How to design a house to last 1,000 years

Good morning!

The 2nd week is the hardest week of the year - the newness of the new year has warn off and you’re back with being yourself, whatever that is.

Here’s to keep pushing on.

Have a great week!

Trevor

Don’t be foie gras (article)

On the danger of startups raising too much capital.

My one pushback on this is that companies can both raise a bunch of capital and not immediately deploy it. In some industries having a warchest is its own moat.

And, critically, the risks here deal almost entirely with hiring too many people. People bring capital asks, communication & operational complexity, etc.

But what if you raised a bunch of money that was used with fewer numbers of humans?

How to design a house to last 1,000 years, Part 1 (articles)

Part 2

Part 3

And congrats to Brian for recently winning an Emergent Ventures grant.

Let’s Settle This (website)

Fun little site that lets you vote on questions like “how do you pronounce GIF” and shows the results. When I did it they were showing 10s of thousands of responses.

RoaringKitty testifying to Congress (youtube)

Do we even remember how insane the first quarter of 2021 was? Gamestop going to the moon, Robinhood raising something like $2b overnight to stay solvent, and a reddit user by the now famous name of Roaring Kitty testifying to Congress: I like the stock”

What a time to be alive, seriously.

Patrick McKenzie on Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) (article)

What happens when you give credit to consumers at the transaction level & can use interchange to finance the credit.

And Finally…

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Have a great week!

Trevor