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

Oct 21
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
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
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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
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
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
Nov 25, 2023
what’s the best truly banned book?

not like 1984 banned — I mean PDFs that are literally unprintable, truly arcane knowledge
the McKinsey internal firm history is an obvious one though easy to get these days

the sequoia history that mm wrote is an obvious one (unless @shaunmmaguire 🤝)
@shaunmmaguire the nick sleep letters were great and esoteric for a while but now easily available as well
Read 5 tweets
Nov 17, 2023
The AI/healthcare discourse has reached new levels of insane this week

A close friend, a MD at a prestigious medical center, recently shared the following memo with me. He asked me to share this anonymously.

"What we don't talk about when we talk about AI/medicine"
1. Standard of Care isn't Standard Care

Novel modalities of care (AI-assisted, etc.) are measured against a platonic ideal of SOC that doesn't exist in clinic

Medicine is as much of an art as a science, providers are overworked, tired, and often veer dramatically from SOC.
Novel care modalities are killed in the cradle as they can never measure up to the textbook provider with infinite knowledge and time.

This isn't what most patients receive. Less efficacious care that scale to many more patients are an obvious moral good but are difficult today
Read 12 tweets

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