Welcome back to the 4th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Just a heads up, we’ll be taking next Sunday off for Memorial day but will be back the following week with some exciting news 👀 … Hope you all enjoy your long weekends!
📙🎧 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Rather than share a single piece here, below are a few things we’ve read or listened to on this topic that try to span the political and moral spectrum of the discussion over the current conflict in Israel/Gaza. It seems clear that we’d all benefit from trying to gain a wider range of perspectives on hot-button issues like this, especially for those who plan to share their opinions publicly—we hope you’ll find the below helpful if you’re looking to learn more and welcome any content recommendations from different perspectives as we’re learning more ourselves.
📙 Fareed Zakaria - The Only Way to Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Problem
📙 Bari Weiss - Can you be a progressive and support Israel?
🎧 The Daily - Netanyahu and Biden: A History (Spotify | Apple Podcasts)
📙 Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham - Gaza Conflict Stokes ‘Identity Crisis’ for Young American Jews
📙 Yasmeen Serhan - The New Word Defining the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Washington
💬 Austen Allred on Twitter
The occasion for this tweet by Lambda School founder Austen Allred was a newly released article by economist Paul Krugman on his skepticism around the future of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more broadly. Beyond just resurfacing a funny, freezing cold take from 1998 on the future of the internet, this made me think about the repeatable way that discussions around new technologies tend to proceed, with the debate around crypto being just the latest example.
The proponents lean into an “inevitability” narrative that others can’t or aren’t willing to understand. They point to past explosions in technology (e.g., the internet) as precedent, and dismiss skeptical resistance with funny anecdotes like the one referenced in the above tweet, or the classic example of the horse-drawn carriage lobby scoffing at cars. It happened with electric cars (win, eventually), it happened with virtual reality (we’ll see), and it happened with the segway (…).
The skeptics generally paint this as semi-deluded arrogance, and point to their own examples of overheated expectations (see: segway). They appeal to the fact that new technologies often seem silly or impractical, and cater to the public’s natural skepticism toward big change and fear of bubbles. The “party line” tends to be remarkably consistent - try to find a crypto skeptic that doesn’t reference the 17th century Dutch Tulip Mania:
The best part if you’re just in it for the entertainment: growing incentives toward sharing opinions in public + the unlimited memory of the internet = infinite opportunity to relive how “obviously” wrong one side was in hindsight.
—Mike
📺 Blitzscaling 18: Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale
Greylock—November 2015 | 98 min
You can also listen to this via Greymatter, Greylock’s podcast, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Reid Hoffman used to teach a class at Stanford called Technology-enabled Blitzscaling where he interviewed a ton of high-profile people in tech. His interview with Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, happens to be my favorite.
If you’re not familiar with the Airbnb story, in my opinion it’s one of the best founding stories of web 2.0. And if you’re already familiar with it, there are ton of great nuggets and lessons in this episode that I think you’ll find entertaining.
From maxing out binders full of credit cards to selling $40 limited edition cereal to fund the company, their story is one of creative problem solving, struggle, and luck.
One great anecdote from the interview you may not know: Brian and his cofounder Joe originally came up with the idea for Airbnb so they could afford to pay rent. After hosting their first Airbnb guests (and yes, the guests actually slept on air beds), the team didn’t work on it for 4 months because they didn’t think it was the big idea. They actually started exploring building a roommate matching website because they were skeptical people would be willing to sleep in strangers’ homes.
Extra: If you’re interested, here’s the full list of interviews, which include conversations with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Patrick Collison, Marissa Mayer, and more.
—Thomas
🎧 Growth at a Reasonable Price
Animal Spirits—May 14 | 43 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
This is an interview with Clay Gardner, cofounder of Titan. Titan is a consumer-facing active investment product, meaning that they invest their clients’ money in an evolving portfolio of publicly traded stocks. Their stated mission is to bring the “hedge fund experience” to regular retail investors, sharing their investment theses for well-known companies like AirBnb and Disney to keep their audience informed of what stocks their money is going into. Titan sits between online brokerages like E*Trade or Robinhood that let you trade for yourself, and passive investment products like Wealthfront or Betterment that primarily invest consumer funds in ETFs.
I think Gardner’s (unsurprising) position that Titan is better positioned long-term relative to both brokerages and passive investment products is spot-on in the current environment. After a year of meme stocks, unprecedented market returns, and a crypto explosion, it’s hard to imagine the growing class of young, first-time retail investors flocking back to set-and-forget ETF-led platforms. On the flip side, active trading on Robinhood has already started to seem less attractive with many big tech names losing value over the past few months, and the return to offices means less time available for staying on top of the stock market. Titan hits the best of both worlds, keeping its investors involved with stocks tied to companies they already follow and love, without having to actively manage the portfolio themselves.
If Titan can continue to lean harder into the media/investor comms side of things (Gardner mentions the idea of launching a podcast in this episode to supplement their research memos), while proving it’s ability to limit retail investor pain in the event of a market cool-off, it has a real chance to become a household name over the next few years.
—Mike
As always, drop us a note if you have any feedback. And if you enjoyed this, feel free to forward it to any friends.
See you in two Sundays.