Category: Technology

There are two primary levers that you have in your life for financial measures.
1) Income
2) Expense

In choosing the assets you own, you need to consider these levers.
Expenses usually come from the assets you own. If you’re most Americans, your house and cars are the largest expense buckets and most of your wealth is tied up in your home. Anything else is probably in stocks somewhere. That’s fine, and those are also not cash generating assets in the truest sense.

Increasing your income can happen through raises and job changes, but the fastest way to do this is by owning more cash generating assets. Have you thought about this?

Two questions to ask yourself:
1) What is your wealth target?
2) What is your wealth generation strategy?

Over the past few years I’ve had to rethink my understanding of the underlying finances of a business. This is necessary when developing your investment thesis. FinTech is a good example. If you look at the trajectory it shows what people are discovering. A NeoBank that was treated as a SaaS company during ZIRP is being realized as simply a bank because the unit economics support that. This is why so much in a lot of companies needs to be written down.

The prevalence of the thought that “every company will be a tech company” simply isn’t true once you apply the unit economics of the vertical that the business exists within.

Everyone else seeing this same rework to investment thoughts?Technology Business or Technology Enabled Business?

Over the past few years I’ve had to rethink my understanding of the underlying finances of a business. This is necessary when developing your investment thesis. FinTech is a good example. If you look at the trajectory it shows what people are discovering. A NeoBank that was treated as a SaaS company during ZIRP is being realized as simply a bank because the unit economics support that. This is why so much in a lot of companies needs to be written down.

The prevalence of the thought that “every company will be a tech company” simply isn’t true once you apply the unit economics of the vertical that the business exists within.

Everyone else seeing this same rework to investment thoughts?

I love the pics insta sends my fees of really slick desk setups. Would love to be one of those people with the really nice. The thing is, I don’t think mine will ever get there. It tends a bit messier than I’d prefer. The reality is mess is where the work happens. So while I’d love a photo worthy desk, I don’t think it’s in the cards for me. Have some work to do.

What about you? Is your desk clean or do you have some projects to roll through?

I’m running an experiment this year. Anytime there is something that is simple and might be delegated, I see if it can be automated by tech instead of given to an intern.

I’ve been hesitant to do this over the past year due to a value for developing others, so i’m also looking for new ways to intro others into a career that involved more valuable and less busy work.

My start on it was a report I get daily. We’re in the O365 platform so I used Power Automate to
1. drop the pdf to Sharepoint
2. archive the email
3. when a new pdf shows up use a trained ai model to pull data
4. add the data to an excel doc

It’s a daily 5 minute task that won’t have to be repeated by anyone ever again. The way I figure it I’m saving about $140 per month on that one task.

AMA.

I’ve been thinking about AI a little more lately after some recent conversations. Since OpenAI launched ChatpGPT, it’s arguably taken more investment dollars relative to the return than any other investment vertical in history.

There’s a lot of buzz around it. Buzz is fine and value is better. I’ve spent the past several months working within a few AI driven tools and here’s the thing i’ve found. What’s here today, is not tomorrow’s answer. This is not a statement about the quality of the tools, it’s an assessment of the stage of the industry. We’re still incredibly early.

Let’s take co-pilot in office as the example. It’s fine and it’s limited. If I want to write a formula faster then that’s great. It does that. Honestly that’s not where most of my brain energy is spent though. Email, it’s kind of terrible. Doesn’t have the context I do for what I’m writing to the point that my feedback to Microsoft one night was that “A monkey on cocaine could write an email better than this.” Really I was missing the point. It’s a Co-Pilot, it’s not going to do my job for me yet. At the same time a human co-pilot would be better.

Predictively guessing at what I want to say next has been a thing for years that Google already gave us. When you think about how you work, that feature isn’t really that helpful.

So, as i’ve had opportunity to use it, the better value has been found in applying that to automated tasks I don’t like. Stuff like:
-capture the data from this pdf report into excel every afternoon
-find empty time on my calendar and preschedule this
-give me the tasks from this meeting

Writing my email for me though? That’s a ways off. So the question is, what’s the IRR we’re looking for on this money being thrown here and how can you capitalize on the models beyond basic use of a Chatbot GPT?