Trevor McKendrick - The one change to make in 2023

Good morning everyone!

Have an amazing week.

Trevor

Extreme questions to trigger new, better ideas (article)

This is about companies & products but you could easily think of a list for you personally (e.g. “who would I spend my time with if I could only pick 5 people?” or “what would I change about myself even if nobody else saw?”)

IMO the best part about having high quality friends, and the importance of choosing the people you hang out with, is that they make you ask better questions.

The best friends open your eyes to ways of living that you didn’t think were even plausible.

Angel List & Silicon Valley Bank data on startup valuations in 2022 (article)

Lots of data from the folks who have it on valuations across stage & sector. No big surprises: valuations are down.

The biggest stock market crash I’d never heard of (wikipedia page)

Here’s the intro to get you started:

"The Al-Manakh market was housed in an air-conditioned parking garage in the historic area of Jibla, Kuwait City. The market was specialized in highly speculative and unregulated non-Kuwaiti companies. At its peak, its market capitalization was the third highest in the world, behind only the U.S. and Japan, and ahead of the U.K. and France.”

Seis got a shoutout in Patrick McKenzie’s KYC explainer (article)

NB: Patrick is one of our investors

The mystery of Richard Posner (article)

“When sitting on the bench, he didn’t want to hear sanctimonious preaching about rights; he wanted to hear practical talk about effects. What ruling will best allocate society’s resources? When Apple asked Posner, sitting in the trial court, to block Motorola from selling phones that violated a batch of Apple’s patents, Posner didn’t care whether Apple had caught Motorola red-handed. Instead he became interested in whether smartphone patents, as a species, serve the public good. He concluded that they don’t—so Apple was out of luck.”

Interchange in 1,000 words (article)
If you’ve ever wondered how neobanks & other companies that don’t charge their customers make money, here’s your answer.

High Variance Management (article)

A contrarian take to the management advice normally given to founders via Andy Grove’s High Output Management

This is specific to median sized companies (500+ people) at a minimum.

Tweets for the week

Jack Altman: "I’ve never met a truly great leader who isn’t a long term optimist, a source rather than a sink of energy, and a believer that they have agency to control their environment. These aren’t sufficient but I think they are necessary.”

Daniel Feldman: “Does anyone else feel like maintaining a house is an entire second, very expensive full-time job”

Julie Gurner: "Yearly reminder: If you want a new habit to add to your arsenal, make it “speed.” Speed of response, speed of execution, speed of decision-making. Speed is a force.”

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