Weekend Reading #92

Photo by Aleksei Ieshkin on Unsplash

This is the ninety-second weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 7th November 2020.

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What we're thinking.

This week we spent some time mapping out KPIs for our private deals platform, 3BC. This process is still ongoing but so far it has been a really rewarding experience – one that has helped to highlight what’s important... and what isn’t. For us, the key indicator has to be the number of partners we can sign to 3BC. We are seeking to build a decentralised network of networks, and that means empowering our partners to engage with their issuer and investor contacts by providing quality deals, engaging content and first-class customer support.

This insight has implications for our product. Right now, we are managing relationships with partners on a personal, one-to-one basis. But we are conscious that this approach (whilst being fun and rewarding, since it enables us to chat to brilliant people all day long) isn’t scalable. So, we intend to build functionality that makes it easy for partners to visualise and follow the issuers and investors that they bring to the platform. At the same time, we need to make it easier for issuers to onboard their deals to our platform so we can increase the number of deals listed on 3BC (without compromising on quality) and further drive engagement with our investor community.

We’re looking forward to spec'ing this out in more depth and finalising our product roadmap for the next phase of 3BC’s development. Exciting stuff!

Like everyone else, we can’t keep our eyes off the US election screens. At the time of writing, it is still unclear who the eventual winner would be. To be honest we don’t really have any great insights as there is probably no event on earth with more coverage. All we can say is that we were fascinated by how quickly the coronavirus headlines disappeared from the mainstream media as they shifted focus. Sadly, the headlines will no doubt be back shortly.


What we're reading.

We got a real kick out of reading Stefan Szymanski's Money and Football. Szymanski, a renowned expert on sports management and economics, is the go-to-guy on the business of football, and he's been at it for years. We all know that modern football is big business (in fact, we wrote about it on the blog last week), but the financial affairs of clubs remain pretty opaque.

With this book, Szymanski does a great job of revealing the history of money in football – he takes us on a journey from the abolition of the maximum wage in the 1960s, through to the impact of TV money both at home and abroad in the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on his own proprietary research into financial records dating back to the 1970s, Szymanski provides clear analysis of the way that clubs have transformed in the modern era.

We also enjoyed this article from The Atlantic on the death of polling. The science (if indeed it is a science) of electoral polling has taken a real hammering in recent years, and the US election has further underscored its limitations. Surveys predicted an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead (at time of writing) the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.

The Atlantic thinks that “This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption”, but we would argue that the industry has already lost credibility. It only survives because it feeds our very human need for visibility in unpredictable and chaotic times. That isn’t going to change any time soon.

Another book we’re enjoying is JM Keynes’ masterful "The Economic Consequences of the Peace about the Treaty of Versailles". It is beautifully written, and insightfully describes the personalities of the main protagonists involved, their character and shortcomings, convinced that to understand its’ destiny, “the world need(s) light, even if it’s partial and uncertain, on the complex struggle of human will and purpose, not yet finished, which, concentrated in the persons of four individuals in a manner never paralleled, made them, in the first months of 1919, the microcosm of mankind.”

Rooted in fascinating depiction and analysis of the change of economic systems that occurred in central Europe in the later part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Keynes proceeds to set out how the terms of the peace not only “includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe — nothing to make the defeated Central empires into good neighbours, nothing to stabilize the new states of Europe,” but moreover creates a situation that “will sow the decay of the whole of civilized life of Europe.”

Have you come across Discord? If you haven’t, you will. It has more than 100m users, in millions of communities for every game and player imaginable. The company has slowly but surely built a massive business around the popularity of gaming, but now it’s undergoing a huge pivot: from a niche platform for gamers to a communication tool for everyone and a new social experience.

This article from Protocol on “How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet” is well worth a look. This is a really substantial piece that looks at the history of the company (including its reliance on pivots to find product-market fit) and the implications of Discord’s model for the broader internet. We also enjoyed this Founders Field Guide podcast featuring Jason Citron, Discord’s founder, which highlighted the story of how it came about.

Autobiographies can be hit and miss. During lockdown, we read some great ones (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles), and some not so great. The danger with an autobiography of a sports hero, film star or business magnate is that they’re writing from a position of enormous accomplishment, usually great wealth, sometimes immense power, so the story of how they got there can leave you feeling as if, well, don’t some guys get all the luck? But then books written by people who don’t achieve very much don’t tend to sell very well.

An autobiography that could turn some people off is Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey, one of the world’s biggest movie stars, whose book is pitched as “raucous stories and outlaw wisdom.” His story about how he achieved his success is fascinating, highly entertaining and packed with a tonne of learnings for anyone who’s attempting to achieve anything. The hardback version of the book is also beautifully presented, with photos, drawings, lists and cool formatting techniques throughout. It’s a great departure from the standard diary-type autobiographies that typically start at the beginning of a life and end in current day. McConaughey does something quite different and it works. He opens the book by saying “This is not a traditional memoir … this is a playbook based on the adventure in my life.”

The title and the motive behind the book are very cool, too. Sections go a little off-grid and talk about McConaughey’s transcendental side, which is forever trying to fine tune his approach to the universe, searching for ways that he feels that a force out there might be guiding his actions. That approach to livin (without the “g”, as that’s how he spells it) has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls “greenlights” – the traffic signals that he’s run into in his life during times when he has to make a key decision and he gets the feeling that he should go for it. These moments have been the key to his success. He shares these greenlights with us, he sets out how he found them, and what he’s learned whilst driving through them.

Like all autobiographies, there are moments in his story when you think about how damn lucky a guy must be in order to have achieved all that he has achieved and to have lived the life that he’s lived. But the book is told and presented in such a way, with such a generous and open approach to advice, you allow him this luxury. By sharing wisdom and by breaking down the route he’s enjoyed to success, he’s clearly keen to help others find their own greenlights. Give it a read and go hunting for yours.

If you want to delve even deeper into the world of Matthew McConaughey, his Tim Ferris podcast appearance is also deeply enriching listening.


What we're watching.

Scrolling BBC’s iPlayer, we came across a documentary called The Trump Show. This was earlier in the week, pre-election, so it felt like the perfect opportunity for a recap on the past four years. It's a show that crams a lot in – protests, political turmoil, pandemic – giving us the inside story of the extraordinary Trump presidency and his rise from TV star to leader of the free world.

The thing we really liked about this documentary was that it felt (relatively) impartial. The filmmakers interview Trump’s critics, sure, but they also spoke to his friends. As the Guardian noted in its review, “Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Omarosa Manigault Newman, Anthony Scaramucci – all staffers, suddenly culled within that first year, mainly through petulance – looked back less in rancour than bemusement.” A fun – albeit at times uncomfortable – watch.

Another superb documentary and an absolute must see (once it hits the UK networks), is “Chasing the Sun” – a powerful and thought-provoking story made in collaboration with the Springboks. It tells the rousing tale of their path to redemption and World Cup glory in 2019. Rassie Erasmus is a genius in our opinion, orchestrating one of the best (if not the best) come backs in the history of world rugby. It's an emotional one...


What we're listening to.

Spotify Kids has been live for a while, but we only recently discovered it. The standalone app is a composite of playlists, which makes it easy for kids to find music and stories from their favourite movies and TV shows. The content is ad-free and hand-picked by a team of curators.

But the coolest thing about it is the UI – the app is bursting with colour! Each child can select a custom avatar and theme to personalise their experience. The kids love using it and playing around with the features. There is only one drawback... downloading the app now means we have to put up with our little ones’ questionable taste in music!