On the Founders podcast, host David Senra distills stories and lessons from Stephen King’s memoir On Writing. 

Link (with transcript): https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/24173074/senra-stephen-king-a-memoir-of-the-craft

The following are my notes. They are bits that stand out to me and not a summary. They are for my future reference and of course, shared for anyone else who cares.

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Encouragement at the right time

When King was 6, true to his belief that imitation precedes creation, he creates a comic book that’s mostly a copy of one of his favorites. His mother praises him and when he admits it was mostly a copy, somewhat disappointed, she encourages him “Write one of your own. I bet you could do better.”

The feeling this unlocked for him remains to this day:

“I remember an immense feeling of possibility at the idea as if I had been ushered into a vast building filled with closed doors and had been given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than one person could ever open in a lifetime, I thought, and I still think that.”

No Speed Limits

Capra taught Dr. Seuss to cut all non-essential words. John Gould did the same for Stephen King. All of these people could tell a big story in a single paragraph. But what is especially interesting is that despite formal writing education, they learned this skill from Capra and Gould respectively directly and quickly.

This is my favorite part of the episode because of how he ties this to Derek Sivers’ revelation that there are “no speed limits”. When Sivers was at Berklee College of Music, he meets an alumni, Kimo Williams, who accomplishes what Sivers thinks is impossible — he teaches him 2 years of theory in a few lessons! Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected:

“Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that the standard pace is for chumps, that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school. Before I met Kimo, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician doing it casually. Ever since our five lessons, I’ve had no speed limit. I owe every great thing that’s happened in my life to Kimo’s raised expectations. A random meeting and five music lessons showed me that I can do way more than the norm.”

Your job is to recognize when ideas meet

“There is no idea dump, no story central, no island of the buried best sellers. Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky. Two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas, but to recognize them when they show up.”

On criticism

“If you write or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, someone will try to make you feel lousy about it. That’s all. I’m not editorializing. I’m just trying to give you the facts as I see them.”

Senra: This is going to echo this thing you and I have talked about over and over again, just sometimes critics are right, sometimes they’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. They’re constant.

Good storytelling

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story, he said. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

Work precedes inspiration

We get the causation backwards. [This echoes what Jack White says]. I’m going to show up every day. And if I show up every day and I put in the work, the inspiration comes. Akon learned the same lesson from Eminem who works on a schedule. He punches the clock at 5pm even if he’s in the middle of a verse! His approach to creativity was to treat it like a job and to show up every day.

Consistency Over Intensity

How does King write so many books?

“Well, the first thing I do in the morning, I set aside, I’m uninterrupted for many hours at times and I write six pages a day. And I do that every day. And in 60 days, I have 360 pages and that’s about — that’s another book…”It might take me five, six hours whatever time it is, but I do it every day, seven days a week, then in the afternoon”

He has a very set schedule. He writes in the morning. Then he takes a nap. He has lunch, takes a nap. I think he answers letters, stuff like that in the afternoons. Has dinner with his wife, spends time with his family, watches a baseball game, that kind of thing. That’s Stephen King’s schedule.

“Writing — the act of writing poems, stories, essays has a lot more in common with sweeping the floor than you think it does.”

Writing Tips

• “Put your desk in the corner and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

• “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of. There’s no shortcut. I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through 70 or 80 books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft. I read because I like to read, yet there is a learning process going on… If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write. It’s simple as that.”

• Just because it’s the right work for you doesn’t mean it’s easy but you have to want to do it.
  “For me, not working is the real work….ust because I like doing it, it doesn’t mean it comes easily to me.” He gives us advice, “If you’re stuck, take a break, go get bored…When I’m stuck, I have long periods where I do nothing. I go ride a bike. I listen to music, I go for walks, I don’t work. And then I get this flood from my subconscious that actually helps me solve the problem I’m stuck on.”

  “Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. For weeks, I got exactly nowhere in my thinking. It all seemed too hard, too fucking complex. I had run out of too many plotlines and they were in danger of becoming snarled. I circled the problem, again and again, beat my fists on it, knocking my head against it and then one day when I was thinking of nothing, the answer came to me.”
  

• Being a writer is a lonely job. Any time you’re doing something difficult, it’s to some degree lonely. You have to be a little off to want to do this. Like, why don’t you just go get a normal job? Like, you’re kind of crazy to want to do something different. “It’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.”

  Senra: Formidable are people built in solitude.

  Reminds me of Paul Millerd:
  
  You’re doing the thing everyone does at the beginning of a solo path — you’re looking to be saved. No company, no other person’s playbook, or metric of success will save you. The only thing that matters is coming back to the thing you are meant to do. You must do it on your terms. Men waste years trying to avoid this.
  

A closing thought

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work and enriching your own life as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book, perhaps too much, has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it and perhaps the best of it is a permission slip. You can, you should. And if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

On the Founders podcast, host David Senra distills stories and lessons from Ed Thorp’s biography A Man For All Markets. 

Link (with transcript): https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/63171342/senra-ed-thorp-my-personal-blueprint?tab=transcript

A thought before I get to my notes:

Senra’s outstanding podcasts are thoughtful Cliff notes to the biographies of successful business founders. It’s a great series because the same themes keep popping up. The repetition is a great way for having the common threads that bind these founders stick. (In fact, “repetition” itself is such a common theme. Most of the founders are extremely focused, taking a small set of ideas to their logical extremes. There is a focus and lack of distraction. Many founders understand the importance of branding which entails “repetition”. Having your product synonymous with quality, or low cost, or prestige, whatever it is. Repetition is a cornerstone to establishing a brand.)

An oft-repeated theme on Founders is that the subjects are deeply flawed, often miserable. You are warned to not glorify them but instead extract their deep but narrow wisdom, instead of copying their lives. This episode is special because Ed Thorp is the one person, Senra uses as his own personal blueprint.

And I agree. Thorp in his entirety (or at least what we can know from his public action and writing) is an admirable and impressive individual.

I strongly recommend listening to the podcast.

The following are my notes. They are bits that stand out to me and not a summary. They are for my future reference and of course, shared for anyone else who cares.

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On mediocre people

“I would learn to avoid them when I could and finesse them when I couldn’t”.

That’s one of the most important sentences in the entire book.

“I would learn to avoid them when I could and finesse them when I couldn’t”.

2 simple guiding questions

If I do this what do I want to happen and if I do this what do I think will happen?

Expect corruption

If there’s a way to make money, the larger the stakes, the more corruption you will find

Ed found patterns of corruption from a young age:

He’s in high school, he realizes, “Hey, the student government is corrupt. It’s just a bunch of the popular kids. Popular kids are not doing anything that can actually help”. He is probably the smartest kid in school. I mean, Ed is no doubt a genius. So he figures out a way. He’s the one leading the charge, and he winds up installing people that think like him in like 13 of the 15 positions. So this made him an enemy. He says, “A couple of the candidates realized I must be behind the change, so they’re doing advertising”.

They’re doing basically a bunch of things to remove people he felt were in unjust positions. “A couple of the candidates realized I must be behind it and spent their campaign speech time attacking me personally”. The social click had always run the student government. They were entitled.

When he starts counting cards he realizes that not only are the casino’s all “mobbed” up to keep people like him out. He was poisoned and later after he gets the gaming commission to send an inspector he learns that the inspector is in the casino’s pocket. It totally backfires, as the inspector is able to fiinger Ed out to the casino whose mobsters cut his car’s brakes to kill him!

Senra compares this to the drug trade in Miami in the 1980s:

There’s a great documentary called Cocaine Cowboys, and in it, they talk about how corrupt the ’80s Miami was. You have a cocaine boom. The richest person in the world at that time was considered to be Pablo Escobar. They’re just printing money. The local Federal Reserve branch in Miami was taking in more in cash than all the other Federal Reserve branches in the United States combined.

And so you have this huge economic incentive. If you’re a drug dealer selling a ton of cocaine, these pesky cops keep catching your guys. They wind up pulling them over, taking drugs, money, essentially costing you an expense, like “I’m losing my product, I’m losing money. So what do you do”? You fill the entire police force up with your people. “So from the outside, it looks like all these cops are there against me, and they’re actually on my team”. And in that documentary, he talks about, “There’s at least 1 graduating class in the 80s, if not more, where every single person, every single new graduate from the police academy was eventually tied to the drug dealers, the cartels, whatever you want to call them” They owned every single cop. And why did they do that? Because they were making tons of money, and money corrupts.

Ed finds Wall Street unsurprisingly more corrupt than the casinos. Bigger stakes:

Eventually, his hedge fund, the East Coast offices, gets raided by the IRS. Rudy Giuliani, who is — this is before he was the Mayor of New York City, he is the lead, what is it, the prosecutor of the Southern District of New York. And this had nothing to do with Ed. Every single thing was wind up being dropped against them. “Rudy Giuliani wanted my partner to give him dirt on Goldman Sachs and Michael Milken. My partner wouldn’t cooperate , so Giuliani raided our office. The trial dragged on for years at a great expense. The government ended up dropping prosecution for most — of most people on most counts”

So it says the case against this hedge fund appears to be a federal prosecution of securities violators. It’s on superficial level, right? To understand why it really happened, you need to go back to the 1970s when first-tier companies could routinely meet their financing needs from Wall Street and the banking community, whereas less established companies had to scramble. Seizing an opportunity to finance them, a young financial innovator named Michael Milken built a capital-raising machine for these companies. This is the invention of junk bonds.

“Filling a gaping need and hungry demand in the business community, Milken’s group became the greatest financing engine in Wall Street history”.

“Such innovation outraged the old” — this is the history lesson, “Such innovation outraged the oldline establishment of corporate America who were initially transfixed like deer in the headlights, as a hoard of entrepreneurs funded with seemingly unlimited junk bonds, began a wave of unfriendly takeovers. Many old firms were vulnerable because the officers and directors had done a poor job of investing the shareholders’ equity. With subpar return on capital, the stocks were cheap. A takeover group could restructure, raise the rate of return, and make such a company considerably more valuable”.

But here’s the thing, the people you’re now attacking are the people they have all the money and the power, and they don’t want you to do this. The officers and directors of America’s big corporations were happy with the way things had been. They had enjoyed their hunting lodges and their private jets. They granted themselves generous salaries, retirement plans, bonuses of cash, stock and stock options, and golden parachutes. All these things were designed by and for themselves and paid for with corporate dollars.

The expenses routinely ratified by a scattered and fragmented shareholder base. Economists call this conflict of interest between management and the shareholders who are the real owners, the agency problem. It continues today. The newcomers were knocking the more vulnerable managers off their horses into the mud. Something had to be done. Government ought to be sympathetic. The old corporate establishment had most of the money, and they were the most politically powerful and influential group in the country. Their Wall Street subdivision might sustain some damage, but one could expect the fall of Michael Milken to release, as it did, a huge honey pot of business to be taken over by everyone else.

The old establishment of financiers were lucky in that prosecutors would find numerous violations of security laws within the Milken group. So he’s not saying that Michael didn’t do anything wrong. His point was that the people that he was overthrowing had sway over with the politicians and used their money in power to say, “Hey, go after that guy, even if we’re doing some of the same shady stuff, okay”?

This is where Ed is going to give us his thinking on this with the — like a story, a metaphor. “It’s like the case of a man who’s been cited 3 times in a single year for driving while intoxicated. His neighbor would also drink and drive but was never pulled over. Who’s the greater criminal? Now, suppose I tell you that the man who did it only 3 times and was apprehended every time, whereas his neighbor did it 100 times and was never caught. How could this happen? What if I tell you that the 2 men are bitter business rivals, and the traffic cops’ boss, the police chief, gets large campaign contributions from the man who gets no traffic citations? Now, who is the greatest criminal”?

Madoff

And so this kind of echoes Ed’s experience with Bernie Madoff in the SEC when he discovered there’s a ton of people, Ed just being one of them, that knew Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme had told people about it. So he’s asked the question, “Did you ever think you should go to the authorities with this”? And then this is Ed’s response, “Bernie Madoff had been a Chairman of NASDAQ. He was the third biggest market trader in the U.S. He was on all types of committees. He was the establishment. The SEC checked him every year and gave him a rubber stamp of authenticity”.

Ed’s schooling us not on how we think the world works or how we think it should work. He’s telling us how it does work.

[This section was resonant because I’m currently watching the History Channel’s The Men Who Built America series which is littered with stories of corruption…manipulating stock prices, collusion, Carnegie/Rockefeller/JP Morgan buying the 1896 election by supporting pro-industrialist monopolist McKinley over threatening populist William Jennings Bryan. Teddy Roosevelt’s eventual anti-trust campaigns were a direct retaliation on behalf of downtrodden workers. Even the Edison/Morgan vs Tesla/Westinghouse battle over the electricity standard led to Morgan/Edison muscling out Tesla/Westinghouse whose AC technology triumphed by threatening lawsuits they knew Westinghouse could not afford to fight even though Morgan knew he would lose in court]

Share in public

The importance of like putting your work out there, putting your thoughts out there and sharing them because it leads to all these unexpected opportunities. He winds up being like first LP in Citadel as a result of this.

The people that are interested in learning what you’ve learned also happen to be people that are lifelong learners. And those are the kind of people that get themselves involved in very interesting activities in the future. Many of those interesting activities can have a financial benefit to them.

Status

Acknowledgment, applause and honor are welcome and add zest to life, but they are not ends to be pursued”.

“I felt then, as I do now, that what matters in life is what you do and how you do it, the quality of the time you spend and the people you share with”

“Chance and choice”

“Life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities”.

Heraclitus, said, “Character is destiny”

“The path I would take was determined by my character, namely what makes me tick”

Voracious consumer of information

A lot of the stuff you’re going to read is not useful, but it’s all the little bits that you pick up that lay the foundation that are actually useful in the future. “Much of what I read was dross, but like a whale filtering the tiny nutritious krill from huge volumes of seawater, I came away with a foundation of knowledge”

Ed and Warren Buffet meet as Buffet starts Berkshire and Ed starts Newport Princeton

As Warren and I talked, the similarities and differences in our approach to investing became clearer to me. He evaluated businesses with the aim of buying shares of them or even the entire company, so cheaply that he had an ample margin of safety to allow for the unknown and the unanticipated. His objective was to outperform the market in the long run, and so he judged himself largely on the performance relative to the market.

“In contrast, I didn’t judge the worth of various businesses. Instead, I compared different securities of the same company with the object of finding relative mispricing from which I would construct a hedged position. Long, they’re relatively undervalued; short, they’re relatively overvalued, from which I could extract a positive return despite stock market ups and downs”.

So his entire life, he operated a market-neutral hedge fund, and I’ll get to more of his numbers and stuff later on. His goal was to accumulate the most money. Warren began to invest while still a child and spent his life doing it remarkably well. My discovery is fitting with my life path as a mathematician and seemed much easier, leaving me largely for you to enjoy my family and pursue my career in the academic world.

And what’s crazy is he’s going to start the world’s first quantitative hedge fund, it’s called Princeton Newport Partners. He’s still working as a professor, for like the first like 10 — even though he’s rich — or he started — like starts to get really rich, like 10 or — I have to know in the book, it’s like a dozen years into it. He’s like, “All right, I can’t do both. I got to finally give up. I’m sad to give up my academic life, but I’m clearly on to something here”. It’s just amazing how long he stuck with it.

So this is the result of — they wind up spending — I think they meant like 2 or 3 times, and this is where he realizes that Warren Buffett is an intelligent fanatic. And so the crazy thing is not only did Ed Thorp make a ton of money, but like I said, he winds up buying Berkshire, starting investing in Berkshire stock. It was like $900 at the point when Ed Thorp starts building position. And then he tries to get other people to buy and he tells them, don’t ever sell this, this will make your family rich…

Impressed by Warren’s mind and his methods as well as his record as an investor, I told Vivian that I believed he would eventually become the richest man in America”. Buffett was an extraordinarily smart evaluator of underpriced companies, so he could compound money much faster than the average investor. He could also continue to rely mainly on his own talent even as his capital grew to an enormous amount. Warren furthermore understood the power of compound interest and clearly planned to apply it over a long time.

The intelligent fanatic is extremely important, and hopefully, you are one in your own business, and if not or you don’t have a desire to, then find somebody who is and let your money ride with that person.

Hiring and management

4 different ideas – one, management by walking around; two, hire for intelligence and enthusiasm over experience; three, hire on a trial basis; and four, talent is expensive and worth every penny.

“Now, I had to learn how to choose and manage employees. Figuring this out for myself, I evolved into the style later dubbed management by walking around. I talked directly to each employee and asked them to do the same with their colleagues. I explained our general plan and direction and indicated what I wanted done by each person, revising roles and tasks based on their feedback”.

“For this to work, I needed people who could follow up without being led by the hand as management time was in short supply. Since much of what we were doing was being invented as we went along and our investment approach was new, I had to teach a unique set of skills. I chose young, smart people just out of university because they were not set in their ways from previous jobs. It is better to teach a young athlete who comes from his sport fresh than to retrain one who has learned bad form, especially in a small organization”.

“It was important that everyone worked well together. I was unable to tell from an interview how a new hire would mesh with our corporate culture. I told everyone that they were temporary for the first 6 months, as we were for them. Sometime during that period, if we mutually agreed, they would become regular employees”.

“In order to attract and keep superior staff, I paid wages and bonuses well above the market rate. This actually saved money because my employees were far more productive than average. The higher compensation limited turnover, which in turn saved time and money otherwise you used to teach my one-of-a-kind investment methodology”.

First LP in Citadel

“What would have Princeton Newport Partners been worth 25 years later? How could I possibly have any idea? Amazingly enough, a market-neutral hedge fund operation was built on the Princeton Newport model, the Citadel Investment Group”.

“It was started in 1990 in Chicago by a former hedge fund manager named Frank Meyer. When he discovered a young quantitative investment prodigy, Ken Griffin, who was then trading options from his Harvard dorm room. I met with Frank and Ken outlining the workings and profit centers of PNP as well as turning over cartons of documents outlining in detail the terms and conditions of all their outstanding warrants and convertible bonds. These were valuable because they were no longer available”.

“Citadel grew from a humble start in 1990 when I became its first limited partner, that’s insane by the way, with a few million dollars and 1 employee, Griffin — with 1 employee, which is Griffin, to a collection of businesses managing $20 billion in capital and having more than 1,000 employees 25 years later. Ken’s net worth in 2015 was estimated at $5.6 billion”. I think today at the time I’m recording this, his net worth is over $20 billion, if I’m not mistaken.

[Really interesting insight that has implications for markets]

Though the institutions of society have difficulty learning from history, individuals can do so.

Why is lifelong learning so important?

“Education has made all the difference for me. Education builds software for your brain. When you’re born, think of yourself as a computer with a basic operating system and not much else. Learning is like adding programs, big and small to this computer. From drawing a face to riding a bicycle to reading or to mastering calculus, you will use these programs to make your way in the world. Much of what I’ve learned came from schools and teachers. Even more valuable, I learned at an early age to teach myself. This paid off later on because there weren’t any courses in how to beat blackjack, build a computer for roulette, or launch a market-neutral hedge fund”…I found that most people don’t understand the probability calculations needed to figure out gambling games or to solve problems in everyday life. I believe that simple probability and statistics should be taught in grades kindergarten through 12.

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed, they are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

Link to Founder’s Mindset Podcast episode: https://pod.co/the-founders-mindset/s2-e4

About Keith Schacht:

What are the psychological building blocks that support a serial founder’s journey from ideation to massive growth to acquisition, to building again—and again?

On this special episode of The Founder’s Mindset, Dr Gena Gorlin is joined by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Keith Schacht, who has founded and sold 4 technology companies. His latest, Mystery Science, was being used in over half of American elementary schools at the time of its acquisition by Discovery Education. 

Now, he’s working on world-changing venture number 5.

He joins Gena for a candid discussion of how he stays anchored to reality during that elusive, early search for product-market fit; why and when he made the decision to sell his company; and how he approaches starting all over again. Gena and Alice then debrief to explore what other founders can learn from his experience.

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These are some of my favorite insights or inspirations from the interview:

Building companies as an instance of building things

As long as I can remember basically, I’ve been interested in starting companies, although I didn’t initially conceptualize it as starting companies. I just I just thought of it as building things. I like to build things and companies ended up being another kind of thing I like to build and a vehicle, for building more things. So I mean, really, when I was in high school, even I discovered the internet and I’m younger than that I discovered programming. But when I discovered the internet, I discovered that people would pay me real money to build things on the internet.

Me: Note that it has nothing to do with making money. In fact, if one’s goal was to just make money you could make the case that entrepreneurship is one of many, and possibly, inferior paths

Keith’s response to the struggle and curveballs native to entrepreneurship

I think it’s not smooth but I just never expected to be smooth so so you’d I don’t get upset when it’s not. So it’s like when you’re off-roading you expect lots of bumps.

An example

An example from my previous company Mystery. I had a very specific idea about something that I thought would be good and it was basically a line of science kits for kids that would help them explore the world.  I remember very specifically the spark of that idea came when I was walking through a toy store. I like toys as a product category. And I noticed that there was a particular aisle like the science toy aisle, and it struck me how familiar it was. There was like a two-liter bottle tornado and a crystal growing kit etc. “Wow, this is a pretty stale product category.” I had a lot of experience building these kinds of toys myself just for fun so I thought it would be a really interesting business opportunity here.

That led to conversations with a friend of mine,  a science teacher at the time. And so we started this business with this sort of clear idea of maybe we’ll do a lot of science kits, but the broader opportunity was helping kids understand the world. My co-founder and I were both new parents and this is a classic case where I was excited about something particular, but I had a conviction about a broad space. And, you know, we quickly tested this particular idea and it turned out to not be a good idea. We built prototypes and put them in the hands of parents. Multiple parents told us how “we’ll do it this weekend” and then we checked them in with them on Monday. “How was it?”

“Oh, we didn’t get to it.”

And then weeks go by. So we pivoted and was like, maybe we’ll do a different idea. And it was a classic example of having strong conviction about sort of a broad area of opportunity and specific ideas but sort of flexible on whether that particular idea was the right one. It was many iterations later before we finally got something so we ended up building — instead of a line of science kits for kids to do a home, we built a set up for digital resources for elementary teachers to use in the classroom to teach science to kids. We solved the real problem for elementary teachers. [He previously gave some background that before high school, general elementary teachers teach science and many find it daunting.]

Keith, without meaning to probably, reveals how his approach actually looks like science

I think one of the most important things at every step of this discovery process is to be really clear on what you know, and what you don’t know. And not to ever confuse the two.

We prototyped a line of science kits and put them in the hands of a bunch of parents. And it’s very easy, after the moment it didn’t work to conclude “Oh, no one wants a line of science kits” or some broad generalization like that. This is too general.

The right way to hold it is “the particular prototype I built, that I put in the hands of the six parents wasn’t used by any of the parents.”

And when you hold the conclusion that way, it leaves the door open to “maybe it was the wrong set of parents, maybe there’s a different group of customers with the exact same product or maybe the idea of lighter physical science kits was a good idea, but those three that we made were bad for a particular set of reasons.”

And so that’s it’s such an important part of the journey. Be really clear on what you know, what you don’t know what to kind of hold those conclusions in the right way.

And I think that’s what makes the journey feel, you know, bumpy and circuitous but not frustrating. It’s just the process of coming to understand the nature of the world and your customers and your idea.

Product-Market Fit

How did we finally know [when we were on to something]? On prototype number six, we had built something that we tried on parents and a number of parents gave we gave it to their kids’ teacher. We thought that was an interesting clue since didn’t immediately jump on elementary teachers at that point. When we did finally decide to build a prototype for teachers. We initially built one for middle school science teachers because we want to help them teach science. That one didn’t work, either. They didn’t use it. I had a friend of a friend who was an elementary teacher and happened to show her one of these prototypes. And she was excited about it. One of the breakthrough moments was she told us about a set of lessons that she needed to teach soon.

We just offered to help her. “So what’s this particular lesson? Okay, well, what if we prepared the following things for you and sent that over within a couple days? Would that be helpful to you?”. And we sort of followed her lead in a really concrete way, like a specific day a specific lesson, a specific problem, and we helped her and that’s that was sort of like big clue number one. She got really excited about what we gave to her use quickly and asked for more.

You’ll know when you have it

Yes, it’s very abstract to tell someone “make something that people want, and you’ll know when they want it.” But I have built things before that people didn’t want and I built things before that people really wanted. You can really see the difference. People use lots of different analogies like “customers actually wanting something from you and pulling it out of your hands instead of you calling them ‘would you like to try this? Oh, sure. I’ll try it. I sent it over. You don’t hear anything for 48 hours. Did you get a chance to try it? Oh, I haven’t gotten to it yet.’

But you can tell what it feels like when you are the one providing the energy to push this product forward versus your customers bringing the energy and sort of pulling it out of you in those early days. Many times Doug, and I would have the conversation. “Is this one what product market fit feels like?” And I would say to him “Oh no, you’ll know.” You could tell the difference. And when we finally got this first elementary teacher who was excited and asking for more, and then we got a few more elementary teachers, I remember Doug remarking “Wow, this feels so different than those other prototypes we built where no one really seemed to care and we got 200 signups, but then no one would use it.”

There’s a meta-discussion linking back to 2 Y Combinator principles:

• This was an example of “doing things that don’t scale”
• This is what it looks like to try to build something people actually want.

  It’s so easy to make something you want people to want, but they just don’t want it. Just the other day I got an email from a friend who has built a prototype and wants to show it to me to see what I think. And just based on the email my first reaction after reading this email was”it doesn’t really matter what I think” because I’m not the customer. I wonder if this person has shown it to five customers by now before building the whole thing. And that was my feedback on this. Because so often people miss that step. And so I really don’t care what anyone thinks except the potential customers that we think we’re going to be serving with these particular ideas.

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-01/benn-eifert-on-the-mania-that-was-even-bigger-than-meme-stocks?srnd=oddlots-podcast#xj4y7vzkg

About Benn: Founder of QVR Advisors specializing in option-based strategies

I found the transcript here.

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The craziest aspect of the investing mania of the last few years was the role of sophisticated instituitions

Benn: I would say actually I found the sizes of the unsecured loans that very large, and you might have thought sophisticated, investors and credit organizations were giving to Three Arrows Capital, two and a half, you know, two and a half billion dollars for Genesis alone with like no collateral. I mean, you come into this just thinking, look, these are big boys. These are wealthy people who’ve created a tremendous amount of money and they wouldn’t just do completely, obviously crazy stuff like that. And then it turns out that the answer is, of course they do…I think retail gets all of the attention and you know, we can talk about that all day and there’s all kinds of interesting stuff there, but I think people forget that the role of institutional investors in this process and the way that institutional investors start to buy into narratives and start to, you know, start to develop this fear that they’re missing some huge technological revolution, and then do incredibly crazy things in huge size, is almost a more interesting story…

 I think a big part of the institutional role in that really came from this huge psychology around private assets and private investments being this fantastic place to be, you know, big sources of innovation, stable returns, because, you know, without mark to market volatility, right, you saw just really in the last few years, you see the formation of VC growth funds, right? So you always used to think of venture capital as, you know, these nerdy, weird engineers doing cool science experiments and backing these early stage companies to do really disruptive stuff.  Whereas growth funds were all about raising mega institutional scale capital at full fees with long lock and plowing that into companies that were already valued at $200 billion and just had a completely different asymmetry to the return profile.

And you had corporates like SoftBank and hybrid public private hedge funds like Tiger, you know, coming in to compete for deals, to get those deals with startups, by saying, ‘look, we have bigger checks and we’re not gonna ask you any annoying questions. We’re not gonna do due due diligence. Like, I want you to sign the term sheet in 24 hours that I just sent you.’ And that was really, you know, alot of that came from, I mean, and I think I had a Twitter post about this, but you know, 2019, 2020, I would go to conferences with big institutional investors. And the only thing that you would hear about was how big asset owners were taking money out of liquid alternatives type of investments and moving them into privates because the returns in privates had been so high and there was such a perception of such limited risk in practice.

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The role of narratives and how the ability to spin them about the future can become a gray area or market failure

Benn: Just to be clear, technology itself is not the problem, right? I mean disruptive technological innovation is what drives the world forward. And, you know, Silicon Valley and venture capital plays a really important role in that. And that’s great, but that technology inherently has this characteristic, right? That you’re not selling a current set of cash flows or a well-trodden path of how, you know, that can be valued by people with spreadsheets in some kind of relatively formulaic way. It’s about selling a vision of the future and a vision of what could be and how that can play into future economics and trying to relate that to past innovation. And that’s a very nebulous thing in the end. And it’s something that is inherently susceptible to hype and narrative, particularly when the, I think, as you’ve seen in recent years, particularly when financial markets set up ways for people to get actually paid and to monetize that kind of narrative and hype, right? As opposed to, ‘Hey, I finished building this company and then it becomes a big company. And then I get really rich,’ right?

When it becomes, ‘I sell this vision of a future that’s really disruptive. And then I can issue a token and I can sell it to retail and I can make a billion dollars just by doing that without actually building anything.’ Or similarly, you know, in technology, if I can create a startup that gets valued at $300 billion, and then I can go into the secondary market and I can get liquidity as a founder and sell a lot of my shares to like institutional investors that want to get some, right? And I think that’s the inherent trick with technology is that it is inherently by its nature, much more susceptible to narrative-driven, you know, valuation and narrative-driven thinking.

And that is what it is, right? That’s not something that’s gonna go away, but it’s something that investors, you know, have to be really cautious about how to differentiate. And you get, it’s like the early phases of a technology cycle. You get those nerdy engineers building really cool stuff in the garage, but then the MBAs start to show upright? That’s kind of a classic line in Silicon Valley. And you end up with a lot of huckster types coming in to kind of ride along the wave because there’s so much money involved and that’s where you get the trouble.

[Me: There’s a bit at the end of the podcast that ties back to this in which crypto which is intellectually seated in unfettered free market ideology ironically self-skewers that ideology]

Benn: But crypto, I think at the core of it, crypto really owned and brought to the forefront, this idea that financialization is first, right? And the use cases sort of follow and that you’re supposed to have, it’s this very like pure Chicago Department of Economics, efficient markets idea, right? That like, if everything is priced a priori, the market is sort of all knowing and all seeing and people will identify the things that are gonna work and they’re gonna finance those. And like the world is gonna be utopia. And it’s completely ridiculous.

It, you know, what actually happens in practice is that if you can create a narrative and create a hype cycle around your company and you get the right VC backing and whatever it is, and then you can create money by issuing a token and you can sell it to retail n humongous size and you can make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for doing absolutely nothing. And that happened over and over and over and over again. And it was sort of institutionalized as a business model by certain venture capital firms that, you know, are big backers of this space. And I think that’s the core issue.

Joe: Well, I forget who made this point, but yes, you might say that crypto has attracted the best and the brightest of the last several years, but if they’re the best and the brightest, they might be the best and the brightest at figuring out how to make life-changing amounts of money in six months, which is not necessarily the foundation of a sound new industry.

Benn: Yeah. You give people really strong financial incentives and it’s really hard to resist, right? It’s easy to obviously point fingers at the most egregious people in the space and Do Kwon, and all these guys, but like if you create a world in which it’s really easy for charismatic hustle-type people to get really rich by scamming people, they’re gonna do that. And you have to expect that, like, that’s just how the world is gonna be. And I think that’s what the incentives that we’ve set up in crypto have really done.

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The challenge of separating hype from real change is hard but it’s easier to rule out than rule in

Joe: How do you know who’s just a storyteller in real time versus someone who is actually correctly identifying a new trend because, you know, you mentioned Warren Buffett in the beginning, he was wrong. Not all of the curmudgeons in a certain area, get vindicated in the end, he was wrong to dismiss the Googles and the, you know, the Facebooks in 2010…so in real time, investors really are faced with a tough decision because sometimes the world changes and it can be really hard to disambiguate in real time between who is a huckster, trying to, you know, sell their token or whatever, versus someone who’s identifying a real change that’s happening.

Benn: It’s really, really hard in real time — to your point. And I think that the reason it’s really, really hard is because again, we talked about momentum is a real phenomenon and structural change in the world. And technological change is a real thing, right? And so you have to keep an open mind and you can’t take the curmudgeon approach, right? Where anything that’s new or anything that people are excited about or that’s going up in price sort of must be wrong. And you see a lot of that kind of thinking, kind of behavior. That’s the wrong mental frame, right? I think it’s easier to think about identifying and screening out the stuff that has a lot of red flags and is fairly clearly actually a bunch of hucksters, as opposed to on the margin, solving the Warren Buffett question. Was there a path for Warren Buffett to figure out that Google and Amazon were real things back in 2010, 2012? There there might not have been. I think that identifying red flags of very likely problems.  I mean, I think you get into things like, okay, do we have projections of returns that are way, way above historical equity returns or based on, you know, nonsensical statements like the Cathie Wood one that we talked about, right? GDP growth of 50% because of artificial general intelligence. You can fairly quickly say, ‘okay, I don’t know exactly what’s going on in the world, but like, that’s not real.’

I think another one, and this I think is very important and hits institutions more, but claims of returns significantly exceeding, you know, the risk free rate but with little or no risk. And that’s the one I think that ends up leading to much bigger problems in financial markets and much bigger problems in the global economy, right? Because people with nice suits and ties and very big offices look at an 8% or 9% or 10%, relatively low risk return. And they think about how they can put leverage on that. And they think about how they could have a five year run making really good money and get paid a lot. And that’s incredibly appealing. And that’s actually the nature of a lot of the biggest losses that you saw in crypto and so forth. It wasn’t necessarily folks buying, you know, Dogecoin and losing a catastrophic amount of money. It was people saying, wow, this anchor protocol, this thing yields 20% and there’s like a Harvard professor that wrote the white paper and, you know, there’s all these credible VCs talking about it. And if I can get 20% on that, and then if I can borrow $10 billion to do that, like I can get really rich, really fast…

I think that the things that I always come back to are to really look out for people trying to credibly claim these astronomical return profiles or pretty high returns with very little risk, because you just have to think of it as the world is full of a lot of very smart, very competitive sharks who run very big businesses that really like getting rich. And if there was an opportunity to make 10% or 20% risk-free in front of you, they would’ve already taken that away from you and done it first. And what it means if you see something like that is that it’s not real, you know, and there’s either some kind of fraud or there’s some kind of extraordinary risk that you’re not seeing. You have to be really wary of extrapolation.

You have to really be very skeptical of overly complex investments with non-transparent sources of return, right? Where people are trying to tell you, this is really good, because it’s really smart and it’s really complicated. And I know you don’t totally understand it. And you have to also be ready to recognize the psychological tricks that the investment world plays on you. Again, a lot of these things, it seems like it should be so obvious, but it’s not, right? There’s a lot of laundering of credibility, right? Legitimization of investment schemes by the backing of authoritative people or people you feel like you should trust. Because especially at peak cycle, people are very willing to lend their credibility to, you know, things that are gonna get them paid. You know, think of, again, the Harvard business school, professors writing the white papers for Ponzi schemes, like Anchor. Using social consensus and group psychology to normalize ideas and narratives and to pressure people to stop asking questions, you know, big Twitter mobs telling you you’re an idiot and you’re not gonna make it, right? And then very much so kind of scarcity or immediacy, like, ‘look, you’re gonna miss the boat. You don’t get it. And it’s like time to get on board or miss the boat.’ 

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Despite the “money printer goes brrr” meme, low rates are not just a “dial that determines the level of speculation”. Although the narrative effect of the meme itself may have been a contributor

Benn: I think there are a lot of different contributing factors. And I think this is usually how things go. So I would say commentators tend to focus very, very heavily on low interest rates and quantitative easing and so forth. I mean, I think there’s a role for cheap money on the margin, especially in areas like real estate. But I think that really the direct role of low interest rates or QE here is very overstated. I mean, you look at the history of interest rates and quantitative easing geographically around the world for the last 20 years. Japan’s been doing QE for a very long time. I mean, we had low interest rates in the US for a long time. Previous manias weren’t necessarily associated with low interest rates. And one way to think about it is like with tech stocks going up a hundred percent a year and crypto tokens paying 20% yield. Like if you have to pay 3% or 4% to get leverage versus 1%, I mean, it just doesn’t matter if you are in the frame of mind, but like you want to do those kind of investments. I mean, the idea, and I joke about this on Twitter a lot, but yeah, the idea that like the Bitcoin folks would’ve just bought a bunch of Treasuries if Treasuries paid 6% or 7% is, on its face, ridiculous. And they would all tell you that.

It’s much more about the collective perception of relative risk and return and the growth of narratives justifying that perception, and then the broad socialization of more and more people into that perception. I do think where rates and QE comes in is perceptions of the role of cheap money coordinating investor expectations or kind of the ‘money printer go brrrr,’ you know, ‘buy everything’ meme. I think that’s actually important. That’s probably much more important than the direct impact of rates being a little bit lower and being able to get leverage, right? Is the contribution to the narrative that like all of this stuff just has to go up.

And I do think, I come back, you know, ultimately, and you pointed out other phenomena, I do think what has been important when you look specifically at retail options trading and a lot of the aggressive market participation that has showed up over the last few years, I do think the pandemic played a real role. I think that there’s a self-reinforcing dynamic to the social internet aspect to it, right? It’s not just people sitting at home in their brokerage account doing stuff by themselves. They’re increasingly in Discords or on Twitter or in some kind of social group or Reddit’s WallStreetBets. That’s like a community that’s fun where people talk about investing and they teach each other stuff and they, you know, they overcome the activation barrier of like, ‘how do you open a brokerage account? And how do you put money in it? And how do you actually click a button to trade?’ and all this stuff. And like once that’s there and once it’s a fun entertaining social thing, and it has a group gambling component to it, it becomes much easier to kind of get out of control and much longer lasting, right? Then, you know, it has all the power of the engagement, you know, clickbait of the internet associated with it. And I think that was really important.

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The froth probably isn’t over

Benn: I think there’s plenty of craziness left. So I think both in crypto and in tech, there are many funky crypto tokens that are down 90%… but whose market cap is still billions and billions of dollars. And you know, they’re just jokes, right? So I think, you know, it’s hard to argue that that stuff doesn’t eventually go to zero. And then within what you would think of as like the ARK basket and, you know, the Goldman Sachs index of speculative software stocks, again, there were a lot of companies that experienced valuations in private markets and sometimes eventually in public markets of $30, $40, $50 billion, that just, it’s very hard to see them ever being worth anything. And a lot of those names are down a lot. They’re down 90%, but they’re still worth $5 billion or $3 billion. The things that have gone down the most are not always the cheapest. Right?

Sometimes they are, but in this case, I think that’s not obvious at all. I think there’s a great Kindleberger quote that the period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and mass panic and crashing, driven by the insiders having exited, but the suckers/outsiders hanging on and hoping for a revival and then finally giving up. And it feels like that’s where we are. Sort of the insiders have been kind of quietly and steadily getting out. There’s apparently still quite a lot of demand, for example to sell shares in the secondary market of startups that are down 90%, right? You’ve got founders that on paper briefly were worth $20 billion, and now they’re worth $2 billion. And they’re like, you know what? That’s still pretty good. I want to see if I can turn that into cold, hard cash.

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Are you optimistic that there will be like a cohort of you know, people who maybe got scarred or burned, but also learned some sophisticated stuff that will have a good combination of skills and knowledge coming out of this period?

Benn: I really hope so. I mean, I’ll tell you 10 or 15 years ago, I remember working with a good friend who’s now a VC on ideas for investor education. And how do you get people to even care about financial markets and investing and pay attention? Because back then it was totally impossible to get the young generation to even think about this stuff. And it’s really good that individual investors have gotten interested in investing. And I feel like, you know, sometimes I hope I don’t give the opposite tone, right? Because it’s so easy for people to get tricked and all this kind of stuff. But I think a lot of times people have to learn from their own experience. It’s just really hard. I mean, you know, Hegel said we learn from history that we just can’t learn from history. People have to one way or another go through their own experiences of mistakes and things not going well to really internalize lessons. And what I really hope is that people are able to take hold of those lessons and, you know, stay interested in financial markets and stay interested in investing and learn how to make good decisions as opposed to feeling so scarred by it that they just walk away.