Thread by @kevinakwok

@michael_nielsen @patrickc One of my old mental models for companies was that reasonably accurate and not-too-much-overlap unpacking was that companies are made of
- team
- NATI
- Strategy

With non-arbitraged tactical insights being the things teams do that have edge and others/competition don't know.

@michael_nielsen @patrickc Most NATI don't scale, they eventually get arbitraged out. If you found one that truly was scale free or compounding eventually would be indistinguishable from strategy. And my idea was that these were the artefacts to collect on companies. If you knew one, you needed to understa

@michael_nielsen @patrickc nd what attributes of the sector/space made it such a good tactical insight, then you could generalize to any other spaces that exhibit those dynamics.

For example. I think many VCs implicitly are collecting/pattern matching NATI and then sharing them with others--hopefully not

@michael_nielsen @patrickc competitors but rather companies in diff spaces with same dynamics. Similarly I found that tracking NATI that came up in a pitch was good predictor of how much people liked the pitch. 0-1 people didn't feel like company had edge or unique insights. 2-4 is normal. 10+ wow, blown

@michael_nielsen @patrickc away and if they had 10 in a pitch must have another 30 they didn't share. And then when those arb out probably know how to find the next 40.

Then question is could you really generalize these. Plus if you and your friends got explicit about them could you increase identifying

@michael_nielsen @patrickc them + sharing them. Naturally answer was yes.

This theory was a longstanding one for me. I now realize it's since been replaced by a different mental model. I should reconcile them, but haven't.

Happy to discuss more, but yeah that's what NATI to are. Used to collect them