Long-Term Money
Morgan Housel opens with a fact that resets everything: Adam Smith wrote that it was common in 18th-century Scotland to meet a mother who had borne twenty children and had not two alive. Queen Anne of England had 18 children. Not one made it. Today we complain about grocery stores having too many options. The piece is a meditation on how profoundly life has improved in ways so total and complete that we've lost the ability to see them as progress. The compounding of human knowledge across generations is the most underrated investment thesis of all time, and this piece makes that case better than almost anything I've read.
A Navy SEAL Breathing Technique to Stay Calm and Focused
Former Navy SEAL Mark Divine's box breathing method has been around for years but I keep coming back to it. The technique is almost embarrassingly simple: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold empty for four. What I find interesting is the physiology behind it. At 16 to 20 shallow breaths per minute, most people are running their nervous systems slightly hot all day. Slow that to five or six full breaths and you're running a completely different operating system. Divine practiced this standing in line, sitting in traffic, before workouts. The point isn't that breathing is magic. The point is that you have a direct line to your autonomic nervous system and almost nobody uses it.
The 12-month window
On a recent episode of No Priors, investor Elad Gil made an observation that's worth sitting with: for most companies there is roughly a 12-month period where the business is at peak value, and then it crashes out. Lotus, AOL, Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com all caught that window. A lot of great companies didn't. This matters especially right now because a significant portion of today's AI startup landscape exists because the foundation models haven't expanded into their category yet. As founders openly acknowledge, that won't last forever. The question for everyone building in this space is: do you know which phase you're in?
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How Not To Die - Chris DeMuth Jr
Vittorio is a biotech accelerationist and thinker exploring reality, how to transcend biology, and truth. He shares the science of how not to die, or at least how to live well, and his thoughts on human potential.
Doubling Down on your Winners
If a company is performing well (and communicating well), continue to invest in subsequent rounds. That follow-on capital can be just as important to overall fund returns as the initial investment.
18 months of Reflection - Sanjeev Agrawal
A personal essay detailing the author's deep introspection on life, career, and values after a major transition. It re-evaluates the pursuit of traditional achievement, noting that true joy was more often found in moments of physical mastery than in financial success.
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On New Year’s Eve 1990, I was 14 years old, standing outside a club in Manhattan with a VIP ticket in my hand that might as well have said “this kid does not belong here.” My black-on-black outfit was carefully calculated, sleeves rolled to just the right fold, and my suede Dr. Martens had seen maybe one other party: my friend’s bar mitzvah. I was freezing, faking, and fully convinced that if I didn’t get into that club, my life would be over.
That night, I got in. Barely. And that moment — that freezing, awkward, exhilarating, low-key fraudulent moment — is when I learned something I’ve carried through every business I’ve built and every founder I’ve backed:
Success is just getting past velvet ropes over and over again.
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What I Am Reading
Same As It Ever Was
This is a few short stories about things that never change in a world that never stops changing.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.”
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What I Am Reading
This is how your brain makes your mind
“Your mind is in fact an ongoing construction of your brain, your body, and the surrounding world.”
The New Science of Clocks Prompts Questions About the Nature of Time
“Studies of the simplest possible clocks have revealed their fundamental limitations — as well as insights into the nature of time itself.”
You'll Never Login the Same Way Again
“Wallet-based authentication will dominate in the next decade because it puts the user in control, where we want to be. The wallet replaces the username, the password, and the cookie.”
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