Weekend Reading #74

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

This is the seventy-fourth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 27th June 2020. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

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What we're doing.

To scale our private market deals platform, 3BC, we know we need to grow 3 individual areas of the business. First, we need to seek out and aggregate the demand, engaging with investors and inviting them to join our invitation-only platform so that we build a unique, first-rate investor community. Second, we need supply, and we deliver this by attracting the highest quality deals to our platform, inviting them to list. Third is the slightly more mundane but no less important stuff, like product, operations and compliance, ensuring that what we’re building is robust and meets the needs of our users. If we do all 3 of these things well, 3BC will fly. 

We’ve spent a significant part of this week focusing on the supply side, on our deal pipeline, working with our network of deal introducers to help them host opportunities on our platform. This is a very enjoyable part of our job, as it means working with the deal introducers themselves, who is often a friend of our business, and with entrepreneurs and founders who are seeking capital to grow their business. It’s always great fun taking a Zoom with these smart, driven individuals and helping them is the reason we are here. 

We’re excited about the quality of deals that we’ve got coming down the pipe. Keep your eyes on 3BC in the coming weeks to see what they are (you can apply for an account here if you haven’t already). Or, if you’re someone who is in the flow or spend your time working with interesting, growing companies, it would be great to connect with you to hear about any opportunities that you might be able to bring to 3BC. We’d love to chat. 

What we're reading.

A fascinating article from WIRED got us thinking about the future of the music industry, one that is being shaped by the rise of video games, a sector we’re always engaging with. Hollywood composers used to be focused on creating scores and soundtracks for the next silver screen blockbuster. But gaming’s inexorable rise means that a new breed of composers are learning to get comfortable across a range of mediums, and they’re beginning to see video games as film’s equal.

And as you can imagine, this doesn’t come without its challenges. Whilst composers continue to draw heavily on Hollywood's orchestral language (as films and games share many of the same qualities), they must transform the passive music of film into the active music of games. Creating music that adapts and weaves seamlessly into gameplay means the music must be dynamic, and the ever-more-complex plots of computer games being developed need to be enhanced by the score, which drives the mood and colour of the gameplay experience. Few other mediums are as multi-sensual, with touch also being so important to games, and audio just adds to the sensory mix. 

We all know this from personal experience how music is intrinsically linked to our visual experiences, and just as music made Arya killing the Night King in GoT a huge amount more awesome to watch, the right music can turn The Shining into a romantic comedy. As the technology gets better and games increase in complexity and depth, music will be a key driver for the gaming sector’s pull as it fights against other mediums for our time. 

Two books we’ve been enjoying this week share the similar theme of unpicking the stories of two men who have built vast empires and shaped the world as we know it. 

First up, The House That Jack Ma Built is an engrossing account of how Ma, an English teacher in his younger days, built one of the world’s most valuable companies and reshaped the global economy in its image. This detailed account tells Ma’s story and Alibaba’s twenty-year-long tale, setting it against the backdrop of the momentous economic and social changes we’ve seen in China during the same period.

The book is written by Duncan Clark, an expert on Chinese entrepreneurship and the Internet, who has worked in China for the last twenty years. He draws on his experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and his many years in China, chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling account of Alibaba’s and its founder’s rise. If you want to understand modern-day China, this is a must-read. 

The story of a man of even greater global influence is told in Putin’s People, a voluminous account of Vladimir Putin’s meteoric rise and how he unexpectedly grasped a seat at the global order’s top table. The real story here isn’t necessarily of one man's rise but, rather, of the rise of the group of individuals around Putin who worked with him to secure wealth and fortune for Russia’s ruling class in the aftermath of the USSR. 

Financial Times reporter, Catherine Belton, spent years investigating the business dealings of Putin and his inner circle on the ground in Russia. Her book would be a brilliant thriller if it wasn’t so grounded in real-world fact. Are her revelations disturbing? Yes. Are they unsurprising? Not at all.

When reading books like these about people of such importance, it’s vital not to forget the chroniclers of these extraordinary stories for modern times. Clark and Belton are equally deserving of our attention, as the literary achievements they accomplished by writing these two tomes-for-our-age are pretty extraordinary. 
 
What we're watching.

As we start thinking ever more about computer games as a medium for entertainment for the masses (not just stuffy antisocial gamers who hide in their basements with their hyper-powered PCs), questions around the longevity of content and franchises start to surface. This presentation from last year by Chris Wilson, Managing Director of Grinding Gear Games, comes to mind as it shows exactly how much thought goes into creating content and experiences for players that is simultaneously rich and exciting, while also manageable for a small studio like Grinding Gear Games. 

The goal of a studio is to make a game that is infinitely playable. And, if done correctly, the outcome is a game like Path Of Exile. And the best part about modern gaming is that so many games are entirely FREE to play. For anyone that’s played Diablo II, loved it and bemoaned the disappointment that was Diablo III – Path Of Exile is the true successor to that legacy, and if you’ve ever dabbled in and been delighted by video games, playing a game like this is an experience that you don’t want to miss out on. As it happens, PoE has just this week started a new season, "Harvest" - new season, new in-game economy, and everyone gets reset, starting on the same level playing field.

Another fascinating development this week from the world of gaming was an event called Night City Wire, which is themed on the upcoming CD Projekt Red game, Cyberpunk 2077. At the event a new trailer for the game was released as well as a rather fascinating announcement around a new anime series in development, The series takes place inside Night City, the world inside Cyberpunk 2077 and is a partnership between CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger, a Japanese animation company. Furthermore it is being produced for Netflix. We find it fascinating how content created from gaming has begun to permeate the TV and film industry and this is the latest example of how content can move across mediums - further food for thought when thinking about the potential of many forward-looking gaming companies like CD Projekt.

Slumping onto the sofa after a hard day of work/gaming, a wearied mind can be soothed by a variety of televisual remedies. An edge-of-the-seat, hard hitting crime drama one night. A sleep-inducing rom-com the next. Fortunately, the options available via that smart TV of yours are so varied that you should never be short of something to ease your tired mind, whatever it is craving. An Amazon Prime series that we started this week, This Is Us, has been soothing us nicely. 

Landing somewhere in the family drama genre, amongst the likes of Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere and The Good Wife, This Is Us tells the heartfelt story of a family of triplets and the separate but intimately connected lives that they lead. It is beautifully acted, full of genuinely surprising and rewarding twists and turns and, we must admit, has us tearing up a couple of times each episode. 


What we're listening to.

Malcolm Gladwell returns with season 5 of his podcast, Revisionist History, and the first episode is an absolute belter. It’s all about accountancy. Yes, that’s right, Gladwell is such a talented writer and presenter that he can even turn accountancy into audio gold. It helps that this episode is about accountancy in the art world, which has long been an extraordinary, opaque and murky operation, and the podcast is stuffed full with jaw-dropping anecdotes about the world’s richest museums, artists and collectors.