Good morning!☀
Here's your weekly roundup of the most interesting things I've read, learned, or listened to. I write about the people and funds that can create a better world for us.
💸Throw some money at it
Been quite a while! I stopped writing for a few weekends because I took vacation and wanted to unwind. Then I was excruciatingly slammed with my start-up so I couldn’t. And then a month had gone by without writing. I had broken my habit and entered a new period of stasis that I wasn’t happy with. Now getting back into the habit that I want is hard work. That got me thinking.
The financial habit for the last decade has been to put money to work. Put money to work in the public market. Put money to work in private market. Put money to work in real estate. Make that money sweat more money. If you don’t have money to put to work, take out a loan. If you’re not putting money to work you’re missing out. That has been the homeostasis we have become comfortable with over the past decade. This was pretty beautifully capped with Bolt executive Ryan Breslow triumphantly announcing his one-click checkout company would offer (and encourage) loans to all employees for them to exercise their stock options.
Whoopie! He also strongly encouraged other companies, even if at seed stage, to offer this “benefit” to employees because he and his board were so forward thinking. He dropped this little nugget in his “oh by the way” section:
Yeah, thanks Ryan. Here’s someone running an $11 billion company encouraging employees of early stage start-ups to take out personal loans and put all that money to work on one risky asset (the start-up). Now you might be thinking “well his company is worth $11 billion. It’s not that risky anymore.” That’s fair. Amazon bought Whole Foods for $9 billion. This is a pretty mature company. But then a story drops in the NY Times about a month later alleging Bolt is borderline fraudulent and outlining how Breslow stepped down from his role immediately after the last round “blindsiding” new investors. Not so stable after all.
So aside from the fact that Breslow is a little shit advocating people take on major personal financial risk as blanket corporate policy, what can we learn about the homeostasis we’ve been living in? It doesn’t exist anymore. That was the peak of “money sweats money” mentality. Overwhelming negativity has overtaken the narrative and the “stocks only go up team” aren’t cheering quite so loudly anymore. We’re no longer in homeostasis, we’re entering allostasis. Where homeostasis maintains an equilibrium, allostasis finds stability via change. Negative narratives have broken much around us and everything is changing.
Our homeostasis is broken because we have broken our good times habit. We are now dutifully working toward the negative. If everyone believes a thing will be a thing, then it will be a thing. That’s not to say it won’t be a thing if nobody believes it’s a thing, but if they do, it will. Clear as mud?
The next year is where the disciplined separate from the impetuous. The success of building a business graduates from being seen as an evil, easy money making scheme to a labor of love to build a haven for jobs and impact. And successfully putting money to work goes from the thing everybody should be doing to downright impressive. Hype cycles and FOMO be damned. Insightful ideas will be rewarded and disciplined investors and operators are about to have their day.
🏆A mother’s revenge
Over the last month, I had all sorts of newsletters drafted about Twitter: what a bid from Elon meant, what different potential buyers would mean for Twitter, what it meant that one man could buy Twitter. Then Musk put the bid “on hold” as he thinks about fake accounts (read: cuts his purchase price by 20% with a 137-character tweet). And I thought “THIS IS JUICY. I can write about this.”
Then I read an article about how we’ve found the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and I realized that actually this Twitter drama is not-quite-but-close-to cosmically meaningless.
SIDS is the cause of over 1/3 of infant deaths and 100% of new parent nightmares. It does what it says on the tin. You can read horror stories of infants who suddenly die in their sleep and the resulting guilt of parents who wonder what they could have done differently. Parents (including me) have taken recommended precautions to try to prevent this random killer: lay your baby on her back, prevent her from overheating. But now we know the cause. And in cinematic triumph, the lead researcher who discovered it unexpectedly lost her infant son to SIDS 29 years ago.
SIDS occurs due to a defect that prevents a infants from startling to arousal when they suddenly stop breathing while asleep. That defect is a lower amount of one particular enzyme, BChE, which plays a major role in arousing infants from sleep. Knowing the cause of SIDS doesn’t mean we can immediately stop it, but confirmation of the biomarker is the necessary precursor to begin work on screening tests and cures. This is not the end of SIDS, but the beginning of the end. To all the biohackers, biobuilders, and techbio nerds: start your engines.
This stuck with me:
We can still have nice things:
Party on, Wayne
— Nico
www.nicochoksi.com | @nico_in140
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