Progression is not always a straight line. It’s up and down.
Seven things for you this weekend.
I am going to start this week with a shout-out to the best TV show I’ve watched since The Wire. It’s called The Bureau, and it’s comparable in its elaborate intricacy to The Wire’s Season 5. Instead of Jimmy McNulty, you have a short French spy, and instead of the depleted Baltimore Police, you have the staid bureaucracy of the French intelligence agency as the background.
Disclaimer: I am only up to Season 2, Episode 2 so please no spoilers, and before I officially vault it to my 3rd favourite TV series of all-time (behind The Wire, and The Office UK) I need to get through it all…
In May, in I've been through a lot, and I want to make something of it, musically I linked to an article about La Haine, one of my all-time favourite movies. Well, La Haine was written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, who is the The Bureau’s central character, and also Amelie’s love interest in Amelie. That’s range.
Related: France: After Lockdown, the Street
Kilian Jornet is an ultra-marathon runner. GQ interviewed him this week.
“Progression is not always a straight line. It’s up and down. Sometimes, you are training very hard, and you are not progressing, which is frustrating. So then you start to think, okay, what can I do? That is when you start to think about shortcuts, which is the wrong mindset.”
Jornet's is one of my favourite Instagram accounts to follow. Three weeks ago, in They Just Came Through Me, I shared five legendary internal business memos that became public. This week saw a fascinating addition to that list: Mark Zuckerberg’s original thought bubble that led to the Instagram acquisition.
2. Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked Instagram emails.
“One business questions I’ve been thinking about recently is how much we should be willing to pay to acquire mobile app companies like Instagram and Path that are building networks that are competitive with our own. These companies have the properties where they have millions of users (up to about 20m at the moment for Instagram). Fast growth, a small team (10-25 employees) and no revenue.
The businesses are nascent but the networks are established, the brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us. These entrepreneurs don’t want to sell (largely inspired our success), but at a high enough price — like $500m or $1b — they’d have to consider it. Given that we think our own valuation is fairly aggressive right now and that were vulnerable in mobile, I’m curious if we should consider going after one or two of them. What do you think about this?”
And this gem from Zuckerberg’s chat log:
“We tend to overcomplicate things. Instagram is winning because they just made a really simple thing and they actually just sat down and built it.”
Related: Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary
3. THE WILD RIDE OF AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS THEME PARK
“Flying off the track was a common occurrence. Even worse, according to Seccia, was the road burn: “You could rip the hell out of your bare skin when it grazed the track at 40 miles an hour. I saw many people getting off at the bottom crying and holding ribbons of their own flesh in their hands. I remember thinking, ‘Who designs amusement park rides? Someone with a physics background, probably? I don’t think we had that person.’”
This week, Vinod Khosla published the climate change version of IT’S TIME TO BUILD.
4. A few Critical Climate Technology Breakthroughs Multiplied by “Instigators” is desperately needed
“12–15 entrepreneurs, driven by entrepreneurial energy and passion for a vision, and a little bit of luck, could change the climate crisis into societal transformation”
Related: How Hot Will The Future Feel?
Pour yourself a cup of tea, and dive into this analysis of the relationship between the U.S. and China, likely the defining geopolitical conflict of our lifetimes.
“The mistake in thinking that we are in a ‘new Cold War’ is in thinking of it as new. In putting a full stop after 1989 we prematurely declare a Western victory. From Beijing’s point of view, there was no end of history, but a continuity – not unbroken, needless to say, and requiring constant reinterpretation, as any live political tradition does, but a continuity nevertheless. Although American hawks have only a crude understanding of China’s ideology, on this particular matter they have grasped the right end of the stick.
We have to take seriously the CCP’s sense of mission. We should not comfort ourselves with the thought that because nationalism is the main mode of Chinese politics today, Xi’s administration is nothing more than a nationalist regime. China under the control of the CCP is, indeed, involved in a gigantic and novel social and political experiment enrolling one-sixth of humanity, a historic project that dwarfs that of democratic capitalism in the North Atlantic.”
Related: Analysis this good makes my brain feel feeble.
6. A Dispatch From Federal Death Row
“Days before Daniel Lewis Lee became the first federal prisoner executed in 17 years, fellow death row resident Billie J. Allen wrote about the shared terror of wondering who’s next.”
“At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Milorad Cavic lost the 100-meter butterfly to Michael Phelps by one one-hundredth of a second. Or maybe he won and there was a timing error. It depends on who you ask, what parts of the internet you read, and how deep down the rabbit hole you go—a place Cavic still finds himself 12 years after one of the closest and most controversial races in history.”
Related: The boys who were almost in One Direction
Real Quick:
Blackbird is hiring an Investment Principal. For the job description, I published our internal notes for how we’re thinking about the role, and in just a few days the post has had nearly 4,000 views. My theory is that people are responding to it less as a job description, and more as a description of how we invest at Blackbird. Whatever the case, if you know great people, please encourage them to apply!
A great moment this week as XY Sense, a company I’ve been supporting for the past ~4 years, came out of stealth. Conversation with me and the founders on the Wild Hearts podcast here, and Alex’s company origin story here. I think workplace utilisation is still a hugely underrated problem, and I’m excited to see XY Sense start to solve it at scale. This photo with the founders didn’t make it into the press release, but do note my attempt to sneak the Blackbird basketball into the shot. The ball was my one indulgence when we first set up the Melbourne office.
Also announced this week: our first investment from the New Zealand Fund - Ao Air. Ao Air is building a mask to be more comfortable than the standard N95 mask, and give 25x better protection.
Next Tuesday morning I’m hosting a conversation with Ben Crowe as part of Blackbird & Smiling Mind’s upcoming month of programming around founder wellbeing. Ben is a performance coach, most famously supporting Ash Barty as she journeyed from quitting tennis, to becoming the world’s best player. Crowe has also worked with the Richmond Tigers, and you can see the transformation of Richmond’s captain Trent Corchin vividly here as he speaks with total authenticity, vulnerability and self-acceptance. You can register for the session now.
And finally, just seven links in this newsletter, one for each day of the upcoming week. A recurring piece of feedback from people is - I’m still catching up on the last one! So 30% less writing time for me, and more chance of you getting through the whole thing = a win for both of us.
From all of us here in Melbourne, stay safe out there.