Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 124
• Total blog posts published: 833

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 7/19/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Principles of Great Traders by George Coyle, a framework book distilling decades of interviews with elite public-market practitioners (investors and traders) into the core principles that powered their enormous returns. Coyle coauthored a book I’d already read, Market Wizards: The Next Generation, and in it he mentioned his other books and articles. I was curious about him and decided to give Principles a read since it’s pretty short.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twenty-nine was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

‍

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• 300 years of Americans getting rich – YouTube interview with Joseph Moore. Moore gives a historical perspective on how Americans built wealth, including investing in the stock market, and how indexing changed the stock market. His take on bonds beating stocks for long periods made me want to learn more about bond history. His views on real estate being a path to building a modest fortune but a terrible way to make a massive fortune stuck with me. He said that real estate has not always gone up (inflation-adjusted) for most of American history and that elevated inflation and the ability to purchase using mostly debt changed this. I loved his views on how the best way to build wealth is to solve other people’s problems, take more risks, and relocate to chase opportunity. Great interview, and I’m buying the book he wrote on this topic.
• Why blogs are dying – An interesting blog post on why the top 100 once-successful blogs are dying. Only 21 of these sites continue to grow, and the vast majority have lost 85% of their traffic. My takeaway is that in the age of AI, blogs where people document what they did to solve problems (i.e., their firsthand experiences) have moats and are performing the best. The days of getting traffic by answering questions on blog posts are over because AI can quickly summarize this kind of information.

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

I’ve been getting up to speed on the latest in e-commerce as I help a friend with his new company. The game has changed a lot since I was actively in the space. Two big things have jumped out at me so far.

First, AI is drastically changing e-commerce. Each person can do more, and AI can handle some tasks, so fewer people are needed to run an e-commerce company. I’ve heard that some large, branded e-commerce companies are running with only 8% of their revenue going toward SG&A expenses. That’s extremely low. AI is also changing marketing. Companies can produce ad creative faster, creating and testing more ads in less time without having to substantially increase overhead.

Next, a ton of branded e-commerce companies are doing over $100 million in annual revenue. Companies’ ability to drive awareness and sales has drastically changed with platforms like TikTok Shops. And it’s easier for companies to scale functions such as importing, warehousing, and fulfillment on a dime through platforms like Flexport, FBA, and FBT. The result of all this is rapid scale for some companies. When I was first starting in e‑commerce, it would take well over a decade to reach $100 million in revenue. That’s if it ever happened; it was rare, with only a handful of brands achieving it after a decade or two of grinding. Now companies can hit those numbers in two or three years!

Overall, I’m learning that the world of e-commerce is transformed. The new class of e‑commerce companies is doing more with less and going further faster.

This week I had a great conversation with someone who came across my blog and reached out. An avid reader and entrepreneur, he asked for feedback, which I gladly gave. I also shared my experience building a product similar to his and some other things I’ve learned. The conversation went longer than we’d planned. He offered to make introductions to other entrepreneurs who are avid readers, which I appreciate.

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned, online for free, encourages serendipity. I have no idea how many people out there are interested in the same things I am. Some of them may come across what I’ve shared, and it may be helpful. And a smaller subset of those who get value from what I share may reach out to discuss ideas.

I enjoy my habits of daily blogging and reading; I’ve grown a ton because of them. And recently I’ve realized that they’re leading to my connecting with like-minded people, which I didn’t expect but do enjoy.  

My takeaway is that sharing what I’ve learned online has little downside and, over the years, a growing upside.

Earlier this week I came across a quote that made me laugh:

An idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest.

I love this quote. Imperfect action by an average person beats perfect inaction by an exceptional person. Why? Because action produces information. Even if the action is wrong, you’ll learn from it and have a better idea of what you need to do to succeed. No action means no information and no progress.

When you’re doing something that doesn’t have a defined path to success, the only way to uncover the path is to walk into the unknown. Take action.

If you’re interested in hearing more about action producing information, consider listening to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s views on this. You can see the link to that interview in this post.

In yesterday’s post (see here), I shared a quarterly letter written by an institutional investor that gives his thoughts on investing in public software companies. The letter references a 1997 email exchange between Warren Buffett and Microsoft executive Jeff Raikes, which caught my attention. Here’s that section of the letter:

SaaS is an amazing business model, which makes us reluctant to give up on the category entirely without deeper analysis. Buffett always says that the best business is a royalty on another fellow’s sales—someone else puts up the capital and takes the risk, leaving you a high-margin, capital-light, recurring revenue stream (particularly relevant during troubled times like recently with the Iran war, when traditional companies face oil/margin/ consumer demand risk and can become difficult to analyze). Traditionally, these royalty-like businesses were rare, expensive, and often no longer fast-growing. Software is a pure expression of that thesis (Jeff Raikes at Microsoft made this point to Buffett in his famous 1997 email) and happens to have the added benefit of continued high growth. When that royalty is offered cheaply, it’s worth looking into more deeply.

This “famous” email is new to me. I’m really curious to understand why it’s so famous and to learn more about Raikes’s and Buffett’s thinking on royalty-like businesses.

I’m going to see if I can dig up this email exchange. If I find it, I’ll share what I learn in another post.

‍

This weekend I was doing research on X about public software companies. I wanted to understand the lens other investors are looking through to view these companies in the age of AI. I found some interesting posts, and one from Tim Liu, founder of Meditation Capital Management, particularly caught my attention. He linked to his fund’s Q2 letter, which focused exclusively on the lens he uses for investing in (and avoiding) software companies. See the post here and the link to the letter here.

He makes some good points, and his framework for evaluating software was interesting. I noticed that software stocks are trading as a “basket” (i.e., they’re correlated and they move together), but I found that the stocks in that basket are very different. The companies all sell software, but they serve different types of customers (enterprise vs. SMBs) and solve different problems (e.g., marketing vs. financial reporting). I think this basket approach the stock market is taking to valuing software companies will provide an opportunity to savvy investors who do the work to understand which companies in these baskets are unique and will thrive in the age of AI instead of being displaced by AI.

The part I found most useful was his framework for thinking about how AI will impact software. A lot of his thinking is logical, but I disagree with his view that customers will rebuild and customize core software that’s key to their business operations. Some will, but the majority, especially SMBs, won’t. As I shared in this post, rebuilding and maintaining a critical system is a heavy lift that carries a ton of risk. Many companies can get a better return on the time, energy, and cost required to build a system from scratch. I think a more likely path is that companies will create apps to handle niche use cases (like specific processes) and integrate those apps into their off-the-shelf, mission-critical systems (i.e., pump the data back into the system of record). This will allow them to use their domain expertise to solve the problem in the way they see fit while avoiding a mammoth allocation of resources to build and maintain a new system.

Overall, I enjoyed Tim’s letter, and it’s a great read for anyone curious about how institutional public market investors are evaluating investment in SaaS companies in the age of AI.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 123
• Total blog posts published: 826

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 7/12/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Unknown Market Wizards by Jack Schwager, a biographical anthology profiling eleven people who generated outsized returns in public markets. I wanted to compare and contrast this book with his latest release, which I read last week (see here).

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twenty-eight was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Seek advice on how to fail – YouTube interview with Alix Pasquet III. I love his idea about leveraging inversion by asking people who’ve had success at what you want to do, “What would I need to do to fail?” This helps you build a list of things to avoid and develop pattern recognition so you can spot those things if you start doing them. He also talked about another idea: that price memory triggers cognitive biases like the endowment effect, which can lead to avoidable losses because you don’t recognize threats (see here). And I love his thoughts on approaching successful people to bring them value, not extract value from them.
• Human intelligence = hierarchical memory + predictions – YouTube interview with Omer Cedar. He explains how humans use hierarchical memory and predictions to think. That’s hard to simulate, so machines and AI can’t yet think like humans. He also talks about his view that the propagation curve is driven by new information being recognized over time by investors (see here). This supports his view that change in the state of information is more important than the state of information (see here). It also supports his view that the amount of a surprise correlates to the amount of alpha available because of new information.

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, I’ve been working with several entrepreneurs and moderating a monthly accountability group for them. We had our third meeting this week, and it went well (lessons learned coming in another post). I’m considering working with another entrepreneur on this project. I had a good conversation with him this week. He recognizes the value in these groups and has been in one himself. The idea is that together we could moderate additional accountability groups. I’m not sure what will come of our conversation, but it’s encouraging that other entrepreneurs are open to moderating these groups alongside me.