Surf Report: Special 2020 Closeout Edition

Issue 14: 01.03.2021

INTRODUCTION

January 3, 2021

Hi everyone, and happy 2021! I’m so glad to have you here. What a year.

This week’s issue is a little different from the usual format. Given the short week in between major global holidays, many firms being fully/partly closed, and the usual low-volume trading days to close the year (apart from any last chance tax-loss harvesting), there wasn’t the usual flurry of activity on Wall Street & Madison Avenue. Execs and investors have been home with their families likely watching the price of Bitcoin and wondering how in the world to prepare for the upcoming year knowing how woefully unprepared we all were for the last one.

So rather than waste your time with filler I decided to gather up some excerpts from the first 13 issues of Surf Report to resurface evergreen helpfulness you might have missed or forgotten. I always like to wrap up quarters and years with a look back to reflect and reacquaint myself with things I saved along the way but have since faded from memory, both personally and professionally. My mind always makes room for novelty but sometimes it’s at the expense of quality. A little rebalancing always helps.

That said, I couldn’t resist sharing a grab bag of of my favorite ✨new✨ links and resources, albeit in a bit more quick-hit fashion than usual. Next week we’ll return to our regularly scheduled format full of recent takes, topics, and tools from that frothy intersection of business, finance, & technology where human nature goes to play.

In the meantime:

markmulvey.com @MarkMulvey

Prosper in 2021 with this mindhack: You are an asset manager and your portfolio is you

Thanks as always! 🤙

—Mark

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2020 Surf Reporting 🏄‍♂️

Sunday, October 4th

• Affinity Bias. When investors make irrational decisions because it reflects their values, or they're worried about how others will view them.

• Gamers make better founders

• 29 Psychological Tricks and Tactics Used to Make People Buy More

Sunday, October 11th

• “The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.” —Plato, from The Republic

• Stocks on the 'all-time high' list can still go up 1,000%. Stocks on the 'all-time low' list can still drop 100%.

• Machines think about floorplans very differently.

Sunday, October 18th

• “Successful businesses are built by solving critical problems for an audience that will pay for a solution to their issues. Not every problem is critical. Not every critical problem is interesting. Not every interesting problem is critical.”

• “Every great product should have a moat, and careers are no different.”

• I’m thinking of creating an entire MBA program out of memes. Lesson 1

Sunday, October 25th

• The one-sentence marketing MBA: “Your feelings are justified.”

• “We like what we choose. Not the other way around.”

• “I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand even though it may mean foregoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully and which, possibly, could lead to a substantial permanent loss of capital”

Sunday, November 1st

• "We think the future of coding is no coding at all. we think autonomous coding is a very real thing.”

• “Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies – our “anti-portfolio” – whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.”

• “Show me a new technology that was immediately recognized for its full potential and instantly adopted by the masses. It doesn’t exist. A lot of pessimism is fueled by the fact that it often looks like we haven’t innovated in a decade because it takes a decade to notice innovations.”

Sunday, November 8th

• “Selling, is change management, not persuasion. Because the psychology of buying is the psychology of changing.”

• By saying “It seems like you’re thinking about something” you’ll get a more instinctive response than saying “what are you thinking about?”

• “Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.”

Sunday, November 15th

• "One of the clearest indications of stagnation is the flatlining of energy usage...Hall calls the long-term trend of about 7% annual growth in energy usage per capita the 'Henry Adams Curve'. In the late 20th century, we fell off of it."

• The DoorDash Flywheel

• “What leaders do is they make situations and people better.”

Sunday, November 22nd

• “Today, we live in an age of infinite leverage where our work can be replicated at no cost, and we don’t need permission to get started.”

• Clean bathrooms.

• The very thing you need to do when times are tough is provide more opportunities for entry which, paradoxically, often involves lower price points.

Sunday, November 29th

• Poker lessons from Tony Hsieh that apply to marketing, branding, financials, strategy, and learning

• Bezos Mental Models

• It’s easy to scare people, but it’s very hard to build up their courage.

Sunday, December 6th

• A thread on helping you understand the relationships between investing and inflation

• “The Japanese companies that have endured the longest have often been defined by an aversion to risk — shaped in part by past crises — and an accumulation of large cash reserves.”

• “If people aren’t searching for your business online, or whatever problem you’re solving, then you’ve got a problem. […] Pick a problem you know people want a solution for.”

Sunday, December 13th

• “Surfing and life have so much in common…”

• The biggest categories of growth globally this year were games, business, finance on Google Play; games, business, and utilities on iOS.

• A fantastic business lesson that Danny Meyer learned while fly fishing

Sunday, December 20th

• “Any framework or mental model you have can become an excuse to stop thinking or decide that the problem is unsolvable.”

• The happiest people are those who spend time with people who are not like them and not their age.

• How Combat Shaped My Thinking About Life: An interview with Preston Pysh on the Once BITten podcast.

Sunday, December 27th

• How do you pivot, evolve, and grow your brand? Figure out what is irreplaceable.

• Paul McCartney as management study.

• “In order to make rational investment decisions you have to first go to first principles, and what I find is 95% of macroeconomists and analysts and the traditional investment community, they rely upon metaphysical abstractions that they learned early in their career, or that are repeated to them over and over again by mainstream media, and because they just repeat these metaphysical abstractions long enough they kinda convince themselves that there’s some veracity to them.”

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New Year’s Grab Bag 🎇

Links to helpful resources and perspectives I found this past week that I think are worth your while:

• A thread of the 15 best books I read this year

  

• A Stylized History of Quantitative Finance

  "There are no reliable theorems in finance; it’s not math, it’s the world"

• Lessons From the Best Trader of All Time: Jim Simons

  “We’re right 50.75 percent of the time… but we’re 100 percent right 50.75 percent of the time. You can make billions that way.”

• The Purpose of Technology

  “Balaji Srinivasan explains that the purpose of technology is to lift people up, cure the deaf, restore sight, and end death itself. Wow!”

• Amara’s Law

• Discord can now screenshare fro iOS & Android

  “The company tells me they’ve been particularly focused on making it work well when there’s a lot of onscreen motion, allowing for things like game streaming or remote YouTube/TikTok viewing parties with high frame rates and minimal latency.”

• The Hidden Patterns of Startup Failure

  

• Why Everyone Should Write

  “Intuition isn’t a tool; it’s a safety net at best, and is more often the fuel of biased decisions. Turning gut feelings into tools means understanding their origin, limits, and how they interact with other ideas. Which requires turning them into words.”

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Disclaimer

Nothing in this email is intended to serve as financial advice. Do your own research.