sports | Life As a FA

What’s Teaching Done? (Notes from Feb 24 to March 1, 2020) October 16, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Digital, finance, FinTech, global, gym, marketing, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized.
Tags: Ads, Business, CMS, D2C, Digital, finance, FinTech, ideas, marketing, NFL, SaaS, sports, Startup, Teaching
add a comment

It’s 2020. I plan to revisit a number of journeys and roles that have ultimately made the person that I am today and landed me in my current place. Being comfortable with where that is, but not satisfied, has enabled an uncommon, jagged path. In realizing that everyone has different paths, it’s definitely fun to be able to share and learn from others – how they’ve arrived in their current states, what they think they learned, how they’ve best come into their place and where they may want to be shortly. That reflection is something that I believe should be a rote process for people age into their late 20s and early 30s.

I really enjoy keeping myself sharp and helpful in teaching/tutoring. I’ve set aside somewhere between 5-50 hours for every week since I was finishing high school for this. It was informal at first in high school – neighborhood kids or younger siblings of family friends. Similar with college – classmates who wanted some help. Right out of school, I took a role with a tutoring company in addition to a recruiter role where I didn’t quite appreciate it as much. Different focus when I was first entering the workplace. There was a challenge of learning a bit inside of tech (IT recruiting), talking with founders and hiring managers there, across many industries. Sourcing candidates, gathering requirements and putting everything in line seemed like a role that had more pieces than the teaching side. However, I left that after almost 2 years to go full-time with the teaching company. I was going to become a head trainer of the full west region and manage/oversee the tutors in each of the 9 locations as well as expanding 5 more.

Over the course of nearly 2 years where I got to oversee much of the training and processes for the NorCal’s tutors, as well as auditing results for students, talking with parents/students/center directors at each location for action plans, it was all very process-oriented. There were people in these students where you had to match how they may learn best, or how they operated. You can have a teacher who knows their stuff but if there isn’t an adaptation, it doesn’t help always. Everyone can teach but it’s learning to adapt that really finetunes the learning process – both for the teacher and student. I’ve heard this repeatedly in talking with those still learning now – teachers that blatantly declared “online/virtual isn’t the way to teach” or that they would only do video recordings or to “just read the textbook” and they’ve given up. That’s not the norm, but it’s a bit too common. Hopefully pointing out that not everyone enjoys their job and work day in and day out – it’s something they can do. And, more importantly, it’s not something you want to eat/sleep/breathe outside of work.

I left the full-time role due to that last point. And that’s why I made it more about teaching those that I wanted to teach or saw those that were willing/able to adapt. It’s fun when I know that my students know I’m helping because I want to. And that’s allowed me to teach some fantastic people. There are connections I have from all of this that have attended some of the best institutions, gone on to do some very interesting work, traveled all over, have positions at some of the best firms. Others still have started business, data and finance clubs after some of our discussions. Siblings of others who recognize the work and time that was put on from both sides. It’s rewarding.

It’s also sometimes difficult. There are failures. And my close interaction with them puts me in the wake – deservedly so. I set extremely high expectations for most of the students and they get scared to tell me – most do still, but I’m more worried that that pressure is externalized from what they’re putting on themselves. A few that I enjoy seeing or emailing back and forth every year or semester or so – check in to see that they’re on a track that they’re comfortable with – not that we ever know what that means in the future, but one that they’re good with. Their development will always intrigue me. Then, I continue when I adapt.

All of this to say that I’m curious. Some days, talking with those that are younger teaches me about new things. Other days, it’s talking to older mentors or someone out at a coffee shop who can drop some knowledge. If you can inspire someone, they may light a fire for you. Being there by just being there is adequate – a peculiar repeated check-in does more than we believe, so reach out.

Who gets paid, and who doesn’t? (Build Your SaaS – bootstrap in 2020, 1/28/20)
- Talking about not using percentages in year/life but we do in Kindle / ebooks
  - The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
  - Working for yourself or remotely – some sense of not being grounded, lonely possibly
- Environment contributing to an interaction – people aren’t present as often, anymore
- Wanting to rebuild the dashboard for Transistor.fm – going from SemanticUI (all-in-one library, CSS and JS)
  - New Rails app and getting integrated with Tailwind UI
- Not truly valuing the CMS because of WordPress/Webflow, etc
  - In podcasting, tools like Audacity and Grabband are free
Dave Sims, co-CEO of Floify, Flux (The Indie Hackers Podcast 11/18/19)
- Start with naivete – starting first business in 2000, 2 initial failed and the third took hold
  - Started another 13 years later, had recruited and retained important people
- 90% Floify and 10% Flux
- Successful CEOs of mortgage companies with hundreds of employees, who partner with motivated entrepreneurs to help
  - Partner legally – each own shares and do it together – pumping out profits
- Used short-term financing to get into house when moving to Boulder with his wife – did long-term refinance after 90 days
  - Talked to local credit union – worker emailed requests for the long-list of papers
    - Didn’t want to email tax returns – for security, he encrypted and sent them
  - Wanted to make the loan officer assistant’s life easier, so he figured he could solve it with 5 people
- 400k loan officers in the US, big enough market
  - Had another idea – meeting with JPMC where you can create bank accounts with APIs
    - Excited but not sufficient enough people that were interested, and it was too slow
- Finding a business idea – medium level of effort and insight
  - Work on what you know, but industries are so deep where you never knew much of it or tech need or business
  - He knew nothing about the mortgage industry other than as a consumer
  - Some small software companies that weren’t that big, not with much traction doing similar stuff
    - Borrower/loan officer assistant in operations don’t get the same love as officers/compliance
- He wanted to make Floify as 1 screen that a borrower could go to where he could interact with the mortgage loan officer/co, bank/cu
  - Make it easier to do encrypted docs, w2, pay stubs and DL, such (at the start)
  - First customer – down in Austin, TX and he’d visit the office a few days a week to see how it worked
    - Built capabilities for messaging realtors
  - He thought the loan officer would be his customer – but occasionally the loan officers would be part of company to wrap up
- What’s happening in email? Spreadsheets? – he has customers in other real estate, solar, commercial
  - Could use it as attorneys or accountants, also – but stayed niche
- To get someone to pay – GitHub check-in from June ’13
  - He wrote a press release in August of 2013 – was doing thirty day trials, screen share and trying
  - He called and took the credit card over the phone in September
  - Backend was Java, NoSQL D/B (no longer there) and helped for speed of development – just had to work, MVP and value
- Selling $50-100 subscriptions a month, want <2% churn
  - Went after smaller customers first – shorter sales cycles – actually doing loans compared to higher up who said they had software
- Missing cloud with Salesforce in 1999, 2000 – had kept other people’s files on his computer in 1984 (DropBox)
Paul Gift, Joe Lemire (Wharton Moneyball, 2/26/20)
- Playoff expansion discussion – what are the leagues looking to optimize
  - Find best team, more teams in, more randomness
- Stylistic conflict for Heinke and the 76ers
- MMA analytics – round by round currently for FightMetrics (owned by UFC owners)
  - Not many camps have this data, let alone the money to get it
    - Training has quite a bit of analytics but not necessarily fight/cage data
- Testing fight dynamics for smaller/larger cages
- Technology is training for Lemire at Sporttechie – clothes that add to energy/effort
  - Wearables and exertion data anecdotes – including Nate Burleson being told to leave field by Browns’ trainer
    - Was feeling good so decided to stay, despite wearable saying otherwise – tore his hamstring, retired
- Combine differences – getting into more of the details in sports for how much analytics there really is
- Sports apparel for positional tracking and now more information about wearables
  - Machine only to “techstile” and smart apparel – work with others
Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner at USV (USV webinar for SimulMedia 2/27/20)
- Incumbent advertising with Google and Facebook – audience has been aggregated extensively
  - Suddenly had increasing parts of the global audience in two places
  - Imperfect markets become perfect as you get closer to saturation of a market
- Starting to lose market with younger audience as it becomes fragmented
- Companies could before, over last 10 years, could mine for performance
  - How can cos use the channels to grab the TV mantle – creating brands to enable mental/emotional shortcuts for recognition
  - Facebook or other things try to sell that the brand awareness is in a click-through, but it’s more a longstanding form
- Build high-quality, easy-to-use and the companies looking to scale will scale with you
  - Slack, Zoom, Expensify, Twilio, Cloudflare, Stripe, etc…
- Split out CAC to steady and experimental – permission to experiment in different channels
  - Kill them quickly for what works or not – open to try many things
  - What’s a good influencer CAC and value (blended, potentially)
    - Modern Fertility startup – work with many influencers as authentic/emotional, telling stories
      - Influencers were buying off of other influencers – then having them talk about their story
- Knowing your funnel and not will determine your marketing channels/spends
- How do you build trust? (D2C question) – any beautiful design won’t build trust day one
  - Very clear on what your brand value is to give to consumer – 1 core promise
  - Nothing more valuable than loud customers willing to evangelize for you
- Finding channels – hypothesis for success needs to be clear initially
  - Bandwidth – as you spend increasingly, you should see the same or better results
    - Scaling doesn’t work, then
  - Unit economics need to work, LTV as tough to figure out early on
What’s Up With All These FinTech Acquisitions, SEC Rules (a16z 16 Minutes News, 2/28/20)
- Anish Acharya and Scott Kupor on Credit Karma’s acquisition by Intuit and VISA acquiring Plaid
- Best companies own distributions instead of products
  - Products aren’t sophisticated, but the reach is wild – CK with 100mln members
  - eTrade in wealth management couldn’t have been easy for Morgan Stanley
- Intuit owns the point of transaction for filing taxes but not durable with customer
  - No ongoing conversation or re-engagement of services/products – bought frequency of engagement
- Morgan Stanley/Etrade to get access of portfolio of consumers – buying/selling stocks
  - Wealthy today on way to retirement, also Amshare Works (co’s with vested/unvested equity)
  - Pre-wealth management and exposure to next gen wealthy folks
- Markets mature with tech innovation (engineers has leverage), product innovation (tech commoditized) and marketing then BD innovations
  - In the most mature phase now – need to reach new generation of consumers, fintech startups are at the right scale
  - No single one app to rule them all – bespoke – company can have old-world money folder (vs button)
- Best companies own distribution and product, having one great won’t be sufficient without other
  - Competitive edge changes over time – macro and micro
  - Company builders should build best product in front of customers and make sure it’s durable
- SEC and cryptocurrency matters – main issue is to clear the underwriter concept and when they’re deemed as such
  - Telegram sold as an investment contract to investors – “grams” as in the future and you’ll have a portion of that
  - If you buy the investment contract for “grams”, you are effectively an underwriter – cannot sell currently
    - Rule 144 (buying private securities holding them for a period of time, you can sell them currently)
  - This type of transaction occurs daily in venture – buy privately, follow rules, you have availability to sell later
  - Very important policy issue is to have a reasoned discussion with the SEC – downstream discussions

Razor’s Edge (Notes from Feb. 10 – Feb 16, 2020) August 5, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Healthcare, Leadership, marketing, MLB, NFL, Uncategorized.
Tags: Building, Digital, health, IndieHackers, investing, Living, MLB, Money, sports, TrueFans
add a comment

Razor’s Edge – Jack Welch autobiography for how many times he’s been knocked to his senses.

“Eventually I learned that I was really looking for people who were filled with passion and a desire to get things done. A resume didn’t tell me much about that inner hunger.” After learning to select for mindsets and not pedigrees.

Growth, not self-importance. Chapter in book “Too Full of Myself”. He promised to develop.

Questions for podcast: Honest feedback – ask execs what they liked/disliked and how they thought it would change.

Kidder, Peabody (WS ib firm with Enron-type culture in acquisition by Welch) – didn’t work out – cost GE hundreds of millions of dollars – self-confidence vs hubris.

Lou Gerstner after taking IBM role – asking frontline employees what could be changed. Sometimes taking a role and coming in to ask those that have been around for a long while what may work, what doesn’t work, and doing it with humility to figure out internal ideas around efficiencies is the best option. Probably more often than not, even.

Vlad Magdalin, Founder of Webflow (The Indie Hackers Podcast #144, 1/24/20)
- Visual s/d platform, without writing code – web design and website builder initially
  - 155 people as of the morning of Jan 24, started 7 years ago
  - 70% remote, 20 countries, 30 states
- 70k customers and 1.5 years ago, $10mln in revenue (with guide to double – lagging indicator, though)
  - Empower more people to build software (est. of 5% there)
- Original idea – (search as solved problem in 90s before Google did it slightly better)
  - He was a web dev, taking photoshop files and turning them into CMS repeatedly, thought there would be a better way
  - Video he saw (Inventing on Principle talk on creating games/animation) – could marry the tools for front-end and back-end after seeing it
  - He wanted to make his and his brother’s life easier, initially (agency work working with businesses, dentists/doctors in Sac that he could help)
  - Late 2011-12 started becoming more prominent with tools like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Wibli
- Someone encouraged him to apply to YC for a bigger opportunity – he had started Webflow in 2005 and others to get discouraged
  - Created a small prototype with a 3 month runway (savings and credit cards), Kickstarter video for ~$300k for a year or two, build product
  - Kickstarter wanted to take them down because they don’t do SaaS stuff ($20k into video already), running out of money, Sac/SD returns
  - Put together 5 week plan for shipping – read-only on HackerNews (design tool that went crazy on dev site – side-by-side for CSS changes)
    - Within a week, 25k people were on the waiting list (also had a lot of detractors), had a year to try to convert them as they built it
- When product launched, it was so limited that only converted 100 people, needed the investment to finance further product
  - Got enough blind optimism from that list, though, to push through
- At seed, investors not really taking board seats, but if you don’t get to profitability, control/equity seeps out in desperation in the new round
  - People believed in web tools from believing in you as a person
  - Ron from Rainfall Ventures would do breakfasts & walks in SF with Vlad – he’d tell to take 6 months off to get inspired (long-term, Patagonia)
  - Knew they wanted to climb mountains and find a sherpa for doing it faster, safer – investor true partnership (could wait since earning)
    - Found that in Accel – LPs were pension funds so they were seeking global maxima
- Making money to break-even as “default alive” vs “default dead”
  - Not optimizing for revenue, much more long-term project for a goal to help that many people
    - Probably from his childhood in Russia, being poor, religious craziness, refugees entering America
  - Leadership model isn’t “I know everything, do it” – bringing other ideas to products/teams/processes
    - Baked it into the mission of the company – empower people to build software without code
  - Create the company where each individual can live an impactful and fulfilling life – whatever it means to them
    - Glue/foundation to doing the right thing
  - Believes that team comes 1st – wasn’t thinking about team, structure, values & core behaviors of the company as a system
    - Considered architecture, features, code base and tests – much harder to build the organism of people than this
- Still maintaining activity with prod management and vision of the company plus features
  - Creators and developers, leadership becomes its own challenge and reward, where YOU are the code base that can be improved
- No-code conf: knew I wanted to build, create and software and now we can see there are others like me
  - How do you market Excel, for instance? How do they look at Webflow? Find a vertical.
    - Clients expect a certain level of custom work that need to move fast for a project – Webflow persona
  - Those using Webflow get a feel for what they may be able to do next once they’re a user
David Sinclair, PhD (Rich Roll Podcast 2/10/20, via Kevin)
- Professor in Genetics at Harvard Med School
- Lifespan book, NYT bestseller now – aging is a disease that is treatable
- Laird Hamilton morning pool workout (had done it the morning of podcast)
  - Start out at 250 degree sauna (wtf?), shower, and jump into the pool – swim until out of breath
  - Get weights and jump up and down, drinking water if you don’t get it (ScarJo talk about 5 minute holding breath)
    - He’d made mistake going too far into the deep end
  - Warmed up in sauna before jumping into an ice bath – said this wasn’t too bad
    - Got to 3 minutes, as well
- Ray Cronise work and Metabolic winter hypothesis – bundling up at night and temperature comfort zones
  - Ray did a book, Healthspan Solution, with Julieanna Hever
- Polyphenolic as bright colors, white/watery as less so
  - Growing oranges – harming plants, for instance, where you nail the trunk a day before picking
  - Great wine – just as they’re stressed, without rainfall, for instance
  - Organic vs real organic – sunlight, rougher conditions (“hyperorganic”, with a chuckle)
- When you eat, hot and cold, plenty of exercises
  - Breakthrough in longevity – exercise, less food, all of these things through the same mechanisms
    - Found this in yeast cells aging – one gene, PNC-1 that makes NAD
    - Give the yeast stress, they live longer, less sugar, higher heat, otherwise
- 2013, oleic acid is a great potent nanomolar activator, similar to resveritrol
  - Needs to be in a fatty food to get 5-10x, not a capsule
- Hoping to breakthrough drug-wise and aging, but naysayers have delayed 10 years
  - Easier for him to not talk to media so as not to get misquoted, especially like at Harvard
  - Always being worried about jobs/too many people/issues surrounding that
- Mobilization of research and technology
  - Old london in 1858 – cholera outbreak, had to figure it out with politicians getting in their way
  - Cholera from water well, removed handle and it went away – people didn’t want to admit this, so politicians replaced handle
- 80% aging as lifestyle and 20% genetics, metformin trials with FDA
  - Doctors treat disease, not lifestyle – people have already gotten to the cliff – whack-a-mole medicine
- Wealthier countries and education ends up being more sustainable on a population level – less than 2 kids per couple
- He’d suggest restricting food (food 3 times and snacks is perma-glucose) is best for restriction
  - Polyphenols where plants are stressed out – Okinawans and South Indians
  - Carnivore diet – arguing that it doesn’t anticipate stress diet, body will age long-term still? Weird.
  - Body’s clock is screwed up by longevity cycles
- NAD levels increase – he won’t get effects of jet lag (seen this myself with a workout after flight)
- Not taking metformin on days he works out
  - TAME (targeting aging metformin) – susceptibility for aging and diseases, clocks slowing or not
Peter Diamandis, author of “Future is Faster Than You Think” (Wharton XM, 2/12/20)
- Autonomous, hyperloop or AI taxis
Tim Wigmore, staff writer at The Daily Telegraph (Wharton XM Moneyball 2/12/20)
- Checking z-scores for Total Strikeouts in MLB for talking about Astros/Red Sox variation
  - Largest in modern HISTORY for the Astros (5-6 sd’s)
  - Can measure the differences – it’s possible first and second order effects
    - Other teams realize this is happening, breaking balls not swung out outside zone, for instance
  - Good teams play generally more innings on the road than at home because if you’re winning, only play 8 at home
- Rates could be different, regression to the mean
- Highest point differential through this point for the Bucks – 46-7, though weird distribution of wins for league
  - u-shaped, 80% in tails and 20% in the middle .400-.600
- Tim as Cricket writer for many other publications – speed one, as well
- Home-field advantage in playoffs for MLB is only a few % points, much lower compared to the NBA
Cory Zue, Founder of Place Card Me, Pegasus (The Indie Hackers Podcast #147, 2/12/20)
- Having fun on the path to independence, living in South Africa – Cape Town (5 years after growing up in Boston)
- Was CTO of high-growth startup before going to a sabbatical
  - Working on breadth vs depth – across multiple projects, trying to get to not having to work by 2023 – collectively $26k profit annual
  - Seeing the adjustment of not having the cache as CTO – not all of his ideas as brilliant
- Spending so much of lives working, so he’s really enjoyed launching and getting users
  - Joined Dimagi in 2006 as ee #1, CTO until 2017
- He wanted to make money – needed to design his life (as time spent on his sabbatical)
  - Hasn’t been full-time on any personal projects over last 3 yrs
  - His wedding was the inspiration for Place Card Me (could do in Word with MailMerge if you know how to do that)
    - Had 2-3 days before happened that it wasn’t going to come in
  - His goal was $1 for the 6 months – took about that long but only a week or two for the website
    - Started at $10, $5 as he figured out the SEO (HackerNews/Noon,FreeCodeCamp, etc… by ending signatures/posts with it)
- Every possible reason for why it wouldn’t work
  - Nobody would ever pay for it. Went on Etsy and they were going for $8 without automatic template and features
  - Has to be traffic, then – didn’t know if it was $5/mo, or $100/mo or something else
  - First year – $1k, 2018 – $10k, 2019 – $20k revenues and he hadn’t worked on it much, organic growth as primary
- Seeing how the growth could be done to optimize revenue growth
  - Wedding stuff works almost entirely on affiliate advertising – Pinterest or Etsy or otherwise, he sees Google
  - Getting into the printing game ($5 digital templates) – cards are up to $1/card (200 person wedding, for instance)
- Keeps track of hours in total for each project and his total is ~450 hours, so 12 work weeks for $30k
  - Strategic decision to decide on a business (especially since as CTO, he’d get a call for servers down if out at a bar)
    - Shouldn’t scale with people – wanted to be small or independent – no services/support team
- Work in an industry that you want to tell people about – though he says wedding is a weird one to him
  - Project that he can tell his friends about (though he can’t even tell about his new project, either, too complicated)
  - Choose the customer that you want – he says a lot of developers would love to have developers as their customers
    - They understand them, can overcome bad UX, bugs, and certain understanding (Tuple founder as well)
- Pegasus – code template that allows you to get up and running with a SaaS application faster
  - Web framework base language: Python, Ruby, JS – framework: Jango, Rails, Node
  - Sitting on top of Jango, including out of the box- user stuff (login/acct manager/password – multi-tenant orgs)
  - UI and Stripe integration, as well
  - Started to work when he started Place Card Me (2.5 yrs)
- Had a more mature product development with Pegasus, so it went a bit better
  - Identity gets wrapped up with the products, though
Truth about 1000 True Fans, Pricing of Our Attention (a16z 1/27/20)
- Kevin Kelly, first proposed in 2008 and updated – just need a thousand true fans
- Attention to widget – hire ad agencies, make ads that people will see the ad and take their attention from the consumer
  - Can short circuit this by paying the audience directly for their attention – call out – $0.25 to watch ad, email
  - Why do we give this away for free? Can fight the spam problem.
    - Bad economic models break in having to pay for attention
    - In media, publications/magazine/newspapers don’t have a choice for ads they run – decided by advertiser
      - What if anyone could run an ad and you get the benefits of the ad if people clicked on it?
      - Crowd decentralized version of ad network – money flowing through system through blockchain
    - Creative people making ads that worked and sponsors have to pay when they’re watched
    - Decentralized ad system that puts power back to the audience, that requires blockchain to maintain integrity
- Proposed ad idea in The Inevitable (his book)
  - In TikTok, people are doing ads (ideas/product/content) viral purely AI-based can do learned intent
    - Any creator can go viral despite not having a huge audience/following
  - Economic just needs to be built in to get the paid side
- True fans that you get money directly from – number you need to get to make a living, about 1000 true fans
  - Your true fans become the marketers for the casual fans – they do the hard work, promoting, evangelizing network
  - 1 in a million of people on earth will still enable you 1000+ fans, so find that idea that can work
- Published an idea called “I’ll Pay You to Read My Book” – people don’t care about selling books, want them to read it
  - He said he’d pay people to read the book, and make money doing it
    - Sell for $4 and pay $5 – ebook on Amazon can determine yay/nay since fewer people finish it
  - Gaming economy and gaming narratives as bigger economies than others – endless narratives
    - Optimize for the few, rare completers but making money off of the ones who dip in and out
  - The actual book is a container for the thought – most don’t make lots of money on them, it’s the speaking outside
    - On average, we surrender our attention for $3/hr for books, let’s say
Dickson Chu, Global Head of PortManagement at BBVA (Mastering Innovation 10/10/19)
- Next Phase of the Fintech Phenomenon
- 25 years in finance, before fintech was cool
- Innovation in banking – common perception of not going together (tech + banking)
  - Citibank in 60s and 70s had quite a bit of innovation, ATM and otherwise
  - From 80s and 90s on, not so much innovating – mobile has now changed everything
  - Enabled different experiences, compute device as always connected
- What’s old as what’s new – has been accelerated in mobile
- Fundamental challenges in risk + security – credit card numbers leaking, retailers as ancillary players that get hacked
  - Some as consequences of the high growth freemium model – banks as spending a considerable amount of money to prevent
  - Pharma as lowering cost and better ideas for outsourcing innovation and research – high R&D industries, in particular
- At BBVA – run a series of events around world for open call to participate culminating in November finalists to Madrid
  - They see 1000+ new ideas and companies – sometimes within the bank or regional differences
  - Much larger % of students is going into students 20-25% compared to 5-10%
- How do we replicate NY/SV ecosystems elsewhere? Hard to get an engineering element of this.
  - Lots of graduates requirement would put many geographies in play
  - Dickson mentioned London, Berlin, and Toronto
- Running Simple, as one of the first neobanks out in Brooklyn before going to Portland to find community skill-base
  - Tagline was to make banking simple – simplicity, transparency and great value
    - Questioning hidden and overdraft fees
Rina Shainski (@rinasha), Chair & Co-founder of Duality Technologies (TechRepublic with Scott Matteson, 1/29/20)
- Trend of right to personal privacy, specifically data privacy driven by ML / AI power that needs more data
  - GDPR in 2018, CCPA in 2020 and harsher sanctions
- Challenges and potential solutions?
  - AI/ML as the commonly blamed parties, but tech can solve it
  - Privacy enhancing tech (PETs) can be used to protect privacy while enabling the usage of data
    - Previously, de-identification and anonymization such as personally identifiable info (PII) fields from data
      - These are increasingly useless because of re-identification of anonymized data
    - PETs as secure computing – homomorphic encryption, multi-party computing (MPC), zero knowledge & diff privacy
  - Her company (Duality Tech) allows d/s computations to be performed on encrypted data
- Privacy difference between consumers and businesses?
  - Consumers are the owners and source of private data. Enterprises as aggregators and custodians
    - Creation of data after providing services, or result of that
  - Digital footprints for benefit of better services, research, progress but if falls in the wrong hands, exploited
- Social media isn’t the only thing – lots of apps using location that user willingly/knowingly sometimes
Legends Brunch for NBA All-Star Weekend (NBA TV Radio, 2/15/20)
- Horace Grant and Frank Isola talking to Bryan Colangelo and Sheryl Swoopes
- Colangelo on starting in Chicago as the expansion team there – going all over for scouting tournaments
  - Exploding growth of NBA, including the following year – got an offer from Seattle, originally
  - He didn’t think there was anything in Seattle, so he passed
    - Received a MIL offer – wife asked why not in PHX
    - Next day, he got a call from the owner inviting him down there
  - Picking the Olympics – anyone that wanted “in” and had been there, no 1st or 2nd year players
    - 44 down to 12 without a tryout with Popp
- Sheryl on Kobe/Gigi’s loss – both for the past and present
  - Mentioned growing up watching Michael, since no WNBA until 1997
  - Houston squad used to support them in Houston – Cuttino, Francis, Moochie Norris
  - That’s different than Kobe wearing WNBA stuff, coming to All-Star game the prior summer with GiGi
    - Deserved to be better pay / if others see him, gives more credibility and questions can arise properly

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Daily fantasy football, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Healthcare, Leadership, NBA, questions, social, sports, Strategy, Streaming, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: Bill Gurley, Bitcoin, Blockchain, contracts, Coronavirus, Gaming, Healthcare, ideas, investing, Investments, medtech, sports, Strategy
add a comment

Productivity tools have been all the rage. Those familiar with adoption of new technology or tools in an office setting bigger than 20 people have likely been through what’s described as the J curve for adoption, popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock in their paper (see: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/brynrocksyv_j-curve_final.pdf) of September 2018 on general purpose technologies. There is a slope downward to start for the adoption because the productivity decrease and difficulty in trying to set it up often leads to a loss. Over time and the consistent use, it can go away and lead to the productivity gains we sought in the first place.

Well, I’m in that too many tools, too many valleys section. Bundle and use a tool that tries to do it all? Or unbundle and use multiple tools. If you are trying to optimize notes for one platform and it doesn’t work for your other platforms (mobile/to-go/car), is it optimal? Is 90% great if you miss on the 10% you don’t have a good solution for? I’m not sure. I’m hopeful that audio can work easily – may even jump into Otter.ai for transcription there.

A family friend of ours was so obsessed with keeping track of all his clothes, colors and features that he took it upon himself to build a database of his closet. Upon telling someone else, I recall a similar story for someone who went further and did bar codes on their clothes. You spend so much time obsessing over something you’d love organization over until that organizing takes up the time you were hoping to save. We could take this further and draw similar analogies to corporate, big companies compared to start-ups in growth as an early employee – always something to be done, may not be optimizing the work, just attempting to get something out compared to optimization runs for something that worked until it breaks. Exciting work on either end but ultimately, there’s a line you must draw.

There are tons of benefits to organization for notes, processes, documentation in that someone could come in at any point and figure out what connects to what. There’s a context. I think YourStacks is doing something like this for personal / professional use of tools and games and everything one comes into contact. There have been corporate / enterprise stack technology sites that break down webpage technology or company technologies. Then there are transparent people / companies who document it both privately and publicly for others to see. We try what we think may improve but it’s tough to know where to start.

There’s a lesson to be learned here in starting, trying to going from there. Some of us want to try to optimize all the tools or one tool to its fullest before moving forward. How good is good? Or not good enough? At what point do you pass to the next or add another tool? How many tools are too many? And will we get a bundling or unbundling of different aspects? I’m hopeful we get voice tools that enable bundling for all sorts of this. Currently, I’ve yet to find the solution. Let me know what your set is!

Dr. Tara Smith, Professor of Epidemiology at Kent State University College of PH, Erik Moses (Wharton Moneyball 2/5/20)
- Hockey – East and West split of conferences currently, top 4 teams in the East and defending champs Blues in the West are 5th
  - More or less deterministic (coin flips previously) – 50% as max from a conference if coin flips
- Mookie Betts as trying to get 10 year, $40 mil per because he’s so young
- Joined in August 2013 after being at Univ of Iowa in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark Capital (Invest like the Best 1/28/20)
- Investing in early-stage, MongoDB, Elastic, Mulesoft and advice for POS in enterprise software building Canvas
- MongoDB – 2012 and had experience building consumer apps from 2007-08 trying to build tech that was pretty limited
  - Felt like an advantage between large companies with proprietary data and tools compared to DIY
  - Met Elliott (MongoDB founder, from DoubleClick) – would ask best devs to work with Mongo and they responded “Don’t need”
  - DB expert – MySQL can work with everything but would miss the class of devs that wanted without planning for scale, app may not work
  - DB could handle scale, millions of users, transactional data by 2015-16, right place right time
  - Oracle as building a great database business and moved into application tier with their apps built on their db
    - CRM, HCM (Peoplesoft) to serve application – 1977 to true leader in databases in 80s, relational
  - Other timing – 1992, for instance, and it would not have worked. Cloud has been so open to these techs.
  - Cockroach for globally scalable, relational db – TimeScale for time-series IoT model, for instance after cloud enabled it
    - Specific use cases have more specifically-tailored results
  - Initiating and potential TAM Salesforce estimates from the start compared to now, where it’s much larger now than suspected
- Now, enterprise software permeates into companies all over for IoT and consumer tech
  - Caterpillar, Pharma, Financial Services, Shipping companies are all buyers
  - Diva built a CRM system for healthcare vertical on general CRM, Salesforce – multibillion dollar company
  - Client facing software is very important – system that will be helpful and customers will tackle that and tell you directly
- People come to work and complete a specific job or task – not to work or be an expert with your software
  - New tool into a workflow, only certain amount of walls to learn the software before leaving
  - Go slow to go fast – if you’re building a software solution in the start, build for 5-10 important users
    - Address the needs of those customers – generally applicable to the market (not just the single customer)
    - Won’t become an outside services or dev shop if you deliver services to the general customer
  - Workday and Viva early days – 50% of revenue were services since they entered enterprises (large installation of PeopleSoft)
    - On-prem CRM for Viva – lots of handholding, data migration and such
- Duffel (Global Distribution System) for airlines selling to consumers
  - Convoluted system to sell and the flows is astounding – entrepreneurs in payments looking to innovate in these instances
  - Found airlines and approached them to “Shouldn’t it work like this?” to get your first partners/customers
  - Patient capital of “go slow to go fast” to super efficient business – spreadsheet vs software
    - Example at Greg Shaw – Mulesoft – burned $8mln from $100mln to 200mln in revenue and burned $4mln from 2-300mln
      - Inside Salesforce, they’ve grown top-line revenues further
- Unlikely that someone else is building what you’re building
  - 2004 – Salesforce selling CRM, main competitor was Seibel – Salesforce had ACV of $4k and 15 licenses at a time vs Seibel $100k/1k
    - Go after the larger competitors when you have thousands of customers and users ecstatic about your product
  - Won’t run into competitors directly, just objections to your own system, since it’s incomplete
    - Valuing you against their internal/custom solution – take time to create product maturity before prematurely scaling
- If you’re not missing as an investor, you aren’t taking enough shots
  - 1x your capital if you miss compared to if you pass, miss on 10x or 100x
  - At Benchmark, they’re making 5-10 investments per year, so it’s 1-2 per partner
- Recruiting and sales – candidates have to feel very good as they go through the proces
  - Only way to scale the software business is to hire the best people to make the software
- Hard to stand out in SF as an enterprise software integration problem (Mulesoft)
  - Competing with FAANG in a limited labor market, have to be able to recruit amazing talent
  - For start-ups, they have 2 advantages: really exciting for them to embrace remote talent (global market)
    - Running a remote company at scale has very little to do with the tools, and more so with the work culture that’s friendly
    - Everyone meets remotely on video, even in same room
    - Writing a lot of documentation, transparency about thinking in the wikis docs so anyone can catch up
  - Offline ad inventory is very efficient – account-based enterprise software ads at airports – targeting top of funnels
  - How do you transmit a culture that was highly efficient in 10 person to 20 or 100 or 1000 and further, if you’re doing 100% each year
    - 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 haven’t been there for more than 1 year, 2 years, 3, etc..
- Most portable of early stage investing – Bill Gurley’s blog on CAC and LTV
  - Going down unit economic traps are widely applicable to all tech businesses, consumer, enterprise, etc
    - Can’t drive spreadsheet growth with CAC/inorganic growth for LTV numbers
  - Product engagement – customers in consumer and enterprise
- Benchmark as 5 equal partners at the firm, no juniors or others
  - Don’t have a NEXT topic that they have to move on to because of this, so open-ended discussions can go very deep
    - Wide networks so they can get useful people to talk
  - Probably not a question that they can’t answer
Adam Draper, Founder & CEO of Boost VC (20min VC 2/24/16)
- Seed stage accelerator, blockchain and VR
- Before Boost, angel invested in 20+ co’s, including Coinbase, Plangrid, Practice Fusion
  - Geography – heart of SV and ecosystem of entrepreneurs, recently adding V/R to build
- Founder of Xpert Financial after UCLA graduation, helping later stage companies raise capital in private markets
  - Made every mistake – funding, hiring, firing, product
  - Helped early-stage companies build product and raise capital, including for a friend – wanted to mentor in bulk
    - As a family, helping people get to where they want to go
- Meeting a lot of people while raising money and helping – took him 12 months to raise his fund
  - $6.6mln after reaching out to 3k, 350 meetings and closed ~35 – basically rule of 10
- Had 52 investments in blockchain accelerator (had about ~120 companies) among currency/contracts-based work
  - Been in industry for 3 years, seeing mature products and higher quality
- Mentioned MuggleNet as his favorite blog and TechCrunch
- JoyStream by a solo founder, trying to merge BitTorrent / BTC
Coronavirus (a16z 16min on the News #21, 1/29/20)
- Judy Savitskaya – 2019-nCoV – 10-20% common cold vs epidemic ones would be severity
- Sequencing this virus has been incredibly quick (within 2 weeks of genome) whereas it’s taken longer in past
  - If someone in SF said they had a cold at a general clinic, they could decide if it’s this or not
  - Figuring out treatments and protocols based on genome and live medicine
- Spike proteins used to enter into lung cells didn’t look as bad as SARS, so they thought it was fine
  - Turns out that it’s actually very similar to the protein
- Nobody really knows – animal sources of viruses (evolving away from human hosts, time in animals)
  - R0 – number of people you’d expect to get sick for every one person that has it
  - Breaking down variables in R0 – how well does virus transmit itself (easy in air, for instance)
    - Is it good at infecting cells? What’s the population like? (Chinese New Year and traveling often)
  - If virus is not that deadly, additional time in the host that can get infected (individually, if deadly and fast, population better)
- Increase in genomic medicine – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations gave out 3 grants to pharma co’s totaling $12.5mln
  - 12-16 weeks time to develop new drugs based on the new sequence
Epic Battles in Healthcare, FICO Changes (a16z 16min on the News #22, 2/6/20)
- FinTech GP’s Angela Strange and Anish Acharya
- Starting with what is a FICO score – 5 factors: payment history, credit utilization, length of history, new credit, credit mix
  - FICO 2, 3, and 10 now as FICO comes out with reweighting
    - 1 trillion in credit card debt now, so people refi from 25% to 12% loans, but it doesn’t change user spending habits
    - Better job of incorporating debt over a long period of time
  - Designed in 1950s to create a proxy for willingness to pay, originally – now, it’s mostly lenders that have their own algorithms
  - Good lenders will use FICO as a factor but they have their own robust models
- Hacks such as adding kids as authorized users
- Old time, 50-100 years credit decisions made on generations, kids play ball with bankers, etc
  - Bank of Italy (now Bank of America), would make loans to Italian immigrants that other banks wouldn’t lend to
  - 2 drivers – willingness and ability to pay
- International vs US – in US, most decisions decided on score/report, not alternative data
  - In international countries, great way to bootstrap a lending business as a proxy for consumer
  - Difficult to introduce alternative data in the US , cash flow streams for instance
- Epic’s CEO (EHR information on data) letter sent – with Julie Yoo bio GP
  - Rule that’s been around for 1 year in context of a longer standing law
    - Opening healthcare records from ONC (Office of National Coordinator for CMS), gov agencies overseeing healthcare spend
  - 21st Century CURES Act – Upton and Waldon – means by which we implement the act (healthcare costs will rise, care will suffer)
    - Contending with nonprofit orgs with slim margins
  - Uniquely stored in healthcare data is the doctors’ context (and dialogue) – for what reason would you need the context vs “code”
  - Connecting data between APIs and interoperability – major concept
- Clause in rule about screenshot sharing – contractual obligations not to share screenshots
  - In trying to see a workflow in a system to connect yours efficiently – one of Julie’s customers at EHR company got hand-slapped for sharing
- Annual meeting with OMB and ONC for driving sharing and interoperability – Epic wasn’t there – everyone else, systems, plans, incumbents, big tech, EHRc
  - HHS secretary was saying that scare tactics won’t affect what they’re looking for
Introduction to ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 (FYI 1/13/20)
- James Wang interviewing Cathie Wood, CEO/CIO at ARK Invest
  - Building on other years – DL, EV, 3D printing, autonomous ride hailing, automation, genome sequencing, digital wallets and Bitcoin
- New ones – streaming media, aerial drones and biotech R&D efficiency
- Streaming media – changing behavior patterns should catapult the industry, roughly $80-90bn, projecting $400bn+ in next 4 years
  - Most people couldn’t understand why she was buying Amazon at $5bn cap at her old firm (when no profits)
    - Believed about their revenues would increase CAGR at 25% for 20 years, deep value play (exp growth wasn’t understood)
  - Terrible sales out of box retailers – want to survive and go to online
  - Gaming could consume media, so is value in content or platforms (say, Tencent showing the way, maybe) – larger than box office now
    - Every time music has come out, it has cannibalized the other, older parts as replacement
    - Gaming was different – expansive, explosive market as stacking (mobile only added to consoles and others)
- Aerial drones – early side of S curve still – released a paper in 2014 suggesting that if FAA would allow Amazon to deliver parcels over 10 mi
  - Amazon, at that time, could have done it profitably for just $1 per parcel for 5 lb package, for instance
  - Food delivery now, air taxis / passenger drones and given battery tech, could save 20k lives associated with heart attacks – drone faster than ambulance
    - Projecting $275bn food delivery (3mi Delivery for cars is about $4.85 – $5) – drones could do it for $.20, profitably
- Biotech R&D Efficiency as converging Nextgen sequencing, AI, CRISPR editing
  - Impact on pharma and biotech sector
  - Fewer trial failures with DNA sequencing and companion diagnostics for trials, time to market decrease
    - Human trials, CRISPR is curing things such as Beta-_ and sickle cell (2 people)
  - Value-based pricing could be installment payments, for every year you live – reduction of trials and drugs to market, higher pricing utility
    - Margin structure could follow more of 1980s and 90s (mid20-30s) – innovations were exhausted from there, but now should be innovative
  - CRISPR and gene therapies are delivering great results, cures and evidence of these
    - AI and software side with mundane, life science has supported SaaS company in Viva – extremely motivated for productivity structure
    - Most AI companies doing R&D drug discovery are early, M&A ripe – tech in Alpha Go search problems, for instance
  - Analysts can’t just be healthcare, have to be technology as well – permeating every sector
- Over past year, innovation has been highly valued in private space – too few opportunities with too much capital
  - Private is valued much higher – seeing some disappointments, public markets should be ripe (P/E ratio is not ideal)
  - 5 year opportunities, not 1-2 timeline and finding out how much growth they’re going to deliver

How to Motivate Yourself to Build (Notes from Jan. 27 to Feb. 2, 2020) July 22, 2020

Posted by Anthony in cannabis, DFS, Digital, Draftkings, education, experience, FanDuel, global, Leadership, medicine, NFL, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training, WomenInWork.
Tags: cannabs, datascience, eye test, Fantasy football, growth, Kobe, machine learning, medicine, sports, training
1 comment so far

Nope, I’m asking. Not telling. It’s constantly a challenge.

Let’s see. A will to win. Certain things provide you a much clearer picture of an end goal. In life or careers, there is often always a next step for those that are driven. I know many people that have said it’s not a linear path, and therefore you see steps/ladders that may be uneven. It’s hard to take that into consideration to pursue action, then, especially if you’re back at square one. It must be some secondary motivator that keeps us looking forward.

I have an idea page of things I want to pursue. Talking about potential pursuits may be a first step. Talking with others, another. Writing them down allows a concrete step toward accountability. Then, what’s next? Talk to potential customers, people in the space, people that could be of interest. Design something, wireframe or code out a rough sketch. Maybe it’s something to see how much of a concrete idea it is. Ideas sometimes just need another opinion to spur passion – whatever can provide the spark to go further.

With a next step in a career, an idea written out for the next step can be a good thing. Approaching mentors or potential mentors or bosses (strategically) may be that step of accountability. The more people involved, the more likely that path could be disrupted as incentives to provide clear steps wane. The earlier you find that out, the better. It’s unfortunate but situations and circumstances can change on a whim for anyone, so it compounds with involvement of others. I’ve seen that time and time again with friends.

Now, I hope I didn’t discourage with that last paragraph. That wasn’t my intention. So, here’s some good news – work has become increasingly global with the progression of the internet / web, more so this year. There are more people online sharing, collaborating, open to discussion with minimal work except seeking the communities out. Tools are better organized and more broadly applied to help, and more people are generally sharing their experience for us to pattern match or adjust. Action is the step. Or asking what the action may be. Take it together.

Coach Paul Alexander, Josh Hermsmeyer (Wharton Moneyball 1/22/20)
- If you pit OL vs DL – OL is more reliable, similar to pitcher vs batter and pitcher wins
- Beane in Moneyball – didn’t have money to spend so he wanted to get shots at college players since they were less random
  - PFF using survival curves (as time) for measuring lines (from PFF data scientist Timo Riske)
- 16 of 17 INTs for Mahomes has been < 5 rushers
- Coach – more hand-oriented now in passing game than leg-driving or shoulders for the evolution of run blocking
- Josh – turned his attention to music and predicting the first song for halftime show
  - Prop from last year – how long will the national anthem last?
    - Over time, singer spent on song increased (ARIMA model) and he looked at male and female but female was longer at end
    - Gladys ended up going over
  - Billboard is predicting JLo’s most popular song – 20% as Let’s Get Loud or On The Floor (books, too)
    - Acts don’t often start with the most popular song, they end it
    - Setlist.fm as going through common starts
  - Game plan to push as many in the box with the numbers advantage, force Jimmy G to beat them
- Some quantitative coaching models at PFF and other places
  - Mostert as the 2nd fastest athlete in NFL at the line, behind only Lamar Jackson, by mph
- Helpful to sit behind someone as QB? (Jimmy, Rodgers, Mahomes) but counters as Peyton (thrown in), Steve Young
  - Qb as living embodiment of the system, not necessarily ‘system qb’
  - When do we get a handle on a QB?
- Owners as billionaires that earned money in a different industry and hope to be able to transition to teams
  - Experience may or may not come – putting right people in there, getting lucky with all of the processes
  - Little edges, enough chances and them adding up together to finally have success while living through the ups and downs
Ian Levy, Michael Hill (Wharton Moneyball 1/29/20)
- Super Bowl week, Kobe Bryant death – Shaq statement and Kendrick Perkins clamoring for hatchet to be buried with Kdurant
- MJ’s 3 and 2 years off and then another 3 – only had Scottie as the overlap of players
  - Kobe – 2 rings but 3 straight finals with Pau, sans Shaq, Lebron – taking some poor players and winning rings
  - Teams and styles that have changed to give credit to the great ones
- Sac down 17 points with 2min 49 sec – broke a streak of 8,378 straight games of losses
Dr. Shaili Jain, Prof of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, PTSD Treatment, author of “Unspeakable Mind” (Wharton XM, Future of Everything)
- Father was a war vet & born in India, Shaili grew up in England and what she ever knew
- Muted emotions, insidious infiltration of how people work, play and create beyond mind and brain
  - Infiltrates organs, independent risk factors for heart disease, cancer
- Too many factors, 1/3 genetic (not on marker-level, though) to determine PTSD levels or exposure
  - Dose matters – more deployments = more likely, and cumulative effects
- Average clinicians outside of VA have a tough time to diagnose & treat whereas vets and exposed know where they can see it
  - Adherence is much lower in people with PTSD and this is massively under-recognized
- Last thing people want to do is talk to therapists – avoided trauma or be cut off, isolated
  - Health problems often make them lose control
- Hippocampus is smaller in those with PTSD (not sure if it’s cause or effect), amygdala (part of brain that controls danger)
  - Lot of work done in epigenetics, learned behaviors and environment (followed moms that were pregnant during 9/11, escaped)
    - Work done by Rachel at Mt Sinai to follow their children based on biomarkers – PTSD in them/child
- Her take – future is in prevention on three levels – primary, secondary and tertiary
  - Primary: prevent the traumas and crimes
    - Lots of people were starting programs that FELT like it worked w/o evidence or metrics for them
      - How do you train women to defend themselves effectively? If you have it, you can scale and replicate. Still need $
  - Secondary: before and after trauma – “Golden Hours” – can you intervene to prevent onset of PTSD?
    - Showing up in ER, instead of waiting for weeks/months/years when they show up to a therapist
    - Group out of Atlanta’s Emory University in the ER that did RCTs to show those that got prolonged exposure medicine improved
      - Cortisol recipients had less PTSD compared to those that didn’t – brain can heal quickly, comparatively
  - Tertiary: integrated care – 10 years prior, she ditched her other-campus psychiatry office to primary care
    - People show up in primary care, not often in specialty offices, attack head on
- Treatment – first line, standard therapy would be talk therapy (prolonged exposure, EMDR – eye movement desensitization & reprocessing)
  - Focus on dismantling trauma, discussing the event
  - Biggest body of evidence for this being successful as first-line treatment, discussion capability without emotional/physical stress
    - Exposure exercises – measurable body response
  - Meds as second-line treatment (prozac and friends)

Best Ways to Push People to Create (Notes from Jan 13 to Jan 19, 2020) June 30, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, NBA, social, sports, storytelling, Strategy, Time, TV, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: books, broadcasting, drugs, equality, esports, experiences, FDA, media, medicine, movies, sports
add a comment

So, my title is a bit misleading because I don’t have the answer. It’s a bit annoying. I have many friends and family members that will cite an interest in making something, or even more generally, wanting something to be made. I try to encourage if there’s even an interest of a consistency in what they’re looking to do. It’s worth sharing if they enjoy it. Encouragement isn’t the part that’s lacking. There’s an accountability or fear of not having the time be worth it.

To me, that’s a bit of a weakness. Sure, you can be scared that it won’t be monetarily advantageous to do it – but that’s the part where your own curious/enjoyment makes up for it. If you’re interested, you may be more likely to generally share and stay consistent than if you’re not. Immediate gratification doesn’t go hand-in-hand with consistency, though. And then the starting point usually has a bit of work. All of this adds up to psyching oneself out before ever starting. All the while, we continue scrolling to the next thing, wondering aloud how nice it seems to be sharing something that we’re moderately interested in.

Peter Guber, Dodgers/Warriors co-owner (KindredCast – WhartonXM)
- Lion Tree CEO Aria Borkhov with Chairman/CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, 4 sports teams
- Hollywood productions for 5 Best Picture nominations (Rain Man winner), Midnight Express, Flash Dance, Batman, Soulsurfer
  - “Tell to Win” best-selling author
- Also owner of Team Liquid and LA FC, professor at UCLA Anderson, Media
- Recorded at the end of WS 2018 – never before having World Series Game 7 at Dodgers stadium
- Can’t just make hits – ups-and-downs are part of the journey, can’t fail will make it so you don’t have success
- Missed out on Dodgers originally when McCourt was buying from FOX, but asked to put up money at last hour, so he backed out
  - Magic brought him in 9 years later and he was more familiar since he owned the AAA team in Oklahoma City
  - Culture providing leadership and top-down, being managing partner
  - Bring best talent, resourcefulness, undervalued performance from someone as surprises, having a long and short-game
    - If short-term doesn’t work, the long-term rarely is cared for
- Caring fully for his team – listen to the audience and imagine their experience is theirs and creating relationships
  - Crucial since you can’t get another audience every time – music, movies, sports
  - Brand affinity as breeding success – crucial that word-of-mouth is more powerful than a 30second clip anywhere
    - Looks at it like bond / what the product means for people
  - Audiences expect experiences (how do they feel, what’s the benefit, life) – customers/consumers are looking to spend only / wallets
- Media – Game 6 had 2nd best since 2009 for viewership
  - How do you get technology into media? Twitter paid $10mln with football, Amazon paid $50mln, Facebook with MLB
  - Linear broadcasting – audience getting every media at once, same way – can’t act on it (analog to digital)
    - Know the individual audience, can talk to friends/you directly – interface with social group, react and a participant
    - Cultivate participation – don’t know about all people generally but now, know the particulars
  - Digital natives – always growing, never had cords – companies need both linear and digital sense
  - Dancing with the enemy – like to kill the other, one is an ally/adversary at different times
  - Can’t take an analog advertisement and plunk it on to digital – won’t be the same
  - When he was in China doing business, he had to go through an interpreter – didn’t have the same feeling/attitude
  - Each sport has unique challenges (and movies) – movie-going has turned into “going to a movie”
    - Driving away from habituation (movie on Fridays) vs (“Let’s go to A movie”)
- Narrative of baseball – can look at different things, fantasy, play-by-play and story
  - Basketball is rapid so you have to address down-time in a different format – paces are more important (digital can help)
  - Gambling will introduce a new evolution – betting on emotions, last-pitch, blowouts will be important still
- Esports – Team Liquid in SC2, LoL, HotS, Overwatch, Halo, CoD, DotA
  - True digital native and a culture change – lifestyle connection is different
  - Became invested in technology after joining Sony and his unique way – his life is connection of artists and audiences
    - How do you create value and multiply value?
    - Consumption with esports as 3 things – expansion, underserving market, global, participatory (could play along)
    - Esports as the music for 18-25 now, lights up their heart (“shut off that music”), engagement attraction
  - Have to understand the language, special – challenge to make money
- Escape velocity for colleges and training, scholarships – getting older
  - Only got into esports Mark Merrill (Riot Games) came to leadership course and was talking about League of Legends, lit him up
- Advertising planning, consumer information, still very early
  - 1 to 1 engagement is the biggest difference – 1 to many probably outdated or less effective
- Made a long bet on VR – 5 years ago – they’re the director – mediators give you the meaning
  - Technology as existing for PoC for phone call where you could turn the fight or a game on
- Fav movie: Godfather 2, Witness — Fav person: Fidel Castro when Peter was doing a show on diving
  - Unbelievably interesting (Castro)
- Reading: Sapiens (rec for Undoing Project), Thinking Fast & Slow
Amy Abernethy (@DrAbernethyFDA), Principal Commissioner of FDA, Vijay Pande, GP on Bio Fund at a16z (a16z Podcast 1/14/20)
- Food, Drugs, and Tech – 100 Years of Public Health
- 113 years ago formed out of 100 laws – hygiene issues as science-based agency
  - Safe and effective medical products to be used with your patients
- Have to come up with flexible mechanisms to avoid and take risks when appropriate
  - Risk-based scientific decision-making, review and expectation of certain risk in products
  - Hepatic failure, may take a person’s life, urgency of problem with number of people of impact, public perception/expectation
  - De-risk: try to ensure pre-conditions are met, toxicity, consistent expectations around clinical effectiveness
- How does FDA (mentions possible show for crises a la CSI: FDA) deal and think of crises?
  - Medical products could have any crises issues (animals, vapes, food, drugs, biologics, devices, cosmetics)
    - Distribution of potential crises are very real – opioid crisis as slowly creeping up – as information accumulates, problem ID
  - Agency – action plan for several parts on what FDA responsible for
    - What can they do to reduce problem? Reduce patient tablets accessible to, for instance.
      - Can increase methods for access for patient-informed labeling.
    - New treatments for pain and solving problem otherwise
- 20% of international GDP regulation under FDA and 15% of food imported so needs to be safely labeled, available in country
  - Investigate trucks across border that aren’t available over borders
  - PREDICT program – 10 years old rules engine where they are most likely to have unsafe food
- Drug shortages – have intervened ahead of 160 drugs for shortages there along with the opposite – what happens if there is one
  - Food-borne illnesses to avert problems and they have these discussions in the morning
- Kits off Amazon for CRISPR – dog glow in the dark, for instance
  - CAR-T as T-cells to re-engineer to supercharge and put back into patient
- Improving software products that help the world of controls
  - How does FDA think about data privacy and ownership?
    - Practically, proprietary information and confidential. Drug surveillance that might be more publicly available.
  - In CIO role, she wants a Chief Privacy Role – when brought up, data even in HIPAA may be re-identifiable
- Platform trials – enabling features within 21st century cures
- Some company/investigators not wanting to subject only product into clinical evidence framework to figure out – especially only shot on goal
  - Taking a while to determine this
  - Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 – contemplation of new payment delivery models, Institute of Medicine research for digital infra in 2007
  - 2008 – GFCrisis for stimulus bill to get the High Tech Act for full-scale distribution of Elec Health Records in 2009
  - Nov 2016 – 21st Century Cures got pulled from shelf as they tried to figure out which was bipartisan opinions
- Food – FDA part, genetic engineer and synthetic biology – talking with USDA to draw the lines here
  - With new innovations, do we need to change regulatory paradigm?
  - How do we ensure consumers know what’s going on? Labels / consistent language (ex: almond milk)
- Smarter Food Safety – possibility for each food to have a full supply chain that we can check on (whether app-enabled, blockchain)
- For future of FDA – far more processes automated using the glut of more data
Seth Walder (@sethwalder), ESPN Sports Analytics Writer; Alexandra Mandrycky, Dir of Hockey Admin for Seattle (Wharton Moneyball, 1/15/20)
- Plus minus for receivers, how the NFL will do statistics
  - Different than hockey +/- but far more team-involved
- Talking an Analytics Coverage for the CFP Championship – what is advantageous, expected, etc
  - Good sports information – bettors can make it as they will – actionable or not
- Daily Wager show – betting and sports and new statistics
  - “Sacks created”, for instance – Zendarius Smith, lead league with 20+ and we’re double-teamed the most often
- Sherman as only targeted 14%, very low for outside corner (one side only – right side)
- Quantitative Analyst, Danny Chu for second person on the hockey side
Cynthia Medina, Founder & CEO of WAGER (Women at Work, WhartonXM)
- Pay equity discussion – safe space for transparent talks
- 15 years as exec recruiter, talent consultant, leadership coach and technical recruiting
  - International relations and policy expert for DoHS, Treasury, JPM
  - Served in Peace Corps as well, and founded Cheeky Monkey (women who don’t want to network)
- Thinking in 3-5 year intervals for Jones C Mitchell – personal level for Cynthia, though
  - Short windows of time, managed by feel – not vision
  - She has 29 aunts/uncles (parents of 15, 14) – curiosity for her but not overall something she was chasing
  - 0 had gone to college, first in family to graduate, get a passport, live abroad
- Lots of layaway for Kmart (waiting 6-9 months), also used to visit Puerto Rico every summer with family – layaway, also
  - Friend group established college as a norm – chose Georgetown since her uncle liked the basketball team
  - She had no sense of the power structure in the US – information and what she was learning
    - Pushes people to apply to hard universities – to be able to make change
- After college – didn’t have a job – got an internship, needed to know she could do it without help
  - Finance area for GAP HQ, could do it (had stayed on a couch initially when she went to SF)
  - Then, decided what she wanted – went to Peace Corp and was the “chicken girl” in Nicaragua
    - Taught how to make a business with microlending loans ($100)
- After Peace Corps – big picture idea for what’s next? Same person – senior year teacher who told her to apply for GU
  - Applies to Harvard – needed a big push – elevating yourself on your own, focus on international affairs
  - Friend at the time was in the area for 9/11 – saw / felt things on 9/11, so 9/12 she went to NY and been with her husband since
  - Felt like she’d done enough for herself, now wanted to serve again – worked for NYPD CT unit, Treasury – anti-terrorist financing
    - Latin American policy expert for the anti-terrorist work
  - She was in DC, husband in NY at the time
- Started a family – husband had to go to SF for his job, 1 child (3-6months but turns out to be 2 years)
  - Everyone else was happy, now time to do what she wanted
  - Wanted flexibility, good at basics, people – razor-like skills on interview process (first for free, then charge)
  - Told what she was doing, advertised it, did her LinkedIn
- Driven by wanting other people to feel content. Having lots of conversations with people who aren’t doing it correctly
  - Asking for right amount, not asking for what they should get
  - Let’s keep good people by being radically transparent – telling husband that she wished all salaries for two days were public
    - Husband, a manager, gave reasons against it (creates more work for managers) – jealousy and infrastructure
  - She BCCed 500 friends – sent email to pair people for salary conversations (1:1) in industry
    - Send LinkedIn and tell her how much everyone made – nothing happened for 12 hours
      - Men, often, would say it’s too personal / we’re good / exec-level where info would be adversely used
      - “My wife doesn’t even know how much I make”
  - Example for 2 people who are now friends of hers – exec woman, exec man – he was making $100/hr more
    - She didn’t want to know how much he was making (he offered)
    - Big data problem – once you know, you have to do something and that’s often where people will fall off
    - Creating database, sheets and sharing this – nothing to do with action / companies doing different things
- With more data, what did she discover and finding the needs?
  - Certain industries, large pay gaps – media, marketing, certain places
    - conversation / article at Google – same levels, women > men but because they were staying longer at levels
  - Making the same in cases but women felt like they didn’t have the same respect / something they weren’t getting
    - Baggage conversations still – persistent imposter syndrome, even when paid well, still work to be done
      - Ability to self-advocate is always around – empowerment to demand space
  - Does workshops out/in companies – compensation with employees in large companies (inc. tech)
  - Example: new shift to tech company – not CEO but 2nd in command or “I’m young”
    - Often hear “well my husband makes more than enough so I don’t need to push”
    - “Money is not as important to me” – don’t see it as failing, afraid, embarrassed to say they want more, know I’m great
  - People will justify when CEOs or execs leave, company wants to bring in diversity hire and pay 60% – women go in to find
- Have to ask what you want? If you want to be a manager but haven’t managed anyone.
  - Is there an ability or opportunity for you where you want to be?
  - If you don’t know what you want – someone will put you where they need you.
    - Haven’t made a decision. If it matters for $125k to do these 4 things, need to make actions to get there.
  - She likes helping people negotiate when they don’t have to – “have to” in short timeframe – next job is when you get promoted
  - Networking as you build relationships before you need them – started Cheeky Monkey because of motivation and clients
Elroy Dimson, Emeritus Professor at London Business School, chairman at Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge (Meb Faber #100, 3/19/18)
- Author of Triumph of the Optimists – producing the indexes, small cap 100 in London
- 10 countries, a century of data, including the UK for returns
  - Found lots of researchers had general interest in more financial returns historically and added them to the book #2 (2000 years Millennium Book #2)
  - Optimists were those that invested in common shares over bonds/T-bills in companies, which is why they named it thus
- Found out that about 80% of industries that existed at start of century disappeared, and 2/3 of those that exist today didn’t exist then
- Bond market in 1900 existed of some bonds with short maturity like 6-8 years, or in London, had perpetual bonds
  - Composition of mutual fund then vs now – always changing, industries decline and come up
  - Very few survive over the long term – perfectly viable investment strategy as changing
- Countries that were utterly important – assets survived but ownership changed completely (1917 – Russia and 1940s – China)
  - Making the World Index, history for each country, assets going to zero and Index as the same
- Idea that economic growth, GDP growth and stock market returns – discovered a negative relationship between them
- Thinking about valuations – market caps (Japan in 1980s as biggest, US as 50% now)
  - Market cap-weighting as only consistent one
  - Interest rates in 21st century have been way down, real interest rates TIPS / inflation-linked bond of 4%
    - Average now is negative .5 %, promising $1 now, < $1 back later. Gordon model – value of a financial security = D / (r – g)
  - Focus is on real interest rates, nominal is adjusted by inflations in each country (which can be different)
    - Real interest rates were lower in 1970s (minus 10% when inflation was 25%+ and yields were 10-15%)
    - Negative real interest rates are about 1/3 of their 2000+ country years (118+ years, 20+ countries)
      - What’s different/rare now – low real interest rates with low inflation and low nominal interest rates
- Want to bring currency back – most is driven by relative inflation compared to the US – long term it protects you, short term, hurts
- Tilting away from market cap-weighting, seeing other factors that may or may not make sense
  - Factors measure exposure to attributes of companies (relative size, growth, otherwise)
  - Some factors have a reward – growth companies do well (no premium), value companies instead that show reward
    - Rewards for exposure to particular factors (in hindsight, clear) may not sustain into the future
    - Smart beta, Five Factor model, liquid common stock vs illiquid maybe (mutual fund wanting liquidity may take lower return)
- For his book’s update, added a new chapter for Global Investment Returns Yearbook
  - Looking at durable, tangible assets – real estate is smaller (domestic aggregate real estate is smaller)
    - Expected return on housing – between financial return for long-term bonds and equities
      - Expected volatility is also in between those
- His grandmother had a wine shop, he’s done studies on investment returns for 1900 on, postage stamps, wine, etc
  - Best wine as Claret, First Growth Bordeaux, Premier Cru
- Best investment – his education, PhD at LBS and then Cambridge

Listening and Encouraging (Notes from December 16 to Dec 22, 2019) May 21, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, DFS, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, Leadership, NFL, NLP, RPA, social, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, Amazon, college, community, content, experiences, finance, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, Jobs, life, Money, questions, reading, research, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training
add a comment

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Asking the right questions to people in conversations to get a sense of what they’re truly passionate about gives me hope for those that may eventually try something different, new. However, unless I followed up repeatedly, most people let their passion slowly pass, or just remain in thought.

This is a big part of how I learn, engage and stay passionate for the things I’m curious about. Other than being scared of stagnation, hearing people come up with ideas, test them, build and hopefully succeed repeatedly gives me an energy to try to convince others to do the same. I understand the difference between being told of something that has been mulling around in someone’s head or even light discussion among friends compared to prototyping or validating with potential customers or asking people in the field if something’s viable.

A few examples of ideas people have told me they wanted to start and hadn’t (yet some that I believe have done well, just have room in the market) include an HR in Tech stories podcast, traveling medicine / tourism aggregator, and a d2c ecommerce diamond shop (which I’ll go into more detail), more social podcast sharing among friends, and still a market-taking happy hour app (yes, I had to insert my own – I’m leaning toward Glide.app through Google Sheets).

For diamond shop – this was by someone who graduated with entrepreneurship degree, had a validation for the idea and then was told by others it wasn’t worth doing because it’d be high cost. Granted, that was a few years ago, but it would’ve been hackable then. It’s certainly easier now with ecommerce shops via Facebook/Etsy/Shopify and other support, not to mention the audience you’d be in front of. The premise is that a diamond historically took the role of what a pearl represented because of the hardness – you could pass this on as an heirloom to further generations, and you know it won’t be breaking. It’s yours. There’s a legitimate attachment there that defines a core part of the worth/value. For the idea – it’s increasingly cheaper to 3D print a model you can build/customize on CAD (or related tools). This would be printed in plastic that can be melted to be replaced by silver – these rings would be sent to customers that are ordering (possibly with a small down payment / shipping covered, ie $5-20). It’s a model of what the ring would look like, just without the diamond part – but as far as sizing/size/bulk and the other key parts of the ring, customers can try them on and feel it. There’s an emotional attachment here that should occur. If they’re loving it, or have requests for changes, they can do that. Possibly a back and forth could take place, but once it’s settled, the wax/plastic mold can be printed as they would normally do a custom ring and use the materials that have been requested. We’ve removed the in-shop aspect and made it personal, simply by removing much of the fixed costs and labor costs that would go in to this. She was an expert in jewelry and had years of experience. Someone just told her no. 3D printing is now a hobby and can be done there. Many jewelers have other shops do the molding. I’ve been thinking of helping her start by just simply creating a mockup of the site. Can certainly figure out the rest.

Anyhow, let’s see the notes.

Week of December 16, 2019

Tyler Willis (@tylerwillis), angel investor (20min VC 2/16/16)
- Raised with seed companies at Index Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures
- Port co’s include Lyft, Patreon, Change.org
- First co that he was on founding team on was acquired by Oracle, then had a friend raising a seed round for concept in CV
  - Preproduct, premarket where he did a small investment (decided it was bad to keep all eggs in one basket)
  - Decided to invest in Patreon, Loungebuddy (Airport lounges) and ShopApp inside of Shopify
- Rocketship – valuation doesn’t play a role but ID opps for big (10x path, seed > 10k)
- Customer acq and growth as a lightweight process to get a core part of the company
  - Optimizing for experiments – 1 week to test compared to 8 week deployment
- Founder type – uniquely insightful to the place they’re in
  - Bias for people when he can sit down and get a high-octane thinking / smarts – hard to hang out to the rocketship
  - False dichotomy of domain expertise – could have learned wrong lessons or may not know anything in enterprise, for instance
- East of Eden, Innovator’s Dilemma as great books
- Favorite investors – Naval, Sam Altman, Gus Tai at Trinity Ventures
- Favorite app – Omni (stuff storage), Delectable (learning about wine)
Ash Fontana (@ashfontana)- GP Zetta, Leo Pelovets – GP Susa Ventures (Venture Stories 12/17/19)
- Getting pricing power – need to find balance between incentivizing founders and price, but not a big deal
  - If they get 80% of company, 20% for founders – may not keep them looking ahead
- Company and VC differences – companies have different roles but VC has very similar, solitary roles
- On non-investing side, COO or Head of Ops to run operations but not particularly CEO or investing side needed
- Working with best founders, LPs aren’t as important (but they are the primary VC customers)
  - None matters unless you have results for LPs and providing value – founders need the platform or help
- If you were an LP, what would you want to be in: YC, First Round or Benchmark?
  - YC for Ash – lots of opportunity for capital deployment at many different levels
  - Benchmark for Leo – very large differentiated returns, ~30x according to Leo (YC may be 5x-7x possibly)
    - More variance because of smaller portfolios in Benchmark
  - YC may be beatable but it would be in losing their way as a general accelerator
    - Ash brought up operational risk for LPs – more points of failure because of all the touchpoints
- AngelList as trading to be profitable and dynamic system for new things
- LinkedIn as insurmountable lead in enterprise/business space of social network (as opposed to consumers)
  - Hard to disrupt with multiple verticals
- Requests for startups: data generation/building data (synthetically) – ex w/ params
  - 10k examples of chairs that are brown that have 4 legs, in low light, at this angle
  - Weather climate, also
  - AutoML – making it easy for non-specialist engineers to experiment with ML
- Leo Requests: ISA with bundling with coaching, training, VISAs – realigning incentives
Ben Tossell, founder Makerpad, Sahil Lavingia (@shl), founder GumRoad (Indie Hackers 11/11/19)
- No-code vs code – building a solution to a problem without being technical
- First web-sites like Dreamweaver and tables for no-code – like WYSIWYG
  - Halfway things like WordPress where you can customize or use framework
  - Building a newsletter, can use Substack, for instance – Marc Andreesen
- Sahil’s opinion that we’re unlikely to see a billion dollar start-up without a code base
  - But likely to see many creatives build on their own, have the options
- Choice of no-code compared to code – using Circle as their integration testing methods
- Nontechnical founders that had cofounders for developers or finding for cheap
- Ben as bringing up Lambda School (Airtable, Slack, Zoom, Notion) and Makerpad member who was just starting to say it’s breaking
  - $150mn in Series A to get to worry about things breaking first
  - “What’s my Airbnb version look like?” but should focus on the first $10, 100 before there
- GumRoad as being built in a weekend – not competent enough for him to do no-code
  - Ben argued it was easy to do in no-code but they’re each discussing the same thing from different experiences
- Queries on data for code – tools like Clay/Retool where you can work together – can run queries easily
  - No-coder does query and can recognize it to manipulate
- Powerful for on-code is git and version controls – clear log of security, feedback, quality of code
  - Apply it to other things – pull requests/merge (conflicts)/conflicts in document setting on Notion, for instance
  - 100+ tutorials in MakerPad now – what’s interesting or grab attention
- No-code as Patreon/Cameo/Airbnb/Uber where the overhead for coding sucks so much value from (Patreon at $30-40mln burn)
  - Creator would be interesting with price-motivating factors because you could have a more affordable option
  - “What’s the point of trying if I can’t even get to the ceiling?”
  - Meetup clone – need the “this is how you build it” – go look at the tutorials
- Not enough answers for “Where can it go?” because they haven’t seen enough
Niccolo De Masi (@niccolodemasi), CEO and Chairman at Glu Mobile (20min VC 2/18/16)
- Kendall and Kylie game (#1 at app store at time), Kim K game, Deer Hunter and others
- Was CEO at Hands on Mobile as well as CEO at Monstermob Group Plc
- No money to be made in games in 2003 because they were for feature films, polyphonic, true tracks and he ran a public co before selling in 2007
  - Raised money to get bid for Glu from Hands on Mobile but got a call from Egahn Zander to transition to paid from f2p as CEO
  - Original IP value with games specifically for mobile on hardware
- How will you make money in late-stage startup for future? Next year or two vs past.
  - Forward looking and professional managers – no founders anymore. Built from 350-850 people.
- Moore’s Law as quite predictable but believes there are different models, utilities, and price models
  - Last gen console power in pockets now
- Barometer of quarterly calls driving placements and interim 6 week calls for how they’re doing
  - If transparent in bad times, you may have quick punishment vs window-dressing
  - Rewarded more quickly in the upside, as well – private markets vs public markets
- New startups as worth more than incumbents – bay as more regular here
  - Well ahead in private markets compared to public markets (his counter – at least they have earnings)
- No BD or CorpDev – scour market and wait for inbounds of compellingly priced assets (often distressed), significant private markets
  - When Glu is $6-7, they can pick up companies easily but not so much at $2-4
  - Savings to be had for core customers when they have scale within Glu (mentioned PlayFirst)
  - “retirement community for young people” – startups subsidized, food, clothing and sharing app
- By 2020 – more discipline in different sectors potentially – overvalued will have to come in line
  - King that was acquired by Activision Blizzard – consolidation forced by VC funding and people flow
- Better to be #1 in smaller market than #10 in a larger one – be great w/ you’re good at
Tim Draper (@timdraper), founding partner at Draper Associates and DFJ (20min VC 2/22/16)
- Original suggestion for viral marketing in web-based email to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market
  - Standard marketing technique now
- EE at Stanford before going to Apollo Computer as assistant to President before HBS
  - Came out and wanted to be a VC (grandpa/father both were VCs and didn’t want to do it) – wanted to be a consultant / cheerleader
  - Helped him having an entrepreneurial base but some can certainly do it if it’s your goal
- Borrowed money from gov to get started – knocked on doors with software on them
  - Most VCs needed others to help fund a company so they worked together – moreso now for angels, but not necessarily VC because of money
  - VC has gone global and has enjoyed that expansion – affecting the whole industry
- His son’s accelerator, Boost, focusing so they can accelerate any business – he enjoys investing in 2-3 people with a good mission
  - Get people set up in the right way – medical, eshares, network accounting, and other operational methods
- Favorite pitch – Nicholas Zenstrom at Skyper – most smooth, effective way and he’d agreed before calling and changing business model
  - Enthusiastic, quiet confidence for the enormous successes – Robin Lee (Baidu), Hotmail’s founder, Martin Everhart (Tesla)
- Draper Uni of Heroes (entrepreneurs/founders) creating school during crash for better people
  - Give these people the confidence + tools while ridding them of shielding
  - DraperUniversity and StartupU – great marketing for school
- Bitcoin interesting for a year ahead of the time, and then post-Mt Gox hack it went down only 20% so he jumped in
  - Micropayments, fees in journalism and podcasting as well as ending credits and cross-country
- Enjoys hearing Andreesen, Moritz, McClure at 500 Startups, Plug-n-Play as first incubator, Ron Conway
- Reflects on The Startup Game (his father’s) and Rothschild’s Bionomics and concept of evolution of econ and bio
- Recent investment Laurel & Wolfe (interior decorating as best furniture for crowdsourcing) – closed update Dec ’19
- Also invested in Favor, marketplace food delivery – acquired by HE Butt Grocery
Brandon Deer (@bdeer26), VP of Ops & Strategy at UIPath (20min VC 12/20/19)
- Using RPA combined with business processes for automation
- Using Gary Kasparov’s loss to IBM in chess before saying it’s no longer a chess or human – combination where average + average is optimum
- Having growth and breaking things
Wharton Moneyball, Ken Pomeroy and Brian Burke (@bburkeespn) (Wharton XM)
- Discussing the biggest predictors, NCAA basketball or in football
- Pomeroy and how he’s adjusted his football predictions

Organizing the Mind, Studying (Notes from Dec 9 to Dec 15, 2019) May 6, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, medicine, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, content, directlistings, experiences, finance, humanity, ideas, IPO, life, marketing, medicine, Money, Netflix, questions, reading, research, sports, Time
add a comment

As I try to stay organized overall, and especially in our current environment, it does seem that I have hit a snag in where/how to curate all information. I’ve attempted to settle on Roam to do notes since it keeps bi-directional links and essentially enables a personal wiki. However, this is awesome once we get to enough notes/details/lists. It’s a pain in the ass until then because it’s just not set up.

Until I get to the point where I can export all of what I want and stylistically group it, it will be a very large work-in-progress. Why? Well, I started to list a few things of what I like to keep track of. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

Notes from Podcasts/Webinars that I usually keep in OneNote (top include 20min VC, FinTech Insider, a16z, Wharton Moneyball, The Indie Hackers podcast, among others)
Book notes that are either in OneNote if they’re older or, if in my Kindle, potentially on Readwise/Overdrive
Daily/weekly updates including investment research via Crunchbase, lay of the land from a16z, Futurism interesting stories, StockTwits Daily Rip, Makerpad/Product Hunt updates, as well as Beta List products
Newsletters and Trends – Morgan’s Blogging, Nat Eliason’s Medley and other notes, Justin Gage’s Technicality, Trends report from The Hustle, Polina Marinova’s The Profile
Then there are the finance and investment articles that go to my RSS feed (OfDollarsandData, Ritholz, Datanami, Tomas Tungaz updates, plenty of others
Last but not least – bookmarked websites, Twitter likes/bookmarks that I just don’t get a chance to go back to, GitHub starred pages, anything shared in Slack or LinkedIn groups

How the hell do I organize all of that? Well, we’re trying and I’ll update you on where we land. All I know is that I should curate it down to my favorites or just try to learn less. Who wants to do that, though?

Week of December 9, 2019

Yaron Kniajer, Jared Kash, Cofounders of Sababa Ventures (Wharton XM)
- Discussing how safe and nice Tel-Aviv is
  - Rising of AI and tech in Israel ecosystem
- Bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and investors
- Talkspace – mental health app from Israeli creator
- 18 million in revenue to New York, knowing the market and opening doors
- Host, Randi, is a GP
David Sinclair (@davidasinclair), Prof in Genetics and Aging at HMS (Kevin Rose Show, 10/30/19)
- Cofounder of 7 biotech co’s, co-editor of Aging journal, boardmember and 25+ patents
- Book – Lifespan most recently Book link
- Genes in yeast cells for aging while 29 entering Harvard finding red wine part
  - Media swinging from “wow we’ll live forever” to the opposite
  - Mice had a healthy longevity even if obese on wine part (caloric restriction without)
- Sirtris Pharma – 2004 started and focusing on activators of Sirtuins – GSK purchased in 2008 for $720mln
  - 2010 people at Pfizer and Amgen published saying their research was wrong
  - 1 amino acid and 1 protein in living mouse as not living longer for resveratrol
  - Scientific debate limiting patients, potentially (needs to be taken with fat / drug-like molecules at GSK)
    - Patent life is 20 years and he doesn’t have the extra $20mln to get the clinical trials going again
- For his book, we age similarly to yeast cells aging – loss of information (1 is genetic and other is, fragile, analog)
  - Backup copy of information for aging / cells came in 2018
- Claude Shannon as one of his heroes – backup copy, need an observer and the rest of backup (when he did computer science/internet)
  - Remembering in 1999 that he woke up in middle of night to write out the theory of aging
  - Gene therapy doesn’t work in the eye – compared to a clock for memory of time, cog, removing hands or resetting
- Nanoworld and subatomic in DNA – if secret is there, Methane compared to subatomic
- Going as fast and safely to get it to humans – eye regeneration for a few cases
  - Nerve crush (spinal damage), glycoma in mice and restore vision, 1 year old blind mice with gene therapy can see
- NAD and InsideTracker for genetic results and following the mixture / output
- Nuances to how CGM and monitors react to individual foods (brown rice vs others, for instance)
- NR, NMN and NAD checking for longevity and how to raise NAD
  - All cells need NAD to grow – if you put them up to levels of younger, you likely won’t cause cancer
  - Guesses for couple hundred thousand people on NMN supplements and nobody has died, to date
- Pulsing and hormesis – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
  - Information on trees where older ones will send a notice to younger ones that a danger is coming
- His father as 80 and healthiest in a while – post-stroke, heart attack and had heart disease
  - Taking metformin, NMN, resveratrol for a bit now
  - 500mg metformin with resveratrol and yogurt (stomach gets upset a bit) in morning – may have some in evening
  - 1g a day of resveratrol – 150mg typical (he mentioned knowing 14 years of research on animals, toxicity and human trials)
    - Min dose from animals at 250mg typically – liver enzymes are fine
Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck), founder & CEO of CircleUp (20min VC 2/11/16)
- Online investing platform that allows to invest in consumer companies
- Previously, worked in consumer product and retail-focused p/e at TSG Consumer Partners and Encore Consumer Capital
  - Hundreds of investment firms that love consumer retail and its returns, love cash-flow characteristics, only after $10-15mln revenue
  - 3.5x average in ~4 years for younger companies – not enough money in that space
- Crowdfunding as group of people coming together to fund something (debt, equity, product, donations)
  - Separate as an investing platform so the investors should thrive
- Title 3 of JOBS Act – if company raises capital there from non-accredited investors, the hoops you have to go through aren’t worth it
  - Less cost to going with accredited investors without benefit – Title 3 will require the yearly book opening
    - Majority of companies don’t need the significant amount of users 100-200 to make a dent in what they’re looking for
  - Would have to prove to a company before taking on the cost – more likely that companies will fail at accredited investors and go to unaccredited
    - Maybe a tech raises up for the inefficiencies to solve this, but not so far
- Lack of institutional capital in the sector of crowdfunding – for Ryan, explosion of institutional on the platform
  - Average in 2012 was $12k individual accredited to 2015 where the check was $100k into one deal and half is institutional
    - Similar to LendingClub growth as individuals to ind, then family offices, small funds and larger funds
- Seed round was with Maveron and Clayton Christenson after ~60 some investors that passed (hard to get them excited)
  - Union Square had said they would never invest in online equity investing platform and changed view for Series A – marketplaces solve need
  - Series B was 30 days from start to invest and series C was easier
- When someone else doesn’t believe in him, he further believes in himself – energizes him (when teammates believe in him and opponents don’t – at his best)
  - Very small details for most meetings that are still vivid for him – uses as fuel
Arielle Zuckerberg (@ariellezuck), Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (20min VC 2/14/16)
- Joined in 2015 and focuses on early stage investment in digital practice
- Started as PM after CS and Philosophy at Claremont McKenna
  - Wildfire Interactive acquired by Google in 2012 where she then worked on social ads
  - then went to small startup called Humin for 2 years and started angel investing
- A lot of investments since you chase after 1 company that likely returns the portfolio
  - How to evaluate the team, market, differentiated product, terms of valuation
- Being a great listener – give them feedback and they would come back every time with a better pitch
  - First few months of venture – personal challenge for thinking of people based on their intellectual capital
    - How can they be helpful? Will this person be helpful toward portfolio? Will this person be a potential founder?
    - Struggles with this as she’s becoming more transactional. Didn’t experience it as an angel investor.
- While interviewing for firms, many people offered to give her introductions (warm, mostly)
  - Small handful of interviews – conversational in nature, questions on background – what motivates her and how she’d fit
  - Taking Tyler’s class gave her energy for VC
- Google, AI and CV – AI as a service – ubiquitous as in the cloud
  - Many industries being productized for first time – likes blockchain and smart contracts
- Goals: Source a deal for Kleiner within a year that will have invested where world is better place/impactful
  - Inspire more women to be in VC and female founders – although talked about finding and talking with many women in VC
- NYE: blog more for 2016, had concrete resolutions for doing a pull-up and moonwalk – did at firm holiday event
- Favorite book: The Symposium by Plato
- Respecting founders who have a belief that others don’t really have – ex: Evan Spiegel as phones being more a camera than anything else
  - John Doerr and Mary Meeker
- Best part of VC – talking to amazing people and hearing other opinions (as youngest of 4 siblings)
  - Introduction of creative conflict, vision for where future is going
- Firm’s recent investment – team execution is crazy, tons of time with customers, great listeners, improved deck 20% each time
Barry McCarthy, CFO of Spotify (former CFO of Netflix), Stacey Cunningham, Pres of NYSE (a16z 12/10/19)
- Direct Listings, Myths and Facts – architecting the direct listing as it currently stands and how they talked to the SEC
- The Street interpreting compared to guidance and what to expect – analysts wanted to BEAT guidance instead of get something close
- Pricing inequities – price discovery in direct listings compared to offerings
  - Large portfolio (AUM) has IPO immaterial – first day pop is meaningless and they have limited ownership in IPO but not direct listing
  - Institutional investors can dump the truck for direct listings for how they want
- Lock-ups are artificial constraints
- DMMs and financial advisors exist anyhow – still need s1 and filing/investor days involve same people
Michael Salfino, Ben Baldwin (Wharton Moneyball 12/11/19)

If You’re Not Sure, Ask (Notes from Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2019) March 26, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, social, sports, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, content, education, experiences, finance, humanity, ideas, Jobs, life, medicine, questions, research, social, sports, training, video
add a comment

Hopefully everyone is staying safe in this current environment of CoVid19. A wild start to the year and March, especially. Seems prescient to identify those of this week of notes, especially with Domm at Fast trying to make things easier/painless in checkouts for ecommerce, Iman at Incredible Health trying to gain power for nurses and the healthcare workers on the front lines, as well as the investment questions we should be asking with Rob Carver and Meb Faber.

Before jumping in, though, I just wanted to reiterate something I’d heard in a few times across forums/channels and communities I participate in – just ask if you have a question or hesitating! It’ll be worth it – or you’ll be in the same position you’re in now. Social interaction and discussion will be key in how we come out better than where we started. I implore you – ASK. Anyone. Hope you enjoy!

Domm (@domm) Holland, founder and CEO of Fast (20min VC 11/15/19)
- Raised seed round from Jan Hammer at Index, Susa, Kleiner Perkins, Global Founders and angels (Inc Harry)
- Director at Tap Tins and CEO/Founder at Tows
- Introduced at 15, started programming and in Australia when it wasn’t cool, building was what he enjoyed
  - Had a large startup in Australia for a bit
  - Wife/him were in the hospital looking after son/daughter and he was home with the wife’s grandmother when she couldn’t order
    - Forgot her password and wouldn’t take credit card because of arbitrary string – pw-less solution, auth as simple solution
    - Put it on ProductHunt and it was #2 for the day
  - Doesn’t make sense that customers can’t move between businesses with their authentication
- Ran out of money in a legal battle with Tows – $17mln that government decided to not pay
- Many people don’t want to solve the problem – they do band-aid fixes, complex solutions
  - Build network of independent contractors of tow trucks
- He just looks at what he’s doing as solving problems, solutions – Stripe gave businesses the infrastructure to process credit card payments
  - Built critical infrastructure that others didn’t have – similar to authentication, Shopify, etc
- Everyone has been building payment, authentication, registration forms all first-party and customer tokens
  - Alternative business models and sharing data conflicts with their independence
- Deciding to be SF-based – he only has certain hours in a day, but limited output and larger market and tech companies
  - People in SF value equity far more since Australia has issues with company stock and issuing options
  - 50, 100, 150 bp in SF to make it worthwhile
- Had done an angel round of $600k Australian, ~$400k to continue product development and areas he didn’t have expertise in
  - Put out job ad for remote role thinking they’d get 1 or 2, had a fantastic applicant from Nigeria for talent
  - Money was so much less than what was budgeted – average earnings, paying 50% above market and fantastic employee
    - So much so, they have 10 employees there – Nigeria with 190 million people, remote and solid advocates
  - Managing engineers in person/remote are similar anyhow – adjusts his time zone to them, checks in to each daily
  - Structured time for functional areas and 15min calls to go over work regularly
- His differentiator is speed, time – act promptly, efficiently and doing things early by operating in that manner
  - Walks 3-4 miles through Tenderloin in SF to make sure he sees inaction as a reminder
- Thirst for knowledge – difficult to not come across new things (Twitter as a tool for exposure to people, tools)
Frank Fiume (@frankfiume), Founder and CEO of i9 Sports (Wharton XM)
- Talking about burnout – body’s anticipation of requiring a form of change
  - Entrepreneur burnout – results not meeting expectations for an extended period of time
- Using behavior tests to filter out the people who may be too similar once you’re looking to hire for expansion
  - He made mistake of hiring people he liked and matched with, as opposed to those that he needed
Meb Faber (@mebfaber), founder of Cambria Investments on The Road Less Traveled (Resolve’s Gestalt University, ep.05 6/27/19)
- Discussing with Adam about his bs meter – how crazy it is to be overweight US equities
- Canada is worse – 86% of advisors
- Global allocation and strategy – always keeping files on board for ETF, not sure when they are needed or will be used
- Launching 2006 with trend following paper and opening ETFs as broadly better managed strategy/fee structure
  - Agnostic – just wants to offer best client experience, strategy
  - Holding for long periods as how the strategy should be assessed, not weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly
    - Managers tough to judge on this long time frame
- Being on call with asset managers where they ask what the best funds are – why? So to avoid them?
- Currently, tax efficient in emerging small/medium cap for long-term 15+ years
- Market cap as terrible way to weight portfolio – as you select highest cap-weighted company, they don’t often stay there
Jon & Justin, cofounders of Transistor.fm (Build Your SaaS – bootstrapping in 2019, 11/26/19)
- Building and looking at Transistor.fm and other podcasts
- Dropping the revenue numbers on Baremetrics – not just competitors, but eventually there won’t be 50% mom growth
Mythology Manager (Marketing Matters)
- Marvel and having a different marketing aspect for big films and otherwise
- Different projects and input for actors/characters
Rob Carver (@investingidiocy), Systematic Money, author (ReSolve’s Gestalt U ep. 03, 5/9/19)
- Discussing different risk metrics – hard to predict or calculate Sharpe ratios so he assumes they’re the same, often
  - Sharpe as primary vs secondary metric – meta-factor
- Construction of portfolio as time frame and strategy – used to start with $100k (first book), most recent book with $500 capital
- Performing out of sample vs in sample – binary strategy vs weighting
- If you don’t select a strategy, you’re biased against it – “Three Judases”
  - Properly keeping strategies in the files/repo to backcheck (if you get rid of some that you’ve used and got out of, others can’t replicate)
  - Proper weighting would be signals that activate / de-activate strategies, maybe keeping the ones above a threshold
- Private equity and private assets discussions – what’s optimum? 1, 2, 10, 50, 100? Take on risks for this, should be rewarded appropriately.
  - Is it 5, 10% of portfolio? Size matters and type of assets. Mentions GE as having a bunch of minor bets on the private side with more liquidity.’
Beth Hendler-Grunt, President and Founder at Next Great Step (Career Change, Wharton XM)
- College attendees going after internships early – not just through career fairs
  - Not everything career-wise is linear, can be creative
- Portfolio & value add – “What happens if you didn’t return tomorrow, next week, etc…?”
Iman Abuzeid (@imanabuzeid), CEO and founder Incredible Health (a16z 11/28/19)
- Nursing Today, From the Bedside and Beyond
- 2018 Biggest industry in terms of number of workers – clinical workers are 60% nurses – 3million of them
  - Regulated in California where the ratio is 5 patients to 1 nurse
  - Beyond 12 hour shift, 2.5x more likely to make medication errors – documentation as well
- Shortage of faculty, nurses and all cities – also pays well, compensation-wise (California $100k, SF $140k, LA $120k)
  - Magnate certified is hospitals with majority of nurses bachelors recipients
  - When overstaffed, higher cost of overtime to contractors and less patients (in a thin margin business of hospitals, ~3%)
- Talent / HR teams as inefficiency across the board – haven’t changed since ’90s
  - Tech tools don’t work for specialization/unique cases – job platforms are just ziprecruiter, indeed, LinkedIn but not matching certs/degrees
  - If you’re trying to fill oncology nurse, CEO and sales – one horizontal platform vs vertical platform
- Most healthcare workers aren’t on LI, search and discovery is hard and fields aren’t specific enough, InMail response is < 10%
  - Narrow vertical, one job description and complexity is enormous – takes level of focus and optimization to add value to healthcare system/nurses
  - Incredible Health: Employers apply to talent, automated screening of certs/licenses/experience/skills with tech, custom matching
- Hospital/health systems are able to fill positions in < 30 days when average is 90+ days – topline benefit
  - Churning nurses costs more on patients, complex environments for matching, high-stakes in retention (moreso than others)
  - 20% turnover with tight labor market – overworked, burnt out, better staffed, commute times, 90% women, higher pay
  - Hired in 11 days – have their act together and higher employee engagement
- Hospital recruiters have a 7 day countdown for interview requests, scarcity for competitive nurses
  - Only platform that nurses get to make their profile and sit back after for interviews

Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, cannabis, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, gym, Leadership, marketing, NFL, NLP, questions, social, Strategy, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, Analysis, cannabis, college, content, education, experiences, finance, freedom, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, life, marketing, Money, NASCAR, NFL, questions, reading, research, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training, Transition, TV, video
add a comment

It had been a long while – 9? months since taking more than 1 day off extra and closer to 20 months since I’d had a week off in a row. I visited the Big Island in Hawaii and stayed primarily on the west side of the island. Gorgeous weather and awesome beaches will bring me back, hopefully shortly.

I want to write a bit further about the escape, but I also want to get these notes out, so I’ll write further in later this week – Thursday.

Enjoy these notes on some of the fascinating people of Eniac Ventures, other investors, founder of EasyPoint, ReSolve quant, research professors, former professional football player and a Nascar driver.

Hadley Harris (@Hadley), Founding GP at Eniac Ventures (20min VC 2/3/16)
- First mobile venture, Soundcloud, Airbnb, Vungel
- 2x entrepreneur in mobile – Vlingo (acq by Nuance for $225mln) and Thumb (acq by Wipulse)
  - Was one of first employees and execs running marketing and bd while working with product
- Worked at Samsung and Charles Rivers Ventures
- Studied engi & math as undergrad @ Penn, joined MSFT & Samsung
  - His 2 really good friends at Penn and him came together for Eniac in 2009
  - Mobile – next place for computing – cleantech was hot at that time, as well
- SF was 50%, NY as 25% and the rest was elsewhere – won’t lead but will do a pro rata and be key in fundraising for next
- Living & breathing the co – coming to right valuation, inevitable for down or flat rounds
- 18-24 months from seed to series A or pre-seed to seed – funds becoming more institutionalized
  - Leading rounds for Eniac at $1.2 – $2mln
- Favorite book: Freakanomics, read it in one sitting
- Tools: gmail, relayedIQ for deal tracking, as todo list, also
- Don Valentine – godfather of VC, great investors but great entrepreneurs and fund raisers
- Favorite blog: Nuzzel – curation of reposts
- Underhyped: mobile enterprise; Overhyped industry: big fan and he does work in social, but lot to weed through
- Most recent investment: Phhhoto – knew the founders, they’d known each other for a while, great design and numbers – self-funded
Zach Resnick (@trumpetisawesom), founding EasyPoint (IndieHackers #130, 10/28/19)
- Iterating your way to founder-product fit, currently at 10 people, 5 full-time, $600k ytd with 15% yoy organic growth
- Traveled, worked and lived abroad in Jerusalem before school, infected with wanderlust
  - CC churning and manufactured spending while he was learning at school in Ohio – VISA gift cards to $1k
- Banking often makes more money on the chance that you’ll become a customer for other areas of business (mortgage, checking account, brokerage, etc)
- Started when he was 19 – would give advice to parents/family/friends on the year before getting an hourly rate for paying customer as consultant
  - Enjoyed his help, he liked helping others – he was getting $1k/mo from hourly before going up
  - Consulting clients – he was helping optimize for business or vacation trip for the points
- Started Land Happier to solve a problem of having everything in one place
  - Cultural norms, transportation, 6 other things for information in a fun and compelling app product (MVP on app store)
  - Wasn’t solving a problem that nobody has, but nobody would pay for – product/founder fit wasn’t there, either
- What he wants – enjoys negotiating, strategic thinking, interesting conversations and sales moreso than product focused than customer focused
- While working on Land, he productized his consulting – generally was helping family friends that were parents’ age
  - Amount of effort he was putting in compared to the value wasn’t the same – not high enough
  - Started to focus on small business or medium enterprise owners to put spending on the right cards and get 6 figures on spend return
  - Focused on people he knew through referrals, points optimization plans for small owners – acquisition and spending for more value
- Early stage owners – hey, this isn’t free
- Playing poker for relatively high stakes – teaching important principles, statistics, risk management and psychology
- Consulting to productized consulting service – had a family friend with small business who would see a $50k in increased return on spend
  - He could do a quick analysis and understand business more, try to get a customized points optimization plan for points
  - Small business owners are leaving 1.5%, maybe 2.5% on the table – using points better for things you already want to do
- Providing value but people didn’t know what it is or weren’t hurting – show them math for 5 figures within a year saving
  - Guarantee: if you sign up points optimization plan, if he doesn’t get you double what his fee is within first year, he gives money back and $10k
  - Making people aware of the problem was going to be a lot of work – never really got off the ground for outbound
    - Was just a way to make money, not necessarily grow it really fast – customers’ needs
- Concierge service now (v3 EasyPoint) focusing on business and first-class international long-haul service
  - Over whatsapp and telegram groups – makes a flight request and they get back to them 24/7
  - They use miles and points that they buy from clients and then use those to book for others
  - Brokers buying all kinds of points and miles – so the arbitrage there contained issues with ToS and such
    - They’re buying transferable points like Chase / AMEX directly to frequent flier accounts
- Working for someone else – interned with The Points Guy and when he was looking at doing it, he posted on the Facebook group
  - Cameron, now their COO, was very good – would he want to have his hires over for dinner?
  - Team of 10 now: Cameron manages concierge, growth marketing (5 on team, looking for Asia now)
    - Part-time business development consultants, full-time that have been searching
  - Revenues and loans for growth/cash flow, venture debt and possibly equity raise
- Concierge service with product-market fit and being focused – enterprise value of $100mln probably but not billions
  - Not much needs to be tweaked for core product – fund raise would be for a different product
    - Help consumers decide on if they want to use their points or cash when booking – trying to automate this for concierge/back-end
    - Chrome extension and booking engine to use or not – this may be billion dollar opportunity
Andrew Butler, ReSolve’s Head of Quant Research (Gestalt University, 10/2/19)
- Machine learning in markets: Silver bullet or Pandora’s box
  - Unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning differences in application or finance
- Student of mathematics, physics in undergrad, keen on not memorizing a lot of stuff – enjoyed the applied side
  - Oil reservoir simulators that modeled tidal flow in Bay of Fundy, wind turbines in giant field for optimization
  - Next step was working on a sub problem of simulators – complex, computationally expensive and trying to optimize NPV in 60d oil field
    - Navigating the nonlinear, nonconvex solutions – how to make a reasonable model approximation by sampling sparse reps of simulator
- How would simulator/emulator apply to financial world in momentum and moving averages
  - Sample distribution would fit well to out-of-sample distributions in physical world but finance wouldn’t – nonstationary
  - Caused him to use simpler models, momentum models (and transformations) and ensembles of simple factor models
    - Mean-variance optimization, error maximizing, in-sample won’t perform well out of sample
- Wanted formal training in financial engineering, so went and got a MFE
- Practitioner compared to theorist – after a conference talk, his construct was mean-variance was same as regression
  - Subspace reduction and regularization as identical terms for mean-variance
- Machine Learning as 3 subspaces
  - Unsupervised learning -> clustering and dimensionality reduction
    - Targeted marketing, customer segmentation and in finance: signal processing, optimization or portfolio construction
    - Trying to uncover relationships/groupings/clusters contained within a dataset
  - If total error is dominated by bias, it’s likely overly simplistic – X as model complexity and Y as Total Error (Bias / Variance)
    - Increase complexity, bias term can decrease, increasing the variance (instability/overfitting)
Kelly Peeler (@kellypeeler), founder / CEO NextGenVest (20min VC FF#034, 2/5/16)
- College Money mentor, empowering students to live full lives, history of financial crisis for motivation to start
  - Went over to Iraq, started and enabled some companies to build there in 2012
- Went to JPMC after graduating to make some money before starting NGV for students
- Financial organization to financial efficiency – going from Mint (organizing money for a user’s financial lives)
  - Now people need efficiency – time priority, optimizing time through automation and personalization
    - Leverage trust to improve time in the background (automation and not wanting to have to look)
- High school trust and students have nobody they can trust for guidance – 8% trust banks and financial institutions
  - If you can build a product/service, on your way to building trust
    - Save users time, money, customized experience
- Serving their customers with SMS and Snapchat – smarter push notifications for the right service in the right way
  - Couldn’t customize communication inside an app, so they did channels that they chose
- NGV clubs at high schools across country – new high schools brought in, engagement and grassroots
- First product that they brought on was for the financial literacy test that 17 states need
- Favorite book: The Thank You Economy – best people outhustle to get more customers
- As visual person, can focus on 1-3 things at a time – preps in the evening, large index cards
- Adam Nash at Wealthfront – build trust with dynamics of product and the culture of company
- Spent too much time at focusing her weaknesses but has tried to get better on that side
Sam Yagan (@samyagan), Starting OkCupid, Sparknotes (Wharton XM, Marketing Matters)
- Turning down consulting job for OkCupid start – told he was crazy but wanted to take the chance
  - Free model and how do you value customers but competitors were Match and eHarmony
  - Had to get enough people on all sides of the market and then could use the data to help
- Internet wasn’t designed to take an expert’s ideas and just use those – bigger than that
  - “You know what you want.” We’ll pull it out and figure it out.
  - Google comparison – index all the pages and figure those out to place on first page
  - Creating a platform to ask all the questions and focus on them
- Sold Sparknotes in 11 months, took OKCupid 8 years (sold to Match, was there for a year)
  - Got the job running the company for another 3.5 years as Match CEO and created Tinder
Rob Gronkowski (@robgronkowski), All-Pro tight end (The Corp, 10/1/19)
- A-Rod investing into Rob’s brother’s, Chris, company Ice Shaker
  - Were able to put money in, along with Mark Cuban, when they were on Shark Tank (all brothers)
  - Rob, upon retiring, bought Arod out of his shares in the business with Chris
- Fitplan – Arod gave Rob a discount on the shares in Ice Shaker and he just wanted Rob to look through his company
  - Rob invested with Arod – parents were in business (gym equipment for retail/commercial for 28+ years)
- Kraft being an owner for the team and being around the game – interested in everything
  - Rare to see owners in the locker room and talking with players – many players say they’ve never seen others
  - Brady, Kraft and Belichick as being the greatest people and diagnosing problems/plays and adjusting
- Rob wants to travel – done a lot in the US
  - Traveling a week from that day to Israel with CEO Barry of CBDMedic there
- Being reckless as single Gronk in the NFL (loves Camille now, though)
Horst Simon (@hdsimon), Chief Research Officer at LBNL (Curious Investor 9/3/19)
- Difference between ML and programming – validity of an email, for instance
  - Computer looks for “@” and domain name, iterative of if-then’s, marking valid or invalid
  - ML – give details of valid and invalid email addresses and have the computer figure it out with a statistical model for rules
    - Relationship between information
  - ML more as being able to see if something is a cat in a picture – hard to program that
- Helped establish the Berkeley supercomputing center – big role all across the world now to complement theory by simulations
- More data than ever before, 90% of digital data created in last 2 years – more in 2018 than all of human history
  - Finance can’t generate more data like autonomous cars, for instance (100 cars means 100 more data points)
  - Markets/economics are dynamic – return predictions of signal:noise approaches zero
    - Driven by economic features of markets – competitive, profit-seeking traders that act on it
  - HFT as real barriers to entry so they’re less efficient and more predictable, potentially
  - Quantitative traders don’t use raw data – they use transformations such as log of equity, cross-sectional rank of book to market ratio
    - Neural network tries to find what the best transformations are (X -> Y and explore all the connections)
- Bonds example: predict if issuer will default or not with firm information using random forest
Rajiv Shah (@rajcs4), Data Scientist @ Data Robot, Adjunct Prof UChicago (DataSkeptic, 10/22/19)
- Started engineering, studied philosophy and law, PhD in Comms before doing research as academic
  - Worked at State Farm and Caterpillar before going to Data Robot
- Deep learning applications in motion data like NBA player data, motion tracking arms and legs (PoseNET, for instance)
  - Nature paper published that used deep learning to study after-shock patterns for earthquakes
- Going through paper – simple starting point or baseline model was skipped – how much value is really added, then?
  - Looking at the 6-layer problem – approach wasn’t unexpected when using keras to add layers
  - Results generated: AUC of 0.85 compared to naïve benchmark of simple, physical model – AUC of 0.58
  - When he reproduced it, test set results were higher than training set – yellow or red flag for model
- Group partitioning – 130 earthquakes happening right after each other, near each other and related
  - Make sure the information for an earthquake/customer doesn’t get split between training / test sites to avoid leakage
  - Basic grounding of fundamentals for setting up initial training data, partition based on time to avoid that, as well
- As community, ensure that there are best practices and guidelines – reproducibility as a large problem lately
  - How to police boundaries for the general field – influence of institutions in publishing (for this, Harvard/Google/Nature mag researchers)
  - Good from them: the data and model for the code was freely available and he could do it on his laptop / notebooks
  - Academics from the earthquake field reached out to him with some qualms and he’s partnered with them for a blog on efforts
- Interpretability focus trade-off with accuracy – that he’ll speak on at Open DS Conf
  - Lots of tools for explaining models with transparency now, though
Julia Landauer (@julialandauer), NASCAR driver (Stanford Pathfinders, Wharton XM)
- Being on Survivor (suggested by a friend while Soph in college), racecar driver
  - Picking Stanford because of so many people that were awesome / ambitious
  - Mentioning Andrew Luck saying that this was why he chose it – people wouldn’t particularly care
- Driving at such a young age and in Manhattan – not getting a license there until 18 on campus
- Having to pitch and learn how to pitch at a young age for sponsorships, running a team and the cost, even at minors – $500k+
- Some 12 female drivers and being competitive

Unapologetic You (Notes from Sep 9 – 15, 2019) October 25, 2019

Posted by Anthony in Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, Amazon, books, community, content, experiences, finance, freedom, humanity, ideas, investing, life, marketing, medicine, Money, questions, reading, research, social, sports
add a comment

Every Sunday morning comes in The Profile newsletter to my inbox. It’s a great collection of what drew her eye on the week that focuses on profiles for individuals, good, bad, successful, unsuccessful, notorious, secretive, dangerous and generally people of all ilk. They’re almost all interesting, some more so than others. But yesterday, it caught my eye when Polina introduced the newsletter about her personal experience growing up and the first convention of being different. In reading it, I could see a bit of the problems and commonalities in many students I have seen over the years. And more than that – the ones who I’ve had the most enjoyment in teaching – were those that were unapologetic about who they are.

Many, as kids, were still working through it, but they were questioning the very thing Polina had described. And that’s of increasing importance as we get larger and larger webs of interconnected communities. The aggregate and the averages tell us how we should be or what you’re expected to score and how you fit relative to the rest. Rarely, if ever, does the crowd define any/every individual, though. The sooner we can all wrestle with that concept, the more comfortable we should be. Starting and doing a newsletter, for instance, should be as simple as writing what interests you. Yes, as it resonates and draws others in, there may be some curation to optimize what you decide to make it. And further, it’s probably good form to have some consistency in producing it (frequency/length/formatting) but that’s up to you, the individual.

I’d like to think that people want real, genuine thoughts, and less gimmicky writing. As an aside, that doesn’t mean people don’t consume if it’s not genuine – I just would venture that as soon as you break the mold on what APPEARS real (if actually not) would cause an uproar – as we see via YouTubers/Twitch streamers and even in some blog/vlog stuff. An act that is an act has an end, but an audience doesn’t then know what it’s getting. People don’t typically like change if it’s different, even if it may be “better”.

The best part of all of this? You get to choose what you want to do. Make the decision that makes you happiest and assess the aspects of your life that don’t. From there, create and prioritize how you may make the changes that lead you in that direction.

There are many people that I listened to over the course of this week.

Jen Stirrup (@jenstirrup), Data Whisperer & created consulting Data Relish (Data Skeptic 9/6/19)
- Deploying data science and impacting businesses
- Last mile of analytics problem – interesting work and how to finalize to take to production
- Cleaning data properly, putting data into dashboards for proper business intelligence – how long does it take to get to reports?
  - When you get reports, how long is your time to question (vs time to answer)?
- She takes them a health check and tries to check out where they are vs where they should be
  - How clean is data, what are the real problems
- Microsoft doing ML Ops and how it can fit into support, how to look after something when it’s gone live
  - Humans don’t want to appear stupid, so they want to be correct before starting
  - Start with end in mine: what are you trying to do?
  - Think about quality of data: still sees bad, missing data, incomplete data and things that they don’t use
- ML Ops examples of solutions – email management, how do you manage it
  - Program can reach the end bound email, what it can do with the email (cs dept with automated service and pass hard emails to people)
- Good customer success can be a chat bot – limited and what it can do but proper
  - Easing productivity issues – maybe tell me your phone number or putting in information to the chatbot to the crm
  - More and more requests for serverless technologies – spoke to university about container technology
    - Research can give the container with the paper and give to someone else to validate it
    - REST APIs or serverless or others can glaze over eyes if talking to business but others, early adopters, jump on it
Natalie Hampton, Founder/CEO of Sit With Us, Inc (Wharton XM)
- Talking about not having any background in coding, her art teacher pushed her to pursue it
  - Wanted to build the app and just found people/classes
  - Bullied and her art teacher was the one who would keep her door open for her
- Pledge to use the app – figure out that adults were using the app, as well
  - Good for conferences, schools, colleges, workplaces

Henry Ward (@henrysward), founder & CEO of Carta (20min VC 4/12/19)
- Carta helping private, public cos and investors manage cap tables, investments, and equity plans
  - $147mln in funding from K9, USV, Spark and Meritech
- Originally tried a version of Wealthfront and Betterment called SecondSite – never got off the ground
  - Met Manu, who introduced problem for financing infrastructure easily in private companies, providing liquidity and power
  - Noticing executive half-life of about 18 months (say, $20mln – $70mln – then again from $70-200)
    - Companies scaling from 150 to 500 and then after that
  - People scaling linearly but companies scale exponentially
    - If an exec isn’t scaling, they don’t say “Let’s hire a VP of FP&A to support execs weaknesses” but instead “Let’s replace CFO”
    - Why is it true? – Any particular problem in scaling a company, can find someone that’s done it before.
      - Founder is keeper of the mission – can’t replace that but job changes a lot more
        
        Smaller, personal relationships and people understood him for best intentions (but he’s a gunslinger and off-the-cuff)
        
        Less mulligans for him as they’re larger now – Jeff Lawson at Twilio had ran into someone for printed t-shirts and Jeff said “not a fan of color”
      - His job becomes very specialized – story for employees, candidates, investors and press; 2 – right execs in right place
- Was sole decision maker in early stage and he still is but he said it was a liability
  - Fewer day-to-day decisions to make but it matters more that they get it right and understand the context
- Investors thinking of markets in terms of size / how big could it be / what’s competitive advantage
  - Happy going after conventionally small sizes but he looks for 1 of n – microstructure economics / territory will support multiple competitors
    - If you win market, creates a defensive ability and that’s n of 1 – 1 platform (as ‘small’ cap tables)
    - By owning a market of 1, you have the platform to dominate others
      - Markets were too small – any market would run out of oxygen, so you need an org that can go further in places
    - Data network effects could block all other entrants
  1. Have to be n of 1 market
  2. Have to have a business model that creates n of 1
  3. Needs innovation on customer acquisition model to quickly take over market share
- In b2b – do you have a product that gives entry to commercial businesses?
  - Product and technology advantage are short-lived – best companies own lines of distribution, not great products repeatedly
  - Can go acquire great products and push them through distribution – both through M&A and through manufacturing
- Their biggest issue – tying all pieces of network together – 10k companies, 400 a month acquired, distribution to vc – managing electronic stock
  - Law firms are power users of product but don’t have product that tie them all together – linearly
- They love services markets adjacent to what they do – commodity product differentiated by brand – funded administration, for instance – 4-9a analysts
  - Paired a product team behind services group so the 4-9a runs at 70% margins – automate them to software
- Goal of R&D is how much value can you provide – go build it, otherwise they won’t
  - Of value created, how much can be extracted – like keeping them as independent variables (when to extract)
    - Early stage, add ton of value and then deliberately say they don’t want to extract much – leave a lot of consumer surplus
    - Investor products: want to extract a lot of value but provide a lot of value and change these decisions (as markets mature, get larger)
- Favorite book: Essays of Warren Buffett
- Economic discrepancy is enormous and how to bring wealth to more people – Carta mission for more owners
- Keeping investors up to date monthly and they love getting board members involved in the company (especially when they have 100 investors)
  - Meeting with VPs or execs to do weekly meetings of sorts
Joe Banner, President & CEO for Browns, Eagles (Wharton Moneyball)
- Discussing needing to find udfa at a time when it wasn’t sexy – needed talent, and cheap
  - Only had 5 draft picks, late rounds mostly but had to fill a roster of 22 more
  - Brought in all of the undrafted free agents and eventually had 20% playing, few starting also
- Making sure to prioritize talent over anything, not overvaluing high draft picks
- Culture of change with placing a system around high valued guys who others thought were low value
Alina Trigubenko, Founder & CEO of Awarenow (Wharton XM)
- Holistic and integrative nutrition
- Corporate and enterprise customers – consumers within those that will do it
- Calm / Headspace – next level and how
Shawn Burcham (@PFSbrands1), PFS founder, Open Book Management (Wharton XM)
- Being from the midwest and going to Tanzania for farmers
- Keeps open books, shares with employees, prices with farmers
  - Has 60% more return for farmers and will even return cash (after being above fair price and world commodity)
- Daughters played on same soccer team as John Sacks – read the book and was interested in changing to open book
Tim Chen (@timchen82), CEO of NerdWallet (Leadership in Action – Wharton XM)
- Going through board – including AMEX former CEO, Jim (both from Series A investors)
  - Board as governance body, weakness on exec team, okay with level of risk
- Initially believed he had to be smartest in the room but quickly realized the organization had to be working together
  - Have to switch mindset from point guard to coach – from Dalio
  - Investment committee – reasoning behind requests and resources, exec team reads through it and approves or not
  - Executive team depends and changes over time, common for product dev
    - Marketing, Product, Design, Legal, Eng, People, Content Heads
    - Monitoring (leading exec team similar to parenting) – irrelevant for what you say, but seeing what you do is the arbiter of what’s going on
      - Rewarding and punishing as consistent or constructive
    - Culture for what is okay and what is not, role of hiring and inspiring an adequate team to grow company
      - Maybe they don’t have right network for company, maybe can’t inspire
    - Have to be technically proficient in their space
- Went from very niche product to being widely known once they started covering nearly all financial products consumers cared
- Seeing around corners to bring himself and the org up the hill and grow
  - Surrounding himself with execs and others, getting named one of Top Workplaces in 2019
Adam Davis, CRO at Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment (Wharton XM)
- Discussing on-ice and on-court revenue for Devils and Prudential Center
- Coming and expanding Prudential Center into what it is now – leading entertainment center
- Up to 49 concerts recently, more than Devils games
  - Data driving who wants to go to games, concerts and how that can be used to improve experience
Rare as One Project, CDCN, Dr. David Fajgenbaum (Wharton XM)
- Partnering with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- Collective network and how do you widely adopt principles for other diseases
- Partnerships with hospitals / care providers
- Having a different background between Penn and medicine, MBA – not great for those that don’t have 5+ years
Nick Johnson (@NLJ1), Principal at Applico (Wharton XM)
- Author of Modern Monopolies
- Discussion of platform businesses and linear – trying to combine
- Encouraging linear businesses to, where applicable, try to get into platform business – didn’t provide any concrete details how
- 3-5 strategies compared to 5-7, where hard for CEO and board to stay the course without “being 1% of 1% of CEOs”
- Seemed to only mention Amazon, Airbnb, Walmart, Alibaba, ebay
Kulveer Taggar, founder & CEO of Zeus Living (20min VC 5/31/19)
- Raised $14mn from Initialized, NFX, Floodgate, YC, GV and Naval Ravikant
- Co-founded Auctomatic with Stripe’s Patrick Collison and sold for $5mn
- Angel investments include Boom, Airhelp, Meetings.io
- Went to work at Deustche Bank and had a friend who had started a company at 15 selling computers, went to uni and offered a PR role
  - Eyes open to entrepreneurship and SV tech start-ups, just before finals got to come to Bay Area and Google office
  - Cofounder Joe was moving from SF to Palo Alto because his wife got residency – took weeks to try to get home rented out
  - What would be the UX quantum leap for your problem? Joe’s problem sparked the idea
- Go to website, type address for your home and it gives you a price – you hit rent
  - Inspired by Opendoor, Stripe’s 7 lines taking payments, lot more rental data
    - Offer to sign lease with homeowner, gain data and solve the problem on demand side
- All being impatient and learned that long-term horizons could’ve been better after hearing Zuckerberg/Bezos
  - Being intentional with culture – lot of fun – 5 guys in 2 br apartment where things may have gotten too far
  - Create collaborative environment
- When you rewrite code, have to redo processes as well in tech-enabled
  - Acquiring and creating physical things – David Han at Instacart said thinking about output
    - Surface area of inputs: Zeus has to be good at many things
      - ID R/E, Pricing, Assessing, Designing, Furnishing, Marketing, Awesome CX, Marketplace matching
    - Then, you can get the output
- Garry as having a conviction quickly – sees something that can change and invests quickly
  - CoinBase – liquidity crunch and he wired money instantly and is supportive
- YC had an experiment funding teams w/o ideas – did it with Srinivas who’d done it
  - Got a check w/o any idea (had done YC in 2007) and YC had scaled a lot
  - NFC technology – was too early for scaling pmf and got into NFX with status app – status on your phone
  - Felt like he’d spent 3-4 years of working on stuff and hadn’t gotten anywhere – taking market risk with what you’re building
    - Instead, create a list of top 20 things by $ amount spent
    - List of top 20 things by $ amount frequency
  - If you have to ask whether you have PMF, you don’t – yanking your head forward with your nose, for instance
- Did 6 weeks of data experiments, conversions tests, 6 weeks of qualitative research talking to users, investors and r/e
  - After 2 months of diligence and testing, partner at NFX sent him a test: In 6 weeks, get 10 homes on your market.
    - What’s margin structure, is there a market? Strangers controlling home.
  - Took about 4-5 months
- Vulnerability strengthened his leadership, can’t be perfect CEO with all answers – motivated to go for culture
  - Once a quarter off-sites, “if you really knew me…” building stronger connections, team bonding
  - Work is where you have your professional self and you bring your whole self, manifests in itself
- Fav book: Midnight’s Children – historical fiction with India told; How The Mind Works by Pinker
- Change the bragging culture in tech – raised this much, vanity metrics and being counterproductive – not open or genuine
- Running into a bottleneck will use software to break through – automate something that may have been manual processes
Michele Romanow, Founder & CEO at Clearbanc (20min VC 5/10/19)
- Wants to spend $1bn in 2000 companies for access to capital
- Founded SnapSaves, mobile savings platform acquired by Groupon and before that, Buytopia, one of Canada’s top ecommerce sites with 2.5mn
- Engineering, started a coffee shop on campus
  - Figured out worldwide supply sturgeon caviar was down by 95% due to overfishing Caspian Sea – built to east coast for fishery
  - Chefs couldn’t get product, so they had a ton of buyers – giant recession in 08 as 21 yr old in luxury good space
    - Went to ecommerce space, didn’t raise funding, bought 10 competitors – controlled CAC and low
- Canada’s Shark Tank – Dragon’s Den – do 17 days of filming back-to-back, see 200 startups
  - Had a father and son who wanted $100k for 25% equity – really needed $100k but realized she could do different deal
    - Wanted to see Facebook ad account to make sure ROAS was what it was
    - Companies spending a ton on early CAC
  - Estimate that 40% of VC dollars go to Facebook and Google ad spend and marketing
- Works for positive unit economics and spending a lot of CAC – any ecommerce company, 70-90% spend cash
  - Subscription boxes, consumer apps/subs, b2b box even – can fund it for way less
- Data science time has to be very good – not lottery tickets, 6% is ideal for them
- VC as true risk capital – 0 to 1 risk, crazy piece of AI, solving disease, then it makes sense
  - If you know channels are working and repeatable, should be able to get capital
  - Comparison of Gates at Microsoft IPO or Lyft (50% ownership vs 3%)
  - Just celebrating when founders give up control / piece of company
    - Milestones for products, hitting 1mln users, etc…
    - Funding
Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of Chaos Monkeys (Launch Pad, Wharton XM)
- Comparison of Seattle and SF and NY
  - SF being loud, Seattle being quiet but not necessarily huge, NY has less loud but big
- Good mixture of deciding where to be

« older posts

Life As a FA

What’s Teaching Done? (Notes from Feb 24 to March 1, 2020) October 16, 2020

Razor’s Edge (Notes from Feb. 10 – Feb 16, 2020) August 5, 2020

Recent posts!

Recent Activity!

Follow Blog via Email

TAGS APLENTY

Archives

Feeds

Life As a FA

What’s Teaching Done? (Notes from Feb 24 to March 1, 2020) October 16, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Razor’s Edge (Notes from Feb. 10 – Feb 16, 2020) August 5, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

How to Motivate Yourself to Build (Notes from Jan. 27 to Feb. 2, 2020) July 22, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Best Ways to Push People to Create (Notes from Jan 13 to Jan 19, 2020) June 30, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Listening and Encouraging (Notes from December 16 to Dec 22, 2019) May 21, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Organizing the Mind, Studying (Notes from Dec 9 to Dec 15, 2019) May 6, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

If You’re Not Sure, Ask (Notes from Nov 25 – Dec 1, 2019) March 26, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Unapologetic You (Notes from Sep 9 – 15, 2019) October 25, 2019

If you found this interesting, share with me and others:

Recent posts!

Recent Activity!

Follow Blog via Email

TAGS APLENTY

Archives

Feeds