- Asiana Airlines in Korea has operated 75 flights to nowhere.
- These flights don’t go anywhere but allowed 8,000 passengers to shop duty free, spending on average $1,450 per flight.
Misc
Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.
Tiger Global
- A fascinating read about Tiger Global’s innovative velocity focussed venture/growth strategy.
- It can be summed up as follows:
- Be (very) aggressive in pre-empting good tech businesses
- Move (very) quickly through diligence & term sheet issuance
- Pay (very) high prices relative to historical norms and/or competitors
- Take a (very) lightweight approach to company involvement post-investment
- Above all, deploy capital, deploy capital, deploy capital
- It is disrupting venture investing and earning high returns in the process.
Interviewing Asset Managers
- Nice excerpt from podcast host and allocator Ted Seides’ book – Capital Allocators – on how asset allocators should grill investors.
- Interesting insights and bits of advice largely on interview technique.
Life Expectancy and Education
- The difference between life expectancy in the US for those with a degree and those without is stark and has been widening.
- Source.
Cherry Blossom
- The Kyoto cherry blossom peak bloom has been recorded since 812 AD.
- March 26th 2021 peak bloom date surpassed the previous record March 27th 1409 (a century before Columbus sailed for America).
- Scientists suggest this is a clear sign of climate change.
- h/t 361 Capital.
a16z Marketplace 100: 2021
- The latest edition of the top 100 private/start-up consumer facing marketplaces using Bloomberg real-time consumer spending data.
- A lot has changed in 2020 for obvious reasons. The full report is here.
- Interesting to see Turo at number 9 (up 5 places), which is an investment (they own ca. 26.8%) by IAC that few talk about.
Luck
- How to make your own luck. Lots of interesting ideas inside re biases and the “serendipitous mindset”.
- Key elements are being “open and alert to the unexpected” and being “prepared”.
Being Negative
- This is an eye-opening essay on The Art of Negativity with useful read-across to investing.
- This was an interesting result from research – “there is a clear “asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.“”
- A nice quote – “An optimist believes we live in the best possible of worlds. A pessimist fears that this is true.”
The Internet
- A thought provoking and contrarian read arguing that the tailwinds from the internet and silicon valley are fading i.e. the industry is maturing.
- This chart shows that growth rates are coming down in most areas of tech.
- Worth noting it was done in early 2020 so missed the pandemic driven acceleration (the unanswered question being whether that was just pull forward or a true step change).
- This type of environment leads to a rebalance of growth away from start-ups towards internet-first incumbents – as the former can’t rely on the market to grow and the latter use vast operational muscle.
- This has profound effects including the financialisation of the technology industry.
Power of a Story
- A really nice piece about the power of stories in academic research, investing.
- And even innovation as seen in these great extracts from Rory Sutherland’s Book:
- “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.“
- Comprehensive and fascinating look at Reddit.
- 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.
Lessons from Gian-Carlo Rota
- Twelve lessons from the famous mathematician and lecturer.
- 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!’”
Electric Vehicles in Norway
- Fun story of how Norway became the leader in electric vehicles per capita.
- Spoiler – start with a passionate 80s pop band, sprinkle political will and add heavy financial incentives.
EU Covid Vaccine Efforts
- A long read on how it came to be that the EU fell behind on Covid vaccine supply.
- Interesting thoughts on the trade-offs of working as a block.
Best vs. Cheapest
- The internet is now more about recommendation and expertise than price comparison.
- h/t Benedict Evans.
The Future 100
- 100 trends “drawn from culture, technology, travel, branding & marketing, food & drink, beauty, retail, health, business and finance sectors.”
- Full of interesting ideas.
Complex Systems
- Anyone involved in financial markets should probably read this introduction to the study of complex systems.
- “There’s no love in a carbon atom, No hurricane in a water molecule, No financial collapse in a dollar bill.” Peter Dodds
EU eCommerce
- Amazing spread of prevalence of eCommerce across EU countries.
Private Stock Exchange
Hardware is Hard
- An interesting read on why life is hard for hardware start-ups – primarily the high upfront costs.