After some conversations with friends around $DIGG it seems like @BadgerDAO needs to do a better job explaining how we are tackling composability with $bDIGG.

1 of the most frequent criticisms of rebasing tokens is the lack of composability with DeFi protocols.

Thread/

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For those unfamiliar, DIGG is based off the AMPL code base. The most battle tested elastic cryptocurrency in the market.

Instead of being pegged to USD, DIGG is targeting the price of #Bitcoin

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Due to the elastic nature of rebasing tokens, centralized parties (like exchanges) and DeFi protocols (like money markets) have some trouble integrating.

DeFi in particular thrives because of the composable lego pieces. Not having that is problematic.

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The secret sauce Badger has are its vaults which currently hold over $600M in tokenized Bitcoin.

When you deposit in a vault today you get a “b” token back which represents your share of the vault.

We then ask you to stake that to quantify your multiplier.

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Our attempt at making a rebasing asset more composable is by using the vault representation of your deposited DIGG aka $bDIGG which DOESNT REBASE.

At launch we will have a DIGG only vault where users can deposit to earn APY in the form of $BADGER & $DIGG.

My 21 stocks for 2021:

Smallest to largest...
$IRBT
$UPWK
$FVRR
$RDFN
$BYND
$ETSY
$TDOC
$ZG / $Z
$PINS
$ROKU
$MO
$MELI
$ISRG
$SQ
$SE
$PM
$CRM
$DIS
$BRK.B
#Bitcoin
$AMZN

Bonus baskets:
$ARKG
A basket of the @chamath alphabet SPACS ( $SPCE, $OPEN, $IPOC, $IPOD, $IPOE, $IPOF)

iRobot ($IRBT) – Ceiling: So much optionality in home robotics + AI to boost growth. Floor: Premium brand, profitable, good balance sheet.

Upwork ($UPWK) and Fiverr ($FVRR) – Marketplaces that win as freelancing and the gig economy take off. Upwork has more sales now, but Fiverr has more recent growth.

Redfin ($RDFN) and Zillow ($ZG/$Z) – Disrupting traditional real estate agents with optionality to extract value in all aspects of the home buying/selling process.

Beyond Meat ($BYND) – Aggressively building distribution and brand for its plant-based meat (similarly impressed by Impossible Foods, but it’s private). The traditional meat industry is a trillion-dollar space.

After my first reading of the draft EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement, here is a short thread with some initial thoughts:

1) this is a massive and complex document, covering very diverse & highly specialist fields. No single person could ever plausibly claim properly to master/understand it. So I’ve focused on my own (“big picture”) interests. Not, eg the (in fact marginal) details of fishing quotas

2) Let’s start with how draft treaty is being framed by UK Gov & client press. They compare it to “no deal” & thus treat it as some sort of triumph. Well: even on own terms, that is far from accurate: for many sectors, draft treaty is barely better than no deal at all

3) But of course: such UK Gov framing of draft treaty = entirely if sadly typically misleading. Real comparison should be draft treaty versus what UK already enjoyed for 45 years as a Member State of the EU. And judged by that benchmark: Johnson’s proposed deal is truly pathetic

4) Draft treaty gives UK nothing it didn't already enjoy, in relations with EU, as a Member State in its own right. Eg Johnson boasts about “zero tariffs and zero quotas” – even though we had that already for decades and Brexit simply risked throwing even those basic things away

1/ Equity crowdfunding or equity investment marketplaces failed. Full stop. Didn’t work.

Here is my synopsis on why the industry hasn’t taken off. Lots of reflection and painful lessons I hope others can learn from.

2/ Reason #1: The financial feedback loop for vc takes yrs. If you want one core reason the industry has not succeeded, it is this. Time between when an investor writes a check and gets confidence she should write again- is way too long to encourage repeat investment

3/ If you are ever at a YC event and some entrepreneur pitches you on a marketplace that helps private companies raise money…..ask how they will solve this issue.

[imagine being at a cocktail event again?]

4/ I missed this point when we started. Frankly the 60+ investors that passed on us also missed it- or at least it never came up as a key concern. Not once.

The difference between credit, with financial feedback loops that took days or months, and equity is huge.

5/ In private investments it is typically >5 yrs before you see the financial feedback. Win or lose thats a long time for most people. If you’re running a VC fund you’re making $ along the way with management fees, but angel investors….are just shelling out checks.

That time everyone in Omaha forgot about Berkshire and went crazy for a bubble stock: Level 3 Communications.

Enter Walter Scott, CEO of Kiewit, Omaha's biggest construction company (BRK's offices are at Kiewit Plaza). He and Buffett go way back: "I first got to know Walter when we were teenagers. We both had a crush on the same girl. Walter won her and they ended up getting married."

But seriously, Buffett: "A lot of people like to make simple things complex. Walter does the opposite. He has an ability to cut through what's complicated. He is a man who gives you his word. He is a person of great integrity. People here have tremendous respect for him."

Scott became CEO of Kiewit in 1979. The company had grown big building tunnels, dams, highways. It generated a ton of cash which was reinvested in its "Kiewit Diversified" segment.

A Kiewit executive named James Crowe urged Scott to buy Metropolitan Fiber System which built networks for phone companies.

Crowe renamed it MFS and started building his own networks. It became a competitive local-exchange carrier (CLEC). It spun out and went public in 1993.

The baby wakes me up at 5am these days, so let’s talk about $RH. I’ve been following $RH for half a decade now, and I started off with a profound misunderstanding of the company. When $RH started its membership program back in 2016, I thought it was a stupid idea and 1/

a half-assed way to graft a Costco membership dynamic onto what was supposed to be a high-end furniture store. Very confusing. Of course, I was the one who was stupid because my girlfriend at the time (now wife) was an interior designer, and I didn’t bother to ask her about /2

it. $RH employs a bunch of interior designers to help you with your design needs, and you get access to them for the $100 membership fee + you get 25% off all full-priced items. What’s going on here? $100 to save hundreds of dollars + you get interior design services? You 3/

might think it’s $100 fee to have the interior designer upsell or sell more products, and it… sort of is? But what I didn’t know and hadn’t bothered to ask my gf/wife was how interior designers worked. It turns out that if you’re a licensed interior designer, you get 20-25% 4/

off high-end furniture for your clients anyway. And once she told me this everything clicked. The $100 rate was a way to aggregate clients for their internal RH interior design folks, and these interior designers were going to get a 25% discount on their purchases anyway, so 5/

We continue to hear that several $ZIL holders are unable to withdraw their tokens from certain exchanges and their withdrawal transactions seem to have errored out as incorrect nonce.

A thread on status update. 👇

1/ This has only affected a few exchanges, while there are others, where withdrawals are getting processed as expected. Also, given that the network is processing transactions as usual, we understand the frustration of some feeling stuck while others can interact on-chain.

2/ PROBLEM: We have spoken to some of these affected exchanges to better understand the issue at hand. It appears that those exchanges issued several consecutive withdrawal transactions which are expected to include an increasing counter called nonce.

3/ However, if any of the intermediate transactions gets rejected for some reasons, then all the subsequent ones get rejected too as the nonce will no longer be consecutive. We therefore believe that nonces were not correctly handled which led to withdrawals getting affected.

4/ SOLUTION: The solution to the problem is in fact quite simple. All the failed withdrawals can be considered by the exchanges to have been rejected by the network and they can re-issue a new transaction with the correct nonce.

1/ Thread on Bill Foley

Over the last ~40 yrs, Foley has been one of the most successful investor-operators

Using the public markets Foley has built, invested in, and driven the growth of 6 generational fintech companies

In some ways, he is the John Malone of Fintech/Software

2/ The Beginnings:

Foley began his as a lawyer in AZ, where he came across Fidelity National (FNF), which was an under-optimized title insurance co.

Title insurance was (still is) a fragmented and arcane industry

Foley saw an opportunity ripe for optimization & consolidation

3/ In 1984, Foley led a $21mm LBO of FNF and got to work

He ruthlessly optimized and professionalized the co. Under his leadership, FNF's title margins avg'd 300-500 bps better than its closest competitor

At the same time, FNF executed a massive roll-up strategy to mrkt-share

4/ Between 1984-2020, tiny FNF acquired 90+ companies and became the country's largest title insurance and settlement services co.

But that wasn't all...

Ever the multi-tasker, during this period Foley used FNF's regulatory capital to invest in generational fintech companies

5/ With the FNF's regulatory capital, Foley created companies that are now standalone public companies:

- Black Knight
- FIS
- Ceridian
- FNFV / Cannae

A dumb thing I did in 2020:
Saw something that wasn't there on a maiden RE trade and bot late. Should have known bulk tonnage MRE/PEA etc almost all sold news in 2020 but was busy and rushed. Need to be early to best win those types of deposits. -25%ish for my trouble. 1/11

It was small money fortunately. <---GT Gold. Embarrassing thinking back on it. Industry guy told me it was kinda dumb after.😀I would say the lesson is to never rush into things but that's not true. There's times you can rush into things but it depends on the circumstances. 2/11

Example: I just happened to be watching the trading on Kodiak Copper as I thought it was through an interesting spot then all of a sudden the stock just started getting walked up. Grabbed some. It halts a minute later and releases proof of concept assays the next day. 3/11

Context is everything. Don't be afraid to try some things but keep it small when trying. You can learn really important lessons. Save piling in on concepts for when you've been doing this for years (10+?). You might win big early and think you're smart. Most of us are not. 4/11

No substitution for the grindstone. I won on a couple positions early. Tough to lose on Claude Resources buyout & finding Nexgen. Was saying to a few of the guys last night that I am surprised I did not go -50% on portfolio next. My strength was knowing I still knew little. 5/11

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Let's talk about returns and return expectations. For traders, this year was probably the biggest opportunity set since...1999?

Many people struggled this year due to obvious reasons but us traders have been living in another reality.

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As most of you know I livestream my trading on Twitch every day using simple setups and principles with no rocket science or fancy indicators involved.

I started the year with $3.7M in all trading accounts combined and finishing it with $36M.

That's an 870% return.

/3 It has been the journey of my life and I did not think making more than $100K was possible when I started trading.

A lot of people had insane returns this year, most due to luck, few due to skill. Most WILL give it all back, a few will keep it.

4/
New traders have the tendency to get more agressive and reckless when their accounts go straight up (been there, done that many times).

When you start feeling like a Greek God just having defeated the Titans, that's when things can mostly go downhill and bad things happen.

/5
A lot of traders I have been checking in on over the years are having 5-10-20x returns over their previous years both %- and $-wise.

I'm talking about daytraders, scalpers, swing traders, long biased, short biased. This market had something for everyone.

THREAD $FB
I see a lot of flippant bearish FB tweets. Typically they are politically motivated or lack data. I love hearing the other side, but haven’t seen a thoughtful bear case so I thought I’d try build it myself.
Summary: 1) Users Fall; 2) Competition; 3) IDFA; 4) Opm% fall.

1) Despite the popular narrative I see of “I don’t use FB anymore and neither do my friends,” unless you think FB is flat out lying about their User #s, the data doesn’t support this. FB Blue DAUs have been going up every year World Wide and in the more mature NA market.

Note, FB reports MAUs/DAUs for Facebook blue app, and only recently started reporting the FB Family of apps in aggregate (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp) which has ~2.54bn DAUs vs. FB Blue at 1.82bn.

But NA Users DID FALL sequentially in 3Q20 (after robust additions during the earlier periods of COVID) and have been fairly stagnant since 2018 when the Cambridge Analytica news hit (3Q17-1Q19, over 6 quarters FB only added 1mn net DAUs and the stock was down over this period).

NA is 10% of FB users but 50% of Revs so it is a key geo to watch for. Admittedly, at 195mn DAUs in NA and 255mn MAUs, there likely aren’t a lot of users left to acquire. If you’re not on FB now, you probably won’t be in the future (unless you’re a teenager and you “age up”).

Dear All,
1. A new year of hope started, I thought to pen some of my views about making money (Investing & Trading), these are the points which I keep telling me & I thought to share with you all. I hope, it will help both all. #investing #investingpsychology #tradingpsychology

2. Equity is a riskier way of making money, but still, the ease of control, liquidity & speculation attracts us all, more adrenalin rush in trading versus any other modes of equity-like MF, ETFs, Small-cases, Longer-term investment. #investing #investingpsychology

3. Everyone comes to equity to become millionaire/billionaire/..., but very few become so, otherwise, most of the analyst would not be running webinars or panel of TV or writing books for regular income.

Starting to collect important questions for 2021 and beyond in this thread.

Please send questions you are interested in too!

1. Will demand for compute continue to double every few months? Tons of implications for semiconductor design and manufacture.

2. What will be the next major use of mRNA vaccines? What will our new understanding of protein folding lead to?

3. How will better data and workflows improve our health care system (prediction, prevention, price of care, outcomes, compliance)?

4. Will we fully unbundle undergrad and graduate school into the information/learning component (which should be a fraction the cost for multiples the quality) and the networking component?

5. Digital art creation and collection make sense to me, but how will digital art be displayed?

People often ask why structural variants (SV) are so important and why $BNGO is laser focused on revolutionizing the way they are detected in the clinic. Doesn’t the success of $PACB and $ILMN show that sequencing and the small variants it detects are what matters?

Let’s look at what happens in the industrialized world when a doctor orders a genome to be analyzed. If a child has a suspected genetic disease, medical guidelines recommend successive testing rounds until a pathogenic variant is found or all techniques have been exhausted. $BNGO

Before we go into detail, let’s start by pointing out that this NEVER involves long-read whole genome sequencing by $PACB or Nanopore. Never, nowhere. Those are niche sequencing technologies for reference genome projects but not practical for the clinic. $BNGO

Long-read sequencing COULD matter in the clinic in the future if they get cost down & throughput significantly higher. As comparison, a whole genome w/ $PACB HiFi takes several days per patient per sequencer. Unusable in the clinic. Each Saphyr can run 96 patients per week! $BNGO

The tests start with chromosomal microarray (CMA), karyotyping, and then repeat expansion testing, single gene or gene panel testing, and whole exome sequencing. This long and expensive process still leaves 50% of children undiagnosed. $BNGO

Just spent an hour on the phone with $trit IR:
1) company has 56 employees of which 6 are engineers related to the platform who are managed by Ashish. The key is in addition they outsource to India additional 50-80 tech contractors at any given time who they used to launch Kratos

2) srinivas is a controlling investor in Rhodium but company has full time CEO and CFO and he doesnt control and is not privy to the day to day operations of the company. $trit started through him seeing a need for a better way to trade more effectively through Rhodium experience

They of course used Rhodium & its relationships with parties it does business with as the first customers of their platform which youd expect. In June 2019 related party rev was 100%, down to 26.5% by Feb 2020 & last q down to under 10% as they onboard more 3rd parties.

As for the digital coin the company initially thought launching a coin would be a good way to solve the issue however after further study shelved it. They gave notice to everyone they would burn the coin and allowed them to redeem. No digital coin now at all

Supply chain finance model coming out in Feb which they expect to have similar fee to trade finance module which is very profitable. Estimates for next yr already include this. The other two modules of credit insurance and logistics dont currently plan to monetize

Last year I co-founded Selva Ventures, a CPG-focused VC firm, as a solo GP

This week I’ve been reflecting on our first year in business and wanted to share some of the lessons learned in building a small investment firm
Thread 👇

1/ As a solo GP I wear 2 hats

Investor: Always challenging but familiar. Same thing I was doing before

Entrepreneur: Incredibly ambiguous and scary, but also the greatest source of fulfillment

2/ Early on, seemingly simple decisions took an eternity: naming the firm, designing a logo, choosing a fund admin partner to name a few

I was so scared of getting these things wrong, but it was so important to be excited about those decisions to build early momentum

3/ Fundraising could be its own thread, but in fund 1 narrow focus is everything

Build a narrative that can get people excited and DO NOT stray from it, even though it can be tempting

Anything that doesn’t fit? Use an SPV or let it go

4/ Starting out I knew nobody else doing this, but the content about this growing field of “Solo Capitalists” has been both educational and therapeutic

@nbt’s substack (below), @Samirkaji’s podcast (Venture Unlocked) and @oper8rio really stand out