Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 29th, 2023
"If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way." —Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Every time I talk about psychology when it comes to investing, it comes back to incentives. That's not a coincidence. The same is true of most psychology. We often believe what we want to believe because of what we want to come to pass.
Human empathy matters more than human associations. In everything I want to be involved in, my hope is that it leads to less suffering than more. Net positive outcomes. We should want to eliminate suffering, from the slightest tweak in someone's expense management software interface to the alleviation of poverty, starvation, and violence."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-inescapable-debate-of-human-nature
2. "many PLG companies combine bottoms-up & top-down selling motion. Those motions target different buyers. It’s possible to achieve this with the same product.
But, it’s easier to achieve with two different products. Atlassian sells Jira to engineers to help them manage their features & bugs. Confluence, the internal communication tool, targets managers & leaders. To achieve this type of sale requires a long-term view or a willingness to acquire products to bolster a suite."
https://tomtunguz.com/plg-trap/
3. "In any case, the larger message here is that neither the U.S. private sector nor the public as a whole, nor even the government, is properly prepared for the risk of a war with China. That war may never come, and I strongly hope it never comes. But being caught unprepared would be a disaster, not just for the U.S. and its allies and global security and freedom and all that, but for the American people themselves, who would suddenly find themselves without consumer goods, shut out of key global markets, etc.
It’s simply better to prepare, both mentally and with policy. If the wars in Ukraine and Israel have taught us anything, it’s that we live in a much more volatile and dangerous world than we did five or ten years ago."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/were-not-ready-for-the-big-one
4. "The son of an engineer and a government administrator, Cerezo was encouraged to get an economics degree in college. But between his studies, he’d fly to Asia and pay a few bucks to hop on a fishing vessel bound for a remote island.
Islands became his obsession.
He began to develop an extensive knowledge of archipelagos in Indonesia, the Philippines, Polynesia, and Micronesia. After he graduated, he began to wonder if he could make a living out of his hobby.
“I wanted to do this every day of my life,” he said. “I had no idea if there were others out there who wanted to travel to these remote islands, but I decided to see.”
In 2010, Cerezo launched Docastaway (a combination of “do” and “castaway”) and billed his service as an escape from the clutter and digital chaos of the modern world. Travelers would pay Cerezo to dump them alone on an island, where they could spend time in complete and utter isolation.
The timing for this service was fortuitous.
Interest in extreme wilderness tourism had taken off, thanks to TV shows like Man vs. Wild and Survivorman, and a growing number of YouTube channels dedicated to “bushcraft” — wilderness survival skills like foraging, building natural shelters, and starting fires.
People wanted to test themselves — and there was no better test than being marooned on an island without food, water, or shelter."
https://thehustle.co/the-wild-business-of-desert-island-tourism/
5. "My life, until now, has been the era of globalization. Trust existed, fragile as it may have been, for the world to function as one global marketplace. If you had the money (or credit), you could buy whatever commodities your country needed.
But on the back of currency wars, trade wars and now hot wars, that era is over.
I don’t think the transition to whatever comes next will be simple, quick or predictable. But I do think that our supply of commodities will become more vulnerable than it has been in my lifetime.
Understanding the world of commodities gives you a unique lens through which you can view global events - because the distribution of these raw materials is what leads to the distribution of power.
If you understand which commodities are most important - who has them and who needs them, then you understand a lot about the world.
Predicting geopolitics is harder than we think. I usually find truth by following the money - but in the case of global power, the money follows commodities."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/if-the-king-looks-weak-every-pawn
6. "The past few years were fun, people were raising and spending without even thinking how efficiently they would invest that money. The party is over, and regardless if you are in the hype of artificial intelligence, building the next boring SaaS an industry needs, or trying to crack the next social consumer cool thing, your job is to build intentionally with financial independence in sight, whether it’s going to take 1 million or 1 billion.
Higher Goals x Positive Yields on Actions, the rest doesn’t matter if you’re not intentional about that equation."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/new-normal
7. Part 1 of the interview series with Sahil Bloom. It is so good. How to make your life better and happier. Worth listening to as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqIL0VgFqOc
8. Love this important conversation. Learned a lot on how to live better and more productively and happier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdxFctWShtc&t=1s
9. "The sudden emergence of fictive kinship didn’t just increase sympathy and support for Israel; it turned millions of unrelated people outside of the Jewish community (both in Israel and the diaspora) into active partisans engaged in moral warfare with an existential enemy.
Weak nation-states and non-state actors will find ways to manipulate this tribal dynamic to amplify their ability to wage war. Ukraine is an excellent early example of success in this area, and Israel is catching up fast.
Israel is also pioneering ways to blunt fictive kinship formation. They cut off Gaza’s power and telecommunications capacity when they began bombing to prevent the upload of empathy triggers. So far, this has been successful in slowing the global spread of fictive kinship production. However, it’s unlikely to last if the campaign stretches on for long."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/fictive-kinship
10. "As the nation-state becomes weaker, alternatives arise to exploit the opportunity. These corporations, wealthy individuals, criminal groups, NGOs, rogue institutions, and tribal political networks find ways to exacerbate crisis events and loot and coerce the system as it becomes vulnerable.
The capitalist Western nation-state, the victor of a five-hundred-year battle for supremacy between alternative systems, has become a victim of its success. The globalization and networking it used to cement its victory at the end of the 20th Century is hollowing with each successive crisis.
The migrant crisis, like earlier similar events, will eventually fade, but the damage it did to the nation-state and its decision-making capacity will not. It will accumulate (from financial losses/budget overruns to increasing network tribalization to unaddressed criminality/corporate looting), setting the stage for the next event in the permacrisis."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/onward-to-the-hollow-state
11. "To make 10X possible, you must focus on expanding what Dan defines as your four most important freedoms — time, money, relationship, and purpose. As your time becomes 10X more valuable, you increasingly multiply the money you earn both in terms of amount and profitable satisfaction. As money becomes a tool you can increasingly access with greater ease, you will engage with a growing number of other freedom-motivated individuals."
12. "Because the traditional vehicle of the last few decades — the startup company — assumes a stable political environment that is no longer in evidence. For example, our literature on competition assumes founders are facing corporate rivals, not captured regulators.
Our models of investment assume that some companies may die over time from bankruptcy, not that many companies might die at once from a failed banking system. And our theory around international expansion assumes that countries actually want economic growth, not that they’ll fight it with trade barriers, product bans, and regulations.
Even more fundamentally, if you’re in the West, you can no longer assume the power will be on, the roads will be open, the fires will be put out, or the crime will be put down. You can no longer assume your bank account will be there tomorrow, your passport will remain valid tomorrow, or that your speech will remain free tomorrow. You can’t just start a space company, or even a taxi company, without worrying about the politics of it all.
At a fundamental level, the political environment we grew up with is transforming from constant to variable. So the model of ignoring politics to focus on technology is no longer applicable. That model worked in its day, but today innovating in tech requires somehow gaining the ability to innovate in politics, without getting entangled with DC. We can’t assume Western institutions are going to keep basic infrastructure — like banking, law enforcement, or even electricity — working anymore. So what do we do next?"
https://balajis.com/p/network-state-conference
13. "In the pursuit of greater intelligence and understanding, Jevon’s Paradox reminds us that complexity is an ever-present companion to most things in the world. You for sure have opportunities to simplify ornate processes and rules in your own organizations. We get more software and tech tools that are supposed to make things faster, but they can easily add more busywork that makes us less efficient and simply creates more red tape or boxes to check, applied incorrectly.
We create onboarding processes for new team members that are overwhelming during a time they are already emotionally overwhelmed. We make it impossibly difficult for customers to get the service they need or even figure out how to contact you. You can think of more examples here, I’m sure.
To overcome these challenges, we must harness the power of simplicity and think through issues from first principles, as well as be unafraid of tearing something up because it’s become unwieldy or makes no sense. Respecting your users and teams also involves not frustrating them with unnecessary complexity for complexity’s sake."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/jevons-paradox-and-a-world-of-spiraling
14. Another masterpiece by Andressen. A long one but worth a read and good call to action. Be a Techno Optimist.
"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
Our enemy is stagnation."
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-techno-optimist-manifesto
15. This is always good. Jason Lemkin is a sharp dude and glad he is my friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_xu9NK53E0
16. Part 2 of this. So much wisdom. Saastr AMA: so awesome. Net net: You will never fail if you don't quit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMxDzn-1Wdw&t=425s
17. Always enjoy Zeihan's takes on the world. He has been more right than wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klzJyO2cXas
18. "But, these two sparse data points do suggest that the acquisition market is moving in synchrony with the public valuation environment. Benjamin Graham said over the long term, the market is a weighing machine, even if in the short term it’s a voting machine."
https://tomtunguz.com/initial-exits-2023/
19. Learning from the greats: Elad Gil. You have to have a great product and also a commercial mindset. And be capital efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT9Q1KY-D5Y
20. "In other words, we should recognize that these two hot wars (the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war) are not just between the parties directly involved in them—these wars are part of the bigger great power conflicts to shape the new world order—and they will have big effects on the countries who are allies and enemies of the four sides in these two seemingly irreconcilable wars.
These two wars will cost the allies of these countries a lot. For example, the US is now fighting proxy wars in Europe and the Middle East while preparing for war in East Asia. As these wars spread, they will cost more.
Fortunately, the progression toward a world war between the biggest powers (the US and China) has not yet crossed the irreversible line from being containable (which it is now) to becoming a brutal war between the biggest powers and their allies."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/another-step-toward-international-war-ray-dalio
21. "Liscovich is a strange, liminal figure produced by a novel sort of conflict. He is a civilian neck-deep in military work, a Silicon Valley emissary to battlefields beset by electronic warfare, a Thomas Friedman character cast into a Joseph Heller world. Having grown up in Zaporizhzhia, in eastern Ukraine, Liscovich went on to a PhD at Harvard and then a career in the San Francisco Bay Area.
For a while, he was the CEO of Uber Works, an Uber offshoot that helped companies find on-demand staffing. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he moved back to Zaporizhzhia and, through circumstance more than intent, became a personal shopper for the Ukrainian army. He deals only in nonlethal equipment—merchandise that’s available off the shelf to everyone, or at most classified as “dual use,” suitable for both military and civilian applications.
Generals and brigade commanders tell him what they need, and he roves the global tech souk, meeting manufacturers and inspecting their products. Then he cajoles wealthy friends or friendly nations to foot the bill and arranges for the matériel to be fetched to the front. In the year and a half since Russia invaded, he has wrangled everything from socks to sensors to Starlink terminals. The two downed Vectors were among his earliest acquisitions, paid for by a Ukrainian benefactor at more than $200,000 a pop.
Loosely speaking, Liscovich is an adviser to the general staff of the army, although the most he gets out of that is a military email ID. The army doesn’t compensate him for his service. Instead, Liscovich said, he cuts himself a paycheck out of donations from an American billionaire. (He wouldn’t say which one, but he assured me it was a household name.) He is one of at least 100 civilians who act as buying agents for Ukraine, an official in the general staff of the army told me.
His is the kind of role that aristocrats played back in the 1800s, when their unelected influence extended to statecraft. Over the past century, as war became a nationalized state function, that species died out. Liscovich is a throwback: a Victorian with an iPhone.”
https://www.wired.com/story/ukraine-russia-war-military-retail/
22. I think this is many of us this last week and half especially. It's been a rough year & many of us feel like crap.
"Make yourself sweat.
Your body is meant to be in motion. It didn’t evolve to sit all day under artificial light.
Exercise, sweating, and sunlight release endorphins in the brain which will make you feel “good”.
You will feel happier, more energized, and it will also reduce the feelings of stress/anxiety if you were going through them."
https://lifemathmoney.com/what-to-do-when-you-feel-like-shit/
23. More of the implications of India assassinating Sikh on Canadian soil. Multipolar world and great power politics now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwpn7EwNmcs&t=360s
24. "War is unpredictable and devastating, making wealth preservation during such times a secondary concern at best. However, if you’re looking for ways to safeguard your financial future in the face of conflict, remember—asset portability and geographic diversity are key. You want to move a portion of your assets before conflict erupts or be able to move them if it ever does.
For those not directly facing conflict, you should focus your investments on those assets that do well during periods of higher inflation since inflation tends to be higher during wartime. Historically this meant investing in global equities, real estate, and short-term bonds, however, the future may not necessarily be like the past.
While no one can guarantee the safety of your wealth during wartime, the principles above can help guide you in making hard choices during extremely difficult circumstances. Let us just hope that you never have to use them."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-to-invest-during-times-of-war/
25. "Quick Summary: 1) the *highest probability* way to make it into the $10M+ camp is by starting a small business, 2) the *highest probability* suggests that if someone is obsessed with their 401K or personal home that they are in the $1M or lower net worth range. They are emotionally attached to those two items due to the weight in their net worth, 3) the *probability* of bonds being this low in the future in terms of asset allocation is low given the rate change from 0% to over 5%+ and 4) stocks or real estate should be your preferred *next* step after your first business.
Read that again if you have to! Until you have a small business (even $20K a year is a fine start), you should not bother with investing. You should be investing in yourself to learn the skills needed to grow your biz.
The USA remains as the greatest country on earth to get ahead by practically every metric. **IF** you’re willing to self inflict massive amounts of pain and suffering while everyone else lazily goes through life doing the minimum since the quality of life is so high."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/talking-about-true-wealth-and-entrenchment
26. "But the livestream e-commerce bubble has begun to deflate this year, with the saturated industry facing an economic downturn. Sick of dwindling salaries, longer working hours, and increasing competition to win over frugal Chinese consumers, livestream sellers are beginning to question their job prospects in the industry."
https://restofworld.org/2023/chinas-livestream-shopping-bubble-is-popping/
27. "That's what the Society of the Spectacle is kind of about, when everything becomes entirely predicated on the appearance of appearances. And we're seeing the response to that now, just based on how often we have to interact with social media, how often we have to interact with each other online, which the pandemic exacerbated.
Media headlines driven by monetizing and Twitter driven by monetizing false information, everything driven by making people feel insecure on social media, all selling you some image of what it is based on what it isn’t.
When we talk about the Society of the Spectacle and talk about the information that we're consuming, especially in a time of intense geopolitical conflict like we're in now, it's really important to check who we are getting information from."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/how-mrbeast-broke-the-economy
28. Learning from Founders Fund. The most iconoclastic & interesting VC fund on the planet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L4CrAb73G0&t=82s
29. "It is time for a Marshall Plan-scale effort to rehabilitate the Palestinians, ensure their and their neighbors’ safety, and set a clear roadmap toward a Palestinian state. It should also dismantle Iran’s proxy militias — including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — on the Israeli and Saudi borders. Such an effort should be secured and funded by all interested parties, in particular the US, EU, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.
For Israel, the price would likely be a commitment to relinquish control over Gaza and over most of the West Bank. For the Palestinians, it would mean relinquishing the dream of eliminating Israel and settling for a smaller but stable and, ultimately, prosperous country of their own. This effort should encompass Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan and help stabilize these troubled countries.
Is it too ambitious a plan? It certainly isn't modest. But this is the type of effort the world is now required to make. It would take years, and it would cost billions. But it would be a better investment than never-ending wars and instability."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/its-time-for-a-palestinian-marshall-plan/
30. Every fund manager should listen so they can learn how LPs think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gwq16XuyVtg
31. "Have you ever looked at the U.S. and thought, ‘man, this looks a lot like the late stage Roman Empire’?
Powerful but divided. Rich but corrupt. Glamorous but dysfunctional.
A source of marvelous technological achievements but unable to build things as it used to.
Ruled by incompetent politicians, owned by a small elite, its masses trapped by unsustainable debt and distracting themselves with endless mind-numbing entertainment.
A nation struggling to meet the many challenges it faces. A people in deep spiritual crisis. In other words a vast empire about to tumble?
Of course you have. You, me, and everybody else.
To assess an empire’s age, Glubb focused on the changes in the minds and hearts of its citizens. He pointed out a shift in attitude “from service to selfishness” due to the “spiritual disease” of decadence. Empires ended with a mood of “cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.”
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/the-roman-empire-fallacy
32. This is the next geopolitical flashpoint sadly.......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hoyeJvge3A
33. "Most nontraditional LPs a.k.a. family offices have not been inclined to invest in venture funds, on the basis that they could do no wrong directly investing into companies themselves. Now that this has changed, we have a new challenge in the form of the current market environment. However, it is common knowledge that great companies are founded during challenging economic times. What this means is that well-managed venture funds of the 22'/23' vintage (incl. 24') are said to perform well — as valuations continue to fall.
“But remember, anybody can get it. The hard part is keepin’ it” — Dr Dre
The difficulty for family offices is not only PTSD from the performance of their direct investments, but more so the lack of access to high-potential venture funds.
According to data from a recent FO conference I attended, if they were to go it alone they would need at least $250M to properly source, evaluate and make direct venture investments - with due diligence requiring not just expertise but an expansive network and perspective.
All things considered, investing in a venture fund would make more sense, right? However, it is no longer a game of ‘the most established player wins’ which adds a new paradigm as emerging GPs come to the fore. This brings additional complexity through the challenges of fund diligence, relationship building and post-investment relationship management."
Train Ride Into A War Zone: Returning to Kyiv (Warning: A Political Rant)
One of the best memories I’ve had in my half year backpacking trip in Europe in 1996 was the wonderful train rides. The beautiful forest landscapes blurring in motion, the relaxing rhythmic clanking of the rails. Lots of time to think, relax and process your day. The communal feeling you get meeting random interesting people, either locals or fellow travelers. So much fun. It’s been decades since a train ride as my business schedule never allowed for this.
But I’m taking the train from Lviv to Kyiv in October 2023 as there are no flights now and I’m excited. Kyiv is a place I’ve come to love, full of great memories and lots of friends. It was my home for the latter part of 2020 and most of 2021. But now it’s also a war zone experiencing concerted drone and rocket attacks by barbaric Russians in a senseless war now going on for one and half years. This is how long it’s been since I’ve last gone there.
I’ve so many thoughts going through my head. At the Lviv train station, I saw so many young and old Ukrainian soldiers in uniform coming and going. Many of them being welcomed joyfully by family or being seen off to the front and the war. The faces of worry and sadness are hard to forget. I’m so heartbroken seeing this.
But as a Canadian Ukrainian friend told me, she recently had dinner with some childhood friends who recently came back from the front. 3 guy friends who grew up together and who had not seen each other since the war began. She showed me the picture and described the incredible joy they had meeting each other after so long. Knowing their friends were alive after the uncertainty of being at war. How can one not be affected by this?
It’s infuriating when I see blatant evil ignorance & lack of compassion from soulless people like Elon Musk, David Sacks, Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, the hard right and left of America and their efforts to mock the Ukrainians and withdraw support for this country.
It’s infuriating to see US & Western Europe slow drip advanced weapons in, giving UKraine enough not to lose but not enough weapons to win. All the while as the war grinds down the flower of the Ukrainian populace. If they had spent any time in this country they would know the Ukrainians will fight on with or without us.
Why? Because of the consequent genocide that would happen in Russian victory. If you want to know the evil things that would happen should Russia win just ask Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs and Slovaks. Or even Germany. There is a reason statues of the Red Army “unknown soldier” are also called the “Unknown Rapist.” And ask Ukrainians who experienced Holodomor, a man made famine that killed and estimated 3-5M Ukrainians.
I hope this war ends soon. But in the meantime, I’ll be doing everything I can to help UKraine. And we in the western world need to continue supporting this amazing country with everything they need.
Remember Ukrainians are the ones being attacked and invaded (Just like in Israel by the Hamas terrorists for the record). They are the victims. This is about right versus wrong. If we fail Ukraine, then we have failed the free world we supposedly represent. But sadly as we’ve learned especially in this decade, the Kissinger saying seems to be true: “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
Feeling Like Crap: Surviving Personal Down Cycles
There are days and sometimes even full weeks or months where you just feel like crap. Low energy. Sad. Maybe even depressed. This is normal when you lose your job, facing economic issues or even socially isolated like many of us were in the cursed 2020 covid lockdowns.
But what is really strange is when you feel like crap with no real reason for it. I found myself feeling down earlier this year. And there really was no real reason for it. No clear direct cause for it. Business and finances were pretty good. My family situation overall at the time was good too. Directionally, things were good overall. Yes, admittedly we are in a financial downturn and more so here in Silicon Valley. But for the most part, was not directly impacted.
I’ve realized that it’s normal. And probably expected at some point in our lives. All of us have our own cycles, up cycles and down cycles. Our own sometimes unrealistic expectations cause us to naturally feel bad when we don’t meet them. Or sometimes you just feel like crap for no real reason. Life is not one unending party and newer constant levels of happiness as we see on social media. There is no light without dark.
When these moments of sadness or low energy happen, it’s okay to wallow. Or even take a short break to get your energy back. Stress on “short break.” Thankfully, I run my own show so I can control my schedule and use my time in whatever way I feel like.
I take some time off. I go to do my meditation, reviewing my mission statement and Vision board and increase my gratitude practice. I also try to exercise more: weights and cardio. No one ever regrets going to the gym. I know how deeply affected I am by the weather so getting more sun is important, which can be tough in San Francisco. That and getting my sleep in order and taking naps. In these times, I also watch standup comedy or watch some motivational talks from Jocko Willick or David Goggins.
I find this process absolutely key to my mental recovery. As they say, it’s mind over matter. And in the end, it’s fixing your mindset and morale that allows you to stay in the fight. You just have to last and get through it. Good times eventually follow bad times.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 22nd, 2023
“To err is human; to forgive, divine”–Alexander Pope
Hard to argue against any of these points. Only people who can reverse Russia's losses are the idiots in US Govt like Matt Gaetz and other appeasers.
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/so-much-winning-by-putin
2. This was an extremely valuable discussion on careers and having goals.(Systems are better). Recommend listening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP8AlPI4gaY
3. Such a great show. Also worth watching if you want to know what's up in tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHlsBBrV94U
4. These are important discussions as seed VCs try to figure out whether their model and product to founders is useful or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxT-23r5Yag&t=839s
5. "With no need for public-market financing, and more options for finding liquidity, private investors will continue to fund a company until the firm arrives at one of two stations: The company is strong but mature and the returns from its growth phase are fully harvested, or its model is suspect and existing shareholders need to deploy a series of false signals to greater fools so they can fling feces at tourists to the unicorn zoo.
And while private capital investors (aka the very rich) reap the gains, public investors (aka everyone else) have scant access to the markets where real wealth is created. As capital concentrates, so does power. The “shareholder class” has always been elite. But, at one time, it reached down to the merely affluent and then, through pension and retirement funds, to the masses — diffusing influence, and strengthening democracy. Public ownership’s transparency requirements are preventive against collusion, graft, and a steady march toward a dynastic society.
Instead we have bailouts of the rich, tech firms who capture trillions building a thick layer of innovation on top of public investments while decreasing R&D and paying less taxes, and an idolatry of innovators who, despite being absent fathers or just shitty investors, continue to capture our affection and capital."
https://www.profgalloway.com/private/
6. "People are alone, angry, and depressed. Something has to change. The world we're living in is simply unsustainable. The world that millennials were promised no longer exists. It is a lie to pretend otherwise. Millennials were raised to dream big, to believe that we could change the world. Now we are told that we are entitled for desiring more from this life, for asking for the things that we were promised growing up. We’re harangued that we should know our place before seeking to change things.
Yet, all the while, our elders, the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, continue to cling onto power while keeping one foot in the grave. How else should one interpret the aging Senators who prefer to die in office of old age and terminal illness rather than relinquish their grip on power? Raised on the importance of competence and promoting the best-qualified people for the job, we watch as our President struggles to climb stairs and our Senate Majority Leader nearly has a stroke on live tv.
The abandonment of classical American civic virtues didn’t start with millennials, we merely mimicked what we saw in our elders. A few fall days, 9/11, 9/15, and 11/8, totally reshaped millennials’ perception of reality. The intervening years only solidified our cynicism."
https://www.shatterpointsgeopolitics.com/p/a-few-fall-days
7. "This notion of “right-to-left” thinking aligns with other ambitious growth strategies, like the “triple, triple, double, double, double” approach championed by Neeraj Agrawal. The underlying message is clear: set ambitious goals, understand what’s needed to achieve them, and then work backwards to make them a reality.
Adopting this right-to-left methodology where you work backwards from exponential growth is an invaluable approach for entrepreneurs. It emphasizes expansive, long-term vision over incremental, short-term gains. The most significant accomplishments stem from the boldest ambitions."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/10/07/think-about-the-growth-curve-from-right-to-left/
8. Lots of global implications for the barbaric Hamas attacks on Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TGj7iLpoA
9. "Like tigers eyeing their prey. The world is starting to revert into a jungle, where the strong prey upon the weak, and where there is a concomitant requirement that every country build up its own strength; if your neighbor is a tiger, you should probably grow some claws of your own. Old scores that had to wait can now be settled. Disputed bits of territory can now be retaken. Natural resources can now be seized. There are many reasons for countries to fight each other, and now one of the biggest reasons not to fight has been removed.
Anyway, Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War and maintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged its hegemony by about a decade, but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity that existed before World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominant global coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kind of expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations — we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/youre-not-going-to-like-what-comes
10. "Although the people who spanned the Inca empire once boasted a range of varied opinions, ideas, expressions, customs, and even gods, Pachacuti ended that within just a few generations. All he left the people with were the ideas, beliefs, and expressions he mandated were acceptable.
I fear if we allow the laws I’ve outlined here to propagate and be further accepted into society, we’ll be faced with the same thing in only a generation or two. We’ll be living in a world of state-sanctioned ideas. A world that our children, or grandchildren will believe is normal, because that will be the world they were born into, and the world that has shaped their ideas and beliefs. The only world they have ever known.
Do you want that world to come to pass? I don’t."
https://abundantia.substack.com/p/you-will-obey
11. Hamas are pawns of Iran (and the axis of Russia/China) and not just terrorists.
"The theory is, Hamas would do do whatever it takes to instigate Israel into doing warcrimes in an attempt to sour their relationship with the Arab world. This would also be great for Iran geopolitically because it could potentially puts the Saudis in a dilemma. It could diminish the Saudi’s influence in the middle east for being friendly and not calling out Israel, or ruin their relationship progress if they do call them out.
Iran is still in the game to be top dog in the middle east."
https://bowtiedhitman.substack.com/p/wtf-happened-in-israel
12. That was a good trip and glad to see the Ukrainian startup scene thriving.
https://ain.capital/2023/10/10/how-to-pitch-the-startup-properly-marvin-liao/
13. "Coming at a time when foreign policy debate in Washington is consumed with the question of whether the United States should focus on the Indo-Pacific or continue its support for Ukraine, the Hamas attack should perhaps also have been expected. The deepening conflict between the world’s democracies, led by the United States, and the de facto Russian-Chinese-Iranian alliance made what is now happening in the Middle East not only possible, but likely."
https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-wake-up-call-for-america-too
14. This was surprisingly interesting and really educational from the controversial Tai Lopez. Be a prince, king or emperor. Most billionaires are warlords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8tVACv4w1I&t=435s
15. This is worth listening to for startup founders. Angellist has built something very special there culture and organization wise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q6a0Smrots
16. I find this therapeutic somehow these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFbWXP-zAQQ
17. "Carey Smith, the founding “contrarian” at Unorthodox Capital has explained how VC is built on bubbles. I’m not suggesting that any of the recent raises are ill-deserved. I wish each company the greatest of success; I know that the DoD needs these products. I do worry, however, that we’re seeing a shift from the deployment of purely “patriotic capital” to the deployment of “momentum capital.”
https://andrewglenn.substack.com/p/hot-in-herre
18. Every creator entrepreneur should watch this. It’s such a master class on building online.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVnAsulQAl4
19. Mexico will be the place to be it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYSwKaGWZKU
20. What an interesting and impressive dude. Great interview with doctor and businessman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K43YBxUp0I&t=307s
21. "So Hamas it seems was the dog that caught the car. We have reports coming in they wanted to do just another attack on Israel. However, they caught what is now seeming to be the perfect storm with: Israel having less military assets due to supporting the front lines in Ukraine, some reservists not showing up due to political rhetoric, bureaucratic red tape with Israeli Intelligence and perhaps some construction corruption.
This resulted in them in just inciting chaos and destruction rather than any informed or coordinated strike on any high value targets within Israel. Because they had no strategy beyond the wall.
The balance of Power within the Middle East has shifted.
These attacks and retaliations underscore the idea that no one can live in harmony with the enemy on their doorstep. Ukraine is perhaps another example of this… We are now entering an era where hard power is returning, the era of Globalization and Peace is ending, where old wounds will be exposed, and borders redrawn.
We are living through History."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/holy-war
22. "Thanks in part to a massive, well funded influence operation in the West, the Qatari regime has succeeded in branding itself in western circles as an intermediary force that can help to negotiate between jihadists and western governments. Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Qatar is not only protected by its army of lobbyists, which include former U.S. military officials who have sold their soul for jihadi blood money, Doha is geopolitically protected by the Al Udeid Air Base southwest of Doha, which hosts the U.S. Air Force and other foreign air forces.
What often remains unspoken, through the fog of Qatar’s well-funded influence campaign, is the reality that these jihadist forces are protected, celebrated, and advanced by Doha. It’s not difficult to discover Qatar’s longtime funding and arming of several internationally recognized terrorist organizations."
https://www.dossier.today/p/the-qatari-elephant-in-the-room
23. What an interesting perspective on the global economy. From an Irish hedge funder based in London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HdKCC31nOI
24. "what remains of the civilized world can. It can arm, it can stand together, and it can steel itself to inflict violence differently than the barbarians do, but to far greater effect. The civilized nations are enormously wealthy, have large and capable armed forces and behind them vast reserves of talented men and women. They have the capacity, should they care to exercise it, to contain and push back the barbarians—who, let us remember, will never entirely go away, and who will always haunt our nightmares."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/barbarism-israel-gaza-hamas-russia-war/675613/
25. "To placate its proletariat — who just wanted their good-paying manufacturing jobs back — former US President Trump started a trade war with China. Current US President Biden has continued the onslaught by signing into law the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act. These acts give generous government subsidies and outright payments to companies for building domestic semiconductor facilities and clean energy infrastructure. These outlays will be paid for by issuing more debt in the form of bonds, which in turn are purchased by the US’ trading partners.
America is cheating by using the savings of China, Japan, and Germany to rebuild domestic industry so that American firms can make goods for America. Obviously, that diminishes the market for Chinese, Japanese, and German goods. As expected, many export-focused nations have cried “protectionism” (as if American politicians give a fuck when faced with losing at the ballot box).
Predictably, US Treasuries have lost value in energy terms, as the amount of debt in circulation has grown exponentially. If I were a large holder of these pieces of trash, I would be fucking pissed. China, Japan, and Germany obviously see the writing on the wall, which is why they have ceased re-investing their export earnings into these bonds. That is cheating as well.
Errbody’s cheating, and for valid reasons. It is obvious that a new global economic system will eventually be created, whether the elites like it or not. The imbalances cannot continue. But as long as those in charge refuse to acknowledge reality, money will be printed in hopes that “growth” is just around the corner — and we can thus Make America, China, Japan, and Germany Great Again!"
https://medium.com/@cryptohayes/double-happiness-18c6533c22ca
26. Older podcast (2 months old) but still very relevant. End of VC Epoch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybMPkzKVKEk
27. This seems sadly descriptive of the West, especially America.
https://twitter.com/NeckarValue/status/1712563533341462965
28. Tai Lopez is back. It's a really fascinating conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qn07rX79pU
29. "In addition to outmaneuvering the Biden administration, MBS restored ties with Qatar, made moves to end a war he had started in Yemen, and, most unbelievably of all, patched up his relationship with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey. It was Erdoğan who had released secret recordings that exposed MBS’s involvement in the Khashoggi murder in 2018, and photos of the two men shaking hands last year proved that the crown prince was willing to put political considerations above personal grudges.
The secret to MBS’s power is his ability to spend lavishly, without checks and balances. It makes Saudi Arabia and its powerful sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, one of the world’s most sought-after financial institutions. On top of remaking the country’s economy, Saudi Arabia is plowing billions of dollars into sports, entertainment, and gaming, all areas that improve the country’s standing with young people around the globe.
It may be that, by simply appearing open to the deal, MBS has been able to put Jamal Khashoggi’s murder behind him in the eyes of the diplomatic community and recast himself as the Middle East’s most consequential figure."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/saudi-israeli-deal-likely-off-mbs
30. Both experts in Personal Holding Companies. Build or Buy. Do both.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g6ErC0O9g0&t=819s
31. "My point is that a lot of complexity is required just to meet today’s baseline expectations. When you meet them, a user doesn’t scream out in joy—they just use it. Maybe that’s one reason why software development has become slower."
https://every.to/p/why-we-don-t-ship-software-as-fast-as-we-used-to
32. "If you scroll back through previous issues of this newsletter, you’ll find a recurring theme: societal ills resulting from cravings. From meme stocks and Robinhood to TikTok addiction and Twitter enragement, to obesity itself, human weakness subjugated to our brain’s reward circuitry is no less a threat to our well-being than climate change, authoritarianism, or cancer. According to Harvard’s Grant Study on happiness, the factor most commonly present in the least-happy cohort was alcohol. It’s that fundamental.
A drug that rewires these reward circuits could be an epochal step in human evolution. And why not? We’ve compensated for evolution in many other ways, from the protection of clothing to the assistance of eyeglasses to the power of wheeled transport. Perhaps we’ve reached the point where a salt/fat/dopa drive, evolved on the savannah of scarcity, can give way to a motivational superstructure suited for our era of superabundance. GLP-1 innovation may be scaffolding for instincts in need of updating."
https://www.profgalloway.com/seconds/
33. "The Israeli demand for Palestinians in north Gaza to move south in 24H surely is inhumane, infeasible and worrying when combined with suggestions from some in Israel that Palestinians from Gaza should be relocated to Sinai in Egypt.
This smacks of ethnic cleansing which I would have thought the West understood from its experience from the wars for Yugoslav succession. Our governments seem to learn nothing from history.
Surely no civilised country can punish a whole nation for the actions of a minority. The language being used by many and, indeed actions on the battlefield would suggest otherwise now.
It is sad to see the lack of humanity from the extremes on both sides.
Our leaders fail to learn that much from history - sad, and worrying."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/reflections-on-developments-in-the
34. "From an entrepreneur’s standpoint, it’s easy to become engrossed in the thrill of securing funding, expanding the team, and growing the business. Yet, more growth doesn’t always equal a better business. Some markets just aren’t that big. Some markets take longer to develop. Furthermore, personal priorities evolve, and one’s perspective on opportunities can shift over time. And, every round of funding shifts the goal posts further out.
Entrepreneurs shouldn’t keep raising money just because they can, especially after a $100M valuation. Instead, entrepreneurs should continually evaluate what they’re signing up for and what outcomes are required to be successful."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/10/14/100m-valuation-and-no-more-funding/
Becoming a Complete And Better You: The New Modern Renaissance Man
Aubrey Marcus’ “Own your Day, Own Your Life” was one of the most important books I read.
A great book that showed you how to have command of every aspect of your life if you want to have a true life. Your diet, exercise, physical health, family & relationships, mental health, business and financial and romantic life. If you aren’t working on these all the time it will come back to haunt you.
This is exactly what happened to me. I focused too much on my career and let myself and my family life decay. It took a lot of personal work to fix it over the last few years. And a lot of it was because I lost the respect of my wife due to me losing respect for myself due to issues at work. Indignity after indignity at work eventually bleeds into your home life.
There is a funny scene in the excellent movie “Crazy Stupid Love” where a family man finds himself mentored by a playboy Jacob after getting cheated on by his wife. Jacob tells him: “Your wife cheated on you because you lost sight of who you are as a man, a husband and probably a lover.”
Now I’m lucky, I did not have infidelity issues with my wife but we were separated & apart for a while. It wasn’t good for a few years. But it was a wake up call for me to sort myself out.
So many men let themselves go. They say they did everything right, by society’s standards. And they probably have. But they stopped developing and growing personally. They stopped investing in themselves and improving on every level that matters. No surprise, their wives begin to look down on them or disrespect them.
The reality is they only respect you if you are strong and have your Sh-t together. No one respects the weak or stupid. There is no excuse to have a dad bod or be out of shape. Go do more sit ups and push ups! Learn a martial art or do some hard physical training.
Jack D Coulson tweeted: “Don’t be rich and fat. Don’t be fit and poor. Have both.”
Have big massive goals and figure out your personally inspiring life mission. Be interesting and aspire to become greater.
There is no excuse to be financially unstable. Read a book, learn business and Go Do the work.
You have to be both tender and capable of hard physical activity. Justin Waller said that: “you have to be able to slit throats and also hold a baby.”
Honestly, there is no point having great wealth without the corresponding health & vigor. There is no point having a powerful body without financial resources and a powerful intellect. It’s about becoming a full & complete man. Jordan Peterson adds: “Become a Controlled Monster.”
Why? Quoting Peterson again: “It’s Better to be a warrior in a garden than a Gardener in a War.”
And make no mistake, war is coming. It is always coming. Mark my words, life is going to become much tougher for everyone. It might not be imminent but it’s inevitable. So all men have a duty to prepare and toughen up. And while doing so, maybe their lives will get better at the same time.
Life Without Constraints Leads to Crazy: Love the Process
I’ve tracked Tony Hsieh’s career and life and reading about him again in the new book “Wonder Boy” helps me recall his greatness but also his tragic last few years.
It’s a reminder of how easy it is to destroy yourself. Especially when you are massively rich. Living life without any checks and balances. Surrounded by cloying yes men. They have almost infinite resources to satisfy any of their whims or desires.
This is why overnight wealth and success is usually highly destructive. They did not develop the mindset nor the discipline to manage it properly. The best example are big lottery prize winners. They almost always end up poor despite winning a massive cash prize.
I used to wonder why I wasn’t successful earlier in life. Curse why I did not have the courage or brains or luck to get there faster. Now I feel I am fortunate that it’s taken decades. For me and my personality, especially in my younger days, having this wealth and success early would have been a fast lane to tremendous personal and professional mistakes. In my youth and arrogance, I would have made too many bad decisions and probably wasted it.
The great philosopher Naval said: "Making money through an early lucky trade is the worst way to win. The bad habits that it reinforces will lead to a lifetime of losses."
Or worse, indulged my darker instincts. My anger management issues would have certainly become far worse. At minimum, I would have become complacent and stopped learning and evolving. This is a form of death in itself.
The point is always be patient and do the work. Learn to be grateful for what you have and for where you are. At every point in your life. Embrace the struggle and lessons along the way. Don’t stop being so goal driven, as that’s the key to success and excellence. But also make sure that you enjoy the process along the way. It will provide you peace, and dare I say, some grace in your life. It certainly does make life more enjoyable.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 15th, 2023
“Don’t fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious to even fail.” – Bruce Lee
This is enlightening. Syed has built an online empire at a very young age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzHdrQ5pDFo
2. Unbelievable fund and impressive performance. Semil and Haystack Ventures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmSyVVhazg
3. "Wifi money by definition is location-independent income.
You have no boss and no financial reason to stay in the U.S.A. if you don’t want to.
So if you want to relocate to a lower-cost of living location with a more traditional culture then an online business is really the only way to do it.
The problem?
You have to go through years of pain to get to that point.
I’ve talked over and over again about the years of struggle you’ll have to go through to get to the point where you have complete wifi money freedom."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/online-businesses-and-passport-bros
4. "The net effect of these developments has been a major Ukrainian advantage in the artillery war.
Massive losses have forced a change in how Russia uses its artillery guns. Whereas pre-war doctrine placed brigade artillery assets 4km from the front, Russian artillery units now hide 15-20km behind the frontlines, advancing only for brief periods to conduct fire missions.
While this may improved the survivability of those Russian guns, their continued communication problems mean that Russian units on the contact line suffer from poorly timed and coordinated fire support.
It is now Ukrainian artillery that operate close to the frontlines with impunity, and Russian batteries that have largely been forced back to a safer distance."
5. This was a great interview, some valuable frameworks for looking at startup investing. Especially for AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZgerlKINHA
6. Volatile future seems to be an understatement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddWh5rI7Mw8
7. "If one thing is never happening, it’s “dedollarization” in Argentina. No one has ever seen a Yuan bill in their life, and they would never swap their Benjies for Mao.
Everyone with half a brain here understands that a currency with capital controls like the Yuan could never be a store of value versus a currency that can be used without any of those restrictions.
Libertarian economist and presidential candidate Javier Milei is proposing a full dollarization by shutting down the BCRA and adopting the dollar."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/watching-a-country-fail-in-real-time
8. Long overdue to visit Buenos Aires, one of my favorite cities in the world.
"Buenos Aires is a city that people fall in love with at first sight, or people find “too European”. The great thing about the city is that there’s enough Latam vibes to go around and it is still a place with beautiful architecture and great nightlife & restaurant options.
For a country with close to 150% real inflation on the ground, restaurants and bars are packed every single day. Those pesos need to be spent at lightning speed."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/city-guide-buenos-aires-bowtiedmara
9. "If emotion is data, people are as well. People and data are two critical pillars of every single company. If you’re not investing a good chunk of your time on it every single week to become a master in those two domains, you’re screwing up. Whenever you chat with an investor, a partner, or a customer, take it as a chance to test whether you really master what you’re talking about or if you’re still compensating for your lack of depth, clarity, and precision.
You are not an exception.
Master to Conquer!"
https://2lr.substack.com/p/master-and-conquer
10. This is absolutely not good news.
"In late 2021, I wrote a post arguing that Xi Jinping simply isn’t that competent of a leader, noting a number of areas in which his initiatives seemed to be failing. The piece drew fire from a lot of “China hands” who felt I was straying outside of my lane (which was true), while a number of other people scoffed at the idea that the absolute ruler of an ascendant superpower could be anything other than a genius. Two years later, after Zero Covid, diplomatic blunders, and a real estate crash, my thesis is close to conventional wisdom.
In recent weeks, a spate of articles has come out in the Western press blaming Xi for failing to adequately stimulate China’s flagging economy. Xi’s personal objections to welfarism — or to any economic policy he didn’t initially plan for — seem to be a stumbling block.
Xi is also clearly the kind of Boomer conservative whose understanding of economics is heavily tinged with industrial nostalgia and strange notions of masculinity. That’s not a sound basis for making economic policy, and so policy mistakes like fiscal austerity in the middle of a financial crisis are only to be expected."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-if-xi-jinping-isnt-that-competent
11. This is a great summary of good customer acquisition channels for brands. Really really good.
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/uncommon-marketing-strategies-california
12. The end of the industrial model of Venture Capital. Great discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j22TodbqM7s&t=1272s
13. Really depressing but enlightening discussion on geopolitics, the USA and its military. The importance of property rights and the dangers of regulatory capture in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x6KDLovJFg
14. The gold standard of seed investing. One of the best but relatively unknown investors in the world. Roger Ehrenberg IA Ventures. So much insight here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAestOS4-OI
15. My favorite new podcast. More or Less: Morins Meet the Lessins. Very timely conversation on the zeitgeist in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF34BGimRaI
16. Zeihan is a bear on China but still....the Chinese real estate bubble is crazy scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVMlEiewyT4
17. Not the nicest man, but brilliant operator and VC investing at the bleeding edge of technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIjxJM_KPsM&t=525s
18. Insightful view on the French and their African colonies. Explains a lot of what’s going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKL_TvieqBg&t=334s
19. "These are the three major “trends”. If you are in survival mode the games are played at different levels. If you have some assets, you sell those to pay the mortgage. If you go through that you go into balance transfers and credit. So on and so forth. We just provided the three general things people will do which is: 1) sell liquid stuff, 2) extend and pretend/balance transfer and 3) begin walking away from assets that are lower on the “importance” stack.
The markets are emotional and everyone is making the same bet “they will print and save us”. While it is true that the eventual solution is printing the question is *when*. Remember, they can hold rates as high as they like for at least 2 years due to the unlimited debt ceiling.
Anyone who is close to default will be part of the list of casualties. When the Fed steps in, it will be *after* job loss, foreclosures, bankruptcies and general pain for the public."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/making-sense-of-the-markets-and-preparing
20. "In essence, young nerds aren't necessarily more innovative because of their age, but rather due to their higher mobility, which allows them the freedom to move to areas where they can connect with fellow nerds. It's still an age-related factor (given that mobility tends to be associated with youth, as I can personally attest), but it's not tied to the biological aspect of age.
A thought-provoking takeaway emerges: by enhancing the mobility of older nerds, it's possible to offset the demographic decline among younger nerds and its negative impact (per Zeihan) on innovation."
https://www.europeanstraits.com/p/who-and-where-are-todays-innovators
21. "For three and a half months, the world’s eyes have been on the handful of villages and the fields surrounding them south of Orikhiv. Of all the areas where Ukrainian forces have advanced, this one is the most consequential, and the best defended.
Since the counteroffensive was launched in June, the story of the Orikhiv axis has been the story of the 47th, with ups and downs, moments of immense pride and inevitable regret."
22. Lots of good insights. Investor Operator podcast. Learned a bunch here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88g9afUw3dQ&t=15s
23. "However, venture investing is far from “easy”. While it may seem tempting to jump into the start-up world, family offices should not underestimate the complexities and the risk involved. Unlike passive investments, venture capital requires active participation and significant expertise to navigate the unique challenges inherent in this asset class."
https://concentric.vc/news/want-to-try-venture-investing-it-isnt-as-easy-as-you-might-think/
24. Love these conversations on what's happening in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkuAjqXfoOw
25. "While SaaS may be ubiquitous in developed markets, helping businesses manage everything from inventory to HR and cashflows, it is still nascent in emerging economies. There are two key challenges for SaaS adoption in these markets.
The first is the willingness and ability of businesses, especially SMEs, to pay for software. Many have become accustomed to using it for free and push back against subscription fees.
The second is the digital literacy of the end user, which can lead to low engagement and churn unless the right education and onboarding is put in place."
https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/100m-arr-club-part-iii
26. Interesting list. I agree with Georgia and Thailand for sure. Montenegro and Malaysia are cool too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqaPm5cUzdI
27. "But because the Belt and Road was so ill-conceived, this warm fuzzy feeling always had an expiration date. Now that the Belt and Road has basically failed, and the cash faucet has been shut off, delight at China’s seeming largesse is clearly going to be replaced with resentment and distrust. Acting like a mafia loanshark is not generally a way to win friends and influence people.
Note that although this is a debt trap, it isn’t really a case of “debt-trap diplomacy”, as some people accuse. Debt-trap diplomacy is where you get a country to owe you money, and you force it to make geopolitical concessions in exchange for loan forbearance. China doesn’t appear to be doing that; instead it appears to simply be walking away with as much of the money as it can, and thumbing its nose as it walks away, and leaving developing countries bitter and resentful.
That’s just a mind-bogglingly bad long-term strategy for achieving global leadership. China’s leaders tout their country as the leader of the Global South, but they’re raiding developing countries like their own personal piggy bank.
Throughout the whole saga of the Belt and Road, China’s government treated countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Zambia like Chinese provinces — assuming they could and would strongarm their populations into supporting new infrastructure, prioritizing economic throughput over efficiency and profitability, and counting on those other countries to take the hit when the projects went…er…south."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-chinas-debt-traps-actually-work
28. Optimistic view of SaaS. Mr Lemkin is a smart dude and hope he is right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4FoMoUzW8w
29. "I wanted to dig into Anduril’s M&A activity specifically because it stands out as a unique company-building strategy for such a young startup. After conversations with the team and dozens of hours of research, Anduril’s acquisitions have illuminated what makes Anduril tick, and why I think it has a real shot at becoming a sixth Defense Prime alongside Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.
Every successful company has a “thing.” Of all of the many things they do, there’s one that’s the secret sauce, the thing they do better than anyone else. SpaceX can get kilograms to orbit more cheaply than anyone else. Meta connects people. Google dominates search. ByteDance does addictive algorithmic feeds. Amazon is a logistics powerhouse. Microsoft sells software to enterprises.
Anduril’s “thing” isn’t any of its particular products, or even its Lattice OS; its thing is its ability to sell modern defense capabilities into the DoD."
https://www.notboring.co/p/anduril-acquiring-prime
30. "The attitude in Kyiv is that there is no choice but to find companies to help them do it themselves.
“Priority number one is that Ukraine will be self-reliant because even if the war finishes today, Ukraine will be a shield for Europe against future attempts by Russia,” to grab territory or destabilize Europe, said Verkhniatskyi from COSA Intelligence Solutions. “It’s just going to happen. The Russians are just simply going to be Russians forever.”
31. Damn good discussion on AI and VC. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqfzn53dKhc
32. "My broad thesis on the consumer ecosystem (including both B2C and B2B businesses) is that the consumer experience follows a steady arc toward 1) more convenient, 2) more affordable, and 3) more enjoyable, with technology acting as the force bending the arc. More enjoyable often means more personalized—more customized to our distinct wants and needs.
Hyper-personalization is one of the largest decades-long shifts. We see it appear in culture, where our expectations have become personalization; we’ve gotten spoiled. And we see enabling technologies like AI arising to make new degrees of customization possible. Soon, everyone should get their own personalized healthcare plan; their own personalized learning path; their own personalized shopping recommendations.
If the 20th Century was about mass consumption, the 21st Century is about “bespoke consumption.”
https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/the-hyper-personalization-of-everything
33. "And the United States should be prepared to fight for Taiwan. Should the island fall to China, America’s most potent geopolitical rival will have gained the world’s 21st-largest economy, roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s or Poland’s. China would also gain a dense clot of advanced technology, particularly in the area of computer chips. A key piece of the so-called first island chain in the Pacific would be in hostile hands, endangering the sea lanes of our closest Pacific allies, particularly Japan.
American credibility would take a brutal blow, and our allies would have to wonder whether they should accommodate China or resort to the development of their own nuclear arsenals to substitute for the guarantees of an unreliable superpower.
And not least important: Another liberal democratic state would be snuffed out, in a world in which free government, liberty, and rule of law are already under pressure."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/big-lie-about-taiwan/675523/
34. Hmmm......5 for 5 here. ;) No wonder no one likes VCs.
https://sifted.eu/articles/liars-hypocrites-egoists-we-are-vcs
35. "For founders, investors, and others who care about tech, my message is simple: it’s time to pay attention to San Francisco again.
In contrast to the doom-and-gloom of the mainstream media, startup and investor activity is picking up dramatically in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley. While we still haven’t hit the bottom in terms of tech layoffs or startups reaching the end of their runway — and San Francisco itself has an incredibly difficult journey ahead of it — the phoenix is beginning to rise from the ashes.
The city of San Francisco is different from before. SoMa is no longer ground zero for everything in tech. Many startups and VCs have moved to other neighborhoods, like the Mission, Potrero, the Presidio and Hayes Valley (though for the love of god, please stop trying to rename it “Cerebral Valley”).
If you’re a Canadian VC, it’s once again time to get out of Canada. If you’re a Canadian founder, you should probably do the same. Founders and investors alike need to benchmark themselves against the best in the world, and the San Francisco Bay Area is reclaiming its crown."
https://chrisneumann.com/blog/sf-is-back
36. "What stands out when reviewing these three very different regimes is how the US has effectively supported startups and innovation over every period, irrespective of interest rates. The US maximized the potential of multiple productive bubbles since 1995, followed by significant public spending to create a platform for future innovators.
Presently, there are indications of direct government intervention under a new industrial policy, aimed at fostering innovation for long-term objectives such as addressing climate change, reducing trade dependence on China, and transitioning away from fossil fuels. As if the US innovation engine can never be stopped!"
https://www.europeanstraits.com/p/what-high-interest-rates-do-to-startups
Counter Lesson from the “Summer of 69”: Improving Your Life Every Day & Every Year
One of the songs I used to listen to all the time was Bryan Adams “Summer of 69”, classic rock song that signifies the nostalgia we all feel for our high school years. Especially the lack of any responsibilities and fun filled summers with friends. In the song for those who don’t know it, there is the most famous part: “Those were the best days of my life.”
I love that song but hate that part. It’s sad to think that your best days are behind you. You are doing something seriously wrong if that is the case.
In fact, I believe every single year should be the best days of your life. You should be looking forward to even better times.
I’m 49 and I can genuinely say I’ve enjoyed pretty much every year since. Okay, 2020 sucked pretty badly, 2022 was not great either. But overall, year over year I’ve had a great time. I’m fitter and healthier than I was at 29 years of age, eat amazing foods, read interesting books. I continue to have tremendous adventures all over the world, visiting new cities and countries; meeting and making new friends all the time. I’m learning new things all the time while building & stacking assets.
You have to actively work on improving yourself and your life. You should be getting better in every single aspect: Your health, your career, business, finances, your relationships.
You are the literal architect and tradesman of your life. Take it seriously and you will have little to be nostalgic about. That’s a good thing and means you are moving in the right direction in life.
Back to the Future in Venture Capital: Small is Beautiful
The Macro is the cost of capital going up. Baby boomers are retiring and their capital will be going to more conservative asset classes instead of something risky like venture capital. No surprise either as LPs returns haven’t been destroyed because of markdowns in the recent year. A big come down from the insane exuberance of 2020-21.
Instacart went public at $9.9B when their last private valuation was $39B. Or Stripe getting their valuation gutted by 50% from its peak of $94B. If this is happening to the best private tech company in the world, what do you think will happen to the almost 1400 so-called Unicorns in the last few years?
There is another trend happening at the startup level. There is a new major Refactoring of startup costs. whereas you needed $5M USD in 1999 to build a product, due to new SaaS tools, cloud services like AWS and new distribution platforms like the Apple AppStore, new startup costs dropped to around $500k in 2008-2010. Yes, the multitude shrinkage of startup costs led to an explosion of new and awesome startups over the last decade.
I posit that we are entering a new inflection point now. There is a rise of even more cloud services, open source developer tools and plenty of low/no code tools as well as the plethora of amazing new AI-tools. Scenario or Midjourney are good examples on the Gen Ai side. Or think of what Bubble or Softr have done for prototyping products. Startup costs will be a fraction of what it was before.
You probably only need $50-100k in 2023 to get an amazing product out the door. Tech is giving new founders even more leverage.
This has huge ramifications on the VC industry.
I could not articulate this at all until I heard an interview with Sam Lessin of Slow VC. The “Factory line” model of VC is over. Seed VCs packaging for Series A investors. Series A investors packaging startups for Series B. On and on goes the factory line until the company is packaged to go public. Works great during boom times but this factory model has broken down as the inventory has rotted and is being worked through. Ie. big valuation markdowns in the private market as the IPO market has shut down or set much lower clearing prices at exit.
Which means that all the lessons that we learned of venture and startup land in the last 11 years are now obsolete. Worth watching the entire Turpentine VC interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py7IPmDKjb4&t=64s
This discussion on the State of Seed Investing with investing legends Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin and Frank Rotman is also very valuable too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUrKr8g8cqw
It has ramifications on the founder’s side. Terence Rohan, said it best in his masterpiece: “Raise less build More:”
“Today, there is a growing common awareness amongst founders that a VC-only path can put them out of business, from either too little capital or pressure to take too much capital. If their company doesn’t exist, the chance of success is zero.
On the other hand, if they are constrained by just profitability, they might not be able to build what they need to build, or others can outrun them. Bootstrapping alone can also impede.
I’ve had similar conversations with dozens of founders on this topic, and I’m seeing them quietly start to pursue a new path – one that doesn’t perfectly fit within the lines prescribed by Sand Hill Road.
They are seeking to combine the growth of targeted venture funding with the durability found in bootstrapping (i.e. profitability).
Their goal is to build a viable business first, while also harnessing the growth, network, and brand benefits of strategically raising capital from top investors.
It’s a new hybrid path, and one that maximizes their odds of survival and breakout success.”
Source: https://trohan.com/2023/08/20/raise-less-build-more/
Notion, Calendly, Vanta, Zapier, Etc are good examples here. Rounds will be skipped or companies will go to profitability sooner. Bootstrapping will be en vogue and more popular, especially for 2nd time founders.
The big implication for the venture capital industry overall is that it will become even more of a barbell structure.
This has already started happening in Hollywood: Blumhouse which focuses on cheap but well crafted horror movies versus big studios like Warner, Sony, Disney et al. and their big expensive and well marketed blockbusters.
In the Big VC world, we have A16Z, General Catalyst, Sequoia which will have the big massive funds, playing the AUM game side of the barbell.
Then you will have the small funds on the other side of the barbell. Specialists, niche and emerging funds practicing the artisanal model. The smartest funds are disciplined ones. Going back to basics. Bespoke.
Some that come to mind are: K9, Haystack, KP, Susa, Floodgate, Union Square Ventures. I’m also excited that Indie.vc is making a comeback. Indie.vc, if you don’t know, invests in software startups but allows the optionality for bootstrapping and getting fund ROI via revenue sharing or going down the VC “go big or go home” funding path as well.
At the earlier stage of VC there will be a restructuring. Nicolas Colin wrote in September 2023, and worth reading the entire write up but here is sample:
“Not only has the VC industry suffered significant setbacks in recent times, but the surviving VC firms are those that have adhered closely to the original VC playbook. To me, this implies that the trajectory of the VC landscape, rather than undergoing perpetual expansion and diversification (the “diffraction”), will consolidate into three distinct segments:
A limited portion of firms will either maintain or revert to the traditional artisanal approach, assembling a compact team, raising small funds, investing in a small pool of companies at reasonable valuations, and maintaining strict control over cap table and governance in an effort to achieve improbable, outsized returns. These firms will concentrate on enterprises engaged in pioneering technologies, essentially returning to the foundational roots of modern VC.
Another subset of VC firms will specialize in B2B SaaS startups—a domain where uncertainty remains high regarding the success of founding teams, thus making room for a VC-like approach. However, unlike the preceding group, this specialization won't revolve around technological breakthroughs. Instead, it will involve supporting top-tier teams from product and go-to-market perspectives, banking on their adeptness in executing a meticulously designed and well-documented approach. In this realm, innovation takes a backseat to execution.
Lastly, a considerable proportion of investors will need to acknowledge their inability to rightly claim the title of venture capitalists. They will forsake the excitement, no longer envision themselves as the next Don Valentine, and revert to the role of standard, boring private equity investors—allocating funds to companies that adopt comprehensible strategies across a wide array of industries, with the aim of achieving profitability through conventional avenues. While this isn't a bad thing by any means, it certainly deviates from the realm of true VC.” (Source: https://www.europeanstraits.com/p/startups-the-door-is-closing)
I am also very excited by the new breed of new emerging fund managers. Especially as they have no legacy portfolio companies to take care of and have a blank slate and relatively small fund to invest. Much easier to deliver returns on a small fund as veteran VCs know.
Everyone stuck in the middle of these two models are toast or walking dead at least in this new world.
I fall on the side of small funds. I firmly believe in small VC funds, SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles), investment syndicates and especially the rolling fund model like the one I run with my friend Carlos at Diaspora Ventures (diaspora.vc). In a nuclear apocalypse or nature’s equivalent, it’s the scrappy and small body mass that wins. It’s the big dinosaurs that die off. Small funds will be the cockroaches that thrive during times like this.
I’m going to let the brilliant Sam Lessin have the second last word here:
“Even in the scenarios where the companies that run the gauntlet ‘up and to the right’, the dilution is so intense along the way it kills seed investors' returns.
Which creates an ironic situation ideal for a tweet … which is the absolute best seed investments are the ones that never need to raise an A — especially with the scaling leverage of Cloud, and now AI — you can do mighty things with a few folks and a million dollars (and a focus on building a great business that is profitable all the way through) — and when you do that, all capital after the seed becomes an ‘option’ rather than a requirement.
In those scenarios? well that is the best for your seed investors — because there is no dilution… they own what they own… they provided the high risk capital when it was needed, and that capital was maximally leveraged.
Multi-stage funds can’t do this model, because they are forced / their job is to deploy capital at scale as ‘asset managers’ rather than investors— they want founders to need lots of money (which they can then supply at scale) — but real investors / seed funds CAN and SHOULD BE VERY EXCITED to execute this plan.”
What an exciting time to be in Silicon Valley as we see a new Renaissance of startups and venture capital.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 8th, 2023
"Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway." ― John Wayne.
"If you are a business that yields customer advantages because of localized economies of scale, make sure you dominate every market you are in, don’t dilute yourself across too many. Getting density is ALL THAT MATTERS.
If you are a business that yields resource advantages because of platform dynamics, make sure you make your platform the most accommodating to 3rd party developers. Being the “go to” platform is ALL THAT MATTERS
If you are a business that yields customer advantages because you are the system of record, make sure you lock customer data in wherever possible. Owning as much customer data as possible is ALL THAT MATTERS"
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/companies-build-capabilities-before-they-build-moats-d331bb167a2b
2. Love this.
"By adamantly (if politely) rejecting the advances of venture capitalists, Holz has bucked the tide among artificial intelligence startups, the top tier of which has raised more than $17 billion in fresh capital in recent years, according to The Information’s Generative AI database. Holz has also succeeded in making Midjourney a source of intense intrigue in VC land, where the company’s profitability and astronomical growth have enticed investors.
The company, which charges users between $10 and $120 for a monthly subscription to its image generator, is on pace to surpass $200 million in revenue this year, according to people close to the company. Details about Midjourney’s financials have not been previously reported.
Although a large chunk of the revenue goes right back into purchasing the pricey AI chips required to train and run Midjourney’s machine-learning models, the company has been profitable since early on, according to several people close to the company. Holz’s ability to rake in hundreds of millions in revenue in under two years and with only about 40 employees puts him in a rare class of entrepreneur. “To put it charitably, he doesn’t need VC in his life,” said Michael Stewart, a partner at Microsoft’s venture fund, M12.
In weekly office hours with customers, Holz, known for his distinctive curly red hair and philosophical manner, has admitted to feeling “bitter” about the VC-backed path he took with Leap Motion and to finding the current cash-hungry batch of AI founders uninspiring.
His goal is to remain a bootstrapped company that stands the test of time—“kind of like Craigslist,” Holz told The Information in a rare interview. He wants Midjourney to be "this weird thing that no one knows how to compete with that just sort of stands alone.”
3. This is a masterclass in Venture capital from 3 masters. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xouls5eX0&t=3049s
4. "Only $1 in every $5 spent shopping lives online. And from customer acquisition through to fulfillment, the commerce landscape remains full of friction and in need of digitization. It’s still the Wild West in commerce. In the long run, this week’s blockbuster IPOs in Klaviyo and Instacart will still look like early winners; there’s still massive value up for the taking."
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/the-wild-west-of-e-commerce
5. "President Powell is confused by the strong consumer and isn’t looking at how the purchase is made. With debt. Humans are not rationale they are emotional.
Steve from accounting who make $100,000 a year can’t go to his wife and cut spending. He is more likely to keep borrowing. The human ego is far too strong.
“They will bail me out like the pandemic” -unfortunately, they will be wrong.
As they default, unemployment rates go higher than they should have. Banks are forced to freeze lending. (unless you’re a reader of this website and are planning for 25% down when the music stops!)
Investing Conclusion: The rule of thumb is to sell all equities on the “last raise”. This is complicated since the Fed might hold flat for a couple of meetings in a row so the last stable reading is “the last raise”. As usual, the goal isn’t to try and hit grand slams or home runs all you have to do it watch the inversions and have your finger on the de-risk/sell button if it gets close to parity (say the inversion gets to -0.5%). Alternatively, you can hit a single (what we’re doing) and effectively exit the stock market with a minimal amount invested.
The second and most important part? The bond market is saying money printer go on (with a catch).
The only way you would get 4.5% on the 10-year bond is if inflation remains relatively high. Since we know the unemployment rate can’t drop to 2% (it’s already in the 3% range), the market is saying the Fed will print money.
They will keep rates high and print money for the unemployed via: 1) helicopter money, 2) UBI, 3) higher benefits or 4) some other direct cash/food payments."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/president-powell-oil-impact-to-cpi
6. "After reading endless articles about Germany’s malaise, my considered opinion is that it boils down to three big mistakes: trusting its economic health to Russia and China, a naive degrowth-focused environmentalism, and a reluctance to embrace change and progress. On all three counts, the country seems not to recognize the magnitude of the challenge. Instead they seem to be just muddling along, dreamily expecting the economy of the mid-2010s to somehow magically return.
Germany needs to stop messing around and get serious about fixing its economic model. The fate of Europe rests on its shoulders.
What Germany needs now is to become a serious country again. It needs to restart every nuclear plant that can still be restarted, even as it accelerates the building of renewables. It needs to cut off any remaining tech transfers to China.
It needs to increase spending on the military and rebuild its defense-industrial base. It needs to focus on giving software companies a safe and profitable haven to grow and develop, and encourage more rapid digitization. It needs to quash NIMBYism and allow more building."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/germany-needs-to-stop-messing-around
7. "Dalio highlights five major forces that will shape our future. “They are 1) the unsustainable level of government debt growth, 2) the great internal conflicts over wealth and values differences that are causing high levels of populism of the right and the left that threatens to cause bad international conflict that will be a type of civil war, 3) the international great power conflicts most importantly between the United States and China that is in the brink of some type of international war, 4) disruptive acts of nature in the form of droughts, floods and/or pandemics, and 5) technology changes, most importantly AI related and its consequences.”
To me, one of the macro trends that powers resiliency, local wealth creation and counters populism is the rise in entrepreneurship. This manifests itself in various forms, be it the creator economy, the gig economy or the general aspiration to become entrepreneurs present in younger generations. As another Forbes article wrote, 48% of Gen-Zers have numerous side hustles and 62% indicate they have started, or intend to start, their own business.
This is also an opportunity for fintechs in powering small businesses and new business creation. For example, my former portfolio company ZenBusiness serves as a single pane of glass for services businesses, in the same way Shopify has powered ecommerce. A range of horizontal platforms are emerging to power this shift."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/3-lessons-ray-dalio-founder-of-the
8. "AI vastly empowers a regular person because we can all now create businesses, websites, content, characters, apps, art, storylines, research and more without needing to pay a Silicon Valley coder hundreds of thousands of dollars anymore. Yes, some people will lose their jobs to AI, but AI also empowers them to create and pursue new forms of work.
But, even as AI enriches new forms of income for many, AI is also profoundly reorganizing the way we interface with reality itself. It may be causing crashes - plane crashes, train crashes, perceptual crashes, and, eventually, market crashes.
Extending our cognition and offloading the cognitive load of decision-making thanks to AI expands our capacity to get things done. But it is also distancing us from reality and the skill of wrangling with reality. I’d rather wrangle with a real horse than with the sensuous skin of a digital horse.
But now I see that I’ll need to do both simultaneously. If a digital building is a nervous being, so are all digital creatures. It’s the gap between the real and the unreal that intrigues me. It’s the spaces between the zeros and the ones that the future now resides in."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/ai-what-has-not-been-said
9. Lots of good ideas from Codie Sanchez. Micro PE + Personal Media Company is the way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdgKDdJ3MI&t=920s
10. "It is impossible to responsibly, or even imaginatively, report that dollarization would save Argentina. First of all, there is an unimaginably-large backstop of dollars the country would need to hold and resist spending, which feels like a country-level Stanford marshmallow experiment any administration in recent memory would have failed.
Second, the unit of account is not the problem, as no matter how the spending is tallied, it outruns and dwarfs the fundamentals of the Argentine economy. Third, the loss of control over core central bank functions may seem like a needed straitjacket for policymakers, but long-term it means domestic monetary policymaking capacity may erode even further.
The lack of clarity about government monetary policy moving forward, the lack of constraints imposed by the IMF, the temptation of taking recourse loans from the Chinese, and the institutional inability to implement binding capital controls combine in Argentina for an exciting election cycle, a strange on-the-ground experience, and an uncertain future."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/argentinas-macroeconomic-situation
11. "Over and over again, Musk defies the odds and builds something incredible. It is not hyperbole to say that he single-handedly ignited a second space age and accelerated the electric car revolution by at least a decade. This history of success means there is at least a chance he can do the same with brain implants, social media, tunneling, and AI. The guy is relentless—sleeping on factory floors, working 100-hour weeks. He simply doesn’t quit.
If he succeeds in just 75% of his ambition, he could be one of the most important people in human history. However, that success results in huge costs to him personally, to his employees, and to society at large.
He compels us to dream big yet retain moral autonomy. We need not fully embrace or reject him. Perhaps the best takeaway from studying his life isn’t in the acceptance or condemnation of it. Maybe it should be an inspiration to be better and build something better."
https://every.to/napkin-math/oh-no-i-kinda-want-to-work-for-elon
12. "Now that rates are higher, and the Fed is signaling a commitment to long-term higher rates, this generation of consumers and investors will have to recalibrate. The irony of the situation is that boomers were slow to acclimate to low interest rates because it was foreign to their lived experience, but now millennials are likely going to be the ones who are slow to acclimate to high interest rates.
There is no specific cure to the problem. The pain will continue until young people realize the world has changed and they now live in a new regime. Their investment decisions now have to account for 5% interest rates. Their car and mortgage payments are going to be higher than they anticipated.
But that is the price for living today. It may not seem fair, but the worst mistake would be sitting around complaining rather than living life. Time is the most finite resource we get. Letting the central bank steal it from you because they made capital expensive sounds like a bad plan."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/high-interest-rates-usher-in-new
13. "Inside the abandoned building in central Taiwan, there are are only paper targets, and the weapons used are low-powered airguns that fire small pellets.
This is the resistance, the civil defenders should Taiwan's army be overwhelmed in the face of attack by China, which wants to reunite the mainland with the self-governing island.
"We won't surrender," says one of the masked men. "Anyone who invades will face us, and we'll use whatever we can to resist."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/taiwan-china-civil-defenders-1.6971920
14. I like eating alone. I travel a lot by myself for business and used to it now. Actually can be enjoyable.
https://www.bosshunting.com.au/lifestyle/eat/dining-alone/
15. This is a quick explainer on what is happening with Armenia and Azerbaijan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPx9kdanWNk
16. "Gatorade, BodyArmor, and Powerade dominate the market, and the only real challenger has been Prime, which owns about 6% of the market and was built on the back of two of the world’s largest YouTube personalities (Logan Paul and KSI).
So, if you are going to challenge those brands, you need some advantage. BodyArmor had it with Kobe Bryant and Mike Repole, and Prime has it with Logan Paul and KSI. But simply paying athletes cash to promote your brand on social media isn’t enough.
You need a good-tasting product. It has to be healthy. And most importantly, you need an unfair advantage — celebrity ownership, distribution, connections, secret formula, etc. — that competitors can’t match.
BioSteel didn’t have any of that, and that’s ultimately why the company failed."
https://huddleup.substack.com/p/patrick-mahomes-backed-sports-drink
17. "Now, with our goals a bit more clearly stated, it’s time to address, with coherence and persistence, our leaders. This includes both our politicians, and our virtue-signaling CCP puppets (mere speculation, of course). Our line of questioning for both should look something like this: do you believe this planet belongs to human beings? Do you believe your purpose, in addressing the issue of climate, is to produce the best possible climate for the greatest number of Americans?
And, finally, how do you plan on decreasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, increasing our arable land, and “changing the world”? Actually, I mean. As in, please pull out some diagrams and charts and a little laser pointer or whatever and physically show me the path to your intended impact.
Because here’s an inconvenient truth: if the fate of humanity hinges on a carbon neutral watch we are absolutely, totally, irredeemably screwed."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/an-inconvenient-truth
18. This is long overdue.
"That’s the phrase that an executive at private equity-owned financial firm U.S. Anesthesia Partners (USAP) used after acquiring yet another Texas anesthesiology practice, with the intent of hiking prices on Texas patients. And “Cha-ching!” was the right way to put it, since the excess profits amounted to tens, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in just one medical specialty, in just one state.
But the new quote should be ‘uh oh.’ Because today, the Federal Trade Commission, led by Chair Lina Khan, filed suit against USAP for monopolization, as well as its owner, New York City-based private equity firm Welsh Carson, which from its offices on Park Avenue engineered the entire strategy of gouging patients in Texas.
It’s an important suit, for reasons I’ll go into, and it also reflects a more aggressive antitrust enforcement regime, and skepticism of private equity in health care.
In every area of health care - hospitals, pharmaceutical distribution, ambulances, emergency physician services, insurance - there has been massive consolidation, which increases prices and lowers the amount of care delivered.
Private equity, a financial model focused on ruthless extraction, came into health care in a big way after the financial crisis of 2008, and it super-sized this trend. PE funds look specifically for areas where they can acquire pricing power, and then they squeeze."
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/cha-ching-lina-khan-attacks-private
19. Lots of great thoughts and wisdom. How to both be happy and operate with excellence in your life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d4AkAaF_Mw&t=2042s
20. "So what could a venture firm focused on frontier technologies possibly see in Angel Studios, a media company whose productions include a TV series about the life of Jesus Christ and a libertarian-themed children’s cartoonwith episodes like “The Itsy Bitsy Victim Mentality”?
While a Gigafund spokesperson said Oskoui and Nosek were impressed by the Harmons’ “highly disruptive vision of a uniquely democratic media publishing house,” another answer can be found in their political and social interests over the past decade. These ties shed light on the unlikely connections between the present-day culture wars stoked by Musk and others in Silicon Valley, and the race to unleash technologies that they believe will ultimately benefit humankind."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-elon-musk-investors-with-dreams-of-a-new-social-order
21. "For the majority of companies that limped across the finish line of 2023, the 2024 fundraising climate may not be forgiving if burn rates remain too high or revenue growth too sluggish. But for many, strong execution under adversity in 2023, reduced burn rates, and overall better execution learned through bitter experience will combine to create the conditions that will enable fundraising and sales.
This is the darkest of nights, but next year may see the dawn break. It will not be roses and unicorns, but we are likely to return to a much more functional market in which customers are willing to buy and investors are willing to price risk."
https://medium.com/@gdibner/2023-the-crucible-year-a24e6d7acc7c
22. "I think solopreneurship is incredible way to find a niche and build something that people love. But I fundamentally believe for the majority of solopreneurs, they should hire themselves out of their roles or build teams.
Yes, less profit but more scalable business and better for your mental health."
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/im-feeling-spicy-today
23. "Worryingly though if Russia has captured key Western interests, they likely remain captive, and active. Are we doing anything to expose and root these out to stop their continuing influence on at least the public narrative? Not really.
And are the same mistakes possible when it comes to China - absolutely.
Western business interests are similarly invested up to the hilt, and appear active in lobbying to remain engaged and invested. Are they asking the right questions, are they able to table the right questions to the right people? Unlikely. Can they “be in the know”? Also unlikely. I hope for their own sakes that they have set stop losses and could still exit if need be.
Interestingly, I now see those very same “Fortress China” economic policy settings as we saw in Russia from 2015 onwards - deleveraging, building FX buffers, running much tighter fiscal and monetary policies, sacrificing growth for a stronger balance sheet to defend against future tensions with the West. The warning signs are there."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/why-did-the-west-get-russia-so-wrong
24. "That’s the danger of the mediocre success. The point of startup experimentation isn't the success itself; it’s the learning that comes with clear-cut success or failure. You don't really care about the sales revenue generated by your first two reps; you care about whether this is a strategy you can scale to dozens and then hundreds of reps, or whether you need to use a completely different strategy. It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.
Making it worse is that we’re all heavily socialized to aim for mediocre success. Schools, universities, large organizations — they don’t want big swings and big misses; they want safety and consistency. A steady 7 is better than 10s interspersed with 0s. This might work well in structured, predictable environments, but in startup-land it’s anathema."
https://pivotal.substack.com/p/the-worst-outcome-is-a-mediocre-success
25. "It’s clear to me that every being will register joy and tragedy, and the ratio is 90% a function of when and where you’re born and the chemistry you inherit. Seneca believed religion was regarded by the poor as true, the wise as false, and the powerful as useful.
As someone who has been all of those things, however, I find the absence of religion and opportunities to congregate with strangers leaves a void. I’m getting older, wanting to serve in the agency of others, to be part of something bigger, and register comfort. I’m left wanting."
https://www.profgalloway.com/losing-my-religion/
26. "So yes, it’s not just that the Fed came out this week to intimate that they’ll keep rates higher for longer that’s prompting the reevaluation by debt investors. It’s something else. Investors are realizing that this isn’t quite the world we’ve been used to all along. Some things may have actually changed, so much debt has been issued that now needs to be refinanced, and so many things cost so much more. All of these things need to be priced in now.
It all starts with interest rates, and if rates are going higher and gravity is getting stronger. . . well asset prices may just need to come down to match.
Nothing is given and everything is earned . . . even for our government."
https://openinsights.substack.com/p/a-whole-generation-of-investors-have
27. "People tell founders not to take the “no” personally, but that’s hard, especially considering how much founders pour themselves into their companies. You can both feel the pain of the “no” and still move past it. Sometimes, a “no” is the end, and sometimes, it’s the start of something more interesting."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/sometimes-no-is-the-beginning-not
28. "Contribution margin tells you how much you can spend on acquiring a customer while still growing profitably. From a DTC perspective, you can also do this exercise using lifetime value if you want to push the envelope of growth if you have plenty of runway with cash to wait 3-12 months to be profitable."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/contribution-margins-with-bowtiedopossum
29. Nick Huber is a wise man. Worth a listen here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmDjOradP4&t=296s
30. Jason has one of the most unique perspectives on SaaS. Anyone involved in the business should listen to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NqB19-5sog
31. This is very good. VC is hard. Your best investments almost always look weird or were written off at some point in time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPiumq0Vmso
32. Learning from the best in Micro-Private equity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkwHwl5mDVA
33. This man is a hypocrite and a cancer on San Francisco. He is emblematic of the disastrous progressives wreaking havoc in the city.
"Above all, though, Dean Preston is a man of profound, puzzling contradictions. He’s a democratic socialist who believes “the solution to the failures of capitalism is not more capitalism,” but he is also a multimillionaire who, according to public disclosure forms, owns between $100,000 and $1 million of stock in each of Apple, Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft, and owns at least three homes worth over $1 million. He has repeatedly insisted that he “[doesn’t] own rental property,” and is “not a landlord and [has] never been one,” but his wife is part of a family LLC that owns and operates several luxury apartment buildings from which Preston presumably benefits financially.
He brands himself “one of California’s leading affordable housing advocates,” but his voting record shows he has opposed tens of thousands of units of affordable housing (many more than he’s supported), often at the behest of local landlords. In many ways, he is a typical “champagne socialist” — a wealthy individual who supports policies at odds with his luxury lifestyle. Politicians and activists like Preston often prompt head-scratching. Why would someone vocally support political positions in clear tension with their personal lifestyle?"
https://www.piratewires.com/p/dean-preston-san-franciscos-millionnaire
34. "Dual threat CEOs aren’t going to be commonplace, but I do think they’re needed in the startup community. Entrepreneurs that are building businesses are going to find great investment opportunities in the normal course of action, and by being a dual threat CEO, they’re able to deploy capital in a way that is a win-win for both them, the startup community, and the funding providers."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/09/23/dual-threat-ceos-that-build-and-invest/
35. Live it up. Such great stuff here with the guys and Andrew Wilkinson of Tiny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HChb0C5pQDs&t=1s
36. I always learn from Mike Maples Jr. on the art of VC investing.
The Present & Near Future Alpha in Tech: Rise of Private Equity & Micro Private Equity
I met a founder friend back in 2023 in Montreal after a 5 year hiatus. He had sold his last few companies so he had done well. I asked him what he was up to.
He told me he had just put in an offer to take over a well funded VC backed startup. The issue is growth had stalled out, the VCs had written it off, and founders were tired after grinding it out for 8 years and unwilling to recap it.
The idea is to buy it out for a good price at a massive discount to the last valuation. Put in new management, fix the cost structure and find new distribution channels. Grow the equity value or just take out dividends from the profits.
This is going to be more common and many PE funds will feast well in the next few years.
Too many of the 1400 Unicorns raised at crazy multiples of revenue, at valuations that are too high whose growth expectations can never be reached. Or at least not reach for many years.
Like the previous story mentioned and worth repeating: VCs have pretty much written these growth stage companies off. Or worse if it’s an east coast hedge fund, trying to squeeze nickels out or selling secondaries for pennies on the dollar to get some cash out. The founders are diluted and or/ just damn tired to continue.
VERY Big opportunity for PE. Come in: replace the leadership team and gut the cost structure. It works extra well when it’s enterprise software or SaaS business. It works for big public cos and for the first time in a while, for growth stage private co.
Constellation Software is an excellent model which acquires software companies and holds them for a long time. They have bought over 500 acquisitions since 1995 and deals range from $5M to $250M usd.
We’re even seeing PE funds buy out publicly traded software companies. Thoma Bravo took private enterprise software company Coupa after beating Vista Equity Partners in a $6.2B deal. There will definitely be more of these. And they bring a new skill set of financing and operating with a clear eye and operational expertise on margins and profitability.
Add on top of the example that Elon did at Twitter by cutting 70+ percent of an over bloated staff. This will become standard practice at many of these newly privatized tech cos. Which results in massive margin and profit expansion as a consequence.
I’ve always said PE firms are the vultures, jackals and sharks of the financial world as they do the dirty but valuable clean up after a massive bubble of excess. The tech industry is at this point now. It will be painful and bloody but necessary as private equity feasts on the carcasses of these zombicorns, right sizing and turning them around. Or going further and rolling up several competitors in a category, ending ruinous competition and building out a dominant player in the space.
Once this is done, it clears up the field for future growth in our ecosystem and for a new generation of awesome startups to rise.
Ignorance is Costly: Be Curious
I was wandering around the famous Mitsukoshi department store in Ginza district in Tokyo in April. Engaged in one of my eating and cookie/pastry buying sprees. At every stand & place I went to, they asked me whether I had a card or even wanted one. I was like whatever.
But as I was walking out I saw a sign that said as a foreigner I could get a special card for a pretty good discount on everything there. Duh? Double duh as I am a cheap deal hunter. So it bugged me. I like a deal as much as the next guy, even more so considering how much I spent there. (It was A LOT btw).
But the quick lesson is ignorance is costly. This is not just about shopping or deal hunting.
Thinking you know it all is damn expensive. This is about life in general. Ignorance of a language, a country's customs, about how a company or even an industry works, will eventually hurt you. Not understanding human behavior is even more dangerous. This leads to fights both physical and emotional.
We all have gaps in our knowledge and experience, we start off as blank slates. It’s a good thing so it means we can shape where our lives go. It’s impossible to know everything in such a wide world that is changing all the time.
How do you fight this and get better? Have some humility and acknowledge you are ignorant. And work your ass off trying to learn as much as you can from books, other people and your own experiences. Even better, be genuinely curious about the world around you. That’s been the most universal trait that I see in those most successful.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 1st, 2023
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein
"In an era where luxury cars and extravagant timepieces once symbolized success and prestige, a profound but quiet transformation in our values has taken place. No one talks about it much, our modern cinema and music ignore it because they’re incentivized to, but the internet forced a change here — you see it on display constantly.
I believe strongly in the thesis material possessions have ceded dominance to the virtues of mentorship, the free/open exchange of ideas, the art of creative expression and other intangibles. In essence: we’ve moved past status being biased to financial achievements and once again care more about intangibles (the transcendental).
Related, the notion of ‘getting rich, then getting off the grid’ as some on fintwit love to say is deeply nihilistic. These are lost individuals. Affix your oxygen mask, then lift others up. Stay on the grid and help shore up our shared infrastructure, take off the VR and join the rest of us in base reality."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/on-status-in-modernity
2. Always learn stuff by listening to Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4MQldIKMg8
3. "He will keep coming back to that darkness, and is likely to submerge himself into it all the more as the realities of mortality enfold him. When you are as messed up as our hero, there is a lot of psychological work to be done to stop the downward spiral, work more boring than building a rocket. Work even more boring than this book.
It is no wonder that Musk has renamed Twitter “X” after his favourite letter. X is also a crossing out, the opposite of a tick, and that is what Musk has been steadily doing to his legacy. Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win."
4. "In other words, expensive-to-make chips with slightly trailing performance will slowly deprive Chinese companies of market share, and thus of the market feedback necessary to help push Chinese chip innovation in the right direction. The Chinese state can lob effectively infinite amounts of money at Huawei and SMIC and other national champions, but its track record is very poor in terms of getting bang for its buck — or even any bang at all — from semiconductor subsidies.
And the greatest irony is that China’s government itself may help speed along this process. Confident of its ability to produce high-quality indigenous phones, China is starting to ban iPhones in some of its government agencies. Those hard bans will likely be accompanied by softer encouragement throughout Chinese companies and society to switch from Apple to domestic brands.
That will give a sales boost to companies like Huawei, but it will slowly silence the feedback that Chinese companies receive from competing in cutthroat global markets. Voluntary Chinese isolation from the global advanced tech ecosystem will encourage sluggish innovation and more wasteful use of resources — a problem sometimes called “Galapagos syndrome”.
What effect all this will have on China’s military capabilities isn’t clear, because that depends a lot on the pace of military innovation. It might be that old chips are fine, and China can just overwhelm the forces of developed democracies with sheer mass of missiles and drones. Or it might be that new AI algorithms that allow the creation of highly effective drone swarms might need to run on bleeding-edge chips, in which case China could be at a qualitative disadvantage in a fight.
We just don’t know for sure; the argument that China’s military will be hampered by a weaker chipmaking industry is probabilistic, not a law of the Universe. But it’s still one thing that might help put a check on Chinese expansionism in the 2020s and even the 2030s, and every little thing counts."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/whos-afraid-of-the-huawei-mate-60
5. "TL;DR: Vast majority will not get raises that keep up with inflation and will likely lose 4% of their purchasing power again. Unemployment goes up as we’ve been expecting. This implies a period of some stagflation. Don’t expect rates to come down any time soon so please don’t lever up praying for a sudden pivot that is unlikely to come. If the math works (of course take it) just don’t leverage on a “prayer”
It should be relatively obvious but if it isn’t we might go into it deeper.
-It’s logical to assume that a CEO selling shares is horrible.
-It’s logical to assume an attractive management team is a horrible red flag.
-It’s logical to assume that Sales people are not good long-term thinkers due to years of quarterly payouts.
-It’s logical to assume that there is a “halo effect” on management teams that were in the right place at the right time due to pure luck (no way anyone would predict COVID). If you can’t control your weight you probably can’t control your spending. And. The last one.
-It’s logical to assume that a company shouldn’t be spending time impressing retail and investors with fancy events, your company is likely in the dumpster."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/declining-real-wages-evaluation-of
6. Hard not to agree with this. Still think there are some use cases for Crypto but I guess we will see.
"Crypto seemed like a giant slot machine that had been rigged to pay out almost every time. Hundreds of millions of people around the world gave in to the temptation to pull the lever. Everybody knew somebody who’d hit it big. And the more people who bought in, the higher prices rose. By the time of the conference in the Bahamas, the total market value of all of crypto was $2 trillion.
From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world. The crypto apps hyped as the future of finance and art barely worked. As I crisscrossed the globe, from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes. By the end, I’d find myself in Cambodia, investigating how crypto fueled a vast human-trafficking scheme run by Chinese gangsters."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zeke-faux-number-go-up-book-excerpt.html
7. "Critics can quibble, of course, with Ukrainian commanders’ decisions about when and how to go about recovering territory occupied by Russian invaders. But for all the anonymous sniping about how Ukraine should fight like NATO, the reality is that other countries, including the superpower United States, have a great deal to learn about war from Ukraine."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/ukraine-war-nato-kathleen-hicks/675310/
8. This is sadly depressing. Regulatory capture in America. Telco, Healthcare, Education, Pharma, Defense industry. Proof is these are awfully terrible for customers and capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM&t=138s
9. "If interest rates stay well above zero and productivity fails to experience a late-90s-like boom, expect more articles like this. As interest costs rise and start squeezing the rest of the budget, expect Democrats to call for higher taxes and Republicans to call for cuts to Medicaid and other social programs. Expect to see analyses from think tanks detailing all the wonky little ways we could restrain federal spending. In other words, expect somewhat of a return to the intellectual and political climate of 1992.
In other words, an age of austerity will force everyone in the country to tighten their belts and lower their expectations. The last 15 years pushed us to imagine what more the U.S. government could do if only it had the political will to open its purse-strings. Unless a productivity boom and/or a return to near-zero interest rates with low inflation saves us from having to make hard choices, the next 15 years will force us to curb our imaginations and put a damper on our fiscal dreams."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/an-age-of-austerity-is-probably-on
10. "The good news for us—at least for now—is that it was much easier to wipe the Templar Order from the face of the Earth than it will be for our overlords to take away the entirety of our crypto, gold, cash, and other items of value we can use for trade. But they’re not lacking in effort to do so.
However, they’ll never be able to control a silver coin in your hand, and who you choose to give that coin in exchange for goods and services. That’s why I believe the time is now to prepare for a future when that may be one of your only options to trade with some semblance of privacy.
For me, the important thing is to not wait until it’s too late to stock up on items that you can use to trade with in an untraceable manner. Holding even small amounts of gold and silver isn’t about taking part in illegal trade, it’s about owning something that all cultures and people agree has an equal value, that can be used to buy things on your own terms. Terms that are very difficult for your government to force you into; terms that are between two consenting human beings.
So, a few silver coins, or an ounce of gold per month? It doesn’t matter how much. Something is better than nothing. And now is better than never."
https://abundantia.substack.com/p/the-holy-war-over-your-money
11. "At this point the writing is on the wall. Heavily levered businesses and individuals will be sent into bankruptcy. People hoping for the Fed to bail them out won’t get it.
The best solution is to position yourself for the tail end of both risk and no risk assets. The middle has absolutely no value in times of volatility. If you want to own stocks it makes little sense to own anything but the tails (ultra safe or ultra risky).
People will choose to flee to 1) safe assets - mature companies/utilities or T-bills - we’re in short term t-bills or 2) hyper growth/near gambling stocks like the “magnificent 7” or crypto (you can see the second one playing out in part 2 of this post) - we’d suggest adding in the rough $25K/$1600 ranges for BTC/ETH."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/bond-market-crypto-alts-in-tax-havens
12. Somewhat negative view of Biohacking. My view is why not?
Health is wealth and you have nothing to lose except for a little bit of money and time for plenty of upside. Why not try to optimize your longevity if your life is good & you have the resources.
This is why the reporters and academics who are closed minded on this lose in life all the time. Haters=losers.
13. "Members of the Creative Class gravitate towards a cluster of creative expressions, ideas, experiences, places and things that both unite them and differentiate them from each other and everyone else. The politics of the creative money aesthetics is that never stand out in an obvious way, but to be immediately noticed and envied.
It has to be aspirational: others need to wonder where a member of Creative Class acquired this particular piece of clothing (Osaka? Shoreditch? Milan?), or heard about a particular book or a movie. Differentiation is in the details visible to the insiders, never in-your-face."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/the-creative-class-starter-kit
14. "Looking at the examples set by India, LATAM and SEA, we can see that, once the foundational layers of digital payments has been established, the speed and scale of FinTech startups accelerates rapidly.
While there remains work to be done, Central & South Asia are reaching that inflection point as government and private sector backed payment solutions approach a critical mass. One variable to monitor will be whether the traditional financial institutions are able to adapt and evolve their technology stacks to compete with FinTech startups, as they have in India.
Collaborative efforts involving technology, innovative business models, and strategic embedding of financial services within ecosystems are likely to drive further growth and financial inclusion in these regions."
https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/the-100m-arr-club-part-ii
15. I think many men do think about the Roman Empire. I do it all the time. Fascinating time as a history major.
https://time.com/6314544/tiktok-roman-empire-trend/
16. Awesome NIA episode with guest George Mack. Excellent discussion on creativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP9-qbFXBWE&t=3390s
17. Hilarious.
https://www.theonion.com/ivy-league-graduate-risks-it-all-for-love-of-consulting-1850840626
18. "We assume that because Russians generally are so good at chess that it influences all their strategy. This is not the case with Putin. The exiled Russian Grandmaster Gary Kasparov notes ‘Putin, as with every dictator, hates chess because chess is a strategic game which is 100 percent transparent.’ He sees the Russian leader as more of a poker player, in which you can play a very weak hand, ‘provided you have enough cash to raise the stakes—and also, if you have a strong nerve, to bluff.’
In fact we know that Putin’s favoured game , to the point of obsession, is judo which is intensely tactical. In 2015 Kimberley Marten observed that for Putin the judoka to win it is not necessary to be ‘bigger or stronger than the opponent, just quicker and shrewder.’ The goal is to survive, to be sure ‘to be the last one standing at the end of the tournament, come what may’. Judo also does not allow for a draw. There must be a winner.
Hence, having started a war, that he intended to win rapidly through exploiting his opponent’s weakness, now Putin fears a conclusion that exposes his own. He is determined to hang on, absorbing losses and playing down difficulties in the hope that something may turn up to save the day."
https://samf.substack.com/p/stalemate-zugzwang-and-a-long-middle
19. Zeihan has been a China bear for a long time. But there is not a lot of good news coming out of the place recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqA5NODRnQI
20. Interesting opportunity for real estate investing & living in Rural Spain. I'm a fan of Calvin Froedge, who is one of the sharpest thinkers in alternative & contrarian investing.
https://twitter.com/calvinfroedge/status/1703344635806900649
21. More people should study the Hanseatic League: Baltic ocean merchant city states that challenged kingdoms.
https://twitter.com/germanshistory/status/1703676753514791239
22. "Since 2020, Sand Hill Road's most successful individuals have broken away on their own to raise capital for their micro-funds. Europe, often a few years behind when it comes to startup trends, is also starting to produce its own solo GPs."
23. "Grosberg estimates that Putin has enough resources to continue waging the war against Ukraine “at least as long as it has already been ongoing.” But this depends on several factors outside of Moscow’s and Kyiv’s control.
“It depends on if the sanctions hold and how well we can implement them. It largely depends on how well we as the West can endure and how well we recognize that it is not just a piece of land. Ukraine is fighting over the same values that we respect and protect. As long as we understand this, the situation is satisfactory – far from good, but satisfactory.”
Another factor explaining why Russia hasn't been strategically defeated yet is the West’s initial reluctance to arm Ukraine before that abortive airbridge to Hostomel was even attempted. “Now, 550-plus days into the war, we have agreed to supply Ukraine with weapons and equipment that Zelensky asked for on Day 1,” Grosberg said. “If these had been granted right then and had we not delivered heavy equipment a few pieces at a time, the situation could be much different.”
F-16 fighter jets and ATACMS, Grosberg insists, will bring Ukraine “one more step closer to victory” but won’t be “silver bullets” that will decide the war. “Russia is not sitting idly and waiting for the F-16s to arrive. They are taking measures to adapt against them and they have nine months to do so.”
Grosberg isn’t much persuaded by the argument that providing these weapons systems will somehow cross Russia’s “red lines” for escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons."
https://theins.press/en/politics/265092
24. Demographics is destiny.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66850943
25. 2 businessmen and guys I respect a lot. Good people building massive empires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgyqch_0JXw
26. "Evans has been working steadily and successfully in Hollywood for more than 20 years. But he has not always felt in control there. When he was younger, he acted in a lot of what he now describes as “bad movies.” His first real successes in the industry came by way of a series of characters who were “jocky pricks,” he says: handsome, muscular assholes whose smugness was their most memorable quality.
And then came Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, a character so defined and iconic—unlike other Marvel heroes, Cap has basically been the same virtuous guy since the day of his invention in 1940—that Evans’s main job was as much to be a caretaker as it was to be an inventor or an explorer.
None of these roles line up all that precisely with the way Evans is in his daily nonworking life, a fact that suits him. “There are some people that you meet and you just think, Man, that’s a movie star,” he says. He is adamant that he is not one of them. “I love to act,” he says. “But it’s not something that I couldn’t live without.” He has had enough success to be financially secure for the rest of his life, and probably a few lifetimes beyond. But despite that success, or maybe because of it, he is interested in, well: anything but the grand narrative of Chris Evans.
“When I don’t pay attention to myself at all,” he says, “and just, you know, question why black holes exist, that brings into perspective a macro understanding of the fact that I’m even here is a miracle. It’s like shooting a bullet with another bullet. I mean, the fact that any of us are here is unbelievable. And that kind of just brings me a sense of deep peace. And I don’t have any more thoughts or questions about my own career.”
https://www.gq.com/story/chris-evans-october-cover-profile-2023
27. Must watch if you are a newbie or old VC. Mike is the BEST and I always learn stuff from him. So many great insights here & Mike has mentored an entire generation of new VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45v9vOJlK_E
28. Ukrainian SF drone forces targeting Wagner in Sudan. Unexpected but inevitable expansion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Battlefield is global.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/19/africa/ukraine-military-sudan-wagner-cmd-intl/index.html
29. "While his affable sales persona had helped win over customers and investors alike throughout much of Flexport’s history, and his storytelling skills rocketed him to pandemic-era stardom with his public reporting on the supply chain crisis, Petersen will have to come up with a new playbook to rescue the company from a serious slump.
Flexport is feeling the pain from an industrywide collapse in freight volumes and a sharp drop in the prices that ship, truck and plane operators charge to move cargo. While the company offers flashy tech to help customers see shipping options and track their goods, the way it makes money is by acting as an intermediary, booking freight shipments and pocketing a cut of the price.
Flexport's revenue dropped nearly 70% in the first half of this yearto around $700 million, and it burned through roughly $300 million in cash.
Petersen declined to be interviewed for this story. But in a text message to The Information last Friday, he laid out his agenda for Flexport: “Cut a lot of waste, solve a handful of issues hurting our customer quality, and grow so fast the only answer for how Flexport became so profitable will appear to be divine intervention.
“We will make believers out of all these atheists yet!” Petersen added."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ryan-petersen-fix-flexport
30. As always, a good convo with Justin Waller. This man is a great model for young men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=areO3acpMwQ&t=3047s
31. "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 whom 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."
32. Graduation of seed to A will be 20% not 80% like it was in the past. Seed stage still needs to correct. AI is real. Back to basics: SaaS should be at massive margins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEFLjAshxLk
33. "let’s assume in an imaginary and highly unlikely scenario that the US and Europe stop arming and funding Ukraine. Can we imagine that the Ukrainians will just stop fighting, even then? Why/how can they when Putin has made it clear that he is at war with the Ukrainian nation.
This is a war for Ukraine and Ukrainians’ very survival. They will fight on, long and hard, and as noted above, still will have plenty of arms supplies to make a Russian occupation very costly. And focusing on this, how can Russia enforce a victory in Ukraine? How can it invade the whole country, occupy and sustain that invasion, when we saw the inability of the Russian military to hold even one third of the country, through to Kyiv in the initial few weeks of the full scale invasion. The military, human and economic costs to Russia of forcing through a victory in these circumstances would be unsustainable.
So I don’t buy the line that a long war suits Russia, or that Russia’s position is somehow going to be greatly improved come January 2025 and a Trump second term. All scenarios in the longer term just get worse for Russia.
That is why I think that Putin would still jump at the prospects of peace talks towards the end of this year, perhaps brokered by China - and perhaps after his meeting with Sullivan et al in Malta, perhaps that is what the Chinese foreign minister was angling after with his follow on trip to Moscow this week."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-outlook-q-and-a
34. This was a solid episode. Always talking about timely topics in the tech and cultural businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS7ypWFGWOQ
35. "The Roman Empire is of course celebrated for its incredible achievements in architecture, governance, and military conquests. However, one aspect of Roman civilization that is often overlooked but really fun is their sophisticated marketing and branding work.
Yes, the Romans were not just builders and conquerors; they were also expert marketers well before ‘marketing’ was a codified practice. After all, every civilization brands itself, it is a natural byproduct of the organization of humans and the sprawling of empires."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/marketing-lessons-from-the-roman
36. This is a great geopolitical snapshot of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7uuxRliBU
37. Part 2 of this Geopolitical Snapshot of the world. Very interesting perspective.
Learning from Italian Chefs & Stanley Tucci
Yes, it’s a random title. But I’ve recently become obsessed with Italian food after watching the new food series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.” The Hollywood star of Italian heritage travels across all the regions of Italy experiencing the culinary delights specific to each place. Venice, Piedmont, Puglia & Umbria among others.
A beautiful magical food experience. Really worth watching for foodies of course. But for those interested in watching art and excellence there is nothing better. It’s incredible watching the zest of the chefs who try to harness tradition with the new.
I learned from the Michelin star awarded Costardi brothers and their new takes of risotto. “We like to take inspiration from what’s happening in our lives. From music, from television, from cinema, from art, from everything.”
It’s why generalists in the long run win. They are learning to put different things together. They end up being more creative and bring new perspectives to solving a problem. Focus is great and important. But being overly focused and specialized leads to creative cul de sacs. And they also end up as dead, boring people too. You want to be around people who are inspiring and alive, who take cues from everything around them.
It’s as Tucci says in the show. “Adding new ingredients just makes the stew richer.” Life is like that I think.
The Storm on the Horizon: Get Ready
I fly way too much. But it gives me time to think, to read and write. It’s the end of the 3rd quarter of 2023.
It’s looking pretty grim. We’ve just come out of a 2 year global pandemic and the incompetent, heavy handed lockdowns across the globe. So many of us have been broken. Businesses have been destroyed, people isolated for 2 years and mentally traumatized.
War continues to be waged by the barbarian Russians in Ukraine. China is aggressively pushing all over Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The world is fracturing into the Global West (USA, EU, Canada, Japan, AUNZ), The Global East (China/Russia) & The Global South (Africa, SEA, India, Middle East and Latam).
Politically, the USA is divided and the populace angry. Income inequality grows. Large corporations and the government erode and intrude into our privacy and civil rights. Inflation continues and the economy for all intents and purposes is in recession, The job losses abound all over the USA.
As we have found over the last few cycles, these mass Layoffs started in Tech in Q3 of 2022, then Wall Street followed 6 months later Q1, 2023. It will be happening on MainStreet 6 months after that. Net Net: It’s going to be a rough next few years.
As the character John Connor from the Terminator movies states: “There is a storm on the horizon. A time of hardship and pain.”
I’ve railed about the incompetence, arrogance and greed of our politicians. Stupid woke & ESG policies domestically and our foreign encroachments in the Middle East that have wasted lives and resources.
I’ve also complained about the complacency and entitlement of people in the West, especially in Canada, the USA and Western Europe. All of whom have squandered the prosperity that our ancestors built for us. Our forefathers would be embarrassed by what they see today. Weakness, cowardice, laziness and stupidity.
But I choose to channel my anger and rage at what I can do and not at what I see. I believe this downward slide can be arrested. As John Connor says: “There is no fate but what we make.”
We can still turn things around and this starts with yourself. Making yourself stronger, physically and mentally. Learn skills & make money (ethically). Assemble resources and build a strong community. Steeling ourselves for the hardships that will come.
I loved what was said in the Mandalorian tv show which I really enjoy. Hardship is like a forge.
“This is the forge. The heart of Mandalorian culture. Just as we shape the Mandalorian steel, we shape ourselves. We all begin as raw ore. We refine ourselves through trials and adversity. The forge can reveal weaknesses.”
So get ready for even more turbulent times. It’s the new Hunger Games coming. Surviving is thriving. And the stronger and better prepared you are, the more people you can help. Charity ultimately starts at home.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 24th, 2023
“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” – Michael Jordan
The Bull case for America.
"By nearly every measure, America is doing just fine. Better than fine. Our annual GDP is $26 trillion — 40% greater than China’s, whose population is four times larger. And, despite our enormous output, our economy is still growing, with 2.4% GDP growth last quarter. China’s is higher, but slowing faster than expected.
Meanwhile the yuan continues to slide and this week hit a 16-year low. We have many unique advantages, including unrivaled innovation, the best universities, the best military, strong rule of law, a willingness to embrace risk, and a culture of doing the right thing (I believe this). Last year, U.S. startups received $245 billion in venture funding — roughly equal to the rest of the world combined."
https://www.profgalloway.com/least-bad/
2. "Entrepreneurs would do well to identify the type of independent board member they’re looking for and consider one that’s either a coach, an industry expert, or a functional area expert. Identifying that type of person at the outset will make the process of recruiting the independent board member that much more efficient and productive."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/09/09/types-of-independent-board-members-for-startups/
3. Wide ranging conversation: understanding the world through the lens of tribes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIJLW_Rc6Rg&t=899s
4. A beautifully written love letter to New York City. It is an amazing place still.
"Don’t get me wrong — New York City has its problems. It’s not perfectly manicured and its blemishes are evident on any city block. But there’s only way I can possibly describe it: It’s extraordinary."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-the-ceo-fighting-for
5. "The 40-year-old music manager is best known for discovering Justin Bieber and fighting with Taylor Swift. But over the years he has transformed himself from a well-compensated babysitter to the stars into one of pop culture's most influential power brokers.
Last year, he made a billion-dollar deal to sell his company Ithaca Holdings to the South Korean entertainment behemoth Hybe. Along the way, he's gone to great lengths to distinguish himself as a good guy: a family-oriented philanthropist with a strong moral code, known for steering artists out of rough patches.
But many say that far from being an exception in a particularly ugly industry, Braun is one of its most ruthless players — a relentless egotist whose main focus is burnishing his image and growing his empire. The majority asked that their names not be used out of fear of retaliation, citing Braun's reputation for litigiousness. "I've never seen anyone burn so many bridges with so many people," a person familiar with Braun's business dealings said."
6. "There are moments when we’ve truly, irrevocably, fatally failed, and we should say so. If a company has to shut down, especially before it achieved some meaningful success, then okay, we failed.
Otherwise, find a better way to describe what’s happening, so we understand the situation better, and are pointed in the direction of what we should do next."
https://longform.asmartbear.com/fail
7. "Since then, the internet has increasingly devolved into tribalism. Balaji makes the point that the founder, creators, and influencers who are thriving in the current internet age are "tribal leaders." Call them taste makers, aggregators, curators, whatever you want.
But to bring it back to my core reflection on the rising generation. I want my kids to be aware of the frontiers. And I want to help them to be capable of overcoming the barriers to entry, and engaging with these challenging and compelling frontiers that exist, to solve hard problems."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-rising-generation
8. "This is the company Musk dubbed xAI. He personally recruited Igor Babuschkin, formerly of DeepMind, but he told me he would run it himself. I calculated that would mean he would be running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter, the Boring Co., Neuralink, and xAI. That was three times as many as Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) at his peak."
https://time.com/6310076/elon-musk-ai-walter-isaacson-biography/
9. "The inflection point is coming — sure as it has already with podcasts — for Substack, OnlyFans and any platform where creators are reliant on the largesse of their audiences. When creators realise the dream of financial success and celebrity is sputtering, so too will the impression that this is a radical new future for content creation fade."
https://medium.com/@nickfthilton/the-end-of-the-subscription-era-is-coming-ed197f252c6a
10. "As an economist, I keep saying, follow the artists. They spot the future before the rest of us. I also believe that life sends you invitations. When one came to go to this culturally iconic gathering, I said yes. So, I started making the long trek to feel The Burn. I learned many useful lessons about start-ups, fundraising, visioning, art, and madness that are relevant for people in business.
There is a particular etiquette at Burning Man. No one says, “So, what do you do?” Instead, they offer. They say, “This gives me joy. Maybe it will give you joy too”. People here give the gift of their most interesting ideas, music, songs, and secrets. The implicit question is not “what do you do but what gives you joy?” This gives everyone blanket permission to not be in a silo and to express a wide range of unrelated interests.
The workplace rewards the specialist and considers outside interests a drag on your time. Burning Man rewards those with the most eclectic and obscure interests and considers work a drag on your time. The wise are smart enough to ensure avocation and vocation are aligned. There are lessons here for business conversations. We’ve got to do better than “So what do you do?”
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-gift-of-burning-man-lessons-for
11. It's a long one: but worth listening to. Tribes of blue versus red versus gray. Pretty interesting framework to view the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqJoXaNFFjY
12. "Like the animal kingdom, when you know you’ve been gifted a large win, you’re supposed to prepare for the upcoming winter.
Winter is here thanks to 1) unemployment, 2) credit tightening, 3) student loan payments and 4) major companies now struggling to show y/y growth (excluding the standard 3-5% increase in pricing)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/what-us-citizens-should-want-and
13. "Pleasure is what you are after. Why would you be with someone if you don’t find any pleasure in being or working with them. To me, that was the fundamental matter, it sounded so obvious, and yet I hadn’t realized it.
I really loved how he addressed it: Did you ever find pleasure in being with that person or working with them? If the answer is negative, it’s interesting to dig into why you joined them because there might be a wrong pattern going on there. If the answer is positive, get back to those enjoyable moments again and try to understand how and why those encounters felt great.
Then, dig into the things that raised friction and address them together. Very often, the trust that will arise from sharing your vulnerabilities will allow you to solve the dysfunctions of your relationship."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/pleasure
14. "When Peyton Manning left the NFL in 2016, he had plenty of options in retirement.
The Hall of Fame quarterback could have taken a coaching job on any team he wanted. He could have signed a nine-figure broadcasting deal, like Tom Brady’s $375 million agreement with Fox. Or he could have sat back and relaxed, enjoying his $250 million in career earnings without adding any additional stress to his life.
But Manning didn’t do any of those things. Instead, the 2-time Super Bowl Champion has taken on another challenge: Building a billion-dollar sports media company.
Omaha Productions, named after Manning’s infamous audible call, has become one of the hottest companies in sports. The production company works with ESPN, Netflix, the NFL, and many others in the audio and video space. And if you are even a casual sports fan, you have unknowingly seen much of their content over the last few years."
https://huddleup.substack.com/p/peyton-manning-is-building-a-billion
15. Lots of good views here. Patrick Bet-David is a sharp dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7shJgAA-na4
16. "In other words, it’s wrong to see this next wave of globalization as a shift of economic activity away from China. Yes, FDI in China will drop, but China will help drive the next wave in totally new and different ways from what it did in the 2000s. It’s a developed country now, and it will start behaving like one.
So I think the future of globalization is bright. Even if the spread of industrial activity to South and Southeast Asia gets interrupted by a major war or hobbled by climate change, the spread of economic activity from region to region is a deep and inexorable economic force that is very hard to deny. This party isn’t over yet."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-next-phase-of-globalization-is
17. "Contrary to how some understand the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan, the lesson extremists are taking from the Taliban’s success is not simply that jihad works but that diplomacy and engagement are a necessary part of the process, which includes reassuring the West about external threats emerging from their areas. What can be gained from parlays in Doha is more significant and lasting than any terror attack.
In the past month, analysts noted with interest how the Taliban assisted U.S. forces at the Kabul Airport during the evacuation of American citizens and their Afghan allies. The Taliban practically held the door while the U.S. troops departed the country. What appeared bizarre and paradoxical was in fact entirely predictable to anyone who has studied how jihadism, shaped by the past 20 years, has reevaluated its priorities.
The other lesson is to not mess with the U.S. if you can help it; in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, jihadists fought the U.S. as an occupier not as the “far enemy” as such. The Taliban limited their fight to Afghanistan, while al Qaeda and the Islamic State took the fight to the West. The first succeeded and the other two failed."
https://newlinesmag.com/argument/what-the-global-war-on-terror-really-accomplished/
18. "Despite the grim assessments of some over the past few months, Ukraine is making progress in its ground offensives, holding off a Russian offensive in the north and accelerating its strategic strike campaign. Ukraine now holds the strategic initiative.
Ukrainian diplomatic activity will focus on international support for Ukraine, maintaining the flow of military and economic assistance — and forestalling peace initiatives designed to hand the strategic initiative to Russia.
Finally, Ukraine will want to ensure its people are able to endure the winter conditions."
19. A lot of stuff is gonna be re-shored soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHOWMnUU02s
20. This is super cool. Digital remake of old Aztec Capital Tenochtitlan.
https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/
21. "Recently we’ve seen two pretty significant shifts in technology — first with crypto (I’m still a believer) and now with generative AI — that are recreating what is possible.
Moreover, we’ve seen a demographic shift as boomers age out, millennials enter their mid-life crisis / disposable income years, and Gen Z (a cohort that makes millennials look like luddites) takes the mantle of the young and cool.
So there are tons of ‘good’ ideas that didn’t work before but can work today. Midjourney looks a lot like the 100 digital design startups that failed over the last 10 years. New tech (Gen AI) + new distribution (discord) = new opportunities."
https://darcy.substack.com/p/ive-seen-this-before-it-didnt-work
22. "One of the ways we might view contemporary operations in the Ukraine War is through a lens of North versus South. In the south, Ukraine is conducting a campaign which is designed to contribute to it winning the war. In the north, Russia is conducting a campaign that is designed to prolong the war.
This framing can be useful because it provides insights into the overall strategies of Ukraine and Russia."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/north-and-south
23. "The focus of this program is to, as opposed to most DoD programs, create unmanned systems that are low-cost, autonomous, fast to produce, and attritable. Given what we’ve seen in Ukraine and what we can expect in a war with the PRC in terms of ammunition expenditure and casualties, focusing on attritable systems that don’t break the bank is a very smart idea.
The challenge is nailing down how we are defining terms like low-cost, attritable, and autonomous, and how we are going to turn them into reality."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/how-to-build-a-robot-army
24. "The message of this whole thing is to start now. Anyone who thinks they are “underpaid” in a non-revenue generating role will get the biggest wake up call of their lives. They will suddenly realize that if there is no existing client base they are worth $0 in the open market. That is right. Their positions, their skills and their tasks have absolutely nothing to offer if starting from ground zero.
This isn’t a bad thing. In fact it is a good thing. You will learn how to sell a lot earlier which makes it 100x easier to secure promotions at your W-2 in the first place! Funny how that works. By trying to start something yourself you will learn 1) the value of an existing customer base and 2) what really matters to the firm.
This is excruciatingly important. By knowing what truly matters to a firm you can work 50-75% less hours than your peers… yet secure that promotion every 3-years. The firm will recognize that you’re always going all out on what matters and it is hard to even notice the stuff you’re ignoring (since no one cares anyway)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/corporations-are-designed-to-bleed
25. Sahil Bloom has built an amazing life and we can all learn from him on his habits and learnings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeJiC_lEUi4
26. "Whatever the work is that you are doing, love it, and commit to it. If it’s activism do that. But don’t do photo-op activism. Circulating another petition and getting people to sign a letter that will be forgotten in a month is most likely not “the work,” but we can’t rule it out without further information.
Only you can know if you are loving the work or acting the superior. But it’s a good meditation exercise: Does this action support “the work” or is it merely putting on airs or sycophancy?"
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/love-the-work
27. "It’s the idea of being a contributor. Life is not a zero-sum game, and neither is work. That if all of us contribute just a little bit of what we know and some of our hard work and combine it into a shared potluck, the result is magical and much bigger than any one of us could possibly have imagined."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-art-of-possibility/
28. "Oil is very volatile. It's not like real estate. You can't just sit back and not monitor your portfolio closely, and you need to be ready to dump your positions. It's a very different way of investing."
https://mailchi.mp/f96b1741e9b0/why-i-own-oil-stocks?e=123a1c25c4
29. "Obviously, governments would love to fund themselves at a lower rate than the economic value their debt generates. Using financial repression to ensure that nominal GDP growth is higher than bond yields has been the policy of all the most successful export-led Asian economies since the end of WW2. China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc. have all used this playbook to export their way out of the destruction their countries experienced during and in the wake of WW2.
To implement this type of financial repression, countries must use their banking systems. Banks are instructed to offer depositors low rates. Depositors then have no choice but to earn a negative real yield on their savings, as the government puts restrictions in place that prevent them from moving money out of the system. The banks are then told to lend to state-backed or large, politically connected heavy industrial firms at low rates.
Deposit Rate < Corporate Loan Rate < Nominal GDP Growth Rate
The result is that these industrial companies – which require a large amount of CAPEX – get cheap funding to quickly build out a modern manufacturing base. Governments then use these manufacturing bases to accrue sovereign wealth, which is recycled into US Treasuries and other dollar-based financial assets.
Supposedly, these funds can be tapped into when the economy falters. The plebes all get good-paying, blue-collar manufacturing jobs for life. When compared to their prior lives as agricultural peasants, during which they endured a standard of living only slightly better than that of slaves, working nine to five with full benefits for a large corporation is a major improvement.
As it becomes clear that, even with short-term nominal rates at 5.5%, sitting in bonds is a mug's game, capital at the margin will begin seeking hard financial assets. Certain assets such as Bitcoin, big tech / AI stocks, productive farmland, etc. will continue rising and confound the majority of financial analyst muppets."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/are-we-there-yet
30. I'm cheering for Yahoo! to turn around. Very surprised this is happening under Private equity.
"Yahoo is on pace to generate about $7 billion in gross revenue this year, compared to a reported $8 billion in gross revenue last year, though the makeup of the business has changed significantly over that period. Despite the weakness in the ad market, earnings, measured before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, have grown in recent quarters because of operational improvements, the person said.
A turnaround at Yahoo would represent a huge tech win for Apollo, but Lanzone and others say Yahoo is at least a couple of years away from being able to make another run at the public markets.
“Yahoo clearly has had its ups and downs. Right now it’s very much on the up,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital at Omnicom Group, which owns ad agencies that do business with Yahoo. “It’s kind of miraculous to see this company from the mid-’90s come roaring out almost 30 years later.”
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-yahoo-be-saved-how-apollo-is-rebuilding-an-internet-icon
31. More on Sahil Bloom. Such a great story and so many learnings on how to build a creator business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSpnnwbZrxo
32. Seems like an interesting book. Dark but interesting.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23840033/vaster-wilds-review-lauren-groff
33. "As it currently stands, no nation alone could challenge U.S. hegemony. Russia is an oil-based exporter with not much diversification in economic terms, China is declining demographically and has an authoritarian government with capital controls (which can’t be held onto if you want to become a WRC). Brazil, India and South Africa are all export based economies.
These countries cannot sustain constant current account deficits and thus would need to switch their economies overnight if they wanted to gain WRC status. That isn't feasible.
And the combination of these countries is no better. Imagine all these nations, with different cultures, histories, traditions, governments, and monetary policies all trying to band together and manage ONE currency with a single monetary policy."
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/brics-a-ghost-power
34. Not a fan of his politics but this is pretty spot on about the disaster zone that is California. Lots of telling data here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=balGGAd6ZrI
35. Back to basics. Susa leading the way to specific concentrated, focused funds. Also why multistage funds are a challenging model to execute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWIhC0c2L50
36. Sahil Bloom is an impressive guy. The Personal Holding Company business model exemplified.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm2l9eXAIew
37. Excellent conversation on global macro situation and IPO market. Worth listening to if u want to understand why the IPO market and VC is broken right now.
Lessons from the Borderlands: Innovation & Good Things Happen at the Edges
“La Frontera” is a new show by James Beard Award winning chef and tv show host Pati Jinich where she covers the very US Mexico Border. It’s a fascinating show about the culture & community of the border and the free flow of ideas there.
She states: “Borderland communities exist and live and thrive and get challenged in all sorts of ways, under unique circumstances, so there are these creative possibilities for art and music and religion and food that just couldn’t happen in other places.”
This is an amazing description of frontiers and port towns in general, places where there is a mixing and intermixing of different people and cultures that lead to so many new things.
This is why I think the existence of pluralistic cultures like the USA, Canada, UK, Brazil, Australia/New Zealand are so important. For city states, port towns or places that fit this criteria, I’d include Hawaii, Dubai, Singapore, Panama and Hong Kong (before it was taken over by China) here. Multicultural, tolerant places that allow different cultures to rub against each other. That friction leads to sparks of new thinking, cross pollination. And lots of beautiful people. This is the ultimate in innovation.
Pati goes on to say “we’re made to feel like if you’re a combination of things, you’re a lesser person, but it actually means that you have more. You’re richer.”
I couldn't agree more.
Unhappy in Paradise: Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side
So it’s the end of March and I found myself hanging out in beautiful Maui with my family. The sun is shining, the ocean is a spectacular blue, fringed with stark lush greenery. The weather is perfectly tropical. Food is amazing and everyone is happy here. Life should be good.
Yet it’s 2023, a few weeks after the Silicon Valley Banking crisis, I’m stressed, tired and distracted. Since then, I’ve literally been on calls with my now fairly extensive portfolio of startups. And it’s all bad news. No one calls to talk to you about good news. Founders having cofounder problems, runway or fundraising problems. Or what I experienced in just one week: 4 companies calling me to tell me they are shutting down.
But it’s the game and I accept it. When times are good, enjoy it. But when times are tough, like they are now, it’s your duty and honor to be there for your founders. Otherwise, don’t be an investor.
Fundraising has dried up, VCs and LPs are scared as we enter a risk-off environment where money is now expensive or scarce. Layoffs abound across Silicon Valley and will only accelerate through this year. Mentally you are stressed and struggling.
Yet in contrast, there seem to be so many people around you, especially in my circles that seem to be crushing it. Raising massive sized VC funds, selling their companies, building massively profitable businesses. It’s hard not to feel like a loser, especially when fundraising from LPs has gotten challenging, a bunch of your investee companies are shutting down. You feel stuck and wonder what you are doing wrong. Or even more pernicious, what is wrong with you personally?
But if you want to accomplish anything, you can’t think this way. We don’t know the travails and challenges that others have faced getting there. We still have no idea of the challenges in their life right now. You only see the good stuff. This doesn’t mean take it easy on yourself, let alone excusing yourself.
You have to step away from social media, shake off your doubts and be grateful for what you have. Then dig in deep, refocus and get back to work. You have a responsibility to yourself and your family to keep going hard. And be prepared to do this for a long time. If you do this, you will be fine. Having been in a bunch of cycles myself over the last 2.5 decades I know how these things go. This is a big test of life. Don’t get too down and definitely don’t quit.
Atlas (@DentesLeo) on Twitter says it right:
“I never see the winners complaining about the state of the world, inflation, the crisis or circumstances external to them.
Complaining is a loser's business.
Winners keep playing.”
We can all learn alot from Jeff Bezos here. This is encapsulated in a great tweetstorm by William Green:
“Jeff Bezos on the power of a long time horizon: "If everything you do needs to work on a 3-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a 7-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people…”
"Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in 5 to 7 years. We're willing to plant seeds [&] let them grow....we're stubborn on vision & flexible on details."
(Source: https://twitter.com/WilliamGreen72/status/1641185082361757697)
Taking the long term view is key. So get back to work!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 17th, 2023
“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” – Molière
"The optimal conditions for some ambitious founders may be at odds with what the venture business model requires. That’s not a judgement on the potential scale of the business or the capabilities of the founder; rather, it’s an acknowledgment that the venture model isn’t a great fit for many founders- maybe even the majority of those that raise it.
As the two examples above suggest, there’s a growing wave of founders who are choosing to defer or avoid adding venture risk to their businesses. I think we will see a lot more experienced and capable founders doing the same.
Rather than continuing to hammer on the question of whether a business is or isn’t venture scale, we might be better served asking whether a company and its team are right for venture risk. The likelihood of venture scale is negligible, but the reality of venture risk is universally present once the wire hits."
https://medium.com/@bryce/risky-business-venture-scale-vs-venture-risk-9593cf5ce66c
2. "Given Blumhoue’s focus on horror movies, it’s only fitting to think of how terrifying it would be for Big VC if the low-budget startup goes mainstream…"
https://medium.com/@bryce/the-low-budget-startup-f7d9ed7f139a
3. Vertical media is where it’s at. Everyone needs to be a media co.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1jI11ZJSto
4. I love what this man is doing for the book industry. I love Barnes & Nobles now.
"Daunt was a respected independent bookseller in London before he found himself running chains in both the U.K. and U.S. He was exactly the sort of person who could make Barnes & Noble interesting.
His plan to save the company and its bookstores is to combine the power of a big chain with the pleasure of a beloved indie. By shifting control of the process to individual store managers across the country, Daunt is giving local booksellers permission to do things they were never able to do before.
They have discretion over purchasing, placement and even pricing. He wants Barnes & Noble locations to feel welcoming but not overwhelming—a chain store should be more inviting and less intimidating than a truly independent shop—and that means he needs the people who run them to make sensible decisions for their markets. “It’s only inexcusable if it’s not interesting,” he said.
Daunt, 59, speaks quietly, as if he were in a library, but the insight at the heart of his management philosophy is worth screaming from the rooftops: find people who are passionate about books and let them sell books as they see fit. This sounds rather obvious when he says it. But entrusting a chain to someone who not long ago was running a posh store in Central London was a radical act of corporate desperation.
“I think it had to almost die before anyone was prepared to risk that,” Daunt said as we strolled around the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. “It’s no coincidence that I took over Waterstones when it died and I took over this place when it was barely breathing.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/barnes-noble-bookstores-james-daunt-c1afc06b
5. "I am willing to admit that the creation of a completely digitised currency system can bring efficiency, homogeneity, and unity to a society, just like the ban liang did for the Qin Empire. But it also comes with many downsides.
It overwhelmingly stifles the agency and diversity of how citizens choose to trade on their own terms. It inevitably funnels an increasingly larger percentage of the value an individual possesses into the banking sector, consolidating more wealth into the hands of a few. It allows our overlords to tax us via inflation even more easily than they can already. And most disturbingly, it makes money—an essential tool for survival in the modern world—a tool to further impose control on a population by our governments."
https://abundantia.substack.com/p/illegal-money
6. "The notion of a Zero-Billion Dollar Market is that it’s something that you can see as an entrepreneur, but no one else believes. As we’ve talked about before, being consensus and correct is wonderful in many parts of life, but not in entrepreneurship.
If you’re trying to create something new and valuable then it’s generally down the less traveled path, against the grain, and certainly not wildly obvious to others. Value is located when you’re both non-consensus, or contrarian, and also correct."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/zero-billion-dollar-markets
7. "Choices in foreign policy are never simple and are always sub-optimal. The choice faced now is whether to continue to support Ukraine fighting a messy, tragic war, which it may take time to win, or to let it carry on alone, with the prospect of an even more tragic conclusion from which the Western Alliance, let alone Ukraine, might never recover.
As Western countries are not actually doing the fighting and have the resources to sustain Ukraine in its struggle, in the end this is not that difficult a choice to make."
https://samf.substack.com/p/american-grand-strategy-realism-and
8. "The lesson here is pretty simple: If you’re going to commit a multi-million dollar fraud, don’t get caught… and maybe start a little smaller; a whole airport is a hell of a thing to try and blag. But, as the famous saying goes, God loves a trier."
https://www.dmarge.com/how-a-nigerian-fraudster-sold-a-fake-airport-to-japan-for-375-million
9. This guy is 89 years old but he looks several decades younger. Strong of body and mind and bank balance: Ed Thorp. So much to learn here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvz91Jyzbg
10. "When Cucinelli saw his father's "teary eyes," he decided that the objective of his life would be to give those with whom he worked a moral and economic dignity.
As a result, the fashion mogul has been preaching a new business approach called "Humanistic Capitalism," in which money is seen as a tool to improve the human condition. Services, schools, places of worship, and cultural heritage require capital, but they empower the community.
"I believe in capitalism," Cucinelli says. "I need to make a profit, but I would like to do it with ethics, dignity, morals. It's my dream."
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/the-profile-classic-the-philosopher
11. Part 2: Lots of good frameworks and ideas. The power of long term thinking in investing. Ed Thorp is my new hero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs39QFYIbBY
12. "Today, with its booming technology sector and thriving tourism, Japan continues to be an exciting place to be. The Japanese stock market looks buoyant now and investors are increasingly drawn to the nation, captivated by its strides in chip technology and other innovations.
There is no doubt that Japan has undergone significant transformations over the past decades. Yet, for all its changes, my love for the country remains as steadfast as ever."
https://www.markmobius.com/news-events/japan-love-at-first-sight
13. Always inspiring and educational. David Senra. Kanye self belief with Kobe Bryant work ethic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJYeSTvV5es
14. "Looking at where the offensive stands today, Ukraine’s decision to attrit Russian forces via fires and advance incrementally with small units played to its strengths. This is a grueling fight. The combat power and reserves available to both sides will play a significant role in determining the outcome. Ukraine’s offensive neither is over, nor has it failed. Ukraine’s prospects depend on how well Western countries resource the Ukrainian war effort into the fall, replace lost equipment, and provide the necessary enablers — above all, artillery ammunition.
Ultimately, in planning for their support, Western countries must also think beyond the offensive, rather than taking a wait and see approach. This includes learning lessons from this spring and summer to improve Ukraine’s chances in future offensives. Western efforts should be geared to the assumption that the war will continue well into next year, balancing long-term transition programs, such as the transfer of F-16s and scaled up unit training, with managing Ukraine’s more immediate needs.
The West ought to be introspective about missing important decision points, which had a profound impact on the course of the war, constraining everyone’s options later on. Decisions about future support should have been made well before this offensive even began, assuming that it was unlikely to end the war.
The recent anonymous criticism by officials spilling select narratives in the press, rather than fostering an open discussion about Ukraine’s challenges and successes, reveals enduring problems in this war effort: The first, is a lack of Western understanding of how Ukrainian forces fight. The second, which is closely related, is an insufficient Western presence on the ground to enable closer coordination or even the invaluable understanding that could be offered by battlefield observers.
Western capitals have sought to keep this Ukraine’s war, avoiding an in-country presence that includes contractor support or trainers. To be clear, there are Western contractors and companies operating independently in Ukraine, but this is not the same as a government sanctioned and supported effort. There is much more that could be done without becoming directly involved in fighting or deploying uniformed personnel on the ground.
The hitherto cautious approach has clear limits to its efficacy. Western support thus far has been sufficient to avert a Ukrainian defeat, and arguably has imposed a strategic defeat on Russia, but not enough to ensure a Ukrainian victory. Independent of the outcome of this offensive, Western countries need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this will be a long war. Taken together, Western industrial and military potential greatly exceeds Russia’s, but without the political will, potential alone will not translate into results."
15. "We can and should be aspire to be more like the 747 than the glass cannon. We are entirely capable of enduring, adapting, and overcoming many scenarios and situations, especially in the modern day. Most of the threats and fears that consume us are social or self-esteem related rather than truly life threatening.
But the ancient fear centers of our brain can't always make the distinction.
But when you know you are resilient, fear loses its vice-like grip. You are no longer trapped in its prison. When you know you can handle most any circumstance, whether withering criticism, a bad breakup, an unfortunate firing—you are more willing to aim high and swing big.
You are not a glass cannon. You can take the hit and keep going. So go for it."
https://www.jasonshen.com/168/
16. "The Chinese will also have observed how outrageously and brutally the Russians can behave without Western forces intervening. This will inform the Chinese decision-making about the level of military aggression towards Taiwan before and during any conflict. However, given recent statements about the re-education of the Taiwanese after any Chinese invasion, we can assume that China will not recoil from the kind of brutality demonstrated by Russia against the Ukrainian people in the past 18 months.
Nearly 600 days since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion, we must assume that the Chinese government and their military has studied this war at least as closely as they studied the 1991 Gulf War. It is prudent that we assume they will learn and adapt, even if there are gaps or shortfalls in the institutional capacity for the Chinese to make a full range of transformations based on Ukraine.
Because their learning and adaptation does not have to make them perfect. They just need to be slightly better than their adversaries."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/what-china-is-learning-from-the-ukraine
17. It's been fascinating watching the journey of the brilliant Liberman brothers. The guys are on the cutting edge of the tech business industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zP75PCZ_P0&t=4272s
18. Burning Man is not for me but we live in a free country so do whatever. Don’t understand the hate for it.
"It’s perfectly fine to ignore stuff you don’t care about, or don’t like. There are any number of reasons Burning Man is probably not for you. It’s probably not for me, honestly, at this stage of my life. But the hatred for it? That has nothing to do with the event, which most of the haters online have never attended. It also has nothing to do with people at the event, who most of the haters have never met. No, this wasn’t about techies or hippies or woke idiots. This wasn’t about socialism, or God.
For the average hater, this was war with the demonic apparitions of their own self-doubt, and all their insecurities, on a public stage before an audience of millions. The “cringe social media influencers” were not at Burning Man, in other words. They were glued to their newsfeeds, inside, on a nice day. A little bit pathetic, if we’re being honest.
Now try to be less embarrassing, or at least have the decency to shut up and let people like shit."
https://www.piratewires.com/p/rage-against-the-wooden-man
19. "Argentina’s GDP graph cratering from the heights of one of the wealthiest nations on earth is one for the history books, and it has become a famous case study at this point of what not to do if a country likes economic growth and prosperity. Today we will go over some of the causes of the century long decline, and reasons why Argentina never fully goes bust compared to countries like Venezuela or Cuba."
https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/argentinas-century-long-decline
20. "Today we dive into the fascinating story of one of the early flag planters of Argentina who even minted his own shitcoins, and the related campaign to conquer as must of the unclaimed deserted territory in the south as possible before Chile was able to lay a claim on most of Patagonia.
As you can see, planting flags and expanding territory was a bit more violent in those times."
https://www.bowtiedmara.io/p/argentinas-last-frontier-and-the
21. I think we are all rooting for Kleiner Perkins to make their comeback. One of the storied firms in SV, expousing the craftsman mentality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRGp6npx0PI
22. "So you can see the changing contours of a new emerging order. With Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi leading the charge (and Brasilia and Pretoria as fellow travellers) an attempt is made to shift dependence on the West towards new power centres who can shape world events to their favour by collaborating. Again, the war in Ukraine is a case in point and Russia is a keen partner of team BRICS.
At best it is a mixed bunch with aspirations that are hard to materialize. BRICS is more of directional movement than a power block that is ready to dismantle the US-led world. But if Americans do vote to retreat there is an opportunity for this grouping to begin to start influencing that global order in a more serious way.
Much like BRICS itself that order is increasingly a fractured one where different power centres will strive to preserve their place in a decentralized and less global world."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/brics-time
23. "I would argue that the only thing that China has perhaps learned from Putin's wars on Ukraine has been that Fortress Russia economic settings have worked in that they have provided some durability to the Russian economy in the face of Western sanctions. And I think what we have seen in recent years is the adoption of Fortress China economic policy settings.
This has meant accelerating efforts at deleveraging - trying to let down bubbles in the real estate, shadow banking, et al sectors. And on the growth front, it means accepting a much lower growth target which the hope is that it ensures fewer balance sheet vulnerabilities going forward to Western sanctions when they inevitably come.
Xi is also building a nationalist economic narrative - a more socially inclusive, almost socialist agenda, "levelling down" almost to ensure the support of the mass of the population both while he has embarked on the concentration of power around himself but as the geopolitical outlook darkens. I assume herein if there is a trade off lower real GDP growth for geopolitical insulation/security that Xi assumes its more important to take the majority of the population with him rather than the elites and middle class who have done best from the globalisation trend over the past 30 years. This explains his attack on private education, corruption and the affordability of housing.
The combined impact of all the above has been a crisis of confidence in China both because of the slowdown in foreign investment but also the policy choices, and mistakes, being rolled out by Xi and his team."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/china-copies-fortress-economic-policy
24. So many ways to build an enduring VC firm. Lessons from General Catalyst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HESSmrfCgF4
25. "I must now acknowledge that I was entirely mistaken. Not only has the VC industry suffered significant setbacks in recent times, but the surviving VC firms are those that have adhered closely to the original VC playbook.
A whole era of rapid growth and innovation has receded into the past—the metaphorical door closing on startups. Yet, ample space remains for excelling and prospering at doing capitalism, similar to the scenario in the 1970s, when trailblazers introduced us to novel business strategy tools and methodologies, as well as leveraged buyouts."
https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/startups-the-door-is-closing
26. "World War 2 wasn’t just the thing that brought the United States all the way back from the Depression; it made the U.S. the center of global innovation for many decades to come.
That history is probably on China’s leaders’ minds as they contemplate starting a major great-power conflict. Of course there are other possible outcomes as well — Germany, Japan, Russia, and Britain didn’t benefit economically from the world wars, to say the least. But with their economy in the dumps and their technology under pressure from foreign restrictions, China’s leaders may see the potential upside of war mobilization as a benefit to add into their mental calculations.
Ultimately, I still think that war would be a very foolish choice for China — the risk of having its rise crushed by a global coalition, or being obliterated in a nuclear exchange, outweighs the modest gains from conquering pieces of Asia. China is already a very large country, with little need for additional territory or population; conquest and hegemony simply aren’t worth the risk.
But as leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm to Vladimir Putin have shown, national leaders are not always wise or risk-averse. And when the economic costs of war decrease and the potential upside increases, their natural overconfidence and aggression may gain the upper hand. Unfortunately, every economic factor I can think of seems to point to a major war being less risky for China on the margin compared to five or ten years ago. All I can say is that I hope cooler heads prevail and deterrence succeeds."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-slowdown-and-the-incentives
27. "A moat can be based on various factors, such as your tech, your network, your brand, oryour customer loyalty. A moat matters because it helps you generate more value for your stakeholders and reduces the risk of disruption or commoditization. And they usually grow stronger over time.
Building moats is easier said than done. In the early stages, moats are difficult or nearly impossible to demonstrate.
The strongest moats help ensure you have a business that sustains value over the long run, and honing in on these levers early on can help you focus your strategy. Moats often grow by just executing. They are compounding. So, ask yourself this: What is your compounding moat?"
https://www.yannickoswald.com/post/what-is-your-moat
28. "As one thoughtful Ukrainian colleague put it in a later discussion, they expected someone would ‘open the gates’ for them. Hence little effort was made to isolate the theater, cut ground lines of communication, or engage in other actions that I think analysts anticipated as part of the operation. Russian forces did not conduct a combined arms operation, but essentially drove in, initially trying to conduct ‘thunder runs’ along divergent axes of advance.
This takes us to why analysts rated Ukrainian chances as low. I think there were several reasons for this, but I would highlight that Ukraine did not appear to be preparing a defense against a full-scale invasion. Kyiv had taken steps in secret, but many of the preparations, from mobilization to deployments, were made last minute, and often from the bottom up."
https://samf.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-mike-kofman
29. "The reality is that the vast majority of businesses cannot possibly support the type of super-linear growth required to go from zero to $100m+ in annual revenue in 7-10 years. Marvin Liao of Diaspora Ventures noted that companies whose revenue grows linearly with the number of employees, like consulting firms, will never be able to achieve this. That doesn’t mean those aren’t incredible businesses — it just means that they’re not a fit for VC funding.
Unfortunately, many founders aren’t ready to hear this.
Between the deafening hype of VC in the media and the encouraging yet often misguided notion that all founders need to do is find “just one investor” who sees their vision, too many founders get caught up on an endless quest to find mythical investors that simply don’t exist."
https://chrisneumann.com/blog/vc-probably-isnt-right-for-you
30. "One question that I often get from founders — how did we feel after surviving Facebook? Waking up to news that Facebook is your newest competitor is a nightmare for almost every consumer founder, so I understand the curiosity.
The easy answer is we felt invincible coming to work everyday. We had survived our greatest threat.
We don’t have championships in tech, but if there is a championship to win as a consumer company, beating Facebook in your own market is the trophy you want to win."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/when-facebook-tried-to-kill-tinder
31. Learning about the craft of VC here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUTL5NNQOE
32. Pretty solid discussion on how to build a podcast show. I love "Acquired."
Good guys those two.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixN-HR-aR8A&t=156s
33. Defensetech is here.
“Part of the movement is driven by an awareness of the Russian war in Ukraine, several VCs said, which has highlighted the role defense can play in protecting values of democracy.
You have an aggressor nation, taking land and causing death and destruction to civilians,” said Raj Shah, managing partner of Shield Capital, adding that tech workers “want to do something to help and they want to have meaning in their lives. And photo-sharing apps are only so important.”
As Lux co-founder Josh Wolfe said, “Do you want to build software that has people clicking on ads, or do you want to do things that have a lasting impact on the safety and security of the American people and helping to reduce human suffering around the world?”
There is No Finish Line: Playing the Long Game
I came across an excellent post by CEO coach Matt Munson, a few months ago. It really triggered a lot of thinking. The title is perfect and has been a big struggle throughout my adult life: “Rethinking Ambition: How to navigate the tension between reaching high and living a more content life.”
He goes on to say:
“One key mistake I made was not aligning my work with a purpose I cared about. Another was approaching the work with a finish line in mind.
I hold ambition quite differently now.
There is no end game to our work at my coaching firm Sanity Labs. We know the change we exist to effect, but there is no arriving. And that is how we like it.”
Source: https://www.mattmunson.me/rethinking-ambition/
I’ve always been very goal driven. I’ve always been very type A-aggressive. It’s gotten me to where I am now. This is the formula that is driven into our brains growing up.
It’s our programming: “If I get X, then I will be Y.” A common example for many young people: “If I make a billion dollars, I will be happy”. Or If I get married, I will never be lonely and my life will be fulfilled.” You think your happiness and contentment will happen when you get there or meet your goal.
Yet like many people, when you hit your big goals, what happens is, surprise, surprise, you aren’t as happy as you thought you would be. So then you go pick new goals in the hope that this will fix that. But like any treadmill it never ends. You find out that when your happiness is dependent on these goals, you never end up being fulfilled.
As I’ve gotten older, gotten past old goals and learned more about myself, I’ve realized that there is no end goal except the end of your life. So the cliche of enjoying the journey becomes even more important. You can still have a mission, you can still have big ambitions and be goal oriented. But if you aren’t enjoying the path most of the time, with a big stress on “most of the time”, you are probably doing something wrong.
It’s not to see you have to become a complete hedonist or sybarite, you still have to grind, to do hard things that hurt and challenge you. Having massive sized goals does that for you. Humans thrive on challenge and hardship and this is what brings out the best of us. It’s that careful balance between ambition and contentment. That’s what true happiness really is about in life: Understanding that there is no finish line, except for death.
This has been a big relief to me personally and has allowed me to really enjoy my life. I believe this might help you too.