🍪 Tour de Chamath

Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta - we’re the Escalade of tech newsletters. Mysterious on the outside, but a party on the inside.

Let’s get to the good stuff.

In the oven this week:

• 🤑 Chamath shows us how billionaires actually learn

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines

• 🍕 Poll of the week: life vs food

• 🍫 Chocolate chips: our 3 favorite finds of the week

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memery

FRESHLY BAKED

TOUR DE CHAMATH

Most billionaires like to stay under the radar.

Some have blacked out escalades.

Others go out the back exit.

But there’s one billionaire that ain’t afraid of the limelight.

Our SPAC king, Chamath Palihapitiya.

He tore it up on the east coast conference circuit this week. Who went and ate it all up for ya?

That’s right, us.

He talked a lot about tech, the economy, and gave a bunch of career and life advice for young grasshoppers like us.

Here’s what ya missed:

• He thinks AI is still anyone’s race. Warren Buffet said: the person who invented refrigeration made some money. But the most money was made by Coca-Cola, which used refrigeration to build an empire. Chamath equates large language models to refrigeration. Will there be some money made in it? Sure, but the “Coca-Cola” has yet to be built.

• When interest rates are high, tech usually builds better businesses. Why? Cause investors can find better risk free rates beyond venture captial. Less capital floating around means the companies that do well are forced to have more efficient businesses.

• If you know Chamath, you know the guy is the OG SPAC guy. Well, he says the whole SPAC craze was fueled by excess liquidity and that now he's gone back to “basics” (i.e. early stage venture) LOL.

• He thinks it could take 3 years for valuations of late stage companies to fully come down and reprice accurately. Uh oh for people working at Stripe…

• He says if you’re young and wanna be successful, you need to pivot your career into 2 things: 1. energy or 2. computing. Why? Because he thinks the cost of these both will go down to 0 over time and will create new opportunities to make bank.

• His best piece of career advice is to find the thing that makes you unique and find ways to express that through your work.

• The one thing that’s made him most successful is learning how to manage risk: knowing when to put all his money in and when to take it out. Apparently he learned this from playing poker.

Oh yeah, and if you’ve ever noticed how billionaires seem to have deep expertise in so many fields, Chamath shared how that actually happens.

Turns out, consulting firms like McKinsey have what are called “teach ins” for rich dudes like him and Bill Gates.

Whenever Chamath has an idea or topic of interest, he hits up McKinsey, who will assemble a team of people to do the research and basically teach him everything to know about that topic for weeks or even months on end. They can even hook him up with experts in the field.

That’s how Chamath learned about climate change. He spent a few million bucks and a whole summer with McKinsey, and followed that with months of meetings with climate experts.

Then, he invests and makes bets in the space so he really gives himself a reason to continue paying attention and staying sharp.

Wild.

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED TREATS

POLL OF THE WEEK

HOW MUCH IS 25% OF YOUR CALORIES WORTH?

Ok, so ya heard it hear first. Now we know the research, but how slow does the aging process gotta be for it to really be worth eating 25% fewer calories? Sound off:

How many more years of life would you need to get in exchange for eating 25% less calories every day for the rest of your life?

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

• What exceptional people’s childhoods have in common: being genetically smart, being surrounded by successful/exceptional people, getting lots of 1:1 tutoring as a kid, and having people around them that regularly helped them learn new ways to think and use their brains.

• For inspiration: a catalog of well-designed logos

• 12 cheat codes to 10x your career

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

😂

What'd you think about this email?

• 🍪🍪🍪 Top notch!

• 🍪🍪 Meh... could use more milk

• 🍪 Undercooked, do better