Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

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.
Misc

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.”
Misc

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.
Misc

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.“
Misc

Reddit

  • 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.
Misc

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!’”
Misc

74 NYT Facts

  • “Each day, our editors collect the most interesting, striking or delightful facts to appear in articles throughout the paper. Here are 74 from the past year that were the most revealing.”
  • Great list from NYT. A few examples:
  • “Brooks Brothers, which Henry Sands Brooks founded in Manhattan in 1818, is the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the United States.“
  • “Often, the screams we hear in movies and TV are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well-used it’s got a name, the Wilhelm. It’s in hundreds of films.“
Misc

Parable of the Pottery Class

  • “The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.” (Source).
Misc

Climate Change Economic Impact

  • Fascinating read about who stands to benefit in the very long run from a warming world.
  • “Draw a line around the planet at the latitude of the northern borders of the United States and China, and just about every place south, across five continents, stands to lose out.“
  • “Incredible growth could await those places soon to enter their prime. Canada, Scandinavia, Iceland and Russia each could see as much as fivefold bursts in their per capita gross domestic products by the end of the century so long as they have enough people to power their economies at that level.“
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