I didn't learn much in business school.
For me, it was a way to move from being an engineer to an investor. And as such, it was super valuable. As an education, not so much. It did lead to MBA Mondays, which was a ton of fun to write. But I digress.
There are a few occasions in business school that were "aha moments" for me. One was in a class called "Speculative Markets." The professor explained that speculating and hedging were two sides of a trade. And that there would not be hedging without speculating.
I had never considered that. It made me think.
Speculating has a dirty quality to it. One thinks of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems or George Soros making billions betting against the British Pound. How can speculation be good?
Hedging is different. A farmer in Iowa needs to hedge the risk of a bad winter so she can keep the family farm she inherited from her parents. How can hedging be bad?
And yet you need one to exist for the other to exist. That's powerful. At least it was for me at the young age of twenty-four.
I thought of all of this when I read Murtaza's thoughtful musings on writer coins this morning. In it, he writes:
Part of the difficulty is philosophical: journalism is a public good, not a speculative asset.
There it is. The dirty word. Reading that makes me feel bad.
And yet, what if he had written this?
Journalism is a public good and we should invest in it.
Reading that would make me feel good.
Investment needs speculation.
If you make an investment and you can't sell it, no matter what the price, then you are way less likely to make it.
If you make an investment and there is a highly liquid market that allows you to exit the investment any time you want in a nanosecond, then you are way more likely to make that investment.
If journalism needs investment, then, sadly, it also needs speculation.
That is how it is.
As icky as it feels at times.
In poker, the big blind is a mandatory bet you have to make if you are two seats to the left of the dealer.
In the world of geothermal energy, the big blind is finding a huge source of heat underground where there are no obvious clues on the land surface above.
Our portfolio company Zanskar has been using advanced AI models to prospect for geothermal sites. As this article in MIT Technology Review explains:
The first step to identifying a new site is to use regional AI models to search large areas. The team trains models on known hot spots and on simulations it creates. Then it feeds in geological, satellite, and other types of data, including information about fault lines. The models can then predict where potential hot spots might be.
Yesterday Zanskar announced that their AI models had predicted a massive "blind" underground heat source in this part of western Nevada and their onsite work over the last year proved that the models were right.
This post made the rounds at USV this week and got us thinking about declining fertility rates around the world. While I am sharing that link with all of you, I don't agree with the author's conclusion about the inevitability of extinction. I think humanity is an extremely complex system with many self-correcting mechanisms in it.
But the charts in the header of this blog post are worth paying attention to.
I was emailing with a friend about this earlier this week, and he said that three charts he is staring at right now are 1/ global installation of solar, 2/ declining fertility rates, 3/ massive adoption of AI.
My friend is a very astute observer of history, technology, and the interaction between the two. I pay attention to what he pays attention to.
If the population of the world is going to be declining, not growing, and if we are adopting cheap, and getting cheaper, energy at a very rapid pace, and if we have technology to make everyone massively more productive, what kind of world does that look like?
It is a world very different from the one we are living in now. Pressing issues like the unaffordability of housing, for example, can change quickly if we are living in a shrinking world, not a growing world. And the need for robots that can do the work of humans will be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Of course, that doesn't mean we should ignore and stop working on the affordability of housing. But it does mean that at some point, those won't be our most pressing problems and humans do have a habit of fighting the last war, not the next one.
Being a venture capitalist gives us the privilege of focusing on future challenges more than most. And that is why I am going to incorporate the idea of declining population into my thinking more than I have been doing.
I didn't learn much in business school.
For me, it was a way to move from being an engineer to an investor. And as such, it was super valuable. As an education, not so much. It did lead to MBA Mondays, which was a ton of fun to write. But I digress.
There are a few occasions in business school that were "aha moments" for me. One was in a class called "Speculative Markets." The professor explained that speculating and hedging were two sides of a trade. And that there would not be hedging without speculating.
I had never considered that. It made me think.
Speculating has a dirty quality to it. One thinks of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems or George Soros making billions betting against the British Pound. How can speculation be good?
Hedging is different. A farmer in Iowa needs to hedge the risk of a bad winter so she can keep the family farm she inherited from her parents. How can hedging be bad?
And yet you need one to exist for the other to exist. That's powerful. At least it was for me at the young age of twenty-four.
I thought of all of this when I read Murtaza's thoughtful musings on writer coins this morning. In it, he writes:
Part of the difficulty is philosophical: journalism is a public good, not a speculative asset.
There it is. The dirty word. Reading that makes me feel bad.
And yet, what if he had written this?
Journalism is a public good and we should invest in it.
Reading that would make me feel good.
Investment needs speculation.
If you make an investment and you can't sell it, no matter what the price, then you are way less likely to make it.
If you make an investment and there is a highly liquid market that allows you to exit the investment any time you want in a nanosecond, then you are way more likely to make that investment.
If journalism needs investment, then, sadly, it also needs speculation.
That is how it is.
As icky as it feels at times.
In poker, the big blind is a mandatory bet you have to make if you are two seats to the left of the dealer.
In the world of geothermal energy, the big blind is finding a huge source of heat underground where there are no obvious clues on the land surface above.
Our portfolio company Zanskar has been using advanced AI models to prospect for geothermal sites. As this article in MIT Technology Review explains:
The first step to identifying a new site is to use regional AI models to search large areas. The team trains models on known hot spots and on simulations it creates. Then it feeds in geological, satellite, and other types of data, including information about fault lines. The models can then predict where potential hot spots might be.
Yesterday Zanskar announced that their AI models had predicted a massive "blind" underground heat source in this part of western Nevada and their onsite work over the last year proved that the models were right.
This post made the rounds at USV this week and got us thinking about declining fertility rates around the world. While I am sharing that link with all of you, I don't agree with the author's conclusion about the inevitability of extinction. I think humanity is an extremely complex system with many self-correcting mechanisms in it.
But the charts in the header of this blog post are worth paying attention to.
I was emailing with a friend about this earlier this week, and he said that three charts he is staring at right now are 1/ global installation of solar, 2/ declining fertility rates, 3/ massive adoption of AI.
My friend is a very astute observer of history, technology, and the interaction between the two. I pay attention to what he pays attention to.
If the population of the world is going to be declining, not growing, and if we are adopting cheap, and getting cheaper, energy at a very rapid pace, and if we have technology to make everyone massively more productive, what kind of world does that look like?
It is a world very different from the one we are living in now. Pressing issues like the unaffordability of housing, for example, can change quickly if we are living in a shrinking world, not a growing world. And the need for robots that can do the work of humans will be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Of course, that doesn't mean we should ignore and stop working on the affordability of housing. But it does mean that at some point, those won't be our most pressing problems and humans do have a habit of fighting the last war, not the next one.
Being a venture capitalist gives us the privilege of focusing on future challenges more than most. And that is why I am going to incorporate the idea of declining population into my thinking more than I have been doing.
This is the third such finding in Zanskar's short life and we are very encouraged that AI prospecting will be a game changer in geothermal, an energy market that many have written off because finding heat sources has been so challenging.
It is wonderfully ironic that the technology that is creating an energy crisis is also a potential solve for that energy crisis.
This is the third such finding in Zanskar's short life and we are very encouraged that AI prospecting will be a game changer in geothermal, an energy market that many have written off because finding heat sources has been so challenging.
It is wonderfully ironic that the technology that is creating an energy crisis is also a potential solve for that energy crisis.
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