Rejecting Advice, 👁👄👁.fm & Hectocorns!
What I Learned at School this Week
Howdy Y’all!
I’m at the beach on Hilton Head Island this weekend, so I’m going to cut the small talk, and dive right in…
Hectocorns
Fareed Mosavat posed the “thought exercise” asking “what private companies have a reasonable probability (>5%) of growing to a $100b+ valuation in the next decade?”
I love this exercise as it makes you take a step back and think through the markets that will grow the most. Forget about the team, the current revenue, the brand, the LTV:CAC payback. And instead just think through what spaces are massive and growing, and could support a hectocorn (company valued at $100B).
Here is the final list:
All companies with at least 3 votes (unordered): Stripe SpaceX Epic Webflow Discord Figma Bytedance (maybe already there) Snowflake Segment Airbnb Carta Flexport Wish Robinhood Coinbase Airtable HashicorpThought exercise: what private companies have a reasonable probability (>5%) of growing to a $100b+ valuation in the next decade? My current list is Discord, Figma, maybe Instacart.. Who is on your list?
Fareed Mosavat @far33dI would absolutely invest in this portfolio!
Pomp
What a great description of Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano. He’s a crypto-guy who is slightly… well, pompous. But, I do like his ability to pull me into the crypto/finance world, with approachable guests and conversations.
Here are three episodes that caught my attention this week:
Jason Calacanis - The World’s Most Successful Angel Investor?
Andrew Wilkinson On Building Profitable Businesses With No Funding
Mike Naples on Finding World Class Founders (This one was my favorite — he unpacks the ideas from a blog he recently wrote: “How to build a breakthrough,” which I keep finding myself revisiting.)
👁👄👁.fm - A Lesson in Leveraging Virality for: Good
An inside joke about a TikTok meme among a group of friends on Twitter grew into a minor social media mystery before morphing into a fundraiser for anti-racism causes. Yes, that might be the most 2020 sentence I’ve written to date.
The group trolled “VC Twitter” and monetized FOMO. You can read the whole story here: It Is What It Is: a fake app hyped on Twitter turned into a fundraiser for racial justice causes.
A wake-up call for the American dream
This fourth of July, nationwide protests and the Covid-19 crisis have forced America to recognize the ugly inequality lying just beneath its star-spangled surface.
The country's economic fragility is clear: Almost 40% of Americans were unable to cover a $400 emergency expense and quickly pay it off, according to the Federal Reserve.
The public market has continued to perform fairly well the last week or two, and yet 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck — further proving and/or exacerbating the widening income inequality gap.
Is this causation or correlation? I’m not sure. But it certainly is something we should be aware of, especially as we enter the upcoming political season.
Reject Most Advice
The best founders I know, listen to everyone and read [a bunch], but then they ignore everyone and make up their own mind...
…If you survey enough people, all the advice will cancel to zero.
So, when looking at a certain subject, I believe that you have to decide where to stop researching and start acting, else you will just end up going in circles.
This week I read an argument for why you should not read White Fragility, a book I have been reading, and recommended last week.
Have a happy 4th of July! And stay safe on the beach, or wherever your plans take you this weekend!
Cheers,
Brendan J Short