Will Manidis Profile picture
Oct 3 6 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
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

Sep 13
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.

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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.

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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 Image
Read 13 tweets
Aug 29
Last year, I paid thousands of dollars for a physical at one of the best hospitals in America

I wanted to see how different healthcare was for the ultra-rich, and what this meant for the rest of the healthcare system

Here's what I learned: Image
I work in healthcare.

I was always aware that executive physicals— ultra-high-end, luxury concierge care— existed, but I had never met someone who went through one.

and now, due to an accident with my flexible spending account, I ended up with enough cash to try it out.
The core of an executive physical is a multi-day, exhaustive medical exam

advertised as a way to both optimize your health and mitigate long-term risks.

Almost every major academic medical center in America offers one at a cost of a few thousand dollars per year.
Read 23 tweets
May 4
if you ask anyone, they’ll tell you hard tech is … well hard

they’d be wrong

there’s a secret playbook to raise billions as a deep tech entrepreneur

without ever having to ship product

here’s how:
step 1: problem selection

the perfect problem is easily explained over cocktails, and sounds straight of of a sci fi novel.

the best problems are known to be impossible at the outset for reasons outside of your control such as “physics” or “the law”
the best problem is something spacex interns might argue about how to build over bong rips at del taco

the truly perfect problems lack any milestones that can be measured at all.

if your problem is too easy, put it under water, in space, or make it inexplicably human shaped.
Read 11 tweets
Feb 27
on the 28th of January, 1983, 15kg of dynamite annihilated a data processing plant in Toulouse, France during the dark of night.

the blast caused $30m of damage

marking the beginning of an unprecedented campaign by disgruntled software engineers to kneecap tech progress
the attack was claimed by a group calling themselves the Committee for Liquidation or Subversion of Computers.

CLODO, "bum" in french

the group claimed to be IT workers radicalized by the growth of computing its role in facilitating violence, surveillance, and office drudgery
over the next three years, CLODO would go on to strike a dozen additional targets

they burned and bombed the offices of computer companies such as Philipps Systems and Honeywell

carrying out their attacks with expert precision, they disappeared in December 1983 without a trace
Read 9 tweets
Feb 14
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.

why is this?
Read 19 tweets
Feb 1
founders/vcs are making a huge mistake by applying generative AI to healthcare delivery

GPT3 isn't going to replace your doctor, but it will change how healthcare runs.

Let me explain:
Technology in healthcare has a massive trust problem.

Every "generational shift" in technology has lead to big expectations, and even bigger failure in healthcare.

from "AI" like IBM Watson to RPA companies, billions have been burnt on big dreams and little impact in clinic.
Outside of telemedicine, which had the unique tailwind of a global lockdown, care workflows look basically unchanged since the early 2000s.

The last meaningful technology shift in healthcare was the widespread adoption of electronic medical records in the mid 2000s Image
Read 20 tweets

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