This Week I Learned #49

““Go to bed smarter than when you woke up””

— Charlie Munger

2019-05-06

Zeigarnik Effect - People remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than finished ones.

2019-05-07

Conversation with Marcus Rader of Hostaway on Finnish culture. 1) Learned bout how business culture is bottom up, work hours would be shorter, companies would be operated much more democratically. 2) Finnish people love privacy. You rarely even go to a bar with 2 people. When u go to a bar to drink u only speak to the bartender to order and maybe to say thank you. Groups tend to be exclusive and you need acceptance into a clan. 3) Honesty is the norm. Where a weakness is a true weakness. No bullshit like saying "I work too hard" but a weakness like "People don't like me because I scream at them for messing up"

2019-05-08

Learned from speaking with a WeWork employee that for private companies in the US with annual revenues exceeding $1B there are more public disclosure requirements like the disclosure of pay for senior management as an example. This may be one of the contributing factors for the IPO.

2019-05-09

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished" - Dan Gilbert

2019-05-10

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it... Life is long if you know how to use it." - Seneca

2019-05-11

The short-term-ism of public markets. Dara, Uber's CEO, is incentivized as such: If he can keep Uber’s valuation above $120 billion for 90 consecutive days on the public markets, he’ll win net stock bonuses topping $100 million. Maybe it's the VCs who want to prop up their earnings prior to returning their LPs investments or maybe it's the employees who wanted a brand and the financial payout. Either way, the leaders are incentivized to facilitate an exit for the financial suppliers for the venture.

2019-05-12

The China/US tradewar is the rage. Here is a great list of the products that would be impacted. My first thoughts were to look for products that the companies I invested in could be impacted by from a first and/or second order effect. Like, the impact of computer products for software-dependent businesses.

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