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
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)
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
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.
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+
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
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Norton Commons is the most underappreciated development project of the last few decades.
A hyper-walkable, basically car free, traditional community built in the middle of Kentucky in 2003
No venture funding, no twitter threads on vitality. They simply chose to build well.
Norton Commons is in Prospect-- a farming community roughly 15 miles west of Louisville.
The land was originally a family farm owned by the Norton Trust. Mary Shands inherited the farmland in 1988 and wanted to preserve the rural character of the land.
Enter, Charles Osborn III a Baptist preacher from Texas that left the church to found houseboat manufacturer Kings Craft
He ultimately would settle in Louisville and open a sports club and senior care facility, before becoming obsessed with the idea of New Urbanism
Healthcare spending makes up 20% of the U.S. economy,
yet only 1 of the 100 largest software companies in the world is a healthcare software company.
Why has healthcare been a graveyard for enterprise software? And why is it actually the best place to build a saas monopoly
Healthcare seems like the perfect vertical for enterprise software:
- Huge market (20% of GDP)
- Growing rapidly (5% YoY)
- Ballooning IT spend (3% YoY)
- Huge unmet need -- today's bad software leads to poor quality of care, physician burn out, inflated costs
You'd think every VC would be tossing aside heady concepts like "anduril for shooting down balloons" or "offshore crypto fraud" to fund healthcare IT businesses
but for the last decade the industry has been a graveyard of venture subsidized hopes and dreams.