How'd funds fare in 2020 when viewed through an ESG lens? We assign Globe Ratings, w/'High' (ie 5 globes) going to funds whose holdings court less ESG risk and vice versa for 'Low' (1 globe). Tldr: Funds w/higher ESG ratings beat their M* idx more often than those w/lower ratings

For fun I made a Robinhood account. It took me 5 minutes to sign up, get approved and transfer funds for trading...

Here's some details... Read on.

...it took me another 5 minutes to get qualified for options.

If I share a sign up I get "free shares" and I can share as much as I want up to 500$ worth.

The main UI has a prepopulated "list" of stocks/crypto to watch and links to news.

Clicking a stock opens a "trade" button that looks like this.

Notice options is first, buy second.

Options took me to an approval process (which took about a minute) and now away I go trading Baba options.

Buying stock looks like this. It emphasizes fractional shares.

1. Let's talk about Albanians. No, not THOSE Albanians, in the Balkans. The Caucasian Albanians, the pre-Turkish inhabitants of the land now known as Azerbaijan. 🇦🇿

2. Yeah, I know, there's also an "Iberia" there, which should cause even more confusion (with Spain), but let's focus on "Albania".

3. This ancient church in the village of Nij (or Nic), just south of the Caucasus Mountains, belongs to the Udi people, a Christian minority in Azerbaijan descended from the area’s pre-Turkic Caucasian Albanians. 🇦🇿

4. Nearby are the ruins of the Caucasian Albanian capital of “old” Gabala (Qebele), where I was given a personal tour by one of the resident archeologists (just for showing up). 🇦🇿

5. Only a very tiny portion of the extensive site has been excavated. “Every place you dig,” the archeologist told me, “you will find artifacts.” This whole field is a city waiting to be uncovered.

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.