Links

For today only, to celebrate their recent corporate reputation score, you can get $8.62 off any order of $50 or more on Amazon by entering the code BIGTHANKS at checkout. And as always, you can support this blog by shopping on Amazon through THIS LINK.

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"When an enterprise pursues questionable accounting policies, all its securities must be shunned by the investor, no matter how safe or attractive some of them may appear.... You cannot make a quantitative deduction to allow for an unscrupulous management; the only way to deal with such situations is to avoid them." -Benjamin Graham & David Dodd (Security Analysis)

The $143bn flop: How Warren Buffett and 3G lost Unilever (LINK)

Unilever deal is dead, but Buffett's 'big game' danger lives on - by Lawrence Cunningham [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Jay Wintrob of Oaktree Capital at the LSE Alternative Investments Conference [last month] (video) (LINK)

Grant's Interest Rate Observer now has a podcast (audio) [H/T @svafier] (Episode 1, Episode 2)

[From 2014] The Dentist Office Software Story - by Fred Wilson (LINK)

This story is designed to illustrate the fact that software alone is a commodity. There is nothing stopping anyone from copying the feature set, making it better, cheaper, and faster. And they will do that. This is the reality that Brad and I stared at in 2003 as we were developing our initial investment thesis for USV. We saw the cloud coming but did not want to invest in commodity software delivered in the cloud. So we asked ourselves, “what will provide defensibility” and the answer we came to was networks of users, transactions, or data inside the software. We felt that if an entrepreneur could include something other than features and functions in their software, something that was not a commodity, then their software would be more defensible. 

LSE Literary Festival 2017 | Messy: How to be creative and resilient in a tidy-minded world (audio) (LINK)

Related book: Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives 

The opportunity for telcos in the coming platform revolution (LINK)

a16z Podcast: When Will Genomics Live Up to the Hype? (LINK)

Brain Pickings: Bruce Lee’s Never Before Revealed Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development, and the Measure of Success (LINK)

Book of the day (released yesterday) [H/T @PeterDiamandis]: Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

Links

Transcript of the chat between Sanjay Bakshi and Shane Parrish (LINK)

Transcript of the FRMO Corporation Annual Meeting of Shareholders (LINK)

Fred Wilson: Software Is The New Oil (LINK)

It makes sense to me that software is the oil of the information revolution. Companies that control the software infrastructure of the information revolution will sit back and collect the economic surplus of the information revolution and that will be a path to vast wealth and economic power. It has already happened but I think we are just beginning to see the operating leverage of these software based business models. The capex spending necessary to be a software infrastructure provider at scale has shielded the cash producing power of these companies (and many others) and may continue to do that for a time, but I suspect at some point the profits are going to overtake the capex at a rate that the cash will be flowing out of software companies the way that oil flows out of wells.

A nice chat with Malcolm Gladwell about writing [H/T The Waiter's Pad] (LINK)

Book of the day: Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland's Van Sweringen Brothers