25iq

My views on the market, tech, and everything else

Archive for 2016

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Chamath Palihapitiya About Investing and Business

  Chamath Palihapitiya is the founder of the venture capital firm Social Capital. Chamath lived in Sri Lanka until he was 6 when his family moved to Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Waterloo, where he achieved First Class Honors in Electrical Engineering. Chamath was an early member of the Facebook senior management team. He was Facebook’s VP of Growth, Mobile & International. Prior to joining Facebook in […]

Continue Reading →

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Dr. Michael Burry about Investing

  Dr. Michael Burry is the founder of Scion Capital. He was recently made famous with the general public as a character in the movie adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short, but even before then he was famous in investing circles for his astute investing during times like the financial crisis of 2007. Michael Burry is portrayed in the movie by Christian Bale. The real Michael Burry started […]

Continue Reading →

Two Powerful Mental Models: Network Effects and Critical Mass

This post is all about network effects and critical mass. But it’s also about applying those concepts as important mental models in business, so I will share a short story about a business decision I once made that required me to consider network effects.   The Internet bubble had popped by 2002, and a lot of people were looking for the next big thing. One day that summer, my friend […]

Continue Reading →

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Benjamin Franklin About Money and Investing

  Benjamin Franklin was an amazing person measured by any standard. His story is worth learning about in detail and there are some wonderful biographies available. It is hard to do justice to Franklin’s accomplishments and his life story in a a blog post, but here is a highly simplified summary of the basics: “Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. He was legally indentured to work in his brother’s […]

Continue Reading →

Richard Feynman and Charlie Munger: Expert Generalists

  Richard Feynman was a scientist, professor, musician and raconteur. Bill Gates adds to that description Feynman: “In 1965, Feynman shared a Nobel Prize for work on particle physics. Feynman wasn’t famous just for being a great teacher and a world-class scientist; he was also quite a character. He translated Mayan hieroglyphics. He loved to play the bongos. While helping develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, he entertained himself […]

Continue Reading →

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from South Park About Investing

1. “Phase 1: Collect underpants.  Phase 2: ?  Phase 3: Profit.” Eric Cartman. Underpants Gnomes. http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Gnomes/Script The business model problem flagged in the Underpants Gnomes episode of South Park is real since creating a significantly profitable business model is hard. Not only is it hard, it is rare. Many important companies have done it exactly once. And companies that have created a successful business model are often not able to […]

Continue Reading →

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Richard Thaler about Investing

Richard Thaler is not only a famous economist and author, but is also part of a very successful fund said Bloomberg in an article published just today: The 70-year-old University of Chicago professor, whose stock-picking theories drive the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund, is getting discovered in more ways than one. The small-cap mutual fund, which beat 99 percent of its Bloomberg peers over the past three and five years, […]

Continue Reading →

A Dozen Famous Lines about Investing from the Movies

I am working on a new “mental models” series for the blog. The writing is taking a bit longer than I thought, so in the interim here is something light.  I have paired each movie quote with an appropriate Charlie Munger quote.   “Buy low, sell high. Fear? That’s the other guy’s problem.”  Louis Winthorpe III. Trading Places. Charlie Munger: “Look for more value in terms of discounted future cash […]

Continue Reading →