Weekend Reading #86

This is the eighty-sixth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 25th September 2020.

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What we're doing.

We spent a portion of the week exploring how our private market deals platform, 3BC, can be enhanced to better suit the needs of our community of partners. Our partners are the lifeblood of our business, providing us with A* deal flow and access to networks of investors. They are helping us to grow both sides of our marketplace and we view partnerships as the way by which we can scale in rapid time. Hence, we’re obsessed with the idea of building a product that perfectly matches their needs. Wherever their itch may be, we want to scratch it.

Our initial thoughts centre on the fact that partners want to be able to view how their deals are performing and the way their investors are behaving on 3BC. We need to provide them with the granularity that gives them insights into what is working (and what is not) amongst their client base. Of course, we currently have access to this information, and we readily share it with our partners on a regular basis or when asked, but building out the functionality that allows them to view this information for themselves, as and when they need it, feels like an obvious but exciting upgrade.

Pleasing our partners is how we will succeed. We know that success in this business is far from zero-sum, and that’s why we’re keen to develop 3BC with this network of partners in mind. They are, in essence, our customers and the only way to go about product development, whether you’re building a social network, a lifestyle app or a fintech platform, is to place the user at the heart of the product development process.

Egos and hubris rarely get rewarded when building products, so we’re open to listening to anyone in our network who has any ideas about how we should be evolving and developing 3BC. We think our v1 is a solid foundation upon which to build. Now we’re keen to take it to the next level and we’d love to hear any feedback or ideas from 3BC users as to what we should be building.

What we're thinking.

Last week, two greatly anticipated IPOs finally occurred. First, Unity, which offers its gaming engine and ecosystem to a large portion of the world’s game developers and second, Compass Pathways, which as readers of this newsletter will know, fits right into the heart of our thinking around the promising future of psychedelic drugs.

Both IPOs have resulted in staggering gains, with both trading well over +100% from their listing prices despite the weakness we have seen in US markets over the past few weeks. Hot on the heels of the Snowflake IPO, we suspect that passive-driven broad market weakness has hidden the strength in hot IPOs and the SPAC boom (more on that another time).

We were not fortunate enough to be given allocations in either of these two IPOs but are watching them closely. We have done our research on each of these and are ready for when the opportunity presents itself.

What we're reading.

This fantastic article gives deep insight into the world of esports and in particular how a game from Garena, a subsidiary of Sea Limited, a name we are invested in, found its way to success in Latin America. It details the spectacular rise of a streaming player who goes by the name of Nobru. He is Brazilian and rather than follow the traditional route to riches of playing football (he was rather good at that too), he very quickly found his path while playing Free Fire, which having taken Southeast Asia by storm, is now well on its way to similar popularity in Latam. Free Fire has also been the biggest beneficiary of India’s ban on PUBG and a litany of other Chinese “origin” apps.

We also read with bewildered awe the reports over the last few weeks that there may be signs of life in Venus’s gaseous skies. These stories seem to bubble up from time to time and they usually don’t end up with live pictures of little green men with oversized eyes walking on a neighbouring planet. But this time it feels a little different, with the scientific and astronomical community extremely excited by the hints of alien life that have been found floating around in Venus's atmosphere.

This remarkable article on WIRED breaks down what scientists found and why the discovery could be so significant. The key is phosphine, a long-ignored simple compound, which was discovered on Venus back in 2017. You’ve probably never heard of phosphine, much less have an idea of why its existence on a nearby planet would be such a scoop. But scientists think phosphine may be a biosignature: a sign that, if seen on a solid-surface terrestrial planet, might intimate that life might be present there.

Until now, the idea that Venus might be habitable by any living creature sounded absurd. Its surface temperature is more than 800 degrees celsius, while its surface atmospheric pressure is akin to that found 3,000 feet under the Earth's oceans. To top it off, the planet itself is made almost entirely of metal. Hence, sending a spacecraft to explore its surface isn’t possible with existing technologies, and our speculating had to be done from afar.

But scientists have speculated about strange life on Venus for decades. And in a year when many of our pre-existing assumptions about the world we live in have been turned on their head, they might have just found it.

Ever considered the economics of gravedigging? Well, we hadn’t either but this article from Vice digs deep into one of the world’s oddest, oldest but most essential professions.

Amidst a COVID-related spike in burials, gravediggers are in greater demand than ever before, and their rights as workers are being pushed to the limits, especially in COVID hotspots, where minimum wages and the maximum hours they’re having to put in (in order to make sure that standards don’t slip) don’t really go hand in hand. In grim detail, Vice teaches us a lot about a profession that, for many, is better out of sight, out of mind and reminds us how, especially in times like these, the interests of all workers, whatever their profession, need to be considered and protected.

This incredible thread from Dave Perrell picked apart the awesome story of 2020 U.S. Open champion, Bryson DeChambeau, who Perrell claims might be the most innovative athlete in the world right now.

Using maths and science, DeChambeau revolutionised his golf swing, opening himself up to a mountain of criticism and ridicule from golf fans and fellow professionals. But he’s had the last laugh, as his odd-looking swing has had an incredible effect on his game. This is a thread for golf fans, especially, but everyone can learn a little from Perrell’s central premise that is: If you’re innovative, people will laugh at you.

This is a thread packed with innovative learnings, digging deep into Perrell’s own back catalogue of life lessons as he looks to articulate why DeChambeau, in not listening to the naysayers and focusing on what his gut told him he should do, went from a decent circuit golfer to one of the world’s finest.

As Perrell says about DeChambreau, he “practices like a scientist so he can play like an artist.” And that is a rule which can be applied to so many other areas of our lives, from sport to business and everything in between. This is an inspirational story of a guy who did his own thing, worked maniacally hard and was paid back with interest.

What we're watching.

We’ve just ploughed through 3 series of The Sinner on Netflix and, given how here in the UK we seem to be heading back towards some form of lockdown in the coming few weeks, we can heartily recommend it to pass the evenings locked inside your home.

The series focuses on Bill Pullman’s Detective Harry Ambrose, a cop with a limp, who unpicks complicated crimes... all so-so (so far) but The Sinner will keep you hooked right up until the big reveals and twists in the final episode. It’s a show where things are never quite what they seem, and Series 1 especially, starring the excellent Jessica Biel as a normal mother who commits a terrible crime, is gripping and very, very clever.

Series 1 and 2 are excellent before Season 3, as is often the way, bubbles slightly under. Still, Harry Ambrose is a great character, a guy you always root for, and he’s definitely worth a watch, especially if, like us, you’ve got 6 months' worth of sofa-surfing to endure.

This superb lecture from Sadie Valeri to the 1517 Fund assembly in 2017 is a bit different and focuses on her training in classical drawing. She speaks about the evolution of the drawing process and how, when she trained as an artist, the skills she was taught were nowhere near as good as those who trained hundreds of years ago. She compellingly takes us through the history of why this is the case with all sorts of applications to other areas of life and then tells her story of how she put it right.

Edward PlayfairSeptember 28, 2020