Jeremy Giffon
@jeremygiffon
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Went on the biggest finance podcast in the world.
Woke up to a ton of texts.
Here’s six ideas that seem to have surprised my investor friends…
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Underrated trait is the ability to hang. Surprising how rare it is to meet someone and know that you could introduce them to anyone and they’d be an asset rather than a liability
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Tiny announced its IPO with a near $1 billion valuation.
I was the first employee.
Here’s what I learned:
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A thread of incomplete theses I believe to be true as of of 06/15:
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Sage advice I got in a boxing gym once: there are guys in here who’s survival hinges on wining the fight and there’s everyone else. It’s prudent to know which one you’re competing with. The older I get the more I think this applies to everything.
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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
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“One man came to Mozart and asked him how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age, and I am 21.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t run around asking people how to do it.”
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I don’t believe there is such a thing as laziness. Rather, I believe that most people spend their lives working on the wrong thing. No one is a lazy procrastinator in all areas of life. Everyone has something they can do effortlessly for hours. And they tend to do that effortless
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It’s an acute symptom of modernity (late-marriages, no kids, city living, secularization, materialist metaphysics) that we foolishly look to our jobs for meaning.
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Academic papers are underrated and should be read more widely. They're succinct, always attempt to deliver something novel and correct and are not hard to understand.
Here are five of my favourites:
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The better the investor, the simpler the questions. When I started, I was obsessed with jargon, complex questions and spreadsheets. Now I ask things like “what does it do?”, “why do people buy it?”, and “why are you selling?”. And I never do more math than I can fit on a napkin.
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Most would rather make $100k/yr at a prestigious job than $500k/yr owning a small trades business.
Same for owning a niche clever stock, instead of a big name growth stock.
Incentives are rarely first order
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The greatest good of capitalism comes from redirecting the energy of the ambitious away from zero-sum games.
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Everything is negotiable.
Legal bills, fees, contracts, offers, compensation.
Contract? Strike out the terms you don’t like and send it back.
Can’t get the deal done? Offer to buy the seller a Ferrari.
Don’t like quarterly board meetings? Make them annual.
It's all made up!
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Apparently 10% of Wharton is now search funds, which are basically vehicles to buy plumbing, concrete and HVAC companies.
As always, accelerationism and horseshoe theory dictate that b-school becomes trade school and vice versa.
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The only correct way to treat email is as you would a text message.
Without fail junior/unsuccessful people are slow to respond, format them like letters and are generally just too precious about it. Save it for a memo chief!
This should be taught in schools.
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Underrated activity is studying very succesful and very unsuccesful people who share your Enneagram (personality) type. Find this infinitely more useful than learning about people at random.
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If you can't see that we're on the brink of a religious tidal wave in young people you have your head in the sand
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There's a pleasing recursive genius to Taleb's books in that every time there's a black swan, he presumably sells lots of books, making the books themselves anti-fragile and positive black swans for Taleb.
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There’s no higher aesthetic/intellectual achievement than calling your shots. Only a rare few have been able to do it.
- Jonah Peretti
- Li Lu
- Thiel
- Soros
- Keynes
Are a few who laid out theoretical world views early in their careers and then executed on them
Next level.
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Twitter is just a series of people shouting “I’m in pain” via increasingly convoluted metaphors
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The best writing prompt for when I'm stuck is simply "be more honest".
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To get started, give it a name. A great thing I learned from Andrew is when you have an idea, take action right away by giving it a name, buying a domain and throwing up a website.This transforms it from an idea into something real.
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The most successful people respond the fastest. This is because they are routers. Their job is to make sure the right task for the business gets to the best person in the business. They never Not work on the task or try to be the best person themselves.
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A pretty much constant paradox is that we expect outlier outcomes from people that we demand act in normal, average ways.
We love geniuses after they do the great thing, but we basically loath and harass them if they act in uncouth ways before hand.
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There is still no better way to get things done than the following:
1. Figure out how long it will take to do task X.
2. Drain your laptop battery down to 90% of X.
3. Take it to a cafe with no power cord.
Instant focus!
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It’s amazing how normal it’s become for peoples hobbies to boil down to nothing more than some form of consumption.
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I spent a lot of my life wanting to play my own game because I didn't like the game that was laid out in front of me on principle.
But great artists understand that you have to play everyone else's game first.
Don't be mad the world doesn't want what you wish it wanted.
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Buy your way in. Andrew paid $57k to have lunch with Bill Ackman and now he is the largest outside shareholder in Tiny. You can meet anyone. No one is as busy or hard to reach as you think and good company is always scarce.
Just send an email or make a donation and be interesting
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Pondering the notion that the average profit margin of the food you eat probably tracks to your body fat percentage
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Long periods of low effort work w/ nebulous goals and no defined end -> much progress, little results -> dissatisfaction -> more low effort work -> repeat
vs.
Short periods of intense work w/ bounded & defined outcomes -> results -> satisfaction -> rest -> inspiration -> repeat
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College campuses are much better than offices. The architecture is inspiring, they have aesthetically pleasing outdoor space to layabout in/take calls, lots of food options, bountiful coffee and gyms and libraries provide on demand refuge from noise and interruptions.
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The Romans had the right idea that there ought to be distinct stages for distinct ages. Young men go to Gaul to prove themselves and get rich, then serve their people in public life, and finally serve the youth via writing, oration and elder statesmanship broadly. Accumulating
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Too much ink spilled about being longterm and doing the same thing everyday for 60 years (Buffett, Leonard, Icahn etc)
Not enough about going on an epic ten year run and then disappearing into the sunset (Arnold, Cohler, Sacca, Greenblatt, etc)
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Huge class of founders who know they over raised at ridiculous valuations and are never gonna personally see a dime out of their companies but feel trapped by guilt to team, investors, and customers. Investors beat them to keep going, gets nasty as VCs fail to raise next fund.
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everyone is getting ripped, rich and "enlightened" cause they have no idea what they actually want to spend their time doing
Harvard/McKinsey isn't the only type of optionality people chase
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don't fret, behind the most unique, out of this world, how did they ever become this way person, there is a couple of books or other people that they are ripping 90% of it from. the most extreme and unique are actually just 5% tweaks from a source that's unknown to you
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There’s a specific generation that grew up with unfettered access to a totally un-policed internet because both their parents and the government had no idea what went on online. Never happened before and won’t happen again.
Digital equivalent of be home by sunset generation.
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You are more stupid being right with a dumb argument than wrong with a good one.
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As for me, I'm working on a new company. I'll be tweeting a bunch more about this stuff. If you're buying or selling a company and want advice, feel free to DM me as I always love chatting about it.
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The more you understand who you are, the less you’ll envy those who you aren’t. If you don’t know whether you want to be a quarterback, a chef or an artist you’ll find yourself envious of all of them. A great sign that you’ve found your calling is when you stop envying others.
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After hiring tons of CEOs there’s only one question that really matters. After you have a convo, do you both leave feeling energized or drained? We’ve never regretted hiring someone we look forward to talking to but have made many mistakes hiring otherwise great people we did not
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Intimacy and Desire are diagonally opposed. One relies on familiarity and repetition, the other on novelty and the unknown.
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Still haven’t seen a better predictor for young business talent than just having made money online in high school.
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I was worried I wouldn't have enough to talk about with
@thesamparr
and
@ShaanVP
and couldn't have been more wrong.
They just released the first part of our conversation where we cover the tactics of deal-making, acquiring companies and some of the history of Tiny.
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Realizing I use my Kindle for bad books and hardcopies for good books.
Why do I have a kindle 🤔
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The second part of my chat with Sam and Shaan is live, we get into way more stuff beyond investing and business. This was my favorite part!
This podcast episode was amazing. 10 outta 10 imo
- Jeremy was 1st employee at Tiny
- How they turned ~$5M into ~$500M in 10 years
We talk about:
- 3 specific biz opportunities
- Why MrBeast shouldn't be selling chocolate
- What is the single best investment strategy right
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If it's considered an ‘asset' it’s too late. When we started investing everyone would look at us like we were crazy and ask if what we were buying was even a ‘real asset’. Job boards, plug-ins, Shopify apps, you name it.
Easier to find a new pond than to be the best fisherman.
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If you want to do something well, do it everyday. And if you don’t want to do it everyday, you won’t be able to do it well.
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I bet most people have spent more time learning about the thing they want to do than the time it would’ve taken to do the thing. A unique phenomenon of the internet age.
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Nothing hurts ambition more than fear of conflict. Ambition must be lowered until we can arrive at a vision we “all can agree on” which isn’t a vision at all. Any organization driven on common agreement will be unable to act on the highest ambitious vision. Must be rule of one.
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The sub-optimal done consistently trumps the optimal done sporadically.
Can't talk about that endlessly on podcasts though.
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If you’re at all money oriented, you can more than easily outrun the first decade of stock market compounding by using your capital to build something. Time in the market is a dangerous idea for high agency individuals.
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All advice cancels out. When someone says you have to do something a certain way I just laugh. Tiny did the opposite of what all the conventional 'success' advice would tell you.
Don't take it too seriously. There are no rules.
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When people talk about philosophy they either abandon all nuance and dumb it down to make it entertaining but useless, or they maintain the rigor but make it so dry and boring that it’s unwatchable.
9/10 times you’re better off just reading the work
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I sincerely think people max out at around 4 hours of focus time and the fact that it’s so widely denied is one of the biggest collective lies we’ve all agreed to believe.
Something I’ve accepted this year:
I basically have 2-5 hours a day of productive time, starting first thing in the morning.
Scales from 2-5 based on how many decisions I have make.
Way downhill from there.
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When Munger said “the first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it.” He was talking about the neccesity of getting the compounding snowball rolling.
I disagree, the real value is having a year of living expenses liquid.
It gives you nearly infinite leverage.
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A sabbatical is the unfettered act of following your curiosity until you are grabbed by compulsion.
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I'm not even sure how I found it but this deck by
@robvinall
called "Mistakes of Omission" is the investment writing I find myself referencing more than anything else almost ten years later.
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The hidden price of podcasts and other media is not being distracted by bad ideas, but being distracted by other really good ideas. In fact, when I've found a good idea I want to work on, the last thing I need is other good ideas that will compete for my time and attention.
Michael Moritz on Bill Gates’ insane level of focus: “The most extreme desire to concentrate I ever encountered was young Bill Gates.
After he had bought a TV to watch educational videotapes, he eliminated the temptation to watch shows or movies by disconnecting the tuner. He
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First, some background:
@awilkinson
&
@_Sparling_
created a billion dollar fortune in their thirties. They never took VC or gave up control. Today, it does over $110mm of revenue and $50mm of EBITDA and they own 98% of it.
Now, let’s talk about how they did it:
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Shocking how many founders had millions in the bank before starting the ventures they are known for.
This x 10,000.
The number one mistake people make is thinking too big on their first business.
They try to start the next SpaceX when they should be starting a paving company.
Something boring that gets you the money to start the next SpaceX later.
Build the launch pad
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Columbia cancels classes and a thousand people gather on the quad to hang out.
Really nice to have these lessons of human behaviour driven home.
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Basically three categories of colleges worth going to: top ten (to join ruling class), big state school frat/athletics (for peak life experience), weirdo lib arts colleges, eg Deep Springs, St John’s, etc (to actually become erudite). Highly suspicious of everything else.
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Product I would pay for/fund:
- go through all the links I've sent in messages in the last two weeks and surface all the articles
- build them into a list I can approve or dissaprove
- compile them into a newsletter with 3 or 4 line GPT-3 summaries
- send it to my friends
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"I always wanted to have enough money in the bank so that even if our customers didn’t pay us for a year, we could still keep paying everyone and doing the [research and development]. So I could still be viewed as conservative." -Gates
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I can count on one hand the amount of people that were as impactful on my life as Charlie. A truly uncompromising person and a great man. RIP.
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You’re having a good conversation if the main constraint becomes language itself.
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Asked the founder of a large firm if he was worried about succession and he said he wasn't because the right successor will simply show up one day and take it from him. I think about that a lot.
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There’s a lot of explanatory power in the heuristic that women seek to preserve their worth while men seek to prove theirs.
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Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?
Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole
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Art became bad because we stopped believing in Beauty so we turned to critique.
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In the spirit of spreading the value of Leisure (h/t
@David_perell
), even as it relates to output, here is a thread of very successful people who didn’t spend all that much time working*
*not a comment on how hard they were working when they did actually get around to working.
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A somewhat crazy conclusion I’ve come to from reading a lot of 19th century biographies is that the number one thing holding children back from doing stuff like this today is a lack of belief from their own parents that such things are possible.
"For Christmas in 1877, a 13-year-old Max Weber gifted his parents two historical essays, "About the Course of German history, with Special Reference to the Positions of the Emperor and the Pope", and "About the Roman Imperial Period from Constantine to the Migration Period"."
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I often think "damn what if this doesn't work" but then I consider the alternative that I could just try nothing and then die, and that doesn't seem much better?
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Psychology as a field is overrated, but as a factor in other disciplines is hugely underrated.
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The greatest evil of capitalism is that it redirects ambition to its most benign applications.
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There will be “audience cofounders” in the same way there are “technical cofounders”. People with large audiences will own material amounts of small biz/startups in exchange for ongoing and organic promotion. Drive demand for the co and wealth through equity for the creator.
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Lil Nas X made a post on r/whatsthatsong with the first lyrics to Old Country Road to optimize for SEO once it got traction off Twitter and Tik Tok memes. Hilariously it is Trent Reznor’s first
#1
.
“This is no accident” - Lil Nas X
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Most writing is bad because when someone sits down to write they picture themselves reading it in a state of the union, not to their best friend.
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The more advanced the investor is the simpler his questions are. Anyone can do spreadsheets but only great investors can do napkin math. It’s the ones that get you excited by their obvious simplicity rather than hidden complexity that are the real gems.
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The best deals are so obviously good they should smack you in the face. It only took a few sentences to get the team excited about our best deals. The ones that required heaps of justification were never as good.
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The original sin of Liberalism (and thus its downfall) is that it pits its two core values - liberty and equality - intractably against one another.
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Most founders are in the glory business, not the money making business.
The theme of this post has been coming up a lot in recent conversations:
“A founder selling at the Series D price of $210M, would make the same amount of money at exit as they would had they sold for $38M after only raising a seed round.”
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Another downside of rising secularism is that those who would’ve previously joined the clergy now become full time grifters who position themselves as moral police in specific industries (AI, Education, ESG, etc.)
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In every single interaction in your life you bring an implicit ask. For some it's impress me, others it's confess to me, help me, compete with me, dominate me, etc. It's worth knowing what yours is and understanding how to use it.
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NY financial engineering is still miles ahead of SV. Going to be something when VCs get PE mega fund like sophistication.
1) lever up to buy co w/ float
2) charge co $400mm/year to invest that float in your own funds you take fees on
3) ???
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If you’re selling something for 0 marginal cost you should be printing money. If not, you better have a good reason. It’s possible to have VC like growth while being profitable. Just because a company spends a lot and grows a lot doesn't mean the two are casually related.
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Let your people get burned. Putting someone in charge means you can’t come to their rescue if they screw up. If you do, they’re not actually in charge. It was only once we let our CEOs make mistakes, botch hires and waste money that the businesses really started to take off.
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Europeans live better than Americans because the spirit of the American lays in the infinite frontier. Europe is enclosed and complete, the frontiers are known. So the European must turn inward. The good life for him can be found in simply asking "what is for lunch?".
But the
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Apple is very obviously the best large tech company to work for. Its market cap is about the only thing it has in common with its peers.
It doesn't rely on user attention, it has a goal of making them healthier and it's a (the only?) F500 w/ a positive aesthetic vision.
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I’d read a book like the Outsiders but just for guys who sold their companies at the top then bought it back at the bottom. Underrated capital allocation move.
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One of the true joys of starting a business is the amount of incredibly accomplished people, who will go very far out of their way to help you, that you get to meet.
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I’ve yet to hear a business origin story that isn’t mostly fabricated post hoc.
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People really miss that buy and hold means the ability TO buy and hold, not that you should buy and hold
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Fly people in. There is tremendous power in being based somewhere obscure and having people come to you. It changes the power dynamic in your favor, you both get a much better sense of each other and you don’t have to waste your life on terrible Zoom calls.
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Investing is an apprenticeship business. You learn the craft in the day in, day out, marginal decisions. Who you pick as a teacher is really all that matters. I was incredibly lucky to get to watch & learn from Andrew/Chris up close as they went on one of the all time great runs.
Jeremy (
@jeremygiffon
) was employee
#1
at Tiny and worked hand in hand with Chris and I for half a decade.
He's a great thinker and we're excited to see what he does next.
Lots of interesting nuggets in this interview:
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When it comes to beliefs, Fight Club had it right in that the only pertinent question is “how’s that working out for you?”
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