Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.