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

Dec 27, 2024
If Elon wants to create the Texas Institute of Technology, he should replicate Olin's model.

Olin College, founded in 1997, became the top ranked engineering school in the country in just 10 years before its recent stumbles.

Here's the brief outline:
1. Free tuition for all students

Olin short cut selectivity by offering full tuition scholarships to every student. You don't need billions to achieve this, a $400m endowment did it for Olin for 20 years before mismanagement cut it short.

This works, steal it.
2. Project-Based Learning

Olin's greatest innovation was project based learning. You cut lectures, and have students learn through building and shipping end to end projects. This also forces cross disciplinary work across degree agrees.

This works, steal it.
Read 9 tweets
Dec 23, 2024
I went to Olin College, a tiny engineering school outside Boston.

Olin was once the top engineering college in America, now its in free fall. The actions of the board and administration are unacceptable; Olin was a powerhouse, and it still can be.

Here's what's really going on Image
Olin was founded in 1997, fueled by a $460 million gift from the Olin Foundation, as an experimental hub for reimagining engineering education.

It championed hands-on, project-based learning. The approach worked, and scaled up at many top universities.
Olin decided to stay small, giving every student a full scholarship and housing, never expanding beyond a few hundred students.

Admissions selectivity soared, and the college quickly ranked among the top in the nation.

It was an incredible place.
Read 14 tweets
Oct 21, 2024
In 2020, an explosion rocked Satartia, Mississippi.

A thick cloud engulfed the town as 911 calls flooded in. One mother begged for help as her daughter gasped for air. Residents passed out standing up

Satartia is the most important infrastructure failure you've never heard of. Image
Satartia, Mississippi is a small community on the banks of the Yazoo River in western Mississippi.

Most residents were unaware that a 24-inch CO2 pipeline ran near their town-- part of a system the White House sees as key to defeating climate change.
The pipeline was part of a carbon capture and storage effort.

CCS captures CO2 emissions at the source and transports them to long-term storage in pockets deep underground.

The Biden administration poured an initial $251 million into funding CCS in 2023. Image
Read 12 tweets
Aug 16, 2024
Every week, a dozen new companies boasting "tech-enabled healthcare for the rich" announce massive funding rounds.

I think nearly every single one fundamentally misunderstands the business of high end medical care.

Here's how to build a real executive physical killer:
over the last two years I've done basically every single executive physical.

I've flown to the Mayo Clinic in the middle of winter, five times, I met a referral only infusion clinic in an empty warehouse filled with buddha statues, I've done every variety of full body MRI
Image
Image
more important, I've interviewed patients of each.

academic medical centers pull in tens of millions a year to serve these patients, and techniques used here are a leading indicator for what the rest of care will look like.
Read 18 tweets
Mar 27, 2024
five thoughts on choosing who you work with/for:
1) moral alignment matters more than incentive alignment

people focus too much on aligning incentives. incentives are messy and can hardly be aligned. find people you share convictions and faith with, and keep working with them for long amounts of time. it'll work out.
2) even on long days, it should be fun

there's a difference between challenging and exhausting. the best people are extremely challenging, but never exhausting, and always in enough control of their emotions to know when to step back after a long day.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 2, 2024
within months you will be able to buy genomics data from 14 million americans for +/- $200m?

the inevitable fire sale of this mess to an overseas PE firm is going to be a national security matter on the scale of which we haven't seen in healthcare in years Image
in general, hhs has left open a dangerously large hole around healthcare data sales

the reg we have now are so deeply embedded in precision oncology/2010s-RWD that they are completely unprepared to address what post-LLM healthcare data sales will actually mean
ONC should build federal data lake, incentivize state funded systems to contribute, allow companies to access these data for training/benchmarking but not directly touch/view the data.

use this as a backdoor to build a non-SAMD regulatory pathway for healthcare AI.
Read 4 tweets

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