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No new feature necessary. Just make sure that we can do that. And then that allow the business the company to just pour a whole bunch of hardware behind that and it will scale.
There has to be sound business model that makes sustained profit, right? Growth and profit. Growth alone eventually burn, you know, money and that's not good.
There may be a lot of AI things that's going on right now, right? Uh eventually some of these things will consolidate, some will go under, some will become really awesome solutions and all that stuff. And so, but the the market will sort it out.
the best of the best still get offer from us because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for yeah years from now, right? You have to feed the talent pipeline
had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?
And then the rest of it, to me, is: is it possible for NVIDIA to be a, you know, $3 trillion revenue company in the near future? The answer is, of course, yes. And the reason for that is because it's not limited by any physical limits.
a lot of companies haven't started until now thinking about how we could apply AI to the very human, very business process part of it. And so, that will keep slowing us down until we find a way to to address it, right?
The competitive moat for a business right now is not the use of AI. It's human-originating, high-quality, high-fidelity data that other systems can't replicate - even if they implement the exact same features and are built by the same agentic systems.
TSMC is much more excited to give allocation to Graviton than they are to tranium because they view CPU business as more stable long-term growth right and as a company that is conservative and doesn't want to ride cycles of growth too hard you actually want to allocate to the uh the market that is more stable and lower growth rate first before you allocate all the incremental capacity to the fast growth rate market.
if improvement stopped you know here the value of an H100 is now predicated on the value that GPD 5.4 four can get out of it instead of the value that GP4 can get out of it and the margins and all that stuff that these labs are doing and they're in a competitive environment so their margins can't go to infinity. Um so you sort of have this like dynamic that is quite interesting in that an H100 is worth more today than it was 3 years ago.
Um DRAM gets released goes to AI chips who are willing to do longer term contracts, willing to pay higher margins, etc., etc. because at the end of the day, the margin that they extract is much larger from the end user or whatever. Um, and so this this this probably leads to like people hating AI even more, right?
and so I don't think TSMC would kick out Apple. I think Apple will become a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of TSMC's revenue and therefore be less relevant for TSMC to cater to their demands.
Um I think at least this year we're going to see margins for the model vendors go up a lot, right? Because they're so capacity constrained, they have to demand destroy demand, right? there is there's no way they can continue anthropic can continue at the current pace without destroying demand.
I believe that data - real-world data, mostly human-generated, validated, and cleaned - is the only reliable moat we have as software founders in the near and mid-term future.
If you run a software business that is purely transformative - that takes incoming data, does something to it, and turns the data back out - that will be a problem.
Because they're all starting to spend their own salaries in tokens. And so, at least for a while, if you want your engineers to be as productive as possible, you're going to have to get rid of half of them to make the other half maximally productive.
I'm mad at Amazon for laying off 16,000 people and blaming AI without an AI strategy for it. Those people are not going to be able to find jobs, by and large, and they're the first of many to come and nobody has a plan for this.
My my feeling is that probably people have a low tolerance for non-determinism. And these things are fundamentally non-deterministic. So, they can't just go replace customer call center software because they they could be wrong.
I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.
At Anthropic, we don't build for the model of today, we build for the model of six months from now. And that's still my advice to founders that are building on LLMs.
It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.
but at the same time, we're spending $10 billion to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money. Each model makes money, but the company loses money.
And if my if my revenue is not a trillion dollars, if it's even 800 billion, there's no force on Earth. There's there's no hedge on Earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I if I buy that much compute.
does that mean the robotics industry will also be generating trillions of dollars of revenue? My answer there is yes, but there will be the same extremely fast but not infinitely fast diffusion. So, will robotics be be revolutionized? Yeah, maybe tack on another year or two.
so so I think we're definitely going to see business models that that recognize that, you know, at some point we're going to see, you know, pay for results or you you know, in some in some form or we may see forms of compensation that are like labor. Um, uh you know, that that kind of work by the hour.
a worry I have is that the growth rate could be like 50% in Silicon Valley and, you know, parts of the world that are kind of socially connected to Silicon Valley and, you know, not that much faster than its current pace elsewhere. And I think that'd be a pretty messed up world.
It has a surplus of STEM graduates that are often underemployed, while "Hukou" residency restrictions complicate hiring hourly labor in coastal factories.
The economics of orbital “datacenters” or essentially glorified Starlink satellites with a bunch of GPUs attached are likely to be even better than Starlink.
there should be no way to get a big company like a public SAS company Unless NR is greater than 100, like otherwise cancellation should just win. And that is in fact the case.
And that is never ever ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you promised, looked at the pricing page, and decided to buy it.
When you have a loss, a percentage loss, you have to have a greater percentage gain just to get back to where you were. In this case, a loss of 20% requires a gain of 25% to get back to where you were.
Teresa Torres is the best in the business at helping teams build products and services that their customers want. Here she shares her techniques for transforming your process into one of continuous discovery and learning.
The most important business and product management book of the past fifty years. If you’re a technology PM and you haven’t read Christensen, do so right now.
Listening is one of the most important product management skills. Learn how to connect to customers, co-workers, and team members with this beautifully illustrated and accessible book.
Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer.
If you could only read one book on product management, this would be it. Marty has had a long and storied product management career, and is the founder of Silicon Valley Product Group.
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
As with self driving cars, most of the early players in humanoid robots, will quietly shut up shop and disappear. Those that remain will pivot and redefine what they are doing, without renaming it, to something more achievable and with, finally, plausible business cases.
With AI, he's trying he's targeting 3 to five million in revenue per rep. 3 to 5 million. Honestly, if this was three or four years ago for a similar company, it would be 3 to 500K. That's an order of magnitude more efficiency.
Net net, we're going to need more sales and go to market professionals than ever because the winners are growing so quickly that even if they're more efficient, they will need more human beings than ever.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
Come for the stories about one of the msot storied franshises in entertainment history. Stay for the business and leadership lessons from Lorne Michaels.
Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.
I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.
When you allow tech bros too much power over decision-making along with their running dog lackey in kind of management consultancy, you're optimizing for something which may be very very distant from what your real world customers really care about.
There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
investors at many tech companies, including most on the large cap list, have given up their corporate governance rights, often voluntarily (through the acceptance of shares with different voting rights), to founders and top management in these companies
I think that the pathway that you would need (in terms of revenue growth and profitability) to justify Nvidia's and OpenAI's current pricing is improbable, but that is just my view
the delusion comes from the reality that if you aggregated these breakeven revenues across companies, the market is not big enough to sustain all of them
For language acquisition, Pimsleur is by far my favorite online/app program. (Even Mr. Mari, who gathers no joy from learning languages, was addicted to it for a while!)
If you are in regular meetings with a hardware vendor as a customer (or potential customer) you can accomplish a lot by providing firm and tough feedback, particularly with Intel today.
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
So this AI thing will be that right. So if you take coding um what we built with GitHub and VS code in over whatever decades uh suddenly the coding assistant is that big in one year and so that I think is what's going to happen as well which is the market expands massively.
which I think is going to just keep growing because guess what it's going to grow faster than the number of users. So in fact that's kind of one of the other questions people ask me is hey what happens to the per user business at least the early signs may be the way to think about the per user business is not just per user it's per agent
In fact, I kind of look at it and say our business which today is an enduser tools business will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work.
So you have to be, in your mind, you’re spending large amounts of someone else’s money. You have to try and make it back for them. But at the same time, my argument with myself was, well, if we… The way to make it back is try and make something great. So both pressures are pointing in the same direction.
I do, but it's business as usual because we're we're in an intelligence explosion already and have been for decades. And when you look at GDP, it's basically the GDP curve that is an exponential weighted sum over so many aspects of the industry. Everything is gradually being automated has been for hundreds of years.
And I kind of feel like the industry it's it's um it's over it's it's making too big of a jump and it's trying to pretend like this is amazing and it's not. It's slop and I think they're not coming to terms with it and maybe they're trying to fund raise or something like that.
Data centers are so much more efficient with their water that they generate 50x as much tax revenue per unit of water used than golf courses in the county:
Yeah, I mean user retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on like day one. That's super hard, right?
So as opposed to going against I guess human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't on the margins want to share like lean into it more actually like grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much much much better and you can kind of 5x or 10x and and drive a lot of growth that way too.
And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR uh prior to the service going out just to get the word out. Um and you know PR has has its time and place. Uh but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost uh once you get it out because you're you're just you know you need to see it through.
I think if you have especially a B2B feature where you may have some lock in reverse trials can be super powerful. You just want to get people in there. You don't need to ask for their credit card because they're using your CRM or they're investing quite a lot of time in like building out, you know, material and content. And so by the time that window drops, you actually like feel, oh man, I probably should keep this and and start paying. I think for a lot of consumer products, it's a little bit harder for that to work. And so I've typically seen more just normal free trials be be the norm.
So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.
I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.
It's easier to even predict whether growth will slow down at a certain point. it's easier to catch these trends earlier. If you don't have good observability over how your business runs and what the company's um key levers are, then you will be scrambling.
I I think most companies play too much with pricing all the time. It's like it just like causes all these problems with data and like it makes it hard to predict and then suddenly you you do you AB test discounts and then you cheapen the product because now people are just going to wait for the next discount
And I think we'll see the same thing with automation where uh basically robot plus human is much better than just human or just robot. Uh and and that just like makes total sense. It also makes it much easier to get all the technology bootstrapped because when it's robot plus human, now there's a lot more potential for the robot to like actually learn on the job, acquire new skills.
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
But once you actually have a sophisticated industrial economy, central planning can't handle the complexity. And so you try and create incentives and structures around that while not having pricing and that just doesn't work.
Customer Obsession is great, but I often see Amazonians taking this too simplistically: "Start with the customer" doesn't have to mean "ask customers what they want and then give them faster horses".
When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.
We can have a breakthrough in our agent architecture on Monday implemented on Tuesday and have it deployed with hundreds of our customers on Wednesday and directly see the impact of of that work.
And in contrast to software as a service or software you'd buy off a shelf at, you know, Fry Electronics, you know, decades ago, which might help you be marginally more productive, help you get a job done. Agents, in contrast, are actually getting the job done for you. And so you're in essence hiring software to accomplish a task and get it done well.
And the reason this is important is what we're trying to do in a way is resolve this age-old tension between the cost and quality of customer experience where I think every great business wants to deliver an amazing experience to their customers. But unless you're like Hermes or the Four Seasons, it's too expensive to do.
I mean I've heard from multiple investors that foundation models are the fastest deteriorating asset of all time. And so if step one of your business is to burn through tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of capital before you find product market fit and that asset has value for like a a week, I'm not sure it's like a great business model.
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
In the US, capital controls politics, one could argue. In China, it has to be the other way around. Capital must be reigned in by politics. As part of the capitalist class, do not have the ambition to exceed the powers of the political class, is really at the core of it, I’d say, is the biggest difference between US and China.
So you if you look at the leverage in some of these securitization books and mortgage books if you have 30 times leverage and you're getting 20% of the profits you'll go to 40 times leverage. It's just going to it's literally will add you know 25% to your bonus.
the fortress balance sheet is that you run a company serving clients well, you have good margins, good liquidity, good capital. I'm as conservative in accounting as you can find. I don't up-front profits when I can spread them over time.
we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. We could do a lot of things. Your margins will go up. Your growth will go down. Your long-term margins will probably get worse.
A lot of our middle market clients use investment banking products. A lot of our consumer clients use some effects. So, all of our businesses feed each other. There's no extraneous. We got rid of everything that didn't fit a strategy.
I've always been very risk-conscious. And risk-conscious does not mean getting rid of risk. It means properly pricing it and understanding the potential outcomes.
I had always thought that all "Intelligent Investing" is "Value Investing". And that true value is always sustainable. In otherh words, "All Intelligent Finance is Sustainable Finance."
Assuming you are still hiring junior engineers (you really should be even in this AI era), the good ones will learn quickly and want to see career progress in their first few years of working.
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company "a good place to work," not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
So the idea is when you start a business, you get to make all the rules now. You can, like in this little part of the world, you get to decide how things should work. You don't have to follow norms.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
I have written forewords for Amir in the past on two of his prior books, Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New Economy and Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global Investors, both of which I recommend.
When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.
Well, I strongly believe that we should make business software like we make games because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends. They fall in love with them.
And that's why when you have a missionritical product like email where you are interfacing with customers with candidates with investors it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a halfbaked product.
I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
But the price point that supports our best-in-class best-in- position is actually the third one. it starts to feel expensive, but then you sit down and you think about the time that you spend in email, the ROI, and you still buy it anyway.
A more how-to pragmatic version of carving your own path. Includes some personal story of reinvention but more on experimentation that challenges our default scripts of success and ambition.
For most of my investing life, Vanguard was THE one-stop shop for index funds of all types. They have the lowest expense ratio and the utmost respect for their customers.
I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.
The short-term that company that could make the most money is the one that figures out what advertising targeting method works for language model generations.
Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX.
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
The Social Network is substantially made up, more a source for vibes rather than a source for facts. Even the vibes fail to cohere with reality. And yet it convinced many proto-founders to put in YC applications.
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom.
I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.
Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
I think the thing that most people get wrong after they’ve decided to start a company is work on things they think the market wants. Not being passionate about any idea but thinking, okay, look, this is what will get me venture funding. This is what will get me revenue or customers. That’s what will get me venture funding. If you work from that perspective, I think you’ll give up beyond the point because it’s very hard to work towards something that was not truly important to you.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.
nobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a nonprofit and adding a for-profit arm later. I’d heavily discourage them from doing that. I don’t think we’ll set a precedent here.
I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.
So as I like to say, incentives drive all human behavior and that certainly applies in the business world. So understanding the people and what drives them, and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business, are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company.
And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.
And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.
To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.
That's an inventor's greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
I came into the business world with Comma, and I found the exact opposite. I found 5% of people good and 95% of people bad. I found a world that promotes psychopathy.
The two companies that have endured through technology are Apple and Microsoft. And what do they make? Computers and business services, right. All the meme, social ads, they all come and go. But you want to endure, build hardware.
this is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.
This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
This is precisely the role the central bank can play. By announcing that it stands ready to buy the bonds that investors want to sell at the price associated with the low interest rate, and credibly indicating that it has deep enough pockets to buy whatever is needed, it can eliminate the bad equilibrium.
Sovereign debt markets (and many other markets as well) are subject to sudden stops in which investors either drop out or ask for large spreads even in the absence of large changes in fundamentals.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.
Their words now
But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.
a lot of industries over time end up not like that. They end up not being actually a fair and free market with market discipline. They end up as something else. In the business world, what they end up with is either just, you know, one company with a full up monopoly or more commonly they end up with what's called an oligopoly
A successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
in quote-unquote real life, right? Which is starting businesses or you know, writing books, right? Or composing music or playing basketball or playing poker, right? Or basically doing anything interesting we're in a probabilistic domain, right?
the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.
My key takeaway from the book: Spielberg, for reasons that McBride can never quite nail down, was capital-D driven. His story provides a master class in the potential of mixing relentless ambition, talent, and perfect timing.
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.
Sedgewick was more successful in developing his characters, and I also appreciated that he took regular tangents into other related and interesting matters like the Leadville mining boom, the growth of Los Angeles, and the business maneuvers of other railroad barons like Jay Gould and Collis Huntington.
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
One of those business books (and there are many) that you can get the main idea within the first 20 pages and can stop reading there. I skimmed through most of it.
A must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, has started a business, wishes they started a business or has ever thought about starting a business.
Rather than being defined as one side of this artificial dichotomy, value investing should instead consist of buying whatever represents a better value proposition, taking all factors into account.
My extensive discussions with Andrew led me to conclude that the focus on value versus growth doesn’t serve investors well in the fast-changing world in which we live.
Not only are the traditional staples of classic value investing (readily discernable quantitative measures of cheapness in the here-and-now) no longer likely to produce a sustainable edge on their own, but the world has gotten more complex, with many more dynamics that can drive a decoupling of near-term metrics from valuation, both to the positive and negative.
Adopting the traditional semiconductor manufacturing business model to compete head to head against the likes of Intel would guarantee automatic failure.
The fast route — venture capital funded — is going to impose constraints on your business that will ultimately make it difficult to remain true to your open-source mission.
Want to know the story behind how Salesforce was built? This is that story in founder Marc Benioff's own words. At times I found him overly prescriptive without an appreciation for his unfair advantages he had (getting to start it while having a big salary at Oracle, having $6Mn in "bootstrapped funding", etc). However, he also helped pioneer the cloud and SaaS as a business model, so there are many great lessons to glean if you're building a high-growth SaaS business.
This book was written before the Lean Startup movement, but espouses many of the same concepts. If you feel like you're starting at zero in understanding what to do to become customer driven, this is a good place to start.
If you actually want to learn how to actually BE a lean startup or how to actually do it, this book will not help you. If you want to learn the high level concepts only then this is a great book. The other books I have above I encourage you to read before this one if you want to truly learn and implement lean practices. 7. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (3.13.18)
This is a really short book that just gets to the point. It's a great checklist to think about what you need to pull together if you're going to raise money from investors. It helps you avoid some common pitfalls and gives you a good start on what you need to do to nail your elevator, recruiting, and funding pitches.
If you need a 101 outline of the basics of how to build a community on the web regardless of your business type, this is a good, although now slightly dated, book to check out.
These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.
One of the craziest, most impressive stories of business smarts I’ve come across and from someone otherwise unknown. Like a real-life Francisco d’Anconia from Atlas Shrugged.
If intelligence lies in the process of acquiring skills, then there is no task X such that skill at X demonstrates intelligence, unless X is actually a meta-task involving skill-acquisition across a broad range of tasks.
A must-read for every entrepreneur. A holistic, generous, human, emotional, long-term, story-driven approach to your business. The world would be a much better place if businesses were led this way. You'll have a competitive advantage if you do this, since so few do.
Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning: Galloway should be familiar to readers as both the brand strategy professor at NYU Stern School of Business, a regular guest on Masters in Business, and as the author of The Four. He usually writes about technology and business, but concern with his students’ life issues led to this 10 minute YouTube video that garnered nearly 2 million views. That became this lovely short book which is likely to be a graduation and holiday gift for years to come.
His book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises is an important read for investors that want to protect themselves from or benefit from recessions and other financial crises.
Regular Rotation Investing Focused Interviews The Meb Faber Show Master in Business with Barry Ritholz Capital Allocators with Ted Seides Bloomberg’s Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal
Regular Rotation Investing Focused Interviews The Meb Faber Show Master in Business with Barry Ritholz Capital Allocators with Ted Seides Bloomberg’s Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
A $250/mo recurring donation to would be a drop in the bucket of most businesses, but a major boon to any open source project, with which the business will almost certainly see tangible value-add as a result.
This a journalistic book, a very sound bit of journalism by Suzanne Mustacich. She is based in Bordeaux, but she clearly travelled to China an awful lot and unravelled a most amusing commercial battle that went on in the early years of this decade between the Bordeaux chateau owners and merchants on the one side and Chinese business people on the other.
Adding new folks to a team disrupts that team’s gelling process, so I’ve found it much easier to have rapid growth periods for any given team followed by consolidation/gelling periods where the team gels.
Many folks try to move all teams at the same time, peanut buttering their limited resources, but resist that indecision-framed-as-fairness: no one getting anything is not a fair outcome.
Podcast. Another classic manifesto from Jason Fried and DHH, challenging the status quo of business today. Properly sparkled with both “fuck”s and wisdom. Fuck 50 or 80-hour work weeks, the always stressed, always anxious way of working, constant crunch. Let’s all calm down. It doesn’t have to be crazy at work.
The bottom line: When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.
ScreenFlow - I believe the future of my business is in video + video courses. I'm in ScreenFlow almost every day. Sometimes I use it to "hijack audio" during interviews. Sometimes I use it to edit video. It's getting a lot of use.
this is where the oft raised concern that hiring is
slowing us down comes from: at high enough rates, the marginal added value of hiring gets
very slow, especially if your training process is weak.
Every business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles.
My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.
Real product decisions aren’t easy. They require you to look at a proposal and say “This is a really great idea, I can see why our customers would like it. Well done. But we’re not going to build it. Instead, here’s what we’re doing.”.
I was correct in my original article: what we call design thinking is practiced in some form or other by all great thinkers, whether in literature or art, music or science, engineering or business. But the difference is that in design, there is an attempt to teach it as a systematic, practice-defining method of creative innovation.
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