Cash

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Naval Ravikant on the right reasons to start a company

“I really just wanted to be a founder,” Naval confesses with respect to the first few companies he started. “That desire kind of overrode everything… It was not a pure motivation.”

Then his motivation shifted to money and power:

“Nobody wants to talk about it, but [money and power] are fundamental drivers,” he admits. “I want to make money, and I want a company that has an influence. And that wasn’t that great of a motivation either.”

Naval continues:

“Now looking back in my career, I was most successful when I did projects because I was genuinely curious about them… Following my own intellectual curiosity gave me insight that led to good investments, startups, and outcomes.”

Today Naval is in a position where he doesn’t have to do things for money or status, so he only works on products he wants to see exist:

“What’s a beautiful thing I can make that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t put effort into it?” he asks himself. “And what people do I want to spend all my time around?”

Naval reflects:

“The truth is that when your material desires are somewhat met, you end up extremely bored… When you don’t have to hustle for a living, you’re like, ‘What do I do?’ You’ve lost your purpose in life. You can go meditate in a corner for a long time, but that gets boring too. You can go completely hedonistic, but that’s a death trap and just an empty lifestyle.”

He continues:

“What I want to do is self-actualize. I want to be the best version of myself. And what does the best version of myself mean? That means creating something. It’s better to create than to consume. It’s far more fulfilling to learn along the way and build… And I want to do it with friends — people that I really respect, admire, and enjoy spending time with… I wish I had that motivation and insight 20-30 years ago.”

Source: @zfellows (Aug 2025)

[Clark Square Capital @ClarkSquareCap]

If you are looking for some SaaS ideas...

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Strong people don't necessarily look like strong people. Though actors & social media health grifters must look the part.
(Just as surgeons may not look like surgeons).

[Cash @Cashxe]

Localization

[Michael Fritzell (Asian Century Stocks) @MikeFritzell]

The Top Finance Newsletters of 2026:

- Citrini - thematic investing (⭐)
- East Asia Econ - macro commentary on China/Taiwan/Korea/Japan (⭐)
- The Transcript - earnings call transcript analysis (⭐)
- Capital Employed - interviews, links to stock ideas (⭐)
- Latticework - John Mihaljevic’s Substack (⭐)
- Sunday’s Idea Brunch - interviews with great investors (⭐)
- Astutex - trend-scanning through alt-data (⭐)
- HFI Research - oil & gas (⭐)
- Net Interest - Marc Rubinstein’s blog (⭐)
- Healthy Stock Picks - global healthcare sector specialist (⭐)
- DMT Capital - Young investor with a talent for short-selling (⭐)
- Byron Street Research - small-cap ideas from a pro (⭐)
- KEDM - event-driven ideas from Harris Kupperman’s team (⭐)
- ToffCap - High-quality special sits ideas (⭐)
- Yet Another Value Blog - Andrew Walker’s Substack (⭐)
- Bireme - Poker player Evan Tindell’s fund that also invests in Japan (⭐)
- Clark Square Capital - stock ideas from around the world (⭐)
- Cluseau Research - US-based investor with a tilt towards financials (⭐)
- Floebertus - opportunistic investing globally (⭐)
- Gezzogero - German investor investing global small caps (⭐)
- Halvio Capital - a talented global hedge fund (⭐)
- Sector Stories - ex-buyside analyst turned sailor and blogger (⭐)
- Sweet Stocks - Alex Sweet’s stock ideas (⭐)
- The Mikro Kap - micro-caps from David Katunarić (⭐)
- Undervalued Shares - Swen Lorenz’s newsletter (⭐)
- A Value Fund - Tim McElvaine’s fund (⭐)
- Alluvial Capital - Dave Waters’ fund (⭐)
- Base Hit Investing - John Huber’s blog (⭐)
- Bonhoeffer Capital Management - Keith Smith’s global value hedge fund (⭐)
- Kerrisdale - US long/short fund occasionally writes about Asian equities (⭐)
- Speedwell Research - high-quality deep dives (⭐)
- The Science of Hitting - Alex Morris’s blog (⭐)
- Ian’s Insider Corner - LatAm/North American stock ideas from Ian Bezek (⭐)
- Value and opportunity - Germany-based blogger (⭐)
- Asian Century Stocks - Asian value stocks (⭐)
- Collyer Bridge - Singapore-based Substack covering exciting new themes (⭐)
- East Asia Stock Insights - Value stocks in East Asia (⭐)
- Made in Japan - growth stocks in Japan (⭐)
- Offpiste Investing - great curation of Asia-related links (⭐)
- One Foot Hurdle - Taiwanese and Hong Kong equities (⭐)
- Smartkarma - a research platform for institutional investors (⭐)
- Bronte Capital - John Hempton’s Sydney-based long/short fund (⭐)
- East72 Dynasty Trust - Andrew Brown’s fund focusing on global equities (⭐)

Do NOT take this list too seriously. It's based on what I've read - what I can personally vouch for. If your publication is not included, it's probably because I haven't read enough of it. Maybe next year.

Michael

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

This is potentially the biggest news of the year

Google just released TurboQuant. An algorithm that makes LLM’s smaller and faster, without losing quality

Meaning that 16gb Mac Mini now can run INCREDIBLE AI models. Completely locally, free, and secure

This also means:

• Much larger context windows possible with way less slowdown and degradation
• You’ll be able to run high quality AI on your phone
• Speed and quality up. Prices down.

The people who made fun of you for buying a Mac Mini now have major egg on their face.

This pushes all of AI forward in a such a MASSIVE way

It can’t be stated enough: props to Google for releasing this for all. They could have gatekept it for themselves like I imagine a lot of other big AI labs would have. They didn’t. They decided to advance humanity.

2026 is going to be the biggest year in human history.

[Webb-site @webbhk]

It is with great sadness that we share that David M. Webb MBE passed away peacefully in Hong Kong on Tuesday January 13th, 2026 from metastatic prostate cancer. David will be missed by family, many friends, and supporters. The family request privacy at this difficult time.

[yammi @sighyam]

No country has ever gotten rich from tourism. Ever. It has never happened, and it never will. The level of greed, short-sightedness, and corruption required to squander a country that’s educated and decently progressive. Thailand is a perfect country example of “we almost had everything”

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

Is there an AI bubble? With the massive number of dollars going into AI infrastructure such as OpenAI’s $1.4 trillion plan and Nvidia briefly reaching a $5 trillion market cap, many have asked if speculation and hype have driven the values of AI investments above sustainable values. However, AI isn’t monolithic, and different areas look bubbly to different degrees.
- AI application layer: There is underinvestment. The potential is still much greater than most realize.
- AI infrastructure for inference: This still needs significant investment.
- AI infrastructure for model training: I’m still cautiously optimistic about this sector, but there could also be a bubble.

Caveat: I am absolutely not giving investment advice!

AI application layer. There are many applications yet to be built over the coming decade using new AI technology. Almost by definition, applications that are built on top of AI infrastructure/technology (such as LLM APIs) have to be more valuable than the infrastructure, since we need them to be able to pay the infrastructure and technology providers.

I am seeing many green shoots across many businesses that are applying agentic workflows, and am confident this will grow. I have also spoken with many Venture Capital investors who hesitate to invest in AI applications because they feel they don’t know how to pick winners, whereas the recipe for deploying $1B to build AI infrastructure is better understood. Some have also bought into the hype that almost all AI applications will be wiped out merely by frontier LLM companies improving their foundation models. Overall, I believe there is significant underinvestment in AI applications. This area remains a huge focus for my venture studio, AI Fund.

AI infrastructure for inference. Despite AI’s low penetration today, infrastructure providers are already struggling to fulfill demand for processing power to generate tokens. Several of my teams are worried about whether we can get enough inference capacity, and both cost and inference throughput are limiting our ability to use even more. It is a good problem to have that businesses are supply-constrained rather than demand-constrained. The latter is a much more common problem, when not enough people want your product. But insufficient supply is nonetheless a problem, which is why I am glad our industry is investing significantly in scaling up inference capacity.

As one concrete example of high demand for token generation, highly agentic coders are progressing rapidly. I’ve long been a fan of Claude Code; OpenAI Codex also improved dramatically with the release of GPT-5; and Gemini 3 has made Google CLI very competitive. As these tools improve, their adoption will grow. At the same time, overall market penetration is still low, and many developers are still using older generations of coding tools (and some aren’t even using any agentic coding tools). As market penetration grows — I’m confident it will, given how useful these tools are — aggregate demand for token generation will grow.

I predicted early last year that we’d need more inference capacity, partly because of agentic workflows. Since then, the need has become more acute. As a society, we need more capacity for AI inference.

Having said that, I’m not saying it’s impossible to lose money investing in this sector. If we end up overbuilding — and I don’t currently know if we will — then providers may end up having to sell capacity at a loss or at low returns. I hope investors in this space do well financially. The good news, however, is that even if we overbuild, this capacity will get used, and it will be good for application builders!

AI infrastructure for model training. I am happy to see the investments going into training bigger models. But, of the three buckets of investments, this seems the riskiest. If open-source/open-weight models continue to grow in market share, then some companies that are pouring billions into training models might not see an attractive financial return on their investment.

Additionally, algorithmic and hardware improvements are making it cheaper each year to train models of a given level of capability, so the “technology moat” for training frontier models is weak. (That said, ChatGPT has become a strong consumer brand, and so it enjoys a strong brand moat, while Gemini, assisted by Google's massive distribution advantage, is also making a strong showing.)

I remain bullish about AI investments broadly. But what is the downside scenario — that is, is there a bubble that will pop? One scenario that worries me: If part of the AI stack (perhaps in training infra) suffers from overinvestment and collapses, it could lead to negative market sentiment around AI more broadly and an irrational outflow of interest away from investing in AI, despite the field overall having strong fundamentals. I don’t think this will happen, but if it does, it would be unfortunate since there’s still a lot of work in AI that I consider highly deserving of much more investment.

Warren Buffett popularized Benjamin Graham’s quote, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” He meant that in the short term, stock prices are driven by investor sentiment and speculation; but in the long term, they are driven by fundamental, intrinsic value. I find it hard to forecast sentiment and speculation, but am very confident about the long-term health of AI’s fundamentals. So my plan is just to keep building!

[Original text: https://t.co/psPlIFRJsi ]

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

Quentin Tarantino has started to reveal his 20 best movies of the 21st century:

11) Battle Royale
12) Big Bad Wolves
13) Jackass: The Movie
14) School of Rock
15) The Passion of the Christ
16) The Devil’s Rejects
17) Chocolate
18) Moneyball
19) Cabin Fever
20) West Side Story

[Cluseau Investments @blondesnmoney]

Stunning, stunning.

If only the Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, President, Chief Executive Officer, and director gave us some sort of indication...

[Lawrence McDonald @Convertbond]

Thank you! CFA Institute - Top 20 Finance Books All-Time, as chosen by CFA candidates.

“Holiday gift ideas - “Colossal Failure of Common Sense” - pick up one for that college student.

Gratitude.

[Cash @Cashxe]

@shortmagsmle @grok validates this statement in relation to Food stamp policy

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The World in Which We Live Now.
7 Points. Lecture at the Ron Paul Institute Annual Meeting.
Thanks @DanielLMcAdams

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Antifragile.

[a16z @a16z]

.@pmarca: "Every job, every role, every company you go to is an opportunity to learn how a business works and how an industry works."

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Genie 3 is here - it can generate an entire world simulation that you can interact with in real-time, just from a text prompt! It's pretty mind-blowing really when you stop to think about it, and it's rapidly improving - one day we will be able to build the Holodeck for real!

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The argument that increasing tarrifs to cause adaptation by local industry assumes all parties consider the tariffs PERMANENT (even if we ignore the immediate impoverishment from decline in trade, the clumsiness in the abruptness).
The problem is everyone by a functioning brain (including people on the traditional "right") by now realize that Trump is a bit deranged, erratic, & these moves are likely to be transitory. He could be booted out; the 4 year mortality of an unfit 78 y.o. is >20%.

Heavy investments take > 5 years, more than the political cycle & initially require more imports. Huge capital commitments require a bit of certainty.

Some products s.a. wine may take >10 years, olive oil >12 years.

[tphuang @tphuang]

Louis Gave on China's position on US tariffs vs 1st Trump term.
Will it hurt different sectors? Sure, but it will also hurt Apple & many American companies that use lower cost Chinese energy & labor + its supply chain that make stuff on low margin & capture low value added.

[Clark Square Capital @ClarkSquareCap]

Great article by @uv_shares on how to get exposure to Ukraine once the war ends: