☝️ Interesting Things by Alex Sharp

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☝️ Interesting Things #3 - January 23, 2021

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☝️ Interesting Things #3 - January 23, 2021

Saturday Night Edition™

Alex Sharp
Jan 24, 2021
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☝️ Interesting Things #3 - January 23, 2021

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📱Products

  • Books Read By highlights books interesting people are reading

  • Copy.ai uses AI to write your marketing copy

  • Daily is a real-time video API that powers Tandem

  • Tandem is a simpler way to do audio and video chat for remote teams

📚 Reading

  • Ezra Klein with an excellent piece of political analysis and recommendations on how Democrats ought to govern.

  • Noah Smith with a quick 5 min read on on why a $15 minimum wage is probably a good thing, despite the legacy economic research. FWIW, this piece did a lot to soften my position on it (I’ve been pretty adamant against a national $15 min wage until now).

  • WONK ALERT. Revisiting speculative hyperinflations in monetary models by Rogoff and Obstfeld

  • Open source is eating SaaS from Posthog. Related: last week’s SUPER DEEP 🕳 discussion

🎙 Podcasts

  • Bloomberg Odd Lots interviews a quant manager on lessons from 2020. There’s a lot of useful info here, and almost none of if it is about “quant” per-se. A few particularly insightful bits:
    1. Flows vs prose. Price action increasingly becoming a function of momentum (fund flows) vs fundamentals and/or narrative.
    2. On the reflexivity between institutional money managers with required rates of return (e.g. pension fund managers) and central bank zero interest rate policy, and how it effectively drives cash-based savings into equities.

  • Village Global with Morgan Housel. This is a particularly insightful section of the conversation on Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway’s investing success: access to permanent capital. Housel notes that Berkshire has a completely different set of incentives than most professional investors because he doesn’t have to keep his investors happy and/or worry about redemptions. Berkshire is a holding company, not a hedge fund. Thus, Berkshire can afford to do nothing; most fund managers cannot.

    This reflexivity between incentives and the ability to do nothing — or, more generally, the right thing per your own calculus — is something I’ll be noodling on for a while.

  • 🔌🔌🔌 Last week on SUPER DEEP 🕳 episode 2 @heyzk and I talked with Jon Morehouse about the SaaS privacy revolution that’s driving the adoption of on-cloud solutions, and the rise and challenges of open source businesses.

💡 Ideas

  • A marketplace for AWS credits

  • A better directory for SaaS / dev tools

🔥 Tweets

Twitter avatar for @morganhousel
Morgan Housel @morganhousel
Two good investing skills are changing your mind when the facts change and not changing your mind when the facts haven't changed.
6:17 PM ∙ Jan 22, 2021
1,807Likes251Retweets
Twitter avatar for @chriscantino
Chris Cantino @chriscantino
Still early days for ecomm software infra Headless Payments Automation CMS MarTech Retail tech Social commerce Customer comms Seller tools More funds will raise on this thesis and begin rolling up breakout SaaS co’s while partnering with Shopify It’s time to build
7:51 PM ∙ Jan 21, 2021
105Likes9Retweets
Twitter avatar for @danielpearson
Daniel Pearson @danielpearson
Every decision is a long-term decision whether you believe so or not.
7:21 PM ∙ Jan 17, 2021
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☝️ Interesting Things #3 - January 23, 2021

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