Friends and family joke that I have no shame about asking for what I want, especially when traveling and in other service-related situations. They’re right, and I own it.

I view knowing what you want and asking for it as a positive trait. So many people accept what’s offered to them in life. Life happens to them. They may want more, but they never take action to try to get more. I’m not wired like that. By taking the step of saying what I want and asking for it, I’m increasing the chances of getting the outcome I’m aiming for. I’m also making others aware of my goal or expectation.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying it’s okay to bully people into doing what you want or ask in a negative or nasty way. I don’t believe in that. I try to ask for what I want in a manner and tone that mirror how I would want someone to treat me.

I’ve explained to family and friend that I think about this in terms of risk and reward. In many of these situations, the upside dwarfs the downside. The upside is often a more enjoyable experience or a positive impact on you and those with you. The downside is just hearing no.

Family and friends still joke with me about this. When they do, I remind them of the famous Wayne Gretzky quote: “You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.”

‍

This is my two-hundredth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Learning – My learning survey started out as a silly exercise, but it’s turning into something resembling customer discovery. I’m surprised how interested people are when I ask about their learning habits.
• Focus – I paid close attention to how often people’s attention is pulled in multiple directions every day. The ability to focus appears to be becoming less common. Those who have it and use it will have a leg up on life.
• Trends – Jeff Bezos started Amazon after learning that the internet was growing at an insane annual rate. I’ve been thinking about new trends that are growing rapidly but aren’t well understood.

Week two hundred was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

My learning survey is ongoing and I’ve learned some interesting things. One of them I shared in a post a few days ago. Today I had a good chat with a VC investor. I’ve known him for a few years and think highly of him, so I was curious about his learning habits. The best investors and entrepreneurs are frequently trying to figure things out that others haven’t, so they tend to make learning a priority.

Our conversation was helpful, and he mentioned one big thing in several different ways: he wants to learn more but doesn’t feel like he has enough time.

I hadn’t thought about this, but it makes sense. Investors are busy people with jam-packed calendars. Squeezing in time to find material that contains the knowledge you want and then consuming it is difficult.

Now I’m wondering if feeling like time limits the ability to satisfy a desire to learn is common.

I recently caught up with a friend working at an investment firm. He’s been wondering when venture capital will escape its downturn. Many factors are contributing to the downturn. I shared two things I think need to happen: venture capitalists need to be able to sell companies to public market investors, and those companies need to be received well by public markets.

IPO activity and performance are important. Venture capital investors need (1) overall stock-market sentiment and direction to be positive (investors are in a buying mood) and (2) technology IPOs to perform well (not tank). If these two things happen, we’ll likely see more IPOs, and the venture capital industry could be on an upswing again.

As of the writing of this post, stock market sentiment is positive, and the direction of the market has been up (disclaimer: this could change at any moment). The NASDAQ Composite Index, as of today, is ~15,500. For context, the all-time closing high for this index was 16,057 on November 19, 2021. So we’re ~3.5% below the all-time high. This is encouraging, especially when you consider that the index was ~10,500 at the beginning of 2023.

The missing piece, though, is technology IPO performance. I followed the most recent high-profile technology IPOs, those of Klaviyo and Instacart (see here and here). Both companies went public in September 2023. Today I checked to see how they’re performing. Both are trading near the lowest levels at which they’ve traded as public companies and below where their IPOs were priced. Both companies priced at $30. As of this writing, Instacart is trading at $24.80, which is 17.3% below the IPO price. Klaviyo is trading at $24.74, or 17.5% below IPO price. During that same period, the NASDAQ went from ~13,500 to ~15,500, an increase of 14.8%. The performance of either company’s stock could change anytime, but as of today it hasn’t been great.

This is something I’ll keep an eye on. I suspect these and other factors will be key to venture capital’s downturn changing course.

I caught up with an entrepreneur friend this week. I’m doing my learning survey, so I asked him about his learning habits. That led to an interesting comment from him that stuck with me:

How I learned and how my kids will learn will be drastically different. I had to go to college to learn from people who possessed knowledge about jobs I wanted. My kids likely won’t need to go to college. The knowledge is more accessible now.

He went on to say this:

The jobs that my kids will have as young adults don’t even exist now. What people do for work will be so different from what prior generations did for work. How we learn and work is changing faster than people realize.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation because of my newfound curiosity about how people learn. The more I think about it, the more I believe my friend is right. If he is, then we’re likely to see disruption in education, which will create opportunity. These are early thoughts, and they’re subject to change. I want to think about this more and discuss it with other smart people.

Recently I listened to an interview in which the guest shared his favorite class in high school. It wasn’t a regular class; it was a work–study arrangement his senior year. He got to leave campus every day to work at a local business. He was paid for his time and received course credit. This work–study class was his favorite because he made money, which allowed him to buy and do things he enjoyed.

My favorite class in high school was woodshop. I loved it. I’d spent a summer working for a homebuilder and discovered I enjoyed woodworking. The teacher realized I knew what I was doing, so he gave me free rein. I could build whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t cause trouble or disrupt class (which the rest of the class did daily). It was the last class of the day, so he’d let me leave early when I was finished.

As part of my first “official” business, I sold speakers to friends and usually gave them a design for speaker boxes, too. They’d have to find someone to build the box for them, which wasn’t always easy. One day I realized I could use my time in woodshop class to build those boxes for my customers. I asked the teacher, and he thought it was a great idea. From then on, I was building and selling speaker boxes in woodshop class. It was a great hustle because I didn’t have to pay for materials, and I ended up showing a few classmates how to build their own speaker boxes.

Woodshop was my favorite class because it ended up being an entrepreneurial class. It allowed me to work on my business and make money, which made me feel financially independent from my parents. It also allowed me to share my knowledge about building speaker boxes with my classmates and do woodworking, which I find fun.

I was listening to a podcast today that mentioned a quote from Bruce Lee that I hadn’t heard before:

If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

I like this quote. It speaks to the power of mindset in what you can achieve. If you believe there are limits to what you can accomplish, then you will unknowingly limit yourself in everything you do in life. When you’re trying to accomplish anything hard, periods when you feel your progress has stalled are inevitable. But you have a choice in how you handle them. You can view them as your having reached your limit, or you can persevere and push through them and go further.

Over the years, I’ve learned that mindset matters a lot. For example, when exercising, I’ve always been able to lift more or run farther or faster than I thought possible. I learned that limits hinder my growth. I learned to keep pushing as hard and as far as I can (without hurting myself). It’s hard and painful in the moment, but when it’s done, I’ve always been glad I kept pushing. This approach led to achieving new personal fitness goals and realizing I’m physically capable of much more than I thought.

I have a personal goal to learn something daily and a personal system for doing so. I recently shared my system with a friend, who told me my habits are abnormal (in a good way). He doesn’t believe the majority of people are learning daily, or even weekly for that matter. If they are, it’s because it was pushed on them.

This got me thinking. I wonder how people are approaching learning (if at all). How do they figure out how to solve unfamiliar problems? What tools are their default for learning? Are they proactive about what they learn or reactive to information pushed to them via social media?

I decided there’s only one way to find out: start asking people. I’m going to spend time casually asking friends and family about their learning habits over the next few weeks. I’m curious and excited to see what responses I get.

This is my one-hundred-ninety-ninth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Idea – This week I listened to someone share an idea they used to build their business. The idea isn’t new, but the insights he shared about the idea were new to me and resonated. Something clicked in my head as I listened and got my wheels turning. I’ve been thinking about it the last few days, and I’m excited about digging into it more next week.  
• Reading tool – I played with this new tool. It’s going to be a lot more work than I originally thought to digitize the highlights in each book I read. Not the outcome I hoped for, but I think the value in doing this will far exceed the effort. Most people who read books rarely review their highlights. When they do, they usually have to go to each individual book to find the highlights. I think the value from aggregating highlights from various books, having them be searchable, and regularly reviewing them could be big.

Week one hundred ninety-nine was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

One of the things I like to think about when evaluating a business model is the cost of scaling it. For example, if a company is in the business of manufacturing and selling widgets, to grow sales it would need to produce more widgets and then sell them. A cost is associated with each additional widget sold. To produce and store more widgets, it would need to incur costs to increase production and warehousing capacity. These investments likely must occur before the number of widgets sold can increase. The widget company has high replication costs, which impacts the scalability of its business model (unless it has unlimited cash).

Conversely, if a company is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, it’s selling a software product that’s delivered digitally over the internet. Incremental sales don’t require producing more software. People can just buy the existing software at will. The software company can increase sales without incurring replication costs (for simplicity, I’m ignoring costs for R&D, sales, marketing, etc.). In an ideal world (which business isn’t), the software company has low, very low, or nonexistent replication costs, which means the business model is highly scalable.

Businesses with low replication costs and the potential for infinite scalability are intriguing. As I evaluate business models through this lens, businesses that don’t appear attractive on the surface become interesting opportunities, especially if their product or solution could be distributed digitally.