This week’s highlights: Perplexity, Employee Ownership, and Starvation
Happy Friday everyone –
Original Content This Week:
- 7 Core Capabilities for Legacy Families to Develop. Most often, people focus on the first – can the family work together? While this is necessary, it is not sufficient to address the full panoply of challenges that families face over the generations.
Cheers,
David
Food for Thought
- St John’s College 2022 Commencement – Start here – one of the most thoughtful reflections I have heard in awhile – love this line – “How terribly difficult knowledge is, and how rare. I hope you understand the difference between opinion, by which we live, and knowledge, which is a very small part of what any of us have at our disposal.”
- PD – Why You Should Enjoy Being Perplexed – this builds on some of the same themes
- WSJ – The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine. Citizen volunteers teamed up with soldiers to turn the tide in the most consequential European battle since World War II
- NYT – Billy McFarland Is Out of Jail and Ready for His Next Move. Five years after the Fyre Festival, the convicted fraudster is planning a comeback.
- CommonSense – Generation Swipe. Tinder promised it would revolutionize romance. So why are my peers lonelier and more sex-deprived than ever?
Business and Markets
- CapitalAllocators – Employee Ownership at C.H.I. Overhead Doors. Despite being the fourth private equity owner of C.H.I., KKR transformed the company through a series of operational improvements and perhaps most importantly, an employee-ownership model. In fact, the firm’s seven-year holding ended up generating the highest return of a KKR deal in thirty years. Upon the sale, employees received $360 million in proceeds with a substantial majority going to those below the C-suite level.
- FastCo – How Matt Mochary became the preeminent tech-world CEO coach – Credit CMF – The coach to the CEOs of Coinbase, Brex, and many others is now taking the field by building his ideas into software.
- FamilyWealthReport – After Bumpy Ride, FOX Faces Turning Point. This news service talks to Family Office Exchange, and also reflects on the network of such groups and the role they play in the North American wealth management landscape.
- HBS – The Persistent Effect of Initial Success: Evidence from Venture Capital. This pattern of results seems most consistent with the idea that initial success improves access to deal flow. That preferential access raises the quality of subsequent investments, perpetuating performance differences in initial investments.
Science, Technology, and Culture
- RevisionistHistory – The Department of Physiological Hygiene. In the final year of the Second World War, 36 men spent a year in a dingy set of rooms under the University of Minnesota football stadium. They were part of an experiment none of them would ever forget. What happened in the Department of Physiological Hygiene? Revisionist History uncovers a forgotten box of interviews in the archives of the Library of Congress.
- WSJ – Ted Lasso, AFC Richmond Join ‘FIFA 23’. The fictional coach and soccer team from the hit Apple TV+ show will be new choices in latest version of Electronic Arts’ popular videogame franchise
- Watchfinder – Watch Experts Rank Top Watch Brands From Best To Worst
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
- Does how you handle your wealth actually align with what you care most about in the world?
- Do you feel like you are pro-active and intentional with your financial affairs or entirely reactive to a busy world?
Growing financial wealth is a natural occurrence on the path to success. While this should make life easier, that is not always the case. With greater wealth, comes great opportunity and an overwhelming number of choices to make.
When Anything is Possible is the guidebook about how to engage strategically with wealth. It will help you change your wealth from something overwhelming and all-consuming towards a resource to be deployed to help you positively impact the things that you value most.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.