Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 20th, 2021
“The more self-discipline you have, the more you do the things you should do, the happier your future self will be.”--Maxime Lagacé
"There is now a global movement to make just-in-time supply chains more robust and better able to absorb shocks. This means holding larger inventories and buffer stocks. It will add to costs. This is inflationary.
It remains to be seen if this truly becomes the new norm. Maybe it is just talk. Time will tell. But one thing is sure. The improvement of logistics supply chains over the past several decades was a huge efficiency driver and a deflationary force. If this has reversed, we can all expect to pay higher prices for goods and services in future."
https://globalvaluehunter.com/what-i-learned-trip-to-dar-es-salaam-port/
2. Lots of wisdom here. The ever burgeoning socialist class in the western world will hate this but F--k them!
"Your 20s are not the best years of your life. If you live life correctly the general path should be: 20s pain and suffering, 30s tons of excitement change and income, 40s repeat 30s but your body slows down a bit and then 50s = do whatever you like."
"You owe it to society to become a producer. In fact, if you have the skills to become a producer you’re doing society a *favor* by being selfish in the *beginning*. You are going to create jobs and opportunities for other people. You owe it to yourself and to the country you live in to become a successful individual. That will generate the most value for society over the long-term."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/five-lies-that-can-ruin-your-life
3. This is a horrifying & sad story. Feel bad for Venezuelans and what happens when you have incompetent corrupt socialists in power. This country used to be RICH.
"In 2014, after oil prices peaked, my country’s economy started shrinking, and it hasn’t really stopped. The basics of modern urban life have collapsed there, one after the other. There are power or data blackouts constantly, often multiple times a day, making my online freelancing gigs almost impossible to keep. Even when the internet works, it’s excruciatingly slow. There’s no public transport, sometimes there’s no cooking gas, and even the most basic of foods, like bananas, keep getting more and more expensive."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/fleeing-venezuela-b71
4. "Worldbuilding is when an idea or theory is taken from a concept and created through action. Most people think of fiction writing when they hear the term worldbuilding. An author has a vision of a world in their mind and communicates that vision through written word.
But worldbuilding is more than creating works of fiction.
People become worldbuilders when they use their time, energy, and resources to build belief systems, processes, and companies to shape the world to make their vision a reality.
Worldbuilders are entrepreneurs. They create products, services, and/or concepts to shape the world with solutions to build the world a certain way."
https://dougantin.com/prototyping-the-network-state/
5. "A Nomad Capitalist is someone who is pioneering a different kind of life.
Spending time in vastly different parts of the world both expands and transforms your ability to relate to the world. It is a lifestyle full of both adventure and work, freedom and discipline, passionate connection and sometimes deep loneliness—but always LEARNING."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2017/02/06/22-things-nomad-capitalist-taught-me/
6. "This is the beauty of a programmatic, transparent, fixed monetary policy. Bitcoin is literally the wealth protection that billions of people around the world need. While the market manipulators are pretending to save the world, they are actually running trillion dollar marketing campaigns for the true wealth inequality solution.
I wish the market interventionists would knock it off. I wish they would let the free markets do what they do best. I wish they would stop inflating asset prices artificially and punishing the bottom 45% of Americans who hold cash. But they won’t. So this is why we bitcoin."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-market-manipulators-are-laughing
7. "I think Americans’ terror of automation is another example of the scarcity mindsetinto which we’ve fallen in recent decades. Like timid mice guarding our last crumb of cheese, we look to any change as a source of dread rather than a source of opportunity.
But we don’t have to be like that. Believing in technological progress is about believing in the potential of humankind. Do we really think that QR code ordering in restaurants will be the innovation that finally renders humans obsolete? Do we really think that wandering around a restaurant saying “Are you still working on that?” was the last thing that the average human being was good for, and after this we’ll never be able to find something new for people to do?
I don’t believe that. I believe we’re only at the beginning of our quest to unlock average people’s true economic potential."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-virtuous-cycle-of-worker-power
8. This is such a great podcast. SO good. The All in Podcast!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSB93bkB4NQ
9. All founders should read this. How to manage your lawyers while closing your fundraise.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RomeenSheth/status/1403825413663637504
10. This is the macro behind all the money flooding into PE & VC.
"Here’s the bottom line: as interest rates increase, we should expect venture capital investment to regress. When the cost of capital is low and yields on cash are small, investors seek greater risk to attain a return. As the risk-free rate on Treasuries increases, market forces should engender enough friction to pull venture investment from the stratosphere into the troposphere or below."
https://tomtunguz.com/10-year-yield-and-venture-capital/
11. This is so eye-opening. Why Lumber is so damn expensive right now.
https://thehustle.co/why-is-lumber-so-expensive-right-now/
12. This is a pretty big deal. Great signal for EU tech ecosystem. The Nordic startups are the secret that is not really a secret.
https://sifted.eu/articles/thiel-sno-ventures/
13. "Paul Tudor Jones is a legend of Wall Street. He has spent the last few decades navigating financial markets better than almost anyone else on the planet. His comments yesterday really drove home the point that a transparent, programmatic monetary policy would not only be attractive to the average citizen looking to protect their wealth, but it would also be attractive to macroeconomic traders looking to grow their wealth aggressively as well."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/paul-tudor-jones-explains-bitcoins
14. "It feels as though all the rules of early-stage investing are getting rewritten in real time and that kind of unbounded change is something I’m incredibly excited to be a part of. But, as I explore those possible futures, I keep coming back to the above Bezos quote as a reminder that the uncertainty that comes with unbounded possibilities for change have a counterbalance in the things that don’t."
https://bryce.medium.com/whats-not-going-to-change-9a5951c8fc57
15. Good stuff.
“A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable,” writes Savodnik. “In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.”
Are you wondering how to manage the in-house team of cultural authoritarians you inadvertently hired? Well, allow me to be so bold as to make a few humble suggestions.
One possible approach is refusing to tolerate psychotic behavior in the workplace initiated on your time, with your money. Speaking of money, if you have the resources, literally paying activists to leave is a now proven, effective strategy (thank you, Brian).
But the easiest thing to do remains the simple act of never hiring employees primarily focused on niche political activism in the first place."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-talking
16. Super proud of Bogdan Litescu & the team. Plant an App is doing awesome, for me the great thing is the revenue & customer growth, not the fundraising.
17. Not sure how I feel about this.
"Compared to some other brands, Big Oil has made relatively small forays into the world of Instagram marketing—but if history is any indication, they’re just getting started. Almonte’s post—with the accompanying whiplash of seeing a company partly responsible for the climate crisis sponsoring a trip to a place greatly endangered by climate change–could become the norm.
History has shown that fossil fuel companies have mastered the art of quiet persuasion, and they’ll almost certainly join in the battle for our time and attention on social media.
Earther has found at least two oil and gas companies—Shell and Phillips 66—have launched campaigns with different types of Instagram influencers."
https://gizmodo.com/the-big-oil-instagram-influencers-are-here-1847091004
18. I'm excited for this new emerging and frankly better future.
"Independent work aligns with the way that younger workers approach work—as entrepreneurs and investors. They’re tired of renting their time to corporations: they watched their parents and grandparents do that, only to be burned in the 2008 recession and again in the 2020 pandemic.
Corporations aren’t reliable; corporations don’t have your interests at heart. Younger workers would rather dictate their own fortunes through hustle and grit. They want to own equity that appreciates, and they understand that equity is the path to true wealth creation.
The disaggregation of work is about that control—that ability to control your destiny. You reclaim your agency from “the system” and you control your own career arc. You aren’t a businessman, donning your suit and tie and commuting on the Metro North and dreaming of the day you get to stick it to the man. Those days are over. You’re a business, man."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/im-a-business-man
19. Good life advice for men.
https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/alexander-krafts-9-rules-for-living-elegantly/
20. The best & ultimate combo of Media meets VC Solo Capitalist. Congrats Harry Stebbings!
“A lot of times a Series B or C [stage startup] approaches us — or their investors do — and say, ‘Hey, we’re thinking about distribution, the content machine, the founder brand…’ and then I write a $3-5m cheque in a $30-50m round,” he explains. “It’s a small part, but it’s super collaborative, and I bring something very different.”
https://sifted.eu/articles/harry-stebbings-140m-funds/
21. "The common misconception about Russia is that Putin controls all, sees all, knows all. He doesn’t. His has been a regime reliant on the buy-in of interest groups, oligarchs, and powerful clans within law-enforcement agencies. Behind the scenes, decision makers from among the siloviki and the technocrats have battled it out as analysts have sought to guess who has been on top and how deeply tensions have run. Putin is no liberal, but he himself has described his government as divided between “Westernizers” and “people of the soil.
Not any longer. The people of the soil have won. They monopolize nearly every aspect of Putin’s government and are enforcing their will—his will—on Russian society in a way that was previously unimaginable.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/06/joe-biden-vladimir-putin/619209/
22. “There’s a tendency for people to suffer with ‘delayed life syndrome’,” says Serov, meaning that they are only preparing for “real life” to start. Often, this comes from a desire to move away. But, for many this doesn’t happen. “They’re not living for the moment.”
23. I'd agree with this assessment. Not a value judgement but it really could have been much worse in 2020. (not that I think majority of city and state governments have done a good job at all during the pandemic, most have been pretty awful & incompetent).
"That bold decisive action on the part of the U.S. government, which set aside our usual stinginess and skepticism of welfare spending, was instrumental in staving off economic devastation for millions of vulnerable people. American ingenuity and determination was very important, of course, but we couldn’t have come through the pandemic nearly this strong without a helping hand from our government."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/covid-doom-predictions-that-never
24. Hmmm.....this seems like a good opportunity. I love Japan and am planning on spending more time there as well so this could be interesting.
https://japaninsider.com/transform-japans-abandoned-property-into-your-dream-home/
25. "Set goals. Set deadlines. Stick with it. Be disciplined. Be free.
Do this for 6 months and you’ll be amazed at the results.
Discipline is the path to freedom. This sounds paradoxical which is why freedom is so elusive."
https://benjamingjw.com/2019/03/25/what-is-the-path-to-freedom/
26. Canada is sadly not immune to the brain damaged Woke movement. #DownwithWOKEmovement
27. HAVAH Nagila! Congrats Itai Damti & the Unit team.
28. No surprise. Singapore is the top entrepôt of Asia by far.
"As the coronavirus pandemic hammers Southeast Asia and political turmoil threatens Hong Kong, the city has become a safe harbor for some of the region's wealthiest tycoons and their families."
29. "The biggest divide, though we don’t often talk about it, might be between knowledge workers and other workers; between those who benefit from the spillovers of ideas and capital that arise in superstar cities, and those who will do just as well living in the exurbs. Knowledge clusters have reshaped the entire geography of the nation; this has led to a divergence of class interests between the residents of the exurb and the denizens of the megalopolis.
Class in America is thus so complex, so multidimensional and fragmented, that it requires an enormous amount of cultural capital just to navigate."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/social-class-in-america-719
30. I do like Hungary!
https://mailchi.mp/cf9fdb2aa515/escape-plan-in-hungary
31. This is the scary case for why covid pandemic may be with us for a very long time as it mutates and evolves and spreads from one region to another because we can't vaccinate or eradicate it quickly enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha6yUxze1vk
32. "Most people are slow to notice and accept change. If you can just be faster than most people at seeing what’s going on, updating your model of the world, and reacting accordingly, it’s almost as good as seeing the future."
https://jasoncrawford.org/precognition
33. "I believe pessimists make better operators. I, no joke, sit awake at night and imagine everything that can go wrong in my firm(s). Then I start emailing people to ensure it won’t. On a livestream last night with two other entrepreneurs, someone asked about our management styles. The other two panelists gave Hallmark Channel answers about helping people find their purpose and encouraging failure and some other bullshit. Then it was my turn.
“I’m fucking all over everybody all the fucking time.”
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-reluctant-optimist/
34. This is immensely stupid and goes against the science. BUT What do we expect from gutless government bureaucrats?
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/us-canada-travel-limits-extended-5079060/
35. I love this idea of a "Digital Bugout Bag." A must in the emerging new world.
"Most people don’t need to worry about bugging out. But a Sovereign Individual knows that an ability to exercise the tech enabled exit can require leaving a country. And because of this, it makes sense to think through and explore your options for moving abroad. How might your life be impacted? What can you do to create insurance policies that ensure the continuity of your lifestyle? Most importantly, how can you ensure that as many of your families wants and needs are seen to?
Reorganizing your life to a remote oriented society requires a fundamentally different approach. If nothing else, it’s a healthy activity to think through."
https://dougantin.com/how-to-think-about-a-digital-bug-out-bag/
36. "Meme Investing , like SPAC’s are here to stay in the new world of retail investing/trading. It is a weird by product of the internet as power shifts ..you can hate it, ignore it or figure out how to harness it. I choose to harness it."
https://howardlindzon.com/meme-investing-the-fundamentals-are-coming/
37. The concept of the North Star metric is crucial for every founder to understand.
https://davidcummings.org/2021/06/19/define-the-north-star-metric/
38. VERY Interesting.
"Chinese consumer tech giants are pursuing owning the funnel through a combination of buy, build or partnerships (investments). Each of them starts from their domain of expertise (Tencent's WeChat is traffic, Alibaba's Taobao is conversion, and Bytedance is also traffic), before moving either up or down the funnel. Once you consider the pieces they need to acquire, their next move is no longer a surprise.
Generally, it is easier to move down the funnel than up since traffic players already control the users’ attention. Users move from low intent browsing to high intent buying rather than the other way round. This is also why Alibaba's acquisitions tend to struggle. Aside from the difficulties of integration, Alibaba is more often than not trying to obtain traffic from its acquisitions, whereas Tencent is giving traffic to their partners. The differing dynamic is stark."
https://lillianli.substack.com/p/owning-the-funnel
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
“Cause My Life is Dope and I Do Dope Sh--t!”
Kanye West was reported to have said this. I think this is such an amazing quote and something I’ve taken to heart. I do NOT like Kanye as a person but boy is he an interesting, creative and accomplished individual in both music, fashion, design and business. There is so much to learn from him.
I think the point of the quote is that if you want to be interesting, go do interesting things. Even if something does not personally seem attractive to you, it still might be worth trying at least once. I’ve been pleasantly surprised far too many times in my life on this front. I’ve also been unpleasantly surprised, but now I know. In fact, trying and doing is the only way to find out.
Have interesting hobbies, play sports, go travel to interesting places (once the pandemic is over), eat different kinds of foods, read interesting books. DO SOMETHING. Get real life experience and develop a point of view, which is your hopefully very different take on the world. As my friend Justin Mares tweeted “Money can’t buy being interesting.”
My biggest gripe with most people is that they do not have a well thought through opinions or ideas. They just follow what everyone else is doing. Nothing wrong with this in the beginning as you start off doing whatever it is that you are doing: writing, Instagram, Startups, Art. But you will need to develop your own point of view and take on things.
There is this quote from this movie: “We are your Friends” where an older successful EDM DJ takes a budding young kid DJ under his wing and mentors him. He tells him:
“Any successful artist has this moment where they stop being an admirer and they find their signature. Sounds have soul. Build them from scratch. Find new ones. Get your head out of that laptop and start listening to what the world's trying to tell you.”
This is how you differentiate yourself from the pack and why Jerry Garcia’s famous quote has so much resonance.
“Don’t Be the Best, Be the Only”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Eat the Frog As Early as Possible in Your Career
Mark Twain once said:
“If the first thing you do in the morning is to eat the frog, then you can continue your day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that will happen to you all day”
Productivity expert David Allen used this quote to talk about how you should do the hardest thing first thing when you get up in the morning. There is a career version of this too. When you are starting off your career, you should volunteer and try to do the most complex and most challenging thing. In a Big company, take the toughest projects that no one wants. Or join the startup over taking that prestigious big company.
Why would you do that? Well, for one thing you will learn A LOT. You will exercise mental muscles that you never knew you had. It helps you build personal momentum. And whatever happens you will be better off than where you started even if things don’t work out.
I experienced this at Yahoo!. I took on everything they asked me to do and asked for more. I was lucky enough to be in a fast growing company. But I was doubly lucky to end up in what was at that time an ignored but fast growing part of the business. International growth. Then I also volunteered to take on the online marketing side of FIFAWorld Cup 2002. That made my career there and I was off to the races. It was a brutal, gruelling 100+ hours a week for a period of 10 months. But boy was it worth it. This set the foundation for my rise through the organization over the next 10 years.
The project gave me exposure to key people at all levels throughout the organization. The relationships I built throughout the organization served me well in all the executive roles I held later on. It allowed me to push through projects others could not. You also never know who will notice you either. My work got me in front of most of the C-level leadership team at Yahoo!
Many of the most successful people I know in technology, on Wall Street or any other industry shared a common road. They took the hard, unsexy route (at that time) and grinded it out. Eating the frog early allowed them to get their reps in, measure themselves against the best and acquire the skills & experience faster than their peers. This allowed them to take advantage of the big opportunities that came their way later on.
To paraphrase Indiana Jones: “It’s not about the years, it’s about the mileage”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 13th, 2021
“Discipline is choosing between what you want now, and what you want most.”-- Abraham Lincoln
"In software development, there is a concept called “technical debt.” It describes the costs companies pay when they choose to build software the easy (or fast) way instead of the right way, cobbling together temporary solutions to satisfy a short-term need. Over time, as teams struggle to maintain a patchwork of poorly architectured applications, tech debt accrues in the form of lost productivity or poor customer experience.
Our nation’s cybersecurity defenses are laboring under the burden of a similar debt. Only the scale is far greater, the stakes are higher and the interest is compounding. The true cost of this “cybersecurity debt” is difficult to quantify."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/04/the-rise-of-cybersecurity-debt/
2. There is very much to take in here. But these trends are the future. Worth a reading the whole thing.
"The methods of government and societal organization of the late industrial and early information age are failing in the digital age. And the fallouts from this narrative erosion are leading to conflict and a sense of future shock. The people and jobs that rely on past societal structures create a populist push for nationalism. While digital age workers push for neomedieval and globalist institutions. The needs of these two divergent classes of people coming into increasing conflict with one another.
As this conflict grows – we can expect to see more us versus them narratives."
https://dougantin.com/8-technology-trends-that-define-the-digital-age/
3. It is noisy in Micro-VC land these days. But ultimately this is good for founders & the larger ecosystem in long run.
"So while micro VC funds may not be as prolific as they seem, if anything, many in the venture industry would welcome more. In a way startups themselves, they take advantage of many of the same tactics as the companies they’re backing to make a splash. While being the noisiest fund in the market isn’t the best investment strategy on its own, no one seems eager to turn the volume down."
4. This is quite insightful of why the USA has become such a scary place in last few years. I've definitely felt it change since 2016 for sure.
"So America has created artificial scarcities of tangible goods like housing, education, and access to the country, and intangibles like a sense of belonging. Not all of our scarcities are artificial, of course — high-paying jobs at top companies like Google are limited due to the superstar firm phenomenon. But for the most part, the things Americans are scrabbling to take from each other are things whose supply we have chosen to limit.
I’m not saying that this artificial scarcity is the only reason America has shifted toward survival values like personal violence, ethnocentrism, and distrust. But I think it’s a contributing factor. We’re taking a country that should be a land of plenty, the ultimate positive-sum game, and we’re turning it into a zero-sum
game."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-scarcity-mindset
5. I love Mexico too just like Rock: it holds a special place in my heart. Can't wait to go back soon.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/the-rock-dwayne-johnson-tequila-mexico/index.html
6. There is so much good advice here for young people. Wish I had this when I was in my twenties. Whole thing is a Must read.
"nothing prevents you from starting a basic online business that makes even $30-50K US Token per year. You could do something low risk like reselling products or becoming a copy writer. You could even attempt to scale out something on Fiverr.
In the end, you should become more optimistic. In your 20s and even 30s, you have a ton of energy. There is no need to take your foot off the gas as you can use it to build a bigger base/foundation. The future is brighter than it has ever been before and you can de-risk your future while simultaneously increasing your income. It is a no brainer!"
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/personal-finance-and-collegeeducation
7. Not sure why people are surprised. This is the way the US tax system is supposed to work. It favors business owners & investors, NOT employees. Not saying this is good or bad, its just way it was designed. This should be a wake up call to everyone in America, that being "YOU, INC" is critical.
"America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell."
8. The private space race is on!
9. Net net: don't have a hot wallet.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/07/politics/colonial-pipeline-ransomware-recovered/index.html
10. "Our media’s reliance on its in-group web of trust is entirely human, and almost all of us rely on something similar. I would never have been early to the danger of Covid-19, for example, had I not trusted people like Balaji Srinivasan, my opinion of whom was and is enough to make me take a closer look. I think this kind of trust is useful, and in any case probably impossible to entirely adapt away from. We’re wired to love each other, and belief is a bond between men as much as it is between men and ideas.
But in this new and rapid media environment we live inside, our disembodied schools of talking heads on Twitter are bigger than we’re built to manage, and we have wildly exposed ourselves to any bad faith actor smart enough to hack the dynamic."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/zone-of-repulsion
11. “In our role as a wizened witness tree, we have been asked repeatedly over the past year, ‘Is this worse than the dot-com bubble?’” he wrote. “We have tried to be cautious when answering, and there are many ways to compare the two eras, but now our answer is yes, it is worse. The main difference: the anger.”
12. This is a great perspective. Play your own game.
"When startups face these big decisions, they're often framed in the most high-stakes way possible. One path could lead to success and riches. The other to failure and ruin.
The reality is a bit more nuanced.
In most cases, both paths are viable. The key is heading the direction that makes the most sense for your mission and business model.
And remembering, too, that your competitors face their own forks in the road. Depending on the choices they make, they may cease to be competitors at all.
The internet contains multitudes. Even for digital sports publications, there are many paths to success.
So don't worry about the paths not taken. Focus on the one you're on."
https://davenemetz.com/sliding-doors/
13. "We have had proof of just how good networks are at solving modern problems. I don't think we can go back."
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/malcolm-gladwell-post-pandemic-covid-optimism-adobe-summit.html
14. I think YC was right in these situations & within their rights to kick them off community board. These founders broke privacy policy of community.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/09/does-what-happens-at-yc-stay-at-yc/
15. These are very good lessons from the pandemic.
https://thenextweb.com/news/5-lessons-post-pandemic-startup-ceo
16. Spot on. Hedonic Adoption is a killer of financial freedom.
"As I started to design my life around working less, I also had a calmness and contentedness re-emerge in my life. I stopped drinking alcohol, craving expensive meals and opting for the nicer arrangements while traveling. I no longer “deserved” them after a long work-week. Nor did I need them.
I’ve come to believe that “financial security” as most people frame it is a myth. The problem with this idea is that there is never a number that is defined as “enough.” While some in the financial independent, retire early (FIRE) crowd are are literally defining how much is “enough”, it doesn’t seem to resonate with most people. Yet this community is often spot in with diagnosing the problem.
We are owned by our jobs and our stuff, not the other way around."
https://think-boundless.com/lifestyle-creep-frugal-cut-expenses-by-75/
17. "With startups staying private longer and growing larger, Seed and Series A venture investors have come across an interesting dilemma: with limited reserves to follow on across multiple financing rounds, what should they do with their pro ratas in their breakout portfolio companies?
Enter the opportunity fund: a new fund structure soaring in popularity among early-stage GPs that offers an elegant solution to this problem. Done properly, an opportunity fund — sometimes known as a “select fund”, “follow-on fund” or “growth fund” — offers fund limited partners (LPs) the prospect of doubling down on emerging winners in a fund’s portfolio."
https://fjlabs.medium.com/opportunity-funds-3f500b9017da
18. I can't lie. I'm excited to see this. Back to my childhood!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81wyj65SJIo
19. "My bromide: Be warriors, not wokesters.
Be mentally and physically … warriors. Lift heavy weights and run long distances, in the gym and in your mind. Many tasks you’ll be asked to perform early in your career will be tedious. Don’t do what you are asked to do, but what you are capable of doing. Think of it as boot camp before being sent to battle, as there are millions of other warriors fighting to win the same regions of prosperity.
Get strong, really strong. You should be able to walk into a room and believe you could overpower, outrun, or outlast every person in the room.
The most rewarding things in life — relationships, work, kids — are all really fucking stressful."
https://www.profgalloway.com/advice-to-grads-be-warriors-not-wokesters/
20. The lockdowns have been a travesty & debacle across the so called free world.
"Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working classwere the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history."
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/
21. Farmland makes sense as an investment. Works for Bill Gates.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22528659/bill-gates-largest-farmland-owner-cascade-investments
22. Scary scenario here. We need to be prepared for China unmanned platforms in war.
23. Incredibly wise article. We should all pay attention.
"Today’s economy is good at creating two things: wealth, and the ability to show off wealth. Part of that is great, because saying “I want that too” is such a powerful motivator of progress. Yet the point stands: We might have higher incomes, more wealth, and bigger homes – but it’s all so quickly smothered by inflated expectations.
That, in many ways, has been the defining characteristic of the last 40 years of economic growth. And Covid-19 pushed the trend into hyperdrive.
Whether it’s savings or investing, getting the goalpost to stop moving – or at least move slower than your income grows – is the only way to both be happy with what you have and ensure you don’t push beyond the limits of what you can handle."
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/goalpost/
24. Lots of painful nuggets of truth in here.
"To change you’ve got to understand that your beliefs aren’t just good because you have them. Your head, my head, and everyone else’s head are stuffed with inherently broken and self-destructive beliefs that have no business being there. Until you understand that, you can’t begin to let them go because you mistake your beliefs for actual reality. There’s objective reality and how you perceive it and they aren’t the same thing.
If we mistake our beliefs for actual reality, those beliefs run us like rats through an invisible maze. They limit our actions and our range of responses."
But surviving tigers and surviving the modern world of social media and tremendous abundance are two very different things. And the resilience of our beliefs can really hurt us because they tell us not to look to closely. At the deepest level we don’t want to change our beliefs because it feels like we might die.
That helps us when we believe looking both ways before crossing the street is a good idea but it’s not so good when we think we’re worthless or that we’ll never find someone who loves us how we want to be loved."
25. Wholeheartedly agree here. The power of Sabbaticals.
"Taking a break is scary but from what I’ve seen it’s probably one of the simplest ways to grapple with one of people’s biggest fears: that they didn’t live a life that they were capable of. Taking a break is a way to take a different perspective of your life, remember the things that mattered to you, and sometimes simply rest and be with the ones that matter to you."
"We are moving from what Seth Godin has argued is a competition of “being more ordinary, more standard, and cheaper” to “being faster, more remarkable, and more human.”
https://boundless.substack.com/p/the-case-for-sabbaticals-144
26. Good stuff takes time (and consistency).
"Working for yourself requires a tectonic mindset shift. A shift that flies in the face of society’s deeply programmed views of progress and achievement.
When you work for yourself your growth will be very, very, very slow."
https://radreads.co/passion-economy-secret/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Pitfalls of Operators as Investors
It’s become a widely lauded trope in Silicon Valley that Venture Capital is changing and that the best investors used to be founders or operators. I have written about this many times and generally think it’s a good thing for any tech ecosystem. It is a very helpful thing having someone who has built and run a company sitting on your cap-table.
But one observation from personal experience is that the best operators aren’t always the best investors. When I ran the core 500 Startups Accelerator in SF, I had a fairly large team who helped me. Many of them were accomplished and experienced founders who were incredibly helpful to my startup founders. But I would say in many cases, there was a direct inverse correlation to their picking abilities.
I think this happens due to several things:
1) They look at everything from an operator perspective. They literally think “this is such a great opportunity, if something goes wrong I can just come in and help fix stuff.” The problem is that as an investor, you are only an advisor & help at the edges.
2) They don’t always have a bigger picture or large enough sample set to understand or evaluate the business model or team properly
3) They are too empathetic to the founder that they overlook big flaws in business model or market size
I made all the above mistakes as an operator turned angel investor and then Venture Capitalist. Picking is one of the toughest pieces of the investing game to do well.
My angel investments and many of my early VC investments were pretty much write offs. It took me probably about 2 years or so, with lots of guidance from VC friends on the outside and at least 100 investments to really calibrate and learn the trade. At some of the better venture firms, new investors are not allowed to invest for the first year while they apprentice beside some of the more experienced hands.
In fact, historically, if you look at some of the top VCs, they weren’t founders or operators. John Doerr was a manager at Intel, Mike Moritz was a journalist. On my team, the best pickers were actually not ever founders or operators. But they had good instincts and worked on them. It also helped that we just had a lot of investments to the tune of 60-80 investments in a year, so we were able to get a good sample set fast.
Of course, just because you are a good investor, it does not mean you know how to run a startup. This is pretty self explanatory.
It’s a very rare person who is both an excellent operator and investor. Some folks who come top of mind who fit this bill are Kevin Hartz, David Sacks & my friends Mike Maples of Floodgate, Sheel Mohnot/Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures and Zach Coelius of Coelius Capital. You are very lucky to get these folks to invest and work with you. So do treasure it.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Caesar’s Palace Coup
I recently read a very entertaining and somewhat dense book by Journalists Frumes and Indap. It told the story of a massive battle among the titans of Wall Street. It was a billionaire battle between storied Private Equity firms Texas Pacific Group (TPG) & Apollo versus equally tough Hedge Funds like Elliot, Oaktree & Appaloosa with over billions of dollars at risk. A bruising & complex battle that spanned executive board rooms, court rooms & the halls of DC aided and abetted by a multitude of white shoe law firms and investment banks.
Basically TPG & Apollo ended up doing a Leveraged Buyout (LBO) of Harrah’s gambling empire and ended up overweighing them with debt to goose their returns. With the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a declining business burdened by overwhelming debt and many employee layoffs later, things get tricky when some hedge funds start to take the other side of the bet.
No one comes out looking good. To me it shows the economic battles happening around us and at levels far above us. And an African saying comes to mind “When Elephants Fight, the Grass gets trampled.”
That is literally what happened, the employees being the grass. With many of them losing their jobs and their retirement plans as a result of these machinations. Yet so many of us are ignorant of what is going on around us with technology trends on one side and globalization on the other. But ignorance is no excuse. Not in this day and age.
Growing up in Asian immigrant academic family was great for me in many ways. I gained a drive/hunger, a good work ethic & willingness to do the grunt work which has served me incredibly well. At the same time, on the negative side, I also inherited an unhealthy distrust of business, investing & sales along with the middle class scarcity mindset. The last few things I have had to unlearn over the last 2 decades, and something I am still working on.
You have to take personal responsibility for rectifying this ignorance or else you will be bracketed and regularly caught off guard by all these changes in the world. Basically, learning the bigger picture of where the world is going and how business and government actually works.
David Bailey said “The Best advice I ever got was Knowledge is Power and to keep reading.”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 6th, 2021
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”-Jim Rohn
This man is an investing legend. I read and listen to everything he says. Stan Druckenmiller, one of the Global macro greats.
https://thehustle.co/stanley-druckenmiller-q-and-a-trung-phanin/amp/
2. Really excellent fundraising advice and lessons. Big fan of this longevity company too.
https://www.celinehh.com/seed-raise-how-to
3. "A new generation of early-stage investment firms offers an alternative. "Calm funds" (CFs) seek to work with company builders that choose to play a different way. Rather than shooting the moon by pursuing growth at all costs, calm founders look to build sustainable businesses that are "default alive," meaning they don't require regular capital injections to stay alive.
While some may operate in niche markets that cap their ultimate size, many of these businesses seek to reach the same scale as VC's biggest winners. Indeed, though they're not always viewed this way, companies like Github, Atlassian, and Zapier all ran this playbook, taking in limited outside funding, or delaying it. Instead, of trying to gobble up market share unsustainably, these founders chose to secure the existence of their company early in its lifecycle.
Other less recognizable calm businesses like Wildbit, Tuple, Papertrail, and VueScan, might approach or surpass unicorn status in a venture paradigm."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding
4. Holy crap. Lesson: do NOT be a Chinese Billionaire!
5. "Traditional media has been a powerful source of accountability for centuries. In more recent years, social media has as well, as any individual can share what is actually happening. The power of both these institutions is staggering, and they serve an important function. But traditional media and social media each come with a healthy dose of misinformation, and I believe people’s trust in these institutions has been in decline in recent years.
Companies are now emerging as a third source of truth, and can create accountability when misinformation is spread via other channels.
Amazon and Netflix built their own studios, Hubspot acquired the Hustle, a16z is going direct, Stripe has Stripe Press, and many more tech companies are quickly ascending the stack from mere “content marketing” to full-on media arms, complete with editors-in-chief and original content. As Balaji Srinivasan points out, this is the mirror image of legacy media corporations hiring engineers and declaring their aspiration to become world-class tech companies. There is no distinction anymore between app, distribution, and content — everyone is going full stack."
6. A really great episode as always. All-in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZG89pDzzY
7. "If you want to ensure failure, just follow your passions with no regard to scale or income. This is a trap that the masses believe in. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. The only thing you should love is winning/being the best."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/general-life-framework-and-defi-sr
8. I've said it before. I'm a fan.
"For the many people in tech circles who once proudly considered themselves outsiders and now control some of the most powerful firms in the world, Palihapitiya embodies the kind of interloper currently in ascendance: the bitcoin millionaire, the Reddit oversharer, the arriviste who moves markets by tweeting memes.
Palihapitiya has gained notoriety by telling seductive stories of quick riches and upended hierarchies. These narratives have become such mainstays of how the technology industry sees itself that executives refer to enrapturing a roomful of people as “Chamathing the audience.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/the-pied-piper-of-spacs
9. I like the idea of the "Freedom Class" versus say Middle Class.
"A Rich Life is about FREEDOM and FLEXIBILITY. You can be rich on $50K/year if you’ve created a life where you can do the things you love — whether it’s traveling, eating sushi every week, or teaching drawing. You can also live that Rich Life on $500,000 or $5 million. And of course, more money makes it easier.
You can also have a lot of money and be drowning."
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/class-in-america/
10. Like to see things like this in other ecosystems.
"People in tech circles sometimes jokingly refer to the Shopify-affiliated angel investors collectively as the “Shopify mafia.” The term “mafia” is often used to describe the networks of current and former employees of tech companies who go on to invest in or start other companies (the PayPal mafia was one early example).
Shopify has encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit among its more than 7,000 employees, many of whom have developed deep expertise in e-commerce and a track record of working for scrappy online merchants trying to compete in a world of online shopping dominated by Amazon.
Lütke and Shopify president Harley Finkelstein “have often spoken about Shopify being the best entrepreneur school in the world,” according to Ananta."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/shopify-mafia-aims-to-become-bigger-force-in-angel-investing
11. This is the future.
"With an army of supporters, collaborators, and followers accessible with the click of the 'Tweet' button, a successful founder-creator doesn't need to chase deals.
The deals come to them."
https://davenemetz.com/founder-creator-investor/
12. Word.
"Just as by the time WW2 rolled around, the country no longer thought of German Americans as the enemy (as they had in WW1), this sort of vigorous proactive inclusion of Asian Americans in the national story can help sever the link between U.S.-China conflict and anti-Asian racism. It can help Americans understand that conflict between nations is not a race war — a clash not of civilizations or peoples, but of governments, institutions, and values.
And one of America’s core values must be that we accept and include everybody. Otherwise, what the hell are we even fighting for in the first place?"
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-to-criticize-china-without-abetting
13. "So why exactly is Russia deciding to drop the dollar in the National Wellbeing Fund? There is an element of politics at play (Putin and Biden are scheduled to meet on June 16th), but the consensus belief is that Russia is trying to mitigate the risk of sanctions and other economic pressures from the United States. While this makes sense from a risk mitigation standpoint, it may not make complete sense from an economic standpoint.
Russia is exchanging the US dollar for two other currencies that are less trusted around the world by populations. They are trading one monetary policy and political regime for two others. Some will argue that the euro and yuan are managed by economies and central bankers that are more sympathetic to Russia than the United States, but others will argue that all non-Russian ruble currencies carry similar risks."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/russia-drops-the-dollar
14. Not a fan of this guys bizarro land political views but I agree with the data points he presents on challenges China is facing. But these challenges & the CCP's frenzied reactions are what makes China so dangerous to the free world.
"The reality is that China will grow old, weak, and poor long before it can achieve its dreams of global dominance. It will be strong and powerful, to be sure, for at least the next twenty years. But it will not be long before SERIOUS cracks in their system begin to show up and threaten to topple the whole thing."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/06/the-dragons-downfall.html
15. This documentary looks amazing. Such a fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. Miss that man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEEjwRlghQ
16. "In risk disciplines, whether they are in finance, defense or technology, we are often confronted with the challenge of sensemaking. Understanding our world can only be done in retrospect with causal stories, but managing risk in real time is an exercise in acting with incomplete information. The lesson of Akira is not to fight the positive feedback loops or try to contain entropy, but to embrace it, ultimately benefiting from these societal phase changes."
https://refractor.substack.com/p/systems-thinking
17. "China’s long game is to show nations in play that applying the brand at home is forever beyond their reach, that the U.S. can’t or won’t protect them, and that Beijing’s armies of engineers can do a better job of delivering prosperity to them now than the capitalists will ever deliver in some far off future.
That’s where the real fight is, not in the South China Sea. Aircraft carriers are just targets now. The hardcore struggle for military domination is in cyberspace."
https://www.spytalk.co/p/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before
18. Is this a joke? No wonder the world is losing respect for America. WTF?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7ebqa/darth-vader-and-stormtroopers-attend-us-military-ceremony
19. Very exciting news for travelers everywhere.
“Supersonics could connect major cities as never before, vastly extend global business networks, boost American competitiveness, and enliven an industry that has been stagnating for decades,” Bloomberg’s editorial board wrote in March. “Down the road, ultrafast travel for the masses isn’t implausible.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22508975/united-supersonic-plane-concorde-boom-hermeus-virgin-nasa
20. Good daily routine here.
https://www.theproofwellness.com/rob-dyrdeks-playbook-for-optimizing-your-life
21. Go Bangladesh!
"All those skeptics should take a look at Bangladesh. The compact but populous South Asian country has quietly been powering ahead using a very traditional-looking growth model. A Bloomberg article recently reported that Bangladesh has now surpassed both India and Pakistan in terms of GDP per capita. That’s an astonishing milestone. In purchasing power parity terms, India is still ahead, but the gap is closing."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/bangladesh-is-the-new-asian-tiger
22. Cousin Greg!
"His groundedness, as I read it at least, can be chalked up to a piece of advice given to him by Daniel Petrie, the director of his first movie, a made-for-TV melodrama called Walter And Henry, when he was just 12 years old. It was extremely simple, a comment that most children his age would have shrugged off as the allure of fame and money drew them deeper and deeper into the mechanism of Hollywood. To paraphrase, it was: don’t let acting and fame become the crux of your wellbeing. But Braun took it seriously, even as he watched his teenage costars, including Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, become superstars.
He has learned to find his self-worth in things apart from the approval of others, an impressive achievement in an increasingly gamified entertainment industry. “I do love when people love the show,” he says, “but if it makes me feel so much better about myself that someone said this to me, I think I need to work on my self-esteem more.”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/nicholas-braun-interview
23. What’s happening with mining in China. This is a good thing in the long run as miners move out of China.
24. "Unlike traditional bank accounts, which are registered under a legal name and subject to oversight, digital assets like Bitcoin and NFTs don’t have a central regulatory authority.
Crypto investors maintain their own assets using digital wallets that are only accessible via a password or a private key — a 256-bit long string of alphanumeric characters that is only known to the account holder.
Without these private keys, there is little hope of heirs ever accessing a dead loved one’s crypto holdings.
By one estimate, ~20% of all bitcoins are “lost,” meaning the wallets containing them haven’t been accessed in 5+ years. This works out to ~3.7m bitcoin, or ~$140B in capital (as of publication) — and that doesn’t include the 10k+ other cryptocurrencies on the market."
https://thehustle.co/what-happens-to-your-bitcoin-when-you-die/
25. What an amazing time to be young.
"Yu is part of a growing cohort of Gen Z investors who are beginning to make their mark on the startup ecosystem. Some of them are now old enough to work in VC firms or pursue careers as investors.
Others, like Yu, are newcomers to angel investing, as new platforms and recent regulatory changes widen the aperture of who’s eligible to participate. Like-minded young people congregate on TikTok and Twitter, where talk of startups can lead to valuable connections and deal flow. A Slack group called Gen Z VC has more than 7,000 members, many of them still in their teens.
For many of these Gen Z investors, angel investing is less about getting rich and more about participating in the startup economy for the first time."
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-your-next-angel-investor-theyre-19/
26. This is a really good sci-fi book list.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/science-fiction-novels-for-economists-7d8
27. "How else could we discover what we’re up against? After all, if SARS2 came from nature, then the biologists who were furiously studying its close relatives were, if anything, too slow and too cautious to protect us. The straightforward lesson of the pandemic would be to simply face up to the clear risk of studying dangerous, novel infectious agents in the lab. Indeed, we would be forced to redouble our efforts before SARS3 catches us off-guard.
If, on the other hand, SARS2 emerged from a lab, then the lesson is the opposite. Covid-19 would be, at the bare minimum, the direct result of our failure to heed prior warnings about the possibility of such an accident. Lab leaks are not uncommon, so making already dangerous viruses even more dangerous is a recipe for disaster. If, therefore, we want to avoid a pandemic from happening again, obviously we would need to curtail this research."
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-we-should-welcome-the-lab-leak-theory/
28. This is a pretty big deal. And why Biotech is where the action is at.
29. "We need a generation to emerge from this crisis with a commitment to being better fathers and mothers, spouses, and citizens. The fastest path to a better life is regularly assessing what we leave behind. The fastest blue-line path to a better world is more engaged parents, not a better fucking phone."
https://www.profgalloway.com/what-we-leave-behind-2/
30. "Max Benator co-created Orca (orcashop.co) as a platform-agnostic retail opportunity that allows any influencer to monetize his or her social-media following. Currently on such sites and platforms as Amazon Live, Instagram and YouTube, Orca showcases live and taped selling segments of influencers extolling the benefits and appeal of everything from K-beauty brands to kitchen essentials, fashion accessories, tech items and children’s toys."
31. Go Ham and team. Chipper Cash is crushing it. Batch 24!
"To send money across Africa used to involve going to an agent, at a kiosk, negotiating a rate and then sending money, before collecting it offline or by getting an mobile top up via the MTN network. Chipper makes it all fade away and eliminates the cost, which founder Ham Serunjohi was motivated to solve “The cost of sending money in Africa is the highest in the world”.
https://mediciglobal.substack.com/p/chippercash-is-a-diaspora-payments
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Bubble or Revolution: Why Not Both?
Bubbles in Short term, Revolution in Long term
Sahil wrote: “When millions are buying to sell: bubble.
When millions are buying to own: revolution.”
https://twitter.com/shl/status/1370798254930104323
Dotcom Boom in 1999 is a great example. Definitely a Bubble and completely imploded in 2001 as I lived through the painful aftermath. But fast forward 20 years later, the internet has been a revolution that has affected almost every business and person on the planet.
Having participated, operated and invested in numerous categories and technology markets, trends can be both. A Bubble in the short term but a game changing Revolution in the long term. Using the Gartner Hype cycle as a tool, you can pretty much chart every single major technology trend that has happened over the last 2 decades. 3D Printing, Food Delivery Startups, Bitcoin/Crypto, SaaS, Insurancetech, Autonomous Driving, SPACs & the long list goes on.
Phase 1 Innovation Trigger which has initial heat from the hardcore and fanatics
Phase 2 Peak of Inflated Excitement and Hype where everyone seems to be making a crazy amount of money. Tonnes of new startups join this category. VCs mindlessly invest, followed by Big Corporates and Wall Street.
Phase 3 Bubble Pops and we get the “Trough of Disillusionment”: All the “Get rich quick” type guys leave the market. The Media writes off the space. But the hardcore stay and continue building.
Phase 4 Slope of Enlightenment: Where the technology gets legs and starts being used by the mainstream. Clear winners emerge, a category becomes recognized by the media. People start making money again.
Phase 5 Plateau of Productivity: Everyone is using this that it just becomes standard and normalized.
Very simple, right? Simple but not always easy to execute against. These cycles happen over a very long cycle that usually ranges from 8 to 15 years.
All these steps seem really basic. But with our regular human short term-ism, goldfish-like attention spans and lack of discipline, it’s really hard to pay attention to these. We get so burned or scared by the popping of the bubble, that we choose to ignore it. Or more likely we lack the courage to act. As well, shiny new objects continue to show up and distract us with what appears to be easier or exciting things.
This is why it’s the long term players who seem to do well when it comes to the technology industry. As Naval says:
“Play Long term Games with Long term Players, All Returns in Life Come from Compound Interest in Long-Term Game”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Up in the Air
I always enjoyed watching this movie. George Clooney plays a high flying executive named Ryan whose true home is nowhere and everywhere. He spends his life as a business traveler on the road 340 days of the year. I can definitely relate to him as I have spent a career traveling all around the world for close to 19 years. (Albeit thankfully not that many days away). Many of the lessons are very relevant for all of us even if you don’t travel.
Routines:
You need a sense of routine & comfort while travelling. You need a touchstone when everything around you is different. This allows you to process the differences & acclimatize quickly. You want some change and some exoticism but not too much. It’s a balance, if you do not have some touchstones, you start to feel lost and out of control. I personally think this is one of the reasons franchises like Starbucks or McDonalds are so loved by many American business travelers. It’s a touch of the familiar. (For the record, i personally hate most American franchises and you would not catch me in them anywhere unless i was using their bathroom)
Motion:
The state of motion allows you to feel like you are moving forward with your life. Although motion doesn’t always equate to progress. But it drives excitement and slows the speed of time. Your awareness of things around you goes up and your life is so much more interesting.
Motion equates to new Experiences. As my old violin teacher told me, in the end all the matters are your experiences and your memories.
Mileage:
Ryan maximized his expense account spend when traveling to optimize getting miles. This is just plain smart, you accumulate miles and good credit while saving all the other expenses you would normally spend while at home. If you are extra smart, you would bank and invest all this money.
Connection:
Making sure you connect with people wherever you are going & making friends in different cities & countries is really what makes business travel so special. But at the end of the day, despite the apparent sexy lifestyle of business travel, you do need to land and return home. Having loved ones to return home to is probably the best part of business travel. At least it is for me.
Watch this old movie. It’s a funny & sad yet eye opening look at business travel. And a glimpse of that pre-Covid world we took for granted.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 30th, 2021
“The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
It’s been another nutty crazy week. So short one this round. Gonna be saying NO to many things a lot more for the rest of the summer and probably year. I’m supposed to be on sabbatical.
Talk about the long con.
"Kurniawan seemed to have boundless cash and a knack for finding extremely rare vintage bottles that lifelong oenophiles had only ever dreamed of — 1920 Petrus, 1945 Romanée-Conti, 1947 Château Lafleur.
In a few short years, he would sell off millions of dollars’ worth of his wines to some of America’s wealthiest connoisseurs.
But behind the ever-flowing stream of Burgundies, Kurniawan harbored a dark secret: He was carrying out history’s greatest wine fraud.
And it would take a vengeful billionaire, a French vintner, and the FBI to get to the bottom of the barrel."
https://thehustle.co/the-man-who-sold-millions-in-counterfeit-wine-to-rich-collectors/
2. Down with Tbilisi, Chiang Mai and HCMS!
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2013/12/01/top-5-best-cities-live-bootstrapping-young-entrepreneur/
3. Cool story.
4. This is worth listening to if you want to understand what's happening in tech. 2 of sharpest guys in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbnDay35L8I&t=2477s
5. "With the pullback in growth stocks and the crash in SPAC prices and now crypto, I imagine we will see a reset in seed stage pricing at some point soon, but this is all anecdotal through my eyes and ears.
Chasing/pushing prices higher at the seed stage puts so much pressure on the founders and companies to deliver immediately. It is really disappointing to see this sloppy behavior so early in the company life cycle."
https://howardlindzon.com/tiny-bubbles-seed-stage-edition-and-sunday-reads/
6. "This is the beauty of bitcoin. The countries that seek freedom and true economic competition will embrace bitcoin. They will encourage their citizens to participate in the revolution. The authoritarian countries will fight the technology. They will do their best to prevent entrepreneurs and investors from participating."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/china-gave-us-a-gift-last-week
7. This is so awesome.
"One such Twitch food streamer is L.A. Geronimo, a Florida-based former sushi chef and the creator behind the Twitch channel The Hunger Service. Geronimo’s livestreaming centers on sushi and other Asian dishes stemming from his ten years of experience in Japanese and Asian restaurants. But he also leans heavily into pop culture, creating dishes inspired by anime like Food Wars and Studio Ghibli films along with video games like Final Fantasy XV."
https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/l-a-geronimo-the-hunger-service/
8. Yikes. Although if I am honest I'd be okay being called Darth Vader.
"In Russian political circles, Sechin is known as “Darth Vader.” They call him that because he’s particularly ruthless, notably venal, and kind of a dick. While colorful and provocative, this nickname misses the point. The Star Wars villain, father of Luke and Leia, was supremely talented in his own right. Through years of disciplined training, he harnessed the Force.
Igor Sechin has no such mystical powers. He’s a crony and a thug. True, he is a linguist by training, fluent in both French and Portuguese, and thus more refined that your average brute. But in practice, this just means he can say “Give me my fucking money” in three different languages. A goon who enjoys jazz is still a goon."
https://gregolear.substack.com/p/igor-sechin-russias-darth-vader
9. This is bar none the best guide to becoming independent in 2021. All young people (and old) need to read this & follow the formula (wish I knew about it earlier).
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/1m-us-token-10-years-or-10-btc-no
10. Its about being long term greedy, so many people (investors, LPs & founders) forget about this.
https://bothsidesofthetable.com/playing-the-long-game-in-venture-capital-97f017811707
11. Good to know!
https://blog.coinbase.com/fact-check-is-bitcoin-mining-environmentally-unfriendly-3559823af6f1
12. "With this in mind, the timing of the CCP’s latest wave of regulatory scrutiny could not have been better. The ensuing miner exodus currently taking place is one of the most positive fundamental developments for Bitcoin in 2021. Even if we see short term drops in monthly Implied Hash Rate figures as miners emigrate, it would be for an important cause."
https://medium.com/coinmetrics/bitcoin-miners-are-escaping-china-d3937e8f018c
13. 110% agree with this view.
"The content I create works for me when I'm having downtime with my family. When I'm sleeping, it's still going. Making new connections, generating opportunities, and creating deal flow.
By creating content, I'm building leverage. By activating an audience, I'm applying it."
https://davenemetz.com/audience-leverage/
14. Longevity: so very interesting and the next big code to crack.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-could-live-up-to-150-years-new-research-suggests/
15. Rise of Pseudononymous future.
"Anonymity is key. Being a virtual creator is about enjoying the self-expression and creativity that come with creating content, while avoiding the scrutiny and invasion of privacy that have traditionally accompanied fame."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/transhuman-the-rise-of-digital-identities
16. "The realization that if workers can be productive from anywhere, why not look abroad where the cost of living is lower and thus, cost of labor is lower. Meaning that in time, companies will realize they can cut human capital costs without sacrificing quality of work by looking abroad. A globalized labor arbitrage will take place.
This further reinforces the reduction in localized real estate needs. It also validates a move away from hybrid models to purely remote. And the ultimate consequence is further pressure on corporate real estate values in the developed world."
https://dougantin.com/a-meta-consequence-of-remote-work/
17. "Bitcoin was launched in the 2008 financial crisis as an antidote to bad central banking policy. What policymakers did then was unprecedented in all recorded financial history.
But that pales in comparison to 2020 when policymakers completely abandoned any rational long-term thinking.
This is why Bitcoin was created, to protect against recklessness by the financial elites."
https://danheld.substack.com/p/inflation-is-coming-0a6
18. "The first is that you MUST learn the basics – of anything. There are no shortcuts or easy paths to success. I’ve written about this over and over and over again in The Agoge, and it is an absolutely critical lesson. You must always focus on learning the basics of anything – or, as I’ve said in the past, “learn the rules – then break the rules”. That is how you achieve mastery of any practice or art.
The second is that multitasking is a sure path to failure. Having had to engage in plenty of that sort of nonsense in the past, I agree entirely with this sentiment. Multitasking ensures mediocrity. Focus on doing one thing at a time – and doing it to the absolute best of your ability. Then move on to the next thing. That is how you focus and how you win."
https://didacticmind.com/2021/05/guest-post-lessons-learned-from-erich-fromm-by-the-male-brain.html
19. "For now, Russia has financial reserves to weather near term economic storms, and Putin still has an approval rating above 60%. But that number is falling, and while Russia’s rainy-day funds are in solid shape, the Kremlin’s inability or unwillingness to diversify the Russian economy ensures there is little reason to believe things will change for the better.
That’s the bad news for Putin. The bad news for Ukraine and the West is that as conditions get tougher, Putin will feel the need to look tougher still."
https://time.com/6004236/russia-ukraine-border-putin/
20. I actually think China is the major illiberal threat to the West and we better get our act together ASAP.
"COVID-19 was a test of the American and Chinese systems, and one side clearly did better. Even if China made mistakes at the beginning, given the way that the West has failed in its COVID response, it’s simply not credible to think that Europe or America would have done better if they had to go first.
This is why 2020 saw China make up more ground on the US economy than in any other year on record. If COVID-19 is any indication, China is better suited to deal with unforeseen disasters than the US is, meaning that I may be underestimating the extent to which it will overtake America as the most powerful country in its region, and ultimately the world."
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-most-china-analysis-is-just-cope
21. "The bottom line is that cyber attacks are going to become more frequent. The economic consequences will become more severe. And at some point, a cyber attack will lead to kinetic warfare. As individuals, we can take steps to prepare for these outcomes and reduce the economic burdens when they happen."
https://dougantin.com/economic-damage-by-cyber-attack-is-the-digital-age-attack-vector/
22. “For most of us, the goal of financial independence isn’t to just check out and quit life,” he says. “We just want the freedom to work on what we choose. When you take money out of the equation, you can spend your time doing more important things for yourself and society.”
https://thehustle.co/how-to-retire-early
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
The Future of Work: Are You Above or Below the Algorithm?
There was this old joke in the 1980s about Factories of the future being made up of Computer, a Dog and A Human. The job of the human is to feed the dog, while the dog’s job is to keep the human away from the computer which is running the factor. Now as we enter the age of software as robotics and automation are starting to really accelerate, this joke is becoming less funny and more dark. There is this new term called a “Dark Factory” which is run without lights because there are no humans working there. Robots only.
This does not just threaten blue collar manufacturing jobs, this has come for white collar jobs as well. As Software-driven automation starts to penetrate corporations and firms, we will start seeing employees start taking direction from algorithms. If you take a look at a disruptive bottoms-up example, let’s look at Uber or Lyft.
The driver takes whatever jobs or riders that are assigned to them & where to go. The App or an alternative like Waze or Google Maps tells them how to get there. The Algorithm for all intents and purposes controls them. This is what I mean by being “Below the Algorithm”.
As Naval Ravikant says: “If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.” Sadly with Autonomous driving coming to fore in the next 5 to 10 years, even drivers won’t have work anymore.
Contrast this to the software engineer or Product manager at Uber/Lyft who is designing and programming the App with the rules and setting the criteria. This is “Above the Algorithm”.
The question for you as you are thinking about your career: where do you want to be career wise? Telling the computer what to do or having the computer tell you what to do. The answer is very clear to me.
But I would go even further, the ultimate job security in the future is not having a job. Be an entrepreneur and build a business. When I say business, it could mean a one-person consulting company, a small SaaS software co or agency, all the way to a Silicon Valley type venture funded high growth startup.
Yet many people would argue: a job is more safe and secure! But is it really? If you are running a business you probably have multiple customers and thus multiple income streams. If you have a job, you have literally one income stream. Also seems very clear to me.
So to close off again with Naval: “Creativity is the last frontier…automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job…that’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken of, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.”
Entrepreneurship, mark my words, is and will be the ultimate creative activity of the 21st century.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Riches Among “Supposed” Ruins: The New Era of Globe Trotting Capitalists
I recently finished an autobiographical book by Robert Smith called “Riches Among the Ruins” which detailed his adventures buying and selling debt in what at that time were very scary and risky markets during the 70s to 90s. Places like Nigeria, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nigeria, Russia. It’s a grand story of how one man went where others did not to make his fortune. One I highly recommend.
I had the fortune to stumble on international business when I was at Yahoo! And it was the reason why I ended up spending over a decade at the company. I was so lucky to be able to work with across 35+ countries during my stay there. In fact, in what was one of my more “risky moves” I joined my boss in the newly formed Emerging Markets group to run, start and build our business in the MENA (Middle East/North Africa), Africa & Eastern European region. Best move I ever made career-wise, as I got to visit a whole region of countries I had never been to. But these are now ones that are clearly growth markets. I made friends and learned more than I ever thought I could. More importantly I fell in love with the region of Central/ Eastern Europe. The much ignored and overlooked part of Europe. And the best and most interesting part in my personal opinion.
As Richard Smith states …”the real riches I pulled from the ruins weren’t the spreads on my bond deals. The riches came from a lifetime of unforgettable experiences in some of the most exotic and remote corners of the world--riches I pulled from the ruins of my own young life.”
I was definitely influenced by my previous travels as a young student but also by the legendary global investor Jim Rogers of the Quantum hedge fund fame & his many books such as “Adventure Capitalist” and “Investment Biker.” I’ve always been fascinated by folks who were able to make a living traveling to far corners of the world and making their fortune.
These are the Indiana Jones of the business world. Folks like John Templeton and Mark Mobius who are renowned for their investing in global financial markets. Or Adolf Lundin who gallivanted around the globe buying up natural gas companies in Qatar & Russia in the 1970s. Even the hard core libertarian Doug Casey going all over Africa chasing natural resource companies or real estate.
In our present age, the people i would list as being on the forefront of international business are Andrew Henderson of the Nomad Capitalist, Simon Black of Sovereign Man, Swen Lorenz of the Undervalued Shares & Ladislas Maurice of the Wandering Investor as well as my venture investing friend Paul Bragiel.
I think as the trend of “Digital Decolonization” continues, the regions in the southern Hemisphere will be where all the action is. Digital Decolonization as coined by investor David Halpert is where the dominance of the big US tech giants slowly reverses as local and regional tech giants emerge. Examples abound but some examples here are MercadoLibre in Latin America or Gojek and Grab in Southeast Asia. In 2020, it became very clear where the action is and I have heard several smart people now say instead of calling it “Developed World versus the Developing World”, we should now call it the Rising versus the Declining World.
There are fortunes to be made by young people with a sense of adventure and a willingness to be a little bit (or ALOT) uncomfortable. The frontier is where opportunities lie as my friend Taylor Pearson says:
“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.”
Also instead of scrapping it out in highly competitive places like Wall Street or Silicon Valley, if you get off the beaten track you will have more of the field to yourself. So for young people these days I’d advise you to not “Go West” but “Go to the Southern Hemisphere”! This is where the future growth will be.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 23rd, 2021
“Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.” – Tony Robbins
This is one of the best new newsletters out there. My Friend Dmitri started this and I wish I had thought of it. Weekly Actions that will make your life better. Check it out.
https://newsletter.weeklyaction.club/p/weeklyactions-database
2. WOW....this is bit too close to home for many of us I think. Most of us, if we admit it are "looking good not feeling good."
"Maybe you are also fed up with your current way of life, the hiding, the lying, the sense of not being really present with what’s there inside of you. Well, if you work on it, then don’t get your hopes up too much. The reward you get from doing it isn’t particularly great. After many years of this process, the reward is that occasionally you’ll feel good, meaning more connected to yourself and others than you’ve ever felt before in your life, in a warm, cuddly, open, and spacious way. And in plenty, honestly most of the other moments of your life you will feel shit, hateful, angry, sad, lonely, tight, shivery, shaky, and so forth.
And however bleak that is, it’s still a million times better than the perfect story that looks good from the outside."
https://leowid.com/looking-good-vs-feeling-good-a-true-story-about-success/
3. Can't say I was a big fan of social media influencers. Even less so now. F--ing douchebags.
"Social media influencers – who are drawn to the island’s photo-perfect, emerald-green paddy fields, its scenic temples and beaches – have proved a particular problem. “The key for Bali recovery (from the pandemic) is the low number of (Covid-19) cases. But the foreigner who has (online) followers creates content about violating the health protocol, leaving an impression that Bali is not safe,” Niluh said.
Over the past few months, reports of disrespectful, brash stunts, careless partying and even insulting behaviour by social media influencers have angered the public."
4. Glad to see this: Fellow introverts unite!
https://thehustle.co/why-introverts-make-great-leaders/
5. What a wonderful story. This makes me hopeful for humankind.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/05/14/college-graduation-uber-passenger/
6. Good health and longevity tips from an expert.
7. "Now that you get the big picture:
1) money printer has gone mad,
2) inflation will likely increase,
3) asset inflation causes problems between rich and poor,
4) Bitcoin solves this by acting as a store of value with a fixed supply and
5) Ethereum – or a competitor similar to Ethereum – will dismantle all businesses with middlemen… It is time to take action! This means you need to get involved."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/beginners-guide-to-the-future-decentralization
8. "If you can’t hold the dollar, what else can you hold? Real estate? Stocks? Bonds? Commodities? They are all underperforming bitcoin. Bitcoin remains the apex predator of financial markets. It is continuing to gain adoption, which can be seen by wallet addresses, trading volumes, on-chain transactions, hash rate, and registered users at various platforms. Bitcoin is winning. It is winning despite the billionaires and Wall Street bankers."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/there-are-no-gods-among-us
9. Not saying the stupid Woke movement in western world is anything like the awful Chinese Cultural Revolution (its no where close....yet), but directionally its not good.
"If you disagree with a company’s woke politics, stop buying their products. Honestly. If you hate the fact that Disney is ultra-woke, but you’re not willing to give up your Disney+ membership, then you may need to rethink your priorities.
Same goes for Woka Cola, or any other major brand.
There’s also the vote you can make with your feet.
If your state or local government has totally lost its mind, consider moving. You can’t fix your neighbors’ way of thinking, but you can might be able to find greener pastures elsewhere."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/two-ways-to-push-back-against-the-cultural-revolution-32245/
10. "Every great artist and writer in history has been an outlier. Every great entrepreneur, scientist, and technologist has been an outlier. Without robust experimentation, and a culture that protects our weirdest handful, we will absolutely stagnate and decline into oblivion. Among people who feel out of control of their own lives there tends to be an impulse towards aggressively policing the perceived weirdness of others out of existence. Increasingly, such efforts are succeeding. But what’s America without a little chaos every now and then?
High-level, I think it’s always worth asking if you’re on the side that’s burning books, and try to be honest if you are: do you really think you’re the hammer-wielding heroine of this saga, or are you the aging Orwellian villain, terrified of change?"
https://www.piratewires.com/p/making-space-for-monkeys
11. "The data showed that the most significant trait among billion-dollar startup founders is a history of entrepreneurship, whether that's building a company, a side hustle, or a smaller project.
Those who had created something that generated value--even on a small scale that would be considered a failure in the venture capital world--were more likely to go on to found billion-dollar companies than those with shiny resumes filled with brand-name employers and universities."
12. Coming out of the pandemic we have an opportunity for a restart of our lives. Let's not waste it, I know I won't.
"In one recent survey, the specific things people said they yearned for most were traveling (24 percent), visiting family (19 percent), and hanging out with friends (16 percent).
I haven’t been able to find any surveys of what we most don’t miss from pre-pandemic times. But there is research that gives us clues. Studies have shown that spending time on people or activities that bring us down depresses our sense of meaning in life; unpleasant exchanges with bosses, customers, and co-workers lower our sense of well-being."
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/05/happiness-end-pandemic-start-over/618870/
13. I'm a fan personally.
"This kind of financial virtuosity has made Palihapitiya a billionaire, not to mention a hit on social media. He has 1.5 million Twitter followers, a popular weekly podcast, and an audience of day-trading millennials and zoomers who hang on his every word. He’s 44, cocky, blunt, and seems like the kind of guy who’d take pleasure in calling BS on current stock market hype."
14. Sucks to be a tech tycoon in China.
"Today, new rules are fast emerging for China’s wealthiest tycoons: don’t publicly criticize the Party; keep a low profile; give workers a fairer shake; and make state priorities your priorities. “It’s really significant and could have a major impact,” says Rebecca Fannin, author of Tech Titans of China. “These companies had been allowed to flourish without a lot of scrutiny. This crackdown could just be the beginning.”
https://time.com/6048539/china-tech-giants-regulations/
15. "The world may yet explode into another WW2-style conflagration, or the kind of nuclear holocaust we feared during the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dominate that battlefield. But most of the modern military technologies led themselves to a very different kind of great-power war — a war of constant sniping and harassment.
Assassin drones, cyberattacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the possibility of never-ending low-grade attacks that are below the threshold of massive retaliation."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-future-of-war-is-bizarre-and
16. "r/WallStreetBets, Crypto, Tinder, NFT’s, wagering — adrenaline! Financial platforms are now trading at a fraction of a second — co-locating at the exchanges and limited only by computing processing speeds. At the May 1 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Warren Buffett lamented the rise of Robinhood, dubbing it “a very significant part of the casino aspect” of investing today. Guess what? The casino aspect is the point.
The games business is built on adrenaline. According to Grin Gaming founder Nick Bucheleres, the future of entertainment revolves around it. Free to play. Virtual goods. Creator Economy. Mobile. Global. Last year, people spent over a trillion hours watching and interacting with other people playing games! Valve’s Steam platform (including CS:GO and Dota 2) regularly exceeds 25M concurrent users.
And just wait until 5G hits."
https://johnkosner.medium.com/the-adrenaline-economy-9175829ba03b
17. Like many folks watching the Fed's moves, it’s very concerning.
https://www.kevinrooke.blog/investor-letter-004/
18. This is such a great podcast. This show particularly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRZJ_ObyRE4
19. "Sinclair says there are a host of science-backed lifestyle changes people can make in order to live longer. If you want 14 extra years right off the bat, simply do what many doctors recommend: eat less, exercise regularly, stay away from cigarettes, and get enough sleep.
Finally, aim for a mostly plant-based diet: On average, meat is eaten only five times a month in the Blue Zone hot spots, the regions where people live the longest, like Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; and Okinawa, Japan."
https://www.instyle.com/beauty/health-fitness/reverse-aging-longevity-research
20. "In this bulliest of markets, with prices popping on everything from stocks to bitcoin to corn futures, Litquidity has emerged as a giddy and astute observer of finance high and low, followed by Reddit day traders and private-equity sharks alike."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/litquidity-capital-wall-street-memes.html
21. "Over the past decade, digital nomads leveraged their global mobility to pursue distributed work and borderless living. Many newly remote workers will follow this path in the years ahead. Visas are legitimizing the lifestyle, and startups are emerging to support and simplify globalized hiring. More people will now choose between being a nomad and a settler, as early adopters like me already do.
Nomads already exist as an online and more occasionally offline community, never restricted to just one territory. This puts us in an ideal position to begin organizing and building on the foundations we've laid. Old nation-states and new internet countries will soon come to exist in an ongoing battle to attract and retain the most desirable people as citizens."
https://lraz.io/minimum-viable-state/
22. Pretty interesting. For some odd reason, really in portfolio management these days.
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/the-florentine-portfolio
23. Pomp is crushing it. Setting the roadmap for the Multi-SKU Solopreneur.
https://mobile.twitter.com/anneleeskates/status/1395105774817267712
24. "The US does not have to physically cut off global trade routes like the Ottomans in the 15th century. In the electronic age, the ability to cut off access to the world reserve currency and banking system has just as drastic and immediate consequences to regimes around the world.
The old world powers in Europe and Asia are very much aware of this strategic disadvantage and are constantly looking for ways to lessen the US’s dominance on world trade.....
This is why China started to build the One Belt One Road Initiative and why China is moving full speed ahead with the Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) program. China dreams of a day when they have a digital centralized currency which any company that does business in China must use as an end run around the US dollar.
The One Belt One Road Initiative is being built for the same reason Europe launched ships off the map in the Age of Discovery.
China needs to find a way to circumvent and neutralize the maritime power of the US Navy and the soft power of a weaponized US Dollar which threatens to cut it off from global trade."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/why-i-invest-overseas
25. "China has certainly been willing to incur widespread diplomatic opprobrium in the defense of its declared national interests; witness its mass internment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and its suppression of pro-democracy activism in Hong Kong. An attack on Taiwan would risk vastly more, including massive military damage and punishing economic sanctions – not to mention significant technological setbacks, as a U.S.-China armed conflict would imperil TSMC’s operations."
https://thediplomat.com/2021/05/taiwan-at-the-nexus-of-technology-and-geopolitics/
26. "More important than cash for Hamas, though, is Iranian military know-how and tech. The Iranians have a Manichean view of the world. It is Haq versus Batel, (truth and righteousness against falsehood) and Dar al-Islam (realm of peace and belief) versus Dar al-Harb (realm of war and disbelief). They perceive themselves to be underdogs in a just battle against overwhelming odds — and they fight accordingly."
https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-hamas-became-so-deadly/
27. "It seems that Facebook's private groups have created a kind of dealer economy, where the barriers to entry are just a bit of extra time (which the pandemic has given many of us in spades), a certain level of geekery in whatever you'll be dealing, and the willingness to hold some inventory and take a bit of risk.
Apart from the fact that these dealers operate informally on Facebook, the other main thing that makes them different from old-school dealers is the side-hustle factor. If any of the dealers I've encountered are doing this as a living, I'd be surprised. Mostly it seems they do it in order to participate in their hobby in a way that's subsidized."
https://doxa.substack.com/p/the-dealer-economy
28. "Accurately identifying which new habits — WFH, working out at home rather than gyms, remote meetings rather than business travel, car ownership, the great migration out of cities, food delivery — that formed during Covid are durable vs. ephemeral is going to be essential.
Accurately identifying which cheap consumer cyclicals permanently improved their business models such that they can sustainably grow off 2021 numbers vs. those which did not invest and improve their business models is going to be critical."
29. Super interesting. Good summary of leading gaming trends.
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/gaming-trends
30. "Right now there's a lot of noise from people who believe monetization is the single most important problem for the Creator Economy to solve. I tend to disagree. The real battle in front of us is not monetization, it's ownership. How can you realistically hope to monetize something you don't own? As it stands, creators are giving away ownership at the moment of publication and consumers are renting this content from platforms."
https://uncutfm.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-ownership
31. "If you’re going to take financial advice from an athlete, make sure that athlete’s Shaq.
Did you know 60% of the pro athletes end up broke within 5 years of retiring? They’re not joking when they say professional athletes die two deaths in their lifetime.
Meanwhile, basketball’s friendliest giant is making more money as a retiree than he did during his legendary 19-year NBA career."
https://contrarianthinking.substack.com/p/shaq-400m-from-carwashes-and-franchises
32. Hmmm......
"Instead of only subsidizing us, investors will pay us directly to consume. Instead of protecting our money by keeping it in cash and bonds, we’ll gamble it on bets that, at least, promise to generate a return. And instead of getting paid for productive work, we’ll pay to contribute to projects that give our lives meaning."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/explicit-economics/
33. Useful data on state of VC for investors and founders.
https://www.wing.vc/content/the-sharpest-of-recoveries-the-2021-v21-analysis
34. "Once the purview of heiresses like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, it seems that influencing has become fully democratized, making a Jay Gatsby out of every intrepid Jimmy Gatz. Or as one collab-house press liaison puts it to me:
“It’s the new A-list celebrity except it’s attainable for anybody. You can be in Cleveland, Ohio, alone in your bedroom, and you can get a million followers overnight. That’s fucking crazy. That’s never been possible. Wealth, fame, status has never been more attainable for anyone in the history of the world the way it is right now.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/
35. "People are scrambling for leaders who can give them a sense of what reality is or should be, and we call these community builders. We call these content creators. But really, I think these are reality entrepreneurs.
Fans are not just followers or consumers, but they’re investors in that leader’s model of reality. My friend calls this kaleidoscope theory, where culture fragments into thousands of shards. Each culture plays out its fantasies alongside all the other cultures, and the result is skyrocketing cultural innovation at the cost of shared alignment on anything."
https://www.nfx.com/post/rise-of-reality-entrepreneurs/
36. This is absolutely spot on. Substitute China for Spain, USA for England and this story rings true.
"Problem is the more I thought about this, bitcoin is exactly the right asset at exactly the right time for the CCP, too.
Lets take a step back in time for a moment to show why the CCP is so dangerous. It is not based on strength, but on desperation as you can see from the demographic chart above."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/bitcoin-weighing-risks-and-life
37. Massive trend in making.
"Play-to-earn games have been life-changing for members of the community. One 75-year-old man plays from 4am to 10pm and says, “This is my only entertainment.” His wife adds, “We’re praying to the Lord that Axie doesn’t go away. It’s how we pay for our medicine.” During the pandemic, playing Axie became a viable source of income in many developing countries: players in the Philippines comprise about 30% of global Axie players; Indonesia comes in second with 15% global share.
What’s fascinating about play-to-earn games is how they foreshadow future labor structures—structures that will become more common in an increasingly-digital, borderless economy.
With new technologies—first, the internet and now, blockchain—there’s no reason that economic classes should be stratified into the investing class and the salaried class. Everyone is an investor. Anyone can trade stocks on Robinhood, buy and sell Axies on OpenSea, or claim an economic stake in someone’s work on Mirror."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/how-people-in-the-philippines-are
38. Title says it all. Although it might just be because I am old and don't understand.
39. I personally think if you can, always better to be more generous than not. Ie. Tip over and above expectations.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22446361/pandemic-gratuity-covid-service-work
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Let the Sleeper Awake!: Change and Discomfort is Growth
"A Person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without Change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The Sleeper must awaken." --Duke Leto Atreides
There is so much depth and insight in Frank Herbert’s classic Sci-fi book “Dune.” This quote happens as the Atreides family is about to leave their watery paradise of Caladan for the water parched but rich desert planet of Dune. This was one of the most profound quotes for me which I didn't really understand or appreciate until much later in my life.
I think we all end up following comfortable routines in our lives. For me, growing up in a very pleasant suburb of Vancouver, Canada, I never expected that I would leave the city let alone the country as a young boy. Life was safe, good & comfortable. Thankfully my parents encouraged me to go take that high school trip to Japan in 1989.
My life was never the same again. Imagine going from a country of less than 25M people at that time to visiting a 30M person metropolis of Tokyo that was in the tail end of an economic boom. My eyes were opened and my perspective expanded dramatically. I was never the same person again. I also attribute my deep love of travel and exploration to this trip. Probably also why Japan still holds a very deep place in my heart.
Humans are wired to dislike change. This goes back to our caveman days where making big changes to our lives could lead to our deaths through starvation or being eaten by sabretooth tigers. The cautious ones lived to pass down their genes, the less cautious did not live to do so. But this was hundreds of years ago. We are in a very different time where the world is changing very quickly and the risks of being eaten or starving have gone down dramatically. In fact, if you aren’t able to adapt to change you risk falling behind in your career and life.
Complacency kills literally. Humans were made to be challenged. I find that when you get too comfortable you literally stop growing both mentally and physically. At the gym, it’ s why you keep adding on weights and why it’s a good thing your muscles are sore after.
Stress is actually a good thing assuming you understand that this is the body giving you signals to step up and overcome. In our present world, a healthy paranoia coupled with a sense of adventure is important.
Change is hard. Discomfort is hard. But as Tim Ferriss says:
“The more you schedule and practice discomfort deliberately, the less unplanned discomfort will throw off your life and control your life.”
And the best way to do this is to change your environment. Travel or take a new role at your company. Or join a new company or maybe even start your own.
Basically if you are not doing something uncomfortable mentally, you probably are not growing, evolving or learning. So let the sleeper in you awake.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Financial Independence is Personal Independence: How to Become More Sovereign
Probably one of the smartest guys on the planet, Balaji S. Srinivasan did a talk on the Network State in February of 2021: Balaji S. Srinivasan: The Network State
The key lesson for me coming out of this is the importance of becoming financially independent.
How to become Financial Independent?
Move away from expensive geographies (goodbye San Francisco & New York City). Cut personal consumption & live like a grad student. Basically digital nomadism and geo-arbitrage. His example: Instead of making $120k & spending $100K to live there, get a remote job and make $120k but live on $40k. Save and invest the rest. Save enough money to last you for a few years and start a company or just continue to invest. This buys you freedom to do whatever you want. Reducing consumption and having less physical stuff gives you more mobility. Mobility is leverage against the state.
These are an extension and a more tactical recommendation from the classic book “The Sovereign Individual.” A Must read by the way.
WHY is this important?
As a well travelled observer, I’ve noticed some things over the last half decade in the western world that have definitely been exacerbated by the encroaching growth of the State and large technology platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon. Even more so during the 2020 Pandemic.
1. Freedom of Speech is diminishing fast as we have seen people on both sides of the political fence be deplatformed or just shut off for no explanation.
2. Cancel Culture Reigns supreme in western World where people are “cancelled” or fired because the unthinking mob deems what they do to be wrong (or thinking differently)
3. Rising Tribalism and Nationalism leading to closed borders. How many countries shut their borders to others in 2020. Pretty much most countries & you learned how useless your passport really is in these situations.
This is why it’s more important than ever for those independent minded people to build resiliency and build geographical as well as financial diversification. Do not be too dependent on one income, or one job or one company. It’s never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket. You never know when the cancel mob will come for you, sometimes even based on just one tweet taken out of context or you liking someone's tweet. Yes, it’s becoming that stupid in America, Canada & Western Europe. Insane when we have so many major problems in healthcare, climate and inequality to solve.
For the sane & rational ones among us, we just need to survive through this mess as the world is transitioning fully to the future Information Age. We are moving from a world of farmers staying in one place back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle of old that is now enabled by technology. This is “Digital Nomadism” where one can pick up stakes and go where both the weather and the culture is better or more receptive. One example is the exodus of many talented techies to Miami most recently in 2021 and this is a quality over quantity conversation.
This will be an age where Countries and States will fight for talented people to stay relevant. This transition will happen but it will take a while (like a decade or two). For those who don’t believe this is happening, just take a look at what Singapore, Estonia, Portugal, Georgia, Taiwan, Dubai in Emirates, Finland or North Macedonia are doing. They are all small countries focussing on creating business, capital and immigration friendly policies combined with attractive lifestyles, environments and good infrastructure. They are clearly software centric and forward thinking countries that act as signals for what the future will look like. This is the exact opposite of the old & large lumbering countries and State entities that dominated the 20th Century.
As the famous Schumacher book states “Small is Beautiful.”
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 16th, 2021
“Practice creates the master.” – Miguel Ruiz
Short write up this week. Made the mistake of overcommitting to way too much stuff.
"Almost every decamillionaire I know or have read about is well diversified. Like the centimillionaire crypto investor, there are a few who aren’t, but if you want to be sustainably wealthy, diversification is key.
We regularly discuss diversification strategies here at Nomad Capitalist, including:
Having bank accounts in multiple countries,
Having money that is more than just a number on a bank computer,
Having a cash position,
Having precious metals,
Having real estate investments and rental real estate,
Owning the properties you live in, and
Doing everything within your power to ensure that you don’t have to start over again.
That is, after all, one of the greatest fears of the wealthy. What if it all falls apart?
Being diversified eliminates that threat."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/06/22/how-to-become-a-multimillionaire/
2. "We’re dead serious about staying low-key *for now*.
Why? It is clear. In 2018-2019 it was okay to have some luxury goods. Rolex, a nice car and a nice home. Today? It is no longer as cool/interesting. People lost their jobs. People had their businesses shut down. Well off people lost tons of money and many even went bankrupt.
Back in 2018-2019 driving a flashy car was totally fine. Totally. Fine. In 2021? It is not smart.
Recently, Pop Smoke an up and coming popular rapper was killed by a 15 year old for a Rolex watch. That is insane. The reason? People are suffering. Before? If you had some flash to your lifestyle it was “aspirational” now it is just insulting. You’re driving by as hundreds of people are struggling to survive. Basic living expenses are rising and they lost a huge part of their savings in 2020. Be socially aware!
Start tipping 50% at restaurants when things open up. Tip everyone you can. Waiter, bartender, spa services, auto mechanic, coffee shop, hair salon etc. This will allow you to build up your surrounding community. These individuals will appreciate the money 100x more than you could possibly imagine.
They don’t care about your Lambo. They care about survival."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/announcements-bet-on-winners-flex
3. "At the end of the day, it’s important to focus on the unit economics of UA which is ultimately what the debt is financing. Compare the cost of capital versus ROI on ad spend over the lifetime of a user gives a predictable spend pattern and it’s pretty simple to model. If you don’t get a positive return on investment on the UA (after pricing in the cost of servicing the debt), don’t draw the credit line and buy ads. Pretty simple when you strip it right back.
It's great to see a wider acceptance of debt funding become mainstream in mobile gaming."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-supercells-180m-credit-facility-metacore-signals-macmillan/
4. This is quite interesting. Title says it all.
"When it comes down to it, I am driven by learning and having two jobs is my way of ensuring I am maximizing my hours and keeping me stimulated. I love getting to use my brain in various ways every day.
With a finite number of years on this planet, I think it’s crucial to be intentional with your time and for me, I feel most fulfilled with these two commitments."
https://caseycaruso.medium.com/engineer-by-day-venture-capitalist-by-night-585929430c21
5. It’s good to be King I guess. World of Super Yachts.
Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts
6. "My father dealt with racism throughout most of his life by acting as if it had never happened—as if admitting it made it more powerful. He knew bullies loved to see their victims react and would tell me to not let what they said upset me. “Why do you care what they think of you?” he would say, and laugh as he clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re all going to work for you someday.”
“Don’t get even, get ahead,” was another of his slogans for me at these times. As if America was a race we were going to win.
These lessons my father gave me—to be the best you can be, to fight off your enemies and defeat them, to swim to safety if the boat sinks, and in general toughen yourself against everything that would harm you—these I had absorbed alongside certain unspoken lessons, taken from observing his life as a Korean immigrant. To have two names, one American, known to the public, and one Korean, known only to a few intimates; to get rid of your accent; and to dress well as a way to keep yourself above suspicion. Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe."
https://www.gq.com/story/korean-fathers-lessons-self-defense
7. "I’m not yet 100% sure this is true, but I am starting to think it might be: seed funds and “accelerators” basically can no longer work together. Choose one path and you self-select out of the other."
https://medium.com/angularventures/the-great-acceleration-of-seed-investing-a3057f7b3b83
8. "Robinhood has become successful in Silicon Valley by following a trajectory similar to that of other tech companies: behaving aggressively in pursuit of fast growth. In the first four months of 2020, more than three million people opened Robinhood accounts, bringing the total number of users to more than thirteen million. The median age of Robinhood’s users is thirty-one; about half of them are first-time investors."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/robinhoods-big-gamble
9. This man knows what he is talking about. One of the best Hedge fund guys ever......It's a scary world we are entering now monetary policy wise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScAeHsXIUqI
10. "A side project is an incredible way to bridge the gap and cover the dip as you move between ladders. Just one note: I said, “a side project” not “side projects.”
It’s so easy to get carried away with dozens of exciting ideas, working on each one as motivation and inspiration are there. But if you keep that cycle going it’s so easy to be spread thin between so many projects that will prevent you from making any one of them actually successful."
https://nathanbarry.com/wealth-creation/
11. "But while we might wish that economic life were more pleasant, Milanovic thinks we should face reality. Capitalism has channeled our private vices into public benefits, directing human acquisitiveness into forms of competition that increase our overall well-being. All we can really do is soften it around the edges.
“Capitalism,” he argues, “has successfully transformed humans into calculating machines endowed with limitless needs.” We may be disturbed by the way these calculating tendencies have burrowed into our private lives and eroded our moral commitments, as many left-wing critics of commodification are, but we have chosen to participate, and now there’s no going back."
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/branko-milanovic-capitalism-alone/
12. MONK MODE!
"Monk mode is as much about learning self-discipline as it is engaging in self-improvement. When you manage to sustain monk mode as a way of life you’ll be on your way to cultivating a lifestyle of success. You will be wrapped up in the self-importance of improving all the facets in your life, managing them with a keen eye and watching all your personal investments flourish (much like a stock portfolio.) Your schedule will be so packed that you won’t have time to waste on low quality, frivolously time hungry exercises. If someone’s got something going on and you know you’d get more done doing your own thing, then keep doing your own thing.
You are the basis for your sense of direction; don’t get drawn in by other people’s whims. You should never feel like being the tag-along, you have the ambition, the vision and the determination to keep moving towards the top. Your time is far too valuable to even contemplate wasting it as a “tag along.”
https://illimitablemen.com/2014/04/13/monk-mode/
13. "Financial freedom -> Personal freedom -> Ideological freedom
But what good are you and your wealth without guiding principles to live by? In a world today where we are all starved for leadership, maybe you will find something thirst-quenching in the lessons I’ve learned from the painted warriors."
https://contrarianthinking.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-navy-seal
14. "The great thing about outbound is every single company I talk to, I'm already interested in investing in them.
90% of the companies Yohei meets with come through his own research and vetting followed by targeted cold outreach. Counter to conventional wisdom about vetting for credibility via closed networks, Yohei vets by product, positioning, and category before connecting with the founders. Because of this, he can form an opinion without being influenced by the typical insular, exclusive signals of the venture funding world. And the state of the business itself can be a testament to the team’s capabilities."
https://automatter.substack.com/p/recap-a-fireside-chat-with-yohei
15. "The world is entering its darkest moment at least since the 1970s, when it saw the Cultural Revolution, Indira Gandhi’s brief dictatorship, and a resurgence of expansionist Soviet authoritarianism under Brezhnev. The key difference is that this time, as Freedom House’s report warns, all of the world’s most powerful countries are trending toward illiberalism at the same time."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-darkness
16. "Ending a partnership — personal or corporate — is generally seen as an admission of failure, and one that sticks. Frequently on administrative forms, the options for marital status are single, married, and divorced. (How is “divorced” a status? Isn’t that just single?) Five years after my own divorce, telling people about it still inspired a depressing mix of pity and judgment from those whose (married) lives rested somewhere between denial and awful.
Companies, likewise, experience shame after a failed marriage. To avoid looking foolish, firms resist writing down the value of an acquisition or selling it outright (as Verizon did with Yahoo). After unwrapping the gifts and evangelizing the synergies to shareholders, they’re loath to admit they were wrong. The disarticulation of any union is expensive and painful, and most people and corporations would be better served to acknowledge the mistake … sooner."
https://www.profgalloway.com/divorce/
17. "Crypto is a non-specific amplifier: it has the potential to create a hypercapitalist libertarian nightmare, or a mutually-beneficial interdependent utopia. One thing I do know is that the only way we can influence which outcome we get is by radically participating in its creation.
This time, the stakes of sitting on the sidelines are too high: the imagined darkest possible timeline a certainty only with our inaction. The call to adventure for every burnt out technologist is, therefore, not to surrender to the mundanity of the Silicon Valley of the past or the imagined outcomes of the future, but to bring our full attention to co-creating meaningful and human-centric digital environments that we can be proud of."
https://gold.mirror.xyz/6ZUtkEg7kR2IM5sjkf74DhHvIehZ6GOfr56rE6wvAog
18. The new cycle begins in Corporate Venture Capital. Why does it feel like they never learn.
https://sifted.eu/articles/corporates-spinning-out-cvc/
19. "Here, we describe an abstraction we call the network union, a social graph organized in a tree-like structure with a leader, a purpose, a crypto-based financial and messaging system, and a daily call-to-action."
https://1729.com/network-union/
20. Interesting.....
"To stick to the example of cars, the fund management industry has not yet seen its Henry Ford. Cars only became affordable mass products once Ford came up with the idea of an assembly line. However, new funds are still assembled by hand, with many professional advisors asking for payments along the way, often for work that is 90% standardised.
Hold that thought and imagine how a "fund assembly line" should look like in the Internet age:
A web platform that lets you choose what kind of fund you want to create, as well as all its features and parameters.
Artificial intelligence software that creates all the documents based on templates, instead of hiring expensive humans each time a document needs to be created.
A commoditised process so cheap that you can easily set up investment funds even if you want to pool a relatively small amount or buy just a single investment.
That's exactly what Vauban.io has created: a digital platform where you can set up and manage a fund without ever having to leave your house. The process is fast and comparatively cheap because everything is automated and web-based. What used to be done by lawyers, will (mostly) be done by artificial intelligence and a proprietary platform."
21. "Long feedback loops, by their very nature, cannot be pleasurable in the way short feedback loops are. Basically: the thrill will disappear. And that’s okay.
In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long."
https://ava.substack.com/p/long-feedback-loops
22. "The reasons we do not have an approved aging drug today are not due to the science - the biological blockers to a first-generation aging drug have been clear for at least ten years. The primary reasons there are no approved aging drugs today are much more tricky - they are regulatory, societal, structural, and cultural.[a]"
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field
23. I fully agree with this advice. Its served me well too.
"I focused on learning potential at pretty much the cost of anything else, and it’s served me well. What a lot of young people don’t understand is that if you bet on increasing your learning potential, your earning potential compounds over time. The money will be there if you gather differentiated skills the market values (my knowledge of obscure electronic music, for some reason, is not one of those skills the market values).
This advice is fairly easy applicable and, I think, well understood by a lot of people. If you are making a choice between learning and earning, the former will almost always make sense not only from a happiness perspective, but also from a financial perspective long-term. I want to talk about what happens after you self-actualize in this direction."
https://caseyaccidental.com/personal-mission
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Builders as Venture Capitalists: The Paypal Mafia leading the Charge (As Always!)
Technology and platforms are shifting so fast these days that it is very hard to keep up. More so if you used to be an operator and become an investor. This is why it’s important that everyone, especially Investors should make or build something.
The biggest reason is you get far more insights from the frontline. You also gain a practical edge of understanding the process of creating (or where there are gaps). Sahil, founder of Gumroad & angel investor is an example of this. He built his startup on top of Stripe and this was what allowed him to get early insight into Stripe and how fast they were growing. Or the founders of Shippo or Klaviyo who had early insight into the Shopify ecosystem and how much business they were getting from Shopify stores. They saw the monster growth happening at Shopify back in 2015. I really wish I bought Shopify stock back then.
And no surprise the Paypal mafia is very far ahead on this. Looking at recent examples:
Max Levchin’s Sci-Fi VC (formerly HVF) started Glow and Affirm.
Joe Lonsdales 8VC incubated Quaestor among others
Khosla Ventures when Keith Rabois was there, started the now publicly traded Open Door
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund helped start Anduril Industries and Varda Space.
You use your skills as an investor to be a talent scout and conductor for building a company.
Thinking like a builder, you can go look at spaces and find conceptual gaps which helps you as an investor evaluating deals. Building in a sector or space, leads to all the dealflow coming to you and your firm. Additionally, the more you are a builder, the more respected you are by founders.
Despite the risks of and accusations of lack of focus when both building and investing at the same time. There are now some clear albeit exceptional cases where the skills and insight do compound and become a virtuous cycle. Watch this development closely!
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Hard Times Breed Hard People: Necessity Facilitates Innovation & Opportunity
There is much to learn from history. I recommend the Netflix series“Age of the Samurai” which detailed the surprising rise of great lord Oda Nobunaga. He was a lord from an obscure, factionalized, tiny clan of a tiny province surrounded by larger and more powerful enemies in the Sengoku Warring States period.
This forced him to utilize technology (guns), finding untapped & overlooked resources (Ashigaru peasant foot soldiers). They also introduced new tactics and changed the rules of fighting utilizing surprise/night fighting. Oda also raised the level of brutality and ruthlessness at the same time, so much so they called him the “Demon King of the Six Heavens”
That’s how they won over bigger and more conventionally trained enemies. This allowed him to conquer and unify most of central Japan after almost 300 years of chaos.
Ironically, the same forces of privation and necessity also created one of his fiercest enemies during his rule. The Iga from a small/ poor province of the same name, has to adapt by utilizing irregular warfare to fight larger more conventional enemies. They became particularly adept at infiltration, espionage, assassinations & pioneered the use of explosives and poison. These folks are what we now know as Ninjas. They were in the end only pacified by much effort, time and overwhelming force in a policy of what we would now call genocide.
What can we learn from this? Many of us just came out of a brutal 2020 pandemic lockdown.
I think this pain and suffering has sadly broken many people and we will be dealing with a mental health epidemic for a long time. But it has also created a new generation of mentally strong individuals who until last year had a fairly smooth ride. Great challenges and suffering are the crucible that strength & character comes from. This pain and these challenges are also what pushes them to find new insights or ways of thinking. Otherwise known as innovation.
The best startups came out of the carnage of 2000 and 2001, as well as the Great Financial Crisis from 2008-2009. It’s the analogy of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. They need to feel great pain breaking out of the cocoon but it’s this process that strengthens their wings.
This is why I would only invest in founders who have done “hard” or crap jobs. This is why I would only hire people who have had some setbacks in life but have persevered, grown and learned from these setbacks. These are people who are proven and are less likely to fold when things go wrong. This is a better signal of potential and success to me than any of the outdated credentials like where one went to school or where one worked before.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 9th, 2021
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” — Benjamin Franklin
Personal Appeal: please support this kickstarter for a Children’s book. I’m biased but it’s a great project. For all fans of Asian food & Night Markets.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arielchang/night-market-0
2. Here is to the rise of weirdos!
"Talent aside, this is Doja’s charm: To her fans, she is proof that there’s room for the weird kids at the top."
3. "The same year People crowned Jordan the Sexiest Man Alive, he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people for his work pushing Hollywood toward better racial diversity onscreen and behind the scenes, both above and below the line.
But he is still in uncharted waters. He’s a young man navigating an industry where every choice for Black creatives is one of consequence and responsibility, and he’s stepping into a period in his life when he’s fully aware of his purpose—and calling all the shots.
“I’m playing to be autonomous,” he says. “That’s liberation, because you’re really controlling your own destiny, and it gives you the freedom to make an impact where you see fit. It’s like, ‘All right, I can do what I need to do, when I need to do it, and there’s no asking."
https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a35651743/michael-b-jordan-without-remorse-interview/
4. "So the choice is now: “I’m going to find this niche obscure thing, or I’ll get the mass market thing.” It’s either Paul Skallas or Malcolm Gladwell. Aesop Rock or ASAP Rocky. Boutique brand or Amazon. You get the idea.
And you’d think removing friction creates a more level playing field — if it’s easier to find & purchase someone’s products, you’d think consumers would pick the easiest option. But that’s not always the case. Instead we see the familiar barbell with global mega hits on one side and a long tail of niche creators on the other."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-middle
5. "So here is where I come out on all of this after having the weekend to think more deeply about it. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are two of the greatest investors in history. They have not performed well during the internet age. There is a big gap between what they know (cash flow focused industrial age companies) and the most valuable companies in the world (software businesses). This isn’t a bug, it is a feature.
As the saying goes, “what got you here, may not get you there.” Should we really expect anything different from two investors who have historically stayed away from anything that wasn’t a cash-flowing business? Of course not. We should simply understand that their expertise in one area does not necessarily mean that they have expertise in another area."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/buffett-and-munger-highlight-bitcoins
6. "Miami makes even more sense as an outpost for international technology when you realize that it's been the Singapore of Latin America for generations...... It's an entrepôt that has always welcomed entrepreneurs, it deserves its success, and it's a great place to build technology.
For many years, international technologists have been aware of what's been happening in Silicon Valley, but often not vice versa. Now that is changing. In the remote economy, in the cryptoeconomy, in the Starlink economy, in the post-COVID economy, real estate is being repriced worldwide. Dense cities are less valuable and time zone colocation is more valuable. Asia is rising and traditional capitals are falling. It's not just about Miami or Austin anymore, but about Estonia, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel, Dubai, and New Zealand — and about Culdesac, Starbase, and Prospera.
And that's the fourth lesson of Miami Tech Week: startup cities are now feasible because the market for cities is now manifest. The overnight collapse of Silicon Valley, California as the undisputed tech capital means that cities are suddenly just as subject to competitive pressure as tech companies and national currencies."
7. "The web in its current state is like a city without public spaces. People can only interact in places owned by someone else, and a small group of landlords captures an oversized share of all economic activity.
Cryptocurrencies offer an alternative. Most people think of bitcoin when they hear the word crypto. They think of trading and speculation and “digital gold” and whatnot. But the more interesting aspects of cryptocurrencies are the ones that are abstract and harder to explain: the infrastructure that currencies run on and how applications that have nothing to do with trading or speculation can use this infrastructure.
This infrastructure is still young and relatively unproven. But it is fascinating and offers a glimpse of a possible future — even if that future might end up relying on entirely different technologies to achieve the same ends."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/the-token-society/
8. USA is one woke mess but agree Basecamp did not manage this well either.
"Fried and Hansson’s moves last week, and the discussion around them, revealed clear fault lines between executives and workers that go far beyond Basecamp. Founders at Coinbase, Basecamp, and other companies have sought to quash internal dissent that, in their view, distracts workers from the company mission and makes everyone miserable. To a manager, the exchange that led to Singer’s departure could lend credence to the idea that addressing social injustices on company Zoom calls is bound to be disastrous.
Meanwhile, employees at those companies have recoiled at what appear to be transparent efforts to prevent their workplaces from becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive."
https://www.platformer.news/p/-how-basecamp-blew-up-8c7
9. Interesting M&A approach from Apple.
"Apple has used acquihires to speed expansion in fields where it needs technical talent or it sees a specific technology that could set it apart from its rivals. While the acquihire is a common technique among big tech companies, Apple's near-exclusive focus on smaller transactions sets it apart.
"We have seen companies such as Google, Facebook, Intel and Amazon going for many billion-dollar deals," said Nicklas Nilsson, analyst at GlobalData, a firm that tracks M&A transactions. "Apple is buying more smaller startups while others spend more on established players."
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/01/how-apple-does-ma-small-and-quiet-with-no-bankers.html
10. I love this. Patent trolls are scum.
"A few years ago, Cloudflare got its first patent troll lawsuit, and decided to take Newegg's never settle strategy and kick it up a notch or three. Instead of just saying it wouldn't settle, Cloudflare set out to completely destroy the patent troll who sued it (an operation called Blackbird Technologies). In response to the lawsuit, Cloudflare launched something called Project Jengo, in which it sought to crowdsource prior art not just for the patent used against Cloudflare, but every single patent in Blackbird's portfolio -- and to hand out cash awards to those who found such prior art. It also went after the lawyers at Blackbird for violating legal ethics rules.
Cloudflare's campaign against Blackbird was a huge success. The company easily won in court and Blackbird became a shell of its former self. Prior art was discovered on some of its patents, the firm filed way fewer troll lawsuits, and it appeared that its staff had dwindled."
11. "To that end – in this Digital Age, to build wealth and gain influence, your goal should be to embrace anyone and anything that can expand your network. The people that promote you and your work are valuable to you. The people and advertising mechanisms that can extend your reach are valuable to you. Most importantly, your ability to create ways of gathering, organizing, and retaining your network into communities is what will drive value on a personal level.
In the Digital Age, the most important network nodes have become the people and information that meaningfully contribute to the global network. The more that people that join and are effectively organized into communities and the more information that is productively curated into actionable information, the more value the network has."
https://dougantin.com/global-network-value-in-the-digital-age/
12. I think this is a good thing. Also smart thing in this day and age.
“They are not sharing celebratory instances with broader social groups right now because they don't want to get lynched and they want to be perceived as responsible people with the larger social circle online,” she says.
“The same people are sharing celebratory instances within their smaller social circle via WhatsApp.”
13. "Employees are going to vote with their feet and I feel for People Ops teams who are going to be having a tremendous number of emotional conversations."
https://hunterwalk.medium.com/the-great-talent-reshuffling-of-2021-has-begun-d587c019ed89
14. Reading this, no wonder most founders fear, don't trust and/or hate VCs.
"Zhu's firing has blossomed into a bizarre saga that hits on many of the classic Silicon Valley cultural touchpoints: founders who don't act like conventional businessmen, the search for additional productivity through drug use, and the risks of talking openly about the pressures of the job. It’s also a story steeped in the tense ethnic politics that are currently roiling the tech community and American society at large."
15. "The big picture plan is as follows: 1) you are underpaid at your job/career. Why do we know? No one hires someone who is unprofitable otherwise they would go out of business.
So. Step 1 is knowing that you can always do better and are currently underpaid;
2) step two is a second income stream. No excuses. There are blue collar workers who follow our website that created online income streams related to their work (car repair, home repair etc.) that generate multiple 6-figures online;
3) you do this by building it up while you’re not working. If you have “rules” to follow you simply start a business under the name of a family member. If you cannot trust a single person to help you build a business, your life is in terrible shape & you need to ramp up creativity;
4) while investing is cool, you *MUST HAVE* laser focus on two income streams first. If you have two of them, investing becomes more important. An income stream is defined as anything that pays living expenses – Rent, food, drinks & utilities & 5) once you have a business up and running, you *can* quit *if you want* when it is generating 2x more than you make at your current job/career.
https://bullbowtie.substack.com/p/bowtiedbull-faq-will-be-updated-over
16. "First, China seems less likely to start a world war than Imperial Japan. China has much less of a need for external conquest, its military is not used to conquering places, and it has centralized, consolidated rule that will not let it be pushed into war by rogue factions. Other than a general sense of having been oppressed and humiliated by the West, China has none of the motives for war that Imperial Japan had.
BUT, if China does end up going to war with the West — or even have a protracted Cold War type struggle — it will be an infinitely more dangerous foe than Japan ever could have been. It’s far larger, with endless manpower and manufacturing capacity and vast stores of natural resources. And it has a fearsomely effective and centralized decision-making apparatus. The U.S. was able to overcome Imperial Japan alone, while fighting a two-front war; against China, it could probably only hope to prevail with a significant number of powerful allies."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/contemporary-china-vs-imperial-japan
17. Very observant view.
"Cars. Fashion. Fitness. Sex. Who cares? These things are not important. In San Francisco, we value “ideas.” In New York, we value “greatness.” But let’s attempt a little self-awareness. The physical stuff of San Francisco and New York is literally crumbling, which is something most reasonable people, including reasonable people from San Francisco and New York, find alarming.
I don’t believe it’s a coincidence the most openly materialistic city in America also appears to be the American city most committed to new construction, chief among this new construction housing, which accommodates new people, with new ideas and new businesses, which generates new wealth and perpetuates the whole dynamic cycle. Lambo culture isn’t some shameful “other thing” that’s happening in Miami. Lambo culture seems to be the engine driving this entire city forward."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/misery-and-joy
18. Fascinating thread on the super wealthy.
https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1389588498315939844
19. Shades of the Weekend Fund but I think these operator-run micro VC funds are awesome.
20. Yikes. Been there!
"When several employees publicly state: “I found out about this from Jason Fried’s public blog post”, then it’s unambiguously the CEO who’s at fault. He should have ensured that the decisions were adequately communicated to staff before making them public. You can make excuses for him, but, at best, these never rise above ‘whoops! he broke something’.
He still broke something, didn’t apologise, and, as CEO, is ultimately responsible no matter what. He prioritised getting ahead of potential leaks over ensuring good internal communications. No matter how you slice that, that’s pretty irresponsible management right there."
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/you-are-what-you-do/
21. Learned something new.
"What’s important to recognize here is that this isn’t something that requires someone to be a huge celebrity, just someone that’s popular in their own particular sect.
And I believe that social media layers on cues that strengthen these quasi-parasocial (IE: very light communication, through likes or retweets or the occasional reply) or parasocial relationships.
Someone following you on Twitter creates a certain level of attachment - we believe that we are connected somehow, even if said follow never actually results in any kind of other reaction."
The weight of certain social media-based reactions is such that we can, in our minds, say that we “know” someone that we don’t."
https://ez.substack.com/p/how-parasocial-relationships-have
22. "Indeed, there are, as you might have seen, a lot of others in the market pursuing the “FBA rollup” model — consolidating businesses that have been built on the back of Fulfillment by Amazon, with the pitch being they can apply more sophisticated economies of scale, analytics and management to grow great cottage industries into high rises, so to speak. But Razor believes its point of differentiation is its focus on technology to improve its responsiveness to the market, both when it comes to identifying and buying brands, and then growing them.
It’s a big opportunity. By one estimate there are about 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon today, and their ranks are growing exponentially, with more than 1 million sellers joining the platform in 2020 alone. Thrasio has in the past estimated to me that there are probably 50,000 businesses selling on Amazon via FBA making $1 million or more per year in revenues."
23. I would never move to Guernsey but love the concept and they are definitely doing it right.
"One likely winner are micro-jurisdictions – countries such as Singapore, Monaco, or Liechtenstein. These small countries tend to be faster at political decision-making, and during times of crisis they often benefit from a higher degree of societal cohesion. Their agility and stability will prove an asset during the coming years of rapid change and potentially unprecedented turmoil."
24. "Inflation is not some potential issue down the road. Inflation is already here.
As Warren Buffett told investors only days ago, “We’re seeing very substantial inflation.”
25. I will admit, I was a bit surprised and saddened by this. Guess there are many lessons here. Marriage is just tough.
https://time.com/6046072/bill-melinda-gates-divorce-couples-therapists/
26. "So how do we get the best of cities and the best of the internet? What if creative, ambitious people found each other online and then decided to get together in the same place?
It's not the place that matters, it's the density of creative ideas and interesting people. When I think about where I meet interesting people, it’s increasingly not in a physical place at all. It’s on Twitter threads and Discord channels and WhatsApp groups.
In the Facebook era, people met in person and then became “friends” online. But it makes more sense to do the opposite: find your friends online and then meet up in person."
https://www.meatspacealgorithms.com/decentralized-cities/
27. Very interesting data that I am sure VCs will be putting in their decks.
"This new analysis shows half of all VC funds launched between 2009 and 2017 generated returns to investors, net of all management and performance fees, that outperformed the public market equivalents (PME) of both the S&P 500 and Russell 2000."
https://dan-malven.medium.com/why-institutional-investors-should-double-down-on-vc-5a0f103c1ae9
28. "TL;DR It's never been easier than it is today to be a creator. To create content online. To find an audience. To monetize. And that — that's absolutely amazing because we're seeing more and more creators emerge. We're witnessing a rebirth and renewal of connection that technologies previously disrupted. And we're only at the beginning. The Creator Economy is representing an important shift in our society — for creators, but also for consumers."
https://uncutfm.substack.com/p/creator-economy-how-did-we-get-here
29. This is a credible new VC fund for Europe.
"You’re looking at utilizing software, automation, and machine learning. If you look at any industry that is what happened – software is eating it up. It touches every component of your process from discovering companies to managing them, evaluating them, helping them with support. So we still have our thesis-driven approach, but what we’re doing is pairing it with software, like a bionic suit, so this is how to augment what we do and do it bigger and better.”
He added: “The European ecosystem is a lot bigger today, so relying on gut instinct, relationships, networking is not going to be efficient. Utilizing software is going to be critical for us."
30. It's a fascinating take & alot of folks (on East Coast) will disagree.
"Over the course of 2020, public health failed, public schools failed, fire departments failed, and police departments failed. National, state, and local governments failed. Media corporations failed and even the US military failed. Just about every Western institution run by a political heir failed, because it was presented with the unanticipated shock of COVID-19. The widgets these heirs' factories were cranking out were no longer suited for the occasion. And their failure has caused a crisis of faith in American institutions specifically, and in the postwar order more broadly.
Where heirs failed, founders succeeded. The internet stayed up. The state couldn't deliver checks, but Amazon could deliver packages. The legacy universities were closed but the MOOC platforms were open. The restaurants were shuttered but the delivery apps were shipping. The media corporations reported that the virus was at best a remote threat while the tech companies prepared for remote work. And the billions spent on military biodefense didn't do much (see above), but the millions invested in Moderna did."
https://1729.com/founding-vs-inheriting/
31. "My biggest takeaway from Munger's comment is to recognize that everyone thinks they're a great investor because everything is going up. Coinbase and Robinhood have been on top of the US App Store leaderboard all week, ahead of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
It seems like everyone is on high alert for the next big thing, and most won't get what they're looking for.
If there was ever a time to turn off your phone and stick to your investing strategy, it is this moment right now."
https://www.kevinrooke.blog/investor-letter-002/
32. "Basically, there are structural inefficiencies that prevent incumbents from competing. And they did it to themselves because for the last 100 years they put up all of these barriers of lobbying and regulation. Now, they can’t compete."
https://www.nfx.com/post/outsider-to-spac-in-six-years/
33. "In fact, the government could also pay signing bonuses to companies that hire workers at significantly higher wages than what they were paying before — a temporary wage subsidy. Not only would that provide additional impetus to hire, it would help normalize the habit of offering higher wages to attract workers.
So these policies could help kick the labor market out of its current doldrums and produce the rapid recovery we’re all expecting from the end of COVID. They won’t represent a rejection of Pandemic UI — instead, they’ll simply represent an acknowledgement that as conditions change, policy has to change too. Pandemic UI was never meant to be permanent, and it’s time to replace it with something better."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/lets-give-a-fond-farewell-to-pandemic
34. "But our idolatry of innovators and the algorithmic media ecosystem have distorted the allocation platform. In the spectacle economy, it’s about the show, the now, the short-term hit. We’re the richest country in the history of humanity, and we can’t garner the political will to fix our bridges, let alone reach for the stars."
"If there is a glitch in the matrix, it’s us. One in five U.S. households with children is food insecure, and we have a man telling his 53 million acolytes to purchase a digital currency so he can sell it at a profit to pad the earnings of a company that’s worth more than automakers producing 60 times the vehicles. And why wouldn’t he? When you tell an innovator he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. Once we idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now we worship tech innovators that create billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-martian/
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/
Be Long Term Greedy
Paraphrasing Goldman Sach’s Gus Levy, this has been my hard learned attitude from being in the tech industry & business in general for the last 2 decades. Growing up in Canada, my experience of the general culture was that it was pessimistic, parochial, cynical & small minded (thank you British Empire). It was culture shock for me when I first moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the late 90s.
The Tech industry was fast emerging and the culture was optimistic and cooperative. “Pay it Forward” was the dominant culture. You also learned to not cut “winner take all deals”, basically you always leave something on the table in business negotiations. It might sound utopian but there were very practical reasons for this.
The tech industry is incredibly dynamic and yet somewhat small despite its massive growth. So someone who is a nobody today, could be a billionaire tomorrow. Someone who is working at a startup, which would usually be acquired by Google or Facebook or Salesforce and then end up running a key part of their business. The person you end up screwing in a deal, will most likely end up on the other side of the table down the road. And with way more power and leverage over you, plus a long memory. So it just does not pay to purposely screw someone over if you intend on having a long career in the tech business.
As an early stage investor, you are always surprised. What attracted me to the pre-seed and seed stage is that you are basically in the human potential business. You are investing in the arc of the entrepreneurs career. I used to be very judgemental on someone’s potential: the reality that I’ve learned over the years is that you really never know. The winners turn in losers and vice versa. But most folks who stick it out never stay down for long and this is why this industry is so challenging and encouraging at the same time.
The key Lesson: Never ever write anyone off. Think Win-win. And probably the most important point: It really does pay to be Optimistic ie. Be Long term Greedy.
Listen to this Newsletter: https://listencat.com/the-hard-fork-by-marvin-liao-podcast/