Collab = (people x stuff) + new technologies^creativity Read our Substack: collabfund.substack.com/
- Tweets 13,929
- Following 393
- Followers 52,398
- Likes 7,068
Alt forms of rich:
You can go to bed and wake up when you want to.
You can buy any book you want.
You have time to read those books.
You have time to exercise.
A short commute.
No dress code seven days a week.
Liberal use of the thermostat.
74
1,135
6,463
90% of personal finance:
1. Find a job you enjoy.
2. Spend less than you earn.
3. Invest the difference.
4. Be patient.
13
244
959
How John D. Rockefeller lived to 99, from his doctor at the time:
"First, he avoids all worry.
Second, he takes plenty of exercise in open air.
Third, he gets up from the table a little hungry."
11
174
904
"In expert tennis, 80% of the points are won, while in amateur tennis, 80% are lost. The same is true for wrestling, chess, and investing: Beginners should focus on avoiding mistakes, experts on making great moves."
- Erik Falkenstein
8
187
711
"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."
- Albert Einstein
26
691
539
The amount of (justified) praise Jack Bogle is getting is a reminder that when this is all over no one will care how much money you made but everyone will remember how much good you did and how many people you helped.
3
114
492
Key to eliminating most personal problems:
Work hard in a job you enjoy.
Live below your means.
Invest the difference with a long-term mindset.
Be nice to people.
Exercise and eat right.
Sleep 8+ hours.
5
100
421
"I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span." -Munger
1
113
375
A simple and realistic hack list:
Work hard.
Be nicer to people than you need to be.
Realize that luck is real and under-observed, so be careful treating actions as a direct cause of both success and failure.
4
115
350
This is amazing.
"Steven Pruitt has made nearly 3 million edits on Wikipedia and written 35,000 original articles. It's earned him not only accolades but almost legendary status on the internet."
cbsnews.com/news/meet-the-ma…
8
56
286
Underrated job skills:
Understanding others' point of view.
Quickly recognizing your own mistakes.
Continuing to learn past age 22.
109
262
“Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.”
-Munger
1
66
265
"People will pay more to be entertained than educated."
- Johnny Carson, applies to many products.
5
141
248
"If you want to invent and you want to innovate, failure is a part and parcel with that." - Jeff Bezos
13
255
226
“Steve [Jobs] and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated.”
@BillGates
Everything takes a team.
1
42
232
HUGE news.
Burger King to Launch Impossible Whoppers Nationwide.
finance.yahoo.com/news/burge…
7
34
224
Strong correlations between:
Experience and humility.
Patience and performance.
Ego and meltdown.
Reading and understanding.
3
102
210
Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism, because pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you, while optimism sounds like a sales pitch -- even if it's usually right.
5
47
196
Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose explains Amazon's first round of fundraising:
geekwire.com/2013/jeff-bezos…
2
128
202
Confidence without arrogance.
Optimism without complacency.
Independence without isolation.
Skepticism without cynicism.
Respect without idolizing.
Loyalty without fealty.
Open-minded without gullibility.
Opportunistic without FOMO.
collaborativefund.com/blog/t…
8
49
205
This is interesting.
"The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_e…
7
35
200
"To make money they didn't have and didn't need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that is just plain foolish. If you risk something important to you for something unimportant to you, it just doesn't make any sense."
-Buffett on the LTCM blowup, 20 years ago today
2
62
200
Different kinds of rich:
- Sleep/wake up when you want to.
- Buy any book you want.
- Enough free time to read those books.
- Enough free time to exercise.
- Short commute.
- Wear what you want whenever you want.
- Enough free time to have long chats with friends.
3
25
185
Investing is half as technically complex as it’s often taught but twice as emotionally difficult as it’s often assumed.
2
40
164
"A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could."
- Larry Summers
1
32
160
Pessimism can sound smarter than optimism because pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you while optimism sounds like a sales pitch.
2
38
163
Very simple, but very not intuitive:
- Compounding
- Tail-driven events
- Incentives
- Reversion to the mean
1
30
149
Three aces of customer satisfaction:
1. Customer thinks they got their money's worth.
2. Customer intends to come back.
3. Customer will refer friends and family.
2
25
156
Trajectory of breakthrough ideas:
- I've never heard of it.
- I don't understand it.
- It's a rich person's toy.
- Now I use it as a toy.
- It's becoming useful for me.
- I use it all the time.
- I can't imagine life without it.
- I don't believe anyone lived without it.
1
27
156
The desire to have an opinion far exceeds the number of things that need to be opined on. “I don’t know” is a phrase that should be praised for its honesty, not belittled for its detachment.
1
62
150
And it's live! We're excited to share the first issue of #Featuring from @collabfund and @i_am_OTHER. → eepurl.com/biJryX
14
55
139
The best simple business models:
Make intimidating things painless.
Make boring things exciting.
Make complicated things simple.
Make obfuscation transparent.
Make middlemen irrelevant.
Make things disappear.
collaborativefund.com/blog/s…
3
37
154
"The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be."
- Ray Dalio
Repeat this line to yourself the next time you're certain of something.
44
140
Excited that our founder @cshapiro made this list for 50 most important philanthropists in the world by @TandCmag. → townand.co/60184if6
6
35
122
A wise old owl lived in an oak,
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren’t we all like that old bird?
- Poem Rockefeller used to set the tone of meetings
2
35
135
Learning hack:
Read a lot.
With an open mind.
On topics outside your day job.
Connect lessons from one field to other fields.
58
134
"Negotiations is not about trying to convince the other guy. It’s about trying to understand them. So again, it’s slowing yourself down. It’s not doing what comes naturally because trying to convince them is applying pressure."
fs.blog/knowledge-project/da…
23
135
"The ability to change your mind is a superpower." @farnamstreet
farnamstreetblog.com/2017/09…
1
48
134
No magic answers:
Health hack: Eat well and exercise.
Finance hack: Spend less than you make.
Business hack: Solve a problem that can be sold for more than it costs to make.
33
130
New York Times asked Stephen Hawking in 2011: "Are you always this cheerful?"
"My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21," He said. "Everything since then has been a bonus."
collaborativefund.com/blog/t…
1
23
133
Introducing Collab+Sesame - our new partnership with @SesameWorkshop to invest $10m in tech for children & families: bit.ly/1NLVkTB
10
63
126
"One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. It sounds trivial and obvious, but if you unpack the idea it has extraordinary power."
-Scott Adams
41
131
Where we're going, and where we've been:
Today @collabfund is happy to announce Fund IV, a new $100M early-stage fund. A few thoughts about where we’ve been and where we’re going.
17
12
111
Best of Quarterly is a virtual pop-up shop for a limited number of recent @Quarterly boxes: j.mp/1kLD6Vr
1
36
89
Two things needed to learn in this era:
1. Lots of inputs (data, reading, conversations).
2. A strong filter (what's irrelevant, what's not).
Without #1 you get confirmation bias, without #2 you get bogged down.
1
27
116
“It is insane to risk what you have and need in order to obtain what you don’t need.”
berkshirehathaway.com/letter…
27
111
Investing:
No points awarded for difficulty.
Say "I don't know" when you don't know.
Plan on every plan not going according to plan.
2
15
113
Investing is not the study of finance.
It’s the study of how people behave with money.
The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.
1
24
113
The biggest innovations happen during the most challenging times:
WOW 😳 New HIV vaccine with a 97% antibody response rate in phase I human trials. This is the most effective trial HIV vaccine to date. It is based on the Moderna's COVID vaccine. COVID tech acceleration could change Rx for cancer & HIV in future. europeanpharmaceuticalreview…
28
110
The five levels of entrepreneurship:
Level 1: Hoping to change the world
Level 2: Hoping to double your valuation
Level 3: Hoping to get acquired for 10x
Level 4: Hoping for an IPO
Level 5: Hoping to change the world
The five levels of wealth:
Level 1 - No Watch
Level 2 - Apple Watch
Level 3 - Rolex
Level 4 - Patek
Level 5 - No Watch
1
17
108
74,462
“Always tell us the bad news
promptly. It is only the good news that can wait.”
- Berkshire Hathaway message to its portfolio companies.
16
106
The best simple business models.
collaborativefund.com/blog/s…
4
25
103
Sign up for #Featuring, a newsletter on the intersection of love and money in collaboration with @i_am_OTHER: bit.ly/21c0hPX
1
54
92
Fundamental Skills of All Investing:
1. Distinguishing “temporarily out of favor” from “wrong.”
2. Adapting views you wish were permanent.
3. The ability to be comfortable being miserable.
4. Distinguishing when analytics vs. psychology is necessary.
collaborativefund.com/blog/t…
35
104
Business wealth: fundraise when you want.
Career wealth: wear what you want.
Personal wealth: sleep as long as you want.
2
13
103
“Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.”
-Brian Chesky
1
31
103
Nothing's black/white.
Have conviction. Also, change your mind when necessary.
Be patient. Also, don’t be stubborn.
Trust your gut. Also, beware of your own biases.
Give work 100% of what you have. Also, don’t burn out.
2
21
100
"A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule."
@ScottAdamsSays
1
15
101
"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent."
-Munger
16
96
Highly underrated investing skills:
Long attention span.
Lack of ego.
Willingness to say "I don't know."
Skepticism of sales pitches.
23
99
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."
- Kahneman
1
19
97
Being nice to people is the easiest career competitive advantage.
Being smarter than others is the hardest.
22
98
"I’ve come to appreciate reliability, integrity, grit, and hard work as the necessary ingredients of long-term success. Everything worth doing is going to be brutally hard and take far longer than could be expected."
@BrentBeshore
collaborativefund.com/blog/s…
1
19
99
Huge news.
The SEC has approved the creation of @ltse.
money.usnews.com/investing/n…
1
36
100
It's crazy how important financial literacy is, and even crazier how little attention it gets in public schools.
7
49
90
There’s little correlation between hard work and success, but lots of correlation between solving other people’s problems and success.
1
24
84
This is great.
Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
(ht @patrick_oshag)
joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/1…
2
17
97
Inspiring Steve Jobs video:
"I've never found someone that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help."
piped.video/watch?v=CThPfG9a…
1
23
88
Business strategies that will never change:
Lower prices
Faster solutions
Greater control over your time
More choices
Comfort
Entertainment/curiosity
Deeper human interactions
Greater transparency
Less collateral damage
Higher social status
Greater confidence/trust
1
19
96
"You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death."
- Phil Knight
18
96
Live below your means.
Work in a job you love.
Consider different points of view.
Sleep 8 hours a night.
Think long term.
1
32
88
Highly overrated: Forecasts, goals, multitasking.
Highly underrated: Having options, systems, focus, and getting along with people you disagree with.
27
90
The hierarchy of earning profit.
Each needs to be completed before the one below it is achievable.
3
38
93
The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is amazing, but this one sentence from its introduction sums it up:
amzn.to/2kXoHfo
3
23
86
"The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then they stop."
- Twain
cc: @sesamestreet
27
92
Business math:
Patience > Speed
Empathy > Exploiting
Product > Marketing
Careers > Jobs
Adapting > Momentum
Culture > Strategy
2
41
92