10/52: Detox digest

#CapitalAtRisk

Above: Handing over Bill Powers’s book, “Hamlet’s Blackberry” to Hector

The 2010s was the decade of the Entrepreneur. The 2020s will be the decade of the Investor.

“Whenever I open a gap between myself and my screens, good things happen”

William Powers in ‘Hamlet’s Blackberry’

Hamlet, King’s Cross and turning £1 into £10

I first met William Powers (who goes by Bill) at an Aspen Socrates Program in January 2020. Aspen runs these forums from time to time for people to come together and discuss (after quite a bit of pre-reading) various texts and the ideas, challenges and opportunities they foster. Of course not long after January 2020 the world changed forever and (fittingly one way or another!) one of the texts participants had to read beforehand was The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster.

I can’t remember the other texts we studied and discussed. Such was the power of The Machine Stops it was talked about the most during the program and in the WhatsApp group afterwards. When the covid lockdowns happened it felt like humanity really was living locked away relying on ‘the machine’ for permission to travel and communicate, and the word ‘dystopian’ was definitely used more in that group than any other before or since.

In the years since Aspen Bill and I have kept in touch. We’ve swapped book recommendations, introduced each other to smart people and even did a bit of research work together in early 2022.

In amongst our chats I mentioned that I’d invested in Unplugged and, given our ‘The Machine Stops’ chats and Bill’s own book, ‘Hamlet’s Blackberry’, he was intrigued.

Bill wanted to send Hector Hughes, the CEO of Unplugged, a copy of his book so that Hector could read it and would then hopefully leave it in a cabin for others to read while they detoxed from digital life for a few days. The subtitle of the book is, ‘Building a good life in the digital age’. Perfect¹.

So on my most recent trip to London I handed over the copy that Bill had posted to me from the US. I hope Hector enjoys the book as much as I am (Bill kindly sent another copy for me), however (and sorry about this Bill) I must confess that when we met up in King’s Cross I also mentioned someone else whose ideas I’d been digesting recently and whom I thought Hector ought to look up as well…

And so, to Sleep

That person is Nick Sleep and Nick, along with his partner Qais Zakaria (aka Zak), is the co-founder of the Nomad Investment Partnership. There is and there isn’t a lot to read by, or about, Nick. There’s a lot because you can read the full collection of his investment letters, here, which at 219 pages is about the same as Bill’s book and in which he shares, in fascinating detail, the partnership’s investment and fund performance. There’s also not a lot because, while there’s a fair bit of other people’s commentary on the letters and on Nick (and now with one more bit, mine), if you Google Nick you’ll not find anything else written by him beyond those letters²³.