Good morning!!!!
Before I get started…I’m doing some maintenance to my website this weekend and there is a potential for some internet access issues which would take site down for 24 hours.
Onwards…
Congrats to the Padres on beating LA which is all that seems to matter to people here in San Diego and I stand with my San Diegoans.
My buddy and next door neighbor here on Coronado (Eliot) took me to the Padres game on Friday night (game three) and it was fun. I grabbed a video of the last pitch of the game.
Ellen and I have been back and forth to Coronado and Phoenix as we deal with the damages from a water leak in Coronado (a reminder you don’t own things but things own you).
Last week I was in Phoenix at the office for a few days and to give a talk at Arizona State University, my MBA alma mater in 1989, to the venture capital class of the business school. The professor Timothy Haitaian is a successful entrepreneur (redshelf.com) and he is doing it for the love of the game.
I shared a bunch of my entrepreneurial and investing stories which they seemed to enjoy and a few of my overall thoughts on what makes a good entrepreneur and investor. Back when I was in graduate school, the ASU MBA students had two highly recruited paths – work at Dial or Proctor and Gamble in consumer products or at Intel in procurement. I chose ‘stock broker’ and passed on a purchasing job at Intel.
Not one of the students had seen the movies ‘Wall Street’, Trading Places’ or ‘Back to School’ and that is a crime. I told them to head to their favorite dispensary and do their homework!
I also told them that the fact that ASU had a venture capital class was the reason that venture capital was going into a nuclear winter (not a judgement on them or their abilities).
I shared the anecdote on Twitter and Kyle Harrison had the ‘truthiness’ response of the day:
I explained ‘the joke’ and how I stumbled into ‘venture’ from my roots at ASU and that I am proof that there is no ‘roadmap’ to be an investor; that their generation was likely to be an ‘investing class’ so the more they read, write, network and build domain expertise the better.
I hope to teach a class at ASU one day myself which of course the school can’t risk.
Now to some reads and listens…
Speaking of investing movies, this old podcast with Bill Simmons and Brian Koppelman is great.
Every Friday, Tadas at Abnormal returns does his business podcast linkfest which is a great way to find some weekend podcasts worth listening. I always check it and listen to one or two.
If you have read this blog, you know I don’t trust BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later). While the SEC and FTC have had their noses on Citadel, Robinhood, confetti, Crypto, Razor Blades, Facebook etc, the BNPL lending hack has proliferated and the ‘bagholding’ has just begun as the deliquencies are set to explode. I would add sports gambling here but I am not looking for more enemies this weekend.
Have a read of Marshall Lux’s paper on BNPL.
Kudos to Jack at Square, now the ‘Block’, for ringing the bell at the top of the BNPL scheme by paying $29 billion for BNPL company ‘AfterPay’ (I call it ‘NeverPay’)…the damage so far to The Block and shareholders:
Have a great Sunday.
