Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 18th, 2021
“The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” — John Maxwell
- “Banks are massively larger and more important in terms of their institutional power and centrality to our way of life than printers ever were. When this insanely consolidated, over-levered, politically invincible loses its grip on the basic plumbing of finance, it will be a way bigger deal than the advent of the Web. More along the lines of the Catholic Church losing its grip on government and culture with the rise of the printing press.
All this is already in progress and will happen at the speed of software.”
https://www.jonstokes.com/p/cryptocurrency-and-the-great-unbundling
2. Net net: Be like Thiel and learn the tax rules.
https://contrarianthinking.co/peter-thiel-accumulated-5b-with-this-trick/
3. “Technology — from AngelList syndicates to new insurgents to no-code solutions — has made it easier than ever to accommodate new types of investor relationships. Now the legal docs just need to catch up.
I don’t quite know what the solution is yet, but I feel pretty confident that we shouldn’t keep working off the same document that’s been used since the birth of venture capital. Emerging startups and the adoption of automation by the legal industry should make it easier to generate new agreements that accommodate the nuance of modern investor relationships.”
https://automatter.substack.com/p/the-future-of-vc-is-decentralized
4. Interesting new VC firm focusing on the psychedelics space. Vine Ventures.
5. “the timing of the CCP’s latest wave of regulatory scrutiny could not have been better. The ensuing miner exodus currently taking place is one of the most positive fundamental developments for Bitcoin in 2021. Even if we see short term drops in monthly implied hash rate figures as miners emigrate, it would be for an important cause.”
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-miners-moving-out-
6. Monster write up I posted before. It’s such a good one on the Future of Work.
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35
7. “Bottom up” go-to-market strategies and product-led growth are changing the game, forcing companies to rethink traditional funnel-focused processes when it comes to sales and more. Compared to the old world, where software tools were imposed upon workers who had little say in the matter, this world is one where purchasing power has become decentralized; where users expect as much from their work products as they do from their personal apps; and where paywalls and “call us” pricing have been replaced with trials, free tiers, and self-serve.
So where does community come in then? A strong “go-to-community” competency not only helps companies proactively compete in this new environment, but it also provides the framework and tools to shift from top-down to bottom-up. Go-to-community helps build positive-sum relationships beyond just sales. And perhaps most importantly, it uplevels the very notion of community from something that’s purely company-centric and transactional (e.g., “good for deflecting support tickets”) into something that impacts every part of the organization.
Community, in other words, can become a force multiplier for the entire business.”
https://future.a16z.com/community-≠-marketing-why-we-need-go-to-community-not-just-go-to-market/
8. Worth learning about. DAOs: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
“On a fundamental level, you can think of DAOs as internet-native constitutions. Like regular constitutions, DAOs embed a fundamental set of rules and principles that establish an organization and determine its governance structure. But unlike regular constitutions, DAOs can execute some activities fully autonomously. For example, a DAO with its own internal capital can automatically buy and sell cryptocurrencies based on specific programmatic conditions.”
9. Beyond Meat!
“For me, getting the innovation that’s in our labs to market is the most difficult part, and it’s the most difficult part for any business. I spoke at Tesla a couple years ago, and I enjoyed the fact that I was with people who knew how hard it is to commercialize. There was a sense of shared recognition that scaling something that is new for the market that is really special and new, not not just another knockoff … It’s difficult and there’s going to be a lot of failure and it’s gonna be a lot of frustration. A lot of our products are very good, but we have stuff in our labs — it’s a lot better.”
https://time.com/6078353/beyond-meat-ceo-ethan-brown/
10. I like the idea of Libertarianism but they are wildly ineffective in real life (kind of like Communism and Socialism).
“In conclusion: Libertarians play in their own little sandbox, but there’s an entire playground they’re missing out on. They pretend that the larger playground doesn’t exist, or that playing in it would be a waste of time, so they’d rather be king of the sandbox than an average Joe on the playground. As a result, they’re playing status games in their own little echo chamber in their own little ecosystem while having no impact whatsoever on the outside world.”
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/why-libertarians-lose
11. Basics of DEFI.
“The current problem with DeFi is that no one trusts it. You have too many scammers running off with funds and too many software bugs. This is no different than the internet. When the internet came out people said only scammers and crooks used it. Back in the day people said that Craigslist/eBay and all of these online portals for peer to peer sales would be zeros. That didn’t work. In fact, the brick and mortar business suffered dramatically once e-commerce was up and running.
Your job? Find projects that are mispriced. We’re more than happy to give a basic risk framework around this: 1) BTC/ETH, 2) LINK/Stables, 3) Defi, 4) NFTs and 5) random new meme coins/hottest trend on Crypto Twitter.
From the above if you spend all day looking at yields you’ll find that the biggest spreads occur on level 3 and level 4.”
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/farming-risks-fees-and-crypto-information
12. “The short answer is that you need to create an evolving lifestyle investment strategy. And as you invest and create new types of digital assets to meet your lifestyle needs, you will need to also learn and adopt treasury management practices. ie: Your money management practices should mimic what corporations do. Learning to plan and manage cash flows, volatility, and risk across a wide variety of new assets.
Why?
Because digital assets can be very different from traditional assets. And there are no unified services offered by brokerages, banks, financial advisers, or other 3rd party services to manage your entire digital asset portfolio in an optimized way. For example: your cryptocurrencies are in separate accounts from your websites and newsletter, which are separated from your business income, and your social media accounts. All of which are separated from your traditional assets.
Adopting treasury management practices promotes a unified and collective picture of your financial circumstances. All of which helps you maximize the value of your assets to ensure you maintain the lifestyle you want to live no matter what situation you encounter.”
https://dougantin.com/how-to-manage-money-like-a-sovereign-individual/
13. Good to know. Notice how there are no US cities here. (just a comment, USA is not about lifestyle, it’s about biz for better or worse)
https://www.positive.news/society/the-worlds-best-cities-for-mental-wellbeing/
14. This is so deeply insightful. Must watch if you want to see where the world is going. DeFi= Defection….in a good way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPQpG5vDp5M
15. “This is the big picture. Why do we have to wait for specific time periods to send a wire transfer? Why are the fees so high? Why does someone pay 1% of total assets (a huge amount) unless there is real differentiation in the advice? Why do firms pay up to 7% to raise funds in a world where transaction costs are lower and people can connect via the internet rapidly? Why should governments cover the costs of bad loans?
Lots of questions here. In the end we know the long-term answer.
Banks and Wall Street are going away. The talent is leaving to new industries and the firms will struggle to hire anyone with an understanding of technology. And. They didn’t move fast enough to adapt to the new world.”
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/the-banking-model-and-wall-street
16. “Asia is rising peacefully. Its economic heft, widespread prosperity, and cultural clout are all still on a steeply upward trajectory. That is what China’s aggression jeopardizes. To disrupt the Asian status quo and embark on bloody military adventures, when the status quo has been good for almost everyone in the region, would be not just a terrible crime but also a tragedy.
But in addition to preserving this status quo, there are other reasons the U.S. and its allies shouldn’t back down in the face of Chinese aggression. To allow a revisionist power to press revanchist territorial claims would invite more such adventures
In other words, when the Left asserts that any resistance to China means that the U.S. is responsible for starting Cold War 2, it’s actually a call for appeasement. If Cold War 2 is upon us, we have little choice but to fight it — and, hopefully, to do it while avoiding the mistakes we made in Cold War 1.”
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-didnt-start-cold-war-2
17. Tiger and Softbank shaking up VC. This is a very good thing IMHO.
“What they have in common — and what makes them both symbols of this golden age of venture investing — is being open-checkbook investors who aren’t afraid of pouring hundreds of millions into a startup with a desire to hold that position into the public markets. As such, they’ve both shaken up the venture capital market in 2021 and are the new forces driving deal speed and price in late-stage investing.
Tiger Global may be setting the pace and the deal terms lately, but founders may be the real winners from its growing competitiveness with SoftBank. Instead of one ominous capital cannon, there are now two — both willing to move quickly to snag deals. And if VCs can’t rethink their dealmaking traditions, they may find themselves caught in the crossfire.”
https://www.protocol.com/tiger-global-softbank-vision-fund
18. Balaji Srinavasan remarked, “In the future, everyone is an investor.”
Or newsletter writer as an investor.
Packy M has a big audience and writes incredibly well. This definitely helps him with deal flow (and LPs). Impressive LP list and some super interesting companies. We can all learn from him.
https://www.notboring.co/p/introducing-not-boring-capital
19. People forget how important the French & Indian Wars were to setting up the conditions for the American Revolution.
https://douthat.substack.com/p/reflections-on-the-revolution-in
20. Bitcoin as a religion. Which is what makes it so potent and scary.
“Many people I speak to are disillusioned by the state of the world generally and the state of America specifically. Society, if you haven’t noticed, is in dismal disarray. The Federal Reserve — or “the Fed,” as it is often spat out derisively — is printing money willy-nilly. Inflation is on the rise. The dollar is backed by little more than the whims of shadowy plutocrats who’ve been sucking the value out of your bank account faster than a greedy toddler with a milkshake. Or have you not been paying attention?
Ask Bitcoiners (and I mean real, hardcore Bitcoin acolytes, not cryptotourists dabbling in dogecoin) what Bitcoin means to them and you’ll find that they grow passionate and misty-eyed. Often, becoming a Bitcoiner is not all that dissimilar from the transformative awakening of someone who’s undergone a radical spiritual conversion.”
21. “Now we live in the age of neuroscience, positive psychology, biohacking, and supplement stacking. We have research in every direction telling us how we can be successful, get rid of bad habits, rewire our brains, supercharge our willpower, and be the superhuman we dreamed of becoming as children.
But psychological trauma is a very real thing, and it makes us sick — physically and mentally.
Clearly money, fame, success, popularity, or talent alone does not help us to reliably escape the grasp of psychological trauma. Self-enhancement and self-healing are two different things.
self-enhancement without the inclusion of self-healing will likely create traumatized supermen — dazzling but unstable stars that eventually collapse in on themselves.”
https://highexistence.com/self-healing-vs-self-enhancement/
22. “Despite the various challenges we face currently, the reality is that Americans have never really known hard times within living memory — real hard times, not invented ones based on Twitter dramas and ‘misinformation’.
All that Americans have known since World War II is yet higher plateaus of freedom and material wealth, with all the horrors of the world — killing fields, political prisons, autocratic demagogues, a real resistance — held so far out of their mind’s eye they don’t even know what they look like anymore. There is no law of physics that dictates that must continue however.
America wasn’t built on ‘cancelation’ and ‘content moderation’ guidelines and ‘problematic’ this and that; it was built on the inalienable right of every citizen to tell their government, as well as any fellow citizen, to go fuck themselves and read and write and do whatever they like. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, and the hellbent drive toward some supposed utopia often ruins an imperfect society that would be better served by a more fervent embrace of its founding principles.”
https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-invisible-boot
23. “Over the last decade in Silicon Valley, “growth hacking” has become a popular term. It refers to analytical, innovative, often unconventional ways to rapidly grow a startup. Lil Nas X took growth hacking and applied it to fame. When one thing meets another, Gen Zs often use the 🤝 emoji. Lil Nas X said: growth hacking 🤝 music. He took a playbook of scrappy, savvy, brilliant marketing tactics and applied them to a slow-moving legacy industry.
Lil Nas X didn’t get lucky. He didn’t get hand-picked by a record label executive in a suit. He manifested his own success with ambition, creativity, and an internet connection.”
https://digitalnative.substack.com/p/lil-nas-x-is-gen-zs-defining-icon
24. “Cool, once narrowly delineated and foisted upon us by marketing cherry-picked from hip kids, has been blown apart for the new generation. In a world where everyone, not just the most interesting youths, is under a kind of constant surveillance — where our individual information is more valuable than any short-lived idea of collective cool — demographics give way to data. Gen Z might willfully defy categorization, but each disparate bit of their bizarre taste stew can still be marketed to.
Cool — and by extension, taste — just isn’t all that useful anymore.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22570006/cool-consumer-identity-gen-z-cheugy
25. “And this is another way that Sudeikis and Ted Lasso are alike, because both are always learning and relearning this lesson, which is: Be curious. Both are philosophical men whose philosophies basically boil down to trying to live as decent a life as is possible. Not just for the sake of it but because to be curious — to find out something new about yourself or someone else — is to be empowered.
“I don’t know if you remember G.I. Joe growing up,” Sudeikis said, “but they would always end it with a little saying: ‘Oh, now I know.’ ‘Don’t put a fork in the outlet.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you could get hurt.’ ‘Oh, now I know.’ And then somebody would say, ‘And knowing is half the battle.’ And I agree with that — with kids, knowing is half the battle. But adulthood is doing something about it.”
https://www.gq.com/story/jason-sudeikis-august-cover-profile
26. I am such a big fan of Anthony Bourdain. RIP. I still remember him speaking at our big annual sales conference. So funny and sharp. This should be a worthwhile documentary to watch.
https://www.gq.com/story/anthony-bourdain-morgan-neville-roadrunner-documentary
27. This is a little bit grim. Pretty natural, everyone gripes about their boss. Don’t think this is smart move on Netflix’s part.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/fired-for-venting-on-slack-about-boss-5489370/
28. This does sound about right on present geopolitical scene. Sadly so I might add.
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/afghanistan-and-the-great-powers
29. “Still, Tribe’s successful fund raise is a high-profile validation of the venture firm’s thesis, one that could ultimately disrupt the way the VC industry operates, from identifying promising start-ups to determining whether to back mid- and late-stage companies. While Silicon Valley venture capital has bankrolled tech companies that have upended whole sectors of the economy, venture firms themselves still use little more than Excel spreadsheets to identify companies and conduct due diligence.”
30. “Emerging managers also seem adept at capitalizing on the venture industry’s blind spots. One is the excessive wealth of more veteran VCs. An investor’s experience counts for a lot, but there’s a lot to be said for up-and-comers who are still establishing their reputation, who aren’t sitting on more than a dozen boards and whose future will be closely aligned with their founders.”
….the industry is changing shape, and some form of consolidation, if not imminent, seems inevitable once the checks inevitably stop flying. Some firms will break out, while others team up. Some newer investors will find themselves at top firms, while others close up shop.”
31. “Imagine the first digitally inhabitable country. It’s implemented in a virtual reality city with 100,000 inhabitants. Someone set up the rules and put the city up online, and people can join and see what it’s like.
Without some level of commitment to the city, this would obviously be chaos. so maybe you’d need some minimum requirement from members. That could be done by requiring people to stake some amount of ETH, or to log a minimum number of hours per day in the city.
But testing a government in VR is faster and safer than testing it in the geographic world, not to mention that it isn’t constrained by physical resources. Hundreds of governments could be tested online simultaneously.
Testing entire governments with VR is the most broad-based application. You could even test more granular aspects of a government. Start with some common base for a city, with a standard set of rules, and let people run tests on it. What if we reduced the size of the police force? What if we changed our road system?”
https://1729.com/voluntary-governments/
32. Good way to think about your career. You, your company and your industry.
https://medium.com/@jillcarlson/trends-and-timescales-a9b738be3e97
33. “Shein’s ubiquity, most notably on TikTok, has catapulted the retailer to cult status among young women across the globe. And while Shein is based out of China, it ships to 220 countries, with the US serving as its largest consumer market. In June, Shein overtook Amazon for the first time on the iOS App Store to become the leading US shopping app, a title it holds in over 50 countries. This comes after a pandemic year of record-breaking sales: Shein raked in close to $10 billion in 2020, which was reportedly its eighth consecutive year of revenue growth over 100 percent.
The retailer is also one of the most talked-about brands on TikTok and YouTube, and the most visited fashion and apparel site in the world, according to the web analytics platform Similarweb. Shein had enough in its coffers to place a bid to buy Topshop in January, which it ultimately lost to Asos.
So what makes Shein so special? The answer might seem simple (two words: supply chains), if not for its influence over ever-changing trends and its impact on fashion consumption. There’s no doubt that it’s Shein’s world, and we’re just shopping in it.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22573682/shein-future-of-fast-fashion-explained
34. No surprise either. Banks are zeros. #fintech
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/junior-bankers-have-had-enough-5087524/
35. “The social “panic” that disturbed mayors, presidents, columnists, and Communists never materialized. It never does. Time and resources that could have been devoted to combatting a very real pandemic were wasted combatting an imaginary social phenomenon. In 2020, we all learned the perils of the myth of panic.”
https://palladiummag.com/2021/07/15/the-myth-of-panic/
36. “Professionally speaking, where you live physically may no longer be more important than where you live digitally. The people who you engage with on Twitter, or on group chats, or in online communities might influence your career more than your longitude & latitude. Which means you can finally live & work anywhere — an absolute game-changer. We didn’t even have to build The Silicon Valley of Idaho or India: we built it in the cloud.”
