=82a25f4378
29. Good concept. "Micro-coach" who is there when you need guidance in certain point of negotiation in deal whatever it is. A good investor, advisor or fellow founder friend can serve as this when you need.
https://also.roybahat.com/how-to-use-a-microcoach-d4764ebce0ee
30. This is quite the story even by Silicon Valley standards. Grit & great execution.
"Founded in 2011 to help app developers get discovered and make money, AppLovin grew up without the help of venture money, reckoned with a scrapped acquisition, raised a big private equity round and transformed itself into a leading game publisher by going on a buying spree.
AppLovin was valued at $28.6 billion in its IPO ahead of the start of trading on Thursday, based on a reported $80 share price, which was in the middle of the expected range. Foroughi, who created AppLovin after starting a couple other ad tech companies, owns 27.9 million shares valued at $2.2 billion."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/applovin-ipo-mints-ceo-adam-foroughi-as-latest-tech-billionaire.html
31. This makes sense! YOLO!
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/yolo-is-fueling-risky-career-moves-5049108/
32. "The shift in power from publishers to personalities will manifest across mediums. Incumbent organizations will continue to hemorrhage talent until they properly compensate their top performers, offer long-term incentives for building the publisher’s brand, allow co-ownership of persona-driven properties like newsletters and podcasts, and lift up individuality rather than sterilize it.
Media should take cues from sports teams, which intimately understand how spotlighting and retaining stars is crucial to building a popular franchise."
https://constine.substack.com/p/audience-portability
33. This is a good thing in my book. YOLO!
"Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they want.
They are emboldened by rising vaccination rates and a recovering job market. Their bank accounts, fattened by a year of stay-at-home savings and soaring asset prices, have increased their risk appetites. And while some of them are just changing jobs, others are stepping off the career treadmill altogether.
Individual YOLO decisions can be chalked up to many factors: cabin fever, low interest rates, the emergence of new get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs and meme stocks. But many seem related to a deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/technology/welcome-to-the-yolo-economy.html
34. Wow. This is actually quite impressive on so many levels when you think about it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56822571
35. This seems really bizarre but its a strange time. I've actually subscribed to some of Agora Publishing's newsletters & am a fan of Rickards, Bonner, Stansberry, Rees-Mogg & Davidson's writings.
36. "Modern creation is always-on and the creators who define the next generation of culture will be the immersive creators. They will glide so effortlessly between the real and digital realms that they’ll nearly always be producing content. Emma Chamberlain is one example of such a creator: there’s rarely a moment in Emma’s life when she’s not filming or livestreaming. The camera is a fluid extension of who she is."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/the-two-way-mirror-of-art-and-technology
37. "So why are people choosing to earn 0.6% or lower, when they can earn 8% or higher? There is a lack of education in the market. This will change very quickly though. From finance professionals to corporate executives, the world is going to wake up to the massive arbitrage opportunity that exists in simply holding your dollars in digital stablecoins rather than electronic CUSIP cash."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/yield-arbitrage-is-coming-to-corporate
38. "To create new value, publishing needs to unbundle and then rebundle in much more rational ways. The destruction of the cable bundle was a necessary and messy step. We’ve seen the start of the unbundling of publishing with Substack. The defection of many well-known writers heralds the needed collapse of the op-ed pages.
But the people who dismiss Substack and newsletters as just hot takes sound a lot to me like the people in the early 2000s who dismissed bloggers as dudes in their parents’ basement with pizza stains on their t-shirts and a desperate need for vitamin D. How things start are not how they end."
https://therebooting.substack.com/p/the-unbundling-of-publishing-1x
39. This is a really interesting idea. Universal Creative Income. Makes sense.
"For platforms, the idea is simple: use company revenue to fund a Universal Creative Income program for emerging creators on the platform. For instance, companies like Facebook or YouTube could carve out a fund to support creators on the platform and send them a monthly check to cover basic living expenses, regardless of skill, training, or background.
UCI differs from most prevailing platform creator funds in terms of consistency of payments, transparency of eligibility criteria, and focus on smaller emerging creators. To the last point: we believe focusing on creators who are in the greatest financial need would create the largest impact on participation in the creator economy."
https://li.substack.com/p/the-case-for-universal-creative-income
40. "George Floyd the man is dead, and his family have received the justice they deserve, but George Floyd the icon will live on, a powerful symbol for the faithful as they strive to build a third age of racial equality.
(This) political ideology mostly offers only rewards — status, popularity and often jobs and money.
This kind of moral confusion is the perfect environment for bullies and sadists because it is far easier for people to be punished for using the wrong language, or having the wrong opinions, and for many it is a ruthless competition to reach the top. Most of the nastiness is mercifully online, but we had a taste of the medieval at one point when a latter-day mini-Münster — the CHOP — sprang up in Seattle.
The victims of that utopian experiment, not being part of the litany of the saints, have been largely forgotten, but the underlying violent energies of the social justice movement shouldn’t be."
https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-george-floyd-became-a-martyr/
41. Have heard good things about these folks. Also from LP perspective it seems like a differentiated offering too. (which is unlike most VC funds these days).
42. "Welcome to the TINA Economy. There is no alternative. Embrace risk, or suffer guaranteed decline."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/the-tina-economy/
43. "What’s in store for the new head of the SEC? Gensler is taking over an agency whose situation is not unlike the CFTC in 2009. The SEC’s influence significantly faded under the Trump administration. Insider trading cases are near all-time lows. Repeated budget cuts have severely hindered the SEC’s ability to track & prosecute fraud.
Celebrities walking the legal tight-rope like Elon Musk have blatantly taunted the agency with little consequence. While I believe Gensler will have the power to reverse some of this, the hole his predecessors have dug for him is a deep one. The equity markets are as close to the Wild West as they’ve been in a long time."
https://frontmonth.substack.com/p/the-man-with-no-name-returns
44. "It is a little naive — or then disingenuous — to discuss Bitcoin’s energy consumption while leaving out the profound links between traditional finance and carbon emissions. Have those impetuous Bitcoin critics at the Financial Times heard of the petrodollar?
As large volumes of oil revenue from energy-producing countries were invested directly in Treasuries and in other financial markets of the major industrial economies, a perpetual motion machine quickly developed: those financial markets could not work as planned without an ever greater supply of petrodollars and thus an ever greater extraction of fossil fuels.
Should we inquire about the carbon footprint of the greenback or are those sins reserved for Bitcoin?"
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/does-bitcoin-hurt-the-climate-not
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Be Like New Zealand!
Andrew Wilkinson talked about going after companies that are like New Zealand. It’s a brilliant analogy and what his Private Equity firm, Tiny Capital focuses on.
Sometimes the best businesses are like New Zealand:
It’s food and energy independent and safe. Totally self sufficient. No middle man, minimal paid acquisition, no platform dependency.
Middle of nowhere, Hard to Invade: so forgotten by competitors and dominates a niche.
Stable democracy: Loyal and engaged user/customer base. Strong network of customers
These are very simple businesses that can grow over the long term. If these are digital, software businesses, they can also be incredibly scaleable in ways offline or service businesses are not. So for example, you can easily increase revenue 6-10X with the same amount of people and costs versus offline or service businesses where you need to add people in direct correlation as your business grows.
Now that markets are so global and large, the right niche can still end up being a very significant business that grows for decades steadily.
I really hope that there is more media focus on these kinds of businesses as they are a great alternative to the Venture-funded Unicorn (companies valued over a Billion dollars for those living under a rock) strategy so prevalent in our present cultural discourse.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Magic 5 Years
This is what I call the epoch that every once great company has. Some examples that come to mind are Microsoft in the 1990s, Ebay from 2001-2006, Google from 2006-2011, Facebook from 2008-2013. For me it was Yahoo! from 2003-2008. Possibly more recently it would be AirBnB from 2012-2018 or Stripe last few years till now.
Ask anyone who works in these companies during this time. The company was expanding so fast. “The Rise” that i wrote about previously here: The “Rise” & The “Grind”
Absolutely magical times. Everyone wants to work there. You are so proud, you are eager to tell people where you work at parties (when they were allowed in pre-covid times). You wear the t-shirt or whatever swag with pride.
I’ve stated many times, you are only as good as the people you work with and you never want to be the smartest person in the room. I can honestly say from 2001-2009, I was by far the dumbest person in almost every meeting, that was how good and experienced the level of the people were at Yahoo! My learning curve was at a vertical line up during this time. No surprise many of these people ended up populating the leadership ranks of all the top Silicon Valley companies from Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple & eBay. Many have ended up joining many of the top media companies & ad agencies in New York and globally in all major rising ecommerce and Adtech startups and giants like Criteo, Alibaba and Tencent among others. Yahoo! Alumni have been well represented in Venture capital as well.
This network has been an incredible resource for learning and opportunities. This is why I tell anyone young or old, follow Sheryl Sandberg’s famous advice: “If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on.”
I was fortunate to be able to get to do this at Alibris, Yahoo! & 500 Startups. You may not get rich, and the companies may or may not end up doing well. In some cases, the “rocket ship” implodes. But regardless, if you are able to do this, it will literally change your life and the trajectory of your career. These magic five years in a growth company is something very few people in the working world get to experience. I look back very fondly at those times & consider myself very lucky to have gone through this in my career.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 18th, 2021
“The difference between a strong man and a weak one is that the former does not give up after a defeat.”― Woodrow Wilson
"With two major money making operations now stood up in options & ETFs, Susquehanna followed other upper echelon trading firms and began diversifying its investments. In 2006 Susquehanna founded its own venture capital firm focused on startups across the US, Israel and China. Noteworthy portfolio companies today include Credit Karma, eToro and Pyoneer, each worth billions in market value and some undergoing public listings in 2021. In a way, Susquehanna isn’t straying very far from its core strength when it comes to venture capital - like options, startups provide a convex risk/reward opportunity with limited downside but truly massive upside.
No company better explains this theory at work than ByteDance, formed in 2012 with Susquehanna as an early backer. A $5 million investment in ByteDance’s founding year bought 15% of the company and a board seat. As TikTok grew in Asia and was launched in the US in 2017, returns started to build. By the end of 2020, TikTok had become the #1 most downloaded app in the US with over 800 million monthly active users - more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat or Reddit. That 15% investment is now valued at over $30 billion, rivaling the value of Susquehanna itself."
https://frontmonth.substack.com/p/the-susquehanna-six
2. I love Japan and Japanese culture (pop and otherwise) and am definitely a Weeb.
"But while some people refer to anyone who loves Japan as a “weeb”, the connotation of the term is usually more specific. It generally means someone who loves Japanese pop culture — cartoons, comics, video games, music, costumes, and so on. Cartoons above all; it’s hard to imagine a weeb who isn’t a fan of anime.
....as the generations turn over and a larger and larger percent of Americans grew up enjoying Japanese pop cultural products. Just as “geek” became a positive thing when the Star Wars generation came of age, “weeb” will probably shift first to an ironically positive word (“LOL, I’m such a weeb!”), and then finally to something lots of people want to be."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/weebs
3. "Citizenship insurance is having a contingency plan in place in case you no longer want to live in your home country. It is having a backup citizenship and passport so you and your family can leave quickly, safely and legally if you decide where you are is no longer conducive to your comfort and happiness."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/03/04/why-you-need-citizenship-insurance/
4. "To me, using business knowledge garnered in the toughest place to do business on earth – the United States – to start a business that is based and sells overseas is the best of all worlds. I believe just living overseas, while a great start, is half the picture."
"A lot of online entrepreneurs are joining me, relocating to live overseas in some of the best cities in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America to save money and propel their business further.
The idea is simple: by not paying $3,500 monthly rent to live in San Francisco (and the accompanying tab of $200 for a night out partying), you can plow more money back into your business. That money just might be the difference between success and failure."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2014/01/02/the-mistake-online-entrepreneurs-are-making-living-overseas/
5. The Winklevii twins, Bitcoin billionaires helping to drive the decentralized world forward.
“The idea of a centralized social network is just not going to exist five or 10 years in the future,” Tyler predicts when asked about Facebook. “There’s a membrane or a chasm between the old world and this new crypto-native universe. And we’re the conduit helping people transcend the offline into the online.”
6. "The story of the vaccine’s path from development to mass distribution is a lesson in the power of the global capitalist system — the network of corporations and supply chains that, though it can suffocate and disempower us as individuals, can also summon forth immense material and intellectual resources and deploy them for the greater good."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/the-story-of-one-dose.html
7. "In 1891, the Garden State adopted an extremely generous corporate tax law that “would allow business to do as business pleases.” By incorporating there, a company based in another state could save big on taxes and enjoy perks like unlimited market expansion.
A flood of conglomerates took up this offer and New Jersey earned so much from taxes that it was able to pay off its entire state debt.
Pressured to incentivize businesses to stay, other states offered their own lenient corporate tax policies.
In this so-called “race to the bottom,” Delaware emerged victorious.
Adopted in 1899, the Delaware General Corporation Law “reduced restrictions upon corporate action to a minimum” and promised to maintain the most hospitable business enclave in the nation — a place where corporations could frolic in the open fields of capitalism, unencumbered by income tax, bureaucratic policing, and shareholder litigation."
Why do so many companies incorporate in Delaware?
8. The importance of World and Systems building.
"You’ve probably heard a familiar piece of career advice: “Everyone works in sales, even if they don’t realize it.” This is good advice.
I want to propose an updated version for today: “Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.” It is more or less the same idea, but tailored even more for a world of abundant narrative and complex choices.
The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out - without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there."
https://danco.substack.com/p/world-building
9. So very good.
"...On why voluntary suffering can help prepare you for involuntary suffering:
“The one thing suffering has taught me is that everything is fleeting. Pain is fleeting, feelings are fleeting, how you feel in this moment is going to change. So when I've been through heartbreak, when I've been through breakups, when I've been through job changes, I tell myself, 'I'm really in it right now. I'm really in it. I'm having a really bad time. Life sucks.'
But then I tell myself, 'Focus on what's in front of you, and things will slowly start to change. It may not be immediate. It may be longer than you want it to be.’ But I remember that through racing where it's just you'll go through ups and downs, and you can't always predict those.”
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/amelia-boone
10. "Emerging trends are about a collision between the new – typically a new technology – and an age-old, fundamental human need.
The mistake many people make when they want to think in a structured way about the future is that they fixate on what is changing. Usually, that means a shiny new technology: blockchain, machine learning, and driverless cars.
But taken alone, those technologies aren’t trends. Simply saying, ‘there will be more AI in the years ahead’ tells us little that is useful.
Meaningful trends are founded not only in change, but in fundamental and unchanging human needs such as value, security, convenience, status, and social connection.
Here’s the key: New trends emerge when some change – typically a new technology – unlocks a new way to serve one of those needs. So if you want to start spotting trends, start looking at technology through the lens of human needs."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/spotting-trends-in-a-fast-changing-world
11. “Our lofty goal is to create the entertainment experience of the future. I think some of that is feeling our way into what feels like it’s going to be a new medium, where it’s this blended entertainment experience that has interactive elements."
https://www.theverge.com/22338403/fortnite-story-narrative-interview-donald-mustard-epic-games
12. "Rae’s deal with Ipsy was but a small part of a major shift in the beauty industry, which is nowhere more complex, and profitable, than the United States. People with clout, from celebrities to social media stars to lifestyle influencers, are changing the way the sell works, exploiting the intimate relationships they have with their fans in a way that wasn’t possible before in the industry.
And while most of their profits aren’t close to comparable to established brands, at the moment, beauty is big business: Americans have long spent more in aggregate on beauty and personal care than any country in the world, about $92.8 billion in 2019, according to Euromonitor, a consumer-research company.
Though revenues dipped during quarantine, over all, global consumers have close to doubled their spending in the past 15 years, as prices of products have risen and beauty has entered a phase of total pop-culture domination, on par with hip-hop and gaming."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/magazine/addison-rae-beauty-industry.html
13. "Consuming, signalling, loving, and praying have been the fuel of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google’s ascents, respectively. That the crypto asset class universe has reached $2T reveals, I believe, that it taps into two attributes we instinctively pursue: trust and scarcity."
https://www.profgalloway.com/scarcity-cred/
14. What a crazy story. 20B dollars gone in 2 days. Still can't get over it. Leverage: it works until it doesn't.
15. "Nowadays, cloud is no longer new — it’s the bare minimum expectation. To differentiate, new startups must aggressively (and at their outset) rethink fundamental assumptions of how to build a software company. My partners and I are convinced that we are in the early innings of the next big transition. This era is all about the user, and we want to focus on three strategic pillars that best-in-class software companies will exemplify: user-centric products and distribution, global distributed teams, and creative monetization."
16. Hmmm......My take though quality of life on many dimensions is WAY better in Europe than in the USA. By far.
"The average European is about a third or more worse off than the average American, and it's getting worse.
What the heck happened? It could happen here too. Maybe it already has, just not as bad.
This should be profoundly unsettling for economists. Everyone thinks free trade is a good thing. The European union, one big integrated market, was supposed to ignite growth. It did not. The grand failure of the world's biggest free trade zone really is a striking fact to gnaw on.
Sure, other things are not held constant. Perhaps what should have been the world's biggest free trade zone became the world's biggest regulatory-stagnation, high-tax, welfare-state disincentive zone. Still, "it would have been even worse" is a hard argument to make."
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-europe.html
17. "All healthy relationships start with shared values. They are what engender trust and link relationships together. Many different types of values can emerge in relationships but there are three essential — foundational — values:
Transparent Communication + High Frequency
Clear Ownership
Alignment of Vision
Co-Founder relationships are unique, but nearly any healthy relationship will feature these three values."
https://www.nfx.com/post/the-pyramid-of-cofounder-success/
18. Some good nuggets here.
"Our trends toward strong federal authority and local rot are clearly intensifying, and Americans, when they’re paying attention, focus mostly on how to destroy each other while an antagonistic, genocidal nuclear superpower grows increasingly belligerent abroad.
But with the cold weather finally broken, and vaccinations fully in play, America is thawing. Businesses are open, mass-remote work culture is looking more endangered by the day, and awoken like the kraken comes the most powerful force in the world: single people who want to get laid. The mass psychological shift has been almost palpable"
https://www.piratewires.com/p/mating-season
19. Neat company.
20. "If you find yourself focusing on building up your business, Plan A is going to be the most important camp for you to join.
If your company is increasing 100% year over year, Plan A is going to help you keep more of that wealth in the business so you can continue to grow.
Someone who’s actively earning money needs to start with a Plan A.
But maybe you’re past that stage. Maybe you’ve already scored the wins. Maybe you’ve already seen all the success you want or you’ve developed a Plan A that is working well for you.
Plan B is about creating those insurance policies that will extend the shelf-life of your wealth."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/02/24/plan-a-or-plan-b/
21. A very good write up and why Tiger Global is eating traditional VC's lunch. Approach=Better, Faster & Cheaper.
"The hedge fund most often in the crosshairs is Tiger Global — a tech-focused “crossover" that has dominated media headlines & VC gossip circles for the last 12 months due to its record-breaking deal pace & aggressive style. From an outsider’s perspective, Tiger’s investment strategy can be roughly summed up as:
--Be (very) aggressive in pre-empting good tech businesses
--Move (very) quickly through diligence & term sheet issuance
--Pay (very) high prices relative to historical norms and/or competitors
--Take a (very) lightweight approach to company involvement post-investment
--Above all, deploy capital, deploy capital, deploy capital
And Tiger isn’t the only fund employing this type of strategy. Addition (led by ex-Tiger Global Partner Lee Fixel), Coatue (a “Tiger Cub”, just like Tiger Global), and several others exhibit these tactics to varying degrees2, and have elicited similar amounts of frustration from more “traditional” VCs."
https://randle.substack.com/p/playing-different-games
22. Good to know. I'd favor Portugal, Mexico & would check out Colombia and Vietnam. All nice places to retire.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/here-are-the-10-best-places-in-the-world-to-retire-11617116826
23. "What happens to the job market if people live longer? How about housing? Or like in the controversial case of Joe Biden, what if our leaders are in office later into their lives but suffer more cognitive deterioration? What about the funding and administration of social welfare programs with benefits for retirees, like Social Security? The point – we haven’t had a public conversation about the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of human life extension."
https://dougantin.com/longevity-extended-life-what-we-arent-talking-about/
24. The best show on air these days.....a great discussion on what’s going on in business and America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaU1P5-pzLU
25. PG really nails it.
"Part of the reason it's getting easier to start a startup is social. Society is (re)assimilating the concept. If you start one now, your parents won't freak out the way they would have a generation ago, and knowledge about how to do it is much more widespread. But the main reason it's easier to start a startup now is that it's cheaper. Technology has driven down the cost of both building products and acquiring customers.
The decreasing cost of starting a startup has in turn changed the balance of power between founders and investors. Back when starting a startup meant building a factory, you needed investors' permission to do it at all. But now investors need founders more than founders need investors, and that, combined with the increasing amount of venture capital available, has driven up valuations. [8]
So the decreasing cost of starting a startup increases the number of rich people in two ways: it means that more people start them, and that those who do can raise money on better terms."
http://paulgraham.com/richnow.html
26. "The thing is, some (maybe most) of the stress that we experience in our daily lives is stress that we bring on ourselves via the habits that are part of our regular routine. Harsh to hear, but the good news is that means by modifying these habits we can dump unnecessary stress."
https://www.emergencymind.com/post/how-high-performers-remove-stress-daily
27. Ordered the book. Have a Scout's mindset.
"The central metaphor in the book is that we are often in soldier mindset, my term for the motivation to defend your own beliefs against arguments and evidence that might threaten them. Scout mindset is an alternative way of thinking. A scout's goal is not to attack or defend, but to go out and form an accurate map of what's really there."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-julia-galef
28. This is one of the coolest companies I've seen in a long time. Factory of the future in space.
29. "The lesson here is very, very simple. If you want to motivate yourself – first, BE ABSOLUTELY HONEST WITH YOURSELF. Admit to yourself whether or not you actually want something. If you do, you will act in accordance with your desire. If you don’t, nothing and no one can motivate you to get it."
https://didacticmind.com/2020/11/how-to-light-your-inner-fire.html
30. Love this idea of building Guardrails in your life.
"If you stick to these guardrails every day for a number of years, they’re almost guaranteed to yield some degree of outlier returns.
The compounding nature of some guardrails is easier to wrap your head around than others. Take lifting for example. It’s obvious to anyone that a daily workout will compound over a number of months and get you in better shape."
"Guardrails are just a fancy word for your default settings. Meaning, the best guardrails reduce your reliance on willpower and snap decisions."
https://www.theproofwellness.com/guardrails-rule-your-future
31. "He who pursues his purpose should beware, then, of distractions and troublemakers who wish to deflect him from his path: for it is they who “mix mead with misery.” And in the end it is the quest for knowledge that redeems us all; it is this that transforms every single-minded pursuit of a worthy mission into a virtuous exercise."
https://qcurtius.com/2021/04/17/alive-today-dead-tomorrow-then-alive-again/
32. Pure gold. This is one of the best recent write ups on finding Product Market fit. Also love the overly-simplified Ries vs. Rabois models. Very much worth a read.
"So, for most businesses, instead of measuring satisfaction, measuring retention is the best signal of product/market fit. Measuring retention is pretty easy. Perform a cohort analysis, graph the curve over time and see if there is a flattening of the retention curve.
As I’ve discussed before, what you measure for your retention curve matters quite a bit though. For your product, there is usually a key action the customer takes in a product that best represents product value. For Pinterest, it was saving a piece of content. For Grubhub, it was ordering food online. For your product, there is also a natural frequency to product use."
https://caseyaccidental.com/caseys-guide-to-finding-product-market-fit/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Going to Monk Mode
In line with “Work like a Lion, Not like a Cow”, I have found myself working in sprints and more sporadically now that I have actual control over my schedule. Something that i believe many former white collar office workers have experienced since the start of the pandemic where offices are still shut down 10 months later. As remote work becomes more prevalent, learning how to manage your time, energy and effectiveness will be even more important.
However, there are some times when you have to make a major push due to some crisis or deadline. This is what they call “Monk Mode.” That means literally working in isolation and going to take extreme measures in living without distraction from other people around you. This happened for me after I sent my family to Taiwan on July 19th in 2020. I was facing a personal financial crisis, so once my wife and daughter were away, I could go to deep focus and literally live like a monk. I turned off the heater, took cold showers or showered every two days, ate sparingly. This enabled me to cut dramatic amounts of costs from the monthly budget. Then I spent almost every waking hour outside of my exercise regime working on the eBay business for cash, taking paid consulting projects, working on selling one of my properties. Basically fighting my way out which I finally did in October.
One of my favorite authors wrote:
“(Monk mode) means shutting out the world for a time,” McKeown says. “It is a relatively extreme approach to take, but (my wife and I) decided I would write from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day. I did that for five days a week for about 9 months. I worked from a small office–tiny really–but in it I found space. And in that space I found creative freedom.”
I did this for 3 full months until I was out of the crisis and able to get back on more stable footing. Brutal but it works. My realization was that having my family around is an amazing and pleasant life. Something to look forward to and treasure. I love being around them but they can also be a distraction, albeit a pleasant distraction. And the priority for them is comfort. But that comfort is the enemy of progress in all its forms. Nothing ever started from being comfortable. It prevents you from getting stuff done, especially in a crisis.
This is when you have to go to war, and war with yourself in some cases. It’s going to war WITH yourself, FOR yourself! You literally have to go to the mattresses as they say in the classic movie “The Godfather”. One of my life heroes, Bobby Axelrod from Billions (yes, I know he is a fictional TV character) said this best.
“Do you know why they call it going to the mattresses. Because you had to move out of your home and hole up some place where no one can find you with all your men. But you had to do it quick, so you’d get a jump on the rival family before they get a jump on you. So you had places stashed around the city with the mattresses on the floor. That is where you make your stand until you nailed the boss of the rival family. And once you got him and all his soldiers fell into line, that’s when you go home to your comfy bed and your wife and kids.”
Not always fun but sometimes you have to do it.
“As a blacksmith uses heat to temper steel, so should a trial by fire strengthen one's mettle.”--Jeffrey Fry
Every single person will face this in their life and it can be one of the most productive if not brutal times that shape you. Monk Mode is a great tool, used sparingly, to get a lot of Sh-T done.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Fundraising is Supposed to be Hard!
A big part of running an accelerator or a Venture Capital fund is fundraising. Whether it’s fundraising for your fund or more importantly, helping and working with your portfolio companies on their own fundraising process. I would say particularly being in Silicon Valley this is what I and other investors spend a disproportionate amount of time on. (I could argue maybe a bit too much).
So many of my founders or founders in general complain about fundraising. “Fundraising sucks!,” “I hate fundraising” or “I can’t wait to get back to working on the business.” But my response to them is, “I get it but it’s actually an important part of working on your business. It’s not supposed to be fun.”
I really do get it. The crazy amount of time it takes, the passive- aggressive blank responsives from investors, in some cases blinding arrogance, or the ghosting. So much ghosting.
And I say this as someone who has fundraised for a venture fund. If you think raising money from angel investors or venture capitalists is hard, try raising money from Limited Partners like big corporates, family offices, or Fund of Funds. Way longer sales cycles, even more arrogance and also way more flakiness. I could tell you about this A--hole High Net Worth Individual I met at LP conference in New York. I don’t recall ever having such a demeaning conversation.
BUT, this is the nature of the beast. This is the game. And I took this in stride as part of the process. I had no choice. Fundraising is an important step in your startup (or venture fund). It’s a forcing function to clarify your vision and get your story right. It helps you fine-tune your messaging and strategy. It makes you step away from the day to day and take a top down view of the business, its metrics and overall direction ie. it forces you to set milestones and plan. One additional benefit from the fundraising process is you get some valuable feedback on what you are doing right and wrong. This is both in the presentation but also on your business and your approach to the market from people who see a lot of startups.
The key pieces of a successful fundraise is about the homework you do, going after the right profile of the investor, running a tight timeline with a compact process. Exactly the same as an enterprise sales process. And understand that this is a numbers game. For a seed raise, you can expect to talk to at least 100-120 angels and VCs. Not everyone will say YES. In fact, most (90%) will not be interested. You only need a few investors to come aboard before the momentum shifts your way.
Yet, even if you do everything above right, it really starts with having the right attitude. If you need to do fundraising, at least try to enjoy it. Think of it as an opportunity to share your vision and startup with the world. Founders who are able to have this mindset are able to increase the odds of their success here. Or at minimum, it will make a painful process much less painful.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 11th, 2021
“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”― Nelson Mandela
"Regardless of what you think bitcoin is worth, it is obvious that millions of people around the world are buying bitcoin and planning to hold them for the long haul. This may be the most bullish data point available to anyone."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-is-leaving-exchanges-and
2. "The third great conveyance of the modern economy (the first two being globalization and digitization) is in full swing: Dispersion, the process of value leapfrogging traditional points of distribution. Three sectors stand to register the greatest reallocation of stakeholder value (i.e., shit-kicking): healthcare, commercial real estate, and education as consumers leapfrog hospitals, HQ, and campuses.
Dispersion is enabled by both globalization and digitization. High-bandwidth communications link billions of people, and robust mobile devices render that network continuous. Now, blockchain technology is enabling the network to store value (bitcoin) and act on it (etherium). This will bring further disruption to industries low on IQ and heavy on EQ, such as insurance/asset management/central banking."
"Most companies aren’t going 100 percent remote. But when we return to the office, we will want less space that is more flexible, and more appealing to the premier asset of any firm: its ability to attract skilled, young human capital."
https://www.profgalloway.com/we-might-work/
3. "In 2016 I sold my possessions and moved from the United States to Colombia, looking for a better life. Four years later, it’s safe to say that I’ve found that better life.
The irony isn’t lost on me: Centuries ago, my ancestors moved to America for a better life. And in the twenty-first century, I moved to the “third world” for a better life.
Think about this for yourself. What do you want out of your life? Are there ways you can have those things, if you’re only willing to sacrifice other things? If you can settle for “good enough” in some places, and even take risks in other places, you can ultimately build a “better life”, not by “first-world” or “third-world” standards, but by the only standards that really matter — your standards."
https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/third-world-better-life/
4. This is actually quite a helpful video to understand what vaccine efficacy rates really mean. Worth watching.
https://www.vox.com/22362894/which-covid-vaccine-is-better-moderna-vs-pfizer-video
5. "When the buffet of life presents you with all these opportunities, it's hard to say no.
The problem with overeating at the buffet is you can't fit anything else in. When you've squeezed your schedule, finances, energy, and family to the limit, there's no margin.
Inevitably, a crisis will emerge, and then all those plates you've been spinning will come crashing down."
https://justinjackson.ca/the-principle-that-changed-my-life
6. Not sure what to think of this one. But like the name "Anti-Fund."
7. Some wise words and lessons for leaders from the Ramayana.
"When you single-mindedly pursue pleasure, anything you are responsible for – be it a kingdom, a family, or a business – it all collapses. Focus on what is important. Pleasure cannot be your #1 priority if you want greatness. You are not a commoner.
Taking advice from people who do not know what your vision and objectives are is like taking medicines without knowing what the problem is. It might cause you more harm than good.
Failure to start projects that have been decided leads to stagnation and also causes a decline in the trust and faith people have in their leader. You do not want to be thought of as ineffective and incapable."
https://lifemathmoney.com/management-lessons-from-the-ramayana-teachings-for-kings/
8. This is quite good and something all young people should watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hdu4DlnLIk
9. This is a very long but excellent & insightful discussion on what's happening in Venture Capital with one of the keenest observers of the space. Sar & Semil really capture the zeitgeist of VC in Silicon Valley.
https://sarharibhakti.substack.com/p/a-chat-with-semi-shah-founding-general
10. Easy come, easy go?
"As best we could trace, every major Angolan investment held by Dos Santos stemmed either from taking a chunk of a company that wanted to do business in the country or from a stroke of the president's pen that cut her into the action. Her story was a rare window into the tragic kleptocratic narrative that grips resource-rich countries around the world."
11. "This time around I am looking to buy blood and tears.
I want to buy from all the people who sold at rock bottom prices. That means I’m waiting to run the 2.0 version of this strategy when there’s blood in the water and the market has totally burst. When nobody is talking about cryto anymore and it’s not in the news, that’s when you’re looking to buy. I will wait 1 year to 15 months after the market dies off and then flatlines before buying again.
Go look at every chart from 2018 to the beginning of 2020. Notice how you have a massive decline and then a huge flat period. You are looking for the flat period."
12. What a difference a year and a new Presidency makes. But lesson is stay humble and don't gloat about other countries incompetence & your own supposed excellence (ahem.... EU & Canada in 2020 re: idiocy in USA). Things can change very very quickly. BTW: Lockdowns still don't work........
"After a horrible year for the U.S., it appears those north of the 49th parallel have a feeling of jealousy about their southern neighbours for the first time during the pandemic."
13. This is THE Riches to Rags story. $8B lost in a few days.
https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1378750061731926018
14. Bidenomics is here. Let's hope it works.
"Thus it was clear that the Reagan policy program of tax cuts, deregulation, and welfare cuts wasn’t working. So we needed to come up with a new paradigm. We should have come up with one in the Great Recession, but we didn’t. Instead, it took COVID and the insanity of the Trump administration to push us over the edge and make us realize big changes were needed.
Well, we finally woke up, and here we are. The big changes are Bidenomics.
....... with its dual focus on research/investment/immigration and care jobs + cash benefits, is an attempt to boost both sectors of the economy at once — to make the export sector more productive while making the domestic sector better at spreading the wealth around. If there’s one unified characterization of the vision Bidenomics is creating for our future, I think that’s it."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/bidenomics-explained
15. These folks are nuts but it's fun to watch.
"With first-place prizes in the most prestigious challenges hovering around the $1,000 mark, it’s a wonder why he or any of the thousands of YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagrammers and Facebookers regularly upload challenge videos to the internet for fellow pepperheads and friends.
While competitive chilli eating has existed for years in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia among predominantly white men between the ages of 20 and 45, it’s become more mainstream and organized through social media and events like New York’s massive Hot Sauce Expo, Albuquerque’s Fiery Foods Show and Smokin’ Ed’s Pepper Eating Challenge in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
The pandemic has driven everyone online, where people like Roger Trier, host of the Hot Dang Show, and Johnny Scoville (who is named after the Scoville heat unit, the way spice levels are measured in peppers and products) have built impressive followings for their hot sauce reviews and daring feats of strength."
16. Never heard of Emma Chamberlain but then I am patently not cool. Impressive creator career here.
"There’s a theme here folks and it’s ownership and control. We saw it with Addison Rae (cc: the unstoppable Addison Rae) launching her music career without a label, we saw it with Charli D’Amelio investing in Step and we’re seeing it with Emma and Chamberlain Coffee and Bad Habit.
Our TL;DR? Sleep on Gen Z *women* creators at your peril. They’re making $$$ moves, pioneering new editing styles, reaching millions of followers and quietly building their own multi-million dollar empires – no LP required."
https://hightea.substack.com/p/emma-chamberlain-and-the-business
17. I love a comeback story: in this case Will & Jada Pinkett Smith.
"Will Smith's social media impact is a signal of the power shift from institutions to individuals. A similar shift happened in Silicon Valley. Amazon Web Services cut the cost for startups to get off the ground, which made it easier for founders to operate without the same reliance on venture capital. VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz leaned into this by elevating founders and getting them the best terms possible. The firm's strategy was inspired by CAA founder Michael Ovitz, whose talent agency led Hollywood's power shift from film studios to actors. Today's social media influence, for both actors and founders, is a natural evolution of that dynamic."
18. "While Occupy Wall Street’s early revolutionaries struggled to get past Goldman Sachs’ security guards, they’ve more recently found tech-enabled unlocks via platforms ranging from Reddit to the aptly named investing platform, Robinhood. While commentators ranging from the Chairman of the SEC to your local Starbucks barista are only now taking note, the writing was already on the wall — or, in this case, on wallstreetbets."
19. Love this. Paradoxes of modern life.
https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1378943649845678082
20. "When I later spoke to Goldberg, asking if this can be true, if Rogen can really be so serenely content, and suggest there must be another side, he told me, no, really, there isn’t.
“He just wants to be on the couch, with his wife and his dog and his weed, watching reality television. I guess it’s a weird thing for a famous person. But that’s his ultimate goal in life. It’s the boring answer. But it’s true.”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/seth-rogen-interview-2021
21. My post Pandemic Bucket List is getting very long.
https://time.com/5918335/a-post-pandemic-bucket-list-and-what-to-do-in-the-meantime/
22. "By that February morning in Austin, Bumble was a dating app, a business-networking bazaar and a friend-finding tool that has engineered 8.6 billion connections among tens of millions of users in 237 countries since 2014. It employs more than 420 “brand ambassadors” across more than 100 college campuses and is planning to open Bumble-themed coffee shops after the pandemic.
A month after the IPO, it’s valued at more than $14 billion, and last year it hauled in $582 million in revenue with a 26% profit margin. Wolfe Herd once told me she wanted Bumble to be “Facebook, but for people who don’t know each other yet.”
https://time.com/5947727/whitney-wolfe-herd-bumble/
23. "Maybe you don't need to be reachable either.
Most things are a distraction, especially in the startup and tech world.
If you get to the core of building companies it's about creating a great product that gets customers that pay for it.
If you get to the core of life it's living an existence you're proud of with people you love doing the things you like while minimizing suffering."
24. "The Beeple Instagram account had nearly two million followers, which gave Winkelmann the idea that he could make a fortune with N.F.T.s. “I’m more popular than all of these people, and if they’re making this much then I would probably make a fucking shitload of money,” Winkelmann told me he thought at the time. “Oh, sweet baby Jesus, this is ridiculous.”
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-beeple-crashed-the-art-world
25. I feel its going to be stupid crazy this summer (stress on stupid) in Startup & VC land.
"Now another change is underfoot. As millions of Americans get vaccinated and states lift restrictions around gathering, people are preparing for a Great Reopening by summertime. Comparisons to the 1920s abound. And that has led venture capitalists to make new prophecies. Sequoia, for example, sent out a new memo to all of its founders in recent weeks. The message? “Now is the time to start stepping on the gas.”
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-revs-up-for-hot-startup-summer/
26. Tiger Global is crushing it these days. They are playing at a very different level.
"To win deals in top-performing privately held companies—including enterprise software firm Databricks and virtual conferencing firm Hopin—the firm has drawn on a rising stockpile of VC money. Its newest $6.7 billion fund is nearly double the amount it initially targeted, as well as the second-largest U.S. VC fund ever, according to PitchBook. Overall, Tiger has $65 billion in assets under management, far more than most Silicon Valley-based VC firms. Tiger says that collectively, its own employees are the firm’s largest investor.
In an already scorching-hot market that has pushed valuations to levels not seen since the dot-com boom, Tiger's speed has left fewer opportunities for traditional VC firms, according to interviews with two dozen startup founders, venture capitalists and others with close ties to the firm.
In the first three months of this year, the 100-person New York firm funded more than 60 companies worldwide, according to research firm PitchBook, averaging more than four deals per week."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-tiger-globals-deal-machine
27. "When governments raise taxes, the free market responds. Raise the taxes too high and people will leave to find a more tax advantaged geography. Lower your taxes and people or companies will be attracted to come to your geography. Incentives run the world and taxes are some of the greatest incentive mechanisms that governments possess.
This is what a digital world looks like. The idea of citizenship is going to change. The idea of a country or state is going to change. There will be more global competition. People no longer need to live near an office. They can live wherever they want. Companies no longer feel stuck in a single country. They can move around as they see fit. They can move their revenue to other jurisdictions if a specific government creates a bad or overreaching policy."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/global-competition-is-important
28. Holy Moly.....Coinbase is a monster. $1.8B in revenue in Q1 alone. That is insanely impressive.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/06/coinbases-monster-q1-in-context/
29. As normal this is a damn interesting interview with one of smartest people in the world. Balaji S. Srinivasan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVENfzgyj6Y
30. This is funny yet may also be prescient.
"The first rule of 2021 is to never sell a single crypto asset. For example, all of the food tokens represent actual food in 2035..... If you’re reading this we recommend you keep a few units for sustenance in 2035 as you will need energy to compete with the growing enemy: the Clowns.
The second course of action is to invest in two major defense mechanisms: 1) a double barrel shotgun and 2) an air tight 20×20 living space with facial recognition entry system.
The third course of action is to live with near zero expenses. If you have a one bedroom apartment you need to ditch it for an Efficiency studio and live with a roommate in said studio. Every satoshi and gwei will be worth more than your entire annual salary if you could only afford a one bedroom apartment. Also. You should stockpile food in bulk from costco and save every cent for more precious crypto coins."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/it-is-the-year-2035-questions-welcome/
31. I really hope he is right! The New Roaring 20s!
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/economic-boom-could-last-into-2023-4371417/
32. I love these routines & habits!
"I’m a big believer that reading not only helps you be more knowledgeable at work but also makes you a better conversationalist and a more interesting person to be around.
A lot of investing is about forming a view on where the world is going, and reading constantly is key to that."
33. Whoops!
34. Hard to argue against this.
"If I were forced to make a conjecture about the most important driver of unrest, my guess would be that it was the result of a general realization that bad people are running the world.
The general feeling that bad hegemons are in charge of the planet could fester in the backs of people’s minds, causing them to strike out at authorities closer to home in the name of democracy, freedom, equality, and so on. And awareness of hegemonic illiberalism is coupled with an awareness of rising authoritarianism closer to home, as many countries embrace their own versions of Trump/Xi/Modi/Putin. The result, according to Freedom House, is that the people of the world are engaged in a “leaderless struggle for democracy” — a struggle that’s both local and global at the same time. "
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-great-protest-wave
35. Good profile & routine of a very interesting guy.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/chris-burkard-on-finding-stillness-exploring-the-wild
36. "Everyone focuses on distribution because that’s the easiest thing to see. Distribution only gets them to the front door; the quality makes them stick around. The key is to write great content consistently."
"Newsletters aren’t the highway for the Pompliano family. Rather, the highway is a combination of quality and consistency served through Twitter. Anthony, Polina, and Joe are in the business of connecting with like-minded people. They are not in the content business. They are in the “building companies and investing in companies” business. The way to build companies today is to build audiences first."
https://2pml.com/2021/04/04/scale/
37. Investing in farmland is a smart long term play. Interesting perspective on the long term plan here.
"Well over the past 10 years+ Bill’s money manager has been accumulating acres of farmland across 19 states. As billionaire’s go with their money, Bill’s pretty secretive. No one from his Holding Co (Cascade) will speak to the media (I get it) and he hasn’t publicly stated why he owns the land. Regardless, it’s estimated through his multitude of holding companies that Bill owns about 242,000 acres of farmland and another 27,000 of other land.
THIS is why money is power. You get to play the long game. Why mess with lobbyists and regulators when you can just acquire all the assets and change the regulations yourself."
https://contrarianthinking.substack.com/p/invest-like-bill-gates-farmland-never
38. Great news for Portugese startup ecosystem. Congrats to the team at Shilling Founders Fund.
39. "Could a sufficiently robust cloud country with, say, 1-10M committed digital citizens, provable cryptocurrency reserves, and physical holdings all over the earth similarly achieve societal recognition from the United Nations?
A cloud country with a population of this size would actually fit right in the middle of the pack globally, as out of the 193 UN-recognized sovereign states approximately 20% of existing countries have a population of less than 1M and ~55% have a population of less than 10M.
This includes many countries people typically think of as "real", like Luxembourg (615k), Cyprus (1.18M), Estonia (1.3M), New Zealand (4.7M), Ireland (4.8M), Singapore (5.8M), and so on."
https://1729.com/how-to-start-a-new-country/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Cooks Versus Chefs
Chefs make something completely different. A great example is Elon Musk. From a startup perspective this is the act of Category Creation. A Cook on the other hand follows a recipe. Most of us are Cooks. From a startup perspective, this is competing in an established industry.
BUT you can start as a cook, mastering the basics. Over time, you mix, re-mix and add in new things and end up as a Chef. Thinking about Chinese Internet ecosystem, most of the big players like Alibaba, Tencent, Netease, Baidu all started as Chinese copies of similar US internet giants. But they all morphed into completely different and arguably more dominant internet giants in their market.
For example, Alibaba was a B2B Marketplace, which turned into an online classifieds business, Alipay (Paypal), Taobao (Amazon) & fast growing cloud business like AWS.
Tencent started as a messaging product QQ, morphed into a massive gaming giant (globally i might add), Weibo (Twitter), Wechat the world’s first super App which is a mix of Whatsapp, Instagram, Microblogging, & business sites. All underpinned by Wepay, the immensely popular mobile payments service.
Same with some of the Japanese internet giants like Rakuten (Amazon) or Yahoo! Japan (Yahoo! started as a portal but ended up adding a dominant consumer auctions business like eBay, Broadband & Mobile phone business). Or even GRAB in Southeast Asia, which started as a clone of Uber but ended up as a major player in the payments space.
This reminds me of my friend Hiten Shah’s framework. You can start business as an Explorer or Pirate. Explorer wants to explore the frontier and build something no one else has seen before. A pirate literally takes an idea that is out there already and will try to do it better. A company example he uses is Drift, who in the first couple years basically cloned Intercom. But over time, they completely changed their product and business where it became something totally different to Intercom. And a very successful business just like Intercom.
As per the examples from the Chinese, Japanese & Southeast Asian markets, you can start as a Pirate but end up being an Explorer. This is similar to many of our careers, it’s good to have mentors, heroes and roadmaps to model ourselves on but over time as you get your own experience and learn more about ourselves, you can start to find your own path.
As I’ve said many times, it’s not where you start, it’s where you end up that is important.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Theory of Constraints for Startups: A Prioritization Mechanism
“The Goal” by Eli Goldratt is a classic business fiction book that came out in the mid-80s. The hero of the story, Alex Rogo has 90 days to turn around a manufacturing plant before corporate HQ closes it down. He learns from his professor the Theory of Constraints.
“The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link". This means that processes, organizations, etc., are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them or at least adversely affect the outcome. (Source: Wikipedia)
The idea is you need to have some source of metrics and measurement in place. Once you have that, you can use this to identify what your constraint is and fix it.
In Startup parlance, it’s about figuring out the one metric that matters. I still like using the very simple AARRR Metrics framework which can help you figure out what the biggest issue is. A=Acquisition, A=Activation (Onboarding), R=Retention, R=Revenue, R=Referral in case you don’t know it. It’s a very valuable framework to diagnose what your immediate problem is. It’s a way for a startup founder to focus all their time and energy to fixing this.
To go back to Constraints, here is the definition from the book.
“A constraint is anything that prevents the system from achieving its goal. There are many ways that constraints can show up, but a core principle within TOC is that there are not tens or hundreds of constraints. There is at least one, but at most only a few in any given system. Constraints can be internal or external to the system.”
It is very relevant for Startups to help them focus on the area that is holding them back from growing. What is the biggest constraint in growing the business. Ie. what is the choke point? In some cases, it could be a Product issue. If so, do you need to hire more engineers & then build. Or maybe you are getting a ton of leads but you can’t close any of them. Then the issue is a sales team quantity or quality issue. Or perhaps business is coming in and you cannot keep up with demand. The constraint could be a money issue to hire people, so fundraising may be key. Or maybe you have the money and then it’s an actually hiring issue. And by the way, the constraint will change all the time. It’s like whack a mole but that is the game of startups.
I found this framework to be a really helpful one whenever I talk with startup founders who have a hard time prioritizing. Once you use this lens it does help clarify what they should be focusing on. This focus is what will allow you to win.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 4th, 2021
“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
― Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
1. This is so good. So many insights per minute here. I'm trying to get smarter and I recommend listening to this if you want to know where the world is going. Rise of Decentralized world. Declining (the West) versus Rising World (Asia). Another great Interview with Balaji S. Srinivasan.
The Realignment Ep. 98: Balaji Srinivasan, the Coming Decentralization of Everything
2. "Negative press is an attack on your social network.
Your bank account is your stored wealth, your real name is your stored reputation. Only you can debit your bank account, but anyone can debit your reputation."
http://www.marknagelberg.com/notes-on-the-pseudonymous-economy-balaji-srinivasan/
3. "Remember, you are choosing the VC as much as they are choosing you. You might be “married” to this partner for the next ten years -- so you need to choose wisely. No need to waste your time with VCs that are not going to be good fits. This is especially true in today’s more frothy market where you don’t need to collect term sheets just to optimize valuation."
https://www.safegraph.com/blog/10-non-obvious-rules-to-raising-a-series-b
4. "The purpose of telling this story is to turn the heads of those in the global tech community towards this remarkable project that is being built in India so that we can collectively build upon the lessons learnt from India Stack, similar to how the virtues of M-PESA are still extolled in business schools and case studies around the world today.
Although the implementation of India Stack has undeniably helped to transform the fortunes of the world’s fifth largest economy and its second most populous country, this work has largely gone unnoticed. This needs to change."
https://tigerfeathers.substack.com/p/the-internet-country
5. An old book that I seem to have missed. Will have to fix this. Lessons from Vanderbilt.
"Vanderbilt rode this wave like no other. He was rich. Filthy rich. At the peak of his wealth he owned the equivalent of one in every nine dollars in the United States.
Vanderbilt’s legacy provides timeless and universal lessons in business success. He thrived in an era of enormous technological change as railways revolutionised the American economy. Yet his approach to business is evident in many of the successful businesses we see today; tapping new markets through lower prices, respecting shareholders, sharing scale advantages and sacrificing short term profits for long term gains."
http://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2019/8/2/learning-from-cornelius-vanderbilt
6. Wow, just wow. It's a long one but I strongly recommend listening to this. It is dark but I think he is one of most prescient & sharpest humans on the planet.
https://tim.blog/2021/03/24/balaji-srinivasan/
7. "Virtually all investing mistakes are rooted in people looking at long-term market returns and saying, “That’s nice, but can I have it all faster?”
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/too-much-too-soon-too-fast/
8. "Most good investing is just sticking around for the longest time possible, through thick and thin. Quash the need to own whatever is going up the most and you reduce the urge to abandon whatever eventually goes down. Someone will always be getting richer than you. It’s OK."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/five-investing-powers/
9. "While money is immensely important, the reason why you have it is to keep your health! By being rich you’re able to eat healthy, get some sun, live without stress and help people who have helped you in the past. The point of getting money is not to buy a Tesla (you can if you’d like) it is to eliminate every negative aspect of your life."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/1-million-10-years-zero-excuses/
10. The brilliant content marketing of Cathie Wood & ARK.
"While other firms go out of their way to hide their investments, ARK is an open book. This is also uniquely tailored to our current market environment. It’s effectively pushing a press release to the entire world every day. The financial media eats it up, while it dominates social media. They remain in the conversation every single day.
That simple push of numerical information catalyzes an army of investors, all looking for guidance, affirmation, and just something to think about, to think about yourstocks. Every day you manage to live, as the saying goes, rent-free in all of our heads.
It's become pretty clear in the past decade there's a correlation between power and the space you occupy in our collective consciousness."
https://themargins.substack.com/p/cathie-wood-and-content-strategy
11. "But now it's time for risk-takers to shine: entrepreneurs, creators, influencers, chefs...
Embrace optionality:
Risk isn't a bad thing per se, and we need to help people assess and take more risk.
Risk can never be totally eliminated, and doing nothing is probably a bigger risk than making the wrong decisions.
Only diversification can mitigate risk. No asset manager puts all of their money into gold, no matter how safe gold is considered to be.
As a (young) individual, don't park your money in products earning 0.5% interest, don't choose your education because it's safe, don't go work for large corporates with 40-year career plans. These were strategies for a society that thrived on large companies, cheap real estate, and heavy leverage."
https://thefamily.substack.com/p/were-in-a-high-variance-world
12. "I’ve started nine businesses. The best predictive signal for their success has turned out to be the phase of the economic cycle in which they were started. Put simply, the best time to start a business is on the heels of a recession. And while pandemic economics haven’t resulted in a garden-variety recession — in either its duration (short) or its recovery (K-shaped) — there are factors that make this the best time to start a business in over a decade. Specifically:
--Unprecedented stimulus and savings resulting in a Nazaré-like wave of consumer spending.
--A gestalt among consumers and enterprises to question the status quo, and be open to new products and services.
--The emergence of new fields and the capital to disrupt traditional industries as immunities kick in and monopoles are broken up."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-sonic-entrepreneurship-boom/
13. "What we have here is a frothy mix of startups and large companies racing to provide a comprehensive spectrum of workflow automation tools to empower companies to spin up workflows quickly and move work involving both human and machine labor through an organization."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/26/no-code-workflow-and-rpa-line-up-for-their-automation-moment/
14. "The first rigged game is certainly money and there is one big trap here. The trap? The personality destruction that comes with it. You’ll find that “most” rich people are boring as rocks. They are extremely conservative and simply worked hard all day long slaving away to make money. They are so conservative they don’t even think the 4% rule works and likely live at 35% of annual passive income “just in case”. These are the same people that exhibit large amounts of passive aggressive behavior, live with quiet desperation and just don’t see money as a tool (instead they view it as their actual worth)."
"Fortunately, just like money there is a basic formula to being happy which is as follows: Don’t bother comparing yourself to anyone else and put all your effort into each day. That is really all there is."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/the-five-rigged-games-in-life/
15. "The best deals used to be reserved for the best investors. But as more liquidity entered private markets, and finding money was no longer the primary issue, founders now have other factors to consider. One of the biggest factors is getting their product or services in front of users. Traditional venture capitalists are no longer the only game in town."
https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2021/03/26/everyone-is-an-investor/
16. Never was a fan of Russell Brand, but it definitely looks like he has grown up, which is a good thing.
“You go through little deaths,” he continues. “The little deaths of the phases of your life. And perhaps our progression as individuals is contingent upon if we are able to accept that.”
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a35885497/russell-brand-revelation-interview/
17. "Every civilization rests on a core stack of social technology that coordinates and sustains its vital institutions. Social technologies—intentionally designed ways for the people in a society to operate—form the basis of the varied systems of material production and material technology that we see in every society. These social technology cores decay with time as they obsolete their own foundations, and as errors and parasitism build up. This decay can be circumvented, and the decaying core social technologies can be swapped for new ones, but this is a process of immense historical difficulty.
What, then, is the core engine of our own civilization, and in what way might it decay? While we lack an incontrovertible answer, the Industrial Revolution appears to be a leading candidate."
https://palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the-end-of-industrial-society/
18. Man, I love Strand books. Pandemic has wrecked alot of stuff.
"The Strand, with its four retail floors and its claimed “18 miles of books,” is a collector’s paradise. A nerd’s sanctuary. A place where staff take pride in knowing their stuff and imparting that wisdom to shoppers. The past year, though, has laid bare just how perilous a job you like, or even love, can be when you’re working without the most basic of safety nets.
This fragility is something that Strand employees have always known — they work in retail, after all. Before, though, the job had just enough perks, just enough meaning, to make it worth the struggle. In that way, working at the Strand was like a microcosm of living in New York, a city that absolutely does not need you. Without all the good, the bad takes on new weight."
https://www.vulture.com/article/the-strand-bookstore-union-protest.html
19. The Sharper Image. I remember that store that was in almost every major mall in the 80s and 90s. Its rise and fall.
https://thehustle.co/how-one-man-built-the-sharper-image-into-the-worlds-wackiest-gadget-store/
20. One of the best threads I've read on Future of Work. This is must read on where the working world is going. Seriously.
https://twitter.com/chris_herd/status/1375429865281875976
21. "Discord gives Microsoft access to a growing list of more than 140 million monthly active users that includes thousands of top YouTubers, creators, and gamers. Microsoft wants its own community.
The community and creator aspects for Microsoft’s potential Discord acquisition are clear, but the company is also driven by its desire to have big public services running on Azure."
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/26/22352028/microsoft-discord-acquisition-analysis-report
22. Good profile & write up on the story of Clubhouse. It's very early days but this has been fun to watch.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-clubhouse-audio-app-paul-davison-rohan-seth/
23. "But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can’t hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they’re still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They’re stumbling around like zombies.
Our politicians and institutions are going to have to adjust to the new world in which the public can’t be walled off or controlled. Leaders can’t stand at the top of pyramids anymore and talk down to people. The digital revolution flattened everything. We’ve got to accept that."
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the-revolt-of-the-public-global-democracy
24. "And as remote workers realize they can reprioritize their personal needs, they will leverage this ability to conduct a tech-enabled exit. Through this “vote with your feet” practice of “tech enabled exit”, governments will begin to adapt their policy offerings to attract this class of people or be forced to adapt to their absence. In the end, the Sovereign Individual class will gain previously unavailable qualities of life.
This change will not be a smooth transition. It will be full of conflict, populism, and will change what people value. There will be bitterness, resentment, and attempts to publicly shame and extract value from this new group of people. Most importantly, in this transition, freedom of movement will become a luxury good."
https://dougantin.com/remote-work-the-tech-enabled-exit/
25. The lockdowns don't work & if they do, u have to go all out like in China.
"the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.
What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.
The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along."
https://www.aier.org/article/why-is-everyone-in-texas-not-dying/
26. "The talent game has become more complex for the 2020s. Businesses continue to seek out human capital in inventive ways and with little regard for national borders. Now, though, countries have joined the race — which means more freedom and opportunity than ever before for in-demand workers."
27. The Lesson: The Noble Lie is usually not. Also learn to think for yourself.
"Which brings me to the reason experts should be more reluctant to lie to the public: They aren’t experts on the topic of when to lie.
Just because you know about biology or public health doesn’t mean you know whether publicly admitting that masks work will make people hoard them. And just because you know about economics doesn’t mean you understand politics and public opinion formation. When experts make guesses about whether the public can handle the truth, they aren’t acting as experts; they’re acting as amateurs. They’re winging it.
Experts who take it upon themselves to decide what truths the public can and can’t handle might be making the same mistake so many smart people make — that because they’re smart about one thing, they’re smart about everything."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-experts-will-lie-to-you-sometimes
28. What an implosion.
"He was a hot-shot disciple of the hedge-fund legend Julian Robertson — one of the stars to strike out on his own from the vaunted Tiger empire. Now Bill Hwang is at the center of an extraordinary spree of giant stock trades that’s reverberated through financial markets and set Wall Street abuzz."
29. "For every negative thought, there is a positive counter thought. If you don’t like the Celtics, maybe you like the Knicks. If you don’t like Trump, maybe you like Biden. If you don’t like Bitcoin, maybe you like Ethereum. It is a pretty simple move, and also a very powerful move, to focus on what you like versus what you don’t like."
https://avc.com/2021/03/staying-positive/
30. “It’s clear that Americans feel comfortable relying on their local pharmacies for the vaccine,” said one senior Biden health official. “The retail pharmacy program will keep growing and I think you will begin to see more people going down the block to CVS to get the shot than driving maybe an hour to the federal sites to get it.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/29/covid-vaccine-sites-478233
31. "The future of finance is crypto currencies and the world is changing at rates we’ve never seen before (we lived through the birth of the internet – unfortunately getting old). The reason we have to do this product and people need to pay attention is because of Darwinism “Adapt or Die”. If we didn’t focus our attention in this area you would know that we fell behind in terms of advances in technology. If we figured out VPNs, Aff. Marketing, Hypervisors etc… It would make sense that we were following this space as well.
Will there be blow ups? Yes. Will there be 100x returns in certain projects? Yes. Do you want to have absolutely zero exposure to this type of market? No. The writing is already on the wall as high tech rarely goes to zero.
If you look at history, the internet was a massive bubble but it ended up being life changing technology. The car was laughed at and was a bubble with 1,000s of car companies but that was also life changing technology. We can go on and on. If you see a massive bubble in anything that pops and comes back to life… You’ve found a real technology."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/book-intro-crypto-starting-for-the-beginners/
32. Crypto, Precious metals, Farmland and Uncorrelated Foreign Investments.
"These are the four stores of value that I think any portfolio should consider. There’s not one golden ticket. My perspective, as a pragmatic entrepreneur, is to get involved in all of them. I don’t go all-in on anything. I like to have a little bit of everything.
You’re better able to protect yourself and your assets by having several options.
The added benefit is that in buying land or real estate or by investing in foreign businesses or governments you might get a residence or citizenship out of it. Especially for Westerners, this residual benefit will provide big value going forward that you never thought you needed 10 years ago."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2021/03/17/stores-of-value-asset-protection-diversification/
33. "The Suez accident, which is holding up an estimated $9.6bn of goods a day according to Lloyd’s List, has drawn attention to the inherent fragility of tightly stretched global supply chains at the very moment when they are already being buffeted by a pandemic and in an era when the philosophical underpinnings of global trade are being challenged."
https://archive.is/dmRU4#selection-1701.0-1713.22
34. A very good summary & history of money here.
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-history-and-evolution-of-money/
35. "The goal is to earn across all time zones in a 24 hour period. A kind of temporal income strategy.
24 hour time zone earning maximizes freedom by earning in many environments. It’s a hedge against localized risks like war, natural disaster, and changing economic environments. If you’re trying to cultivate resilience and freedom, then you want to incorporate a time zone strategy into your income portfolio."
"Leverage proof of work by creating an information capital asset and gifting it to the person whose attention you want to attract. By gifting real value, they will have a better understanding of your worth and you will rise above your peers."
https://dougantin.com/6-ideas-worth-exploring/
36. "So, in short: too much debt and money printing leads to a declining value of the US dollar, and potentially stagflation.
As a result, the government is likely to drastically raise taxes and chase business and capital away from the United States, leading to capital controls and prohibitions on alternative investments.
This is not some wild conspiracy theory or crazy conjecture. This is one of the wealthiest, most successful fund managers in human history bluntly calling the end of the US-dollar debt supercycle.
His top recommendation, for example, is “a well-diversified portfolio of non-debt and non-dollar assets.”
And in Dalio’s view, diversification means “currency diversification, country diversification, as well as asset class diversification.”
In other words, don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket, one country, or one currency."
37. Babylon Berlin is a great show. Bit dark but still good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/opinion/babylon-berlin-weimar-america.html
38. "Long term thinkers have the upper hand. It takes emotional intelligence and control, but if you can keep your focus on the select few things that move the needle for your goals, you have a fighting chance. And ultimately, a fighting chance is all that any of us can ask for."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/a-fighting-chance-is-all-you-can
39. "The big ad-based platforms will become more commerce-focused over time, and emergent platforms will likely start with subscription, microtransactions, or virtual currencies—or stitch together all three. In this future, platforms will capture more of the value that they create, creators will more easily earn a living, and consumers will have a better experience online."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/how-to-monetize-culture
40. "99.99% of people in this world, the Common Man, have much more in common with each other than the media/political/banking/corporate class that is actively trying to pit them against each other by taking extremely nuanced topics and forcing people to view them as "black and white", pick a side, and aggressively attack the "other" for not demonstrating "same think".
Don't give into their games. They are pure evil and they will lead society to ruin.
Turn off the boob tube. Talk to your neighbors. Have open and honest conversations. Don't let them divide. And most importantly, SPEAK UP against their dividing tactics."
https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-961-gradually-then-suddenly-authoritarianism/
41. "This is not to say there cannot be changes in how we deal with China. Europe and the United States are developing new forms of economic competition with China, but this is better regarded as the final triumph of neoliberalism, not its collapse: Western democracies now behave like firms in the market, jostling for share and control over advanced technology."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/what-is-happening-with-china-a-new
42. This is a smart move. Nano Funds do perform well.
"We then looked at performance across our fund managers, and it turns out that of funds with $50 million in capital — our better-performing funds — have more ownership than 7.5%. They have more like 10% to 12%. Now, when you look at these tiny funds, if you’re a $15 million fund, 15% of that [should equate to] 2.2% ownership, but we are seeing that these tiny funds are actually getting more like 4% to 5% ownership. They’re punching above their weight because of who is involved."
43. Ukraine is pretty awesome and I do love Kyiv!
https://mailchi.mp/fa916e7d1bc6/how-to-obtain-residency-in-ukraine?e=123a1c25c4
44. WOW. This is a big fund. But based on their past track record, no surprise that LPs would throw money at them.
45. "Assuming that we can go back to feel safe around each other and the vaccines can manage our safety effectively, I think it’s fair to assume that urban amenities will come back pretty much at the same level that existed before, so [the] labor supply of well-educated workers will keep flowing to these places."
https://www.vox.com/22352360/remote-work-cities-housing-prices-work-from-home
46. Importance of Frontier & mindset which has served America well.
"In Tocqueville's view, the existence of a frontier seemed to divert a lot of political energy into commerce. In a country like France at the time that was fully settled, a lot of the way that people got ahead was through politics-redistribution of existing wealth rather than the creation of new wealth.
When you have a huge frontier that includes some of the best farmland & access to natural resources on the planet, it’s actually easier to advance by going out and settling the frontier - effectively discovering "new" wealth."
"One wonders to what extent America’s philosophy of pragmatism was born of the frontier. There is less to be gained by getting all political, just focus on getting things done & you'll do just fine.
There’s a lot of deservedly negative things that can be said about America, both present & past, but one thing I find nearly everyone agrees with is that it’s still probably the best place in the world to be an entrepreneur. It seems plausible to me that part of this is attributable to the frontier that existed for a long time. If you were an entrepreneur that wanted to get new things done, a country with a vast frontier is a good place to do it."
47. "Once you make an honest accounting of the sources of stress in your life, you'll know to balance all of that strain with rest. This is important! It's easy to see how only doing strenuous workouts without any time off is not a good way to get stronger, right? You'll just be exhausted. But this pattern happens too often in our daily lives, in a society that pushes us to be constantly productive. Too many of us are consistently in a state of low-level aggravation and threat response. This takes a toll on the body. It makes us sick; it shortens our lives. Thinking about your life in cycles of stress and rest—welcoming the hard parts but committing to real recovery—is a way to break out of this pattern.
In this way, embracing stress is not about living a life of discomfort. It's about balance. Be sure you're bouncing back. But also know that you can never rest your body to greatness: Whether we want to admit it or not, all growth starts with stress."
https://www.gq.com/story/embracing-stress-is-key-to-living-well
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
“Growth Investing” Versus “Value Investing” Style in Venture Capital
Growth investing is defined in the stock market as investing in an asset that has the potential to outperform the overall market.
Growth investing in regards to Venture: Usually a proven & reputable Founder (ie. who has had an exit 100M usd+), from a renowned company alumni like Stripe, Uber, AirbnB (or Facebook or Google back in the day). Super sexy space, competitive round.
This is an access game. This is where branded investors like Sequoia, Accel or A16Z really shine. Their firms brands, reputation capital and network are crucial to selling and getting a founder to let them into the round. I stress the point “let them in.” Deals are being oversubscribed literally within 24 hours. Or for some lucky or fortunate companies even getting pre-emptive term sheets. I have seen this happen for at least 3 of my companies for series A stage in the last month or so. I should note that these firms are also not afraid of batting aside others through offering higher valuations or better terms. Or in some cases even squeezing earlier investors out of their pro rata.
Value Investing is defined in the stock market as investing in companies that are trading below what their real worth is. In Venture capital, it is going after under appreciated sectors/stages/founders/geographies. I note that Founders Fund and Khosla seem to be great examples of this.
Also we see the rise of Studios who farm and cultivate founders for this, 8VC is a great VC fund but they do an excellent job incubating companies too. Vertical focused VC Funds are also better able to practice value investing style as they can cultivate and even help ideate with founders in their specific sector before the founders even start a company.
You can make money with either strategy. In fact, the best investors try to do both but all investors tend to predominately follow style over the other. In my time, with the volume of deals I did with my team, we had to pursue both strategies. But most of my best returns came from the value approach. This was one of looking for founders, sectors & companies that were not as obvious and usually overlooked by most investors in Silicon Valley. Ie. Unsexy investments. It requires a lot of homework, digging around, public speaking, networking & travel aka #AirplaneArbitrage. These tendencies explain why I spent so much time exploring new geographies full of awesome but under-appreciated founders served by inexperienced and lacklustre investors. Regions like Central/Eastern Europe, New Zealand and Canada to call out some specific geographies.
Personality wise, I also lean more toward the Value investing method. I hate being rushed and actively fight against FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). I like to get to know founders over time when possible, just as I think it’s important for founders to get to know me first.
As always, there is no one best way. It’s what is the best fit for you as an investor. This style preference is also something founders need to understand when looking for investors.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Fools Theory
I am a collector of mental models and frameworks. I learned a new one recently from Ukrainian investment banker friend. It’s the “Fools Theory.” In this framework, it posits that the world is split between 4 types of people. Wise Guys/Gals, Simpletons/ Martyrs, Bandits and Fools.
The Wise Guys/Gals: make decisions based on what is good for themselves and other parties.
Self explanatory but these are the Win-Win folks straight from Steven Covey. Long term thinkers and this path tends to be more sustainable.
The Simpletons/ Martyrs: make decisions that are good for others but not themselves.
These are amazing human beings who end up being burned out or resentful because they end up giving so much of themselves and are taken advantage of by others (sadly).
The Bandits: make decisions that are only good for themselves, but not for others.
We all know people like this. Not necessarily bad either as you know they are out for themselves. So they are pretty predictable and you know what to expect from them.
The Fools: make decisions that are bad for themselves and for others.
Basically these folks have no clue what they are doing. Also arguably the most dangerous people among us as they end up hurting everyone around them.
I found this to be a super helpful framework as I get to know people. Once you see this, you literally cannot unsee it around us. Understanding what drives people is critical.
Using this framework & seeing where people fit, you get a better sense of whether you want to do business or hang out with them. And assuming you have no choice in spending time with them, it’s a guideline on how you handle them. We’re all in the people business at the end of day.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 28th, 2021
“Creativity Is Intelligence Having Fun.” – Albert Einstein
"So as we are watching this all play out, investors are fearful of inflation. They aren’t going to wait for inflation to occur before they act. They’ll front run the inflation. They will move capital into inflation-hedge assets. And those inflation hedge assets will continue to rise."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/investors-will-always-try-to-front
2. This looks like a cool place. Will have to check it out.
https://www.amazingarchitecture.com/bar/rabbit-habit-bar-in-kyiv-ukraine-by-yod-design-lab
3. "Instead of focusing so heavily on content expansion, creators and publishers need to be thinking about building features they can provide their most loyal customers — the subscriber. The goal should be to have subscribers identify directly with the creator and feel invested in their work. They should feel value in the environment the creator is building outside of the content itself, through community, collaboration and participation. These features and tools should enable that, which makes loyalty and retention as a functioning utility vs. a sentiment."
4. "The best way to scale these technologies up quickly will be to directly speed-up large-scale adoption. That means massive government investment in solar and storage. Carbon taxes will be much less effective, since their effect is diffused through all sectors of the economy rather than focused on the key areas, and since carbon taxes are partially a degrowth policy in addition to an adoption incentive. Similarly, policies to intentionally limit economic growth will be actively counterproductive.
Green growth — intentional rapid mass adoption of renewables — is America’s best shot at saving the planet from catastrophic climate change, because it’s our best shot at actually getting China and other countries to decarbonize. It’s also fair, because it minimizes the sacrifices that developing countries will have to make. And it’s likely to be far more politically acceptable to the American people than high carbon taxes or degrowth policies."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/decarbonization-think-globally-act
5. "In an industry roll-up, you acquire and merge multiple smaller companies into a large company. If you have chosen the right industry and the right acquisition targets, a roll-up allows you to:
--Cut costs by pooling resources.
--Become more competitive.
--Benefit from so-called "multiple arbitrage". Smaller firms tend to be offered for a cheaper valuation, whereas the stock market values larger, growing firms at higher multiples. In theory, with each acquisition, the valuation of a publicly-listed consolidator should leap forward.
It's a neat strategy if you can find the right industry to apply it to. Most industries already have a significant degree of concentration, and there are simply not enough smaller targets to acquire."
6. Tanzania is a growth star in Africa.
"There is a huge domestic market with a population of nearly 60 million, two-thirds of whom are under 20. Population growth is over 3% a year. Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital and major port city, is projected to be among the largest urban areas by population anywhere in the world, during our lifetimes.
There is great potential and much to be positive about, but, as ever, the execution risk is massive. “This is Africa,” as they say.
As I have often said, the perception of risk is often much higher than the actual risks of investing in Africa, which has much to offer."
https://globalvaluehunter.com/straight-facts-on-tanzania-for-investors/
7. Routines are critical for nomad capitalists. Always interesting to learn about other folks.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2018/01/01/routines-habits-successful-nomad-capitalists
8. This is quite a good discussion on what's happening in Venture Capital these days. It’s cray cray competitive which is great for founders and death for most of the traditional undifferentiated VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVLyPwJAZQ
9. Alexander Tamas is the secret weapon behind DST's success. Incredible investor.
"Cross-border foresight can also be very important, as the history of technology is playing out in different geographies at different speeds."
https://mediciglobal.substack.com/p/2021-2-decoding-alexander-tamas
10. This is a smart kid. Alot of the knowledge, opportunities & tools available now did not exist 20 years ago.
"Your goal should be to reframe how you approach traditional investment returns. Effectively split your investments into 2 buckets. One, the traditional path designed as retirement savings. The other, your angel portfolio that you’ll use over the next 5 to 10 year period to reinvest profits in yourself."
https://dougantin.com/how-to-angel-invest-in-yourself/
11. "Bitcoiners are conducting an information insurgency.
They are quite literally controlling the public narrative through an overwhelming amount of content that has no reliance on traditional distribution methods. Up until recently, the only time that journalists or television shows wanted to speak with bitcoiners was to ridicule, mock, and attack them.
The bitcoin community ignored those short term challenges and instead built a direct relationship with the mass population. Twitter. Reddit. Telegram. Podcasts. Instagram. Facebook. Email. You can’t exist on the internet for 24 hours without coming in contact with content that is created by this community."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoins-information-insurgency
12. "Looking back at history, we see that general-purpose technologies often take a long time to start lifting productivity by measurable amounts. The reason is that when new technologies appear, you can’t always just swap them out for existing ones — you often have to entirely reorganize your systems of production around the new technology, and that’s a difficult and expensive process."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/distributed-service-sector-productivity
13. Rally (and all the others listed) is an AMAZING business and I wish I had discovered them earlier so I could have invested in them. This is the future.
"Rally is a platform that allows people like you and me to invest in partial shares of high-value stuff. Rally started as a place where investors could purchase shares of rare cars, before moving into art and watches. Now, it’s ramping up its sneaker offerings with these Kobe 2s, along with more: a pair of Air Jordan 6s game-worn and signed by Michael Jordan himself; shoes Zion Williamson wore in action; and a 1972 prototype of Nike’s Moon Shoes.
What all these investment vehicles—Otis, Rally, WatchFund, Robinhood, cryptocurrencies and NFTs more generally—have in common is a stated desire by their founders to level the economic playing field. For decades, only the wealthiest people have been able to play the stock market, buy a rare watch worth tens of thousands knowing its value would only rise, or treat a collectible item like a painting (or a sneaker!) like an investment opportunity."
14. This seems like a very interesting way to buy farmland. Acretrader, Tillable, FarmTogether & Harvest Returns are taking different angles to this.
15. "So while China’s government is popular within China, it is extremely unpopular among most of its neighbors, developed and developing alike. The Russians are a big exception, of course (and maybe Pakistan too, though I can’t find a poll). But if China is going to supplant the U.S. at the center of the global order, or even just the regional order in Asia, it’s going to need the approval of countries like India, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Currently, it just doesn’t have it."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/china-just-isnt-very-popular
16. The things people do for free sushi!
17. Beyonce's content strategy: very good stuff.
"Every content creator should have a funnel. It's a living document that changes over time. In today's content landscape, there are plenty of tools to segment your audience to do the same. For many folks starting, social media is their best opportunity to reach the masses."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/beyonce-streaming
18. "It is through the transitive property of trust that companies and employees can share audience members. Once an employee builds a trusted relationship with an audience, their followers are more inclined to trust the individual’s employer. After all, the choice of where to work is not a decision most people take lightly. When an impressive person shows their dedication to a company, it signals to audience members that the employer must be impressive as well.
As the brand gains prestige through its public-facing employees, it can distribute the status back to its employees in the form of a virtuous cycle. This is the magic of a strong platform brand."
"Rather than building skill-based career moats, workers of the future may be using their audiences to secure permanent employment.
If this turns out to be the dominant strategy, many younger workers will start looking for opportunities that enable them to grow their following.
While some individuals will still want to build audiences on their own, many will opt to gain legitimacy and investment by partnering with an employer who can help them grow their reach and status."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-platform-brands
19. Nobody likes change. But Goldman Sachs always seems to end up on top.
"In many ways, it should all be sunny at Goldman Sachs: Its Wall Street businesses are booming, the stock is on a tear and the bank finally put to rest the 1MDB scandal that dogged it for six years. Instead, the firm is riveted by palace intrigue over executive defections, bristling over the use of company jets for personal trips and debating how flexible the workplace will be after Covid subsides."
20. For those who don't know what a SPAC this is a good discussion.
"Prominent companies like DraftKings, Virgin Galactic, and OpenDoor have all used SPACs to go public.
But SPACs — which are generally subject to less regulation than IPOs — have also drawn controversy for the risks they pose to public investors: earlier this week, the investment bank UBS banned its financial advisors from recommending SPAC stocks to clients.
What exactly is a SPAC? Why are so many companies choosing to go public via SPACs in lieu of a standard IPO? And how beneficial are they to businesses and investors?"
https://thehustle.co/what-the-hell-is-a-blank-check-company-spac/
21. "Clean air is now the ultimate luxury, and the business proposition rests on turning a commodity we’ve never had to pay for into a premium -product. But hovering over Molekule and the rest of the purifier industry are questions coming from university labs and consumer–product testers: Do these things actually work? And how much should clean air cost? Molekule and other manufacturers would put the question back to you more urgently: Just how much is your next breath worth?"
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/molekule-air-purifiers-business.html
22. "A scene is essentially a collection of purpose that everybody has agreed to and that's why they're there. And that's why they help you get into those mindsets. That's why scenes actually accomplish all these interesting, creative things.
These human behaviours about how scenes work and how this jockeying for status and competition and half working together, but also half being wary of each other is a generally reproducible rule about how people behave in general in situations where people's status and worth and presence and value is expanding rapidly, but also very indeterminately.
The startup scene is almost indistinguishable from a music scene. It is virtually the same thing. Bands are like startups, record labels are like VCs. You have the press and the whole mechanics of telling people about things is virtually indistinguishable from the Techcrunches and the Twitter presences of the world.
But ultimately what matters is that it's a hits business. Nothing matters until you get a hit, even if it’s a small hit. And then once you do, your life changes and everything revolves around this idea of figuring out how to preempt who is getting these hits and why, and that's how everything organizes. And so the elements that contribute to these scenes, which are the terroir for hits happening, like the floor plan of CBGBs. This is where art comes from. This is where creativity comes from. This is where new comes from."
https://danco.substack.com/p/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaughnessy
23. It happens......
"Never before had Puritan, founded a century ago in the tiny town of Guilford, been more important. And never before had it been so dysfunctional. A yearslong feud between the two owners, Templet and his cousin John Cartwright, had left the business in a management crisis."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-18/covid-test-swab-company-puritan-faces-family-feud
24. I really like these! Building your personal competitive advantage.
https://sahilbloom.substack.com/p/on-competitive-advantage
25. “There is a playbook for success as an influencer and I believe it is a skill that can be taught,” Venz Box says. “Let me say ‘skills’ plural, that can be taught. To succeed you have to be a polymath— you need marketing skills, business skills, performance skills and creative skills.”
RewardStyle isn’t as difficult to get into as Harvard, but it is close—according to its spokesperson, hundreds of thousands apply every year but they only have approximately 100,000 registered influencers, among them Molly Sims, The Home Edit, Studio McGee, Aimee Song, Louise Roe, Nastia Lukin, Kristen Taekman and Tayshia Adams. The application involves a review of a potential influencer’s social media feeds—examining their audience engagement, their aesthetic, how often they post, what kind of an audience they reach and whether their content is “shoppable.”
26. Not sure why this is a big surprise as I think most billionaires do this. You want your people in power.
But this also shows the eternal nexus between money and power that has existed throughout human history.
"The donations are the latest display of how Thiel is cultivating a network of young, populist, Ivy League-educated proteges and encouraging them to run for Senate all around the country."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22332045/peter-thiel-jd-vance-ohio-senate-donation
27. “Just look at the kind of coin and you know how much it’s worth because everyone else agrees to accept that coin too. It changed the world and the way we run our civilizations.
But the time of analog money is passing and passing fast.
Digital technology is infinitely more flexible and it will let us take money in a thousand new directions we’re only beginning to imagine now.
Tomorrow’s money is smart money.
Just as digital cameras have replaced their analog counterparts, so too will digital, programmable money replace plain old paper money."
https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries/why-people-still-dont-get-cryptocurrency-2c0607857c63
28. "It’s a textbook example of a rational action in response to monetary inflation. Can we agree that the money supply is expanding in an unprecedented fashion the past 12 months everywhere in the world? If you’re going to make a rational investment decision today, whether you’re a real estate investor, a stock investor, a bond investor, or just a wage earner or you’re a treasurer, you have to estimate the rate of monetary expansion for the next eight years. We know there’s a commitment to run deficits, and we know this commitment to stimulus.
So now the issue is, What’s a rational behavior? I’ve got to find a store of value."
https://time.com/5947722/microstrategy-ceo-bitcoin/
29. This is a very deep discussion. I had to listen to this half speed to understand it (not sure I have either). So much here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42uhsP4vvCE
30. Thanks to the ever continuous & badly thought thru long downs. The almost 1 year lockdown in California (and other Democratic ruins states) will be considered a crime against humanity many years from now. (and FYI: I voted and am actually a Democratic but maybe not for long if things continue)
"More than a year into the pandemic, people have become accustomed to the lives they’ve built and the routines they’ve created in isolation at home in their “Covid caves.”
"The pandemic has already taken a mental toll on Americans. As of June 2020, nearly 41% of adults in the U.S. had reported they were struggling with mental health or substance use, with 31% reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression and 26% reporting trauma or a stressor-related disorder related to the pandemic, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report."
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/20/why-some-are-averse-to-return-to-normal-post-covid.html
31. This is SUPER smart. VC fund with influencers as their LPs and supporters. As good as a win-win for all parties & major value add for their consumer portfolio cos.
https://www.tubefilter.com/2021/03/19/night-media-20-million-venture-fund-mrbeast/
32. Geopolitical Anarchy is here.
"By dismantling physical and informational barriers across the globe, the basic capacity of states to provide security for their citizens has become weakened, perhaps fatally. By eroding the lines between home and abroad, postmodernity has globalised conflicts, and eroded even the very distinction between war and peace. Instead of perpetual peace, it has ushered in an age of perpetual anarchy that states are finding themselves powerless to contain.
Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground."
https://unherd.com/2021/03/anarchy-is-coming/
33. "As we transition from the industrial age to the information age, and now the digital age, the lifestyle operating systems of happy people are changing. And as we move deeper into the digital age, we will see a fragmentation of society along an infinite number of cultures.
But governments will continue to experience a slow stagnation as their constituents fragment along a growing number of lifestyle preferences. This will force governments to adapt policies to support the growing number of lifestyle preferences in their communities.
This adaptation reinforces the rise of the Sovereign Individual. As governments fail to adapt to changing preferences, individuals will move to locations that better suit their ideals. Supported by remote work and the tech-enabled exit, we will see a large scale reshuffling of people moving to communities that support their belief systems. The change will be slow at first but then will advance rapidly. And we are already seeing an example of this reshuffle of communities take place referred to as the “purpling of America”.
https://dougantin.com/lifestyle-culture-are-human-operating-systems
34. "If you knock it out of the park on day one, you should just quit. It is clear that you’re an anomaly. If you’re in the second camp and it takes you 5-8 years to really figure things out, you should take a calmer approach to your decisions. If it took you 5-10 years to figure it out, there is no reason to leave your career if you haven’t taken your foot off the gas. If you’re a middle of the pack employee you’re actually important to a company. Anyone who is generating operating profits for the firm is an asset. You just want to find a way to improve your operating margins while reducing your time."
"The only reason you should quit entirely is if you’ve knocked it out of the park or your career is hindering your side income. This is quite rare. If you’ve successfully built something over 5-10 years, is much more likely that dedicating 2-3 more hours will lead to more income. So you’re already increasing your exposure to your side income without giving up the steady pay check."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/reminder-post-rig-the-system-in-your-favor/
35. I find it very hard to be sympathetic here.
This is what Investment banking is notoriously known for ever since the 80s & am surprised they are surprised. (well not surprised because most people don't do their homework). This is what you signed up for to make what you make!?? This upcoming generation is so WEAK!
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/investing/goldman-sachs-analyst-workplace/index.html
36. "In recent years, sneakers have become an asset class like stocks, bonds and cryptocurrency, becoming a multibillion-dollar market worldwide. They trade on a variety of reseller platforms; the best known include StockX, GOAT, Flight Club and Stadium Goods.
The marketplaces like to promote their extensive authentication processes so that buyers know that the items they end up with are the real deal.
But such efforts don’t get at how the sellers acquired the shoes, and that’s what is stirring up sneaker fans who don’t think they’re getting a fair shot at buying newly released products."
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-22/nike-sneaker-reseller-scandal
37. I will have to say, it does work. Cold showers are powerful.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/managing-stress-like-jack-dorsey-4366425/
38. Incredibly insightful presentation by THE Balaji S. Srinivasan.....The rise of the Network State. So much to take in here but the future looks bright (for some tech savvy folks at least).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5UAtAOV66c
39. About bloody time. America has been asleep at the wheel and forgotten about the critical piece of supply chains (not just for semiconductors). This review is only the start of what needs to be done.
"Biden’s review won’t just look at the US supply of semiconductors. Over the next two months, the administration will also look at America’s manufacturing abilities for pharmaceuticals, high-capacity batteries, and rare-earth elements that are found in everything from lasers to electric vehicles. There’s also a broader, year-long review of sectors ranging from food and energy to transportation. The ultimate goal, the president said in February, is “making sure the United States can meet every challenge we face in the new era.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22336388/gm-chip-shortage-ford-semiconductors-biden
40. Portugal represent! Big round for Feedzai.
41. "Investing is directly linked to money and also to status. So it’s no surprise that every generation creates its own investing platform in response to its unique relationship with status. In a purely offline world, a game of golf with your Merrill Lynch broker cuts it, but that doesn’t work in an online world where followers count.
In this framing, ETrade was simply the stepping stone between Merrill Lynch and eToro. It provided the means for users to accumulate wealth but it didn’t vertically integrate that into status. ETrade’s marketing tagline in its 2000 heyday was “It’s your money.” Contrast that with eToro’s: “Trade like Steve.” One’s solitary; the other is social."
https://netinterest.substack.com/p/party-like-its-1999-from-etrade-to
42. This is smart. Leveraging their brand for ownership.
"Creative Juice initially will focus on valuing and buying minority stakes in YouTube channels and supporting creators with mentorship. It’s part of a growing trend toward platforms aimed at meeting the financing needs of the creator economy by offering investors the chance to buy into creators’ future earnings in various forms.
Equity-based investment models for individuals are gaining momentum. A variety of companies oriented toward income-sharing agreements, particularly in the education arena, have emerged in the last several years. Meanwhile, companies such as Pando Pooling offering income-pooling products, which allow young baseball players and MBA students to pool together for a share of their future earnings, are gaining acceptance as financial products."
43. "One misconception about creators is that they’re just seeking fame and fortune. The same survey of today’s youth showed that “Creativity” is the top-rated reason for wanting to work as a creator, outpacing celebrity and money. Being a creator is a form of self-expression."
"The creator economy is broader than entertainment and it’s broader than consumer—it’s about people being able to use technology to build in new ways, and then being able to use the internet as distribution to share and monetize those creations."
"The internet levels the playing field, and anyone can use their hustle and savvy to amass a following and monetize that following. In a time when American capitalism is broken and when the rich get richer, the internet actually resembles something like a meritocracy.
We’re just at the beginning of this shift—work will continue to disaggregate and the next generation of entrepreneurs will be “solopreneurs”.
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/what-people-misunderstand-about-the
44. Whoops......
Titanic Taiwanese ship could be stuck in Suez Canal until mid-April
45. "Aella herself ranks in the top 0.8% on OnlyFans, and in her best-performing month last year made $103,000. Others on the site may make very little, despite posting lots of content. This extreme asymmetry in who benefits from a platform eviscerates everything except the very top of the curve. I think of this dynamic as Aella’s Law – and over the past year, largely thanks to Covid control measures, it has made rapid incursions into real life."
https://unherd.com/2021/03/were-living-in-a-pornstars-world/
46. This is too bad. I really like Medium and hope they can turn it around. Also shows how VC probably is not the right fuel for most media startups.
"Medium entered the year with more than 700,000 paid subscriptions, putting it on track for more than $35 million in revenue, according to two people familiar with the matter. That’s a healthy sum for a media company. But it represents a weak outcome for Williams, who previously sold Blogger to Google and co-founded Twitter, which eventually went public and today has a market capitalization of more than $50 billion.
Medium has raised $132 million in venture capital, but its last funding came in 2016. Williams has been funding the company out of his own pocket since then, sources said."
https://www.platformer.news/p/-the-mess-at-medium
47. "The market is undeniably hot, but that doesn't mean a majority of rounds get done overnight—far from it. “Dry powder”, the capital that investors have at their disposal, is always less than the number of startups looking for funding. So when established players say they’ve never seen such a busy market, they’re right—but there have also never been so many great startups to fund."
"The truth is that the scene of early-stage funding has shifted, and very few funds want to invest in rounds ~1M€. So you’ll likely get quite a bit of enthusiasm right away, because they do invest those amounts in pitch decks, but only with people they can “trust” because of their existing relationship, track record or someone else’s trust. So a few weeks later, you’re likely to be sitting with a lot more No’s than your first impressions suggested."
https://thefamily.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-hype
48. On Deck is the future of education. Super bullish and love what they are doing.
"On Deck is building a modern, digitally native education platform at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional higher and continuing education.
Over the past year, On Deck has done something insanely hard: scaled community and education, online, profitably, while growing revenue 10x and building out a platform on top of which it can launch new products and integrate acquired ones such that each is a desirable standalone offering that connects to and strengthens at least one other part of the ecosystem. If that’s a lot in one sentence, that’s because On Deck has done a lot."
https://www.notboring.co/p/whats-on-deck-for-on-deck
49. "This is the future. The technologists are in charge. They are innovating at a pace that the nation states can’t keep up. We have digitized financial markets, which shifts the power dynamic. The regulators and former owners of the system are now rendered less effective. This is a net positive. It moves us closer to a free market. Free markets lead to more innovation. What a time to be alive."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-technologists-are-leading-the
50. I'm such a big fan of Argentineans & the country (the continually destructive government there, less so).
"Since mid-2020, major agricultural price indices have surged by over 40%. Prices are now at their highest level since 2013, and some predict there is more to come.
One of the biggest beneficiaries? Argentina, the country that makes 70% of its export income from agricultural products.
Is now the time to pile into Argentinean assets at vastly discounted prices?
The surge in global food prices can be a powerful catalyst for Argentina, if the trend continues – as many believe it will."
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
You Either Win or You Learn
I continue to say that I have been incredibly fortunate in life. Lucky to be in San Francisco for the last 2 decades during the start of the massive ongoing technology boom. Lucky in the friends I have and to be surrounded by so many smart, successful and good people around me and around the world.
Consequently I’ve learned much just from being in their proximity. Remember, you become “average of the 5 people you spend the most time with?” Being around them you see barriers broken and their thought process that got them to where they are at.
Many of them started with nothing. Some being immigrant kids or even straight fresh off the boat new immigrants. Yet they were able to build big businesses or very successful careers in investing and creating. Not discounting luck & timing as a small part of this. There was also a clear correlation to crazy hard work ethic. But besides thinking long term, I believe a big part of this was due to their attitude and Mindset. A willingness to take the initiative, to risk and try new things all the time. This is the core idea of “Either Win or Learn.”
The point is that you benefit either way, whatever you do. Take a swing and you can potentially create an amazing business or whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. As hockey superstar Wayne Gretzsky’s said?
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
If it does not work out, which is most of the time btw, at minimum you learn something new.
The point is that if you keep swinging, you will be moving forward over time. And you build muscle memory to keep pushing forward.
This is not what we learned growing up or in school aka “child industrial indoctrination camps”. In school and most of the working world, we are trained to get straight ‘A’s which means following the rules and not taking any risks. (I’m not talking foolish jump off the bridge risk btw). We were taught that making mistakes is a bad thing. That it is better and safer waiting for other people to tell you what to do. Taking the initiative is not worth it.
I should note this is on purpose because our present school system in most of the “developed” world is a legacy of industrial age. This is where people were trained and prepared for factory work or joining the military. Places where everything is top down hierarchical and you take orders.
Maybe this made sense for people to thrive in that old world. But everything has changed. We are entering the “Knowledge Age” and the old school system is pushing an obsolete mindset (as well as a crazy & intolerant woke religion in most western world schools). One that has not served the people well, based on growing income and life inequality we see across the globe these days. I think Peter Thiel had something right with his Thiel Fellowship where he gave money to university students to drop out and start a business.
I remember that old joke “A students work for B students, who run companies started by C students.” In my extensive experience, this definitely seems to be true. Your mindset really matters.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Watch the Next Big Frontier: Africa
It is one of the worlds biggest and fastest growing populations and a massive free trade zone.
Add to that a young population with an average age of 19 and in the world where youth drive innovation this is critically important. They will also make more money as they enter the workforce. Sixty percent of Africa’s 1.25 B people are under the age of 25. That is a massive 750 million people.
(Source:Charts of the Week: Africa's changing demographics)
This young population is going to be the biggest workforce in the world in a few decades. And it’s growing fast.
“More than half of global population growth between now and 2050 is expected to occur in Africa. Africa has the highest rate of population growth among major areas. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double by 2050. A rapid population increase in Africa is anticipated even if there is a substantial reduction of fertility levels in the near future.”
(Source: https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/population/)
With the growing trend here in massive urbanization, deep familiarization with smartphones and mobile payments as they have had Mpesa for over 13 years now, they have skipped legacy systems like landlines. So Mobile first is the default with Mpesa on payments and the now emerging Chipper Cash. (full disclosure this is a portfolio company). I expect that due to lack of infrastructure they will continue to skip technology queues. There is a real opportunity for technology leapfrogging effect here. Similar to what occurred in China with the rise of advanced consumer applications like Wechat/Wepay and the corresponding ecosystem that grew around it.
One other interesting factor is the various countries' experience with inflation and currency mismanagement. The most gross example being Zimbabwe. In regimes of massive inflation, locals quickly get the importance of Cryptocurrencies for example. Similar to how Argentineans, Greeks, Cypriots or Venezuelans were the first to fully understand the use case of Bitcoin because of their own painful experiences at home. They were the first to fully adopt it and use versus people in the so-called Developing markets where our financial systems work well enough (for now).
All of these factors from a macro trend level, add up to one of the most interesting business opportunities ahead of us. I’ll be paying very close attention to the growing tech ecosystem. And personally, there is a good chance I’ll be focusing much of my own attention in ten years' time after Central-Eastern Europe (2021-2025) and Latin America (2025-2030). Stay tuned here.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 21st, 2021
“Do What You Can With All You Have, Wherever You Are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Bytedance making big moves in the gaming sector.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/12/bytedance-gaming
2. Steve Yeun is such a great actor (and cool dude). Can't wait to see "Minari".
"These days Yeun finds himself very much in a hazy in-between space of his own, on the precipice, it seems, of something bigger, something special. It's not the first time, either. He became famous, basically overnight, as a beloved character on a popular TV show in which a virus ripped through Earth's population and forced everyone into a gloomy existence in which they wear the same clothes every day. It's like one day there was no Steven Yeun in the culture, and then out of thin air: There's Steven Yeun, the Asian guy from The Walking Dead, skinny-dipping at Wi Spa with Conan O'Brien."
https://www.gq.com/story/steven-yeun-april-cover-profile
3. Always a good entertaining & educational listen. The All in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrx8d_TIrz0
4. "In school, we’re told to do assignments where you have to write 1,000 words. Volume of words is a primary driver of the output. More words is conferred as more value. In business, it’s easy to fall into that trap.
In lieu of more words, the focus needs to be more clarity. More thought over more verbosity. More crispness over more jargony."
https://davidcummings.org/2021/03/13/complexity-of-startup-messaging/
5. Go Taiwan. I can't wait to go back in May!
"This island of 24 million, which has seen just 10 Covid-19 deaths and fewer than 1,000 cases, has used its success to sell something in short supply: living without fear of the coronavirus. The relatively few people who are allowed to enter Taiwan have been coming in droves, and they’ve helped to fuel an economic boom.
The influx of people helped make Taiwan one of last year’s fastest-growing economies — indeed, one of the few to expand at all. There was a brief slowdown at the start of the pandemic, but the economy grew more than 5 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the same period in 2019. The government expects 4.6 percent growth in 2021, which would be the fastest pace in seven years."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/world/asia/taiwan-covid.html
6. Absolutely true. Learn to think for yourself.
"It's hard to know what to believe anymore, but one thing is for sure.
Scepticism towards anything and everything coming from politicians, the mainstream media, large corporations, government-related think tanks, and other members of the establishment will continue to grow. This issue could even become one of the defining developments of the 2020s.
Choose your media diet accordingly.
You need to keep yourself informed about these developments, to ensure you make the right decisions for your savings and financial future."
7. Super excited for the next decade in tech: Digital Decolonization!
"Worldwide, there will be two to three billion incremental users joining the digital economy across emerging markets. For all the reasons stated above, more of them will utilise the services of companies that are not part of the FAANG group. The trend of domestically-grown tech champions emerging in Latin America, South East Asia, South Asia and Africa has only just started.
Any new such trend takes a decade to take hold, but the potential is vast. Multi-billion tech firms are likely to emerge in Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, Kenya, South Africa, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Nigeria – to name just some of the countries that have a sizeable economy or population. There could also be regional players, just like MercadoLibre managed to expand across a range of smaller Latin American countries which gives the group critical mass despite the relatively small size of some of these nations."
8. Everything is becoming gaming......super thought provoking thread.
https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1370771791891861515
9. The latest from Peter Zeihan. Lots of interesting takes on US politics and geopolitics here. Ramifications for all of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kch4Z1GpNOQ
10. "I believe we may be in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods of our day and age in the US (and perhaps globally). That during our lifetimes we will see the internet age run headfirst into the nation-state. They will battle, one will reign supreme, and the world will look much different following."
https://contrarianthinking.substack.com/p/a-money-conspiracy-that-scares-me
11. Sounds about right! Not much to learn from most VCs websites or public statements.
"Our.... primary conclusions:
--Public theses are often inconsistent with how firms actually deploy capital.
--VC theses are often so vague that they’re meaningless.
--Investment theses are just hypotheses; the portfolio shows how accurate the hypothesis was."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/11/does-your-vc-have-an-investment-thesis-or-a-hypothesis/
12. Not sure what to make of these allegations. We all have a dark side. This piece strikes me as a hit piece as I don't think they spoke with Armie at all.
"When Armie Hammer broke through in Hollywood, with 2010’s The Social Network, the sordid lore of his family backstory was a footnote, whether forgotten or purposely ignored.
To the world Armie Hammer was simply a cartoon-prince-handsome scion. It’s easy to discount a beautiful person, especially a beautiful person with a famous last name, as being one-dimensional. But Armie spent many interviews over his decade-long career telegraphing his own texture."
13. Fascinating interview with Investor David Halpert. More on the Digital Decolonization trend. I'm a believer here too.
"Eventually, we will see USD 20bn to 50bn of DigDec market cap in the Philippines.
There will be USD 20bn to 50bn of DigDec market cap in Vietnam.
There will be USD 20bn to 50bn of DigDec market cap in Thailand.
There will be USD 5bn to 10bn of DigDec market cap in Bangladesh.
For Pakistan, it will be USD 5bn to 10bn.
In Sri Lanka, make it USD 3bn to 5bn.
Ethiopia will take a while, but it will be USD 5bn to 10bn in DigDec market cap.
In Nigeria, there will be USD 5bn to 10bn – maybe even USD 20bn.
Egypt has such a deep ecosystem that, eventually, there will be USD 20bn to 30bn in DigDec market cap.
Turkey could have USD 20bn to 30bn, but it will take a while because Turkey's financial market is underdeveloped."
14. This makes me very optimistic about our green future (clean energy and money). We can do this!
"The issue was that it was just too damn expensive to start stuff back when they were investing. CapEx and OpEx were bonk. And so much of the stuff they wanted to build required handouts from lawmakers because the pricing just didn’t make sense...
But so much is different now. Huge, shared computing clusters have allowed nuclear fusion to be an impending reality. Bio and agricultural advancements are coming out of shared lab space that startups could’ve never afforded. Manufacturing is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper. Electrochemistry and stuff like CRISPR have all come so far that today’s founders can piggyback off of the hard work of those who took stabs at this shit before. Add to this that we now have a generation of hardcore scientists who went to school knowing that they wanted to start a climate tech company. Those folks used to dig into this super geeky biophysics hoping one day they would be a tenured professor with some steady health insurance."
15. "The story of what happened at Gimlet Media is not unique: In many ways, it’s a classic story about start-up culture. Gimlet, which was purchased by Spotify in February 2019, has been billed as one of podcasting’s biggest success stories, yet its meteoric rise papered over the managerial problems within the company. Soon, one of the industry’s most-coveted companies would erupt in spectacular controversy."
https://www.vulture.com/article/gimlet-reply-all-controversy-spotify-test-kitchen.html
16. "This emerging category is about the democratisation of software development, unlocking the potential that digitisation brings to anyone that has access to a computer or a phone & the internet.
Let’s be clear: no-code and low-code tools are not about eliminating code or engineers. They are about making life easier for coders, while opening access to everyone, making everyone a ‘citizen developer’. They are about abstracting away the complexity of code to focus on design and logic. It means no longer having to do boring, mundane, and off-project tasks."
17. Tourism industry got slammed in 2020: no surprise sadly.
https://www.gzeromedia.com/the-graphic-truth-tourism-reliant-economies-take-a-hit
18. 2 Buck Chuck!
"Priced at a mere $1.99 to $3.79 per bottle, this magical ether is cheaper than most bottled water. It’s been knighted as the “darling of the discount wine world” by critics, and boasts a cult following among price-minded consumers.
For Trader Joe’s, the wine is also a gold mine.
The grocery chain has sold 1B+ bottles of Two Buck Chuck since debuting the beverage in 2002. Today, some locations sell as many as 6k bottles/day — or ~16%of the average store’s daily sales.
How is a supposedly decent wine sold at such a low price point? Where does it come from? And how did it rise to prominence?
This is the tale of one wine brand, two vintners, and the unlikely democratization of a historically snobby industry."
https://thehustle.co/how-two-buck-chuck-changed-the-wine-industry
19. Good to know!
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2013/10/27/top-5-emerging-markets-for-offshore-banking/
20. Pipe is the precursor to a very exciting future for alternatives & complements to Venture Capital.
"Pipe starts with a simple idea: shrink the black box. If you have real revenue and real cash flow coming in, and you want to grow your business by pulling that revenue forward, don’t sell debt, or a WBS; don’t sell a claim on the black box of your entire business. Sell the smallest unit possible. Sell the thing itself: your revenue. And the purest way to represent that - the atomic, tradable unit of the subscription economy - is the revenue contract.
This is the first step of the Pipe thesis: the revenue contract is the atomic unit. It’s the closest thing there is to revenue itself, and the smallest possible black box you can trade.
They can work together. Pipe isn’t competitive with Venture Capital! They both strengthen each other. Being able to trade revenue with investors and platforms means you can raise less equity, and take less dilution down the road. And having a strong equity base means you can access that lower-cost capital, and add a bit of leverage by trading revenue, with focus and confidence."
https://danco.substack.com/p/pipe-it-platforms-funding-and-the
21. Also bullish on the emerging startup ecosystem in Latin America. Part of the Digital Decolonization trend. Just ordered the book "Viva the Entrepreneur"
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-different-viva-entrepreneur-latin-america-schroeder/
22. Chinese SciFi is optimistic and this is why China seems to have a much more utopian and pro-technology culture than the western world.
"But in the past few years—a period that has seen China’s sci-fi authors elevated to the status of New Age prophets—Chen’s own career has become an object in the fun-house mirror. After The Waste Tide garnered widespread attention at home and abroad, reviewers began praising Chen as the “William Gibson of China,” and the tech industry has embraced him as a kind of oracle. An institute run by AI expert and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee’s company has even developed an algorithm capable of writing fiction in the author’s voice.
In hindsight, the ascendancy of sci-fi in Chinese literature seems almost inevitable. After all, walking the streets of Beijing today can feel like inhabiting a cyberpunk fiction: Bright yellow shared bikes line the streets, facial recognition cameras hang on street lamps, robot servers deliver hot-pot dinners to your table. Liu Cixin has compared present-day China to the US after World War II, “when science and technology filled the future with wonder.”
https://www.wired.com/story/science-fiction-writer-china-chen-qiufan/
23. This is really an impressive yield. Ukrainian real estate property.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a9cj9cgiwE
24. Fascinated by these globetrotting adventure capitalists. Going to & investing where most business people are wary of.
"In many cases, there is a wide discrepancy between what one can read in Western media and the realities on the ground. Western media is afflicted by groupthink from a class of similarly educated people.
I have absolutely no issue doing deals and investing in “risky” markets such as Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Nicaragua, and African countries emerging from civil war. I firmly believe that with good legal support risk is actually quite minimal."
https://investorstory.co/how-i-invest-in-real-estate-in-emerging-markets/
25. Low profile is the only way to go.
"In the new world, you do not need the approval of large numbers of people. You only need a few close friends/family members and they don’t need to know your net worth. No one does. In fact, there is always going to be a “richer” person in the world so you’re effectively playing a losing game.
Take a step back and ask yourself “Why do I want people to know I am rich?”. If you ask this enough you will come to the no-BS conclusion, which is that you’re insecure.
If you’re a public figure, you also inherit the following: death threats to your family. Death threats to you. Potential for serious violence particularly after the COVID-19 global recession. Potential for additional security attacks (people will find all your personal information and go straight into attack mode). So on and so forth."
https://wallstreetplayboys.com/the-status-disease/
26. "Love it or hate it, self-care has ballooned into a billion-dollar industry. At one end of the spectrum, exercise, meditation, and journaling help proponents find balance. Meanwhile, at the other extreme, astrology, tarot cards, and healing crystals help disciples find meaning.
Similarly, the HPL (High-Performance Lifestyle) is tapping into meaning. Filling a void left by the collapse of traditional institutions and the changing definition of masculinity, self-mastery has become the holy grail. In HPL circles, those pursuits include stoicism, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, big-game hunting, archery, kettlebells, surfing, contrast therapy, intermittent fasting, and psychedelics."
https://insider.fitt.co/high-performance-lifestyle/
27. WOWZA! 95 Billion dollars! I would love to get my hands on some secondary in Stripe. Super exciting company.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/14/stripe-closes-600m-round-at-a-95b-valuation/
28. The Global South aka Emerging Markets is where all the future growth is going to be & SE Asia is leading the charge with Latam & South Asia & Africa coming soon after.
"In other words, something interesting is happening in Southeast Asia. Figuring out what it is will take some digging. But given the vast diversity in characteristics and outcomes among these countries, it seems unlikely that the answer will lie in some strategic industrial policy or change in resource prices. Instead, something appears to be lifting up the economy of the entire region to grow. That could be China, but my guess is that it’s going to be bigger than China.
My guess is that it’s an agglomeration effect — a function of the general clustering of supply chains and product demand in Asia. That would also explain why Bangladesh, which is located very close by, also got invited to the party."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/checking-in-on-the-global-south
29. Clubhouse stepping up their platform game.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/14/22330281/clubhouse-accelerator-creators-davison-app
30. "Despite its enormous population and geographic size, California’s government is highly decentralized–and the exact same thing could be said about the United States in general. That dynamic, according to the Guardian, favors pandemics over people because it ensures that protocols, policies and messaging will be inconsistent from region to region and city to city. That regional inconsistency sowed confusion, misinformation and resentment in California and the country, which intensified the already roiling distrust and tension between pro- and anti-lockdown forces."
https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/economy/california-taught-tension-between-covid-safety-economy/
31. "As we continue to discuss in this letter, long term holders have a significant advantage over the weak handed short term traders. Humans are emotional. We succumb to fear and greed. But if you have deep conviction in a thesis and refuse to allow the short term price movements to affect your decision making, you will do fairly well over the long term."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-was-the-safe-haven-asset
32. "We have leapt over the fence marking society of the past and are racing with increasing speed towards our inevitable future. What we can expect from looking ahead is near constant change. Lifestyles of adaptability and willingness to try new things will do well in this environment. And despite the rapid breakdown of traditional institutions that is inevitable from such rapid change, the future and what it means for society looks bright."
https://dougantin.com/the-digital-age-paradigm-shift/
33. "Some people are natural maniacs, and you can’t ask for the maniac parts you like without realizing there are maniac parts that might backfire."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/natural-maniacs/
34. I have to admit I did enjoy the original Justice League movie......(don't cancel me!)
But look forward to checking out the new recut version.
https://www.vox.com/22325749/snyder-cut-review-justice-league-hbo-max
35. I've been fascinated by Biotech for a very long time since my friend Ryan Bethencourt eased me into it.
This is a good guide for those interested in what I consider one of the most important sectors in the next few decades (outside of energy).
"There’s something unique happening in biotech right now. Some once in a generation moment where low cost of capital, a century of maturing discoveries, and a global pandemic collide."
https://minutes.substack.com/p/biotech-for-the-biocurious
36. "But it was the rise of the consumer Internet in the 1990s, and especially the popularization of the social web starting around 2007, that allowed scenes to break free of the limits of local geography and time zones. No longer did interest groups have to find enough members willing to drive to a specific place at a specific time. They could self-organize online and become massive networks with incredible buying power, socializing power, and even political power.
Online scenes now attract most of our discretionary attention and social energy. They stream into our living rooms from unknown locations in cyberspace to every Internet-connected device.
We are likewise now discovering that it is easier to find and hang out with people who have similar interests, tastes, and goals online than in the physical world. It is no accident that, in the COVID era, many people are reversing the trend of urbanization and moving to larger dwellings far from cities. We can now access everything and everyone we need online."
https://fortelabs.co/blog/welcome-to-renaissance-2/
37. Another example of being penny wise, pound foolish. The EU does not look good here. 2021 shaping up to be another lost year for the region.
“The price difference is macroeconomically irrelevant,” Wolfgang Münchau, head of the London-based Eurointelligence think tank and a frequent critic of Brussels initiatives, wrote over the weekend. The potential impact of the pursuit of low prices isn’t. If the EU suffers longer lockdowns because other buyers are willing to move faster and pay more, the “indirect effect of that short-sighted policy will be massive.
The EU’s slower, more deliberative and cooperative effort may have cost precious time, and precious lives.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-struggle-pfizer-biontech-astrazeneca/
38. I do like Squarespace and am a proud customer.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/16/squarespace-raises-300m-at-staggering-10b-valuation/
39. "The more that I spoke to this investor, the more it became obvious that much of his success was driven by doing things differently. He didn’t want to speak with inferior investors for fear of ruining his advantage. He also didn’t want to simply be an inbound-based investor either. The second comment that stuck out to me was that the best investments of his career were all the product of a hunting expedition.
The investor would sit down and look at an industry or vertical. They would map out who the best company in the space was and then reach out to the founders. The goal was not to invest in a specific person or company, but simply invest in the market opportunity. The best way to invest in that market opportunity was to find the best company pursuing it."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/differentiated-investing-is-an-advantage
40. This is a sad part of America. For the record, this also exists in UK and Canada too. I will admit I've had way more racist comments in Canada against me versus in America. But thanks to Trump and the cursed CCP this is coming to fore again in USA.
"The attacks Asian Americans are facing across the country are bringing the dialogue about longstanding prejudices to the fore. And as Americans are having more frank conversations about race and institutional biases, they aren’t as easy to ignore as they have been in the past."
https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/4/21/21221007/anti-asian-racism-coronavirus-xenophobia
41. "People are reacting to a broken system and they’re turning to grassroots communities to do so. The 2020s will be shaped by these cultural forces—the search for belonging and the reclaiming of agency—and where they intersect to take down centralized power and build a new architecture for American capitalism."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/the-memeification-of-american-capitalism
42. "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/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/