Mental Health is About Protecting Your Company’s Most Important Asset: YOU as the Founder
Life in America can be hard as many of our traditional communities have broken down. We live far away from our families. Many people don’t even know their neighbors or go to church. Work is your community now. Because of this, you need to ensure that your work life makes sense for you. It’s so easy to grind yourself to the ground. Easy to be guilty when you want to take a break. This is more so with business founders. Most founders end up taking too much responsibility.
They put their constituents like customers, employees, partners & investors first.
Many founders put themselves last. They don’t take care of themselves. And this is why so many of them burn out.
This is far more endemic than we think and no one in our macho work culture talks about this. Not when everyone is posturing and talking about “killing it”. This has to stop as it serves no one well. This is why I’ve become such a fan of Tyler Tringas and the Calm Company Fund movement & community. At their awesome Founders Summit in Mexico City, things like Mental health were front and center of the discussion and how to build a company that fits your own personality and goals. For the record, not everyone’s idea of entrepreneurship is the Silicon Valley Unicorn-chasing rocketship, even though this is the garbage being pushed on founders these days through the media.
There were so many great lessons and workshops and discussions that would take more than this post to describe. But I will leave you with a few important questions & exercises that were raised at Founder’s Summit that every founder should ask themselves.
What is your One Thing? Ie. What is it that you are working for. Is it Freedom? Is it Money? Is it Fame/Glory? It’s very important to be honest with yourself.
For me personally, it’s clearly freedom, which money is an enabler of. I will never be beholden to anyone or work with or for anyone I don’t respect.
2. If money was not a problem: what would you do? What kind of life would you live?
This is something in line with the “Perfect Day Exercise” I described before (https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-perfect-day-exercise). This really set me on the life I live now.
3. What would you do if your doctor told you, you only have 5-10 years to live?
This is crucial to help you think about how to make some small and big changes for the long term. And if what you are doing now is accretive to that long term life you want to live.
4. What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?
This question should make you think about what you are doing now. Life is fleeting. If you are not doing what you want to do now, when will you do it?
These key questions helped me to crystallize and figure out my own personal life mission and I think they will for you.
This Mission for me ultimately is about having a positive impact on 10 million people around the world through my investing, writing, public speaking and mentoring. But this of course is to be balanced with family, health and fun. My personal mottos are “I do WTF I Want” & living out “My Life is Dope and I do Dope Sh-t!”
I hope all founders really do think more about the type of business and consequently, the kind of life they are building. This way they can build happier and sustainable outcomes.
And as it is December 25th today: Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!
Scaling is F—Ng Hard: Hard lessons hard earned
I’ve been lucky here, having a fairly broad experience of scaling in Silicon Valley. Had some experience @ Alibris (scaling from 15 to 150), at Yahoo! scaling from 2800 people to 15,000+; at 500 Startups; going from 30 to 150 people. Plus I’ve invested in over 400+ startups, many which have scaled to hundreds of employees. Most companies do this very badly and like many things in life, you only learn the hard way.
I noticed 2 key breakpoints in startups. 1) Dying before PMF 2) getting to PMF but not able to scale quickly enough or Spinning out of control.
I want to talk more about the 2nd breakpoint. I noticed that this typically happens after raising their Series B.
One big problem that seems consistent: “Bad Hiring” (usually hiring big name company executives). Most founders have never managed a large team nor cultivated them. Something also common is not getting rid of commandos when you need infantry. (https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-jungle-the-dirt-road-and-the)
This is hard, these folks have been with you and helped you get to this point. But the company has evolved and they may not be effective anymore.
Tied to this and also very common for VC funded startups: “Over Hiring” and then having to fix this. You get so caught up in adding people, you end up cutting corners and hiring the wrong people. If you are honest, you know it’s not working but you want to give them more time to acclimatize. Or hope they can turn it around. Fast forward 2 quarters and you know it is not working, so you inevitably have to fire them and rebuild the team from scratch. No one talks about this but its way more common than you think.
“Messing up on Processes”: this sometimes is either underinvested in or over invested in.
Founders either tend to be allergic to bringing processes. Thus they try to keep the org flat and decentralized, which also tends to make things very messy and disorganized. And havoc when you grow the organization.
Or they over-invest and bring in processes from much later stage established companies. My view is that this was one of reasons Zynga fell behind in the early 2010s because they brought in so many execs from Electronic Arts. They became very bureaucratic and schlerotic.
Another big question and risk: “Going beyond the core customer segment. Ie. Lack of Focus.” So for example, you have grown on the back of SMB but then decide to go after Enterprise. It requires changes to product, support mechanism, and a brand new sales motion and GTM.
The big question is does it make sense right now? Have you saturated your original core market (like in my opinion, ~70-80% of the market)?
I can spend a lot more time on all the issues that come with scaling. But if companies can surmount the previous challenges, they are well positioned for tremendous hypergrowth. Like many things, it’s easier said than done. Thankfully there are an ever increasing number of people who have had great experience with scaling. And additionally, who are very open to sharing their hard earned knowledge here. I expect the art of scaling will be more common knowledge as the Unicorn startup count increases as it has in the last few years.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 19th, 2021
“You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.”--Morgan Wooten
"It’s stories like this that may help ease any lingering worries that Nanjiani has absconded from the dingy basements and Games Workshop backrooms of comic book culture to mix in the gym lockers and frat houses with the beefy, square-jawed jocks. Even when he’s shredding himself into the best shape of his life to play an ancient, genetically altered guardian of the galaxy who can blast laser beams from the tips of his fingers, he still manages to mount a rococo, Bollywood-inspired dance sequence. More than a turncoat in the pop culture wars, he may well manage to ease tensions between the betas and the alphas — an ancient enmity that, like the battles between Marvel’s various races of superhumans, is seemingly eternal.
For all the hype around his new movie (and his new body), Kumail Nanjiani is still the same guy. He remains — proudly, and even a bit defiantly — an indoor kid."
https://sharpmagazine.com/2021/11/16/kumail-nanjiani-profile
2. This is the dream but surprisingly few VCs use tech and data themselves. Probably changing fast with all the competition out there (and new tech too)
“Especially as venture firms grow, and especially as having access to data and speed and efficiency become competitive advantages, I do think that there will be more demand and budget for buying additional products,” Lerner said. “There are real firms out there, like Tribe, that have built proprietary datasets and data models and that is their edge, but I don’t think that’s how the majority of firms differentiate.”
It may not be a core differentiation, but venture firms are turning to data sources and building their own analysis layer on top of it to help them gain a competitive edge."
https://www.protocol.com/tech-software-venture-capitalists-use
3. "I think that the key to believing in a very bright future is to have trust in oneself, in others, and in the future itself. Things will only get better if we work on making them better. It’s just as self-fulfilling as being Debbie Downer. Plus, according to the late Hans Rosling, most things do get better over time.
I think that the only threat towards this bright future are distractions. We are daily bombarded with attempts to distract us from what I believe really matters: self-fulfillment. Its news, phone calls, social media, traffic, emails, spam, commuting, drama, unproductive meetings, boring Zoom calls, mindless thoughts et cetera."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/unlocking-the-bright-future
4. "By the 20th century, the term pulling yourself up by your bootstraps had morphed, changing to something not only possible, but desirable.
Zimmer said it’s not exactly clear just when the turn happened, but it became a compliment about self-sufficiency.
.......bootstrapping most often isn’t the way to become one of the biggest companies on the planet, despite a few tales of outliers.
Still, Godin defended bootstrapping as a choice most founders should consider to stay focused on the unique product or service they’re hatching."
https://thehustle.co/who-gets-left-out-of-bootstrapping
5. Very thought provoking and well worth a read. Strong recommend.
"Put all these pieces together, and rather than a unipolar Pax Americana or a bipolar “New Cold War,” the future will be a decentralized race to the top as countries, cities, companies, and communities—physical and virtual—compete to attract talent and capital. We do not argue that states are irrelevant; rather, they will be more relevant if they embrace the arrow of history and work with the network and less relevant if they attempt rearguard actions against it. Such is the nature of great protocol politics.
What does that mean for the United States? Today, the United States is experiencing a relative decline in strength across economic and military axes. Its global role is more a function of its victories in 1945 and 1991 than its capabilities in 2021.
Places as varied as Estonia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and Chile are all vying for newly mobile talent through “nomad visas” and other similar programs. After all, many aspects of life are already in the cloud (like email, education, and e-commerce) and many others are partially digitized (like finance and foreign incorporation). Government is what economist Mancur Olson famously termed a “stationary bandit,” extracting rents in exchange for providing benefits."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-great-protocol-politics
6. Good framework for thematic vc investing. Tech, Society, Timing and Team.
https://worldpositive.com/how-to-build-a-time-machine-f207b2cae3fb
7. This is a worthwhile interview with Doomberg on the decentralization of media. Also the future seems to be anonymous and content driven. People taking control of their lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deD3QRt3DZw
8. "In a world where US oil production tapers off, spare OPEC+ pumping capacity fails to materialize, financing for new exploration and development continues to shrink, and demand for oil in the West continues to grow while exploding higher in the emerging economies, what happens to price?"
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/theres-not-enough-oil
9. "We are interested in people like Wallis because he is a successful content creator, and we are continuously researching and learning all we can about the rapid decentralization of entertainment and education into such niches. The gig economy for brains is exploding and has only accelerated under the world’s response to Covid-19.
Brand is one of five pillars of any business, the others being production, technology, demand creation, and channel. An effective way to improve business performance is to do a deep dive on each of these five pillars, identify strengths and weaknesses, and then look for ways to get better."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/the-riches-are-in-the-niches
10. "nations are not very old, and there is no species law that we must organize beneath their banner. Across human history, we have cobbled ourselves into tribes and fiefs and city-states of varying prosperity and endurance. We have favored other configurations and flourished.
We will do so again. Just as mechanical advancements gave rise to national systems, the technological revolution enables new structures. While the internet was the dominant force in the current shift, cryptocurrency represents the missing piece. Though much discussed, we remain in the early innings of understanding how profoundly the blockchain "vernacularizes" economics and empowers digital, censorship-free homesteading.
The result will be a new kind of civilizational structure: decentralized countries. "DeCos" will operate above national borders in the digital realm. In that respect, they resemble the "cloud nations" theorized by one of decentralization's poet laureates, Balaji Srinivasan. This piece owes a debt to his thinking and the writings of Benedict Anderson and Marshall McLuhan.
While Srinivasan's "cloud nations" seek to proceed "cloud first, land last," DeCos may never attempt to settle terrestrial territory. Rather, these entities recognize that our digital lives are more real and valuable than our corporeal ones."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/the-decentralized-country
11. Whatever you think of this man, he is the real life Iron Man & a bloody, interesting guy who deserves to be Time's Man of the Year. Elon Musk.
"This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.
His startup rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper.
He’s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds.
He dominates Wall Street: “The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,” Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk’s “Gamestonk!!” tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere."
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk
12. "The conclusion goes back to the same: computer coins. Individuals and institutional investors need to figure out a way to move up the risk spectrum given double digit inflation (minimum) and an asset class that is secure from confiscation. Crypto offers both. As we go through a rocky Q4/Q1 (more mandates, Covid-19 new variants), keep your eyes on the prize: holding onto all assets.
Smaller countries will continue to adopt BTC, larger countries will be better off in Fiat terms (US Token, Euros, Yuan etc.). However. The cat is out of the bag. As inflation ramps up, third world countries are generally hit harder. This results in a need for a new financial system to combat $30+ fees on remittance (just ask the Middle East, South America or Africa). Crypto solves it."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/improving-the-free-value-and-some
13. Woohoo! Congrats to my friend Apostolos, go Venturefriends!
14. "From travel restrictions to the efficacy of vaccines, every single major Covid position has diametrically switched across party lines, and almost every person responsible for Covid decisions, which have nearly all been disastrous, is still in power. Unless we’re all completely insane, none of this would be possible were we able to effectively remember.
Intuitively, most people seem to understand we’re missing something important. Even while nuclear power plants around the western world fade to dust, the concept of nuclear power is gaining popularity across all political ideologies.
In terms of space, Elon was just named TIME’s person of the year. Sure, the bluecheck anti-moon crew was furious about it, but the intuition of the average person seems to draw us back to these concepts, to American greatness, really, and to the people who embody the concept.
With a clear vision of a greater future now somehow difficult to grasp, and to really see, intuition — our feelings — are perhaps our last guide through the dark. Trust your gut. Things used to work. Things can still work. On some level, you know this is true.
That something has gone wrong with the world is not exactly controversial. But what, exactly? Perhaps that nagging feeling of something “off” is less a looming danger than it is a thing we’ve lost. An erosion of the soul, maybe, almost too gradual to name."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/variant-xi
15. "We’ve argued on several occasions that replacing coal with natural gas and scaling nuclear power alongside renewables like wind and solar is the most sensible energy strategy available to humanity today. Substituting baseload power with exclusively intermittent sources consistently fails those who adopt such a strategy, leading to higher costs, less reliability, economic damage, and rolling blackouts.
We find it odd that this empirical evidence is not only routinely ignored, but those who dare point to the data are labeled primitive defenders of the status quo. We prefer to think of ourselves as pro-human realists.
If one wanted to destroy an economy from within, it would be hard to do a better job than what Germany is doing to itself. By systematically shutting down baseload-critical nuclear power facilities and replacing them with intermittent renewable energy, Germany has left itself – and by extension, the entire European Union – vulnerable to shortages of reliable sources of electricity.
Not satisfied with that error, Germany has further impaled itself by attacking its suppliers of natural gas – the remaining option for producing reliable baseload power, having ruled out nuclear and coal – turning a mistake into a predictable catastrophe.
Unfortunately for some Americans, especially those living on and near the Pacific Coast, Germany holds no monopoly on dummkopfs. For evidence, consider that the formerly great state of California will soon begin the process of shutting down its last remaining nuclear power facility."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/california-ditzkrieg
16. Very exciting. I’m definitely binge watching this December 31st.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3uX4uwrAaY
17. I'm super bullish on Eastern Europe. Great place to invest, live and hire.
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/lifestyle/why-we-hire-in-eastern-europe
18. "This finite resource model of the world implicitly assumes finite knowledge. It says knowledge creation has come to an end. We are stuck at this current point, and, therefore, based on the knowledge that we have currently, these are all the resources available to us. Now we must start conserving.
But knowledge is a thing that we can always create more of."
19. "Brotman said he estimates small, early investing venture firms allow about 95 percent of pro rata rights to expire due to a lack of capital, funds needing to be closed, and the simple fact many of the firms are not growth round experts.
It often makes sense for investors. A small seed investor who may have invested $1 million for a 5 percent stake in a startup from a $20 million fund likely cannot now budget $5 million in a follow-up round to maintain that stake."
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/pro-rata-rights-vc-explained-changing
20. "To The Moon is not fundamental analysis. It is an inducement. It is an encouragement of belief. And the only thing that is fueling that rocket ship To The Moon is the credulity of others. There’s always a case for optimism, optimism of human ambition and capability of great technological and scientific discoveries.
But if your main argument for owning an asset is that other people will own it, not because it has intrinsic value, but because there’s a greater fool—i.e. let's just hype it up and pump it and promote it until more and more fools get in—eventually, the smarter people that induced the fools are leaving them as the bag holders. That to me is the great inequity. To The Moon is a constant encouragement of people. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbx9b/the-to-the-moon-crash-is-coming
21. "When we look back on 2021, however, no story will be more consequential than the people’s revolt against institutions. In recent memory, there hasn’t been a single year where so many people told society’s pillars to buzz off. Instead of holding jobs, they chose to resign. Instead of making safe investments, they chose meme stocks. Instead of political orthodoxy, they chose to vote independent."
https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/the-revolt-against-institutions-is
22. "When we eventually emerge from the energy crisis, the story of how China came to dominate the magnesium market should inform a strategic reconsideration of the West’s entire approach to the economy. Certain critical raw materials are difficult to make and doing so with all appropriate environmental controls is a price worth paying. Allowing China to abuse its environment so it can flood the world with cheap goods and put our manufacturers at a terminal disadvantage is dumb policy.
We need to get smarter, and soon."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/magnesium-pi
23. I wouldn't invest in this space personally but I'm a happy customer!
"The final step in delivery, handing a product to the consumer, is known as the last mile. Historically, the mile has been rhetorical. The nearest UPS hub or DHL warehouse might be 10 or 20 miles. These businesses, however, have dispersed their distribution networks to within an actual mile. The last last mile.
VCs recognize the opportunity. Gorillas has raised more than $300 million since its founding last year and is valued at over $1 billion. Jokr, which started delivering groceries eight months ago, has raised $350 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. They’re two of the fastest zero-to-unicorn firms in history.
It’s a global phenomenon. Spain’s Glovo raised $528 million in April ($2 billion valuation). Turkey’s Getir raised $550 million in June ($7.5 billion valuation). America’s Gopuff raised $1 billion in July ($15 billion valuation). Prague has Rohlik, London has Zapp, Moscow has Samokat … the list goes on. In the first quarter of this year alone, instant-delivery startups raised nearly $8 billion — more than in all of 2020.
This is part of a larger trend that’s bigger than just physical delivery. Everything is getting delivered. Streaming brought the box office into the home; roughly half of pre-pandemic moviegoers aren’t buying tickets. Telehealth brought doctors and therapists into the home; telehealth claims are up 37 times from before the pandemic. Yet more evidence of the Great Dispersion.
Over the past two decades, the dispersion of retail from shelves to porch fronts has created and reallocated trillions in value. A similar tectonic shift is likely to occur in grocery and restaurants at the hands of ghost kitchens, ride-hailing companies, and well-capitalized last-last-mile firms. The question is, will new giants be birthed or will the existing behemoths grow new heads?"
Building, Managing and Living by Values: The Importance of Principles
What do you do when it’s tough or your back is against the wall? Do you do the right thing or the expedient thing?
I always try to do the right thing but if I look back I don’t think I’ve always succeeded here. I’ve also tolerated or excused bad behavior from companies and firms I’ve worked at or associated with.
As they say, “There are rules, and there are laws”. Don’t break laws for sure. But the way they treat people or employees would not exactly be considered best practices or even remotely kind or human.
For the record, I don’t think these companies are run by bad people. But they are either too busy and/ or frankly cash starved and thus desperate. Desperate people do desperate things when their back is against the wall. Hence, they do some questionable things to cope and survive. Good people do bad things all the time.
I don’t justify or condone this bad behavior. And i can genuinely say, it always will come back and haunt them as their negative reputation begins to spread.
But you also need to survive so you can fix it. And hopefully you are in a position to influence or fix it.
So what can you do?
Clarify your personal values
These values should be the filter & guide of how you make hard decisions
Have a red line on what is acceptable or not
Always focus on doing better and beyond what is okay
This is something I believe I will be working on for the rest of my life.
This is why personal financial independence is so crucial. You need to be able to walk away if you have concerns or find your values diverge clearly with who you work with or for. It’s way too easy to overlook, excuse or rationalize bad behavior when you rely on their cash. Btw: this is relevant for not just employees relying on a company, but also a Venture Capitalist relying on a big Limited Partner for their Fund; or a company relying on a big customer/client. Diversification & thus less reliance on a specific revenue stream is critical.
This is another lesson I learned far too late in my career. Heed my warning here if you want to keep your conscience clear and sleep well at night.
Startup Now!: Entrepreneurship is the Ultimate Vehicle for Personal Development
James Clear stated on Twitter: “Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit.”
I think if you ask any entrepreneur they would agree with me.
In the beginning, you will work. You will work hard and you will work long hours. You are putting down the foundation & there is no way around this. And you will learn a lot.
You have to learn or your company will fail. Mindset matters & you may need to change a lot to build a successful business.
Values show up in culture. Business is personal. Every business is a snowflake and unique in the world. While it is helpful to see, hear and learn how other people have built their businesses. BUT it does not mean you have to follow what they do. You can adopt it or not.
You are in charge and you own the results. Because of this, you have a Choice: You can hire the people you want, hopefully people who can do the job well. (You will also learn quickly if this is the case or not).
You can find the customers to focus on and solve the problems you want to work on. If you do this well, you can build massive value in your business. Ie. Equity value.
One of the key lessons I’ve learned in the last 22+ In Silicon Valley, building equity is the proven road to financial independence & wealth.
At minimum it could be “Launchpad Business”, one which provides you enough of an income and living that you can go work on something you really care about. I wrote about it here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/the-launchpad-business-concept
A successful commercial business has a social impact. You are fixing customers' problems, growing & educating employees and supporting their families.
The point is that besides starting a family, the starting and running of a business is the most impactful & high leverage thing you can do for yourself and society at large.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 12th, 2021
“When you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less.”--Paul Brown
"Free on the Internet these days is a gateway drug. Once hooked, we forget why we are wasting our time on stuff that doesn’t add value. If it has a value it’s worth paying for. Making the user the product that is being sold in shady virtual alley deals is not cool.
These days I’m very suspicious of everything free online and prefer to pay for services to avoid advertising and that my data is being sold to who knows whom.
Pay well for what matters, for brands and services that is moving humanity forward. Support initiatives that protects our planet and people, and use technology intelligently to serve humankind and create the lifestyle your heart and mind desires."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/free-versus-pay
2. This is a good discussion on the China menace to Taiwan & the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gzMMGEysBk
3. This is a good tweet storm on the future of Fintech in 2022. Worth a read.
https://twitter.com/Mark_Goldberg_/status/1467858752447475715
4. "For more than 20 years now, the mountains have been the crucible in which Chin has forged his singular life. He is a professional climber, sponsored by The North Face; a mountain photographer, sponsored by Canon; a filmmaker with National Geographic. He shoots big-budget commercials for blue-chip companies like Ford. More recently, of course, he’s also become the codirector of nail-biting, award-winning documentaries—Meru (2015), Free Solo (2018), and The Rescue (2021)—that reevaluate the limits of human potential.
Through that multifaceted success, Chin has become a citizen of two worlds: He’s a Manhattanite and a Jackson local, a dirtbag climber who’s at home on the red carpet. More than anything, perhaps, he’s the consummate generalist whose constellation of skills has never aligned in quite the same way for anyone ever before. Plus, there’s the snow-melting smile.
Along the way, he’s become a survivor—of accidents, disasters, near starvation, bitter cold, trench foot, bandits, and other ordeals on expeditions in places like Patagonia and Borneo, China and Oman. “Jimmy could’ve become a Navy SEAL as easily as he became a climber,” says Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer, a friend and collaborator of Chin’s. “He’s really good at big-wall climbing, bust-ass-hard endurance stuff where you’ve gotta suffer. He really thrives and excels when you’ve gotta deliver, when failure isn’t an option, when you don’t get a second chance.”
https://www.gq.com/story/jimmy-chin-uncharted-territory
5. Great to see the growth of these kind of new focused funds in tech. Climate tech is important. Very credible people here too.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/06/climactic-raj-kapoor-josh-felser
6. Lots of great life advice here.
"Making money is *never* zero sum. There is always opportunity for wealth and if you are *unhappy* when someone you know succeeds, you’re the problem and you are are parasite. If you are thrilled that they made it, they will *remember* you forever and they will look out for you if you need something in the future. In short, don’t be a hater and don’t be insecure. Support people and you will have powerful friends beyond your wildest imaginations in less than 5 years.
Incentives drive results. If you can do this well, everyone will be happy. Over time incentives do change (which causes infighting), however, the incentives matter over the long term. If you leave a starving dog in front of a steak and expect it to die vs. eating the steak, you’re simply a fool."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/change-your-psychology-and-the-cartoon
7. This makes sense, many people including myself learned that you have to take ownership of your life and career. Relying on a company or job is plain suicide.
"I believe more people are going to work for themselves and/or going into small businesses that are not part of the employer survey.
Maybe what we are witnessing is not the Great Resignation but the Great Formation."
https://avc.com/2021/12/the-great-formation
8. Getting close to the world of the sovereign individual.
"Overall this is really great. Governments need new sources of tax revenue, and we’re starting to see more of these programs where they roll out the red carpet for foreigners.
There may even come a day when governments are forced to think about all the things they are doing wrong— because people can simply take their lives and their businesses elsewhere."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/why-not-shop-around-for-the-best-government-34056
9. This was a fun interview for those in tech & investing biz. Geoff is a smart and funny dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzTqHmSQbB0
10. The new Great Game in Africa over Cobalt. Also attracting grifters from everywhere.
"Mr. Mutombo is among a wave of adventurers and opportunists who have filled a vacuum created by the departure of major American mining companies, and by the reluctance of other traditional Western firms to do business in a country with a reputation for labor abuses and bribery.
The list of fortune hunters includes Erik Prince, the security contractor and ex-Navy SEAL; Jide Zeitlin, the Nigerian-born former chief executive of the parent company of Coach and Kate Spade; and Aliaune Thiam, the Senegalese-American musician known as Akon.
All have been drawn to Congo’s high-risk, high-reward mining sector as the demand for cobalt has skyrocketed because automakers around the world are speeding up plans to convert from gasoline- to electric-powered fleets.
But for now, at least, the adventurers have taken center stage, and sometimes their ambitions converge at the Fleuve. Ambassadors, mercenaries, celebrities, musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs — they all pass through."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/world/congo-cobalt-investor-hotel.html
11. Yikes: if this was any other source outside of The Information I'd be dismissive of this.
"The enmity between the former co-founders has outlasted a Series D round that today values Modern Health at $1.17 billion. In spite of its unicorn status, Modern Health has become a cautionary tale for startup founders.
Its story, much of it told here for the first time, is a minefield littered with charges of fraud, kickbacks, plagiarism, theft and racism on one side and accusations of incompetence, personal vengeance and corporate sabotage on the other. It offers a rare view inside a Silicon Valley startup that continued to raise hundreds of millions of dollars even as its founding partnership imploded."
12. Exciting & educational discussion on the rise of Crypto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4pesTrC2Vg
13. A little bit simplistic but also why I am a long term buy and hold investor in general.
"Let’s not even discuss the herd mentality, the absurdity of everyone trying to jettison the stock at once. Nobody paused to take a deep breath and see if the fundamentals of this company were somehow less solid than the day before they reported earnings. Were there any red flags beyond the slowing growth, this absurd idea that if you are not continually growing at an accelerated rate, you are somehow less valuable?
If you are growing at a reasonable rate, and you are not losing money, and it looks like that will continue into the future, that sounds like a good company to me."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/07/wall-street-panic-about-saas-companies-is-completely-misguided
14. More information on the supply chain mess in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEdKaEVNg3M
15. "The People’s Liberation Army poses a formidable threat to Taiwan. Devoting more of Taiwan’s finite defense resources to distributed, mobile, affordable, and lethal anti-air and anti-ship systems could leverage Taiwan’s advantages and exploit the vulnerabilities of China’s military. This porcupine strategy makes sense independent of whether one favors clarity or ambiguity in America’s defense commitment to Taiwan or considers invasion a near-term threat or a long-term possibility."
https://tnsr.org/2021/12/a-large-number-of-small-things-a-porcupine-strategy-for-taiwan
16. What a wacky yet interesting story. Crypto meets Seasteading.
17. Wow, I ended up on Venture Capital Journal!
Great to catch up & chat Alastair Goldfisher. Excited by what we are building at Diaspora.vc with my Partners Carlos Diaz & Chris Allexandre
https://www.venturecapitaljournal.com/rolling-fund-diaspora-lures-marvin-liao-in-as-partner
18. Hard not to see this.
"Money has become something to play with for fun and profit. There are even now hundreds of play currencies, some of which are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, for people who find government-issued money too constrained.
The decadence is increasingly offensive to anybody living paycheck to paycheck, or even just people brought up to respect the value of a dollar."
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-capital-4bf8a6d6-769c-4b4b-9a56-e2ef0f39f78d.html
19. "Thankfully, a researcher at Wharton took the initiative to run a new study on the relationship between household income and self-reported well-being. Sure enough, he found no evidence that well-being tops out at $75k/year.
Instead, my overall takeaway is this: when it comes to money, a healthy respect for it seems more likely to actually improve our lives than a cynical or dismissive attitude."
https://stewfortier.substack.com/p/more-money-fewer-problems
20. "I have used the Gartner Hype Cycle many times in my career to prevent myself from committing a grave mistake that almost any investor will be familiar with. In my experience, spotting an emerging new narrative to latch onto is easier than getting yourself to sell near the peak of the hype.
It is SO easy to eventually believe in the hype yourself. I have trained myself to realise that each time I believe it's really worthwhile to hold on to a successful investment in anticipation of everything turning out as expected, it's quite likely the right moment to sell.
This is counter-intuitive, but it has worked for me many more times than it hasn't. Virgin Galactic is a case in point. I, too, watched the launch of the space ship. Emotionally, I was all in. Rationally, I knew that shareholders were in for a difficult period post-launch."
21. The OG of authoritarian rulers. Whether you like him or not, Putin is a master chess player.
"What comes next for Putin’s Russia (he’s likely thinking about his legacy) and what comes after he’s gone are the questions I’m thinking about. Clearly, Russia would like to be the regional superpower dominating Europe in commerce, energy, and foreign policy."
https://sofrep.com/news/a-look-russias-vladimir-putins-secret-past-and-whats-next
22. I'm such a huge fan of the region from the lifestyle, people and startup investing. I'm very partial to Tbilisi and Belgrade myself, although I always enjoy Skopje, Yerevan and Kotor.
"It’s about time that you leave the trappings of the more popular European destinations in favor of the tranquil, modern, and culturally rich cities of Eastern Europe. There’s always something to try or see here, and it’s always ready to welcome the ones who are brave enough to come.
Not only that, but the cost of living in Eastern Europe is relatively better than most of its counterparts in the European Union. You can choose from a lot of Eastern European countries that have lower costs of living. Whether you’re earning a few thousand dollars or an eight-figure salary, you can get the best value for your money here. You can work, hire or even invest in these countries, and it’s going to be worth your while."
https://nomadcapitalist.com/expat/lifestyle/living-in-eastern-europe
23. The new drone arms race in the world.
""Drones would be highly effective delivery systems for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons," he said. "Drones could, say, spray the agent right over a crowded area.
Drones are not tomorrow's weapons of mass destruction. They're here today, and the technology required to fashion such a device is only getting cheaper, smarter and more accessible."
https://www.newsweek.com/could-next-9-11-caused-drones-1647249
24. Scale kills quality. That's the iron law.
"The problem isn’t for the investors; they’re going to be just fine. The challenge is for the startups. Some will argue that network effects get better when the network gets bigger; and that might be true — but that is an incredibly hard problem to solve. Not least because the very best founders don’t have time to actually participate in the network; especially in the early days, they’re heads down building their startups, not rolling up their sleeves to help other founders.
As a founder, I’d question whether it’s worthwhile to be a part of a 1,000-strong cohort. Will the Y Combinator badge of honor help you get a meeting with an investor? Will it help you get bumped to the top of a journalist’s email inbox? Or will it simply cease to be valuable as a filter to the outside world, and drastically reduce the value of having been a Y Combinator alum in the first place?"
Hustle versus Calm: A Call for a New Way of Building Startups
As a young business person or founder, influenced by all the media of hustle culture, without any good mentors, all you can do is hustle & grind.
You hustle because you don’t know any better or you don’t know anything. So you brute force it. Try everything, throw spaghetti at the wall, work 24/7. And if you do this long enough, it starts to work. All at the risk of burning out and building something unsustainable.
But there seems to be a better way. This is why I’m really interested in Tyler Tringa’s philosophy of building businesses.
Calm Companies are patient and have long-term ambitions.
Calm Companies stand by their convictions, even in hectic times.
Calm Companies prioritize physical and mental health across the entire team.
Calm Companies don’t sacrifice the sustainability of the business for short-term growth.
Source: https://calmfund.com/writing/introducing-calm-company-fund
The older I get & the more I learn, this innately makes sense to me. And it is easier than ever for founders to tap into. With the new canon of bootstrap founders (namely spread by DHH, Jason Fried and the Basecamp crew), growing success stories of massive self funded entrepreneurial exits (Mailchimp, Spanx) and a growing community represented by the folks at Calm Company, Indie Hackers, MicroConf. Plus we have lots of best practices coming out (thank you MicroAcquire! https://resources.microacquire.com)
We hear about the aphorism of “enjoying the journey, not just the destination.” But the way we build these high growth startups in Silicon Valley, this seems to be ignored. We seem to celebrate the pain and brutality. I’m not saying you don’t need to work hard in startups. This is absolutely crucial.
But we also need to talk about working smart too. This way the founder can embark on a sustainable and hopefully enjoyable journey while building his business. We need to see more of this if we want to get more people into a career of entrepreneurship & to rebuild our economy for everyone.
A Walk Down Memory Lane: Using the Past to Improve your Future
I had the chance to visit my University (The University of British Columbia) after almost 25 years. Wow, has the place really changed. There were still elements I recognized but the place seemed busier and filled with lots of new buildings. And the students, everyone looked so young and excited. Doubly fun being able to do this and hang out with my Dad and my daughter.
It definitely made me very reflective. I thought about the young Marvin, a kid with a huge chip on his shoulder, with lots to prove to his family, friends and himself. A kid who never really felt like he fit in. One who kept quiet or talked about the stuff that everyone else cared about but I never really liked. (For the record, I hate hockey and only watch it for the fights. Also not that interested in football. The only real sports in my book are 3 Gun shooting, Mixed Martial Arts & Boxing) I was so angry and naive, so eager to get away from Canada for adventure in the real world.
In retrospect, not much has changed. I still feel like an outsider, still have a chip on my shoulder and still trying to prove myself. Yet I’m in an industry (Tech) and in a city (San Francisco, most of the time) that is full of outsiders and despite myself, feel I have thrived to a relatively good degree. It’s hard not to feel incredibly grateful for where things are at in my life & career right now. And most, importantly, I’m building and living a life that I could have only dreamed of as a young kid in Vancouver.
As we come to the end of the year, it’s a good time for reflection. Going back to places of your youth and childhood is an important ritual. It’s a reminder of how far you have come. And think of all you have experienced and done since then. This is doubly valuable for someone who is so goal-driven, insecure and never feeling accomplished enough. As my therapist has said, I’m far from easy on others but even harder on myself that I can’t enjoy anything I’ve earned. The shadow can be overwhelming.
This is also why you need these rituals as a good reminder of where you came from and who you really are. It’s almost like a reconciliation process. This process is an important step to help you become more comfortable with yourself. Which in theory should lead to some higher level of personal happiness. It’s working so far. Now, just like 25 years ago, I once again stand eager and ready to jump back into building the future. But this time with the hard lessons and the hindsight of my history. BRING IT ON!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 5th, 2021
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”--Vince Lombardi
Crazy, crazy story.
"For nearly 30 years, Kearns waged an impossible legal battle against one of America’s most powerful companies. In the end, he won millions of dollars — but it cost him his sanity, his marriage, and the remaining years of his life.
Kearns’ story is remembered as one of history’s great David vs. Goliath lawsuits. But it’s also a reminder of the shortcomings of the US patent system for independent inventors."
https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns
2. "I’ve seen annualized retention rates in PLG businesses range considerably from 50% to upwards of 90%. When retention falls on the lower end of that range, it puts tremendous pressure on a company’s ability to keep accelerating new logo acquisition and to squeeze as much as possible out of the customers who stay.
It’s easy to dismiss churn as a Customer Success problem that just requires additional bodies. Here’s the thing: much of the churn happens within a user’s first 3-6 months (below is a real life example), which means SaaS companies need to get their customers to see value extremely quickly. It can be extremely tough to win a customer over if they stumbled out of the gate."
https://kylepoyar.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-churn
3. "From today’s perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the trade of a lifetime, buying more Amazon stock in the middle of the dot-com bust, was controversial and difficult. Miller admitted “we were clearly wrong in buying when we did,” and averaged down.
He eventually shifted from Amazon stock to the convertible bonds (which also allowed him to realize a tax loss). He remained steadfast in his belief in the company’s future. “Most people try to maximize the number of times they’re right,” he said. “The real question is how much you make when you’re right.”
https://neckar.substack.com/p/bill-miller-an-investors-evolution
4. "His story contains a warning against overconfidence and becoming too concentrated in a bold thematic bet, especially if it has significant downside risk.
His journey is a cautionary tale to never let down your guard, to never believe you’ve figured out the game. The moment of our greatest success can lead us straight into the abyss of defeat.
“I’m much more sensitive to risk and being wrong than I was before,” Miller said “It’s an admission that I didn’t think I could be as catastrophically wrong as I was.”
It’s easy to point out that he drew the wrong historical analogy. But it’s hard to withstand the temptation to find meaning in patterns from the past. It’s always different this time, but we don’t know in which way. And we intuitively look to history for guidance (see also comparisons of 1987 to 1929; and see Paul Tudor Jones and the Japanese bubble for a trader’s perspective on working with analogies).
Miller’s journey shows us the need to become resilient. Structural weaknesses silently compound and become exposed in times of stress.
Miller faced redemptions due to the mutual fund’s daily liquidity provision. He also dealt with divorce, a hostile market, margin debt in his personal account, and public humiliation. I can’t imagine the amount of stress that weighed on him. If the ability to make good decisions and take risk is impaired by poor health, a lack of sleep, anxiety, and depression, how does one make the bets necessary to emerge from the depth of crisis?
In the end, Miller’s journey shows us that comebacks are possible. That there is a life after failure and humiliation."
https://neckar.substack.com/p/bill-millers-journey-part-ii-lessons
5. Cogent discussion on the emerging Covid Omicron variant crisis.
"Basically, the age when we could expect to stop the virus with non-pharmaceutical interventions — lockdowns, social distancing, masks, test-and-trace — is long, long over. Not only has popular appetite for this strategy waned to almost nothing, but new variants are so contagious that these strategies just aren’t sufficient to stamp out the virus.
Every country except China is transitioning to a “live with Covid” strategy (and China is hurting itself by trying to maintain its “zero Covid” policy). So while you should still wear a mask, and while some cities may do some limited business closures, we should assume that distancing measures will not be our first line of defense against Omicron.
Vaccines will be our first line of defense."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-omicron-situation
6. Some good growth ideas here for founders.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/turbo-boosts
7. This is a bit dark but forewarned is forearmed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mepBMJNwFqc
8. Always love listening to these shows. Kevin and Tim are always on the cutting edge of tech and biohacking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF7XqmNXGLo
9. I'm not an Anti-vaxxer and Covid denier. Covid is dangerous. BUT I don't like the grossly heavy handed and frankly authoritarian steps being taken by most governments across the globe.
Much of this write up rings true & we are seeing civil rights being infringed on everywhere.
https://dossier.substack.com/p/dont-take-the-new-strain-omicron
10. "Neo Medievalism is a modern adaptation of medievalism where non-state organizations or sovereign authorities compete for authority over a group of people. These organizations can implement rules and establish processes on the group that follows them. Sometimes, these rules come into conflict with one another because they come from overlapping authorities.
Overlapping political hierarchy was common in medieval times when the regional feudal nobility, the church, and national level sovereigns were forced to coexist. Each organization had rules and authority over their constituencies. Sometimes the church was in conflict with the nobility or a sovereign over the control of the people. In some cases, this conflict of authority led to the fragmentation of power.
This concept of overlapping authority and struggle for power is common in the digital age.
Simply put, governments will start competing with each other to win over the loyalties of these new groups of people. They’ll target policies that cater to these new buckets of motivations. And through this fragmentation process, The Sovereign Individual will emerge as the primary beneficiary.
Digital jobs typically earn more than enough to service basic, lower order needs. Ie: if you earn money online, the chances you’ll go hungry are minimal. Because of this, a digital worker’s focus shifts to higher order motivations.
And digital incomes are on the rise everywhere. Especially within traditional communities filled with location-dependent workers surviving paycheck-to-paycheck. When you rely on community dependent income streams, lower order needs aren’t always a guarantee.
A location independent social class that is willing to exploit the location and policy based arbitrage opportunities that present themselves in a dislocated and competitive environment. This is jurisdictional arbitrage."
https://dougantin.com/neo-medievalism-and-the-sovereign-individual-age/
11. This is a great newbie guide to crypto. Worth a read or bookmark at least.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/crypto-nft-twitter-discord-guide.html
12. Lots to absorb here. Some good insights for the future: relocation of the professional classes & how this affects major cities in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX5qi_dqvQc
13. The End of Dogma. Worthwhile talk regardless of how you feel about Peter Thiel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggp-e6qBxSM
14. This move actually kind of makes alot of sense. Focus is always good.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/03/pinduoduo-puts-profit-into-agriculture/
15. I need to watch this.
16. "There are no certainties. All you can do is set yourself up for positive expected value outcomes - make good bets over a long period of time. Make calculated risks, minimize variance, use the best information you have, and understand all the potential outcomes."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-federal-reserves-wager
17. Actually hate them both: ad agencies and management consultants suck.
The question is which one is more useless faster in the long run. (ad agencies in my view).
https://sparrowone.substack.com/p/why-management-consultancies-are
18. This is a pretty awful but important historical figure. Tamerlane, literally the "lord of destruction" responsible for killing 5% of the world’s population in the 14th century.
https://historyofyesterday.com/tamerlane-388241acc894
19. Good thesis for a VC fund. Focus on Canadian diaspora startup founders.
20. Good overview of latest VC news. Also some crazy numbers on the extreme expansion of seed stage market.
https://thatwastheweek.com/2021/12/04/seed-the-best-of-times-the-worst-of-times
21. Great discussion on the pros and cons of Angellist VC Rolling Funds. I've been doing this for the last 3 month at Diaspora.vc & its been pretty good so far!
The Biggest Loser: Wasted Time & Wasted Potential
I’ve been to Canada a few times already this year. As a requirement to return to the USA, you have to go get a covid test. I have used the same service for the last 3 times now and always get the same nurse every time. She seems so unhappy and embittered to be there. I understand it when people hate their jobs. But to be so open about it. I have never understood this.
Maybe it’s also my perspective that everyone should be more like the Japanese. In whatever you do, you do your best. Whatever the work is, no matter how small or low status it is, it is always treated with honor and with a focus on doing it well.
You are a highly skilled individual, in an industry where your role is in high demand. If you hate the place or occupation so much, go do something different. No one is putting a gun to your head. Yet they keep showing up and spending a big part of their life here at work. And it’s probably all due to the time honored “devil they know, then the one they don’t” aspect of people. Without knowing all the circumstances here it just seems like incredible laziness. I don’t mean for this to sound as judgemental as it is: but what a waste.
Growing up in Canada in the early days, it was tough. While we never starved, we didn’t always have resources, so we just got by. We always watched the budget and never threw away food unless it was really bad. As things got better as my parents' careers and economic lives improved, the scarcity disappeared thankfully. But these habits became so ingrained that they still have not really left me. And in some cases have penetrated even further in my attitudes, especially in regards to money, time and energy.
I viscerally hate waste. This was very helpful when it came to my business career in operations. Operations is the fine-tuning and optimization of everything. My personality naturally orients to this. Excess costs & people sitting around doing nothing is offensive to me. Yes, you need to have some excess capacity or else you will run your team and business into the ground. But the best businesses are able to keep a close balance of some redundancy with effectiveness.
I think about this in relation to people all around us. People like that sad & somewhat angry nurse. All that time is spent unhappy. Time you cannot get back. You lose money, you can usually find a way to make it up. You literally can never get your time back. But more important, all that wasted potential. To do something that excites you, that challenges you and inspires you. Especially in your work life which equates to so much of your life. A life that literally is too short to waste.
I wish I had the courage to strike out on my own earlier, so I truly do understand the fear and lack of confidence here. So learn from my mistakes and not your own. I believe that the sooner you can start your path to finding the right thing that sparks you, the better off you and the world will be.
Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk logistics: the Critical Importance of Supply Chains
Watching all the issues happening with the Los Angeles and Long Beach port gridlock, I got a good tip from logistics expert https://twitter.com/man_integrated, aka Huntsman. Wanting to learn more, I watched some videos (check out this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25rt3SvOBMw) and went down the rabbit hole. One of these rabbit holes was the book “Ninety Percent of Everything” by George. Wow, it really gives a great perspective on how critical yet hidden this industry is to our everyday modern lives. 90% of the world’s goods are brought to you via shipping on the sea. Oil from the Middle East, low end manufactured products like Toys from China, clothing from Bangladesh or Vietnam, advanced semiconductor chips from Taiwan, raw iron ore from Australia or Brazil.
Globalization of our economy shows how interconnected we are. Whatever happens in China or Vietnam or Saudi Arabia directly affects things in America. Built as Just-in-Time Systems. When things operate smoothly it’s like a symphony. This is why your local grocery store or retail shop only needs to stock a few days of product on the shelves. When it runs out, there is a new order triggered and it’s filled “Just in time” like a conveyor belt with its long lines running all the way around the world: between farms or manufacturing plants, trucked or trained to ports, shipped or flown to the end market. These are then sent on trucks or via railways to a regional warehouse storage/ distribution depot and then trucked to the local store. It’s a very long, complicated and complex chain.
But like all chains, it’s brittle as it’s only as good as its weakest link. When things break, they break badly with all the knockdown effects along the rest of the chain. War. Covid pandemic. Natural disasters like a hurricane hitting Texas gulf lands. Energy shortages in China.
All these cause Supply chain issues.
We’re seeing too much demand as we slowly come out of the pandemic but accompanied by lowered supply. After oil prices dropped to below costs in 2020, energy prices in 2021 are going way up. Actually the price of almost everything is going up. For example, look at the shortages of automobiles in the world, which is due to there not being enough advanced semiconductor chips.
We have seen in 2020 that many countries started focusing on redundancy & self-sufficiency not efficiency. I expect this trend only to further accelerate. With the growing US-China Trade war, reshoring of key manufacturing back to US or Close to US like Latam and Canada. It’s already happening with the Japanese and South Korean heavy & electronics industry.
At a macro level things we probably can’t do too much about except for understanding them better. This is why I am so excited about the technology aspects to improve the micro effects and shocks. That is why I’m such a fan of the work Dynamo Ventures (https://www.dynamo.vc), Up Partners (https://up.partners) and Bryan Laung Aoaeh at Refashiond (https://angel.co/v/back/refashiond-seed) are doing with their focus on investing in logistics and supply chain startups.
At a personal level, I expect we will continue to have these supply shocks over the next few years. Some of these shocks might even affect our day to day stocks of food. This is why it’s not a bad idea to pick up some of the Prepper or Mormon habits of keeping a few months of non-perishable foods in storage. Or even better, learn how to grow some vegetables and fruits and chickens. All these can help reduce the shocks and your dependence on supply chains.
Globalization is being rolled back and in a growing decentralized world, we should be focussing more on local markets and supply. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a forcing function. Better to be prepared and not need it, than being unprepared if things start to go badly. Sadly as we know, most people only learn after and from trauma.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 28th, 2021
“You may encounter defeats, but you must not be defeated”--Maya Angelou
Observant.
"Today we move more bits than atoms. Robots are building our products and artificial intelligence is taking care of the machinery. We order everything we need online which will soon be delivered to our doorsteps with self-driving trucks. And Starbucks, with the help from Amazon, is opening up cashierless coffee shops in New York City.
By letting software do all the hard, repetitive, and boring work we should be able do enjoy more leisure time, right. But that is not what seems to be happening. Everyone is just getting busier, more stressed out, and unhappy in their work as per research. Now why is that? Isn’t the idea with technological innovation to make everything easier and free up time, money, and attention for the really fun stuff in life?
I think part of the problem is that while digital technologies have revolutionized the world over the past 25 years we human beings are still thinking in atoms and not bits. We are getting more addicted to the mindless distractions of the digital world and less engaged in the real opportunities this new brave world offers.
Instead of slowing down to understand the new paradigm shift we are accelerating and becoming busier and busier. But when we move too fast we get tunnel vision and our ability for a 360-view of the world disappears. We are running faster in a hamster wheel that is broken and that will eventually lead nowhere. But we have to change as we are on the cusp of a large-scale human revolution in lifestyle and being."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/slow-down-you-move-too-fast
2. This was a crazy educational interview. Don't agree with some of his views/points but I do for most of this. Balaji back on the Tim Ferriss Show. Very thought provoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRao8xS_nyM&t=3329s
3. What a great time to be alive.
"With the Internet, you can choose your parents, your friends and your belief system through a series of smart decisions. While it seems extreme to suggest your “parents” can be replaced, you can replace the word with coaches (assumes you have a good relationship with them). This was *impossible* 40 years ago. You’d be stuck learning from the same people… living in the same place… working the same jobs, year after year after year.
It gets better! As economies move online (as you can see that’s our plan!), you can move your business/work online as well. You can have your own proposals, your own budgets and your own sub-culture that filters out the bad actors over time.
In short, the future is high-tech. Decentralized Wi-Fi money economies. This means your future is not dependent (at all) on what a 75-80 year old guy does or says. As long as you have internet access you can find a way out of any situation you are in (if you care to do so)."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/some-politics-and-general-life-rules
4. Lots of good stuff here. The man is one big massive brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AyeAy9ljHY
5. "A lot of early majority users are afraid to adopt crypto because the user experience is a radically different experience from traditional finance. An investment opportunity exists in building a digital wallet with UX designed for later adopters, not early adopters. Users that care less about self custody and more about the investment and international use cases. The point is that not all features that appeal to early adopters will be appealing to the early majority. New opportunities will form by adapting early tech to help onboard new users with altered needs."
https://dougantin.com/bridging-the-chasm-by-minding-the-gap
6. So many great nuggets on the bleeding edge of the internet and business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEzgAKa9RRs&t=914s
7. This is actually a very smart play. Focus on Japanese crafts businesses.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/24/forest-bags-8m-seed-round-to-acquire-japanese-e-commerce-brands/
8. "Which leads me to my third point: making users happy isn't just a sign that you're on the right track. Making users happy will also give you the strength to fight the headwind of conventional opinion. And you're going to need help, because that headwind is strong. You can't be in denial about that.
What it should feel like in an early stage startup is that you're having a little party with your users, and it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, because you're having such a great time. Except of course that that party has to be growing. It can be small, but it should be growing.
When you can find something that everyone else thinks is dumb but that a growing number of actual users love, this doesn’t just give you the strength to carry on, but is a sign that you could be onto something really big. That's my fourth point: the bigger the difference between conventional opinion of your idea and users' opinion of it, the more potential it probably has."
https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/think-different-think-users
9. "If you’re a founder who’s trying to decide whether to pursue venture capital or nontraditional investors, ask yourself these questions: What do you need at your stage of development? Have you punched through all the possible failure modes? What risks remain in the business? Given that perspective, how much money should you raise and at what valuation?
If you’re a founder and you are completely confident you know everything needed to build a durable company, and all you need from investors is money, then taking money from an asset manager may be the right path for you.
But if you understand there are risks that happen in the lifetime of a company — things that can go wrong that money alone won’t solve — then pairing up with a venture investor who knows your business might be the best approach. A pure asset play can buy you a little bit more time, but fundamentally you need to have talent in the management team, and a VC firm can help you there."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/not-all-money-is-created-equal-a-vcs-advice-for-founders
10. Love these business teardowns.
"Why are tickets so pricey? It’s the nature of live entertainment.
The shows are expensive to produce — and unlike movies, they can’t be scaled globally. Instead, they are performed 1-2x per day in theaters ranging in capacity from ~500 to ~1.7k, creating unusual supply and demand issues that affect both megahits and run-of-the-mill shows."
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-broadway-shows
11. "Be competitor aware of their latest positioning, messaging, strategy, etc. but don’t obsess over it. Find the balance where the minimal amount of attention is allocated to stay aware of what’s going on with them but no more. As a simple exercise, whenever you find yourself obsessing over a competitor’s press release, immediately email three of your customers to find a time to check-in and see how things are going. The more you obsess over competitors, remind yourself to transfer that energy to obsessing over customers."
https://davidcummings.org/2021/11/20/customer-obsessed-and-competitor-aware
12. "I have heard a lot of Angel investors say “I never do bridge rounds” or “I’ll just take the markup and save my capital for more shots on goal.” Another view is “Double down on your winners.” Which strategy is superior? In a market where power laws apply and the “winners” deliver the vast majority of the returns at all stages, it is important to have a framework to decide (at every stage) “is this one a winner?”.
In my investment career, I evolved from an “early only” to a “double down on your winners” investor. If you are an “early only” investor today, I encourage you to read on. You may think differently about follow on investing. Or not, this is my model, you need to figure out your own."
https://incisive.vc/2021/07/19/how-i-think-about-follow-on-investments
13. "In the age of the individual creator, creator tech’s responsibility to the creators themselves is as much an ethical position as it is one of self-preservation. (No creator tech without a full thriving ecosystem of smaller creators, to err on the side of the obvious.) The superstar economy is ceding ground to independent creators with dedicated followings scattered across platforms and mediums.
If the creator economy is to thrive, the creators must thrive first. Patrons must come from unexpected places and the bottom up. Audiences must be easier to access. Creator tech can’t take the lion’s share and leave pennies for the creators. In other words, creator tech’s success is inextricable from creator success."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/23/small-creators-are-big-business
14. "You can only bet on unknown unknowns near the frontiers of human tenacity and creativity. Towards the tail distributions on both traits, unexpected tail events start to happen that dominate everything else. The problem with JC Penney isn’t that the department store business is a bad business (you could argue that the online bookstore business for Amazon was also a bad business). The problem is that JC Penney doesn’t have a high density of people who are either deeply tenacious or deeply creative. The unknown unknowns at JC Penney are 1,000 times less likely than at Amazon, so you likely shouldn’t be betting on them.
When you have groups of people who are especially tenacious and especially creative, magic happens. Amazonians had to be far more tenacious than competitors, otherwise they would die. Amazon’s tenacity has perpetuated into Amazon being one perhaps the most innovative company in the world, continuing to invent and enter new markets at a breakneck pace. At its core, the reason to bet on Amazon is their corporate tenacity, and therefore inventiveness.
A bold vision can sometimes be confused with arrogance or hubris, and sure enough, sometimes that’s how it ends up looking. Betting on unknown unknowns still requires a deep ability to execute."
https://alexw.substack.com/p/betting-on-unknown-unknowns
15. For those who want to learn more about this DAO thing.
https://future.a16z.com/dao-canon/
16. I like this pay/stay framework for evaluating developer tools.
"Investing in pre-product companies in this noisy environment is particularly challenging as you have to squint to see the potential value that a tool can create once it’s built. This is also true when evaluating startups planning to build a tool tied to an open source project with traction.² The project may point to an unaddressed pain point but that doesn’t always mean there’s a venture-scale opportunity where hundreds of millions of ARR can be generated.
In order to assess the market potential for developer tool startups, we created a framework that we’d like to share with founders. We call it the “pay/stay framework” and break it down below."
https://medium.com/cowboy-ventures/breaking-through-the-devtool-noise-dac92ec3cdab
17. Rise of the Solo Capitalists.
“The value proposition is clearly resonating and solo capitalists are proving they’re useful to founders and valuable to LPs,” said Altman, founder of Lattice. “I think they can manage a lot more capital than people historically imagined, and deploy it effectively.”
https://www.angellist.com/blog/solo-capitalists-vs-vc-firms
18. Good interview with one of nicest & hardest working guys in Hollywood. Keanu Reeves.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a38241136/keanu-reeves-interview-2021
19. “Whenever obstacles present themselves, I’ve had to find the solution,” says Hart. “Once I find the solution, I find happiness. That cycle repeats. Work to find the solution, find happiness. Let it all go. There’s nothing else you can do.”
https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/kevin-hart-2021-cover-story
20. "While the timeline is still unclear, it’s likely we’re headed toward a future where we could all be using some yet-to-be-determined version of the metaverse to go online. And Facebook is determined to play a major role in building and shaping this new realm, meaning that even if Facebook doesn’t single-handedly own the metaverse (as it has insisted it won’t), it’s still striving to wield control over it. That means Facebook may one day have even more influence over our daily lives.
Today, Facebook still has to operate under the parameters set by Apple and Google, which make and control the world’s dominant smartphone operating systems. But in this new world that will likely rely on VR/AR headsets and digital sensors, Facebook is striving to create its own rules and operating platform.
The metaverse presents a potential future where Facebook won’t have these constraints anymore. If Facebook succeeds at being a pioneering founder of the metaverse, then it would be the company building and selling virtual reality headsets used to access that metaverse, and it could control a major app store distributing metaverse apps. This would all give Facebook a level of control and influence over the future internet that it doesn’t have today on the mobile web."
https://www.vox.com/recode/22799665/facebook-metaverse-meta-zuckerberg-oculus-vr-ar
21. This is literal gold for SaaS Founders and investors. Amazingly useful data points here for reference.
https://www.bvp.com/atlas/scaling-to-100-million
22. Impressive group of people and investors. Long Journey Ventures.
"One of the secrets to my success is that I have a lot of secret weapons and I’m infinitely curious. A few people across my career really stick out, but two in particular I can now call my partners. If you want to spend time with your friends, the best way is to collaborate and if you are worried they might leave you in the dust eventually, well, the next natural step is to join them."
https://medium.com/@cb_36019/my-not-so-secret-anymore-arsenal-f8e539a4e410
23. I agree with this. Tote bag as a flex.
"The tote bag is to the 21st century what the button badge on the lapel was to the 20th. It is a declaration of values for an age when principles come with merch. This is citizenship as consumerism. You either pay for a branded tote bag, or you are given it because you bought something else.
A bookstore tote tells the world not only that you read books, but also that you have excellent taste in retail establishments. A museum bag is a memento of a cultural expedition – but more specifically, the time you spent in the gift shop."
24. Precursor to the future. Cyberwar effects civilians in Iran and Israel. Expect to see the same across the globe sadly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/world/middleeast/iran-israel-cyber-hack.html
Pity the Loud, Rude and Belligerent: External Behavior as the Ultimate Tell
I’m not the most political person but I’ve long been an observer of politics and geopolitics particularly. As a history enthusiast and long time international investor, you have to be aware of what’s happening at the global macro level of economics, demographics, sociographics & military changes. What I found disturbing is the recent growing belligerence of China that has happened under Xi-Jinping. The crackdown on corruption & also the wealthy, the breakup of big tech giants, aggressive “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy that has emerged in most countries by the Chinese diplomatic corp. We also see the increasing PLA military flexing across the straits of Taiwan, the Spratly Islands with Vietnam & Philippines and more antagonism with India on their border. The “peaceful rise” of China is definitely over with many so-called geopolitical experts and media luminaries commenting that this is due to Chinese ever growing power.
Yet looking at the data, we see some really deep problems underneath. The Chinese population is shrinking (at least 20% in next decade), the economy is slowing with major real estate industry collapse & growing percentage of Non-Performing-Loans in all their banks. China has also faced major electricity shortages that have left millions in the literal dark (September 2021) and intractable environmental issues such as bad air and water quality. To understand the real situation, this growing aggression and belligerence stems from weakness, not strength.
These aggressive internal and external projections are ones of attempting control, redirecting internal populace’s attention to outside issues and hiding their own problems. No different than when an animal postures by standing on its hind legs to look bigger and taller than their opponent.
The point of this is not to call out China specifically but as a point relevant to people, companies and countries as a whole as well. When you run into someone who is rude or aggressive, it’s not because they are happy or their life is going well. It’s because they feel insecure or are threatened. A wounded animal strikes out against those around it.
Happy confident people don’t feel the need to react, they tend to let things slide.
I think back to my own life. When things are going well in general, you tend to be pretty tolerant of things. When things are not going well, you tend to operate on a hair trigger. For me personally, I’d get easily tilted. Little small things cause me to lose my temper.
It’s the same for those who feel the need to flex or brag or even worse dunk on other people. These are sad, massively insecure people. We are all insecure to some extent and many of us got to where we are in life by using this as an internal driver. An internal driver that is used to accomplish things and prove others wrong. This is an incredible tool but you also have to learn to reign it in. And knowing, recognizing and celebrating your accomplishments are important to build this confidence.
So going back to the title. When you are faced with a braggart, loudmouth or someone incredibly rude. Be patient, show them pity and tolerance or just ignore them. They are fighting a battle internally that they don’t understand and their behavior is the bad outcome of this. Also be careful in business of taking someone’s bragging too seriously. Quoting Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones, “Any man who must say, 'I am the king,' is no true king.”
Everybody Wants to be a Gangster, Till its Time to Do Gangster SH-T
Seeing this awesome t-shirt made me chuckle. Also made me think. We live in a social media & media saturated world full of posers. So much talk and so little doing. How many so-called entrepreneurs who are seen to be driving around in Lambos, living in a crazy big mansion actually own these. How many business gurus actually built something and were actually successful before they started selling courses?
One of the biggest challenges for founders, LPs, and investors is sorting the signal from the noise. And it is really damn noisy out there. Much of this is made by LPs, Venture Capitalists, angels and founders who have figured out how to tell a good story and dominate the news cycle and social media. So many are amazing writers or great on social media or the PR front. This is also why we see so many of the best VC funds turning into Media companies. A16Z has 70 people who work on the media aspects and frankly think they do an amazing job. Lots of other funds are in the midst of attempting the same thing, albeit doing it very poorly.
I think this is a challenge for founders especially. Which investors will really help you when the chips are down? Which ones are willing to roll up their sleeves and pitch in to do the hard work? Reality in my experience is very few (ie sub 10% for sure).
It goes the other way too. So many founders are following the concept of “Building in Public.” They have become incredible at social media and the hype machine. This clearly helps them when it comes to fundraising, hiring and even potential partnership conversations. But how many of them are able to execute and deliver on their promise? Also pretty rare. And in the most extreme cases “Fake it till you make It” ends up turning into fraud. There is a balance to be struck here. How do you balance promoting & selling with actually delivering? Worst thing you can do is overhype and raise expectations to a level you can’t deliver on (think Matrix 2 or the awful Star Wars movie prequels). It only leads to disappointment and sometimes anger. In the consumer world, this is death for companies.
Unfortunately, we are in the time where flash truly has become trash as we see deal cycles speed up and where due diligence is sparse. This probably is not going to change for a while and it’s the game we have right now. All I can say for both investors and founders: take the time to make sure you are partnering with the right people.
And follow the basics:
Always manage expectations
Do exactly what you say you will do, and when you promise you will do it.
If you do these two things, you will be a true gangster. And more importantly, you will be far ahead of 95% of people out there!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 21st, 2021
“Patience, Persistence, and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success”--Napoleon Hill
Good explanation for why we have the snarl in our ports. Monopolies.
"But what is going unsaid is that these bottlenecks are actually excellent news for two sets of players: the highly consolidated container shipping firms, with names like Maersk, MSC, COSCO, Evergreen, and One. There are eight dominant firms, all foreign-owned, and this year they are on pace to hit $100 billion in profit.
It is also good for terminal operators, which are the firms that lease space from ports and run the warehouses, cranes, and docks. Terminal operators are often owned by ocean carriers, who then can use their vertical integrated power to exclude competitive shipping lines, or they are owned by private equity giants like Brookfield Asset Management or Oaktree Capital’s Ports America.
Both carriers and terminal operators are bottlenecks in the system, and they profit not just by charging normal prices, but also by imposing a variety of surcharges on anyone who needs their service. This is similar to how airlines will offer a price for a ticket, but then also charge baggage fees, ticket change fees, or administrative fees on top of that.
In 2009, for instance, roughly 50% of total freight charged came from surcharges. The ability to extract extra revenue, especially when demand is high, means that we’re not in an all-hands on deck situation, but a situation which is working quite well for some, and terribly for much of the industry and the public."
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-legal-revolution
2. I am fascinated by DeFi movement. This is a good framework for portfolio management here. I'm still newbie but this is pretty interesting and will have to be re-read a few times as I evaluate the space a bit more. (I don't invest in anything I don't understand which is very obvious that I don't get this space as old guy).
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/overview-of-portfolio-construction
3. "With the pandemic, geography suddenly no longer matters quite so much to either entrepreneurs or early-stage investors. Entrepreneurs can now easily access the investors who are the best fit for their venture in terms of specific expertise and value-add — and similarly, investors can now easily access entrepreneurs all around the world."
https://bussgang.medium.com/the-world-is-flatter-than-ever-59a61a663000
4. "Everything that we do during our awaken 16 hours a day are just habits. From when we get up in the morning to how we take our coffee, how we dress, how we get to work, how we do our work, where we go for lunch, who we hangout with et cetera. These habits then define our identity. Example: If I write every day I’m a writer.
The secret to creating positive habits is to make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying (read James Clear’s excellent book Atomic Habits)."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/great-habits-are-the-new-superfoods
5. Absolutely LOVE this. Thank u Polina Marinova Pompliano.
Always bet on yourself: something I deeply regret and wish I had the guts to do much earlier in my life.
"I share these three stories just to remind you that yes, sometimes, you'll put it all on the line and it will spectacularly blow up in your face. And other times, it might result in the greatest success of your life.
Following the rules seems easier than inventing them, but the latter is certainly more rewarding. As Beyoncé once said, “I don’t like to gamble, but if there is one thing I’m willing to bet on, it’s myself.”
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-men-who-carry-out
6. "A final piece of advice: only take money from individuals you get along with. As they say, it’s like a marriage.
You should lean on your investors as much as you can — not to do the work for you, but to provide differing perspectives, lived experience and strong opinions. And if you’re going to be leaning on them, they had better be people you get along with and look forward to speaking to.
While the typical investment banker-turned-VC tended to drill us on numbers (which, frankly, at the pre-seed and seed stage don’t mean all that much) and personal connections (“[insert portfolio company] got around [insert challenge] because they knew [impressive person]”), ex-operators focused more on our personalities, how we approached problems and our track record of execution."
https://sifted.eu/articles/good-bad-seed-investors/
7. "So I’m actually quite worried about how we’re going to navigate to a hybrid environment. It’s going to get a lot more complicated. This situation where everyone has got one screen, in a sense, it’s been a great leveler. Everyone’s got a screen, everyone’s on the same playing field. Going to a world where there are three people in the room, two people on a call. It’s going to be pretty difficult trying to find that right balance. And I think it’s going to take a lot of experimentation as to what are the best communication methods.
What are the sort of clear three or four rules that you’ll have to adopt to make sure that everyone is an equal participant in the conversation? And I don’t know the answer to that yet. We’ve got a bunch of ideas. One is like one screen, one person. You know, even if you’re in the room, you have your own screen.
But I’m anxious about it because I think it’s going to be in some ways more challenging than the move to 100% remote where everyone was in the same situation."
https://time.com/6117090/tim-cadogan-gofundme-ceo-interview/
8. Damn, this is so nutty & exemplifies the short term extremes of supply and demand capitalism in a bad way.
https://thehustle.co/why-thieves-love-to-steal-catalytic-converters/
9. This is frigging brilliant: investing in human potential. (and I know Marina Mogilko :) This could be the future of VC.
"And as the creator economy began to evolve into a real industry in recent years, he saw his chance to put his idea into motion. Earlier this year, his venture firm, Slow Ventures, set aside $20 million to invest in creators themselves.
Now the firm has gone and done it, joining a few individual investors in spending $1.7 million in the future of Marina Mogilko, a 31-year-old YouTube personality with multiple popular channels that touch on topics like life in Silicon Valley and learning new languages. (Slow Ventures is also investing in “serial entrepreneurs” like the Liberman siblings, at least two of which are coincidentally individual investors in Mogilko.)
The decision to invest directly in humans brings about a host of legal, ethical, and moral questions that Lessin will surely need to confront head-on. The idea that someone might sign a 30-year employment contract and that society should explicitly value a human brings up questions of indentured servitude and worse—claims which Lessin sees as entirely ill-founded. (“it's def not indentured servitude,” he recently wrote in response to someone who said the legal issues seemed “daunting.”)
He believes that he is setting society on a path where we are free to invest in our favorite humans through multiple venture rounds, providing young, brilliant people with the money to fund a path to success that doesn’t exist today."
10. A16Z has been on forefront of Crypto so I always pay attention to what they say.
"I think it’s really important with NFTs not to judge the current state of innovation by the end state of innovation. I completely understand what you’re saying. I’ve seen it myself. Yet I also see [parallels], in terms of status symbols, in the physical world, where many Americans are struggling, [while] others can afford luxury vehicles and Rolexes, so I think the digital world is no different.
And like there are luxury physical goods, there are also basic goods that people want to own in the real world that aren’t ostentatious, [and] I think you’ll start to see more of those [more basic goods] developed digitally."
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/14/vc-katie-haun-nfts/
11. Another example of the CCP bullying and the NBA selling out to China (as well as many in US Media, politics and business). Benching Kanter. Shameful to say the least.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4345934
12. Not sure how I feel about this. It's not an untrue story as there are literal crap ton of foreign grifters in Crypto coming to Ukraine. The foreigners profiled here are cringeworthy.
But they don't talk about the impressive growth of local grown tech ecosystem as well as many legit foreign entrepreneurs who have made the place home too. Guess it did not fit the narrative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/business/crypto-ukraine.html
13. Can't wait to watch this. "Longevity Hackers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT2KJTf3wNQ
14. The man knows what he is talking about.
"So, in a world where we are seeing more and more $100mm valued seed rounds, one has to ask the question what are the investors expecting? A $100 billion outcome? Doubtful. Less dilution, maybe. A different power-law distribution? Don’t count on it.
I think they are being delusional, comforted by the likelihood that someone will come along and pay a higher price in the next round. But it seems that person may also be delusional. Because when you model things out, the numbers just don’t add up."
https://avc.com/2021/11/seed-rounds-at-100mm-post-money/
15. "The US dollar will continue to be a fantastic medium of exchange. It is highly liquid, accepted by millions of businesses and individuals globally, and comes with the full faith and credit of the United States. But the dollar may not be the best store of value asset to denominate your portfolio at this time, especially when you consider approximately 40% of all dollars in circulation have been created in the last 18 months.
My point in writing this is not to convince you to go put all of your assets in bitcoin, but rather to get you to switch your frame of reference. The assets you allocate towards have to keep up with, and ideally outperform, bitcoin. This is no easy task. The digital store of value has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 180% for the last decade."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/your-portfolio-gains-arent-what-you
16. "The world is changing and you cannot afford to sit on the sidelines. The most valuable and asymmetric opportunities will present themselves as distortions in society’s time preferences.
Most people intuitively understand where the world is heading, but they don’t know how to align their goals with a shifting time value of money. Your ability to establish clear lifestyle goals and build a financial strategy around these goals will provide you with a competitive advantage in the digital age. With clearly defined goals and a system of time-based financial strategies, you will be well positioned to jump on opportunities.
But most importantly, this lifestyle design investment strategy will empower you to live the life you want to live.
Your peers will stick to conventional wisdom, you must use shifting time preferences as your edge."
https://dougantin.com/a-lifestyle-design-investment-strategy-for-the-digital-age/
17. This is important. Rule of Law has definitely degraded in America so there is work to be done. But thankfully we are not at the point of no return yet.
"Rule of Law is incredible important; throughout history, societies with a strong rule of law flourished.
When laws are fair, predictable, and evenly applied, businesses can plan and prosper. People can confidently invest in the future. Economies grow and everyone wins.
Where the Rule of Law is weak and corrupt, the opposite happens. Businesses can’t plan anything because the rules are constantly changing. No one wants to invest because they feel like everything is going to be taken from them.
This is the sort of thing we’re seeing now in the Land of the Free."
https://www.sovereignman.com/trends/without-rule-of-law-youre-just-a-banana-republic-33965
18. "In 2022, it will become clear to more people what many in the web3 world already know: the best way to rein in big tech companies is through competition, not regulation. Already, there are policymakers in Washington who appreciate that web3 is about much more than cryptocurrency or speculation. In the coming year more leaders, in America and in other democracies, will realise the need for sensible regulation that encourages responsible innovation while also allowing entrepreneurs to build the next generation of the internet."
https://archive.md/F1cjK#selection-781.0-783.1
19. This is a great teardown of Tiger Global who is shaking up the world of VC. Worth a read. I'm so glad I'm not a growth stage investor right now.
"Bobby Fischer once said, "Blitz chess kills your ideas." For Fischer, the rapidity of the game handicapped one's ability to generate sophisticated, novel stratagems.
It's tempting to think of today's venture market and Tiger's role in it, along the same lines. This is a spray-and-pray business now, this line of thinking goes, and Tiger's got the biggest hose.
While it's true that Tiger might not have the most conceptually adventurous of investment theses, there is plenty of thought in its approach. By adjusting its mandate, shifting its resource allocation, and mapping the ecosystem, it has developed a fund capable of executing around the world, around the clock, ceaselessly and sleeplessly.
For now, at least, it is the closest thing venture capital has to a winning machine."
https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/tiger-global
20. I fully subscribe to this view.
"There are people who can see the truth in spite of prevailing wisdom and make their own investment decisions outside of the influence of others. Through the history of financial markets, some of the world's best traders have been the independent ones, the loners, and the ones willing to discount others' opinions."
"The more insane a period of groupthink, the bigger the reward for those who have the guts, the perseverance and the analytical prowess needed for going against the established narrative. Once the current bout of silliness has sucked all oxygen out of the system, there will be a bigger reckoning than ever before. The opportunity to benefit financially from it is what I view as the biggest upshoot of the strange era we currently live in."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/the-value-of-going-against-groupthink
21. Net net: read the Lame-stream media but learn to think for yourself.
"We have several clear examples: 1) inflation is good, 2) fantasy relationships that assume the person is the top 1%, 3) sitcoms suggesting the perfect life is seeing the same people everyday for coffee and 4) making it seem like rich people are evil though cinema.
As you can see, the same theme persists. Anything to make you believe it is “okay” to be mediocre."
"Historical Context: Back 100 years ago, if you didn’t fit into a “tribe” you could be ostracized and die. This is something that is evolutionary and fortunately we’re now entering into the *opposite* era. You can now become more powerful than an entire village by yourself through the use of technology.
Future Context: The new era: If you “fit in” you are now replaceable. Read that short sentence at least 15-20 times if you have to. The future is sovereign individuals who are not replicable. If the current “value addition” is simply being a middle man or copying others, you will go to zero suddenly similar to the life of a Turkey. It works for a while until it doesn’t.
By getting you to fit in, you are much weaker. Once again, if media convinces you to fit in, you end up floating along and living an “average” life just like everyone else. You don’t want to know what that looks like over 80 years because it ain’t pretty."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/mainstream-culture-is-designed-to
22. This is spot on. #Portfolioentrepreneur
Errors of Omission, or Errors of Commission: Some Lessons from Hundreds of Startup Investments
I always learn new things when I listen to Patrick OShaughnessy’s podcast. Carl Kawaja is an incredible investor at Capital Group which does a lot of public stock investing. Made me reflect on my own investing career now with 8 years of data. So I spent some time this last year or so, dissecting my investments and thought process behind them.
I always ask myself when doing a deal: How am I so lucky to get this deal? What did I miss?
Having Anxiety, Ambiguity and Uncertainty is a very good thing to have as an investor. It forces you to do your homework & approach every investment with more rigor in due diligence. It also forces you to re-look at your investments with fresh eyes and question your assumptions where possible.
Managing Ego: is probably the biggest challenge for an investor. Paraphrasing Chris Sacca: “When you do well, you think you are smart and awesome. When you don’t do well, you are unlucky. You need to invert that. When you are doing well, you should be thinking you are lucky. When you don’t do well, you should realize you are an idiot and make sure you hustle to learn quickly and get better at it. FAST.”
Investing in Slopes and Curves: Understand that markets are much bigger than you think. I make the mistake of misreading the market size all too often. I’m either really wrong on just how big the market is or discover over time that there is a more limited market than expected. This second point is usually tied to my next big omission.
This mistake is in not understanding the timing of a startup, which is usually tied into one trend but multiple trends coming together. That acts like a massive wave that drives a startup forward. I was right on the 3D printing market long term and the teams as well, but I was totally off on the timing. The aphorism of “Being too early is the same as being wrong.”
The biggest and hardest part is really understanding and reading the people piece. In the early stage, founders are everything. And you really don’t know how a founder will react in times of crisis or when the chips are down. You can ask lots of questions, ask them to do special personality tests & do all the reference checks you want. You will miss something and get this wrong. Thankfully I do have a very large sample set of founders. I always compare the founders I talk with against my top 10% of founders in my portfolio. If they compare well (obviously assuming I like the business and market), I usually do the investment. Every time I break this rule I usually end up with deep regret in doing the investment.
The key point is that investing is a constant battle to get better by learning about your own psychology and blind spots or else you will fall by the wayside of irrelevance. I never understand investors who are arrogant and think they know everything. (They usually don’t and the arrogance is to hide their massive insecurities). Any new investor who says or thinks investing is easy usually does not last long in this business. As they say, there are two types of investors in Silicon Valley: “Those who are humble and those who will be humbled.”
Freedom is Never Free: Earning an Exit and Building a Global Lifestyle
Freedom is this esoteric term that is used a lot in the United States, yet so many people here don’t really understand what it really is. It’s a state of mind of being free.
It’s defined by Wikipedia as:
Freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change without constraint. Something is "free" if it can change easily and is not constrained in its present state. ... A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in practice, be prevented by other forces.
Whether this is financial freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to worship or not, Sexual freedom, freedom to travel. This has only truly been around in human history for a relatively short period of time (Ie. 200-250 or so years).
Freedom has to be fought for and earned. And it is not cheap.
Yet, I see people in the former Soviet Bloc countries (Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech & Slovak Republics, Romania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia) having far more freedom than we do in the Woke West. And the people in all these former Communist countries have a far deeper appreciation of this freedom than we do. It’s because they understand what it’s like to not have it and gain it.
We in the West (USA, Canada & most of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand) have it but most people here take it for granted. And now we seem to be on a slippery slope to losing it. Just look at the growing illiberalism & government (Fed, State/Provincial & Municipal levels) overreach in Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc. Or at cultural level, we see the extreme leftist Woke PC thugs or nutty Right wing in the US that is crowding out any rational discussion. So many of us end up self censoring ourselves for risk of “offending” someone. (Usually someone weak minded I should add: F—ing brain washed snowflakes).
On one side, the government is getting bigger and more heavy handed. Yet at the same time they are more ineffective and dumb. This is not a good combination. So along with this growing illiberal State, there is also a massive Corporate Autocracy (FAANGs & Medical/Media/Pharma monopolies anyone?) that is leading to a decline in overall quality of life and much higher costs.
The world is a big place and “Exit” is a very logical strategy. We are seeing pockets of effective well run government and overall good places to live. No surprise many of these places are small and somewhat City-State-like. Modern Entrepots like I detailed in a previous post: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/back-to-the-future-modern-entrepots.
Doug Antin has a very articulate and intelligent way to figure out which jurisdictions make sense for you. (https://dougantin.com/lifes-tradeoffs-impact-where-you-live-why). You can find a place with a good quality of life that fits you. It’s not easy but nothing worthwhile is supposed to be easy.
This is a wake up call and a call to action. If you are not thinking of an exit strategy and global approach to living and investing, you are doing yourself a disservice.
Better to be prepared than not. As per a previous write up, (here: https://hardfork.substack.com/p/self-sovereignty-versus-growing-government), create some options for you and your family. You don’t want to be like any Jews still left in Germany in 1936 when the borders closed. Or Chinese Indonesians in May 1998 when Suharto fell and the Bumi populace rioted and viciously attacked them.
As the Roman saying said: “If you want peace, prepare for war”. Or in this case, If you want peace, Prepare for exit and emigration. You never know when this might actually be necessary.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 14th, 2021
“Energy and persistence conquers all things”--Benjamin Franklin
"My real dream was never about acquiring a lot of things or about financial success but about location independence, personal freedom, and creative thinking. I wanted to explore, learn, and grow to become a mindful creator rather than a mindless consumer.
I began to redesign the system, change the parameters, and write the new code for a happy and meaningful life in the 21st century. I digitized, dematerialized and became a digital nomad, which I still am today despite having relocated to a small surf town."
https://fewerbetterthings.substack.com/p/on-lifestyle-systems-design
2. This is super valuable for anyone starting off their career (or evolving their career).
"Fulfilling careers are built around infinite games. Whether it’s the pursuit of wealth or the drive to solve intractable problems, we all need goals to motivate our choices. But the satisfaction of achievement is fleeting. Ultimately, a career well-spent is one that provides meaning throughout the journey.
Unfortunately, no one tells us which games we can choose from. So, instead of making an informed choice about how to allocate our working hours, we stumble into a profession that sounds interesting.
Fortunately, no matter how you’ve spent your career thus far, you can still make better choices about how to spend your remaining hours at work.
Below are nine examples of infinite games that can guide your career choices. Each offers its own measure of success."
https://junglegym.substack.com/p/nine-infinite-games-to-play-with
3. I guess its true. Everyone's a VC these days. I'm Glad Jay-Z is one though.
4. Completely & fully agree. For information workers, work based on time and hours makes no sense.
"Whether it’s the grueling approach of Musk or the leaner approach of Iceland, hours and structure are how we typically measure work, even though the relationship of time to success makes little sense.
“Everybody is aware that time is a poor substitute, but we’ve taken up the assumption that our output is proportional to hours,” John Pencavel, a Stanford economist, told The Hustle.
The pandemic has accelerated conversations about remote work, hybrid scheduling, and 4-day workweeks (an idea that has been trotted out since at least the 1970s and never stuck). But some scholars propose a more radical alternative to time-based work: destroying the clock altogether and just getting stuff done.
That means working when we’re at our best, and around our family and health priorities, instead of from 9 to 5, or 8 to 6, or longer to try to impress our boss."
https://thehustle.co/to-reinvent-work-we-have-to-destroy-the-clock/
5. "By failing to offer realistic alternatives to Russian-centric economic and security mechanisms, the West has left another region to the tender mercies of a predatory power and helped create another zone of instability. The West must step up its diplomatic game before the region slips further beneath the waves of Russia’s illiberal hegemony."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/russia-west-caucasus/620581/
6. These are pretty glaring red flags in men. Worth a read.
https://edlatimore.com/red-flags-in-men/
7. "First named by the writer Nilanjana Roy in a 2016 column in the Financial Times, time millionaires measure their worth not in terms of financial capital, but according to the seconds, minutes and hours they claw back from employment for leisure and recreation. “Wealth can bring comfort and security in its wake,” says Roy.
“But I wish we were taught to place as high a value on our time as we do on our bank accounts – because how you spend your hours and your days is how you spend your life.”
And the pandemic has created a new cohort of time millionaires. The UK and the US are currently in the grip of a workforce crisis."
8. "In simple terms, if you see the cost of food, rent, housing, utilities, gas etc. rising by 20-30% (please don’t tell us it is 5%, our honest number is 30% for total inflation by year-end)… it means you have to beat 20-30%.
The sentence above is significant even if it reads like a run on sentence. If inflation is 20% you must find assets that appreciate 20%+.
You are not gonna get that by buying Macy’s/Restaurant stocks. Instead you have to look to higher volatility. This means tech, biotech, some medical and of course good ole’ computer tokens."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/how-early-are-we-we-is-real-early
9. "But in many ways, standing still can be the worst option because their is a stickiness to the decision. This is because the people that make the right choices in the exponential age will develop accumulated advantage. When good decisions compound at an accelerating rate, they leave the competition behind. This means that if your peers are taking action and winning, you’re now much less likely to catch up to them because they are riding exponential growth trends.
So the moral of the story, develop your instinct and use it to take quick decisive action. Measure results and course correct quickly. Because there are consequences to indecision. And those consequences are increasing at an exponential rate."
https://dougantin.com/combat-future-shock-by-trusting-your-instinct/
10. There is alot of good stuff here.
"I’d argue the best way to think about the history of the internet is in distinct epochs. The modern internet that we experience today started at scale around 2012.
The basic philosophy is to aim for balance and focus on the macro over the micro. By the way, I think it makes sense to apply a similar philosophy to one’s mental life. So for example, my ideal morning schedule (although I usually don’t have time for this) would be 1) one hour of exercise in a meditative / flow state 2) one hour of creative activities/arts (reading a novel, writing), 3) one hour of math/science/programming.
I also try to pay close attention to my media diet. I find it’s much easier to control the inputs vs how you process those inputs. I studiously avoid corporate media and other secondary sources and get almost all my news from primary sources: one-on-one conversations, Twitter and Substack, video interviews, financial reports, technical papers, primary data sources, and so forth."
https://sotonye.substack.com/p/words-with-web-3s-king-an-interview
11. Well said!
"Time is precious. Spend it wisely. Focus is a superpower. Enjoy your family. And just do the shit that makes you happy."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/focusing-on-what-is-most-important
12. A good case for Poland as major technology center. I am bullish myself and will spend more time there in 2022.
13. I'd be down for a sequel.
https://www.insider.com/love-hard-jimmy-o-yang-sequel-idea-netflix-interview-2021-11
14. I don't know how to feel about this. Most companies fall down badly on execution side.
"I wonder if it’s the right metric long term. Unlike the forward ARR valuation method, this technique doesn’t normalize for forward growth which means there’s information lost in the figure.
Regardless, the 100x ARR multiple seems to be a benchmark in the industry today. It has some foundation in the public markets, but assumes quite a bit of forward execution."
https://tomtunguz.com/100x-arr/
15. This guy is a crypto non-believer, which is his axe. But this is a thought provoking read.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/inflation-is-up-but-the-inflation
16. Best thing I've seen all week. The Icelandverse: parody of the recent FaceBook aka Meta announcement.
17. Good thread on how to do effective investor updates.
https://mobile.twitter.com/zealoustiger/status/1458871700938903614
18. I enjoy his musings on independent freelancer life. Great newsletter.
"Self-employment exposed a clear tradeoff between money and time. When I see a car, I see the equivalent time I could spend not working. When I hear about a home someone has bought I think about the life experiences it could buy me instead.
There are a lot of Teslas in Taiwan. When I see someone driving it on a commute from the office, all I can think about is the two or three years traveling the world that money would fund instead."
https://boundless.substack.com/p/valuing-life-and-work-options-161
19. Rise of the Super Apps.
"Over the next several years, I predict that the biggest social media companies around the world will become super apps, acting as gatekeepers to a wider array of things people do online. While they started as ways to mainly keep in contact with friends and family or be entertained, these social networks — Facebook, Snap, and TikTok, for example — will become increasingly important ways people shop, bank, and entertain themselves.
Some of these firms that started in the US, such as Snapchat, are already starting to resemble super apps, even though they’re still primarily thought of as social networks.
In a crowded landscape of apps, becoming a super app is mainly about becoming more integrated into people’s lives and maintaining a grip on their attention, whether it be an endless feed of short videos or an easy way to find clothes to buy."
https://www.theverge.com/22738395/social-media-super-app-facebook-wechat-shopping
20. Very observant. Media First Investors.
"First, as Sean O'Neill wrote, the “ability to propagate a viewpoint at scale is a new function in financial markets, and it is a big deal.” Firms like a16z are building media platforms. Individual VCs are present on Twitter, podcasts, and YouTube. Their ability to shape and amplify the narrative around portfolio companies can affect hiring, availability and cost of capital, and even the exit. Some creators with large audiences in technology and finance will be able to leverage their position to join the industry (as Packy just did).
Secondly, in the world of venture capital having an audience and network of collaborators can be core to the investment process."
https://neckar.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-media-first-investors-6b0
21. One of the most interesting and unique individuals in Silicon Valley.
"She doesn’t name drop.
She doesn’t brag about her returns.
She doesn’t even bring up her portfolio companies without prompting.
She could be forgiven if she did. Her storied track record includes angel investments in SpaceX, Uber, Thumbtack, Postmates, Opendoor, Affirm, Carta, and Niantic.
Along with her husband and long-time business partner, Scott Banister, she boasts more than 170 portfolio companies. The pair was recognized by TechCrunch as the 2016 Angels of the Year and they topped the Crunchbase Angel Leaderboard for 2010-2020.
In 2016, she joined Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund as its first female investing partner. Today, she leads Long Journey ventures alongside Lee Jacobs.
She is one of the valley’s pre-eminent angels. But she’s more comfortable talking about her hero Bill Murray (“when you seek to become enlightened, enlightened people just appear to you”) or about her fascination with Japanese sex clubs than she is about her success.
Banister lives life on her own terms. "
No Pain, No Gain: The Hard Truth of Life
Nothing worth doing is easy. This is the case in marriage, business, startups, investing, becoming good at anything.
Yet everyone is looking for the easy hack. This is why we are seeing the prevalence of “everyone gets a trophy” or the “participation award” BS. No real apparent outside enemies or threats so we turn against each other internally, hence the insane PC (Politically Correct) cultural wars going on right now.
Too much comfort and ease. Everyone wants an easy life without earning it. Hence, the proliferation of the term Growth Hack or Biohack or Lifehack.
We are watching a slow death in the western World & North Asia (Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea). We know it’s not getting any better but we don’t do anything about it. Apathy reigns. Reality is people prefer the devil they know than the one they don’t.
Yet this cannot last forever. We all know that unearned rewards are easily lost. How many lottery ticket winners end up losing all their money? How many hedge fund or day traders get beginner’s luck in their first few trades but then hit a very long losing streak? They never return to the game.
Look at the case with most of the ex-Soviet Bloc countries which saw their system end quite suddenly. Followed by almost a decade (or more) of chaos. Same in Lebanon, Argentina & Venezuela. Many of the people there are still suffering from the catastrophic collapses there.
That is why I am skeptical of the growing ESG (Environmental Social Governance) movement. I love the end goals of this. But I also understand human behavior and psychology. Add the crazy media hype around it which makes me extremely wary. People want a climate friendly social good world but are not willing to give up their creature comforts or make major changes for it. If the weird weather, regular forest fires and flooding were not enough to wake us all up. Yet nothing much has truly changed policy or consumer habit wise.
No one wants to sacrifice their lifestyle. Or at least they won’t until some really bad things happen that force them to do so. Reality is there will be a lot of pain before this change happens. Pain is a signal from your environment that something big has changed and you need to adapt. Otherwise you just keep ignoring it. It seems most of the world is still numb from all the weirdness in 2020.
So what’s the point of all this? Besides, wake the F—k up! From a personal perspective it’s important to be aware of what’s happening around you. The world has a way of testing us to see if we have the grit and determination to push through.
Watch the signals that are around you. Manage your cost structure tightly. Embrace the small discomforts to help you prepare for the big ones that are coming for us. This is why I think we are seeing the trend of cold showers, fasting & extreme sports rise among the self improvement set.
The West is in for some pain this next decade. Let’s hope we can turn this around before it’s too late.
The Perpetual Outsider: The Big Benefits of Not Belonging
Growing up, I never felt like I fit in. Born in the USA, moved to Canada when I was 1 year old. Vancouver at that time was a backwater and we were clearly the minority. Bear in mind this was before the wave of wealthy Asian immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan & China that came after 1986. I got used to being called Mr Kung Fu man. I also did not belong to the clique of well off Asian kids.
I was popular in high school though but I think this came from suppressing my true personality, interests, opinions and views. The best way to be liked is to just agree with everyone. I think this is the main reason I found and still find Canada so stifling for me. Probably Also why I left as soon as I graduated university. (UBC: The University of British Columbia aka University of a Billion Chinese :)
I traveled through Europe and then lived in Taiwan for a few years after where despite being of Taiwanese heritage, I was seen as a banana: yellow on outside, white on the inside. Then my move to San Francisco in 1999. Definitely an outsider without the Stanford or Berkeley or Ivy League background & relevant business background.
Frankly even now, I still don’t feel like I belong.
I recall a conversation with my friend Itai in Hong Kong where he said “you’ll never belong in Silicon Valley because you are way too international” which he meant as a compliment.
But in my older age, I’ve come to embrace it. There is a power to not “belonging”.
There is a term called “Third Culture Individual”: According to Wikipedia, people who were raised in a culture other than their parents' or the culture of their country of nationality, and also live in a different environment during a significant part of their child development years.
There is this great scene in “Billions” where Axe is trying to hire the young transgender genius Taylor Mason. He says to her “Sometimes you catch yourself watching all people like they are some other species. So you retreat behind your aquarium walls watching. But you don’t realize. That glass is not a barrier. It’s a lens. It’s an Asset. It’s what makes you good. You see things differently: That’s an edge.”
This really stuck with me. Social cues are overwhelming but most of the time the crowd is wrong or usually late. I now actively resist the pull of hype and crowds. As a VC I saw how many investors, myself included, invested in some bad deals (or crowded trades as they call it on Wall Street) due to the need to follow a trend and not get left out.
If I look back, this resistance has served me well in my career and in my investments. Some of my best career moves were completely unconventional or questioned. Ie. Joining a startup in 1999, running Sales Operations for International in 2003, joining the Emerging Markets group in 2007. Also Investing in startups overseas, especially in Europe and Africa before it was cool to do so, as it seems to be now. Most of my best performing investments were derided or misunderstood. When I suppressed this resistance or gut feeling, it came back to haunt me.
So my point is that in our now vanilla monoculture world, embracing your own difference and outsider-ness may be what actually helps you win.