Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 31st, 2024
"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." – Marcus Aurelius
"I fear the war will drag on, its costs will grow, and its political impact in Ukraine or Russia will also increase. By 2025, possibly with Donald Trump in the White House, there will be a question of which belligerent is better able to manage the impact at home (keep the economy going, preserve political unity, manage mobilisation requirements and avoid a collapse of morale in the army) and abroad (coalitions for military aid and sanctions enforcement). This year is unlikely to bring anything besides more war and more destruction."
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2024/02/ukraine-war-second-anniversary-symposium
This is absolutely instructive. A must for all B2B founders. Harsh but helpful truths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMe_FWldQF0&t=751s
"Donaldson’s swift rise has been spurred by massive changes in the media landscape where individuals have replaced institutions as the gatekeepers of entertainment and information. He’s proved an adroit Pied Piper, figuring out how to work the YouTube algorithm to hook and keep a crowd. But he’s also disrupting the new ecosystem, showing what’s possible, even far from Hollywood, with a gigantic following.
The ethos of doing things differently, of growing quickly and exponentially, has sparked concern among some about the company’s safety and labor practices. For now, though, the question seems less whether Donaldson will get where he wants to go than where he’s going—what the world he is helping shape will look like.
His sway has grown such that in 2022 he launched a line of snacks, Feastables, that by 2023 was in multiple countries and will have, according to him, $500 million in annual revenue this year. Stars the wattage of Tom Brady and Justin Timberlake now appear in his videos, and the Charlotte Hornets wear a Feastables patch on their shirts. And while he models his career on Steve Jobs, he has a little Melinda French Gates in him too. On a second channel, Beast Philanthropy, he performs outlandish tricks of the charitable sort: rescuing 100 unwanted dogs, giving away 20,000 shoes, helping distribute $30 million worth of food that was going to waste.
In December 2020, he started a food-delivery service, MrBeast Burger. It grew to a reported 1,700 virtual locations and $100 million in total revenue by August 2022, before becoming ensnared in a legal battle. He also has a toy deal and is reportedly on the verge of signing a nine-figure deal with Amazon."
https://time.com/collection/time100-leadership-series/6693255/mrbeast-interview/
A good discussion on geopolitics. Net net: the West is lagging behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTsWGUDYkQM
"Casinos are unique in their aim. No other industry builds a world designed to maintain a customer’s fantasy so that they continue to partake in an activity that, in the long run, advantages the house. But retailers share at least one common goal with casinos: They want to keep people inside.
“The goal of the retailer is to make sure that they find ways to increase the time we spend in the store, the number of items we see at the store, and end up buying not just what we came in for but ideally a few additional things,”
https://thehustle.co/originals/why-you-almost-never-see-a-clock-at-the-mall
"As it turns out, it’s not social media that connects us in the 21st century. It’s ships. Shipping is a $14 trillion-plus industry, and the overwhelming majority of the world’s goods—a colossal 90 percent of them—spend time at sea. Marina believes that shipping is good for humans, as to trade with people around the world is to acquire empathy for them.
“To see them in their places, to see what they need, what they want. It’s globalization.” And with the ramp-up of TMV’s latest fund, it seems to me that Marina, in her steel-bougainvillea way, is currently orchestrating a one-woman overhaul of the entire shipping industry."
https://archive.ph/bN1hG#selection-777.0-789.0
This is really cool.
"Ridley, now 33, is a full-time “bikepacker” who has been traveling the world for eight years. He started using bikes to travel in 2015 and has since ridden the lengths of Africa, Asia, Europe, and nearly all of Oceania.
His solo travels started with nights in hostels and traveling by buses and trains. From there, he moved into hitchhiking and camping. Wanting even more flexibility, he began considering cycling. After a few painful trips, it became his vehicle of choice.
“There's times when I'm very grateful to be alone,” Ridley said. “For personal growth, I think traveling solo has enormous value.”
He said traveling alone taught him how to improvise, be comfortable under pressure, and how to deal with people. In terms of security, he finds that personal skills and forming accurate judgments are his “first line of defense” and more useful than knives or pepper spray."
"In all three of these instances—podcasting hosting, podcast consumption, and audiobooks consumption—my colleagues and I were told to tread carefully, to explore other avenues, to respect the No Trespassing sign. This advice came from people who had worked in these respective industries for a long time, and whose perspectives were often skewed by their familiarity with the status quo.
Their view: The incumbents have too broad an existing user base, too much brand recognition, and too strong an incentive to defend their strongholds for a challenger to disrupt them.
I can’t help but disagree. I’ve come to learn through first-hand experience that monopolies often serve as the ideal competitor to take on. There are four main reasons why:
-Monopolies have already proven the industry is viable and lucrative
-Monopolies refuse to cannibalize their own dominance
-Monopolies have institutionalized their inefficiencies
-Monopolies have the most to lose from making mistakes, whereas startups have the most to gain"
https://every.to/p/don-t-be-scared-to-take-on-a-monopoly
"This is, I think, one of the major reasons for the Diversity Paradox. Whilst in theory the pool of potential recruits has been much widened, in practice the messages sent out by “successful” people today amount to a subliminal incitement to a new generation of would-be sociopaths, focused on narcissistic ego-gratification and the satisfaction of a lust for power and money.
They also discourage many “excellent” people from joining organisation or going into politics, because they judge, quite understandably, that they would not like to work in such an environment, nor are they interested in fighting political battles for more status and even more money. And this applies across the board, irrespective of skin pigmentation, genital arrangements or anything else. Sociopaths are sociopaths, and in general sociopaths are bad managers and bad at their jobs. The only skills they have are those related to personal success. Thus, organisations and political systems fail.
This helps to explain, I think, the terrifying shambles of the western reaction to Ukraine. Western politicians have come to believe not only that narrative control is essential, but also that it is all that is necessary. This worked, more or less, in Afghanistan. But in Ukraine, with western-trained troops being slaughtered and western equipment blown to bits, elites have suddenly realised what Bagehot could have told them: that while narrative control can “impress the many,” you still need instruments of coercion to actually get things done, and the West, of course, now has none.
In effect, organisations of all kinds have essentially returned to the pre nineteenth-century model of predation and parasitism, where the state (and these days private corporations) are there just to be exploited and looted. You choose your career according to the benefits you can expect, and you arrange your professional life to maximise them.
You say and do the right things to secure advancement, and in due course, you cooperate with others in positions of power to loot the system, and pass on. The benefits may be financial, but they may also be those of status and perception, and indeed your first career—in the public sector for example—may be no more than a preparation for a much more lucrative one elsewhere."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-diversity-paradox
"So nuclear proliferation is happening, and it’s mostly being done by China and its allies. Increasingly, this means that U.S. allies are facing nuclear-capable enemies without nukes of their own. India has nukes to balance Pakistan’s, and Israel has nukes to balance any future Iranian arsenal. But three key U.S. allies are in a very perilous situation right now: Japan, South Korea, and Poland.
So for Japan, South Korea, and possibly Poland, getting nukes is the obvious strategy for dealing with the expansionist empires next door. If these countries went nuclear, it would draw “hard boundaries” past which Xi and Putin could not pass, even if they succeeded in gobbling up Ukraine, Taiwan, and other small nations in the area. Japanese, South Korean, and Polish nukes would freeze the battle lines of Cold War 2, potentially stopping it from turning into World War 3."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/japan-and-south-korea-need-nuclear
Solid discussion with LP on evaluating emerging VC fund managers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9YQIaKupR8
This was such a good discussion. Not just for investing insights but for life. It came at the right time for me.
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/62018848/banister-investing-for-a-higher-purpose
"Social media may thus create instability in democracies while leaving autocracies untouched.
In other words, the rise of smartphones and social media means that the internet is now a powerful centralizer of both personal information and public discussion, rather than the decentralizing force that the creators of the Web intended it to be. And centralization plays into the hands of those who seek to control every aspect of other people’s lives — i.e., totalitarians.
Most of China’s “sharp power” methods are fundamentally enabled by the smartphone-and-social-media internet — and/or by globalization itself. Manipulation of TikTok, attempted control of Zoom, and social media misinformation campaigns give China a propaganda reach that the USSR could only dream of. The unprecedented surveillance state
China has built — superior to anything the Nazis or Soviets had — relies crucially on smartphones. Meanwhile, a globalized economy makes it much easier for China to order American companies around, to steal technologies, to install its surveillance technology around the globe, and so on.
Liberalism has not yet evolved an effective defense against these methods of control. Our companies, venal and fragmented, are prostrate before China’s economic coercion. Our social media chaos is self-sustaining — it drives political polarization that prevents us from taking steps to rein in the chaos. Our attempts at digital privacy laws so far have been cack-handed and largely ineffectual. Our cybersecurity has been thoroughly penetrated.
Totalitarians don’t just have an advantage in manufacturing capacity now. Their power has thoroughly penetrated democratic societies; in the language of the old internet, we have been p0wned. Figuring out effective defenses is a crucial task if liberalism wants to prevail in the 21st century the way it prevailed in the 20th."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/new-technologies-new-totalitarians
"I know a lot of really smart, interesting people. That’s why I find myself telling a lot of people that I’d love it if they shared their thoughts more often in public. I don’t much care whether they do it in writing, or a newsletter, a podcast or on LinkedIn—but I feel like I every time I interact with them, I learn something or I’m inspired to think about things in a different way.
Yet, the response I get most often is, “But there’s already so much content out there!”
I’ve never quite related to that way of thinking—mostly because I don’t actually find most online content to be that good. Remember, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the slowest camper—and in the world of online thought leadership, there are a lot of slow campers."
https://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2024/2/27/but-theres-so-much-content-out-there
A great view on geopolitics by one of the best in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLjY502lPtU
An excellent discussion on what’s happening in business on the internet and popular culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVGuGnIyY90
Disturbing discussion on growing Chinese military (and unserious Taiwanese defense initiatives)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK_eH5UnlTo
"Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige.
Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?
What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do.
Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants
"The collapse of the US-led, rules-based international order means everything the US will do internationally in the future will be more challenging and filled with danger."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-american-way
"What I do think has become clear, though, is that the nation is slowly calming down. The Wikipedia page for “domestic terrorism in the United States” lists 9 “notable” domestic terrorist attacks from 2015 to 2019, and zero since. In my opinion, they’re omitting a few from the list, but the basic pattern is clear — the mid and late 2010s were the peak. Murder rates — which took decades to start falling after the unrest of the 60s and 70s — are now dropping.
Part of this might be due to simple exhaustion, after years of continuous unrest. Part of it might also be due to improvement in Americans’ economic circumstances. Employment rates are very high. Real wages are rising strongly for regular workers."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/getting-past-the-2010s
Lots of disturbing things on the geopolitical side. Erik Prince does know what he is talking about. USA is stretched and ground down by incompetent bureaucrats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBfyyLLM3pc&t=966s
"At a high level, the bearish sentiment makes sense. Inconsistent consumer sentiment and dwindling savings accounts prompt fears that spending will slow, customer acquisition costs have been rising, inventory and supply chain challenges are material and the shift toward generative artificial intelligence has emphasized infrastructure to date.
But public market data reveal a different story: Compared with enterprise software companies, consumer companies are more likely to go public after raising a Series B, more likely to drive efficient growth at the time of an initial public offering and just as likely to trade at 10 times revenue at the time of IPO.
Some of the world’s largest companies started by serving consumers. Just as enterprise software companies aim to expand revenue with clients by adding new products or increasing usage, consumer companies have parallel ambitions and success. Think about Amazon (books), Google (search), and Meta Platforms (Facebook)—three of the most influential companies, all of which began with a consumer-first value proposition and then expanded into adjacent businesses and multidimensional business models."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dont-give-up-on-consumer-startups
Latest on what’s up in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwgUMt24qbE
I'm pro Taiwan and American so I am fan of this move.
https://www.defensehere.com/en/us-permanently-deploys-training-mission-in-taiwan
25. "This has a significant impact on the competitive advantages of a firm in the market as it scales. When party rounds were the standard course for smaller seed firms, connections were the scarce skill set, enabling access to deals led by other reputable firms. As these funds have become larger and rounds have become increasingly tighter, conviction becomes the scarcer skill set (i.e. can you lead and win the deal).
As someone who began my investing career outside of the valley, leading early rounds independently feels very natural to me. I knew full well that if a generic enterprise SaaS deal made its way to my desk from the Bay Area that it was likely adverse selection (sure enough, I lost nearly every $ I invested in the Bay Area). This forced independent conviction.
Not by choice, but by circumstance — fewer investors were looking at those deals and categories. Our team has developed capabilities to source independently, develop conviction independently, and partner with those that can appropriately complement us as co-investors and downstream investors. We also capped our fund size to enable the opportunity for us to continue to collaborate with our partner firms, whereas had we raised a larger amount we’d have to be even more restrictive.
Much like with startups, growth at all cost is a fool’s errand. In some select cases, scale can have advantages, but to pursue scale without recognizing its ramifications is a dangerous course of action. As firms grow, the fund size dictates the strategy and capabilities necessary to execute it."
https://medium.com/@EqualVentures/fund-size-is-your-strategy-d30f284c176a
A great discussion and historical review of the evolution of media businesses in the USA. Really interesting stuff if you want to build a media empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrsZl1NHmCE&t=82s
"Trae Stephens, a former government intelligence analyst turned early Palantir employee turned investor at Founders Fund, where Stephens has cofounded two companies of his own. One of these is Anduril, the buzzy defense tech company that is now valued at $8.4 billion by its investors. The other is Sol, which makes a single-purpose, $350 headset that weighs about the same as a pair of sunglasses and that is focused squarely on reading, a bit like a wearable Kindle. (Having put on the pair that Stephens brought to the event, I immediately wanted one of my own, though there’s a 15,000-person waitlist right now, says Stephens.)
We spent the first half of our chat talking primarily about Founders Fund, kicking off the conversation by talking about how Founders Fund differentiates itself from other firms (board seats are rare, it doesn’t reserve money for follow-on investments, consensus is largely a no-no)."
"The moon is just a weigh station for this grand plan. But think of space and the lunar surface as the most important physics lab humankind has ever been able to access. Much of the testing there will define what is possible on Earth. This is especially true of autonomous robotics. Mining on the moon or on asteroids is also about new methods for radically transforming mining on Earth.
The low gravity on the moon makes it a very cheap and easy place to launch from. The buildout on the lunar surface and beyond will mainly be done by 3-D printers and autonomous AI-led robotics."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/cows-jump-over-the-moon
"The multitrillion-dollar question is who gets to the steep part of the S-curve first — or whether OpenAI and its peers have already reached it. Because once ChatGPT (or Perplexity or Claude or a model we haven’t seen yet) hits escape velocity, the history of innovation tells us the race is over. A bad sign for Alphabet: Of the original eight researchers who wrote that AI “Attention” paper, only one still works at Google. Six others founded their own companies, and one joined OpenAI.
Something that’s speed-balled Christensen’s theory in this era is the amount of capital available to the defectors. Generative AI and AI-related startups raised more than $50 billion in 2023, led by Open AI. Over 70 rounds of $100+ million raises occurred last year. These companies aren’t immediately direct competitors of Google; they’re coming at the search game obliquely.
ChatGPT doesn’t fill every role that Google’s product offers, but it begins to nibble at the periphery, just as Google has been gnawing at all media for two decades. A former Google employee who founded their own AI startup recently said, “The pirates have their boats in the ocean, and we are coming.”
https://www.profgalloway.com/searching
"I asked how they approach things from a team and work perspective, and he shared something I’ll never forget. Their goal is to never have more than 10 employees and instead, they lean heavily on ChatGPT and other AI tools to augment their onshore, in-person team. Then, they have a growing presence in Eastern Europe for all of their development efforts and a customer service presence in the Philippines.
So, the business is based in Atlanta. The founders are in Atlanta, and their goal is to never have double-digit official employees. Instead, the main work is done by experts in one country, and the main support is done by experts in a different country. Everything that can be automated internally is automated; everything that can be outsourced is outsourced.
The ultimate result is a new category of startup: the forever lean startup.
Thinking more about this model, I think this is going to be a serious trend in startupland."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/03/02/rise-of-the-forever-lean-startup/
I love Buenos Aires and long overdue to return.
"The point of mentioning this is Buenos Aires is epic, from the georbitrage, nightlife, extremely attractive women, barrios (neighborhoods), and restaurants, I can’t find a better place to live and I consider myself very picky for where I base myself.
Geoarbitrage is the single most important reason I live here. The cost of living is incredibly cheap, even by Latin American standards, from rent to eating at classy restaurants, buying drinks/fun stuff, gyms, etc. I can live off $1200 USD per month and still enjoy the quality of life described below.
I’m going to say that I think I’m sitting on a good hand in the market (probably deserve to get a smack for this), I’ve already made some money thanks to investing in March 2020 market lows & being very early to uranium stocks, but I’m not willing to sell anything until I think the investment thesis has played out. So for now, I’m quite happy to base myself here, in a safe city with a low cost of living, trading options for income enjoying a bloody high quality of life."
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/i-have-the-best-quality-of-life-here
"The other reason people never become financially independent is pure laziness.
Many smart people have already figured out that they will never become financially independent working a job (at least not before old age) and that they need to start some kind of business if they ever hope to get there.
The problem is “someday”. These guys are always stuck in “someday” and never take any action TODAY.
Someday and tomorrow are just words people use to express their laziness. Weeks, months, and years go by and these types never take any action.
Starting an online business is NOT hard but it does take some effort.
You have to learn a high paying skill (I recommend audience building, web design, copywriting, or programming). You have to send cold emails and DMs. You have to do the work.
It’s easy – all you have to do is click mouse buttons and hit keys on the keyboard.
But most people are lazy. They just don’t have the initiative to do it. They’d rather just beg their boss for leaves instead of trying to become their own boss.
There’s no excuse. The internet gives equal opportunity to everyone, but not equal results. Meritocracy.
If you don’t do the work, you don’t get results. And I have zero sympathy for the lazy."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-to-become-financially-independent
"In summary, I’ll lay it out like this. If you’re a young professional, look at your peers higher up in the hierarchy, do you like what you see? Ask yourself is this what you aspire to? 99% of people do.
If you’re in the 1%, like me, set some goals, live cheaply, take calculated risks in the market than you may otherwise might later in life, and remember there are “options” out there to help you escape it all and live a life completely on your own terms. The further you move away from the thought and expectations of the 99%, in my experience, the less you actually give a fuck what people think.
Aspire to live a life true to yourself, and don’t take it all too seriously, remember at the end of the day, we’re just an evolved monkey species spinning around on a rock."
https://geologotrader.substack.com/p/create-opportunities-for-luck-my
"People consider what I’m doing as “risky”. 18 months without an employer or investment property, still with a regular income while I geoarbitrage my life in low-cost Argentina, trade options for income and let my longer-term investment thesis’ play out.
Having the character and strength to be the black sheep is when your eyes really open up to how the rest of the world works.
I like to think my one year in Argentina has almost left me with a Bachelor of how not to do Economics and a minor in anti-socialism."