A fascinating read about Jim Casey – the man who built UPS.
“On August 28, 1907, nineteen-year-old James Emmett “Jim” Casey and his friend Claude Ryan borrowed $100 and founded the American Messenger Company in a six-foot by seven-foot basement office below a Seattle saloon.”
From this grew one of the largest transportation companies – delivering 6.3bn packages globally in 2020.
As with all histories there are some fascinating anecdotes
“Merchants Parcel [an earlier name] considered painting their cars and vans bright yellow to attract attention, or even painting them different colors to make people think the company was larger than it was. But Charlie warned that they should not try to show up their retail customers, who were proud of their brightly decorated delivery vehicles. He had studied the more subtle Pullman brown, the color used on railroad sleeping cars to minimize signs of dust and dirt. Thus the partners decided to go with brown—only slightly modified in today’s UPS brown.“
Starship, the fully reusable rocket under development by SpaceX, is a revolution the industry grossly under-appreciates. So goes this fascinating blog post.
“Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift.“
“Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year) … Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon.“
It is developing in leaps – “Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.“
From only being founded in 1949 to having no AI publication in 1980, the Chinese Academy of Sciences now firmly has the top spot in quality AI research.
Truly remarkable catch up, also by the Chinese universities, now publishing on par with Western leaders.
Source: State of AI Report 2021 (must read report, just overflowing with interesting insights)
Excellent review by Bruce Booth, partner at Atlas Ventures, of 2021 Year in Biotech.
It covers the impact of the pandemic (both good and bad), current pipeline (5,000 compounds, $180bn of R&D spend), policy picture, the abundance of capital against constrained talent (here and 25:30) and so much more!
Hedge fund returns have become gradually more correlated to the S&P 500*.
This is bad for diversification and when combined with falling alpha, as described in this post, is worrying.
*This chart shows the 10-year trailing correlation of hedge fund returns (measured by a 50/50 weighted after fee return of Barclay Hedge Fund and HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Indices) vs. S&P 500.
Counter to the prevailing narrative – e-commerce hasn’t seen a step change and is almost exactly where a 10-year trend line would have predict it would be as a share of total retail in the US.
The reason for this is that total retail sales has grown strongly (+13% vs. normally being +2-3%). In absolute terms, shoppers spent $204bn on e-commerce in Q3 2021 but the pre-pandemic trend would have predicted $183bn.
