Nothing is Truly Free
What do I mean? On Google or FB you can use their awesome services without paying for anything. But you actually are paying for it, just in a different way. You provide your data, they sell your data to advertisers and you get targeted with ads. Basically YOU are the product.
That highly discounted stay package to a Hawaiian hotel? Part of the deal is you have a mandatory meeting to listen to a real estate timeshare sales pitch. I might add that timeshare sales people are very good & the close rate is high, which is why these offers work. Great customer acquisition costs here.
Those meals or drinks your friend or neighbour pays for, unless you are a sociopath, you will feel obligated to them. I don’t know about you but as a fairly independent minded person, I hate owing anybody anything.
This is completely applicable to life as well. You want a healthy & fit body, you have to work out and eat healthy. You want a great marriage or family, you have to prioritize & put in the time and energy. If you want to get good at martial arts, surfing or anything, you have to put in the effort. You want to be a great investor or manager, you need time, experience & books and classes or at least that is what I did. There is always a price you have to pay. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying to you or is an inexperienced idiot (or a spoiled useless rich kid hidden away from the real world).
I truly believe that you can have and do almost anything you want. The question is are you willing to pay the price? Most people are not.
The sooner you understand this, the better your life will be. That means you can take ownership for where you are and what you have. If you don’t like it, you can fix it.
There is no free lunch in life or business.
Everyone will be a Creator, a Business and an Investor: The New Global Entrepreneurial Generation
Watch the new group of Influencers. They create & build an audience, make money from ads, sponsorships & merchandise. What venture capitalist Hunter Walk calls a multi-SKU creator. More here: Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator
Then they either start companies on the back of their audience Like the now somewhat disgraced David Dobrik with the app Dispo for example. Or investing in startups & leveraging their audience to promote their portfolio cos like Jake Paul via the Anti-Fund or Josh Richards via his Animal Capital. Another great example is my friend Anthony Pompliano, started as an investor, then became a creator powerhouse on Twitter, Substack, then other platforms. Then he leveraged this audience to build a Rolling Fund, even going on to lead Series A rounds. He tips this off with launching the Bitcoin Pizza product (How does he find the time?! :).
Ann Lee Skates details this very well in this tweetstorm: https://twitter.com/anneleeskates/status/1395105774817267712
This is absolutely going to be a model for all of us: the everyday person in America and soon the world.
Why is this possible?
This is due to the Rise of Global Platforms. From Gig Economy platforms like Uber, Lyft, Upwork, Doordash and others. We are now turning fast into the Creator Economy. Mainstays like Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Snap to the new platforms like Substack, Tiktok and Clubhouse. Or Shopify and Amazon for ecommerce players. Education platforms like Maven, Kajabi and Udemy. Let’s not forget very specific creator platforms Patreon and OnlyFans.
Many of these Influencers can rent the larger platforms and then build up personal brands and large audiences. Talk about opportunities here for building audiences.
As they make money, this goes into investments if they are smart or even just want to keep with inflation.
Balaji famously stated:
“The internet turned everyone into publishers, and crypto will turn everyone into investors.
The intermediate step is hundreds of small angel funds run by individuals.
The Blogger era of investing, before the Twitter era.”
Source: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1188014806709633025
It’s not just angel investing startups. On top of this we now have new alternative assets that will become more accessible for everyone. This is not an exhaustive list but you get an idea of the how many new awesome assets there are to invest in:
Angellist & Republic for early stage tech startups
Binance & Coinbase & many new Defi Exchanges like FTX for Crypto
Rally Road for collectibles
Masterworks in Art
EToro, Common Stock, Public and Robinhood for Public stocks (yes stocks are norm but these services do make it easier for anyone to buy & manage their portfolio)
AltoIRA for investing in alternatives thru your IRA
Acretrader & Farmtogether in farmland
Fundrise, CrowdRise, Yieldstreet, Lex Markets in fractional real estate assets
Investor Mercedes Bent remarks:
“the simultaneous surge of the creator economy & retail investing isn't a coincidence.
they both reflect consumers' desire to join the ownership economy & declare independence.”
The world is changing around us. I cannot help but feel optimistic. But it certainly feels like in the media and for most people we are so focused on the past world we lived in and not looking at the new one.
As Alexander Graham Bell said:
“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads August 1st, 2021
"Recognizing that you are not where you want to be is a starting point to begin changing your life." - Deborah Day
"The metaverse has to be persistent, synchronous, and live. Just as in the inspiring vision put forward by Neal Stephenson decades ago, it has to go on all the time, even when you are asleep or living entirely in physical reality. You jump into the metaverse. And it has to be highly concurrent: this artificial world has to be continuously updated from the inputs of its millions or potentially billions of users."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/the-metaverse-is-here
2. 110% agree with all of this + Super bullish on Eastern Europe.
"Taking this idea of country categorization and the digital transformation one step further – Eastern Europe is a digital age growth powder keg.
Immense digital opportunity exists in the surging eastern European style countries. Countries that have lagged the last 30 years finally have an appetite and the skills to enter the digital workforce. What’s most important is that they can enter the global, digital workforce at a fraction of the cost of “first world” and “developed” nation workers.
Act quickly, decisively, and more frequently than your peers.
Any action you skip will increasingly be done by someone else. When your peers take action that you don’t, they compound their progress at a greater rate than you. This creates a runaway advantage for the action oriented people and harms anyone that can’t keep up momentum with societal progress."
https://dougantin.com/important-things-about-the-digital-age/
3. No surprise but sorry, the Olympics suck.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/olympic-ratings-hit-33-year-low-4455985/
4. "figuring out how to make games is a very different skill set than making TV shows and movies — which is why most big entertainment companies have failed whenever they’ve tried to get into games themselves (big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have all swung and missed to varying degrees, as well). So it’s entirely possible that Netflix’s move into games could flop, too.
On the other hand: As even the most hidebound Hollywood executive knows by now, games are bigger than Hollywood, and they’re not going away. If it’s going to take a long time to figure out, it’s better to get started sooner than later."
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/20/22586084/netflix-gaming-strategy-earnings-explained
5. Damn......$4.75 Billion worth of BTC stolen......
https://www.bosshunting.com.au/hustle/africrypt-ameer-raees-cajee-crypto-heist/
6. "We don’t see a good argument against the future being Robotics, AI, VR and crypto. Instead, we have to *prepare* intelligently for that future.
So. Look at the big picture: 1) AI is going to displace tons of jobs - no reason to type numbers into excel if software can scrape it and put it in there with zero errors. No need to have an Uber/Taxi driver if the car is self driving. No reason to pay a middle man a fee for executing a contract if it is just a line of software code. 2) AI is already making the elite more profitable. Many of the media accounts you interact with today are already bots/not human. You just can’t tell the difference - yes, seriously. Which is an uncomfortable fact in and of itself. 3) As money is printed the price of goods will go up as supply of money is higher (M2 - latest figure at $20T)
You can tell that someone is not rich when they are attempting to prove to you that they are rich. Instead they are trying to use that to sell you something. If anyone is using status goods to sell a product, you know the product doesn’t work."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/big-picture-on-ubl-taxes-and-spotting
7. What else is new? Gen X has taken the brunt of multiple recessions and massive changes in economy throughout our lives. Speaking as a Gen X, Don't like it but it is what it is. So all we can do is adapt.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/gen-x-may-shoulder-jobless-crisis-5098564/
8. Totally spot on.
"No longer will the best investors have the best track records. In the future, they’ll also have the strongest signal and distribution."
https://www.joinfreehold.com/posts/great-founders-seek-investors-with-reach
9. "This is the definition of slow and steady wins the race. There is still a lot of work to do, but taking a long term view on building a decentralized network is likely to be the most sustainable and resilient. It can be hard to see the validity of this approach in the short term, because it feels like everyone is getting rich or zooming past you on a day-to-day cadence.
But as we have seen from example after example, the systems that go fast and aren’t focused on resilience, historically have run into major problems."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/last-man-standing-is-a-winning-strategy
10. "I believe that the future of retail investing will be one of mass customization. We will look back on an era when everyone owned the S&P 500 in its exact proportions as archaic and backward. The fact that a school teacher, a financial services professional, and an oil worker all could own the same set of equities seems absurd to me.
Why would these people take the same equity risks in their portfolios when their careers have very different risk profiles?"
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/we-are-all-investors-now/
11. "Power. It corrupts the best and attracts the worst. Its allure is loved and despised. It brings more pain and less happiness. And yet, men chase it like wild animals. We cannot help ourselves. But not only can we not help ourselves, we are nothing without it. Welcome to earth, where women are born with value and men are born without it. Us men need to find our value."
https://unmodernmen.com/personal-power-2/
12. This is a very interesting video. Russia is overlooked from an investing perspective. A contrarian view but this is where the alpha can be found.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU-AlpoldG0
13. "For many years, anyone asked about investing in Russian stocks would have answered one of the following:
"Putin will steal all their money."
"Boring, old economy companies."
"Value traps."
Indeed, these views would have been spot on ten years ago. However, Russia has changed a lot over the past decade. E.g., in 2012, the Russian government started to encourage state-controlled public companies to pay out at least 25% of their profits to shareholders. In 2016, it upped the suggested payout ratio for dividends to 50%."
14. Very much look forward to this book.
"For Sergey Young, such a best-case scenario sounds preposterously pessimistic. With advances in AI-enabled diagnostics, wearables, regenerative medicine, age-reversing pills, and other longevity-focused areas of innovation, a child born today can expect to live well over 100. In the much longer term, it’s within the realm of possibility that we could be looking at living to 200 years or more, said Young."
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/when-90-is-young-what-a-moonshot-vc-thinks-about-radical-longevity/
15. "Packy is far from the only person who has parlayed online creation into an investing practice. Others have raised funds from their newsletter subscribers, Twitter audience, or former coworkers. TikTokers and other celebrities are also adding private market investing to their list of SKUs.
Private market investing is now a part of the creator economy, with the deal organizer or fund manager taking up the position of creator. It’s yet another SKU available to those looking to monetize an engaged audience. This SKU has been unlocked due to an inflection point in the private markets -- low interest rates, regulatory easing, and a renewed belief in the potential for massive technology and media outcomes.
Venture capital -- while still inaccessible to 90%+ of the US -- is more accessible than ever before. And even for those who are still excluded, the private investing boom has made it more aspirational, perhaps just out of reach. How is aspiring to be a successful VC any crazier than aspiring to be the next Charli D’Amelio?"
https://automatter.substack.com/p/the-year-that-everyone-became-a-creator
16. For anyone trying to understand the nutty venture funding space right now.
"In my eleven years in venture capital, I've never experienced a market that's moving as quickly as it is at present. And in conversations with fellow investors, it seems we all feel the same way.
Founders are going out to raise a new round, and within weeks, if not days, have multiple term sheets. So what's driving this speed? There are of course benefits to founders and investors for rounds to move faster. But what are the costs? How fast is too fast?"
https://nbt.substack.com/p/fast-fundraising
17. This is a pretty cool company. SPACE manufacturing!
18. There is a major need for this company in the USA. Massive problem and huge market.
19. I'm a big fan of Futurism. Recurrent Ventures is doing some cool stuff in media space.
20. "In DeFi, there are no regulations since it is decentralized. If a vampire attack is launched on any chain there are many potential issues: 1) the code is purposely made buggy, 2) the project manager suddenly runs off with the coins and 3) the tokenomics are unclear and have triggers built in (unknown to general public). While this is a base level explainer the point is the same: if you lose your funds no one is coming to help you."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/vampires-early-days-of-defi-and-more
21. "The most obvious trait he exploits is the West’s constant preference to avoid confrontation. The United States and its allies almost always seek to avoid escalation and look for negotiated solutions. On issues of importance to Russia, this gives the Kremlin an immediate advantage."
https://cepa.org/how-putin-keeps-winning/
22. "Embedded Finance (i.e. distribution of banking services by non-banks) defines the revenue opportunity for Banking-as-a-Service (i.e. banks delivering services via API) and is a driver for Embedded Fintech (i.e. integration of fintech offerings by banks). It was catalyzed by Open Banking (i.e. banks sharing customer data via API)."
https://www.trackingpayments.org/p/issue-13-unpacking-fintech-themes
23. "Over the past 10 years we had the mobile smartphone revolution, it brought us on-demand services, constant digital connectivity, and social networking. Simultaneously, we were introduced to crypto assets and decentralized digital infrastructure. And quietly in the backdrop and at a small scale, we had remote work and gig style economies begin to form.
But these changes didn’t impact overall societal makeup immediately. Inertia kept life progressing as it always has. These changes seemed like fads and trends at the periphery that supported the late industrial society and did not signal the reshaping of the world.
And yet, they were quietly working in concert, under the radar, reshaping society.
That is until COVID happened."
https://dougantin.com/how-covid-broke-reality-and-delivered-the-digital-age/
24. "Product-led growth skills have quickly become among the most in-demand for SaaS companies both large and small. In fact, a recent search uncovered 950+ open positions citing “product-led growth”, up from only 200 in January.
Here’s why: companies with a growth team have demonstrably higher free-to-paid conversion rates (12% vs. 5%). They see somewhat higher website visitor to free sign-up conversion rates, too, as growth teams work cross-functionally with marketing to attract the right audience."
https://kylepoyar.substack.com/p/7-new-product-led-insights
25. Apple's IDFA changes have caused chaos in the gaming space. Some interesting lessons for adapting in the gaming space.
26. This is pretty awful.
https://thehustle.co/how-employers-steal-billions-of-dollars-from-workers-every-year/
27. I was hesitant to post this as this piece seems like typical anti-tech write up that we see in dying old media. But the Metaverse is coming and we need to be aware of its origins & how we can make sure it’s utopian and NOT dystopian.
“The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies—the whole industry,” as Zuckerberg put it. “You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eqbb/the-metaverse-has-always-been-a-dystopia
28. Incredibly well said. We need more independent thinking and questioning in our world.
"Approaching the world with a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing — even if it may not be popular. Next time you hear, "I am doing this because [insert X authority figure] said so," question, inquire, and verify."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-woman-who-got-reincarnated
29. It's incredibly impressive what Mayor Suarez has done. He has put Miami on the tech map.
"Suarez is a Republican and has pursued an avowedly conservative agenda: pro-business, pro-technology, lower taxes and reduced regulation, pro-police and tough on crime. Say what you want about his politics, but it’s hard not to admire the energy and enthusiasm he brings to his cause. Suarez has bounded from coast to coast and from social media platform to social media platform extolling Miami as open for business (even in the midst of a historic pandemic) and positioning it as a safer, cheaper, more business-friendly alternative to San Francisco and New York City."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/07/miamis-mayor-is-charting-a-course-for-a-post-trump-gop
30. "Our experience limits our imagination.
People believe that great entrepreneurs develop novel ideas because they're exceptionally creative, brilliant, and visionary.
But the truth is, everything we come up with is a mixture of what we've seen, heard, and experienced.
So, if we want to develop better ideas, we need to expose ourselves to new experiences, gain new skills, make new connections, join new communities.
We need to expand our horizons."
Check Yourself Before you Wreck Yourself
I wonder about this all the time. People who seem to have it all, people at the pinnacle of success like Hollywood stars, super star musicians, powerful politicians and corporate executives, hedge fund financiers & billionaire entrepreneurs. One minute they are on top of the world. The next their lives have imploded. And most of the time this is very much self inflicted.
These are clearly NOT stupid people. But eventually the skills and attitude of what made them successful, works against them when they hit a certain stage.
One big factor in my opinion is they start to develop a massive sized ego for their rightfully hard earned position. They start to believe their own PR. They stop listening to others and/ or more likely surround themselves with “Yes People.” This is a very dangerous environment to be in as you rapidly lose touch with reality. The Greeks had a great term for this. Hubris: “Excessive pride and self confidence which leads to their destruction”.
This is endemic in big corporations with a long history. Why do you think there are always big crises hitting big companies (and big bureaucracies)? NO one wants to pass up bad news. SO the truth gets suppressed until it hits critical mass and explodes. For an illustrative example, read the latest book on the WeWork debacle called “The Cult of We” by Brown & Farrell. No one comes out of this looking good.
I also think a combination of complacency or magical thinking makes them lose their edge. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates once remarked, “Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can't lose.”
In the startup world I see this in founders who recently raise a very large venture capital funding round or rounds. They take their feet off the gas in the business, or they jump into the conference speaking circuit.
Or what is also common, arrogance & know-it-all-ism in many venture capitalists. They are treated like B-list stars by founders and the media. They conflate this for their own personal brilliance and genius, when it’s really just about their access to money.
How to combat this?
Have a sense of humor and try not to take yourself too seriously. Ego is the enemy as they say
Try REALLY hard to have some self awareness, some humility & remember where you came from
Have mentors you respect and who keep you in check
Have a partner and friends not from your industry (this definitely works as they don’t care or understand your fame/clout whatever)
Hang out with people way more successful than you are
Work with diverse people who challenge you (nicely or not) ie. No YES PEOPLE & Sycophants. You have to weed them out.
With success that seems to hit so fast these days, it’s really easy to lose touch with reality. Make sure you build some self awareness and humility and face reality. As remarked in the bible, Proverbs 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
Sadly, I believe many people will only learn this the hard way.
Outsiders versus Insiders Drive the Cycle of Innovation
As a History major & business practitioner over the last 2 decades, I needed to look at technology trends and innovation to better understand how things work in the world.
Outsiders innovate, they win, become incumbents and the new establishment.Then they become insiders, get fat and lazy. New hungry outsiders come in and wreck them. The insiders wake up or get scared and try to compete. They usually lose in the end. Change is just plain hard. Even if the incumbents are not fat and lazy (usually not the case), it’s very challenging to keep up in our present ultra competitive environment full of change.
You saw this in many different instances. Roman empire versus the Germanic barbarians. Spanish empire versus the Dutch, French & British. Old Europe versus the rising USA at the turn of century circa 1900 through to 1945. In the business world, Hedge Funds and PE firms versus the Fortune 500. East Coast versus West coast. Mainframe versus Microcomputer versus PC versus Mobile. Countless examples.
We’re seeing this in the Venture capital industry and ironically it’s the hedge funds like Tiger Global, Two Sigma, Coatue & D2 doing that from the top. And solo capitalists and new emerging fund managers coming in from the bottom. The only firm that seems to be staying on top is Sequoia Capital and it’s because they have fully embraced Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” mindset. Can’t say the same for many of the old guard in VC who have made too much money and are not willing to hustle anymore.
The exact same phenomenon is happening in the larger financial services space. Crypto versus the incumbents of the old financial world of Central Banks, big Retail banks, Visa and Mastercard. The crypto industry are the new barbarians at the old Finance gates. There is going to be a massive fight but the trends in the long run are in favor of a decentralized world. It might take 10 years, maybe even 20 but I am certain it will happen as this present young digitally savvy millennial generation comes into positions of power and influence.
This cycle is well described by one of my favorite Medium writers, Daniel Jeffries:
“Crypto will be the establishment. And then somewhere, someone much younger, who’s left out of the system will dream of bringing it all crashing down, and they’ll come up with an idea and a brand new technology that scares the hell out of us and threatens to topple everything we worked so hard to build with crypto.
We’ll be the ones trying to suppress the revolution.
The wheel of time spins forever and ever. And the eternal cycle will roll back to the beginning once more.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 25th, 2021
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."--John Quincy Adams
This is a must read thread. Why gaming wins versus Music. But relevant for all businesses if they want to stay relevant.
https://mobile.twitter.com/cdixon/status/1416452788498927617
2. "The economic case for a geroscience moonshot is compelling. Healthcare is among the most pressing challenges we face as a nation and, by far, the greatest fraction of healthcare expenditures comes from caring for the sick elderly population. The disease-first approach has been quite successful at keeping sick people alive longer than was possible 50 years ago, which it turns out is really expensive.
In contrast, if we keep people alive longer in good health, they can remain productive members of society. In fact, one recent study estimated the cost savings from a conservative geroscience intervention that increases healthy life expectancy by only one year would reach about $38 trillion annually. Given the proposed ARPA-H price tag of $6.5 billion, that equates to a 5846-fold return on investment."
3. "Depending on where you look, Robinhood is animated by contrasting energies, trying to convince you of the intelligence and nobility of its endeavor at the same time that it assures you of its playfulness.
This is clear even within the first few pages. One spread proclaims “Our mission is to democratize finance for all”; the next alludes to the Game Stop fiasco’s chief protagonist with a cheeky “ROAR” ticker. A similar juxtaposition plays out a moment later: right before Robinhood’s founders extoll their values — clear-minded and sober as they are — they wink again at Roaring Kitty with this paraphrase: “If you like these values, you may like the stock."
This is amusing, certainly. But it leaves the impression of a business unsure of whether it wants to be the most serious fun company or the most fun serious company. Does Robinhood want to be the Allegiance of Magicians from Arrested Development or Mean Girls’ “cool Mom”? Is this an addictive social app with an economic agenda, or a bank with a sense of humor?"
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/robinhood
4. This is a great podcast for biohackers. Lots of good ideas and protocols.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXvDEmo6uS4
5. Go Cube. Batch 18 represent. Congrats to Artyom Keydunov, Pavel Tiunov & team.
https://www.decibel.vc/content/cube-seeing-the-power-of-cloud-data
6. "Since a huge chunk of your net worth is going to be tied to your side venture it is better to start today. It is also a lot smarter to choose a path with the highest *chance* of success. This means you do not follow what you “love”. You do not go into writing. You do not go into painting. You do not go into making music. You find the most monetizable skill you have and run in that direction.
If you are a good writer you need to learn to copywrite and sell things to people (conversions = massive income). If you are good at art, you go into UX/UI design - you don’t sit on a street corner selling paintings for $20 hoping to be “seen”. If you are good at music, you go work at an advertising company at minimum (cinema etc.) instead of trying to be “seen” at random pop up events. Yes. There are exceptions to the rule (Kanye West, other rappers etc.). However. We’re playing a game of probabilities not hopes and dreams."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/probability-based-decisions-make
7. Very cool company. Congrats @Samir Kaji & team.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/allocate-banks-5m-to-open-up-venture-capital-fund-access
8. "But Golding possesses what you would call main character energy. Born out of TikTok, the term refers to puffing up one’s own chest as a means of self-care than a shallow ego boost. In a June 2021 essay for The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes that post-Covid main character energy is about trying to “reclaim control of our stories, exert ourselves upon the world,” and “take our places as protagonists once more.”
This is Golding’s narrative. He’s an actor with all the attributes of the main protagonist, but decades of systemic racism in Hollywood have kept protagonists from resembling Golding."
https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/henry-golding-is-snake-eyes
9. "As you can see, people have less wealth and more debt. The devaluation of fiat currencies has made everything more expensive around us. The promise of bitcoin is that we will usher in a new era of sound money. The currency is outside the system. No one controls it. People will once again be able to simply save their way to financial freedom. The money won’t lose value over time. In fact, the purchasing power will increase."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/fix-the-money-fix-the-world
10. This looks so awesome!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g18jFHCLXk
11. "Well, DeFi does give us hyper automation. If you take out a loan in Aave, there is no one deciding what the collateral should be, no one examining your credit history, no courts are needed to seize the collateral, no police to enforce a court decision. This, finally, is a rational world.
The Enlightenment, at long last. Loan disbursement and repayment happen automatically and collateral will be seized in the same way through the application of a smart contract embedded in the blockchain. Aave also allows certain loans to be instantly issued and settled. These loans require no upfront collateral and happen almost instantly, taking advantage of a feature of all blockchains: transactions are only finalized when a new bundle of transactions, known as a block, is accepted by the network.
So far, so good. The most problematic, but also potentially most interesting element of DeFi is that hyper automation may well be impossible. Smart contracts can be gamed."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/decentralised-finance-and-the-world
12. For anyone interested in house clearing....like I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxolFYFCi24
13. Still the best podcast show around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAtPReTswZo&t=241s
14. "But China never really shifted out of survival mode. Yes, China’s leaders embraced economic growth, but that growth has always been toward the telos of comprehensive national power. China’s young people may be increasingly ready to cash out and have some fun, but the leadership is just not there yet. They’ve got bigger fish to fry — they have to avenge the Century of Humiliation and claim China’s rightful place in the sun and blah blah.
And so when China’s leaders look at what kind of technologies they want the country’s engineers and entrepreneurs to be spending their effort on, they probably don’t want them spending that effort on stuff that’s just for fun and convenience. They probably took a look at their consumer internet sector and decided that the link between that sector and geopolitical power had simply become too tenuous to keep throwing capital and high-skilled labor at it. And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-china-smashing-its-tech-industry
15. "Today you can learn skills, showcase your expertise, build a reputation, and forge key relationships from anywhere in the world — and the tools accelerating these trends will only continue to improve.
Imagine a world where 8 billion people are connected to the internet — instantly, they join the global economy, information space, and education space, giving them the ability to learn, contribute, and communicate permissionlessly across language barriers, borders, and time zones."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/silicon-valley-in-the-cloud
16. This is a disturbing topic. Hope the CCP pursues peace (not getting my hopes up here though).
17. Invaluable tweet storm on what's happening in the tech investing space right now.
https://twitter.com/fintechjunkie/status/1417854022883713026
18. "Rappi is a Latin American Super App offering users rapid delivery of a range of items (food, medicine, clothes), a suite of financial services and a platform for booking experiences from travel to concerts and hotel stays.
Rappi initially launched as a food and grocery delivery platform but has quickly evolved into a Super App offering a broad range of complementary services to its users. Like all Super Apps, Rappi has grown its product offering as its user base has scaled."
https://reademergent.com/p/rappi-latams-super-app
19. This is an awesome story especially when you know the people. Healthy ramen!
https://mailchimp.com/courier/article/immi-ramen/
20. Big fan here.
"At 48, his life seems relentlessly full of activity, projects, causes, releases. He’s the star of an imminent summer blockbuster, The Suicide Squad. He’s a rapper who releases music online at a rate of about a track a month. He hosts a podcast. He’s just released a new line of T-shirts. Earlier in 2021, Elba signed a deal with HarperCollins to write children’s books.
He and his wife, the Canadian model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, have recently been petitioning world leaders (France’s, Belgium’s) on behalf of rural farmers in Africa. The couple have also co- designed a Louboutin sandal. When Elba sits down to chat to me over Zoom, it’s during a break between night shoots on a new movie he’s making, and I’m tempted to tell him to forget about it; shut the laptop; sleep."
21. This is the future. Embedded Fintech!
"Embedded Fintech refers to the integration of fintech products and services into traditional financial institutions' offerings. Embedded Fintech enables banks to increase the speed at which they can deliver Fintech-like services, including Embedded Finance (i.e. distribution of banking services by non-banks) and Banking-as-a-Service (i.e. banks delivering services via API). It was catalyzed by Open Banking (i.e. banks sharing customer data via API)."
https://www.trackingpayments.org/p/unpacking-fintech-themes-embedded
22. "In June, Cooper’s podcast, Call Her Daddy — now a solo venture — was licensed by Spotify for a reported $60 million for three years, which might make her its second most highly paid podcaster after Joe Rogan and definitely makes her much richer than the guys she once dated for dinners and vacations."
https://www.bustle.com/politics/alex-cooper-call-her-daddy-spotify-deal-breakup
23. Why are used cars so expensive now? The critical importance of semiconductor chips.
https://thehustle.co/why-are-used-cars-so-expensive-right-now/
24. "In terms of the soulmate, one person cannot give you what an entire community should provide. That is bound to create a crumbling of too many expectations on one unit. So do not give up your friends. A wedding is not saying goodbye to your circle or to these relationships. They're super important, and especially the men.
The men, particularly guys in straight relationships, lose massive amounts of social connections once they get married. But this is for people in all types of relationships. One person cannot give you what a whole village should provide."
https://www.gq.com/story/esther-perel-interview
25. "The most critical thing your users table does for you, though, is it gives you access to network effects, and these network effects give you some lock-in. The more users your platform has, the more value it has to any one user (cf. Metcalfe's law), and the more value it has to any one user, then A) the easier it is to attract new users, and B) the harder it is for any one user to leave (because to leave is to give up all that value).
So the entire online attention economy is built around proprietary user tables that different apps jealously guard and are constantly trying to grow.
Every web-scale software player, from small B2B IaaS products to big consumer-facing SaaS megaplatforms (Facebook, Google, Amazon), is about to get its eggs scrambled.
Here's what's coming: the public blockchain amounts to a single, massive users table for the entire Internet, and the next wave of distributed applications will be built on top of it."
Environment Matters: Location, Location, Location
Always learning new things about yourself. Been seeing a therapist for the last 8 months now and it's definitely been a great investment in myself. You get to understand what really drives you, both in good and bad ways. One of the recent things I’ve discovered is how specific locations tilt me or push me to certain behavior.
So for example, everytime i am in San Francisco, I find myself overbooking my schedule with meetings, calls and such even when I don’t need to. It’s like I find myself going back into the programming I have when I am there. Similar situation with Tbilisi, New York or Tokyo. Always busy and always overscheduled. This has personally been great for my career in the past and present. But it certainly has not always been great for my family life nor my physical and mental health.
On the other hand, I find myself being way more relaxed and chill in Kyiv (Ukraine), Vancouver (Canada), Lisbon, Mexico and Taiwan in general. I tend not to overbook or push myself too much. I always have plenty of time to read and spend time with friends and family. I am far more present. Overall a good thing but on other hand, it does detract from getting stuff done. The goal for me is to find a better balance between these two states of high frenzy versus low frenzy.
So what will I do with this information? Well, on one hand knowing this is the situation, I should be able to more consciously program myself and be aware of this tilt I get in each of these places. It will allow me to be more deliberate with how I manage my schedule when I am in a high frenzy environment versus a low frenzy one. This also gives me a new frame to look at my travel schedule as I split my time between each of these locations.
The Lesson: the environment affects all of us and the more conscious we are of this and in designing our environments, the more likely we can take control of this and manage our personal lives and moods better.
The Next Decade: Reformation and Renaissance Framework
I was struck by Vibe Capital’s thesis and really had to share this. I think this is one of the most insightful frameworks I’ve seen for viewing the future. Dave Goldblatt absolutely nails it.
To quote Dave, this will be what the next 10 years will look like:
Reformation - 2021-2025
The next 10-15 years will be marked by unprecedented volatility and change. Similar to the Reformation, traditional power structures are being challenged as technological, climatological, and demographic forces expose inadequacies of the current system.
Renaissance - 2025-2030
During any volatile period, enormous wealth will be created, and incumbents will be disrupted.
But just as the outcome of the Reformation was the Renaissance followed by the Enlightenment, the Modern Reformation also presents a chance to usher in a dramatically restructured society: one in which power structures are more equitable, beneficial, transparent and accessible.
(Source: https://vibecap.co/our-thesis-who-we-are-and-our-portfolio)
This basically means that it’s going to be continual chaos for the next 3 years. Between major macro geopolitical changes, a cold war splitting the world between China and the United States & massive money printing everywhere, there will be a massive reset. Added on top of this, with slow rollout of the vaccines across the globe, a surprisingly large anti-vaxxer movement and the virulent nature of Covid-19 itself, we will be stuck with this pandemic for longer than many of us expected with new variants showing up.
I definitely was much more hopeful in Q1 of 2021. Sadly, I believe we will see countries going in and out of lockdowns, borders closing and opening irregularly over the next 2 years at least. This is already happening in parts of the European Union as they have opened and then closed during the summer. Former countries that managed Covid well for the most part, will get slack or unlucky and Covid will break through. Just look at Taiwan in April 2021.
Forewarned is forearmed. If we thought we were going through a crazy time of change, hang on to your hats. We are just getting started. Everything is circular, what goes up, must come down. Just hang in there.
Yet as with most tumultuous times, there will be tremendous opportunity for companies and individuals to thrive. Old ways will die and hopefully new and better ways of doing things will emerge (big stress on “hopefully”). As the old Chinese curse (or blessing) goes: “May you live in Interesting times!”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 18th, 2021
"The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”--John Maxwell
"Banks are massively larger and more important in terms of their institutional power and centrality to our way of life than printers ever were. When this insanely consolidated, over-levered, politically invincible loses its grip on the basic plumbing of finance, it will be a way bigger deal than the advent of the Web. More along the lines of the Catholic Church losing its grip on government and culture with the rise of the printing press.
All this is already in progress and will happen at the speed of software."
https://www.jonstokes.com/p/cryptocurrency-and-the-great-unbundling
2. Net net: Be like Thiel and learn the tax rules.
https://contrarianthinking.co/peter-thiel-accumulated-5b-with-this-trick/
3. "Technology - from AngelList syndicates to new insurgents to no-code solutions - has made it easier than ever to accommodate new types of investor relationships. Now the legal docs just need to catch up.
I don’t quite know what the solution is yet, but I feel pretty confident that we shouldn’t keep working off the same document that’s been used since the birth of venture capital. Emerging startups and the adoption of automation by the legal industry should make it easier to generate new agreements that accommodate the nuance of modern investor relationships."
https://automatter.substack.com/p/the-future-of-vc-is-decentralized
4. Interesting new VC firm focusing on the psychedelics space. Vine Ventures.
5. "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://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-miners-moving-out-
6. Monster write up I posted before. It’s such a good one on the Future of Work.
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35
7. “Bottom up” go-to-market strategies and product-led growth are changing the game, forcing companies to rethink traditional funnel-focused processes when it comes to sales and more. Compared to the old world, where software tools were imposed upon workers who had little say in the matter, this world is one where purchasing power has become decentralized; where users expect as much from their work products as they do from their personal apps; and where paywalls and “call us” pricing have been replaced with trials, free tiers, and self-serve.
So where does community come in then? A strong “go-to-community” competency not only helps companies proactively compete in this new environment, but it also provides the framework and tools to shift from top-down to bottom-up. Go-to-community helps build positive-sum relationships beyond just sales. And perhaps most importantly, it uplevels the very notion of community from something that’s purely company-centric and transactional (e.g., “good for deflecting support tickets”) into something that impacts every part of the organization.
Community, in other words, can become a force multiplier for the entire business."
https://future.a16z.com/community-≠-marketing-why-we-need-go-to-community-not-just-go-to-market/
8. Worth learning about. DAOs: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
"On a fundamental level, you can think of DAOs as internet-native constitutions. Like regular constitutions, DAOs embed a fundamental set of rules and principles that establish an organization and determine its governance structure. But unlike regular constitutions, DAOs can execute some activities fully autonomously. For example, a DAO with its own internal capital can automatically buy and sell cryptocurrencies based on specific programmatic conditions."
9. Beyond Meat!
"For me, getting the innovation that’s in our labs to market is the most difficult part, and it’s the most difficult part for any business. I spoke at Tesla a couple years ago, and I enjoyed the fact that I was with people who knew how hard it is to commercialize. There was a sense of shared recognition that scaling something that is new for the market that is really special and new, not not just another knockoff … It’s difficult and there’s going to be a lot of failure and it’s gonna be a lot of frustration. A lot of our products are very good, but we have stuff in our labs—it’s a lot better."
https://time.com/6078353/beyond-meat-ceo-ethan-brown/
10. I like the idea of Libertarianism but they are wildly ineffective in real life (kind of like Communism and Socialism).
"In conclusion: Libertarians play in their own little sandbox, but there's an entire playground they’re missing out on. They pretend that the larger playground doesn't exist, or that playing in it would be a waste of time, so they’d rather be king of the sandbox than an average Joe on the playground. As a result, they’re playing status games in their own little echo chamber in their own little ecosystem while having no impact whatsoever on the outside world."
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-lose
11. Basics of DEFI.
"The current problem with DeFi is that no one trusts it. You have too many scammers running off with funds and too many software bugs. This is no different than the internet. When the internet came out people said only scammers and crooks used it. Back in the day people said that Craigslist/eBay and all of these online portals for peer to peer sales would be zeros. That didn’t work. In fact, the brick and mortar business suffered dramatically once e-commerce was up and running.
Your job? Find projects that are mispriced. We’re more than happy to give a basic risk framework around this: 1) BTC/ETH, 2) LINK/Stables, 3) Defi, 4) NFTs and 5) random new meme coins/hottest trend on Crypto Twitter.
From the above if you spend all day looking at yields you’ll find that the biggest spreads occur on level 3 and level 4."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/farming-risks-fees-and-crypto-information
12. "The short answer is that you need to create an evolving lifestyle investment strategy. And as you invest and create new types of digital assets to meet your lifestyle needs, you will need to also learn and adopt treasury management practices. ie: Your money management practices should mimic what corporations do. Learning to plan and manage cash flows, volatility, and risk across a wide variety of new assets.
Why?
Because digital assets can be very different from traditional assets. And there are no unified services offered by brokerages, banks, financial advisers, or other 3rd party services to manage your entire digital asset portfolio in an optimized way. For example: your cryptocurrencies are in separate accounts from your websites and newsletter, which are separated from your business income, and your social media accounts. All of which are separated from your traditional assets.
Adopting treasury management practices promotes a unified and collective picture of your financial circumstances. All of which helps you maximize the value of your assets to ensure you maintain the lifestyle you want to live no matter what situation you encounter."
https://dougantin.com/how-to-manage-money-like-a-sovereign-individual/
13. Good to know. Notice how there are no US cities here. (just a comment, USA is not about lifestyle, it’s about biz for better or worse)
https://www.positive.news/society/the-worlds-best-cities-for-mental-wellbeing/
14. This is so deeply insightful. Must watch if you want to see where the world is going. DeFi= Defection....in a good way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQpG5vDp5M
15. "This is the big picture. Why do we have to wait for specific time periods to send a wire transfer? Why are the fees so high? Why does someone pay 1% of total assets (a huge amount) unless there is real differentiation in the advice? Why do firms pay up to 7% to raise funds in a world where transaction costs are lower and people can connect via the internet rapidly? Why should governments cover the costs of bad loans?
Lots of questions here. In the end we know the long-term answer.
Banks and Wall Street are going away. The talent is leaving to new industries and the firms will struggle to hire anyone with an understanding of technology. And. They didn’t move fast enough to adapt to the new world."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-banking-model-and-wall-street
16. "Asia is rising peacefully. Its economic heft, widespread prosperity, and cultural clout are all still on a steeply upward trajectory. That is what China’s aggression jeopardizes. To disrupt the Asian status quo and embark on bloody military adventures, when the status quo has been good for almost everyone in the region, would be not just a terrible crime but also a tragedy.
But in addition to preserving this status quo, there are other reasons the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t back down in the face of Chinese aggression. To allow a revisionist power to press revanchist territorial claims would invite more such adventures
In other words, when the Left asserts that any resistance to China means that the U.S. is responsible for starting Cold War 2, it’s actually a call for appeasement. If Cold War 2 is upon us, we have little choice but to fight it — and, hopefully, to do it while avoiding the mistakes we made in Cold War 1."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-didnt-start-cold-war-2
17. Tiger and Softbank shaking up VC. This is a very good thing IMHO.
"What they have in common — and what makes them both symbols of this golden age of venture investing — is being open-checkbook investors who aren't afraid of pouring hundreds of millions into a startup with a desire to hold that position into the public markets. As such, they've both shaken up the venture capital market in 2021 and are the new forces driving deal speed and price in late-stage investing.
Tiger Global may be setting the pace and the deal terms lately, but founders may be the real winners from its growing competitiveness with SoftBank. Instead of one ominous capital cannon, there are now two — both willing to move quickly to snag deals. And if VCs can't rethink their dealmaking traditions, they may find themselves caught in the crossfire."
https://www.protocol.com/tiger-global-softbank-vision-fund
18. Balaji Srinavasan remarked, "In the future, everyone is an investor."
Or newsletter writer as an investor.
Packy M has a big audience and writes incredibly well. This definitely helps him with deal flow (and LPs). Impressive LP list and some super interesting companies. We can all learn from him.
https://www.notboring.co/p/introducing-not-boring-capital
19. People forget how important the French & Indian Wars were to setting up the conditions for the American Revolution.
https://douthat.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-revolution-in
20. Bitcoin as a religion. Which is what makes it so potent and scary.
"Many people I speak to are disillusioned by the state of the world generally and the state of America specifically. Society, if you haven’t noticed, is in dismal disarray. The Federal Reserve — or “the Fed,” as it is often spat out derisively — is printing money willy-nilly. Inflation is on the rise. The dollar is backed by little more than the whims of shadowy plutocrats who’ve been sucking the value out of your bank account faster than a greedy toddler with a milkshake. Or have you not been paying attention?
Ask Bitcoiners (and I mean real, hardcore Bitcoin acolytes, not cryptotourists dabbling in dogecoin) what Bitcoin means to them and you’ll find that they grow passionate and misty-eyed. Often, becoming a Bitcoiner is not all that dissimilar from the transformative awakening of someone who’s undergone a radical spiritual conversion."
21. "Now we live in the age of neuroscience, positive psychology, biohacking, and supplement stacking. We have research in every direction telling us how we can be successful, get rid of bad habits, rewire our brains, supercharge our willpower, and be the superhuman we dreamed of becoming as children.
But psychological trauma is a very real thing, and it makes us sick—physically and mentally.
Clearly money, fame, success, popularity, or talent alone does not help us to reliably escape the grasp of psychological trauma. Self-enhancement and self-healing are two different things.
self-enhancement without the inclusion of self-healing will likely create traumatized supermen—dazzling but unstable stars that eventually collapse in on themselves."
https://highexistence.com/self-healing-vs-self-enhancement/
22. "Despite the various challenges we face currently, the reality is that Americans have never really known hard times within living memory—real hard times, not invented ones based on Twitter dramas and ‘misinformation’.
All that Americans have known since World War II is yet higher plateaus of freedom and material wealth, with all the horrors of the world—killing fields, political prisons, autocratic demagogues, a real resistance—held so far out of their mind’s eye they don’t even know what they look like anymore. There is no law of physics that dictates that must continue however.
America wasn’t built on ‘cancelation’ and ‘content moderation’ guidelines and ‘problematic’ this and that; it was built on the inalienable right of every citizen to tell their government, as well as any fellow citizen, to go fuck themselves and read and write and do whatever they like. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, and the hellbent drive toward some supposed utopia often ruins an imperfect society that would be better served by a more fervent embrace of its founding principles."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-invisible-boot
23. "Over the last decade in Silicon Valley, “growth hacking” has become a popular term. It refers to analytical, innovative, often unconventional ways to rapidly grow a startup. Lil Nas X took growth hacking and applied it to fame. When one thing meets another, Gen Zs often use the 🤝 emoji. Lil Nas X said: growth hacking 🤝 music. He took a playbook of scrappy, savvy, brilliant marketing tactics and applied them to a slow-moving legacy industry.
Lil Nas X didn’t get lucky. He didn’t get hand-picked by a record label executive in a suit. He manifested his own success with ambition, creativity, and an internet connection."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/lil-nas-x-is-gen-zs-defining-icon
24. "Cool, once narrowly delineated and foisted upon us by marketing cherry-picked from hip kids, has been blown apart for the new generation. In a world where everyone, not just the most interesting youths, is under a kind of constant surveillance — where our individual information is more valuable than any short-lived idea of collective cool — demographics give way to data. Gen Z might willfully defy categorization, but each disparate bit of their bizarre taste stew can still be marketed to.
Cool — and by extension, taste — just isn’t all that useful anymore."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22570006/cool-consumer-identity-gen-z-cheugy
25. "And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious—to find out something new about yourself or someone else—is to be empowered.
“I don't know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don't put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that—with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it."
https://www.gq.com/story/jason-sudeikis-august-cover-profile
26. I am such a big fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. I still remember him speaking at our big annual sales conference. So funny and sharp. This should be a worthwhile documentary to watch.
https://www.gq.com/story/anthony-bourdain-morgan-neville-roadrunner-documentary
27. This is a little bit grim. Pretty natural, everyone gripes about their boss. Don't think this is smart move on Netflix's part.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/fired-for-venting-on-slack-about-boss-5489370/
28. This does sound about right on present geopolitical scene. Sadly so I might add.
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/afghanistan-and-the-great-powers
29. "Still, Tribe’s successful fund raise is a high-profile validation of the venture firm’s thesis, one that could ultimately disrupt the way the VC industry operates, from identifying promising start-ups to determining whether to back mid- and late-stage companies. While Silicon Valley venture capital has bankrolled tech companies that have upended whole sectors of the economy, venture firms themselves still use little more than Excel spreadsheets to identify companies and conduct due diligence."
30. "Emerging managers also seem adept at capitalizing on the venture industry’s blind spots. One is the excessive wealth of more veteran VCs. An investor’s experience counts for a lot, but there’s a lot to be said for up-and-comers who are still establishing their reputation, who aren’t sitting on more than a dozen boards and whose future will be closely aligned with their founders."
....the industry is changing shape, and some form of consolidation, if not imminent, seems inevitable once the checks inevitably stop flying. Some firms will break out, while others team up. Some newer investors will find themselves at top firms, while others close up shop."
31. "Imagine the first digitally inhabitable country. It’s implemented in a virtual reality city with 100,000 inhabitants. Someone set up the rules and put the city up online, and people can join and see what it’s like.
Without some level of commitment to the city, this would obviously be chaos. so maybe you’d need some minimum requirement from members. That could be done by requiring people to stake some amount of ETH, or to log a minimum number of hours per day in the city.
But testing a government in VR is faster and safer than testing it in the geographic world, not to mention that it isn’t constrained by physical resources. Hundreds of governments could be tested online simultaneously.
Testing entire governments with VR is the most broad-based application. You could even test more granular aspects of a government. Start with some common base for a city, with a standard set of rules, and let people run tests on it. What if we reduced the size of the police force? What if we changed our road system?"
https://1729.com/voluntary-governments/
32. Good way to think about your career. You, your company and your industry.
https://medium.com/@jillcarlson/trends-and-timescales-a9b738be3e97
33. "Shein’s ubiquity, most notably on TikTok, has catapulted the retailer to cult status among young women across the globe. And while Shein is based out of China, it ships to 220 countries, with the US serving as its largest consumer market. In June, Shein overtook Amazon for the first time on the iOS App Store to become the leading US shopping app, a title it holds in over 50 countries. This comes after a pandemic year of record-breaking sales: Shein raked in close to $10 billion in 2020, which was reportedly its eighth consecutive year of revenue growth over 100 percent.
The retailer is also one of the most talked-about brands on TikTok and YouTube, and the most visited fashion and apparel site in the world, according to the web analytics platform Similarweb. Shein had enough in its coffers to place a bid to buy Topshop in January, which it ultimately lost to Asos.
So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22573682/shein-future-of-fast-fashion-explained
34. No surprise either. Banks are zeros. #fintech
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/junior-bankers-have-had-enough-5087524/
35. "The social “panic” that disturbed mayors, presidents, columnists, and Communists never materialized. It never does. Time and resources that could have been devoted to combatting a very real pandemic were wasted combatting an imaginary social phenomenon. In 2020, we all learned the perils of the myth of panic."
https://palladiummag.com/2021/07/15/the-myth-of-panic/
36. "Professionally speaking, where you live physically may no longer be more important than where you live digitally. The people who you engage with on Twitter, or on group chats, or in online communities might influence your career more than your longitude & latitude. Which means you can finally live & work anywhere — an absolute game-changer. We didn’t even have to build The Silicon Valley of Idaho or India: we built it in the cloud."
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains: No Such thing as Overnight Success
We see this all the time: people who seem to come out of nowhere to become big name successes, whether this in Hollywood, Wall Street or Silicon Valley. But dig into their stories and look back a bit longer like 5-10 years earlier and you can see they were hustling and grinding in obscurity. The only difference is they just had the grit to keep pushing.
I think the other secret besides having some personal mission to focus on is that they make a lot of small smart decisions that build on each other. This gives them massive velocity and growth.
It reminds me of a Fireside chat I did with Charles Hudson of Precursor Capital, easily one of the best and most active pre-seed Venture funds around in Silicon Valley. Charles talked about how some of the best founders just make a long series of good decisions. And how the average founder makes good decisions but ones that are just 10% off each time. The problem is that this slight deficiency compounded over time causes them to lose trajectory versus the top best founders. The top founder’s trajectory is just much steeper in the long run. In the highly competitive environment Silicon Valley, this steep trajectory makes all the difference.
We all know people who just seem to go from strength to strength. People who make a lot of good decisions and usually just don’t make many bad decisions. This is especially where it matters like where you live, who you do business with, who you date/marry etc. etc. I think we all know many people who just can’t seem to get their act together. No matter what they do. People who tragically go from one mess up to another in life and career, year after year after year.
This is the same with companies whether big established companies or startups, it’s very rarely one decision that causes them to fail. It’s usually a long series of bad decisions. I saw this far too many times in my career to count.
The power of compounding goes both ways. It’s like you are pulled into a vortex and you cannot escape. Or if you do escape, it’s only through massive effort and energy. This is why mental frameworks and decisiveness are critical.
Even if you make the wrong decision, as long as you recognize it, immediately deal with it and fix it right away. This is how you get your upward trajectory. This positive momentum is how you win in the long run and carries you much further than you think.
The Power of the Conscious and Subconscious Mind: Language, Programming and Mindset Matters
I’ve always been interested in learning about the power of the human mind. I have read Psycho-Cybernetics and Neuro Linguistic Programming since I was a young teen. The idea is that your brain is like software and you can program your brain to do things & to act in a certain way. As Henry Ford was reported to have said: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right.” If you study the most accomplished individuals in whatever field, Mindset and attitude really does matter. Vision boards and mantras really do work.
But one of the problems of growing up in Canada and in an academic household, was a very high level of skepticism & cynicism. I always half believed these and that was the problem. It doesn’t work when you half believe something. Or more dangerously, you are programming yourself but without much deliberate thought.
This is kind of what happened to me. When I think about the things I’ve always wanted, I actually end up getting them in the end. 3 very simple things.
1) Being able to buy whatever book I want, whenever I want, regardless of price. This is also how i ended up as a crazy Tsundoku: ie. Japanese word for person who has more books than they can read.
2) Traveling around the world for my life and career
3) Being able to afford and eat anything I want without looking at the price on the menu.
3 very simple and frankly somewhat petty things that bring me incredible joy. Yet I got this point subconsciously & really only figured this out through my sessions with a therapist. I certainly do wonder if I had been a bit more thoughtful & deliberate when I was younger I might have had bigger, more ambitious and impactful goals.
Don’t get me wrong. I am immensely grateful to be where I am but there is a lesson for all of us. The mind is going to be programmed one way or the other. Might as well aim high & be thoughtful about it. This programming is from the content you consume (aka your media diet), the people you end up spending most of your time with and the self talk you have.
For the record, you can’t just imagine and picture yourself to success or whatever it is that you want. You have to put a lot of mental and physical work behind it as well.
But the hard work without some bigger vision is like going hiking in the woods without a GPS or Map. You end up getting lost or end up somewhere else far away from where you planned. I personally think this is why so many people end up having midlife crises in our society. They come to the realization that the life they lived was not the one they truly wanted.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 11th, 2021
"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."--John F. Kennedy
This is a good summary of the Robinhood S-1.
"Robinhood is the brokerage for fun gambling on meme stocks and meme cryptocurrencies. The main theme of financial markets for the last year or so has been “fun gambling on meme stocks and meme cryptocurrencies.”
2. "I face recurring challenges adapting my skills to support a growing portfolio of assets. I’m learning to write copy, create lead funnels, and use social media to build a brand. Simultaneously, I’m learning to treat myself like a business. This requires budgeting, planning, and treasury management as I look to build and leverage unique assets to support this lifestyle.
Through this new perspective, I hope to increase globalized income streams focused on information based products targeting global audiences. Simultaneously using time based consulting, ghostwriting, and other freelance initiatives to accumulate money in the short term to buy income streams for the long term.
The logic: you can build an income source or you can buy income. I want to do both."
https://dougantin.com/building-a-sovereign-individual-in-public/
3. Hope it never comes to this. But glad to see Japan is backing Taiwan in possible CCP invasion.
4. 110% here. I still think we can turn America around even with the mess we have here.
"If we want to make it through this era of crisis, we’re going to need a greater sense of urgency.
But I also think we’re going to need something else: Optimism. When FDR and the New Deal dragged America out of its last existential crisis, his attitude wasn’t dire or dark, but confident and unafraid. This is what they call “optimism of the will” — not a blithe reassurance that it’s “morning in America”, but a faith that if we keep digging our way out, we’ll come out on the other side stronger than we were before.
And in addition to a belief that America can persevere and win, we need a conviction that it should."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/fourth-of-july-thoughts
5. Interesting list. I'm partial to Tokyo, Montreal, Sydney & Melbourne personally.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/05/these-are-the-best-cities-globally-for-remote-working.html
6. Not a fan of PE firms in general but this is a great story of one of the early legends.
https://neckar.substack.com/p/reginald-lewis-bootstrapping-buyouts
7. Are Social media influencers aka Creators "Uncancellable?". It seems the answer is a resounding YES.
"That’s the power of YouTube. That’s the power of influencers and that’s the power of parasocial bonds."
https://brendangahan.com/are-creators-uncancellable/
8. “When a company first launches, honestly what you’re looking for is whether it seems like there’s a real product need. Are customers adopting it at some reasonable rate, and then is that growing?”
Elad believes that the “reasonable rate” will depend on your product, pricing, and customer. In some cases it could be a handful of net new customers; for other products, it could be thousands. Just as important is to look at retention: “Does it look like those customers will stick around and do they see some expansion over time or from a revenue or usage perspective?”
For a later stage company (“or I should say for both mid- to late-stage”) it’s time to start looking at your overall growth rate. “How fast is the thing actually growing off of a revenue basis, what’s the churn both from a dollar and customer perspective, and what does expansion look like?”
For Elad, a company that turns a $1 customer into $1.40 the next year is best-in-class SaaS, bringing together churn reduction, expansion tactics, and customer satisfaction."
9. "Bitcoin expands free speech, property rights, individual sovereignty, open capital markets, and checks on government power. America was founded on these values, and can thrive with them. The Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s dictatorship in Russia, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?”
“Not so much,” he says."
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-and-the-american-idea
10. Lots of truths here.
https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1412012537986568193
11. "The world is changing quickly. No one is going to come and save you.
You should operate under the following mantra: 1) be a top performer, 2) don’t be number one, 3) learn *any* specific skill, 4) learn how to make even $100 a month from it and 5) begin to scale that skill.
The one big change we’ve made here over the last decade is that you *CAN* go ahead and trade time for money. Why? You can shift the business model later."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/going-from-not-gonna-make-it-ngmi
12. Yikes. Throw the Quad into the mix and this will be WW3.
"And the experience of that war shows that even a limited conflict between two great powers can be terrible – millions dead, years wasted, a country devastated for decades. Taiwan probably won’t spark a US-China war in the next five years, but it might, and if it does it would be a disaster."
https://unherd.com/2021/07/will-china-invade-taiwan/
13. This Moore guy seems like the ultimate grifter. What a crazy story, especially for a self proclaimed prepper like me.
https://theintercept.com/2021/07/05/barrett-moore-brad-thor-doomsday-prepper-the-haven/
14. "There is a level of insanity at the moment that is hard to comprehend. Grocery stores are acting like hedge funds through their speculation on future food prices. Think about that for a second. The current economy is so out of whack that the grocery stores are speculating."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-world-is-so-crazy-that-grocery
15. This is pretty terrifying to say the least.
https://blog.keys.casa/casa-client-case-study-the-tinder-trap/
16. This is not a good trend......
"This worrying increase in mortality due to hot weather is already evident as summer temperature records are broken each year by severe and extended heat waves. The Pacific Northwest heatwave at the end of June killed hundreds of people, and these intensely hot periods are projected to continue as summer reaches its peak temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the next two months."
17. This is absolutely fascinating. Ethiopia being a great power during the Middle Ages.
"The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness."
18. "In sum, fintech is likely as underhyped as space is overhyped. Why? The ROI on your professional efforts and investing are inversely proportional to how sexy the industry/investment is, and fintech is … boring. Except for the immense opportunity and value creation — for multiple stakeholders. “Half the world is unbanked, but we need to colonize Mars,” said no rational investor ever."
https://www.profgalloway.com/bank/
19. "Any veteran of the video games industry will tell you that good games are products of miracle. Think about it: A symphony of idiosyncratic, often underpaid artists, coders, designers, sound engineers, marketers, writers, and producers must all unite in their vision for a commercial art product. Anything and everything could go wrong—and it has, explosively, even at the Activision-Blizzards, the Biowares, and the Rockstars. No amount of money and personnel can ensure success. Blockbusters can flop, and indie titles, some even made by a single developer, can sell millions.
Yet Amazon’s total inability to excel in gaming is remarkable. Breakaway wasn’t its first fiasco, or its last. After more than a decade of concerted effort, the tech company that brute-forced its way to dominance in books, retail, and cloud computing has failed to produce a single successful big-name title."
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-wants-to-win-at-games-so-why-hasnt-it/
20. Colombian ex-soldiers are the backbone of alot of private military companies around the world.
"The presence of such a large number of foreigners among the Haitian leader’s alleged murderers has shocked many, particularly in Haiti itself. But Colombian guns-for-hire have been turning up in war zones around the world, including Yemen, Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan, for years now.
Many were once trained by American soldiers and, having spent years battling insurgent groups or drug traffickers within Colombia, go on to find work with US-based private military contractors.
“After so many years of warfare, Colombia just has a surplus of people who are trained in lethal tactics,”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/09/colombia-haiti-guns-for-hire-assassination
21. This is a really good book list.
22. I love this.
"During his tenure as head chef of Noma, the restaurant was ranked either in first, second, or third place in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. No easy feat. Giusti is clearly a hard-working man with skill and ambition. But that same skill and ambition is what led Giusti to see past the accolades and want to make an impact beyond 45 covers a night. He wanted to feed the masses, and he wanted to do it his way.
What sets Giusti apart from other ambitious chefs in the food world is his approach: Rather than peel off of Noma to start his own restaurant empire or string of fast-casual concepts, he decided to start on an institutional level, and more importantly, start at a place and community that needed the change the most. Transforming what America’s youths eat and the way they think about food—that’s a meaningful change."
https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a23027389/dan-giusti-noma-brigaid-school-food/
23. Very cool company.
“Oil was the new gold, data the new oil; now, nature is now the most precious and valuable resource of all. A company having a hectare of forest saved as a key metric to scale is a company we are thrilled to back. Disrupting the economy and financial markets with a new tradable and liquid asset class that has a positive impact on the environment is an irresistible investment.”
24. "The stock market is a reflection of memes, notably magnified through SPACs, NFTs and GME. The memefication has displaced reality from valuation, as fundamentals grow less and less useful as each new flying helicopter company hits the market.
It’s not a bad thing – it just reshapes how we think about investing and the decisions that we make around portfolios. This is a hype cycle in a bull market. It’s to be expected. The core drivers are some of the financial tools (SPACs), but it’s also the broader market environment – memes are no longer a metaphor, but a living structure, called the stonk market."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-meme-market
25. So much wisdom here. Worth a read.
"Much of life is about the return on investment — your relationships, life, and career are reflective of what you consistently invest into them. You ultimately get what you put in. Of course, it's much easier said than done."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-investor-turned-criminal-f99
26. Some really great books to understand where the world is going. Good summaries here.
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/understand-our-changing-world
27. "Our value as employees is often boiled down to the quantifiable, whether it’s our output of nails, the number of products we sell, or the number of pageviews we get on our articles.
But there’s a problem with that: When a metric becomes a target — that is, when it becomes the primary focus of a job — it ceases to be effective."
https://thehustle.co/Goodharts-Law
28. Creators paying to advertise themselves. Totally makes sense.
https://creatorscape.substack.com/p/issue-13-creator-advertising
29. "The current higher education “bundle” is comprised of three value drivers:
📕 Content
🍻 Community
📜 Certification"
https://foundercollective.medium.com/the-three-cs-of-edtech-cb987835e701
30. "Despite our exuberant optimism, we keep getting the potential market size wrong. Market sizes have proven to be much, much larger than any of us had ever dreamed. The reason? Today, everyone aspires to be an early adopter. Peter Drucker’s mantra, innovate or die, has finally come to pass.
Looping back to our market size definitions, “software eating the world” has dramatically expanded the TAM while also catalyzing a compressed technology adoption lifecycle, which has dramatically expanded the SAM."
31. "Software is fashionable, but we need more than software to reshape our physical world. Software alone will not construct manned bases on Mars. Software alone will not decarbonize the atmosphere. And software alone will not make our cities gleaming wonders. America needs to be a place that builds. Manufacturing capacity isn’t merely a nice-to-have to respond to emergencies, but is the key to realizing a technologically-accelerating civilization.
The Bay Area once led in manufacturing — it was where transistors were first produced at scale, spawning the computing industry — and can do so again. Let’s once more prioritize the “silicon” in Silicon Valley. To do so we have to prize manufacturing as more meaningful work."
https://future.a16z.com/the-silicon-in-silicon-valley-again/
32. This is really really interesting for some odd reason.
The Rise of Edtech: One BIG result of the 2020 Pandemic
One of the biggest emerging trends to come out in 2020 was the rise of Edtech (Educational Technology). I don’t need to go into too much detail about how disillusioned and concerned parents and students were feeling about institutional education as a whole prior to the pandemic. The crazy rising costs of education with a range of 144% to 200% in tuition increases since 2000 according to US News & World Report. (Source:https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities)
There was also a non-surprising consequent rise in student debt (almost $29k usd for bachelor degree) and frankly declining quality and student satisfaction of schools at almost all levels.
MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy were a precursor to the Edtech boom in the 2010s. It fizzled out despite the promise of making education more accessible. But it did show that education is at heart a big bundle: not just content itself but arguably, it’s the network, community, identity & the credential.
The pandemic lockdowns showed the Education emperor had no clothes. The pandemic completely unbundled this & forced every parent and student to re-evaluate what it is they were getting with their hard earned money. Basically NOT very much. Especially in California where my kid goes to school.
But thankfully Education is changing. Lots more options coming up: Homeschooling for example really grew, doubling to 11.1% in households with school age children. Outschool generated $100M in bookings and raised over $120M in two rounds in 2020 and 2021.
We’ve also seen the rise of ISA’s (Income Sharing Agreements) prior to 2020 as exemplified by Holberton School, Lambda School, Kenzie Academy,Strive School in Germany, even Mate Academy out of Ukraine. These companies have only continued to grow and expand more in the post 2020 world.
But more importantly: the INTERNET really came to the fore. One of the best classes I ever took was an online writing class by David Perell called “Write of Passage'' in 2020. Amazing group of people, great content and I personally learned a ton. They took the best of what traditional offline schools do, but combined it with the best of the internet (international distribution, flexibility, remote and diverse).
Venture Capitalists have definitely noticed these new trends, changes and opportunities.
Reforge raised $20M, Ondeck raised $20M, Maven a cohort driven education platform raised $20M from A16Z. Professor Galloways Section 4 for business school students. One of the most exciting companies is Synthesis (https://www.synthesis.is), a spin out from SpaceX.
There is so much activity happening here and I truly believe all these new education options are great for society in the long run. This will be the space to watch in the next few years and if done well, this might be the leverage that pushes our civilization to the next level.
Business does not need to be Busy-ness: the rise of Calm businesses
Frenzy. Mistaking activity for progress. Focussing on time spent. This is all Industrial Age thinking. This is why so many incompetent people rise through the ranks in Big organizations like Fortune 500 companies & government bureaucracies. I also think this is the reason people keep their schedule so packed.
One of my favorite quotes is from French philosopher Blaise Pascal "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
The hardest part for most people is sitting alone with lots of time to think. The first and most critical part is finding the time to do so. That is also why beyond the personal and financial reasons, I spend as much time away from the SF Bay Area as I can. I tend to have more control of my schedule with the weird times zones & it makes me more considerate about where I open up slots or set up calls. Or even if I choose to have calls that day at all.
Whenever I am back in San Francisco which is arguably where a large part of my network is, I end up with a frenzy of back to back calls and meetings. I end up feeling harried. End up being mentally tired with very little time to read, write, process things and most importantly think.
You need silence to think more clearly. Multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett is known to have a completely empty calendar. Not because he is not doing anything. But as his friend Bill Gates was quoted to say.
“I remember Warren showing me his calendar. I had every minute packed and I thought that was the only way you could do things....
The fact that he is so careful about his time, he has days that there's nothing on [his schedule]... [I learned] that you control your time, and that sitting and thinking may be a much higher priority than a normal CEO, [where] there's all this demand, and you feel like you need to go and see all these people...
It's not a proxy of your seriousness that you've filled every minute in your schedule.”
This thinking piece will be the edge for the creative class as the world gets faster and more complex. Calmness as paraphrased from rising investor Tyler Tringas. (Read more on the cool stuff he is working on: https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/calmfunding)
It’s about being effective versus efficient. Are you even working on the right and most important things? But even more importantly for me, do you have the freedom to choose what to put in your calendar? This is a reflection of what you choose as your life’s work and time.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 4th, 2021
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Good to know.
"Current trends Hernandez is forecasting revolve around the drink space: ranch water, chagaccinos, apéritifs, THC-infused drinks, and hibiscus. What she does from there is try to weed out the gimmicks from the legitimate products and recommend the latter to her readers."
https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/snaxshot-profile-andrea-hernandez-food-trends
2. This is pretty funny.
https://thehustle.co/how-tomatoes-took-over-twitter/
3. "While there may still be space for cryptocurrency in China, it seems the CCP authorities have finally concluded they have little to gain from nurturing anti-authoritarian technology. On the whole, their loss could be the world’s gain but there are still likely turbulent waters ahead."
https://www.coindesk.com/watch-traders-not-miners-china-crackdown
4. Dollar stores are crushing it in America for all the wrong reasons. ie. decline of middle class and stagnant wages.
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-dollar-stores/
5. Peloton crushing it. Also shows how backward and awful the music industry is.
"The company, which went public in 2019, has a market cap of around $30 billion. It has signed deals with Peloton member Beyoncé (on classes that celebrate her music) and member Shonda Rhimes (on a campaign called Year of Yes, designed to build self-confidence and encourage regular exercise).
And Peloton, whose bikes start at $1,895, has done it all by carefully controlling its production values, smartly promoting its instructors, and making music integral to its ethos, as 17 interviews (with company execs, instructors, industry sources and former employees) attest."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywoodization-of-peloton-1234964386/
6. "If one were to dissect the self-made industry titan’s path to success, Braun has clearly been a calculating figure in his years-out development of artists’ careers, but he’s also demonstrated a Forrest Gump-ian quality of being in the right place at the right time and, more recently, an understanding and appreciation that the universe lets the chips fall where they may."
7. Fast & Furious Tokyo Drift was the best one in my opinion. Loved the Han character. A very cool cat I want to be more like.
"Kang played Han with a studied, laconic charm, and it put his unpretentious but undeniable good looks on display: all high cheekbones and sweeping curtains of hair. But Han is also a deeply melancholic character, someone who’s cool and collected and has a story you’ll never hear all of. It’s an odd choice for the second lead in a franchise reboot, and a more delicate touch than the Fast movies had seen before, or since.
“He's the guy that is in control of his, you know, his room, his world, but yet it's easygoing,” Kang says. “So where do you get that? Where do you get that confidence, that purpose? And so, you know, I hung out with a lot of dudes from L.A. that have that swagger. And I was like, where did they come from? It comes from community, man.” It’s clear that Kang was pulling from the Newman and McQueen playbooks — with an added Pitt-esque obsession with constantly snacking. What’s most surprising is how well his performance worked."
https://www.gq.com/story/sung-kang-han-fast-and-furious-f9-profile
8. This is why I do what I do.
"That’s why leaving your home country for a few days or weeks can act as a reset, allowing you to get a more wide view of the world beyond the rigid mental walls you’ve built over the years."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/traveling-mental-frameworks
9. I love this story. Goes to show the Silicon Valley way is not always the best way.
"By the time Tangney started his next venture, Doximity, in 2010, he’d learned a few things: Don’t raise too much money. Don’t burn too much cash. Fix a real problem for doctors.
On Thursday, Doximity debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, closing the week with a market cap of almost $10 billion after raising around $500 million in its IPO. Tangney’s stake is worth $2.9 billion."
10. Very good to know! Get multiple passports if you can! #Citizenshipinsurance
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2019/10/23/how-to-travel-with-two-passports/
11. Yikes.....
"It’s hard to criticize the venture capitalists when they seem to so effectively be doing what they’re supposed to, earning money, just realize that having VCs invested is no indicator of quality. Often they have done no more due diligence than the average anon Twitter account in your mentions screaming #XRPTOTHEMOON."
https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/
12. A talented actor here.
13. "Bitcoin is energy stored as value —> 10,000 miles away or 10,000 days into the future.
Bitcoin defined as a battery -->
Bitcoin converts electrical energy to economic energy. The energy can then be transferred or stored with virtually no loss in energy (value)."
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/btc-is-a-battery
14. DEFI!
"To reiterate, the reason why the opportunity is so large is two fold: 1) you have fiat money being printed at all times and 2) you have *much* lower cost of business as people are being replaced by lines of code - same thing that happened to the music industry when it went digital.
You are in the Wild West. If anyone says it will be an easy road, they are lying. If anyone says they never miss, they are also lying. Mark Cuban got rugged with TITAN. Every single wealthy DeFi investor has gotten rugged. There is just no way to learn something without making mistakes. The best you can do is learn as much as possible and stay on top of all the changes"
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/opportunity-risks-and-going-down
15. This is a great interview. Always learn stuff from Chamath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKHCCZnGzzE
16. "The idea that you have to follow a particular set of rules that other people set for you to qualify as a “real man” is a form of psychological slavery.
People want you to do things in their best interests – they don’t care about you.
Think for yourself, ask yourself “why”. Is doing the thing they want you to do, being how they want you to be, and taking on the responsibility they want you to take – is it in your best interests or not? Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s not.
You are not a donkey, so stop letting people manipulate you into becoming a beast of burden."
https://lifemathmoney.com/what-is-a-real-man-the-real-definition/
17. “I think it is a stunning fact that China, just as it becomes successful and more wealthy and more powerful, has managed to alienate one country after another,” said Schell."
18. Singapore ahead of the curve again. This "living with Covid" plan does seem to make sense. Admire the pragmatic approach which I doubt will be adopted any time soon by others.
19. "I suspect an interesting byproduct of an abundant society is increased mental illness. As we have more time and ability to focus on our new fundamental purpose, we may struggle to make sense of this changing world. The fundamental question of how to find our place and sense of belonging in society will eat at our sense of self worth.
But what is clear is that in a world with UBI, the value systems of society will change. Wealth and status this reshaped society will come from an ability to create, entertain, and become culturally productive. The ability to service the populations higher order needs."
https://dougantin.com/the-consequences-of-universal-basic-income/
20. "It’s the rare person who has an independent mind capable of looking at everything on its own merits and who can think outside of these simplistic tribal group think patterns. If you’re one of them, then your mistake is thinking other people fall into the same category because they don’t. You might as well be arguing with a non-player character in a video game.
The truth is, all money is the same at its core, whether that’s gold, Bitcoin, or the US dollar:
--It’s only valuable because we believe it is and it’s backed by nothing but our faith (and violence, in the case of fiat currencies)
--It’s a massive energy suck that serves the purpose of keeping the wheels of commerce turning"
21. This looks so damn good. The Foundation series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcjxbQ8ItvM
22. "By embracing and mandating a state-controlled and distributed monetary system in the form of a digital yuan, the CCP will be able to further control every aspect of the lives of China’s 1.2 billion citizens. With the digital yuan, the CCP can monitor and manipulate the spending, earning, savings, and behavior of Chinese citizens. The CBDC furthers the goals of China’s infamous social credit score system — the national blacklist launched by the CCP about a decade ago — and its mandated adoption comes with the additional bonus of giving the government even more surveillance tools over citizens’ movements.
Now, Bitcoin serves as the antithesis to both China’s digital yuan and social credit score system. When properly secured, your Bitcoin cannot be confiscated, stolen, or hacked. Moreover, the Bitcoin network functions as an entirely market-based decentralized network."
https://dossier.substack.com/p/why-china-fears-bitcoin
23. “In chaotic situations, creativity takes over. We understood that unless we work hard to develop our country, we won’t move forward.”
In the span of just a few days in February 2021, two earthquakes shook the capital. Warm weather timidly appears only for an hour or two, until biting cold, rain and heavy snow rush back — a warning that the gentle awakening of spring won’t come easily this year. Yet on sunny days, at golden hour, Yerevan lives up to its “pink city” epithet. A warm hue surrounds the city, making it look like it’s rising from the ground up to the sky — proof that beauty can still be found even in the hardest of times. “Pain, whether at the level of a person or a country, always has a chance to affect positively because it gives you a space to open up and try new things,” says Sukiasyan. “Against all odds, the cultural scene in Yerevan has the opportunity to gather momentum, to be in its best moment.”
24. "We do not believe it will be easy for someone to compete under their own names anymore. In the “creator economy”, you have to be different and interesting. The only way to be different and interesting is to say controversial “in the grey/black area” stuff. That means it’s easier to do these things as an anon. Good luck posting jokes about escorts or “dank memes” under a corporate drone face. You’ll be fired instantly."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-jungle-and-creating-your-own
25. I am not sure how I feel here. This is a hopeful & interesting solution, yet horrified at the underlying causes of this growing homelessness in what is supposed to be the world’s wealthiest country.
“If the Great Recession was a crack in the system, Covid and climate change will be the chasm,” says Bob Wells, 65, the nomad who plays himself in the film Nomadland, an early Oscar contender starring Frances McDormand. Bob helped April to adopt the nomad way of life and change her life in the process.
Today, he lives exclusively on public lands in his GMC Savana fitted with 400 watts of solar power and a 12-volt refrigerator. His life mission is to promote nomadic tribalism in a car, van or RV as a way to prevent homelessness and live more sustainably."
26. For the record, many countries do the same. This is not new.
"There are a number of PMCs in Russia, but the Wagner Group typifies the way global business and geopolitics operate in Putin’s Russia. Mercenaries who work for companies like the Wagner Group provide security to sites (such as mines and oil fields) that are of strategic interest to the Kremlin and its kleptocrats.
PMCs also perform such functions on behalf of foreign governments, and in this way, they have become an important tool for the Kremlin to promote its foreign policy objectives. For each of the key parties involved — the Kremlin, foreign governments, state industries, and private business interests — PMCs not only offer lucrative opportunities but, due to their quasi-legal structure, also provide plausible deniability for their clandestine activities."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-soviet-origins-of-putins-mercenaries/
27. "There are threye ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [1]
Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era, but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one." It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.
Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are."
http://paulgraham.com/hwh.html
28. This is a really good idea. Arming the creators. ie. Be the arms dealer. :)
29. Been a fan for a very long time.
"There’s a softness to Brosnan — in both voice and temperament. He’s clearly content, happy to follow his own path and be his true self — but he’d never let this freedom of spirit bring detriment or discomfort to others. Speaking to the actor, one thing is clear: we should all be moreBrosnan. Because this is a happy man happily growing old. He’s happy for his hair to go grey — “I just let it go…”. And he’s happy living by his short, time-tested list of considered mottos and mantras.
“Be kind,” he says, checking them off. “Show up on time. And be patient. You might have to step back and take a breath. You might have to think about what you’re doing, think about the situation. I don’t get angry. I could get angry — but where would that anger go? There would be no point.”
30. "Wall Street is not a nice place. People are not exactly known to sing together around the camp fire. They operate in a cut throat, ruthless world. In fact, there was a class action lawsuit recently filed against many of the top banks for an alleged collusion on federal antitrust grounds related to CDS pricing and trade execution. You really want some of these organizations to run your exchange or be the counterparty to your transaction? Probably not.
I say all this because we have to remember the pros and cons of the entrance of Wall Street. It will likely be a net positive, but it won’t be without some ridiculously nasty stuff. Keep your head on a swivel out there. Stay alert. And most importantly, remember the importance of decentralization and sovereignty."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/wall-street-brings-pros-and-cons
31. "To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people.
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
32. There is a lot of macro economic stuff here. Not just crypto. Very much worth a read.
"As stablecoins grow and silo high quality liquid assets, which are the same assets central banks like to use to suppress volatility, US will either fight against stablecoins or adopt them into the system.
Politicians love using a weapon against their enemies when it is disguised as an olive branch.
Bringing dollar stablecoins into the traditional system would not be striking at China or intended to destroy weak currencies and cement dollar supremacy, it would be for the good of countries and people currently cut off from dollar swap lines."
https://www.radigancarter.com/dispatches/a-tale-of-two-eurodollars
33. Interesting way to play the economic growth in Africa. The African Lions Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH7xuYj8Ls0
34. This is a great thread for European history fans like me.
https://twitter.com/NewJersey_Rob/status/1407357975463972865
35. Great discussion on Asian economic development which has relevance for most of emerging markets.
"And the upshot of that grand theory is that countries have to basically wait in line to get rich. There’s just no way for them to all hop on the rapid industrialization train all at once. Better policy can let you cut to the front of the line, but then the countries you cut in front of are out of luck.
To be sure, this is a highly stylized, pretty speculative theory, which is even harder to prove than Studwell’s. But it kinda-sorta fits the observed pattern in Asia — first Japan and Hong Kong and Singapore grew quickly, then Taiwan and South Korea, then China, now Vietnam and Indonesia. Malaysia and Thailand got a head start on China but then slowed down after the financial crisis of ‘97, while China accelerated — perhaps because China “cut in line” in front of the Southeast Asian tigers. But now, with China slowing down, perhaps Malaysia is back at the front of the line."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-studwell-got-wrong
36. Africa is one of the most exciting tech business opportunities of the future. This excellent write up shows why.
"Many may have become convinced of the “African opportunity” by observing the demographic zephyrs powering the continent into the coming decades. No other region on earth is poised to undergo such explosive growth across so many dimensions.
With massive demographic tailwinds, a growing capital base, a cohort of companies building necessary infrastructure, the next century may very well belong to the continent. We can hope that as its position on the global stage grows, more granular detail, more profound analysis, and greater attention is given to the industries and companies it hosts.” https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/africa
37. This is really creative. Ikea Hacking or Ikea as a platform! :)
"This type of upcycling, called Ikea hacking, has been on the rise during the pandemic.
And for companies that sell custom Ikea-friendly fixtures — legs, couch covers, knobs, and cabinet doors — business is booming.
Broadly, Ikea hacking is any form of upgrading, customizing, repurposing, or personalizing a piece of stock Ikea furniture.
The movement gained steam in the mid-2000s, when popular DIY blogs like Ikea Hackers and Instructables began offering up easy, affordable tweaks to popular items like Billy bookcases and Kallax shelf units.
At first, Ikea wasn’t a fan of people customizing its furniture and even sent Ikea Hackers a cease and desist. But since then, the company has embraced its hackers.
And over the past decade, this once small and wacky community has burgeoned into a full-fledged industry."
You Earn the Right to Grow: Commitment, Focus and Prioritization
A common issue I see for young people these days (or people in general) in the first few years of their career: complete lack of focus, taking short cuts, not willing to put in the time. Or something I’m still conflicted on: Seed stage founders who also want to do venture scouting or run a rolling fund/angel invest. I think it’s a different story if you are a founder of a Series B company which is somewhat established and has a leadership team in place. But at the seed stage you are still searching for product market fit. And intense focus is how you get there.
This is a hard concept for generalists like me who are interested in everything. But one thing I did well after some missteps early in my career was that I stuck with things until I got half decent (or hopefully good). That usually took 2 years. First year, you are grinding and learning. Second year, you begin to see the results of the previous year’s work, good and bad. That is why I have an issue with people who jump around from company to company or role to role after less than a year. They don’t stick around long enough to learn and see the outcomes of the things they worked on.
This is the same with startups. They find a channel or tactic that works but they get shiny object syndrome and they want to try something new. SO they divert their attention and resources to this new thing and the old tactic that was working so well stops working because of lack of focus. This is almost chronic in startup land.
The lack of attention, shows lack of discipline. But maybe even more important, a lack of commitment. Fortunes are made with concentration, not diversification and hedging.
It reminds me of a time in the latter part of my professional investing career, when I was exploring doing my own Venture fund. I met a HNW (High Net Worth) Australian who had sold his company for half a billion dollars. He liked my presentation, we had dinner and a lot of drinks together. Initially he said he was very interested in putting some major bucks in. But as we discussed next steps, when he found out I was not going to jump in until 9 months later, he told me directly that he would not invest anymore based on this. He said I wasn’t going to make it because I was not ALL IN.
It totally stunned me at the moment and I had all these excuses. But he was 110% right. I really did not have the courage or conviction for this. I was just playing and doing what I thought I was supposed to do by Silicon Valley standards. It was a great wake up call that I actually ended up emailing and thanking him later for. (Separate Lesson is don’t be so thin skinned as its usually outsiders who tell you the truth versus those closest to you who fear offending you).
The point I try to make here is that you have to be “All in” and get Step ONE done and executed well. Then you can move on to work on something else. This is the same regarding projects, startups and even big companies. This was one of the key issues I saw at almost every company I worked at: Alibris, Yahoo! & 500 Startups. All were organizations infamous for trying to do too many things at the same time with limited resources. We never got good or known for one thing.
Some examples: Alibris did B2C, B2C, B2G all at the same time, definitely. Yahoo!’s infamous lack of focus issue was well stated in the Peanut Butter manifesto here: https://www.cnet.com/news/brad-garlinghouse-updates-yahoo-peanut-butter-manifesto/
For 500 Startups, the challenge and question: is it a Venture Capital fund, an Accelerator, a Corporate Innovation Agency? Focus & prioritization sounds so simple but it’s never easy. Very smart people run these organizations but it’s so very easy to get pulled into a new market or opportunity. And it’s also very hard to say NO to customers or when there is a lot of money on the table.
Yet as Napoleon famously said: “He who defends everything, defends nothing.”
This requires immense discipline and something I think most people and companies will continue to struggle with in our ever competitive world.
Mixing & Remixing: On Personal Identity and Reinvention
The hardest part of leaving a job/role/company: What do you tell people you do when you meet someone at a party? Work is a very big part of your identity.
In the Netflix Sci Fi series “Tribes of Europa”, one of the main antagonists was the vicious Crow warrior tribe. In the making of a Crow warrior, the candidates. fight to death. The winner has a ceremony where a new name is chosen. Your old name can never be spoken aloud again or you will be executed. I don’t think you need to go this far but sometimes this is the only way you can jumpstart into your new life. It’s like the girlfriend you broke up with. Usually not a good idea to see her all the time afterwards. Makes it hard to move on.
After you leave your company and role, it’s important to step away and take some time off if you can. Go far away from the work friends, clients, partners and business network & community you normally spend your time with. “New country and city” far away. As my friend the writer Polina Pompliano wrote: “That’s why leaving your home country for a few days or weeks can act as a reset, allowing you to get a more wide view of the world beyond the rigid mental walls you’ve built over the years.”
Go hang out with new people. Read some new books. Take some classes. New Inputs are everything. And the data that will help you form new ideas and opinions. This break will help you gain a new perspective. Take the time if you can.
Also it’s key from the get go that you don’t identify too closely with your occupation, your city, your state, your politics or religion. Or at minimum be more conscious of it. Paraphrasing Naval, you need to ”Keep your identity small”.This way you don’t build up the biases that keep your brain in a mental straight jacket. It allows you to be more mentally flexible.
It’s scary and goes against our own instincts that have been deeply instilled in us for millenia. We are wired to identify with a tribe and to distrust change. But with the right mental framework, steps and a little imagination and luck, it can be manageable and prevent us from being stuck in the past whether that is an identity or relationship. Our occupations, especially so in America are a strong identity and a deep (usually abusive & dysfunctional) relationship.
I think it would be a personal failure on my part if I only just jumped back into doing Venture capital after a long break. I love the industry and the business. It will definitely be some part of my personal skill portfolio & practice. But as a creative individual, I would hope I would be evolving further.
I should be mixing in new skills or knowledge during this sabbatical. Maybe I should just go do something that builds on top of my old startup, tech executive and Venture investor skill sets by taking this into a completely new region or market. Or maybe I will even go to a completely new industry or role. I guess we will see. This journey of discovery has definitely been fun so far.
“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”― Cornelia Funke
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 27th, 2021
“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”--Jordan Peterson
I don't agree with his conclusion. This dude is an overly pessimistic grim dark guy who I don't usually post anymore. But he has a point of view that I do think may come true if we don't get our act together.
"The decades of catastrophe we face now — climate change in the 30s, mass extinction in the 40s, and the final collapse of our ecologies in the 50s — are going to cause inequality to grow even wider.
Covid’s a dry run for the future of catastrophe. The good news is this: there are things we should learn, about how fast and hard collapse happens, how fragile our societies are, economically, socially, politically, culturally. A few months of a pandemic — and they snapped like twigs. And if you think things are “normal” now, go ahead, again, and tell me why you’re paying 30% more for the same stuff..."
https://eand.co/the-future-of-the-economy-is-even-more-dystopian-than-you-think-14342f2f7fe4
2. This is a solid view on what's happening in the VC world now.
https://mobile.twitter.com/semil/status/1406132999708577792
3. I am a fan of Ryan Reynolds. Great actor but really sharp businessman.
"From distribution and budget control to marketing and brand collaborations, Reynolds has poured himself a whole new résumé of skills as owner and creative director of the liquor brand. So if, like us, you’re wondering just what it takes for a high-flying A-lister to reinvent themselves as a boardroom big shot, wet your whistle with Ryan Reynolds’ five indispensable, unpredictable — and regularly rambling rules of business."
4. "Calm promises to give the anxious, the depressed, and the isolated—as well as those looking to be a bit more present with their family, or a bit less distracted at work, or a bit more consistent in their personal habits—access to a huge variety of zen content for $15 a month, $70 a year, or $400 for a lifetime. For that, its investors have valued the company at $2 billion—roughly as much as23andMe, Allbirds, and Oatly—making it one of just 700 private start-ups to hit the 10-digit mark.
Now flush with venture capital, Calm is in the midst of becoming a full-fledged wellness empire: It is producing books, films, and streaming series, as well as $10 puzzles, $80 meditation cushions, and $272 weighted blankets. It is expanding its corporate partnerships, offering meditations on American Airlines flights and in UK Uber rides, in Novotel hotel rooms and at XpresSpas, and for employees of GE, 3M, and a number of other companies. It even has ambitions to move into hospitality, offering real-world oases to match its smartphone ones."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/do-meditation-apps-work/619046/
5. "Bitcoin, like the Protestant Reformation before it, disintermediates a powerful, central institution: Government monopoly of money
Your property rights are your rights to the extent you can defend them.
Government exists as a monopoly of violence in a given territory. A lack of a monopoly on violence exists in parts of Mexico and Iraq to name recent examples.
Bitcoin is individual sovereignty not because a government, court, or power enforces your “rights”.
https://bowtiedbarbary.substack.com/p/monetary-reformation-bitcoin
6. This is quite the thread on the Sovereign Individual and the decentralized future we are entering.
https://twitter.com/BowTiedBarbary/status/1406480720818757662
7. "If you’re only hearing positive things within a company, something is obviously wrong because something is always wrong, no matter the company. And as nice as it is to celebrate wins, it’s also just easier than talking about hard truths and times. But the latter are so much more valuable in the long run, especially as ways to accelerate learning across a team."
https://mgs.blog/making-bad-news-travel-fast-a35ee7764e8f
8. "Emerging markets are better if you value convenience. Buying stocks in China or a condo in Malaysia is much easier than figuring out places like Myanmar.
Meanwhile, frontier markets are best if you want low correlation with other investments, potential for outsized returns, and don’t mind some additional work.
A big reason why frontier markets boast immense opportunities is because few people put forth the effort needed to discover them.
But that’s only a positive thing if you’re among the willing.
Large money managers spend billions on trading algorithms and well-paid staff. They’ll find any truly undervalued asset before you’re even aware it exists. As such, there aren’t many deals left on major stock exchanges.
Goldman Sachs isn’t looking at stocks in Vietnam or land in Manila though. It leaves a chance for the rest of us."
https://www.investasian.com/2018/09/29/emerging-frontier-markets/
9. "So decades of unequally shared progress, rampant NIMBYism, elites telling Americans that some of them don’t have what it takes to use computers, and fears of automation taking jobs. No wonder Americans aren’t as excited about The Future as they used to be!
But as reasonable as that caginess toward The Future might be, I still think America could benefit from a lot more artists crafting positive, optimistic visions."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/losing-sight-of-the-future
10. This is why you do not negotiate with terrorists. In this case "Woke" ones.
"Hopefully, Basecamp will learn from this incident that woke employees cannot be satisfied, and they will do everything to find a molehill they can make into a mountain. If it wasn’t a dumb list of funny customer names, it would have been something else. This is the true lesson every CEO should learn — that you cannot please these employees, no matter how much you try. The answer must be “no, do not bring politics to work, whether I agree with you or not.”
Anything less than that will invite chaos to your company, will destroy team psychological safety, kill team collaboration, and have a direct impact on your bottom line.
We should all be striving to create happy, fulfilling workplaces where all employees have access to opportunities to advance their careers and do good work. But sometimes, you have to serve your team by giving them what they need, rather than what they might want."
https://karlyn.medium.com/the-real-story-behind-basecamps-woke-revolt-bd9b56b3d11d
11. "While China is losing market share in bitcoin mining, the United States is gaining market share. It won’t necessarily be one-for-one because some Chinese miners will not come to the US, but it is hard to argue any country is going to benefit more from this than the United States."
"As we have discussed over and over again, open systems beat closed systems. The Chinese approach of banning an open monetary network in pursuit of a tightly controlled monetary system is unlikely to be seen as an advantageous strategic move for their citizens. But just like North Korea, this decision will be helpful in continuing to consolidate power and ensure the longevity of the dictatorship."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/china-just-made-a-significant-geopolitical
12. For young folks starting off their careers!
"Steps to gaming the system: 1) focus on relevant experience and make sure your grades are good enough 3.5 GPA, 2) to make sure it is roughly there, 3) get the position and play politics to get ahead, 4) at your mid-year review if you’re in the top group, you’ve done enough, 4) being #1 just means you’re doing too much and are being abused, 5) start ramping up your side income, 6) if you do make it to a revenue generating role where you’re heavily incentivized the game gets trickier… Ideally that doesn’t happen to you."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/getting-your-first-career-we-all
13. So basic but hard to execute and get right. Sometime the best startups focus on seemingly simple & obvious problems.
14. This will be fun to watch. E-commerce roll up plays around the world.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/22/berlin-brands-group-enter-china-roll-up-amazon-ecommerce/
15. "Well, the essential point, it seems to me, is that Washington still lacks a strategy. I am not talking about the erratic policy of the Trump years. The problem has persisted and it was there before Trump.
Would you be able to say what the US wants from its China policy? To be tough, it seems. But tough with what purpose?
The truth is that no one knows, not even the people crafting the policy. They look to the past, disagree with the previous approach and have embarked on a different course. But the future remains a dark abyss."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/what-exactly-is-the-american-strategy
16. This is a crazy diffuse and insight dense interview. Must listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHQi1HnCZGY
17. Big congrats to Victor Folmann, Rasmus Holmgaard & the Gamerzclass team!
18. This is a valuable framework for figuring out financial independence. You can make your money go further & get a better quality of life with geo-arbitrage. (versus spending your time in expensive countries like USA & most of western Europe)
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-much-do-you-need-to-be-financially-independent/
19. "In the workplace, the biggest change has been the move of technology from a supporting role to a central role. It isn’t just that messaging became more important or that video meetings began to work, but that people quickly realized these can actually be superior. The next step is to take these tactical lessons and apply them more broadly to how a company is structured and operates.
In the coming months, many will claim to offer the best solution to managing the tension between returning to the old normal and adopting some new approaches to appease those wanting more. Some corporations will work hard to snap back to the pre-pandemic world as quickly as they can. Some will stridently try to find a compromise approach, the hybrid work environment or dual headquarters and so on.
In great numbers, startups and newer companies have all been adopting far more aggressive approaches to the future, with fully distributed teams. These are not solutions but tactics. One does not recover from a significant trauma by making one change or one compromise."
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35
20. This is a very interesting take on EU's strategy for China. We can learn something here.
"With the notion of systemic rivalry, the European Union hoped to separate political differences and economic links. In strategic rivalry, conflict leads. In systemic rivalry, conflict is limited to the political sphere. It is part of the EU’s political tradition to believe that politics and the economy can be insulated from each other. Even inside the bloc, political differences with Poland and Hungary are not allowed to interfere with the single market.
Performing the same trick with China is far more difficult, but the Commission has been busy putting the plan in practice. Over the past two years, it approved a barrage of new regulations limiting the Chinese state’s ability to interfere with the framework of economic links between the two blocs. These include investment screening, trade defense instruments, a package against state subsidies and a public procurement tool."
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-china-strategy-geopolitics/
21. Net net: own assets.
"Coca Cola has clearly become a LESS valuable company over the past decade. And yet its stock price has soared to record highs.
Coca Cola’s record stock price has nothing to do with the company’s success; it has everything to do with the tidal wave of cash that the Federal Reserve has printed. Much of that money has made its way into the stock market, pushing up share prices– even when the companies are in decline.
This is asset price inflation."
22. "Why in the world do we need a centralized exchange to trade stock certificates? We do not. If you put all of these certificates onto the internet it is actually a lot easier. You can see buy and sell orders from every single person with an internet connection. The only reason this doesn’t work right now is due to regulations.
If you think about crypto, there is absolutely no need for a Centralized Exchange (such as Coinbase) over the long-term. Decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, 0x, Sushiswap, etc. already do more volume than Coinbase! So. The future is a decentralized exchange environment.
As a note to keep ourselves honest here, centralized exchanges will still exist. Large funds with tons of regulation involved will be around for a long time. The big picture is that the decentralized side will gain more mass adoption over the long-term."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/decentralized-finance-the-high-level
23. Kaboom! Batch 14 represent. Go Olivier Pailhes, Jonathan Anguelov & the Aircall team!
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/23/aircall-raises-120-million-for-its-cloud-based-phone-system/
24. "Now for the fun big picture: governments need to compete for citizens. There was a book on this topic called “The Sovereign Individual”. We’d go as far as to say that this is required reading for anyone at this point. This era relates to the novel 1984, the millennial and zoomer generation will relate more to the Sovereign individual.
This means that *you* (everyone reading this) will become your own bank. This means you will be allowed to lend out your assets. You can borrow from anyone in the world and on top of this you can transact 24/7/365. If you’ve made a wire transfer before you know that there are windows to send money even if it is a small sum. The future is 24/7/365 with no intermediary.
Crypto currency is the biggest invention we’ve seen since the Internet. Sadly, we’re getting old here and many people don’t remember life before the internet. We used to put quarters into payphone machines to make domestic and international calls. Back then people argued that the internet would be less impactful than the fax machine… These arguments all proved to be incorrect."
25. "Investors invest in deals. They don’t invest in dreams. Sure they’ll lie to TechCrunch and say they love investing in untested ideas by made geniuses, but that’s a lie. They want to make money, and if your deck doesn’t have dollar signs pinging off of it in with cartoonish AWOOOGA noises you’re probably not going to get a check.
So what should you do instead? Approach investors for advice. Tell them about your product, ask them what they think, and just listen. They’ll tell you important stuff and maybe be able to help you with devs, management, and logistics. Maybe they’ll even like you enough to put in money."
https://startupstrats.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-jerk
26. This is really damn funny. This is a parody BTW.......I think......
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/23/an-interview-with-a-leading-venture-capitalist/
27. This is a fun podcast to learn about what's happening at the edge of the internet.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdv7VmpESKo
28. "This unholy trinity—the quasi-religion of wokeness, corporate ingestion of the corrosive social-media machinery and a deluded view of working life—is what bedevils the newest generation of American companies.
Once you let the mob accrue influence internally, short of taking a hard stand managerially as Coinbase did, you have no option but concede to their demands and offer the mob the object of their desire (or rage) on a plate. Every company who goes down this path will be limping from crisis to crisis forever (as Google is)."
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/bad-apple
29. "While there may still be space for cryptocurrency in China, it seems the CCP authorities have finally concluded they have little to gain from nurturing anti-authoritarian technology. On the whole, their loss could be the world’s gain but there are still likely turbulent waters ahead."
https://www.coindesk.com/watch-traders-not-miners-china-crackdown
30. I've been wanting to take the Trans-Siberian railway for a long time. One day in the post covid world.
31. "In other words, Pakistan is eating its proverbial seed corn instead of planting it in the ground. Bangladesh and India, in contrast, are planting their seed corn — foregoing current consumption in order to build productive capital and be richer tomorrow.
Why would Pakistan consume today instead of investing for the future? I’m not sure, but my guess is that it has to do with the country’s political system. The country alternates back and forth between civilian and military rule:"
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-would-pakistan-grow
32. Propublica just seems shrill. Maybe more of us regular folks can learn from this & use Roths better.
"Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments."
33. Lots of good inside notes on what's going on in Venture capital.
https://www.newcomer.co/p/looking-back-on-the-week
34. So many nuggets of wisdom from the Wall Street Playboys.
"★ Fame is harassment from regular people. Regular people have nothing better to do with their lives than live vicariously through someone else. This is why celebrities go nuts. They are harassed every single day as people charge after their cars just to touch their shirt or skin. Lunatics.
★ If you are never able to sell and never able to scale… you can become “well off” but you will NEVER be rich. You need to make money in your sleep to generate real wealth.
★ A successful man does everything in life with a purpose.
35. Worth pondering. Building a great digital Virtual reality or Building a Great Reality.
"Should we be confident that the further internet-ization of Western life can go hand in hand with other technological leaps forward? Or alternatively, is our progress into realms of virtuality and simulation actually intimately connected to the dearth of building in the real world?"
https://douthat.substack.com/p/decadence-and-andreessens-dilemma
36. Finally! Good news for Taiwan. Suck it CCP.
Gaming is the Extreme Frontier of Business: Time Machine Investing and Operating
I listened to the excellent Josh Buckley interview on the Invest Like the Best podcast. Josh is a 15 year gaming operator turned investor and consumer startup founder extraordinaire. He states that Gaming is one of the most competitive markets bar none. Not just in the fight for consumer mindshare. But literally super competition in pure numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of products fighting fiercely to fill the very few top slots in the store ie. Apple Appstore and Google Play. In 2020, according to Statista, there were 957,390 gaming apps in the App Store as compared to 3.42 million non-game apps available. This came out in my research and analysis when I was a VC. (I even wrote about this unique industry here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/why-gaming-industry-is-so-interesting)
Now as a board member of a Gaming holding company I definitely see that in 2021, this space has even become more popular. This competition has gotten even more crazy with consumer interest rising during the pandemic.
Because it’s so competitive there is an extreme amount of experimentation and the only edge that a games company has is operational excellence in analytics, monetization, gameplay & design + Distribution and customer acquisition.
It’s almost like a time machine: I talk alot about geo-arbitrage, learning advantage technology or business models and bringing them to a newer geographic market. Well in gaming, the most advanced markets are from North Asia: namely China, Japan and South Korea. There is almost a 2 to 3 year lag time from Eastern gaming market to Western gaming market. Within the west, we see another 2 year lag time of best practices and learnings being applied to consumer products and then another lag to B2B software. I should note this lag time is shrinking very quickly at each step as business and competition speeds up.
Gaming is where the cutting edge of analytics & online marketing. I’ve learned a lot of my online marketing tactics from gaming folks when I was retooling back in 2012.
Games are also where most advanced behavioral psychology is applied. Variable rewards are a very big part of most games. Loot boxes. Status games & leaderboards. Super engaged communities and belonging. Gaming companies have been integrating and executing on these for the last 2 decades. All things that have migrated to become basic parts of consumer and now B2B businesses over the last 5 years particularly.
The biggest lesson from Gaming to other businesses according to Josh Buckley & something I wholeheartedly agree with. (and I should note if you ask many of my old portfolio companies I do spend a lot of time talking about customer segmentation with them)
“It would be the full understanding of power laws. It would be understanding your base of users or customers in their segments, and then understanding how much of your business is driven by your biggest segments and realizing you probably don't understand them as well as you think. Both you're probably underpricing that segment because you don't value the product nearly like they do. And you probably don't understand how to build effectively for them, because either you don't love the product as much as they do or you don't derive as much value from it as they do.
So you can't really build a one-size-fits-all product. There's so many different jobs to be done for a product. Your product may be a Swiss army knife because you have 10 different segments or 5 different segments. And each of those segments may both have different things they want from the product and they may have different importance to your own business.”
I think the point of this incredible discussion is that there is so much to be learned of the art and execution of business from the gaming industry. It is the literal bleeding edge of business. Operators and investors dismiss this industry at their own risk.
Have Fun Getting Kidnapped: Why Stealth, Privacy & Pseudonymity is the Future
People who have followed me know I’ve been a big fan of Wall Street Playboys (recently rebranded as BowtiedBull) for a long time. They preach keeping your ego in check and to not show off via status signaling. Ie. driving around flashy lambo while your neighbours fall behind economically. Falling behind: an awfully easy thing to happen in 2020 while we are all buffeted by hugely significant economic, geopolitical and technology change. Going into 2021, that has only accelerated. Some smart and lucky folks will pull far ahead but a good majority of people will continue to fall behind in desperation.
It’s what is called the “Red Queen” effect: You have to run twice as hard to stay in the same place.
This is why I stress two things for those who are fortunate to have gotten ahead in the last few years. I define this as having a well paying job or running a business on the right side of the trends, possessing assets and being healthy (mentally and physically). This is a shockingly low percentage of the world population.
Number 1: Make sure you are helping your friends, family, neighbors & community at large. What kind of human drops those they came up in the world with?? Donate to charities you believe in and at minimum use a tithing system (10% of $$ made donated, it’s simple, easy and the right thing). Also tip your restaurant waiter and waitresses very well, like 30–50%. Literal hat tip to BowtiedBull for this recommendation. I’ve been doing this for the last 6 months. It is a great feeling seeing how surprised and happy you can make your server.
Number 2: is the biggest part. Be modest, Go stealth and have different layers of identity in public. That’s why you see the rise of cartoons or pseudonyms on mass social media like on Twitter. As a young up and comer (and now old and still trying to be an up and comer), I always wanted to be in Forbes (Midas List or whatever), or be famous or have a huge Twitter or social media following.
Now I think it’s a horrible curse and just opens you up to attacks. Post the wrong thing, or say something that is taken out of context and you can be cancelled by the idiotic “Woke mob” that seems to be actively looking for things to be outraged about.
Or even worse a target of physical violence or threats from the insane or the professional criminal class.
Seriously anyone who thinks being famous is the thing: read this by Tim Ferriss and it will cure you of any inclination or interest for fame:
11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”).
I have admired the guy forever but would not want to have his life ever.
The point is that there are going to be a lot of disenfranchised, desperate and rightfully angry people in the world looking to take this anger out on those seen to be doing well or seen as different (in my case, being Asian/American-Canadian). We have already seen a 150% rise of Anti-Asian attacks in America in 2020 and do not see this sad trend ending anytime soon. It seems inevitable with the Covid coming from China & the increasing animosity growing between America and China. No different than what happened to many Arabic looking folks after 9-11. Lots of ignorant idiots in America sadly. But this is just something any student of history, psychology and sociology has seen time and time again.
That is why we will see a growing movement of pseudonymous players. Privacy for the smart folks will be en vogue again. The ultimate flex is going stealth and living a life doing whatever you want to do, hanging out with whoever you want to hang out with & being left alone when you want ie. True freedom. You can’t do that if you are being chased by paparazzi or surrounded by security or at the beck and call of others.
I am not a begrudger. Many of these people worked hard and earned their good fortunes. In the world prior to 2020, when most people were doing well, you can show off all you want. But in the post 2020 Covid world, for pure decency and self preservation, I hope those who are doing well check their egos and stop their status signalling. Otherwise keep on showing off on Instagram, showing your luxury travel porn, doing bottle service at clubs, going to ostentatious restaurants & driving around your flashy lambo. If you keep doing this, as the guys at BowtiedBull say: “Have Fun Getting Kidnapped!”