Will Manidis Profile picture
Oct 3, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
You can outperform most venture funds by buying LEGO.

I analyzed the last 20 years of secondhand LEGO pricing data, and found randomly purchasing sets will match most VC's returns

if you're somewhat intentional about what you buy-- you massively outperform even the best firms Image
I pulled data on 16,000 LEGO releases since the year 2000. I dropped any promotional items, duplicate items, or any other oddballs. This got me down to 10k or so.

For each, I then pulled in resell data from bricklink for each item to get current market price (ebay prices higher) Image
This allowed me to calculate a net IRR, assuming you bought it at release, and held it until 2023.

The VC benchmark data is sourced from the Cambridge Associates

recent years are iffy because of extreme paper markups (30%+ mean IRR). The data seems best through 2010/2015 Image
In most years, random purchasing rivaled the returns of the median venture fund.

If you just blindly bought certain themes, you can consistently generate double digit IRR across all vintages. For most, resale was high enough at EOY1 that these strategies would be obvious. Image
Dollar value, and piece count, seem to have less effect on present resale value.

But other strategies seem possible.

Applying modest statistical methods, on like two years of data, leads to finding strategies producing 20%+ irr over 10y+ Image
the world of super alternative assets is hilariously vast and probably deeply unexplored.

there are paths towards transcendence (a hamptons compound w/ a 1974 Land Rover Series III) that involve deploying capital at things other than b2b software

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More from @WillManidis

Aug 25
regardless of where the ai cycle ends, it is inevitable that the number of investable assets pre-ipo is going to go from 1000s to dozens pretty quickly

most of the market has intuited this, but very few are taking it deadly seriously.

my view of what’s going on here;
I’ve written about the causes of this shift elsewhere, but the story is very simple,

even if all model progress plateaus tmrw (or already has months prior) we already have a world where the marginal cost of the inputs that make up a company are orders of magnitude cheaper
this means, counterintuitively, the cost of building anything consequential is much more expensive

things that used to be cheap as a result of good software— distribution, attention, install base— are now order of magnitude more expensive and the returns they drive much greater
Read 13 tweets
Aug 10
if you talk to every investor up >80% this year at institutional scale they all have kind of the same view in private

ai will not lead to super intelligent utopia, it’ll plateau far before then, but it will allow everyone to wirehead themselves on fake companionship, labor, etc
the question for the entire street is how do you invest in a “global opt out” in a way where the Qataris can still run billions with you.

the answer seems to be to continuously talk about super intelligence and buy the precursors instead of the sin stocks directly
you’ve seen this kind of “motte and bailey” trade before when crypto was going to rewire the entire US financial system, and wasn’t actually just a way to loot retail for exit liquidity at scale

that isn’t to say these models don’t have huge effects on cost structure
Read 4 tweets
Aug 8
its hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened, but sometime in the last five years our world shifted from most people being resonable, high social trust actors

to grifting, scamming, and violence being the norm and i don't think we're going back to high trust society.
whatever the cause, i'm very unsympathetic to the easy explanations like "m2 supply" "trump" "plandemic" etc. there's something different going on here that started before 2016.

i am even less sympathetic to the idea that the solution is "monasteries" or some kind of "exit"
my rough view is that we've been living in an island of false stability since that started some time during the post-war-reconstruction period (maybe 46-47?) that lead to a tremendous amount of technological/cultural progress

but it was never stable

Read 4 tweets
Aug 3
the cultures of tech and washington are fundamentally incompatible.

in tech the foundation of a good career are reckless sharing of favors, expecting nothing in return, endorsing young ideas and people, and public networks of influence

in washington, any of these will end you
in the fullness of time tech will end up having dramatically less influence on american politics than finance or any other industry that was once a similar size.

we are used to infinite, positive sum games. tech came in like a conquering army, and will be run out by midterms
it'll be a record year for lobbying firm profits, certainly a record year for _state house_ lobbyists as tech learns their ABCs of government, and you should expect a lot of consolidation and retirements in this space.

but the # of bills will be all time low, this too will fade
Read 4 tweets
May 30
the reason you feel exhausted is because you've convinced yourself being always online is the requirement for great work. great work isnt driven by 24/7 slack messages, isn't driven by coding at the party. great work is driven by intense periods of focus, followed by leisure
this is ultimately one of the weird side effects of 1) internet companies spitting off so much cash and 2) that cash being so unattributable from the individual labor/work units of a single individual.

when the faangs professionalized, they brought in professional management
general management, the product 90s MBA programs,-- is so deeply weighted in factory floor mgmt/effficiency movement/taylorism.

this means professional management obsesses with the legible inputs (meetings, messages, responsiveness) and is allergic to the magic of technology
Read 4 tweets
Apr 21
theres dozens of stories every week now about people finding miracle cures for lifelong conditions with LLMs

I think what’s going on here is much weirder than people think:
i spent ~3 years dealing with debilitating pain and weakness in my leg before progressing to the point where I was nearly unable to walk.

I went to every top doctor I could find, and none could offer a consistent diagnosis, let alone a cure. why?
because the pain wasn’t real.

I found my cure via Dr John Sarno.

sarno pioneered the theory that much chronic pain is caused by repressed emotions and psychological stress rather than physical injury - what he called TMS (Tension Myositis Syndrome)
Read 7 tweets

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