It is the Best of Times: Life in the Post ZIRP-Boom Silicon Valley
I love being in Silicon Valley most of the time. It is by nature a “Gold Rush” town with fierce boom and bust cycles. The boom is fun but it does get silly and stupid near the end. Filled with get rich quick carpetbaggers that just seem to ruin everything. I admit I was one of these folks when I got here in the first Dotcom bubble in the late 90s. Thankfully after 25+ years I’ve absorbed some of the core values here.
But the bust that started in 2022 is still in full swing despite the insanity we see lingering in Generative AI. Nature is healing after the last 5 years of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) induced craziness that started in 2016 and ended in 2022.
We are going back to basics. And many of these basics are the core values that made this place special.
We are back to building and back to “show me, don’t tell me” phase of Silicon Valley. This is the best time, when everyone has written you off but you and your team are quietly building and selling in the background. It’s fun, scary and exciting.
Your background doesn’t really matter unlike on the east coast. We don’t care what school you went to or where you worked before whether McKinsey, Goldman or Google.
All that matters is: are you willing to get your hands dirty and do the work. Are you willing to grind at something for the long term. Long term here means 5-10 years not 2 years, or even 3 years. That you are going to do whatever it takes to make it happen. That you are building something that fulfills your curiosity, solves a real problem in an interesting, novel way and is also a net positive for society.
This attitude is what originally made Silicon Valley the wonder of the world and will keep us there. Exciting times for founders and investors and I am personally glad to still be here.
HaLT: The Stages of Relapse & Importance of Discipline
Chris Williamson is one of the best new podcasters around. Great interviewer and goes deep with some top guests. Bedros Keulian was no different. I learned a key term called HALT.
Hungry, Lonely or Tired. These are the stages when you relapse to your old bad habits, lose control or fall back on progress. It’s important to understand how each of these feelings affect you. For me I get especially irritable, affected or weak when I am tired.
This is also why building strong habits are so important for progress in your life.
It’s why the military drills you like crazy to overcome these stages. Some anonymous Navy SEAL once said: “Under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That's why we train so hard.”
So instilling strong regular habits into your brain, drilling your mindset to be more optimistic and be more action oriented is key to growth. There are many times when you are Hungry, Lonely or Tired, especially when you travel. Long flights, bad food, no sleep because of crazy schedules and jet lag.
This is where discipline and the strength of routines come into play. I force myself to do the cold showers, meditation and work out routines even when I am tired or seem to be running out of time. You make the time because if I don’t do these things I feel like I am breaking a promise to myself. And there are big differences in your performance and effectiveness during the day when you don’t follow through. Discipline and routines help you overcome the stages of HaLT.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 20th, 2024
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou
"When people think about the risks of outsourcing, the first thing that comes to mind is usually IP (intellectual property). In actuality, the impact of outsourcing on a company’s IP is generally low. A typical contract with an outsourcing agency or freelancer will make clear which aspects of the work product belong to the company and which (if any) belong to the contractor. So there should be no surprises.
However, there is an indirect impact that outsourcing has on IP that many founders underestimate: the institutional knowledge that a startup loses out on by not having solved the problem itself.
When you outsource development of something, the project is typically defined in terms of input and output. Rarely, if ever, does the project specification define how that should be done. The company will likely make some suggestions based on their experience and expertise, but the “how” is usually left up to the agency or freelancer. As a result, the startup doesn’t get the benefits of all of the lessons learned along the way while building the project.
And those lessons and their associated learnings can be significant."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/why-i-dont-invest-in-outsourced-startups
2. "Starting in the late 19th century, the elites running global governments made a deal with the plebes. If the plebes handed over more and more of their freedoms, the “smart” people running the state would create a calm universe by keeping entropy, chaos, and volatility at bay. As the decades progressed and the role of government became greater in every citizen’s life, it became extremely expensive to maintain a veneer of ever-increasing order in a world becoming more complex as our knowledge about our universe increased.
Previously, a few men wrote books that were the definitive source of truth about how the universe operated. They killed or shunned any man that practised science. But as we removed the shackles of organised religion and thought critically about the universe we inhabit, we realised we know nothing and things are much more complex than you would otherwise believe if you just read the Bible, Torah, or Koran, for example. It is then understandable that humans flocked to politicians (mostly men, a few women) who replaced priests, rabbis, and imams (always men, never women) in offering a prescriptive way to live that promises safety and a rubric to understand how the universe operates. But whenever volatility spiked, the response was to print money and paper over whatever problems were ailing the world so as not to admit no one knows what the fuck is going to happen in the future.
Just like when you hold an inflated ball underwater, the deeper you push the ball, the more energy is required to maintain its position. The distortions are so extreme globally, especially for Pax Americana, that the amount of printed money required to maintain the status quo grows exponentially each year. That is why I can say with confidence that the amount of printed money from now until the eventual system reset will dwarf the total amount that has been printed from 1971 to date. It’s just maths and physics.
Assuming you don’t misuse fiat leverage, the real risk is when the elites can no longer suppress volatility, and it surges to its natural level. At that point, the system resets. Will it be a revolution like in Bolshevik Russia, where bourgeois asset holders got wiped out entirely, or like the more common varieties where one group of corrupt elites is replaced by another and the misery of the masses continues under a new “ism?”
In any case, everything goes down, and Bitcoin just falls less vs. the ultimate asset … energy. You are still outperforming, even though your overall wealth is diminished. Sorry, there ain’t nothing in the universe that is risk-free. Safety is an illusion peddled by charlatans pining for your vote on election day."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/volatility-supercycle
3. Seriously valuable discussion on the art and science of practicing venture capital from one of the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKQLq4NxMro
4. "A model that is trained on a specific problem, by a team who intimately understands each industry’s control points, with an excellent user experience focused on a specific vertical, can gain a lot of traction in today’s SaaS world. More traction, in fact, than many are giving it credit for.
We’re at a pivotal moment where several factors are converging to create a perfect storm of vertical SaaS innovation. The endpoint of this shift is what we call “the verticalization of everything:” AI empowered vertical companies are going to unbundle and dominate compared to horizontal SaaS.
Great companies are changing the way they look at software in general – it’s not just about incorporating algorithmic intelligence. It’s like hiring a superstar employee. The ability to understand and execute job tasks at a high level is only the beginning. Those hires distinguish themselves by understanding the larger context of the organization, and the domain you’re operating in, and fluently translate that understanding to others.
AI-powered companies with deep vertical expertise should be like superstar employees. Perhaps we may even think of them that way in the future."
https://www.nfx.com/post/verticalization-of-everything
5. This was a great episode for what’s up in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJSHXl36e9M
6. Actually, really insightful discussion this week. The section on VC and AI killing call centers was excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUA9QgqkxM
7. This was a thoughtful interview and discussion from one of this generations best founders and entrepreneurs.
Zuck was widely known as a great strategist but he really has come into his own in recent years.
Learning through suffering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QciJ9ubeLQk
8. Fun discussion this week on NIA. Mr Beast Memo teardown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5vvxhhl5HA
9. One of the best operating execs around. It's clear now that it was skill not luck. Google, Softbank and Palo Alto Networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7sSi9h6nYM
10. This is an important geopolitical discussion around AI, lots of alternative and "spicy" takes. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d6U0t8wTI4
11. Lots of great insights from a top vc for founders and investors: have an internal locus of control. 1517 Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiEqLvZKOb4
12. "Because it’s probably the country least affected by anti-growth, anti-progress, and anti-technology ideology, China represents the future of energy technology better than anyone else. And that future appears to be slow growth in nuclear, but an explosion of solar.
Nuclear still has important uses — in particular, where land and sunlight are scarce. But it’ll be a relatively niche energy source — a backup to the solar and batteries that form the backbone of our energy usage.
We shouldn’t hate nuclear power, or fear it. It really is good for the environment, and it really did get mistreated by the regulators and social movements of the 20th century — especially in America. Our failure to build nuclear when it was the best alternative energy source is a cautionary tale in how panic and misguided ideals can lead to national self-sabotage. And it will certainly be a useful supplement to solar and batteries.
But at the same time, we need to let that nuclear retrofuture go. We need to understand that even without regulation, nuclear would have been passed up by solar and batteries. We might have gotten the glossy 50s-poster atompunk future for three decades or so, but we missed our chance. Fortunately, the only reason we missed our chance is that we found something even better. Sometimes the future you get is even more amazing than the ones you merely imagine."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/let-go-of-the-nuclear-retrofuture
13. This talk happened 9 years ago. I was there and it was instrumental in changing my views on the world of work. If you rewatch this, Peter Levels was incredibly prescient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD8eC_hSMCU
14. This is a masterpiece and incredible state of the VC & Startup Industry. Must watch. Explains a lot of the situation in Silicon Valley right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWcoZVSx1T8
15. Incredible teardown of the amazing career of Francis Ford Coppola. So much about the business of creativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i5WT7YWttA
16. For Silicon Valley OGs, this is one of the top conversations around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ZKbMWUjsM
17. One of the top shows on what's up in Silicon Valley news, sentiment and trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIHB620QUYY
18. Energy in America and how Data centers are driving increasing demand. This is a very helpful video to understand what's happening in America in this important driver of our economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6uCUuQwEog
19. "The fix is on the demand side. If we want to stop illegal immigration, we need to decrease demand by raising the costs and enacting real deterrence. The quickest route to a solution would involve punishing employers. Create a biometric database of documented immigrants. Then levy any employer who knowingly hires somebody who’s not on it with a $10,000 fine. No restaurant is going to risk getting hit for $50,000 hiring five cooks or dishwashers without papers. No chicken processing plant is going to risk a $1 million fine for hiring 100.
This, of course, will likely not happen. Too many of the people who employ undocumented workers also employ lobbyists and give significant money to politicians. Those politicians are happy to accommodate their backers and exploit the racism and fear of many Americans by continuing to tell lies about immigration.
I believe one of the keys to healthy relationships and relative harmony is to not inject agita (argue, get upset, etc.) when the stakes are low. To not create disharmony where there isn’t a real problem. Yes, illegal immigration is a real problem, but why let it divide us when neither side seems genuine about fixing it, or even having an honest discussion? I believe we will have immigration reform once the perception of the problem appears to eclipse the benefits of our existing hush-hush system. And maybe that time has come.
The fix will need to come in the middle of the election cycle; the issue is too easy for politicians to demagogue when they’re campaigning. Again, if we’re serious about the issue, why was the legislation presented during an election year?"
https://www.profgalloway.com/unserious-people/
20. Good stuff this episode. How to turnaround the Japanese economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV264WqRdg8&t=1s
21. The first 3/4 of this podcast are excellent when they speak about Silicon Valley and startups, I disagree with their take on geopolitics and Russia-Ukraine. I think they are misinformed here (and don't travel enough).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Rd-y2xe84
22. Fun and interesting conversation on consumer AI trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4egz4IiHNY
23. The new intellectual Renaissance in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rCJbZwooE4
24. A must watch with one of the most thoughtful frontier tech investors around. Been following Compound for a while. Incredibly insightful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZmLtgKzfN4
25. "Investing has never been harder than it is today because there are so many distractions tempting us to trade and speculate on anything, anywhere, all the time, but investing is supposed to be a passive endeavor.
We have a stock market that has averaged 9% returns annually for the last century, and, sure, future returns of that level aren’t guaranteed, but the track record looks good so far. Less than a year ago, you could get a guaranteed 5% return on 10-year treasuries. You can just invest your money here, keep adding money over time, let compounding do its thing, and you’ll be just fine.
But no one wants to talk about long-term compounding when you can trade your way to a 100% return, right here, right now. Just hit the correct buttons, of course. And that’s why investing is so hard in 2024: how are you supposed to take a “long-term” perspective on anything when your brain is constantly stimulated by temptations begging you to make a trade?"
https://www.youngmoney.co/p/investing-in-an-age-of-distraction
26. I love the Great Gatsby. This is a great history of the book and how it became so popular.
https://oldbooksguy.substack.com/p/how-an-obscure-book-became-a-classic
27. "When AI products are sold as services, they replace in-house labor. This changes internal processes.
When the internal processes change, the opportunity to replace the system of record arises because the existing workflows are no longer relevant.
Selling service-as-a-software enables a startup to change the way a customer works. Behavior change is hard. But successfully executed, it’s a moat."
https://tomtunguz.com/services-as-vector-sor/
28. "Caro’s experience reminded me of what it was like to be an investor. Paradoxically, good investing is boring, yet discovering a great investment is exciting. It’s like the investor looks around, stops, squints, and goes “Oh, that’s weird.”
This is also what made great investors interesting to me. They spent their lives trying to find what others missed and their careers seemed like portfolios of surprising insights. I found the same curiosity in both Caro and Mr. Beast and it felt as inspiring as their passion."
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/the-truth-sifters-can-you-find-gold
29. "In 2021, everyone wanted to become a VC, and it was easy to raise. It attracted the wrong crowd. We don’t want people to get into VC because they think it’s easy or cool or the pathway to a lifestyle.
Now, interest rates are higher, and fewer are trying. But there’s still capital there for people with the vision and expertise to go after it. And you should go after it. We need people to get into VC because they have a vision for the future that others don’t, and believe they can make the vision a reality.
If we have the same types of people looking for the same types of investments, we’re never going to get big, radical ideas off the ground."
https://www.nfx.com/post/how-to-start-your-own-vc-fund
30. Zuck's view of the future. It's pretty fascinating and exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX7OduG1YmI
31. "If winners hire winners, and losers hire losers, what do bureaucrats hire? More bureaucrats of course.
The reason is that companies that highly prize consensus, process, etc., will inevitably hire the people who are good at executing against this set of constraints. This continues and continues, until the moment the company is required to actually move nimbly to face off against an entrepreneurial new startup (example: car companies versus Tesla) or a big technology trend occurs (example: AI and Europe). Because there’s so much that’s unknowable about these situations, and so much of what’s required is just to try things and learn things fall apart. The highly consensus-driven, collaborative organization that has become staffed with self-replicating bureaucrats end up not being able to bureaucrat themselves out of the situation.
The cycle of life
This phenomenon is so ubiquitous that it’s almost a cycle of life within tech.
A new, nimble startup with an aggressive new founder(s) emerges
To scale, it hires well-intentioned, competent managers
It wins the market (woohoo!) and IPOs
Later, bureaucrats who are attracted to peacetime (and brand, and stability) sneak into the company. They have shiny resumes
The entrepreneurial people quit, or leave, and can’t deal with the new processes. The bureaucrats take over. The founder either checks out, or retires
The company is in Bureaucrat Mode
A new, nimble startup then emerges…
Without this cycle of life, the tech industry would not exist. I saw this first hand at Uber, which was respected as the fastest-moving big company led by an aggressive founder, and eventually things got bogged down as it grew."
https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/bureaucrat-mode
32. "Unlike with previous generations of software companies, investors and founders are underwriting science risk as well as product risk. In the 2000s era of SaaS, we knew the cloud worked, and we knew how to make software on it.
The only question was if you could make a product that used the cloud in a way that benefited customers. With agents—both tooling and models—we haven’t completely figured out the science of making it work, let alone the product.
That is a mouthful, so let me repeat myself as simply as possible: This shit does not currently work, but investors are betting it can. Many assume we are just one or two scientific advancements away in models or tooling to make agents available at scale."
33. "The last post in this series discussed the ways in which the supply networks underlying modern economies can break down: concentrated dependence on an upstream supplier like Russia; the complexity trap of economy-wide gridlock when most of the nodes and links in a large system are simultaneously hurt by, say, spiking energy prices. During the crisis triggered by Russia’s war, German business leaders were lobbying the government aggressively to take these arguments seriously in forging its foreign policy.
They were successful. But, in August 2022, despite Germany’s forbearance, Moscow turned off the taps, closing the critical Nord Stream 1 pipeline.
The expected economic apocalypse? It never came. Germany's economy actually grew by nearly 2% in 2022. Winter brought only a "technical mini-recession".
How did Germany defy forecasts of economic doom? The answer lies in a textbook macroeconomic idea whose origins go as far as 1955: Economies are far more adaptable than individual companies—they have more substitution possibilities. Think of the economy as a forest ecosystem: while a single tree species might struggle with changing conditions, the forest as a whole can adapt and thrive.
By reviving and quantifying this insight, a team of leading economists accurately predicted that the overall impact on Germany of cutting ties with Russia would be small. If some firms could substitute Russian imports in their production, even imperfectly, they could provide a route for the German economy as a whole to go around the missing Russian gas.
While some heavily gas-dependent firms struggled, others found creative solutions."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/strategies-to-secure-americas-supply
34. This is a great discussion on excellence whether in Olympics, Navy Seals and Startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c8Jrj3v8qM
35. "In this example of aligning interview questions with core values, we took one value I care about and organized a series of common questions around it to assess how the candidate responds and presents their answers. Entrepreneurs would do well to enumerate their core values and ensure that, during the interview process, they have a series of questions for each core value and a rubric to score responses accordingly."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/09/28/align-interview-questions-with-core-values-2/
36. "So why is this allowed? And why do consumers continue to eat this junk? A major reason is the food industry’s lobbying power, which spent $28 million last year to keep the same ingredients banned in Europe legal in the U.S. The influence of processed food giants has a direct impact on public health policy, allowing known harmful ingredients to remain in circulation.
Other causes of this health epidemic include a lack of food education, the loss of the art of cooking, misleading advertising and seductive labelling with words like “natural.” Food deserts, where fresh food is difficult to access, affect 17 per cent of Americans. Even when fresh food is available, the long distances it must travel often deplete its nutritional value, necessitating the use of preservatives. Some foods are so laden with chemicals that even mould refuses to grow on them, no matter how long you leave them on the counter.
Adding insult to injury, the pharmaceutical industry preys on the health problems caused by processed food. Americans spend an astronomical amount on medications, accounting for about 45 per cent of the global pharmaceutical market. The pharmaceutical industry spends significantly more than the food industry on lobbying efforts to ensure consumers remain dependent on medications."
37. "Don’t be a YouTube creator.
Don’t be a personal brand.
Don’t be an influencer.
Be you. But in a place where your work can be discovered, followed, and supported. Right now and for the foreseeable future, that’s on the internet.
The internet is a tool.
Social media is a tool.
Software is a tool.
If you think these things are toxic and negative, that’s a direct reflection of yourself. Algorithms show you more of what you pay attention to. Social media, for the right people, is the singular thing that will change their life. If you believe it’s toxic, you close yourself off to that reality.
These new forms of technology are tools to display your work, your art, your findings in the unknown that others can benefit from.
Jordan Peterson isn’t a “content creator.”
He goes on tours, writes books, leverages social media as a base, and uses all of the tools at his disposal to spread his life’s work. He isn’t worried about the latest content idea trend. His mind outperforms any of those myopic growth strategies. The quality of his ideas is what sets him apart and changes people’s lives (regardless of your opinion on Peterson)."
https://thedankoe.com/letters/the-death-of-the-personal-brand-and-what-comes-next/
38. "So yes, another game changer. We are going into a phase of more uncertainty sure, but Israel has boldly re-arranged the power balance, reasserted deterrence and regained the initiative."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/eliminated
39. "Taking the human out of the loop opens up a massive new frontier, and a troubling one at that.
This is what’s so important to understand. The man-in-the-loop (MITL) control concept is hugely restrictive on what lower-end drones — including longer-range kamikaze types — could potentially do. This is especially true if you are trying to hit a dynamic target or target of opportunity at significant distances. These barriers rapidly degrade when the drone has the ability to pick its own targets using commercially available sensors and onboard artificial intelligence-enabled hardware and software.
What you end up with via the injection of machine learning/AI into lower-end weaponized drones are far smarter, more dynamic, and far less predictable weapons that are harder to defend against. With the current ‘man-in-the-loop’ shackles cast off, these weapons will take on a much more impactful role on the battlefield of tomorrow than what they have already achieved."
https://www.twz.com/news-features/drone-warfares-terrifying-ai-enabled-next-step-is-imminent
40. “Your time is limited,” Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech, “so don't waste it living someone else’s life.” Well yes. What he doesn’t mention is how many people it took to stage the story in which he was the main character.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can of course be true to yourself working for other people (and getting Apple stock must have been a sweet deal). I’m not saying don’t compromise. I am saying the world is ready for you to cast you as an extra in someone else’s story. To avoid this regret, you have to build something like an anti-force field around your truth.
We’re so used to doing the opposite. We’re rewarded for pitching ourselves, for condensing our lives into easily digestible tiny Hero’s journeys. But words shape reality and the stories we tell get etched into our minds. One day, we wake up and think that’s us. Decades later, we wake up and regret."
https://alchemy.substack.com/p/dying-without-regrets-how-to-see
41. "The very best entrepreneurs are not just storytellers. And the very best business builders are not just chasing payoffs. The people who build the most exceptional businesses are those that understand the artistically nuanced balance between big promises and big payoffs. Do they deliver every time? No. But they deliver enough to maintain that balance; that equilibrium between fantasy and reality.
The best stories are those that compel you to believe in them, but its the payoff that rewards the faith people put in storytellers. Its when I'm promised a product or feeling or experience that compels me. And then I get it!
Bezos' customer obsession principle isn't "pay super close attention to what the customer wants so we can tell them a nicer and nicer story." You're obsessed with the customer because you want to understand the payoff they're hoping for and then tell them a story that will compel them to believe you long enough for you to deliver.
Investors spend a lot of time wondering about the question, "what do you have to believe?" But as you spend more time with a company or a founder, you also need to start asking yourself, "why should I believe this?" One of the most common phrases at Contrary Research that we use to push back on each other is “prove it.”
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/loudest-or-proudest
42. Good perspective on global macro and end of globalization by Zeihan. Massive inflation coming over the next 5 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ6NFuFjao
43. This show is always fun and educational. Two accomplished people talking about new and interesting things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq8iS5VsAHQ
44. "Anxiety and depression are now twice as common among students as concerns about academics or relationships.
Don’t expect more positivity in popular culture until we reverse these trends.
But we might have already created a vicious circle where a bleak society leads to gloomy songs and stories, which further amplify the depression and desolation.
In other words, the culture is not just an effect—it’s also a cause.
If that’s true, the people who have the most responsibility here are entertainment execs as well as technocrats who run the main cultural platforms—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Their algorithms and addictive interfaces are literally the growth engines for dysfunction. They amplify it, they disseminate it, they help it go viral."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-did-pop-culture-get-so-gloomy
45. Fascinating conversation with Silicon Valley thinker and intellectual, Samo Burja.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfLUxVHbXSA
46. "What does this mean for VCs? The overall basket of early-stage investing is nowhere near as attractive as it was in 2014. The AVERAGE manager is likely going to produce far less exciting returns in today’s environment, than those of these previous vintages.
Early-stage investors need to figure out their “right to win more” than ever and practice discipline to ensure they are breaking away from the crowd. Those that do are likely to deliver returns that resemble those that look far more like the 1999–2000 vintages.
What does this mean for LPs? They need to look back at managers from prior vintages and determine whether past performance was driven by skill or luck. Michael Mauboussin often writes on the entanglement of these and the danger of focusing on outcome > process.
Turns out a lot of prior managers benefitted from a bull market (some of which were more lucky than skillful), so it may be worth considering new managers capable of addressing the needs of today’s market rather than assuming the prior returns will persist."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/untangling-luck-from-skill-bbda640bee5e
47. "So, when she was named CEO of Food52 in April, the appointment felt odd.
While Barstool serves an audience of young men seeking sports takes and blue humor, the chic food media firm, started by New York Times journalists Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, caters to an affluent, primarily female readership with a penchant for boutique flatware and seasonal cooking.
The two media publishers—on the surface, at least—could hardly be more different. But Badan sees it as a “natural fit.”
“I think to evolve your career, you need to do things that scare you, and I knew I wanted to work with a different kind of customer,” Badan said. “There is never going to be another Barstool, but I liked the idea of an organic content experience that can be monetized in multiple ways and serve a commerce business.”
https://www.adweek.com/media/erika-badan-food52-barstool-sports/
Life as an Introvert in a People Business: How to Thrive
For those who have known me in my various business careers, they are usually surprised to find out that I am pretty introverted. My natural inclination is towards books and the internet versus meeting. It’s not that I don’t like meeting and hanging out with people. I do and enjoy it. But like many introverts, too much social time is draining. In fact it’s both physically and mentally exhausting.
I only learned this during my time at Yahoo! traveling the world, meeting colleagues, business partners and clients all over for days and weeks on end.
I tend to have pretty good health but I found myself getting very sick all the time. It wasn’t the travel, it was the intense level of social activities and constant meetings every single day. Even on weekends. I discovered the cure was pretty simple. Just taking a day to myself every week. Just one day of time to myself to recover my energy, literally hiding in my hotel room just reading and surfing the web or watching stupid movies, ordering room service.
Resting ethic is important. It’s no different than taking time after a heavy work out at the gym. You need recovery time. Same with your mind & emotions. It’s the only way you can be your best self. Time for yourself to recover, to read and think and get perspective. It’s great to be able to do your own thing by yourself. It helps you rebuild energy to effectively engage others when you can jump back into the fray.
The Red Queen Effect: Infinite Competition in the New World Order
The Red Queen Effect comes from the famous “Alice in Wonderland” story. Basically it posits that you have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place you are. It certainly sounds like hell to most people I am sure. But I’ve never shied away from reality.
Think about the world we are in. Massive changes are increasing all the time. Change driven by geopolitics on one side as the world splits into the 3 big spheres of the Global West (US/ Europe/Japan) versus the Global East (Russia/China) versus the Global South (Latam, SE Asia & Africa). Globalization as we know it is over as these blocks focus on self sufficiency versus trade with other blocks.
Yet, what will not change is the globalization of talent and the increasing capability and expertise from hungry, hard working, well educated workers from the developed world. Ie. Emerging markets of India; Eastern Europe etc. People Willing to work harder and cheaper than those workers in the developed world.
All of this is enabled by the continuing growth trend of technology. Look at the previously much hyped Artificial Intelligence (AI), as exemplified by ChatGPT. As the excellent folks at BowtiedBull state:
“AI is just a scarier word for software. It is the same thing. The only difference is that the software is improving its capabilities in an exponential fashion. That “small difference” of course is enormous but the point stands. AI is simply advanced software.”
One of the fastest growing and adopted technology products ever: think of it as a booster for your brain. This kind of AI enables a white collar worker to do the job of 4-5 people (maybe more as it gets better). It also raises the requirements and the bar for anyone working in their occupation. It provides massive leverage for companies but consequently fewer jobs.
This is leading to massive future shock of the populace who are having a hard time adjusting, let alone understanding what is happening to their world and their jobs. These three massive trends will crush white collar jobs. Even previously in-demand and secure jobs like Software engineers will be in big trouble.
We are entering a brand new world of ruthless, severe, crushing competition. Driven by ever higher levels of desperation among the world’s populace. It will be player versus player, all the time! This will be a very harsh and tough world. And it will certainly not be a fair one. In fact, it will be completely merciless.
For those who either hate their work or want to coast in life, you will be in big trouble. Complacency, laziness, a lack of curiosity and mediocrity will be punished severely by the market. You will become irrelevant quickly and probably replaced by software or someone willing to do your work for a fraction of your pay. I’ve spoken publicly about this for a decade but it’s now becoming more glaringly obvious.
Harsh Strongman (yes, this person exists) of Life Math Money wrote:
“What I can tell with certainty is that for the vast majority of people, life does not get better with time. In fact, it gets worse.
Their bodies grow older, they put on weight, their income doesn’t rise much, and the stress from their jobs shows on their face.
Life does not get better unless you make it better. If you are not working to actively make life better, it will only get worse."
This will be a boon for someone who is ultra competitive. And also for someone who has been lucky enough to find something they enjoy and am somewhat good at. I literally spend all my time trying to perfect my craft. It’s fun. And thus it becomes my sustainable competitive advantage.
This new environment will be doubly beneficial for you if you have any inkling of entrepreneurial instincts, sense or interests. It will be perfect for anyone who is interested in personal growth & personal development, obsessed with solving problems, independent minded and searching for control of their own destiny.
This will be your time as you can harness all these massive forces to build a business and the life you truly desire.
It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn: Hang in There
It’s ugly right now in Silicon Valley. The VC money train is over and lots of startup founders and employees used to the ZIRP era environment of cash are facing the harsh reality of a down cycle. Layoffs abound, runways are getting short and founders are getting desperate. It’s a tough spot to be in and the pressure is high. It’s easy to despair during these times.
I faced this back in 2001, after getting laid off and unemployed for 6 months, down to my last $500 usd in the bank. It sucked. I admit that year was the only other year beyond 2020 that I seriously thought of offing myself. Things looked that bad. It was dark and all I felt was a massive sense of failure and shame. Literally no hope.
But I hustled and ended up through luck at Yahoo! which transformed my career and ultimately my life. My life was never the same after in a good way. In fact it has been a wondrous adventure overall.
It’s so easy to give up in life and you think things can’t get any worse. Yet, sometimes it does. However it’s all up to you. You can quit or You have to reach down deep. Remember the reason you are around: your mission. If you are a startup founder looking into the abyss, don’t hide or isolate yourself.
Go exercise, get some sun, go talk to fellow founder friends. And believe in yourself and fate. All you can do is your best and the rest is not up to you. There is something freeing about that. And also remind yourself things always change. You have to be there when the cycle turns as it always does.
Nothing is permanent except for death. Keep going and worse case you go down fighting, this may be the dent you leave in the world.
As Seneca said: “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 13th, 2024
“Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.” – Stephen Covey
Really educational discussion between Jwaller and Tai Lopez. Good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8sHJEKRrxM
2. "Electronic warfare (EW) is a bit of a sleeper in the US arsenal. The US invented its modern form and has used it to great effect in every war we’ve fought, especially since 1990. Indeed, if you want to know what the literal “war” in “chip wars” is, it’s this. The US spends about as much on it as its much cooler and flashier younger sibling, cyberwarfare (around $5b) and spending is due to increase. Likewise, the Chinese think of it as essential to their victory in a potential war against the US. Finally, it has become a defining aspect of the war in Ukraine, with Russian and Ukrainian forces playing a cat and mouse game between drones and electronic attacks.
My specific prescription is a strategy around nimbleness and autonomy. The Chinese are investing heavily in EW and if we want to remain dominant, we need to be able to adapt fast. This nimbleness and autonomy will come out of some amount of industrial policy, but the primary locus will be improved AI and autonomy."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-us-needs-to-pay-more-attention
3. End of an era here.
"Twenty years ago, when my kids were little, the thought of having more money ten years later was pressing. Now, having more money ten years from now seems like the epitome of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Right now I have enough money to do what I want. I don’t have enough money that other people do what I want. To me that sounds like the perfect place to be.
Even so, it took me a while to get to writing this. It’s hard to step away from a position where I could probably ride the coattails of my previous success for another decade, at least. It’s hard to step away from being relevant. The easy path would be to do what most VCs seem to do and just pretend I’m still investing. But, man, that’s a lot of time wasted just to get people to return my emails."
https://reactionwheel.net/2024/09/resignation-letter.html
4. Important discussion on Nuclear power on BG2. We are behind here in the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYCTfrec6FE&t=608s
5. "Let me make this very clear: if we run out of ammo, spare parts, and ships because we expended or lost all of them in the Western Pacific with minimal in reserve, then none of those shallow China bills matters very much. You don’t win wars banning Xi’s family from buying stocks, you win them with well-armed and well-trained warfighters.
You win wars by not having a fragile, compromised defense supply chain that has been running on minimal manning and production up until the last two years and is still trying to overcome anemia and supply shock.
It takes years to build these things up, you can’t do it overnight. COVID and Ukraine have taught us that much. You win wars with good strategy and strong coordinated policy, reliable budgets, training, ammunition, and advanced technology applied to the right operational design. You don’t win it with a media cycle."
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/the-potemkin-village-of-natsec-policy
6. Luke Belmar is the man. Break free from the matrix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PygNdfLp60M
7. "Selling AI is being discovered because the technology is new. Buyers don’t know how to use it or how to buy it.
Because the sales motions are new, we can’t apply the previous playbook to the new sales process. The CEO/founder should hire a sales leader that they fully trust who focuses on ultimate success. The sales process is a part of the product : using both the customer’s language & the ultimate use of the product through success efforts"
https://tomtunguz.com/software-playbook/
8. "Savoir faire is ergo a social skill and thus largely about adherence to unwritten rules of conduct. In the Silicon Valley land of engineers, we don’t talk much about social skills. We prefer our numbers, facts, and figures.
But to say these rules are unwritten is not to say they don’t exist. I’ve been repeatedly reminded of them in the past few months, courtesy of several encounters with people who were simply, for lack of a better term, doing it wrong.
More interestingly, when I tried to give these people feedback, the reactions I got were defensive and either hostile or passive aggressive. You can argue this is about me, my direct style, or my not having earned the right to offer such feedback. But I believe it was primarily about the nature of the feedback itself."
9. "There is just 13 ships in the United Kingdom’s RFA serving a nation of 69 million.
For comparison, the United States’ Military Sealift Command has 125 ships serving a nation of 330 million.
Just look around. The USA, UK, our friends … all while China grows in strength, size, and capability.
We don’t own the seas or the international order. It must be defended and maintained.
Which way Western man? Which way?"
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-sad-shadow-of-a-seapower
10. This is quite the ad. Anduril's Barracuda-M.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzVD4vb5ZxU
11. The OG of Enterprise SaaS Sales leaders, turned growth stage VC. Lots of good stuff here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF--PmtqLWQ&t=1998s
12. Good discussion on AI and the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CvjVAyB4O4
13. This interview helped me really understand the possible future for AI and how it will affect the startup and enterprise world. The Agent Era, Bret Taylor.
https://joincolossus.com/episode/taylor-the-agent-era/
14. Another great discussion on all things Silicon Valley this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XKQcUc1wy4
15. "Not every one of these firms or investors started as an “N of 1”, but they evolved there. These firms compete ruthlessly against themselves to build their monopolies, making the competition against the rest of the market comparatively easy. Simply put, you don’t want to be an investor competing against these firms for a deal and you are likely terrified if they back a competing company. If I were a LP, I’d be spending my time exclusively focused on finding these “N of 1” firms. We often say “competition is bad for business” and these firms did some pretty damn good business by avoiding the competition and their LPs have benefitted handsomely.
Even if/when one of these strategies fails, the gains are offset by the incredible returns of those that succeed. Success as an “N of 1” doesn’t yield a 3x outcome…it’s more likely to lead to 10 bagger outliers that simply can’t be achieved with consensus strategies. That might be a volatile portfolio, but I’d wager that it’s also one that drives above market yield for investors who enter these funds before the market wises up and copies these strategies (which inevitably happens)."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/being-an-n-of-1-firm-9dad6fe3061e
16. Always an orthogonal & interesting discussion with Peter Thiel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRunzR9fbk
17. So many things to take from this conversation. This is a must watch for startup founders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phiq7Ytnzo8
18. "Low-paying jobs, particularly first jobs, tend to be shitty. That is as it should be — almost everybody with a great job now started out doing something tedious and hard for not much money. How do you make a lot of money? A: By starting to make money … any money.
For young people, though, an early job is as much about socialization as it is about cash. Somebody working on the front lines in service or retail can’t help but learn a lot about themselves and the rest of humanity. Pro tip: The biggest tippers are people who’ve worked in service jobs and now have money.
You learn how to work on a team, how to deal with co-workers and managers and customers who can be jerks. You learn how to get people to buy something from you, which is the key skill in a capitalist economy (i.e., the U.S. and anywhere else you’d want to live). In short, you learn how to develop and deploy social capital and begin connecting work and talent with money, and money with a better life. It sounds obvious, but many never make the connection. They want success, but aren’t willing to sacrifice for it. Few things build a young person’s self-respect, sense of purpose, and willingness to buy into society more than their first paycheck.
The assault on the prosperity of the young is especially mendacious, as it’s taken place in concert with the greatest increase in national wealth registered in history. Be clear: This has been purposeful. Americans over the age of 70 are 72% wealthier than 40 years ago, and people under the age of 40 are 24% poorer. Money is the transfer of time and work. To give someone or something money is to love them. And America loved me, connecting my effort with prosperity. At an early age, I understood the assignment.
Our youth now are depressed, anxious, obese, and broke. It’s not globalization, network effects, or some other bullshit narrative fomented by the incumbents. It’s the wealth transfer, and, like I said, it’s been purposeful. And the most elegant, effective means of reversing this lack of care/regard/love for the young in America would be a massive increase in the minimum wage. It would be costly — and worth it."
https://www.profgalloway.com/doing-the-minimum/
19. If you love Roman history as much as I do, this is a great interview. 3.5 hours flew by.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyoVVSggPjY
20. Insightful conversation on how to drive innovation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEOiyCmNU6E
21. "Last week, an entrepreneur reminded me that one of the greatest gifts you can give someone is to believe in them. I’ve been working with this entrepreneur for a long time, and they recently launched their new business. As part of the launch, he sent me a note expressing his gratitude that I believed in him. This reminded me of one of my earliest entrepreneurial endeavors."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/09/14/the-gift-of-believing-in-someone/
22. "If history's best scientists and artists were finding their ideas on forest walks (Nietzsche) and dreams (Kekulé), then perhaps the future masterpieces won't be unlocked by apps, spreadsheets, trackers or A.I...but by a sincere invitation to the Muses."
https://oldbooksguy.substack.com/p/take-the-muse-pill
23. "For the past few years, civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack. Russian hackers have targeted small municipalities and ports with phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and individuals travelling as tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure.
Norway’s domestic-intelligence service, the P.S.T., has warned of the threat of sabotage to Norwegian train lines, and to gas facilities that supply energy to much of Europe. A few months ago, someone cut a vital communications cable running to a Norwegian Air Force base. “We’ve seen what we believe to be continuous mapping of our critical infrastructure,” Roaldsnes told me. “I see it as continuous war preparation.
Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West. “That’s for sure—we are saying that openly,” the Russian representative to the United Nations recently declared. Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute.
They are acts of so-called hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. The strategy appears to be to push the limits of what Russia can get away with—to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear—and to paralyze Western governments by hinting at even more aggressive tactics. “They do it because they can do it,” an air-traffic controller told me, of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. “Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don’t stop accusing them of what you know they’re doing, bad things will happen to you.”
Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, its military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in Kirkenes, treating the area as “a laboratory,” as the regional police chief put it to me. Some attacks were almost imperceptible at first; others disrupted everyday life and caused division among locals. To understand what was happening in her district, she started reading Sun Tzu.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war-in-the-arctic
24. Jim Rogers is an investing legend and I grew up reading about his international investing adventures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o5bepJgopQ
25. Mega Bullish on Poland. This is a great list of recommendations for making Poland even more powerful & Influential.
"Poland’s economic rise has been among the world’s most remarkable. In 1991 it was a third as rich as countries like the UK, Japan, or Spain. But after three and a half decades of nearly uninterrupted growth, it’s almost as rich as those, and has already surpassed Portugal and Greece."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-poland
26. "But what to say that this leadership void has to be filled solely by state actors. What happens if in the new world of social media, AI, and the resurgence of populism/nationalism that individuals, or egos have who could be non state actors) could fill the global leadership void.
The rise of the personality cults around Trump, Putin, Xi, even Modi and Musk could suggest that prominent leaders, or personalities, have reach beyond their own states, and while they might be state actors (leaders of states) their own interests typically end up pre-empting, subsuming overwhelming those of the states that they are supposed to represent.
The idea here is that it is in a work of social media and AI is is increasingly becoming a work of global egos and personalities as much as states or even ideologies - and often the three are intertwined with egos such as Trump using the platform as POTUS, and the ideology of populism, to push his own agenda which seems to be one to achieve pre-eminent global fame (infamy to many) and ultimately huge wealth.
In a G-Ego world we could perhaps think of who would be in the top ten of global egos with power, or influence, which extend beyond their state but which threaten the pinnacle of global leadership or influence."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/from-a-g-zero-to-a-g-ego-world
27. Some geopolitical thoughts. Veers a lot toward tin foil hat territory. Worth listening to though as an alternative to present narrative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eut7golb9c0
28. Entering and investing in a new era of technology, driven by AI. Good conversation.
https://joincolossus.com/episode/guo-the-power-of-conviction
29. This was great for new emerging VC fund managers to listen to.
https://x.com/twistartups/status/1834664789655835055
30. "One of the greatest tools for keeping a government from overreaching or becoming authoritarian is when people can speak privately and share ideas without Big Brother watching. It encourages dissent and debate, and allows people to feel safe from the jackboot of retribution that a totalitarian state may employ.
In short, anonymity is essential for the embers of rebellion to rise and to protect the open societies most of us currently live in.
When the government is watching and listening to everything you say—or even if there is the assumption they may be—it leads people to self-censor and not speak their minds. This is how the Mauryan Empire controlled its population via its network of spies, and this is how our modern governments will achieve the same some 2,300 years later through the use of a digital ID linked to social media."
https://anticitizen.com/p/you-will-give-all
31. This is an important discussion on how to prevent civilizational collapse. It's hard not to see signs of this decline around us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3Zd2K0BJoI
32. Insight dense convo on leading edge medical treatments and AI-driven innovations for the enterprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtNrCJCwwlc
33. This is a masterclass for consumer startup founders building apps. Well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhnfZhJWCWY
34. "Every day that passes without decisive action from the West, Ukrainians face relentless Russian attacks. Missile strikes on Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa have left cities in ruins, indiscriminately targeting schools, hospitals, and homes. Western leaders have been endlessly talking about support, but they refuse to deliver the instruments Ukraine needs to defend itself effectively. The reasoning behind these delays is an irrational fear of provoking Putin, but this logic is deeply flawed. Putin’s Russia has already shown that it will escalate regardless of Western restraint. The war must be moved to Russia’s doorstep if we want it to end.
Ukraine is not asking for Western troops; it is asking for weapons – long-range missiles that would allow it to strike back at Russian military infrastructure deep inside Russia’s borders. The war must not be limited only to the territory of Ukraine. It is absurd that the West binds Ukraine to a defensive position, practically denying it the right to conduct an offensive defense.
An invasion can only be repelled when the aggressor is forced to experience the consequences of his actions. The Ukrainian army’s operation in the Kursk region proved how effective a counterattack on the Russian side is in defending against aggression. This action shocked Moscow, leaving it paralyzed to respond.
We must remember: this is not a war that Ukraine chose. It is a war for its survival. By denying Ukraine the means to strike Russian bases and logistical hubs far from the front lines, Western leaders are prolonging Ukrainians’ suffering. Ukrainians are bleeding and dying, while the West is caught up in meaningless diplomatic finesse and fear of offending a terrorist state that does not shy away from targeting civilians."
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/39056
35. "It is equally important to recognize that Ukraine is already executing an effective strategic interdiction campaign. Ukrainian long-range drones have repeatedly and successfully targeted Russian oil refineries and other critical infrastructure targets thousands of kilometers from the frontline.
Despite their relatively unsophisticated nature, these drones have managed to breach Russian airspace on several occasions, including in areas heavily protected by modern Russian missile and air defense systems. In the medium to long term, these strikes will strain and diminish Russia’s warfighting budget, and accelerate Russian attrition.
As a result, providing Ukraine with the means to conduct an effective deep strike campaign is not about enabling a new capability; it’s about scaling an existing one. This can be achieved by allowing Ukraine to use current Western missile systems in its arsenal, such as ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG, for deep-strike purposes into Russia. Additionally, new systems like the German Taurus KEPD-350 or American JASSM and JASSM-ER land-attack cruise missiles could be provided.
If this approach is considered too risky from an escalation management perspective, Ukraine could be given the tools to expand its own long-range strike weapons programs domestically. For instance, supplying critical components like sensors or turbojet engines, or providing computerized numerical control (CNC) machine tools for precision manufacturing, could accelerate Ukraine’s domestic missile and long-range drone production."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/the-value-of-striking-deep-how-a
36. One of the best observers of Global macro right now. Lynn Alden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSoBjkVRUXM
37. Great discussion on the basics of venture capital from a multistage vc's perspective. 20 years in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sze6f8WDSU
38. "The point is that the value of income from a biz is worth more than any career/job because you can sell it later.
Why Online? Our *bias* is always going to be for online income streams because you can move. We saw some crazy stuff happen with COVID and major companies like Tesla are even voting with their feet to leave high-tax states. This is just an example in the clear and growing trend of flexibility.
If you can take your income anywhere, it can: 1) reduce your taxes and 2) help you create a different work schedule. While the taxes can be calculated, the freedom and mobility is really an intangible asset that should be worth something. We’d wager a ton of money that people would rather make 80% of what they currently make if they were allowed to work anywhere in the world.
Why Invest? This is redundant for anyone following this side of the web, but countries will continue to print and print. Even if tech helps create some deflation that has ramifications for job loss, potential UBI/unemployment claims etc.
Outside of a few blips in time, over decades, the amount of money being printed has a clear trend.
The world has changed tremendously over the past 25 years. High paying careers/jobs don’t really offer the stability or *quality of life* that it did years ago. Excel sheets don’t lie and none of this is necessarily bad. If you’re a smart worker, it isn’t too difficult to be well liked and use technology to help you produce better results than your co-workers. The path forward is clear, it just isn’t the same as it was in the late 1990s.
One of the major traps is getting comfortable with any sort of high paying position. If you want to motivate yourself, it’s a good idea to track down the people who are in their late 30s - early 40s. Figure out how many of them really sustained a high paying position for a decade, how many dropped off and look into how steep the decline can be if “called into the conference room with HR” in the middle of a work week.
We would not bet against America. America is home to practically every single innovation. Europe is largely just a museum outside of Airbus and ASML. Latin America is improving but outside of Mercado Libre haven’t seen a major innovation. Asia is on the come up with things like TSMC and Alibaba but in the end it pales in comparison to everything in the USA (Mag 7 and a litany of successful entrepreneurs)
A second passport is largely an insurance policy for a high net worth individual or family. If there is a world changing event (war, another pandemic, or sudden governmental changes - tax, regulation, etc)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/second-passport-and-sovereign-individual
39. Fun interview with the wild man of Sports & Pizza Media!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Tz3TpELxc
40. Business legend, and a story of constant career reinvention. Michael Ovitz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBGH_Hq0Bm4
41. "So many geopolitical moving parts this morning."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/so-many-geopolitical-moving-parts
42. Been pretty disappointed with the Biden administration's foreign policy across Ukraine, Haiti, Red Sea, Latam and pretty much everywhere. Weaksauce, half-as-ed.
"The counter argument to my criticism here would be the US is in a good place. Russia is weakened, China’s economy is in shambles, Israel will handle Iran and it’s proxies, Haiti is a small country so it doesn’t matter.
These things are true, but I don’t think it’s what the Biden admin was thinking. Why would you give these people hope but not actually push them across the finish line? The most likely answer is just fear. All of these half measures come from a fear of making big decisions, they’re scared to make a mistake. What do you do when you fear? You pick what on the surface seems like the safest route."
https://www.globalhitman.com/p/bidens-fence-sitting-administration
43. "With the use of network disruption increasing and the prohibitions against it melting away, here’s what we can expect.
Israel’s pager attack is a crude preview of what a significant zero-day disruption would look like. For example, a conflict with China over Taiwan could result in millions of modified devices (large and small) malfunctioning, catching fire, or bricking the moment the conflict begins. This would be followed by relentless disruptive attacks on critical infrastructure (cyber and physical/drone).
Conflicts will become increasingly deadly to the civilians of the participants as they are stripped of their protective status. Furthermore, disruptive attacks by the protagonists will cause waves of failure that cascade across borders. For example, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and the Houthi drone blockade on global shipping (related to the Israel/Hamas war).
Small states and established non-state groups will become increasingly adept at using increasingly autonomous drones to project power, damage enemies, and profit from conflicts. However, they will quickly learn that the effectiveness, sustainability, and impact of their drone operations become radically better when they are focused on network disruptions (regardless of the civilian impact) rather than direct military engagements."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/disrupting-everything
44. "I’m roughly ten years into building Precursor Ventures, and I am not the same person I was when I started the fund. My life circumstances have changed, I’ve changed, and I’ve learned a lot about the business of running a venture capital fund. Being in the market as a venture capitalist teaches you a lot about how things work in this business.
Every long-tenured manager I know has a handful of things that he or she thought would be important that don't matter and a handful of smaller things that end up being important but feel trivial at the moment. Whenever a new VC manager asks me for advice, I pause and ask myself if my experience is useful and still relevant.
One of my mentors always reminds me that in life, you are almost always an example or a warning, and you don’t always know which one you are at the moment."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/youre-not-the-same-fund-manager-you
45. "A union representing 85,000 US dockworkers—spread across 36 US ports on the East and Gulf Coasts—will start the largest shipping strike the country has seen in nearly 50 years if a deal isn’t reached by Tuesday. Ports and other infrastructure are getting congested as importers scramble to reroute their goods.
Experts predict that the consequences will be severe, retracing the steps of the pandemic-induced supply chain chaos of 2021–2022. Container traffic jams will bring ports to a standstill, shipping prices will spike, and many retailers will ultimately be left out of stock for the holidays. The consequences for US commerce will reverberate for years, likely reawakening inflation.
This is just the latest in a series of supply chain disruptions over the last three years—the last one being the ongoing shutdown of Red Sea shipping due to war in the Middle East. In some cases, supply chains have adapted successfully, while in other cases their fragility has led to lasting scar tissue. Rising geopolitical tensions across the Pacific threaten to test the fabric of world commerce more severely than anything we have seen yet.
This raises some pressing questions about the economy. When is the world’s network of supply chains fragile, and when is it resilient? Researchers have made surprising discoveries about how supply networks break down and what keeps them healthy."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americas-supply-chains-are-a-disaster
46. "We are all in “the matrix”.
Unlike the matrix movie, the real matrix is not centralized.
The matrix is a mixture of various powerful financial and other vested interests who all benefit from manipulating you into a certain type of voluntary servitude."
https://lifemathmoney.com/matrix1/
47. "Startups are like blitz chess. What you achieve is important, but just as important is how quickly you achieve. When a startup raises a seed round they often think about their Series A milestones – what they need to accomplish to unlock their next round of funding. They might set the following goals to unlock their A: “Launch the product, derisk a key piece of the technology, and get at least 3 customers signed for $100k+ contracts.” That's classical chess thinking.
Why? No speed goals. In classical chess, players can afford to sink into long bouts of strategic contemplation. But in blitz chess, every second counts. Spending too much time finding the perfect moves can cost you the game because time – not just the position on the board – is an ultimate arbiter.
Founders should think just as much about how quickly they can achieve milestones as they do about the milestones themselves. Better goals would be “Launch the product within 4 months, derisk a key piece of the technology within 8 months, and get at least 3 customers signed for $100k+ contracts within a year.”
Why is this important? Because speed unlocks speed."
Degeneration & Despair: The Coming Great Cope in America
I was hanging out in Italy with several friends for a wedding in 2023. In one of the numerous conversations, a buddy was talking about some young Italians he met. He described them as “nice but no prospects in life.”
When I asked what he meant, he said: “these guys literally have no future and they know it.”
I guess that's why they are just living purely in the now. Sadly, it seems they have zero ambitions or thoughts to change this or their circumstances. They are setting their own limits. It’s so sad.
But this is representative of a very wide swath of America these days.
We have an upcoming generation that has gotten spoiled, entitled and aimless. They think they deserve that glamorous and rich lifestyle they see on Instagram and other social media. But they are themselves unwilling to do the hard work, move cities/countries or take any risks.
We will see a large portion of society move down one economic strata. Dating will be brutal for both males and females.
For most Americans, we will see rising crime, rage on streets and the middle class disappear. This is accompanied by a clueless, unaccountable & grifting political class and fast declining state capacity.
That is why I agree with what the smart folks at BowTiedBull have been saying for years now: we are going to see a tremendous amount of complete degeneracy. What do I mean by degeneracy? I mean excess food, alcohol, drink and sleeping around/ whoring. Partying like mad. Las Vegas & Miami will do very well in this new world I think. It will be completely rampant hedonism to an unhealthy degree. Why? This is the ultimate COPE when they realize their lives are going nowhere. Just like the young Italian men my friend met, absolutely zero prospects in life.
And this degeneracy will be promoted in the mainstream media. It already is. Why? Because what other way can you keep a restive populace distracted and contained.
So watch this space and don’t get caught up in it. I’ve said this many times: this crisis actually does provide massive opportunities to pull ahead. If you are ready for it.
If you are one of these people feeling stuck in life. Troy Francis tweeted some good advice:
“If you're really stuck in dating, or any area of life
Sometimes you need to go nuclear
- Ditch your loser friends
- Move to a different city/county
- Take on radically different habits
- Completely overhaul your personality
What you've been doing until now hasn't worked”
Just move somewhere. Anywhere. Make new & better friends. Get a new job. Motion creates emotion.
Start a new business, maybe even one catering to this degeneration. I wouldn’t personally but if this is the only way you can pull ahead, do it, “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Stack cash as money equals freedom. Freedom to escape if you need. Otherwise have good home/ private security and shooting skills to protect yourself from the desperate crooks and druggies out there.
Just stay focused on your health, your family, keep learning and building skills and your business/craft. And make sure you carefully curate and build your tribe of fellow driven, healthy and ambitious individuals. This may be the only way to keep sane and moving forward in life.
Lessons in Living a Dolce Life: My Italian Trip
I came to Italy for a VC friend's wedding in September 2023 in Apulia. Ended up staying at this very nice 1400 year old B&B hotel, in the hills, surrounded by extensive groves of Olive trees that run as far as the eye can see. There is also a great view of the Mediterranean Sea from here. Absolutely stunning and a very relaxing place.
The owner was walking us around and I asked him about his life here. He said he only spent 5 months here during the summer. He spent most of the year in Milan where his business was. Now this is good living.
I admit I am a city boy. I love big cities but there is much to be said about splitting your time between your city home and a rural country place. This is actually how many of the wealthy and the not so wealthy Europeans live. You get a dose of the opportunity, excitement, buzz and diversity of the big city; balanced by the quiet, peace and nature of the countryside.
Being here in nature brought a strange feeling of solace to me. Especially in light of all the troubles I’ve been facing at home.
After more than 2 decades of gallivanting across the globe building businesses, peace and quiet is probably something I could do with a lot more of. In fact after the last few years, this peace and quiet is something most of us could do more with too.
Spending time in Italy I realize just how unbalanced my own lifestyle is. And have realized I have much to learn from Italian living. Being more present. Having more exposure to nature. And of course, eating good, healthy delicious food which dovetails perfectly into my preferred lifestyle.
So my goal for the next few years. Be more Italian! :)
Be a Pioneer: Immigrants Are the Best Entrepreneurs
Louis L’amour was one of the best Western writers in America. There was a beautiful passage he wrote in the intro to the Sackett series that perfectly describes pioneers and immigrants to America and any other country.
“Physically and psychologically, the pioneers' need for change had began in the old countries with their decision to migrate. In most cases their decisions were personal, ordered by no one. Even when migration was ordered or forced, the people who survived were characterized by physical strength, the capacity to endure, and not uncommonly, a rebellious nature.”
Sounds like a perfect description and fodder to be a good entrepreneur doesn’t it?
This is why some of the best performing founders are immigrants or children of immigrants. It’s a much quoted statistic that 50% of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley are immigrants or children of immigrants.
Some of the top performing Venture capitalist funds like One Way or Unshackled Ventures purely focus on immigrant founders. No surprise their performance is unbelievably good.
America is born from immigration and our strength has been from attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. Long may this continue. Louis L’amour wrote: “In a new land, all things are possible.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 6th, 2024
“A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.” – Michael Larsen
State of venture investing & fundraising in Europe. Lessons post boom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLguB-j8E9E
2. I enjoyed this interview with a Deeptech VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8so2ijONKA
3. Interesting discussion on longevity & biotech. I've long been fascinated by the sector. But I always found it hard to understand, thus hard for me to invest in.
But biotech is really the future in my view. The first trillionaire will come from this sector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWLb4EvUwoQ
4. "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
5. It's always enlightening and motivating at the same time when I listen to Wes Watson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RttYlGP1fG8
6. "Billionaires like Musk and Durov shouldn’t be above the law. But it’s clear the law isn’t being applied fairly or equally across all billionaires. Only those who refuse to censor or allow complete government control of our data seem to be targets.
Musk and Durov are our Templar Knights. The governments of the EU, France, and Brazil are modern-day equivalents of Prince Philip IV having a temper tantrum.
Our leaders won’t stop painting targets on people like Durov and Musk. Because it’s never been about crime. If it was, every other messaging app and social platform would have been shut down already.
Governments despise independent power."
https://anticitizen.com/p/kill-the-messenger
7. "We live in an age of grifters, hucksters, scammers, and narrative weavers. Everyone is looking for the opportunity to take advantage of others at the expense of any long-term value. And, what's worse, they've managed to craft such a strong sense of self that they can't acknowledge the way in which they've taken advantage of people.
I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life NOT like a status quo novel where they're guaranteed not only to be the hero, but to survive, succeed, and thrive.
I think every person has a responsibility to treat their life like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel that it really is. Choices and consequences. Consider the possibility that you are the bad guy. Consider the possibility that you're wrong. And then explore accordingly."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/against-your-own-self-interest
8. "Status limbo is a state of ambiguity and future uncertainty about your status, both in your estimation and as perceived by others.
When in limbo, your status is challenging to pinpoint, both for yourself and those around you. And your future status is uncertain, with no visible path in front of you charting your next steps.
To get status, you have to give up status. You have to sacrifice some existing status to make it back and more. This is especially true in creative fields and high-upside opportunities. Writers, musicians, actors, directors, entrepreneurs must all do their time in status limbo. And you don’t know how long that time will be. How well you tolerate this state can be the “winning” difference between you and someone just as talented and hard-working as you.
The more status you have, the more you may feel yourself giving it up. That’s the price that comes with the privilege of your starting position. Are you willing to pay it?"
https://www.workingtheorys.com/p/status-limbo
9. Amen.
"Many of the assumptions underlying the startup boom of the 2010s were fundamentally misguided. In my opinion, we are now exiting the age of glut and entering the era of the gritty startup—companies that take the best of what we learned and reject the harmful habits of yesteryear. This is not just about being “lean” or cash-flow positive. I genuinely believe that we are on the cusp of a spiritual and operational revolution in how we build organizations.
Gritty startups will still provide generous equity packages, but they won’t hire the same volume of people. They’ll be smaller, faster, weirder, different. Employees will use AI to do 10 times more work than what previous generations of employees did. It’ll be a hard transition for most—it is tough to accept that expectations are 10 times what they were before—but it is also deeply empowering. At Every, we like to say that AI will make you the most creative you’ve ever been.
In many ways, gritty startups will look the same as what came before. They’ll still be scrappy and hard. They will still pursue big visions—and if anything, their visions will be even bigger. But crucially, they will know what they are—and that starts with the recognition that AI means you can build a fundamentally more effective company. You don’t build the next Google by acting in the same way it did. You do it by building something new."
https://every.to/napkin-math/welcome-to-the-era-of-the-gritty-startup
10. Another example of the rot happening in Academia in America. Incredible.
Bureaucracy at work. BITFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWMpB0fK1Sk
11. So much to learn from Bill Gurley, one of the most storied vc investors in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Glbvtw9Z4
12. This is a solid punch in the face for understanding how to scale sales teams.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBxwWXlA4Po
13. "So, all allies are being roped into place. America is pulling Japan, Australia, and others like Singapore closer together. Russia is pulling in China and the BRICs.
The US is actively demonstrating this shift by moving its battle command operations into both Japan and Australia while making it clearer to China and Russia that the US will not tolerate any encroachment on these two allies. The US is requiring Japan and Australia to become more deeply integrated into the US commercial economy and the American strategic security space. While preparing to decelerate from Taiwan and Ukraine, the US is increasing its presence in Asia, especially in Japan and Australia. This clearly signals to China and Russia that these two countries are sacrosanct.
Similarly, The Washington Post writes, “Australia offers U.S. a vast new military launchpad in China conflict: Australia is expanding its northern military bases, with U.S. support, to counter China's growing threat. Critics quip it’s become the “51st state.” However, this is controversial in Australia because it remains caught between the US and China. China remains a critical trading partner, and the US remains a critical defense ally. Australia’s job at the moment is to try to avoid being asked to choose sides. It watches carefully as both China and the US jockey for footholds and influence across the many island nations of the Pacific that lie between America’s forward presence in Guam and Hawaii. I’ve called this the Cold War in Hot Places. The Lowy Institute calls it the “Great Game” in the Pacific Islands. Taiwan is no longer the only island that matters between the US and China. Seemingly unimportant, remote and small Pacific island nations are now central to global geopolitics, which further enhances Australia's strategic importance to the US.
Some call Australia an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” but the reality is that Australia would rather not test that proposition. Japan, Australia, and the world would be relieved if the stress between the superpowers had de-escalated."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-asia-pac-australia
14. "This is where Australia’s position becomes critical. Its commercial well-being is linked to China, and its strategic well-being is linked to the US. As such, Australia is beautifully placed to help diplomatically encourage these two superpowers to keep talking and find a way forward. Australia is talking to the Pacific Island nations.
The South China Morning Post recently wrote, “Beijing has been restrained in response to Pacific island leaders backing Canberra’s regional policing plan – a move seen as a “diplomatic coup” and a “masterstroke” for Australia as it tries to counter China’s security presence in the region.”
To the world, this may seem inconsequential. For those in the know, this is a central part of managing geopolitical tensions and moving the superpowers away from conflict and toward cooperation."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitics-of-asia-pac-australia-54f
15. "As I look at the broader venture ecosystem, it rests on the laurels of best practices and pattern recognition. The long duration and volatility of return cycles permits allocators (both on the LP and GP side) to simply stay the course on what has been done (and is perceived as safe), rather than what is new. This has been gamified to feed the AUM of large scale asset managers - they have adapted and evolved in the Darwinian nature they were supposed to and I place no fault on them for doing so (it’s an evolutionary function of the free market).
However, my fear is that we will see an extinction level event to the venture industry if left unaddressed. This is akin to when you see an foreign predator come into an ecosystem that they are suited to dominate and effectively kill off all other life, eroding their own feed supply and ultimately collapsing the ecosystem.
Unlike in RE, PE or public investing (where small timers can win by accessing obscure opportunities and the returns are normally distributed), consolidation in venture (given power law and the needs for downstream funding) may yield a landscape where ONLY the megas survive unless thoughtful action is taken to embrace greater diversification - in terms of both capital and cognitive thought."
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/the-extinction-of-venture-capital
16. "Like Pavlovian dogs, we all believe the correct response to rate cuts is to BTFD. This behavioural response is rooted in the recent memories of Pax Americana’s subdued inflation. Whenever there was a threat of deflation, which is terrible for financial asset holders, aka rich cunts, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) responded forcefully by pressing the Brrr button on its money printer. The dollar is the global reserve currency, creating easy monetary conditions for the world.
The effects of global fiscal policies to fight the COVID hoax or pandemic, depending on your view, ended an era of deflation and ushered in an era of inflation. Central banks belatedly acknowledged the inflationary effects of COVID-19, justified monetary and fiscal policies, and hiked rates. Global bond markets, and most importantly, the US bond market, believed our monetary masters’ seriousness about vanquishing inflation and did not send yields 2 da moon.
However, the assumption is that the witches and warlocks at the helm of various central banks will continue raising the price of money and reducing its supply to appease the bond market. This is a very dubious assumption, given the current political climate."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/boom-times-delayed
17. Great discussion today on NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyMXHVeR9rQ
18. SO much here re: the Data ecosystem and implications for startups and enterprise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLzsLgacR6c
19. This is a grim forecast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPECLBd22Eo
20. This is an eye-opening discussion. Heretical to this day's stupid woke sentiments and I love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef09eK5zHSk&t=2703s
21. This is always insightful and interesting. Global Macro and geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KBZw9fIO7Q
22. The most interesting and original VC fund in the world. Founders Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xHxZqGIyIg
23. All seems surprising but I guess we will see. Net net: More manufacturing jobs in America and lots of inflation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-VQzjxHaWc
24. Always love this show. Fun yet also education. Get a good zeitgeist of Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhK0rlfpsvs
25. "Over the past two decades America expended vast resources to fight scheduled wars that, at a strategic level, resulted in failure. The grand “nation-building” and “state-building” projects pursued by successive administrations, Democrat and Republican, depleted our national resources, shrank the nation’s military to the point where we are able to fight only in one major theater, reduced and consolidated our defense industrial base such that we no longer have the capacity to produce weapons and munitions at speed and scale, and most of all, sapped public confidence that our leaders are able to provide effectively for our security and defense, and to do so at an acceptable cost.
During the two decades of the Global War on Terror and “overseas contingency operations” we seem to have forgotten the basic verities of great power politics, i.e., that there is no substitute for hard power, and that in a state-on-state near-peer conflict a country’s military capabilities ultimately rest on its manufacturing capacity, its manpower reserves, and its human capital, for without them no nation will have the requisite resilience to deter and, if need be, defeat its enemies.
The United States needs a generational investment in defense, an effort that will require the next administration to articulate a clear vision of victory – not in normative terms and values, but one that speaks directly to geopolitics, our economic welfare, and the security of our homeland.
We need a strategy that returns national security priorities to our economic policy-making, speaks directly to the imperative of re-shoring our critical manufacturing and supply chains, and most all is grounded in the clear articulation of the hierarchy of our national interests. Those critical of increased defense spending argue that the American public will not support more military spending, but the truth is that as of today nobody has made a clear case to the public about how dangerous the international system has become, and what is at stake."
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/06/phase_zero_of_the_coming_war_1056517.html
26. For anyone who cares about the art and craft of super early stage venture capital, this was a great conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYWNMd6LkUU
27. "My bias is probably obvious: I lean towards the abundance side of the spectrum. I know you have to take leaps of faith to build a successful company, even if that means having a smaller role and less control. I want to have the biggest possible impact on the market, build wealth, and bring a fantastic team along for the ride. It’s also more fun.
I’ve met founders who put their energy into “not getting screwed.” They obsess about dilution, giving the smallest equity grants possible when they hire people. They don’t trust investors, even ones with stellar reputations. They hire junior people who won’t challenge them, or they even try to outsource critical functions. I’ve never seen one of these founders do well.
But abundance doesn’t mean abandoning caution and being indiscriminate about who to trust and what risks to take. Abundance decisions, which usually involve who you want to invite into your startup, need to be made carefully. You need to do plenty of due diligence and take risks only when you have a good chance of getting more in return."
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/choose-abundance-fb8b7df8de17
28. The rise of Vertical SaaS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-lKAsrllE
29. "Emerging manager backers such as Cendana Capital and Screendoor remain supporters; joining them in Wischoff’s third fund is the foundation for Children’s Health, the Dallas-based pediatric healthcare system. There, Wischoff impressed the investment team by flying in to present in person with her young son in July, just four weeks after giving birth. “She has a really tenacious personality that she has parlayed into investing,” said Yangge Seaman, head of private investments at Children’s Health, who added she was impressed by Wischoff’s pristine founder reference calls and focus areas tied closely to her past startup experience. “There’s a lot of strategic coherence. It’s not random that she picked those areas,” Seaman added.
Wischoff’s online presence also helped. A consistent poster on X and TikTok, she’s also gone unexpectedly viral in recent years — including when she posted about closing an investment with a founder while on her honeymoon (she was bored on a cathedral tour). Last year, when Midas List investor Keith Rabois dismissed her critique of the Miami startup ecosystem as that of a “third tier VC,” the immediate blowback turned the would-be insult into an internet meme."
https://archive.ph/22TY9#selection-599.0-599.464
30. Can't wait to read his book. A discussion on where America's youth is going wrong: lazy, entitled and intolerant to disagreement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDiVZ7RFtU&t=1446s
31. "Much like the myth — that I first learned about in business school — that captains should grab the yoke and fly the plane alone in an emergency. It turns out that cockpit crews get far better performance by maximizing teamwork and communication in emergency situations. Coincidentally, this practice is called CRM (crew resource management).
I understand the attraction of founder mode. It sounds cool. But while it’s more romantic to imagine the founder grabbing the yoke to drive the company, it’s more effective to have a strong team working together to face challenges."
https://kellblog.com/2024/09/07/we-are-not-the-same-the-obligatory-post-on-founder-mode/
32. "So what happened between Chinese explorer Zheng He and British Captain Elliot that led to this stark reversal in supremacy? This is a fascinating point of contention among economists and historians, mainly because it begs a question that precedes the question of “Will the West continue to rule the world?” with a new question:
Does the West rule the world?
Or, in the bigger span of history, has the West stumbled into a 200-year hiccup amidst an otherwise 4000-year history of Eastern dominance?
Fun, to debate."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/who-is-really-in-charge
33. "If you are finding yourself squeezed for money as prices rise, realize the important fact: Prices will NOT stop rising.
You can either live extremely frugally (which in my opinion is not a great life) or you can find a way to increase your income.
Personally I much prefer the latter (even though you should manage lifestyle inflation) because there’s a limit to how much you can cut costs but no limit to how much you can make.
Pick any online business and work on it for a few years and it will set you free.
Even if you fail the first few times, the things you learn will help you in the next one (also known as falling forward).
If you think you can just focus on your wage slave job and “wait for prices to come down”, you are like the base public – delusional, ignorant, and stupid.
You have been warned."
https://lifemathmoney.com/inflation-will-come-down-does-not-mean-what-you-think/
34. "Our leaders know these taxes are unpopular and controversial. So, what better way to get the population to say yes to them than by saying, “It’ll only be for the rich?”
In fact, this is exactly how US Federal income taxes were initially proposed in 1913. The government received the American people’s acceptance of them under the guise that only citizens earning over $500,000 (more than $15.8 million USD in today’s terms) would be taxed 7% on that income.
Fast-forward to today, and all residents of the United States are taxed between 10% and 37% on everything they earn.
This is always how new taxes are pushed through. First, only for a few. Then inevitably, for all. Our governments must think we’re stupid if they believe we’ll fall for it this time.
Just as the wealthiest citizens in the time of Peter the Great could pay to avoid the beard tax, so will the ultra-rich in our societies be able to pay to escape taxes on unrealised gains when they inevitably become commonplace.
For normal people who can’t, their wealth will be slowly shaved away by the authoritarian tax enforcers of today who want to claim their profits before they even materialise."
https://anticitizen.com/p/flee-the-beard-tax
35. A very fair and solid discussion on the growing multipolar world and China's role here. And America's decline, which is for most part self inflicted.
Everyone Has Problems: Why You Should be Kind to Everyone
I have a staple of movies that I can always go to that bring me great joy. Movies that I never get tired of watching when I am on long flights: Top Gun, Top Gun Maverick, Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift, Crazy Stupid Love or The Great Gatsby, The Godfather 1 & 2. All classics.
Another one of these movies is “Notting Hill” starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. A romantic comedy about an unlikely pair, a bumbling everyday guy, English book seller Will Thacker meets America’s favorite leading lady Anna Scott. It’s such a great & entertaining movie.
There is this excellent scene when the actress is brought over to meet the bookseller's friends at his sister's birthday dinner. After dinner, in a conversation, each of them detail why they have the worst life in a typical British ironic way of communicating. The person with the worst problems would win the last brownie. (You have to watch it to really get it).
One friend is a failure at work, the sister is unlucky in love, the bookseller is barely getting by, followed by another friend who is now a paraplegic and cannot have a baby due to the accident.
They are surprised when Anna, the actress, wants to join in and make an attempt. Especially as she is beautiful, successful, rich and famous and living a glamorous life. She talks about her painful surgery, how she has been on diet for 10 years, how her last few relationships have been terrible and when she is heartbroken, it’s spread all over the media like it’s entertainment.
She finishes with a telling comment. “One day not long from now, my looks will go, they will discover I can’t act, and I will become some sad middle aged woman who looks like someone famous for a while.” It’s a powerful scene, at least to me.
The table goes silent because it’s so surprising. They, like the audience, realize that even those who seem like they have everything and are secretly envious of, actually also have vexing problems in their lives.
I think this is the reality. As I’ve climbed through my career, and gotten to know people across all walks of life: corporate execs, social media influencers, high flying investors, business people, super successful people in general. They are humans, they have problems that absolutely consume them. I can tell you so many stories of people who seem to have it all but whose health or family problems you would not wish on your worst enemies.
I find it funny when I talk to many young smart people who ask for advice. They tell me, “I want to be you when I am older.” I am always honored. But I am also always shocked & surprised everytime I hear this. I feel like a fraud and imposter.
Do I tell them the price I paid for some mild & perceived financial/ career success?
To quote Al Pacino’s character in another classic movie ‘Heat’: “My life, No, my life is a disaster zone.”
Away from my aging parents. I also missed key moments in my kid’s life that I can never get back. I am estranged from my family and daughter, especially my daughter who has good reason to be angry with me. I’ve worked with some pretty awful human beings. I’ve become isolated most times from my friends and community because of a business life that requires much international travel. All stemming from choices I made and have to live with. There is no one to blame for this except for myself.
The great irony is that at a time when my business, career and finances were at something of a high point, my personal life was an awful mess. The exact reverse of my life prior to 2020. Life can feel cruel.
Yet, I love most aspects of my life. I feel blessed most of the time to have the career I have. But I am haunted. Haunted with regret & guilt sometimes. And this pain and sadness can be crippling sometimes when I have time to sit down and think.
So I try to keep active, meditate, go to Church, workout/train. I remain focussed on my mission and do what I can to repair the things I can.
And most importantly, I try to be patient, generous and helpful as possible to everyone I meet.
The big lesson is that you never know what personal hell someone is going through in their life. So try to be kind.
A Good Year
I saw this movie back when it came out in 2006 in my Yahoo! jet set days. It stars Russell Crowe as a hard driving, world class a—hole, playboy and money hungry investment banker named Max Skinner. “Max Skinner doesn’t do weekends. Max Skinner doesn’t do holidays. Max Skinner makes money.” Living in London he learns he inherits his recently passed and estranged uncle’s winery and estate in Southern France.
Away from his high pressure job he starts to reminisce about his happy childhood with his uncle. “Every single one of my memories takes place within 100 steps of this very spot. Good memories? Grand.”
“This was my room when I was a little boy. Sleeping here was the safest place in the world. No bedtimes, no chores, no squabbling adults. Those summers saved my life.”
“I can’t for the life me think of why I stopped coming down here. I love this place. It’s intoxicating.”
He also meets a group of eccentric French winery workers, an American cousin from Napa and a new local love interests. It opens his eyes, ignites his joy and makes him realize there is more to life than work and money. It reawakens his humanity and his deep regret for not telling his uncle he loved him. More importantly he does the right thing in the end and protects his uncles legacy.
There is a specific scene that stands out near the end of the movie. After the chaos he causes, he gets an offer from his big boss, Sir Nigel. Either leave with a big severance or become Partner of the firm for life.
When talking with his PA who tells him: “partner, you are made for life. Sir Nigel didn’t become partner until he was 53. Now look at him.”
Max replies. “Yes, look at him.” What he means if you have not watched the movie, Sir Nigel was an old, out of shape man with more money than he can spend, buying expensive art and paintings that he doesn’t even look at. Existing but not living. Which is a good career lesson: if you want to figure out what your future looks like, look at the life your big boss lives. Is it one that you want? I’d say in most cases, probably not.
I actually needed this movie as one of my wake up calls when I was making the decision to leave my cushy, comfortable executive job at Yahoo!
I was so money hungry, goal obsessed and scared at the same time, that I spent the first two years of my daughter’s life away working and expanding the Yahoo! empire. And for what. Foolishly, I did the exact same thing at 500 Startups to my ever lasting regret.
“This place just doesn’t suit my life.” No, Max, it is your life that doesn’t suit this place.”
I’m glad I caught this movie again. Money, career, work and success are important. But it’s a reminder that it’s good to stop and smell the flowers. To be more present. To enjoy the simple pleasures of life. That is my big take away rewatching this movie.
I’ll end with a quote from the uncle. “Once you find something good Max, you have to take care of it. You have to let it grow.”
The Kids Are Not Alright: The Repercussions of ZIRP Era 2018-2022
I invest in people and early stage startups. At least that is what I did for the last 10.5 years.
I’ve been doing this for a long time and gotten lucky along the way. I love the business of finding and investing in the brightest and most ambitious people and ideas.
But somewhere and sometime in 2024, I just wanted to take a break. After the craziness and stupidity of 2020-2022, I thought we would see a return to sanity and basics. But the Gen AI boom only seems to be an exact repeat of the Crypto/Web 3 or the Metaverse or most of growth stage silliness. It’s like investors have learned nothing from those days.
I thought there would be more humility in founders and investors. And definitely less entitlement especially as fundraising and tech employment at large has gotten so much harder.
Unfortunately this is not what I see. This only happens after massive pain in the market and we aren’t there yet. Nowhere close. We haven’t seen the write downs and write offs of the many so called Unicorns. We haven’t seen enough VC funds shut down yet.
But this is coming still. Mark my words. Many of these Unicorns are not run by their original founders anymore. Many founders were able to take out 10s of millions of dollars of secondaries in the 2020 & 2021 mania. Unlike in prior downturns, these folks have FU money and are now doing the chairman of the board thing.
Why stick around in crap times, when you have to fire half your staff, you have no business model and probably have to take a down round (or more). Easier to chill out cuz you have the cash, join the board, promote your COO to CEO and chillax. I mean, my god, if Frank Slootman of Snowflake, wisely known as one of toughest CEOs in SV quit, most founders will definitely not stick around.
I also feel for the founders of 2019-2021 era who learned all the wrong things in startup land, aided and abetted by even more clueless VC investors. They all learned bad habits or basically all the wrong things on what makes a startup or business. Add the incredible arrogance and entitlement which has bled into most tech workers at large. Remote work. Paid lunches. Gym memberships and answering emails only during work hours. Summer Fridays off.
They got used to easy fundraising, milestones and valuations that were frothy and that have been resetting hard in the last 2 years. It’s like you grew up rich but then your parents lost their fortune and now your whole family has to move out of your 50 room mansion and into a small studio apartment in the not so good part of town.
It’s reminds me of folks who win a massive amount of money from a lottery ticket or betting on an NFT or Crypto Sh-tcoin. The easy money breaks your brain and you cannot adjust to reality, especially as they inevitably lose that money. However, this loss allows them to quickly see the reality of the real world. One where good things take time, immense hard work and unrelenting commitment. That extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.
I admit I was one of these clueless, deluded idiots back in 1999-2000 & it took the dotcom bust and near destitution to reset my brain. As Jensen Huang of Nvidia said in a speech: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”Maybe only then will you be able to wake up and get to the real work of building.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 29th, 2024
“It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” – Benjamin Franklin
"This observation backed me into what I now use as my four-question framework for evaluating angel opportunities:
Why this idea? Do people need this? Will they pay for it? How big can it be? Is this really a company or just a feature?
Why now? Is this idea too far ahead of its time? Or, is this company too late?
Why this company? Do they have a technological head start? Do they have uncommon expertise that is difficult or impossible to replicate?
Why this leadership team? Why is this particular group of smart people (hint: they’re all smart) going to win? What is special about the founders that makes me believe they will beat everyone else in this race?"
https://kellblog.com/2024/08/26/the-4-key-questions-on-every-angel-investment-opportunity/
2. "The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians. There are many reasons for this, including Russia not assembling all the available pieces of intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian attack, the Ukrainian deception plan, and a failure of humility on the part of Putin’s regime and military.
The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.
Ukraine has shown that, fortunately, strategic audacity is not entirely dead in democratic nations."
https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/ukraine-kursk/
3. "So where to invest in an AI world? Invest in the things that AI can’t change. Invest in uniquely efficient customer acquisition models, because all the people playing the standard customer acquisition game will have perpetually worsening business models."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-indirect-implications-of-ai-when
4. "Quick Summary of Good Options
Boat Rentals
Smaller tiny homes if at/near major city
Car detailing for luxury vehicles
Pets - but more niche has to be something high-end to keep margins up
AI GF/BF experiences
Handbags/status good product resells
Upscale Mid 30s-40s bar experiences
Niche collectables that are expensive
Rehab/mental health type establishments (would pass honestly but needs to be mentioned)
This is our general view of what will become more common. Of these probably like car detailing, niche upscale bar and AI girlfriend/boyfriend.
As usual, we’ll have to wait and see for something like this. We’ll check back in 5-years to see how we did!"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/monetizing-extended-youth-the-next
5. "With AI, we believe there’s a new opportunity to win on quality. We anticipate a shift in this three-point framework, moving from an emphasis on convenience & price (Access) to convenience & quality (Edit). So for example, rather than providing greater access to healthcare, companies in this new paradigm will provide better healthcare. Price will always be a factor, but parity will suffice — similarly to how quality parity was serviceable for the last wave of access-focused companies.
With AI, quality largely hinges on a product or service's ability to properly capture nuance, intent and context to either 1) effectively serve up the most relevant and useful insights, or 2) effectively perform tasks on our behalf.
We see a world of opportunity for products and services that help people get to the best possible output, providing fundamentally more useful value than the previous alternatives rather than cheaper or more accessible extensions of existing standards."
6. "Though it has no large warships in its navy, Ukraine has used these drones to outmaneuver one of the greatest naval powers in the world. Produced at a cost of around $200,000 apiece, the weapons have damaged or destroyed about two dozen Russian warships—as much as a third of the Black Sea fleet, including large landing ships and missile carriers worth billions of dollars. These strikes have forced the rest of the Russian navy to pull back from Ukrainian shores, all but conceding defeat in the greatest sea battle Europe has seen since World War II.
Standing on that beach, nose to nose with the Magura, it was hard to believe this motorized dinghy could score such an epic victory. Russia’s status as a naval power dates back more than three centuries to the age of Peter the Great, the Russian czar who was so obsessed with battleships that he once traveled in disguise to the Netherlands to learn how to make them. Now, thanks to a drone conceived in a Kyiv garage, the Russian navy has begun to look useless along a critical front in the war. Vladimir Putin knows it. In February, he fired the commander of the Black Sea fleet; a month later, he sacked the head of the entire Russian navy as the Ukrainian drone strikes intensified."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMxE_hXUKQI
7. Very timely discussion on the AI Hype cycle. The YC guys have an amazing data set.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-5xJQ4U8g0
8. Sad that it's needed in modern society but here we are. The growing divorce coach industry
https://thehustle.co/originals/getting-a-divorce-theres-a-coach-for-that
9. "The important thing to note here is that these two profit drivers are driven off of two fundamentally different things. Fees are driven off AUM. The bigger the AUM? The bigger the fees. Carry is driven off returns. The better your returns? The bigger your carry.
And maximizing fees vs. maximizing returns are not only fundamentally different games, but are in many ways diametrically opposed. The bigger your AUM, the worse your returns. Understanding that dichotomy is fundamental in understanding the strategy of many (though not all) venture firms.
You might come to the conclusion that bigger just means better. The bigger you get, the more swings you can take, you can take bigger losses, and have lower expectations.
But there is a fundamental bottleneck. Not every company can be a really big success. And building a model around massive pools of capital that require massive outcomes to move the needle will increasingly give investors "nail goggles" and they'll take their hammers, and just start swinging. But in the process, they'll shatter a lot of good businesses trying to form them into $10B+ outcomes.
Some firms, while being large, have still made attempts at being responsible stewards of capital, like in early 2023 when Founders Fund chose to reduce its eighth venture fund from $1.8B to $900M. It wasn't that they couldn't raise the size of fund they wanted; they told LPs they wanted the fund to be smaller, and pushed capital out of that fund.
And don't get me wrong, I'm hopeful that more and more of these massive firms can be responsible stewards of capital. I want there to continue to be great successes and outcomes that will continue to alleviate LP's concerns and continue to build the pool of capital going towards big, ambitious ideas.
But I've worked with a lot of these firms and I gotta say, I'm not super optimistic. And the existential danger to all of us, from the funds that want to be big or small, to the founders that want to build productivity tools or humanoid robots, is that the more irresponsible the biggest firms continue to be, the more capital gets destroyed, the more we run the risk of chasing a large volume of capital out of the asset class."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/mo-money-mo-problems
10. "Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion we can draw from all this is that billionaires represent a kind of moral singularity—a point beyond which our usual ethical frameworks break down. They operate at a scale where intentions, actions, and consequences become so intertwined and far-reaching that clear moral judgments become nearly impossible.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to evaluate, and also regulate, the impacts of billionaires. But it does suggest that we need new frameworks for thinking about them. Maybe the question isn't, "Are billionaires good or bad?" but instead, "How can we structure society so that no individual wields outsized influence over everybody else?"
In the end, the Bill Gates paradox—philanthropist or predator? Savior or sinner?—may be less about Gates himself than about the limitations of our moral intuitions in the face of vast wealth and power. As we grapple with the rise of the billionaire class, we may need to develop new ethical tools, alongside all the new economic and technological ones."
https://every.to/napkin-math/billionaire-or-despot-or-both
11. "Yet, despite this returns compression, venture capital remains an incredible asset class. Here is some fascinating data from JP Morgan. Despite the downturn, it still seems to be the best long-term asset class (this is not investment advice). Between 2014-2023 annualized VC returns were 16.2% IRR, compared to 14.6% for private equity, 4.4% for hedge funds, and 8.8% for direct lending."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/vc-hot-or-not
12. Great conversation here on zigging when others are zagging. All three of them are original thinkers. Made me question my own investment thesis a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIMRXp1qkg
13. "First and foremost, it’s a reminder to stay vigilant. The strategies and decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, Brussels, and elsewhere will ripple across the globe, affecting everything from trade policies to military alliances.
Next, it’s likely that the United States will remain the most powerful of the great powers at least over the next decade. Beyond that, there are too many variables to account for (kind of like how weather forecasts remain only good for ~8 days, as explained by Chaos Theory).
We can maintain our strength through intelligent investment in defense capabilities (both high-end exquisite systems as well as low-cost attritable ones), continuing economic policies that strengthen the American base (reshoring / friendshoring manufacturing, restoring infrastructure, leveraging competitive edges in software, etc), regaining control over information systems messaging our vision of progress (the one that glamorizes hardwork and industry more than influencer status domestically and that sees a rising tide lifting all boats internationally), and smart diplomacy that doesn’t just talk-the-talk, but walks-the-walk.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. This period of competition also brings opportunities—opportunities for innovation, for forging new alliances, and for rethinking old strategies. The key will be to stay adaptable, to keep our eyes on the long-term game, and to understand that in this new world, nothing is set in stone."
https://andrewglenn.substack.com/p/buckle-up-the-era-of-great-power
14. "Just like how I eat candy bars and sugar goo when I’m not hungry to avoid a drop in blood glucose levels, the Fed is committed to never letting financial markets stop their upward ascent. The US is a hyper-financialised economy that requires up-only fiat asset prices so that the population feels rich. In real terms, stocks are flat to down, but most people don’t look at their real returns.
Nominally rising stocks in fiat terms also drive capital gains tax receipts. In short, a falling market is bad for the financial health of Pax Americana. Therefore, Bad Gurl Yellen began subverting the Fed’s interest rate-raising cycle in September 2022. Powell, I believe, under instructions of Yellen and the Democrat party leaders, is falling on his sword and cutting rates when he knows he should not be."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/sugar-high
15. "As postulated by Carlota, this new world enables a wider surface area for founders and one where the core skillset may very well be industry knowledge and connections, not just technology acumen. Founders and investors alike need to be able to tap into the knowledge and networks of their industry segment if they’re hoping to unlock opportunity. As Kanyi Maqubela puts it “The Services as Software era is about industry.”
Ultimately, our mission is to find, fund and help founders capable of transforming their industries. Sometimes this will be through SaaS and other times it will be competing with incumbents directly. The freedom to pursue investments outside of traditional SaaS presents an incredible opportunity along with the equally incredible burden of (as one of our LPs lovingly put it) “knowing your shit”.
Learning these industries is rewarding, but time consuming given their nuance. It’s not for the faint of heart and even some of the most brilliant investment minds have been burned by approaching these markets without a fully informed appreciation for their difficulties. That said, those who do invest the time to unravel those complexities of these markets may have the opportunity to unveil some of the largest investment outcomes ever achieved.
Buckle up as we leap forward into the age of “Technology Deployment”.
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/the-technology-deployment-phase
16. This is a must listen to. Incredible discussion on the future of AI, Semiconductors and Robotics. The future of tech. I'll have to re-listen to this one as it’s insight dense.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/67636422/baker-ai-semiconductors-and-the-robotic-frontier
17. One can never listen to Luke Belmar enough. The youngest wise man around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09HJKepCY8E
18. As always: a great informative and fun discussion on whats happening in business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMbaAZtCJR8
19. "Generally speaking, we buy the idea that *income* taxes will go up. That makes logical sense to us. It doesn’t impact anyone with real money. Income taxes entrench mega companies because their employees can no longer save enough money to leave and create a competitor.
The truly rich do not have large salaries. The truly rich are CEOs and private company owners. They pay themselves a fake salary ($1 is common amongst major tech executives) and then get the rest in stock. When they sell the stock they incur a 15-20% capital gains tax (USA)
Summary: The faster you can get your income tied into businesses? The safer you are. You can move them, shut them down, sell them to someone else to put in a trust… so on and so forth. The chances of anyone tracking this down is limited. It is even less likely they bother with you if you just retain the paper work. You get a letter asking for proof of the transaction and that is it.
They can’t do much if you gift your grandmother a house. You have $13,610,000 to give away in your lifetime and they can just put that into a trust that goes to someone else. For small money you can gift $18,000 to anyone you want tax free (current limit for 2024). As long as you have some trustworthy relationships, none of the tax rules will ever impact you."
Similarly, if you run a private company, you can avoid paying yourself a salary and simply get paid out in dividends."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/taxing-unrealized-gains-wont-be-passed
20. Luke Belmar is the man. Most of this is on crypto & trading side but it's really good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAdahc6xEmY
21. A wide ranging conversation with Luke Belmar. Small parts of this veers into tinfoil hat land but overall it's an exercise in thinking for yourself and first principles thinking. Understand the world around you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQs8ZHfZNq8
22. Great conversation here. Is coding even relevant in an AI world? Can u build billion dollar cos with less people.
I don't agree that more Unicorns are being created every year, as they are just valuations from ZIRP-era stupidity. Question is are they sustainable businesses.
But I do believe it's easier than ever to start up a startup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKvo_kQbakU
23. "Talent and funding are great, but they won’t get you anywhere if customers don’t want to buy what you’re selling. And that’s where recent economic and political tailwinds come in. Tensions with China and Russia have created pressure on our government to fund defense innovation.
Strained relations with China are also causing companies to rethink their material sourcing and manufacturing for the first time in years or decades. Additionally, rising minimum wage laws and intensely seasonal hiring needs in sectors like agriculture are pushing many industries toward increasing automation in order to survive.
These global trends are an immense tailwind for startups focused on robotics, manufacturing, defense, energy, and many other areas."
https://www.codingvc.com/p/the-golden-age-of-deep-tech
24. "This post barely scratches the surface of these dynamics (trust me, I’ve got plenty of adjacent topics for future blog posts). For now, if you take anything away from this analysis, it’s the following:
Silicon Valley is a global outlier when it comes to fundraising dynamics.
In the rest of the world, early-stage funding rounds are overwhelmingly led by local investors.
U.S. participation in early-stage Canadian funding rounds is higher than anywhere else in the world — including in most U.S. states (which is either a blessing or a curse, depending on whether you’re a hungry startup looking for funding or a Canadian investor wary of competition)."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-mythical-us-lead-investor
25. There is so much gold here for founders. How to buy back your time and become a more effective leader and parent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZF_7_tjepU&t=2247s
26. This provides good details for the simmering hybrid war & spy war happening on European soil between Russia and the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2DkseOnL2M
27. Japan ramping up their military force to meet the increasing CCP threat in Asia. Good rundown on Japanese military capabilities and plans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqqAtDqq6Mw
28. Great edition this week on what's up in tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVoyROHOPt0
29. There can never be too much Luke Belmar. Mental reframing for success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19aKbciNKdA&t=2199s
30. "You cannot produce a top decile fund with just reserves and recycling. You need to be working with great founders and teams who are building breakout companies. Just like a poker player needs to get dealt some great hands. But how you play those hands when you are dealt them is also critically important.
I have seen early stage VCs make way too little on their best companies because they ran out of money and could not keep on participating or they had to sell too soon or some other reason that was effectively poor portfolio and fund management.
Reserves, recycling, and returns go hand in hand. So build them into your firm's culture and processes. They make a difference over the long run."
https://avc.xyz/reserves,-recycling,-and-returns
31. "While much, if not most, of the furor surrounding fake news is due to a power struggle over control of the new medium, fakes exist. Let’s toss around some ideas on this:
We’ll get used to them. Like marketing fakes in the past, we’ll learn to live with them. Most AI fakes, even political fakes (see above), are far more humourous than harmful.
The power of network dissent. In open media networks, free of authoritarian censorship, dissent will flourish. This means that every published fact and their narrative interpretation will be challenged. It also means that facts won’t be overlooked or ignored (on the main).
Opt-in narratives. Without control over the narrative, governments will be forced to adopt narratives that deliver beneficial results. If they do, people will opt in voluntarily, and alternative narratives will wither. If not, dissent will flourish and hound their every move. Forcing people to adopt a narrative without delivering beneficial results is tyranny."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/fakes
32. "Open source is a powerful idea that's shaped the modern world but it's largely invisible because it just works and most people don't have to think about it. It's just there, running everything, with quiet calm and stability. That's made it hard to defend and that's a tragedy because open source gives everyone a level playing field.
With that kind of reach and usefulness I never saw it as even remotely possible that someone would see open source as a bad thing or something that must be stopped ever again.
But I was wrong. Here we are again. The battle is not over. It's starting anew."
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/why-open-source-is-so-hard-to-defend
33. "This idea of a negative roadmap is complementary to the normal roadmap. It’s a way to document things that are not going to happen in the product or things that are going to be removed from the product. Roadmaps are critically important, and as organizations grow, getting everyone on the same page becomes harder. Adding a negative roadmap to the mix is another exercise in aligning the team around what is not going to happen. Entrepreneurs should consider adding a negative roadmap to their collection of documents and best practices that they use to run their startup."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/08/31/negative-roadmaps-for-startups/
34. "We all crave access to experts. It’s why people show up to hear Scott speak. It’s why someone once paid $19 million for a private lunch with Warren Buffet. It’s why, despite all the bad press re: their ethics and ineffectiveness, consulting firms continue to raise their fees and grow.
But most of us can’t afford that level of human expertise. And the crazy thing is, we’re overvaluing it anyway. McKinsey consultants are smart, credentialed people. But they can only present you with one worldview that has a series of biases including how to create problems only they can solve with additional engagements, and what will please the person who has a budget for follow-on engagements. AI is a nearly free expert with 24/7 availability, a staggering range of expertise, and — most importantly — inhumanity. It doesn’t care whether you like it, hire it, or find it attractive, it just wants to address the task/query at hand. And it’s getting better.
The hardest part of working with AI isn’t learning to prompt. It’s managing your own ego and admitting you could use some help and that the world will pass you by if you don’t learn how to use a computer, PowerPoint … AI. So get over your immediate defense mechanism — “AI can never do what I do” — and use it to do what you do, just better. There is an invading army in business: technology. Its weapons are modern-day tanks, drones, and supersonic aircraft. Do you really want to ride into battle on horseback?"
https://www.profgalloway.com/what-does-ai-think/
35. "Fear of missing out, today’s parlance for "keeping up with the Joneses,” can drain on your wallet.
Use this mantra next time you feel compelled to do something or be somewhere:
“There will always be another ___.” For example [party/event/rave/Burning Man/conference/vacation].
Knowing and repeating this mantra will help you get over not feeling compelled to attend for whatever reason."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/how-to-be-good-at-money
36. "One of the major questions for web3 exists in the US where the regulatory regime isn’t clear.
Overall, web3 continues to see activity but most of the interest exists in the public markets as the market awaits next-generation of infrastructure & applications & regulatory clarity."
https://tomtunguz.com/web3-disclocation-public-private/
37. "The scale and nature of the task is determined by the capabilities of the opposition. In World War 2, the Axis powers had advanced manufacturing prowess, but small populations and a lack of access to fuel. In the Cold War, the Soviet bloc had a lot of fuel and a population similar to ours, but had a small and dysfunctional economy and struggled with advanced manufacturing.
In contrast, a potential “New Axis” of Russia and China would control enormous population, vast fuel resources, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and a combined economy of enormous size. Except for the fuel part, this is all just China.
So today’s post is about how the U.S. and its likely allies stack up against the New Axis in economic terms."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/sizing-up-the-new-axis-3ce
38. "As a result, that soil is a precious resource the Ukrainians ought to safeguard, but which foreign firms, funds, and banks have long eyed like wolves. Now, with the Russo-Ukraine war presenting an opportunity, it is a resource up for grabs that those same firms and funds are now are coming for.
However, the exigencies of war since the Donestk conflict began in 2014 have meant that corrupt entities, including foreign companies and even the Saudi Arabian pension fund, have managed to gain not just a foothold in Ukrainian agricultural land but also acquire control of a major percentage of it."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/when-ukraine-finally-falls-american
39. "Instead, learn the names of who is on your city council, school board and other people making multi-million dollar decisions with your property taxes, and make sure they know YOUR name. This can be done on a middle-class income and the energy you expend on this endeavor will have a far-higher likelihood of improving the quality of your life."
https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-favor-bank-local-politics
40. "Whether the ancient Aztecs, Rome, China, or the US, civilizations traditionally flourish as long as they invest in the fertility of their soil bank. Once they begin extracting the soil’s future fertility by consuming its stock of carbon at unsustainable rates, the clock is ticking, and they need to expand outwards with imperialistic might if they are to sustain themselves (with the US being the starkest example of this in history).
At a certain point, they are no longer able to continue expanding outwards and managing already-conquered territory, and at this point, collapse is a single generation away. The high time-preference thinking that invariably captures empires on the decline can arise from many sources, but all the patterns of consumption and waste that an empire employs to feed itself by robbing from the future lead to the same outcome."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/soil-and-money
41. "The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.
Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
Most folks in the tech and venture orbits are probably aware of the most salient example of the vibe shift in startups: the happenings in The Gundo. The tl;dr on the Gundo is a bunch of bright, young, ultra-ambitious dudes in El Segundo, CA have forsaken the “don’t rock the boat by saying what you believe and focus on hitting the SaaS jackpot” ethos of 2010-2020s Silicon Valley and are instead unapologetically pro-America, pro-family values, openly religious, all of which they channel into challenging and important missions like manufacturing hydrocarbons out of thin air, making it rain where it doesn't, and more generally “rebuilding America.”
But part of what is causing the Vibe Shift is that it goes well beyond the Gundo: indeed, no matter what circles you run in, almost everyone—from AI accelerationists to techbros to gun owners to Bitcoiners to Christians to normal families to children who like math to American citizens—is undergoing a variation of the same kind of pressure to conform, stagnate, decelerate."
The Silent Pandemic After the Pandemic: The Global Mental Health Crisis
I emerged out of the Covid pandemic lockdown bubble in 2021 but only really started reconnecting with many old friends and acquaintances in 2022.
Fast forward to 2024, what has struck me are the lasting scars the pandemic and the now widely condemned lockdowns have caused people. I now know countless couples divorced or separated. And many of our kids are irreparably harmed psychologically or developmentally. This is not some random observation but a trend I’ve noticed in a sample set of dozens if not a hundred or so folks in relatively deeper conversations.
I’ve widely written about how badly the lockdown affected my family for the worst. It caused me massive financial pain and due to my own weakness, led to the unintentional damage for the rest of my family. It also stripped bare any illusions I had regarding my ability to provide, how strong a husband and capable of a dad I was. O for 3 in 2020. Some of these, I’m still working very hard to sort out.
When I feel helplessness or fear, it quickly turns to rage. And in a situation where dojos, parks, gyms and churches were closed, there were literally no outlets for this.
Multiply this situation to almost every family in the world to different degrees of severity and you see the endemic rash of violence, suicide and loneliness of many young and old people now. The amount of broken families whether here in California, Canada, India, Australia, China or anywhere in the world. I know very few people unaffected.
The only good thing to come out of all of this is an openness now to therapy and the importance of mental health, things that were taboo to speak about prior in society.
The other big thing I’ve learned is that I will never blindly follow what the media or our so-called experts in government and corporations say. These people are either corrupt or incompetent. It reminds of the old Hollywood saw “Nobody Knows Nothing.” And it’s funny that many of the things labeled conspiracies turned out to be true like the virus coming from a lab, the lockdowns & masks being useless and the health effects/issues with the Covid vaccines.
The price of not being prepared or not thinking for yourself is high. This is why having financial independence is so important, you need the resources to leave and or/ protect ourselves from overarching malicious or incompetent bureaucrats.
The big lesson is: if you panic, panic early and take action. Use your extensive resources and leave.
My big mistake was that I made assumptions that the lockdowns would be short. I should have taken my family directly to Taiwan or Vancouver that first week of March 2020. Now I am literally paying for it in the thousands of dollars of therapy every month to repair the extensive damage from those hellish 6 months locked in. Well, live and learn. I can tell you this, nobody and nothing will stop me in the future.
So remember folks, take care of your mental health. Therapy is a good thing. And when the next major global crisis happens, panic early and don’t trust our elites. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
The Magic of Modern Air Travel: Refuge in the Sky
I wrote this post after a trip to Australia. It should be magic that I’m leaving Perth on a Saturday morning and arriving Saturday morning in San Francisco. And this is a 22 hour trip btw, so not short. It never ceases to amaze me about the miracle of international air travel.
It should come to no surprise that I really enjoy flying. It’s tiring and not good for your health with the radiation exposure but I’ve been sucked into the romance of air travel since I was a kid. Walking into the airport and knowing that everyone there was going someplace else. The airport for me symbolizes adventure and an escape from the mundane and everyday.
It’s almost become an addiction to me. But it’s also become a refuge. A refuge from the ubiquitous phone and Internet. A refuge from the disturbances and chores of everyday life. A refuge from business challenges or family problems. A place I cannot be reached by others for a period of time. Pure introvert-time.
Flying is more than a distraction from my normal life, it’s a place for my personal growth & self development, where I can read and write without guilt. It’s a place I can catch up on movies and television shows I normally do not have any time for in my regular life. It’s a place for me to discover new shows and movies typically from Japan, Korea, China, India or some non-Hollywood. An opportunity to expand my perspective.
So while flying might be a chore for others, it holds a special place in my heart. A place and time of discovery and reflection. If you reframe the experience, maybe you will end up enjoying it as much as I do.
Only the Paranoid Survive
Tech legend, Andy Grove’s autobiography is one of the best books written regarding thriving in the fast paced business world of Silicon Valley. I’m surprised more people have not read it. It traces the rise of Intel to the one of the most dominant semiconductor companies in the world. Well, at least until the last decade decline. But the lessons he shares are invaluable: the most important being the title.
All the best founders and investors are a little bit paranoid. You have to assume that competition can pop out of nowhere to eat your lunch. If you let your internal operations get a little bit out of whack, that usually ends up causing big problems down the road. Comfort kills.
This is relevant for our life too. Every time I’ve met serious issues in my life was due to my own complacency. The minute I was flying high and took my eye off the ball, things would inevitably start to slip.
This happened in the end of 2000 when I was at the startup Alibris. I ended up getting absolutely REKT in 2001.
It happened in 2013 when I overspent my bounty from Yahoo! and got myself in financial straits. This also happened again in 2020 albeit it was during a pandemic with the criminal & idiotic government lockdowns and anti-eviction programs for crooked tenants.
Of course you should be present and enjoy the wins that happen. I certainly don’t do this enough.
But also don’t take anything for granted. Your health, your personal finances, your business and especially with your family. The minute you start to get too comfortable or complacent, let alone arrogant, life will come and smack you on the head. Rightfully too. I am paying for this on the family side.
This is a lesson we all seem to learn on a regular basis. In our insane state of competition and intense change, a little bit of paranoia goes a long way. As I heard from Ray Dalio before, “if you are afraid, you probably don’t need to be afraid. If you are not afraid, you should probably be afraid.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads September 22nd, 2024
“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vincent “Vince” Lombardi
Good guide for founders talking to VCs.
https://startupistanbul.substack.com/p/what-investors-say-vs-what-they-mean
2. "The rationale behind these higher prices rest in the idea that AI companies have signficant future growth & likely faster growth than their non-AI peers both public & private.
Most of the time, the private tends to lead the public market with trends & valuations. Not this time. The markets are moving in parallel. This is likely because the major AI publics like NVIDIA & Microsoft have spurred the market forward first."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-premium-2024-08-16/
3. "The power of music and books and movies and TV shows lies in the fact that they don’t just take up our eyeballs and time. They impact how we live our lives, the decisions that we make, and how we see the world around us. And, while dystopian fiction can act as a wake up call, it can also be a dangerous drug in a world increasingly in the grips of hopelessness and depression. The collective imagination is increasingly becoming a collective nightmare."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/science-fictions-dueling-fates
4. Educational discussion on what’s happening in VC land. Some smart & very experienced folks here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6CxMTy6Peg&t=1017s
5. This is a pretty solid discussion on the future of Crypto as the title states. Worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQdaQr3EW8g&t=1142s
6. "If your primary source of cash flow is a job, it’s of paramount importance that you become an unfireable employee.
Like the name suggests, an unfireable employee is one the company wouldn’t even dream of firing.
There are a few ways of making this happen."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-make-yourself-unfireable-from-your-job/
7. I love Montreal (except for during the winter).
"French Culture Without the Insanity: A good filter for you is if you would enjoy a cleaner version of Paris. If that’s the case you’ll probably like it a lot. If you don’t like the French look and don’t like french food, it’ll probably be whack.
While France is a heavy tourist destination, it just doesn’t make sense when Montreal is closer, cheaper, cleaner and a potential second home for the right person.
Essentially, Montreal is a better version of a major city in France...... As stated “cleaner and cheaper” version of France.
Upgraded across the board."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/city-guide-montreal
8. "For the foreseeable future therefore, both Ukraine and Russia must commit to conducting two major ground campaigns concurrently. While Russia is probably better placed to resource two such campaigns, neither Ukraine nor Russia is likely to be able to do so into 2025. The issues explored in this article will hopefully inform readers about how complex and challenging the decision making will be about Kursk and the Donbas campaigns for Ukraine and Russia in coming weeks and months.
Unfortunately, as stunning and clever as the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has been, it may not change Putin’s overall war goals. Previous setbacks, including the Russian Army’s defeat in its 2022 Kyiv offensive, its defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson as well as the international sanctions regime, have not modified Putin’s overall goal of subjugating Ukraine and destroying its capacity to exist as a sovereign, prosperous democracy. Kursk, unfortunately might only make him more determined to achieve this – assuming he remains president.
But, if we are lucky, Ukraine’s audacity, demonstration of offensive capacity and most importantly – will – might convince the U.S. and its NATO partners to reconsider their strategy for supporting Ukraine and the level of resourcing it provides."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-kursk-offensive-dilemma
9. Really educational discussion on what's happening with AI Foundational models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUGosOgiTeI
10. "Hope for the Best Plan for the Worst
One downside of all this stuff after you make it? You’ll become insanely paranoid. Rational optimism is probably the best you can do. No matter what you’ll get the paranoia.
Write down the absolute worst case scenario for everything (finance, health etc.). Then try to line it all up to prevent disaster. Once you get to this point and feel safe *never* make a decision that gives you any sort of pause/anxiety.
As the saying goes “if you have to think about it the answer is no”. This only applies after you’ve hit your exit number though."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/regret-minimization-framework
11. "This tendency is bad because these tools are fragments of a future that is taking shape around us—and by ignoring them, I’m setting myself up to fall behind. But there is a bright side: I’m staring down the problem and understanding why it exists, which is the beginning of solving it. I need to be more comfortable with the uncertainty that AI brings with it.
Take it slow.
Learning a new language as an adult is similar to weaving AI into familiar workflows. While learning a new language, you’re basically learning new ways to do familiar things. You’ve been to a grocery store many times, but suddenly, you have to find new words to ask when that fruit you like will be in season again. Similarly, when it comes to AI, you’re attempting to use new tools to do things that you’ve done many times before."
https://every.to/learning-curve/why-i-avoided-ai-and-how-i-finally-embraced-it
12. One of the best shows to know what’s happening on the edge of the internet and creative businesses. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYSXF-15Upw
13. Good discussion on how the American's think and American culture of rejuvenation. Compared with AUS, Canada, NZ etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNJKuV53sU0
14. This was a fascinating interview with Pieter Levels. He is King, nay, God Emperor of Indie Hackers and Patron Saint of non-douchey Digital Nomads.
I first saw him present at Brain Bar in Budapest back in 2015 and it was incredibly eye-opening to me re: the growth of the digital nomad world and geo-arbitrage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg&t=2780s
15. Great update on Ukraine's Kursk incursion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AVSki6dIgg
16. A good overview of the new Axis strategy in Africa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOKvX0ezMTg
17. A must listen to discussion on the state of venture capital. More on the end of the industrial VC model.
It's the time of Tinkerer/Builder VCs, not Finance VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-jARU9rjrY
18. Important discussion on the challenges of mass immigration in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDATt_4dVk
19. "Johnson’s practice of Not Dying—and talking about it to anyone who will listen—has made it so we all know far too much about him. Yet, beyond this, it’s as though we really know nothing about the man at all. In recent months, though, Johnson seems to have at least become a bit more likable. Maybe something has shifted in our public perception of him, possibly due to the mild sense of levity he has started to use in his posts online. In the talk, too, he came across as thoughtful, charismatic. I found myself thinking: I genuinely sort of like the guy! But still I wonder, what exactly is he buttering us up for?
Johnson's mantra is “Don’t Die,” which he thinks of as a game, one we’re all playing whether or not we chose to, “like capitalism.” And certainly, the way Johnson is doing it, it does seem as though it’s all for sport."
https://www.gq.com/story/bryan-johnson-immortality-party
20. A surprisingly interesting and wise interview with Dan Bilzerian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lleTnSIiAFE
21. I'm a fanboy here. Josh Wolfe is one of the best deep tech investors around for over 2 decades. I always learn from his interviews. One of the few folks who think for themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGdZzGzy0xU
22. "Six years before that conversation, Morgan had completed his purchase of Andrew Carnegie’s entire steel operation for the unheard-of sum of $480 million, hundreds of billions in today’s dollars. You don’t do that deal and amass that kind of wealth with a persistently negative outlook. Count the perma bears on the Forbes 400 list or the number of pessimists who run companies in the Fortune 500. You will find none.
Winners and other men and women of foresight and ambition do monumental things; pessimists watch them from the sidelines, making a list of all the reasons things won’t work out. The losers do get to win sometimes, too. But their victories tend to be Pyrrhic, as every calamity ultimately leads to opportunity when the dust clears.
But the optimists are eventually proven right. Not every day, but always and eventually. Indisputably. It just takes a while to be able to see it play out. Even if you don’t believe me, make your investment in the future anyway, just in case I end up being right again. Plant your seed regardless. If you end up being right in your pessimism many years from now, we will all have bigger problems than what our investments are worth. Being optimistic all the time is difficult. But having any other disposition as a default setting makes little sense when you’re investing for a future far out in front of us."
https://www.profgalloway.com/optimism-as-a-default-setting/
23. Interesting inside view of Anduril, the leading Defense-tech company in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0NGTEMEvVI
24. "Theseus’s story reveals a lot about the Pentagon’s changing relationship with non-traditional companies and innovators. For example: breakthroughs in the defense space are no longer the sole domain of a handful of established defense contractors. Advances in AI—coupled with decades-long trends in information technology—are lowering the bar to bringing important new capabilities online. Now, a group of smart young people with no experience in the military can create new battlefield-relevant capabilities from cheap, easily available components, and do so at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional defense contractor.
It also shows that the culture of young Silicon Valley programmers and aspiring company founders is changing. The taboo of collaborating with the Defense Department is not what it was in 2018, when Google programers objected so strongly to the company’s work with the Pentagon that the company dropped the contract.
That change is fueled in part by the success of a new breed of defense-focused startups like Palantir and Anduril, who are winning contracts and showing that digital-first processes in design and manufacturing can deliver new capabilities much more quickly than in the past."
25. "Moctezuma II’s authoritarian control of true speech may have happened over five centuries ago. But the three examples I just touched on from the Soviet Union, Germany, and China all took place in living memory. People like my Oma (who just turned 101) lived through these historical events and under some of the tyrants who created them.
We are teetering on the brink of experiencing the very same fate.
If we allow laws like these to propagate, we’re allowing our governments to build a prison for us that encompasses all of society. A prison where one day, without intent, something—anything—you say could be used as a means to persecute or imprison you.
You’ll say it’s truth.
They’ll say it’s hate.
However, only one side gets to win the argument without intent, evidence, or fair due process.
It won’t be the side of the people."
https://anticitizen.com/p/a-prison-for-us
26. An inspiring story of Stronghold Refugee Rescue and Relief.
Our military vets are amazing. Incredible interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAUqYoxv_ZU
27. This is going to end in tears. It's like we learned nothing from 2019-2021.
28. Wes is the kick in the butt every person needs, at least those who wants to be the best version of themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKWLtTFv7I
29. "There is no single optimal pricing model for AI. Each AI application creates and delivers value differently and to different personas (e.g., individual vs. team vs. institution), and they will have individual value metrics optimal for achieving a company’s monetization objective.
However, from a pricing strategy perspective, as more sophisticated AI applications shift the value scaling away from the user, these developments pressure user-based pricing in two ways: 1) Cannibalization — as these systems become more productive, they potentially reduce the # of users required, and 2) Increase sales friction — continue pricing these applications on a per-user basis will make the sales conversation increasingly tenuous as its user growth no longer correlates with increased value delivery.
These developments will require companies to change monetization away from pure user-based subscription pricing to a pricing model that incorporates elements of “pay-as-you-go,” or sometimes called “usage-based pricing” (UBP) metrics.
There are many types of Usage-based metrics, operating across a spectrum between cost alignment and value alignment in four distinct patterns: price to Resource, price to Activities, price to Output, and price to Outcome. Price to Resource is generally not recommended for SaaS Applications as it ignores the application’s value proposition.
Activities-based metrics are a good choice for AI Applications operating in the “human augmentation” and even most content generation paradigms as they align well with the user’s engagement model with the application. They are also a good proxy for resource consumption and can be used as a cost governance metric in a hybrid model (e.g., Kittl.) However, they may become more challenging to operate with AI systems designed for complex workflow automation due to the potential complexity of defining and attributing values to activities.
Output-based metrics are a poor fit for AI applications operating as “human assistants” because they are difficult to attribute value to. However, more sophisticated AI systems operating in the Generative or Agentic paradigm will generate more discrete and intrinsically valuable output, making this model a potentially good fit for these types of AI applications.
Finally, outcome-based metrics have the potential to be the best usage metric for the most sophisticated AI systems automating complex workflows, as they fully align monetization with customer success. However, value attribution remains a concern, and whether highly autonomous AI systems can make value attribution self-evident remains to be seen."
30. "The key difference now being that the US military has lost a decade of valuable time to rebuild military capacity and bolster conventional and nuclear deterrents. The US Army active duty force is the smallest it has been since the end of World War II; the Navy has stagnated short of 300 battle force ships, half the size of the Cold War fleet; and the Air Force combat aircraft inventory continues to shrink as retirements outpace new purchases every single year.
Reality gets a vote. The military balance keeping peace across three theaters—two of which are engaged in wars of mass and attrition—is no longer possible with the smaller, older, less ready force on hand. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Indo-Pacific."
https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/americas-one-war-military-is-no-match-for-reality/
31. I kind of get this. But like every place people take this to stupid extremes on the right (or left as on the coasts).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5kb3gX6UM
32. "The way I sum it up for myself is that I’m just a normal bloke doing very unusual things that most people don’t have the guts to do. The ones who do can be serious oddballs with whom I generally have very little in common at the end of the day.
Has Australia and the West Lost Its Way?
I think so. But you can think this and still be a semi-normal, rational-thinking human without aligning yourself with the whole package of some particular political category or mindset."
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/finding-my-place-between-reality
33. Lifestyles of the rich and famous in Japan. Bit flashy but you can do this in Japan and Dubai and most of Northern Asia without getting robbed or kidnapped. (Definitely do NOT do this in America or Latin America or Africa)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHKmo5MOy5g
34. Good discussion on the IPO and M&A market from an experienced Tech I-banker. Lots of old but useful tech history too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjfcK-lF0o
35. "English is the new programming language. Coding this way, I explored the data much more deeply, more rigorously, & more quickly than I would have otherwise.
The user still needs to be aware of the underlying syntax to fix errors & some statistical tests to verify the computer is doing the right thing, but gone are the days of memorizing the functional arcana of individual programming libraries."
https://tomtunguz.com/higher-level-of-abstraction/
36. I'm on a Wes Watson kick. Motivation for doing the work & Getting S--t Done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61CyhWhS-lU
37. Who are you when you are facing hard times? The coach I needed in 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9kBKsStr2w
38. "If data = the future of personalized healthcare, then it’s tragic that these visionaries in the field of healthcare data were all wiped out just days after having been exonerated from the criminal charges associated with the legal case HP brought against them (an extremely rare outcome in the US justice system). HP complained that Autonomy’s data-gathering software and/or the Autonomy team were not performing as expected, accused them of fraud, and had them extradited to the US (which is also rare).
One wonders how it's possible that these rare minds who truly understood the marriage of data and healthcare, who were loaded with a ton of money in the bank, hard-won venture capital expertise, and who had an interest in advancing the cutting edge of medical solutions, were all lost at once. Healthcare is at the heart of everything, everywhere you look. Trump and Kennedy now own and have knitted together these popular issues – healthcare and inexplicable suspicious deaths.
To be clear, I fully support medical innovation. I’m hoping they can 3D print a new me and give me personalized life-saving drugs in my lifetime! Longevity isn’t about a new vitamin protocol. It’s about 3D-printed spare parts and medicines that are genetically specific. That helps explain why so many in Silicon Valley are backing Trump and Kennedy now. I am just saying that what is happening in American politics is bigger than this particular Presidential race.
These questions about life and death don’t just refer to who wins or who loses this race, but to who gets to decide who gets to live and who gets killed, and how we all get to live or die. Kennedy has long been investigating all the different kinds of shots, from assassins’ merciless bullets to medical syringes to media potshots. Now, he has a Presidential sponsor and is potentially armed with a platform to find the smoking guns, to get under the skin of healthcare, and to hit his “money shot” - even if he does not win this particular Presidential race."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/assassinations-autonomy-anatomy-anomalous
War of Traps: Power Corrupts Absolutely
I started watching a Japanese political drama called “War of Traps.” It’s a very good tv series which I recommend to get an insight into Japanese politics.
Washizu is a loyal lieutenant and secretary to a Senior minister in the Japanese government. He does everything he can to support him. Until his son is hurt and he is betrayed by his minister. He starts to see how corrupt and broken things are.
“Do the powerful get anything they want? Must the weak accept everything? I’m not having any of it. They’ll get what is coming to them. I will teach them how much it hurts to get stomped on. I will teach them.”
He gathers his team and slowly uses his position to rise through the political ranks. He even joins the Japanese Diet and becomes special advisor to the Prime Minister, punishing his enemies along the way. It is a literal war of political traps he sets and escapes from. He becomes the power behind the throne.
“I used to suck it up when I was mistreated. But when I got power, people started to bow down. People listened to me. Truly a good feeling. I wanted to help people. I had to be coercive at times to do so. I thought power made me virtuous but I was just being possessed. Possessed by power and authority.”
But he destroys his relationship with his beloved family along the way. His son becomes alienated to him and his wife divorces him. All a result of him getting lost in the pursuit of power. He eventually wakes up and sacrifices his career to take down a corrupt Prime Minister.
“I looked it up. The fate of a bamboo grove when it dies after blossoming flowers. The grove dying allows more sunlight to reach the soil and then new bamboo plants sprout and grow.
Soon an even stronger grove sprout.”
The point is sometimes you need massive change to improve things. “When the old perish, the new will sprout. Something new, and something beyond imagination. Cover up injustice to uphold the status quo? Politics like that should disintegrate.”
I guess this is a lesson we need to learn here in the Global West. We need a rejuvenation of our system. New blood, new energy and it’s coming.
“The weak have their own way of fighting.” Remember that.