Gurley is well known for his thesis around marketplaces. While many of the companies listed on this post are constantly critiqued for their extractive practices, in the end the people who sell their labor or their products on those platforms are better off because those platforms exist. I don’t buy the “level playing field” point, but it surely is more level than it used to be.
There’s a difference between generating value and generating profits. Value isn’t self-sustaining. Profits keep businesses alive, and the world running around us.
A counter-intuitive result about time diversification and the dollar cost averaging strategies that most passive investors use these days.
Any conversation with Gurley is worth listening to. Here he covers a lot of his personal story, as well as the theses behind his fund and his way of thinking about his specialty - market based businesses.
Spotify is a business that I do not understand well, but I am a very loyal customer. I’ve been paying for their premium service for many years, and hearing about how the company runs on the inside was fascinating.
A conversation about technology, investing and how Wolfe’s VC firm, Lux, makes decisions.
Income sharing agreements (ISAs) are becoming more common. There are some serious ethical issues behind them, but superficially I think I prefer them to the current debt-based system. We should really focus instead on fixing the credentialing problem, and on finding a way to decouple education and learning from the “college experience” that is central to young people’s identity in the US.
I had never heard of McKeon until this podcast came around, and honestly crypto is only a small part of why this episode is worth listening to. His background in the wine industry gives him a unique perspective about business in general, and his time working on the heavily regulated space of drone startups makes for interesting parallels with the inevitably upcoming round of regulation about to hit the cryptocurrency world. I especially enjoyed his analogies, which make concepts such as thin vs. thick markets especially accessible.