Week 54

Hi Reader,

Andrew Yang is calling out political correctness an issue. I grew up in a country that does not have this issue, but is incredibly backward and anti-diverse in many other ways. That does make me wonder, is political correctness the price we have to pay top prevent racism and other forms of hate spreading; or is there a solution?

Countries with increases in racial unity (Singapore) tend to be highly censored. It's not a direct trade-off because China suffers from both issues. So how could we construct an "anti-China", a country with the right balance of tolerance and open-debate?

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"I think early on, I find it valuable to not just satisfy users by achieving the metric I had in mind but often exceeding it. Truly going a bit further than I originally intended to ensure that I really solved the problem. It is easy to trick yourself & work on something new."
- Suhail

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📈 Investing

Michael Dempsey shares his investment memo template. I've complained in the past that investors rarely share their secret sauce and Michael has kindly done it. The surprising thing is that it's relatively simple. Perhaps the reason investors don't share these is not just the fact that they are a great competitive advantage, but in fact that it's mostly a structured document to start a conversation.

🚀 Start-ups

Poolside.vm a viral website is gathering investor attention.

Suhail argues for going deeper with your first few features.

💵 Crypto

Chris Burniske talks about the Middleware thesis in crypto protocols. This is beautiful - when there were very few protocols, people believed in the fat protocol thesis. Then everyone realized we're missing dApps, and started getting excited about how applications and tokens may capture much of the value and drawing parallels to the internet stack. Now both are giving way to the middleware thesis, the connective tissue that can be a real "platform" working across multiple networks.

Nic Carter on the best white papers to read.

✊ Participation

Andrew Yang made a statement about political correctness. Glad that people are calling it out as an issue in America.