"There are tricks in startups, as there are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem. Someone who knows zero about fundraising, but has made something users really love, will have an easier time raising money than someone who knows every trick in the book but has a flat usage graph." -Paul Graham (2014 class video lecture)
David Kass with 10 Highlights from the “Becoming Warren Buffett” documentary [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK) [And the quote I posted on Twitter while I was watching it last night was: "It's kind of crazy to spend your life painting if you're painting a subject you don't want to look at." -Warren Buffett]
Brexit as a game of Chicken - by Tim Harford (LINK)
The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion - by Gail Tverberg (LINK)
Inspired Media - by Ben Thompson (LINK)
William Ury on the Wavemaker Conversations podcast (LINK)
Related book: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving InBook of the day [H/T @John_Hempton]: Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
A nice chat between Patrick O’Shaughnessy and Brent Beshore (audio) (LINK)
If you don't have time for the entire O’Shaughnessy/Beshore podcast above, you may at least want to go to the 1:51:14 mark for the brief discussion on meeting Charlie Munger. Beshore mentions (at about the 1:55:00 mark) some advice he took away from the Munger meeting:
One of the biggest pieces of advice that I took out of it was that he said, "Don't feel like you need to be impressive to people." He said that for the longest time, [it was] the single biggest thing that affected his life negatively.... He said that his need to show people that he was right, and that he was smarter than them, and that they were doing something stupid...he said he would have been much more successful than he was if he had just been able to, I think he said "disguise your judgment."
This also reminded me of similar advice Munger gave in his 2007 USC School of Law commencement speech (VIDEO). In my notes, I recorded it as "My advice to you is to learn sometimes to keep your light under a bushel." And in Poor Charlie's Almanack, in the longer transcript of that talk, that particular piece of advice is written as:
Even though I was a good poker player when I was young, I wasn't good enough at pretending when I thought I knew more than my supervisors did. And I didn't try as hard at pretending as would have been prudent. So I gave a lot of offense. Now, I'm generally tolerated as a harmless eccentric who will soon be gone. But, coming up, I had a difficult period to go through. My advice to you is to be better than I was at keeping insights hidden.