Over the years, I've tried to keep a list of criteria for deciding on whether to take on a project.

Here are the 9 questions I ask myself now
1. If you didn’t make any money, would you still have had a great time?
2. Is the project a purple cow? Imagine having a conversation at the last cocktail party (or even better, actually have one) do people’s eyebrows raise and say “cool"
3. Does the project leverage your unique ability? Why are you uniquely qualified to do it?
4. Imagine that you are selling a million dollars-worth of this product. Are you happy with how you spend your time?
5. Do you respect your customers? Would you be happy to see one if you were walking down the beach on vacation?
6. Does this solve a pain point people already know they have? I.e. Can you sell this without need to re-educate the market?

If not, can you position it that way?
7. It the problem a 'tooth-ache level' pain point? Will they do anything to get rid of it?

Does it itch or does it burn? (You want something that burns)
8. Is it something I Personally Need - Are you scratching your own itch?
9. Does it follow @RichardKoch8020's Star Principle - Is the market growing at least 10% YoY so that overall size of the pie is growing?

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More from @TaylorPearsonMe

10 Sep
1/ The investment management business is turning into the media business, but most investment managers don't realize it.
2/ This is a natural result of aggregation theory (stratechery.com/aggregation-th…) applying itself to the investment management business.
3/ On the internet, attention is scarce and anyone that can aggregate a specific type of attention will be able to aggregate that and "match" it with investment management.
Read 11 tweets
9 Sep
Thought-provoking interview on how American politics really works and how elections are really won.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Some of my favorite bits 👇
Voters have a few radical views that they are the most passionate about so candidates tend to be more radical than people that vote for them
Whatever issues are getting most talked about is what people end up voting on.

"In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down."
Read 6 tweets
4 Sep
I believe for most investors, the easiest way to improve their risk-adjusted returns is not to get better at "picking winners" but to get better at diversification and portfolio construction.

A short 🧵 on why that is and how to do it...
As a simple example, let’s say you have the ability to buy two assets out of a possible three choices.
The first two assets (Asset A and Asset B) have positive returns but are highly correlated; they track one another and the business cycle. Both do well when markets are up and poorly when markets are down.
Read 23 tweets
18 Aug
Has any bitcoin/Austrian person written a good analysis of Bitcoin in light of Graeber's debt thesis?

As I understand it, a key point of his theory is that inequality grows over time and so you need some sort of reset every 100 years or so in the form of a debt jubilee.
This is because economics ultimately becomes political.

When .1% have everything then everyone else just comes to kill them and take their stuff so the wealthy end up either forgiving the debt or letting it be inflated away.
Is there a good refutation to this point?

If it is true, what are possible futures? Some Diamond Age/Snow Crash city-state future with high levels of inequality? Something else?
Read 10 tweets
3 Aug
1/ Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order is one of the most insightful books on understanding what's going on today in geopolitics and political systems that I've read.

Here's a short summary 🧵
2/ At the core of his thinking is the notion of an institution as a "stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior that persist beyond the tenure of individual leaders."
3/ Different Countries today face one of 3 challenges

1. No functioning institutions - E.g. Post-Qaddafi Libya

2. Decaying institutions - E.g. United States

3. Social change outstripping existing institutions - E.g. Turkey and Brazil
Read 18 tweets
30 Jul
The Farmer's Fable

Today, I’d like to tell you a little story about a farmer named Bill.

If you’re not into farming, it just so happens that Bill discovers one of the most important principles in investing and decision-making in this story, so there’s also that.
Anyway, back to Bill.

Bill grows crops. In a good season, Bill harvests 150 seeds for every 100 seeds that he plants.

That’s a 50% growth rate!
If Bill does that every year, his farming business will grow exponentially. 1 kilogram of seeds grows into 1.5kg of seeds in the first year. 1.5kg of seeds grows into 2.25kg of seeds the next year, then into 3.375kg of seeds the next year, and so on.
Read 25 tweets

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