“When you rest, you catch your breath and it holds you up, like water wings…” — Anne Lamott
Same situation this week.Totally crushed with projects and deal memos due by December 12th while fighting this cursed lingering cold.So shorter than normal recap.I should be back with full content programming in a week: I hope! Wish me luck! 🙂
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Subscribe Super interesting investment opportunity.Swedish serial acquirers.
“One thing I like about investing in serial acquirers is you get some built-in diversification.You’re getting a collection of different businesses.
Slowdowns in one area may be offset by strength in another.
As a group, I’d expect their financial results to be resilient.
Might there be better opportunities for serial acquirers when times are bad? All those debt-fueled private equity buyers may disappear.
Maybe.But then the concern is the good companies won’t sell.They’ll hold out because they know what they could’ve sold out for before and won’t accept less.
We will see.No one can predict the future, all we can do is prepare for a variety of scenarios.”
https://www.woodlockhousefamilycapital.com/post/notes-from-stockholm
“Living in the era of the revenge of capital requires acknowledging that VCs and their LPs have memories and they remember how they were treated on the way up.All of today’s conversations about valuations, round sizes, and fund sizes are informed by the feelings that investors had about how they were treated on the way up; we are not starting from zero from those conversations.
And now that power is tilting back toward capital providers, those folks remember how they were treated and that influences the decisions they make about who to support and why.
I bring this up because if you are a founder or a fund manager who maybe pushed the envelope in terms of valuation, terms, control provisions, economics, or other negotiated terms, the people on the other side of the table likely remember how they felt when that happened.Many of the most challenging conversations I see today are ones where people who pushed the envelope or were aggressive on the way need to come back to their existing investors or LPs without considering where those folks are and what they’re dealing with in their portfolios.
Rightly or wrongly, I think many people on the capital provider side are looking for some recognition of the excesses in the past and some humility from those who are making new asks at this time.”
https://www.charleshudson.net/living-through-the-revenge-of-capital
Word.
https://www.mattmunson.me/your-metrics-are-not-your-worth
“Venture capitalists, in general, are cogs in a machine to maintain status quo and incremental improvements.The allocation of capital should be an exercise in optimism.We need investors, not those that just learned to talk the talk, but investors who have read science fiction and poetry.
Who are both rational, and human.Who recognize the importance of profits, but also factor in the intangible costs and benefits to humanity.
We could be so much better than we are.”
Investing 101 I Choose Optimism This is a weekly newsletter about the art and science of building and investing in tech companies.To receive Investing 101 in your inbox each week, subscribe here… Read more a month ago · 23 likes · 1 comment · Kyle Harrison “Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around.Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars.But not all quests have an end state.You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym.Maybe you’re just on a quest to have the most fun possible before you die.A far cry from refrigeration or running water, but a nice life.
As you’ve probably already intuited, not all quests are created equal.
In the most simple terms possible: a good quest makes the future better than our world today, while a bad quest doesn’t improve the world much at all, or even makes it worse.
Today, we are in a crisis.
Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on bad quests.
Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest.Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest.Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.
Even among the talented who choose a path of building, most take safe, incremental bets — another SaaS company, another turnkey consumer startup, another digital Beanie Baby.Such pursuits not only fail to push the world forward, but pose a cost in opportunity.There are important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges.In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral.It constitutes a loss for humanity.”
Pirate Wires Choose Good Quests Today, Silicon Valley faces a crisis of nonsense.
With no shortage of problems, and no shortage of both young technologists and well-capitalized former founders capable of solving them, our best and brightest have largely lost themselves to easy money, the attention grind, and early retirement.In tech especially, for all of the industry’s rare potentia… Read more a month ago · 135 likes · 9 comments · Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner “So both sides seem to be suffering ammunition.If this continues, and both sides are relatively equally affected, then I would certainly rather be in Ukraine’s position with its advantage in accuracy and range.They will need less ammunition to do equivalent damage.”
Phillips’s Newsletter Weekend Update #5 Weekend update #5 Ammunition, Airpower and the Endless Russian Offensive to take BakhmutThanks for reading Phillips’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
The battlefield seemed to relatively static over the past week, though there are small signs of movement.The Russians continue to creep closer and closer to Bakhmut … Read more a month ago · 251 likes · 41 comments · Phillips P.OBrien “You already know this.You will *practically* never get rich from a career.Read that sentence carefully.One of the main reasons why we yell “wifi biz” everyday like lunatics is because it is true.
Without an online business (SaaS and E-com being the *most likely* success stories), the probability of getting rich is just too low.There are several reasons:
1) if you lose your job/career most end up eating into savings so they lose more than just a year of effort,
2) your job/career will pay you less than you are generating by definition – otherwise the firm would lose money and your boss would be fired,
3) the number of high paying positions is a “triangle” shape by design, so the probabilities get harder and harder: “being moved up” is not a guarantee.No matter what, there are significantly less Directors at a firm vs.
Associates/entry level so you know attrition occurs and
4) you can’t *sell* your job/career.If you make $100K on a W-2 versus $100K on a business the business is likely worth at least $300K+!”
BowTied Bull Career Advice and Some Small Announcements Welcome Avatar! As expected the number of layoffs is going up and we expect this to continue through March.Anyone following for a while knows we mentioned this dynamic about 8 months ago so the news isn’t a surprise.
The more important part of this post is as follows… Read more a month ago · 102 likes · 72 comments · BowTied Bull Slava Ukraini!
“These strikes are another demonstration of Ukraine’s confidence and will.It also shows that they will leverage their momentum in defending their nation to continue hitting the Russians where it hurts over winter.Ukraine has fought hard, and suffered much, to seize the initiative in this war.Once again, they have made clear that they intend to sustain and exploit this initiative at every level at which this war is being fought.”
Futura Doctrina Russian Airfield Attacks: Ukraine Strikes Back Over the past weekend, short videos emerged that purported to show an attack on a Russian airbase located over 700 kilometres from its shared border with Ukraine.Subsequent videos and Telegram posts appeared to provide corroborating evidence that some kind of attack had been conducted against the Engels airfield, on the Volga River in southern Russia… Read more a month ago · 61 likes · 14 comments · Mick Ryan, AM “So that’s the America that Chimerica helped create — a country riven by widening divides of geography, education, and wealth.I can’t say that it’s a worse place than the America of the 90s, overall — after all, technology has been improving, and there have been some positive social changes too.But it feels more fractured, more precarious.
That America is still the country we live in today, but the beginnings of decoupling mean that we’re starting, ever so slowly, to move toward a different model.There’s no chance that we’ll go back to the America of the 1990s, or the 1970s.
But at least the promise of something different is on the horizon, finally.”
Noahpinion How the old system of the world shaped American society Back in October I wrote a post about U.S.-China decoupling, rather melodramatically titled “The end of the system of the world”.It was a brief review of how the U.S.and Chinese economies became co-dependent in the 2000s and 2010s, and why both countries became dissatisfied with the status quo, and what drove the eventual rupture… Read more a month ago · 100 likes · 34 comments · Noah Smith “Which brings me back to the attacks on the Russian airfields.
Ultimately I think they are only important if they deprive Russia of the force needed to attack Ukraine (unlikely), if they divert Russian resources to now defend those airfields thus distorting the way the Russians fight in the future (maybe a small amount) or politically make a difference in how the Putin government prosecutes the war (doubtful).”
Phillips’s Newsletter How one might judge the importance of a ‘battle’ Thanks for reading Phillips’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Just thought it might be interesting for you to understand how I, at least, tend to judge the importance or not of an engagement in a war and why I point out which events I think are important and which are not.Its arisen because of the really rather d… Read more a month ago · 114 likes · 63 comments · Phillips P.OBrien “If I’m right, we’re headed towards Summer in AI, Solar, Nuclear, Space, Biotech, and Crypto within the next decade or so.What’s more, these technologies are reaching their potential at the same time, and could overlap and intersect in predictable and unpredictable ways.
Even the most optimistic early advocates of each of these technologies couldn’t have predicted that they’d come to fruition concurrently with a host of other potentially world-changing technologies.Despite their hyperbolic optimism, they might have underhyped the potential impact by missing those intersections.
In energy and healthcare alone, there are tens of trillions of dollars up for grabs for renewable and biotech companies.
New industries like AI, Space, and Crypto will capture spend from existing industries (media & entertainment, communications, mining, and financial services are the obvious ones), and create new opportunities by expanding markets, creating new ones, increasing velocity, and reducing friction.
We’re not there yet, but after decades’ worth of Winters, we should pause to appreciate the fact that it’s a possibility, and start stocking up on sunscreen, just to be safe.”
Not Boring by Packy McCormick Four Seasons Total Tech Welcome to the 4,399 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last Monday post! If you haven’t subscribed, join 175,133 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: 🎧 For the audio version, subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts… Read more a month ago · 65 likes · 2 comments · Packy McCormick I am so far away from this.
“Storage Zero is the optimal level of minimalism where everything is being used almost daily and at least weekly.It’s designed for a world where everything is accessible to acquire on-demand, and sustainable and easy to divest at any time, nothing stored.”
Fewer Better Things Storage Zero: The Holy Grail of Simplicity Apologies for being one day late with the Sunday edition, my last minute travel plans shifted my schedule a bit.Now back on track from the most southern point of California.… Read more a month ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Per Håkansson Probably not a surprise here.
Sequoia is ruthless with low performance.(This is why they are the best).
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/crypto-and-ai-focused-sequoia-partner-is-leaving-the-firm
This is pretty interesting.Date Masamune: inspiration for Darth Vader.
https://nipponrama.com/date-masamune-samurai-darth-vader
This is the effect on the tech industry from rising costs of capital.
Feel like I’ve been in Goblin mode my whole life! 🙂
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/05/goblin-mode-new-oxford-word-of-the-year
This is the future of VC: Solo GPs.Go Robin & Robin Capital!
https://tech.eu/2022/12/07/entrepreneur-investor-and-now-solo-gp-robin-haak-launches-robin-capital
“There is speculation Kyiv has developed a strike drone with an astonishing 1,000km range.
Late last month a Ukrainian serviceman said the weapon had already been used against the Russian military.
If accurate, this means much of European Russia is now in reach.And that the asymmetric advantage Moscow has enjoyed this year – the ability to launch cruise missiles safely from deep inside Russia itself – is under threat.”
It is the age of grifters.Can’t believe anything anymore.Also shows why it sucks to be famous.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/youtube-primal-living-guru-liver-120025443.html
This guy is one of my investing heroes.Oren Zeev.
““You can divide entrepreneurs by the way they create hype around their companies and by how much they are focused on operations.I’ve never gone with entrepreneurs who know how to create hype and it is no coincidence that I didn’t invest in the likes of WeWork.
All of my entrepreneurs are boring.They are responsible, mature, and don’t do coke on a private jet.I don’t have entrepreneurs who know how to sell a story.I prefer the doers over the talkers.
In the market that existed over the past decade, the talkers also succeeded.When everything is built around storytelling this nurtures itself.In a normal market, this stuff doesn’t work.
Nobody buys it.I’ve been investing for 28 years and I learned how to act in the last bubble.Therefore, generally speaking, my companies are successful even in a period when there is a shortage of money.”
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hyc4yqjps
True heroes here.Heroic & honorable does not fully describe their decision.#slavaukraini
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/05/europe/russians-fighting-for-ukraine-intl-cmd/index.html
This is pretty interesting.A new dimension to Ukraine striking Russia.
Very good stuff here.NIA is always on the edge of the internet.
A worthwhile thought exercise here.
Devolution of Russia: could not happen to a more deserving place.
Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani National Divorce Within the next year Russia will spiral into a deep political crisis.There is a nonzero chance that it may scale up existing separatist tendencies leading to the breakup of the empire.In this thread I will outline a model of how this process could look like🧵
6:04 PM ∙ Dec 7, 2022.
