Hey guys, happy Wednesday. Today I’m trying another new format going forward on the newsletter. I’m going to stick to just writing about my last week in business, money, and life. Each newsletter will be relatively short to read and at the end I’ll add some links to some things I found interesting.
A Moroccan Get Together
The past two weeks I’ve been in Morocco for our annual team offsite.
This year was special because we brought in the most amount of team members together than ever before from many different countries.
Two ops people traveled from the Philippines, an engineer from Argentina and one from Egypt, a part time QA / content contractor from Serbia, and my cofounder Shane and I traveled from the U.S.
And while I was seeing 4 of our team members for the first time in-person, for many people in the the team this was the farthest they had ever traveled in their life by a long shot.
Spending time together at the offsite made me realize how much I miss working in-person. It’s much easier to communicate through projects, tap people on the shoulder to ask questions, and overall have a fun time working as you build up inside jokes. But of course focusing on work as the CEO I realized was near impossible at times when everyone has things they need to tell you or ask you about.
We also tried some team bonding exercises. I tried to get everyone to do this betting prize game where each person got a set number of chips and had to make bets to try to end up with the most number of chips at the end of the week. But besides a few impressive exercise challenges in the first day - eventually people kind of forgot about it or didn’t participate.
One exercise that I felt added some value in person was running an “unsolicited feedback” session. Everyone was uneasy at first when I began, but I think the benefits and doing it in person was really illuminating as we can acknowledge each other’s strengths and weaknesses and not hurtful because we’re giving the feedback truthfully and from a place of respect.
I also learned a lot about Islam and what’s it like living in an country dominated by Islamic beliefs. Ramadan started last Tuesday along with a growing 90 degree day. An entire city of people is essentially not drinking water or eating food from sunrise to sundown while getting baked in the heat. Our Egyptian engineer suffered through this for a few days before heading back home.
I’m excited to see how the team operates after the offsite. When the person you’re discussing projects with or delegating tasks is not a 2D live image, I think we’ll ideally have more things to bond over and more empathy for the person behind the screen.
Interesting Things to Share
I finished The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder during my trip. It tells a story of the shipwreck of The Wager back in the early 1700s off the barren coast of Patagonia. It’s an insane journey and reminded me of the chapter in Hawaii by James Michener where Christian missionaries sailing to Hawaii and having to go through the Sea of Magellan. While Hawaii was historical fiction (though likely based on real journals), it’s pretty crazy to read about how much regular people suffered through sailing and getting from place to place. In The Wager, the amount of starvation, scurvy, and tales of survival are almost too brutal to imagine. Yes it’s a good book if you need a reminder of why your life in any comparison does not suck.
Ketamine is going through the hype cycle right now which means a lot of people are associating ketamine = good for you. And while there is a lot of popularity in using ketamine in place of alcohol, the truth is probably more like no drugs > any amount of drugs but small amounts of ketamine is better than binge drinking alcohol and getting hungover. And so because ketamine can be addictive, this rise in popularity in ketamine is probably going to slowly lead to worse results for a certain set of people for the next few years before things shift back again.
I’m currently reading a compilation of Buffet’s shareholder’s letters from Berkshire Hathaway. Currently I’m on year 1981 and that’s about 10% of the way through the book. For reference, he started writing them in 1965 when he took over 49% of Berkshire Hathaway. So far the book has been a gold mine and probably one of the best business books I’ve read in my life. While I’ve read his huge biography before “The Snowball Effect” - I feel like this book is a better representation of his actual thought process. And it’s super fun to follow along on this journey that Buffet is taking in building this empire. Reading the book also takes a lot of time. Many times I have to re-read passages, ask ChatGPT to explain whole paragraphs, or look up term definitions for terms I don’t understand. It almost feels like I’m getting a mini-MBA from just reading the letters. And it’s extremely inspirational and giving me ideas towards how I might structure my own kind of holding company.
Tyler Tringas reflects on five years running a fund specifically investing in non-venture growth companies. It’s really interesting to get perspective here because even when I run a non-VC software company, almost everything I get exposed to in San Francisco is either FAANG and tech companies or venture startups. One thing I found interesting was that the fund didn’t have a way to deal with founders starting multiple businesses. It makes sense that if you’re a bootstrapped founder building a non-VC business, one reason why might be because you don’t want to work crazy hours but another is to have the flexibility to be profitable or do multiple things in lieu of intensive growth. So creating a business model of investment returns is still kind of hard with these constraints.