Weekend Reading #67

This is the sixty-seventh weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 9th May 2020. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

*****

What we're doing.

We’re loving the experience of running a fund again. As we wrap up our first full week of trading, carefully deploying risk exposures in our portfolio, we’ve also spent lots of time optimising trade execution. Most interesting perhaps is the difficulty we’ve had in implementing stop orders, whether for opening or closing positions – not by any fault of our brokers or system providers, but simply as a function of the fact that no one has ever asked them to build stop order functionality! Why that is the case we can't tell – perhaps the focus has always been on how much one can make, rather than limiting how much one could possibly lose.

We’ve also spent the week working through feedback from beta users of our deal platform for private investors in private markets, 3BC. The response has been really gratifying – thanks to everyone who has taken the time to play with the product and provide notes on how we can improve. Feedback on the 5 private deals we have listed has been quite limited so far, as users get to grips with the platform and help us identify product bugs – one major one which was thankfully fixed by our dev guys within hours, and lots of little things that we will improve on over the coming days and weeks. We expect more detailed feedback on deals as we push the product out to more test users and begin engaging with investors on a deeper level.

Also this week, we spent some time as a team looking at revenue generation plans for our three product lines. Our business has reached a critical – and hugely exciting – stage, in which we move from planning and building to execution. We’re massively relieved to have gotten to this point and earned the right to push for revenue and make this a sustainable enterprise. The real work begins here, so it’s been helpful to canvas the team’s views on how to find paying customers and generate revenue.

We also made the decision to reinstate Slack this week. We tried it out in the infancy of our business but at that point, it wasn’t really needed – good old WhatsApp did a good enough job. But as our business has developed and matured, we have felt the need for a more structured and transparent approach to communicating and collaborating. Slack offers just that, in a slimmed down and low-maintenance kind of way. We are keeping things simple with 3 chat groups covering the 3 different arms of our business (fund, 3BC and trading platform), providing valuable context and enabling everyone to see what’s happening without feeling obligated to engage all the time. Team banter continues to roll into WhatsApp, which is more of a social space for us all to hang out, share links, and document our (increasingly busy) family lives. We’ve only been using Slack for a few days and already it feels like we’re communicating better – it’s almost as if we’re in the office together. Who knows if we’ll stick at it over the long term, but right now, it feels good!

Long term – despite the media hype around the era of remote working – we will DEFINITELY be returning to a more traditional office environment (albeit augmented with remote working), as we miss the conversational context and human interaction that gathering together in one physical place offers.

What we're reading.

An uplifting read this week – a week that involved a lot of change in our own company, at a time in the world when nothing seems very certain – was the reassuring This Too Shall Pass by Julie Samuel. The book’s tagline says it all: "Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings", and these are stories worth exploring in times like these. 

Samuel is a leading British psychotherapist who, over the last thirty years, has worked for the NHS and in private practice. Her book is a non-fiction account, a clinical diary if you like, of the problems that people have walked into her practice with – and the ways in which she’s helped them to overcome them. 

The message is that change, whilst uncomfortable, is a natural part of life and should be, if at all possible, expected and welcomed. The individual case-studies can speak to specifics in one’s own life but, perhaps more importantly, lessons can be drawn from the experience of others, and there many lessons to be learned by reading about the troubles of others that may never afflict you. Empathy is healthy in a time like this. Samuel’s book illustrates how we all suffer from problems in one form or another and, for the most part, we all manage, with internal grit and a little external help, to work our way through them to the other side. That common human decency and optimism are worth reading about. 

You might have come across the concept of flow states. These are mental states in which we perform an activity fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process. When we’re in the zone, we lose a sense of time and enjoy living in the moment.

To our minds, there are negative and positive flow states. Negative examples include eating an entire family-sized packet of Doritos whilst watching international handball on Eurosport, and mindlessly surfing the internet when you should have gone to bed two hours ago. Positive examples include getting into an incredible rhythm whilst out running, or getting lost in your work and looking up from your screen to find you have completed a day’s worth of work in three hours. 

We’re interested in leveraging flow states to accelerate our personal development. With this in mind, we’re currently halfway through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s extremely interesting psychological study Finding Flow, which claims to help us reclaim ownership of our lives. To be honest we never felt like we lost ownership of our lives, but this book is still a useful aid to actively engage with the days that seem to roll by inexorably during lockdown, and promote positive behaviours that reinforce our aspirations and goals.

We also just finished Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractible. It’s very good. Some of the points that Nir makes are quite obvious, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn't be made. Ultimately he argues that technology isn’t your enemy when it comes to avoiding distraction – both external and internal triggers make us susceptible to distraction. To improve and gain traction in our lives and projects, we must do a better job of understanding ourselves and how we relate to apps, devices and content. It was great timing completing this book just before we reinstated Slack for team comms – hopefully helping us to avoid the all-too-common horror story of tech addiction, shallow work and corporate face-time.

This tweet from Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano (Co-founder and Partner at Morgan Creek Digital) induced a wry smile. Slowly but surely (and whether you agree with it or not) Bitcoin continues to enter the financial mainstream. It’s even made its way into the plot of Billions!

We also LOVED this tweet form Eric Stomberg, who says:

“Read non-fiction to raise your floor.
Read fiction to raise your ceiling.”

It’s so true. We’ve previously blogged about “What investors can learn from reading fiction”. 

Finally, we enjoy this brain-teaser from the New York Times (thanks to our friend, Brent Shapiro, for sending). It got the grey matter moving. Hit us up with your answer and let’s compare notes on how we got there!

What we're watching.

Last weekend we binged on Normal People, the BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s hit novel. It’s easy to dismiss this show as “Twilight for hipsters”, but it is actually a really well made piece of television. Watching all 12 episodes over three evenings was certainly an emotional rollercoaster, one that made us feel very grateful for our relationships – partners, friends and family. Give into the hype and watch it. Just make sure the kids are in bed, if you know what we mean!

Having been served an ad for Masterclass on Facebook, we had a good look around the platform to see what it offers. It’s an ed-tech product that provides online classes created for students of all skill levels, hosted by world famous instructors:

+ Gordon Ramsay teaches cooking
+ Neil deGrasse Tyson teaches science and communication 
+ Natalie Portman teaches acting
+ Annie Leibovitz teaches photography

The list goes on. The partners they have onboarded are obviously phenomenally impressive, but can the company really command a rumoured $800m valuation? Perhaps we should list it on 3BC and see what our investor community thinks?!

What we're listening to.

Without question, Tim Ferris’ podcasts always include something worth remembering. However, of late, Ferris’ guests are sometimes a little too esoteric and his USP (“deconstructing world class performance”) can feel a little exhausting. However, a recent episode we particularly enjoyed was Ferris' conversation with the author Michael Lewis. 

Ferris and Lewis' wide-ranging chat is tremendously engaging and inspiring, covering lots of ground between Lewis' time starting out in finance, through the success of his writing to his podcast series Against The Rules, which is well worth a listen too. 

There's much to be learned from these two riffing about anything and everything. It's also a pretty funny episode, which can't always be said of Ferris' intense style, and you can clearly see why Lewis' books are often laugh-out-loud funny. It also makes you want to re-read some of Lewis' great works again, so that could also be a good idea this weekend, too. 

We also enjoyed Grounded With Louis Theroux. Stuck at home, Louis exploits lockdown to track down some high-profile people he’s been longing to talk to – from all walks of life and both sides of the Atlantic. The series is just getting going, but we’ve liked what we’ve heard so far.
  

Weekend ReadingEdward Playfair