Musings

Inspired by Esquire’s “Eat Like A Man Awards” (a name I take some umbrage with, for reasons I’ll maybe blog about later), which named El Farolito’s as the Most Life-Changing Burrito In America, I’ve decided to assign awards to a handful of Mission burritos**. Submissions most welcome.  Papalote: “Most likely to only have been to the Mission once.” La Taqueria: “Most likely to have a drinking problem” El Toro Taqueria: “Most likely to live in […]

*Disclaimer* If you’re intimately familiar with Berkshire Hathaway, or with sophisticated investing in general, this isn’t an article for you. First, a primer on insurance. Actuarial science follows the law of large numbers. As the amount of data about a certain set of activities grows, the ability to create a stochastic model that accounts for the probabilities of loss improves. The longer you hold policies for a certain type of risk, and the more similar […]

First, watch this video. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, the world’s biggest global macro hedge fund, breaks down the economic machine into cycles of credit, debt, and growth. If it’s TL;DR, the money section (for my purposes) starts around 24:30: Having already lowered its interest rates to zero, [the Fed] is forced to print money. Inevitably, the central bank prints money out of thin air, and uses it to buy financial assets and government bonds… […]

I’m very unsure about the following, but it was nagging at me yesterday, so figured I’d put it to paper. The philosophy of highly iterative, capital efficient, prototype-focused product development was popularized by by Eric Ries in his concept of “Lean Startup”. The goals of this approach to product development (and business creation) aim to get the furthest with the little capital possible, to avoid splashy launches upon which the success or failure of a […]

I was struck by this slide (below) of Henry Blodget’s presentation on Future of Digital. The slide is meant to demonstrate the incredible growth of smartphones and tablets, and to show that smart TVs and wearables are still young, but will soon be showing promise. But I’m more interested in the PC part of this equation. You’ll notice that the number of PC shipments per year has stayed relatively flat, and that smartphones and tablets […]

The ways that it is overrated: – Looking for ‘rockstars’ and ‘unicorns’ for commodity tasks – tasks where the skill set is fungible and common in the market. Just hire someone. – Trying to find the A+ engineer, who will build at breakneck speed with perfectly elegant clean code, and make your entire engineering team operate better. – MBA’s (often) get the job done. Don’t listen to the Silicon Valley mentality hating against them. One […]

Originally posted on Progress Report. Credit, though we take it for granted, is a revolutionary human invention. Because I trust you, I will take as trade-value for this item, a payment at some point in the future. Today, though, you only get a promise. It is as old as commerce itself, and it is the grease upon which the wheels of our economic engine have run forever. When Bill Fair and Earl Isaac created Fair, […]

I always found it curious, and mildly offensive, when well-meaning peers in school would speak so enthusiastically about basket-weavers in Uganda, using the term ‘social enterprise’. It felt at times condescending and paternalistic – it’s not a real business, because a “black woman in Africa” is doing it. Sometimes it felt irresponsible – TOMS shoes may capture far more value than they create. And they may even hurt the very communities they purport to help. But most […]

C.S. Lewis, my favorite essayist, makes a very interesting distinction between “to excuse” and “to forgive”. In his words, “Forgiveness says, "Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. To excuse […]