Marc S. Bathgate

Lesser 1/4 to @kkbathgate. Dad to 4. Converted Utahn. Finance & tech geek; avid skier, podcast lover. Alternatives skeptic & investor. Not investment advice.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

There’s always a discussion about technology being ahead of ethics. This is especially prominent with AI.

I call BS.

The ethics are not behind the tech. They have existed for 2000 years. The problem is that the people creating the tech don’t know them and how to code them.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

Incredible piece of land. I hope someone with the right vision and capitalization buys it from the creditors.

[The Park Record @Parkrecord]

Investment company hopes to fix Wohali’s financial problems, but the development’s future remains uncertain
Read More at: https://t.co/IBVLknqvi7

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

If you think different morals apply to home life vs. business or anywhere else in the world, you have a problem.

The Almighty sees your heart and knows your intent. Forgiveness is always there for those who seek it, but why not try to do life right, even as we all fail forward?

[PEoperator⚡️ @PEoperator]

Was talking with our CFO.

He coaches little league. Got into it with the other coach.

CFO’s player (bats last) gets HBP in the head/neck. Gets dizzy.

He decides to sit him out. Kids mom agrees.

Other coach comes over… hey whats the rule here?

Like he’s being totally objective.

In fact, he’s trying to get an automatic out.

These are 9 yo kids. This “adult” man is trying to win a game at the expense of a 9 yo.

So the hurt 9 yo feels bad, says “I can go.” CFO coach (former coach of the year btw) says no way, we’ll just take the out.

The opposing coach is hiding behind the rules. “Just trying to understand.”

No you’re not. You’re pathetic scum trying to find a way to win a 9 yo baseball game. At a 9 yo kids expense.

The point I want to make here is: you can’t compartmentalize your soul.

That coach may console himself “I’m a great family man”, or “I volunteer” or “I’m a deacon at church.”

But that is not your identity, those are just things you do.

Same is true in business. Just because it’s allowed doesn’t mean you should do it.

You know that but you still justify behavior sometimes by what’s allowed.

I know because I’ve done it too.

How you do things matter. You are a collection of little decisions. The big ones are easier. It’s the little behaviors that end up making you who you are.

I posted about an MD who, through a banker buddy, reached out to a former employee to surmise his status.

The point wasn’t that he can’t do that… he can. These point is, for 2 years, he’s been denigrating this employee after an acrimonious departure. And for those 2 years he’s been worried sick because he knows that guy could hurt him.

Imagine looking in the mirror every night and knowing you’re a fraud.

That MD probably has a family and considers himself a good person. Meanwhile in business, he does things he wouldn’t tell his priest.

Not because the priest wouldn’t forgive him, but because he has justified this behavior so much he doesn’t see a problem with it.

Meanwhile his soul erodes.

That’s the same as this little league coach. He’s out there volunteering, just checking on the rules but actually asking for a 9 yo with a concussion to either get back out there or be the reason his team loses.

If he wins the game like that, he loses some self respect.

But actually- he didn’t win.

The CFO coach decided to take the out for the kid and in the last inning, his team rallied and won the game!

In fact they rallied so hard that they batted all the way through and the kid sitting out cost them two automatic outs.

CFO coach left with a the respect of the crowd, his own self respect, and a win.

The loser coach went home to justify himself in the mirror.

[Dr. Arthur Brooks @arthurbrooks]

I ask the executives I work with when they last made a real friend.

They get quiet. Almost without fail, the names they come up with are people they haven't seen in twenty years — old roommates, or people they knew before the striving started.

That is the warning sign. And I recognize it, because it used to be me. At one point in my life, I was surrounded by people all day. My phone never stopped ringing. My calendar was packed. But I had never been lonelier.

I would not have admitted it at the time. But if something truly hard had happened — the kind of thing you don't put in a meeting agenda — I'm not sure I would have known who to call.

There is a lie strivers tell themselves about friendship, and the lie sounds reasonable: I'm in a sprint right now. There will be time for real friends later. I've heard versions of this from people in their twenties through their fifties. The essence never changes; only the "later" gets pushed further.

But friendship doesn't work the way the striver imagines. The people who become your friends-for-life are the people you accumulate time with — through the moves, the boring Tuesdays, the bad years. You can't fast-forward to them. You can't acquire them at fifty-five the way you acquire a second home.

The reason the names always come from college is that college was the last time friendship was the default mode of their lives. They were thrown together with people in proximity over years, with nothing competing for their attention. They didn't have to choose; the friendship happened on its own.

After college, friendship stopped being free. It started costing time, and the deliberate decision to make somebody a priority. Most strivers stop paying that cost and then, decades later, wonder why the bench is empty.

Friendship compounds, and so does its absence.

Striving is a fine thing — I'm pro-striving. The mistake is treating friendship as something that sits outside the striving, a hobby for the off-hours. By the time the urgent work slows down, the people who would have become your friends-for-life have spent those decades becoming somebody else's.

The friends you'll need at fifty-five are the people you are postponing this week.

Do not wait for friendship to become convenient. Pick up the phone and make the plans now.

[Pedro Santa Clara @psantacl]

Six famous economists — @JosephEStiglitz , @PikettyWIL , @jasonhickel among them — published a manifesto in the @guardian last week: "growth is a doomed strategy." They say they've done the maths.

I checked the maths.

The claim that growth failed the poor is contradicted by the most uncontroversial dataset in economics: extreme poverty fell from 44% of humanity in 1981 to under 10% today — during the very decades they call a failure. China alone lifted 800 million people, not with a UN roadmap, but with growth.

The "92% of excess emissions" statistic? It's one of the authors citing his own paper, without saying so — and it's not a measurement, it's a moral allocation dressed up as data.

The policy toolkit — "public control of strategic assets," "credit guidance" — has a track record: Soviet collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban, which starved the poor it claimed to serve within eighteen months.

What worries me most: degrowth is being marketed to young people who feel locked out — telling them their stagnation is virtue. It's a swindle. The young aren't victims of too much growth. They are the first victims of its absence.

Growth is the only anti-poverty program that has ever worked.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

The only advantage we have in all that distributed nuclear waste is that it will be easier to deploy it into third-generation SMRs that can use “spent” uranium from LWRs as fuel, like @CphAtomics.

[Jim Geraghty @jimgeraghty]

I mention this because the country of Finland is weeks away from opening the world’s first “nuclear tomb,” 1,430 feet underground “in rock older than animal life, built to stay sealed for 100,000 years and need exactly zero human attention from day one.” They built it for $1.6 billion.

[Scottish Banter @1scottishbanter]

Introducing the Scottish-American travel dictionary 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

We’ve put together this guide to keep the Tartan Army out of trouble in the States.

Read carefully to avoid confusing the locals, deeply offending the country, or being interrogated by Homeland Security over a sandwich.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

You’d have to put me under oath to get me to admit how deeply these sounds are embedded in my brain. GoldenEye for N64 will forever be the best first person shooter game.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

I fear getting people to live downtown will be harder than expected. Denver is located at the confluence of two water sources. That geographic feature is no longer relevant to life, and there are more desirable places to live on the Front Range. https://t.co/U1bKEMFWQr

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Tried to log into my bank this morning

Not a new bank. My bank. The one that has my money

First it wanted my password

Wrong

Tried the other one

Wrong

Reset it

"New password cannot match any of your last 24 passwords"

That is every password I have ever used

Created a new one that I will forget next week

Then it said "please verify you are human"

I am human

I have a mortgage

I paid $52.18 for bread, milk, and eggs last week

Only a human would do that

But the bank was not convinced

"Select all squares with traffic lights"

Nine squares

Three had traffic lights

One had the edge of a traffic light pole

Maybe two pixels of yellow paint

Stared at it for a full minute

Selected it

Wrong

"Select all squares with stairs"

Two squares had stairs

One had a ramp

Is a ramp stairs

A ramp is the opposite of stairs

I selected the two obvious ones

Wrong

It wanted the ramp

I am a CFO

I've fired people with more due process than this

But I cannot pass a test designed to keep bots out of my own checking account

"Click and hold until the image stops moving"

A jigsaw puzzle piece floated across the screen

Held it

"Verification failed"

Held it for thirteen seconds

My finger cramped

"Success"

Then a new screen

"Your account has been locked due to suspicious activity"

The suspicious activity was me

Trying to access my own account

Called customer service

The phone menu had ten options

None of them were "your website thinks I am a robot"

Thirty-seven minutes on hold

The same fourteen seconds of smooth jazz

Looping

Every ninety seconds a voice told me my call was important

It did not sound important

Finally a man answered

"Thank you for holding, my name is John"

That man's name was not John

We both knew it

I did not press the issue

John asked for my mother's maiden name, my first pet, and the street I grew up on

He unlocked the account in forty seconds

Forty seconds

The bank trusts John more than me

And John does not exist

Final tally

Nineteen minutes of captchas

Thirty-seven minutes of smooth jazz

One man who was not named John

To access money that is mine

At an institution that emails me every single day asking if I want a home equity line of credit

My wife walked in

She said "what are you doing"

I said "proving to a computer that I'm not a computer"

She said "are you winning"

I said "I just spent an hour deciding if a ramp is stairs"

She said "that sounds like something a computer would do"

She wasn't wrong

She usually isn't

Plz fix. Thx.

Sent from my iPhone

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

Certain people seem determined to ruin the experience of others. The same ones will complain about Vail’s mismanagement of Park City Mountain.

[The Park Record @Parkrecord]

Park City Mountain lift improvements appealed
Read More at: https://t.co/Bivs9pzihe

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

The current structure punishes companies for being public and rewards them for staying private. It’s contrary to the interest of shareholders and needs to be reversed.

Aside: if a CEO says they don’t want to manage “quarter-to-quarter,” you have the wrong person in the role.

[Dan Gray @credistick]

Databricks could have gone public in 2020 at a comparable scale to Snowflake.

Instead, it stayed private and raised an estimated $28B across seven subsequent rounds.

Consider two scenarios based on public comps:

- A hypothetical 2020 listing, resulting in a public company worth ~$200B in 2027.

- The current trajectory, where Databricks goes public at a valuation of ~$200B in 2027.

The difference between these scenarios is the 7 years of private capital at a cost of around 18%, versus public capital at a cost of 12%.

As a result, 2020 shareholders have sacrificed ~$30B of present value in order to stay private, and venture capitalists expanded their fee income by ~$6B.

Even the carried interest from a much larger 2027 IPO is lower, if you factor in the time value of money.

Unfortunately, it's easy to grandstand with the TVPI on earlier investments and obscure the damage done to the company by injecting more capital.

[Paul Lee @iPaulLee]

The best emerging managers understand:

Fundraising is not an event.

It's a relationship-building process that starts years before the first close and continues years after it.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

A Nazi commander loaded his pistol, pressed the cold metal barrel directly against the forehead of an American soldier, and gave a chilling ultimatum: "Order the Jewish soldiers to step forward, or I will shoot you right now."

What happened next in that frozen prisoner-of-war camp changed history forever, yet the man who stared down death kept it a secret for the rest of his life.

It was January 1945, and the bitter winter of World War II was at its peak. Inside Stalag IX-A, a notorious German prison camp near Ziegenhain, thousands of American soldiers were trapped behind barbed wire. Among them was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a twenty-five-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in his section, Edmonds was responsible for the lives of 1,275 men.

One day, the camp commander, a fanatical Nazi major named Siegmann, issued a terrifying directive.

He ordered that the following morning, all American prisoners of Jewish faith must step out of the ranks during roll call. Everyone knew what this meant. Separating the Jewish soldiers was the first step toward sending them to extermination camps.

Inside the dark, freezing barracks, the prisoners panicked. Some of the Jewish soldiers considered stepping forward willingly to protect their Christian brothers from Nazi wrath. But Edmonds refused to let that happen. He looked at his men and gave a clear, definitive order: "Tomorrow, everyone steps forward. Everyone."

The next morning, the ground was thick with snow. Major Siegmann walked out onto the parade ground, expecting to see a small, isolated group of Jewish soldiers standing apart from the rest. Instead, he stopped dead in his tracks. All 1,275 American soldiers had stepped forward together in perfect unison.

The commander turned red with anger and stormed over to Edmonds. "They cannot all be Jews!" Siegmann screamed.

Edmonds stood completely still, looked the Nazi straight in the eyes, and replied: "We are all Jews here."

Enraged, Siegmann drew his Luger pistol and pressed it against Edmonds' forehead. The tension was suffocating. Hundreds of men held their breath, waiting for the gunshot. But Edmonds did not blink.

"According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number," Edmonds said, his voice steady and calm. "If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us. And when the war ends, you will be tried for war crimes."

Edmonds knew the German army was collapsing and the Allies were advancing. Siegmann knew it too. The Nazi commander looked at the wall of unified men, realized he could not break their spirit, and slowly lowered his gun. He turned around and walked away without saying another word.

Because of that moment of defiance, two hundred Jewish-American soldiers survived the Holocaust. When the war ended, Edmonds returned to Tennessee, married his sweetheart, and raised a family. He never bragged about his actions, never looked for medals, and never even told his own children what he had done. To him, protecting his men was simply his duty.

Decades after his death in 1985, his son uncovered the truth by talking to the survivors. In 2015, Edmonds was officially recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, the highest honor Israel bestows upon non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. He remains the only American soldier to ever receive this recognition.

True heroism does not look for applause, and love will always be louder than hatred.

By standing together in the snow, those soldiers proved that when we refuse to abandon each other, ordinary human beings can become absolutely invincible.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

I couldn’t tell if my Uber driver was practicing his tap dance routine on the pedals, had consumed too much caffeine, or just enjoyed making the bobble head on his dash nod more, but car sickness is nor a feature I was hoping for in today’s ride. 🤢

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

Just that - reduce the blackout windows. Structure the rules so that it’s presumed management teams and boards should be buying stock, not that doing so is a rarity.

Lower the threshold for calling a shareholder meeting and getting a candidate on a corporate proxy. Boards easily displaced will see good governance as more in their self interest.

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

@27XVII I think we need to make it easier for insiders to buy stock (so they can’t hide behind the rules) and easier for shareholders to fire them (so that there’s accountability).

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

I’ve lost count of the number of times I book a window or aisle seat, often in an exit row, and @Delta “upgrades” me to a Comfort+ middle.

This despite having checked the box so many times NOT to upgrade me to a middle seat. 🙄

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

My father always enjoyed responding to the question posed to him and my mother of “Are these all your kids?” with “they’re from her first marriage,” leaving out the fact that that marriage was to him.

I’m still waiting for someone to ask me so that I can try it.

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Took my wife to the company dinner tonight

She stepped away to use the restroom

Came back mid-conversation with the CFO and his wife

I said "and this is my first wife"

Because she is. That is a fact.

She looked at the ceiling

Set her drink down

Walked to the car

I still don't know what I did wrong

I was being accurate

[Marc S. Bathgate @msbathgate]

I swear @Intuit’s competitors are paying them to keep their mobile app so bad.

The web version of QuickBooks would be sufficient misery for most, but being forced to use the mobile app is a criminal sentence in some states.

[Lisa Britton @LisaBritton]

Our education system favors feminine traits and it has for a long time. I don’t think it’s crazy to say if we want boys to succeed academically we should change up the system to work better for them, rather than just suggesting they need to be more like girls. Boys are not broken girls.