flâneur

Andrew Xu

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on the atlas — 45

highlights — 138

  • the essential skill isspotting the key drivers of a situation — seeing the underlying reality — not coming up with the raw analysis.
    The Playing Field - Graham Duncan Blog
  • Pride of authorship is an obstacle when it comes to making money.
    The Playing Field - Graham Duncan Blog
  • I don’t want to pretend like I’m too good for ugliness, for effort, when I know very well that it’s the price that unlocks everything beautiful in the world.
    effort - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I think people make the best things when they love the process, when they willingly shoulder the inherent uncertainty and pain that comes with it. It’s almost like a form of prayer: you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love.
    effort - by Ava - bookbear express
  • people always assume I’m interested in the end result—the wonderful thing they’ve made—when what I’m really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I’m curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years of wanting and hoping and working. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by craft. I think it’s because it requires such a sustained tenacity.
    effort - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Here’s some of our secret sauce of how we win so much. We’ll invite a founder in when we issue our term sheet, saying we have a few final questions. Then, when they get to our office, they’ll find our whole firm in the conference room, ready to pop the champagne and celebrate. But then it’s our turn to pitch. We go through our deck and walk through it. It’s like, “Hey, this is why we’re so excited, this is our thesis, this is how we can be helpful.” Then someone on our People team goes, “You know, based on our diligence and your plan, you have to hire ten people. Let us show you the pipeline w…
    Capital: Ben Sun - by Mario Gabriele - The Generalist
  • New York or nowhere. So many people here proudly proclaim all this. Not liking the city is non-consensus and socially unacceptable.
    goodbye/ hello to all that - by Lyndsey Kong
  • This is how we fell in love with life and each other: wandering, free, as quiet witnesses entrusted with the world’s most beautiful secrets, wanting nothing other than the present.
    goodbye/ hello to all that - by Lyndsey Kong
  • I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.
    No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear: Toni Morrison on the Artist’s Task in Troubled Times – The Marginalian
  • make ~4 investments each year, lead every financing, target high ownership
    More Pace
  • why it’s important to be a generalist investor focused on frameworks rather than domain specificity, intellectual rigor, honesty
    More Pace
  • I research and explore ideas that I think are interesting and spend time with companies and individuals who are thinking along those same lines, with the intent to invest in them. I usually do a solid amount of work to get to conviction on my own, then bring a subset of these opportunities for broader discussion with Jordan and Chris. I spend individual time with both of them, sometimes in structured conversation and sometimes free flowing. I also have the freedom to independently form the way I engage with the broader tech ecosystem. For me this has been a mix of forming personal relationship…
    More Pace
  • I have learned to understand companies at a mechanical level, I am building my own perspective on the traits of a fundamentally great business, my technical articulation is detailed, deal structure is something I can consider with nuance, and I have developed my own universe of peers / founders that I derive significant meaning from interacting with. I feel like I’m framing the kind of investor I want to be for several decades moving forward.
    More Pace
  • I also feel like I’ve stumbled into everything meaningful in my life when I was just like, hey, I’ll just give this a shot and it definitely won’t work.
    in praise of uselessness - by Ava - bookbear express
  • It’s surprising how many people are resistant to doing things with no agenda. Often, when I ask someone why they’re not doing something they seem good at, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s not going anywhere.” / “I don’t have enough time.” / “I started too late anyway.” They would rather expend their time and energy on the sexier thing, the more obviously lucrative thing. And who could blame them? But that tends to take you along a less interesting route. I’ve always been partial to the Feynman line about studying what interests you in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. On s…
    in praise of uselessness - by Ava - bookbear express
  • the useless thing, as I understand it, is to pursue the thing that is compelling only to you, not obviously remunerative, limited in scope
    in praise of uselessness - by Ava - bookbear express
  • I told David that all of the risk factors he had pointed out: political opposition in cities, the chance that guests would cause problems, unions would fight it, etc– those were all accurate. But I believed that if it did actually work, Airbnb would have a global impact and generate virtually uncapped returns. Those opportunities are special. And despite all the very serious and reasonable concerns, the Airbnb founders had a credible theory of the game for each one. It wasn’t a kind of one-shot faith in a silver bullet, but it was like “Oh, we could try X, we could try Y, or we could try Z. Ou…
    Letters to a Young Investor: Reid Hoffman
  • One of the things I learned from my father is that not making choices can often lead, paradoxically, to closing off future options. Committing and being in the game can produce multiple knock-on effects that change the entire equation.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Reid Hoffman
  • One of the ways I update my theory of the investing game is to go back and revisit the important ones: “Why did I make an error in this particular investing opportunity?”
    Letters to a Young Investor: Reid Hoffman
  • Because intrinsic to venture investing is that success comes from disproving the past.
    Letters to a Young Investor: Reid Hoffman
  • fairly well understood today that investing successes come from when the “rules” based on historical information are disrupted
    Letters to a Young Investor: Reid Hoffman
  • Deterrence of large M&A is a stated goal of the FTC, and this is a signature win for that initiative as surely other larger companies will think twice before floating the idea of a large-cap merger. If that road is closed off now with a “Warning – Danger” sign, companies that are scaling will have no choice but to go it alone, go through the regulatory work of preparing for IPO, and subjecting their business to at least 6-12 months of public pricing pressures to arrive at what regulators believe to be a fair price.
    Reflecting On Haystack’s Investment In Figma – Semil Shah Blog
  • It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • They may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files, but their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently. It has never exposed them to live fire. Their idea of violence includes vocabulary.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too: over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance, will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable …
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • n its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • I began to discover the rewards granted any serious reporter: that when you acknowledge how little you know, looking in at a world from the outside brings a special clarity.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.
    When the New York Times lost its way
  • The purpose of having freedom is to choose what or who you want to give up that freedom for. Freedom has no meaning until it is given the opportunity to be sacrificed
    Transcending the Rat Race - by Sherry Ning - Pluripotent
  • Holding onto freedom for too long will turn that very freedom into a form of imprisonment. Too much freedom, before long, will become the very thing we try to escape from.
    Transcending the Rat Race - by Sherry Ning - Pluripotent
  • we worship false gods and indulge in activities of temporary delight that distract us from what we care about but don’t want to attend to at the moment.
    How to be Happy, Really - by Sherry Ning - Pluripotent
  • loopholes and shortfalls in the export control system are enabling the outflow of U.S. technical know-how to the PLA. Among the 273 AI equipment suppliers identified in the study, less than 8 percent are found on the Commerce Department’s Entity List of individuals and organizations subject to U.S. government licensing requirements. The overwhelming majority of PLA suppliers are also not blacklisted by either the Treasury Department or the Defense Department.
    Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. - POLITICO
  • China could export this technology to potential adversaries or militaries with poor human rights record
    “AI weapons” in China's military innovation
  • Chinese leaders are cognizant of critical weaknesses, such as the semiconductors, particularly specialized developments in AI chips, necessary to enable and deploy AI/ML systems, and actively
    “AI weapons” in China's military innovation
  • Plan called for China to “strengthen the use of AI in military applications that include command decisionmaking, military deductions
    “AI weapons” in China's military innovation
  • Chinese military is “intelligentizing” warfare by purchasing AI systems for all manner of applications, including autonomous vehicles, intelligence analysis, decision support, electronic warfare and cyber operations.
    Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. - POLITICO
  • Although China is working diligently to make its military supply chain more independent of the U.S. and free itself from reliance on Taiwan for semiconductors, industry leaders say it will likely be years before Beijing can achieve its dream of self-sufficiency.
    Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. - POLITICO
  • Intelligent and autonomous vehicles, for example, accounted for more than a third of the contracts in our dataset. These include swarms of fixed-wing drones and rotorcraft, which could be used to saturate U.S. or Taiwanese air defenses in a conflict over the island. Several PLA units seemed to be purchasing unmanned vehicles
    Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. - POLITICO
  • China is working to make its military more connected and autonomous in the immediate future. We found several instances in which PLA units were already buying commercial, off-the-shelf autonomous drones and AI-enabled surveillance software — in other words, ready-made AI tools that can be used right away.
    Opinion | We Spent a Year Investigating What the Chinese Army Is Buying. Here’s What We Learned. - POLITICO
  • Chinese advances in autonomy and AI-enabled weapons systems could impact the military balance, while potentially exacerbating threats to global security and strategic stability as great power rivalry intensifies.
    “AI weapons” in China's military innovation
  • as a baseline, is to articulate and defend various points of view, to have been well-read on the industry and be able to make non-obvious connections between disparate bits of information, and to have shown evidence of staking out a position and sticking with it.
    The One Ingredient Required To Get Into Venture Capital – Semil Shah Blog
  • Tell the right stories about yourself.
    advice - nabeelqu
  • you want to get rewards from doing a productive thing, not from doing an unproductive thing, and social media gives you rewards in a way that perniciously substitutes for the kinds of rewards you actually want. Once you have the ‘reward’, your drive to do things lessens, so by checking Twitter you kill your drive to do the more productive thing.
    advice - nabeelqu
  • Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral.
    advice - nabeelqu
  • When fibs are told to prove a social point rather than to elicit an easy laugh, does their moral weight change?
    Hasan Minhaj’s “Emotional Truths” | The New Yorker
  • If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you're competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. And just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue.
    The Decades-Long View - by Nikhil Basu Trivedi
  • Pleasure is passive and consumed, whereas enjoyment is active and created.
    The Death of Hobbies - by Sherry Ning - Pluripotent