An epic hour long speech given by Charlie Munger in 1995. It’s a long one but it’s worth the time.
For those that want to follow along at home, or would rather read, here is the transcript: http://buffettmungerwisdom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/mungerspeech_june_95.pdf
The Term Sheet – that enigmatic, not quite binding legal document that every entrepreneur both craves and fears. There is no shortage of resources to help one understand a term sheet but there are a few worth highlighting. I’d be remiss to not mention Brad Feld’s term sheet series over on his blog or his book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Brad is one of the early pioneers of demystifying term sheets and deserves being mentioned first.
In addition, Founders Fund has a Transparent Termsheet section on their website that allows you to plug key terms into a calculator and play around with various exit scenarios. They also have their own plain english guide to a term sheet as well.
Finally, embedded below is probably the most plain english term sheet I’ve come across yet. Provided by UK based Passion Capital.
Check ’em all out!
There has got to be a better way to benchmark oil spot prices…
Key to the strategy is a peculiar aspect of the spot market for oil, where traders buy and sell bargeloads for immediate delivery. Deals are negotiated in private, and buyers and sellers aren’t required to disclose prices to anyone. To come up with a benchmark price, Platts has to rely on information volunteered by traders—a far cry from the way stocks or even oil futures are priced by crunching comprehensive data from public exchanges.
Source: WSJ
Although he’s usually very open about his thoughts, its not often that you get to see a detailed investment analysis authored by Warren Buffett. In fact, talking about the stock(s) he thinks are attractive is generally off limits when interviewing The Oracle of Omaha. That’s why the write up below is such a gem – not only is this a pretty cool artifact of Berkshire Hathaway’s history (GEICO is one of their core businesses) – we get a detailed look at how Buffett thought about the business and why he invested.
Reading this assessment from 1951 about a company that is now an insurance powerhouse is a testament to Buffett’s strategy: find good businesses with a durable competitive advantage, good management, and buy them at a cheap price.
Great Reuters article about an incredibly common practice in the world of PE (and VC) – funds sitting on assets for the sole purpose of collecting fees.
Generally these funds have a 5 year period to make investments, after that period comes to pass a fund generally switches into “harvesting” mode where the GPs work to realize (sell) the assets and return money to LPs (investors). But because of the way GPs are compensated they actually have the perverse incentive NOT to return your money or realize many of the investments.
You see if the fund has a 10 year life and the GP is paid 2% per year on the dollar value of the investments then why give that up? Sure it will piss off the LPs but the GPs will likely be on to their next fund before that happens. Money for nothing and fees for free.
The article is more enjoyable if read while listening to this.
If you can’t laugh at the subversion of our basic liberties what can you laugh at? The recent leak of the NSA’s secret PRISM program has elicited quite a response – especially the poor presentation value of their “pitch” slides. Seriously, if you’re asking for $20M a year of taxpayer money at least jazz up your powerpoint a bit.
Every Business Cliche Ever, in One Excellent Toast From Super Angel Chris Sacca
Source: All Things D
Found via The Big Picture
A few of my favorites. Source: Buzzfeed
If you are an entrepreneur, deal with startups, or have seen the movie The Social Network then you’ve probably at least heard of Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook, and has made countless other investments through the various funds he manages (Founders Fund, Clarium, Mithril, etc.). In short, the man is not some one trick pony that got lucky a couple of times. His advice is valuable; when he speaks you should listen – especially if you’re involved with startups.
Last year he taught a startup class at Stanford. As you might imagine it was incredibly popular and hard to get into. Fortunately for those of us that were unable to attend, one of the more diligent students not only took incredibly robust class notes but decided to share them with the world through his blog http://blakemasters.com/.
You can check out his notes here: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup Class Notes.
Thank you Blake, thank you PT. A few notable quotes highlighted on Pinterest of all places are below:
They say the only things guaranteed in life are death and taxes… unless you’re a corporation. Yes, a corporation can hypothetically live forever and, as it turns out, they don’t always have to pay taxes. Cool interactive graphic from the NYT regarding US corporate tax rates:
Found via The Big Picture
Photogenic Thoughts 