Happy Monday!!
A bit of inspiration:
“Nature does nothing uselessly.”
― Aristotle, Politics
A few thoughts:
Max Read said this about his football (not soccer haha) interest, which was really funny:
I have a sort of health-insurance plan view of fandom, by which I mean I don’t think you should be allowed to switch allegiances barring a “qualifying life event” like moving to a different city or marrying into a different fandom or suffering a grievous brain injury. Unfortunately I am locked into the “Tottenham Hotspur” healthcare plan, with its high deductible and nonexistent mental-health coverage, and there is no open enrollment to save me.
And then there’s me choosing to become a Chelsea fan by way of only having seen their games at the sports pub of my Berlin hostel.
And…
An important component of the culture of Twitter is one outlined in this excellent apologia by Matt Pearce: most of the people who make Twitter worth checking are not famous, or particularly credentialed, or trying to sell you something. They’re just smart and interesting people who have a lot of time on their hands, and probably some kind of minor psychological deficiency that compels them to post.
You’ve got me there. I’m still sorting it. Ugh
A few interesting things said here:
Application evolution itself changed, of course, with Internet apps and services. For the first time, there was a more direct two-way conduit between what users did with applications, and what developers could see about what they were doing. This led to a more coupled system, and more rapid application development, where many features were created in reaction to real data about how products were used, as opposed to instincts, or interviews, or surveys, all of which were popular before it became possible to get that information directly.
This leads to interesting and important questions. For example, and we can push this analogy too far, we know that in biology over-fast evolution leads to instabilities; we know that slow-evolving species tend to do better than fast-evolving ones, in part because the latter respond too readily to transient stimulus, rather than exploiting their ecological niche.
Benedict Evans said this in his 28th of March newsletter and it is very funny. This also sounds like a stellar job to have, so much fun:
Hindenburg Research is a hedge fund that looks for companies it thinks are frauds, goes short, and then publishes a long research report explaining why - it was recently in the news after writing about Adani Group (knocking $100bn off the market caps and Nikola (CEO subsequently convicted of fraud). Now it’s written about Block, formerly Square, the payment company co-founded by early Twitter employee (and notoriously absent Twitter CEO) Jack Dorsey.
Traditional banks do not have customers who will spring into action to set up a telephone chain to cause a bank run. But Silicon Valley is efficient and scalable, so they got their money out fast.
I loooooove this and it is so goals:
Challenges at Big Tech companies and venture-funded startups dominate the news. For a change, I contacted the founder of HR Partner, a small, bootstrapped company whose founder wrote its Ruby / JavaScript application for the first 4 years. After a slow start, the company has nearly doubled its team the past few months. Why don’t we hear more stories like this?
Sadly I don’t have the premium subscription so didn’t get to read the full article :((
Also some cool stuff on Lyft’s employee compensation and founders’ voting power in this version of the newsletter.
Yea that classics degree coming out, I see you:
But then an investor called Hudson Bay Capital came to Bed Bath & Beyond with an idea. [2] The idea is less an idea of corporate finance and more an idea of math. What if, instead of taking the stock down from $3 to $0 immediately with a bankruptcy filing, Bed Bath slowly took the stock down from $3 to $0? What if Bed Bath just sold stock until the price hit zero? Sell a little stock at $3, the stock drops to $2.90. Sell a little more at $2.90, it drops to $2.80. Sell a little more at $2.80, it drops to $2.70. Keep selling some stock each day, raising a bit of money and driving the price down some more. It’s Zeno’s paradox: If you keep selling stock as the price gets closer and closer to zero, you can keep raising money and never run out.
My primary reflex to the question: what are you doing with a classics degree? is Matt Levine did it… ;)
Anyways, that’s all for today, I’m off to Vienna for the rest of the week for Easter. Have a good one!
With love,
Angeline