Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
God, Money, YOLO: How Cathie Wood Found Her Flock NY Times (reading time: 17 minutes)
I am admittedly a huge Cathie Wood fan. This profile in the Times gives an overview of her career and how her contrarian bets paid off. She currently has $85 billion under management and has a massive following on Reddit. There’s a religious fervor in the kind of image she portrays and there’s a reason for it.
Status Monkeys Packy McCormick (reading time: 27 minutes)
Over the past thirty days,, the top ten NFT marketplaces did $1.86 billion in volume.
The NFT bull rush has once again picked up steam at an insane pace. If you are like me and have no idea why people would spend significant amounts of capital to purchase a JPG, you should read this article. Packy does a great job of explaining the phenomenon simply and its social appeal. Interestingly, he also applies a framework from Eugene Wei called Status as a Service to explain NFTs from a social network perspective.
Collectivizing Finance David Phelps (reading time: 16 minutes)
The world of venture capital investing is becoming increasingly complex with more sources of capital. The emergence of crypto assets has made it even more complicated given tokens represent instant liquidity into a project. David Phelps argues that the world of traditional VC is going to get completely disintermediated as a result. I don’t necessarily agree with this viewpoint given the difficulty of company building but it’s a great thought experiment and is actually starting to play out in the real world.
Everything Is a DCF Model Morgan Stanley (reading time: 31 minutes)
I don’t usually share lengthy investment articles but this one is interesting to learn from. Michael Malboussin and Dan Callahan from Goldman Sachs argue that everything is a DCF model. Traditionally, discounted cash flow models have been harder to apply to early stage companies and other types of assets. In their article, they provide guidelines and their rationale for their mantra.
