geoMarvin’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.
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.”
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.”
4. Important discussion on Nuclear power on BG2. We are behind here in the West.
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.”
6. Luke Belmar is the man. Break free from the matrix.
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”
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?”
10. This is quite the ad. Anduril’s Barracuda-M.
11. The OG of Enterprise SaaS Sales leaders, turned growth stage VC. Lots of good stuff here.
12. Good discussion on AI and the future.
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.
14. Another great discussion on all things Silicon Valley this week.
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).”
16. Always an orthogonal & interesting discussion with Peter Thiel.
17. So many things to take from this conversation. This is a must watch for startup founders.
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.”
19. If you love Roman history as much as I do, this is a great interview. 3.5 hours flew by.
20. Insightful conversation on how to drive innovation.
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.”
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.”
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.”
24. Jim Rogers is an investing legend and I grew up reading about his international investing adventures.
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.”
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.”
27. Some geopolitical thoughts. Veers a lot toward tin foil hat territory. Worth listening to though as an alternative to present narrative.
28. Entering and investing in a new era of technology, driven by AI. Good conversation.
29. This was great for new emerging VC fund managers to listen to.
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.”
31. This is an important discussion on how to prevent civilizational collapse. It’s hard not to see signs of this decline around us.
32. Insight dense convo on leading edge medical treatments and AI-driven innovations for the enterprise.
33. This is a masterclass for consumer startup founders building apps. Well worth watching.
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.”
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.”
36. One of the best observers of Global macro right now. Lynn Alden.
37. Great discussion on the basics of venture capital from a multistage vc’s perspective. 20 years in the business.
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).”
39. Fun interview with the wild man of Sports & Pizza Media!
40. Business legend, and a story of constant career reinvention. Michael Ovitz.
41. “So many geopolitical moving parts this morning.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
