Max Olson

Founding team @Mashgin. Public market turned deep tech seed
investor. Publish Buffett letters book: SpaceX book

[Max Olson @maxolson]

SpaceX has been succeeding in public for 15+ years. Now they're the most valuable private company on Earth & the competition isn't close.

Is any of this repeatable? Why hasn't the model been copied?

Wrote an essay on why + what anyone building hard things can learn:

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Had claude make me the time cycle clock I've always wanted: day, week, lunar month, year. Now I want a physical version...

[Tamara Winter @tamarawinter]

And now you can preorder the NOMAD LETTERS (out December 1!): https://t.co/EN1kL7bGcz

For years these letters have circulated (at first, unofficially) among investors, acquiring a devoted readership. We wanted to give them a permanent home in print.

Nick and his partner Qais Zakaria’s record is extraordinary. The letters are the account of how they got there, featuring everything from studying Amazon and Costco (Nomad’s defining investments)—to visiting cement plants in Zimbabwe, and beyond.

They’re candid about their mistakes and curious about the forces that shape investors’ behavior: incentives, psychology, and the wisdom (or foolishness!) of the crowd.

Since closing the fund, they’ve devoted their time to philanthropy, a journey Nick recounts in the lovely foreword he wrote for this edition.

I’m thrilled to continue adding to the investing corner of our catalogue, and I can’t think of a better work to follow Poor Charlie’s Almanack. ❣️

[Max Olson @maxolson]

The French Revolution, 250 years ago or today?

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@licyeus Yeah, I think it's hard pressed to overtake X but I agree, lots of rough spots for X. I wouldn't want to be a new user building my feed, so much crap out there. Substack much higher q on avg but still not enough people there.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

I gave genuine tries to threads and bluesky. Bluesky was awful. Threads ok at first but I had to delete it also got pretty bad.

X is best. Although still needs a lot of curation effort to make it truly useful. A lot more could be done

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

Last year I thought Threads was an existential risk to X.

When Meta puts its full weight behind something -- by injecting the app into Instagram, it’s DEFCON 5:

You have to squeeze out every last drop of growth from all available surfaces to save the app.

However, I started to realize that the opposite was happening:

It was strengthening X.

If you look at any announcement by Zuck, you will see the most rude & toxic comments on the internet.

But when he makes those same announcements on X, people are thrilled about how he’s pushing humanity forward. X is a place where people are excited about the future, so it’s no surprise he and his top lieutenants are using it more than their own app.

Threads — and Bluesky — have effectively quarantined some of the worst people on the internet.

And so I had an epiphany: those apps are X’s anti-abuse systems.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@patrickc @WorksInProgMag Hard agree, props to the designer/team

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@abhinai it was so simple this whole time...

[Damien Echols @damienechols]

I’ve had a lot of people asking me about the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, as well as the upcoming execution by firing squad that’s supposed to be livestreamed. Having spent nearly 20 years on death row, my thoughts and feelings about these things are so vast that I sometimes struggle to find a place to begin. I became close friends with a man who had committed murder. He was like a brother to me. I once watched him break down crying, trembling as he told me he wished he was as evil as the world believed him to be, because then he wouldn’t have to care about what he’d done. Fifteen years later, he was still having nightmares about it. I know in my soul that he would never hurt another person again. But I’ve also watched a man being stabbed to death in prison. I cried for days afterward, and something inside me was changed forever. I learned that some people are capable of extraordinary transformation, while others remain capable of terrible violence even behind prison walls. There are no simple answers here. No slogans or political arguments that can adequately address the complexity of human beings, guilt, punishment, and suffering.

But there is one thing I want to say about the upcoming execution by firing squad. Don’t watch it. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, even if you think the person being executed deserves to die, don’t watch it. You cannot witness a human being being killed and simply walk away unchanged. What you see becomes part of you. It follows you into places you never expected it to reach. There are things I witnessed in prison that I would give anything to forget, things that still cast a shadow over my life decades later. There’s a difference between understanding that terrible things happen in the world and deliberately making yourself a spectator to them. I don’t have all the answers about justice, punishment, or forgiveness. But I do know that killing another human being should never become so ordinary that we turn it into something to watch from the comfort of our living rooms.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Yeah I’m sure that’ll deter radicals in the future…

[History Photographed @HistoryInPics]

execution of Fort Hood shooter will be livestreamed

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@EricJorgenson A good place to be on a good list

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@webdevMason Yea thats the general range. Different kids can shift a bit either way. Babies, especially with nursing mom, can be super easy to travel with. My 2.5yo is definitely not out yet...

[Max Olson @maxolson]

"area man watches videos every night of his recently deceased best friend" 😔

RIP Charlie

[tae kim @firstadopter]

This is crazy. Warren is just like us.

WSJ: "In August, Osberg visited Buffett’s home in Omaha. They spent hours on YouTube."

"At the office, he’s known for poring over annual reports, searching for nuggets that can lead to a profitable investment. Mornings are dedicated to CNBC. Evenings, though, are all about YouTube. The content is hardly ever related to investing or finance" https://t.co/J2707sCT4f

[Max Olson @maxolson]

I finally have all my Berkshire archive material and data in 1 place: https://t.co/FADGmwNdOJ

Check it out!

annotated, interactive charts are a favorite medium of mine so this was really exciting to build.

[Explorist @explorists]

60 years of Berkshire Hathaway on one chart.

Zoom into any year and you land in that year's Buffett letter and meeting transcript. Every letter since 1965 and every meeting since 1994, in one place.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@Austen @KellyClaudeAI There’s a lot more and many of these are excerpts. I’m impressed it found this many though given none are search indexed anywhere

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@CinemaTweets1 The reason why Affleck, Scorsese, and (I assume) Lucas, coppola and more are ok with AI is because it's only 1 of a long line of tech that can enhance storytelling. No different than CGI, digital cams, sound, any vfx

[Max Olson @maxolson]

New post: Everyone warns founders about doing too many things. Almost nobody warns them about doing one thing for too long.

https://t.co/cM9vP8j5Mz

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Is there a good reason @Substack still doesn't allow simple tables in posts? some arcane religious rule I'm not aware of? An inside joke?

Prediction market widget: yes
Table: ?

[Chris Anderson (in Bay Area) @chr1sa]

The bioethics circle jerks during the Human Genome Project, which were allocated 5% of the project's funding, were a total waste of time.

They had countless conferences and workshops imagining bad things that could happen like punitive health insurance rates based on genetic risk, none of which actually came to pass. Meanwhile all the real issues that arose from ubiquitous DNA data, like accidentally doxing your criminal relatives with your own 23andMe data, were never imagined.

It's a condemnation of the precautionary principle. Philosophers can make up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios in a vacuum but it's nothing like actually trying things and seeing all the weird second and third-order consequences that emerge and *then* dealing with the unwelcome ones.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

No Mr. Robot? This entire list is suspect

And 30 rock was good but #8 really?

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

The NY Times has released a list of the Top 100 Best TV shows of the 21st Century.

They polled over 500 major stars, showrunners & other notable names.

(Source: https://t.co/9Vav3wlHkE)