Monday Seven No. 022
How else can I get there?, Bill Gates on COVID, and Fantastic Fungi
Hi Friends 👋🏽
Welcome to Monday Seven, where I discuss and share random topics I’m interested in. For those of you new here you can read previous editions and subscribe here.
The last edition had a 60% open rate. Top links were Magic Mind a productivity drink I’m trying to recreate, and Question Breaker an app to help you be a better conversationalist.
This week, I’m sharing a life lesson and a question I’ll be asking myself for the rest of my life. It’s an important one. I also got to sit in on a private talk with Bill Gates and hear his thoughts on a COVID vaccine and 2nd/3rd spikes. I’m sharing key takeaways from that conversation here. As well, I’m trying something new and sharing a bit about my investment strategy in the stock market. I’m a total amateur but I’ve spent a bunch of time this year learning about finance and investments. I’ve found some modest success so I think it’s worth sharing my portfolio. All that plus, learning about silk-producing spiders and the mushroom kingdom whilst listening to Radiohead.
Let’s go!
No. 022
1 — Getting there another way
A lesson I learned over the past couple of weeks is one that I’ll carry with me for life. I’m going to attempt to share the lesson here without sharing the specifics of the story, which are too personal. But if you’re stuck on a big goal, need help thinking through it, and interested in learning more, send me a note — I’d love to chat.
For the past 3 years, I’ve had a big North Star in my personal life. I thought about this goal every single day. Some days it felt completely within reach and on other days it was painfully and impossibly far. How attainable the goal seemed at any point in time was in direct correlation to how well I was doing financially. This meant it was tied to how well my company was doing, potential founder liquidity, profitability, the performance of my personal investments, and many other financial factors not in my direct control. I sought advice from those closest to me and even my personal coach, but while everyone’s perspective was well-intentioned, none of it really helped. It was an emotional roller coaster and I mostly felt stuck and powerless.
The problem was that I had a material goal for what was really an emotional need.
About nine months ago I began reframing the problem. I noticed this change when looking back at my journals this week. Daily affirmations entries changed from “I am a ____ with the financial means to attain X for Y.” to “I am a ____ with the ability to make Y feel Z”, where blank is my relationship to that person.
Just this past week, I got to a place where I knew I had begun to achieve my goal. I have a clear path to the North Star. It was an incredible moment. I suddenly realized I could get to my goal much sooner by asking “How else can I get there?”. Looking back, I could have saved myself a lot of unnecessary angst. When I removed the hard requirement to attain a material goal, I freed up energy to see the problem from a different perspective. There are many paths.
2 — Super Risky Investing
Weird shift, but let’s now jump into investing.
I began investing in super risky individual stocks on March 22, 2019 — the day Zoom went public. It was the first public stock I purchased after a failed disaster when I bought Blackberry in my early 20’s and watched it die. That experience paused any further investments in individual stocks. I probably lost out on a bunch of opportunities but more likely avoided losing much more.
Following the investment in Zoom, I started buying a bunch of other companies and building my portfolio. By the end of 2019, I was playing a dangerous game and investing in companies with no real strategy or sense of what I was doing. So I decided to get smart and spent late 2019/early 2020 learning about finance and investing.
I put about 20% of my savings into individual stocks. More than I recommend but I feel I still have time to recover from mistakes. I hope to share more about investment in the coming months, but for now, I thought I’d start by sharing my portfolio. Obviously, this is not investment advice and I am not an investment advisor. Please don’t do anything stupid.
My stocks fall into three categories. I call these Commerce, Technology Infrastructure, and Consumer Trends.
Commerce: $SHOP, $BIGC, $SNAP, $NKE, $LULU. This includes brands I believe in and the technology that powers commerce. Nike and Lulu because that’s what I like to wear and I know I’m not unique. I also see 20-somethings in spin class wearing them and moms shopping at both stores. When you can capture 25 to 50-year-olds, that’s a pretty good bet. Athleisure brands selling to GenZ like Gymshark and Madhappy still have a long way to go before capturing any serious market share away from these two. Shopify for obvious reasons and Big Commerce because I know Shopify doesn’t work for all merchants, specially larger ones and that’s why I bought $BIGC at IPO. The next investment in Commerce I’m excited about are Afterpay or Affirm. The former has increased 2,500% since IPO and the latter will IPO soon. I also really like Affirm’s recent partnership with Shopify. More on Buy Now Pay Later commerce solutions here.
Technology Infrastructure: $NVDA , $TSM, $TWLO, $ZOOM. Here my strategy is two-fold. First, I listen to trusted geeks. Business-savvy engineer friends who are much smarter than me and actually understand the technology these companies are developing. These are my investments in Nvida and Taiwan Semiconductors. Second, in the case of Twilio and Zoom, these are products we used in my companies since 2016. I see Twilio owning phone/text and Zoom owning video calling infrastructure for the internet. For the same reason, I am waiting for the much anticipated Stripe IPO.
Consumer Trends: $ROKU, $BYND. This is the category I find the most challenging. Both times I felt like I was rolling the dice a lot more than in commerce and tech. Luckily, these are two of my best investments. There are many more examples where I should make bets but continue to sit on the sidelines. These include Tesla, Spotify, Peloton, and Netflix. I feel they have a ton of upside, but I likely still have trauma from getting it wrong with Blackberry.
3 — Bill Gates on COVID
I was fortunate enough to sit in on a talk with Bill Gates hosted by Ron Conway of SV Angel. Since Bill warned us about a pandemic back in 2015, I think it’s prudent to listen to what he has to say. Here are my takeaways related to COVID from the talk:
The most reliable COVID-19 Projections are coming out of The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Their model was able to predict the current spike in Europe 3-weeks before anyone else. Based on the model, things should be okay until December, but January and February will be tough.
We can expect to have 3 vaccines approved by Q1/Q2 2021. This does not mean vaccines will be ready for administration by then — that will take longer.
The manufacturing of vaccines is happening in parallel to the research.
The Gates Foundation is manufacturing the vaccine being developed by Eli Lilly.
The first round of vaccines will likely only produce 100-200 million. Enough to cover the U.S. but not to serve global needs.
The biggest vaccine manufacturers are in India. The manufacturer’s capacity has been reserved. That’s how we’ll get to billions of vaccines.
Any vaccine will be 2 doses administered 28 days apart.
4 — Golden Silk Spiders
This is pretty cool and another reason I love human ingenuity. Hand-woven textile created by the silk of 1.2 million Golden Orb spiders. The project was led by Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley. It took 80 people to collect the silk and eight years to create the cape.
5 — Watching
Really enjoyed watching Fantastic Fungi, a documentary on the mushroom kingdom. It’s the first time I heard a theory that the rapid increase in the size of human brains could have been a result of early humans ingesting magic psilocybin mushrooms. Not sure how this can be proven but seems like a probable theory. Fantastic Fungi is a must-watch. A central character in the documentary is mycologist Paul Stamets who is fascinating. Check out Paul Stamets on The Joe Rogan Experience (2019) and The Tim Ferris Show (2018).
6 — Sounds of the week
Saturday morning inspired a revisit to the soundtrack from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996). It led me to the song Talk Show Host by Radiohead and eventually to their 2008 performance recorded in London, which I’m listening to while writing this.
7 — Quote of the week
Wrote this in my notebook from the talk by Bill Gates. He was speaking in the context of philanthropy, though I believe this applies more generally to a philosophy of work.
“You have a moral obligation to take your talents and give it back to society.”
— Bill Gates
Last Words
I really enjoyed taking a couple of weeks to write this longer edition. I felt like I had a lot more to pull from. I’m thinking a lot about how to structure this newsletter going forward and will likely switch to a monthly cadence. This will allow me to go deeper on a few topics I am interested in. For now, I’m going to continue publishing every two weeks. The next time you’ll hear from me is Monday, November 2.
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Thanks for reading,
Yashar