Thought I was going to finish 2020 empty handed, tough real estate market out here.

Managed to snag a great deal at the last minute and wanted to share the details.

Here’s how I analyze multifamily real estate investment opportunities 👇

THREAD: 15 of the most useful razors and rules I've found.

Rules of thumb that simplify decisions.

Bezos' Razors:

• If unsure what action to take, let your 80-year-old self make it.

• If unsure who to work with, pick the person that has the best chances of breaking you out of a 3rd world prison.

Skinner's Law:

• If procrastinating on an item, you only have 2 options:

1. Make the pain of not doing it greater than the pain of doing it.

2. Make the pleasure of doing it greater than the pleasure of not doing it.

Luck Razor:

• If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line.

I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix.

In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.

Bragging Razor:

• If someone brags about their success or happiness, assume it’s half what they claim.

• If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume it’s double what they claim.

The map is not the terrain.

Below are some of the most interesting business stories I came across in 2020.

P. S The list is not exhaustive.

1) PSG unbundled it's 28.1% ownership of Capitec.

2) MTN sold a minority stake in Jumia Technologies for R2.3-billion.

3) Dischem has completed the acquisition of Medicare Health for R282million

4) TFG bought 381 Jet stores from Edcon for R480m.

5) Capitec entered into a partnership with SA Home Loans to offer home loans.

6) Food Lover’s Market has started closing outlets in Zambia.

7) Sasol sold 50% of the "base chemicals division" at Lake Charles which equates to ~25% of total Lake Charles project. Sasol will still retain around ~75% of the total Lake Charles Chemical Project.

8) Sasol agreed to sell its 50% stake in Gemini for R6.2bn.

9) Tongaat Hulett sold its starch and glucose business to Barloworld for R5.26bn. The group has used R4.64bn of this to pay down debt.

10) The Competition Commission approved Nimble Fund 1’s intention to acquire Edcon Book Debts.

11) Greg Maloka has decided to resign from Kaya.

12) Ethos Private Equity has won a contract with Ninety One to take on an advisory contract for Ninety One's Africa Private Equity funds.

Ninety One will maintain control and oversight of the portfolio, while Ethos will manage the assets

13) Bidvest Wits sold to TTM

$CCIV / LUCID MOTORS

DD Thread ⤵️

The $CCIV leadership team:

I will highlight who I believe are the key players.

Starting with Sir Jony Ive, who was the Chief Design Officer at Apple Inc for over 20 years. (Connections to Apple are never a bad thing..)

Andrew Leveris is the former CEO of The Dow Chemical company who also just happens to be a board member of, you guessed it - Lucid Motors, further supporting SPAC rumors.

As the former CEO of Ford, Mulally brings a wealth of motor industry experience to Churchill Capital and Lucid Motors.

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

🧵

Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures

Apologies for tweeting about European Land so much yesterday, but this article was a significant moment for us. For more than 3.5 years we have suffered enormously and this has mostly gone under the radar in the

2/ The Times article is the first recognition of the Reubens involvement in the cladding scandal. From the time we discovered we had ACM, European Land has refused to contribute a single penny towards the remediation. Even after their own intrusive survey showed that the missing

3/ fire breaks and flammable insulation they installed were AGAINST regulations, they still refused to contribute to fix their mistakes.

4/ To make things worse, their aggressive behaviour meant they issued S20 notices against leaseholders and started billing us for millions from as early as 2018 (two years before any remediation works had even started). They then instructed their lawyers to take actions against

5/ against leaseholders and started proceedings against us if payments of £40,000-60,000 were not made within months. The stress and misery this caused us we will never forget or forgive.