Amazon launched 22 years ago this week. Its first web page shows its early days: What’s neat about this isn’t what’s changed. It’s what’s stayed the same. The line, “One million titles, consistently low prices” seems like marketing guff. But it helps explain why Amazon has domina … | Continue reading
The Department of Homeland Security created terrorism warning codes after 9/11. The idea was to attach a label on the level of risk faced at a given moment. There was yellow (significant risk), orange (high risk) and red (severe risk). Comedian Ron White pointed out the problem. … | Continue reading
You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize just a few big ideas changed how you think and drive most of what you believe. A few ideas that had a big impact on how I think about investing: Markets have to be pushed to crazy extremes once in a while, b … | Continue reading
I’m going to explain why it’s OK to make irrational investment decisions. First, a story about a guy who won the Nobel Prize for infecting syphilis patients with malaria. Julius Wagner-Jauregg was a 19th-century psychiatrist with two unique skills: He had exceptional pattern-reco … | Continue reading
This is a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II. That’s a lot to unpack in 5,000 words, but the short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then r … | Continue reading
Every past decline looks like an opportunity, every future decline looks like a risk. There are investments out there that never get wild. They are called FDIC-insured savings accounts and they produce the exact return you deserve. “Occasionally wild” is the cost of “eventual gai … | Continue reading
At one point last week Florida was selling 550 lottery tickets per second. For perspective, that’s 2% of what the entire Visa payment network can handle. The $2 billion Mega Million/Powerball jackpot was worth more than nine states spend on K-12 education each year. Of course, th … | Continue reading
To realize how outdated the five-day, 40-hour workweek is, you have to know where it came from. Before 1900 the average American worker worked more than 60 hours a week. A standard schedule was ten-hour days, six days a week. The only structural limits to working were lighting an … | Continue reading
I’m going to try to explain what’s going on in VC. First, a story about fish. Take two groups of identical baby fish. Put one in abnormally cold water; the other, abnormally warm water. There’s a certain temperature on either end that does something interesting: Fish living in co … | Continue reading
Today we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Gem, which launched today as the first FDA approved, real-food vitamin supplement that you eat like a snack. We led an investment in the company this spring and are proud to join them on their mission to make supplements more eff … | Continue reading
Collaborative Fund has backed several new retail concepts over the last five years, including, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, and byChloe. Today, we are excited to add Spyce to this list. Our thesis behind this investment was simple: Fresh and delicious food at a reasonable pric … | Continue reading
Author Robert Coram once wrote about military promotions: There are officers of great patriotism who are appalled by what they see in the Pentagon. They say to themselves, “I’ll go along for now. But when I get to be colonel, I’m going to change things.” What they don’t realize i … | Continue reading
One month after Japan surrendered World War II, General Douglas MacArthur met Japanese emperor Hirohito. MacArthur asked the emperor – who U.S. intelligence knew had been questioning the war for years – why he didn’t surrendered earlier. The emperor mentioned his generals, adviso … | Continue reading
One day you wake up and realize you have a great idea. You tell people about it. Not everyone gets it. The reason it’s a great idea is because no one’s thought of it before. But it means other people’s first response to your great idea may be confusion. And people deal with confu … | Continue reading
When Collaborative Fund started, we believed we’d see a radical shift in consumer behavior toward values-led brands and shared resources. We think it’s just getting started. Here’s why. People’s day-to-day choices and the companies they support are increasingly important to how t … | Continue reading
“The average person today receives more information on a daily basis, than the average person received in a lifetime in 1900. The average person gets 1 interruption every 8 minutes.” (source) One of the consequences of technology becoming cheaper, easier to use and more widely ad … | Continue reading
“What was the happiest day of your life? The documentary How to Live Forever asks that innocent question to a centenarian who offered an amazing response. “Armistice Day” she said, referring to the 1918 agreement that ended World War I. “Why?” the producer asks. “Because we knew … | Continue reading
“I did not intend to get rich. I just wanted to get independent.” – Munger Place yourself, your business, and other people you know, on this list. Level 0: Complete financial dependence on the kindness of strangers who have no vested interest in your success. Panhandling when una … | Continue reading
Archibald Hill just wanted to know how fast he could run. He ran every morning, on a track before breakfast. Some days it was fast and effortless. On others his “stiffness and exhaustion” made him question how his body worked. Hill began studying his own capacity for exercise. It … | Continue reading
All greed starts with an innocent idea: that you are right, deserve to be right, or are owed something for your efforts. It’s a reasonable feeling. But economies have three superpowers: competition, adaptation, and social comparison. Competition means life is hard. Business is ha … | Continue reading
A real optimist wakes up every morning knowing lots of stuff is broken, and more stuff is about to break. Big stuff. Important stuff. Stuff that will make his life miserable. He’s 100% sure of it. He starts his day knowing a chain of disappointments awaits him at work. Doomed pro … | Continue reading
We recently announced our new $100M early stage fund that we closed in May, along with a series of new additions to the team in June. Now that July is upon us, we’ve started to make investments out of the new fund and thought it would be good to share how we’re evolving the busin … | Continue reading
Robert McNamara was hired by Henry Ford II to help turn Ford Motor around. Ford was losing money after World War II and needed a “whiz kid” – that’s what Henry Ford called it – who saw running a business as an operations science, driven by the ice-cold truth of statistics. McNama … | Continue reading
Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. Later cartoons were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at onerous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons – … | Continue reading
“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just doesn’t work that way.” – Warren Buffett Someone hired a social media consultant at an old employer. During a three-hour session she walked us through hashtags, what time of day you should post on Twit … | Continue reading
Capitalism’s success is built on a belief – a story – that, given the right incentives, people can work together to solve problems. It’s worked magnificently. It’s the greatest story ever told. But to wrap our heads around its potential, we have to dig into how stories are told, … | Continue reading
Let me tell you the story of two investors, neither of whom knew each other, but whose paths crossed in an interesting way. Grace Groner was orphaned at age 12. She never married. She never had kids. She never drove a car. She lived most of her life alone in a one-bedroom house a … | Continue reading
Lakshman Achuthan went on TV in 2011 and predicted a recession was near. This wasn’t bold. Forecasting trouble was standard fare for economists after the Great Recession. But Achuthan did something that set him apart: He clearly defined what being wrong would look like. “If there … | Continue reading
Lakshman Achuthan went on TV in 2011 and predicted a recession was near. This wasn’t bold. Forecasting trouble was standard fare for economists after the Great Recession. But Achuthan did something that set him apart: He clearly defined what being wrong would look like. “If there … | Continue reading
Abraham Germansky was a multimillionaire real estate developer in 1920s. He also loved stocks, betting heavily as the market boomed. As the crash of 1929 unfolded, he was wiped out. And that was basically the end of Abraham Germansky. Germansky disappeared on October 24th, 1929. … | Continue reading
The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in history. With it came equally superlative stories of how people dealt with risk. One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, … | Continue reading
Evolution knows what it’s doing. And one of the things it does is give animals bigger bodies over time. Edward Drinker Cope was a 19th Century paleontologist. His work, later deemed Cope’s Rule – not universal enough to call a law – tracked the lineages of thousands of species an … | Continue reading
A fascinating part of VC is sitting on the board of directors of companies you invest in. You get a view almost never offered to public market investors. I sit on the boards of a few of our portfolio companies. One thing that has stuck out to me: Everyone needs help. Running a bu … | Continue reading
Brace yourself. According to various media sources we now have at least 14 bubbles: | Continue reading