Piles
#CapitalAtRisk
It’s World Book Day
And I start reading *a lot* of books. I don’t finish them all. I’ve tried a Kindle, but it didn’t work for me, so I have a ‘to read’ pile on my desk.
This year I’ve read Mastery and re-read The Education of a Value Investor.
I’m halfway through The Tools, just started Paper Belt on Fire and am re-reading Influence.
I’m not sure if that’s the best approach to learning but, like working with lots of startups, I like to have lots on my plate at once.
I read most days for around one to two hours — it’s part of how I engineer Parkinson’s Law, which I’ll tell you about in another post.
Some highlights from the books in the photograph:
The Education of a Value Investor is the book I’ve re-read the most. I go through it each year and always pick out something new that’s helped develop my investing focus. This year I was reminded of the importance of two things in particular:
1. The significance of the order of DD research. Guy starts with the least biased and most objective sources first — that’s typically the public filings and audit letters. These are prepared with good deal of care and attention, often checked by lawyers, and so have the least ‘salesy’ language or hype.
2. Check if the management are going through any difficult personal experiences that might affect their ability to act in the best interests of their shareholders. I like to think I get a pretty good handle on this by evaluating founders over a long period time before investing, but being more direct with my questioning is something I’ve added to my process after re-reading Guy’s.
I heard about Paper Belt on Fire from the author, Michael Gibson, when he was on Danielle Newnham’s podcast, here. I was halfway around a 20km run, stopped and ordered the book on Amazon. Michael says that, “Character is revealed over time”, which obviously resonated. Michael realised this in the early days of the Thiel Fellowship — in the beginning they selected potential Fellows on their academic cred’s, prizes won and the like but realised that by following under-the-radar people for a while they could find the really smart people who bent the rules, had a disregard for the conventions and had actually created something interesting. With his Thiel Fellowship colleague, Danielle Strachman, Michael went on to co-found 1517, a fund that backs, “dropouts, renegade students & deep tech scientists at the earliest stages of their companies”.
And More Money than God is a helpful reminder that hedge funds were once new, radical and convention-breaking investment structures. It’s Alfred Winslow Jones who is credited with coining the term ‘hedged fund’ and with setting up the first hedge fund structure in 1949. Hedge funds came from a desire to not be restricted by the heavy regulations. It’s a good reminder for me that VC and the way it’s run now isn’t set in stone and a bit of creativity with structure might be in order.
I love discovering new books and re-reading the best. I’ll get stuck into the rest of the above pile as we go through 2023 but, with my own book about 9others out in July I’ll be encouraging you to add that one to your pile.
In other news
Great stuff from Hector Hughes, Ben Elliott and the Unplugged gang in their investor update this week. In particular:
👨👩👧👦 Community reviews (switching off & on again is good but don't just take my word for it). Read a sellection of the reviews here.
🏕 Flexa® Careers's Out of Office wellbeing benefit with Molly Johnson-Jones & Maurice O'Brien (strategically planned for just, *just*, after finishing raising their Seed round). That post is here.
📞 And to read about how multitasking is a myth (your brain also needs space, which makes sense) look here.
Important: None of these posts are investment advice. If you are thinking about investing you should seek the advice of a suitably qualified independent advisor.