Marcellus's #3Longs3Shorts this week: An interview with Ravi Ashwin, the age of 'techno-politics' and why Peter Thiel is such an influential thinker are amongst our 6 curated picks to read this week.
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LR1: R Ashwin: ‘I’ve always been good at assessing batsmen, but now I think I’ve taken it to another level | Sidharth Monga interviews R Ashvin | Cricinfo
LR3: Great Protocol Politics – Bitcoin, Ethereum & Web3 Are Already Reshaping the World | Parag Khanna, Balaji Srinivasan | Foreign Policy
There are 10 ways in which the world is transitioning from the age of geopolitics to one of techno-politics! bit.ly/3pOYUKz
SR1: Buggy, Messy & all that | Anand Sridharan | Buggy Humans in a Messy World
Humility is important in what is largely a probabilistic life. Anand brings out the nuances of the terms ‘Buggy’ and ‘Messy’, especially in the context of markets & investing bit.ly/3EOvZL6
SR2: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’ | David Perell | The Profile
The need to question consensus and look for undiscovered truths is what makes Thiel an inspirational thinker.
India’s booming start-up ecosystem birthed over 40 unicorns in 2021! Its thus a good time to revisit Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’, which is our Marcellus Book of the Month. We ourselves have sought inspiration from the book in starting and building Marcellus. #MarcellusBOTM
(1/7)
The book gives a fresh perspective on building a successful business. For this, companies must invest in the difficult task of creating new things (0 to 1) rather than trying to achieve just incremental progress or improvement on things already being done (1 to n).
(2/7)
Going from Zero to 1 allows you to monopolize your markets and that is the only wat to build lasting success in a business. Thiel’s mantras of ‘start small’, ‘do not disrupt’ and ‘be the last mover’ are super counter-intuitive insights on building and scaling a business.
Here are the books we read, and in many cases reread in 2021. These were featured in Marcellus Book of the Month, a series we started in March this year.
Which ones did you read too and liked the most? Please let us know!
How does a smart company achieve dominance in its business? A short thread 👇🏼
Attack a challenging aspect of the sector: Eg. India is a vast country riddled with poor infra, diverse socio-economic demographics and non-uniform demand patterns which makes it challenging to build large B2C business (2/7)
Don’t address the challenge in a simple straightforward manner: The easy way is to build a push-based model through 3rd party wholesalers. Instead, build direct reach by removing intermediaries or create pull demand via influencers eg. Pidilite's initiatives with carpenters (3/7)