In November 2010, Nick Brown happened to find himself at a Manchester conference attending a talk by popular British psychologist Richard Wiseman, who had written a book called The Luck Factor. “Basically, the way to be lucky is to just put yourself in situations where good things can happen,” Brown remembers, “because more good things will happen to you than bad on any given day, but nothing...
I have a strange attraction to worthless currencies, or those on the path to being worthless. Most people just take currencies for granted, never wondering where their value comes from nor understanding how it sometimes disappears. No one truly knows those answers, but sometimes we get accidental experiments that help us understand. The latest of those is happening now in Yemen. As described in...
I don’t follow the European stock markets but from time to time see and hear them referred to as a Bourse. Ever wonder where that term comes from? Googling doesn’t easily provide an answer. Turns out it’s a family name. The real story is related to the true stories of the original stock markets trading under a tree in a square or on a street. Turns out stock markets were not...
This week in Visual Capitalist is an infographic on American companies that failed in China. Which made me wonder… what are the biggest Chinese companies and have any of them succeeded at expanding in the United States? So what are the biggest Chinese companies? There are two ways to answer that question. The Wikipedia answer, which includes the government-owned corporations like the power...
Two interesting infographics from The Visual Capitalist. The first showing the distribution of GDP around the world and the second, the size of the global middle class both now and where it’s headed by 2030. Do remember that GDP is a flawed index, but ignoring that, what pops out to me on this graphic is just how insignificant the oil wealth of the Middle East is in comparison to North...
We take much of modern economic infrastructure for granted, including stock markets and the idea of publicly traded companies. While you may have heard the anecdotal stories about the first public companies having their shares traded under a tree in Amsterdam, London, or on Wall Street in New York City, the very first company (in the West) to sell shares to the public was The Marchants...
The Long Twentieth Century is more than its name describes, a very long and detailed economic history of not just the 20th Century but global Western capital of four eras: Venice/Genoa, Dutch Empire, British Empire, United States. TL;DR, with an emphasis on the don’t read… the interesting part of this book isn’t the 20th Century nor the Long 18th Century either, as both of those...
The Federal Reserve published their first public paper on digital dollars, a.k.a. Central Bank Digital Currencies, a.k.a. the dollar CBDC. This, of course, is spurred by the popularity of cryptocurrencies and the questions of whether they will replace the government issued fiat currencies. At a high level, this paper says nothing interesting. A bone dry nothingburger. But what is interesting is...
Compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) is a very common metric when looking at how fast a startup is growing. Unfortunately neither Excel nor Google has a formula named CAGR. Instead, you need to use the RRI function. When you do this, there is one pitfall to avoid. There are three parameters to RRI. The first is the number of values. The second is the starting value. The third is the ending value...
I teach the important skill of Seeing the Future to both entrepreneurs and investors, but before stumbling on this conversation, I had never before seen this framework of success in startups based on “the long term view”. By necessity, founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup. But great founders do something different at the same...
