Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
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Premature financial deregulation in south-east Asia led to a proliferation of family-business-controlled banks which did nothing to support exportable manufacturing and which indulged in vast amounts of illegal related-party lending. It was a story of banks being captured by narrow, private sector interests whose aims were almost completely unaligned with those of national economic development.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
this romantic insistence on seeing a dark shadow behind each invention is as dogmatic as the belief in the inevitability of progress.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Below are a few that subsequently worked well for me. Note that I don’t need to satisfy all of them, but I do want to satisfy most of them: If it has a single founder, the founder must be technical. Two technical co-founders are ideal. I must be eager to use the product myself. This rules out many great companies, but I want a verified market I understand. Related to the previous point: consumer-facing product/service (e.g., Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) or small-business focused product/service (e.g., Shopify), not big enterprise software. These are companies whose valuations I can directly impact through my platform, promotion to my audience, introductions to journalists, etc. More than 100K active users OR serial founder(s) with past exits OR more than 10K paying customers. Whenever possible, I want to pour gasoline on the fire, not start the fire. More than 10% month-on-month activity growth. Clean “cap table,” minimal previous financing (or none), no bridge rounds. U.S.–based companies or companies willing to create U.S.–based investable entities. Shopify started in Canada, for instance. Have the founders ever had crappy service jobs, like waiting tables or bussing at restaurants? If so, they tend to stay grounded for longer. Less entitlement and megalomania usually means better decisions and better drinking company, as this stuff normally takes quite a few years.
Tools of Titans
Timothy Ferriss
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