In Buddhism, the Samsara doctrine contends that beings undergo endless cycles of rebirth, existence, and death, with the type of birth in this life being the result of karma from previous lives, and across six realms (hell, hungry spirits, animals, asuras, human beings, and heavenly beings). “If you want to…

Every Sunday in Hong Kong and Singapore one can expect streets, shopping malls, and public spaces bustling with movement of people going after their personal chores and enjoying their free time. Sundays are also the busiest day of the week for one type of business: Remittance shops. Immigrant women and…

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” A Stanford University computer scientist is attributed to this simple but powerful recognition of the importance of long-term compounding effects. Our general inability to understand that progress isn’t linear have affected…

“The Room Where It Happens” is one of my favorite songs from the excellent musical Hamilton that talks about how Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison supposedly negotiated in secret to establish what is now the U.S. financial system. …

Network effects, also known as Metcalf’s Law, occur when the value of a product or service to a customer increases by the use of the product by the next customer (more on that from a VC perspective here and from the FTC view on competition here). As the network…

August 20, 2011 - Marc Andreessen famously wrote that “Software Is Eating the World”. While the text is great throughout, I love this paragraph: “In some industries, particularly those with a heavy real-world component such as oil and gas, the software revolution is primarily an opportunity for incumbents. But in…

The Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease called COVID-19 has hit every single aspect of our lives with an unimaginable death toll across the world. While fighting the virus, we learned and became overnight experts in ‘flatten the curve’, R0, ventilator technology, log charts and ‘social distancing’ techniques in…

The act of comparing is common in all aspects of our society. We believe that Usain Bolt is currently the fastest man on earth because the rules and objectives by which we identify and compare runners are clear (runners start at the same time, run the same distance and all…

The 2020s started on-a-tear. In the first three days alone China lowered its required liquidity ratios from financial institutions to boost its local economy, an U.S. airstrike in Iraq killed a top Iranian military official and The Pope became the first worldwide meme! In IPO land, it has…