July 2, 2020: One-Sentence Summary: The story of an industrial conglomerate in Brazil with a leader using his uncommon sense to create an unconventional workplace that focuses on investing in quality of life for business success. Rating On Time Of Review: Best business book. 10/10. Just study this over and over again.
Read MoreJune 30, 2020: First look at Alphabet. Splitting the research into multiple parts. Continuing from yesterday, in this episode I’ll look into costs, margins, returns on capital, reinvestment, culture, management and the like.
Read MoreJune 29, 2020: First look at Alphabet. Splitting the research into multiple parts. Today I look into some elements that make GOOG "not a conventional company”, how it makes money, customers, and market position of its major product segments
Read MoreJune 26, 2020: An interview with Katie Wyka, Performance Coach at Clio. Learning about Clio’s culture/values, Katie’s role in talent acceleration as Clio’s first in-house coach, the frameworks for coaching, measuring ROI from coaching, building trust and everything to do with developing people.
Read MoreJune 24+25, 2020: One-Sentence Summary - A challenging set of essays that genuinely makes you “think” as it outlays the value of independent thought that is so rare in the world. Rating On Time Of Review - It was okay. It’s a classic so I’d like to revisit it again in the future. I think there is enough there to warrant a second try.
Read MoreJune 23, 2020: Talking through an essay I wrote on "How to Read a Book Every 2 Weeks”. Going over my system currently (my best one yet) and all the past systems that didn’t work.
Read MoreJune 22, 2020: One-Sentence Summary: A fictional tale that masterfully incorporates various mental models on the singular focus of embarking on the journey to live a life of purpose.
Read MoreJune 19, 2020: A narration of incoherent thoughts I had trying to grapple with why ROIC matters, its relationship with valuation (i.e. IRR) and trying to look at margin of safety differently. A revelation of how little I know and how I noodle investing concepts.
Read MoreJune 18, 2020: A curiosity-driven adventure took me down the rabbit hole of learning about Peter Diamandis’ 29 Laws and Maria Popova’s essay on Finding Purpose through 7 fascinating people. This started my annual pilgrimage to Paul Graham’s essays digging into various models for Doing What You Love.
Read MoreJune 17, 2020: Talking about a position I took that accounted for 40% of my portfolio and one I exited with losing 15% of my net worth. A reflection on how it started, what it was like as a quick post mortem from the 2 years of holding this position.
Read MoreJune 16, 2020: A first look at Pinterest, company living on making inspirations come true, and the world of digital advertising. I’m not a Pinterest user. Just putting it out there. Though, I did try using it once and didn’t understand what the point of it was. Over time, as I saw the business grow, IPO, and even expand into Toronto… I got curious on how this could be.
Read MoreJune 15, 2020: One-Sentence Summary: Probably one of the best books on the psychology of happiness and how we fool ourselves.
Read MoreJune 12, 2020: Learnings inspired by listening to Invest Like The Best podcast episodes with Sarah Tavel of Benchmark and Jeff Lawson of Twilio. This took me down the rabbit hole of learning about 100 marketplaces from a16z’s article on private/startups and First Round Capital’s focused interview with Jeff Lawson on Twilio’s values and culture.
Read MoreJune 11, 2020: A first pass look at Wix, a cloud-based website design and hosting platform. A company "founded on the belief that the Internet should be accessible to everyone to develop, create and contribute, irrespective of their level of coding skill." Aka, it started out as a DIY website platform for non-tech folks like yours truly. Once again, I use Phil Fisher’s 15 point investment checklist as a foundation.
Read MoreJune 10, 2020: Learning about Open Source with LEGOs, Illinois Tool Works’ decentralized business model, a Canadian box company that rewards cost savings with money, and Benchmark’s bottom-up investing approach to venture and using Gall’s Law as a model supporting it.
Read MoreJune 9, 2020: One-Sentence Summary: An excellent overview of building a framework to achieve peak performance in sports and life through the lens of tennis.
Read MoreJune 8, 2020: One-Sentence Summary: It’s the book to read when you feel resistance, envy, failure, and anger at the world because the problem is you and all you need is the perspective this book provides.
Read MoreJune 5, 2020: A medley of learnings from the Invest Like The Best podcasts’ interviews with Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Bill Gurley of Benchmark. Learning about what makes a platform vs. aggregator, the moats that make these businesses thrive, building a media business and mental models for identifying ‘potentially’ successful marketplace businesses.
Read MoreJune 4, 2020: A first look at Lululemon through its 2019 annual report, proxy statement and articles into the company’s culture and history. Once again, I use Phil Fisher’s 15-point investment checklist as the foundation and if I were to hint on the verdict…. It’s been disappointments on its management for a business I had high hopes for. I still recommend taking a look at the business that brought us athleisure.
Read MoreJune 3, 2020: Sharing learnings from Money Compound Fund’s 2019 Q3 Letter by Michael Shearn. Michael wrote the Investment Checklist but his investment philosophy has evolved since writing his book and this letter is an amazing checklist for analyzing culture, management and business model for compounders.
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