Business & Personal Thoughts

If you are an analyst or associate consultant/banker, how do you improve? Your decks get "better"? What does that even mean? You learn new terms like TAM? A new framework? It's presented more cohesively? The people like it better? I very much doubt it's at all linked to outcomes given that most good outcomes come from iteration of the deck, not the deck itself.

For IB, it is just a sales game. Improving is just selling more deals. But for juniors, it's not like your models are ever tested. It's not like there's some metric to judge the validity of your models against.

So, are you supposed to get better? In sales, you close more deals. In marketing, you generate more MQLs. In recruiting, you have better retention & hire better talent that does the job better. In programming, you build more useful products. In investing, you make more money. In Hormozi businesses, you make more profit. Generally, going into careers where there is not good reward signals seems to be a trap. I'm not sure how one can objectively measure their performance, and find fulfilment in getting better.

My general belief is that people should actually build businesses, rather than going to McKinsey/investment bank for a couple of reasons.

Generally McKinsey/IB is seen as prestigious/high credibility, but most people from those 2 paths going into either 1) startup or some early stage company 2) private equity

Generally I think both of these are accessible with 3 years on some random commerce degree learning about 'HR departments' and then trading 2-3 yrs of work life on getting coffee for partners & writing useless decks.

For those that go and work in a startup, you do not need degree/credibility. Startups like hustle. If you hustle, you'll get a job. Work in Sales, Marketing, Recruiting, Ops or SWE if technical. You don't need McKinsey for that.

For those going into PE, I think the model will die. Financial engineering is contingent on ZIRP policy & low-cost debt i.e. not the current era. Plus, aside from Stephen Schwarzman the richest PE guys have $10BN net worths. My thesis is you could do this by building boring businesses, operating and executing the hell out of those businesses. Then, building a media empire to attract investments. While you won't be able to raise an initial fund from institutional investors, you can do this from HNWIs, small funds as well. Then, when you prove you can invest, you then parlay that into networking with institutional investors. This is the Graham Weaver playbook. The big PE boys raise $50BN funds which you cannot do without a prior track record. So it will take time, but ultimately, Schwarzman (the best ever) didn't raise a fund till ~40 years old. If you start at 18, you could probably raise something similar if you executed the hell out of everything. Hormozi certainly could do it.

If you going to continue in corporate, banking or consulting, you'll earn more money running a plumbing business. And you don't have freedom.

Literally useless to do commerce/economics degree at uni. All people that do it are retards & low agency incl elon & naval. IDC what u say, big IBs will hire Gs that do com-sci & engineering and it makes you smarter because it's harder rather than a random commerce degree, learning about what HR does on a daily basis. #normies

It basically doesn't prepare you with any proprietary knowledge beyond being able to do basic P&L + Cashflow statements, and knowing in basic terms how to value a company.

Lowkey if you don't wanna be an investor, the best way to learn is to build biz ... reason is that you learn by osmosis & pay other people to reach out

E.g. if you own a website design firm, you only need to be good at cold-calling & designing a website

Then you'll have cash to hire:

Basically my opinion on uni is you should go if you wanna be architect, lawyer, in healthcare, corporate finance or engineer

Otherwise it's generally a waste of time.

If you wanna network, find a good job, upskill & reach out to ppl
If you wanna learn, go on YouTube & read textbooks
For programming, recruiting, sales, marketing, physical jobs (TAFE), ops you don't need a degree

It's perverse the incentives that young people with no agency have to join finance. Say you're 125 IQ. Went to top 40 university. 1500+ SAT. If you do not think about anything & have literally no interests/ambition & just study for exams. You'll end up with 85 WAM. Then, if you do commerce/math/com sci degree, you'll have option to go to Macquarie/Goldman/JP Morgan/Morgan Stanley or a quant bank if you're 140 IQ. You'll make $120-200k straight out of school. You'll have potential earnings of $25-50M as a median top-performer with the higher earnings of $100M. That gives you a top 1% life, not quite the net worth to be financially free at any point in time. But, makes you comfortable & risk averse enough to not follow it. And you have those golden handcuffs where your lifestyle becomes $150k/year and to go anything below that means to move location, moves house. So, you don't bother.

That's insidious for society. Less builders. Less Mozi entrepreneurs. Less engineers. Less technologists.

Damn so at least 1/3 of the economy doesn't earn >$40 per hour which means:

40 hr weeks at $40/hr = $83200 — barely enough to get by:

$55k disposable income =
$30k rent = $2500/month — very modest (cannot find one of those in Sydney — maybe have to do flatmates)
$5k on food per year = $100/week ($14/day)
$20k savings — but also travel etc etc

Are $500M companies meaningful exits for VCs? My intuition is not, but I'm not sure

Napkin math: if they invest in seed & invest $2-4M for 5% equity, they enact non-dilution & retain 5% equity at $500M, then they get $25M in total capital ... they return 80% to LPs, so they get $5M total from that investment. After that, you split among 4 partners & they each get 1.25m. From that you give 25% to capital gains tax. So you're left with $800k. That is fine. However, if that is the winner of the fund for 6 years, that means you get an effective salary of $125K/yr on top of your $200-300k job. And it's not that appetising?

Where is my math wrong? I suppose if this $500M is layered in with 2-3 unicorns than it may help?

At its core the economy works in a bartering fashion with money being the thing to represent value. Economy thrives when people can trade good & services for money. Fundamentally these good and services should provide value to your fellow human beings. The better the economy is, the more good & services any one individual can buy at a given time. To be useful, you have an obligation to provide good & services to as many individuals as possible. This is why technology businesses are the most impactful because they inherently have the ability to service millions and millions for no additional cost unlike a brick n mortar shop. Though, you need all types of folks in the economy to provide good & services, and if we didn't need it, people don't pay and it goes out of business. If there is no supply but there is demand, people will pay more for it & then the supply will increase. Market becomes efficient over long stretches of time.

People in finance hide the layers to cling to some level of status. Barring rare exceptions like Buffet, the status of G's goes:

Essentially, the level of IQ trends upwards the further you go up. Technically, some interlink e.g. PWC has deals arm which is effectively investment banking.

I feel like finance rewards "fake" charisma, shaking hands the right way, looking people in the eyes, appearing to know a lot about disparate topics like AI, energy, but just scratching headlines rather than deeply understanding any one topic. There's also something perverse by having no objective bar for reward — in consulting there are no reward signals like there is in trading, software, math, building companies etc etc .. You build presentations and that's that. There's no way of knowing if you're actively getting better. It's a lot of fluff. To be fair, is there even one in investment banking? That you value a company how it performs over the long-run. That seems more like value investing & something you can accurately assess, even if it is more boring.

It feels like humanities subjects is actually a conduit to law/commerce

If you do ext 1 math, economics — you will probably go into some form of finance
If you more do humanities like SOR II, Modern History, economics, english — it's almost certain you'll go into law
If you do 4U math, physics, biology — you'll go into med or engineering generally

That would account for like 95% of people that go to uni.

Humanities = law
Math & humanities = business
Math & bio = med
Math & physics = engineering type degrees

I feel like unis psy-opd non-IB, MGMT consulting type people to go into a commerce degree to "understand business" even though it doesn't really make sense to do so? They learn vague business concepts about 3 aspects of a business, how accounting works, how financial statements are prepared etc w/o much thought? Even though, all that stuff is super intuitive and unless you're doing complex financial models around LBOs, DCFs and whatever other stuff IBs need you don't need to learn "business" in an overall sense; maybe you learn it in a Hormozi-tactical sense about how to sell? How to market with hands on experience, but not as a "degree" that you "read" about

I feel like in terms of leverage you go:

Biggest bizzes and richest ppl are tech: Zuck Jensen Altman Musk Ellison Bezos
Next are capital: Schwarzman, Buffet, Munger, Kravis, Leon Black, David Rubenstein, Hormozi & you get ppl that own capital intensive assets like Charles Koch, Carlos Slim & other infra players that are effectively capital as well
Next are media: billionaires like Kanye, Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, Murdoch family
There are very very few billionaires simply off labour —— IT services dudes from India is good example

Which one is Hormozi? Some part of me thinks that unless you build a tech company, or generally build a net-new product, the highest form of your job is an investor anyway. You get more freedom/choice, but if you were optimising for cash, you'd be probs best to work at an IB like Goldman, MS, JP, Macquarie then working in PE or trying to raise at age 35-40. You raise a couple hundred million and start working on 8 year cycles, eventually layering in credit & real estate as recurring plays via interest & rent. Hormozi advises businesses between $1-10ishM revenue and charges $40-50k as a consulting fee. He then chooses 1% of businesses to get ongoing consulting & training from his team, as well as takes a slice of equity. He is essentially just a PE guy that happened to not raise money. He can claim he doesn't gut the team, but ultimately it services the same purpose as any other PE bro? I get it, he has a brand, millions of followers, could have great lifestyle if he wanted. But since he wants to work 12 hrs anyway, the only difference is he has less capital to play with but doesn't have to answer to investors. Some would argue his audience is a mute point because 99.5% of them are wantrepreneurs or run <$1M EBITDA businesses. If you stayed in corporate, you may have less relationships but a stronger brand. Most finance guys with $10BN net worth are 60ish, raised a fund at 38ish and had 3 vesting cycles to get to $10BN. I suppose Hormozi starts now. Could he raise a fund right now on top of his cash? I guess the consulting part of the biz brings free cash-flow is also cool? They might earn $10Mish per year with that which is free money to get better staff & invest back into the biz.

Do Amazon own the end to end supply chain?

If Superpower becomes the platform of the future for diagnostics and certified supplements, what does owning the supply chain end to end even mean? Do they own the labs & phlebotomy clinics that take the blood? Do they own the VO2 max machines, the cancer testing labs ... this seems like a really labour intensive business? Own everything?

I think Daniel Ek is doing this with his EU health company: Neko Health?

Is it wrong to consider the next 20 years as being downstream of AI ...

It feels like if you asked the question in 2010, what if everyone started using the internet 10 hrs per day ... what would life actually look like? You could verge on same answer of today.

Similarly, if you ask what does a world of abundance look like? In specific job roles? In specific orgs? But more importantly in the lives of the end-consumers — the ostensible beneficiaries of every business.

It feels like defense, energy, healthcare is all downstream of this?

My general sense is that between 2010-2024ish, there were new marketing channels constantly & therefore low CAC on some of them which has changed now:

- Google ads had low CPC when they launched in 2007
- Meta ads were dirt cheap .. maybe a $2CPL when they launched in 2012ish
- TikTok ads were huge arbitrage opportunity in 2023
- LinkedIn content huge op in 22-24
- Generally becoming influencer online through blogs then YouTube was huge in 2015-2020

It feels like all marketing channels suck right now as Andrew Chen said. This always happens when supply catches up to demand.

My general sense is that for various reasons, AI is not that useful for businesses rn (memory, agent scaffolding, context window, onboarding to business use-cases) ... it has shown some promise on the application layer (icon.me, clay.com, mercor), and some agentic use-cases namely in coding. But otherwise it is largely a human assistant helping to augment an individual workers tasks, rather than allow for workflows to become better because of aforementioned reasons before insufficient.

Hence, while many orgs are talking about AI & promoting it. I generally think that all the MCP, agentic use-cases aren't actually all that helpful and people are more/less lying about it.

This will change. MLA will help context windows. Agent Scaffolding will improve as OpenAI places salience on computer usage as a core metric. So it's not bad that people are ahead. Because it means you're familiar with workflows that could be used when it does advance, but ultimately I doubt many businesses are getting vast economic value from it. Even platforms like Relevance AI are pretty clunky & relying on 1-2 more OOMs improvement on reasoning capabilities, memory from the models. This is why I ultimately decided not to run an AI agency; after thinking deeply, it seems contrived & like a glorified software dev shop that uses cursor lol. In future, when UI becomes more native, it'll be more and more about the prompt, rather than scaffolding imo.

I would just stay wary of what people are saying.

Thoughts?

Essentially the reason most investors take so long to get properly rich is you need to raise capital. The only reason someone would give you capital is if you're shown you're capable of investing and getting returns. The only way someone does that is if you've invested or have a track record of investing. And so, you need proof that you've invested well.

Some have somewhat mitigated this:

WB — invested at age 13 so friends and family trusted him
Ken Griffin — started from Harvard dorm room
Most PE investors don't start till they're 40 because they work at Big4/MBB OR Goldman/JP/MS for 5-10 yrs, work buy-side@PE firm and wait one round of carry, then they raise their own fund. 22 + 5 + 8 = minimum of 35-40 years old

So, media & code most permissionless forms of leverage

Examine these & give me advice ...

I currently weigh 99kg, am 6ft5, go to the gym 3 times per week and have quite a sedentary lifestyle unfortunately because I spend tonnes of time on my laptop.

I sleep 7.5-8.5 hrs per night between 11pm-8am.

I do not eat breakfast in the morning and try not to eat till 1230/1pm where I have lunch: beef mince and sort quick releasing carb like wrap/bread though I know that's bad. I eat a decent amount of corn chips, cashews, black liquorice, beef jerky, chips, protein yogurts as snacks. My mum usually makes dinner: spaghetti bolognese, chicken schnitzel, chicken.

I don't really have supplements. Take L-theanine & magnesium glycinate before bed. Have creatine occasionally. Drink 2-3L of water per day.

My blood tests are linked above. Same with my lab results.

I drink 2 shots of coffee per day. Though, my tolerance is quite low without it because I have very days off.

I typically have cold-shower in the morning. But have had warm ones recently

I spend 9-12 hrs on laptop all day.

I have a lot of fat around my thighs like huge amounts. I have moderate fat around stomach area, particularly around the hips and lower part of stomach.

I had tonnes of acne as a kid. I took Accutane to get off it. Was on it for ~7 months and then never had to use since. Get occasional bits of acne but they always go away.

I took minoxidil for 6 months last year. Tried to grow a beard but it looked horrible so I ditched that attempt.

In terms of feeling, I get occasional heart pain, and soreness across my body but nothing too extreme.

I want clinical recommendations about how I should optimise my life for cognitive function, longevity and general energy. Please give me recommendations with quite high conviction.