Read & Repeat

William Thorndike's "The Outsiders" provides a masterclass in capital allocation like no other! The book highlights 8 successful CEOs who have defied conventional management styles and adopted unique investment strategies, such as buying back huge portions of their stock, making acquisitions worth 25% or more of the enterprise value, and avoiding tax-inefficient dividends. Across War...

Felix Gillette and John Koblin’s influential book "It's Not TV" chronicles the rise of HBO as a premium cable channel and its eventual competition with Netflix in the streaming wars. The book shares countless stories of HBO's high-quality content playbook, stemming from its desire to be different from the broadcast TV networks and their advertising-supported business models. From...

Ed Catmull's inspiring book Creativity Inc is a must-read for anyone looking to build a culture of innovation and creativity. Ed Catmull is the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and one of the pioneers of the computer-animated film industry. We’ll dive into his secrets of managing Pixar, including their effective Braintrust feedback system, their story is king quality mindset undergirding...

Bob Iger’s book The Ride of a Lifetime chronicles his inspiring journey from the bottom of ABC to CEO of Disney, where he successfully pulled off 3 of the biggest media acquisitions over the last two decades, bringing in Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm into the House of Mouse. We’ll discuss many of the management lessons he learned from famed Sports mentor Roone Arledge, such as Innovate or Die &...

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a powerful business framework, characterizing when incumbent businesses ignore disruptive technologies for 3 main reasons: listening too closely to their mainstream market customers, targeting higher margin products which thus leads to higher cost structures, and ignoring small new markets due to large growth forecasts. Managers are usually rational in their decision-mak...

We build on the last episode by discussing lessons learned from historical periods of irrational exuberance, going through examples given by John Kenneth Galbraith in his impactful book, A Short History of Financial Euphoria. We cover Tulipmania and its resemblance to crypto, the US Paper Currency euphoria, and the excessive overleverage of the Great Depression. By the end of this episode, I hope...

In today's episode, we'll be diving into the dot-com boom and bust with Bull! by Maggie Mahar. This book delves into the characteristics that define market cycles and examines the events and players that shaped the dot-com 1990s era. We'll be exploring the key themes and takeaways from Bull! and how they resemble today's market, such as FOMO and euphoric extremes, “this time is dif...

Ron Chernow's Titan is an epic biography of John D. Rockefeller, the man who defined the oil industry in the late 1800s. We discuss the monumental impact Rockefeller had on modern-day American capitalism and philanthropy, through his monopolization of the booming oil industry, his competitive practices to gain leverage over refiners (the Cleveland Massacre!) and railroads, and his relentless p...

Kai-Fu Lee’s book AI Superpowers is particularly useful right now as we’re seeing AI reach the mainstream consumer, from ChatGPT to Lensa magic avatars to DALL-E and Stable Diffusion image generators. This episode will serve as a great primer for what’s really going on behind the scenes within AI models, discussing the foundations and history of AI research, current progress in deep learning archi...

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz shares some of the key lessons he learned during his entrepreneurial journey, including how to manage, train, and incentivize employees, the importance of courage as a CEO, and the difficult but necessary task of making tough firing decisions. We’ll discuss his early pioneering work in the cloud computing industry as the co-founder of Loudcloud and...

I’m excited to share my conversation with Jimmy Soni, the author of the incredible book The Founders! In this episode, we discuss the power of the people around you, Brad Stone’s influence on Jimmy’s writing process, the value of network effects in PayPal’s business, Thiel’s developing thoughts around competition, Elon’s skin in the game, and the tumultuous culture of PayPal post-merger. If you’re...

Jimmy Soni's The Founders tells the incredible story of the founding of PayPal and the influential characters behind the online payments provider. From monopoly-forming mergers to multiple backstabbings and intense competitive dynamics on another platform’s home turf, this story has it all. We will be weaving between the stories of Confinity and X.com, eventually arriving at the PayPal merger...

Joe Coulombe shares his insightful lessons from founding Trader Joe’s, spanning from his early focus on the overeducated and underpaid customer segment to later innovations across intensive buying and double-entry retailing. We discuss the stories and lessons from his excellent book, Becoming Trader Joe, including his emphasis on paying employees well, having deep product knowledge, selecting prim...

Ed Thorp is a remarkable figure, achieving great success in the casinos of Las Vegas and Wall Street, while also investing in Berkshire at $1K, contributing the first LP check to Ken Griffin’s fund Citadel, and calling the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme 18 years before Madoff was exposed! Thorp advises us to only invest when we have a clear edge, question the commonly held assumptions, attract top tal...

In Part 3, we discuss the decline of Kleiner Perkins, the institutionalization of growth equity with DST & Tiger Global, a16z’s emergence, Sequoia’s sustained dominance, and the main takeaways for the VC industry going forward. The Power Law - Sebastian Mallaby Please share with a friend or rate 5 stars if you enjoyed this episode! | Find me on Twitter  @ReadnRepeatPod

In Part 2, we discuss Google’s origin story, Brian Arthur’s increasing returns to scale, Peter Thiel’s founder-friendliness & competition is for losers philosophies, Paul Graham’s founding of YCombinator, Neil Shen’s Sequoia China ambitions, and Meituan’s monopolization of the China services industry in “the war of a thousand Groupons”. The Power Law - Sebastian Mallaby Increasing Returns to S...

Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law is an incredible account of the history and evolution of the venture capital industry. We explore how power laws shape returns within a VC fund, where one investment can more than pay off for the entire rest of the fund. In Part 1, we discuss the early founding of liberation capital with Arthur Rock, the formation of historic firms Sequoia Capital & Kleiner Pe...

Superforecasting describes how we live in a probabilistic and uncertain world, but we seek out certainty and absolutes in our everyday lives. Using examples across Fantasy Football, Inverse Jim Cramer, Inflation, and Chipotle’s future growth, we discuss how hard it is to predict the future, and how we are often flawed in our prediction updating abilities. Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not t...

Healing Back Pain, by Dr. John E Sarno, is an interesting exploration into the role our repressed emotions play in creating physical pain. The physical pain behind chronic back and neck pain distracts our attention from the true issue, which is our repressed anger & anxiety in our lives. Physical pain is meant to distract us from the hidden emotional pain, and we must bring that emotional pain...

Zell is a phenomenal real estate investor to study, with core investing tenets that we should all look to emulate. His investment mantras include: failure is not in my lexicon; simplify risk down to its most important variable; if everyone is going left, look right; if there is scarcity, price is no object (thus avoid competition like the plague); leave a little bit of money on the table in any ne...

In Part 2, we’ll discuss the evolution of the chip industry from the mid-90s to its current state, based on Chris Miller's excellent new book The Chip War. We'll cover ARM's power-efficient chip architecture, Apple's in-house design strategy, ASML's EUV monopoly, Intel's 3 big mistakes over the last 15 years, and the growing geopolitical tensions with China. The chip indust...

Part 1: Today we’ll discuss the evolution of the chip industry from its founding to the mid-90s, based on Chris Miller's excellent new book The Chip War. We'll cover Fairchild and the early days of semiconductors, Intel and the Japan memory battles, the rise of TSMC and Taiwan's foundry dominance, and the Fabless Revolution with winners such as Nvidia and Qualcomm. The chip industry is...

Behavioral economics rejects the idea that all humans are perfectly rational and contends that we make repeated mistakes in decision-making. In an entertaining and funny read, Ariely discusses how we are fooled by decoys and relative anchors, we bend over backward for FREE items, we mix social and market norms to our own peril, we prefer instant gratification over long-term rewards, we keep too ma...

Annie Duke's new thought-provoking book Quit describes how quitting is a superpower - it gives us the ability to experiment and test out new ideas. The problem, however, is that many cognitive biases prevent us from quitting, such as sunk costs, sure loss aversion, identity bias, and status quo bias. Using examples across public works projects, stock market investing, professional sports, semi...

Today's episode serves as a comprehensive guide to cognitive biases, reflecting on the 25 biases Charlie Munger highlighted in his famous Psychology of Human Misjudgment speech. We discuss in depth how these biases affect our personal and business lives, and propose frameworks to combat some of our most vicious cognitive errors. We cover incentives, inconsistency, envy/jealousy, reciprocation,...