How long until the tech investors realize that winners rarely take it all? Winner takes all, Go big or go home, Move fast and break things, etc. doesn’t apply to 99.999% of startup opportunities. Memes like these harm more than they hurt. They don’t help fund great startups. They don’t help put capital to efficient use building financially sustainable companies. While tech...
The backstory of Warren Buffett’s career and the creation of Berkshire Hathaway is a lot more fascinating and interesting than I thought possible. Last we left this story, Buffett had retired in 1969 but was still not yet working full-time with Charlie Munger at his side by 1974. Roger Lowentein’s biography Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, isn’t told chronologically...
“Poverty First” on the Africa Eats blog explains why poverty needs to be addressed before other important impacts. The end of that post includes a link to Dollar Street, a great project on the Gapminder website, created by the late Hans Rosling of TED talk fame and Factfulness book. On Dollar Street you can see pictures and videos of families living on $1/day, $2/day, $3/day and...
Every year or so I find myself lost on a hike through the Forest of All Knowledge, and, so far, have enjoyed those journeys quite a bit more than one my the best YouTubers, CPG Grey. If you’ve never seen his videos, start with Rules for Rulers and Airport Codes and the State Flags. If you want to understand the Forest of All Knowledge and the wayfinding needed to reach the other side, watch...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, and he was still telling people he was retired in 1974. If you missed my first blog post about Buffett’s retirement, best to start with that one, which left off at the cliffhanger asking how he got from there to Berkshire Hathaway. Halfway...
A few weeks ago I posted a graphical update on the UN SDGs globally. That was the first progress report I had seen. A reader today pointed me to the U.S. status and per-state rankings. The map is not surprising, closely mirroring the national voting preferences with the Northwest and Pacific coast states ranked ahead of most of the middle and south. And also not surprisingly, none of the states...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, never to be heard from again. The first half is completely true. The second, true as of the end of 1969. Learning about both of those facts has dropped me down a fascinating rabbit hole of corporate history and Buffett lore that I’ll...
Given all that I do, a very common question is whether I sleep. I do. But not uncommonly in the biphasic style of old, and when dreaming, usually lucid dreaming where I can control the narrative. Neither of which I recommend, but se la vie. What I don’t do is work during the middle of the night. At least not on anything work related. When my mind spins on those worries, it takes far longer...
Imagine the game Monopoly, but instead of every player starting the game with $1,500, create a pile of $5s, $10s, $20s, $100s and $500s that add up to $5,000, shuffle the money, and deal it out one bill at a time to the players. Some will have start with more than $1,500 and some with far less. Or to be even more like the real world, all but one player starts with $100 and the last player gets...
You can’t work in impact without talking about the UN Sustainable Development Goals. For impact investors, the SDGs are our de-facto standard ontology to describe our interests. What isn’t often discussed is the progress of these goals toward the 2030 deadline the UN set. At this point, seven years away, that deadline, unfortunately, seems ridiculously short. It feels like most of...
