Thursday, February 29, 2024

Wealth Beyond Career

“A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. Then it has meaning.” .........Nike marketer Sonny Vaccaro


In business school, corporate finance professors teach three well-established principles about value:

1. The value of a business is equal to the present value of its expected future cash flow (CF).
2. Revenue growth and return on capital (ROC) drive CF.
3. For growth to create value, ROC must exceed the cost of capital.

In the 40 years “Jordan Brand” has grown into a global franchise, with Nike’s 2023 annual report attributing $6.6 billion in gross revenue to the sub-division.

In many respects, the brand has extended beyond basketball into other sports and public consciousness. Around the world, “Jumpman,” the brand’s iconic logo, will outlive Jordan.

The rise of social media and software allows individuals to monetize directly, cut out intermediaries, and build extraordinary wealth. Rather than relying on executives like Sonny Vaccaro and Nike founder Phil Knight, today’s Air Jordan could run on Shopify, collect payments through Stripe, and advertise over Instagram and TikTok with 100% ownership.

A few athletes building wealth beyond their careers. 

LeBron James, $1 billion. One of the challengers to Jordan’s title as the NBA’s greatest ever has reached $1 billion in net worth while still competing for championships. In addition to banking high salaries, James has taken equity in brands like Beats by Dre and Blaze Pizza. He has also spearheaded a holding company of his own, SpringHill Entertainment. That vehicle has spawned movies, game shows, and talk shows and is about to launch a men’s grooming line called “The Shop.”

Serena Williams, $290 million. The GOAT of women’s tennis is a prolific venture investor. As an angel, Williams backed Zipline, Masterclass, Daily Harvest, and many others. A dedicated $111 million fund, Serena Ventures, debuted in 2022 and has started capitalizing a host of other startups. Alongside her venture activities, Williams has launched two fashion brands and taken minority positions in the Miami Dolphins and UFC. Forbes estimated her 2023 net worth at $290 million.  

Maria Sharapova, $220 million. The retired tennis star has grown her confectionary brand, Sugarpova, into a viable business, earning a reported $20 million annual revenue. Sharapova capitalized the business herself and still owns 100% of it. She has also invested in Public.com, Supergoop, and MoonPay. Her net worth is pegged at $220 million. 

By investing savvily, especially in sports franchises or mass-market consumer brands, athletes can earn far more in retirement than they ever did as athletes. 

Social media has eaten traditional media and changed the equation, allowing talent to talk to an audience intimately, repeatedly, and on a global scale. Traditional gatekeepers no longer have the same leverage – people have greater control than ever over their story and its distribution.

Technology has reduced startup costs, removed complexity, and increased upside. It is cheaper than ever to start a company. It is also, easier, to launch an e-commerce brand, you can use a platform like Shopify. If you want to test out a new media property, you can use tools like Anchor to launch a podcast and YouTube to distribute videos.

See You at the Top 

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Learn with Speed

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds........President Kennedy of USA (Rice University 1962)

Very few vocations require as much rapid learning as an innovative startup leader, a role that requires flexible intelligence and constant adaptation. The leader of an early-stage company might split their time between decoding governmental regulations, hiring staff, wooing investors, scanning deal documents, reviewing code, reviewing design, running a marketing campaign, and making sales. It is a learning treadmill that doesn’t stop. Though some functions are absorbed as a business grows, an innovative company will always find a new frontier to conquer.

The most important thing you need to do as a CEO is learn faster than the pace at which your company is growing. you shouldn’t think about learning as simply absorbing information and then copying what others are doing, but understanding the HOW and the WHY in a way that makes sense for your company.

Leadership skills are necessary in order for you to be successful with the company. Thankfully, leadership is a learned skill.

  • Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to manage 100+ people.
  • Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be a “smooth talker.”

Being a leader often means “listening more than speaking.”: That means listening to market trends, customer feedback, and ideas from your team. 

Being a leader often means Patience: Though there’s value in speed, but most of the best things in life take time to reveal themselves. They take time to unfold and play out. That process often makes the outcome richer, the learnings deeper, and the rewards much better. And sometimes, sitting in discomfort along that path is essential to finding the truth. 

Bringing people along professionally requires patience, building a company requires patience, and often finding answers requires patience. 

Being a leader often means Reading: The key nugget for a leader is to treat every resource – conversations, books, blog posts, etc. – as one single data point that will feed your own strategy.

Here are a few good books recommended by Mathilde Collin, CEO and Co-founder at Front.

- The Effective Executive. 

- High Output Management. 

- The Hard Things About Hard Things.

Finally, being a leader means Networking: Find coaches, mentors and create a group of peers (similar-stage companies) you can learn from and then hire people better than yourself.

See You at The Top

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Enjoy the Season

 Happy Holidays...



True Love Heals 

True Love Shares

Share words that are True to Heal and Restore

Daniel Williams, a philosopher, argues that misinformation is the symptom of deeper societal issues rather than the cause. It emerges from polarization, institutional distrust and governmental corruption.

Misinformation refers to false or inaccurate information that is spread, whether intentionally or unintentionally, misleading people and potentially causing harm. In the age of rapid information dissemination through the internet and social media, misinformation has become a significant concern.

Types of Misinformation:

Disinformation- False information that is deliberately spread with the intention to deceive or mislead.

Malinformation- True information that is shared with the intent to harm, often by disclosing private or sensitive details.

Misleading Information- Information that is presented in a way that leads people to draw incorrect conclusions.

Satire or Parody- Content created for humor or satire that may be misconstrued as factual information.

Misinformation poses significant challenges to society, impacting public discourse, decision-making, and trust in information sources. Addressing this issue requires a multi-faceted approach involving individuals, technology platforms, media organizations, and policymakers. Promoting a culture of critical thinking, fact-checking, and responsible information sharing is essential to mitigate the impact of misinformation.

Enjoy the Holidays

Monday, November 27, 2023

Intuition with Computation

Your product is your "first product", but your "second product" is building a company around the initial product such that you can scale your original product and bring it to more people. ----------- Ali Rowghani (Business Entrepreneurs)



AI is not the ultimate. It’s important to match the right technology to the business problem. Starting with the problem—not the technology—is essential to a business-first approach.

The first brush with AI in many businesses is often limited to tier-one functionalities such as AI assistants that automate repetitive tasks: ghostwriting emails, scheduling projects, and fielding customer queries. AI, however, is capable of far more: complex problem-solving, hyper-personalization, and even the generation of new multimedia content.

We may get to the point where AI systems can get broader and more creative than humans. Let’s assume we get the rules right — [to build] safe, honest, harmless AI — I believe that everyone can have an AI assistant they really trust to help them make better life decisions.

Reportedly, a secret AI can do grade-school math's on problems it hasn’t seen before. This has previously been a challenge for LLMs like GPT-4. While ‘grade-school math's’ doesn’t seem like much, with exponential progress of the type we’ve witnessed, grade-school math's could quickly become PhD math's.

Merging human intuition and reasoning with AI’s computational prowess creates a powerful alliance.

Imagine a hospital where AI aids surgeons by suggesting optimal procedures in real time based on patient data. Or consider a marketing team paired with AI tools that optimize campaign strategies while the human team focuses on the creative narrative.

In each scenario, AI doesn’t replace human skills; it amplifies them, fostering an enriched, symbiotic workflow. It’s not just about improving current processes. AI’s capabilities enable new methods, products, and business models.

By weaving AI into the very fabric of your business strategies, you should aim for deeper industry-transforming applications.

See You at The Top

Monday, October 30, 2023

Innovate but Execute

When once the inch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen........(Samuel Lover, Irish writer 1797-1868)



Intellect is not enough. Though possessing an elevated IQ make good dinner discussion, it is insufficient to build a great business. Indeed, intelligence as something of a commodity. 

What separates average leaders from great ones isn’t horsepower but less tangible properties like obsession, commitment and energy. These entrepreneurs not only have the brains to innovate but the grit to execute.

Energy positivity. Anyone building anything sufficiently difficult needs to sell and galvanize people around them. They interact with more enthusiastism and excitement about an idea. But it is not just talk. They have immense clarity and urgency in their thinking. They understand what needs to be done, the key risks and milestones.

Innovation refers to the creative and forward-thinking aspect of a project or endeavor. It involves coming up with new ideas, approaches, and solutions to problems. Innovation is about pushing the boundaries, thinking outside the box, and staying ahead of the curve. Without innovation, a business or individual can become stagnant and fall behind the competition.

Execution is the practical and disciplined side of the equation. It involves taking the innovative ideas and actually implementing them effectively. Execution is about planning, organizing, and delivering on the promises made through innovation. Without strong execution, even the most brilliant ideas can remain unrealized.

The key is to strike a balance between these two elements. Too much innovation without execution can lead to a lot of great ideas but no tangible results. On the other hand, excessive focus on execution without innovation can lead to stagnation and missed opportunities for improvement and growth.

In essence, "innovate but execute" suggests that to be successful, one should not only generate new ideas and concepts but also be able to put them into action effectively. It's a reminder that both creativity and discipline are essential for achieving one's goals.

Consider these Headlines:

  • Daily active users on X have fallen by 16% since Musk took it over. Advertising revenue is down 54%.
  • In 2021 Google paid $26bn to be the default search engine on web browsers and mobile phones.
  • OpenAI is negotiating a deal potentially valuing it at $80 billion, positioning it as San Francisco’s highest-valued startup.

The question then becomes: Does the capital and appetite for risk involved make this difficult for smaller entities?

See You at The Top

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Risk or Opportunity

 A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art........Cezanne



In the world of AI, ChatGPT can now speak, hear, see, and more.

Risk or Opportunity?

For the creative worker, it may expand the ranks of professional artists, creating opportunities for humans to co-create or collaborate with AI on an equal footing. 

It could also starkly devalue the work of copywriters, composers, and artists, and relegate these workers to supporting roles, such as polishing scripts or adding some depth of feeling to digitally rendered art.  

With tools like FaceSwap already in use to de-age stars like Harrison, if you lock down control of your digital twins, they you can monetize your avatars for old age and eventual demise.

Web3 technologies could allow artists to grow and perhaps even thrive, rather than suffer at its expense. For example, smart contracts can create avenues for artists to be compensated when their work is used to train AI like a large language model.

Web3 adds an economic layer and a rights layer to the Internet stack, where users can not only track intellectual property but also protect, manage, and monetize these digital assets themselves with transparency peer to peer. 

Stranger creative instincts is A24 superpower, same instinct A24 used for startup Instagram and then sold to Facebook for $1billion.

Such fiscal prudence gave A24 the confidence to take risks elsewhere – namely, on the creative side. From the very beginning, Fenkel, Katz, and Hodges made the decision to seek outlier auteurs, those with bold, original visions. Their thesis was that gifted creators with a distinct point of view would appeal to younger audiences seeking an antidote to Hollywood’s stale sequel machine. A24 now boast of several Oscar wins.  

Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma warned at a recent internal meeting that Alibaba’s core e-commerce group is facing very severe competition and that without innovative measures it may now be like Nokia on the eve of its mobile phone collapse.

Social media influencers have started to become product ambassadors, turning the emotional relationships with their followers into direct revenues for the companies they represent. The platforms take on an active role in generating user curiosity and interest by providing attractive, creative, and emotional content.

As the new sector matures, smart platforms are finding ways to help their influencers succeed, by leveraging AI to channel content of interest to individual users, thereby increasing users’ time and purchase on the platform.

A Risky challenge is a worthwhile Opportunity.


See You at The Top

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Computational Illusion

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes, they were easiest for his feet.......John Seldon(1584-1654, English historian)



Learning the secrets of “geniuses” and the habits of titans with AI; 

How do we think about generative AI? My view is that generative AI brings a drop in the cost of cognition and how we think. If the internet was the cost of information dropping to zero, my believe is that the cost of cognition and how we think, who we think with, is dropping to zero.

Although the human-like responses of AI are productive they are statistical illusion.  They have just been well-trained by humans to respond to humans, and they have used all our texts and all our videos to be human-like in many ways. But in the end, it’s a computational illusion.

Due to the complexity of these systems, it's possible for them to produce outputs that appear meaningful or insightful, but upon closer examination, these outputs might be the result of statistical noise, biases in the training data, or even errors in the algorithms themselves.

The concept of computational illusion highlights the importance of critical thinking, validation, and understanding the limitations of computational systems. It reminds us that while these systems can provide powerful tools for analysis and decision-making, their outputs should always be interpreted with caution and an awareness of the potential for misleading results.

The European Union’s proposed AI Act takes some important steps, requiring transparency about the data used to train AI models, mitigation for potential bias, disclosure of foreseeable risks and reporting on industry standard tests.

The essence of humanity is relationship and the tension of ideas it produces, value your AI assistance but cherish your relationships more.

See You at The Top