It’s valuable to understand the lifecycle of things (peoples’ careers, companies, quarterly planning cycles, etc) because there are often discontinuous jumps in understanding/legibility which one can get ahead of by being a bit more willing to put in the work than the median is.
This is probably not a huge source of alpha in e.g. publicly traded large cap companies because there are already a lot of smart people spending an appropriate amount of effort around quarterly earning announcements, but there are a lot of other lifecycle events in the world.
It’s borderline crazy that it took tech companies decades to understand that graduation changes functionally nothing and therefore you should be as willing to talk to someone six months before as six months after.
There are many more things shaped like that.
Broadly look for things which allow bootstrapping signal, look for things which allow getting ahead of gatekeepers, look for things which enable second chances and side doors, look for bets with outsized potential to the upside, and look for bets which don’t sound good at dinner.
“Bets which don’t sound good at dinner?”
A lot of investors express the desire to be contrarian, but they’re contrarian in a way which makes for sparkling and attractive dinner conversation, which is probably just about the least likely place to find contrarian alpha.
“What’s a bet which doesn’t sound good at dinner that you’d nonetheless be happy investing in?
Most business software in the world is written by a fundamentally inefficient capital stack. It wants a tiny layer of capital followed by cheap debt to operate and scale. I.e. PE.
That’s at least five different investing theses in a tweet and while they might be wrong they do have the advantage of being so utterly snooze-inducing that only people who care an irrational amount about B2B software can stand thinking about them for more than 30 minutes.
(This one actually might be quite popular these days in the right circles; got to keep moving to find the boredom frontier :) )
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