“Making a train journey 20 per cent faster might cost hundreds of millions, but making it 20 per cent more enjoyable may cost almost nothing.“
“The Uber map is a psychological moonshot because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating.“
“It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.“
This chart shows the S&P 500 (green line) vs. dealer gamma exposure (yellow/purple line).
“The read is simple: positive dealer gamma means that dealer flow attenuates market flow (i.e. the brakes are on); negative dealer gamma means that dealer flow amplifies market flow (i.e. pedal to the metal).”
The level on the 4th of March is 30% more than this time last year – which ever direction the market moves it will be get an extra boost.
The article covers its tumultuous founding (YC start-up) and history.
The undervaluation vs peers – the latest round valued the company at $6bn or $115 per daily active user (DAU) vs. $400 for Facebook and $310 for Twitter.
And finally possible areas of improvement and expansion.
All interesting to read ahead of the speculated IPO.
We previously covered one brilliant tool to emerge from his lab – Project Alpha – which tracks in real time probability of success for clinical trials.
This is a good article about him and how his ideas about pooling biotech research into a mega-fund has come to life with BridgeBio (IPOed in 2019).
The inventory of housing in the US is at a record low.
Seasonally it tends to be the lowest around the winter months.
Inventory dictates prices more than any other variable and factors suggest it will increase slowing house price growth from the blistering +10.9% forecast for January.
They relate largely to teaching and writing mathematics but, with Farnam Street’s magic commentary, they transcend to much of life.
A nice quote from Feynman as well – “Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”
They acquired social podcast tool Breaker, Substack competitor Revue (and cut take rates to 5%), and are developing Clubhouse competitor Twitter Spaces.
Financial twitter is alight with commentary on the change going on. This was a brilliant thread (liked by @Jack himself) sent to us (thanks Tom!) on the cultural change going on.
This is a nice (fun) write up on the stock – including the narrative change.
“In this market, value is dead (jk sorry value folks!), obvious growth is crowded, but finding that inflection point when the narrative around a company switches from dead to very much alive is like finding a magical money printer in a market fueled by a magical money printer. brrrrrr^2”
Thanks to commercial rocket development (SpaceX) space launch costs are falling again.
“The cost of space launch dropped from very high levels in the first decade of the space age but then remained high for decades and was especially high for the space shuttle. In the most recent decade, commercial rocket development has reduced the typical space launch cost by a factor of 20 while NASA’s launch cost to ISS has declined by a factor of 4.”
