Category: Food for thought

I read this thought provoking excerpt from the paid FT article Silicon Valley billionaires remain in thrall to the cult of the geek on The Overspill.

…Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was asked what painful lessons he had learnt when building his software company. His answer startled the audience back then and is all the more resonant today.

Gates replied that in his early twenties, he was convinced that “IQ was fungible” and that he was wrong. His aim had been to hire the smartest people he could find and build a corporate “IQ hierarchy” with the most intelligent employees at the top. His assumption was that no one would want to work for a boss who was not smarter than them. “Well, that didn’t work for very long,” he confessed. “By the age of 25, I knew that IQ seems to come in different forms.”

Those employees who understood sales and management, for example, appeared to be smart in ways that were negatively correlated with writing good code or mastering physics equations, Gates said. Microsoft has since worked on blending different types of intelligence to create effective teams.

Anil Dash talking in metaphor of burning fire. My favourite paragraph is about how the most important thing is invisible to our eyes and often the most ignored.

It’s very obvious that you need fuel and a spark to start a fire. But the most important enabling aspect is oxygen, and it’s the part you can’t see. So many struggling fires are lacking only oxygen to enable them to become a true conflagration, but people often fall back to reshuffling the things they can see, rather than considering the vital parts that are invisible to them.

Ashish Shanker, MD & CEO of Motilal Oswal Wealth, discussing with Anupam Gupta.

People get carried away, because making money becomes so easy. I mean, it’s like a dartboard, right? You just throw darts at any company out there, and you suddenly see after a year, your portfolio is up 40-50% and you tend to get carried away.

So, it is extremely important at this point in time¹, at this juncture for us to keep reminding clients not to forget their core risk appetite and asset allocation. So, I always keep telling clients, you know, your risk appetite is how you felt when markets fell 40% during COVID.

March 2020.

Right. Your risk appetite is not what you are feeling today. What you are feeling at the worst is actually your risk appetite.

— Unlocking HNI investment secrets

1. Referring to the bull market we are in now. ↩︎

Daniel Susskind explaining the pitfalls of relentless pursuit of growth and how we can sustainably grow without causing an ecological disaster.

Growth does not come from using more and more finite resources, but from discovering more and more productive ways of using those finite resources. In other words, it comes not from the tangible world of objects, but from the intangible world of ideas. And the universe of those intangible ideas is unimaginably vast: as good as infinite. In other words, our finite planet is not the constraint that matters when thinking about the future of economic growth.

— WE MUST CHANGE THE NATURE OF GROWTH

Pallava Bagla describing how ISRO manages to keep the costs low.

At the moment, he says, India uses small rocket launchers because they don’t have anything stronger. But that means India’s spacecraft take much longer to reach their destination.

So, when Chandrayaan-3 was launched, it orbited the Earth several times before it was sling-shot into the lunar orbit, where it went around the Moon a few times before landing. On the other hand, Russia’s Luna-25 escaped the Earth’s gravity quickly riding a powerful Soyuz rocket.

“We used Mother Earth’s gravity to nudge us to the Moon. It took us weeks and a lot of resourceful planning. Isro has mastered this and done it successfully so many times.”

— Why it costs India so little to reach the Moon and Mars

Let’s say you’re a student and you use ChatGPT to write your essays for you. Give it the right prompts and it will produce pieces that are good enough to get the grade you need. That seems like a win: it saves you time and effort, presuming your tutors don’t notice or don’t care. Maybe you get through the whole of university this way. But be wary of this equilibrium. Over the longer term, you will be stunting the growth of your own mind. The struggle of turning inchoate thought into readable sentences and paragraphs is a powerful exercise for the brain. It’s how you get better at thinking. It is thinking.

— The Good Enough Trap

So if I want higher returns, now this is where it flips away from being me and it’s no longer my characteristic, but I do want higher returns for higher risk, then you choose which instrument has actually given you those higher risk. And I think by and large, this has become a function of size and manager affluence. So the size question would be that as you grow bigger and bigger in size, the number of companies that you can buy into in India becomes smaller and smaller.

So now the biggest Indian mutual fund is nearly 80,000 crores.

Oh, they hit 80,000 crores?

70 plus thousand crores. So at that rate, at the 80,000 crore rate, even if I have 100 companies, I don’t think he has 100 companies, he has 50 or 60 companies. But you’re still buying more, nearly a thousand crores per company.

Now the number of companies that you can afford to buy a thousand crores for is now countable in the total number of companies you actually have. The 100th company in India today has a 1 lakh crore market cap. That means if you bought 100 companies with a thousand crores each then the 100th company you would own 1% off.

So effectively, you’re owning more and more percentage of… So what this happens is you just have to spread yourself too thin. You can’t meaningfully take large bets.

And until Indian market cap of Indian companies reaches a much higher degree, you’re limited by the growth of… The size of the mutual fund is greater than the growth of market cap of all the companies. So in the sense that that becomes your limiting factor.

— Capitalmind Podcast: Mutual Funds, PMS, or AIF: Choosing the Right Investment Vehicle for Your Needs

Wow!

Every forecast takes a number from today and multiplies it by a story about tomorrow.

— A Number From Today and A Story About Tomorrow

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.

Why are climate impacts escalating so quickly?

A wonderful post on why do we want more money.

When you’re poor, your desire for more money stems from a need to survive. When you’re wealthy, your desire for more money stems from a need for status, because you are surrounded by other status seekers.

…

In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money.

Why Don’t We Do What We Want?