Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 16th, 2021
“Practice creates the master.” — Miguel Ruiz
Short write up this week. Made the mistake of overcommitting to way too much stuff.
- “Almost every decamillionaire I know or have read about is well diversified. Like the centimillionaire crypto investor, there are a few who aren’t, but if you want to be sustainably wealthy, diversification is key.
We regularly discuss diversification strategies here at Nomad Capitalist, including:
Having bank accounts in multiple countries,
Having money that is more than just a number on a bank computer,
Having a cash position,
Having precious metals,
Having real estate investments and rental real estate,
Owning the properties you live in, and
Doing everything within your power to ensure that you don’t have to start over again.
That is, after all, one of the greatest fears of the wealthy. What if it all falls apart?
Being diversified eliminates that threat.”
https://nomadcapitalist.com/2020/06/22/how-to-become-a-multimillionaire/
2. “We’re dead serious about staying low-key *for now*.
Why? It is clear. In 2018–2019 it was okay to have some luxury goods. Rolex, a nice car and a nice home. Today? It is no longer as cool/interesting. People lost their jobs. People had their businesses shut down. Well off people lost tons of money and many even went bankrupt.
Back in 2018–2019 driving a flashy car was totally fine. Totally. Fine. In 2021? It is not smart.
Recently, Pop Smoke an up and coming popular rapper was killed by a 15 year old for a Rolex watch. That is insane. The reason? People are suffering. Before? If you had some flash to your lifestyle it was “aspirational” now it is just insulting. You’re driving by as hundreds of people are struggling to survive. Basic living expenses are rising and they lost a huge part of their savings in 2020. Be socially aware!
Start tipping 50% at restaurants when things open up. Tip everyone you can. Waiter, bartender, spa services, auto mechanic, coffee shop, hair salon etc. This will allow you to build up your surrounding community. These individuals will appreciate the money 100x more than you could possibly imagine.
They don’t care about your Lambo. They care about survival.”
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/announcements-bet-on-winners-flex
3. “At the end of the day, it’s important to focus on the unit economics of UA which is ultimately what the debt is financing. Compare the cost of capital versus ROI on ad spend over the lifetime of a user gives a predictable spend pattern and it’s pretty simple to model. If you don’t get a positive return on investment on the UA (after pricing in the cost of servicing the debt), don’t draw the credit line and buy ads. Pretty simple when you strip it right back.
It’s great to see a wider acceptance of debt funding become mainstream in mobile gaming.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-supercells-180m-credit-facility-metacore-signals-macmillan/
4. This is quite interesting. Title says it all.
“When it comes down to it, I am driven by learning and having two jobs is my way of ensuring I am maximizing my hours and keeping me stimulated. I love getting to use my brain in various ways every day.
With a finite number of years on this planet, I think it’s crucial to be intentional with your time and for me, I feel most fulfilled with these two commitments.”
https://caseycaruso.medium.com/engineer-by-day-venture-capitalist-by-night-585929430c21
5. It’s good to be King I guess. World of Super Yachts.
Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of superyachts
6. “My father dealt with racism throughout most of his life by acting as if it had never happened — as if admitting it made it more powerful. He knew bullies loved to see their victims react and would tell me to not let what they said upset me. “Why do you care what they think of you?” he would say, and laugh as he clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re all going to work for you someday.”
“Don’t get even, get ahead,” was another of his slogans for me at these times. As if America was a race we were going to win.
These lessons my father gave me — to be the best you can be, to fight off your enemies and defeat them, to swim to safety if the boat sinks, and in general toughen yourself against everything that would harm you — these I had absorbed alongside certain unspoken lessons, taken from observing his life as a Korean immigrant. To have two names, one American, known to the public, and one Korean, known only to a few intimates; to get rid of your accent; and to dress well as a way to keep yourself above suspicion. Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe.”
https://www.gq.com/story/korean-fathers-lessons-self-defense
7. “I’m not yet 100% sure this is true, but I am starting to think it might be: seed funds and “accelerators” basically can no longer work together. Choose one path and you self-select out of the other.”
https://medium.com/angularventures/the-great-acceleration-of-seed-investing-a3057f7b3b83
8. “Robinhood has become successful in Silicon Valley by following a trajectory similar to that of other tech companies: behaving aggressively in pursuit of fast growth. In the first four months of 2020, more than three million people opened Robinhood accounts, bringing the total number of users to more than thirteen million. The median age of Robinhood’s users is thirty-one; about half of them are first-time investors.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/robinhoods-big-gamble
9. This man knows what he is talking about. One of the best Hedge fund guys ever……It’s a scary world we are entering now monetary policy wise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScAeHsXIUqI
10. “A side project is an incredible way to bridge the gap and cover the dip as you move between ladders. Just one note: I said, “a side project” not “side projects.”
It’s so easy to get carried away with dozens of exciting ideas, working on each one as motivation and inspiration are there. But if you keep that cycle going it’s so easy to be spread thin between so many projects that will prevent you from making any one of them actually successful.”
https://nathanbarry.com/wealth-creation/
11. “But while we might wish that economic life were more pleasant, Milanovic thinks we should face reality. Capitalism has channeled our private vices into public benefits, directing human acquisitiveness into forms of competition that increase our overall well-being. All we can really do is soften it around the edges.
“Capitalism,” he argues, “has successfully transformed humans into calculating machines endowed with limitless needs.” We may be disturbed by the way these calculating tendencies have burrowed into our private lives and eroded our moral commitments, as many left-wing critics of commodification are, but we have chosen to participate, and now there’s no going back.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/branko-milanovic-capitalism-alone/
12. MONK MODE!
“Monk mode is as much about learning self-discipline as it is engaging in self-improvement. When you manage to sustain monk mode as a way of life you’ll be on your way to cultivating a lifestyle of success. You will be wrapped up in the self-importance of improving all the facets in your life, managing them with a keen eye and watching all your personal investments flourish (much like a stock portfolio.) Your schedule will be so packed that you won’t have time to waste on low quality, frivolously time hungry exercises. If someone’s got something going on and you know you’d get more done doing your own thing, then keep doing your own thing.
You are the basis for your sense of direction; don’t get drawn in by other people’s whims. You should never feel like being the tag-along, you have the ambition, the vision and the determination to keep moving towards the top. Your time is far too valuable to even contemplate wasting it as a “tag along.”
https://illimitablemen.com/2014/04/13/monk-mode/
13. “Financial freedom -> Personal freedom -> Ideological freedom
But what good are you and your wealth without guiding principles to live by? In a world today where we are all starved for leadership, maybe you will find something thirst-quenching in the lessons I’ve learned from the painted warriors.”
https://contrarianthinking.substack.com/p/what-i-learned-from-my-navy-seal
14. “The great thing about outbound is every single company I talk to, I’m already interested in investing in them.
90% of the companies Yohei meets with come through his own research and vetting followed by targeted cold outreach. Counter to conventional wisdom about vetting for credibility via closed networks, Yohei vets by product, positioning, and category before connecting with the founders. Because of this, he can form an opinion without being influenced by the typical insular, exclusive signals of the venture funding world. And the state of the business itself can be a testament to the team’s capabilities.”
https://automatter.substack.com/p/recap-a-fireside-chat-with-yohei
15. “The world is entering its darkest moment at least since the 1970s, when it saw the Cultural Revolution, Indira Gandhi’s brief dictatorship, and a resurgence of expansionist Soviet authoritarianism under Brezhnev. The key difference is that this time, as Freedom House’s report warns, all of the world’s most powerful countries are trending toward illiberalism at the same time.”
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-darkness
16. “Ending a partnership — personal or corporate — is generally seen as an admission of failure, and one that sticks. Frequently on administrative forms, the options for marital status are single, married, and divorced. (How is “divorced” a status? Isn’t that just single?) Five years after my own divorce, telling people about it still inspired a depressing mix of pity and judgment from those whose (married) lives rested somewhere between denial and awful.
Companies, likewise, experience shame after a failed marriage. To avoid looking foolish, firms resist writing down the value of an acquisition or selling it outright (as Verizon did with Yahoo). After unwrapping the gifts and evangelizing the synergies to shareholders, they’re loath to admit they were wrong. The disarticulation of any union is expensive and painful, and most people and corporations would be better served to acknowledge the mistake … sooner.”
https://www.profgalloway.com/divorce/
17. “Crypto is a non-specific amplifier: it has the potential to create a hypercapitalist libertarian nightmare, or a mutually-beneficial interdependent utopia. One thing I do know is that the only way we can influence which outcome we get is by radically participating in its creation.
This time, the stakes of sitting on the sidelines are too high: the imagined darkest possible timeline a certainty only with our inaction. The call to adventure for every burnt out technologist is, therefore, not to surrender to the mundanity of the Silicon Valley of the past or the imagined outcomes of the future, but to bring our full attention to co-creating meaningful and human-centric digital environments that we can be proud of.”
https://gold.mirror.xyz/6ZUtkEg7kR2IM5sjkf74DhHvIehZ6GOfr56rE6wvAog
18. The new cycle begins in Corporate Venture Capital. Why does it feel like they never learn.
https://sifted.eu/articles/corporates-spinning-out-cvc/
19. “Here, we describe an abstraction we call the network union, a social graph organized in a tree-like structure with a leader, a purpose, a crypto-based financial and messaging system, and a daily call-to-action.”
https://1729.com/network-union/
20. Interesting…..
“To stick to the example of cars, the fund management industry has not yet seen its Henry Ford. Cars only became affordable mass products once Ford came up with the idea of an assembly line. However, new funds are still assembled by hand, with many professional advisors asking for payments along the way, often for work that is 90% standardised.
Hold that thought and imagine how a “fund assembly line” should look like in the Internet age:
A web platform that lets you choose what kind of fund you want to create, as well as all its features and parameters.
Artificial intelligence software that creates all the documents based on templates, instead of hiring expensive humans each time a document needs to be created.
A commoditised process so cheap that you can easily set up investment funds even if you want to pool a relatively small amount or buy just a single investment.
That’s exactly what Vauban.io has created: a digital platform where you can set up and manage a fund without ever having to leave your house. The process is fast and comparatively cheap because everything is automated and web-based. What used to be done by lawyers, will (mostly) be done by artificial intelligence and a proprietary platform.”
21. “Long feedback loops, by their very nature, cannot be pleasurable in the way short feedback loops are. Basically: the thrill will disappear. And that’s okay.
In the best case scenario, we create routines to hypnotize ourselves into repetition. We have loved ones and mentors who tell us to keep going, and help us figure out when we’re on the wrong track. We look for signs that we’re getting better, but we also understand that the process of getting really, really good at something sometimes just feels like a incoherent slog. If we’re lucky and resourceful and creative, we’ll eventually break through the membrane and find ourselves on the other side we’ve been clawing towards for so long.”
https://ava.substack.com/p/long-feedback-loops
22. “The reasons we do not have an approved aging drug today are not due to the science — the biological blockers to a first-generation aging drug have been clear for at least ten years. The primary reasons there are no approved aging drugs today are much more tricky — they are regulatory, societal, structural, and cultural.[a]”
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field
23. I fully agree with this advice. Its served me well too.
“I focused on learning potential at pretty much the cost of anything else, and it’s served me well. What a lot of young people don’t understand is that if you bet on increasing your learning potential, your earning potential compounds over time. The money will be there if you gather differentiated skills the market values (my knowledge of obscure electronic music, for some reason, is not one of those skills the market values).
This advice is fairly easy applicable and, I think, well understood by a lot of people. If you are making a choice between learning and earning, the former will almost always make sense not only from a happiness perspective, but also from a financial perspective long-term. I want to talk about what happens after you self-actualize in this direction.”
https://caseyaccidental.com/personal-mission
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