Learning from Troy Carter (who discovered Lady Gaga) ⭐️- Downturn in VC coming up? 📉-Learning from Morgan Housel 💸- Advice from a French CTO ⚙️- Real time data is the new normal ⏱
Taking a distance is your best ally for growth.
Episode 55. 👋🏼 Ready to read and learn?
Spring is coming and this is the right time to (re)wire your brain 👇
#1. Learning from Troy Carter
TLDR From 5 lessons you can learn from Troy Carter’s relentless determination, an interview published in Trapital on March 19, 2021. Takeaways from Patrick Kervern.
Troy Carter started pretty much from zero. Troy is now the founder of Trapital and is one of the biggest producer of US rap. He is sharing some lessons he learnt from life:
Use failure as tailwind not as a head wind. Troy’s grandmother used to say “When you are down, you never fall”. “You have to find the strength to give the last punch. Because this last punch can be your winning ticket”.
Favor slow cooking rather than micro waving. Cultivate your first 50 fans and create inflexion points (ie. opportunities to build your brand and your business 10x more popular).
Build your own board. You are never too old nor too rich to live without a mentor. There is no shortcut to success. Many people never achieve on their targets because they live too much in theory and do not dedicate enough attention to action.
#2. Is this the beginning of the end in VC?
TLDR From Is venture capital ready to enter an edge of reason?, an article published in a blog called “Odyssey” on March 2022.
Investments in startups fell in February 22 as a consequence of many macroeconomic situations (Covid, Ukraine…) and startup valuations fell down.
What can we anticipate next?
1 | Invest massively in seed- and early-stage ventures. Back to basics. Like in any crisis, it is the right moment to bet on projects that will emerge from this situation as winners.
2 | Switch your investment thesis from “growth at all costs” to “reasonable growth + profitability”. This makes those companies eligible to more exit scenarios. This strategy prevails when tomorrow is nothing but certain.
We will most likely witness the return of bootstrapping and the end inefficient cash burn.
#3. Learning from Morgan Housel
TLDW From Morgan Housel - The psychology of money, picking the right game, and the $6 million janitor, a video from the Tim Ferriss Show shared on Youtube on March 2, 2022. Takeaways from Patrick Kervern.
99% of Warren Buffet’s wealth came after age 59 and 97% (of his wealth) came after age 65.
A common denominator of people is that they want independance and autonomy. That's the most powerful and universal thing money can do. This is so overlooked.
There is a huge thread of differenciation through content in the Venture Capital world. Writing a check is not enough. Many firms just write checks.
Media is about people. "I don't read the Atlantic I read Derek Thomson. I don't read the New York Times, I don't read the Wall Street Journal, I read Jason Zweig.
Most funds success comes from 5% of the investments. That changes the views of success. Even in a boring Index fund like the Russel 3000, from 1980 to 2010, 40% of companies went out of business.
There is a difference between being rational and reasonable. No one saw the big historic and economic events coming although they look obvious in hindsights and that is a constant in human history. If you are only planning for the risk you can imagine, than 10 times out of 10 you are going to miss the biggest risk that actually hits you.
Great writers are great observers & great communicators
90% of my writing happens on walks.
#4. Advice from a French CTO (Quitoque)
TLDL From Quitoque, nouveau CTO, 11 principes pour réussir sa transition, a podcast published in Tech Manager on March 23, 2022.
Here is a paradox when you manage a team. You have to accept to lose time to avoid crashing into the wall.
People leaving your team is not necessarily a bad thing. You need to anticipate your new organisation because driving change is more complex while delivering projects. When you are too late in changing your organisation, you will be defensive pressure to cope with workload; you will face unhappy coworkers that are not willing to change. You will end up losing lots of time to figure out a system that works out.
Taking a distance is your best ally for growth. The more your team grows, the more your impact will transform from execution to anticipation. At the beginning, you are part of this change, you are super hands-on. At some point, get ready to pull the plug to give yourself the time you need to anticipate the future.
#5. Real Time data is the new normal
TLDR From How the modern data stack is going real time, an article published in Techcrunch on March 18, 2022.
Traditional data infrastructure is becoming too slow to align with the real time needs with live business realities. The old “batch” paradigms (one big update, once per day, slow to query) is now being replaced by more granular, higher-frequency updates on a continual basis (multiple updates per second, fast to query), leading to much fresher data and quicker time to insight.
Real time data infrastructure now prevails with:
“Streaming small packets of data from A to B at high frequency and volume (Ex: Apache Kafka, Redpanda, Apache Pulsar)
Filtering and transforming streaming data in-flight via stream processing tools (Ex: Apache Flink, Apache Samza, Decodable)
Real-time analytics that lets analysts get fresh, up-to-date responses to their business queries at low latency (Ex: Materialize, ClickHouse, Tinybird)
Real-time or online machine-learning models that continuously adapt and learn from data and generate predictions on-the-fly (Ex: Tecton)”.
Just look at 2 real life companies that are already very much relying on live data decisioning: Netflix (Developed >2000 real time use cases to personalize the user experience) and Uber (“multiple petabytes of data and trillions of messages per day, continuously collected from Uber drivers, riders and other users”).
Real time data is the new normal.
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