Weekend Reading #56

Photo by Saad Sharif on Unsplash

This is the fifty-sixth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 22nd February 2020. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

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What we're doing.

For the most part this week we’ve been head-down, ploughing through the final items on the to-do list for a fund launch: subscription forms, initial board meetings, GDPR notices… The list goes on. If all goes well, we’ll have all our documents in order by the coming week, and our non-executive directors can assemble for a launch meeting and get things moving.

When we first started Three Body Capital, we had aggressively optimistic timelines for when everything would be completed. Thanks to good advice that things always take much longer than expected, we’ve managed to run a tight ship and keep everything (largely) on schedule.

By the time this newsletter drops in your inbox, it will have been exactly 485 days since our company was incorporated. We’re still at it. Let the show begin.
 
What we're reading.

This week, the NY Times put out a fascinating long read that takes a close look at the world of eSports. The gaming gold rush is now underway, with companies cashing in on competitions, sponsorships and merchandise. 

Four decades on from the first Space Invaders Championship, eSports remains a complicated, fragmented world, with a wide array of governing bodies, games makers, leagues and competitions jostling for recognition at the top of the eSports tree.

Consolidation is coming, and that’s being reflected in both the huge revenue spike we’re seeing and in the names (Drake, Jennifer Lopez, Sequoia Capital) and brands (Louis Vuitton, the New England Patriots) seeking to surf the wave. As has been the case in sport for decades, the big money in eSports will not be dictated by the biggest brands, games or teams but rather, by the best individual players. Getting to grips with who these individuals are, and what they’re looking to achieve, is vital for anyone who wants to understand the future of eSports. 

Speaking of gaming, we were excited to read about the collision of gaming with venture capital as Fortnite launched Fortnite.vc with the tagline: “Connecting Founders and Investors through Fortnite.” What an idea! As Delian Asparouhov, principal at San Francisco based VC Founders Fund, said: "Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to 2020. If you ain't sourcing on Fortnite you're missing out."

Our own deal platform, 3BC, is nearing launch. This week we’ve been working on ways that we can optimise its rollout. We think instant messaging could be a great way to exceed issuers' expectations and help them painlessly navigate the onboarding process. Messaging is a hugely powerful tool when it comes to managing relationships with clients, one that’s under-utilised by other marketplaces due to concerns regarding scalability. But 3BC doesn’t need millions of users to thrive. It needs a small community of quality investors and issuers – and the formation of such a community can be aided with some good old fashioned communication.

At its core, 3BC is a marketplace, hence we were drawn to an immense repository of information published by Andreessen Horowitz titled, Required Reading for Marketplace Entrepreneurs. We've learned plenty digging deep into this library, and it reminded us of the quality of content that the a16z team are producing for entrepreneurs, investors and all interested individuals. They’re constantly rolling out articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters on a whole range of subjects, from fintech to crypto to gaming to healthcare. 

Whatever you’re currently working on, it’s almost certain that the a16z content hub has something that you can read, watch, listen to and learn from. 

What we're watching.

We admit, it’s not a pastime that usually piques our interest... But we’d never seen cheerleading presented like this. Cheer is a Netflix documentary about the world of competitive cheerleading and we found it a strangely compelling and emotional watch. If your idea of cheerleading is high kicks and pompoms, think again. This is a ferocious and competitive sport where blood, sweat and tears are spilled with painful regularity. 

Cheer follows the trials, tumbles and tribulations of a troop of cheerleading champions at Navarro College, Texas, in the lead-up to the National Cheerleading championship – a competition they’ve won 13 times and they’re willing to sacrifice everything to win it again. You soon find that these are some of the toughest athletes on the planet and concussions, torn muscles, broken bones and shattered dreams are all part of the story. 

What was powerful about Cheer was the unexpected nature of both the content and emotional pull of the show. If you watch a sports documentary about the All Blacks, Manchester City or free climbers, you know you’re going to get footage from the dressing room, spine tingling motivational speeches and grainy video montages of athletes learning their craft as children. 

We love sports documentaries because they take us behind the scenes – but we already knew Pep Guardiola is a great motivator, that free climber Alex Honnold has incredible physical strength and mental fortitude. Documentaries usually confirm what we know. This felt different because it lifted the curtain on a world that we never knew existed, proving how goals and ambitions come in all shapes and sizes, and that people all over the world spend their lives sacrificing everything in the pursuit of dreams that, to the rest of us, seem beyond crazy. Above all, Cheer was an education, and that made it worth a watch.