Trevor McKendrick - Please read the art gallery piece

Hi all,

As I write this on Thursday December 5th the prediction market about my weight goal is not doing well.

There’s been a crash in the YES price in the last month from 60% to 23%.

Admittedly the market was acting rationally as I’d stopped updating my weight chart, a sure sign that someone has given up.

I still have plenty to lose by my Jan 1 goal, and it will be hard, but I think it’s still possible.

Trevor

One theory on how to build a massive, enduring company(article)

Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like the Best said the writer from the article (Jesse Beyroutey) is one of the best, smartest investors he knows, so I had to read this from him about why some companies become super dominant and others don’t.

The basic idea is you want your incentives to be aligned with your customers. That helps create a reinforcing loop which can goes for a long, long time.

It was written in 2020 so you can test some of his examples. Unfortunately one of the them is Guideline, a 401k provider for businesses that we at Seis are customers of.

Most asset managers charge you for AUM. His point is that’s against the interests of the customer since it doesn’t take that much work to manage e.g. $10m vs $100m. He pointed to Guideline as the example because, in 2020 at least, they charged on a per user basis.

Well, fast forward to 2021 and Guideline changes their pricing structure to also now charge for AUM. I was upset about this when it happened and even wrote in to their customer support on May 27, 2021:

“Definitely not happy to be seeing an AUM fee. That was the primary reason we chose Guideline.”

Even sneakier is the AUM fee is charged to the employee, not the company.

And yet… we are still customers of Guideline today! It’s just too much pain to move with not enough benefit.

While one example doesn’t discredit Beyroutey’s theory, it does show why not everyone takes that path.

(On the other hand: Beyroutey is only looking for the best possible companies that provide the best possible returns. His POV is probably that his theory is in fact what is behind the biggest companies. So if you want to find the biggest companies, you use a model that applies to only big companies. All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares.)

Karl Yang on running (article)

People writing about their experiences running is almost always a great read, and Karl’s is no exception.

Karl’s writing is some of my favorite writing on the Internet. Here’s a good one to get started on: some weird tricks for working faster.

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery (article)

I’m not changing the clickbait title because I really, really want you to read this. It is the best writing I’ve linked to in a long time.

It pairs perfectly with Habit 1 from Stephen Covey’s the Habits of Highly Effective People: Be Proactive

Read it!

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