Howard Morgan: Insights from an Uber Successful Tech and VC Legend
Howard Morgan’s inimitable career began with his early and prescient interest in computers. In fact, Howard has been on email for 51 years! He is currently the Chair and General Partner of B Capital. He is considered one of the pioneers of early-stage investing, having co-founded First Round Capital alongside Josh Kopelman, which was the first professional seed stage fund and the first institutional investor in Uber.
Prior to First Round, Howard helped found Idealab with Bill Gross, and served as President of Renaissance Technologies, which he co-founded with Jim Simons. Renaissance Technologies is the best performing investment firm of all time, and its mysterious and famous Medallion Fund is considered to be the most successful fund ever.
A.I. Revolution
Can we harness the power of artificial intelligence to solve the world’s most challenging problems without creating an uncontrollable force that ultimately destroys us? ChatGPT and other new A.I. tools can now answer complex questions, write essays, and generate realistic-looking images in a matter of seconds. They can even pass a lawyer’s bar exam. Should we celebrate? Or worry? Or both? Correspondent Miles O’Brien investigates how researchers are trying to transform the world using A.I., hunting for big solutions in fields from medicine to climate change.
AI can restore the middle-class jobs lost to automation
AI is indeed changing the labor market, see the flood of news articles on layoffs happening in part due to companies’ priorities shifting to AI. Now a new working paper from Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor says that the shift presents a unique opportunity: AI could enable more workers to perform higher-stakes, decision-making tasks that are currently relegated to highly-educated workers such as doctors and lawyers.
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How Markets Respond to Geopolitical Crises - A Wealth of Common Sense
According to a survey by the CFA Institute, more than two-thirds of global investment professionals expect the geopolitical climate to affect investment returns over the next three to five years. And a full 70 percent of respondents expect these changes to negatively affect market performance.
The Keys to Life
In 2014, Google acquired a little-known artificial intelligence (AI) research company. It paid around $600 million. It was considered a large sum at the time… especially for a startup that had only been around for a few years, had no real products, and very little revenue.
AI and Quantum Computing: Glimpsing the Near Future
Catch a glimpse of the near future as AI and Quantum Computing transform how we live. Eric Schmidt, decade-long CEO of Google, joins Brian Greene to explore the horizons of innovation, where digital and quantum frontiers collide to spark a new era of discovery.
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“Everything That Moves Will Become Robotic”
Horsepower. Raw horsepower. After watching NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at NVIDIA’s GTC conference, I couldn’t help but think about it.
While all of the GTC conferences have centered around artificial intelligence since 2015, this year stood out. It’s all about power this week — computing power… and having the “horses” to accelerate even faster.
Three things to remember in times like these
The key takeaway for me is that the economy is too good to expect a rapid cooling off anytime soon. The faster disinflationary fall we’d been enjoying since the middle of 2023 has now trampolined on us and the data is coming in warmer and warmer. When people are working, people are spending. Almost everyone is working. That’s it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Ed Thorp: Survival of the Fittest Mind
Are you incentivized to chase deals and put money to work, or is there time to follow curiosity and investigate thoroughly? What are you optimizing for: short-term returns or making good decisions?
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Why you, personally, should want a larger human population
Resources are not static. Historically, as we run out of a resource (whale oil, elephant tusks, seabird guano), we transition to a new technology based on a more abundant resource—and there are basically no major examples of catastrophic resource shortages in the industrial age.
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
Something’s changed in the past few decades. After the 1970s, American dynamism declined. Americans moved less from place to place. They stopped showing up at their churches and temples. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam recognized that America’s social metabolism was slowing down.
Ancient Greek antilogic is the craft of suspending judgment
In Syracuse, 2,500 years ago, there was a famous teacher of rhetoric named Corax. This new discipline was in high demand: mastery of persuasive speaking, it was hoped, led to fame and wealth.
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What Will Happen In 2024
As we enter 2024, the capital markets have found their footing and are moving higher. The Fed has taken interest rates as far as they want at this time and inflation has come down. It seems that a “soft landing” is likely. That is good news for the innovation economy because healthy capital markets are a necessary support system.
Ice baths boost sex drive
A group of 17 male and 8 female Czech Army soldiers who participated in 2 min freezing cold water immersion, followed by light exercise for rewarming, reported improvements in sexual satisfaction, reduction in waist size, and reduction in anxiety, compared to controls.
Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You
From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics, and new technologies to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions, and becoming a parent, we undergo change and transformation—both good and bad—regularly. Change is not the exception, it’s the rule. Yet we endlessly fight it, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self.
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The Roman Empire Fallacy - by Frederik Gieschen
Have you ever looked at the US and thought 'man, this looks a lot like the late stage Roman Empire'? Powerful but divided. Rich but corrupt. Glamorous but dysfunctional. A source of marvelous technological achievements but unable to build things as it used to. Ruled by incompetent politicians, owned by a small elite, its masses trapped by unsustainable debt and distracting themselves with endless mind-numbing entertainment.
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past. Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change. With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life.
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What I Am Reading:
The hottest new programming language? Biology
mRNA is just one example of a synthetic biology technology. As we speak, people around the world are bending biology to all sorts of precise, ambitious, and (at times) controversial ends. A quick list: resurrecting wooly mammoths, reversing disease, growing meat in a lab, editing genes, producing waste-free materials.
The Secret Tool of Elite Athletes for Achieving your Career Goals
The difference between those who succeed and those who fail in their goals is the transformation of identity. "The act of stepping into a new identity that you're unfamiliar with is a surprisingly effective brain shortcut to change. The human mind is wired to protect its identities, even in the face of irrefutable contradicting facts…
The case for reading all of your emails, according to Tim Cook
“I religiously start looking at customer notes every morning, starting around 5 am or so,” he says. It’s not uncommon for him to forward them to other Apple employees, the feedback having sparked an idea.
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What I Am Reading:
Octopus time
“We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time?”
For when someone says “I’ve seen this before, it didn’t work”
“If you’re a founder you’ve probably heard someone say “oh, I’ve seen this idea before - it didn’t work” or “isn’t this just like that other thing that person/company X tried?”
As a founder, I heard this dozens of times. It’s likely to come from investors, but you hear it from other founders, potential employees, advisors, customers, even family members. Like it or not, pattern matching is strong.”
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For every successful business I’ve started, or investment I’ve made, there have been multiple failures: businesses that never took off, investments that went to zero, and times when I was super gung-ho about something, only to have it end up in my Bad Idea Hall of Fame. Want to know more? Let’s take an honest trip down memory lane.
The Kickoff
The first one that comes to mind takes me back to my college years, when I was about 20. I was still in school at the time, and really into kickboxing, which was just becoming popular, with studios popping up everywhere. One day, I had a lightbulb moment for how I could monetize the kickboxing trend.
I bought the domain name Kickboxing.net with the plan of building an online directory of kickboxing studios. To fill out the front end of the site, I put up a bunch of content around the sport, but that was the easy part. The more labor-intensive work was creating the software that would pull information from a database about different locations. During my limited free time, I programmed the whole thing, spending probably about four months on it.
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What I Am Reading:
Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently
Perception is the foundation of human experience, but few of us understand why we see what we do, much less how. By revealing the startling truths about the brain and its perceptions, Beau Lotto shows that the next big innovation is not a new technology: it is a new way of seeing.
In his first major book, Lotto draws on over two decades of pioneering research to explain that our brain didn't evolve to see the world accurately. It can't! Visually stunning, with entertaining illustrations and optical illusions throughout, and with clear and comprehensive explanations of the science behind how our perceptions operate, Deviate will revolutionize the way you see yourself, others and the world.
With this new understanding of how the brain functions, Deviate is not just an illuminating account of the neuroscience of thought, behavior, and creativity: it is a call to action, enlisting readers in their own journey of self-discovery.
What I Am Reading:
The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI
After three years, Elon Musk was ready to give up on the artificial intelligence research firm he helped found, OpenAI.
The nonprofit had launched in 2015 to great fanfare with backing from billionaire tech luminaries like Musk and Reid Hoffman, who had as a group pledged $1 billion. It had lured some of the top minds in the field to leave big tech companies and academia.
But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally behind Google, people familiar with the matter said.
And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take control of OpenAI and run it himself.
Altman and OpenAI’s other founders rejected Musk’s proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company — and reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk’s departure on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that’s changing the world, and the company at the heart of it.
What I Am Reading:
The Art of the Good Life: 52 Surprising Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success
The Art of the Good Life is a toolkit designed for practical living. Here you'll find fifty-two happiness hacks -- from guilt-free shunning of technology to gleefully paying your parking tickets -- that are certain to optimize your happiness. These tips may not guarantee you a good life, but they'll give you a better chance (and that's all any of us can ask for).
Crazy Train
Semper Augustus Client Letter 2022
PROFITLESS PROSPERITY; INVESTING IN FLATION; AND – BERKSHIRE: GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.
What I Am Reading:
First Ever Recording of Dying Brain May Shed Light on Our Final Moments
“Scientists gain an accidental glimpse into an age-old question about what happens to the human brain as we die.”
After The Fact
“Everything has a price, and prices aren’t always clear. The price of exercise isn’t just the workout; it’s avoiding the post-workout urge to eat a ton of food. Same in finance. The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money or dealing; it’s avoiding the post-income urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.”
hat I Am Reading:
Planning Ahead Is the Key to Living With More Spontaneity
“It may seem counterintuitive, but spontaneity often can’t happen without a bit of advanced planning”
23 semi-controversial predictions for 2023
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works
“To get what you want, deserve what you want. Trust, success, and admiration are earned.”
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A lot of people ask me why I wrote my first business book, NightLife Lessons. The answer is simple: it was mostly a bucket list item for me, and not about making money. Sure, I wanted to help myself by looking back and writing down what I’ve learned over the years, in the hopes of helping other startup entrepreneurs on their journeys. But for the most part, I just wanted to see if I could write a book…and then hold it in my hands. Below, I'll share a bit about the process of writing my book and what it was like for me.
Telling Stories
I’ve been funding and advising startup founders and entrepreneurs for almost a decade now. As part of that role, I often find myself telling stories from my own experiences building startups, to help founders not only deal with their current struggles, but also avoid pitfalls that might lie ahead of them.
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What I Am Reading:
Bear Market Investing Strategies
“Harry Schultz has been identifying bear market warning signals and teaching people how to prepare a profitable survival portfolio in light of these signals for over thirty-five years through his highly acclaimed newsletter, The International Harry Schultz Letter, which reaches subscribers in over ninety countries. The 1960s' classic book Bear Markets has been fully updated and revised to reflect the unprecedented changes taking place in today's volatile economic environment-making it extremely relevant to the current financial market. This book provides the necessary tools for investors to construct a portfolio that will allow them to protect and grow their money under the most severe bear market conditions through technical analysis and models of numerous bear market variables. Bear Market Investing Strategies offers practical and approachable strategies that every investor needs today.”
How scientists want to make you young again
“Research labs are pursuing technology to “reprogram” aging bodies back to youth.”
Old Frugal Habits Die Hard: Why I Force Myself to Spend More
“Why enjoying your money is so damned hard!”
What I Am Reading:
You weren’t supposed to see that
“Widespread prosperity, it turns out, is incompatible with the American Dream. The only way our economy works is when there are winners and losers. If everyone’s a winner, the whole thing fails. That’s what we learned at the conclusion of our experiment. You weren’t supposed to see that. Now the genie is out of the bottle. For one brief shining moment, everyone had enough money to pay their bills and the financial freedom to choose their own way of life.
And it broke the fucking economy in half.”
We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began
“The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.”
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective
“Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated -- and nearly everything in-between -- our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can't be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.
Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.”
What I Am Reading:
Five Things I Know about Investing
In this essay, Dartmouth finance professor Kenneth R. French explains five investment principles that he uses as the foundation for a holistic approach to portfolio design.
The Key to Behavior Change is Identity Change
Use the psychology of self-image to transform your habits for good.
How Unboxing Elaborate Packages Became an American Pastime
American consumers can’t resist the lure of a well-designed container.
What I am Watching:
Who made these circles in the Sahara?Deep in the Sahara, far from any towns, roads, or other signs of life, is a row of markings in the sand. There are dozens of them stretching for miles in a straight line in central Algeria, each consisting of a central point surrounded by a circle of 12 nodes, like numbers on a clock. And when we started making this video, no one seemed to know what they were.
What I Am Reading
The Power of the Marginal
“If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because there were too few insiders to explore everything.”
The Tacit Knowledge Series
“Tacit knowledge is ‘knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone’.
This series explores how expertise is tacit, why the research around extracting tacit knowledge is more important than the literature on deliberate practice, and how to go about acquiring tacit knowledge in the pursuit of skill acquisition.”
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Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts, commonly referred to as GRATs, are a financial instrument that allow a property or asset owner to pass appreciating assets to their heirs with minimal, if any, estate tax consequences. Affluent taxpayers often turn to GRATs (and capitalize on the higher estate tax exemption eligible under the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017) as part of a creative, proactive strategy in planning their estates.
So how can you benefit from a GRAT? The first step is for you, the grantor, to contribute an appreciated asset(s) to an irrevocable, fixed trust. You would then be entitled to receive an annuity from the asset during the term of the trust. Keep in mind, this annuity is not the same as the income generated by the asset. The grantor of the asset is eligible for an annuity based on the fair market value of the asset at the time it was put in trust, not simply the income generated from the asset.
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