Big Disclaimer: I’m not a finance professional, so please take this post with a healthy dose of skepticism.
The bottom of the Great Recession in 2009 caused the S&P 500 index to retreat to 1996 levels — over 20 years of wiped out gains. Other crashes have been much less dramatic, though the general pattern of apparent overcorrection is similar.
With this pattern in mind, I went looking for a simple alternative strategy to Buy and Hold that reduces downside risk to these apparent overcorrections, trading only long in the S&P 500 index. Enter the Sell and Hold strategy:
- When a market crash starts to happen, sell and hold (cash). …
2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
Around 2003 I came across Charlie Munger’s 1995 speech, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, which introduced me to how behavioral economics can be applied in business and investing. More profoundly, though, it opened my mind to the power of seeking out and applying mental models across a wide array of disciplines.
A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor — “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are tens of thousands of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience. …
2019 UPDATE: I’ve co-authored a new book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, and I’m highly confident that knowing the mental models in this new book will also help you get traction! You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
The second edition of Traction is now out, published by Penguin Random House (the first edition was self-published). …
2019 UPDATE: I’ve co-authored a new book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, and I’m highly confident that knowing the mental models in this new book will also help you get traction! You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
Below are some basic marketing test ideas across all nineteen traction channels. These tests are designed for businesses trying to get to product/market fit, either preparing for a successful launch or post-launch, but may be useful for any business.
As part of our Bullseye Framework for getting traction, these are called middle ring tests and should cost less than a thousand dollars and take less than one month of time (that is, fast & cheap!). …
2019 UPDATE: I’ve co-authored a new book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, and I’m highly confident that knowing the mental models in this new book will also help you get traction! You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction. As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it:
2019 UPDATE: I’ve co-authored a new book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, and I’m highly confident that knowing the mental models in this new book will also help you get traction! You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
37,617 is exactly how many copies we’ve sold of Traction. That number is frozen because our self-published 1st edition is no longer for sale in preparation for our revised 2nd edition coming out Oct 6, published by Penguin Random House. …
2019 UPDATE: I’ve co-authored a new book called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, and I’m highly confident that knowing the mental models in this new book will also help you get traction! You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
In Traction (the book), we have a chapter on each of the 19 customer acquisition channels you can use to get traction, along with 5 key introductory chapters explaining how to find the 1 traction channel that will lead to explosive growth for your business.
Here we have enumerated all 19 traction channels and some of the people we interviewed for each, so that you can have an easy traction channel list to use when brainstorming marketing test…
I believe that ambitious startup ideas have similar success probabilities to their less ambitious counterparts, if not higher success rates. No, I don’t have any hard evidence. Call it a highly educated guess.
Disclosure: I’m the Founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo, the search engine that doesn’t track you. I may be biased, but I’m also well-informed.
We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation, telecommunications and agriculture technology. Why not online tracking? With digital technology making its way into more parts of our lives, and with our data quickly becoming more and more valuable, of course there should be some limits on online tracking!
The operative question is: what limits? The status quo of collect it all and reveal as little as possible has to go, but there is a massive range between maximum possible collection and minimum necessary collection. Here are a few things we could do. Companies (and governments) could explicitly tell you what is happening to your personal information. They could allow you to opt-out. They could give you granular control of your data. They could even tell you exactly what you’re getting when you give out specific pieces of information. Disclosure requirements could mimic those in other areas like credit cards and mortgages where the most relevant risks are highlighted. In other words, there are a lot of options. …
Forewarning
Be forewarned, this post is long. You can tl;dr it by reading the section titles.
It’s long because I compressed four months money into one post. I don’t normally do that, but I didn’t want to influence my funding by blogging about it in the middle of it. And historically I’ve been bad at doing serial posts, so here you go…
I’m new at this.
I’ve raised venture capital only once. I’m going to relate what happened below and highlight my mistakes/takeaways in the bold section titles. …
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