1/An interesting thing happened tonight. I was scrolling through clubhouse and found WileyCEO, Godfather of Grime (kicked off Twitter in July for antisemitic tweets) speaking. So I tweeted this (and included a screen shot, later deleted as I found out TOS don't allow it ...

No one is going to do it for you

A thread...

As a founder, if you won't show up every single day, despite how you are feeling, or how the startup is doing or what the press is writing about you, or your cofounders not working out, or your product failing or your customers shouting

No one is going to do it for you

As a student, if you won't do things that scare you, that make you feel nervous, that challenge you, that intimidate you, that you have always wanted to do but never gathered the courage to

No one is going to do it for you

In your first job, if you are not going to make an effort to know how things have happened before and why, to meet new people, to seek help, to ask for feedback, to be patient with results, to not seek "impact" in the first month itself

No one is going to do it for you

If as a son/daughter you are not going to realize what your parents went through while growing up, that they want the same things from your life that you want for your self, that their path is different but there are reasons why

No one is going to do it for you

1/ Vanna’s a widow maker... waging war with her & Gary is exhausting... we were able to take a textbook short at 3803 and take a profit On half at 3771. We will look to add more in a similar way on tomorrow morning’s likely vanna rally again... looking for exuberance once again

2/ in that 9-10am CST window. The growing chorus of bulls emboldened by Vanna’s continued support the last few days gives me confidence that this opportunity will be there again. W/Gary & Vanna behind them the retail exuberance is rising to a fever pitch. This is exactly what we

3/ want to see. But what happens when their backup is gone?? Who’s going to buy this market at these increasingly higher levels this week. Better yet who’s going to buy it @ lower levels when they are forced to sell next week? Not Vanna. She’ll be @ the beach. It ain’t cool bein’

4/ no Jive Turkey so close to Thanksgiving (OpEx)... Bear Steepening of the yield curve took a breather yesterday & so did the stair steps, which was a bit discouraging, no 2 ways about it. But those pressures are far from over. But... remember w/ Vanna still at 1/2 force SPX was

5/ still just unchanged. W/out EOD vanna flows where would the market have been yesterday? The NDX generals continue to be violently shot 1 by 1 as the rotation continues. The last generals will be BTC & TSLA. Watch them closely... listen closely into the rally. The fear of Covid

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.

If you’re a Startup trying to compete with a Megacorp—the 800-pound Gorilla in the space—you need to understand the tax inherent to being a Gorilla

And then you need to make that tax work against the Gorilla—with your product's positioning & features

A thread on Gorilla taxes👇🏾

1/
Collaboration Tax

Getting two or more product groups at a megacorp to collaborate on creating a seamless end user experience is the hardest problem in computer science.

(I am not joking)

Examples of Collaboration Tax:

Calendly exists because the Gmail team & Calendar team haven’t worked together on creating a more seamless experience for that use case.

Loom might succeed because the Gmail, Video, Meet teams at Google are probably too busy with their own goals.

The takeaway for startups:

If you can create meaningful value by seamlessly integrating features of two or more distinct Gorilla products, you will typically have a lot of runway before the Gorilla can get its act together and eliminate its Collaboration Tax.

2/
Denominator Tax

Once a Gorilla’s product reaches massive scale (i.e. the denominator for its metrics gets very large), the pressure of OKRs & incentives will often force the Gorilla’s product teams to prioritize breadth of usage more than depth of usage.