Dear Friends,
It’s been a beautiful, warm, sunny weekend in New York City. Spring blossoms are out. I feel sorry for all my friends and family in Minneapolis who experienced an April Fool’s Day blizzard; summer will be here soon.
Today's Contents:
Good Reads: Trends
Song of the Week: I Keep Ticking On
Good Reads: Trends
Xi Jinping Says He Is Preparing China for War. The World Should Take Him Seriously. I don’t read much about China, but this seemed worth taking seriously.
Blocking the Louvre Won't Defuse Pensions Bomb. Demographic denial is the new climate denial. Interesting frame and raising of an issue that is only going to get more significant and more contentious with time.
The Index Mindset. Well-written and thought-provoking essay with a healthy dose of cultural references.
Our world is increasingly characterized by an “index mindset.” The idea comes from the success of index investing, whereby investors eschew active management of their portfolios (searching for big winners) in order to own an entire index of stocks, providing a mechanism for (mostly) not losing big.
Very broadly speaking, the index mindset favors average results over extreme ones, a bird-in-hand over two in the bush, relative over particular truth, function over form, quantity over quality, mandate over merit, efficiency over exploration, passivity over action, predictability over tails, determinism over freedom of choice, mistake avoidance over smart decisions, evolution over revolution, adaptation over reformation, safety over risk, diversification over concentration, preservation over creation, velocity over due diligence, optionality over decisiveness, the general over the specific, and growth over profit.
How MrBeast Learns. In short: By doing. He is skeptical of extracted knowledge — knowledge that has been extracted from its context and turned into advice or frameworks or theory. (Me too).
When a group of obsessed people is exploring something together, they can go much faster than you can on your own — they get to learn from each other’s mistakes, and they can share know-how at a very high resolution.
Peers like this seem to be a good thing to have if you want to do something great. But what if you grow up in an intellectual nowhere place? What if, like MrBeast, you grow up in a small city in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, where the main attraction is a river called Tar, which was once “a navigable waterway” — what do you do, then? How do you find a thriving creative scene there?
The answer, these days, is: by working in public. Which is what he had been doing
Does GPT 4 Really Understand What We Are Saying? No.
There is a distinction between super-functional and intelligent. No one would say that a car runs faster than a human. A car can move faster on an even surface than a human. So it can complete a function more effectively, but it’s not running faster than a human.
Song of the Week: I Keep Ticking On
Live version here on YouTube.
The Harmaleighs is an indie folk duo that ‘honestly crafts poetic, passionate, and powerful songs cut from a pastiche of indie, folk, pop, and Americana.’ This is song is infinitely easy to listen to. I’ve been looking for a new answer to ‘How are you doing?’ And I like ‘I Keep Ticking On.’
“I Keep Ticking On” by The Harmaleighs
I woke up in an alley by my work
Laying with my sins my hair in the dirt
I met a guy named Jack he was my friend
Jim took me down in the end
I Keep Ticking On x8
Selfie of the Week

“The best investment firms are run as dictatorships (the buck must stop somewhere) but this does not require all decisions to originate from the top.”
Rob Sheridan wrote recently in one of his excellent investor letters.
There’s plenty of chatter about ‘solo-GPs’, which is one way to characterize what I do. I’ll do whatever it takes to avoid labels, but our brains do benefit from categories to make sense of a chaotic world. But even though the label is technically true, it feels far from accurate to described my lived, day-to-day experience.
Yes, I’m solely accountable for the performance of our firm. But, also, I can’t be the best unless there is diversity of sources of input and others to challenge me regarding various decisions and ideas. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eric Lavin as a venture partner for the last year. It’s been wonderful to work with someone who has previously been a founder, thinks deeply about learning technology, is constantly curious, and just fun to be around.
In the ups and downs of this job and every job, the people you surround yourself matter. I’m lucky and grateful to work with Eric. We’ve been in NYC this week and next.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn