Every once in a while someone launches a business and I think "fuck, why didn't I do this first?"

Sam just launched what I think will be one of the most quietly successful, profitable, and simple businesses in the world.

Here's why I'm jealous:

https://twitter.com/thesamparr/status/1640708316908392455

✅ Perfect audience alignment (successful entrepreneurs)

✅ Relatively simple to operate

✅ High switching costs (once you're in with and trust a group, you aren't going anywhere)

✅ Huge CLTV ($10,000+/year)

Here's a big list of incredible Charlie Munger quotes from Buffett's annual letter.

"The world is full of foolish gamblers, and they will not do as well as the patient investor." "If you don't see the world the way it is, it's like judging something through a distorted lens."

"All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there. And a related thought: Early on, write your desired obituary – and then behave accordingly."

It's tempting to panic about the impending AI revolution.

It will undoubtedly cause a massive amount of disruption.

But it's interesting to think about some of the industries that *should* have been disrupted by existing technology but haven't been... For example, today, anyone can go on Wealthfront or WealthSimple and get every feature (and more) of a stock broker or "wealth manager."

Any investor with a brain, realizes that typically a wealth manager is just a very good sales person who knows very little about investing...

Companies are just groups of people.

So your company will not grow without the right group of people.

The problem is, if you haven't experienced the next level of scale before, you don't *know* what those people look like.

Inevitably you hire bozos... ...or worse, try to do it yourself badly.

You read a bunch of books about how to scale and manage a bigger company.

But lets be real:

It doesn't matter how smart you are, if you try to do anything for the first time, it usually sucks.

Something I've learned over and over again:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If you give someone a chance to do something that is a big swing/has low probability of success, then you need to be 100% ready to have them hate your guts with a passion.... This is counter to what we want to believe.

We want to believe that people will respect us for taking a chance on them.

For seeing an opportunity. For doing something unique.

But the world doesn't usually reward that, it punishes.

Two years ago, my friend @MohnishPabrai (who taught me almost everything I know about investing) mentioned something bizarre:

He had hired a psychologist to deep dive on his life and rip it to shreds.

This guy interviewed his wife.
His co-workers.
And him, for hours and hours. He said it profoundly changed his life.

So, I hired this guy, Dr. Jack Skeen.

He spoke with my closest friends, my wife, my co-workers, and we spent hours on the phone together.

He'd ask me weird uncomfortable questions like:

"Are you a good person?"

"One of the ways I used to describe machine learning was that it gives you infinite interns.

You don’t need an expert to listen to a customer service call and hear that the customer is angry and the agent is rude, just an intern... but you can’t get an intern to listen to a hundred million calls, and with machine learning you can.

But the other side of this is that ML gives you not infinite interns but one intern with super-human speed and memory - one intern who can listen to a billion calls and say...

As I've learned more about finance, I've realized:

1. It's not that complicated (it's mostly dressed up with confusing terms)

2. There are a lot of EXTREMELY simple best practices that every startup/company should be following (but don't).

Here's one of my favourites... Most businesses have cash in the bank.

Sometimes it's "working capital" — money needed for near-term operations.

But often, especially in startups, there's a bunch of cash sitting around waiting to be invested in growth + R&D.

Say, a $20M Series A that just got raised.

I think @elonmusk had no choice but to remove the CEO and CFO of Twitter.

Here's why:

Investors who have never run a company think of businesses as spreadsheets.

But businesses aren’t spreadsheets.

They are groups of people.

And people are complicated... You can't just say "execute this strategy".

You need a lot of ingredients in order to change a company:

Tiny is searching for an M&A partner to join head office.

This means you would be one of our top capital allocators.

You'd run your own team and report directly to Chris and I, doing deals ranging from $5-$200M.

Here's what you look like (see below).... Ideally:

• Experience running deals a conglomerate or holding company similar to Tiny

• Value investing nerd

• Understand technology companies and their moats

• Friendly/culture fit <--- Most important

At Tiny, I've hired CEOs for 60+ companies and interviewed hundreds of others.

After over a decade of trial and error (and I mean BIG errors), here’s our hiring process: First, I want to drive something home.
Hiring the right CEO matters. A TON.

The right CEO can 10x your business with minimal effort from you.

The wrong CEO is a nuclear bomb. They can ruin your business, take tremendous risk you’re responsible for, and even bankrupt you.

You can have the best design in the world.

The best product. The most innovative features.

But if your copywriting sucks...you suck.

It's like having the world's best restaurant with a moldy, unreadable sign and front door that opens the wrong way... Good copy can make or break your entire business.

Bad copy obscures incredible products and services...

A simple insight that sounds depressing but makes life a lot easier in the long run:

Never expect people to change.

In your romantic, personal, and work life.

Most people generally continue their pattern of behaviour... I'm not saying people don't change.

They do.

But typically only after a breakthrough/rock bottom disaster, which most people never go through...

A very sad and messed up fact:

In many cases, diabetes is preventable and reversible via diet and lifestyle modifications.

Instead, for most people, the metabolic train wreck gets worse and worse over time.

Tiny Foundation is trying to help change this... In British Columbia, where I live, there are over 1.4 Million people in BC currently living with prediabetes and type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

Almost all of them will have shorter lives and struggle with difficult symptoms.

Most people are garbage at conversation.

People don’t realize that it’s not what you SAY that makes others like you.

It’s about how you make the other person FEEL when they’re with you.

What you give THEM space to say... The question you asked that nobody else has ever asked them.

The interest you showed in what they shared.

What they feel in their gut when you smile and nod. That you genuinely care and like and understand them.

That they feel seen.

We Canadians love to brag about our free health care…

A few highlights from @RobynUrback in today’s @globeandmail:

• “Canada is among the highest spenders on health care per capita among comparable countries, but we boast some of the poorest results.” • “Canadians wait longer for a specialist appointment than do residents of all other peer countries, including those in Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany and the U.S.”

Do you ever think about what could of happened if you’d taken a slightly different turn in your career?

In 2005, I dropped out of college and got a job as a barista.

I LOVED it. My job was just chatting with interesting people, nerding out on espresso, and playing great music… I thought about maybe starting my own cafe.

But then, one day, these hip looking guys started coming in.

They would sit there all day on their laptops pounding espresso.

One day, I asked them what afforded them this luxury.

Didn’t they have jobs?

In Canada, we love to brag about our amazing free healthcare 🇨🇦

When it comes to COVID, at least in British Columbia, where I live, we have completely missed the mark and under-utilized the private sector.

This is how poor BC’s command-and-control COVID testing strategy is… Currently, in BC:

- Only government PCR tests available for free (24-48 hour wait to get it, 24 hour wait to receive results)

- Pharmacy PCR tests cost hundreds of dollars (24-48 hour wait)

I just had one of those miserable Dad nights where my kids woke me up a bunch and I ended up tapping out and making coffee at 3:30AM.

I feel like human garbage right now.

Here's two tricks that are helping me (a tiny bit): Trick #1:

I love this one:

Pretend that you are on your death bed and wished you could go back and live your life all over again...

Our first son was born early and low birthweight.

It was insanely stressful.

My heart was pounding out of my chest for about 3 days, wondering if there would be any long-term issues.

I kept wondering if there there anything we could have done... Fortunately, our son ended up being perfectly healthy, but I continued digging into the science to ensure our second pregnancy would go more smoothly.

I read a book that blew my mind a little and I can’t stop telling people about it.

It explains why so many people dedicate their lives to achieving things that make them miserable.

This might sound crazy, but an unseen force is pushing you towards empty and unfulfilling goals… No, I didn't read Dianetics ;-)

The book is called ‘Wanting’, by an guy named Luke Burgis.

It’s about mimetic desire. An academic theory popularized by Peter Thiel.

At face value, it barely sounds worth mentioning:

When the people around you want something, we want it too…