Welcome to The Saturday Slack, a list on what what I’m pondering and exploring with a short summary for those too busy to dive in.
Writing is your brain’s API. Check out and follow my streaming API (Twitter feed) to get real-time calls with no request limits (for you software nerds out there).
Articles
What Sort of Business is Investment Banking : With financial markets rapidly changing, (specifically for high tech / software), I’ve been spending more time learning the nuances of the players, mainly Investment Banks, Hedge Funds and VCs. And Marc Rubinstein is my go-to expert on all things capital markets. In this piece, he posits that the business of investment banks is to take risk, match risk, and source risk for market participants. Said differently by former a former Goldman Sachs CFO, “[A] client has a risk they don’t want or wants a risk they don’t have… we make it happen for them.”
The Business of Innovation: An Interview with Paul Cook: What separates the winners and losers in innovation is those who masters the drudgery. The person who can combine deep knowledge of the product with deep knowledge of the customer problem is the rarest person of all. It reminds me of Naval’s tweet…Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Invest Like a Pessimist, Save Like an Optimist: Be long term positive, but short term paranoid. In money, careers, and health.
Who Disrupts the Disrupters? In the world of technology investing, you are paid to be better than average at answering the question: what’s next? I’ve been diving deeply into all things Web3 and Blockchain. Both are fascinating, and I believe, deeply misunderstood technologies by most, including me. At the base level, think of Blockchain as the new server layer (AWS, Azure, etc.) of tech architecture. You’ll be able to code directly on the blockchain (app layer) which can be consumed by end users on their browsers (network layer). By replacing the server layer with a decentralized platform, no single company has the ability to control the what is built on top of them. This is a very crude and rudimentary summary, no doubt, but it helped me better understand why a lot of very smart people thing this is the future.
Podcasts
Invest Like the Best: New Physics of Business: Applying technology to non-typical industries can be an incredible place to look for great businesses. How can you leverage software to transform the laundromat, lawn-care, movie, etc industries? In this discussion, Thomas Tull (backer of movies like the Dark Night and CEO of Tulco), talks through his career of doing just that.
Greg McKeown – The Art of Effortless Results: There is only one decision in life. Will you take the Light Path? Or will you take the Heavy Path? The choice is yours.
Short Video
Jeff Bezos on Regret Minimization: Time is the most important non-renewable resource. We can make more money, but not more time.
How Gymshark Grew a $200M DTC Brand: It is always fascinating to learn origin stories. Not so much to be inspired but to pick up on the original “why” and the early pains of building something of value. In this case, Gymshark, one of the largest DTC brands, starting as a supplement company and had to pivot into apparel after TWO YEARS. It is often better to just start and learn as you go.
Quotes
In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing. – Kwame Appiah
Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. – Morgan Housel
When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits. – Warren Buffet
Sign up here to join our community of 3,000 thinkers diving into the intersection of business, software, and living fully.